J[our]ney

Alice tapped her feet nervously in the quiet underground station at Outram Park. It was late, and no one else was there. Ordinarily she would have taken a taxi cab home from work, since it was on the company dime, as was her taxi to work every morning. Being secretary to Mr. Richard came with certain perks. Most of the office girls thought it so glamorous, the way she’d stroll past them into her black and yellow taxi every evening at six o’clock. But times, Mr. Richard had said this morning with an apologetic British shrug, are getting leaner. And so it was announced after lunch today that the transport budget would be cut for everyone except key management, effective immediately.

Dave gets on the train at Raffles Place. He’s never liked this part of town, which is full of office-shirted people in various stages of unhappiness. In the past, he’s spent a couple of sleepless nights imagining himself in the CBD, pouring off the train at 7.30am with the rest of the office rats, later in the day streaming to Amoy Street Food Centre to do battle over lunch with packets of tissue paper. These possible futures flicker in his head now, and he holds the letter in his hand a little tighter as a talisman against them. It’s his letter from the UK Visa Office which has finally, with only weeks left before his flight, given him the green light to go.

Elise brushes past the politician outside Simei station. He’s handing out flyers, and a small crowd has formed around him. In her hurry, Elise notices she hasn’t caught the colour of his uniform. Is it a mixture of red and white? Or all-white? Or pastel blue, or green? Not green. If it’d been one of the Greens, she’d definitely have stopped to take a flyer, maybe even a selfie. As she waves her wrist watch over the gantry and enters the steaming hot station, she realises she doesn’t know if the Greens are even contesting in Simei. She purses her lips a little sadly. They’re made up of young university professors with socialist ideas and she thinks their angry Instagram stories about climate change are pretty cool. She’d have liked to cast her first ever vote their way in this, the hottest August in recent memory.

Professor Zaida Abdullah hates the smell of the blue chemical gel that now fills the carriage. It smells like petroleum. And she hates the way it feels on her wrinkled skin, more like burning than cooling. But she slaps it on anyway and watches her body temperature dip slightly on her wrist monitor. She leaves a voice note for her faculty secretary to let the students know she’ll be late for lecture.