The Last
When the nice young man with the shiny slicked-back hair, white starched shirt wet with sweat, mud-spattered pants and shoes, and innumerable insect bites, appeared at her door one especially hot day in the middle of an interminable season of hot days, Su realized that life as she knew it would soon come to an end.
She was the last of the humans left on the island.
And she knew that the man in white was here to serve her her notice of eviction.
She had been expecting him.
She had been expecting him for ten years now from when the first of the families, the Angs, had moved to the mainland.
The Angs left with everything they could carry. There were chairs, some severely crippled, an extended family of pans, adopted pots, a corral of motley bicycles, all broken-in and defeated through years of spirited use, piles upon piles of farm detritus, shears, hoes, chains forever locked in rusty embrace and many more unidentifiable objects of great sentimental value. They left with everything except what was most precious to them, because they could not, the massive durian trees in their substantial orchard with many seasons left to fruit.
Then after the period of rains it was the Abdullahs whose final act on the island was the scuttling of their boats painted with the palette of children. You can still make them out where they lay, when the tide ebbs, at the bottom of the rocky inlet to the bay. The wrecks now a geography of corals and anemones circumnavigated by constellations of sea stars and orbited by galaxies of kaleidoscopic reef fish wheeling and flashing in the soft refracted light.
Then it was the Teos. They who in the end did not bother to close the windows and doors to their precious shophouse, which they had never left unlocked at night through all the years for fear, even though the family, with their squad of twelve children, fully grown, sons strapping and daughters big-boned, all lived and slept there haphazard, on straw mats across the floor and on tables, and were a formidable deterrent to any would-be thief.
The Teos' shop was emptied of its provisions of course when they boarded the boat never to return. Su was grateful to them for leaving her with all that they could not carry and some which they could but for the softness in their hearts. She took whatever that needed no refrigeration for her generator was ancient and could not be counted upon.
Su stretched the last packet of her favourite Khong Guan biscuits the Teos had left her for almost the entire wet season. Then she decided to parcel the spoils and share it with the hungry mould whose initial timidity proved to be no match for its appetite, until one night a brigand rat from the swamp invited himself into the larder and beat them both to the last crumb.
After that it was the Lees of the north who left.
Then the inland Lees, whose ancestors were among the first to arrive on the island together with Su’s great-great-grandfather.
And so the island stood deserted, save for her.
On long drowsy afternoons, nodding under the nipa's dapple, Su wondered if it was not a voracious plague that had swept in with the northeasterlies over the marsh or perhaps a vengeful sea spirit that had come by in the night and made off with the people so he could fill his cavernous marine halls with the warmth of company.
She did not know why it had taken so long for them to come and get her. She had almost let herself believe that they had somehow forgotten her, seeing as she had no living kin. Or maybe it was because she was so ancient that they were hoping they could save themselves the trouble. If they waited long enough, surely death himself would relocate her.
Whatever it was, the sudden appearance of the young man with the white shirt and an ever-spreading bloom of bites after all these years did not raise any rancour in Su. Whatever anger she felt with what they called progress and redevelopment had long since disentangled and drifted from the swamp of her mind.
Over the years, Su had met a few of the displaced when they had made trips, primarily of nostalgia, back to the island.
The Angs, in particular, lured by the haunting perfume of the king of fruits, had actually returned on several occasions and scaled the state-erected fence for the strange pleasure of surreptitiously picking their own spoils.
They seemed genuinely content as they related to Su their new lot in a life far away.
Most of the island’s former residents had been relocated to the same block of flats in Bedok South and they would meet each other regularly. That effectively blunted the blade of resentment and dulled the pangs of change. Though it was not quite the good old days, sure, they were ready to admit, still, there was a lot to be said about staying in a housing estate. It was clean and mosquito-free and airy and convenient with everything a short walk or bus ride away. And they had plenty of things to buy. from even more to choose. And with the mainland’s vastly improved reception, much television to watch.
