The sun rises up the moss-covered walls to slip between the open concrete slabs and across the white tiled floor of the hawker centre, where June is wiping tables with a cloth that has become part of her arm. She always looks tired this early in the morning in her worn nylon overalls and broken sandals. She is pushing on a bit, must be thirty, but Albert tells me she would be fine if she tidied herself up, and put on a dress and a little makeup. 

He often speaks of women like this, telling me how he would like to throw them on the table and climb on top as he did as a young man. He goes into graphic detail as though I should be impressed with his vigour, then he wipes his hands on his stained apron, scratches his balls and turns up the gas.  He tells me to get off to school, though he thinks it’s a waste of time and he never went. When I do, I spend forty minutes in Chemistry with a humping Albert squatting in my head that makes me want to drink the first experiment.

That, unfortunately, is Uncle Albert, famous for his fried noodles we call Mee Goreng. But all is not what it seems. Despite his bullish, macho fantasies, he is over eighty. Also, he is not my uncle and his name is not Albert.

***

My school is next to the Tanjong Shopping Centre where the hawker centres occupy the second floor above the market. They share an architecture of Cold War bunkers, and they suffer from the tropical disease of damp, mould and spalling concrete that reminds me of the psoriasis on my cousin’s ears. It is no wonder that the four storeys will soon be replaced with something ten times higher. Albert disapproves. He says the only benefit of living in the sky is to get the rain before those on the ground, and in the tropics we have too much rain anyway.

I help Albert set up his hawker stall before I go to school. It’s one of sixteen stalls surrounding June’s tables. I didn’t want the job, but he told me that if I didn’t help he would tell my teachers I was a drug user. June backed up his allegations like some gang member. I am not a drug user, but this is Singapore where these things are punishable by imprisonment… or death.  A fine, say, two weeks pocket money, I could live with.

I wipe the worktops, stack the plates, and clean the floor in Albert’s little kitchen, being diligent in routing out the cockroaches. I carry bags of chicken, prawns and noodles up three flights of stairs from Albert’s tuk-tuk, while he watches from the driver’s seat like a disappointed emperor, or watches the young American women from the bank next door. What he is thinking I can only guess but would rather not. 

Luckily, they don’t notice him as old people are invisible, like it’s a superpower, and Albert uses this to hide his imagination. I often wonder if the police have a device that can detect bad thoughts, and he will be arrested and I can escape my incarceration. But to tell the truth, I would miss Albert –or whatever his name is – and not just because he makes the best Mee Goreng in Singapore. For me, Albert is Singapore. And while I feel bad that I like the old pervert I also feel good that in helping him I am preventing some of his perversions and I am living a little bit of history, and Albert has seen a lot of history. Maybe that will be taken into consideration when they decide to hang him. Still, he is harmless, like a sharp knife kept in a drawer. 

Through the tinted glass of my history classroom, I can see the hawker centre. I sit there sometimes wondering what harm the old bastard is causing while I am trying to educate myself so I don’t have to work in a hawker centre or drive a taxi all night like my father. Our history lessons are not like Europeans’, who learn of wars, kings, politicians and the wars they all started. We learn about our people. Perhaps that’s why we spend less time calling our former leaders imperialist and pirates – except when Albert talks about the Japanese. We have statues of Raffles who said he built this country, though Albert says he got us to build the country and then went back to England and left everything to us anyway. 

I don’t know why he went back as I learned in Geography that the weather is bad, and I read a book by someone called Dickens that said the food is terrible in England, and they have rickets and malnutrition. We seem to have avoided that in Singapore, so perhaps we got a good deal from Raffles. In truth, Raffles rarely visited Singapore but the story is fine by us, or at least we see no reason to change it. 

At lunchtimes, I drop by the hawker centre for my payment of one bowl of Mee Goreng. When Albert sees me he grudgingly drops the bowl on the table. Maybe that’s just for appearances in front of June and Miggy, who Albert says is the head of a gambling syndicate but like it’s a good thing. No matter how many times I have it each bowlful is the best. The sauce is rich, the noodles thick and juicy, and the chicken shreds float on top like the tiny survivors of a sunken ship waiting for me to pick them up. Some days Albert drops in a fried egg which floats on top and sparkles under the bright, fluorescent lights. I place survivors on top and push the sinking egg into the noodles, and then I eat the whole scene before running back to school. Even in a plastic bowl, Albert’s Mee Goreng is art. 

