THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Fourteen

I can only take our mother’s word for it because I was too small at the time. I was one year and five months old when Fei was born and when he was brought home from hospital, according to her, my first act as big sister was to offer my little brother my bed. It was one of my few acts as big sister probably because by the time I was old enough to remember he was big-brothering me more than I was big-sistering him. I would be in trouble with our mother, trying to hide from her and her cane maybe after I talked back to her too much, and he would be saving my hide. It was a three-room flat and there weren’t many hiding places. If I ran out of ideas (again) and ran to the bathroom, he would run with me, get me inside and locked, stay outside and stop my mother. He wasn’t even five years old then.

Sure we did brawl, we did fight and we did have our wars growing up. If he thrashed me in chess, I would be a bad loser and I would have to thrash him back or die trying in countless rematches. I wasn’t adult enough then to accept that he would know better; now I am.

He knows his chess and his Chinese history (he is well-versed in Qing history, having read the non-fiction that I haven’t bothered to because “you can’t write like Louis Cha by reading him – he read history”); he knows his economics and his engineering; he knows how the world works. (When I think about it I think I got most of our parents’ silliness and he got most of their sense.)

When I had problems with a previous boss he said, “Didn’t you read The Deer and the Cauldron?” I did, I said. I read all five books of the Louis Cha novel more than 10 times and laughed myself silly each time. He got very different things out of the very same books, however. He gleaned from the tale of Wei Xiaobao, his Manchu boss, Emperor Kangxi, his anti-Manchu boss, Chen Jinnan, his seven wives and three children the art of human relations.

When I had knee problems he ran with me. He came down to my level and ran at my pace, to teach me a better technique – Chi Running – to save my knees from me.

When I was in real trouble, the one time I was in real trouble, he did what he could. Although I didn’t say anything at the time, he somehow knew why I was in a black mood (…Oscar…) and why my mood was changing from black to bleak (…our parents…). So he took me to How the Grinch Stole Christmas and when it didn’t work he took me to breakfast. Over kway chap he fed me a Louis Cha tale I hadn’t read, about a couple with the most ideal, happy marriage. Who never fight. Who are the envy of every other couple in the whole jianghu. But as it transpires, their marriage is a sham. So. People fight in real relationships, he said. We know how our parents’ fights go. Our mother will do this and our father will do that. We know how their fights come and go as wayang do, he said. I heard him; I heard the things he said and the things he didn’t say; and when there was no more to be said to me in my darkest moments he went shopping with me.

So. He is married and moving out soon. For years I thought I was prepared for the day we would have very separate lives. I had bought extra Louis Cha books for the day we would have very separate libraries, hadn’t I? I was big-sister prepared, wasn’t I?

Silly me.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Thirteen

My mother wasn’t looking at the time. She was what, 18 or 19, staying with a kinswoman for a couple of days, putting the rubbish out in the alley. She wasn’t well. She thought she was looking a little wan. But someone in the alley kept looking at her. Some boy next door, having a smoke outdoors. The boy who would be my father. Reportedly – according to my mother’s reports – he clapped eyes on her in the alley in Kota Bharu and he knew they were going to be together. He just knew.

This was the mother of all tales I grew up with. It wasn’t a fairy tale but it was fantastic enough to have damaged my brain. This was, I thought, proof of destiny, proof that it was knowable. You could meet the love of your life just like that; he would know just like that, even if you didn’t; and you could live happily ever after or not-unhappily for decades. Not-unhappily isn’t shabby.

I was fascinated by fate. I was a fan. One of my favourite films, when I was 18 or 19, was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red, in which a young model and a youthful judge don’t quite meet. But as she connects with an old ex-judge it becomes profoundly plain the three are connected by the dotted lines of destiny. You know she is meant for the judge, even if she doesn’t. It was a movie after my own heart.

Away from fiction I saw more dotted lines. A friend studied at the same poly as her Mr Right, lived in the same district as him but never got to know him, not until she resigned from a company, he replaced her – getting her work, her desk, odds and ends like her slippers – and they got to know each other as almost-colleagues. Where some would have seen chance I saw fate.

