Author Jackie Bailey’s sister, who lived with a disability, died at age 41 in 2015. In her new auto-fiction novel The Eulogy Jackie draws on how her life and death impacted her and her family relationships.
I breathe on the window and squeak off the condensation. A fine dew glitters on the lawns of Railway Road. If I were any other person, I might look at number 19 and think, what a perfect place to raise a family.
You know, I have never forgiven our mother for you. For any of us, really – because who has eight children in the twentieth century? – but especially for you. I have not forgiven our mother for keeping you alive after the diagnosis and then proceeding to spend the next twenty-five years sabotaging every chance you had at happiness. I have not forgiven her for ruining my attempts to get you out of her house before you ended up on the floor, being kicked for your failure to get back up. I have not forgiven her for changing your medication dosages from one day to the next, claiming that the neurologist had told her that she could. Whenever I challenged Mum she would reply, ‘I am the mother’. Not her mother or your mother: the mother. El Presidente comes to mind.
I acknowledge that I am being hard on Mum. She loved you with the best part of herself. Is it her fault that the best part of herself was not enough? But Annie, come on. There are so many things I tried to do for you, and every single one of them our mother ruined. Why? I don’t really know. Some were inconvenient for her, I guess; some would have meant depriving her of your pension; some were just about power.
I acknowledge that I am being hard on Mum. She loved you with the best part of herself. Is it her fault that the best part of herself was not enough?
Our mother expressed her love for you in these ways: making sure you were warm, dry, fed, clothed, clean; making sure you had what our mother considered entertainment: TV, radio, a puzzle book always in front of you, even though by the end you were no longer capable of doing puzzles. She sometimes abused you. She sometimes thwarted efforts to make you happy. But here is the clincher: Mum was what you always wanted.
Did you give up the fight in 1983, deciding then and there that remaining with Mum was going to be easier than trying to leave her, internalising the lessons of our sisters’ desperate attempts at flight? Or did you do the opposite: did you make the noblest sacrifice of all, enabling us to leave because you stayed behind? Here I go again with my magical thinking, pretending to myself that you had a say in your own cancer. Bad luck can look like poetry from a distance of twenty-five years.
I know that our mother didn’t invent violence in 1983. It predates us, this rage; its source is long buried in the unwritten annals of history. At some point in the past I can only hope it was justified: a murder committed, a sucker punch thrown, a fire left to burn the house down.
Let’s go back, back; try to figure this whole thing out. The seeds of your death were planted long ago among the abundant mosquitoes of a tropical island and the rancid smells of belacan cooking. I try to picture the Singapore of 1942, right before the island is invaded by the Japanese. The eggs that will one day become her many – too many – children are already safe and snug inside our mother’s belly. She is five years old.
The Eulogy. Source: Supplied
On that day in 1942, Jia En did not even need to pretend to go to school. She, Alice and the other kids hover in front of Alice’s house while the village mothers huddle together nearby, talking in low voices. Even Jia En’s mother has come down the hill to stand with the other women. Alice’s and Jia En’s ears prick at the same time that the dogs start to bark and they run together down the main road. It’s Alice’s dad with a handful of men straggling after him, just a fraction of those who had left. When it becomes clear that Li Jie is not with them, Yi Ling turns without a word to the women and walks back up the hill.
The girls fuss over Alice’s dad, urging the cook to make his favourite things. Alice’s dad has a black smudge that reads ‘examined’ on his arm which he refuses to wash off, even after his wife brings him a cloth and a basin. He pushes aside the wonton soup and motions for Jia En to follow him. Wordless, he starts up the hill. Jia En and Alice follow.
Li Jie seems to have a knack for escaping purges, but this time there is a catch: Alice’s dad reports to Yi Ling (the girls crouching outside, eavesdropping) that, upon finding out he worked as a construction engineer for the British, the Japanese overlooked Li Jie’s Shanghai accent and put him to work building bomb shelters for the empire’s officers. He is alive but must remain at Changi, until when or what, Alice’s dad won’t or can’t say.
The family has to give up its bungalow to the Japanese and move into the kampong, into a village house with three other families. Alice’s dad and the other men who have returned are grey-faced and close-lipped about what they saw, but the whole village is awash with rumours of the killings at Punggol Point. Jia En can almost picture the bodies washed up along the beaches of Sentosa as if she had been there, the scent caught in her nose like that of Alice’s dad’s butcher shop where he can no longer work, not that it matters: there is no meat to buy or sell.
What did Mum inherit from her own mother?
Every week Jia En and her brothers save scraps of dog, sometimes fighting the other kids for it, and wrap them in a gunny which their mother carries down the road in her elegant manner, as if she is merely taking a tray of tow kway to her mah-jong ga-gee. Hours, sometimes a whole day passes, before Yi Ling returns without the parcel. The children know not to ask if she saw him.
When he finally does return three years later, in 1945, after the liberation of Singapore, Li Jie still has the tall frame of the young man who escaped the bloodshed of Shanghai almost twenty years before.
But that is all that is left: there is no perceptible scrap of dog meat turned flesh on his skeletal self. Jia En can still remember what it was like to be rich, or richer than they are now. At least the family still has a Malay woman to come and help with the cooking a few times a week. The family is permitted to return to its bungalow but Jia En does not return to school.
She is required to help around the house, look after her stupid little brother or run errands for her bossy big brother. Li Jie works only sporadically now, so the family’s hopes are pinned to Hui Jie and just as well he is tall enough for the job, taking after their father in the looks department. But even Hui Jie must be quiet in the house now that Li Jie is back, sitting in his room, alone but for the ghosts they hear him muttering to.
What did Mum inherit from her own mother? Perhaps all those tricks she used on the big kids: chilli applied to the eyes or to other, less public body parts; forcing them to kneel half clothed on the front verandah for maximum public humiliation.
According to our sisters, Mum had mellowed by the time we came along. For us it was just those bamboo sticks, the kneeling and the crew cuts, scissors snagging our ears while words sliced through something more tender than cartilage.
This is an edited extract from The Eulogy by Jackie Bailey, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $32.99. Available in stores nationally.
