The Wires in My Sister's Head

By Sally Ann Chan

I wish I could have been joking when I called my sister crazy.
Mary should be fulfilling life's grand phase of getting married and having children by now. But Mary cannot do that because she believes she has used up her ‘quota' of life's miracles when her prayers were finally answered in 1990 in the form of a baby sister, Betty. Betty is the perfect reason for Mary to live. She seems to be made for greatness until one day, Mary starts to realise that her baby sister isn't as normal a sister as one would expect.
Betty begins having a haywire range of mood swings that Mary cannot comprehend. Betty becomes darkly dramatic and suicidal. She continues towards promiscuity, alcoholism and self-harm threats that worsen with time. Mary has to hang onto her sanity and find another reason to live as Betty challenges her cruelly. Desperately, Mary tries—together with Betty's boyfriend, Emir—to save her sister from the hell she's living in. But ultimately, Mary has to face the harsh truth that her sister has a mental disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or as the common man puts it, ‘crazy'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781528927024

Sally Ann Chan

Sally Ann Chan is an actress and singer living in Paris, France. Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, she began writing fiction at the age of six, starting with stories that were rather twisted for her age. She has written two articles about her deceased dogs that were published in the Malaysian national newspaper during her teenagehood. She now has a cat. She also enjoys writing for the theatre and has had two of her scripts, 'If Your Cat and I were Drowning' and 'Debt of Love', mounted at a theatre festival at the KL Performing Arts Centre. She's currently working on other novels while pursuing her career in the arts.

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Thirty-Five

About the Author

Sally Ann Chan is an actress and singer living in Paris, France. Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, she began writing fiction at the age of six, starting with stories that were rather twisted for her age. She has written two articles about her deceased dogs that were published in the Malaysian national newspaper during her teenagehood. She now has a cat. She also enjoys writing for the theatre and has had two of her scripts, ‘If Your Cat and I were Drowning’ and ‘Debt of Love’, mounted at a theatre festival at the KL Performing Arts Centre. She’s currently working on other novels while pursuing her career in the arts.

Copyright Information

Copyright © Sally Ann Chan (2017)

The right of Sally Ann Chan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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 publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781787106215 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528927024 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2017)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Dedication

For Sue-Ann

Chapter One

Thirty was the year my body betrayed me by trading youth and liberation in for wisdom and indisputable social traditions. I found my years of defence shattering as the worldly invasions of customs and normalcy came charging through my faltering walls with that old unmerciful Mr. Age at the front line, all ready to write history on my Asian baby face. Out loud on the battlefield he declared that I was supposed to be a married woman with at least one kid and another on the way. All I could do was stand still and let time bind me up to its will. Try rebelling against this old monsieur and his world of social conventions, especially in Asia where I was, unfortunately in this case; and you’d find yourself on a lonely war field with drones marching all over you, stabbing you day after day with their criticisms until you were finally in that corner fulfilling the stereotype of misfits. In my case, I saw myself slowly turning into that spiteful crazy cat lady, which really would have been fine with me, I guess.

The circle of life rested as the ultimate king, even if the world had come a long, long way since its own infancy. It was and still is and will always be the meaning of life for there was nothing else to replace it, to many philosophers’ dismay. No matter how advanced, how modern or how obscene our generation has become today, with music videos of butts shaking heavily to the beat, smacked right in your face in full HD and called artistic to boot; the animal instincts prevailed in us: we were made to reproduce. Some persevered in their fight against it until their ovaries exploded for that one last time; but most who proclaimed futilely ‘I will never have kids’ in their young adult years, ended up the ones getting knocked up first, followed by a clan of bouncing Teletubbies.

But my proclamation wasn’t a loud clueless speech without justification. I had every reason not to want to have kids even though I adored them. And since I was not for reproduction and I had no real affiliation with men in the traditional way, I also decided that I did not need to get married. Neither of these two things that made up that great big phase of adulthood, was ever meant for me.

Believe it or not, the very first reason why children were annihilated from my life’s purpose was because I knew I had already been blessed more than the common man and could not have asked for another miracle in the form of a child of my own blood. In that I meant that God had already given me my share of miracles that was to spread throughout my living years, into one single brilliant form of time in substantial beauty on one fateful day in the year 1990.

I had prayed for a sister all throughout my childhood. And for close to a decade, I had prayed and prayed to no avail. Ironically the only retaliation from the awkward crickets did not break my faith in God but strengthened it instead. As I heard the wind blow in response, I let it sweep away more things in exchange for that one that I wanted so badly for. Take this, Lord, take that, Lord, but please just give me a sister.