If a friend’s faith in her relationship wavered I would recall the fortune teller’s positive prognosis. I wouldn’t be telling her, “The fortune teller said so.” I wouldn’t be thinking it. I would be thinking about the science of relationships – thinking about psychologist John Gottman, who can analyse 15 minutes of a married couple talking, track negative emotions from defensiveness to contempt and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married 15 years later – thinking about the absence of contempt in the friend’s relationship – and quietly believing the fortune teller.

I was sold on the idea of cosmic certainty, the bigger the more inevitable the more inescapable the better. I am still. Of course, in my lucid moments I don’t think my father knew. He was as old then as Bak is now: Would Bak know destiny if it kicked him in the face like a football hooligan? Maybe my father said the same thing to a lot of girls. Maybe my mother was the only one who believed him. It might have been luck that a hardworking woman like her happened to a high-maintenance man like him. (I also don’t think Oscar knew. He said a similar thing to me and I now think – I now know – it was talk.)

In my normal moments, however, you can still sell me a show by titling it Destiny Love or I Was Fated to Love You. It gets me every, every time.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Twelve

A couple of my mummy friends are concerned that their tots may not be bilingual enough and I can completely understand. When I was with Oscar, who speaks English and Dari, I was preposterously, prematurely determined that if and when there were kids they would speak – and think in – two to three languages. Through the windows of multiple languages they would have multiple views of the world; single-celled monoglots they wouldn’t be, not my kids; and my plan was to reverse-engineer them as their grandfather had reverse-engineered me once upon a time.

My father hadn’t planned us (we were all accidents) but once we were born he planned long and hard to bring us up bilingual, I think. Seeing as we were in a Chinese-speaking house, he decided he wouldn’t have to teach us Chinese. We would learn it by osmosis and when we were old enough we would learn it better by reading a couple of Chinese books. Not that we would be force-fed any novel. Delicious books by Louis Cha and others were left all about the house (some were my father’s, some were a stranger’s which had been thrown at the void deck and picked up by my mother); no one said we should read them and no one said we shouldn’t; we were left to find out for ourselves and we did.

My father didn’t leave English to chance though. (He hadn’t received much formal schooling and had learnt English by pure will – enough English to understand legalese better than I will in my lifetime – by reading newspapers cover to cover, word by word and looking up all the new words in his dictionary. It would take him a week to read a daily.) As he saw it, our Chinese-speaking circumstances put us at a disadvantage. He couldn’t disadvantage us more by doing what others did: which was, as he saw it, to speak to their children in either bad English or a middling mix of English and Mandarin and doom them grammatically. So he didn’t speak English to us and nor did he make my Chinese-speaking mother speak English to us. He decided to make us memorise whole books in English instead. Kids in ancient China were made to learn the four books and five classics by heart so that they would, in later life, never compose a bad Chinese sentence, weren’t they? My father was convinced that English syntax could be hardwired into us too.

I must have been three or four or five, at an age when I would rather draw manga princesses with starry eyes than memorise The Frog Prince, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, when I was put on the Rote Learning 2.0 programme. I must have memorised a fairy tale every week, learning a page every day and reciting it to my father every night. I was a good girl too, barring the days I had my head buried in colouring books and forgot to be frightened of his disapproval.

The Frog Prince isn’t the Analects of Confucius, of course, and nor is it the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Would I sound smarter now had I been exposed to Gibbon then...? Maybe… Maybe not.) But I don’t think my brothers and I are relatively bilingual by accident; my father may have got something there.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eleven

When I think about it the Taiwanese ones are taller and the Korean ones are heavier.

When I think of a Taiwanese rom com that works, like It Started with a Kiss, I think of its dizzy heights – girl gets giddy when she gets to be in the same building as boy. When I think of a Korean rom com that works, like My Girl, I think of its weight. I feel it and I weep it. Might it have to do with how serious the Koreans are about everything?

