Parent/Guardian - comments please!

Dear Readers,

having arrived at a narrow breather in the fury of the term 3 exams, tkwek churned out this latest short story, about the vagaries between a parent, and a guardian. and whether the two are really different.

enjoy,
The Straight Times Editor

Parent/Guardian

His hands, trembling, held the cold green form that more or less spelt his efforts for the past year in three underscored digits.

Approaching the door of the master bedroom, he glanced over the form again. It wasn’t difficult to read, unless, of course, you were personally involved in those stark and glaring digits. At the top was stamped, in bold, his school name and crest – that elaborate coat-of-arms handed down from eternity (or so it seemed). Slightly below, his full name, class, index number, and form teacher’s name, and reading those lines in the past, he’d often thought to himself how people could rattle off these personal details completely unemotionally – as if the school was a place where ever student were reduced to a mere three-row linguistic-mathematical description. But as he took on more roles in the school, and as life grew busier – too busy for chit-chats, too busy for harmless pranks, too busy for a jog round the field – he began to use those flat and audacious full names, guiltily catching himself in the act once or twice.

Moving on down the form, he found rows and rows of numbers, under columns titled with no less than three syllables each – “percentile”, “overall T-score”, “grade point average”. Numbers had never meant much to him, and frankly, these numbers especially, confused him. But even he knew that the never-ending rows were meaningless, for the only three digits that mattered lay inoffensively near the bottom of the page, just above the teacher’s comments, and separated by a little inoffensive decimal point. Two point six four. So innocent. So humble. So tiny and forgettable.

And so out of character, he mused, as his hand reached out to rest on the door for the umpteenth time. But as he did so, his eyes came to rest on two self-important words separated by a rude slash, nestling even further below the ugly numbers. There they were, their initials P and G as if uncensored for all the world to see. Parent/Guardian. They weren’t words he noticed often.

After all, when he’d last gotten this green form back, it was still the time when his Parent had signed the paper carelessly and with a broad smile, congratulating him as his results called for. It was the time when the report card meant a celebratory dinner, laughter over the table and a movie after that. It was the time when the holidays, heralded by the arrival of the end-of-year report card, meant family treks and fishing trips, vacations abroad and sumptuous Christmas dinners.

But now things were different. Ever since his Parents had left two weeks ago, silently and unobtrusively and almost unnoticed – out through the front door to the Workplace like they did every morning, but never coming back again – the Guardians had come to take their place. Gone was the banter and radiance of the household; the pastel walls turned to stone and the plants wilted before his eyes. Even the singing of the sunbirds on their roof every morning gradually petered away, and he was left facing two foreign, stony and decidedly unpleasant adults.

It wasn’t that they didn’t look like his Parents. In fact, his Parents had somehow managed to get spitting-image replacements of themselves. Those were the same right-parting hairstyle, retro glasses, curiously detached earlobes and unassuming stubble. Those were the same wavy auburn cut, lilac contact lenses and emerald pendant. They were similar – right down to the Obermain loafers and modified high-heels. True, they dressed more stiffly and properly than the Parents had, but still, everything was the same.

It was just that they – the Guardians – did something that they – the Parents – never did. They quarreled.

‘Quarrels’ wasn’t that suitable as a choice of word, though. What they had started off like what he had just failed History at – the Cold War. He knew both of them kept and constantly trimmed nuclear warheads (both had carefully instructed him not to open their emails), and he knew that when they couldn’t come to an agreement, they would just give the other the cold shoulder. However, he also knew that sometimes, the Parents came back to take their place, for just a little while, becoming warm and loving to each other again. But the change was always subtle, and he never really got the hang of how they did it, until they were gone and back were the Guardians.

He’d never really had much reaction to the whole fiasco. He just treated it as another one of those permutations of parenthood that he in his immaturity had yet to understand. Ignoring the entire situation, and enjoying the brief periods of silence that it brought to the house, became his chief strategy. It was easy for him, to see things as un-understandable. Ignorance was bliss, he thought to himself. And you could never have too much bliss.

Reaching out and pulling his thoughts back from the inner workings of his Parent/Guardian caretakers, he realized that over time, he WAS getting used to the queer silence of the Guardians. Glancing down at the report suspended gingerly between his fingertips, he told himself that perhaps the Guardian would just open half an eye to him, welcome him to the chamber with the usual severity, sign the form with barely a glance at his poor results and turn back to her bedpost. Or perhaps she would notice it and not pass the stinging comments that the Parent had once passed.

Whichever he was, he had to get it signed. Somehow. Mr. Chua wanted the form back by the following afternoon.

He pushed the door open, as softly as he could, afraid that he would disturb the pin-drop silence of the Guardian-Guardian ceasefire.

---

Salt and water splotched unreasonably on the high-quality paper, momentarily blurring the ‘two point six four’ into a mere ‘four’.

Somewhere near the bottom of the page lay a forceful signature, and the remnants of a broken pen-nib, still dripping with a scarlet ink.