The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (9 page)

She gazed at the full lips from which those words emerged, and her eyes lazily travelled down to his jutting chin. ‘Yeah, it really does!’ she breathed. Then she realised that the sunny smile firmly attached to the front of her face was entirely unsuited to the conversation. She abruptly wiped it from her face. ‘It really, really stinks, like
totally
!’ As soon as the words left her mouth, she cringed so deeply that her eyes momentarily closed. Where had her
brain
gone?

It had been an interesting morning. Immediately after she’d learned that Jimmy was no longer going to be working at The Players’ club, she had found an excuse to go back to the gym office, where he was packing a pitifully small number of possessions into a box.

Astonishing herself with her gall, she thanked him for showing her the way to the fitness room that morning, announced that she didn’t know a soul in Perth, and theatrically shared her bafflement about where she should have lunch.

The personal trainer appeared to be in a daze, but had picked up the signal and quickly agreed to show her the local cafés. He arranged to meet her at the corner of the street at 12:30. Thus, two hours after first meeting, they found themselves in Bev’s Snags and Sarnies sipping cappuccinos and dipping French fries into mayo and sweet chilli sauce.

Her eyes scanned the coffee shop, as she became increasingly desperate to make some sort of comment worthy of an intelligent young woman. ‘These coffee shops are like, really totally amazing. I mean, a couple of years ago, there weren’t any, and now they’re all over the place.’

‘Do you have them in China?’

‘Singapore. I’m from Singapore.’

‘Oh yeah, right. So do you speak Japanese?’

‘No. In Singapore people speak English mostly. They don’t speak Japanese there.’

‘Really? Weird.’

‘Yeah. Did you know it’s shorter to go from Singapore to Perth than to go from Perth to Sydney?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh. I guess it’s ’cause of the curvature of the earth.’

‘I guess. Or daylight saving time.’

There was a lengthening moment of silence that grew and threatened to become awkward. The chatter of people having more successful conversations at tables neighbouring theirs became problematic. They needed to be drowned out.

Joyce and Jimmy tried to fill the space at the same time.

‘D’you —’

‘How’d —’

Both stopped. Then both spoke together again:

‘You fir —’

‘Go o —’

They both halted. This time they laughed.

‘You first,’ chuckled Joyce.

‘Can’t remember what I was gonna say,’ grinned the personal trainer. ‘Oh yeah, I know. How do they learn English in Singapore? Is it through all the video games like Nintendo and Playstation and that?’

‘I don’t know. Probably. But I thought Nintendo and that stuff was Japanese?’

‘Oh,’ said Jimmy. ‘Yeah, maybe. But I thought you said they didn’t speak Japanese?’

‘No. Well, I suppose some do. I don’t speak Japanese. That’s what I meant.’

‘Me neither.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Yeah. It means we got something in common. That’s very important in a —.’ He looked away, suddenly embarrassed to have almost said the word ‘friendship’.

Joyce was equally alarmed by the near-use of the word ‘friendship’. The word was closely associated with the word ‘relationship’. An instant friendship and/or relationship was precisely what she wanted from Jimmy Wegner, age twenty-three, unemployed personal trainer, of Perth. Yet she knew that the cast-iron, number-one, golden rule of dating said that at no stage of a developing relationship should either party ever admit that a relationship was developing, or that either party was remotely hopeful that a relationship might develop. To do such a thing would be to immediately forfeit all chance of a relationship developing. She didn’t know why this should be so, nor who wrote these rules. But she felt instinctively that all human beings acquired knowledge of these rules in their teens by osmosis. They were built into the genetic programming of adolescents, and would just appear, like armpit hair and zits. They must be taken seriously.

‘Er, what movies do you like?’ asked Joyce, wanting to move the discussion on to safer topics.

Jimmy smiled, grateful to her for rescuing the discussion. He wrinkled his stubbly Clark Kent jaw as he considered this. ‘Tough one,’ he said. ‘All of them, I guess.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Joyce said.

