All Up To Me
The room is neatly, immaculately arranged, as if on sale. Books line one wall, and on the other are bright, smiling faces in photos and inspirational posters. Windows breathe morning sunlight into the room, spreading a warm glow infused with that feeling of a new day. Against the shelved wall is a peach sofa, next to which is a comfortable red armchair.
“Please, sit down.”
The man closes the door and gestures to the peach sofa.
A man, a room, a sofa, a chair.
And a boy.
The boy sits down on the sofa, his shoulders relaxed, his face calm, withdrawn.
The man settles himself in the chair, man and chair as if becoming one. He selects one of the five files on the bookshelf and leafs through it briefly. The boy blinks unconcernedly, taking in his surroundings, the bookshelf, the posters, the light.
“Now…Dill, is it? You prefer Dill?”
“Yes,” the boy nods.
“You’re probably wondering why you’re here,” continues the man, observing the boy.
“Yes, I am.” The boy’s gaze returns to the man. “I’m not depressed or anything, Mr Seng. I’m perfectly—”
“Well, it’s not exactly about you, Dill,” says the man.
The boy looks at him, expecting an answer, his eyes deep and penetrating, like little telescopes that if you concentrate hard enough on bore right into your heart—
The man shudders involuntarily and looks away for a moment. When he looks back, he sees nothing but what he originally saw—the bright, alert face, the mop of hair, the dark brown eyes. He continues as if nothing had passed, knowing that, being what he is, he should be above that sort of fright.
“It’s about your family, Dill,” he says, his tone encouraging, hiding the concern he holds within. “Or more precisely, your father.”
“What about my father?” says the boy neutrally, but the man can already sense the undercurrent of suspicion, the small raise of the eyebrows, the anxious curiosity.
“Well, Dill, your father is in prison for…murder,” says the man, trying to pass the statement off as a casual aside, but the boy’s defenses have already gone up.
“So what?” he says coolly, gripping the sofa seat.
“Dill—”
“Crime doesn’t run in the family, you know.” The boy traces the outline of his palm.
“You don’t know that, Dill.” The man chooses to adopt a blunt, more commanding tone—the boy is becoming restless.
“Yes I do, Mr Seng,” mutters the boy. “I’m not a criminal, and I’m not planning to be.”
“Your two brothers already have quite a record – stealing electronics, engaging in gang activities – look, Dill.” The man thrusts the file into the boy’s hands, Kai and Ash’s faces prominently displayed on the open page.
“But I’m different,” protests the boy, giving him back the file. “I’m a good person, Mr Seng. I’m not like my brothers or my father—”
“All I’m saying is, Dill, we care about you here.” The man puts a hand on Dill’s shoulder. “We don’t want you growing up like any of them. That’s why we’re going to give you a little more attention here—”
The boy pushes the hand off. “I don’t need it.”
He leaves, the man watching him go impassively, his expression neutral, his heart troubled.
*
“So what did the counselor want?”
Dill looks up from where he has been working on his first project for the year, a model of a suspension bridge, the four pillars already formed and shaped, standing upright, ready to bear the weight of anything. “Nothing much, Josh,” he replies. “Just a routine checkup.”
“Well if it’s just a routine checkup, then how come no one else has been invited?” Joshua glues a few more ice-cream sticks to one of the pillars, its thin and macabre appearance making it stand out from the other three. “Does it have something to do with that scar below your eye?”
“I…” Dill picks up an ice-cream stick and twirls it around in a good impression of absentmindedness, trying to hide his unease beneath his casual mien. The scar has been there for a long time; a thin slice, carved just beneath his right eye, as a reminder of how to behave.
Spin, spin, spin.
How will you react, Josh?
How will you feel if I tell you about my brothers, my father, what they’ve done?
Are you just like everyone else?
Or would I have found a true friend at last?
Spin, spin, spin.
“Come on, Dill—you can trust me.” Joshua pats Dill’s shoulder. “Don’t worry—if you smoke or something, I won’t tell anyone.”
“It’s not like that, Josh,” smiles Dill sadly.
Spin, spin, spin.
“I, I—”
Spin, sp—
Snap.
“I can’t tell you.”
