The Sea Remembers

Kim Cheng Boey

Just when you turn your back on it and give it up for lost, it starts to come back, tides sweeping in from the lost horizon, or maybe it is rising in you, the sea returning with its waves of remembering, its lilting cadences and lapping folds on the mossy, weedy sea-wall, the hum, the chugging of sampans and tongkangs, the stirring sea breeze and bracing salt air, the shifting chords of bronze light, all the missing places, faces and voices, the vanished years come rolling in on the incoming tide, the Marina Barrage disappeared by memory’s reverse sleight of hand, the sea roads open again to archipelagic echoes. Nothing dies as long as the sea remembers, as long as the trees shield it in their grass calligraphy of shade, in the murmuring leaves, in the drowsy queue of royal palms, as long as the banyan with its long limb pendant over the water catches the ghost-notes from the waves, and the five trees and their drooping angsana heads sing the dreams in their papery yellow blooms, keep the past alive in their winged seeds.

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Nothing dies, as long as the water, the trees, the bridges remember, and you see the father and son walking on the tiled promenade, the son running ahead, hopscotching on the terracotta-red pavers, then dashing back to hold his dad’s callused hand, his light steps gliding like darting swifts over his father’s dark pained bass beat. To the beginning, alighting from the Hock Lee bus, the conductor announcing ‘Gor Zhang Chiu Kar’ – Under the Five Trees – where later in the evening, the boy will walk back across the lawn and feel he is trespassing on something secret, risky, bodies locked in embrace, and what a different place it is on weekends when his dad brings the family for a picnic, before the happy childhood ends. They walk past the War Memorial, and the boy runs up and down the broad steps and then they are sitting at a stall in Satay Club, perched on wooden stools, watching the satay man working the charcoal red-hot with the rhythmic pulse of the straw fan, the dancing flames licking the meat into fragrant browns, and the boy loves sliding it off the stick, biting into something like the meat of memory, the taste and ineffable spice of the moment, the medleyed smell of sea-air and satay, and the fleeting moment when he knows he is his father’s son.

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Always to this spot they came to lean over the parapet, his father to light up, he to feel the sea spray between the railing gaps, this end of the Elizabeth Walk close to the five trees, where the river decants into sea. On Anderson Bridge the hopeful unemployed dangled their creels, the lines clear of the passage of boats, and on the brown-green water tongkangs drag widening chevrons, the wake crashing in percussive wash against the wall, echoes trailing off and awakened now in your body, as you lean over the rail on your sixteenth birthday, and light your first cigarette, and wonder where the years, where the places, where the father and boy have gone. Across the water on the concrete spit, the Merlion stands with its illuminated form and foaming spout. You hate it, its unnatural birth, the way it seems to herald all the changes taking place from the river to the sea. What you love is the tindery box of matches, striking a bead-tip against the strip and watching the match flare in cupped hands, a quick deep draw on the cigarette and you feel a giddy wave that takes you far from yourself. You get a sense you have done this before, even though it’s your first cigarette. For a moment you are your father, the crackle of crisp tobacco and paper loud in the air, your nostrils flaring, the nicotine coursing like peace notes through your body.

— —

Past the five trees, the kacang man under the street lamp, the ice-cream vendor next to him, the boy keeps pace with his dad, through the underpass, whipping up gleeful echoes in its hold, thrilled to hear his voice magnified and then the dying echoes. In the middle a homeless man sits, pain and loss on his face, and the boy is afraid someday his father will sit like that, if he carries on gambling and drinking. He skips past the beggar to Empress Place, the hawker centre right in front, where he will drink and smoke with friends of his youth, then across Cavanagh Bridge, to watch the tongkangs, their deep holds loaded with cargo, often towering piles of plump gunny sacks, coming and going, the bare-chested boatmen looking up at him as the boat clears the bridge, their dark, seamed faces from a faraway place. From the other side of the bridge they watch boys trawl the alluvial mud for worms, printing tiny tracks on the soft odorous muck. As evening falls the whole district will go dusky, ultramarine-dark, the buildings and spaces emptying, the river glazed crimson-red at sunset will deepen to indigo and quieten with its moored barges. But it is daylight still, and the father and son steer past the grey hulk of the General Post Office, past the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, to enter the cool shade of Change Alley, where they go with the drift of browsing bodies, the barter-talk and the language of goods and moneychangers, before crossing the overhead bridge to Clifford Pier, past land-sick old-timers, marooned loiterers, boat offices and ship chandlers, to the landing steps at the far end, where they watch boatloads of sailors riding in from ships resting in the roads, and the father lights up again as he gazes at the hazy silhouettes hovering on the horizon.

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Then he flicks the butt into the heaving, greasy, rainbow-slicked water, and takes your hand and you watch your shadows lengthen beside you, walking on the curving waterfront, the waves lapping the sea-wall, rocking the berthed bumboats, and you take deep draughts of the sea smell as if to store it for the future, then across Anderson Bridge, and there is something about the two bridges, how you live by them, how you seem to walk back and forth in time across their spans, and you are back where you began. You feel your father has plotted something like a route of memory, his feet reading a history of the place, and you are at the five trees, waking to the dark and the lamps coming on, to lovers trysting. Then you realise he is gone, your father, and the places with him, and you are leaning over the parapet of the sea wall, looking into the darkening water for clues to where they have gone, to catch the sea’s voice on the returning tide as it begins its slow work of memory, as it remembers the way home.