backpack and find the money, neatly bound by rubber bands in tight little stacks. When they take them out, they look like small bricks.
Chinese kid with a load of cash in his bag – no further explanation needed. Samseng. They slap him round the head.
Still, he is proud, unrepentant. At the police station he sits in a cell waiting for his brothers to turn up, maybe even the legendary ultimate big boss, who he knows by reputation but has never met, the one people say is best friends with the inspector general of police. After he’s been there a day, then two, he realises that he’s been forgotten. Even the police who patrol the cells seem barely to notice his presence. They give him water and rice with sambal – no egg or chicken or anything – that he eats quickly because he’s so hungry, but it makes him sick, gives him terrible diarrhoea that lasts for a whole day, so when they finally let him out it’s obvious that it’s only because he was stinking up his cell too much. Even the two Indonesians in the lock-up were complaining about how disgusting it smelled.
In the end it wasn’t his brush with the police that ended his brief career as a gangster, it was his mother. He’d thought she’d be happy with the money he gave her from time to time, that even if she suspected what he was doing to earn it, she’d turn a blind eye because they needed it so much. Now she could pay the electricity bill. Now she could buy some herbs to make chicken soup to give herself strength for work. Twice he’d bought her a blouse from Petaling Street because he wanted her to have new clothes to wear to work, but she made a point of never putting them on – and it hurt him to see how these gifts disgusted her. He’d thought she would be happy, but she just accepted whatever money he gave her without expressing gratitude. She looked away each time he handed it to her, the notes folded up so she couldn’t see exactly how much it was. ‘Being a part-time waiter pays well these days,’ was all she said. And then, one Sunday when they were both at home watching TV, she said, ‘I had a craving for noodles yesterday after work, so I went to Wanchai Noodle House. Asked if you were working there that day.’
Keong waited for her to say, ‘They told me they didn’t know anyone by that name.’ Waited for the embarrassment and guilt and anger, wondered for a second how he should react, whether to be confrontational, scream at her, smash the furniture, set something on fire – anything to deal with the pain. But she said nothing more, just continued watching TV silently.
Two weeks later they were down here, living in our village.
What a shithole.
His mother had found a job in a factory processing fish – gutting and scaling them and packaging them for delivery to supermarkets. My mother had once worked in that factory too. It was new, it wasn’t so bad. Her hours were long but regular, her salary small but regular. She’d been born in the area, spent her whole life until the age of twenty-two in Tanjung Karang, just up the coast. A relative had told her about a house that had become vacant in Bagan Sungai Yu, two bedrooms, a big front room, a kitchen – just right for a woman, not young, not old, and her son, no longer a child but years away from becoming a man. It was a bit out of the way, but she didn’t mind, she had a scooter and Keong could cycle into town if he needed to. There were bridges across the river now, it wasn’t so hard to get around. She didn’t know what they’d do, she didn’t have a plan – she just knew she had to move back to these parts and stay for as long as she could.
She still had family up the road, an aunt and an uncle, two cousins, and that seemed plenty. She could call them and get together for dinner once in a while – it wasn’t a fancy life, but it felt as if it would never change much, in fact hadn’t changed much since she’d left two decades before. What she’d hated back then, she now loved: the sense of continuity, of surrendering to something stronger than her – the pulling in of her horizons, the comfort to be found in the death of ambition. She had forgotten what it was that she’d wanted to accomplish when she’d left home for the city, but whatever that dream was, it had caused too much anxiety and pushed her towards bad decisions. Now it was gone, she could start to live again. Years later, I would recognise the same feeling, and I would think of her, this round-faced woman who said little but smiled a lot, her cheeks pulled into small dimples. Auntie Chai. She always asked me to come round for some biscuits and a cold drink whenever our paths crossed, but somehow it rarely happened, even in a village as small as ours.
Only problem for her was Keong. Almost seventeen, bored out of his mind, he despised every minute of his life here, resented being dragged away from KL, where he had felt strong and grown-up. He hated the way his mother had tricked him into moving here – she’d told him that they were visiting relatives for Cheng Beng, that they’d only be gone a week, long enough to tidy the graves and say hello to a couple of distant cousins. They had to pack everything because she was giving up the lease of their apartment in KL, but would be getting a new one when they came back. How could he have been so dumb? He should have just insisted on staying put when he found out – he could easily have made his own way in life. But what else, really, could he do? A mother is a mother. If he’d stayed in KL, chances are he’d never have seen his mother again.
The eighteen months he lived in the village were the longest of his life. ‘If I’m still here when I’m twenty, I’ll kill myself. Swear to Buddha, Goddess of Mercy, every damn deity you can think of. I’ll do it.’
The other kids in the village stayed away from him. When he passed them in the road he just looked straight ahead, didn’t stop to say hello. They didn’t like outsiders, and he could tell that they weren’t going to accept him as one of them – which was just fine, because he didn’t have anything to say to them either. ‘Me and you – you guys, I mean, all of you – we got nothing in common. I don’t know anything about digging prawns from the mud,’ he told me.
‘But prawns don’t live in the mud.’
‘Then why are you sea gypsies always picking through the mud as if it’s the most interesting thing in your life?’
Up to then, I’d never questioned our relationship with the mudflats – our whole life by the sea – but all of a sudden this image of us crouching anxiously in the sticky grey muck seemed ridiculous. Why would anyone want to spend their days sifting through the mud for shellfish that sell for a few bucks per kilo?
‘I don’t even like the sight of you,’ he once said, laughing. ‘Don’t you guys have anything to wear other than rags?’ He continued to wear his city clothes, real shirts with long sleeves buttoned at the wrist, but his copper highlights had faded, and his hair was now just as black as everyone else’s, distinguished only by the long locks that fell over his forehead – a style that the other boys secretly made fun of. He sneered at us, we laughed at him. Sometimes, when I remember how he looked and spoke in court when testifying at my trial – how different he had become from me – I think back to his early days in the village, and realise that I should have known there would always be an unbridgeable distance between us. We both should have known that. But at that age, how could we?
It was only at games – on the small dirt patch that passed for a soccer pitch, and the basketball court that the temple had donated to the village – that the other kids had any real contact with him. Keong watched from the sidelines for a couple of weeks, smoking and pretending not to be interested. Then one day, during one of our daily late-afternoon games, just casually shooting hoops without really meaning to play – we were tired from school and from working with the nets and the cockles – the ball rolled out of play, directly into Keong’s hands. He took a shot, a long graceful arc of the arms, surprising for a kid as skinny as him. He missed, but then, as if to atone for his mistake, stubbed out his cigarette and jogged towards us, waving his hands to receive the ball.
During that first match, and every subsequent one, Keong’s entry was a sign that things were about to turn rough. He hustled for every ball, elbows jabbing, bumping into you just to let you know
