CHAPTER 85
Agreement to our proposals was surprisingly quick, given the allegations about ‘Wily Orientals’ I had grown up with, and within two weeks we were already at the stage of drafting a training roster, splitting Maz and I so that we could work twice as fast while still leaving time for our childcare responsibilities.

The first lot were the ‘matrix’ people, including Audrey, who turned up in one of my classes. They were all frighteningly intense in their approach to the work, and I began to suspect that the local working culture might be just a little competitive, maybe with a touch of canine cannibalism.

When that phrase came to me, I had to fight a smirk down, for while there was a Korean restaurant near ‘our’ mass transit station, as far as I knew they didn’t serve any breed of hounds, not even hot dogs. I took the usual teacher’s escape route of handing out a worked exercise as I wound back my grin.

Maz and I would return home each afternoon, pretty much drained, to find Ish either in an armchair with his e-reader or in a sun lounger on the lawn, depending on weather. It had been a little difficult to get one message through, but he had finally come to understand why we didn’t want him anywhere near the pool when we were both out. I was gratified that he was turning out to be a boy who listened rather than told. We really couldn’t have been luckier.

Leisure time was copious, and there seemed to be an amazing list of places to explore for such a small island, even if it did seem to have just about doubled its size by land reclamation compared to what Alan’s Dad would have known. Maz took us around so many places, from Changi Beach to Seletar reservoir, most of which seemed to need her to carry binoculars. I had a thought, I had several of them, in fact, that she was just like Caro, and my voices simply, amazingly, agreed.

It seemed we would always be a family of five, unless Ish gained a sibling, of course.

We had been in Singapore for nearly four months when the letter arrived. Ish had picked it off the mat on his return from school, and left it on the kitchen work surface for our attention. I recognised the handwriting, confirmed by the fact that it was only addressed to Maz and bore a Malaysian stamp. She was in later than me that day, so as I passed her a cuppa, I pointed at the thing.

“Letter for you, love. Bit obvious who it’s from”

“Bloody finally! I sent our address when we first got here”

She obviously caught something in my expression.

“Nothing special, love. Just let her know where we are. Same as we agreed back home: give her the chance to come down here, leave the door open to her”

She picked up the letter, shaking her head.

“It will be the same old same old, love: ignore the invitation, not mention you, ask when I am going ‘home’, as in KL. Ah well; soonest started, soonest forgotten”

She picked it up, slipping a finger under the flap to open it, and started to read silently, apart from the odd ‘humph’ and a ‘yeah, right’.

“Darling, it is just about what I expected, except she has actually asked about Ish. She wants to meet her grandson”

I found my head shaking of its own accord, not in negation but rather disbelief.

“How many bloody times have we offered her the chance, love? What the hell is different now?”

“I don’t know, darling. Maybe that we don’t have to fly now. There’s a train”

“I’d say ‘she doesn’t have to fly’. We are the busy ones, after all!”

Maz stepped into my arms.

“We are, love. I’m… sorry. A decision for both of us, this. I do not want Ish going there. My family have extremely traditional views on sons in the family They would see Ish as theirs, I think. If she wants to meet him, if any one of them does, they can come to us. No negotiation there. Agreed?”

I pulled her closer, resting my chin on her head.

“Agreed, of course. It’s what we’ve always said, anyway. He has a home. It would still be nice to offer him more family. Roots”

“That’s why I am trying, love. She gets a bit of the future, as well”

“Then we hold our ground, Maz. Let her have some more pictures of him; that might push her a bit”

“No. We send her more pictures of us, all of us. This is a family. She takes us as a family or not at all”

I couldn’t argue with that position in any way. We spent that evening, once Ish was in bed, debating which of our family shots to print off on our very flash ‘official scanner/photocopier/dishwasher/teasmaid device. We settled on a mix of us at the beach, snapped by Bobby, now back in Australia after his little session of wheel-spoking, and one taken for us by a passing stranger in Haw Par Gardens, combined with some of Ish in his school uniform, and others of him, book in hand, by our pool.

