My Life as a Fake (22 page)

Three days after being evicted by the raja I arrived at K. G. Chomley’s house at two in the morning—cut, bruised, muddy, broken, my brain in a boil of murder. The creature had poisoned my daughter’s natural love for me. For that crime I would take his life away as lightly as I had given it in the first place. I knew to send his E.S. parcel in care of the Orang Kaya Kaya, and that this would draw him to the George Town P.O. where I would consign him to the fiery pit.

In the meantime, Mulaha constructed the weapon I would use. It was the plainest, most honest box you ever saw, Mem, stamped with the name of an orchard in Stanthorpe, Queensland. Even when he displayed it, I could not understand its mechanism. Since I did not wish to touch the thing, he pushed it at me and then I felt it sting my arm—his secret weapon, a nail protruding from the box. This caused me no more damage than a little scratch but Mulaha had yet to treat the nail, first with urine, then with millipede powder, arsenic, datura, and finally a simple coat of coconut oil. This same mixture he applied to a dagger with which he pricked a chicken. Just a prick, no blood drawn, but death was immediate.

He is a big man, I said, almost seven foot. Much bigger than this bloody chook.

Christopher, this little nail will bring down an elephant.

Then all we could do was wait. As the headmaster had
diagnosed me
troppo
and dismissed me in my absence, I was banned from the school and forced to hide all day in the locked room. Nothing to do but think about the bastard’s face when he humiliated me before my girl. Drip, drip, drip, poison in her ear. He must have stolen her from me a little every day. He was the great genius. By this logic he should thank me, his bloody maker, but not so. One way only. He made her hate m
e-lah
.

Waiting to kill him, fearing the nail would not hold sufficient poison, I prepared another dagger in secret. I found one not much thicker than a hatpin. As it had no sheath I fitted it inside a length of rubber hose which, once I had corked it at each end, I could keep safely in my pocket.

I was like a brumby at the Darwin Races. When the morning came I almost tripped with my box of fruit as I boarded the Hin bus. There was a temporary post office in Light Street in those years and here I sat on a bench inside the door, for all of one long day, never missing a face. Who could imagine I would come to this when I got my first-class honours at Fort Street High School.

The second day was raining early and I worried the poison might wash from the nail, but this was when he chose to come—that odd springing step of his, a pink chit in his hand. I stepped immediately behind him and, as he reached the counter, drove the nail into his thigh.

He gave a cry and turned. What contempt he showed, even then. He took my left arm and twisted it. I was weak as a child against him. The box spilled, fruit rolling across the floor. And when my dagger fell from its rubber hose, he forced me nearly on top of it. Thus it was with his assistance that I grasped the weapon and drove it into his buttock.

At about that time I was removed from him. Naturally they took me away to a cell in the Carnarvon Street police
station, where I was very soon visited by the idiot Grainger and an English doctor who asked me ridiculous questions such as was I mad or not. I really did not care. What distressed me was that the creature had not died. My surprise at this seemed further proof of insanity, that I had believed it possible to kill a man by stabbing him in the buttock.

So there was one more court case, Mem, and I was deported to Australia. I understood I was to be sent to hospital but when the ship docked there was no-one to meet me and I simply walked away.

Sydney people are always bragging about this beautiful place they live in, but there were no pretty vistas in my life. I found a flat in a hot, bare street in Randwick and a job in the traffic department of an ad agency. Endless bus rides every day. A hateful job, nagging and whining, threatening and pushing, like a parking cop—brown bombers, we used to call them. The clever snot-nosed copywriters would not give me face. If I had not hated them, I would have had no passion at all. My girl was gone forever and now this horrid job provided my only society. Each night I drank two beers in a bar and then went home to work at my whisky. One more, one more—
satu lagi
, as we say.

You might think I would now feel free at least. I could lie in bed without fear the monster was about to creep into the room, yet in truth he had become part of me. After all, he had shaped my life, stolen my heart, cramped my fingers, made me a homeless traveller when I had never wished to leave my street.

Need not have worried-
ah
. Twelve months later his letter found me at the advertising agency. So you miss me also, I thought, for he was the type that always has to win the argument.
Kiasu
, they say here. Scared to lose. It is meant to be the Malaysian disease. And in his ten pages I felt the head of
steam he had. What a triumph he now was. How he had overcome me. I had brought him forth ignorant into the world but now he knew six languages, five of which I never heard of. So learned now. He knew the holy books of Buddha and Mohammed. He knew the name of everything that lived on the Malaysian earth. He was the greatest writer ever born. Much tiresome bombast, such as had always marked him, the same sort of rant Donald Defoe had heard in Bali. Yet even as I read I had no inkling of what was to come. It was not until the last page, Mem, I found what was eating him.

‘It is thanks to you,’ he wrote, ‘thanks exactly to what you planned for me, that I am now dying of Graves’ disease and will leave my family alone and penniless. When you stabbed me in the bum I almost felt sorry for you. How pitiful you seemed that day. But here you finally show your power. How you must hate my little girl to take her father from her. I hear you are an ad man still. I hope you enjoy your corruption and your wealth while you leave my child a starving orphan.’

