By K B Ryan Joshua Mahindapala

Judy's sister, Michelle, and her husband, Daniel, sit a few rows ahead of the Tays, and their son Alston sits at the back with Cynthia, passing a packet of gummy bears back and forth under the chairs and mouthing the words to songs that neither of them quite know.

Alston is 11, a year and a bit older than Cynthia, a loud and cheerful boy who does impressions of their teachers, and once, memorably, of his own father snoring through the sermon. Cynthia, who is quieter, thinks he is the funniest person she knows, and would never tell him so. After the afternoon service, Judy's sister comes back with them for dinner, the way she does on the first Sunday of every month.

Back at the flat, they eat a long Sunday dinner: rice, steamed fish, sweet and sour pork that Alston works through almost single-handedly, and a soup Judy has had on the stove since morning. Daniel says grace, and everyone bows their head, and Alston opens one eye to try to make Cynthia laugh. She does not. She is better at this than he is.

By the time the grown-ups have moved on to coffee and to the slow, circling talk of adults with full stomachs, the two children have been excused, and are already out of the flat and into the corridor, where the evening light comes in long and gold between the pillars.

The corridor runs the whole length of the 10th floor, past a row of front doors and metal gates and the plants the neighbours keep in old paint tins and Styrofoam boxes. It is Cynthia's corridor, the corridor she grew up scooting up and down on. To Alston, who is only visiting, it is a racetrack, a football pitch, a place with a wonderful echo.

They play catching first, and then a game Alston invents on the spot, with rules that change whenever he starts to lose. Their slippers slap on the concrete. Their laughter bounces off the walls into every flat with its door propped open to the breeze. Which is how the old man hears them.

A gate rattles open. An old man steps out into the corridor in a singlet and pressed shorts, his thin hair combed flat, his leather slippers shining as though he polishes them, which he does. He is small and a little stooped, and he moves carefully, one hand trailing along the wall.

Cynthia stops running at once. Alston, half a second behind her, bumps into her back.

"Kit." The old man's whole face opens like a window. "Kit, you're here. Have you eaten?"

Alston looks at the man, and then at his cousin, waiting for her to correct him, to tell him that her name is Cynthia and she is not Kit.

She does not. "Not yet, Uncle Kang," she says, in a voice Alston has never heard her use before, gentle and easy and sure. "We just had our dinner. But not yet."

Alston tugs her sleeve and whispers, "Who's Kit? Why he call you Kit?"

Cynthia keeps her eyes on the old man, who is smiling at her as though she has travelled a very long way to see him. "He isn't well," she says, low, so that only Alston can hear. "He has dementia. He forgets things and mixes them up. He thinks I'm his sister. Her name was Kit. She used to live in our flat, before us, and she looked after him. She passed away."

"Demen—what?" Alston asks, confused.

"Just be quiet and play along, Alston," Cynthia whispers.

"Why don't you tell him the truth?" he asks.

"Because it makes him happy," Cynthia says, as simply as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. "When I'm Kit, he isn't lonely. And it doesn't cost me anything."

Alston looks again at the old man, still beaming at them both.

Then the old man's gaze slides past Cynthia and finds Alston, and his eyes widen with a fresh and even greater joy.

"Eng Hock!" he cries, and claps his hands together once. "Aiyoh, Eng Hock, you came also! So long never see. Come, come, both of you, come inside. I just cooked porridge."

Alston freezes. "Who's Eng Hock?" he mouths at Cynthia. Cynthia does not know either, and this is the part she can never resist, the same itch that first drew her through this old man's gate months ago: the wanting to know. Somewhere inside his tangled memory is a whole family, and each time she visits another piece of it floats up, slow, like something rising to the surface of a pond.

"I don't know," she whispers back, and her eyes are shining. "But we can find out. Just agree with everything he says. Follow me."

"I'm not going into a stranger's house," Alston says.

"He isn't a stranger. He's Uncle Kang. And I come here all the time." She is already moving toward the open gate, unafraid, entirely Kit, and Alston, who has never once in his life allowed his younger cousin to be braver than he is, swallows hard and follows her in.

Inside, the flat is dim and cool and very clean, and it smells of porridge on the stove and of the sandalwood burning at a small red altar by the door. He sits them at the dining table, beneath a wall of photographs Cynthia has studied many times before: a wedding, a family at the Mandai zoo, a young man in an army uniform, all of them fading gently toward the same soft brown.

He ladles out two bowls, pork and ginger, and sets them down, and drags over a stool for himself, and looks from the girl to the boy and back with the plain, brimming happiness of a man whose family has come home to him.

"So long, you two never come and see me together," he says. "Always Kit come alone. I keep asking her, where is Eng Hock, working so hard is it?" He flaps a hand at Alston. "Never mind, never mind. You are here now. Eat first, eat."

Alston picks up his spoon and, not knowing what else to do, eats. The porridge, to his great surprise, is delicious.

The old man sets down his own bowl and points his spoon at Alston, his eyes going bright and mischievous. "Eng Hock. You remember or not? That time we went to the kelong, and you fell straight into the water, in front of everybody?" He begins to laugh, a wheezy, delighted laugh, and waits for the boy to laugh with him, to say yes, of course, what a day that was.

