Sharlene Teo
1. BIOGRAPHY
2. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
3. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
4. SELECTED PROSE
an excerpt from “Roland”
SELECTED PROSE
an excerpt from “Roland”
At the polyclinic, Roland tried not to stare at the girl sitting opposite him. Her big cartoonish eyes reflected the glow from her mobile phone. How old was she? Twenty-one? Even fully clothed, she suggested nakedness. She worked her mouth into cute contortions as she ate. The clear plastic bag on the seat beside her held what looked like a peanut cake from the bakery next door.
Roland admired her candour, being able to maintain an appetite in this stark room that smelled of disinfectant. Her skin didn’t dimple as she crossed right knee over left. That soft, tantalising slope from the underside of her thigh leading up to her cut-offs made him shift in his seat. His stomach gurgled. The girl kept chewing as she peered into her phone. When she started texting, thumbs moving quickly, Roland imagined pressing the warm skin under her thin blue blouse until she squirmed. It had been a long time since he desired a woman so much. He thought he’d sealed off that part of himself, exhausted from the divorce. How destabilising and inconvenient an experience it was, long-dormant lust. He felt himself getting hard. He crossed his legs. Her eyes were fixed on his now. Even when he looked at the floor, past the paunch that domed his striped polo shirt, he still sensed the heat of her stare. When he looked up again, he met her dark, shining eyes, and his cheeks coloured.
The girl held eye contact with a defiant concentration, and now that she had his attention, opened her mouth slowly to reveal its masticated contents: mashed up brown peanut cake. She kept her mouth open exposing the chewed food until Roland looked away, affronted. She smacked her lips and swallowed. Her shoulders shook as she chuckled.
“Goh Pok Lin!” The nurse at the counter called. The girl got her things and went to the door, entered without knocking. The nurse, in her mid-fifties, around Roland’s age, eyeballed Roland from behind the rim of her glasses. Sensing judgment, he looked away ashamed. He remembered the lecherous old men from childhood. How his older sister had gestured with open disdain at those no-good perverts, dirty old men with their bellies hanging over faded shorts, sunburnt faces, baggy skin, rheumy eyes. How had he become one of them? The old neighbourhood where he grew up had betrayed him too. Over the past fifteen years, in rapid increments, it turned into a bustling nightlife district in the north-eastern part of town. The pig farm was now a live music venue cum events space called The Abattoir, which housed a bar called the Meat Market. Roland had never visited it, of course, only read about it in the newspaper, seen the snazzy pictures of the converted loft with its deconstructed, geodesic dome rafters- unrecognizable from its shabby, stinking origins. The monsoon drain where they’d hidden from beatings had long been renovated and closed up, it sat somewhere under the lap pool of the 735 residential unit condominium built over it. Everything old in the city was being varnished over or torn down, nothing remained the same.