Looking back, I marvel at my blind faith in someone I had never met but had only been told about. How great our minds were and how crazy the history of the world was that really, it should have taken a lot more effort from me to fall into the church of Christianity. The very example that truth could be expanded by gossip into something altogether unbelievable, and chained down to a form of its original truth by a community of supporters, or preachers if your faith was more than the size of that mustard seed, was a sign that I had to be a little more careful. But I suppose back then, as my body kept its youth, it forwent wisdom that I now have plentiful of. I wouldn’t say that wisdom was being right though. For all I know, I was being completely blasphemous, buying my one way ticket to hell in advance.

But it really wasn’t easy to keep believing in that Man up there. My father and my mother were not the American Dream that you saw on television sitcoms, happily in love and always there for their children with that white picket fence on the front to prove a secured and assured foundation of what we called, a family. No, set against a small flat with no view, my father was more of a tragic film star, playing the lead role of the father who abandoned his children for career and fame, but still with a conscience to come back from time to time. My mother, on the other hand, kept to supporting roles of tolerant characters that hurt but amazingly found ways to keep their heads up high. With the union so shaky between my father and my mother, how was I ever going to get my wish of a baby sister?

And on the few rare times my father showed some signs of love, which were equally rarely reciprocated by my mother, my pleads for a sibling were always painted with a picture of a baby boy; my father had always wanted a son. I was supposed to be his son. What was this obsession with cocks! Ah but that very statement would trigger a whole philosophical debate about the very meaning of life once more, something I dared humbly say I had no expertise in at all. So I kept silent and continued to pray every night that my sister would come.

Then it happened. I was still living in that small flat with my parents where it was so tiny we had to sleep in the same room but thankfully still with the luxury of separate beds. At ten years old or so, I was very much aware of my spacial boundaries and enjoyed my own freedom of space, even if it was still within the same walls.

So there I was, trying to fall asleep after my prayer for my baby sister, when I heard ruffling of the bedsheets beside me. My mother and my father were still awake. And there I saw from the corner of my eye, a flatbed turned into a mountain of blankets. I knew that it was the very first time in one of those legendary rare times I was witnessing my parents in love.

Chapter Two

I would like to say that I saw her existence from the moment she was conceived. I know it would be ludicrous when I do not have microscopic eyes to see through the ruffling blankets and into the private genitals of my parents. But more importantly, I know how weird it would sound when this involved your parents in action in a union legally sanctioned by a contract. I was glad of the absence of a superpower in this case. Inside I was the squirmy nun who couldn’t say the word ‘sex’ out loud, fearing that my lips would have some hellish effect from it.

A few months later, I spotted the small bump on my mother’s belly. She was glowing with joy and suddenly the family was coming together, at least the three of them were. I still stayed aloof from my father who worked days and nights on end. My mother was still working as well but with lesser hours and more flexibility. Still, she kept me in the babysitter’s house until the evenings when she would sometimes pick me up herself instead of getting the babysitter to walk me home through a beautiful back-alley of flowers. Those were the few precious moments when I had my mother all to myself. And now that she was also in there sharing these days with me only made it all the more sacred. No, I never felt threatened by the impending arrival of a second child. I craved for her arrival all the more, contenting with the nine months of wait only because that would do her good.

My mother told me the news on one of our walks back. Mary, you’re going to have a younger sibling.

Oh ma! I know! I can’t wait for her too! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I jumped in ecstasy, unable to contain my joy for the first time.

We hope it’ll be a him this time. Papa really wants a baby boy, my mother said, making me stop in air as if I was in a cruel episode of Looney Tunes.

I hope it’s a girl, I said defiantly.

She smiled and continued to walk us home. We never quite spoke about the gender of the baby anymore from then on. But I saw how my parents prepared the arrival of a boy. They even selected names for the future heir. Blue was a colour I used to love until it started to symbolise an ugly phallic object to me: the penis. Blue shirts, blue baby boots, blue this, blue that, it was wearing me down in a blue mood.

Every night, I continued to pray. One night, I started to cry silently in the middle of my prayers. God, if you really do love me, and I am certain that you really do exist, please send me that baby sister I have waited so long for. You have heard me chant this hope day and night since I was a baby myself! I am so alone in this world, God, please send me an angel. I know I’m asking for a lot but I would be eternally grateful to you. If this is all the good things I deserve to ever have then let it be. I will be eternally happy with my sister; it would be enough for me. I’ll never ask for anything else ever again.

