Fiction: Behind This Little Cafe [part 1]

1. Behind This Little Cafe

A family with a handsome young son moves into a small shoebox shack neighborhood and everyone is excited. When his sinister shadowers arrive, confusion and mistrust quickly set in. But help is there even in the darkest hours from the ones who appear dumb poor, but in fact are humble and blessed.

1. The new boy in town

There was a bustling shanty town, lying like a rough encrusted gem, about a run down repurposed cinema with its parking lot of dollar-store customers. Shacks, shoeboxes strewn around brick and mortars, increasingly taken up by millennial entrepreneurs. So it was that my friend Jacob, his mother and father, came to live in a third floor half-flat overlooking a stenching back lane strewn with mangled rats and sour rotting trash.


The flat was partitioned with a vinyl curtain that felt like the lino flooring and there were only 2 shared bathrooms. On the other side, there was a Chinese-Indian family with a daughter. He had never liked the word ‘Chindian’, but that was what Malaysians called them. Her skin was smokey and her wavy hair had natural body. But it was her almondish eyes and buck teeth that gave away what she and himself shared. Looking at her, he saw himself, it was like she was his cousin yet, being alone with her, chaperoned, office hours, only by her granny who couldn’t hear, they told each other the stories of their hearts. And they shared love in small shallow dips.


The metro station was visible from the roof of the building he lived in. And in between drawing his Christian comic strip which earned him a paltry $100 a month (besides state benefits to cover groceries), he rode the rails. And they were his window into worlds of which he never suspected existed. He saw a cash box courier with spiked gauntlets and collar; girls with boobs out to there, cosplay babes, and travellers from the west where everything was better made, from their clothes to their packs, to their hair and complexions.


His was a life on hold. He wanted a sign to hold up: ‘please don’t mind me’. But by and large, maybe because he wore Oakleys, girls did dance a little as they passed by. He didn’t protest, even if he couldn’t drive them to Uptown for dinner.


She revealed something to him one day, as they leaned against the rail of his balcony. “Call me something -lah.”


“What do you mean?”


“You’re Jacob. Pure Chinese. I’m just a rojak mixed blood. Give me a name.”


“Jesus loves you. Whatever your name, however you look.”


“Give me a name doesn’t mean Jesus anything.” she proceeded to peel off her top and unbutton her jeans. “Give me YOUR name.”


Soy forms curd on top of its milk. It was skimmed off and left to dry in the sun. And they loved, between the sheets of the delicacy, hung on the rooftop lines. Hers was wet when they had finished. And his was spent dry. There was stain like cheap school glue over the pitted concrete they lay on. And nobody cared, or would bother later.


“Where do you work?”


It came reluctantly, “I’m a food promoter. I just stand there outside the airconned shop, with makeup and a tight skirt. They pay me almost nothing except their expensive logo T-shirt.”


“I know you’re an artist and a leader.” She rolled on top of him, her fists on his chest. But her granny’s voice came calling from below.