Anaesthesia

Behind me, Regina strummed a major chord and started on a stripped-down version of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sway’. I was leaning on a hard cement pillar, gently inhaling on a Dunhill Red, imagining the air filtering itself through the stick of tobacco into my mouth, down my windpipe and into my lungs. Puff after puff, tar, nicotine, ammonia, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, lead, methanol, and so on, swimming in the little air sacs, dissolving in my blood, pumping through my body into every conceivable cell, delivering a slight rush in a faster heartbeat, a little jumpstart to the brain, and a temporary satiation of a pointless addiction.

The smoke exhaled in a grey stream to dissipate across a wooden patio lit by the blue-greens of the bar, the yellow of tiny candles placed on chic picnic tables, and the strange multi-colours from the Christmas lights lying atop wooden slats, an artificial twilight for an ethanol escape.

“It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway.”

Stubbing out my cigarette, I stepped into the chatter and song of the pub, itself lit barely by sporadic lights and a bar, to catch Regina finishing off of the song. Polite applause overlaid the chatter, punctuated at the end with a drunken whistle from the back corner. I was watching Regina smile, laugh lines scarred across her face, when I noticed the woman in the black dress.

She was sitting at the right corner, furthest from the bar. Her fingers played with the stem of a drained martini glass, in which a lone olive, toothpick stabbed through its centre, rolled about comatose. I made my way across the room, picking my way between the midnight drinkers, some laughing, some talking, some dancing impromptu, and others just staring into space, while Regina crooned her way through a Bryan Ferry tune. Random cushions and chairs were strewn about, forcing me to cut a roundabout route from the doorway to the corner.

The woman was sitting sideways in her chair, back leaning against a mirror, watching the scene of the bar inscrutably perform itself. Her head was cocked ever so slightly to the right and leaning forward, having the look of peering upwards distrustfully at the bar. Her face was pearl white, decorated with thin, determined lips, a small, pretty nose, and a pair of large, black, almond eyes, framed by a covering of black, cropped, elfin hair. Along the back of the chair, the woman had hung one arm limply – thin, white and glowing, ending off with five long, slim fingers.

Hands clasped behind my back, I leant forward and asked her, as a waiter would, “Would you like a drink?”

She turned to look at me, eyes moving up to my face. Her lips curving in the dark, she blinked and remarked, “I didn’t know this place had servers.”

“Only for special customers, ma’am,” I replied.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be so punctual.”

“So it’s a dry martini?”

“Gin and tonic.”

Turning towards the bar, I spied the woman in the black dress move her fingers from the stem of the glass to pick up the toothpick with the olive.

Her name was Cecelia Teng, and she had been drinking for close to an hour. She was twenty-nine, a graduate in Marketing and Communications, currently holding a job as a promoter for the National Museum. She used to play volleyball, but stopped when she realised she was only continuing on out of habit. Since then, she told me, laughing, her skin had just become paler and paler as she stopped going out into the sun. Other activities that took up her time were going to the gym, movie marathons with friends, ice skating, clubbing occasionally, playing internet word games at work, pretending to be a film star on Sunday mornings, eating at overpriced food stalls, eating at underpriced restaurants, collecting music, appreciating literature, and, when depressed, reading self-help books.

Cecelia’s favourite movies were, by her own admission, all based on books. She loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather (Part II), Cold Mountain, The Great Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Kramer vs Kramer and Jurassic Park (Laughter). Inexplicably, she hated The Godfather Part I. The movies she liked best did not correspond with her reading; Cecelia’s favourite writers included Fyodor Dostoevsky, Roald Dahl, Jeanette Winterson, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger (but not Catcher in the Rye), Gunther Grass, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen (but of course), Graham Greene, Henry Miller, De Sade, and Georges Bataille. Music-wise, it was the Velvet Underground, Billie Holliday, Jackson Browne (early), Johnny Cash, Judy Garland, the Carpenters, Belle and Sebastian, Portishead, Hooverphonic, Sigur Ros, A Silver Mt Zion, The Byrds and David Bowie (everything up to and including “Heroes”). When questioned about the Beatles, she gave the answer that she thought they were overrated, although George was hot and Paul was cute.

Regina had finished her set long ago, and the crowd at the bar was beginning to thin out. From our vantage point, we had watched the middle aged couple, obviously there to watch Regina, leave, followed later by the early twenties, heading for whichever club for the night, followed by the more trendy yuppies that have become the mainstay of the Acid Bar, till it was just us. Us and a man in a cowboy get-up, making eyes at a transvestite, sitting opposite a young 20-something couple, obviously not going for drinks and dancing, but not drunk like the two lone businessmen; one bald, the other bearded, burbling rants and proclamations at each other. We could see the bartenders getting restless, polishing wineglasses, while the manager surreptitiously began to count the earnings for the night.

