Water

My skin crawled to consciousness before a balmy numbness took over. Then my mind woke up. It struggled to register where I was. And the relentless tapping that echoed from the bathroom at 3 in the morning.

Slowly it came to me. I was in the master bedroom of a house somewhere in PD. It belonged to my mom's fellow churchgoer. Just the day before my mom had given me the keys and a group of us had driven down to spend the weekend. My godbrother, his wife and daughter and another couple.

We had arrived in PD about eleven in the morning, grabbed a quick breakfast and then found our way to the house in a residential area off the 6th mile of the Port Dickson trunk road. It was a nondescript single storey link house. We unlocked the wooden folding doors. It was a decent enough house, spartanly furnished but enough to accommodate a proper night's sleep. We unloaded our luggage and proceeded to sweep and mop the house. It must have been unoccupied for at least a couple of months judging from the amount of dust.

Then we had lunch and spent the entire afternoon at the beach. The beach in Blue Lagoon was as it is now, not the sort of beach you see in a travel brochure that sends thousands of tourist flocking to our shores. But not too bad for not-very-picky city folk who needed a quick fuss-free weekend away from Kl. Dinner was at the warong by the main road before we returned to the house about nine. I was dead beat by eleven and decided to call it a night.

My godbrother had taken the master bedroom in the front when we got there in the morning and then decided against it as it was a little dark and gloomy. But I like dark and gloomy. So I plonked my duffel bag on the bed and proceeded to wash the adjoining bathroom which was as dusty and covered in cobwebs as the rest of the house.

It was from the same bathroom that the sound of tapping of feet had woken me. I thought I was dreaming but the cold sweat on my body reminded me that I wasn't. My heart pounded violently at first then I told myself to remain calm. I laid in bed for about five minutes, getting accustomed to my surroundings and the tapping feet.

Then to convince myself that the tapping feet didn't belong to any one of us, I got up slowly and walked to the bedroom door. I opened the door. In the hall, sleeping on thin matresses lined next to each other were my godbrother, his wife, my goddaughter and the couple. All five of them. All there. All fast asleep.

That discounted the possibility of anyone of them being in my bathroom. Besides there was only one entrance to the bathroom which was thru my room and it was locked. No one else could have gotten in. Fear gripped me.

Then obstinacy stepped in, closed the bedroom door and led me back to the bed. I laid down. The feet were still tapping, one after the other. Tap, tap, tap, tap... I said to the tapping sound coming from the bathroom," Please leave me alone, I just want to sleep.." Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.....I repeated the words again, in Cantonese this time, "Mm goi mou cheng ku ngo, ngo you fan gou...." Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap..... I tried a different approach,"Tiu nia ma hai!" and kicked the bathroom wall for effect. Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.....

My pleas went unheeded so I decided to just ignore the tapping feet and try to sleep. And after a long while, it did stop. And slowly I drifted off to sleep...tiptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap it started again but with more intensity now. I cursed again and tried to ignore it. Fifteen minutes later it stopped. I started to drift off again.

Terromm, teroomm, trumm, teromm, terumm.... goddammit! Fingers drummed on the bathroom door now. That cold, numb feeling spread all over my body all over again. The hairs on my hands moved as tho they were carressed by some imaginary breeze. "F#@k you!", I yelled at the bathroom and spent the next stubborn hour or so trying to sleep in spite of the drumming. And every once in a while it would stop and when I was just about to doze off it would start again.

Terum, trum,terrum,terum, trumm, two hours later I was getting really, really tired and falling asleep in spite of the drumming. "Crashh!" It sounded like the cistern cover hitting the floor. I jumped up from the bed, snatched the pillow and blanket and stormed out of the room cursing the bathroom door as I passed. I wasn't getting any sleep here.

In the morning I was woken up by my god daughter, 3 years old at that time. She climbed on me as she always does, pulling the covers from my face and chirping,"Good morning Godpa!" I opened my sleepy eyes as she climbed off and tottered into the room I had tried unsuccessfully to sleep in. Almost immediately she runs out again, "Momok, momok.." she laughs in her nervous little voice.

I dragged myself off the sofa which had become my bed only a few hours ago and walked into the room. I opened the bathroom door. I wasn't too surprised by what I saw. The bathroom which I had washed just the day before was a complete mess. The cistern cover was on the floor and the entire bathroom was covered in dirt and wood splinters. Whatever was in the bathroom musn't have been too happy with my cleaning.

I told the others of my experience the night before. Not surprisingly none of them had heard the tapping and the loud drumming or any other disturbance. Lucky me.

