Copyright
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Tash Aw 2019
Design by Jack Smyth. Figure © Plainpicture/Saam Riwa. Texture: Upsplash.
Tash Aw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008318581
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008318567
Version: 2019-12-22
Dedication
For Francis
Epigraph
Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?
Primo Levi, If This is a Man
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I. October
October 2nd
October 4th
October 6th
October 10th
She sits and
October 13th
She stares at
October 15th
The thought comes
October 19th
I recognise the
October 24th
II. November
November 2nd
Bang bang bang.
November 5th & 6th
Lets go out,
November 7th
III. December
December 4th
Im writing a
December 7th
December 9th
Every time we
December 12th
What strikes me
December 15th & 16th
A noise. Nothing
December 20th
Youve been smoking.
December 30th
But its illegal,
IV. January
January 2nd
The drive is
About the Author
By the same Author
About the Publisher
IOctober 2nd
You want me to talk about life, but all Ive talked about is failure, as if theyre the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I cant separate the two like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town. Roots clinging to the outside of the walls, holding the bricks and stone and whatever remains of the paint together, branches pushing through holes in the roof. Sometimes theres almost nothing left of the roof, if you can even call it that just fragments of clay tiles or rusty tin propped up by the canopy of leaves. A few miles out of town, on the other side of Kapar headed towards the coast, youll find a shophouse with the roots of a jungle fig creeping down the front pillars of the building, the entire structure swallowed up by the tree the doorway is now just a shadowy space that leads into the heart of a huge tangle of foliage. Where does one end and the other begin? Which one is alive, which is dead? Still, on the ground floor of these houses, therell be a business or a shop, some kind of small operation, an old guy wholl patch up your tyres for twenty bucks. Or a printing press that makes those cheap leaflets advertising closing-down sales at the local mall. Or a cake shop with nothing in the chiller cabinets except for two pieces of kuih lapis that have been there for three weeks. The packets of biscuits on the shelves are covered in the dust that drifts across from the construction sites nearby, where theyre building the new railway or shopping mall or God knows what. These people havent made a decent living for twenty years. Theyre seventy-five, eighty years old. Still alive, but their business is being taken over by a tree. Imagine that.
That night, after the killing or the culpable homicide not amounting to murder, as you politely call it I walked for many hours in the dark. I cant tell you how long. I tried to hang on to a sense of time, kept looking at the sky for signs of dawn, I even quickened my stride to make each step feel like one full second, like the ticking of that clock on the wall over there, that right now sounds so quick. Tick, tick, tick. But that night each second stretched into a whole minute, each minute felt like a lifetime, and there was nothing I could do to speed things up.
My shirt was wet not just damp, but properly wet and it clung to my back like a second skin; only that skin did not belong to me, but to a separate living organism, cold and heavy, weighing me down. As I walked further and further away from what I now come to think of as thescene of the crime (but didnt then it was just a darkened spot on the riverbank, indistinguishable from any other), I listened out for the sirens of police cars, expecting to hear them at any moment. I kept thinking, Theyre coming for me, this is the end, the mata are going to catch me and throw me in jail forever. I said out loud, Youre finished. This really is the end for you. Hearing my own voice calmed me. Nothing had ever felt so absolute and certain. The police would arrive, they would lock me up, and from then on, all my days would be the same. The thought of being in a small empty cell with nothing to think about for the rest of my life the idea of this existence comforted me. When I woke up each morning I would see the same four walls that had been there when I fell asleep the night before. Nothing would ever change. What I wore, how long I slept each night, how many times a day I could eat, wash, shit every decision would be made for me, I would be just the same as everyone else. Someone would take control of my life, and that would be the end of my story. Part of me still wishes things had turned out that way.
