Marked

On Lavender/Jalan Besar—Big Road—corner the Chinese chap standing at the head of the Indian work-crew down on the concrete like little boys in their rows, their yellow hard hats a kind of uniform. Perhaps the man was giving congratulation on a job well done; reminding about safety or rallying for one final effort before completion. Whatever the case may have been how much could these dark lads looking up at the speaker have understood? Isolated words and phrases. In under eighteen months the tower that had replaced the former tower had risen from the ground. It had been observed slowly rising; the prominent safety notices turned out to the street, to the passing cars and buses observed. How much of any of that was comprehended by the workforce? a foreigner had wondered. Could all those banners really have been for the benefit of the workers? Earnest and serious efforts to save the lives of easily replaced foreigners? (In Dubai by all reports this was so much worse and likely no effort whatsoever expended there. Singapore was better, a responsible global citizen.) The gantries taking the lads up to the top of the tower here as elsewhere, their ropes swinging in the wind, sent a chill up the spine. The lads on the concrete in their hard hats had survived here. Towers and more towers, cranes, trenches and form-work raising more and more concrete, steel and glass into the skies, in many corners of the world the same regardless of warnings, predictions and the evidence of outcomes from this urban concentration.... Footing across to the bus stop down from the corner the hard hats were observed and the tall Chinese man at their head, his voice inaudible even from six or seven metres distance. With the voice it was possible the mark on the back of his neck might not have been noticed. One needed to look carefully. No, it was not a shadow from the trees on the pavement. The man carried on the left side of the back of his neck what could only be a birthmark, a large one that rose up into his hair and down below his collar. Dark grey or gunpowder, under the portico of the tower more dark still as he turned one way and another. The sighting triggered the recall of the remarkable copper-oxide blue-green that had been seen the day before on the young Malay mother in her scarf and baju carrying her infant in her arms. Two or three paces in advance the woman was noticed and as the distance between us closed the vivid colour of her mark turned a brilliant iridescent tone that made her something like an alien presence. The mark covered the whole of the woman’s left eye-socket, the upper part of her cheekbone and around toward her temple in a fashionable half Zoro mask. (On the catwalks of Paris they had paraded such masks some years ago.) A good degree of beauty was carried otherwise by this woman and with the enhancement she became utterly overwhelming. An observer walked on along the Bugis street muttering to himself ten, twenty and more metres. The sighting, the happening had made the brain shudder like a spluttering engine. A pulse of that tone might have been seen in a gas flame; perhaps in the volcanic rock that was set in the rings sold at the Al Wadi tables. Could the slender young lad her husband a short distance ahead appreciate that kind of loveliness? Would his tenderness flow more freely waking by the side of a woman who was marked in that way? In the brief couple of moments there had been no opportunity to pass any kind of remark or compliment and the lad may have taken it amiss in any case.