Return to a Sexy Island Page 8

  The MINT Museum exhibits what the city once did during childhood. Saint Jack tells us what the adults got up to.

  And we’re all adults now.

  Somewhere within the Warner Brothers’ empire in Los Angeles, an original print of Saint Jack probably sits on a shelf. Perhaps it’s the property of Roger Corman, producer, financier and king of the B-movie. Either way, the film should be the property of Singapore. Fullerton photographs of the old post office and pretty pillar boxes have their place in the hunt for heritage but Saint Jack is real. Its footage is priceless. The Fullerton precinct recognises the economic value of preserving its past as new Singapore flourishes. But old Singapore stays alive only as long as rare artefacts like Saint Jack remain accessible to all.

  Seven

  I FOUND myself lying on my back and thinking of England. I had spent the last five minutes walking up and down Cantonment Road asking strangers if they had any idea where Pinnacle@Duxton was. They had each stared at me with a delightful mixture of bemusement and uncertainty, nodded towards the interconnected seven towers of 50 storeys that encircled much of the street and dominated the skyline in every direction and then wondered whether it was medication time. When the street was momentarily deserted of passers-by, I stretched out on the pavement and tried to reproduce a childhood memory.

  My hometown of Dagenham and Duxton Plain Park are kindred spirits. One is home to the world’s once biggest public housing estate, the other the tallest. Dagenham led the race to find homes fit for working-class heroes after World War I. Pinnacle@Duxton picked up the baton in the 21st century, designing a standard for public housing beyond the imagination of the flat-capped Cockney brickies who had laid the foundations almost 100 years earlier. Dagenham demonstrated to the world that comfortable, affordable homes could be built practically and prudently with public funds, Pinnacle@Duxton added the swagger. Singapore’s most unique HDB development has been the recipient of numerous international design awards. Dagenham now has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. My childhood home craves the municipal foresight and ingenuity that made Pinnacle@Duxton a reality. Singapore wants Dagenham’s fertility rates. It’s comforting to know they still need each other.

  Unexpectedly, Pinnacle@Duxton made me think of Parsloes Park. As a teenager, I would cut through Parsloes Park, a sizeable green public space at the heart of Dagenham’s vast housing estate, to get to my future wife’s house (I trudged along if her parents were home but moved like Usain Bolt if they were out). The red tiled slates of identical rooftops surrounded me. The view never changed, no matter which way I turned. Parsloes Park marked the centre of one of the world’s biggest (and, for a while, the most famous) housing estates, surrounded by 27,000 homes and more than 100,000 people. The familiar vista was usually only altered on Friday evenings when second-hand Fords rocked gently in the car park while oblivious pensioners cleared up their dogs’ poop. For the longest time, I thought that “dogging” was couples having sex in their cars while the elderly took their dogs for a walk nearby.

  From the world’s biggest to the world’s tallest, I tried to find a position where Pinnacle@Duxton dominated the landscape in every direction. That’s why I ended up lying down on the pavement of Cantonment Road.

  “Bloody hell,” I muttered.

  Should you be passing or visiting Pinnacle@Duxton, do take the opportunity to lie down on the pavement in front of the housing complex’s entrance on Cantonment Road. No other vantage point captures the intimidating immensity of this incongruous icon towering over Chinatown’s cowering shophouses. My view was framed entirely by the soaring curves of the seven towers, their two gardens slicing through the buildings like layers of cream in a Black Forest gateau. Built on the Duxton Plain site to replace two of the oldest 10-storey HDB blocks in the country, Pinnacle@Duxton was first mooted by Lee Kuan Yew in 2001 to showcase the future of public housing and commemorate the historical significance of the location. The fact that Pinnacle@Duxton falls within Lee Kuan Yew’s constituency of Tanjong Pagar was entirely coincidental, apparently. When Lee Kuan Yew says, “Jump”, lots of buzzing civil servants standing around him in garish baseball caps at community events usually cry, “How high?” And the answer was 50 storeys high, across seven towers, with 1,848 housing units and two sky gardens, all of which must connect to the existing Tanjong Pagar Community Club whilst not disturbing the historical nutmeg trees below. Ten years later, I marvelled at the answer, dumbfounded. Where else would a building project running into the hundreds of millions have to incorporate a few historic nutmeg trees along a narrow strip of park?