We spent the rest of the day at the beach. But it wasn't exactly my day in the sun, I felt drained cos I'd had an almost sleepless night. And I couldn't wait to get back to KL.

The next day at work I spoke to my boss. He was a this Hokkien guy from Penang who had a gift for reading palm and dabbled in a little bit of fengshui. He looked at my eyes and said," Wah, your luck is very bad lah! You better do something about it." It had occurred to me that my luck was indeed unfavourable. In the past two weeks I'd had my car knocked into while it was parked and I'd also been run off the road into a ditch.

A colleague recommended a medium somewhere in SS3 who was supposed to be very "ong". I called the medium and she summoned me to her house at 8.00pm the following night. I can't remember now if the time I saw her had any kind of significance.

So at 8.00pm the next night I found myself in front of another single storey house, this time in SS3. It looked like any other Chinese owned house in SS3, a couple of potted plants ran the length of the drain and a big-ish mango tree grew in the middle of the garden. A little red altar hung from the wall on the left side of the doorway.

A middle aged Chinese lady greeted me at top of the tiled stairs and I followed her into the house. At the end of the hall was a huge rosewood altar about six feet across and six feet high. The legs of the altar were about about 3 feet tall. Several ceramic deities that looked like fierce medieval Chinese warriors stood on the altar. In front of the deities were copper pots filled with ash and a bunch of joss sticks stood impaled in the ashes. Mandarin oranges and pink colored cupcakes were placed in pink plastic plates as offering.

The lady asked what my problem was, the way a doctor does. I told her my little experience in PD. She said my "chi" was low and that I should stay away from water for a year.

I almost choked. I loved water. I had to be in and around water. Nothing made me happier than being immersed in water, doing strokes in a pool or diving into the salty shallows of the sea. In water I thought clearly and the world seemed a better place. I breathed better in water.

She made me crawl under the altar three times, I think to humble myself before god and to cleanse my body from the unholy. And drink the ashes of a yellow paper scrawled with Chinese inscriptions mixed with water. Officially I was cleansed. But I wasn't happy. I couldn't stay away from water.

I wanted a second opinion. And the coming weekend I got it. At a Chinese temple hidden away in some corner in the predominantly Indian neighbourhood of Brickfields. I wondered what a Chinese temple was doing in Brickfields.

It was a red, brick building with giant joss sticks sculpted with dragons at both sides of its entrance. Spiral joss hung from the ceilings amidst Taoist chants and the chimes of brass gongs.

The medium was a stern looking fourty-something year old woman. She looked me in the eyes and said," Wah, hou hak ah lei!" (Wah, very bad luck ah you!) She asked me why I was there. I regurgitated my PD story.

"Hmmph! Mm gin guai mm pha hak" (Hmmph! Don't see ghost don't fear the dark), she spat. "Yee ga gin zho, leng mou?" (Now you've seen it, is it pretty?)

"Ngo mou geen tou, ngo theng tou" (I didn't see it, I heard it), I answered defiantly in off-key Cantonese.

"Leng mou hei tseng?" (Is her voice melodious?), she taunted.

"Ngo mou theng tou hei tseng" (I didn't hear her voice), I insisted and drummed my fingers on the table, a little demo on what I'd heard.

"Ha ha ha ha, looi guai lei ge. Mou tau ge, hou leng ge!" (Ha ha ha ha, it's a female ghost. Don't have head, very pretty!), laughed the phony tho I really couldn't see the humour in it.

"Yee ga hai guai jeet, zhong wui geen goh ge, hahahaha..." (It's the hungry ghost month, you will see her again, hahahaha...), echoed her laughter as I drove away. She also warned me to stay away from water.

"Yee ga hai guai jeet, zhong wui geen goh ge, hahahaha...", her taunt resonated in my head as I attempted to sleep that night. And the next night. And every night for the rest of the month.

Every time a cat scampered across the roof, a bird fluttered outside my window, a dog barked, every rustle of every leaf, every howl of the wind, I would wake up with a start, visions of a headless woman floating across my mind's eye. It was a very long August.

Eventually August came and went and the dark rings under my eyes began to fade away. I longed once again to be in water. What the mediums had told me about staying away from water for a year became an afterthought.

So I found myself standing at the edge of the public pool in Kelana Jaya. Never had water in a communal pool looked so inviting. The blue, chlorinated water sparkled in the afternoon sun. So pristine as it splashed against the tiled edge of the pool. Splish, splash, splish, come in, splash, stephen, splish, come, in, splash...

I took in the warm mid-morning sun, and the green trees, and the blue sky and finally a lungful of air. Then I closed my eyes and dived into the pungent, chlorinated depths of my world.