Mr Wong Goes West (2 page)

Everything felt right. Borrowing the shipboard cabin from a rich client had been a masterstroke. And once he was sure of having a location at which major environmental factors were in balance, prosaic, smaller-scale matters, such as the furniture and space design, had been relatively easy to deal with. As he happily surveyed the balanced little kingdom he had created, he sighed with satisfaction—and then felt a slight creak under his feet.

It barely registered in his consciousness, until it was followed by a second, longer structural groan ten seconds later. What was that? Then, a slight unsteadiness crept up his body. He felt his weight shift involuntarily.

It could only mean one thing. The ship was moving.

How could this be? It was supposed to have docked for the entire day—for the next two days, in fact. Were the others even on board yet?

This must not happen: no, no,
no
.

Panicking, he raced out of the cabin and hared down a narrow corridor to the other side of the ship, to an open area where the liner abutted the dockside. Grabbing the railings, he leaned dangerously far over the edge, trying to find the mooring points. Men in kiddie-blue sailor suits could be seen unhooking thick cables of rope. And halfway down the length of the ship, the gangplank—a rather ornate covered walkway—was being wheeled away. He could hear the engines churning the water. The ship had already started to edge away from the land. Were his buyer and his contractor on board? They should have arrived several minutes ago. Or were they running late? Why was the damned-to-seventh-hell boat leaving? Would they have to wait until the boat docked again? What would happen to his all-important deal? This must not
be
!

Wong raced along the deck, half-ran, half-stumbled down a metal staircase and scrambled along narrow passages towards the sailors undoing the ropes. Luckily, he had a good sense of direction and had managed to navigate the corridors efficiently, reaching the men unhooking the mooring ropes before they had completed their jobs.

‘No, wait, stop,’ he shouted in English, and then repeated his words in Chinese.

The sailors, intent on their tasks, did not even glance at him.

‘Stop,’ Wong repeated, and then violently grabbed a cable, yanking it out of a sailor’s hand.

The man was shocked. ‘Hey! What? What do you want?’

‘Must not go. Very important.’

Gathering all his strength, the feng shui master heaved a portion of the cable over the side, where it managed to hook back on to the black iron mooring pillar, more by luck than skill.

‘You’re crazy,’ said the sailor. His comrades turned to stare.

Wong shook his head. ‘Must stay. Very important.’ Having hooked the mooring pillar, he pulled at the six-inch thick cable in a bid to halt or reverse the ship’s outward drift.

The sailor, a wrinkled, sun-roasted man of about fifty, moved in to retrieve the cable. Wong kicked out at him, trying to keep him back.

The sailor stepped back and grinned. ‘Go on then. Go right ahead,’ he said. ‘Crazy idiot.’

More sailors turned to watch the spectacle, and several laughed out loud as Wong stuck his shoes against the railing to give himself purchase. He pulled with all his strength.

The cruiser continued to move away from the dockside.

‘
Aiyeeaah
,’ Wong squealled, as he felt the rope pull away from him. He repositioned himself so that one of his feet was on the top railing and he was leaning back at an almost horizontal angle.

The vessel continued to move away.

The sailors started to call out to comrades to come and watch. Passers-by joined the audience. Within seconds, a small crowd had gathered to watch the remarkable sight of a tiny, skeletal man weighing fifty-three kilograms doing battle with a ship that weighed forty-seven thousand, two hundred and sixty-five tons.

As Wong battled to keep the ship close to shore, his audience’s faces betrayed shifting emotions: irritation gave way to amazement, and finally to admiration.

‘He’ll get dragged off the ship,’ one of the sailors said.

‘Hope so,’ came the reply.

As Wong strained against the rope, a musical chord blasted itself through a public address system, and it was repeated twice more. It was followed by a silky voice, which echoed off
the hard surfaces throughout the ship. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Princess Charisma Cruises welcomes you on board the
Princess Starlight Charisma
. The ship is slightly adjusting its position. It will re-dock again very shortly. You will not be able to disembark for the next twenty minutes. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.’

The engines roared more loudly, the water churned faster, and the ship picked up speed in its drift away from the dockside.

The rope started to move quickly and Wong was suddenly pitched over the railing—until he was grabbed by his trousers by two sailors and a passenger. Trying not to laugh, they placed the furious man on the deck where he angrily slapped their hands off.