  I was content to stay longer lying on my back, snapping photographs from my unique worm’s eye view but people were beginning to stare and one of those little shih-tzu-type dogs was trotting my way, sniffing the ground and preparing to cock a leg.

  The grey tiled slope at the entrance led to an outdoor HDB museum built on the site of the original Duxton Plain blocks, which I wandered through quickly. We both know that story. Singapore needed houses overnight. The British-backed Singapore Improvement Trust proved to be about as useful as Michael Jackson’s doctor so the HDB took up the challenge. Some residents were unwilling to move away from their wooden kampongs but the appalling—and purely coincidental, no, really—Bukit Ho Swee fire in 1961 forced them to accept the moral of the Three Little Pigs. The HDB housed a nation in a single generation, and the rest of the world has been a bit condescending about this socio-economic miracle ever since. When it opened in 2009, Pinnacle@Duxton was an unsubtle retort to the snide critics. Fuck ’em.

  I followed the sheltered walkway that protects the thousands of residents from the sun, rain and killer litter, but mostly the killer litter. It’s no joke. In Toa Payoh, I was once hit on the shoulder by a putrid fish head. I screamed. I defy anyone to peer down at their shoulder, notice a decapitated little Nemo staring back at them and not go ape shit.

  I found a lift and sought out Pinnacle@Duxton’s sexy bits. The seven towers are linked, both on the 26th and 50th storeys, by the world’s longest, continuous sky gardens, which weave their way through each block. Quite rightly, the sky garden and jogging track on the 50th floor are open to the public, at a cost of $5, because they sit on the roof of an HDB building. Residents enjoy the exclusive use of the amenities on the 26th floor, which is equally fair. On the 50th floor, I was confronted by a sign. It was titled Sky Garden House Rules and provided a list of dos and don’ts. It was mostly don’ts. Everyone being ordered to leave during a thunderstorm seemed a rather obvious stipulation and I was tickled by the insistence of no gambling. Personally, I’d happily fork out $5 to watch a gaggle of aunties drag a mahjong table out of the lift and give the tiles a shuffle up in the clouds on the 50th floor. The sign also said that there was to be no soliciting or touting in the Sky Garden. Now who in their right mind is going to lug a suitcase full of cleaning products up to the 50th floor to flog bottles of washing-up liquid? There cannot be people queuing up for tea towels and dishcloths on a sky garden, surely.

  As instructed, I tapped my ez-link card beside the turnstile. Nothing happened. I tapped it again. The turnstile refused to budge. A sign smaller than the rules and regulations sign stating “You cannot sell trays of eggs on the sky garden” indicated that the ez-link card had to be validated at a machine in Block 1G. I was in Block 1B. I poisoned the air with some well-chosen Hokkien expletives and suddenly stopped when the lift opened. A couple of European tourists waltzed past me, tapped their ez-link cards and spun through the turnstile. They were also treated to a quick burst of Hokkien invective. They were impressed. They thought I knew how to say “cheerio, bye” in a local dialect.

  At ground level, I encountered a frazzled mother and her three lively children who were taking turns to cover their entire bodies in ice cream and kick each other in the shins.

  “Excuse me, where do I go to get my ez-link card validated for the Sky Garden?” I asked, pointing towards the roof, just in case she didn’t
know where it was.

  “Er, I’m not sure, ah,” she replied, distracted by her three urchins practising their clothesline manoeuvres on each other.

  “Aiyoh,” one of the older boys said, momentarily releasing his blue brother from a chokehold. “It’s 1G, Level 1, the office, OK? Go to the office, 1G, Level 1, OK?”

  He shook his head resignedly. Residents must get asked this idiotic question from day trippers frequently. And then he went back to strangling his brother.

  I found the office, where a teenager guided me through the simple procedure of tapping the machine to extract the $5 and validate my card. I returned to the summit of Pinnacle@Duxton via the lift at 1G. The layout and floor plan for the 50th floor were identical to those in 1B, utterly indistinguishable. It was most alarming. The grey tiles, the gates and fences and even the position of that damned rules and regulations sign were in the same place, to the millimetre. Who measures these things? I cannot align three movie posters in my living room. I nonchalantly tapped my ez-link card and beamed proudly as the little red light turned green—take that my European cousins and your first-time entry, if only your debt-ridden economies had been so forward-thinking—and pushed on the turnstile. I clicked forward, then stupidly clicked backwards to check that my rucksack was zipped up. Why I felt compelled to perform this trivial task in a turnstile is quite possibly a debate I need to have with myself at some point. Still, the turnstile had clicked twice and assumed I had departed. I was stuck.

