The Catherine Lim Collection (47 page)

No, the trouble of her breasts did not come
from school; if not for the little pricks of pain shooting all over, even in
the armpits, she could almost forget their existence entirely.

Sitting in the bus, she was aware of a
massive thigh pushed against her own. Staring straight ahead, she moved away a
little, and the thigh followed. She continued staring straight ahead. A
newspaper went rustling up and then fingers under cover of the newspaper,
forced themselves under her thigh and began attacking her there. She held her
breath. Somebody buzzed for the next stop, and when the bus lurched to a
standstill, she picked up her schoolbag, stood up and tried to get around the
massive legs determinedly planted to obstruct her way and jiggling up and down
with menacing nonchalance.

“Excuse me,” she said in a small voice. One
of the legs moved, and again, under cover of the newspaper, the hand shot out a
second time and touched her on the left breast, accompanied by a low brutal
gurgle. She ran down the steps in the bus and found herself at an unfamiliar
bus-stop, but no matter, she could easily find her way home. The pain of the
touch was still there. She was not allowed to spit in a public place, but she
would remember to do it when she reached home, spitting being, as she had
observed in her mother and the women neighbours, a symbolic discharge of the
enemy’s poison that would surely rebound on him. She hated the men in the buses
who had pinched, touched, stroked or rubbed themselves against her ever since
the breasts came, but no, the real trouble did not come from them, for it was
in her power to remove herself from them.

Weather and breasts again conspired. This
time it was not the heat, but pouring rain. She came home from school, totally
drenched. The rain reduced her thin white T-shirt and cotton bra to transparent
cellophane against which her breasts now pressed forth in the full flagrancy of
their size, shape and colour: she might as well be naked. She stood near the
door, pinned to the wall by the intensity of her father’s gaze upon those
breasts, as he came out of his room to meet her. His eyes roamed the exposed
concentric circles of beauty, inwards from the smooth white roundness to the
small light brown patches to the innermost pink tips, and then outwards, till
the beauty was fully savoured.

She felt a sickness deep inside her stomach.

“
Ai-yah
, little Pei Pei! You are all
wet! So you were caught in the rain? Why didn’t you take an umbrella to school
with you this morning? Now you are sure to catch cold, little Pei Pei,
ai-yah
– ” The stream of niceties was a prelude only, to be got out of the way
quickly, as he advanced upon her still standing helplessly against the wall,
and the breasts – oh hateful things! – perfectly moulded to the transparent
wetness of her clothes, continued to beckon and invite.

“Ah – ” said the father in final advance,
then stopped, turning round at the sound of a door being flung open and
footsteps approaching. It was the other daughter and he said, affably, “See,
Mee Yin, your little sister’s all wet. She should get a towel to dry herself
quickly – ”

Ignoring him,
Mee Yin who called herself Debbie and sometimes Desiree,
said sternly to her younger sister, “Go and dry yourself
immediately. You may borrow my hair dryer. And next time don’t come into the
house with your breasts all exposed like that. There are people around who are
only waiting for this to happen!” She flung a contemptuous sidelong glance at
the father who was still smiling, but a little sheepishly, as he rubbed the
back of his neck and continued to say, “
Ai-yah
, you’ll catch cold!”

Debbie/Desiree’s breasts were no enemy. She
cultivated them for good purpose. At McDonald’s, where she worked, she wore a
bra specially constructed to push breasts, no matter how floppy, into a
startling twinning of perfect roundness. The waitress’ uniform of puff-sleeved,
high-collared blouse did not allow for this round ripeness to present itself,
but an undoing of the first three buttons down the front ensured a tantalising
peek or two, especially when she bent over the tables with her tray of
hamburgers and coke.

She saw a hand shoot out towards her and was
not in time to arrest its advance; in an instant, deft fingers had wedged
something into the tight cleavage. She laid the tray carefully on the table
before standing up to put her hand into her blouse, pull out a crumpled note
and return it to its owner who was watching her, grinning. “For you, honey, you
keep it,” he said with a wink and left. It was a $50 note. She put it in the pocket
of her apron.

