Mortality

It is midnight. The air is cool and the clouds are white against an iron sky. Is there a moon? I do not know. The boy leaves his house and he carries his school bag - black and heavy, the kind you have to carry by hand because there is no strap. It is the same one he put down on a stone table before mock-sparring with Garrick two years ago. Tonight it is filled with medication. His pills. He closes the gate and he walks.

He makes steady pace, thinking - maybe talking to himself? - walking past roundabouts and down deserted, quiet roads. Kuching is silent at this time of the day - people are either away celebrating Gawai or sleeping, enjoying the mid-term break. Is the boy conscious? Does he know what he is doing? Is he being chased by things we cannot see, or is it because he just wants to clear his head? I do not know. I can never know.

He keeps walking.

He might have passed St Thomas's in the hours that follow. If he did, what had the silent school said to him? What memories did he indulge in? Did he think of the laughter, the ISCF meetings? His Taekwando black belt? The homework and the teachers; Cikgu Elin who protected him so fiercely in Form 3? Or was it only the taunts and the isolation that stuck to his mind - the lab sessions where nobody wanted to sit next to him in the front?

It isn't far now.

The pavement under his feet changes: it is no longer gravel but actual cobblestones. Pools of yellow on the occasional metal sheet, printed with Sarawakian history. Far above him in the morning light is the Dewan Undangan Negeri - a half completed monument to the State Government. He probably faces it, but if he sees it we cannot tell. He is staring at the river, brown and gentle, lapping at the base of the Waterfront.

A waitress is looking outside and sees him as he jumps.

Does he splash? Does he scream and shout? Does he try to swim? The water is dark and it swallows him, but he clings on to the bag - this we know. A silent, disconnected tragedy.

36 hours later he is bloated and dead. A SinChew reporter snaps a picture of his body, face down, dripping wet, and mistakenly writes a piece about a drowned 40 year old man. He has no identification on him - it is only later when they search a bag nearby that they find his pills. Scribbled across the prescription bag, in a doctor's lazy scrawl, is his name.

It takes a week before the news spreads in my school. I am in a Chemistry lab doing Chromatography when Pn Eng asks me: "Do you know Voon Hian Cherng?" A face pops up in my head - it is smiling, he was always smiling. He had sparred with me once in ISCF, we were playing and he had pushed me down and had gotten on top, fist balled up. I remembered the pride he took in his kicks, the laughter as he told me and Garrick about his uncle who did Aikido. "I couldn't even get near him!" These are the things I remember of him. "Yes." I say.

"He's dead."

News spreads quickly in St Thomas: teachers piece together what they know and what they remember of him in their classes. Word of his death flies through a huge grapevine primarily powered by school staff, tendrils snaking down to the students. To the classes. A rumour mill. It is a few days before I know the whole story: his father had gone bankrupt years back and both of them got depressed. His father recovered, he didn't. The trouble, the teachers say, had begun in Form 2 - maybe it was a certain oddness about his speech, or the way he was prone to rages. The class shied away from him. Mocked him. In lab for science subjects nobody would want to sit next to him - the teacher would force one of them to pair up and the class would laugh at whoever it was - How unlucky! How perfectly horrible!

When I heard this story I was reminded how often high school could be hell. St Thom was merely a subsidiary: it was one with flowers and boys.

What struck me the most then was how lonely he must have felt. How painful it must have been to have gone through the whole of secondary school without friends - without people he could talk to and people he could trust. And how he had smiled whenever he saw me, whenever we passed in halls and I would say hello and he would say hi. How could he smile? I definitely wouldn't be able to, if I were in his shoes.

But what do I know of him? I had not known he was taking anti-depressants since Form 4. To me he was a 'friend' - one of countless I would greet as I passed in corridors, whom I talked to in the canteen, whom I laughed with at ISCF. Touch and go; no more than that.

Life can be so fragile. We are caught up in the droll, the mundane - is that a pimple? My shirts aren't ironed and my performance is on Tuesday! OMG why my sms no reply?! - and we forget that the little things we take for granted are often the things that keep us sane. Acceptance and friends and funny moments. Voon didn't have that. He didn't have much of high school and he stopped it all too early, too fast.

If you hear this, Voon, I hope you're in heaven. Be truly happy for once when you smile. No more hiding now. You deserve it.

Slowdown

I find myself in an old world. The faces are different, the belts new. But the laughter and the joy and the smell of sweat … these things, so precious to me, are still here unchanged. This is a world I told myself no longer exists, simply because the people who made it real in my mind had long left. But here I am, looking at it – some God has chipped off a piece and hidden it safe under the earth, silent behind my back. I find myself old in it.

As I change into my gi I scan the dojo – the white belters are resting in the front, on oversized fitballs we used to throw at each other. They are still doing that today – except it is no longer me and Garrick and Desmond throwing them. At the other end of the dojo there is a pile of boys, laughing. As I watch one runs and jumps and lands – bang – into the pile, and soon they are all a mess of knees and elbows.

When I spar with Tang later the Thomians sit and watch. Tang has a bone to pick with me – he once represented Sarawak but has since declined. He is my president and he is one of the most flexible fighters I have ever encountered – three of my Osotogaris whips him downwards, but like a snake he twists and never concedes a score to me. Tang throws me with a loosely controlled footsweep and I get up and we laugh.

There are two new ones today. Jeryl, Jylene’s brother, impresses all of us with a jump and a hard landing on the floor – I never dared to do anything like that before I started Judo. Carlucci sits by the windows throughout the sparring – he is panting and for once I don’t push him to get up and fight. I am beginning to realize not everyone comes to Judo to push themselves. Some, like Carlucci, just want to have fun.

Later in the class we all shout at him because he is spending too much time in the toilets.

There are some things in life that never change. I am surprised that the Thomian judo class – 10.30 to 12 with boys and laughter and body piles – is one of them.

It feels good to be back.