What Was Owed
27. Dec 2024 - He Was Fifty-One. He Had Been, By Every Account, Very Busy.
His name was Raymond.
They’d known him in Melbourne — the particular way you know people at twenty-two, which is to say completely, and the way you lose track of them in the years after, which is to say gradually, without deciding to. He’d come back to Singapore the same year David had. Set up something in logistics. Married. Had children who were now in secondary school. David knew this the way you know things about people you’d once been close to and had stopped being close to without incident — through Facebook. The birthday notification. The occasional post about a holiday or a promotion that he’d liked without commenting, the algorithm delivering proof of a life continuing.
He’d been meaning to call him.
He’d been meaning to call a lot of people.
At forty-eight you start understanding that meaning to is its own form of absence.
The service was at a church in Bukit Timah. Packed — Raymond had been the kind of person who collected people without trying. David arrived and found faces from twenty-five years ago, redistributed by time into people he almost recognised. The women wore black and looked composed and the men stood with the particular stiffness of those who had not worked out how to be in their bodies in a church at ten on a Wednesday morning.
Raymond had died in his car in the carpark of his office building. Massive cardiac event. He’d been fifty-one. He’d been, by every account, very busy.
David sat near the back. He took out his phone and sent Kenny one line — at Raymond’s funeral — then put it away.
He listened to the eulogies and thought about the particular quality of a life described after it ends — the accomplishments, the warmth, the way he lit up a room, the things left unfinished. He thought about the carpark where they’d found him. The particular location of it. The engine still running.
He thought about his own chest. 2012. The squeezing. The monitor under his shirt.
He stopped thinking about it.
He saw her outside.
After the service, in the shuffle toward cars and the particular dispersal that follows a funeral — people reclaiming their own lives with quiet relief — he recognised the back of her head before he recognised her face.
Amandha.
Twenty-four years.
He’d heard she was back. Divorced. Living with her parents in Serangoon, which he’d heard through someone who hadn’t meant to tell him. He’d seen her name occasionally on Facebook — the way you see people, at a distance, their life arriving in fragments you don’t ask for. He hadn’t reached out. Neither had she.
She was standing at the edge of the carpark, not walking toward anything. Just — standing. The way people stand when they’re in the middle of something internal and the external world hasn’t quite come back yet.
He walked over.
“Hey,” he said.
She turned. Something crossed her face that wasn’t surprise — more like recognition completing itself.
“Hey.” She looked at him properly. “You look the same.”
“I don’t.”
“No,” she said. “But you look like yourself. That’s what I mean.”
He stood beside her. The carpark half-empty now, the remaining cars catching the afternoon light.
They stood for a moment in the particular quiet of two people who have things between them and are deciding whether a carpark after a funeral is the place for it.
It was. He’d known it when he walked over.
“I owe you something,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Melbourne,” he said. “I left before you woke. I used what I told you — about having a girlfriend — as a door I could claim I hadn’t opened. And then I disappeared.” He paused. “That wasn’t fair to you. I’ve known that for a long time and I haven’t said it.”
She was quiet.
He waited. He didn’t fill it.
“That’s—” She stopped. Looked at the ground. When she looked up her eyes were steady but her jaw was slightly set — the particular expression of someone holding more than one thing at the same time. “That’s a lot to say in a carpark after a funeral.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what to do with it right now.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it.”
She looked at him again. The same look she’d had when she said you look like yourself — something being assessed at a level beneath assessment.
Then she said: “Give me your number.”
He looked at her.
“I don’t know why I’m asking,” she said. “I just am.”
He told her. She put it in her phone without making it mean more than it did. He didn’t either.
She looked up once more. Then she walked to her car.
He stood in the carpark until she’d gone.
Raymond had died with his engine running.
David stood in the afternoon light and felt his own heart doing what it did — steady, faithful, the same organ he’d pressed his hand against in 2012 over a monitor under his shirt, over the leads recording everything.
Still here.
Still his.
He walked to his car and drove home through a city that had no idea what had just happened in a carpark in Bukit Timah on a Wednesday afternoon.
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