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Marshall Cavendish International - Colin Cheong

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54 pages

English

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After 15 years of humiliation, Timothy is coming out of the closet to murder his insensitive and domineering wife, Marcia. The Man in the Cupboard is a sad and darkly funny tale of isolation - in both life and dreams. Winner of the 1998 Singapore Literature Prize Merit Award. The Series:This title is being reissued under the new Marshall Cavendish Classics: Literary Fiction series, which seeks to introduce some of the best works of Singapore literature to a new generation of readers. Some have been evergreen titles over the years, others have been unjustly neglected. Authors in the series include:Catherine Lim, Claire Tham,Colin Cheong, Michael Chiang,Minfong Ho, Ovidia Yu andPhilip Jeyaretnam.

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Publié par	Marshall Cavendish International
Date de parution	09 juillet 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789814974684
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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MARSHALL CAVENDISH CLASSICS
THE MAN IN THE CUPBOARD
The Man in the Cupboard
COLIN CHEONG
2021 Colin Cheong and Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
First published in 1999 by SNP Editions (Raffles imprint)
This edition published in 2021 by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196.
Tel: (65) 6213 9300. E-mail: genref@sg.marshallcavendish.com
Website: www.marshallcavendish.com
The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Marshall Cavendish is a registered trademark of Times Publishing Limited
National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Name(s): Cheong, Colin.
Title: The man in the cupboard / Colin Cheong.
Other title(s): Marshall Cavendish classics.
Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2021. | First published in 1999 by SNP Editions.
Identifier(s): OCN 1253352074 | eISBN 978 981 4974 68 4
Subject(s): Husband and wife--Fiction. | Husband abuse--Fiction.
Classification: DDC S823--dc23
Printed in Singapore
One
I m going to do her. It s settled. Finally. I m going to do it. Going to do her once she gets back from vacation. I don t know why it s taken me so long, but here I am at forty and I ve finally decided to do my wife and it s a liberating feeling. It s going to happen and it s going to happen right and right after that, I m going to start having a life of my own.
She s been gone a fortnight, but that hardly seems like long enough. Been so long since I ve even felt like I had some space to breathe. But soon it s going to be fine. I m going to breathe easier once she stops breathing. All I have to do is put the pillow on her face, yes, the same one she s always complaining about, saying how bad it smells from my hair and all. Well yes, now she s going to get that pillow on her face, the greasy side in her face, haha, and that s the last thing she s going to smell before she stops breathing, breathing, breathing down my neck.
I ve got it all planned, don t worry, down to the last detail, like my rubber gloves and all. Seen it on the TV and they say TV isn t really bad for you, that young people don t learn anything bad from it really. Bah, humbug. Well, they may have a point. Young people are too dumb, that s why. It s older people coming to mid-life like me, yes, it s us that learn from TV and radio and the Internet all those things we say are bad for young people because they can t tell the difference between good and bad, right and wrong. In my humble opinion, that s pretty screwed because TV and radio and the Internet are just as bad, if not worse, for people who do know right from wrong. Like me. I mean what s the use of having the knowledge to make an A-bomb when there isn t a will to do it?
Anyway, I chose the pillow method not just because of that feeling of poetic justice, but because it seems to be the cleanest. No mess. No bloodstains, nothing. And no pain. At least not much, I think. I owe her that much. She is - was - is - my wife after all. Fifteen years is enough for you to want to help someone die without too much pain. Anyway, there won t be a weapon to lead the police to me, no bloodstains for DNA tests and stuff. I m going to be properly dressed for the job too - clothes not too loose, not too tight, a tracksuit with long sleeves to protect my arms just in case she scratches. I ve seen too many movies where the dead person s fingernails did a lot of the talking by way of skin samples. Not going to happen to me. No way. I don t plan to leave any traces. She s going to die and I m going to get away clean.
