Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Page 5

  And the evening would have been a perfectly tolerable one if 1) we hadn’t been made to sit in a circle and play another infernal game, and if 2) the moment the one person of interest to me arrived, everyone hadn’t pounced on his cat instead, cooing his name, petting and coddling him, making sure that his hair flew to cover every inch of the room.

  To be fair to Louie, he is monstrously adorable—small enough to be scooped up in both hands, grey with large green eyes that seem about to pop out of his tiny face. But I have now lasted one hour and 23 minutes in this room, a record of some sort I am sure, and I listen to my breathing again, trying to decide if another Ventolin break is necessary.

  I stop breathing entirely for a second when Louie’s owner turns his eyes towards me, one hand still absentmindedly buried in Louie’s thicket of hair. He smiles and I smile back, confused, unsure if this is like a moment out of the movies, the pivotal point where our eyes meet that I recount forever to my grandchildren. Then I realise that almost everyone’s eyes are on me, and it’s actually my turn to play.

  I debate the multitude of things I could say, while still acutely conscious of the fact that when I do speak, I may sound like a lung cancer patient. I could of course go right for the jugular and casually say, “Never have I ever had sex”, which would most certainly cause a hullabaloo of some sort, but also be effective in causing several people to lose immediately. But then that’s probably all these people would remember about me, that quiet brown-skinned girl who sat in the corner and kept going to the bathroom. Where was she from again? Mexico? Malaysia?

  So I play it coy, and safe. “Never have I ever watched a Star Wars movie,” I say lazily, trying to make my voice soft and mysterious instead of barely audible due to oxygen deprivation. The predictable gasps ring around the circle, as most of the group take a swig. Clara, I notice, doesn’t, but grins wildly at me. I shrug back at her. I have many more unbelievable statements in my arsenal.

  I excuse myself to the bathroom again, and once there, shake my inhaler desperately before taking another puff, hoping it might somehow increase its effectiveness. I pull the flush at the same time as I take the puff, expertly masking the sound of my feebleness as I have so many times before, and make an auditory show of washing my hands so no one standing in line for the bathroom can judge me for poor hygiene.

  When I open the door, a blonde girl rushes past me into the bathroom, muttering in another language, and Louie’s owner is next in line. I quickly pocket the inhaler. “You’ve never seen Star Wars?” he says, and his face crinkles into an easy smile just like it had before.

  His accent is unfamiliar to me, but with the overtone of an American twang, just like every other international student who has lived here for a while. “No,” I say, and then before I can stop myself—as though I know this is the only reason I am still here—I ask: “What’s your name?”

  “Sam,” he says, and reaches out to shake my hand. I hurriedly wipe my wet hands on the back of my jeans, too distracted by the sure knowledge that I will never find a “Sam” on Facebook and realising it would be way too awkward to inquire after his last name as well. “Myra,” I say. “From Singapore,” I add helpfully.

  “Cool,” he says, and doesn’t offer any corresponding information, or maybe he doesn’t have time to, because my next inhalation produces a clearly audible wheeze. We stare at each other for a second, his eyes questioning and mine beseeching him to let it go, before I force a laugh. “Sometimes I breathe like that,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t, but he laughs too. I notice Louie, who must have stalked in silently, curling his little body in a figure eight around Sam’s legs and curse the cat inwardly for undoing all the effects of the surreptitious rescue inhaler mission in the bathroom.

  Sam sees me looking at the cat and immediately becomes more animated. “You a cat person too?” he says, but thankfully does not wait for an answer. “I found Louie just yesterday, actually, on a trip downtown. He followed me into a coffee shop, and then to my car, so I just let him hop on in. I had a cat back home, you see—and he’s just so cute.”

  “He’s pretty cute,” I agree. “So—you’ve adopted him now?”

  “I guess,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t really think it through, but once I got home, he made himself comfortable, and I didn’t really feel like shooing him out. I left him at home today though and he made a mess, so I thought I’d bring him to this thing.”