Yes, be it in Taiwan or Korea, rom coms are almost always about how the good girl gets the guy. But in Korea they don’t just tell you she is good and absolutely adorable. They also put her through the wringer of extreme Confucian ethics and test her goodness time and again – or they do in My Girl.

(SPOILERS AHEAD.)

This is a roller coaster of a show constructed on the conceit that the heroine is a liar with a heart pure as snow. The rom com of errors starts slow, with how she is hired by the hero to pose as his long-lost cousin at his grandpa’s deathbed; then it goes up, down and round steep narrative slopes when grandfather lives and won’t let granddaughter leave and she has to keep lying – and suffering.

Oh, there is comedy here. Oh, there certainly is (as well as lived-in loverly banter). I really remember laughing.

But the weeping is more memorable. Late in the rom com the heroine has to sound cheerful saying goodbye to the hero. He thinks this is goodbye for now; she is just going to Jeju Island, isn’t she, and he is joining her ASAP. But she knows she is going somewhere else and never coming back; this is goodbye forever. After their goodbyes she is about to fill in a departure form at Incheon airport when the dam bursts. The last lie she told him weighs so heavily, she can’t stay on her feet any more. All she can do is sink to the ground and bawl. Very, very bitterly.

This bitterness I somehow took with me when I went jogging last Saturday. I went up, down and round a hill, bawling. So few things get under my skin these days, however, it felt good feeling bad that day.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Ten

Lyricist Lin Xi, in an interview, speaks of the levels to writing a love song. Level one is when you are at least writing Chinese; level two is when you want people to weep and they do; level three: Not only do your words bring tears they also bring back memories; level four: When the weepers have done weeping they are philosophical, able to see the unhappy past in a happier light; then there is what Mr Lin terms the Huang Yaoshi level, when a love song is also about the world, politics – going beyond “one couple, two systems” to “one country, two systems” and back, as it were.

Coming to the Huang Yaoshi ref in the interview – thanks Ms O for posting parts of it – I felt a flicker of satisfaction. Hey, I thought, Mr Lin reads Louis Cha too. The master lyricist is reading the same master novelist as me. Then I thought, hey, everyone in Hong Kong, in China, reads Mr Cha or learns him by osmosis: Mr Lin is making the ref to Huang Yaoshi (an exceptionally multitalented man in Legend of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes, a genius) without a second thought and everyone there gets the ref without a second thought. So in mere seconds I went from feeling I wasn’t quite alone to feeling I was quite alone. I am a shorthand typist using signs that few of my friends here know. Worse, I thought, we don’t have our own similarly resonant shorthand. We don’t have our own Louis Cha stories, our own rich (if a bit middlebrow) mythology. We are poorer for it.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Nine

Last year I talked and talked of going to Paris, then I read Orhan Pamuk’s essay The Pamuk Apartments and talked and talked of going to Istanbul. Now that I’m booked to go to his home city I’ve been reading his novel My Name Is Red, for emotional preparation. I was looking to fall more in love with Turkey through his fiction – maybe to be dazzled by his brilliance and fall in love with a book – when I found an answer I hadn’t been looking for.

Let me describe for you how our embrace might’ve been depicted by the master miniaturists of Herat, if this tragic story of mine were one day recorded in a book. There are certain amazing illustrations that my father has shown me wherein the thrill of the script’s flow matches the swaying of the leaves, the wall ornamentation is echoed in the design of the border gilding and the joy of the swallow’s matchless wings piercing the picture’s border suggests the elation of the lovers. Exchanging glances from afar and tormenting each other with suggestive phrases, the lovers would be depicted so small, so far in the distance, that for a moment it’d seem like the story wasn’t about them at all, but had to do with the starry night, the dark trees, the exquisite palace where they met, its courtyard and its wonderful garden whose every leaf was lovingly and particularly rendered. If, however, one paid very close attention to the secret symmetry of the colours, which the miniaturist could only convey with total resignation to his art, and to the mysterious light infusing the entire painting, the careful observer would immediately see that the secret behind these illustrations is that they’re created by love itself. It’s as if a light were emanating from the lovers, from the very depths of illustration. And when Black and I embraced, well-being flooded the world in the very same manner.

