James thought he’s preying on a Ah lian working at a handphone shop. He assumes he’s going to own her given his experience at stalking, voyeurism and perverted acts. Unfortunately for James, this Ah lian is not one he expects her to be.
James had never broken the law.
This was the thing he was most proud of.
His job as a senior logistics coordinator at a local SME is nothing glamorous, but stable. He drives a twelve year old Honda that he kept meticulously clean. He had the confidence of a man who believes he had the world figured out.
He knew the law very well. He had made it his business to.
He discovered the grey areas by accident, the way most men discover their worst habits, through the internet of course.
He’d read an article once, one of those outrage bait pieces shared in some WhatsApp group, about men taking upskirt videos on escalators.
The comments were furious, but one can tell most people were there for the drama and the clumsily censored picture. A simple google search revealed the girl’s full face and the video circulating on sex forums.
James had scrolled through them with interest, not because he approved, but because he was the kind of man who liked to understand the mechanics of things.
The act is Illegal, the article said. Section 377 of the Penal Code. Punishable by imprisonment, and you probably will have your face splashed across every major news outlet.
James had noted this. Filed it away. And when he was lying in bed at night, he begun to think about what wasn’t covered under the code. What is not illegal?
A video of your surroundings, for instance, was not illegal. A man standing in a public place with his phone camera open, slowly panning across a hawker centre, a shopping mall atrium, a bus interchange, that was not illegal.
That was a man taking a video of his surroundings. Tourists did it constantly. Old uncles documenting their char kway teow did it. A writer taking picture of his curry puff from old change kee does it. Nobody could arrest you for it.
Nobody could arrest you for it even if you held the frame a little longer than necessary on a woman standing at the bus stop.
Even if she noticed.
Even if she shifted uncomfortably and looked away.
Even if she knew.
That was the part James had come to savour most. The knowing.
The victim must know, if she don’t know, the kick is just not there. The whole point of this was to have the kick of being confronted and caught to James.
That gives him the sexual thrill and satisfaction.
…
On weekends, he will go out to hunt. He sees himself as a predator of sort, scanning the crowd for potential victims like the predator in the movies. Instead of infra red vision detecting heat signature, he scans for pretty girls he liked.
He was at Tampines Mall on a Saturday afternoon when he found the first one that day, a girl, maybe twenty-two, in a white sundress, waiting outside a bubble tea shop for her order. She’s pretty, probbaly a university student. She was scrolling her phone, earphones in, typical of what young people does these days.
James stopped about four metres away. He raised his phone, casually, at chest height and he began to record. He swept the camera left, the shop fronts, a family with a stroller, a Bengawan Solo outlet, old chang kee curry puffs, kaya toasts. He swept right, heading towards the girl. When he has her on focus,he stopped. Five seconds. Six. Seven.
She looked up from her phone. Their eyes met over his screen.
He did not look away. He did not lower the phone. He did not smile or smirk or make any expression at all. He simply held the camera where it was, the lens pointed somewhere in her general vicinity, his face perfectly, deliberately neutral. The face of typical uncle who was merely filming his Saturday afternoon, who had every right to be here, who had done absolutely nothing wrong.
She was the first to look away.
That small capitulation, the dropped gaze, the slight hunch of shoulders, the way she angled her body a few degrees away from him as though she could make herself smaller moved through James like warm tea on a cold morning. It gave him a raging erection.
He won. He has a video of the girl, and she knew what he was doing but was helpless to stop him.
James fought back a groan as his erection pushed painfully against his pants.
Time to move onto another target.
The stalking was a different pleasure. You need more patience and strategy.
He never followed anyone for too long, that had its own legal complications, and besides, James was not stupid. He was strategic. He would simply walk in the same direction. If a woman happened to be walking ahead of him and he happened to be going the same way, that was not stalking. That was two people moving through the same public space. Singapore is small. These things happened.
He would close the distance. Slowly. Just enough for her to become aware of footsteps behind her, neither too fast or too slow no matter how she adjusted her pace. He had learned the precise art of this, fast enough to maintain proximity, slow enough to never technically close in.
The moment he liked best was when they glanced back.
That first look was always the same, a quick, involuntary glance, the instinct of prey.
They’d see him, an ordinary Singaporean Uncle walking near. Some would walk faster. James would maintain his pace exactly, which meant, mathematically, that the distance between them would grow. This seemed to confuse them. They’d slow slightly. He’d close the gap again.
The second glance was different. Longer. More uncertain. By then, they had done the calculation and found it didn’t quite add up, he wasn’t rushing toward them, but he wasn’t falling behind either. They didn’t know what he wanted. That uncertainty, was the entire point. It made him feel powerful, like a god.
When they finally turned down a different path, or found the courage to stop and face him, he was already gone. He’d peel off smoothly, another direction, another purpose, a man on his way somewhere entirely mundane. If they turned, all they would see was his broad back disappearing into the Saturday crowd.
He never looked back.