  He bends down to pick the cat up, and Louie mews and nuzzles into Sam’s neck like they’ve known each other for years. Louie is closer to my face than ever before and I have to stop myself from instinctively taking a step back. “It’s been sort of nice having him, actually,” Sam says. “I’ve kind of missed having a pet for the past two years.”

  “So you’re a junior,” I say, hoping to turn the conversation away from cats.

  “Yeah,” he says, as the blonde girl flushes and darts out of the bathroom without washing her hands. “Well, see you out there.”

  I unwillingly take that as my cue to go back into the main living room, where the group has become more raucous and the responses less coherent. I claim my original spot on one of the couches again, realising for the first time that my heart has been hammering for the past few minutes. Someone is saying that never has he ever peed himself while drunk and the requisite ewwwws ring around the room before two sheepish faces take a chug and the mood disintegrates into screaming laughter again. I can’t concentrate on anything happening here— my mind is still on Sam—but I’m still capable of being grateful that I am at least breathing a little easier now that Louie is standing sentry outside the bathroom.

  It’s Clara’s turn now. “Never have I ever had a threesome,” she says, in an unnaturally high-pitched voice. I roll my eyes as some people drink and others cheer. Clara has never had a twosome either, but I don’t see her bringing that up.

  Someone lightly touches my shoulder from behind. “Myra, right?” It’s Sam and I nearly forget to nod. “Could you help me with something for a second?”

  He motions for me to follow him into the other room, where the bathroom is, and I do, trying hard not to appear too eager. We find Louie standing stock-still outside the bathroom door with his tail in the air and a look of extreme concentration in his eyes. He mews loudly when he sees us and the effort his tiny body is making to remain so rigid is adorable. If his presence wasn’t so antithetic to mine, I might have entertained the notion of sitting down and scooping him into my lap.

  “I’m not really sure why he’s acting like this, but I think he might need to, you know, go,” Sam tells me. “He’s not exactly house-trained—at my apartment I just have a makeshift litter corner lined with newspaper. Sorry to bother you with this—but what do you think I should do?”

  I’m not sure how Sam got the idea from our brief interaction that I was some sort of cat expert, but I am reluctant to disabuse him of the notion as it seems to be the only means of our continued communication. “Well, cats are very clean creatures,” I say, reciting something I once heard an old friend of my mother’s say. “He probably doesn’t want to go just anywhere. I think you should probably just set up a litter corner here. Or take him home, but I don’t know how far away you live.”

  An ingenious way to ask where he lives! I congratulate myself momentarily as he considers.

  “I think I’ll set one up here. I don’t know how long he can hold it if he’s just a baby, and he might be in pain,” he says, sounding very serious. I feel a little of my attraction to him ebbing away, even as I observe in an almost detached manner his strong jaw, kind eyes and a latent smile I already know can make me change my mind. There’s never been much love lost between me and animals—a trait I always worried meant I was a bad person—but I’d always assumed I wasn’t alone in believing only elderly single women and children below the age of six wondered intimately about their cats’ bodily functions.

  “Okay,” I say, wondering what to do now. It seems logical to o
ffer to help, but I am already feeling the depth of my breathing decrease, and I have no desire to spend more time with Louie, let alone his excrement.

  “I’ll go find some newspaper or something, if you could—make sure he doesn’t make a mess?” Sam says. I nod, even as I wonder how I could possibly prevent such a thing, and he leaves me alone with Louie, whose focused stare is now fixed on me.

  “Hey kitty,” I say, trying out my hitherto-unused catvoice. “Hey, Louie. Hold it in if you can.”

  The cat keeps staring at me, or through me, it now seems, still unmoving, with its tail still pointing straight up. I begin to come around to Sam’s opinion that the cat is in an advanced degree of discomfort. Either that, or Louie has recently become demon-possessed, a theory I am not entirely opposed to.

  I hear Sam call for Ahmed, one of the Turkish hosts whose apartment we’re in, and I hear them converse in a language I don’t understand. After a while I hear Ahmed laughing, and then he says in English, “Just grab it, they won’t notice.”

