Singapore
Somewhere in the beginning of the haze that was 2007, the last chapter of the last story got lost in the fog. Somewhere in the haze that was leaving Indonesia, it appeared in the distance; ghosts of the past came home and ghosts of the future appeared in the edges of vision. Singapore, the Lion City, still has to tell its story, and yet still has stories to tell…
The place I’d gotten on the ferry might have been different, but on the Singapore side everything was the same as I remembered. Getting off, not a single taxi driver had breached security to come and hassle me, everything was clean and orderly. An easy walk to customs and an overly friendly dude behind a desk, the same way out and right through Harbourfront Shopping Centre and into the MRT station. A wave of the MRT card over the scanner and I was in; last time things weren’t so simple. I hadn’t had an ATM card and the money changer had been closed, and an impassioned appeal to the man working at the station had yielded no charity, but he did tell me to try the shop around the corner. I did, and the Indian man there generously changed my cash into Singapore dollars. I’d made it to Little India and spent about twenty minutes stumbling in the rain, looking for the hostel, before finding it and a girl out the front had told me the place was closed. She was joking, taking advantage of my unhappy visage and obvious labours, and sucked me in totally.
This time around, I strolled effortlessly from station to reception and enquired as the availability of beds, forgoing the urge to greet the man sitting behind it with a hearty “remember me?” and threw my bags down before venturing over the road to the Tekka Centre to get some food. Food, food and Singapore go hand in hand. Memories of those last days on the road came back, the act of covering familiar travelled territory a powerful tool to trigger these things. I remembered laksa that burned with chillies and soothed at the same time with coconut milk, I remembered icy deserts and fried noodles. All these things and more came back like old friends as I stepped into the hawker stalls, and late as it was they were still going strong. Most were closed but the row of Muslim food stalls across the back stay with it all night. Over chendol and noodles, I looked around and those days, just over a year before, came back. The Englishman I’d hung out with, and her. There’s two “her”s in Singapore for me, and neither of them are around anymore. Neither write back and neither, I imagine, want much to do with me now. That’s ok, kind of, but like all stories of the heart, the truth is less evident than anyone will ever admit.
She took me here the day after, on our only day together, to buy me lunch. She told me she was falling in love, and how happy she was, even though we knew the timer was well and truly clicking. That’s how she was, that’s just how she was, a passionate and strong girl in a space that was too small for her. And she’d seen something worth reaching for and grabbing, and she did just that.
I had fried rice but never finished it. I couldn’t eat.
I went back to the hostel after taking a walk around Little India. The underbelly of Singapore, the improbable underbelly it has to have, is on full display here. The alleyways behind Desker Road house the city’s red light district and when I’d heard about it the first time around, I couldn’t believe it. Singapore is so clean, so socially ordered, so puritanical and so very, very uptight – there was no way it was any more than an exaggeration or a mistake. But it had been there, red lights in doorways housing sultry and professional looking working women, street walking lady boys, and girls in doorways. I walked past, red faced at the audacity of it all. It became part of the tapestry I had in my mind about what life in the city was like, a small but important corner that colours the rest, and I had to make sure it was still there. The government has such a grip over civic life that they could surely erase it from the cityscape as easily as they had moved it on from Bugis Street years ago, and I was happy to see that things had not changed. Satisfied and tired, I went back.
Around the table in the common room was a German guy and a Japanese dude. Always present in the house are the Philippine girls, and one was just coming in, bags in hand, greeting the staff with enough familiarity to make me think she was coming back from one of many visa runs over to Johor Baru. I let these girls be, remembering it had taken a few days for them to talk to me, and had a long chat to the German guy. The Japanese dude was silent and shy, and seemed pretty boring, so I let him be. Things change, but they stay the same, and then some.
