By Amanda Ruiqing Flynn

In four minutes he would be dropping his last passenger of the day at Lucky Plaza. He glanced at his rear-view mirror. The petite woman was jamming away at the small screen in front of her, keys clacking, lost in the reverie of scrolling through someone else's life. Is this the sum of our lives, he thought. Me observing her, her observing the pixels on her screen, the CCTV cameras observing me. He pulled up to the curb and she got out silently, head bowed. He wanted to shout after her, "Hope you find your luck there!" but before he could, the door slammed shut.

Silence. With no more passengers to please he switched on the radio and began to erratically change stations until he took his finger off to indicate left. The DJ on Class 95 FM was interviewing an expert on love languages. Absent-mindedly he absorbed the sound of construction and the transatlantic voice on the radio. His shoulders began to relax. He shifted his torso and his spine cracked. As he started to accelerate after a red light, his fingers felt for a black plastic button, giving it a satisfying push, and a window slid down. A gush of air flew in, zigzagging the hair above his ears, giving him the look of a mynah bird with ruffled feathers. The top of his ears quickly became numb with the sound of traffic and a hot, polluted wind.

He drove into the carpark of Block 15 Telok Blangah Crescent and switched off his engine. Silence again. He paused to take hold of the butterflies that were now beginning to fly free in his stomach. His daughter Meiyun and granddaughter Stephanie were flying in from London tomorrow morning for two weeks. It had been three years. He made a mental note to clean out his taxi before he picked them up. His daughter had insisted there was no need to collect them, that she could just flag a taxi already waiting at the airport, but he had insisted right back.

He whistled as his keys jangled to unlock the gate to his flat. The clanging in the kitchen meant his wife was cooking dinner, and as he walked into the flat proper, he could see she wasn't just cooking for tonight but for a week-long feast. There were open packets of this and that, chopping boards and knives, vegetables and tofu littered on every inch of space. The flat smelt of chicken curry and sweet agar agar jelly all at once. Her whole body was busy from top to toe and she barely took stock of him. He could imagine even her toes were fidgety over what to cook. As if his granddaughter could consume 20 stomachs worth of jelly! What did the expert say, we all show love in different ways.

"I bought you the multicoloured kuey that you like from that Peranakan place on Joo Chiat. I had to park my car and walk, that area has no parking, long walk in the hot sun," he said to her back as he walked past her into the bathroom to wash his hands. She briefly acknowledged him with a half-smile and a nod towards the bag of kuey. The fan in the kitchen blew and rustled the red plastic bag, which housed a white polystyrene box that contained evidence of the flimsy solidarity of 36 years of marriage.

Home felt both safe and stale at once. Beauty had bloomed and faded within the confines of these four walls. There were things that had been said, had been done, but now in their late 50s they had reached a sort of equilibrium. It used to drive him crazy when she shook her legs so hard that he imagined the floor below fantasised they were having sex every day. When he picked at the rim of his nose, not quite picking it but working around his left nostril on the cusp of doing so, it drove her wild, and not in that way. But here they both still were so they must have done alright all these years. He opened the fridge door and saw it was crammed full with fresh produce. He dug deep into the back to rummage for a can of green tea. His life seemed to go from one refrigeration device to another – room, fridge, car, supermarket, room. Occasionally a 4D betting shop. When he got home he sometimes tried to switch the air-con off, but she would switch it on again 15 minutes later just as he was sat in his chair reading the paper, safely knowing he wouldn't bother to get up again.

They had fried noodles with sliced chicken, tau pok and xiao baicai for dinner, which they ate side by side at the dining table in the cramped kitchen, both wordlessly excited for their guests the next day. There was a buzz in the air. Straight after dinner he cleaned his car of the week's passengers; random bits of tissue, hair, dirt, snot probably. When he opened the boot of his car he felt a lurch of regret as he looked into the dark abyss.

