Chapter Excerpt: The Rebellious Tide - Dundurn
Jul 15, 2024

Chapter Excerpt: The Rebellious Tide

Read an excerpt of The Rebellious Tide by Eddy Boudel Tan below, one of our featured summer reads! Don't forget to save 25% off this book when you use code TIDE25 from  July 11 - July 17, 2024.


The residents of Petit Géant didn’t care for the world outside the town’s borders, despite the welcoming signs in English and French at either end of the main road. The hand-painted porcupines on these signs, their paws waving in the air, were meant to make visitors feel welcome. The truth was the locals had always been wary of outsiders.
     No one was more of an outsider than Ruby Goh. Imagine the confusion and suspicion the unexpected arrival of the young Singaporean woman must have created thirty years earlier. And she had been pregnant, too, with no husband in sight. The local hair salon was filled with gossip from mouths puckered with distaste.
     
Ruby gave her newborn son a name that would be considered acceptable by the inhabitants of her new home. The name sounded both strange and beautiful to her ears when she first heard it spoken on the radio. Even so, the young child was excluded no less than his mother. Being the outsider’s son was a sin equal to being the outsider.
     
No matter how much effort Ruby put into helping him blend in, dressing him in sweater vests from the thrift store and trimming his hair with the kitchen scissors, people would still look at him as though he were a wild animal. This little boy with the deep green eyes and bronze skin, with hair as black as his mother’s but coiled like a nest of serpents, was like no one they had ever seen before.
     
Back then, Ruby cleaned the homes of Petit Géant while their owners were busy living their lives. She found a sense of purpose in detergent and disinfectant, taking something neglected and making it sparkle.
     
The money was barely enough to cover the bills even during the busier months, but she enjoyed the work. She loved having the privilege of spending time in these houses. She would look at the portraits on the walls and admire the fine furniture. Sometimes she’d pretend she lived there, tidying up while her husband worked in a fancy office.
     
The only place she didn’t like to clean was the Villeneuve house. Pierre Villeneuve worked as a councillor at the town hall. His young daughter was Sebastien’s age. “She’s sweet as a rock,” he had once told his mother. But the lady of the house was the reason Ruby dreaded her weekly appointment.
     
Ruby would arrive with a smile every Wednesday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Overdressed and eager for company, Genevieve Villeneuve would open the door and then follow Ruby from room to room, smoking a cigarette while she supervised. “I just want to be sure you don’t feel tempted to take anything,” she said on more than one occasion. “I mean, I’m not saying you’re a thief, but I’ve heard stories about that sort of thing happening.”
     
She would offer generous amounts of feedback on Ruby’s performance. “I pay you good money. I don’t want you getting lazy.”
     
Her favourite topic of conversation, though, was her family. “Chloe and I are so lucky to have Pierre. He works so hard to give us such a good life. I don’t know how you single mothers cope. And a wild little boy like that without a father! I just can’t fathom it.”
     
Ruby would return home every Wednesday, close her bedroom door, and cry into the red, raw skin of her hands. She knew Genevieve was a silly woman whose opinions didn’t matter, but every comment felt like the lash of a whip against Ruby’s self-worth. Maybe Genevieve simply spoke what everyone else in town thought.
     
Sebastien would return from school and sit beside his mother with his little hand in hers. It wasn’t fair that women like Genevieve Villeneuve could have such power over women like his mother. “She thinks she’s better than you, but she’s not,” he would tell her. Ruby would nod and force a smile. “You’re right,” she would say, not quite believing it.
     
The weeks went by and every Wednesday was the same. Finally, Sebastien had had enough. One night, when he was nine, he slipped out his bedroom window and walked to the tree-lined streets of the wealthy part of town. The Villeneuve home lay under the moonlight like a sleeping giant. He reached into his backpack. His little hands wrapped around the jagged rocks inside. He didn’t stop throwing until the windows were shattered.
     
Now, many years later, Sebastien heard the sound of broken glass as he cracked the eggs against the side of the frying pan, an echo from the past. He tucked the memory back into a crowded corner of his mind. The eggs spilled from their shells and sizzled in the heat of the pan. Sunny side up, the way his mother liked them.
     
The cramped apartment with the faded wallpaper and stained ceiling was the only home Sebastien had ever known. It sat directly above the neighbourhood’s convenience store in an old two-storey building covered in stucco the colour of traffic cones. The store had been a laundromat when Sebastien was younger. He would sit on the rusted metal steps of the fire escape outside his window and absorb the scent of detergent like a chemical sauna.
     