On that fateful day, I was shaken out of my sleep by my mother who had a painful, worried look sweating off her exhausted face. There was an ambulance outside the flat and we got into the back of it. My father was lying on the bed inside, with a mask on his face. I didn’t know what was happening. My mother held onto his hand tightly. My father seemed unconscious, he couldn’t respond to me calling out his name furiously.

We got to the hospital and he was placed in a ward. After a long wait, a man came out to talk to my mother and when she finally came back, she looked relieved. She told me that father had stones in his kidney and they had to do an operation. He had fallen unconscious in the middle of the night and she had found him weak on the floor. She had thought that he had been a little tipsy and had accidentally fallen down to unconsciousness. No one was prepared to hear that my father was not in tip-top condition. No one was prepared for age.

We sat down side by side, watching the people walk, sit, talk, slowly and quietly like turtles under the blinding fluorescent hospital light, hiding under our shells to keep from feeling too naked in the real world. There was a drop in energy in the overall air. I found it hard to grasp onto any sign of happiness in the emergency ward. Even the chocolate in the vending machine disgusted me.

Then suddenly it got worse. My mother did a ninja flip and a kamikaze cry as she fell to the floor crouching abruptly. I saw a face that even Edvard Munch could not have painted out, tragically coated with layers of pain. My mother looked like she was in hell. Ma! Ma! I kept calling out to her before a team of angels flew by and took her into an emergency room. I ran behind, screaming her name until one of the angels turned back and told me to calm down and stay there.

What’s happening? I asked tearfully. Is my mother dying too?

No, little girl. Your mother is having a baby! She said, turning my world upside down.

As I trembled from fear to joy, I sat down outside one of the chairs facing the ward my mother was in, all alone, smiling. My baby sister was coming, she was coming to join me. I couldn’t wipe that smile off my face, even though I heard mom crying out loud from behind the screen doors. To me, it was the sound of life, it was the sound of my mother experiencing a time beyond happiness. And anything that was beyond its normalcy was expected to be distorted. So the distorted screams of joy only made me smile wider.

There I sat with my mother giving birth to my baby sister in one room and my father going through surgery in another. Nobody was together but I felt closer to the family for the first time in a long time.

Chapter Three

True to His word, she was all the good things I deserved combined into one substantial form of grace and beauty. Everybody loved her from the moment she was born. Aunties flocked towards her complimenting on her cotton snow-white skin, her very thick brown hair that shot up looking like Elvis Presley and most of all, her big animated brown eyes that seemed to tell stories of their own. She smiled often and seemed to have already mastered different meanings of smiles at infancy, choosing from contentment to cheekiness within seconds. Uncles who rarely held babies wanted her in their arms. People kept calling at our house to see the baby and because my mother stopped working, I was able to stay home after school and greet these visitors to proudly show off my sister. My family who had been rather socially alienated out of choice was suddenly boisterously going to parties, events, outings with the new baby.

Even though they had planned for a baby boy, my parents were more than pleased with her. My father changed from beast to prince, attending to my sister as often as he could. He was still a workaholic, but he cut down on some weekends to take us to the zoo or to the park. Most nights when he came home later, we would still get into his car to go for a drive around the town just so that my little sister could see the city lights about her. You’d think a baby wouldn’t care about a ride in the car but she seemed to take things in, even during those tender years of growing up. Her intense eyes spoke of how she was really looking and not just watching. She looked at you and thought and she looked at me and loved. My father brought out his dusty camera and bought rolls of films to document her childhood years. One pose would have at least three clicks. Very quickly, our library was filled with albums of her and her only.

Betty had this special aura about her. She was a smiley baby with a serious disposition at other times. Whenever I had private moments with her, I felt as if she were listening to my thoughts and singing me a lullaby. She knew my sadness before I could even give name to it and taught me to face my demons. I started going to church more to thank Him for her. The church was delighted of our new stable attendance and the presence of a baby. I was delighted in return, singing praises in the choir and taking on leadership responsibilities in the youth department.

As she grew, her beauty really came through. Betty looked like a Disney princess. She was proportionately figured in every way, she was the balance of beauty on its peak. But what made her all the more beautiful was just the way she was. Betty started singing around the age of three, rather in tune for a child in fact. She was not a noisy child with bad temper. In fact, she was rather obedient but not boring. She had her cheeky ways of entertaining us which always put smiles on our faces. Betty could talk really well, walk like she was the Queen and dictate the world about her like a King. People listened to Betty, people gave her all the attention. She was being spoilt but she didn’t behave spoilt.