  Sam returns with a copy of The Campus Chronicle, and I inadvertently perk up, wondering if now is a good time to let him know that I write for that fine media outlet, and if this will perhaps open up a conversation about both our interests, upon which we will find we have many mutual passions and make plans to pursue them together at an indeterminate date in the future. Instead, he crawls into the bathroom and lays out the newspaper carefully, covering almost every inch of the tile. He looks up at me, almost to check if he’s doing it right, and shrugs. “Best I can do,” he says.

  “It’s great,” I say, then feel dumb and amend it. “It’s fine.”

  Sam gets up and then makes a grandiose show of bowing to Louie and gesturing him into the bathroom with a flourish. “After you,” he says to the cat, and I laugh. I’m so busy laughing that I only spot the articles laid out on the floor after Louie stalks in. There on the bathroom floor is my first article and I open my mouth to point it out, but the laughter has depleted my already-struggling oxygen levels significantly, and I wheeze instead.

  Sam looks concerned as I start coughing, and his eyes grow wide when I don’t stop. He puts his hand on my back as he asks me what’s wrong, and even through the cough-wheeze I’m stupid enough to relish his touch. “Inhaler,” I manage to tell him, and he rushes out of the room. By the sound of the commotion in the next room, I can only guess he has told the entire group that some girl is dying of a coughing fit. I turn to see Clara run in and gasp, but she understands and runs out again to grab my bag and my inhaler.

  When she comes back in and I am able to take two deep breaths of Ventolin, I see Louie sitting on his haunches, staring at me from inside the bathroom.

  I turn away and rasp to Clara that I need to get some fresh air, and to go home. “Should I call an ambulance?” she asks, but I shake my head. I can talk more easily now. “I just need to get out of here,” I say, and tilt my head towards Louie by way of explanation.

  Clara helps me up, and the two of us walk into the living room, where people are noticeably less concerned than I thought they were going to be. I am both relieved that I am not the centre of attention and miffed that they had not cared more. I make a mental note not to attend any more parties where my accidental death might not be remarked upon.

  “Hey, Star Wars girl,” calls one guy I don’t know. “Where are you going? We’re all drunk and you’re not.”

  “That’s the girl who almost died,” slurs someone else. “She lives!”

  “She almost died? Shit.”

  Clara turns with a polite smile and starts apologising, but I keep heading to the door, to fresh air, knowing this guy won’t remember my rudeness tomorrow, or even in a few minutes. Once we get out, I inhale deeply—the stillevident wheeze terrifying Clara afresh—and pull out my rescue inhaler one more time.

  I notice then that there are just two copies of the newspaper in my bag, when I had most certainly grabbed three (one for me, one to send home to my parents, and another extra in case either of the two aforementioned parties lost theirs). I check again hurriedly but almost immediately realise that Sam or Ahmed had probably seen the papers sticking out of my bag and grabbed one for Louie’s makeshift “litter”. I feel a sharp surge of irritation but I don’t seem to have enough energy to be both pissed and breathing normally at the same time. I ask Clara how much of a walk it is to get back to our dorm.

  I hear the door open behind us again and someone calling my name. I don’t want to turn, but Clara does, and it’s Sam, carrying Louie. “I just wanted to get your number or something, to see if you wanted to hang out again,” he says. I feel Clara’s eyes on me, and excitement radiating palpably from her body.

  This is probably the juncture at which I should say no, call him a thief, or at the very least announce my debilitating allergy to his pet, but of course, I say: “Sure.” My breath sounds shallow but he probably thinks that’s just my voice at this point. We both get our phones out to exchange numbers. Louie purrs like a motor, and Sam laughs. “He seems to really like you. I thought we could do something next weekend, all three of us,” he says. I smile, and glance at Clara, before realising he was talking about Louie.

