Green

The sun shines differently in Lim Chu Kang, she told me. She didn’t say that we wouldn’t be bothered there—because the estate was abandoned, because it was between military exercises, because the people who thought it was interestingly haunted had better things to do than skip school and take photos there in the midday sun. She didn’t have to say it. We never went places where people would see us, least of all the people who would recognise us; the only way we knew to be together was to be alone.

So I took the bus ride out. I was sweating the whole way, hopelessly adolescent in my best approximation of an adult’s way of dressing, of being in a body. The night after I bought the pencil skirt, I tried to lengthen the slit: my hands were unsteady on the fabric scissors I had smuggled out from my mother’s sewing kit, and I made a cut that was too deep, and strangely diagonal. It took me weeks to get the hem presentable again, and that only from a distance. Even my best stitches were jagged, meandering. The buttons of my shirt didn’t sit right over my chest; the extra one I’d sewn in only made the distorted line more obvious. I folded my arms to cover it when I could stand the extra heat, when I imagined I was attracting too much attention. No one was really looking, I told myself.

I met her at the playground as agreed. It was smaller than I expected, surrounded by open space, overgrown grass. She was sitting on a weatherworn wooden bench, her satchel beside her. I waved as I approached, stumbling a little as still-living leaves caught in the straps of my Mary Janes, then tore. She scowled as she pushed herself up, the bench groaning in her wake.

“Took you long enough,” she said. “Just look at your hair.” She closed the distance between us, using one hand to remove the large clip holding my hair into a loose bun, the other to grab a fistful near the nape of my neck and tug, tipping my head back. We both knew it would hurt less there, but it was my neck she wanted anyway. I whimpered, and she finally smiled. “Better,” she said, before stepping away for her camera. It was a digital model, with a shiny exterior and a black leather cover that hung loosely on the wrist strap when it wasn’t in use. She had once pressed a button one time too many when she was showing me photos she had taken. Without either of us meaning for it to happen, I saw the faces of her parents: their glassy smiles, eyes reddened by the flash, her frame strangely small between theirs. Rather than waiting for the system to display the previous image again at the press of another button, she had switched the whole thing off. We listened to the lens telescoping back inside the machine, watched the screen go dull.

She came back to me and tangled her hand into my hair again, took a shot like that. I knew before I ever saw it that no part of her would be visible in the finished image, that the only skin exposed to the viewer would be my own. Sometimes she would wear latex gloves, long pants and tightly laced boots, barrier protection against the viewfinder, but not today. She let go of me, stepped back again to check the photo. I stayed where I was, watched as she put the camera back in her bag, the case still dangling. She picked up a hank of grey paracord, used it to gesture irritably at the playground equipment. “I was going to tie you to a ladder and beat you,” she said, “but look, it’s the wrong kind of ladder.”

I did look. There were two ladders on the playset, both slanted like small, bare staircases. I imagined my body splayed out over them, the angles awkward, graceless. I walked towards the metal, still bright green where the paint had not yet chipped. “What about these handlebars?” I asked, touching one that seemed designed to help one climb away from a vertical piece of metal, crossbred from a fireman’s pole and fusilli. She shook her head. “That swirly thing’s in the way,” she said. “No clearance. I could tie you but not beat you.”

I eyed the swirly thing in question, its yellow girth coiled like an oversized spring. “There are handlebars above the slide too,” I offered after a moment, gesturing at it: the red plastic was shaped like the outermost whorl of a snail shell, crooking away from us as if hiding something soft. She shook her head again.

“I’m not going to risk wrenching your shoulders out,” she said, her voice as matter of fact as ever. But her eyes lingered on the slide, its shallow gradient. Without saying anything more, she grabbed my arm and led me to the far side, the inside edge of the slide’s curve. She unbuttoned my shirt past the extra button, gently pushed me down with a hand between my shoulderblades, so I was leaning over the grimy plastic incline. She ducked neatly under a higher portion instead of walking the long way back around, went to face me from the outside edge. “Wrists,” she said, and I extended them. She undid the hank of cord. With a loop of it—the bight, a word lifted from the book smuggled from hand to hand after an expat left the country and left the good stuff behind—she encircled the columns of my forearms as if they were one, slid the cord to where their taper was the finest. She was neither rough nor gentle, but certain in her movements. I used to think she must have practiced them on herself a hundred times, two hundred, before she ever once touched me.

I let myself float away from my body as she worked, coming back only in flashes. Felt the measured bite as she cinched cord between my wrists, dividing them once more into offshoots of separate limbs. Heard the mechanical whir of her camera stirring to life. Felt her hands warm against my sweat-slick thighs as she hitched up my skirt, repositioned me for the beating. “Colour?” she asked.

“Green,” I said, and so it began, with the slim paracord flogger she had braided herself, the ends singed sharp using a stolen lighter. The tip of each tail was knotted twice. When she had first used it with me, I tried to feel each knot against my flesh. Then she got better at using it, and I stopped thinking so much.

She asked me the question again some time later, when my heart was leaping in my chest, and I gave the same answer again, again. Green, I said, green, my eyes opening only to the bladed grass, every sharpness nature had to offer. I knew my own answer as well as I knew each fallen leaf I had trodden on to get here, each shining beetle I passed, the whirring of its wings leaving a faint buzz in my ears. I was all green, all hers, the way the fat flecks of paint peeling from the metal bars of the playground set were, the way barbed wire fence, military camo, scum clustered over the surface of a large, stagnant puddle are. I was green the way my body would be, my bruises in the mirror visible only when I peeled my hemlines back to show skin as brilliant as the sunset, its colours fading as fast. Green, the way mould is, thick and bright on bread left uneaten, underripe fruit left sour on the chopping board, a banana tree in full flower, drooping under the weight of its own raw life.

My eyes were closed when she eased my skirt down, untied my hands. I stumbled when she righted me, followed her back to the bench. She put me over her knee, rubbed baby oil into my reddened skin. She knew by then not to praise me. I’d cried into her clothes enough times, told her about the sick way it made me feel. So she told me stories instead: about the abandoned estate and the ghosts that were meant to walk it; how people said it was plagued by the scent of frangipani, though all she smelled was rust and still water and grass; how a gambling man once stuck seven needles into the trunk of a banana sapling and left it there to die, earning his bloodline a curse. “That’s a strange one,” she said. “There aren’t any bananas plants here at all, alive or dead.”

I could have opened my eyes, sat up, looked around. Could have surveyed the land left behind, scoured it for some trace of a haunting. But I didn’t. Instead, I nuzzled closer to the sticky warmth of her body, trusted that what she said was true.

Andrew Kirkrose Devadason (he/him; b. 1997) is a Singaporean poet and student of linguistics. Under his birth name, Devadason contributed the winning piece of the 2019 Hawker Prize to the journal OF ZOOS. His work has appeared in journals including Cordite Poetry Review and PERVERSE, and anthologies including New Singapore Poetries and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.