"My sister’s always been like that," John said, eyes fixed on the laptop screen. "Anyway, it’s good that the children’s fight ended that way. Ah Guan is such troublemaker—that’ll teach him a lesson."
Sook Yee’s husband was hiding in their room, pretending to check his email while the mahjong and chatter continued downstairs, late into the night. Sook Yee was hiding too, because her feet hurt from standing around and her face hurt from holding a neutral smile and she was not going to try mingling while the dead woman’s son, her direct descendant, was here. She’d washed her face and wiped herself down and was feeling slightly more human now.
Sook Yee peered in the dressing table mirror, her tongue lifted, looking at the restless spider twitching its pedipalps in there. She made a dissatisfied noise. "You know, I nearly started a fight with her."
"Kathy?"
"Yeah."
"Mmhmm."
"But I held back. I didn’t."
John continued to look at his work. Sook Yee pressed on. "I don’t think it’s a good idea to challenge your sister."
This got John’s attention. The laptop clicked shut. "Why not? I thought we talked about this."
"Do you really think we should pressure your father to sell the house now?" She sank onto the yielding surface of the bed. "Your mother just died. Can’t we let him grieve a little first?"
A sigh escaped John. His face looked like a Peking duck, yellow and greasy and hollowed-out. "That would be nice. But you know my sister. She’s going to be pressuring him throughout the funeral. Put my name on the house. Put my name on the house. You know her. Then you know what will happen."
What would happen was that Sister-in-law would take the reins and the house would never be sold, remaining forever a mausoleum full of the mouldering things accumulated by the old woman. She had been a serial hoarder. The corridors of the house overflowed with knick-knacks, enamel pans with painted bottoms and tiffin sets and disused guitars with rotting strings. A door on the third floor opened to shelves and shelves of yellowing newsprint and the acrid smell of mould and silverfish. Even the garden was overflowing with ugly lawn ornaments and spine-destroying rattan furniture. Nobody could do anything about it. It had been her house. When John had first brought Sook Yee home years ago his sweet-talk had been peppered, every other minute, with profuse apologies and the words "rubbish dump".
John and Sook Yee were moving out, finally. They had been balloting for government flats since their engagement years ago. Five times they had tried, five times they had failed. But lucky try number six secured them a queue number, and they’d managed to pick a five-room flat being built in Bedok New Town. A nice location. They’d get the keys next year. With them gone the house would be empty, except for the widower and the spinster. And thousands upon thousands of a dead woman’s things that no-one would throw out.
The house was John’s inheritance too, but Kathy would not see it that way. Kathy saw John as an interloper on what was supposed to be her inheritance. Kathy saw John as an interloper on her life in general, a unplanned surprise popping up in her mother’s belly 17 years after she did, bursting into her regulated home life at a time she was trying to lay down her tracks for college.
"We need to act ASAP," John said, as if he were still in a board meeting. "Shut her up, get him to agree to sell the house, done deal."
Sook Yee pressed her fingers into the ugly paisley pattern of the bedsheets, over and over. Like everything else, it was a throwback to the 1970s, inherited from the old woman. "I don’t think my spider’s strong enough."
"You?" John actually laughed. "Come on, Kathy is scary, but she can’t be worse than you, right?" That was her husband, king of the backhanded compliments. "You’re a debate girl. I started dating you because you liked arguing."
"Why can’t you fight with her? She’s your sister."
John fell back on the pillows hard enough that Sook Yee bounced. "You know I can’t win. She’s my sister." Sister-in-law had practically raised him. Never argue with an adult. Old habits die hard.
"She’s been snapping at people all day. Spider’s getting fat on all that venom."
"Okay. Come." John made a lazy, sweeping gesture with his arm. "You feed yours on me." When Sook Yee gave him a pinch-faced look he said, "Insult me!"
That’s the way it worked. Sharp tongues bred sharp fangs. The more aggressive your words were, the more aggressive your spider became. Insult me, her husband said. Do to me what my sister did to you.
Sook Yee got to her feet. Old debate girl habit—arguments had to be had standing up. "You snore at night," she started. "You eat with your mouth open after I’ve told you again and again."
John rolled his eyes. "Come on, no strength, you’re not even trying."
Frustrated breath escaped her. What made him think it was so easy to insult someone you loved? "You never reply to my texts on time. You zone out when I talk to you."
But those weren’t insults. Sook Yee could feel the unimpressed, unruffled weight of the spider in her mouth. She needed to dig deeper. What would humiliate John the most?
She thought back to their school days, when they had first met. "You never had to fight for anything," she said. "Everything was given to you on a platter. You were a pampered little boy." He had annoyed her, a pompous snot with arguments she could shred like wet tissue.
John’s eyes narrowed. "Getting hotter," he said. He had a look in his eyes like he was beginning to regret this.
"You’re weak," Sook Yee said slowly. "The slowest runner in your class. Unfit. Everybody laughed at you." Now his face changed, some tectonic shift of emotions far below, and Sook Yee sped up, encouraged. "You were the runt of the litter. Born to a woman in her forties, everyone said there was something wrong with you."
He bit his lower lip and said nothing.
"You have no backbone," she said. There was a truth to her words, fire in her veins and under her cheeks. She wasn’t even listening to herself. "Nothing is ever your fault. You’re a weasel who just wants to coast through life. You have no self-respect. I only went out with you because you were easy to bully."
John stared at her, his jaw working. Too much. The fire had spread to her mouth, the spider scratching her tongue trying to get out. She bit down on that impulse, kept her mouth closed even though it felt like her skin would rupture unless she let the creature out.
"Okay," said John very slowly. "Okay." His eyes were like black holes now. It wasn’t true that he had no backbone, because he was showing it now, fighting back the hurt in his eyes, keeping his own spider in his mouth.
"I think that spider’s more than ready to go," he finally said. He put the laptop away and turned on his side. Sook Yee crept onto the bed next to him as he turned the lights out. Neither of them said anything more until they both fell asleep.
Sook Yee woke to a landscape of cold and empty sheets beside her. Clock numerals on the wall glowed 6:00. Two hours late. She tumbled out of bed, angrily combing through a hive of reasons why John hadn’t woken her.
Her mouth ached dully with the weight of spider. She could feel it buzzing with yesterday’s bitter energy, just waiting to spring out at someone.
In the kitchen Sook Yee found Cecilia, Ah Guan’s mother, struggling with the expresso machine. This house had belonged to the old woman’s father before her, and it was the the house they had all grown up in. Sook Yee saw a kind of pathos in Cecilia’s face as she pushed unresponsive buttons over and over, fighting the instruments of a home she no longer recognized.