Alston is clueless. His lower jaw hangs from his face, with no words to respond to Uncle Kang. He has never been to a kelong and has never held a fishing rod in his life. He looks to Cynthia, the way he has looked to her for every cue so far, but Cynthia's face is blank, because Cynthia does not know this story either, and for once she cannot help him. The thread stretches thin. The old man's laughter begins to fade at the edges as it waits to be met, and something uncertain and unhappy starts to gather in his face.

And then something takes hold of Alston that he did not know was in him. He puts down his spoon, and shakes his head slowly, the way a man shakes his head at an old shame he will never live down, and says, "Aiyah. So long ago already, and you still want to bring it up."

It is the most useful sentence he has ever spoken. It agrees to everything and confesses to nothing. And it lands. The old man slaps the table and howls, and does all the remembering himself, how Eng Hock came up spluttering and soaked and how the whole jetty stood there laughing, and Alston shakes his head and grins in all the right places, adding nothing, needing to add nothing, holding up a memory that was never his the way you might hold a door open for a stranger. Beside him, Cynthia slowly unclenches.

"Eng Hock." The old man leans in, lowering his voice as though between the two men of the family. "Your toilet tap, still leaking or not? Last time you kept complaining, complaining, and never once call me. Aiyah, such a small thing. I bring my tools, half an hour can fix. Don't go and waste money on a plumber."

This time Alston does not look to Cynthia at all. "Still leaking," he says, easy now, propping his shoulders up slightly in an attempt to project confidence and maturity. "Thank you. You'll come and fix it?"

"Of course can!" The old man looks overjoyed to be asked. "Tomorrow, after my breakfast, I come."

Then he tells them about the coffeeshop. About Tony, whose son has bought a big new car; about Ah Lok, who has found a stall that does very good fish soup; about whose knee is being operated on and whose grandson has got into which school. He tells all of it to Alston, to Eng Hock, the way you bring an old friend up to date on the whole neighbourhood.

"You must come down and sit with us again," he says. "Corner table, same as always. Everybody keeps asking, where is Eng Hock, why he never come down, so long already." His voice dips, and for a moment the brightness in his face trembles at its edges, as though far back somewhere he can feel the shape of an absence he cannot name. "Too long," he says softly. "Come back, ah. Both of you."

And there it is, the piece floating up at last. Cynthia looks at the wall of photographs, at the wedding, at the young bride who is unmistakably the woman he calls Kit, and beside her, in a suit that does not quite fit, a grinning young man. She looks at Alston, and shapes the word without a sound: husband.

Kit's husband. Eng Hock. The brother-in-law who fixed the taps and kept the corner table and has not come down to the coffeeshop in a very long time, because he, like Kit, is not anywhere that anyone can call him back from.

Alston understands. Something passes over his face, and to his credit he does not let it into his voice. He sets down his spoon and sits up a little straighter, and with the whole of his 11-year-old seriousness he becomes Eng Hock, home at last.

"Sorry I took so long to come," he says. "I was busy. But I'm here now."

The old man reaches across the table and pats the boy's hand, twice, and says nothing at all, because he is so happy, and there are kinds of happiness that have no words anywhere inside them.

Having visited Uncle Kang a number of times, Cynthia has learned how these visits must end, before the old man grows tired. She stands.

"We have to go now, Uncle Kang," she says. "The family is waiting for us. I'll bring you more porridge the next time. And we'll come and see you again soon."

He walks them to the gate with one hand on the wall.

"Eng Hock, don't forget about the coffeeshop, ah," he says. "And you, Kit, remember to take your medicine."

And he stands in his doorway watching them go, lifted, restored, as though the evening has handed him back something he had not known was missing.

Out in the corridor, the instant the gate clicks shut, Alston lets out a breath he seems to have been holding for half an hour.

"That," he says, "was so weird." But he is grinning, lit up, buzzing with it. "Did you see? He really believed I was that man. I just said anything at all and he believed me. Every single thing."

"You were good," Cynthia admits.

"I was very good," says Alston.

Later, when Michelle and Daniel are gathering their things to go, and the shoes are being sorted out at the door, and Judy is pressing a container of leftover soup into her sister's hands, Alston plants himself squarely in front of his parents.

"I want to come back next week," he announces. "Can we come back next week?"

"Wah, suddenly so keen," Daniel says. "Just now you didn't even want to come. Why?"

"Because I got to be an actor today." Alston draws himself up, full of the news of himself. "There's an old uncle who lives next door, and I acted as somebody else, and he believed me completely. A whole grown-up. Same age as Ah Gong. And I made him think I was a completely different person." He looks to Cynthia for confirmation, and she gives it, and he turns back, entirely decided. "When I grow up, I'm going to be an actor. On TV. I'm really, really good at it!"

Michelle laughs and rumples his hair and tells him to go and put on his shoes.

But Judy does not laugh, and neither does Brenden, because they know exactly which old uncle next door, and exactly whom the boy has been, and what it costs an old man to be that happy over a leaking tap and a corner table and two children at his table who are not, and never will be, the two people he was so glad to see.

Cynthia walks her cousin to the door and lets him keep all of it: the pride, the plan, the bright and simple evening exactly as he understands it. He is only 11. There will be time enough, later, for him to learn the rest of it, that the finest performance he will ever give he gave this evening to a single old man at a dining table, who needed it more than any audience ever will, and who by tomorrow will not remember a moment of it.

"Come back next week," she tells him. "He'll be so happy to see you!"

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