We, The Survivors. Tash Aw

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 he was there. It wasn’t the way we usually played, and when he wasn’t there we were as lethargic and half-hearted as ever. Keong made us forget the heat and the fatigue – he made us want to fight. He put his hands in our faces, scratching our arms, inviting a punch-up, which he duly got. Once, a boy older and taller than him squared up to him, and when Keong spat at him, the boy threw a punch that floored Keong, to the laughter of the others. The next day at soccer, the same boy slid into a tackle, bringing Keong down face-first into the dirt. This time Keong was prepared. He had a rock in his pocket, which he held tightly in his fist as he swung at the boy’s head. It was the dry season, and the blood marked the earth for many days afterwards.

      On other occasions, the smallest insult would ensure that Keong stopped dead in his tracks. He’d stand still and walk towards whoever had offended him, fists clenched. It could be anything, whispered words that didn’t mean a thing – lia ma, cheebye, really, just meaningless expressions – but Keong would always react in the same way, throwing the first punch, launching himself with the full force of his scrawny body at whoever had muttered the passing vulgarity. I’m not sure why they continued to insult him. He lived in a house at the farthest end of the village, and didn’t go to school, so they had little contact with him. Maybe it was simply that he wasn’t one of us. Or maybe that without knowing it, we were bored by the regularity of our lives – scared by the way our fate was determined by the weather and the tides, the way the slightest change in the moon’s position could mean that we would have little to eat for the next month. With Keong, the equation was so much simpler. Call him a bad name and he’d react in exactly the same way every time. I never understood why he kept turning up at our games, when he knew it would always end in a fight. I guess he needed to do that to remind himself that he would never belong in our village – that he was hated there, and had a good reason to get the hell out of the place.

      That I became his only friend in the village was not a surprise. He never expressed any gratitude for my silence over his beating up of the boy, but I knew he was thankful that I hadn’t caused any further trouble for him. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t because I cared about his welfare that I didn’t snitch on him, it was just because I didn’t want to get involved in anything messy. I was always like that, even as a kid. But somehow, at that age, explanations don’t come easily, and don’t seem necessary either, so the episode became anchored in the depths of our shared history, never talked about, but never forgotten either. It was the same in the days and weeks following the killing, when I was waiting for the police, for someone, anyone, to discover what I’d done. I didn’t know when or how it would happen. I was scared of life’s sudden uncertainty, but I was sure of one thing: that Keong would not tell anyone about the incident. If no one else found out, that terrible act would be silently swallowed up by our past.

      He and his mother were my closest neighbours – the first people we saw when I cycled into the village. At that point we were living in our own house about a mile away from the village proper, and at night I could just about make out the lights of their house from across the fields. Physically separated from the rest of the village, it was easier for us to strike up a friendship that went unnoticed by the others, who found Keong’s urban manners unnatural and ridiculous – his cowboy swagger, arms and shoulders swaying, his constant chatter, always comparing things in the village unfavourably to what he had experienced before. I knew he was an idiot too, but I couldn’t resist his stories of life in the city, even though I suspected that they were exaggerated, and maybe plain untrue. Being with Keong and listening to his tales of fights in alleyways behind shopping malls, or making so much money you couldn’t fit it all into your pockets, was like watching a movie that enveloped me completely, that made me feel I could be part of the action if I wanted to, even when I knew it was made up. Just reach out and I could touch that world. Just hop on a bus and I could be living in it. The more I lapped up his accounts of his life, the more he talked, spinning ever more outrageous tales. Your mother, of course it’s all true!