“I wish I could just get up and dance, pirouette my way down Orchard Road, damn the cars.”

“And the traffic lights.”

“And the traffic lights,” she smiled, eyes closed, “all the way to the sea, no, to the airport.”

“To the airport?”

“I want to scream at an airplane.”

It brought to mind a certain advertisement from years ago. I distinctly remember the image of a woman in a floral dress, hair curlers and rolling pin, screaming defiantly at a landing 747. The ad was advertising sanitary pads, I think. It also brought to mind images of Cary Grant being chased down a cornfield in North by Northwest, the only Alfred Hitchcock film I ever watched. I did not find it enjoyable, nor did I find it scary.

Cecelia, giggling, suddenly stood up and tugged at my hand. We walked out to the verandah, dim yellow lights shadowing our faces, Cecelia, with my arms around her, grinning with her eyes shut tight, me stepping deliberately on slats of grey pavement bordering wooden floor. She leaned against a pillar and, from a floral print cigarette case, pulled out a cigarette, long, white and thin. I produced mine, then went on to light hers.

Through the haze of smoke between us, I saw her eyes attempt to read me, roll upwards to the ceiling, and then drop down to my right, to finally settle on my shoes, when they began to glaze over, curtains over a quiet lonely night. I examined the pillar she was leaning on. It was cream white, with lime green old style colonial embellishments. Restored historical buildings, these are called. They used to be shophouses, back when Orchard Road really was an orchard. People would be selling fruits, textiles, vegetables and books at the ground floor, to live and sleep on the second and third floors. Since then, Orchard Road has become the shopping mecca of today, gigantic malls and towering hotels, subterranean underpasses, fast food gantries, and maids and teenagers and families and tourists intermingling in a thick mélange.

And at night, the mélange redistributed itself, from the boutiques to the bars, the offices to the clubs, the cinemas to the LAN shops, and the restaurants to home. I took Cecelia’s hand and led her up Emerald Hill. She was mumbling to herself, smiling at the odd flashing lights in the windows above us. Before us, outside Ice Cold Beer, a yellow-lit fog of cigarette smoke presented itself, ghouls of men and women in trendy clothes, sneakers, loafers, rimless spectacles, spiked hair, and yellow teeth. We sailed past them, stepping between two potted plants serving to stop cars from driving into the smoking area.

Past the potted plants, the street was practically devoid of people. The chatter of the bars receded behind. Only the clicking of Cecelia’s high heels kept us company. Emerald Hill is a street going from Orchard Road up to Cairnhill Circle. It is lined with old Chinese terrace houses, most of which now restored, lived in by those affluent enough to be able to afford living two minutes away from town. One half of the street is taken up by a one-way road, the other by a pavement. We careened from the grassy edges of the street, across the road, and up the pavement, to the gates of the next house, wherein we bounced off to the other side of the street again.

We passed the Chatsworth International school, its gates shut tight for the night. Cecelia said, “Did you know an ordinary woman can lift a bus? It’s all in the mind. I read on the net the other day, about how this girl with her daughter stuck beneath a vehicle, in her desperation, lifted up a bus with just her bare hands and pulled her daughter out from beneath.”

There were many parts of that story that did not conform to logic. I wanted to ask her if she lifted the bus with both hands, or if the child was conscious, but I refrained. I said to her, “The school here used to be another school. Apparently it also used to be haunted.”

Cecelia let out a small girlish giggle. “Truth is just a bad rumour,” she murmured.

I pulled her closer to me, holding her by the waist. She allowed her head to drop onto my shoulder. We walked on.

We passed a mini-playground. Well, actually, we just passed a see-saw in a small sand pit in between the pavement and the road. Cecelia raised her head up at the sight of it. She turned her face, cheeks glistening with tears, up to mine. She held me tightly, and steered us to walk onto the sand, taking off her shoes. In a tiny 10-metre round, we circled the sand pit, listening to the soft crunch of sand beneath our feet, imagining the sea next to us, a doomed maritime wedding. A cat sauntered past, heading up the hill towards a small laneway. I felt Cecelia tug at my hand, and we left the sand pit, and the see saw, to follow the cat down to the lane branching off Emerald Hill.

