Things fall apart,
The centre cannot hold...
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
The days tumble into a tapioca-dense blur of days. At the ACS Una rattles off Dictation lessons and Daily Verses but without thinking about it. She feels like a ghost, and it's worse at Trinity House, with their trinity of adults sundered. Una feels the palpable absence of Li and Iris like ghosts, and Nenni's death-ghost too. Often, confronted with another Drill practice, knees to the floor, palms to the floor, foreheads to palms, Una gives up on the lessons. Her silver fish swing silent and rapid against her blouse, the weight and spike of their fins as they knock her breastbone, painful where they jab at her. But it's also a reassuringly real sensation in an increasingly surreal world, so Una forebears to complain. She whispers lessons in Yeats to the children but not with any kind of end goal in mind beyond their immediate comfort. Her world – her pupils' world – is unravelling at the seams, bleeding like an artery and she can't find it in her to care if they speak Baba-Malay or English, or if they can recite the Kings of England chronologically. She senses that neither can they.
So they crouch, knees to floor, palms to the floor, foreheads to palms and whisper I remembers to one another. I remember the taste of papaya, says one, wistful. Another might counter, Mock-turtle soup. I miss mock-turtle soup. Yet another says it is none of these; He misses the Harvest Moon Festival, and Una finds that she does too, because Li loved this feast best of the feasts for the living and they used to keep it at Trinity House. Trips to the cinema! Says Sally, and Una remembers the outings with Iris on wedding anniversaries past. The smell of the dark theatre, the plush of the seats, the sweet-sticky smell of the sweets Iris sucked while they watched. In Una's inner ear she hears Iris say, We went to the Capitol last time, Auntie, so we must go to the Alhambra this time. Otherwise it will get hurt feelings. She remembers this is what they did, eschewing the famous dome and picking their way to Beach Road. Liu, pressed warm against Una's side, says, 'What do you remember?'
I remember Singapore, Una wants to say, but it is too big an answer, too much for children. So, kneeling there with her back stiffening and her neck tensing, and her circling silver fish painful-comforting against her chest, she says instead, 'I remember that when I was young we found a girl asleep in a barn and took her home…'It's an easier story. A better one. It belongs to a kinder world. In it there was poetry, and a dark-haired boy who read languidly and with a voice cantor-rich to them from under the tree lovers, their silver bells harmonizing overhead. And in it Una bristled only because Mary Vance remembered to offer her a muff on a bitterly cold day, and another young girl wore too-short stockings to church and it was called a scandal. There were loves and losses and partings and reunions and it was a sweet, golden world. One Una hopes fervently they will all re-emerge into soon. Please God, let it be soon.
At home, Una sits with her ghosts and with her buffalo and sews the tweed uniforms for the Japanese until Carl comes home. They like her work, Una discovers uneasily, and now it comes in as steadily as her furniture disappears. They take the robin's egg blue settle that witnessed so many conversations. Una's particular chair goes, too, and then, horribly, Nenni's favourite footstool. Please, Una wants to say, the cat cherished that stool. But Nenni is dead and not using it, and anyway, what can these interlopers possibly care about Una's sentimental attachment to the last shreds of a Singaporean cat long since dead? So Una lets them take it and afterwards sits by the flourishing catmint and breathes its smell, and feels the ghost of Nenni circling and circling before settling in a ghostly doughnut atop Una's knees.
'I'm sorry,' says Una to the air and the catmint. 'But I suppose you have other, better, sunnier sun spots in Heaven. And I was afraid to stop them.' She thinks Nenni purrs from her ghostly doughnut. It's a thrum like a motorcade and it says Never mind.
Sometimes Puck goes with Carl to the university. Sometimes he stays with Una. This day he goes with Carl and arrives home before him. He arrives early in the evening, when their clock is bonging five and Una is in the middle of feeding her hens. They're fewer than they used to be, and Una supposes they'll dwindle further when Li and Iris come back. But in the meantime, Una and Carl can live on tapioca fine. Una is starting to think that when all of this is over she may be daringly modern and vegetarian, and Carl too. She doubts the others will object.