Thank God I’ve seen enough of life to know that such well-being never lasts for long.

Once upon a time in my Iran phase one of the first films I watched was Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees. The movie starts simply, with a man standing in front of a tree. Then he says, “I’m Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, the actor who plays the director,” and the film seems less simple. To cut a long story short the movie is about the making of a fictional film about life after a non-fictional quake – about a couple who bury their families, then marry each other as they have no one else – and who should be cast as the couple but a schoolgirl, an orphan of the quake, and her suitor, an out-of-work bricklayer whom she won’t talk to. And the ending is a mystery: The schoolgirl still doesn’t talk to her suitor, who still doesn’t give up. He follows her down a hill, through olive trees and into an open field – but the camera doesn’t follow – and all the eye sees of him and her are smaller and smaller dots.

I’ve hoped it is a happy ending. Now I know: I’m sure I saw swaying leaves.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eight

“I’m not very smart.” That’s Sugar’s sad-funny refrain in Some Like It Hot, the manic masterpiece, my favourite 50s film which I watched on the big screen for the first time at The Picturehouse the other day. Sugar, played by the one and only boop-boop-de-boop Marilyn Monroe, is a singer who keeps falling for no-good sax players, who love her then leave her with no more than “a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out”. She just can’t help it. So to stay out of harm’s way, she runs off with an all-girl jazz orchestra. To Miami. Where she may meet a Shell Oil millionaire and marry money.

Well she doesn’t. She meets Joe (Tony Curtis), a sax player who dolls up as Josephine to get a job with the orchestra then masquerades as a shell-collecting millionaire to woo her. She’s “not very smart”. That’s why she falls for Shell Oil Junior, not finding it fishy when he says of water polo, “I had two ponies drowned under me.” When she finds out he is a sax player, a no-good one, she falls harder for him. “Not very smart,” she laughs – it isn’t a happy laugh. Conscience-stricken, he tries to tell her he is no better than all her previous sax players.

“That’s right. Pour it on. Talk me out of it,” she purrs. Tremulously.

It amazes me, how I hear Monroe’s smile and tears as she is saying this. Sugar is drunk and drowning, she knows it. She knows romance promises nothing but itself. Happiness? She might as well fish for the moon in a river. For a very insane farce, Some Like It Hot is very sane on the subject of romance. It’s very smart.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Seven

You forget what it is like to badly want someone.

It has hit you belatedly, weeks after you and your mother watched, rewatched and revised the rom com It Started With A Kiss: This girl really, really wants this boy. She, a dullard, is helplessly, helplessly in love with the star student. She writes him a love letter, which he refuses to read, and everyone in school ridicules her. But she still adores him. She may say she doesn’t. But she does. They go to the same school; they go home to the same house; there is no getting away from him. Not that she wants to get away. She can’t get enough of him as it is. If he joins the tennis team she has to join too. He is a waiter after school so she is a regular at the restaurant, naturally. If he wants to be a doctor then she has to be a nurse or die trying. All she wants is to be his Mrs Jiang Zhishu.

You feel for her, because the part is played by the truly adorable Ariel Lin. You found Lin annoying at first, actually. But she grew on you. If she was a fruit, you reckon, she would be a plum – small, round, sweet, soft, bruises easily. She isn’t like Barbie Hsu of Meteor Garden, Rainie Yang of Devil Beside You or Zhang Ziyi. There is a hardness to Hsu, Yang and Zhang. They don’t look like they will ever lay themselves as open to love as Lin. As open to being hurt. When Lin says, “How? I don’t know how to stop loving him,” she sounds so dazed, it endears her to you. You want to buy her ice cream.