The next day at the airport he stood there dumbly with both hands in his pockets. He was mute when it came to professing love, jealous of the love poets that his daughter had liked to read at the library when she was a teenager. Rumi was it? He couldn't remember. Anyone who could profess a love as deep as the moon and stars without a deep discomfort. When he caught a glimpse of his 34-year-old daughter and his six-year-old granddaughter, his heart soared, but his body stood stiffly, awkwardly, languidly. As they approached, his granddaughter hugged his leg and his daughter hugged his torso. They were warm in the airport chill. He said, "Come, I will drive you home, your Ma is waiting." He let slip a grin as he patted his daughter and granddaughter on their backs.

As they walked through the airport towards the carpark his daughter's phone rang. "Hold on Ba, I just need to take a quick call. I'll only be five minutes I promise," she said with a crisp British accent. She had barely landed and already the London office couldn't do without her. He nodded and took his granddaughter's hand. His daughter was a part-time editor at a fancy magazine in London. She had told him the name of it before but he couldn't remember now. It was the perfect job for her, he thought, as he remembered the hours she used to spend devouring books in the library on the Saturdays he had to drive, and her mother had a shift at the hospital.

"Sorry done, I'm with you now," hurried Meiyun. They finally left behind the pristine gleam of Changi Airport. A blast of hot tropical air greeted them outside. They piled into the taxi and as they drove through the east of Singapore, Meiyun wound the window down and breathed in the hot humidity. Her face rose towards the sky, basking in the sun. "Ba, remember you used to take me to East Coast Park to ride my bicycle?" she spoke at him fondly as they whizzed by on the ECP expressway.

"Mummy, Mummy, I want to ride a bicycle here too!"

"Stop shouting Stephanie, want doesn't always get!"

"Maybe we can get one for her here too?"

"No Ba, don't spoil her, we're only here for two weeks."

At home, while they were waiting for dinner, Meiyun showed Stephanie photos her mother had put up around the house. There was a particular one in a prime place next to the television, larger than the rest. Her mother had framed it because it was her favourite one of father and daughter. It showed a sweet five-year-old Meiyun on her bicycle and her father with his arm circled proudly and protectively around her. "Ba, do you remember, that first day we rode around East Coast Park. You pushed me around until you said your back hurt and we went to drink a whole coconut afterwards. I rode that bicycle every weekend for three years until it got too small for me and Ma gave it away."

"I don't know why you still have that photo up, I look so haggard in that picture!" he replied.

"Granddad, did you teach Mummy how to ride a bicycle? Daddy hasn't had time to teach me yet. Can you teach me?"

"That's your Ah Gong darling, call him Ah Gong, not Granddad, okay?"

"Can you teach me, Ah Gong?"

Under the scrutiny of this six-year-old girl's hopeful stare, his heart soared then sank to his stomach abruptly. In a muddle he mumbled something about going to get changed, slipped quietly into his bedroom, locked the door and sat on the bed.

That day he stole that bicycle, 29 years ago, times had been hard. He wasn't making the money he should have been from driving his beloved Toyota Corona because he wasn't driving it enough. He was suffering from an excruciating pain in his lower back and it had gotten so bad that he couldn't sit down properly without being on the verge of tears. Ridiculous really, but he couldn't drive properly for hours at a stretch like he needed to. He had a doughnut-shaped cushion to help him but that had made him feel like an old man. Asking around desperately and finally with a recommendation from a fellow taxi driver, he went to a shifu in Chinatown to get a massage each day and was walking around a lot instead of making ends meet. He had never mentioned this to his wife. She had been at home looking after their young child and taking care of the household. To top it off an old classmate of his had committed suicide and he had only found out through another acquaintance. He had felt a humming dissatisfaction and a distance from life.

Here in Singapore, on such a small island, death was always somewhere near. You could hear laundry poles clanking to the floor in the middle of the night. He wondered what the statistics of people impaled by those poles were. What a way to die! And a few nights ago, what sounded like hundreds of laundry poles clanking was in actual fact a funeral company setting up for a funeral in the void deck the next day. Fifth floor, fourth floor, third floor, second floor, death. A mild depression was following him around like a stray dog.