And being the last was not easy on Su.
Every two weeks she had to walk the five kilometers all the way to the opposite end of the island to the jetty dragging her bruised and battered little trolley with the one missing wheel to receive her provisions that the South Coast Welfare Group had so generously agreed to supply. And then she had to cart the provisions all the way back.
She argued that she had lived her entire life in that hut on the western tip and would have to be crazy to leave on her own free will. She had been born there and so had her mother, and her mother, and hers before that.
But soon, with only one remaining human, the forests and swamps, with gleeful abandon, began reclaiming what the humans, paddling in tiny improbable canoes from the distant edges of memory, had by force and machetes first taken from them.
Back then the island was only a child and her white bones of granite were supple and strong, and ebullient waters gamboled through her arteries, to frolic with the forests boisterous with life.
And while the humans had unleashed much physical devastation through the years, mining her marrows down to bedrock, raping nubile swamps for mean dowries of meager market produce, defiling her with toxic waste, they had not broken her spirit.
Now deep turquoise pools welling with surprising fish dot the moonscape of dynamited hills. And in the night, vegetation dance in wild abandon over crumbling asphalt tracks and exchange promises of rendezvous in abandoned human houses at first light. And from fortresses of thorny brambles, vast phalanxes of ants march through the undergrowth on perpetual manoeuvres. And stone-faced prehistoric lizards, having lived through it all, flick their tongues, tasting the air, for signs portentous. And the wetlands weep tears of joy in the glittering wake of their amphibious young. And kingfishers flashing crests of imperious blue, squabble incessantly over constituencies. And far above it all, garlands of flowers bloom afresh like precious jewels each morning for the coronation of mighty ageless trees.
The island throbbed with the steady pulse of primordial life, once again, free of humans.
Save one.
The swamp, in fact, was in the process of swallowing Su’s hut.
Because there were no humans to hold her back, because there were no daily struggle with chokeholds waged between drainage and garbage at the tidal estuaries, the swamp was free to do as she wished. So she ventured deeper and deeper inland to reclaim her spawn lost and captured long ago by humans and brought up in a life of servitude.
Su’s little garden of tear-stained onions and senile limes and feeble chilies and mango trees whose loins were so long barren they had been abandoned by the flying foxes, was returned to its rightful place in the cradle of the swamp. Her shrubs and trees soon drowned in the sickening hothouse sweetness of the marsh before being exhumed and set adrift for a burial at sea with the solemn procession of the tide, under arched roots and the cathedral light of the mangrove.
Only the pliant coconut survived where they stood.
In time, Su’s tiny hut on stilts was left deep in the swamp as if it were flotsam that had washed in with the sea and had stranded there.
And then the nice young man in the white shirt and the bites finally stopped nodding and glanced at his shiny watch and informed her that some volunteers would be back tomorrow to help her transit to the mainland.
Su had hoped he would stay awhile. She wanted very badly to tell him how he looked exactly like her young son who often appeared on a day like that day when the air was clear and bright and the water over the quarry lay undisturbed. Tanned and with one sinewy hand on the steering wheel, he would give the most radiant smile, commandeering the mining company jeep, from the lightless bottom of the granite pool.
But she knew he was lost. For the distractions of the mosquitoes that had accompanied him all the way from the pier had multiplied exponentially with the impending dusk.
So she bade the man in white good day and watched him as he waded away in the ankle-deep mud, trying in vain to keep his muddy pants from getting muddier, his hands dancing spasmodically about his head to stop his bites from getting their very own bites, until she saw him disappear into the distant mists, and plunge off the edge of the cataracts of her mind.
Then she sat in the falling light and went back to waiting.
And she heard the swamp rise with the songs of numberless tongues. And saw the flashes of lightning that promised no rain. And she found solace in the submarine warmth and tender vapours that spread like comfort over all that she could see, and all that she knew, and all that she was, and she lay down to die at last.
~
*note to "The Last"
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