Dill looks up once more at his friend, his closest out of all the new friends he has made since arriving here in Altenlotheim Secondary, and sees the hurt, the wounded trust that has been speared by his words; but also the understanding that some things just can’t be said.
Yet.
Dill fully plans to tell Joshua. To ask for his advice. To just have someone normal to talk to about this whole thing, this thing that has been a terrible constant in his life since the day he was born.
It’s just that he doesn’t know when.
To be judged on what you never did…
Can you ever understand that?
“Well, that’s fine,” says Joshua brightly, giving Dill’s shoulder another friendly pat. “It’s not my place to ask, anyway.”
“No, it’s just that—” Dill begins to protest, but Joshua shakes his head. “It’s okay, Dill. No explanation required.”
Dill looks at him for the third time, and relaxes with a heavy exhale of breath, leading into a mournful sigh. “Yeah,” he breathes wearily. “Come on, let’s get this bridge done.”
*
“Why are you so late?”
“I’m sorry mum, I had to see the counselor, and then I did my project– No, it’s not what you think—”
“What? The school counselor? Why? The last time one of you saw the counselor, it was for that triad thing—”
“No, it’s not like that, mum!”
Dill’s voice rings out clearly across the tiny kitchen, his feet planted firmly on the edge of the doorway, his mind full of the unbearable realization that still reveals itself to him day after day. His mother turns to him from where she was slicing tomato, her knife still poised in mid-cut, as if slashing at the tension that ignites the still air.
“That was Ash, mum,” says Dill, words of sadness spilling into the world like unseen tears. “That was Ash.”
Not even my own mother believes me.
“This is me.”
Dill’s mother stares at him, and he stares back, his eyes seeing the doubt still writhing between her unmoving lips, the suspicion that continues to dwell, like an unwelcome stranger, within her heart. She breaks away from his gaze, unable to bear those haunting brown eyes that remind her so much of—
“Mr Seng just wanted to speak to me about what dad and Kai and Ash did, that’s all.” Dill mutters the words nonchalantly, as if they were nothing but words, everyday words.
“Dill,” says his mother, and then they are really nothing but words, as she embraces the boy, and the boy embraces her. “I’m sorry, Dill…it’s just that after your brothers—”
“But I’m not like them, mum!” protests Dill, and the words become tears, tears of conviction, of frustration. “I don’t want to be like them. I’m different!”
His mother shakes her head and strokes her son’s hair, her hair that she gave him, that so complimented the eyes that came from his father. “You are different, my Dill,” she whispers quietly, her voice trailing off like mist into the storm of night. “You are different.”
They stand there for a while, mother and son, a family of their own, lost in their own world of forgotten innocence and days long past.
Just standing.
*
The man, and the boy.
“I hear your brothers are coming home to visit,” says the man, handing the boy a typewritten sheet full of pointless details.
“True,” says the boy, his eyes scanning the paper briefly. Details, details, details. “What’s your point, Mr Seng?”
“Nothing,” says the man, looking out the window at the pale grey sky, still moody after yesterday’s downpour. “Tell me, Dill…have you ever given any thought as to what you want to be when you grow up?”
What I want to be…
The boy has given this a great deal of thought.
“Not like your father, I hope?”
I’ll give him an A for sheer annoyance.
“Of course not, Mr Seng,” he says, ignoring the remark. “I hope you don’t either.”
“Good one, Dill,” says the man, giving a hollow laugh that fools no one, not the sofa nor the posters nor the boy, who feels like fleeing this place that has become a nightmare.
But he doesn’t.
Because that is what Kai did, three years ago.
And his nightmare became reality.
So the boy plays along.
For now.
“A doctor,” he mutters. “I want to be a doctor.”
“Excellent,” says the man, making a little note on his clipboard. “Now, how will you reach that goal...”
*
“Hello, boy.”
Clink. Clink.
Chain dragging against mum’s spotless wall.
“Hello, Ash.”
Step. Step.
Shoes wearing into the bare floor.
Ash walks with the unmistakable aura of one who has seen the other side, spent several years getting to know it too well and then dumped it for someone else. His Senoko Prison tag still hangs forlornly around his wrist, like a forgotten rule that has been broken time and again, and his hair stands straight up, as if he has been hanging upside down for the past three days. He scratches his ear; Dill guesses he was forced to remove his ear studs in prison.
