City Like Water

IN A DARK GREEN BOAT

In the place I used to live, my rusty top bunk rocked like a boat. Night after night, it carried me off towards a secret crevice. Some nights the crevice unfurled a tongue to lick me, and barked at me, sending jolts of excitement through my narrow little life. Other nights it sneaked into my embryonic dreams and bared gleaming fangs, nipping at the nerves of my memory like a feisty lover. During the day, it healed over and became just another scar in the battered walls of our post-war apartment building, the vast and varied secrets of bygone eras held closely within.

The walls were grey, and the staircase that descended silently through the building was dark, opening onto a street where dust and sunshine ran riot. Plants and trees were few and far between, but all year long crowds of people sprang up from the street like mushrooms, their jumbled shouts and earthy faces constantly vying for attention. Meanwhile, meat-red plastic bags whipped round in circles, tied to the blades of fans to scare off flies, and sunlight spread itself evenly across the cratered surfaces of all the orange orbs on the fruit stands. I’d look on as the hands of counterfeit watches did their best to tick, and polyester scarves fluttered in the breeze. Inside a row of plastic eggs, electronic pet aliens awaited the right moment to hatch.

I can’t prove any of this. Those streets are unfindable now. Not because of some developer wiping them off the map, like smears from a kitchen table, or because of a corrupt political regime, or because of any other reason the internet might cook up. That world decided for itself. To evade serial numbers, imposed order and the stink of disinfectant, those sun-dazzled inhabitants gathered close their unspoken words and slunk into the cracks of buildings, where they transformed into cockroaches. With their antennae twitching, and their backs ridged with mysterious codes, they scuttled off into the dark.

Those streets are no longer on the city’s epidermis. They’re somewhere deeper, inside our muddied, contaminated memories, shielded by the seahorse coil of our hippocampus, that physical manifestation of the memory god.

My own memory is a mess. A ravenous, never-tidied storeroom, constantly in motion. A chaotic sea. But the tides of my sea must follow some kind of rule, some subliminal rhythm, because some things sink forever beneath the waves while others keep bobbing to the surface. Among them, an old drawing of mine: the city’s metal become one with its living flesh, genitalia melded and thrust into the air, like a giant black peony in full bloom.

In this memory, I’m still in primary school. All afternoon, the sun has been lying on the classroom floor like a snoozing dog – fluffy, gentle, well-behaved, but jerked awake every so often by Peggy the English teacher with the perm, the one we call Piggy, clacking up and down in her high heels. As she approaches my desk, reality drifts back to me on a cloud of rose perfume. First come the pointy tips of her shoes and then, through her flesh-toned stockings, the creases between her squished-in toes.

A single line of that mysterious toe cleavage is almost enough to win me over.

‘Your drawing is very futuristic,’ says Piggy.

‘It’s not about the future,’ I reply. ‘It’s about the past.’

I don’t tell her that the drawing is about my longing for the city’s industrial age. For heavy machinery, steel fists, fantastical steam.

I wasn’t around to witness the happy days when they say success came to those who worked like ants. Those days melted into air. Now they exist only in textbooks and late-night reruns of black and white films, in which the legend of our city’s golden age becomes stronger with every retelling: the people who arrived fleeing the North were the engines that powered the transformation. They made the cogs turn faster.

If it was a time when anyone could succeed, then the three of us – my mum, my dad and me – must have been the only ones who defied the laws of this science. We were stowaways inside a dark green boat, cramped up and holding our breaths, perpetually waiting to reach land. In the gloom, our long slender eyes were wide and vigilant as a cat’s. Our claws pierced only our own flesh, and we held our invisible tails stiff, anxious for our humble lives to avoid detection.

I silently copied out history textbooks that reflected nothing of history, in which the successes and failures of whole eras were recounted from the perspective of imperial rulers, according to whom a silent, compliant populace was a blessing, a sign of long-term peace and stability. I committed all this to memory, mouthing passages while at the same time being enveloped by them, terrified of the real history I found lurking inside. It was like entering one of those new-build indoor wet markets, the floor slick with foul-smelling waste that glistened like fish scales. Somewhere, a chicken’s throat was slit, its lingering final squawk absorbed by the blare of our home television.

On our television, my parents watched the Mark Six lottery balls spinning in a transparent wheel. Kenny Ng was always there in his bow tie, announcing each disgorged plastic ball, each ball with its own number, each number an emblem of hope. My parents grasped their tickets and stared raptly at the screen, as if their numbers were inside waiting for them, and a door about to appear on our flimsy wall to lead them to a whole new world. I hid in my room and memorized the lies from my textbooks as if they were computer code, all the better to insert myself into the giant mechanisms of the city.

I knew that the heavy machinery had lost its voice. The era of industry-in-plain-sight had vanished. But I didn’t realize that she would vanish too – Piggy in her high heels, along with the breeze through the acacia trees on the school grounds, and the playground where we didn’t have to sing a national anthem while watching the raising of a flag, and the hollow sounds of balls landing on tarmac. Certain kinds of factories remained: school factories, home factories, language factories, face factories, consciousness factories, hope factories. Huge, impenetrable universes and microscopic cells.

I can still picture the afternoon sun flooding the street and the old uncle on the corner slicing up cow entrails, the rich smack of his cleaver opening a glistening, fragmented world and the folds of his plaid shirt concealing countless shadows. Something must have gone wrong. Not some small miscalculation, but an abject failure. The city murmurs through the parted lips of the cow-entrail uncle, through the saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth. I start hearing thuds. Every so often, the news reports another depressed teacher jumping to their death, and all I can think of is Piggy with her eyes closed, palms wide as if nailed to a cross and, as she plummets, her Burberry coat puffed out like a sail.