There was another pause in the conversation, but the young woman did not want this conversational gambit to fail—it was usually a fertile one, and could often keep small talk going for hours. So she reinforced it with a bit of detail.

‘What I mean is, I like most movies, except for ones with Kevin Costner in them. And Tom Cruise. And I just hate Alicia Silverstone. And Jennifer Love Hewitt. I don’t really like movies at all, really. I prefer books. Much more intelligent don’t you think? I read all the time!’

‘Yeah. I suppose so. Movies stink. I’ll tell you what I like much better than movies.’

‘What’s that?’

‘DVDs.’

‘I so totally agree with you.’

‘They’re cool.’

‘Like totally.’

‘How you can change the language into some language you don’t understand and watch the whole movie in that language? And how Tom Cruise is talking in a squeaky voice in like Polish or Irish or African or, or, or Singaporean?’

‘You do that? I do that. Movies are
way
better that way.’

‘Yeah. You can understand them better.’

‘Totally.’

‘Strange, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’

There was another gap and Joyce wondered whether the topic was threatening to run out of steam. She looked for another subject. ‘So what music do you like?’

Jimmy turned to look her squarely in the eye. ‘I
hate
music. Music reminds me of . . . death.’

Joyce nodded furiously, although she couldn’t see the connection. ‘Oh! Right. I suppose it does, if you look at it that way! I mean they have music at funer —’

‘There was music playing when that guy died last week, you see.’

‘Oh yeah? Anything good?’

‘I thought it was good at the time.
You Die 4 Me
by The Booger That Ate the World?’

‘Cool.’

‘But ever since the guy died, I haven’t been able to listen to it. It reminds me of death. It’s terrible.’

‘Yeah, I can imagine, it would be.’

‘I mean, I lost my job, I lost my career,
and
I lost my favourite music. I mean, what else is there? Geez.’

Joyce thought about this. The right answer would be: Your friends. But that would be skirting dangerously close back to the ‘R’ word, which was best avoided. So she decided to take a different tack.

‘You may have lost your job, but you haven’t lost your career. You can get another job, can’t you? There’s loadsa gyms in Sydney, isn’t there?’

He shook his head morosely. ‘Not for me. I’m unemployable. Totally.’

‘Why? It wasn’t your fault. I bet people have died in gyms before. Was the guy very old?’

‘Fifty.’

‘Well that proves it. He just died of old age! Practically everyone dies when they get that old. It’s, it’s,
biological.
’

‘That’s what I think. But they keep hinting that I, like, worked him too hard. They were making out that it was my fault. Like I killed him. Old Boa Constrictor said that I was lucky I wasn’t charged with like
murder
or something.’

‘Who?’

‘My boss. My former boss.’

‘That is
so
mean! That’s slander and libel. You could sue him.’

‘Yeah. I should.’

‘Yeah. You really should.’

Another pause.

‘Can’t you go and work at some other club or some hotel or something?’

‘Naah,’ Jimmy replied. ‘You see, if one person dies during a training session at a gym, it looks pretty bad for the trainer. But if
two
people die . . . well, that’s serious business. It makes people think it’s the trainer’s fault.’

‘But only one person died.’

He shook his head and turned to face her. ‘Naah. I worked before at the Millennium Centre Hotel. Some old woman popped it during a training session then, about six months ago. Old de Boer hired me for his club three months ago. And now one of
his
clients has popped it. It looks like the problem isn’t the old codgers. It’s me. I’m cursed. That’s what it is.’

Joyce realised that these sombre memories were badly derailing the happy, light tone that she desperately needed this first lunch date to have. She determined to steer the conversation back to more cheery waters.

‘So what DVDs do you like?’

‘Dunno. All of them. Tom Cruise.’

‘Me too. I
love
Tom Cruise.’