He’d already seen what he came to see. His phone will have several videos of the woman’s back, butt and legs. Enough masturbation materials for his weekend pleasure.
By mid afternoon that saturday, James has landed 3 prey. It was a good hunt.
The girl in the white sundress. A woman in her thirties at the escalator on level three who had to pretend to rush to the toilet when James stalked her through 3 levels of the mall. A secondary school girl in her CCA uniform near the MRT entrance, who had to immediately called her dad on her phone, talking loudly and glancing over her shoulder, the classic manoeuvre, the performance of being accompanied, of being watched over from a distance.
James had found this one almost tender in its desperation. It turned him on the most.
Three in one afternoon. Not a bad return.
He bought himself a sugarcane juice, found a bench with a good sightline, and sat down for a break.
Around him, Tampines went about its business. Families and couples and aunties with trolleys and teenagers in little packs, all of them shuffling through the warm afternoon.
That was another thing James appreciated, the invisibility of it. He was not remarkable to look at. Thirties, slightly heavy in the stomach, a face that was neither handsome nor ugly, the kind that crowds swallowed without noticing. He had learned to use this. To wear it like a cloak.
He was fucking invisible, that’s what he thought at least.
He was finishing the last of his sugarcane when he noticed the mobile phone shop across the atrium of the bus interchange.
It was one of those independent shops, not Singtel or StarHub, its display window crowded with laminated price lists and phone case samples strung on wire hooks. James had walked past a hundred of them without a second glance.
What caught his eye was the girl behind the counter.
She was leaning against the glass display case scrolling through her own phone while a customer examined a screen protector.
She’s in her late twenties, maybe. Streaked hair, eye lashes, big gold hoop earrings that caught the light when she turned her head.
She wore a white tube top, and on her feet, a pair of furry pink slippers, the kind that belonged in a bedroom and had somehow made it all the way to a shopping mall.
James: Chao ah lian…hehe…
Weekends at Tampines, whole life also Tampines, James thought, with the comfortable certainty of a man who believed the surface of things told you everything you needed to know. A heartlander girl. Probably left school at eighteen, maybe scraped a poly diploma if she was hardworking, most likely didn’t even bother.
The kind who worked retail because there wasn’t much else she could do. Ten years later, she will be a lao ah lian doing the same thing.
He’d met enough of them to know the shape of it.
What James could not see however, was this Ah lian held two degrees from the National University of Singapore. A Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, graduated and A Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, completed concurrently over four and a half years.
Cindy had written her honours thesis on coercive control patterns in non-physical intimate harassment.
A paper her Prof had described, in the formal language of academia, as “unusually perceptive.”
In plain English, what he meant was, she understood, what the fuck sick perverts like James wanted.
The psychology of low-risk, high-satisfaction predation. The architecture of plausible deniability. The way power fed on the silence of the uncertain.
During the week, Cindy worked as a counsellor at a private wellness clinic in Tanjong Pagar, where she spent her days sitting across from burnt out bankers, exhausted executives, and high functioning professionals who had everything on paper and were quietly falling apart.
She was very good at her job. She was good at it because she had an instinct, honed over years of study and practice, for reading what people did not say.
She read people the way other people read menus.
The handphone shop belonged to her grandfather, Ah Keong. He had a bad hip now and couldn’t stand for long. Cindy helped out on weekends. She changed into her slippers the moment she arrived because she’d be on her feet for six hours and she was not going to be the kind of woman who suffered for appearances.
The earrings were simply because she liked them.
The hair was because she had earned it.
She was reviewing a client’s session notes on a clinical app and considering her approach for Monday’s session.
She was, in other words, in the middle of doing her actual job while leaning on the counter, butt perk up with a defiant ah lian expression on her face.
She was also, without having looked up yet, already aware that someone across the atrium had been watching the shop for slightly longer than necessary for a man who wasn’t interested in buying a phone.
She had not looked up because she didn’t need to.
She had learned, a long time ago, the difference between the gaze of a customer and the gaze of something else entirely. It was a distinction most women learned without being taught, absorbed through years of small moments, a kind of knowledge that settled into the body and lived there quietly, waiting to be useful.
She finished her sentence in the notes. Saved the file and set her phone down on the counter.
James tossed his sugarcane cup. Smoothed the front of his polo shirt.
The afternoon, still had potential.
He pocketed his phone, already thinking about how best to use it against the Ah lian at the handphone shop.
One more hunt to add a stupid Ah lian to his accomplishments, or so he thought.
James began to make his way across the atrium toward the mobile phone shop.
He had no idea that the woman behind the counter had a thesis on people exactly like him.
He had no idea that she had spent five years studying the precise shape of what he was.
He had no idea that while he had been watching her, cataloguing her slippers and her earrings and constructing his comfortable little story about who she was and what she amounted to ,she had already begun to read him.
It was the worst mistake of his Saturday.
It was a decision he would come to regret.
For a very long time.
Coming soon