  “Er, help,” I cried meekly. “Is anyone there?”

  The entrance to the Sky Garden in Tower 1G was deserted and even if it wasn’t, well, would you pay $5 to rescue me from a trapped turnstile? I’m not sure my wife would.

  “Hello, if you can hear me, could you help me, please? I’m stuck in a turnstile,” I shouted to an empty lift lobby, staring at the electronic numbers on the panel above, desperately hoping they would reach number 50.

  “Hello again, can anyone hear me?” I called again, irritated now. “Actually, I really hope no one can hear me because if you can hear me stuck in this poxy turnstile and you’re choosing to ignore me, then you are one selfish bastard.”

  After an age had passed (probably three minutes), I took matters into my own hands. I pushed myself up against the turnstile, removed my backpack and swivelled around. Taking out my ez-link card again, I stretched my orang-utan arm through the turnstile, managed to have enough limb left to bend it around the corner and fumbled for the card reader on the wall. Eventually, I heard a faint beep, spun around quickly and flung myself at the turnstile, which gleefully spat me out onto the sky garden.

  Having learnt from the scorching observation deck at Marina Bay Sands, I donned cap and sunglasses and stepped onto the tiled walkway. There is nothing else quite like Pinnacle@Duxton’s Sky Garden in Singapore, or anywhere else for that matter. Unusually for a Sunday, there were only a handful of residents dotted around, doing all the things one might expect in a popular communal space within the HDB heartlands: jogging, stretching, reading a newspaper, taking their children out on tricycles, having a snooze on a bench, canoodling with a girlfriend away from parents, loosening limbs through tai chi, tapping a calculator to solve homework sums. But they did all this 156 metres in the air. It’s a wonder flight stewards do not march across the sky bridges handing out packets of peanuts.

  On the southern side of the Sky Garden, I marvelled at the breadth of the view, stretching from Labrador Park to beyond Marina Bay, incorporating Singapore’s mini-archipelago of the Southern Islands. As I counted the dots that encompassed the city-state’s empire, I noticed behind me that a courteous architect had thought to include some tables and chairs to allow visitors to sit and reflect high on the seaside. I dumped my bag and flopped down.

  “Fuck me,” I shouted, ripping my thighs from the sizzling seat and performing a leg wax that would be the envy of most Brazilians.

  It was indeed thoughtful to provide chairs. It was bloody masochistic to use thick plastic and anchor the bastards 50 storeys high in direct sunlight with no shade. Visitors expect breezy climes when they reach Pinnacle@Duxton, not scorched testicles.

  Different areas of the Sky Garden were conceptualised as distinct landscapes. I loved the tongue-in-cheek thinking behind the “Beach”. Loungers and deckchairs had been placed around a boardwalk shaped like a beach and a shoreline, with blue rubberised flooring depicting the sea. Of course, beyond the sea is the real sea, on the other side of the fence. It was cheesy but charming. Other gardens included the “Lounge”, with tables and chairs mercifully in the shade, a “Sky Gym”, with an actual gym offering an unbeatable location, and a “Hillock”, which was a grassy knoll. The only grassy knoll I know of apart from the one where JFK was shot.

  Just about every iconic structure, building or national heritage sign within 15 kilometres was recognisable from the Sky Garden. Rather than search for them all, I picked a spot at random and tried to locate as many as possible with only a turn of my head. The Peranakan shophouses snaking through Neil Road (I will rent an office there one day), the Supreme Court, People’s Park Centre, Chinatown, Clarke Quay, the MICA Building, the spire of the Armenian Church of St Gregory the Illuminator, Bugis’s magnificent Parkview Square (possibly my favourite building in the city because of its discordant daftness. It could have been Eliot Ness’s home address.), the Istana, that ugly office block in Novena shaped like a fat orange frankfurter, the flats in Lorong 1 Toa Payoh where I once lived and the housing estates of Bishan and Ang Mo Kio—all from the same position.

