School portraits / September deadline to January offer, in a serviced apartment
The Flat They Didn’t Rent
A dual-campus application, two ends of an island, and a family that refused to sign a lease until January.
Daniel Okafor applied to UWCSEA in September for the following August, which is when the college opens its pool, and by October he was living in a serviced apartment in Tanjong Pagar with his wife, two daughters and no furniture. This was deliberate. UWCSEA has two campuses: Dover, in the west, and East, in Tampines, on the far side of Singapore. Daniel had paid for a dual-campus application, which costs twice as much as one, and he reasoned that until he knew which campus had said yes, he could not know where to live. You could apply to Dover, or East, or both, but you could not live halfway between them, because halfway between them was the Central Business District.
His wife, Chiamaka, had read that applicants go into a pool and that applying first did not get you an earlier offer, and had concluded, correctly, that there was nothing to do until January but wait. Daniel does not wait. He made a map. He drove to Dover Road on a Tuesday at seven in the morning and timed it. He drove to Tampines Street 73 the next Tuesday and timed that. He visited condominiums in Clementi and in Pasir Ris and told the agents at both that he was “keeping his options open,” which the agent in Pasir Ris, a cheerful woman called Mrs Tan, heard as “not buying,” and was right.
The daughters, Adaora and Nneka, nine and six, treated the serviced apartment as a hotel, which it was, and the breakfast buffet as a human right, which it became. Chiamaka learned that you can live four months out of three suitcases if you accept wearing the same four outfits in a rotation your children can predict. The first-round deadline passed on the second of November. Daniel marked it in the calendar as though it were a birthday.
By December the strain was showing in his maps. He had six, colour-coded, with bus routes from a parent forum he could not verify. Chiamaka suggested, gently, that they could simply rent in the middle and bus the children whichever way turned out to be necessary. Daniel said that the middle was the CBD and that nobody raised children in the CBD. Chiamaka pointed out that they were, at that moment, raising two children in the CBD, on a diet of hotel croissants. Daniel went to look at a condominium in Bukit Timah, which was on nobody’s map.
The email came in the second week of January. Both girls had been offered places. At East. Daniel read it standing up, in the serviced apartment, with a map of Clementi open on the table, and said, after a long pause, “Pasir Ris, then.” Chiamaka said yes. Then she said she had something to tell him.
She had been back to Mrs Tan in November. Twice. She had found a flat near the park, three stops from the campus, with a room each for the girls and a view of a tree, and she had told Mrs Tan that her husband was keeping his options open and that she was not. Mrs Tan had held it for her, on a handshake and a plate of pineapple tarts, since the week after the first-round deadline. The lease was in Chiamaka’s email, and all it needed was Daniel’s signature and the date.
He signed it. He asked only one question, which was how she had known it would be East. She said she hadn’t, and that if it had been Dover she would have told him she had found a lovely place in Clementi.