On quiet days, Albert joins me at the table to remind me of my debt to him, and to tell me what it was like in Singapore in the old days. As well as being invisible, I think old people have time machines and when they are over seventy-five, they can’t turn them off and live their whole lives in the past, like their heads are stuck in a box of old photographs.

Albert was born in a kampong— a small fishing village on the east coast road— and as a boy ran errands for a few cents. At fourteen he was a tiffin boy carrying food to Europeans in their offices and boats until he blagged a rickshaw license and worked at Johnston’s Pier, smoking clove cigarettes and eating Soto Ayam waiting for the foreigners to arrive with mountains of crates and bags. In the 1930s, Albert worked for a German family, opening the windows of their huge house in the morning and closing them again at night, or clearing up leaves from their garden and fetching big parcels from the docks in a small barrow. He says he stole everything he could from them and made what he calls a ‘nest egg’. And he said he screwed their eldest daughter who coincidentally went to my school but obviously decided that Albert had more to offer than a religious education. 

Then the War changed everything. After the Invasion of 1942 the ‘bloody Japs’– as he calls them – took him to work in their barracks as a cook. He says they were really lazy and couldn’t be bothered to cook their fish- I don’t know why he laughs at that. Perhaps they liked his Mee Goreng or maybe he told them rude stories to take their mind off the war.

I asked him why people start so many wars, is it for money? ‘Boy there is only one war – the strong against the weak, and there are only wars because the strong use the weak to fight.’ What I do know is that Albert survived and lots of people like him were killed though no one knows how many.

My history teacher says the history books in Singapore are not necessarily accurate on such things, and when she says this she looks around like there is a shadow behind her. So, when I wrote an essay about the Second World War, I based it on what Albert told me; that on the day the ice age melted a patch of land appeared and people fought over it and they have been fighting the same war ever since. She marked me two out of ten and told me only to write what is in the history books. 

After the War, Albert told me he became a smuggler and sold cigarettes by convincing young men that smoking was good for them and it would make them tall like the Americans in the advertisements. God knows how many people he has killed yet he has no remorse, or sense of responsibility, or basic decency. Perhaps he didn’t know back then that all those tall Americans would die, and not just the ones who died fighting over a piece of land in Vietnam.  

Albert’s accounts of family vary, especially if he has gone to Mr. Tan’s stall for Chinese beers. He was married once, three times, or not at all. His children, if they exist, reflect his marriages. Sometimes in Maths, I pick a number between one and twenty and try and match them to the dates of his affairs like it’s a difficult exam question that has too many variables. Albert is too many variables and there is no answer to him. Marriages aside, Albert says he ‘enjoyed the company of women’ as they put it in my English literature class. I wonder if that enjoyment was mutual. Judging by most women’s expressions when they see him, it was not.

My father told me that Albert was born on the day Queen Victoria died. There was no connection, though he keeps a picture of a Queen above his hawker stall next to a fire escape plan and a hygiene notice he cannot read. I asked him why he likes ‘Her Majesty’ but he says he found the picture and that I ask too many questions. This was a relief as I thought he might have boffed her as well and before he mentions someone’s wife or daughter he has defiled in so much detail it will stay in my head during two periods of Religious Education, I rush to collect more eggs, empty plates and sweep up the remains of the dead ‘cockies’ that congregate round the bin store.

Uncle Albert has a few good friends. They seem a little, well, better than him. Hok, who knows my dad and is the shortest man alive, runs a driving school and seems to only ever eat at Tanjong. Mudithar, who is Tamil, sells fabrics in Little India. His shop sign fell off in the storms of 1975 and when it was nailed back up it read Farbic Store and that is how it is printed in all the tourist guides. 

They are younger than Albert –so is almost everyone on the Malaysian Peninsula– yet add weight to his ravings especially when they sit and play mah-jong after hours. I sometimes see them when I pop round to scrounge a few meals that are destined for the bin store while my dad does late airport pickups. The three sit and talk and they are serious, very serious, like they are running the government or planning a new one.