She let her boy friend Salleh who worked in
the same place, touch her breasts sometimes; often she pouted, scolded,
screamed and pushed his hand away, aware that these, her greatest asset, were
not for foolish squandering.

Their beauty was strangely enhanced by the
streaks of brown liquid that had splashed on them. This the father had not
expected when he had knocked his mug of coffee against her as they passed each
other in the kitchen, and he was able to take in the strangely compelling view
of a delicately branching pattern of dark brown ribbons on perfect whiteness of
breasts before snapping out of the awe to grab a kitchen towel, apologise
profusely, and attempt to wipe off the stains.

“You don’t dare touch me!” screamed
Debbie/Desiree, pushing him away with such violence that he fell backwards and
lay slumped against the legs of a table. “You did that on purpose, you dirty
old man! I saw you do it on purpose. Wait till I tell my boyfriend about you.
He’ll beat you up! Now you’ve dirtied my dress, and I’m late for work! You ‘re
a dirty old man! I’ll get my boyfriend to bash you up!” And that was the last
time he had tried to touch her.

Pei Yin felt safe with Older Sister. She
shared the other bedroom in the flat with her, and even if they forgot to lock
the door at night, she was not afraid. Lock the bedroom door, lock the bathroom
door. The bathroom door had a hole made by the rotting wood. She had stuffed
that with a piece of rag; it had been poked off, and she had stuffed another,
this time more tightly.

“You listen carefully to me, Pei Yin,” said
Older Sister with authority, although she was only three years older.

“Yes, Older Sister,” said Pei Yin.

“You are a big girl now and you’ve got to be
more careful. Don’t be in the house alone with him.” Pei Yin noticed that Older
Sister never referred to the father as ‘Father’. “We bear his name but he’s not
our real father,” she sneered, “Stay in school as long as you can, and don’t
come home before Mother or I do. Mother says she can’t come home before four.
Why don’t you stay in school till then and wait in the void deck downstairs
where you can do your work while waiting for her to come back?”

The Family Joy Project which Pei Yin was now
very much occupied with, would allow her to stay in the school library till
well past five if she wished.

“All right, but make sure you are never
alone in the house with him. Why were you watching TV with him on the same sofa
last night? I saw him sitting very close to you.”

Pei Yin explained tearfully that as part of
the Family Joy Project, the girls had to watch The Cosby Show and comment in
class on the happy family relationships they had observed. She did not tell
Older Sister that at one point, as she was writing down an observation on a
piece of paper on her lap, the father’s hand had suddenly reached up inside her
blouse and touched the curved underside of her left breast; she sat totally
still for a few seconds, staring ahead, while the fingers played and the
pyjama-clad body shifted, moved closer and thrust itself outwards upon the
couch. Then she jumped up and went into her room, and the father continued to
watch TV, his arms now across his chest and his hands tucked in his armpits.
She did not forget to spit when she later went into the bathroom.

“You are a big girl now, Pei Yin,” said her
mother who the month before had brought home a box of sanitary towels for her.
Mrs Tan, Older Sister, Mother, they looked at her breasts, called her ‘big
girl’ and took away the sweetness of the small girl years. She hated being a
‘big girl’.

“You must know what to do now,” said her
mother sorrowfully, the sorrow intensified by the prospect of interminable
years of backbreaking work at the small food stall she ran at a school. Widowed
with two small daughters, she had married a man who promised to expand the food
stall into a thriving canteen business but who, over the years, had claimed a
succession of small ailments and ended up idling at home.

“Poor little daughter,” said the mother
tearfully, stroking her face. “You are so innocent and ignorant, not like Older
Sister who is so clever and knows how to take care of herself. Do take care,
Little One. Your mother has been a great fool, but what is there to do now?
Your mother does not want anything bad to happen to you. It is good that you
are staying back in school in the afternoons. You are doing something that
makes you very happy, Little Daughter? I see it is a big book with plenty of
beautiful pictures and much writing.” And she took her daughter’s face in her
hands and smiled proudly.