Even Puck. He is more than usually restless as he paces Una's kitchen. It rattles the hens and it gets on Una's nerves. It jars something loose in her fragile sense of steel-gloved holding-on to habit. She threatens to take him to Papatee, but knows better because Papatee always puts Puck on edge. This in spite of there being more contempt for his enemies in Puck's clawed left hand than there is in Papatee's hind left hoof.
Once, and the memory makes Una smile, Puck split his hand cutting Iris a slice of cake. The mess was spectacular, the wound gaping. Carl got the vet, and the vet, flummoxed by this presentation of monkey, had tried to stitch the hand shut again. He did it with Puck asleep, but Puck woke up, inevitably, and plucking with his uninjured hand, out went the stitches. Back came the vet. In went more stitches. This time he stayed and watched a still-drowsy Puck use his uninjured fingers to pluck them out. The repetition might have gone on everlastingly, but then Puck, with great deliberation squatted down on the floor, defecated thereon and flung his offering at the vet. Out went the vet. This time Una put the stitches in ad tied the bandage and threatened Puck with no sugar if he so much as looked sideways at her work. Puck only flung peanuts. But the thing no one got over, least of all the vet, was that Puck repeated this astonishing performance whenever the vet was subsequently summoned. Whether he came for Puck, Nenni or Akela was irrelevant. Puck kept his grudge and cradled it close.
Today Una cannot face this degree of simian tenacity.
Papatee isn't like that. Not at all. Papatee, on Una's say so, lets anyone do whatever they like with him. Una thinks all of this while Puck paces, swings from the ceiling and shimmies up the bannister before sliding immediately downwards. His nerves are contagious and Una lugs her sewing back into her denuded sun room so she can sit there and work while keeping a tab on Carl's irascible, affectionate and today, largely temperamental monkey.
The shadows lengthen. The blackout comes on. Seven o'clock in the evening and Carl does not return. Una begins to understand Puck's prickling nerves. Against her wrist, her watch beats time like a pulse, like a metronome. Una plays an indeterminate prelude on the out-of-tune piano. It is still here because the Japanese do not need anything so extravagant as Una's upright piano with its yellowing ivory keys. Even if they did, it is bulky enough and awkward enough to make them think twice about trying to shift it without serious equipment. This makes its bench the only available chair in the room, and Una sits, her back to the keys, the keys cutting into her back, in it as she sews. Then she pivots, and frets her way through the prelude of indeterminate nature again but cannot settle to it. She gets up prematurely and Puck closes the lid of the instrument with finality. That's what Puck thinks of that.
Nine o'clock bongs on the clock. The time pulses remorseless against Una's wrist. Carl does not come home. Una begins to think about dinner and the fact that neither she nor Puck has eaten. She gets up from the piano stool, which she has moved against the wall to spare her back from the decorative and upraised line of the piano lid, and picks her way to the kitchen. She rootles there for food but cannot face sweet potatoes, cornbread and tapioca alone. Probably Puck can't either and will throw the tapioca like peanuts. Probably Una would let him. And anyway, Una's gut twists and curdles like yesterday's milk, full of molten, bubbling unease. She could never eat like this, she knows.
Ten o'clock and the blackout is in full swing. Carl is not home. Una has not and does not eat. She paces the length of the stripped sun room until she thinks she will wear out the carpet or at least the soles of her shoes. She sinks down onto the floor in elegant ebb of liquid discomfiture. Puck hangs upside-down and screams from the ceiling light at an unsuspecting Kuan Yin. Kuan Yin sits jade and placid as ever. Una gets up, crosses the room and touches her head for luck.
'Scream at someone else,' she says to Puck. 'Let's keep the gods on our side.'
So Puck screams at Una. Una lets him. She would like to join in.
At quarter past ten Una touches her hand to the circling Trinity of silver fish and prays her Yeats. I went into a hazel wood, because a fire was in my head…She chases after it with the Lord's Prayer, words well-worn and shabbily familiar in their comfort. She keeps her hand there, against the spiked silver tails.
Ten thirty and her hand, uncomfortable in its refuge, seeks the white poppy. It's less tattered these days because Una sewed a new one in-between tweed uniforms, her own secret act of rebellion. Now Puck screams at the lidded piano. Una lets him.