I once asked Mudithar why he spends so much time over here in Chinatown. He said it’s the Mee Goreng and that he likes Albert, as though he is seeing a different person from everyone else, or perhaps just the good parts, like only reading the pages of a book that don’t contain anything upsetting. 

Mudithar has known Albert since he got his hawker license in 1950 – when the Tanjong Centre was built. He says it was the architect who loaned Albert money to buy equipment– which still works thirty years later– and he gave Albert his name. That’s a custom in Singapore: English names are easier to navigate in our many languages. English is something we all have in common. That and food, of course.

So how did they all know each other and become friends? Mudithar says that is a long story and that I am young and may not understand the way of adults especially adults like Albert who defies categories, like the books in our school library that don’t fit on the shelves, so they are left on a trolley unread. Maybe most of Albert is invisible to me and not just because he is old. Maybe he is some sort of Chinese ghost from an opera. Or maybe I am hallucinating, and I am a drug user. Or maybe the Tanjong Hawker Centre is a place for those who don’t fit on the shelf.

***

Once a week I go to Kallang to play with my cousin and watch the skin flake like snow from his ears. He lives in an old shophouse on Serangoon Road and his dad sells hardware from the ground floor. Their shop hasn’t changed for a hundred years and the stock for at least fifty, but people still need that stuff. Inside, everything smells of damp and mothballs, even when there is a breeze from the South China Sea. 

The old shophouses will soon be gone. It’s hard to see how they are still here, with cracks in the walls and weeds growing out of the roof. Albert says they are only standing because they don’t know how to fall down. Outside, in the five-foot-way, are baskets, wooden boxes, ladders and steps, and beautiful bird cages of bamboo. Little stuffed birds sit on the perches and my cousin and I whistle and pretend they are singing to each other.  That’s when uncle gives us money to get us out of the way, and we go down to Tekka Centre for prata or fresh mangoes from Pakistan, and we pass the Farbic shop. 

One hot and sticky day, that seemed hotter and stickier than the hot and sticky day before, we see old Mudithar, bartering outside his shop house with some Australian tourists in sweat-dyed T-shirts. He waves and says hello. He still wears the traditional clothes of South India and has the kindest smile even when he is limping around and complaining about his broken knee– he was shot in the 1964 riots before Independence. He asks about school and tells me to study hard. Then he pulls his small goatee beard like it is about to produce coins from his mouth and asks me about my father and how he is managing without my mother. And he asks if Albert has ever told me about the Japanese Invasion. 

I said Albert told me that he had tried it on with a few Japanese women translators, got locked up in a cage, and had an affair with an English woman who was beautiful and who was abandoned when the British surrendered, or were imprisoned or killed.  Albert says Raffles’ statue at Boat Quay cried that day, though as it wasn’t erected until 1978 I doubt the accuracy of the tale, but it’s a good story so I put it in a history essay; my teacher marked me one out of ten and promised a thrashing.

Mudithar pulls up little stools in the colonnade out of the sun. The fabrics are stacked up to the ceiling and others hang from big wooden poles, like we are sitting in a giant’s wardrobe. 

Mudithar says that the English woman Albert told me about was not left behind during the Invasion; she stayed behind. And, yes, she was beautiful. He had seen her many times, shopping at the department stores or when she visited his shop and bought Indonesian Batiks, Thai silks or Egyptian cotton sheets as smooth as her skin. She wore the long dresses of colonial ladies and impossible hats that were so big that the wind sometimes carried them off and they would hover over the terracotta roofs like angels’ wings. That particular angel was Albert’s wife. 

The Japanese forced Albert into their service as he could cook, and he could get them cigarettes and beer when their generals forbade it.  They allowed him and his wife to live in peace and they could eat when others were starving or when Chinese men were being executed and English women sent to prison camps. Then one day, Albert came back to the barracks with fresh supplies and found her gone. Her linen dresses were still hanging in the cupboard and her hats resting on the floor like discarded wings next to a broken picture of the Queen of England: as the Japanese soldiers dragged her off, she had tried to take a last remnant of a home she must have known she would never see again.  

Mudithar stops his story as though there is something that happened to her we should hear but doesn’t want to tell us. I ask about Albert’s other women, his family. Mudithar stands up on his swollen feet and shattered knee, ‘There never were other women. Or children. He always hoped his wife would come back, just turn up from one of the prison camps or walk across The Causeway like she had been for a picnic among the Gelam trees on a perfect afternoon.’   

