What Lies Beneath

My cousins Emily and Jane are still slowly going through the home of their recently deceased parents. By the sounds of it, it’s a slow process.

            For starters, Uncle Cam and Auntie Lucy lived in the Nassim Road house for 50 years and as Emily points out, you can accumulate a lot of stuff in that time. She and her sister have been posting on Facebook memorabilia, stuff they’ve uncovered in one dusty box after the other – photos, mainly, of the family when everyone was younger, more optimistic and had more hair.

My main memories of my uncle and aunt are of a strict, hard-faced wrinkly couple who could barely muster a laugh between the two of them. And yet, in Emily’s Facebook feed, here they were dancing at parties, Auntie Lucy in white flowing dresses, smiling up at Uncle Cam, surprisingly handsome in his neat suit and his pants hiked up nearly to his rib cage.

And here they were posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, looking very chic in the late 1960s, him with his shiny Brylcreemed hair, and she with her bouffant perm – both completely unaware that in their not too distant future was a son, my cousin Luke, who would escape from boarding school in England and end up as a go-go dancer in a dingy nightclub in Patpong who could do some unusual anatomical tricks with a ping-pong ball.

“Well, to be fair, who would seen that one coming?” my sister Michelle told me on WhatsApp.

“Mother did,” I said. “She always said Luke would end up in a bad way.”

Michelle sighed. “She says the same thing about all the cousins!”

Then, a few days ago, Cousin Emily texted to say that she needed a break from the house clearing. “OMG. Its 2 much! I hv to buy a facemask! So much dust! We leave the house covered with grey soot!”

When we caught up for lunch, it was all she could talk about. “I’m not kidding!” she said, reaching over the table to clutch my hand. “My parents literally kept everything! In one room, stacked up to the ceiling are bundles of The Straits Times dating back to the 1970s! There are boxes just filled with receipts of everything they bought in their lives. And chests full of photos! And don’t get me started on the books! My God….”

Her voice trailed off. It was as if she was telling me the plot of a spectacularly terrifying horror movie. You could see it in her eyes.

The more practical part of me piped up with a question I’d been dying to ask. “But how did all that have survived this long? The humidity should have rotted everything!”

“They had the air-con on all day, and there were dehumidifiers running full blast. It’s no wonder their maids never lasted more than three months. And now that I think about it, there was one who had to be hospitalized for a severe asthma attack.”

Another practical question popped into my head. “I’m sorry, I’m not pointing fingers, but how could you guys not know? I mean, didn’t you ever visit?”

Emily rolled her eyes. “Oh, the ground floor where the living room, dining room and kitchen are is neat and tidy, but once we all moved out, we never went upstairs. My parents always said it was untidy or something, but upstairs,” Emily leaned in, her eyes widening in horror, “upstairs is where it all goes to hell! Every single room! Like my old room? You literally can take just one step in. It’s stacked up to the ceiling with stuff. Old clothes, video recorders, cassette tapes, my primary 2 textbooks! It’s all there! A thousand years from now, archeologists would think they’d died and gone to heaven, but today in 2017, I feel like I’m in desperate need of an Oprah intervention!”

When I recounted it all to Saffy and Amanda, they were simultaneously appalled and intrigued.

“I would so love to go have a look at this place!” Amanda moaned. “I only ever get to see stuff like this on The Secret Life of Hoarders! It must be so amazing to see one in real life!”

“Emily says that when this is all done, she will probably need to go for a full lung scan, and then she’s going to go see a therapist to process what it all means,” I said.

“It really just goes to show, doesn’t it?” Saffy said, her bosom inflating. “You think you know someone, but in their bedroom is a 45-year-old copy of the The Straits Times!”