I walked through the long grass it was stringy and sharp and slashed my legs right up to my knees. It was hot, I was wearing shorts, my skin started to sting. Twice, maybe three times, I crossed a bridge and continued to wander along the opposite bank. At first I was looking for my car, but soon I realised I was trying to get as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. The only problem was that I couldnt remember exactly where it had happened. At some point I started to feel mud between my toes and I realised Id lost one sandal, which must have got stuck in the swampy ground, so I kicked off the other and walked barefoot. It was late, but not so late that there wasnt any traffic on the highways beyond, and on the bridges overhead. Their headlamps would sometimes illuminate the tops of the trees above me, and suddenly little details would leap out at me, things I wouldnt have noticed if Id been walking there in the daytime kites with smiley bird faces snagged in the branches, or plastic bags, lots of them, hanging like swollen ghostlike fruit.
Sometimes Id see strange shapes drifting in the middle of the river. Fallen tree trunks and bushes uprooted by the storms upstream, tangled together in huge rafts that looked like some sort of mythical beast from Journey to the West, the kind of nonsense that adults tell children to scare them into behaving themselves, but that no one actually takes seriously, not even children what kid actually believes in a nine-headed bug? until one night theyre walking alone on a riverbank, and then those demons seem real and terrifying. Other times, snagged in the reeds right by where I was walking, Id see a dead creature, a body so bloated that I couldnt even tell what it was a could-be cat or a could-be monkey. When a bodys been in the water for that long, its shape starts to blur, softening around the edges until it becomes impossible to distinguish one kind of animal from another.
My arm ached, I was moving in a funny way, one side of my body less mobile than the other. I realised that I was still holding the piece of wood, the length of tree branch that had felt so light in my hand just a short while ago but now seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. During the trial, when people in court referred to the murder weapon that was never retrieved, I remembered the damp two-foot piece of wood that I held that night. It was just a fragment of a tree. A few hours earlier, when Id struck the man for the first time, the broken length of wood had seemed so insignificant that I thought it incapable of causing pain. I expected it to shatter, I expected the man to laugh at my ridiculous choice of weapon. Now it felt as if I was lifting an entire tree, the weight of the world clinging to its roots. I raised my arm, wanting to throw it far out into the middle of the river, but suddenly I found that I had no strength left in my body. It slipped from my grasp and fell just a few feet away.
I realised after a while that the police were not going to arrive. No one was going to come for me. Not that night, not the following day, and maybe not for weeks. In the end it took them more than two months to arrest me but you already know that. You also know why it took so long. When the victim is that sort of person, the police dont really care. Yes, that kind of person. A foreigner. An illegal. Someone with dark skin.
Bangla, Myanma, Nepal. When the police come its all the same to them. Even Africa. Its as if they all come from one big nameless continent. Back when I was living in Puchong, I saw a group of Africans by the side of the road, a dozen men. Some were sitting on the pavement, others were standing up, laughing, joking, drinking beer and liquor. One or two were dancing they had a big portable set that played their tunes so loudly I almost couldnt hear my own music. I was listening to Jacky Cheung on my phone back then we only had those small Sony Ericssons that made every song sound crackly, as if you were listening to it on the radio in a faraway country. Maybe youre too young to remember those phones. I was on the other side of the road, outside the 7-Eleven, eating a Ramly burger with Keong. This was seventeen, eighteen, maybe even twenty years ago. Back then you didnt see so many Africans around. People didnt know anything about them which countries they were from, why theyd come here. Ask anyone what they knew about Africa and theyd say, Lions.
Keong was looking at his phone, pretending he wasnt interested, as if hed grown up with black people. But he couldnt help making comments. Wahlau, Muhammad Ali brought all his friends! I remember laughing, even though I didnt really find it funny. Most probably I made some comments too. It was so long ago, I dont recall. There was a light breeze that night, I remember that. Next to us an old Indian stallkeeper was clearing up his stand for the night. Business was slow, there werent many people out on the street. Every Friday night, he said. Every week they come here and raise trouble. Friday supposed to be holy day these guys, they dont respect anything. In fact he didnt say these guys, he said these Mat Hitam. Better not translate that.
I said, Theyre Nigerian. Id seen an article in the Nanyang Siang Pau about Nigerian students coming to Malaysia, falling into debt after they graduated and being unable to buy a ticket home. I remember thinking, Must be really desperate to come to college here.
Shut your mouth, Keong said. Nigerian your ass. You dont know anything.