Eleven. No Carl. Una feels the seconds tick unforgivingly by on her wristwatch. Carl gave it to her…Say years ago. Many of them. The seconds elide, slur and tie as in music. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick. Una feels them like a pulse against her wrist. The slim, silver band of the wristwatch features delicate etchings of poppies. On the back of the face, snug against Una's hand runs the inscription, To keep time between remembrances. There's a poppy there, too. Love unspoken at Carl's silent and sensitive best. Now that pulses too, the jeweller's inscription prickly against Una's skin, searing against her agonised conscience. Una hasn't measured the time between memorials in years and if Carl makes Una start again now because he is dead or missing or killed, she will personally see to his murder. She thinks of Percival Curtis that morning weeks back in the staff room, quoting not Yeats but Auden.
Now, wristwatch hand to her fish, she prays fierce and fervent,
Stop all the clocks
Cut off the telephone
Stop the dogs barking with a juicy bone…
Midnight and Carl does not come through the door. They still have not eaten. Una because tapioca is worse than ditto ever was, Puck because he cannot sit still long enough. Also, Una is running out of peanuts for him and doesn't want to risk his throwing them around the room.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick. It's a quarter past twelve and three quarters past a heartache when Akela ventures from his verandaside vigil to snuffle at Una. He snuffles Puck too, and Puck scrabbles all limbs onto Akela's neck and wraps himself around the dog like a scruffy simian shawl. Akela doesn't react. He galumphs on big, canine paws Una-ward, wearing the monkey like ducks wear down. He presses a cold wet nose to Una's face and she lets him do it, even though, strictly speaking, this is against the rules of their relationship. Akela washes her face, gentle, warm and sloppy in his affection. His breath smells terrible, but dread smells worse. Dread smells of tapioca, sweet potato and cornbread and sounds like the tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick-tick of a wristwatch pulse.
Midnight is half-gnawed away by moths and worry and Una swaps Yeats and Auden for Donne.
Batter my heart, Three-Personned God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend
That I may rise, stand, o'erthrow me and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new…
I, like a usurped town to another due…
One o'clock. Akela long since has settled heavily against Una's knees. She was kneeling at the time and now she cannot move because Akela's head is atop them and also because the weight of his head has put her legs to sleep. Una supposes in a fuzzy, obscure sort of way that she could move the dog if she was so minded. She's not. Her fingers curl against her white poppy, shift upwards to the circle of her silver fish. Did Carl know, when he gifted them to her, how pivotal they would be to anchoring her, tethering reason to her body as if it were some fly-away moth trying to take wing? How like a double-heart that sapphire at their core?
And when the moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped a berry in the stream
And caught a little silver trout…
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick. On goes Una's wristwatch. Bong! Goes the clock, just the once, for the hour, wistful, baleful and grieving. Where, Una wonders as she strokes the scruffy, Elizabethan collar of Puck's neck, is Carl?
Two in the morning sounds brazenly from the clock. Still Una prays her poets like a Catholic telling beads. Yeats, Auden, Donne. A strange trinity if ever there was one, but never so strange as the one in Trinity house, now, of Woman, Monkey and Canine. Never so strange as a young Chinese woman, a maiden aunt and a partially-sighted scientist-scholar, all living hand-in-glove and worshipping at the altar of a girl like a Firecracker.
Three o'clock is worse. Una thinks she is sitting a Good Friday vigil but without the guarantee of the Resurrection when she emerges out the other side. Silver fish warm and tight between one hand and Puck warm and sleepily wakeful under the other, Una sings, All my hope on God is founded…The rhythm is like a thurible. Like an arc. The music is warm and vital as blood. Una drifts on its promise, the measure of its reassurance. Briefly it overtakes the pulse of her wristwatch and the desolation of the clock.
Four o'clock only sounds dead and guttering like a candle. Carl is not home. Serpentine dread, like the billowing oil-smoke of weeks ago, spills into Una's blood. It whispers, traitorous, Carl will not come home.
'Don't,' Una tells the invisible Iago aloud, 'be absurd.'
Puck cackles his furious agreement. Akela barks savage warning at a ghost. Carl must come home.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick. Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
Hours slide into centuries which slide into epochs. Epochs slide into eternities. Eternities slip seamlessly into the wild abyss of Hereafter.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick…
Seven o'clock again. The door swings open. Puck shrieks relief. Una thinks she might faint. Soon she must go up to the school even if Carl has not…
Carl has not come home.