‘This is inconvenient,’ he thundered. He looked at his hands, which were bright red and sore from rope burns.

‘It’s no problem, old man,’ a young sailor said. ‘We’re not going anywhere. The ship is just going to another berth around the corner. Some bigwig on board is having a party for visiting delegates from some African country and wants a better view from his suite. So we’re just moving for him. It’ll dock again in a few minutes.’

‘Where?’

‘Over there.’ He pointed to a part of the harbour that curved away from the open sea.

‘Devils from the seventh layer of hell,’ Wong cursed. The line of the harbour turned outward at that point. That would leave his balcony with a northwest energy line. This was disastrous. This was tragic. This was catastrophic.

‘If you are worried about people missing the boat, you needn’t be,’ a staff member said, waving a clipboard. ‘Almost everyone on the list is on board.’

Wong turned to face him. ‘I have two guest coming. One is a rich
gwai poh
businesswoman.’

‘Tall? Yellow hair? Designer clothes? She came on board just before we left,’ the man said.

Aiyeeah
. She was here already! Maybe waiting at his room door. Wondering where he was. Wong raced off without a word—back down the same corridors, up the same steps, through the same narrow passages, running to get back to the room before his client arrived and found it empty.

Seconds later, he arrived breathless at First Class Cabin 472 to see a tall European businesswoman with red-gold hair standing outside.

‘Mr Wong! How nice to see you again,’ she purred.

‘Yes, yes, very nice,’ he said and used the card key to let the two of them into the room. Although she gave him a large, toothpaste-advertisement smile, her eyes darted around the cabin, suggesting she was as nervous about the meeting as he was. ‘Unusual place to meet, on a ship. What a lovely idea.’

She was abnormally tall, and in an apparent gesture to show that she was quite content about having to view life from such a high elevation, was wearing high heels.

‘Good feng shui,’ the geomancer replied. ‘Nice to see you, Ms Crumley. Very happy you can come on board before the ship start moving.’

‘Yes. I wasn’t expecting it to suddenly start drifting off like that.’

‘Me also,’ he growled.

‘The staff told me that the ship was just adjusting its position and would dock again in a few minutes. Is Mr Daswani here? I hope he made it on board before they, er, rolled up the drawbridge, or whatever you call that bridge-stairs thing.’

‘Coming, coming, very soon, already on board, I think,
I hope, I think, yes, for sure, no doubt, maybe,’ Wong said, wringing his hands together. ‘Come, sit on the balcony please, very nice, very comfortable.’

He ushered her onto the terrace, where they both slipped into rattan seats. He poured her a glass of coconut water. Wong prayed for his contractor, Arun Asif Iqbal Daswani (‘The Only Known Indian Member of the Chinese Mafia’), to arrive soon, terrifyingly aware of his lack of skill in conducting small talk in English. The geomancer sat on the edge of the chair, smoothing down his suit—a grey mandarin-collared outfit made for him by his tailor, Mr Tommy of Wan Chai, when he had been six years younger and two kilograms lighter.

Ms Crumley, who was wearing a light grey, stretch-cotton, ruffle-trimmed, belted lightweight coat (purchased last week, $1,200 on sale at Prada), gazed over the balcony at the scene in front of her. Although the suite now faced towards the city instead of the estuary opening, it was still a dazzling sight.

‘Well,’ she said, waiting for her host to come out with some standard pleasantries.

‘Well,’ Wong replied nervously, unsure of how to proceed. ‘Ha ha.’

The conversation showed signs of running out of steam at that point.

A buzzer sounded. Saved by the doorbell.

Wong stood, bowed, and raced for the door. Moments later, Daswani surged onto the balcony, his robes flapping around him damply. He was a large man given to wearing sheikh-like robes, into which he had had numerous pockets tailored.

‘Sorry-sorry-sorry to keep you waiting. Comfortable you are, is it?’

The newcomer flopped down into his chair so heavily that the rattan gave a moan and sank several centimetres lower, its
legs spreading. He grabbed Wong’s glass of coconut juice and swallowed it in a single draught.

‘Wah! Never been so thirsty in all my life. Now, how are we, Miss Crum-bly?’