The pictures were spread around her on the
floor, ready to be sorted out and pasted in the big book with the creamy
pristine pages. Some old Christmas and New Year cards lay nearby, held down by
a pair of scissors, the remains of a large collection that by the transforming
power of scissors, paste and crayons, became dazzling daisies, roses, stars,
moons, bells, fruit, bows, rainbows, Chinese dragons, puppy heads, kitten heads
and perfectly shaped human hearts to be commandeered for whatever decorative
purpose their creator intended. The best of the cards had been put aside for
the supreme honour of servicing the book’s title: letters laboriously traced
upon them, carefully cut out and then put together proclaimed “FAMILY JOY by
TEO PEI YIN” in uncompromising columns and blocks of purple, red, blue, pink
and gold.

Across the heaven of a pastel blue page flew
Tinker Bell and Peter Pan hand in hand, shedding a million tiny silver stars,
ingeniously fashioned out of discarded chocolate wrapping. Blue page, yellow
page, mauve page: the colours provided matching backgrounds, thus blue pages
were skies and sparkling water, yellow were golden chicks, buttercups and blond
children, mauve were Victorian ladies in soft dresses and parasols and hyacinths
in bowls. She enclosed the pictures with whirls and whorls of colour, selecting
carefully from a range of 24 pens in a box that a classmate had agreed to lend
her for the day.

But these, despite the opulence, were
preliminaries only, to lead to the true theme of the book, the joy of the
family, for evidence of which Pei Yin had amassed a roomful of glossy
magazines, advertisements, posters, tourist brochures, calendars, postcards,
greeting cards. The Prince and Princess of Wales with their two sons in the
garden of their country home, the Cosby family in a laughing entanglement of
arms and legs, a sunny family on the beach with their dog wearing a red cap,
cut out from a Qantas Airlines poster – the happy families repeated themselves
down the pages, culminating in a picture of the Holy Family, St Joseph and the
Virgin Mary with their hands prayerfully clasped while they looked upon the
Baby Jesus in the hay, radiating light. Beneath this picture, Pei Yin had
copied, in flawless script, God’s own impassioned rhetoric: “If you ask your
father for a loaf of bread, will he give you a stone? If you ask him for an
egg, will he give you a scorpion?” It was Mrs Tan’s favourite quotation.

The scorpion’s poison as yet lay outside the
pale of the happy family pictures; it would have been incongruous cast in the
midst of so much brightness and hope. For Pei Yin’s happy talk and laughter
these days as she cut and pasted, drew and wrote, re-drew and re-wrote, were
based on the hope of securing the glittering prize of prizes in the school
competition – a silver trophy, with the name of the winner engraved. Hope sang,
hope whistled a happy tune which subsided into anxious silence as a shadow,
long and purposeful, fell across the page bordered by red Chinese dragons. Pei Yin
did not look up; she continued the pasting, while the shadow moved and shifted
and finally settled in a dense patch on top of her.

“
Ai-yah
, what beautiful pictures you
have, Little Pei Pei!” said the father, bending over and smiling broadly. “And
what beautiful handwriting! You are a very clever girl, Pei Pei.”

What happened?
she thought. He was supposed to be at a relative’s house that
evening; that was what he had told Mother. The persistent warning from Mother
and Older Sister not to be alone in the flat with the father now shaped into
fearsome reality: they were alone, and neither Mother nor Older Sister would be
back for some time.

“What are you doing, Little Pei Pei? Tell
Father what you are doing.” He squatted down beside her, his arms hanging amiably
between his legs, his face close to hers, but his hands were as yet untouching.
She shrank into herself.

“Why are you afraid of your father, Little
Daughter?”

She had frozen into immobility, a pink and
blue bird limp in one hand, the scissors in the other. He stood up and she
broke out of the immobility to put both bird and scissors on the floor, get up
quickly and run into her room. Bolting the door, she sat on her bed, panting.
She began to cry.