“Welcome back, Ash,” says Dill’s mother, her smile fixed firmly upon her face. Ash gives her a stiff embrace, his mouth shut as if via another stud. “Where’s Kai?”
“He’s paying the taxi driver,” murmurs Ash, and Dill looks into his older brother’s eyes, seeing the disdain, the utter loathing of this place, where he has to stay and be a good little boy from now on, hearing the unvoiced profanities Ash would like so much to throw at their mother at that moment, tasting the foul air that Ash tastes, the air that poisons his lungs from the inside—
Evidently his mother can taste this too, because she involuntarily steps away from Ash, her skin prickling, as if on fire. “Have you been smoking again, Ash?”
Before Ash can deny the obvious truth once more, a voice issues from the doorway. “We both have, mother.”
Kai pauses on the threshold of the doorway, his left hand sliding like grease over the doorframe, his right holding a cigarette aloft, its ashes staining the floor like a charred trail of blood.
No wait; something’s not right—
“Your hand!” cries his mother, and Dill looks more closely. Not just his hand; Kai’s entire right arm is crisscrossed in tattoos, dark scars and wounds, like a team of spiders set up house there. And what was once his hand has now been reduced to a pincer; for Kai’s last two fingers are totally gone, leaving behind two stumps of dead flesh that Dill shudders to look at. “Let me see it—”
“Get away!” snarls Kai, yanking his hand away from his mother’s tender reach. “You never noticed, did you? All those times you visited me, you never saw this—” He articulates the last word with a choked fury, brandishing the hand as if it were a snake. “I got it fighting the Red Tigers—”
“Well, I think you should stay at home from now on, Kai, in case—”
“In case what?” says Kai harshly, breathing each word as if it were laden down with a heavy weight. “I don’t need your help! You may not have realized behind your thick skull, mother, but I’m twenty-one now. I’m not your little boy any more. I can do what I like. It’s a free world! Who’s going to stop me?”
“But, but…you can’t just go around stealing things, getting into gang fights…it’s not who you are, Kai. You don’t have to be this way!” Dill’s mother cries, and Dill sees the impossible anguish that her boys have come home to her only to choose to walk back down the path from whence they came, and what’s more the terrible knowledge that this conversation has happened before…
Kai laughs, a sound that makes Dill shudder just to hear the venom within it. “I am who I am, mother,” he says, with a touch of weariness. “I’m just like dad. And why? Because when I was a little boy, everyone kept expecting me to turn out just the way he did. Locked up and almost dead. That’s the way Ash went too; and that’s where he is right now.”
And Kai points a threatening finger at Dill, his eyes locked on the boy who is so much like him—
But I’m not!
I’m not like Kai!
“We’re going,” says Kai, gesturing toward the door, Ash immediately moving towards it as he speaks.
“Where?” whispers his mother, tears trembling down her face, as if they too fear what Kai has become.
“To settle an old score,” says Kai ominously, and he clenches his right hand, scars and muscles expanding, contracting, burning with hatred. “By any means necessary,” he adds, and now Dill sees the machete that he has brought with him, a souvenir of prison.
“And that’s not all,” Kai continues. “He’s coming with us.”
“What if I don’t want to?” counters Dill, his expression defiant even in the face of that dreadful crablike pincer.
“I don’t care,” says Kai calmly, taking Dill by the scruff of his collar. He encounters no resistance; Dill’s heels drag on the floor, and his hands dangle limply by his sides, as if his muscles have all gone on strike. Kai touches the claw to Dill’s face, dragging it along the line that divides his eye from his cheek. “Remember, boy?” he hisses into Dill’s ear, words tickling the boy’s ear like a serpent’s tongue. “Do as you’re told.”
Dill’s eyes blink involuntarily, and he feels the pain three years lost when a knife blade left a trail of blood just beneath his left eyelid…
“I remember,” he says mutely.
Kai drags Dill out of the house and marches him down the stairs, as their mother, she and the old apartment the only two left who have lived through those twenty-one years, watch them go, a trail of water dripping hopelessness in their wake.
*
They sit on the 102, Kai and Ash in one seat, Dill in front of them, as the bus speeds on, past tall flats and a waning afternoon sun, clouds observing them like spectators in a race.