One day, she declared that blue was her favourite colour. I had long stopped loving blue as much because of the incident before her birth. I still had some phobia with the colour even though I still had some belongings in blue and sometimes sparingly painted some things in shades of blue. She said, watching me paint one night, I love the colour blue!

Why blue of all colours?

Because it’s the colour you love most.

I had never told her that. I had tried to wipe out my favouritism for it over the years. My sketches were a myriad of colours with just a dash of blue. My bed sheet was white. My pillow was red. My bag pack was green. I had tried every way to evade the colour and had given my sister no reason to think that blue was my favourite colour but there she was, reading me better than I read myself.

From then on, I made my prodigal return to the colour, in all its melancholy I let it seep down into my veins and found once more the peace and tranquillity that the colour inspired in me before.

Betty was my inspiration. I believed from then on that I had found my purpose of life. Life could make no sense and leave philosophers wondering and the common man wandering, but for all I knew, life was now every sense to me. I was meant to be a big sister, to Betty and no one else.

I had grown up nearly a decade quite alone with my father and mother working hard to provide for us. Their love had been rather separated from the absence of a bond, even though there existed the presence of an accidental bond by blood, me. But with Betty, they too had found a bond that seemed to really work and I was secretly pleased that I was somehow a part of that bond now as I was the one who had prayed for her existence.

My high school years were looking up. I started to join more and more societies and clubs in school, I made more friends and at church, I was part of the holy gang of adolescents. I was proud to take my sister out to see my friends, she was never a cry-baby. In fact, she was fascinated with the things I was doing, watching me quietly as I practised my gymnastic moves with the team after school. My friends adored her as well and thought her to be very beautiful and I felt as if all those years losing out on my share of compliments in the looks department, were repaid ten times more.

When she was four, she started reading books on her own, starting with the Enid Blyton ones I had in my library. I asked her, Do you understand what you’re reading?

I think so.

You can ask me anytime if there are words you do not understand.

Okay! But I like imagining what they mean and see if I’m right at the end.

What do you mean?

I make up my mind about what the story is and at the end if I’m wrong, it’s kinda funny. She giggled.

Her imagination didn’t stop there. She started dancing and singing every day in the small hall we had. One day, I came home with a child’s microphone, made of cheap coil and plastic. It was a shocking orange thing with a huge yellow top for her to sing into. There was a small button on the body to turn it on and off, which actually did nothing in reality. I had bought it using the canteen money I had saved up for her.

She was amazed by it and started to thank me. I can never pay you back, sis! She declared, I am a poor princess. I am still waiting for the dragons to slay me. But now, with my voice, I will slay the dragons and I will find the treasure so that I can repay you, sis!

I wondered if she understood what she was saying sometimes. Well, good thing that you now have this microphone. When you are scared, remember that you just need to sing the monsters and villains away. It’s a very delicate talent you have, you must use it for the greater good.

Yes, I promise, sis! Oh I know! I know! I know how to repay you for now! I am going to sing you one song every day! At least one song a day! Since you said that singing makes the bad people go away, that means singing makes the good people come to me. I want you to be with me every day so I’ll sing every day! And no bad people can take us! Right, sis?

I smiled at her and watched her sing a rendition of a Disney song she had recently watched when my father had taken us out on a rare trip to the movies. That man who proclaimed he had no interest in movies, especially cartoons, and rarely did anything else but work, was suddenly delighted to come home with four passes to watch The Lion King. I didn’t comment on it because I knew it was all for Betty. But I was secretly happy that I was getting some benefits from my sister as well. I had never been to the movies before this.

Betty loved the movies. She would come home singing all the Disney songs and acting out the characters. She took all of our dolls and soft toys and set them up on a stage, which was a colourful blanket she had grown out of to sleep with, and placed it on the floor, in front of the couch. Even when nobody, though her imagination expanded to the audience that turned up, came to her shows, she continued to act.

Nobody came today. Sale’s pretty bad these days, she said one day.

Oh no! I’m so sorry. I have been so busy with all my school work, Betty. I promise I’ll bring my friends to come watch after the exams, okay? Can you prepare something big?

Something big?

Yes, like a full story from the beginning to the end. Not just small scenes you’re doing here. A full story like we watch on the big screens, only it’s live and before our very eyes. It’s called a theatre.

Scenes? Theatre? She shook her head, not comprehending.

"One day