Mr Wong Goes West (5 page)

‘Oh hi, CF. What were you doing in the toilet roll cupboard?’

‘Meditation room. That is the meditation room.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I was meditating.’

‘Cool.’

‘Hard to meditate with loud music on.’

‘What? Oh sorry.’ She turned the volume down. ‘This is the new CD from The Rogerers. It’s called
Biscuit Dunked in Death
. Cool title, no?’

Wong was no expert on rock album names and was disinclined to offer an opinion.

‘I bought it to celebrate our new assignment.’

‘Oh.’

He pondered for a moment on whether he should try to return to his place of transcendence but he quickly dismissed the thought—it would be futile. Whether her music machine was on or off made little difference; Joyce herself was intrusive in every way—physically, aurally, visually and spiritually. Dressed in shapeless, garishly coloured clothes, and stinking of expensive perfume and bitter coffee, her arrival immediately tainted every centimetre of the office. His vision of a mountain idyll was gone, swept away as if a flood had burst into a valley and pulverised a village made of paper.

What to do? Life was hard. He owed money. He shared an office with unhelpful people. He had received no high-paying jobs for weeks. He may be knifed to death by the friends of the world’s only Indian Chinese triad in ten days’ time. This was not shaping up as one of his better months. He needed distraction. He needed something else on which to focus.

An idea struck him. From his top drawer, he pulled out his journal, deciding to spend a little time writing some notes on stories he remembered from his days in Kunlun Shan. An hour or two lost in his book might help him regain his composure. Then he noticed Joyce was still staring at him. She was restless about something. She seemed to want his attention.

‘Did you hear what I said? I bought the CD to celebrate
our new assignment
.’

Wong looked up from his tatty volume with undisguised irritation. ‘What?’

‘While. You. Were. Out,’ she said, spacing the words like a nanny speaking to a newborn, ‘on that ship this morning, someone called with an assignment. A majorly nice one. We’re going to make some dosh.’

‘Dotch? Dutch?’

‘Dosh. Moolah. Greenbacks.
Money
.’

‘Someone call with a job?’

‘Yes. Winnie was late this morning, surprise, surprise, so I took down all the details. It was such a nice one that I went out to HMV to celebrate. It’s classified as “urgent” so we can charge the express service surcharge. And the guy giving us the assignment sounded totally swanky. So I think it could be like
major
bucks. You should be happy. This is a good news day.’

Wong listened without getting excited. It was too much to hope that easy money should arrive just when he needed a massive injection of cash. The fact that something had got Joyce excited did not fill him with confidence. She sometimes got things so muddled that good news was bad and vice versa. Nevertheless, he might as well hear her out.

‘So, this assignment, easy and big bucks, is it?’

‘Not only. The guy had been given our number by the British Trade Commission. He wants us to feng shui something for them in Hong Kong on Thursday. They’ll pay the airfares and the hotel and everything—and our fees, of course. They reckon it will take between six and ten days.’

Wong, despite himself, started to become interested. The British Trade Commission sounded like a proper organisation with proper budgets. And international trips could often be profitable, if one spun out the expenses on top of the fees.

‘Thursday? This week? In Hong Kong? Better be plenty big money. I don’t have time to go to Hong Kong just for small thing.’

Joyce theatrically raised both thumbs. ‘Trust me, boss man, it’s
biiiig
money. It’s gotta be. I told him we only travelled business class and he just kept talking. Didn’t phase him at all.’

‘Business class? We don’t travel business class.’

‘I know, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.’

Wong scratched his chin. ‘Good. You tell him to give us money for business class tickets. We go economy and I keep the other money.’

‘I knew you’d say that. But can’t we go business class just this once? I’ve never been business class anywhere—well, except with my dad, but I was too young to remember.’

‘We go economy.’

‘Okay, okay.’

Wong was wondering whether he could let his hopes rise, just a little bit. Perhaps there was some potential money here? How rich was the British Trade Commission? ‘The assignment is what?’

She started rifling through her shapeless bag—a knock-off Louis Vuitton from Shenzhen—and brought out a copy of
Time
magazine. ‘It’s this,’ she said. She opened the magazine to a double-page spread showing a picture of a large passenger aircraft.

‘Airplane? We don’t do feng shui of airplanes. Airplanes are moving transports. They have no feng shui.’

‘I know. I’ve been in this game a while now, haven’t I? But we do feng shui of venues, don’t we? Listen to this. The British Trade Commission is having an important meeting on that plane and they want it to be perfect. They’re meeting reps of airlines from east Asia, mostly Chinese, and they wanna make
sure there are no protocol mistakes or cross-cultural errors. This is the most expensive aircraft in the world—that’s what this mag says, anyway.’

Now Wong was interested.
The most expensive aircraft in the world
. There had got to be a way of turning this into a big ticket assignment. People in aircraft sales are always dealing in amounts of hundreds of millions of US dollars. His humble fee of a few thousand Sing dollars would be small change for them. He could surely milk this for a good return.

‘Maybe we make exception and do feng shui reading of this aircraft for them,’ he said generously.

‘That’s exactly what I told the guy.’ Joyce read out a paragraph from the magazine. ‘Listen to this: “The British party, which includes several members of the aristocracy, is flying in and out of Hong Kong on a specially adapted A380 called Skyparc, which they like to describe as a flying business park, ‘Your office above the clouds’. The meeting is not only an aircraft sales presentation, but the launch of what the chief executive of Skyparc, Sir Nicholas Handey, calls ‘a new vision of flying’. Instead of the usual rows of seats, the plane has a network of multi-use spaces, including lounges, conference rooms, a theatre, two restaurants, a bar and a coffee shop. The event is combined with the launch by MB Dutch Petrochem of a new ‘green’ aviation fuel, which, the company claims, significantly lowers the carbon footprint of the traditional passenger aircraft.’’’

