Singapore Noir

The music sounded sad to Ed. That was the minor scale, he knew. Probably these were not sad songs, just his Western ears that made them so. The old man did look sad, though. Because he was far from home? Or because he was old? Or because no one but Ed and Davey stopped to listen, and he knew Ed didn’t understand?

No one in Singapore stopped to listen, or stopped for anything. No one played music on streetcorners, either, and on a less out-of-the-way sidewalk the old man would’ve been arrested for interfering with the public progress, for distracting citizens from their daily rounds, for being unnecessary. But on this hot afternoon in Bukit Timah, no one other than Ed and Davey were on the street to be distracted.

Ed wondered if the old man lived here, in this sweet, treed expat enclave where Westerners dwelled to be reminded of home. He doubted he did, thought it more likely he traveled to this corner by bus, to other corners of the island also, other quiet empty suburbs where he could sit and play his quavering melodies in the damp heat. Maybe he lived with his family; maybe his daughter was a banker, his son-in-law a doctor, his grandchildren energetic high-achievers who ran off in their school uniforms in the morning, none of them with time for the old man’s music or his memories. Maybe, long ago, young and energetic himself, he’d come to Singapore from South China, from heat like this, and now he was old and an expat and he, too, wanted to be reminded of home.

Ed didn’t. Home was worlds, years, lives away. He didn’t miss it and he didn’t want to go back there, back to New York, back to winter slush and politics he had to pay attention to and buses that didn’t come. It was ten years since they’d left, since Ellen had called, so excited, the promotion had come through and they were headed to London. No more taxi drivers who didn’t know the way, no more slithery roaches, pretentious hipsters, brown smothering clouds drifting over from New Jersey.

“I think they have roaches,” Ed smiled, kissing her at the door that night. Her eyes had been glowing. “And I’m sure they have hipsters.”

“My God, what smells so great in here?”

“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I thought I should learn the exotic cuisine.”

All through dinner she talked, making lists, assigning tasks. She would tackle this and Ed should follow through on that. He sipped his wine, enjoying her incandescence, her mad caroming. A month later they’d settled into a West London flat. “You’ve got to call it a flat now, darling,” she told him as she breezed out the door her first day.

Ed’s own clients were people he’d never met and they didn’t care where he was as long as their websites got designed, updated, and populated, a word that delighted him: as though each page were a tiny village, JoeJones.com, pop. 313. He methodically took care of them and then took long midday walks, as he had in New York, as he always had.

In their new suburban London home Ed saw himself as one of the islands revealed when the tide of commuters swept out each morning. His walks took him to the greengrocer, the locksmith, the fishmonger, islands also, each one craggy or forbidding or gentle, each one worth exploring. The cars driving on the left-hand side of the road he found interesting to watch, like choreographed dancers in a number new to him. He wondered whether England had no tornados because her traffic went counter-clockwise. He learned to differentiate the subtle variations of fog and rain and he liked the clinks when he jingled the coins that made his pockets heavy.

Ellen didn’t. The money exasperated her and she couldn’t get used to traffic coming from the wrong direction. The gray weather was draining. The cabbies never got lost but there weren’t many places, she found, that she wanted to go.

“New York made such sense,” she sighed over lamb chops and green beans one night. The chops were particularly good; Ed had made friends with the butcher, a fat man from Sussex. I’ve given ye the best ones, tender and tasty if ye cook ’em right.

“London,” Ellen went on, shaking her head. “It’s so... medieval.” Her response was to buckle down and work harder. Eighteen months later she called home one morning, an hour after she got to work, thrilled once again: they were going to Prague.

In Prague Ed liked the tensions between the past and the present, the red roofs, the smell of yeast and cinnamon from the bakery. He couldn’t master Czech but the baker spoke English. From Madagascar, the vanilla, she’s cost too much but nothing else worth having. Ed cooked chicken with onions and paprika. Ellen railed against the narrow streets and the traffic. In London, she said, it rained all the time but at least you could get around.