‘That’s Crumley. You can call me Cecily. It’s actually Cecily-Mary—good Catholic girl, you know.’

‘Ah, interesting,’ said Daswani. ‘I am Sindhi.’

‘Cindy?’

‘Yes.’ He looked at the surprised expression on her face and added: ‘Do you know many Sindhis?’

‘No. You don’t look like a…Cindy.’

‘Really,’ said Daswani in a tone of surprise. ‘What do Sindhis normally look like?’

‘I don’t know. I just…I used to have a Cindy doll when I was a child. Small blond thing, skinny as a twig.’

Although Wong thought he could speak English, the logic of conversations in that language regularly foxed him. Where on earth had Ms Crumley encountered Sindhis who were small, blond and skinny as twigs? There were none in Asia, that was certain. Would Arun Daswani be insulted at this? He’d better say something, to set things right.

‘In this part of the world, Sindhis are big fat men, not many blonds,’ he said. ‘Like Mr Daswani. Very fat.’

‘This fat is all muscle,’ Daswani said, patting his pot belly. ‘From all the digesting.’

Crumley chuckled at this, a tinkly, well-rehearsed laugh. But neither of the others did, so she stopped abruptly.

‘Come,’ said the Sindhi businessman. ‘Let’s get down to business, shall we?’

Wong swallowed hard. This was it. He suddenly felt hot, despite the cool breeze. This was a key moment in his life; this was the deal that was going to launch him on a new career.
The fifty-seven-year-old geomancer, chief staff member of CF Wong and Associates, a feng shui consultancy, had set up a side business called Harmoney, the idea being to parlay his skill in creating harmonious places, with all elements in a positive balance, to setting up harmonious business deals. This was his first venture.

Ms Crumley was the buyer for a major European office supplies company. The group she represented, OffBox, was graduating from product distribution to own-label manufacturing. It had come to Singapore because the city–state boasted that it could produce goods with Western standards of quality at Asian prices. OffBox was launching a line of desk goods, starting with highlighters that looked like small fruit.

She glanced behind Daswani, as if to see if he was somehow trailing the promised goods behind him. ‘Where are the…er?’

He gave her an unctuous grin. ‘The consignment is downstairs, on the dockside, in a truck, parked nearby. It will be shipped to the provided address as soon as the final part of the required paperwork is done.’

Wong gulped again and a tremor of excitement raced through his body. He knew that ‘paperwork’ in this instance referred to the climactic part of the business jigsaw: payment.

‘Cheque should be made out to Harmoney Private Limited,’ the feng shui master put in. ‘Harmoney with a “e”. Like “Har” and “money”.’

‘Of course. Have you got samples? I need to check the quality one last time. Just a formality, of course, at this stage.’

‘Of course,’ said Daswani, producing a box from one of the folds of his robes. ‘You can check as many times as you like.’

He placed on the table a white cardboard box emblazoned with the words: ‘Highlighters: Banana’; and deftly tore it open. Lifting out a small plastic banana, he brandished it elegantly.
‘This box contains twelve pieces of banana design. In total we have fifteen thousand packages, twelve units each, four different fruity designs, making one hundred and eighty thousand units in total. All at quality and prices unbeatable anywhere else on the planet.’

Cecily Crumley smiled, comforted by seeing the product. ‘It looks fine,’ she said. ‘So I guess I just need to hand this over, then.’ She started fishing in her expensive-looking, but politically correct, faux-leather briefcase for the plastic file containing the cheque.

Wong stood up and waved at Daswani to rise to his feet. He had been told by a businessman friend that that was the right thing to do to show respect when payment was being made—and to acknowledge that the meeting had come to its climactic moment.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ she said. ‘No need to stand on ceremony.’ She handed Wong a white envelope, which he immediately started to tear open. He needed to make absolutely sure there was no chance of error.

She turned to Daswani. ‘By the way, Cindy, how did you solve the ink problem?’

Wong paused, his finger deep inside the half-ripped envelope. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Ink problem?’

Daswani, smiling just a little too much, said: ‘I told Ms Crumley a couple of weeks ago that we had temporary trouble sourcing fluorescent yellow ink.’

She nodded. ‘So you did a different colour first?’

‘Right. And we’ll get the yellow ones to you before you know it.’