  The roof housed vast water tanks, all secluded and screened of course. As I pondered the green technologies and water harvesting capabilities of the tanks above my head, I was struck by the most obvious of ironies. There were no public toilets on the Sky Garden. Or if there were, I certainly couldn’t find them. I dashed along the jogging track frantically searching for a toilet, gazing up only briefly at the green tip of Bukit Timah Summit in the distance. I passed the different (but same) towers, peered into the lift lobbies and checked that the rules sign was in the same position beside each lift (it was), but my search was futile. There was no toilet. And yet the monolithic water tanks loomed large overheard, flushing and feeding every one of the 1,848 apartments beneath my feet. Perturbed, I pondered climbing the ladder to piss in one of the tanks.

  I had to leave.

  As I waddled cross-legged towards my original turnstile at Tower 1G, I glimpsed something down on my right: a swanky yachting marina. It was Sentosa Cove. I had not seen Singapore’s exclusive playground for international oil magnates and Asian money launderers before. Yes, all right, I’m kidding, aren’t I? Another development built on reclaimed land, Sentosa Cove was nothing but sea when I last lived in Singapore and it occurred to me that Pinnacle@Duxton was one of the few places in the country where one could spy on the rich and infamous. From the top of Singapore’s most illustrious public housing development, I could see its private parts. I liked the symmetry. By definition and deliberate design, Pinnacle@Duxton was built to be as inclusive as possible. Shared communal spaces, online forums and residents’ Facebook pages underline how the kampong spirit of the early Duxton Plain blocks lives on at the Pinnacle. Sentosa Cove, on the other hand, was created to be the most exclusive address in Singapore, the most private of properties.

  It was time to do a little trespassing.

  Eight

  VIVOCITY is a paradox. Singapore’s largest shopping mall has really tried to be something more aesthetic and less soulless than a number of little retail boxes jockeying for attention inside one big box. The funky wavy design is appropriate for its harbour setting and the wading pool, water features and playground are entertaining diversions for children while their parents replace their hand phones because the new model has a shinier keypad. HarbourFront MRT Station and the air-conditioned Sentosa Express provide easy access for the day trippers on either side and there is even a surreal resident marching band that likes to creep up and
scare the shit out of you with a bombastic bang of their drums. How I refrained from chasing that giggling little drummer boy and shoving a drumstick up somewhere sore I’ll never know.

  The problem with VivoCity isn’t the shops, the breezy al fresco dining or Sgt. Pepper’s bloody cast-offs terrifying daydreamers, it’s the people. Not the calibre, but the sheer quantity. Within the first month of the mall opening in late 2006, VivoCity pulled 4.2 million visitors through its doors. That’s a staggering figure, practically the entire population of the country. If 60 million shoppers visited the Heathway mall of my Dagenham childhood, there would not be the time for pickpockets to get to every handbag. VivoCity isn’t a shopping destination, it’s a game of Space Invaders: constantly avoiding moving targets, sidestepping to avoid a headbutt in the groin from a kid running towards Toys “R” Us and resisting the temptation to poke a shopper in the eye for confusing her pointy Giant bags for a cat and my legs for a scratching post.

  Eager to escape that damn marching band of drummers who appeared to be following me, I crossed VivoCity’s promenade and stepped on to something that Singapore has incontestably got right. For the tentative day tripper or the seasoned traveller, it’s always the little things. Our memories, opinions and judgements are formed by the little things. The glitzy, expensive hardware is soon forgotten if the software has been neglected. For example, I once stayed in a delightful five-star hotel in California thanks to a movie junket (where a journalist gets paid to fly overseas, write a couple of preferably gushing features whilst conveniently forgetting that the said journalist had to stab himself in the leg with his pen during the movie to stay awake). The hotel’s opulence was beyond my comprehension (and my salary) until I broke that little paper seal on the toilet seat that indicated the facilities had been cleaned. They hadn’t. Or if they had, the cleaner had failed to spot an object last seen being skippered by Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October. When you come across a turd large enough to be used by police on riot control, it becomes exceedingly difficult to remember anything positive about the hotel. And I haven’t seen The Hunt for Red October again either.