  He probably won’t call, I tell myself as I type my number into his phone, even as I also start wondering if pre-emptive antihistamines could be an option. I turn to walk back with Clara’s face positively shining beside me and decide I must be some special class of self-loather to have a crush on a guy who just stole my first article to wrap his cat’s shit up in, but what do I know? Never have I ever been on a date.

  BODY ON BOARD

  THE PEOPLE OF Phuket have stopped trying to learn English because it has been a long time since they have needed it. Most of the people who visit now are Russians, who don’t speak a word of it either.

  This helpful information is relayed to my six-year-old daughter Zara by Pop, a proud member of the Englishspeaking minority of the Thai populace, who is in the seat next to her on the Silk Air flight from Singapore to Phuket. He is the owner of a chain of boutique hostels, headquartered in Bangkok, but is now on a routine visit to the Phuket branch, where he is expecting to find every room occupied—as always—with Russians.

  “They are everywhere,” says Pop earnestly, looking from Zara to me and then back again, obviously trying to get my attention and ascertain my relation to the child he is regaling. I ignore him steadily. He turns back to Zara: “They come to Thailand, with not one word of English. Not one word! Even the Thai people know more English than them—they can at least say hello, how are you, do you want tuk tuk? This is crazy to me. I thought that everyone knows English nowadays.”

  Zara nods uncertainly and looks to me for some sort of cue as to what to do about him. Pop turns to look at me, too. “Hello, sir,” he tries. “You have a lovely daughter.”

  His voice rises a little as he says the last word, with the slight hint of a question. I am aware that I don’t look like Zara’s father: my dark skin and angular features stand almost in stark contrast to my daughter’s chubby fairness, but she doesn’t look like her mother, either. Sometimes mixed kids just turn out like that. If you look closely at her eyes though, you can see they are actually just like mine: wide with a prominent lower lash line. I almost want to pettily point out this tiny similarity to Pop, but I manage to refrain from doing so.

  “Thanks,” I say and give him a tight smile that I hope conveys how unwilling I am to prolong this conversation. I smooth Zara’s hair, check her seatbelt and adjust the kiddie neck-pillow she insisted on bringing, just to demonstrate my concern for my child plainly, so this stranger can’t judge me when I fall asleep and ignore her in a minute. I would normally have placed myself between Zara and any stranger on a flight—or my wife would have been on the same flight to sandwich our daughter—but the nature of this trip meant that I had to take whichever seats were left on the next flight to Phuket. It was lucky enough that I got two seats together, even if it meant being in the dreaded middl
e seats of the centre row. When getting into our seat, I’d initially thought a sour-faced man who had already yelled once at Zara near the boarding gate looked like he was going to sit in the same row as us. I’d made a split-second decision and placed Zara next to the rosy-cheeked, smiling man on the right aisle instead, leaving empty the aisle seat to my left, but he had kept moving. The seat to my left ended up being taken by a harried and pregnant Chinese woman, who boarded late and fell asleep almost immediately upon strapping in. I glance at her now, snoring softly, and wonder how awkward it would be to orchestrate a seat exchange to get away from Pop’s chatter. I look over again at Zara. She seems to be fine, and really, I’m the one who needs the silence more.

  The flight attendants have finished their cross-checks and are taking their seats, the plane is speeding towards take-off, the cabin lights are dim and I have pulled my eye mask down but Pop is still talking at an ever-rising volume, to keep pace with the din of the plane’s engines.

  “I just don’t know how you will manage it,” he is shouting, and I lift my eye mask to peer at him out of the corner of my eyes. He is shaking his head with an air of affected sadness. “Do you speak Thai?” he shouts, and Zara shakes her head. “Russian?” Zara shakes her head again and starts tugging at my arm. I put my arm around her and I hope that sends a clear signal without having to break my pretence of already being asleep.

  “My hotel is not very far from Patong beach,” Pop tells Zara. “Do you already have a place to stay? My hotel is full but I can find you a room. And then at least you can have me to translate for you. Okay?”

  He grabs a torn piece of napkin from the drink he had before take-off and fumbles around for a pen. “I will write you the address.”