Bak is back from America and with him the spontaneous singing, the epic eating and the spectre of swine flu. “You sure you don’t have swine flu and mine isn’t swine cough?” I say for the umpteenth time, all sputtering and sniffing. “Don’t have.”
“You snorting like a pig?” Dr Fei checks. “No.” “Do you have fever?” “Don’t have.” “It isn’t swine flu.” Oh, so I am not dying? Okay, doc.
My mother is relieved. She has been holding herself back for months. Now she can go back to cooking for an army, secure in the knowledge that Bak will clean us out. “I have forgotten how much he eats,” she says with what can only be called a mother’s pride.
We are a full house once more, a happier one. Here are the sounds of mostly affectionate abuse – nothing unites us more than a baby, our 22-year-old baby boy – and there, in the lift lobby within spitting distance of our door, is the sound of our American Idol courageously attempting Chinese pop. (The notion that neighbours and other innocent individuals might hear him has never stopped him before. Why now, when he is mastering a Crowd Lu? Shui lai jiu wo-aaa-eeeee… Well…maybe mastering is not quite the word for what he does to the song.)
The party boy is back, as is the party. But it is just for a few days more. Fei is marrying P and moving out; change is afoot. It creeps up on me one night, amidst the pitch blackness of sleep, when I hear someone shuffle into my room. “Gor, wrong room…?” I mumble. (How did I know it was Fei? I just knew. When you have lived long enough with someone – since you were one year old – you just have a sixth sense.)
In Fei’s house, his room is on his right when he has to half-sleep-half-walk to it after a late-night tinkle. In the twilight zone between the ROM and the Chinese marriage ceremony, he has been staying there only once a week, enough for his muscles to have memorised it, however: for him to be making the wrong turn here. On some subconscious level, unbeknownst to me before, he doesn’t live here any more. Might it be why, hours later, I dream of an earthquake? I am in M’s house in Tokyo when the tremors start. (She is alive again, yes, and it is a sweet surprise.) We are shaking with the little house and watching skyscrapers crumble one after another like tall cakes. Still, the house stays in one piece and so do we.
Bak is back but Fei is leaving but we’re going to stay in one piece. Aren’t we?
2 comments:
You're going to be fine, my dear. He's getting married, not going away forever. :)
you're right. i know you're right. there are things you know and there are things your heart knows, maybe.
Post a Comment