Miss Seetoh in the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

much rejected girl
would be to bring upon herself lifelong remorse. As a child in primary school,
she had one day pushed to the ground a classmate, a scrawny, scanty-haired
little girl with a perpetual trickle down her nose, who followed her
everywhere, and carried the guilt right up to secondary school.
    Every teacher was relieved at the thought
that Maggie, who resolutely kept her strange family background impenetrable to
the good work of the school’s corps of hard-working counsellors, would be gone
once she finished the O Level exams and be fully absorbed into her dark world,
dominated, it was rumoured, by a hard-drinking, abusive father who lived on the
earnings of her lounge waitress mother. The complaints of some of the teachers,
brought into the office of the principal, ended there, absorbed into the
school’s benign mission of educating the young and preparing them for a useful
role in society. The noble goal was announced in a motto in giant white letters
above the school entrance.
    The formidable Mrs Neo had said to the
principal as she barged into his office and he stood up to greet her, ‘For the
good name of the school, that girl should be expelled!’
    The principal had replied calmly, ‘I’ll see
what can be done,’ meaning nothing would be done.
    He already had a fearful picture of Maggie
Sim taking her story to the newspapers, of the burst of publicity in the
Chinese media ever hungry for sensational news, of the annoyance of the
Ministry of Education at having to respond with a public investigation. A
freakish presence in a noble institution of learning, the girl would be allowed
to stay till she left of her own accord.
    Once or twice, the principal called Maggie
into his office for a mild reprimand. ‘You were rude to Miss Pang, and again to
Mrs Doraisamy.’
    Genteel man that he was, he left it to the
lady teachers to deal with the surreptitious make-up, the vulgarisation of the
school uniform by an undone shirt button here, a lifting of the skirt hem
there. There was something that he had heard from one of the teachers which had
deeply disturbed him: Maggie had once gone for an abortion.
    ‘Do you know anything about it?’ he had
asked Miss Seetoh, possibly the girl’s only confidante.
    ‘No,’ said Miss Seetoh who did not want to
know, and the matter was never referred to again.
    She suddenly had an image of the girl in a
secret visit to one of the government hospitals where abortions were performed
with utmost discretion and minimum fuss, so that the misguided teenager could
get up, go home, and be in school the next day. She remembered Maggie once or
twice excusing herself from class to go to the sick bay because of stomach
pains from her very heavy periods, conspicuously taking out of her schoolbag a
large wad of sanitary towels.
    Her world at St Peter’s Secondary School was
a truly happy one, and Maggie was part of it. If she wrote a novel one day, the
teenager, astonishingly shrewd in the ways of the world, might even be the
female protagonist. Her imagination, ever active and on the alert to store
potentially useful material for that dreamt-of novel, was already storing
images of the girl, her large pretty eyes, her expertly plucked eyebrows, her
impossibly large breasts, all in keeping with the hard opportunism of a
Singapore-bred Lolita.
    When I was her age, Miss Seetoh thought with
some wonder, I knew nothing about the birds and the bees. Her mother kept her
in a protective capsule, still plaiting her hair every morning well into her
teens and watching her recite her night prayers kneeling beside the bed they
shared. Even then she was already responding to the cry for freedom deep inside
that had begun with the smallest of wishes – ‘when I have a bed of my own’ –
for her mother slept badly and kept her awake with much tossing, moaning and
teeth-grinding. Over the years, as she grew into adulthood, the wish was
systematically enlarged, from bed to room to house, and became