On the day he stole the bicycle, he had been resting in his car and stretching his back for a moment after dropping a passenger off on Kim Tian Road. Whilst sitting in the open-air carpark and drinking from his thermos the tea his wife had brewed for him, he saw it. A pink children's bicycle with pink tassels, sitting quietly next to the designated green bin put beside each lift lobby in every HDB block. Someone had thrown it away? Couldn't have. But they had, since it was by the bin. Therefore it was nobody's, because someone had thrown it away, he reasoned. He got out of his car, a chill of excitement building in his spine. Of course it wasn't nobody's, this shiny and new, just out of packaging, newly spray-painted bicycle, but he ignored that voice.

It was his daughter's birthday in a couple of days. Maybe he could spruce it up. He could tie a bow on it. Looking left and right, he saw no one, so he picked it up feverishly and took it to the boot of his car. Just as he had sat back in the driver's seat, he looked up and a little girl and two adults were stumbling into the lobby of the housing block. He wound the window down a little. The girl looked more and more hysterical and started pointing at the green bin. The parents looked around bewildered. He stayed stock still in his car, hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. "But I did leave it here!" she wailed. The parents were very well dressed, and looked like they were about to go to a fancy restaurant for lunch. The girl looks spoilt. They can afford another bicycle. I cannot. As the bicycle sat in his car, he knew that he still had a chance to return it, to make an excuse and say that he had found it and was going to take it to the police station, but he sat frozen in the seat and breathed shallowly. And when he had gathered his wits, he drove off towards his next passenger, and then home, to his wife and daughter.

Soon after driving out of that car park, he was stopped by a red light. He was itching for a cigarette, but he had quit years ago when his wife was pregnant. He distracted himself by looking sideways out of the window, one foot still on the pedal ready to accelerate at the first flash of green. From the corner of his right eye he could see a man teeter-totter on a sky high crane, only his yellow hard hat and tanned brown skin obvious under the glaring sun. He had a bucket of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in another, no hands to catch his own fall. He was meticulously painting, "Trust that God truly loves you" in big letters upon a church. The taxi driver looked away again.

Fifteen minutes before, no one but a mynah bird had observed a little girl pushing a brand new bicycle and walking with her parents. The distance between the absent-mindedly chattering parents and the child grew and grew with each step they took because the girl was not used to the weight of this bike. The parents crossed the curb into the carpark quickly and started to pack beach gear into their red car. The girl slowed and started to cry, as she couldn't lift her bicycle up onto the curb. She stalled and left the bicycle alone, while she ran to her parents, about 50m away. When they ran back and the bicycle was gone, the mynah bird saw in this little girl's eyes her first heartbreak.

He still remembers the look on his daughter's face when he brought her downstairs on her birthday and took the bicycle out of the boot of his taxi. "Ba! Is it for me?!" Her wide-eyed astonishment along with his wife's pleasantly surprised gaze made his chest puff out. He was their hero in that moment, and it made up for all the times he had disappointed his daughter by being too tired to play with her after work, or for getting home after she had gone to bed and not being able to kiss her goodnight, or for not being able to verbalise that he loved her, or when he lost his temper at her for being a child. The bright pink frame, pink glitter paint, pink tassels, bright pink seat, two sturdy stabilisers all made up for every little inadequacy he had had as a father. And that night his wife had made love to him like he was her hero.

The next morning after her birthday, he felt more powerful. His back felt less painful and the dark fog had dulled. As he walked along the path to his taxi his foot crunched down on the tarmac. He stepped on a trail of sturdy ants and he felt good. His body weight was a million times theirs, they would be annihilated in a quick second. His two feet crunched up the tarmac path, killing more ants in their wake.