It was barely enough space for the two of them, especially as Sebastien got older, but they’d learned ways of simulating privacy. They had their own bedrooms, though the wall they shared couldn’t have been made of much more than sawdust and cardboard. Sebastien used noise as a curtain, dialing up the volume of his music when he needed to be alone.
     
The moon-shaped clock on the wall counted the seconds as Sebastien slid the eggs onto a plate. He crossed the linoleum floor of the kitchen, bumping into their faux-wood dining table along the way.
     
“Your breakfast awaits, m’ lady,” he said, in his best English-butler accent.
     
There was no answer. He glanced at the clock. It was unusual for Ruby to sleep in so late.
     
“You awake in there?” he asked with two knocks against the door. “Rise and shine, lazy bum.”
     
He held his ear against the door, but he couldn’t hear a thing besides the creep of worry that had a way of altering his senses.
     
“I’m coming in.” His fingers wrapped around the doorknob as he paused, afraid of what he’d find on the other side. He thought about how silly he’d feel for expecting the worst if his mother was asleep in her bed. He held onto that silly feeling as he pushed open the door.
     
Ruby’s bedroom looked exactly as it had the previous night except for the morning light that slipped through the blinds. She even lay in the same sacrificial pose, cupped by the curves of her mattress.
     
Sebastien set the plate on her desk and stood over the bed.
     
“Wake up, Mama,” he said, although he knew the truth. She was as cold and still as the morning-after remains of a fire.
     
“Wake up.” His voice was less steady the second time. The pain started out dull, but he could feel it blossoming deep within his chest. “Wake up. Wake up.” His face was calm as his fingers felt for the missing pulse in Ruby’s thin wrist. It occurred to him how funny it was that absence could be felt more strongly than presence.
     
He drew a long breath and swallowed it.
     
The checkerboard was on the floor beside the bed where Sebastien had placed it, the game no longer paused but abandoned.
     
With a loud exhale, he picked up the plate of eggs and walked briskly out of the room. He stood in the middle of the kitchen for several seconds before throwing the dish against the wall with such force that it snapped cleanly down the middle like two halves of a moon. The sound wasn’t satisfying. It was flat and blunt, nothing like the music created by the rocks and shattering windows from many years ago.
     
The pain now clawed at his lungs. He grabbed a chair and lifted it above his head until its wooden legs scraped against the uneven ceiling. With a groan, he swung the chair downward. It crashed against the surface of the kitchen table, creating a pleasing sound. The chair sliced through the air repeatedly until his hands gripped nothing more than a splintered frame of wood.
     
“What’s going on in there?” The shrill words were accompanied by three beats against the front door that led to the hall. “Sebastien? Ruby? Is everything okay?”
     
“Everything’s fine,” he shouted back, his voice stuttering. “We’re fine, Elise. Sorry for the noise.”
     
His neighbour hesitated, but the sound of her slippers could be heard moments later as she padded down the hall.
     
He looked at the floor. What remained of the kitchen table resembled the beginnings of a bonfire. The clock ticked steadily as he made his way back into the bedroom.
     
One look at his mother lying motionless in bed was all he could handle. He walked into her closet and closed the creaky doors behind him. It was cool and dark inside. He’d always found it comforting to curl up in a corner of the closet, although he usually took refuge in his own, not Ruby’s. He had forced himself to outgrow the habit. Men mustn’t hide from their problems. He knew that. But he allowed himself this relapse into his past behaviour. He wasn’t strong enough to resist it this time.
     
He thought he had been prepared for his mother to die. As the weeks and months had trickled by, he could almost see the life escaping through her pores. He’d remained positive for years, but the hope had drained out of him. Eventually, he knew his energy would be better spent preparing for what was to come.
     
It wasn’t enough. He’d underestimated his capacity to feel. Smashing the kitchen table had been an effective release, but he couldn’t ignore the burning in his lungs. He knew it wasn’t just grief and shock and loneliness. It was rage. He had kept it hidden inside for years. It was fed by every muttered insult, every Christmas they couldn’t afford, every time his mother embarrassed herself trying to fit in with the other townspeople. Most of all, the rage had grown whenever he saw that his mother wasn’t also consumed by it. More than anyone else, she had earned the right to be angry.
     
As he sat on the closet floor with his knees tucked against his chest, he pictured his rage and saw it had a face not so different from his own. It was the face of the man who had left them there, alone, empty-handed, in a town that would never be home.