At night we’d be together, during the day we’d be together, all year we were together. The start was cloudy, different targets and a lack of definite words had conspired to confuse things just enough to nearly end it, but it had stayed good and it stayed fun. Always there when the other called, always cute, she was. So small, but with the attitude of a giant. She had come to study in Australia from Singapore and took with her the baggage of all Singaporeans, a sense of civic duty mixed with the complex family patterns of the Chinese living at the end of the Malay Peninsula. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, all mixed together to create a blend of obedience and expectation – a pressure not just from teachers and the self, but from the endless line of ancestry looking over their shoulders. It was a good year.
On the MRT to Orchard station the next day I thought I saw her. Someone who looked just enough like her to make me look twice, and stumble over myself. No way would that happen, not there, not like that. It wasn’t her, but it made me think about however ready I might have thought I could be to ever see her again, I would never be.
I went to the Qantas office to refund the ticket they made me buy to get out of the country. All it cost was 75 Singapore Dollars. What a load of crap. I could do nothing about it, so I took it, and left. Walking down the length of Orchard Road to Raffles Hotel, and onto the Padang and the collection of colonial buildings around it, and then to Chinatown to eat, and then tired already back to the hostel. I’d seen it all before and besides, the battery was dying in my camera.
Her ghost is still in there. It never ended well, setting a pattern for bad endings that would follow me a long while after. You can run but you can’t hide. I never spent so much as a second of time in Singapore with her, but the place and my memories are so strongly linked, she might as well have been with me the whole first time. I hadn’t intended to go there that first trip, but lack of options to get home had forced my hand. I’d enjoyed it, no doubt, but she was on my mind. That girl, I still remember her warmth and her voice and her love… I sat around the hostel, a million miles from where I should have been, when the girl who had come in the night before started talking to me.
You look boring. What? I reached and pulled myself into the moment. I think you mean, you look bored. It’s a little different. And then we got to talking. She wasn’t Philipino, but Indonesian, Javanese to be precise, and she was a traveller like me, transiting for a few days on the way to somewhere cheaper and more exotic. She usually came via Singapore and stayed at this hostel. I’d just come through Sumatra so we had notes to compare. She wasn’t all that good looking but she laughed when I made a joke, good or bad, and it was kind of cute. She had a hard edge to her, I could tell she’d been through some things in her time. Turns out I was right, like I always am right. She’d gotten divorced and had a kid, not yet two years old. I could see there was still some pain there, but still she was friendly. We went to eat that night, at a place that did African food. It was terrible, the worst thing on the menu in the whole city, no doubt. I had some chendol after and it was even worse, some Indian version with spices and crap in it, it was truly horrific. I didn’t realise until days later, but we stayed up talking past two am.
I’d stayed up drinking with Mat until about three, over at the all-night eating places in Little India, after a brief tour of the red light sights. Mat had no trouble going up to the “ladies” and asking them what they offered. Seems fifty Singapore will get you off – like the rest of things in town, butterflies of the night were more expensive in the Lion City. Mat never realised but I was timing it so that I would get home about the same time she would be coming in and it couldn’t have worked out better – she saw me and told me to wait upstairs. She took a single room for the night and we used the rest of the night like we were supposed to. That would be our only night together, since her visa was out and was going to have to make the run the following evening and I’d be gone by the time she got back. So it was what it was and we took our chance. She had a kid back in Manilla and I’d never been with someone who’s given birth. Years before I had the experience likened to ‘space-walking’ and that slipped into my mind as it slipped in. Not the best place for my mind to be, but quickly I was back. And yeah, it was like walking in space.
The next day she took me to lunch, and we stuck together the rest of the time, making the most of it. I can still see the look on her face as she looked at me through the taxi window, and the feeling of sinking as I walked back up the stairs. One night? Some kind of cruel joke is how it felt, but we shouldn’t question to far these things.
