Miss Seetoh in the World (4 page)

Her net of influence, cast out to reach the
largest possible number of St Peter’s Secondary School inhabitants, included
the humble workers, such as the gardener, the cleaning woman and the noodles
seller at the school canteen, for these too could be sources of useful
information or pleasurable gossip, and occasionally the opportunity for the
commendable practice of Christian charity. Maggie once initiated a class
donation for the school gardener when his wife fell ill and had to be
hospitalised for a month.

‘Aiyoh, so pitiful!’ exclaimed the girl, in
an easy swing from biting criticism to genuine concern and back. ‘The man so
useless, spending money on drink, and the wife sick all the time, and five
children to take care.’

Miss Seetoh wondered how much Maggie had
pieced together a picture of her marriage from clues inadvertently dropped
during her talks and discussions in the creative writing lessons. The girl had
eyes and ears that claimed the entire school as their territory, roaming it
relentlessly, like a tiny, agile, quick-witted predator that knew when to pounce,
and when to sit on its haunches and beg. She reminded Miss Seetoh of the lowly
eunuchs and maids of old in the ancestral country, who glided noiselessly
through the large imperial courtyards and chambers, sniffing out or initiating
intrigues, rising to important positions through sheer cunning.

Maggie knew which teacher was gay, which
boy-girl pair was having sex. She dragged into the respectable orderliness of
the school the private chaos of young lives: Bin Choo was always sleepy in
class because she helped at her mother’s noodles stall every evening till past
midnight; Gary copied others’ homework; Bina sometimes slipped into the
classroom during recess and stole things; Hock Soon knew how to avoid paying
bus fare on his way to school every morning by choosing only very crowded
buses; Ah Leng belonged to a secret society and had a dragon tattoo on his
right shoulder; it was the quiet Ravi who was responsible for the shocking
incident, still unsolved by the discipline master, of the pubic hairs slipped between
the pages of a library book.

Maggie said, ‘Miss Seetoh, you know what?
Everyone, they talk, talk about why you have drop the Mrs.’

The girl was intensely disliked and
distrusted by the majority of the staff and students. Miss Seetoh held in check
her own deep aversion in the face of so much trust and adulation by a student
completely isolated in a school of teeming hundreds. It was most embarrassing
that the girl had actually taken the trouble to find out her birthdate and
present her with a large chocolate birthday cake, probably bought at great
expense, lavishly inscribed: ‘For Miss S, the best understanding teacher in the
world.’ ‘Please,’ said Miss Seetoh awkwardly, opening her purse, but Maggie
clamped it shut again, ‘No, Miss Seetoh. You are special. I’ll do anything for
you!’

At the wake of her husband, only a month
before, she was startled to see the girl, dressed in full mourning black,
present herself among the visitors and proffer the traditional gift of
condolence money. ‘Oh no, Maggie, you mustn’t,’ she had insisted, and this time
had succeeded in pressing the sealed white envelope back into the girl’s hand.
How on earth had she got the money? There were rumours about her mother working
as a lounge waitress in one of the city’s seediest districts.

‘I know they all talk, talk about me, but
Miss Seetoh, it’s not true! One day I tell you everything, because I trust
you.’ She could already be telling her stories in the submissions in the
creative writing class.

‘Maggie,’ Miss Seetoh had said, trying not
to sound too shocked, ‘don’t get carried away by your imagination. For the next
assignment, don’t write about sex. Or rape.’

To reject the already much rejected girl
would be to bring upon herself lifelong remorse. As a child in primary school,
she had one day pushed to the ground a classmate, a scrawny, scanty-haired
little girl with a perpetual trickle down her nose, who followed her
everywhere, and carried the guilt right up to secondary school.

Every teacher was relieved at the thought
that Maggie, who resolutely kept her strange family background impenetrable to
the good work of the school’s corps of hard-working counsellors, would be gone
once she finished the O Level exams and be fully absorbed into her dark world,
dominated, it was rumoured, by a hard-drinking, abusive father who lived on the
earnings of her lounge waitress mother. The complaints of some of the teachers,
brought into the office of the principal, ended there, absorbed into the
school’s benign mission of educating the young and preparing them for a useful
role in society. The noble goal was announced in a motto in giant white letters
above the school entrance.