“I think, the problem is I’ve got habits I can’t get rid of. I don’t really enjoy smoking, but I do so anyway. And it’s probably killing me…and the drinking, and going home at night, I could do with sleeping under a bridge, you know?”

She beseeched me with her eyes. I pretended to examine the ground, octagonal stones and green grass and brown dirt.

“There’s a story, about a woman who falls in love with anyone who saves her falling off a cliff, I forget the details. The point is, it could have been a tramp, or a politician, or a celebrity, or a horticulturalist, that saved her, and she would have fallen in love regardless. I think we need some kind of adversity in our lives. We need the threat of falling off a cliff, physically. Like how people go on holidays where the main idea isn’t relaxation, but the feeling of life being threatened, by, say malaria, or a tiger attack, food poisoning, robbing. You know, thrill seeking.”

She continued. We were now walking parallel to Emerald Hill, towards Cairnhill Circle again. To our left were the back doors to the terrace houses. To our right, past a wire fence, was the Central Expressway, brightly lit, streaming with taxis. The expressway led to a wide tunnel beneath Cairnhill Circle. I held Cecelia’s hand. She squeezed it tight. A light breeze blew across her face. Cecelia’s face, dimly lit, with two black shadows for eyes, and pale, glowing, skin like a lantern.

We came to a stairway, and staggered up. I noticed the clicking of her heels had stopped, and saw she had no shoes. “I threw them away,” she said, “I didn’t really like them.”

We followed the pavement along Cairnhill Circle up towards the Central Expressway exit, stopping at a ladder leading down to a metal platform jutting out above the tunnel. We climbed down the ladder, hobbled along the platform to the rectangular holes cut into the concrete, each about a comfortable length for us to lie down, to the last one, covered by a tarpaulin, and sat, wrapped in each others arms.  Hanging above the expressway, we heard every single car amplified to deafening levels from the tunnel. It was beautiful. Yellow, white and blue taxis streamed towards us on our right, and away from us on the left, bordered by the wire fence and the terrace houses from our route before, now shrouded in darkness.

Cecelia moved to lie down, slotting her legs behind me. I turned to her, and she stared back. And then she grinned. I lay down next to her, slipping my arm under her waist, as she said to me, weakly, “How did we come to this?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, losing myself in her eyes. She had the look of a teenager about to step off a ledge; wild, helpless and defiant. I told her to shut her eyes, and started to undress her.

From beneath the tarpaulin I pulled out a plastic bag, and unwrapped a six-inch chef’s knife. I traced the knife down her body, clavicle to torso, watching her skin shiver under the metal, and then I stabbed it in, cold and hard. She barely made a sound. And as I twisted the blade into her belly, I moved my mouth up to kiss her as she gasped for air, pulling my tongue into her mouth. I felt her shoulders twitch, and I tugged the blade up to her stomach, cutting through gut, kidney, and liver, and pushed it in again, curving upwards towards her lungs. Cecelia, dear Cecelia, made to scream, so I wrapped my other hand round her throat, squeezing it gently so a light wheezing came out instead, eventually followed by gurgling, blood bubbling out of her mouth. Her hands were flailing about, one onto metal, the other onto concrete. Blood stains were decorating the wall, and tiny droplets fell from the platform onto the expressway below. I briefly wondered if the blood would stain any windshields, and of the drivers’ reaction. Would he, or she, use the wipers and water to clean it off? Or leave it there, unnoticed, till the next carwash? Would they think the blood came from the sky, or from the ceiling of the tunnel?

Cecelia’s eyes lost the panic and twitching of impending death. They slowed down and found a certain peace in emptiness. Her gurgling stopped, and her mouth gaped open, perfect and silent. I rolled up the blood filled tarpaulin, and changed out of my red-stained office clothes, pulling on a polo shirt and Bermudas. Clean and stainless, I started to leave, but turned back to retrieve her cigarettes from her handbag: Virginia Slims, menthol.

Climbing from the top of the tunnel, I re-entered Cairnhill Circle and crossed the road, heading towards Newton Circus. Taxis zipped past me as I walked past Peck Hay Road, trees and condominiums towering over me. A dark, skinny construction worker, dressed loosely in a singlet and shorts, talking rapidly into an ancient phone, strode past me and nodded hello. I took out Cecelia’s cigarette case. For some reason, I rarely ever smoke menthols. For some reason, it felt like a good idea. I lighted Cecelia’s cigarette, taking a long, hard, drag. She said life comes out of adversity. I guess I went too far. I always go too far.

- Andrew Cheah, March 2009