But of course I did not mean the child to be abandoned. Never. Graves’ disease, Mem, had been a joke, a pun, the disease of Robert Graves and T. S. Eliot, all the mumbo-jumbo men. ‘Garlic and sapphires in the mud,’ what will that ever mean? But still I rushed to the dictionary: ‘Disease characterised by the enlarged thyroid, rapid pulse, and increased metabolism due to excessive thyroid secretion.’

I called my doctor. Friend is sick et cetera. He told me not to fret and that Graves’ disease was easily treated. But although he happily wrote me scrips for calmer-downers he could not write me one for this. Just the same, Sydney is a crooked town. I made enquiries.

Do you see what was happening, Mem? I was thinking, Will I go back to Malaysia? No harm to get a nice new passport with no sign of my deportation. Would they have my
name on a list? A risk, of course. I finally met a greyhound trainer. Yes, mate, he could get me the medicine, no worries. From him I learned it could not be simply put in the post. Must be coddled, packed in dry ice. Hah, how perfect! I would have to take it myself.

My life in Sydney, so boring. I am sure you have not the least idea of how a life can pass like this, leaking away like a dripping tap. Monday–Friday, Saturday–Sunday, sleep and drink the only luxury. It is how my mother lived. Work, eat, sherry flagon, sleep.

But now I was alive at last. I burned my bridges, resigned my job, broke my Randwick lease. How could I be sorry? My daughter would see me save the bastard’s life. She could not hate me then.

Chubb paused here as if to appeal to me, and looking into those grey eyes I wondered what in his nature would permit him to shift from murder to nursing without so much as a change in breath. It was only here, so late in the story, that I considered the possibility of him being truly psychotic.

The minute my telegram had been delivered to Jalan Campbell both Tina and Mrs Lim were up and down the road. The
hantu
is coming. The
hantu
is coming. You have seen them together, Mem, so you can imagine the prance, the rage. Soon all the morons in the street were in a state about the ghost.
Cheh!
Peering out like aunties from behind their blinds.

The drug for Graves’ disease was propylthiouracil— which Chubb duly spelt out for me. Got it through customs, he said, without an eye being raised. Passport stamped. Free to go. Everything was first-rate until the taxi pulled up outside the shophouse and I jammed the bloody box inside its sliding door.
Wah!
Suddenly great clouds of carbon dioxide all around me—not a man but a walking factory, a brewery. A dramatic entrance, Mem, but very tame compared to what the neighbours claimed to see. A creature with no body. Entrails flashing blue.

I stepped inside and was greeted by my child. Five foot six at least and almost prettier than her mother. But she had those two tiny freckles on her upper lip and was alight with foolish love for the creature. Luminous, she stung me.

Of course she was frightened and not only of the steaming box. She thought I was the devil. I asked, Where is the patient?

Atas
. So saying she set off up the stairs, her bare feet whispering against the polished teak. Is that not a sound a man will remember all his life—a woman’s feet brushing across a wooden floor?

I followed with my dry ice billowing in the dark. There were lamps upstairs, no electricity. The room was not like now, Mem. It was ruled by the living creature in his giant teak bed. I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes—
wah! what
eyes—were fixed on me. In the lamplight he was a grub in its cocoon, swathed in mosquito net. All around me, on the floor, stacked against the walls, were the journals his slaves had made for him.

He lay in the darkness like a raja. Beside him I could make out his little Chinese soldier. You’ve seen her. Hard to look at all those
scars-lah
. Her flat face shivered when she saw
me, but I was her master’s maker and she pulled back the mosquito net.

Tuan Bob, she announced.

And there he lay, the thing that I had brought to life, the brutish genius, glistening in the dark. His sweaty eyelids had retracted and the eyes were bulging from his shining face. He had become disgusting—gaunt, emaciated, the ribs nearly breaking through his wet and slippery skin. The old doctor in Randwick had prepared me for the jerky and spasmodic movements of the eyes, but not for the power of this disease to topple such a giant.

Seeing me, the tyrant made a choked-off phlegmy noise, presumably a laugh. What was the joke? That I had needed him? That he was my life? Yet the more damn vile he was, the better it suited me. ‘Lo though I were despised and spat upon.’ For now my daughter would finally see what sort of man I was.

I asked the name of his doctor so I could deliver him the drug.

No doctor, he said. It is the disease you invented for me. It has always been here waiting. Cure it if you can.

By this stage I did not doubt I had invented his disease. I set to work, Mem, straight away. Must unmake my joke, you see. There was a large bowl of soapy water on the floor and much of it was spilled. I placed my box where it was dry, and unpacked the bottle and pipette. The propylthiouracil was a tincture. My daughter brought the water so I might dilute it and, though frightened, she met my gaze. I could look directly through the iris and see her courage, as I named it. Silently she pleaded that I would not hurt him, and with more tenderness than she had shown when I was tripped and kicked into the mud.