The formidable Mrs Neo had said to the
principal as she barged into his office and he stood up to greet her, ‘For the
good name of the school, that girl should be expelled!’

The principal had replied calmly, ‘I’ll see
what can be done,’ meaning nothing would be done.

He already had a fearful picture of Maggie
Sim taking her story to the newspapers, of the burst of publicity in the
Chinese media ever hungry for sensational news, of the annoyance of the
Ministry of Education at having to respond with a public investigation. A
freakish presence in a noble institution of learning, the girl would be allowed
to stay till she left of her own accord.

Once or twice, the principal called Maggie
into his office for a mild reprimand. ‘You were rude to Miss Pang, and again to
Mrs Doraisamy.’

Genteel man that he was, he left it to the
lady teachers to deal with the surreptitious make-up, the vulgarisation of the
school uniform by an undone shirt button here, a lifting of the skirt hem
there. There was something that he had heard from one of the teachers which had
deeply disturbed him: Maggie had once gone for an abortion.

‘Do you know anything about it?’ he had
asked Miss Seetoh, possibly the girl’s only confidante.

‘No,’ said Miss Seetoh who did not want to
know, and the matter was never referred to again.

She suddenly had an image of the girl in a
secret visit to one of the government hospitals where abortions were performed
with utmost discretion and minimum fuss, so that the misguided teenager could
get up, go home, and be in school the next day. She remembered Maggie once or
twice excusing herself from class to go to the sick bay because of stomach
pains from her very heavy periods, conspicuously taking out of her schoolbag a
large wad of sanitary towels.

Her world at St Peter’s Secondary School was
a truly happy one, and Maggie was part of it. If she wrote a novel one day, the
teenager, astonishingly shrewd in the ways of the world, might even be the
female protagonist. Her imagination, ever active and on the alert to store
potentially useful material for that dreamt-of novel, was already storing
images of the girl, her large pretty eyes, her expertly plucked eyebrows, her
impossibly large breasts, all in keeping with the hard opportunism of a
Singapore-bred Lolita.

When I was her age, Miss Seetoh thought with
some wonder, I knew nothing about the birds and the bees. Her mother kept her
in a protective capsule, still plaiting her hair every morning well into her
teens and watching her recite her night prayers kneeling beside the bed they
shared. Even then she was already responding to the cry for freedom deep inside
that had begun with the smallest of wishes – ‘when I have a bed of my own’ –
for her mother slept badly and kept her awake with much tossing, moaning and
teeth-grinding. Over the years, as she grew into adulthood, the wish was
systematically enlarged, from bed to room to house, and became the final
longing born out of despair – ‘when I have a life of my own.’ She had panicked
at the sight of her first menstruation, her mother explained that it wasn’t any
injury, that it was natural and God-given, bought her the proper towels and
took her to church for a special blessing.

‘Miss Seetoh, that poor Mr Chin, his heart
broke when you got married, now he can try again!’ Maggie giggled and furtively
looked around to make sure the maths teacher, hopelessly hanging around Miss
Seetoh for years, tongue-tied and fumbling in her presence, his comically
bulging goldfish eyes and stutter a perfect target of student impersonation,
was not within hearing distance. ‘I want to tell him, ‘Hey, Mr Chin, give up!
Where you got hope? You cannot pronounce English words properly. Suppose you
say, ‘Oh, Miss Seetoh, I lub you so velly much!’, she will surely faint!’ ’

The girl was a slick clown with a ready
stock of jokes that could be manipulated to fit the occasion, the special
target being the Chinese-educated speakers of English struggling with the
intricacies of a foreign tongue. Storing up yet another comical episode for later
sharing with friends, Miss Seetoh managed to suppress a laugh and say severely,
‘Maggie, how many times have I told you to speak in correct English?’