The next day I woke up and around about midday went out walking. I ended up walking all the way to Sentosa Island, a place I’ll say little about, since I despise it such. It’s Singapore divided by Disneyland, and is the opposite end of the scale to Desker Road. The Yin and Yang of life in such a city, opposite ends that both colour the whole picture. Plastic fantastic beaches? No thanks. I decided there and then I needed to leave Singapore. It was all getting to me. It was hot, expensive, and there were other places to be. I took the MRT back and flopped on the table in the common room. She was there, as always – for whatever reason she was spending these three days in town but didn’t seem to leave the hostel. Strange things, but not everyone goes there for the same reasons me. This time I took her to get food and it was much better. The way she looked at me over my desert told me I might not get away from her as just friends.
I took her virginity the last night she was in Melbourne. The next day she’d get on the shuttle bus to the airport and leave me for the summer. All year it had been something of an issue between us, what with me being a hormone charged teenager wanting his, wanting her, wanting it so badly, and with her and her quasi-religious leanings – I never understood fully her point of view, but most nights I got her naked and “serviced” her, and then I’d service myself. This was as close as we would get, as close as she’d let me get, and I never forced the issue. But I can only say It was the sense of occasion that led her to let me take her that last night. Anyone who has deflowered a girl knows it’s never the best, but somehow the “sacredness” of it all makes up for it. All I know is I never saw sheets that red, or ever felt that close to someone, or ever hurt so bad the next day when she left. Later, I neglected to hide the ruined sheets and when my sister helped me pack my stuff for the summer, she stumbled upon it and just as quickly, hid it again.
Her father died on New Year’s Eve. I still have the e-mail, she told me she wouldn’t be the same again and she wanted to end it. I was spending the summer chasing my tail, spinning around and going crazy, the only thing I had to look forward to were the nightly chats on ICQ. I wanted none of that kind of talk and told her everything I could to change her mind, and when she came back early to re-sit a couple of exams (the first but not the last time I would be responsible for a girl’s lack of academic fulfilment) I took the initiative and moved into Tommy G’s place in Richmond, so I could go and hold her. I did this, and she was still the same girl, and we talked and talked and I held her all night and it was OK then, but it was never the same.
I was leaving the next day and so was she. Three am rolled around and I made noises about going to bed. She said yeah, it was time to sleep. At the top of the stairs I gave her a hug, and she kissed me. I kissed her back. From there it was a few metres to her room. We had to move the bed so it wouldn’t bang on the wall so loudly. I left when she had to go to the airport, at about five thirty, and got a few hours in my own bed. She was long gone when I got up to eat breakfast, and a few raised eyebrows from the other people in the dorm room were all that was left of it. To tell the truth, it was fucking amazing – but this isn’t that kind of place, we don’t work blue around here. At least, not that blue. She wasn’t that good looking and still had ‘mummy tummy’ but attitude is all the more important, and the moment is telling. I know so little about some things, and ever more do I come across things that defy my use of vocabulary and words in general. Let’s let this be one of those times.
I never saw her after that, just as I never saw either of the other girls who still follow me around Singapore. I half expected one to walk into the hostel common room and I know the other is hiding just behind a corner – and I’m sure they are both happy with someone else. This only makes me feel a little better. If I’d still been with either of them, my life would be very, very different – and I couldn’t swap the last few years for anything like that. Plus, I know I would have gotten bored eventually. I’m a prick like that, and I did a lot of growing up in the meantime, but I know there’s still a lot to go.
Eventually I became cold to her and she left me. I was more hurt because of the pain I caused her, more than any heartbreak I might have felt. A week or so later she showed up at my door and we had sex again, but nothing came of it, and in a month I kept seeing her with a friend of mine. Paranoia set in. There’s scars on my arm that testify to the punishment I endured in this time, and marks that tell you just how little sleep I was getting. Eventually I made her tell me what was going on and I confronted him. His line was the immortal, “I never thought we were friends in the first place”. I should have destroyed him, but I had a steady hand on my arm. Instead I got drunk and spewed all night. I never spoke to either of them again.