You feel for her, because you remember now. You had a Gor Gor who lived under the same roof long ago. You were a four-year-old or five-year-old driving him potty, going, Gor Gor this, Gor Gor that and he was a tween or teen pushing you away, telling the adults how much he hated you. But when you went swimming for the first time, he was the one paddling all around the pool with you… In JC, you were smitten by so-and-so – a broad-shouldered long-fingered so-and-so who played the piano, mahjong and football well – and somehow everyone in your science class knew. The other day, somebody sent you an SMS, “Met so-and-so who is with ERA now. Had to tell you. He was your idol!” It has been more than 10 years and they still think of you as a subset of him… A memory is thawing out after a year in the freezer. It feels like a lifetime ago. But didn’t you once write Oscar a bloody bad poem?

Happily, Kiss is a rom com and not reality. It fulfils girls’ fantasies that the boys they want will be worth it. Zhishu is worth it. Not because he is brighter and better-looking than her. But because despite his apparent aloofness, he sees how she suffers. Another boy, her classmate, has carried a torch for her for years and on a rare lucid day, she says to him, “I am luckier than you. Zhishu may look like he doesn’t care. But he sees what I feel. He knows.”

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Six

In the first few frames of Ex-Lover, Akari is a woman who has everything. She has an apartment with a view of Tokyo Tower; she has a jet-setting job with a jeweller that just took her to Paris; best of all, she has the perfect man. He’s tall, dark, handsome, a highflying accountant, he’s perfect down to his Tokyo University degree and to make things even more perfect, he’s in her bed now. In the sweet afterglow of lovemaking, she gets him to try on his new nude tie from Paris. He tries it on. Then he gets up to announce he’s going home. She asks him to stay. He’s out her door. And her night sours.

In the light of day, it is also obvious that she’s terrible at her job. Her heart isn’t in it. She’s 29, marriage is on her mind but she’s also terrible at getting a man to marry her. The perfect man, Hayato, isn’t interested. He says he wants to be with her forever without ever having to marry her. She says she wants what he wants…she’s lying. And the thing is…he’s a bit of an iceberg. Sometimes being beside him is as lonely as being on her own.

So she falls in bed with her ex-boyfriend, Arashi. He was nuts about her seven years ago but she broke up with him for being a ne’er-do-well. Now he’s successful – but married – but still nuts about her. And as she says to the iceberg, she’s better off being with the matrimonially unavailable man than the emotionally unavailable one.

The iceberg was playing it cool all along. But he can’t be cool anymore. Someone has to save her from a life as a mistress. He has to marry her. She says no thanks at first. But he hears her parents aren’t doing well – they haven’t been happy since their small toy shop closed down – and he calls on them to cheer them up. So it is that she comes home to such heart-warming domestic bliss and has second thoughts, “Is this what the lie of marriage is about?”

And you are going, why is she going on and on about this TV show?

Actually I don’t know if this is such a good show. (Er I have a thing about the iceberg i.e. Abe Hiroshi?) But to me it shows the pain-pleasure cycle of some relationships so well: the smallness of the joys snatched, the comforts you cling to, the uncertainties that eat away at you, the untruths and half-truths you feed each other and yourself.

A couple months ago, I was looking for a little misery to mark the first year of the death of a relationship. Ex-Lover was just perfect for my purposes.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Five

When the going gets tough, some Cantonese go, chin sai. (I.e. previous life i.e. what did I do in my previous life?) On the one hand we don’t want to blame others. But on the other hand we don’t want to be too rough on ourselves – our present selves. So we blame our past selves. Really it’s not so much blame as some sort of resignation: The past self ran up a debt that the present self has to pay off lor. (Lor, by the way, is a sound that sums up Ng Man Tat, that walking talking sideshow of comic resignation in a Stephen Chow show. “I’m getting my gun and I’m going to die with you lor,” Ng tells Chow, beta policeman to alpha policeman, in his most memorable line in Fight Back To School.) It does get us going.