“Where are we going?” asks Dill quietly, afraid to look at his brothers for fear their eyes alone ensnare him in evil.
“Simpang,” says Ash. “Near Yishun.”
“Why?” Shadows cast premonitions of night upon Dill’s small frame, flickering out as the bus rumbles on.
“I told you already,” says Kai softly—dangerously, in the voice he always uses before violence ensues. “We’re meeting someone.”
“Who?”
“You’ll see,” Kai thumbs his knife into his pocket as the bus driver looks into his rear-view mirror. “Yes, you have an important part to play today, Dill…”
“If it involves stealing or shoplifting or fighting, I won’t do it,” declares Dill loudly. Several passengers stir; Ash laughs and the shadows cast warning glances upon the bus. Kai smiles, almost as if he were anything but what he is. “Oh no, nothing of that sort, Dill…no. Your job today is simple, yet vitally important.”
Dill looks at him, expecting more, but Kai merely yawns and closes his eyes, leaning on Ash’s shoulder.
The bus speeds on, clouds still watching, shadows growing longer, as the sun begins to disappear behind veiled walls of sky.
*
The playground is deserted, swings hanging listlessly in the timid breeze, as if ghosts play there now. The trees, still, unmoving, watch over it, silent guardians of the evening. Dill sits in their shade as unanswered questions sear through his mind like lightning strikes.
Where are Ash and Kai? Why have they been gone so long?
Who have they gone to meet?
What do they want me to do?
Dill just wants to run, to run far away with his mother and just escape all of this, these crimes and lives his brothers have dragged him into.
But he can’t. It’s not his place to do so.
And so he sits, and waits for what will surely be the true end of his innocence.
A shout. A laugh.
Someone’s coming.
Dill whirls around as Kai and Ash turn a corner behind the trees, coming into plain view dragging a very familiar form in-between them.
Joshua.
Blood freezes over; muscles lock and his heart becomes a crumbling statue. Dill blinks in shock; Joshua is part of this?
“The person I was looking for,” says Kai calmly, flinging Joshua on to the grass next to Dill, “had another, more pressing appointment elsewhere.”
“But his brother will suffice.”
“You can’t hurt him!” Dill cries. “He didn’t do anything wrong! It was his brother who wronged you, not him!”
As Ash keeps watch, Kai grabs fistfuls of Dill’s shirt and leans in close, so that the poison once more begins to slither into Dill’s lungs. “Shut up and listen, boy. Your part is simple.”
“What?” says Dill, too frightened to even look into Kai’s eyes.
Kai tells him, and in that instant, Dill knows true horror, because what Kai has told him to do is what he never expected, and yet is so simply, purely, wrong. And Kai reads the horror in his eyes, because he laughs and says, “Do it, Dill. Or I’ll kill him.”
Kai can’t kill, Dill repeats to himself numbly, in his shattered mind. He can’t, he can’t, he’s my brother, he can’t kill, it’s unthinkable…
But he’s also a part of dad.
And Dill looks into Kai’s eyes, sees the terrible resolve, the maniac desire to hurt those who hurt him, and he slowly nods, as if he were a robot programmed to do so. Kai lets him fall to the ground, face triumphant.
Joshua’s lip is bleeding, and his left arm is twisted at an odd angle. His eyes open; he grins, despite himself. “Dill?” he whispers. “Is this your big secret?”
Dill can’t breathe, can’t talk, can’t do anything, except grasp Joshua’s arms and hold him firmly down to the ground. Joshua murmurs softly, “Ooh, I bet this is going to hurt. I’m so going to kill Ryan when he gets home…”
At these words, Kai’s poison loses its hold, and Dill finds his voice, enough to say, “I’m sorry, Josh.”
Joshua closes his eyes. “You can explain everything once—”
And then the first blow lands, and Dill closes his eyes too.
Afterwards he will remember seeing none of the punches or the hurt that his friend endures, none of Joshua’s cries or his own uncontrollable sobs, none of Kai stopping the torture, nothing of them dragging him away, nothing at all.
Except that he is now truly part of the family.
*
The next day, Joshua doesn’t show up in school.
Nor the next day.
Nor the day after.