"Granddad! I mean, Ah Gonggggg, it's dinner time!" Stephanie banged on the door and hollered in a sing-song voice. He came out of the room sheepishly and sat at the table with his grown daughter, his granddaughter and his wife in this tiny apartment that they had bought 30 years ago. "You fell asleep is it?" his wife enquired. "Ya a bit tired," he mumbled before reaching for some vegetables. Was that fondness or pity in his wife's eyes? In his daughter's eyes? He looked around the table at his small family. As the years went by, the yelps of joy and adoration from his daughter had gradually been exchanged for bemusement, pity and a promise that she would be doing greater things than he had ever done. He couldn't pinpoint exactly when that had happened. But there was love, love he had built and protected. Stephanie swung her legs under the table and asked, "Can I ride a bicycle in the park like Mummy tomorrow?"

"Maybe we can go to the park and rent a bicycle," mother said to daughter.

"I want Ah Gong to take me," Stephanie replied.

"Ah Gong has to work."

"It's okay, I can take you tomorrow afternoon," he said. It felt good to be needed.

When he finished his dinner he got up and prepared himself to drive for another hour or two. It was Friday night, peak time for business. "Ba, don't overexert yourself, you're not young anymore," chided Meiyun, again with that pity.

He felt stifled by this woman, this daughter of his, this alien grown-up child. With her British accent and her crisp formality, he could scarcely believe that he had raised her, how different she was to him. But this six-year-old granddaughter who looked at him in awe, she didn't pity him at all. She thought he could do anything.

So rather than doing his evening shift he drove across the border to Johor Bahru to buy his granddaughter a bicycle. He brought it back in the dark in the boot of his taxi. He found himself assembling a bicycle for his granddaughter in the void deck late into the night. The bicycle was pink and girly and shiny in all the right ways a six year old would want. At the border coming back into Singapore they had asked him to open his car boot and the customs officer couldn't help but grin when the torch shone on the lurid pink kid's bike. The officer shut the boot and wished him a good evening.

The next day when they woke up, he brought everyone downstairs and opened up the boot of his car with a flourish, presenting the bicycle to his granddaughter. "Wow Ah Gong! Is it really for me!?" He desperately drunk up the adoring gazes from his wife, daughter and granddaughter.

"Come on, let's go and try it out!" The grandfather stooped low to push and the granddaughter sat proudly on the bicycle, riding around the void deck downstairs and onto the tarmac, up to Telok Blangah Hill Park, and back again.

And that night his wife made love to him like she had done thirty years ago.

The fortnight that Meiyun and Stephanie were here went by in a daze of work, delicious home-cooked meals and taking Stephanie out on her bike. There was a void between him and his daughter. There was so much he wanted to ask her, but he didn't want to sound stupid if he didn't understand what she was talking about. So he kept silent. He wondered if her husband, who was away for work a lot, was treating her well. He wondered if she was fulfilled, juggling her role as a mother and working too. He wondered if she had enough money, as inflation was happening everywhere. He wondered if she was cold during winter. But he said nothing.

On a Tuesday morning, one day before his daughter and granddaughter were due to go back to the UK, his wife took Stephanie to the local market to buy some flowers. Alone at home with Meiyun, attempting to make conversation, he asked her if there was anything she needed to buy to take back to London. He could drive her to the shops.

"Nothing we need Ba, don't worry," she said at first. That crisp self-sufficiency.

However, shyness then came over her usually composed eyes, "Do you think, maybe, perhaps, we could go to the library?" she asked softly, eagerly.

"Library? Oh, okay, can, can," he said, smiling first slowly then widely, happy for something to do to make her happy.

He wondered if she remembered it like he remembered it. Those Saturdays that he used to drop her off at the library, drive passengers around, check in on her every few hours during a break. She would update him on what she had been reading, delving into the plots and characters with eager eyes, and over the years the titles would change along with her interests. She used to be obsessed with the Sweet Valley High Books and then Judy Blume and then all of a sudden she was into poets like Rumi and Neruda and then she was grown and gone. He could sense the nostalgia in her. "Let's drive to HarbourFront Library, it has a great view of the sea and Sentosa."