But coming to relationships, chin sai starts to sound negative: What did I do to you in my previous life? Do I owe you a debt from my previous life? The lover becomes a creditor, love’s loan shark, Shylock come for a pound of flesh.

So Cao Xueqin is the poet who has taken much of the bitterness out of the equation, if you ask me, by giving an account of what the creditor did. In his Dream Of The Red Chamber (the version I vaguely remember from reading the first few chapters aeons ago), Jia Baoyu is the incarnation of a magic stone and Lin Daiyu, that of a flower. In their previous lives, the stone was rolling along when it ran into the flower which it liked so much, it watered it every day (in my mind’s eye, the stone was rolling here, there and everywhere to gather water for the thirsty flower – I don’t know if I’m remembering or imagining that). So the flower was so thankful, it said it would repay the stone for the water in their next lives. In Daiyu’s tears.

Beautiful story, isn’t it? I feel so. I felt so. How I did drown, in my own way, in the beauty of the story. When I was with Oscar – through the break-ups and the kiss-and-make-ups – I thought there had to be a reason. Why did he come back for more after the nth parting? Why did I go back for more? I thought there had to be a debt. I tried to think of it positively. Sometimes I even scolded myself, “You owe him means you owe him. Run away now and you will still owe him in your next life.”

When the big one came – the 9 Richter break-up of no return – so did a sense of relief: I’m not as deep in debt as I believed.

But the tale of the debt of tears is beautiful. I do want to read the rest of that book.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Four

These are a few of my comfort foods: my mother’s rice noodles, Milo with crackers and Meteor Garden. Meteor Garden – it’s Pride And Prejudice lite with Jerry Yen as Darcy – is my chocolate. On downhearted days I pop it into the DVD machine’s mouth and press Play. Instant happiness.

There are days chocolate isn’t enough though. Like when first love crashes, becomes first break-up in a foreign country – a friend’s friend takes you in, gives you a shoulder to cry on – you go broke calling friends back home – you don’t know what to do with yourself. I didn’t know what to do with myself that summer Down Under. Then I found myself buying a book, Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, for the friend’s friend and in the middle of writing her a thank-you-for-everything note, I began to reread the book in her kitchen.

Davies has been one of my friends from the first time we met in NUS. That was where I borrowed my first Davies, that is. I really don’t remember if I found him on my own or only after reading his obituary, an inspiring one by The Economist. But I thank the day we met. His is the warmest and wisest of voices – he wrote his best books late in life when he was in his 50s and 60s – and that day in the kitchen, he wasn’t just telling me about Maria Magdalena Theotoky, this beautiful brilliant scholar of Rabelais and how she gets her man and her manuscript; about the body-personality types, ectomorph (scrawny, sex-starved, intellectual), mesomorph (muscular, go-getting), endomorph (plump, pleasure-seeking); about Simon Darcourt, this professor of Greek who may or may not be in love with Maria after he accidentally drinks coffee mixed with her menstrual blood…

Davies was telling me, it’s gonna be okay girl.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Three

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She was more of a buyer of Chinese storybooks, when we were kids. Before my brother and I went to school and on the stock school kids’ diet of Tintin, Enid Blyton and Asterix, she fed us stories about the foolish monkeys who believed four acorns in the morning and three at night was better than three in the morning and four at night; the fool who got his feet measured to go shopping for shoes but forgot the measurement and had to go home empty-handed; and so on and so forth. Never mind that we were too young for some of the stories, which were simplified but not dumbed down from Zhuangzi, Hanfeizi and other old philosophy texts.

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She married one, isn’t it enough? She would be the one who bought us a kids’ edition of Journey To The West and my father would be the one who brought it to life for us, with exciting exaggerations, in weekly instalments. His hero in storytelling was Lei Dai Soh, Rediffusion’s Cantonese charmer in the 1950s (Dai Soh, Big Fool, what a name). Week after week, as he ad-libbed his way through Journey To The West, my father became our Lei Dai Soh.