One week, one agonizing week goes by without Joshua coming back, their form teacher keeping quiet about it and the counselor saying nothing. Dill becomes subdued, even more so than he usually is, huddled in a corner with a blanket of shadows draped over him for comfort.
Then, eight days after that afternoon at the playground, Joshua returns, sporting a cast for his left arm but otherwise none the worse for wear, appearing as bright and as cheerful as before, though when questioned about where he has been he quickly changes the subject.
They sit apart in class, the boy with the cast and the boy with the shadows, each in his own world, though one darts furtive glances at the other throughout the day and one dreads the thought of talking to the other when the day ends.
Who are these boys?
*
“Dill—Dill, wait—”
Dill wades through the sea of students all fighting to get down the long corridor that leads to the school gates, as classes erupt mounds of boys and girls in exhaustion, Joshua lost somewhere behind him.
“That boy is calling you, you know.”
The man looks down at the boy, his expression matter-of-fact, his tone suspicious.
“Yeah,” mumbles Dill softly, looking down at his feet. The man continues to watch him.
“You should answer, Dill. Unless you’re afraid of talking to him. And why should that be—”
“Come on, Dill,” says Joshua casually, grabbing Dill’s bag and starting to drag him away. “Couldn’t you hear me? I was calling you, you know—”
Once they move out of ear shot, they both sigh, and Dill relaxes. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” says Joshua. “I think everyone wants to get away from that guy.”
They walk on in silence for a while, while their brains writhe with questions for the other. Finally Dill says, “You know, about that day…I’m sorry.” A hollow roaring fills his ears, but he goes on.
“I let Kai beat you up. I held you down as you got beat up.”
“Dill, I—”
“That was totally wrong. I shouldn’t have done that, Josh!” Dill looks at his hands; to him they seem tainted, like Kai’s claw.
“Dill—”
“I let you down, Josh…I should have just run away or something—”
“Dill!” Dill looks at Joshua, and Joshua puts his one good hand on Dill’s shoulder, looking him squarely in the eye. “Dill, it’s alright, man. I know you didn’t want to do that to me—I saw that gangster threatening you to do it…”
“He’s not a gangster,” whispers Dill softly, his voice full of pain. “He’s my big brother.”
A momentary silence ensues, which Joshua breaks by saying, with a touch of irony in his voice, “Well, that makes two of us.”
“No kidding,” says Dill. “Really?”
“Ryan fights with the Red Tigers, this gang based near our house…I think your brother is from their rivals, I recognized his tattoos…Dill,” says Joshua suddenly, grasping his shoulder with a grip that makes Dill yelp, “if they see us talking together, we’re dead.”
“Why do you think he beat you up?” says Dill. “Your brother was the one who sent him and Ash to jail, you know…”
“Kai and Ash,” says Joshua firmly, fixing the names in his mind. “Kai and Ash. Good, now my parents can make that police report they’ve so wanted to make — don’t worry though,” he says, patting Dill’s head, “I won’t report you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Maybe you should.”
Joshua stops dead in his tracks; Dill turns away from him, and looks skyward. “MI should go to the Boy’s Home … Mr Seng, my brothers, even my mum all think I’m going to turn out like my dad, killing someone – yes, that’s what he works as,” he says dryly, as Joshua blinks. “I don’t want to be a bad person, Josh…but maybe that’s just how it’s going to be for me.”
“If you believe the counselor, you are an idiot,” mutters Joshua darkly, in such a good impression of Kai that Dill laughs. “Dill, that’s just not true. My brother’s gone and messed up his life already, but do you see me following him in that vein? No!”
“No one can force us to be what we are not. I mean, people can expect us to be this, but ignore them and we can be anything we want to be. It’s our choice what we want to do with life, and it’s our choice alone. Not our brothers, not the counselor, not anyone but ours.”
“And I’ve made my choice. Have you?”
Dill looks at his best friend in the world, and grins. “Oh, I made mine a long, long time ago…”
*
“Mum! Mum!”
Dill runs to his mother’s side, his heart beating as if providing the background music to a rock song. “What happened?”
His mother dabs her eye, swollen and red, with a cotton wool swab. “They’ve gone,” she murmurs, tears streaming down her face.
“Who’s they, mum? Kai and Ash? Where have they gone?”