Maggie persisted and this time her eyes
sparkled with the sheer piquancy of the new information, ‘Miss Seetoh, you know
or not, even Brother Philip, he come to our class, pretend to ask about this or
that, but really it’s all excuse to talk to you. We all notice! Miss Teresa
Pang, she jealous as hell, because Brother Philip so tall and handsome with his
ang moh brown curly hair and blue eyes! Like the Magnum TV hero. She so ugly
with her Bugs Bunny teeth, no man will look at her and you so pretty, with no
make-up even, they all want you. Miss Seetoh, you interested or not, my uncle
he got many rich businessman friends, can introduce –’

The girl was impossible, overstepping her
limits. She could be dangerous.

Miss Seetoh looked closely at her and said
in as severe a tone as she could muster, ‘Maggie, you’re wearing eyeliner
again. You know make-up is against school rules. I’ve told you that before.’

The girl said airily, ‘Aiyah! Only a little
bit. See, you never notice before. How come Sebastian Ong can come to class
with powder on his face? That’s more worse!’ She saw Miss Seetoh’s eyes settle
on the loosened button of the school white shirt, that allowed a peep at a lacy
bra if she turned in a certain way, and quickly did it up. ‘Alright,’ she said
resignedly and adjusted the waistband of the school skirt to let the hem drop
to the obligatory three inches below the knee. ‘Alright,’ she said again, and
removed the rhinestone clip partly covered by a large swatch of hair.

‘What’s that?’ said Miss Seetoh, sniffing.
‘Maggie, you know you’re not supposed to wear perfume to school!’ There was a
list of regulatory don’ts for the girl students, pinned up in every classroom,
that would not have been necessary but for one Maggie Sim Peck Ngoh.

While the girl was petulant and defiant with
the other teachers, she good-naturedly obeyed Miss Seetoh, upon whom had duly
fallen the responsibility of holding her in check. The girl was to be feared,
for her relentless probing of secrets as she chattered endlessly, ignoring Miss
Seetoh’s diversionary strategy of scolding her for her bad English and her
make-up. Miss Seetoh, who adroitly broke school regulations, was now using
them, like a cane, to manage a difficult student. She even echoed the language
of the regulations. She did not at all enjoy that role.

Maria Seetoh went straight into her room,
locked it, took out the celebratory circle of paper from her handbag and once
more stared at it. She saw the story of her life in a full-length novel,
reduced to a one-page synopsis, reduced finally to this amazing nine-word
distillation that left none of the drama out.

It was a three-part drama: her determined
singlehood, followed suddenly by a marriage that the school knew about only
when she returned from her honeymoon after the long December vacation, followed
by widowhood, only three years later, that appeared blithe enough to invite the
‘Merry Widow’ label to be attached to it. Each part had its share of unsavoury
speculations. Was she a lesbian? She seemed to be very close to two other
conspicuously single women, a Miss Meeta Nair and a Miss Winnie Poon, both from
the Palm Secondary Girls’ School that was rumoured to have a disproportionate
number of teachers and students so inclined. When the news of her sudden
marriage spread, starting from the school office where the clerk was the first
to note the official change in name, the staffroom was caught in the grip of
intense conjecturing for weeks, even distracting the mild and pious Sister
Elizabeth from her preparation of lesson notes. Nobody dared to ask, because
nobody dared invade Maria Seetoh’s lofty solitude, even as she moved in smiling
amiability among the scores of students and teachers at St Peter’s.

Had she found her husband through the
services of the government matchmaking organisation that she had so disdained?
Or was she already – ? The young male science teacher with the impish smile and
crewcut who enjoyed entertaining the lady teachers, said, ‘Let’s see, she got
married in the month of –’ and did an elaborate crude finger count.

Soon there was another matter for
speculative wonderment. Was Mrs Tan happy? A sullen-faced husband dropped her
every morning at the school gate on his way to work, and she got out of the
car, equally grim-looking. The first year of marriage should still be sunny
honeymoon, and here were Mrs Tan and her husband, dark-faced and brooding, in
their first month, clearly avoiding having to look at each other. The newly wed
Mrs Jasmine Auyang and her husband exchanged effusive kisses at the gate each
morning, oblivious to student stares and giggles. How could things have gone so
wrong so early for a couple so obviously well-matched, he a senior civil
servant, she a respected teacher, both practising Catholics, both good-looking?