My pelvic bone hurt as I took the local bus 170 to the border and over to Johor Baru. Damn, she was rough, but wasn’t it better that way? I just know I’ll find myself back in Singapore in times to come, and then there’ll be three girls faces hiding in the crowds.
The place I’d gotten on the ferry might have been different, but on the Singapore side everything was the same as I remembered. Getting off, not a single taxi driver had breached security to come and hassle me, everything was clean and orderly. An easy walk to customs and an overly friendly dude behind a desk, the same way out and right through Harbourfront Shopping Centre and into the MRT station. A wave of the MRT card over the scanner and I was in; last time things weren’t so simple. I hadn’t had an ATM card and the money changer had been closed, and an impassioned appeal to the man working at the station had yielded no charity, but he did tell me to try the shop around the corner. I did, and the Indian man there generously changed my cash into Singapore dollars. I’d made it to Little India and spent about twenty minutes stumbling in the rain, looking for the hostel, before finding it and a girl out the front had told me the place was closed. She was joking, taking advantage of my unhappy visage and obvious labours, and sucked me in totally.
This time around, I strolled effortlessly from station to reception and enquired as the availability of beds, forgoing the urge to greet the man sitting behind it with a hearty “remember me?” and threw my bags down before venturing over the road to the Tekka Centre to get some food. Food, food and Singapore go hand in hand. Memories of those last days on the road came back, the act of covering familiar travelled territory a powerful tool to trigger these things. I remembered laksa that burned with chillies and soothed at the same time with coconut milk, I remembered icy deserts and fried noodles. All these things and more came back like old friends as I stepped into the hawker stalls, and late as it was they were still going strong. Most were closed but the row of Muslim food stalls across the back stay with it all night. Over chendol and noodles, I looked around and those days, just over a year before, came back. The Englishman I’d hung out with, and her. There’s two “her”s in Singapore for me, and neither of them are around anymore. Neither write back and neither, I imagine, want much to do with me now. That’s ok, kind of, but like all stories of the heart, the truth is less evident than anyone will ever admit.
She took me here the day after, on our only day together, to buy me lunch. She told me she was falling in love, and how happy she was, even though we knew the timer was well and truly clicking. That’s how she was, that’s just how she was, a passionate and strong girl in a space that was too small for her. And she’d seen something worth reaching for and grabbing, and she did just that.
I had fried rice but never finished it. I couldn’t eat.
I went back to the hostel after taking a walk around Little India. The underbelly of Singapore, the improbable underbelly it has to have, is on full display here. The alleyways behind Desker Road house the city’s red light district and when I’d heard about it the first time around, I couldn’t believe it. Singapore is so clean, so socially ordered, so puritanical and so very, very uptight – there was no way it was any more than an exaggeration or a mistake. But it had been there, red lights in doorways housing sultry and professional looking working women, street walking lady boys, and girls in doorways. I walked past, red faced at the audacity of it all. It became part of the tapestry I had in my mind about what life in the city was like, a small but important corner that colours the rest, and I had to make sure it was still there. The government has such a grip over civic life that they could surely erase it from the cityscape as easily as they had moved it on from Bugis Street years ago, and I was happy to see that things had not changed. Satisfied and tired, I went back.
Around the table in the common room was a German guy and a Japanese dude. Always present in the house are the Philippine girls, and one was just coming in, bags in hand, greeting the staff with enough familiarity to make me think she was coming back from one of many visa runs over to Johor Baru. I let these girls be, remembering it had taken a few days for them to talk to me, and had a long chat to the German guy. The Japanese dude was silent and shy, and seemed pretty boring, so I let him be. Things change, but they stay the same, and then some.
At night we’d be together, during the day we’d be together, all year we were together. The start was cloudy, different targets and a lack of definite words had conspired to confuse things just enough to nearly end it, but it had stayed good and it stayed fun. Always there when the other called, always cute, she was. So small, but with the attitude of a giant. She had come to study in Australia from Singapore and took with her the baggage of all Singaporeans, a sense of civic duty mixed with the complex family patterns of the Chinese living at the end of the Malay Peninsula. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, all mixed together to create a blend of obedience and expectation – a pressure not just from teachers and the self, but from the endless line of ancestry looking over their shoulders. It was a good year.