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. But as kids, we came to expect a good story from her every time she had a fight with my father. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Telling us stories, it was her therapy. These were all true stories of my father’s Dickensian days as a child coolie. He hardly told us these stories, so we had to hear them from my mother, who told them so well, she must have told them, line for line, as they were told to her by her Lei Dai Soh. She must have loved these stories. She did only one thing differently: Her stories always ended with, “Your father is a good man.”

I am my mother’s daughter. Oscar was a man with many tales. Of central Asia, of central Europe, of Effendi.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Two

I shouldn’t – but sometimes I blame that book.

The night before I began my big mistake with Oscar, I read Eucalyptus. In that Australian take on Arabian Nights, there is an old man with one daughter and hundreds of gum trees. When she is 19, he decides to marry her off to the man who can name all his trees. Then who should she chance on but a young man who tells her stories, day after day.

Among his dozens of stories, one stayed on my mind. The girl-meets-boy one about the restless woman from Geelong and her Spaniard. They meet in Corunna in north-west Spain. She doesn’t know he is the love of her life until she leaves him for London and realises she shouldn’t have.

In London at the most unexpected moments she saw the room in Corunna, which seemed from a distance to be jammed in at an angle among the black rocks. She kept seeing him across the room and close up. It was their room. He had a long face and hairs on his shoulders: she liked his solemn expression. She could feel his month and hear his voice.

They never meet again.

At strange important moments a person is given one and only one chance; and that had been one.

Did I want to be with Oscar? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to be the woman from Geelong. It was on my mind that I shouldn't be making her mistake. I ended up making worse mistakes – but they were mine, mostly mine.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter One

I don’t know how Oscar said goodbye to Lucinda – did he say it at all? I didn’t read all of Oscar And Lucinda, you see. I began reading the Peter Carey book, believing it to be a lovely love story about two gamblers, the tale of how the narrator’s grandfather, Oscar, ended up with the narrator’s grandmother, Lucinda. I was wrong.

I am more Apollonian than Dionysian. I like order, harmony and happy endings. I can, and do, live with unhappy endings in movies. Most movies end before I can invest in them emotionally, after all. Books demand more of my time. When I like a book, when I like its protagonists, I want happy endings for them and a big positive payoff for me. So I fast-forward books to find out. I read one chapter here, another chapter there, then I go to the ending: Is it happy, is it unhappy and if it is unhappy, how unhappy do things get? For example, I knew Anna Karenina wouldn’t live happily ever after – it meant nothing to me for I didn’t like her – but I had to know if her in-laws, Kitty and Levin, would. (They would.) For example, What I Loved was sad but bearably so. After I read the ending, I could rewind the book and read the rest. Maybe the title, in past tense, had prepared me for the ending. Maybe I had learnt to be less cowardly, more grown-up. Maybe I had learnt not to box books – nor life – up.

But back when I was younger and reading Oscar And Lucinda, I couldn’t continue past the part when Mrs What’s-her-name, that tricky terrible widow, somehow seduced Oscar. She as good as raped him, really, then she got pregnant with his child, then she got him tied to her for life. Untied from Lucinda. I hated her, that Mrs What’s-her-name. How could she? How could Oscar? I was cross with Carey, too. I wanted to tell him, “It’s Oscar And Lucinda, not Oscar And That Woman. I want Lucinda to be the grandma. I don’t want that woman to be the grandma.”

The book went back to the library. That was the end of that, I thought. How was I to know the book would come back to bite me? I didn’t know the Oscar in my life would turn out to be an Oscar. I didn’t know I would turn out to be an Oscar-less Lucinda. I never saw that chapter with Mrs What’s-her-name coming. It came, oh it came. There was a child, their child, and there may be a grandchild, their grandchild, one day, not that I am hoping to hear from them.

How did Lucinda take it? What did she say? What did she do? Who ended it with whom? I don’t know. Never read the rest. But the tale of my Oscar and I came to the bitter end one morning, after months of mutual misery. He called me. One of the first – one of the last things he said to me, with a very final finality, was, “This is goodbye.”

And I have lived with it.