Wong leaned back in his chair and considered the prospect. It had potential. But still, it was only an aircraft, which was a single, rather cramped tube. How could it be spun out into a high-earning assignment? ‘Just one aircraft? Get it ready for just one meeting? Will not take six to ten days.’

‘They want us to feng shui the aircraft before the meeting
in Hong Kong. And then they want us to go with them in it on a journey to London.’

‘Go to London?
Aiyeeah
, no, no, no, cannot go to London. Too far. Too busy.’

‘What busy? We got no work. Besides, London’s not far. Just thirteen hours from Hong Kong.’

The feng shui master pulled a face. ‘Full of foreigner.’

‘Well, I guess it is full of Londoners. It would be kind of hard for it not to be. But there are apparently some
major
cheeses on the plane. Aristocrats. They want you…um…us to go with them and feng shui their places in London.’

Wong considered this. ‘So rich Londoners want me to do readings of their apartments?’

‘Not apartments. People in Britain don’t live in apartments. Houses. And mansions. And
castles
and things.’

Castles sounded good. One could charge a lot for a castle. Castles must have lots of rooms. Wong rose to his feet: ‘You call man back. Make arrangements. We go tomorrow afternoon to Hong Kong. Book two economy class airfares. Tell man we invoice him for two business class airfare. Also, he pay for hotel, et cetera. I’m going out. I will start work on invoice when I get back.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to the Ah Fat’s. Get some lunch.’

He did not want to show too much enthusiasm for Joyce’s news, but inside he was feeling distinctly excited. Daswani wanted his money in ten days. A big assignment lasting six or seven days, plus travel expenses—it might just fit the bill perfectly. Indeed, it was possible that today’s bad luck was evaporating and a period of good fortune was coming his way.

As he trotted down the stairs of his office block, he reflected on the downside of the deal: going to London. He dreaded
the idea of going to the Western world—everything he had seen of Western culture had been repulsive. The people were annoying, the culture baffling, the values shocking, and the food inedible. If he was going to have to deal with revolting Western meals for several days in a row, he would need to be well fortified.

And that meant as many visits to Ah Fat’s Kopi House as could be squeezed into the allotted time.

Rice was God’s comfort food. There was nothing like the taste of a piece of soft, curried potato, pressed gently with the fingertips into a ball of rice. Somehow, the creamy appeal of the spiced potato combined with the comforting taste of the white rice produced an incomparably satisfying mouthful. And then balance the hand-fashioned rice-potato ball on a piece of poppadum, add a touch of mango chutney, and toss the whole construction into one’s mouth…Joyce referred to Asian food in general as ‘carbo heaven’. Paradise it was.

Of course, eating with one’s fingers did not come naturally to Wong; it simply wasn’t a Chinese thing, too unrefined and indelicate. But many hours of observation of the enthusiastic dining habits of his friend Dilip Kenneth Sinha had persuaded him to adopt some south Asian techniques.

Wong was powering into a mammoth, lip-blisteringly hot curry lunch when Dilip Kenneth Sinha arrived. The feng shui master greeted his friend with a flash of his eyes, his mouth being too full to use for speech.

‘Aha. Practising the use of digital dining.’ The angular, black-dressed Indian astrologer clearly approved. ‘Far superior
to the use of chopsticks and inestimably better than the use of forks and knives.’

Sinha had a habit of philosophising for some minutes about any scene in which he found himself before actually becoming a participant in it. He thus sort of eased himself gently into situations with a sort of introductory lecture.

‘It truly astonishes me that the gourmand around the world takes inordinate care about his drinking utensils, but almost no care at all about the tools with which he takes solid food. I mean, think about it. There has been much written for decades, if not centuries, about the importance of using a good china cup for one’s tea. And there are entire books written about how slight alterations in the precise curve of a wineglass can alter the taste of the wine therein. Yet these same people, who take so much care over their drinking vessels, will taint every mouthful of food they eat throughout their long lifetimes with the taste of cold, hard metal—and never notice. For someone brought up in the south Asian tradition of dining with the fingertips, the addition of the taste of steel to curry is a tragedy. The Chinese habit of using wood or bamboo chopsticks is hardly better. Indeed, a significant number of chopsticks carry splinters, so that the wood not only spoils the taste of the food but actually adds itself to it. And then there are lacquer chopsticks, with their inherent chemical dangers.’

As he spoke, he lowered himself onto a stool and felt inside his pockets. He pulled out an antiseptic wipe, which he used to carefully rub his fingers, and then he flexed his fingers in the warm, midday air to dry, before wiping them with a silk handkerchief from another pocket. At last, after a short period of silence to mentally prepare his oesophagus and stomach for what they were about to receive, he was ready to eat.

Sinha surveyed the dishes in front of him: white potato curry, siya fish, brinjal, daal and several other garishly coloured dishes, some of which appeared to be glowing radioactively. ‘Hmm. I see you are feeling entirely south Asian today, Wong. What gives? In need of spice in your life?’

‘Spicy food clears my head,’ the feng shui master replied. ‘Need to think about lots of things.’

He may have had much on his mind, but he did not share any of it immediately with his friend and fellow member of the Singapore Union of Industrial Mystics. For both of them, eating was a serious business, and the activity did not benefit from frivolous distractions such as conversation. Both concentrated fully on the task ahead of them: to empty the dishes on the table in the shortest possible order with maximum possible pleasure. Talk could come later.

Less than five minutes had passed before Joyce McQuinnie arrived at Ah Fat’s with her news literally bursting out of her: ‘CF! CF. Just wait till you hear this. I called the guy back about the Hong Kong trip. Just
wait
until you hear this.’