On the MRT to Orchard station the next day I thought I saw her. Someone who looked just enough like her to make me look twice, and stumble over myself. No way would that happen, not there, not like that. It wasn’t her, but it made me think about however ready I might have thought I could be to ever see her again, I would never be.
I went to the Qantas office to refund the ticket they made me buy to get out of the country. All it cost was 75 Singapore Dollars. What a load of crap. I could do nothing about it, so I took it, and left. Walking down the length of Orchard Road to Raffles Hotel, and onto the Padang and the collection of colonial buildings around it, and then to Chinatown to eat, and then tired already back to the hostel. I’d seen it all before and besides, the battery was dying in my camera.
Her ghost is still in there. It never ended well, setting a pattern for bad endings that would follow me a long while after. You can run but you can’t hide. I never spent so much as a second of time in Singapore with her, but the place and my memories are so strongly linked, she might as well have been with me the whole first time. I hadn’t intended to go there that first trip, but lack of options to get home had forced my hand. I’d enjoyed it, no doubt, but she was on my mind. That girl, I still remember her warmth and her voice and her love… I sat around the hostel, a million miles from where I should have been, when the girl who had come in the night before started talking to me.
You look boring. What? I reached and pulled myself into the moment. I think you mean, you look bored. It’s a little different. And then we got to talking. She wasn’t Philipino, but Indonesian, Javanese to be precise, and she was a traveller like me, transiting for a few days on the way to somewhere cheaper and more exotic. She usually came via Singapore and stayed at this hostel. I’d just come through Sumatra so we had notes to compare. She wasn’t all that good looking but she laughed when I made a joke, good or bad, and it was kind of cute. She had a hard edge to her, I could tell she’d been through some things in her time. Turns out I was right, like I always am right. She’d gotten divorced and had a kid, not yet two years old. I could see there was still some pain there, but still she was friendly. We went to eat that night, at a place that did African food. It was terrible, the worst thing on the menu in the whole city, no doubt. I had some chendol after and it was even worse, some Indian version with spices and crap in it, it was truly horrific. I didn’t realise until days later, but we stayed up talking past two am.
I’d stayed up drinking with Mat until about three, over at the all-night eating places in Little India, after a brief tour of the red light sights. Mat had no trouble going up to the “ladies” and asking them what they offered. Seems fifty Singapore will get you off – like the rest of things in town, butterflies of the night were more expensive in the Lion City. Mat never realised but I was timing it so that I would get home about the same time she would be coming in and it couldn’t have worked out better – she saw me and told me to wait upstairs. She took a single room for the night and we used the rest of the night like we were supposed to. That would be our only night together, since her visa was out and was going to have to make the run the following evening and I’d be gone by the time she got back. So it was what it was and we took our chance. She had a kid back in Manilla and I’d never been with someone who’s given birth. Years before I had the experience likened to ‘space-walking’ and that slipped into my mind as it slipped in. Not the best place for my mind to be, but quickly I was back. And yeah, it was like walking in space.
The next day she took me to lunch, and we stuck together the rest of the time, making the most of it. I can still see the look on her face as she looked at me through the taxi window, and the feeling of sinking as I walked back up the stairs. One night? Some kind of cruel joke is how it felt, but we shouldn’t question to far these things.
The next day I woke up and around about midday went out walking. I ended up walking all the way to Sentosa Island, a place I’ll say little about, since I despise it such. It’s Singapore divided by Disneyland, and is the opposite end of the scale to Desker Road. The Yin and Yang of life in such a city, opposite ends that both colour the whole picture. Plastic fantastic beaches? No thanks. I decided there and then I needed to leave Singapore. It was all getting to me. It was hot, expensive, and there were other places to be. I took the MRT back and flopped on the table in the common room. She was there, as always – for whatever reason she was spending these three days in town but didn’t seem to leave the hostel. Strange things, but not everyone goes there for the same reasons me. This time I took her to get food and it was much better. The way she looked at me over my desert told me I might not get away from her as just friends.