“That’ll do her, Maz. Otherwise we’re going to end up paying parcel rates”

Letters continued to arrive, now on a weekly basis. According to Maz, they were usually family news or gossip, coupled with requests for her and Ish to visit KL, but as I couldn’t read them due to my almost complete lack of any Malay, I relied on her summaries. One thing I did notice was that my name featured nowhere in any of the letters, although there were frequent mentions of our boy, always using his first name in full. ‘Ishmael’, never ‘Ish’.

I decided to let the old harridan plough her own furrow. Besides, we had found our own source of fun. Not that far from us was what called itself a ‘climbing gym’, which I would have termed a ‘bouldering centre’. There were more than enough low-level challenges there to amuse us all, where ‘low-level’ refers to physical height rather than difficulty. In the eastern part of the city there was also a much higher wall, where leading was possible. It was almost, but not quite, like being back in Perth. We climbed as a family, of course, and trips to the higher wall were always followed by a decent meal. It was about a mile on foot to the bouldering place, so we would catch a bus down the big road before changing to another for ‘our’ station and its eateries.

The taller place was opposite a row of more traditional restaurants in older, low-rise buildings, and those were the ones Ish loved and where Maz was in her element, my palate expanding with each new meal, though I still couldn’t face durian.

Almost like Perth, indeed. Train up some newbies, go for a swim or a climb, grab a tasty meal, and then settle down at home as a family. If I wasn’t careful, I would end up in middle age, but I really didn’t see that as a problem. My life was a shared one, and wonderfully, gloriously so.

We got the first hint of a fly in our sugar bowl when we received another Mum-mail, which had Maz’ brow furrowing.

“What’s up, love?”

“Up? Emotional blackmail, basically. One of my uncles is terminal. They need me there, all the family, vigil to see him into Paradise, all the family standing together, daughterly duty, all the usuals, but this time on steroids”

She grimaced, looking out of the back window to check on our boy as he lay on his back in the pool.

“Thing is, my darling, they don’t want me there, not as such. It’s Ish. Men of the family, standing together, all that rubbish. I mean, we’d be at a mosque, and we wouldn’t even be in the same PART. Women one side, men the other, never the twain should meet except as approved of by the appropriate authorities. I told you about that cinema thing, didn’t I? Keeping the lights on because immorality?”

“You did, love”

“Well, that sort of thing sounds like something from the Malaysian equivalent of RFO, or something with banjos in it, but it wasn’t, it was in the bloody capital city! I mean, KL’s separate from Selangor, but…”

She stopped abruptly, giving me a wan smile.

“Sorry. Getting into a rant”

“Understandable, love”

“Yes, perhaps. It was all part of what drove me away from the place. They need to understand that I have my own life now, our life, three of us in this dance. Three… Mike, it’s stability. Just seeing the parallel. Without… Later, okay? I’m going to join Ish. You coming?”

So we went upstairs, changed into our cossies/swimmers and went to splash our boy. Later, though, in bed, she opened up again as we cuddled, her head on my shoulder and arm across my chest.

“It’s like with Alan, love. He was my pillar, my belay, I suppose. They wouldn’t deal with him, wouldn’t even engage, recognise he existed, until he… until I had lost him. And then it was all ‘come home, get wrapped up by your family, we’ll look after you’, but that was all a lie. They were using his death as an excuse to pull me back in, but all they really felt was relief, or maybe even fucking joy, that he was gone”

She clenched her hand for a second before adding, “Sorry. Shouldn’t swear like that. Trouble is, I now have two of you, and without both of you, I’d probably cave in. I nearly did when Alan died, but, well, I hear his voice, you know that”

“Same with me, love”

“I know, and I understand. It’s just, well, this is building up to a real confrontation with them, and I don’t think I can keep being polite, so could you please come here and bloody distract me for a while? And… and can we forget the protection again?”