Wong trotted up the stairs. Why no elevator? When he arrived at the doorway to the Millennium Health Centre, he saw a set of lift doors to his right and realised that there was an elevator, but it ran up the opposite side of the building. He made a mental note to enter through the east wing of the hotel on his next visit—if there was a next visit.

He was on a mission. On returning to The Players after lunch, Joyce had excitedly related bits of her lunch conversation.

Wong had spotted a business opportunity. The club was part-owned by one of Mr Pun’s board members, so Wong would only get his standard retainer for the two days’ work clearing away invisible repercussions of the man who had exercised himself to death. But if Wegner’s previous workplace, the Millennium Health Centre, had also suffered a death recently, he could very easily do some perfunctory readings, re-edit and re-present the work he had already done, and double his money.

So he had raced to a telephone and quickly made an appointment to see the manager of the facility, a woman named Dominique Alegre. He agreed to meet her at four o’clock that afternoon. To sneak out during a period when he was being paid by one client to try to set up some work with another client—well, it had a feeling of financial impropriety that thrilled Wong. Getting one client to cover billable hours during which he signed up other clients—
that
was the only way a self-respecting independent businessman should run an operation.

At the Millennium Health Centre, he found loud, echoing music coming from a frosted-glass-walled room and he could see colourful shapes moving inside. It sounded more like a nightclub than a health facility. He swung the glass door open, took a step inside and then froze.

‘Sorry-sorry!’ he said. The room, it seemed to him, was full of women in their undergarments. He abruptly started to back out.

‘Come in, Monsieur Wong,’ the jack-jumping woman at the front shouted over the top of the music. ‘We’ll be finished ’ere in exactly twelff minoots. Grab a seat. Or join in, if you feel lack.’

The
feng shui
master gingerly entered the shaking, noise-filled room, gluing his back to the wall. Eyes down, he shuffled as discreetly as he could along one side of the gym where he found a cluster of seats, a bowl of fruit and some magazines.

Instead of instruments and singing, the music consisted largely of room-shaking bass notes, stuttering drum beats and a shrieking asexual voice half-talking, half-singing:

Push it

Push it

Push it

Push it

Git the fever git the fever git the fever git the fever

Come on down ya

Come on down ya

Come on down ya

The woman leading the dance, or whatever it was, continued to shout over the top of the pounding, jarring music. ‘Knee-raise treeples, one last time, to ze right and back and back and back, to ze left and back and back and back. And repeat. And again. And one . . . last . . . time . . . And now we are going to take ze temperature down a leetle.’

The leader, a tall brown-haired woman who was dressed in a purple skintight outfit with a black bikini over it, turned around and fiddled with the controls on a music system. The jarring music disappeared and something more contemplative started to play.

Over the sound of electric piano chords, another female voice began to whimper:

Oooh, oh whoa yeah

Ooooh, whoa-whoa

You are the angel of my dreams

I loved you sight unseen

But now you
’
ve gone away

I need you more each day

Oooh, I
’
m your stalker babe, you better know it

I’m your stalker babe, not scared to show it

I
’
m your stalker babe, I
’
m gonna grow it

I
’
m stalkin
’
you, to-niiiiiiiiiiiight yeah yeah yeah

whoa-oooh

The twenty or so women in the room immediately trotted over to the opposite side of the hall where each of them grabbed a thin, plastic blue mattress. They each found a space on the floor and lay down, like three-year-old children ready for an after-milk nap.

Wong watched fascinated until the women started lifting each leg up in turn. Suddenly he was faced with a forest of lycra-clad thighs and buttocks. This was much too indecent a display for him to watch. He hurriedly turned his chair so his back was to the aerobics class. Then he opened a magazine at random and buried his face in it. Unfortunately, the magazine—something called
Shape—
was full of pictures of underdressed young ladies, so was almost equally embarrassing. He eventually found a page of photographs of protein milkshakes, and read the recipe over and over again until the session came to an end.