The Old Cabinet

Many years ago, we had an old cabinet. It stood quietly in the shared bedroom (Dad and I shared the bedroom); its legs rested on the ugly green tiles and its back almost leaning against the dirty cream-white walls. It was a sturdy old cabinet, about five feet in height, of a light brown colour, and coated with a thin layer of varnish. It had one large shelf on top and two smaller shelves below. The shelves had sliding glass planes. Next to the smaller shelves there were three drawers, one with a lock and the other two without.

One day, while cleaning the shelf, Mum removed a glass pane from the top shelf in an effort to wipe it. As Mum was wiping the glass pane, a lizard suddenly appeared from beneath the cabinet, and, momentarily startled by the lizard, she loosened her grip for a second, and the glass pane fell and broke into pieces. After the incident, Dad removed the other glass pane from the top shelf. The cabinet looked somewhat awkward or incomplete since then.

In those days, Dad put a lot of things on top of the cabinet. There were friends’ name cards (but he never contacted them), medicine bottles, court letters (Dad was an illegal hawker), and Dad’s favourite picture of Brother when he was a year old. The picture was framed in a yellow plastic frame. When Brother left home a few years back, Dad was so upset he smashed the picture with a hammer and threw it away.

Dad also occupied the large shelf with other items. He collected crystals, scissors, nail clippers, knives (yes, knives), old photographs (most of these were black and white) and other curios, such as wooden carpenter pencils, Taoist and Buddhist talismans and fishing lines (Dad was probably a good fisherman when he was young). However, when the cabinet was still around, I never understood that objects have their stories to tell.

The cabinet also contained some of Brother’s belongings: these were left behind after he had left home. There was a chocolate box containing old bus passes, a few fake Harley Davidson handkerchiefs and stickers of ninjas and skulls. An old postcard from Bendemeer Secondary School dated back to 1993 read: your child has not been in school for seven days. Those were days of family violence, and the cabinet contained these memories. Each time I picked up the postcard, Dad’s beatings and Brother’s cries replayed in my mind, though I was the only one who could hear the voices in the quiet room.

The locked drawer belonged to Mum. It contained needles and rolls of thread of different thickness and colours. Mum used to have sharp eyes and soft fingers. She was once a beautiful and lively lady, then a dutiful and conforming housewife, but now what was left of her was a jaded and forlorn ageing woman resigned to her fate. She also kept a few very old song books in there. In the recent years, she still sang some of these songs to my niece, who was with us for a short while, but had left for China a year ago.

The other two drawers belonged to me. The act of opening and closing the drawers drew me into a world of memories and untold stories contained in various memorabilia. These stories and memories changed as I added new things or removed old ones. I used to keep stamps and old chewing gum wrappers, and I concealed love letters in the drawers. New Year cards came and went with each New Year; letters came and went as friends did the same. I kept cassette tapes and lyrics of love songs. All these things were gone now.

It was exactly two years ago, when we decided to sell the house. ‘Come, help me dismantle the cabinet into pieces.’ Mum said. I used screwdrivers to pry the pieces of wood apart and hammered them loose. Then I emptied the drawers of their contents and removed them, after which I carried the drawers and wooden planks downstairs to discard them. All that remained of the cabinet was a wooden box with four legs, like an empty shell. It was quite heavy and bulky, and Mum and I had to carry it to the bin compound. I imagined it being shoved into the incinerator – a large angry fire consuming it as thick black billowing smoke continued to rise, consuming it with all its memories and family history, reducing them to ashes that blew about in the dry wind, and finally to nothing.