Singapore Noir

Bernard had observed one such tree over the course of his childhood. It grew in a remnant of old forest near the bus stop, where he took a bus each morning from Bukit Panjang to school in Bishan. In the early-morning darkness it looked especially sinister, its roots descending like the tangled beard of an ancient pirate. Bernard was a short but fierce boy — Chilli Padi was the nickname his schoolmates gave him — a boy who was afraid of nothing, who gladly fought kids twice his size, and won. Yet the sight of that tree would unsettle him. When he was in Secondary One, parts of the original tree still clung to life, occasionally green shoots would sprout. But by Secondary Four it had given up the fight.

He had grown up in Bukit Panjang. Wedged between the Mandai catchment area and the northern edge of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, it still had fragments of jungle, slowly drying out, and soon to be bulldozed no doubt, but for a while it was at least sanctuary for monkeys and birds. He compared trees by their reproductive strategies — particularly appreciating the Kapok trees for their seed pods bursting with fluffy fiber, the berries of the Tembusu that attracted bats at dusk, but perhaps most of all the Saga trees with their curling pods, twisting ever more tightly till they split open and discharged their jewel-red seeds. These were majestic trees, relying on their own strength and ingenuity.

The strangler fig offended him by its sneaky behavior. It depended on, made use of, and ultimately destroyed another.

The strangler fig is not the only possessor of this parasitic habit. Some women have it too. Chancing upon the right man, the more vibrant and sturdy the better, she draws him to her embrace. Her tendrils caress and soothe, tightening imperceptibly yet irresistibly. The victim, unsuspecting at first, is charmed to be the object of such obsessive attention, until, too late, he is trussed up, his breath squeezed out. The gently deepening deprivation of oxygen lulls him into unconsciousness, as she takes from him the keys to his condo and his car, and of course all of his credit cards.

Bernard felt that he had spent his life struggling free from the embrace of women. Perhaps it was too dramatic to call them strangler figs, but certainly there were times when all his energy was being sucked from him. First there was his mother. After his father’s death when he was just a boy of seven, she had identified his potential and driven him on, through the Gifted Education Programme at Raffles and onward to an army scholarship to study engineering at Cambridge.

Her constant refrain was the need to make the most of his time. Every spare moment should be spent reading or doing homework. Even meals were a distraction — she cared much less about how anything tasted than about whether it would provide the right energy boost at the right time for his studies. When he was in primary school she had warned him about his habit of loitering along the way to and from school. Once, exasperated by the fact that he had not taken her warning to heart, she told him that at dawn and dusk he must be especially careful, for in the shadows of the trees there would lurk female spirits, with long black hair, in long white gowns, and they watched for little boys who lacked purpose, who idly kicked stones at a street corner or missed their bus because of some foolish daydream or other.

When Bernard got married he thought he had found an equal, a partner in life, but his wife, who had pretended disdain for material things all through their courtship, was soon complaining about how low his army pay was compared to friends of theirs who worked for banks or in the legal profession. Even after he left the army and became chief executive of the energy regulator, as well as a member of Parliament for the ruling party, she was unsatisfied, and urged him to push to become a minister. Great pay, great status, she said. When he explained that what he really enjoyed was meeting people, trying to find answers to their problems, she told him he was wasting his time — no one would really be grateful to him anyway — and he should focus on impressing the PM instead. Sometimes she made him angry, and he would feel like striking out, but he kept himself in check. One can strike a man, but never a woman. The same boy who had without hesitation fought schoolmates upon any slight or insult had been unfailingly polite to his mother, to teachers, and in time to the women he dated. No matter how much his wife provoked him, Bernard kept quiet, carried on.