Anyway, she s going to get home in an hour or so and she s not going to find me here. She s going to find the note I left for her on the fridge door and you can bet she ll have something pretty mean to say, or maybe nothing, like she could care. Then, if I know her after fifteen years, she s gonna get showered and changed and get into bed straight. Unpacking will be done tomorrow. Then she s going to sleep and if I m lucky, she s going to take those damn pills of hers. But I m going to give her some time. I ve been waiting so long for tonight, I can wait a little longer, just for her to get to sleep. Sounds almost like our wedding night. That wonderful night that began fifteen years of humiliation. Well, all that ends tonight. She s going to click off the bedside lamp on her side of the bed and then she s going to fall asleep or try to with her pills. She s got this thing about trying - you can use any aid you want, but you have to at least try. Well, I hope she tries real hard tonight and goes to sleep fast. I ll give her an hour to get to rapid eye movements. Then I m going to get out of this cupboard in the guest room and go over to our room. We never lock the door - it s just the two of us here and sex is something we haven t had in ten years. I m going to be so quiet and I ll know for sure if she s asleep because she snores - one of those things that I m supposed to do, or as she puts it, something that I m not man enough to do so she has to do it. Apparently, at least one partner has to. And at least one partner has to be the heavy sleeper who never gets up for anything. That s her too. It s just as well she isn t trying to kill me. Things would be a lot more difficult.
Once I m in the room, I m going over to the bed, my side of it, get my pillow and then walk around to her side - I ve rehearsed this. If I just get on the bed and reach over, the movement might wake her. From there, it s going to be quick. Pillow down, hard and fast, make sure I ve got her nose and mouth covered and then I m going to straddle her, ride her like she s never let me ride her in fifteen years. But it s going to be me who s got my legs spread around her legs so she won t be able to kick about too much. She s skinny in an austere, frigid, heartless kind of way, so it s going to be easy to just use my weight against hers. Two seconds are all I need and she won t be able to move much after that. I don t want to hit her or anything. I ve never hit her in my life. I just want to put that pillow in her face. I want to get on her fast and hold her tight in that position. And I just want her to die. I don t want to hurt her anymore than I have to. Honest.
I don t know how long I ll have to hold that pillow in her face. I know I won t take it off once she quits struggling, she could be faking it, the way she must have faked all her orgasms when we were still doing it. I used to think that she wasn t interested in orgasms or sex or anything like that. Sex was strictly for procreation, she must have thought. I don t know now. I never dared to ask. I can t even be sure she thought that. Maybe she did. Maybe she changed once she passed thirty. They say women get horny as hell once they pass thirty. And by then, we weren t really talking anymore. And what with her frigidity in our earlier years together, I guess that made it impossible for her to ask me for sex. Not that I would have said no, I mean, she s attractive in her own way and all, but she didn t ask and I d learnt early on that if she didn t ask, there wasn t any use for me to ask. So for a really long time, I just figured maybe there really are women who didn t like sex at all, no matter what their age. Until I found that thing. I never thought that a machine could replace me. I mean, come on, I teach English Literature, no computer-aided learning program could ever replace a tutor in English Literature. Mathematics, sure, but not English Literature. But there it was, staring (if that s the word to use) at me in the face, always ready, always willing and superior to myself in all other respects as well, including the fact that there was no man attached to it.
I never asked her about it. I think I was too ashamed to, not for her, but for myself. You have to know her to understand. She wouldn t have been in the least bit embarrassed (or she wouldn t have shown it). She d just have turned around and made a lot of wise-ass remarks about why she needed the damn thing. Like, since I couldn t give her children either, what was the difference? Three inches in length and two in circumference and duracells were cheap and lasted a whole lot longer than me.
So I guess you can begin to even see why I m going to do her tonight and this is just the tip, haha, of the iceberg. I m even wondering if I could use that damn thing, maybe set it up to look like she died from using it a little too hard and a little too long. That would be sweet.
But she wasn t always a bitch.
Two
Now that I think about it, she wasn t too bad when we first met. I guess a lot of guys say that about their wives. After all, they d look stupid as hell if they d known those women were bitches and still married them. The thing about Marcia, like I said,