the back row

We were going on the long bus to visit family up the coast, a whole day on the road, and the second we climbed on board I claimed the back row for my kingdom.

The back row of a long-distance bus is the best seat there is, and anybody who tells you different has never had it. It is up high. It can see the whole bus, every head, all the way to the driver. It is far from the front, where the grown-ups sit and tell you to settle down. And it is wide, the whole back bench, room for a kingdom, and I built one. I put the bags up along the sides as walls. I hung a sarong across the gap as a curtain, so the kingdom had a proper border you could not see past. I drew a map of the kingdom on a piece of paper and taped it to the back of the seat in front. Everyone would know exactly where the kingdom began, and exactly where they were not allowed to be.

The best part, the part that made the whole day, was that Ayah was coming the whole way.

Ayah works in Singapore. He crosses over for work and comes home tired, and mostly we only really get him on Fridays, for a bit, before he has to turn round and go back. We do not get whole days of Ayah. They do not come up. But this was a holiday. The bus was a whole long day on the road, and Ayah was on it the entire time, not going anywhere, not crossing back, not tired from work. Just there. Mine. For hours and hours and hours.

So, naturally, I would not let him into my kingdom.

He came up the aisle to sit in the back row with me.

"This is a kingdom now," I told him. "There is a border. And a map. And rules."

He looked at the map. He looked at the sarong curtain.

"Can the kingdom let me in," Ayah asked.

"The kingdom is full," I said.

So he sat down in the seat just in front of the border instead, on the wrong side of my curtain. Like a tired man who has learned, over many years, not to argue with a nine-year-old who is guarding a border. I had a whole day of my own father, right there, the rarest thing there is, and I spent the first hour of it keeping him out, on the other side of a sarong.

The bus filled up and rolled out, and the kingdom held, for a while. I ran it well. I issued passports, which were torn bits of the map, to citizens I approved of, which was nobody. I taxed the biscuits. I passed a law that the window was crown property and could not be looked out of without permission. Outside, the kampung went by, then the town, then the long green nothing of the road. Inside, the back row was a country, and I was running it, and it was going beautifully. Which should have been the first warning.

Halfway, the bus stopped at a roadside place for everyone to stretch and use the toilet and buy a drink in a plastic bag. I would not get off. You do not abandon a kingdom the moment its borders are unguarded. So I stayed in the back row alone, defending an empty country, while my entire family bought kuih in the sun. Ayah brought me back a drink in a bag anyway, and passed it to me over the curtain like a parcel handed across a border, and I accepted it, because a queen is allowed to accept tribute.

The kingdom did not last. Kingdoms on a bus never do.

First the baby got handed back.

"Hold the baby for two minutes," Mak called from the front.

The baby came over the border without a passport. The first thing the baby did, the very first thing, was eat the map. Ate it. The whole map of the kingdom, the borders, the no-entry zones, the little flag I had drawn, all of it, into the baby's mouth and gone. The kingdom no longer legally existed. Its only official document was now inside the baby and could not be consulted.

Then an aunty further up the bus started feeling poorly from the road, and needed to lie down.

"Let her stretch out on the back row," Mak called back.

And just like that, half my kingdom became a poorly aunty having a lie-down under a shawl. You cannot rule over a poorly aunty. You can only tuck the shawl in a bit and keep your voice down.

Then a man I did not know, a stranger uncle two rows up, fell fast asleep. Over the long hours of the road his head tipped slowly sideways, and then backwards, through the gap between the seats, until it had crossed the border and flopped right into the top corner of my kingdom. Snoring. Claiming the territory by sleep. There is no rule anywhere about how you remove a sleeping stranger's head from your kingdom, so I let him keep the corner. He had taken it fair and square, with snoring.

And Hana finished the kingdom off. Hana is my cousin, and I had made her the border guard, and she takes a rank completely seriously, so she stood guard at the border, broom-straight, hand on the bag-wall, very proud.

"What are you doing back there," Mak called from the front.

Hana cannot lie. Not even a little. Not even to save a kingdom from my own Mak. So Hana stood up and reported the whole thing in a clear, loud, honest voice. The curtain. The map. The bags as walls. The border, the no-entry zones, the lot. She announced the complete defence plan of the kingdom to the one person in the world it was being hidden from.

"Take that sarong down before somebody trips on it," said Mak.

And so the kingdom fell, in about ten seconds, the way most of my kingdoms fall: because somebody told the truth.

So by the last hour of the ride, the kingdom was gone. The map was in the baby. Half the back row was a recovering aunty. A stranger's head was asleep in the corner. The curtain was down, folded on Mak's lap up front. It was just me and Ayah now, squashed into the one window seat that was left. The great kingdom I had built to keep him out had shrunk to one seat, two people, and a packet of biscuits.

There was no kingdom left now. Only the one seat, and the two of us in it.

So I made Ayah a citizen. I gave him the window, the good seat, the one with the view of the road sliding by. I split the biscuits and gave him the bigger half, which for me is a serious act of state.

The bus came down off the main road toward the town as it got dark. The lights of the houses started coming up one by one, little warm squares all across the hillside. We watched them come on out the window together, his shoulder against the top of my head, the biscuits long gone, the family nearly there. "What will you build next time," he asked.

"Another kingdom," I said. "A bigger one."

"Will I be allowed in it," Ayah asked.

"You can be king," I said. "I will guard the border. And I will let you in straight away. No map, no curtain, no questions at all."