Shenanigans

It is MUET class again and the whole class is involved in a lively discussion about the lower six. We do this in order to do as little class work as possible. It succeeds every time.

"I think the girls this year are more beautiful." Mdm Kong says. She appears not to notice the girls in my class; they stop whatever they're doing to stare at her. "Look at L6S2 - some of them very sweet looking."

"Yah." says Teck Chaw, "the girls in our year all so ugly wan."

The class erupts into protest and laughter and Nyuk Choo shouts "KILL HIM!" in Mandarin.

"Teacher we still haven't seen your niece." I say. This is pure cheek - she was boasting about Melissa's beauty before the mid terms and naturally we were all curious as to what kind of beauty this was. (Later we find out that it is the fair skin, big eyes, slim and willowy kind, but for the moment we have only a description to work with).

"Eh?" Mdm Kong says. She does not understand the angle I'm taking yet, but the rest of the class are grinning like idiots, even the girls.

"Teacher I think I fall in love already." says Teck Chaw.

It clicks now and Mdm Kong lectures us about the futility of relationships in Form 6 ("You know all the - what yuu call it? - emotions. Very distracting. Yes."). She tells us it affects us emotionally and she hopes Melissa will only get a boyfriend after university. Then, after we have exhausted the topic, she starts on how she doesn't like men who sweet talk.

"My mother always told me don't trust sweet talks -" (Tay chuckles as she says this) "-my husband never say I love you. Of my two boyfriend last time the first one like to sweet talk a lot. Don't like it."

"So teacher you only got two boyfriends?" Teck Chaw asks.

"Yes."

"And the second one become your husband?"

"Yes."

"So when did you have your first boyfriend?"

The features on Mdm Kong's face suddenly rearrange themselves: they switch from surprise to discomfort and finally settle on embarrassment.

"Uh." she says. "In Form 6."

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.