“Gone to fight, Dill,” says his mother softly. “You won’t, will you?”
“I…”
Dill stares out the window, his pulse jammed into override.
Kai and Ash have gone to fight…
Decisions, decisions. How do I help without turning into them myself?
Your father is in prison for…murder.
I’m not a criminal, and I’m not planning to be.
I can do what I like. It’s a free world!
Kai can’t kill, he can’t, he can’t…
It’s our choice what we want to do with life.
True. But you’re not going to throw it away on my watch.
And Dill knows what to do.
*
War.
Dill stands before a dark street full of hatred and rage, blood and denial, as the sun casts its last rays of light from the edge of the world and the shadows take over. Besides him stands Joshua, his face determined and set.
Find Kai.
They slip into the battle unnoticed, gliding along the walls of the buildings as if they were on rails, as grown men shout and cry and stab and blood paints the night red.
“Won’t anyone notice?” whispers Joshua. “They’re making so much noise.”
“It’s ten at night, and this is an industrial estate,” murmurs Dill. “No one else is here.”
Fear scars his heart as knives flash through the air and some of the gang members drop to their knees, howling as they clutch at their arms or legs. Unconsciously Dill touches the scar marking his eyebrow.
“Look there!” whispers Joshua anxiously.
Apart from the battle stand two tall figures, each brandishing a knife, circling each other warily, mouthing words of fury, words of rage, words of anger. The hate that each carries for the other chokes Dill, so palpable it can reach out and strangle him in an instant.
Then, with a cry of fury, one of the figures launches himself toward the other—
“NO!”
It takes all of Dill’s strength to hold on to Kai’s knife arm, and Kai stares at him in shock. “What are you doing, boy?” he screams in frustration.
“Saving your life!” cries Dill, as Kai attempts to shake him off like a piece of unwanted clothing. “If you stab him you will seal your own fate!”
“What are you talking about?”
“What they say about you being like dad will have fulfilled itself! Go home, Kai!”
“Let me go, you—”
“Dill, Ryan— !”
Ryan shakes Joshua off, and lunges for Kai —
The knife goes down, down, like an aircraft into a cloud, and keeps on going, tearing flesh from blood, blood from soul, soul from —
“DILL!”
Dill falls to the ground, body engulfed in fire, a blast through his whole being, his whole soul, all that he is and ever was, as the shadows blanket him in darkness. The world swerves unnervingly to the left and he wonders, even as night finally, truly, envelopes him, why it is so.
Then he realizes he is falling, and there is no one to catch him —
Is there?
There is Ryan, his eyes trembling in shock at what he has just done —
There is Joshua, screaming Dill’s name as if it can stop time forever, so that he can save him —
There is Kai, cradling him in his arms, the pincer and the hand, the poison leaving him too, so that he can see how he has finally, irrevocably, hurt someone —
“Dill, Dill…” he whispers. “Not this way, no, not this way, please, no!”
“It’s okay,” Dill tries to say. He doesn’t know if the words make it through; they bubble and froth, breaking the surface erratically. His heart falters, his eyes turning to tears, at the realization he will never finish that bridge with Joshua, never cross it to find the real Kai, never reach the other side to who he’s always wanted to be —
But then, as the world dissolves into swirling mist, and faces flash in and out like the last rays of dawn, Dill realizes he already is who he wants to be.
“Don’t die, Dill, don’t die…”
It is Joshua whose face stays with Dill, as his vision dissolves, as the world ends in shadows.
“You told me it was my choice,” Dill whispers, into the world, ghost words. “And I choose this, Josh. I choose this.”
“Why?” murmurs Joshua, beautiful in the death that is not his own. “Why this, Dill? It did not have to be.”
“Why do you have to die?”
“You were wrong, Josh.” Fading echoes, now.
“We all have a choice.”
“But if we choose wrongly, sometimes, life gives us another chance.”
“And I have to die so that others will get that chance.”
“I’m sorry, Josh.”
“No,” laughs Joshua bitterly. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t a better friend, Dill…”
And in the void of his consciousness, Dill hears himself sigh, “You were the best friend I ever had, Josh.”
“Because you made me see that life is all up to me.”
And Dill lifts his head up —
And in this world, and the next, warm hands embrace him, as the man he truly wanted to be.