Dada 174

It was when the door closed after the holy man that I released my breath and shouted and shouted and screamed at the walls. The guards came running but they knew better than to come near me, the chair and metal basin was hurled, the bed broken. I knew nothing of my strength in such a vortex and then I looked up and saw a moon and a night I could imagine scented with flowers and I rebelled again in screams and anger. All the commotion had unsettled me but this time it had reached its final ebb. I lay down upon my mattress on the floor and slept well. A long sleep for me but the stars were still out in the sky and I could imagine the sound of the city and the river and beyond it the country. The marvelous peace of a summer’s night flooded through me. Just on daybreak I heard the deep sound of a ship coming close to the dock and thought of the women below deck, carried in bundles to the wharf along with their baskets. People were starting on a voyage that no longer concerned me. Dada was close to me now. I understood what his life had been like with his ships and friends and where he had come from. Going to that home was just an extension to the life he had lived for years here in the city with his stories, his laughter and songs of Liverpool and the Blue Funnel line. In the home there was no escape from them with Kim Song. I suppose he must have been happy there where lives were flickering and tapering all around him like candles. It was important to remember as many stories as possible and just as important to forget the other stuff. My parents hated him telling me when I was young but what you don’t talk about can possess many layers. Blasphemous they called him but they needed his money then. With death so near, Dada must have felt on the brink of freedom. He had lived under so many rulers, the English, the Chinese, the Japanese and Malays and was despised by them all. He could see through them like through a window and still laugh. He could see through the gauze and dazzle design of the ships who sought to avoid the pirates the way they avoided the truth. No one had any right to weep for him. No matter what he had done.