I took her virginity the last night she was in Melbourne. The next day she’d get on the shuttle bus to the airport and leave me for the summer. All year it had been something of an issue between us, what with me being a hormone charged teenager wanting his, wanting her, wanting it so badly, and with her and her quasi-religious leanings – I never understood fully her point of view, but most nights I got her naked and “serviced” her, and then I’d service myself. This was as close as we would get, as close as she’d let me get, and I never forced the issue. But I can only say It was the sense of occasion that led her to let me take her that last night. Anyone who has deflowered a girl knows it’s never the best, but somehow the “sacredness” of it all makes up for it. All I know is I never saw sheets that red, or ever felt that close to someone, or ever hurt so bad the next day when she left. Later, I neglected to hide the ruined sheets and when my sister helped me pack my stuff for the summer, she stumbled upon it and just as quickly, hid it again.
Her father died on New Year’s Eve. I still have the e-mail, she told me she wouldn’t be the same again and she wanted to end it. I was spending the summer chasing my tail, spinning around and going crazy, the only thing I had to look forward to were the nightly chats on ICQ. I wanted none of that kind of talk and told her everything I could to change her mind, and when she came back early to re-sit a couple of exams (the first but not the last time I would be responsible for a girl’s lack of academic fulfilment) I took the initiative and moved into Tommy G’s place in Richmond, so I could go and hold her. I did this, and she was still the same girl, and we talked and talked and I held her all night and it was OK then, but it was never the same.
I was leaving the next day and so was she. Three am rolled around and I made noises about going to bed. She said yeah, it was time to sleep. At the top of the stairs I gave her a hug, and she kissed me. I kissed her back. From there it was a few metres to her room. We had to move the bed so it wouldn’t bang on the wall so loudly. I left when she had to go to the airport, at about five thirty, and got a few hours in my own bed. She was long gone when I got up to eat breakfast, and a few raised eyebrows from the other people in the dorm room were all that was left of it. To tell the truth, it was fucking amazing – but this isn’t that kind of place, we don’t work blue around here. At least, not that blue. She wasn’t that good looking and still had ‘mummy tummy’ but attitude is all the more important, and the moment is telling. I know so little about some things, and ever more do I come across things that defy my use of vocabulary and words in general. Let’s let this be one of those times.
I never saw her after that, just as I never saw either of the other girls who still follow me around Singapore. I half expected one to walk into the hostel common room and I know the other is hiding just behind a corner – and I’m sure they are both happy with someone else. This only makes me feel a little better. If I’d still been with either of them, my life would be very, very different – and I couldn’t swap the last few years for anything like that. Plus, I know I would have gotten bored eventually. I’m a prick like that, and I did a lot of growing up in the meantime, but I know there’s still a lot to go.
Eventually I became cold to her and she left me. I was more hurt because of the pain I caused her, more than any heartbreak I might have felt. A week or so later she showed up at my door and we had sex again, but nothing came of it, and in a month I kept seeing her with a friend of mine. Paranoia set in. There’s scars on my arm that testify to the punishment I endured in this time, and marks that tell you just how little sleep I was getting. Eventually I made her tell me what was going on and I confronted him. His line was the immortal, “I never thought we were friends in the first place”. I should have destroyed him, but I had a steady hand on my arm. Instead I got drunk and spewed all night. I never spoke to either of them again.
My pelvic bone hurt as I took the local bus 170 to the border and over to Johor Baru. Damn, she was rough, but wasn’t it better that way? I just know I’ll find myself back in Singapore in times to come, and then there’ll be three girls faces hiding in the crowds.
