THE CITIZEN
It is 6pm on the same day and my flat smells of shit again. I tell Joanne about it, and she just ignores me. She has work to do, you know. And what does the smell of shit have anything to do with the revolution, she asks me, again with that sarcastic lilt to her voice.
I lose my composure. Does she not care about what happened to me today? Being humiliated in front of the symbol of government power, that even said symbol feels embarrassed for me? That I spent my afternoon chasing up a false lead on the unravelling of the ever-so-constraining fabric of society that wraps around us all like a straightjacket? I despair, tears in my eyes, as I plead with Joanne to rediscover her sense of empathy, her fire and passion in making a better world, away from all this pragmatism, towards the pure light of ideals and universal human rights.
Her face tightening, Joanne slams her coffee mug onto the table, pulls me up by the arm and yells, “Come with me! You come with me!”
I’m shouting and wailing in despair at my wife’s wanton cruelty -- to leave me alone to resist the pull of conformity, barely clinging on with the meagre salary from The New Paper providing us sustenance, while she moves further away from our ideals and into the murky world of business and marketing. She pulls me to the window and forces my head down, when I begin to smell the shit anew -- it’s from the loading bay, where someone has left not one, but two piles of shit, actual shit, right in the middle of the lot in two red plastic buckets.
I cry out, “Who would do this?”
“I have been investigating this for a week. I have nearly caught the perpetrator, and I believe that he is an Indian man.”
“Isn’t that racist?”
“He was black.”
“Brown?”
“Dark brown.”
“He could be Bangladeshi?”
“Possibly.”
“Are you sure?”
Joanne wipes away my tears.
“Let’s find out together,” she says.
I suddenly notice that she has been crying as well.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ve been really stressed, but I’m still here, Jia Sen. I just need some time.”
And just like that, all the load, the frustration from the past three months just disappears. We both laugh awkwardly, which escalates to real laughter, and then to touching and kissing. Caught up in the moment, we move to the bedroom and make love.