Skimming

Claire Tham

Description

Wai Keong and Li had the perfect relationship-familiar, proper, safe. Until David steps in, overturning their carefully ordered worlds. With searing honesty, multiple award winner Claire Tham renders an uncommon love story from the three protagonists' points-of-view, pitting polished surfaces against painful depths, comfort zones against alien spaces and the surrender to duty against the seduction of desire. Up close, these distinctions are no longer clear ...

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814677608
• Langue: English

Extrait

1999 Claire Tham and Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
This edition published 2010 by
Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1
New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
Cover design: Bernard Go Kwang Meng
Cover photo: Getty Images
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National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Tham, Claire, 1967-
Skimming/Claire Tham. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2010.
p. cm.
ISBN-13 : 978-981-4302-84-5 eISBN : 978 981 4677 60 8
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations) - Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships -
Fiction. I. Title.
PR9570.S53
S823 - dc22 OCN629998687
Printed in Singapore by Times Printers Pte Ltd

Wai Keong
THEY say every story has several points of view. That may be true. But I have only one point of view-mine.
Where to begin?
I could try the winter day more than ten years ago, when I was a law student in London, and David blew into my hostel room, just before the start of the second term in our first year. He had just hitchhiked down from Oxford, where he was reading politics, philosophy and economics. (He always corrected you punctiliously, if you asked him what he was studying .) His hair, flecked with snowflakes, was white. The winter was one of the coldest, snow-heaviest, on record. He shook his head like a dog, scattering the flakes. I just had to come down! he said.
Li had been sitting in my armchair, eating biscuits, legs crossed, swinging her foot. We had been going out a month. Seeing David, her foot went still. He seemed to register her for the first time; falling back, eyebrows shooting up in an exaggerated simulation of surprise, he said, And you must be the lovely-?
Li s eyes glittered; she suspected she was being made fun of. Small, slender, she was always being mistaken for a twelve-year-old by English bus conductors and immigration officials; it had made her sensitive to imagined slights.
I said, David, this is Li. Li, David.
He gave me a long, accusing stare, for not clueing him in earlier on the state of affairs. Pleasure all mine, he muttered indistinctly, flopping on my rug. He spoke into his hair, which seemed to have gone uncut for several months.
What re you reading? he asked Li.
Pure mathematics, she said.
He made a face. Oh, God, one of those! I hate smart women!
Too bad, Li said, lightly. She rose to go. I groaned. Unexpectedly, David put out a hand and grabbed her ankle. Don t go, he said, simply. He didn t apologise.
I don t know why Li didn t kick him; she was capable of that. She stood there gazing down at him. And, to my surprise, she did stay, curled up in my armchair.
He wanted to tell me that he had just spent four weeks alone in Oxford over the Christmas holidays, during a spell of heavy, prolonged snowfall. The place, he said dreamily, had been deserted, eerie, like a town emptied by plague, but beautiful, silent. Such a blanketing silence, white flakes drifting implacably out of an opaque sky, muffling everything in their path. He had thought Oxford grim in autumn, but he changed his mind in winter. He had stood for hours by the window watching the snow, mesmerised. He had never seen snow before, he had nearly died of cold, but it was-he searched for the right word-stunning. The heavy whiteness. The mass of it.
The only other person in residence in his college was an African postgraduate student who hardly left his room. David was sealed off, enveloped, in isolation. At times, he had a curious, ringing sound in his ears, and he had fantastic dreams, of neverending winter, of being found dead, frozen, bloodless, in his room. He went for days without speaking to anyone. When the silence became too much to bear, he fled to Blackweils the bookshop and spent hours in the second hand section, getting smothered and sleepy from the fierce central heating. And the glossy Christmas coffee table books, with their fabulous menus: roast goose, mushroom and walnut stuffing, mince pies, mulled wine, Christmas pudding; he felt feasted, just looking at the pictures. Yet, when the shops closed, he was glad to return to his room, to that isolation which he was beginning to feel had been designed as a test for him. It was frightening, yet exhilarating.
Exhilarating? Li said, interrupting for the first time.
He turned to her. Isn t it? Exhilarating? Brutal and exhilarating. Cold and desolation. He was in that mood I recognised, when words flew into his mind, and tripped off his tongue, in spacy free-association. I don t think he even knew what he was saying.
Behind his back, Li rolled her eyes at me.
In the silence he d kept playing one album, over and over again, Peter Gabriel s So.
You did? I said. Yeah, why?
I don t know, I said. It was a brilliant album, brilliantly melancholic. It was moors music, music to go with the black trees pointing their withered branches at the grey sky. A midwinter thing. Only to be listened to in summer, if you wanted to preserve your sanity.
He d fled Oxford the moment students began filtering back; he didn t want to see his isolation infiltrated piecemeal. If it had to go, he preferred to see it smashed altogether. And so he d dashed up to London to see me.
You re mad, I said. At the same time, I suspected that the reason he d stayed on in Oxford over winter was not to have a transcendental experience, though it turned out that way, but to save money. Though he would willingly have slit his wrists rather than admit it to anyone, including me. Especially me. He was on a scholarship, and he watched his finances carefully.
David was asking Li, Do you like Peter Gabriel?
Li said, coolly, I don t like rock music.
He said, abstractedly, Really? He blinked; I could see him coming down, slowly, from the heights, reassembling himself. He drummed his hands on the floor. He wore his old, familiar, gleeful look. So, he said, musingly, you re the new girlfriend.
He stayed the night and left in the morning. Li said, Where did you meet him?
Her tone was the same as my mother s, years ago, when I brought home a stray cat. Where did you find it?
The bald answer was that I had known David since we were thirteen, when he arrived as an outsider at our school, which had a reputation as a training ground for rich businessmen s sons. From the first, he stood out: tall, with skinny limbs shooting out of a uniform that was patched in places, too-long hair, a black eye. The last gave him a faintly sinister air, which he did nothing to dispel. Everything about him-his accent, his loping walk, his abruptness-made him seem raw, unfinished. His father was a merchant seaman, his mother was recently dead. The first fact alone was notable enough, in a school where almost everyone s father was a professional or a businessman. It was his mother, he made clear, who had made him apply to the place. He wasn t aggressive; on the contrary, he had a very polite, deadpan manner which was unusual in someone of his age. Boys didn t notice the undercurrent of sarcasm until it was too late to think of a good retort, which infuriated them more than if he had called them rude names. In class, he always seemed asleep, yet always gave the right answer when called on. When he was bored-and he was easily bored-he d take out a magazine and read it under the table. Unlike us, he never read comics; he read music magazines, which we suspected him of not understanding. He was fanatical about rock music, in those days.
I wasn t surprised when he was jumped, two weeks after he arrived. He was a living provocation, and a bloodlust had been gathering. I saw the fight, a good one-blood, gore, torn shirts -which began at the portico and ended at the school gate, the two of them rolling down the driveway, hands stuffed into each others faces.
In the following weeks, he got into more fights and was threatened with expulsion. The principal summoned his father to school. I saw him, a tall, lean man with a certain physical grace in his stride, and an uncertain air. David was called out of class to translate for his father in the principal s office; his father s English, it seemed, was poor. Later, I saw them again at the gate, and it was clear from the way they stood, his father leaning towards him, nodding, that it was David who was giving reassurance, instructions, and not the other way around.
We thought he would ask for a transfer to another school, but he stayed on. There were various theories: that it was pride, that he wanted to make life miserable for the rest of us.