As soon as they walked inside VivoCity shopping mall, where HarbourFront Library sat on the third floor, he immediately felt alive with buzz and suffocated with inadequacy. Crowds upon crowds of people swarming, jostling, laughing, eating, consuming. Seemingly happy with their designer purchases. Wake up, spend, eat, buy, sleep, die. Of course if he had all the money in the world he would also like a Tag Heuer watch and an Osim massage chair. This mall was designed to make common people work until they died wanting. When they finally crossed the carpeted threshold into the library, his heart lightened. Meiyun linked her right arm around his left. He had what he needed – his daughter. Here. Now.

As father and daughter walked around arm in arm, it started raining. The sky was grey. The rain pitter-pattering on the glass windows that looked out onto the panoramic view of Sentosa, the man-made island, made him feel like an animal in a tank. Those frantic students typing away, or cramming for some exam, feeling like their whole futures depended on it. Or the uncles reading newspapers, hiding from the nagging and the impenetrable silence that they had to sit with at home, of children left and dreams unfulfilled. He dragged his fingers along the books, musty mould-speckled tomes mixed with brand new titles, but the old would contaminate the new.

Throughout her childhood, he hadn't spent as much time with his daughter as he had hoped to. He couldn't really take credit for much of her, this incredibly accomplished woman. Money had been tight and he worked long shifts, and so most of her childhood was narrated to him by her mother. But libraries had bought him pockets of time with her, that and the bicycle.

Next to them now was a highly strung mother, whose pre-teen daughter tentatively brought over a book, "Can I borrow this one?" she asked her mother shyly.

"Didn't I already tell you? No more ones with pictures in, can get one with more words, please?" her mother frowned disapprovingly and admonished. The girl's legging-clad skinny frame skulked away back into the aisles, her attempt at bonding a failure.

Witnessing this, he held on to his daughter's arm tighter. Life was short and the years went by fast. "So how are you, Meiyun?" He suddenly had a strong need to know.

She stared at him in surprise for her father had never asked her such a question before. So she faltered then answered carefully and deliberately, trying the confessions out on her lips for the first time. "Well, it's not easy you know. I'm tired most days. Stephanie is wonderful, but it's hard to juggle it all. We don't have helpers there like many people in Singapore do. The house is a mess. I'm replying to work emails at midnight. I'm not sure I'm being a good mum. I worry that my marriage is going to fracture. I'm sometimes lonely and miss you and Ma." She said all this in one long breath, then paused, embarrassed, and looked at her Ba, hopeful.

He held her arm even tighter now, and for a moment he forgot that she was his daughter. He was on the verge of telling her that yes he had been there too, he understood, life was not easy. He wanted to spill his worries to her, his disappointments, his weaknesses, even about the bicycle. Especially about the bicycle. But instead, he said nothing. He just stiffly nodded, "Aiya, you are a mother, you just need to stay strong Meiyun." Her grip on him slackened.

They drove home wordlessly, her looking out of the window at the construction works. He switched on the radio again. It was still tuned into Class 95 FM and they were talking about this love languages concept again. Another interview because a book about it had gone viral apparently. He wanted to ask his daughter if she had read it, but he didn't. The expert would do the talking, the explaining for him, right? Meiyun, your Ba loves you, he would tell the expert to say.

In bed that night long after everyone had fallen asleep, he leant over his sleeping wife and whispered to her. Ah Mei, I have something to tell you. That bike I bought Meiyun all those years ago, I had stolen it. He waited for the fallout. But his wife was still out cold so he played out the reply. What, what nonsense are you saying? she would say. I didn't buy it, I stole it, he would reply. Then there would be silence and she would say, I don't believe you.

A plastic bag housing another box of kueh rustled intermittently in the breeze of the kitchen fan.

He drove his daughter and granddaughter to the airport the next day. At the departure gates Stephanie hugged his leg tightly and looked right into his eyes, "Thank you Ah Gong for teaching me how to ride a bicycle." Meiyun looked beyond him with sad, tired eyes and a bright smile. She hugged him close while he stood there stiffly, awkwardly, languidly, cold from the airport chill. As Meiyun and Stephanie walked through the departure gates, their figures receding, his shoulders shrank and stooped. Stephanie danced to the duty-free shops. A bicycle with pink tassels sat waiting for him at home.

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