I prepared the medicine and poured it into a little china
cup as the females attempted to sit my genius up. They
Bapa’d
and
Tuan’d
and whispered in his ear but could not budge him. Finally he made it clear that I was the one he designated to touch his skin, to slip my hand beneath his sweating back and raise him so he might sip his tincture like a damned lover in my arms, a dying Jesus in a Roman church.

There was a strange metallic odour like copper about his skin. And his breath, Mem, dust and garlic. But what I felt most was his animus against me, the tremor of his hatred even as I ministered to him.

No sooner was the drug ingested than he vomited, and all the putrid contents of his stomach flooded down his chest and across his hairy stomach and my daughter began to weep convulsively.

You lift! Mrs Lim barked. Yes-Mem-no-Mem. I was her bloody coolie, so she thought. Lift now, she cried, and I carried her great
Tuan
and she was a little soldier beetle scurrying around the room, floating clean sheets into the air, fluffing pillows.

Tina watched, sniffling. God knows what she thought.

I held her bapa, all the while feeling his malevolent breath upon my cheek. To be so intimate with Bob McCorkle was disgusting, as unnatural and frightening as holding one’s own vital organs in one’s hands. His shaven head lolled back, and when I drew away he leered at me and sought my eyes. This behaviour I could put down to his disease. Nervousness, irritability, emotional lability, every symptom in the book. I held him for as long as it takes a two-gallon kettle to boil and only when his bath was ready could I be released.

To nurse a beloved friend is one thing, Mem, but a tapeworm who has tortured you so long? My daughter knew this. She must have known. I had made myself his nurse, his servant, his doctor. This was how the weeks passed for me. I
slept on the hard floor beside him. I had no desire to lessen my pain.

Neither of the women would speak to me. They brought me soup and noodles but I always ate alone, squatting beside the great dark bed, one of them was always watching over me.

I was so confident about the treatment, said Chubb, so certain of the cure, so slow to notice that my patient now weighed even less. His mind was wandering also. And his eyes—
wah!
Jellyfish about to burst. The weaker he grew, the more polite he became. Twice he smiled. From time to time he thanked me. He was dying. He knew that well before I did, and he was fretting, you see, about the woman and the child. What he needed now he could not steal or extract with violent threats against my person. He wanted me to promise to care for his dependents, and to do that he must charm me or make me pity him.

As my wishes were almost exactly the same as his, you might think I would immediately put his mind to rest? But by now I had known him for fifteen years and had lost my life because of him. I had good reason to be wary of his cunning. So while my heart could not help but be torn by his agony I did not dare let myself soften.

Tell me yes, he cried, or tell me no.

But I would do neither, and finally he could bear my recalcitrance no more and had a kind of seizure, thrashing and twisting on the bed as if he could rip himself apart. He roared. His huge eyes were terrible to see. It seemed the skull could not contain them long. He fell from the bed and cracked his head against the floor. Even this I withstood, but his upset escalated and as it caused such distress to the women I finally allowed myself to offer the thing I craved the most.

I gave him my word that I would care for my daughter, the other one as well.

Hearing this, he collapsed back on his pillow. Everything in his hard, handsome face was sunken, everything except the eyes.
Wah!
So big now I could see my upside-down reflection when I spoke to him.

Come here, he said, patting the bed.

What was there to be afraid of? He took my hand and his own was soft and feeble, boneless as a ghost’s.

I am easy now, he said. We are one, you and I.

It was a lovely morning in the dry season, Mem. Now their patient had grown so calm, they left on separate errands, Mrs Lim for Chow Kit, Tina to fetch a bowl of hot
tow too fah
, which was all the creature could hold down.

We were alone. The early sun was streaming through the windows and the mynah birds were in the mulberry tree out the back. In the street a cracked voice called for people to bring out their old newspapers—
paper lama, paper lama
.

What a shitty thing it is, Christopher, to come to this.

I said death comes to all of us.

No, no. I labour all my bloody life to make a work of art. And now the end is here, there is only you to give it to. My old enemy.

He twisted away and when he turned back I saw the volume which you held last night. Not the least idea of what it was. It felt as feverish and slippery as his skin.

What is this?

Swear you won’t destroy it, he said.

There on the title page I read that fierce sarcastic title,
My Life as a Fake
.

Swear you will not burn it.

What is it?

The human soul, he said.

I thought he mocked himself. What did I expect? Certainly not art.

I swear, I told him, that I shall not damage this in any way.

I was being truthful. I would have protected it even if it was the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic, which is exactly what I thought it was.

Give me, he said. You can read it when I’m gone. He was, finally, very gentle, touching my face so affectionately he might have been a doting uncle. Good man, he said. I know you will look after it.

I had thought his hatred of me all gone, but recently I have come to wonder if, even when he seemed so gentle, he was secretly relishing the notion of making me a bicycle mechanic. So like him. To trick me into living my own lie-
ah
? Lock myself in a pit of oil and gasoline. Did he wish his fate to be mine? If so, he hid his feelings until my daughter returned with the
tow too fah
.

He did not die until the following day but his demise, unlike his life, was peaceful, and he held the book against his chest until the very end.