Shortly after she disappeared Albert made dinner for the Japanese officers and then he wasn’t seen again until after the war. The Japanese army searched for him for days. And then a rumour spread around the island that a Japanese officer had been found with his throat cut, face down in a huge bowl of Mee Goreng filled with blood like too much chilli sauce. 

Albert didn’t come back to Singapore until after the war. He was in close company with an English Lieutenant who had been an architect and would stay to help the reconstruction. It was he who designed the Tanjong Centre, and arranged for Albert to have a hawker stall as a reward for helping the British and Australians in Malaya. 

When he got off the ferry all Albert had in the world was a small, cardboard suitcase, a bundle of recipes tied up with string and the picture of the Queen. In 1953 he kept the frame but changed the picture for the new Queen. Perhaps he thought she looked more like his wife or perhaps he thought that was what his wife would have done. It was a link to her, like a telephone that allowed him to listen but not speak. Mudithar says the picture will hang on the wall until they knock down the Tanjong Centre. ‘Perhaps then, and only then, will he accept that his wife is not coming back.’

That night I ask my dad what will happen to Albert when they take away his hawker stall as he is too old to start again and to buy new equipment and learn hygiene rules; he doesn’t even wash his hands. My dad says that Albert will probably just lie in the rubble hoping Queen Elizabeth will come and save him, floating down from above with her cape and crown. Perhaps she will bring back Albert’s wife and perhaps my mother too, and they will still be young and beautiful as angels should.  The thought upsets me as I never imagined Albert gone – well, not in a good way – and that there will be no more late-night chicken rice, no more of June’s conniving, no more Mudithar, and Mr. Tan and Miggy and free Mee Goreng. I will even miss the cockroaches and Albert’s history lessons. His grasp on the facts may not be perfect but he has lived through most of Singapore’s history, more than Raffles did, yet there is no statue of Albert, or June or Mudithar. Perhaps there never will be.

Then my dad looks serious, just like Albert playing mah-jong, ‘Singapore is changing, son, and in your lifetime it will change again and again so face up to it now and start by doing your history homework – your marks are bad.’  I see no reason to argue with him as I don’t want to work in a hawker centre that will throw me out when I am old. Maybe one day I will buy one and call it the Albert Centre and it will only sell Mee Goreng. 

***

It’s raining, the school is dark, and the island lies waiting for a new day, enjoying the last moments before the sun burns through the pavements and the hot air lands like a huge, invisible blanket. Under bright lights coated in brown film from woks and bamboo steamers, I chop onions and garlic that make my hands smell all day, and I look at Albert’s ancient kitchen knives in the drawer, and I wonder which one he used. 

I tell Albert of my plan to build my own hawker centre. He pulls me by the arm and sits me down at a table.

‘Boy, no silly talk of hawker centres. Get learned, make money and hide it under your bed. And never steal… unless you really, really must and then steal good. You hear?’ 

‘But these places are about our past,’ I explain to him, ‘they are about our people who travelled here from China and India a hundred years ago, and their struggles, the diseases, the wars, the Invasion I’ve learned about in history. If we lose the hawker centres and the shophouses all the people will be forgotten, the recipes will be forgotten. What would Raffles say?’

‘Boy. Fuck history, fuck Raffles and fuck you too. Get to school!’

And he throws me out of the Tanjong Centre and tells me never to come back. 

***

Whatever secret deal my father had concocted with Albert to keep me off the streets and fed when he was working, expired that day thirty years ago. I never did go back to the Tanjong Centre though I watched every day from the playground as it was demolished and replaced with a huge block of public flats. 

It is a beautiful building, draped in tropical plants and with huge bridges spanning between the towers that catch the winds. From the fortieth floor, you can see the ocean and people say the rain is so fresh up there you can drink it straight from the clouds. Perhaps they are closer to the angels old Mudithar used to talk about. Perhaps he’s up there with them. I hope Albert is too, but I know he is probably not. He would laugh at such things; of gods and angels. Perhaps that’s because he knows he could never join them: for what he had done and for what he had allowed to happen to her.