The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (9 page)

The queue moved forward again and the group found themselves at the door.

The bouncer, a large man of Chinese origin wearing a badge that said ‘Commissionaire-In-Chief ’, peered at Wong with puzzlement. ‘Who’s he?’ he barked at Joyce, whom he apparently knew. The geomancer realised that he did not fit the image of the people who normally entered this club. He wondered whether he should retreat before he was humiliatingly refused entry.

‘My banker,’ Joyce told him. ‘My ticket. My sugar daddy.

He’s loaded.’

The bouncer looked Wong up and down. ‘Loaded?’ he asked, suspiciously.

‘Check out the clothes,’ said the young creature who had told Wong to watch someone. ‘Would he dress that slack if he wasn’t?’

The bouncer looked at the feng shui man’s shabby Chinese suit, threadbare shawl and well-worn shoes. He nodded.

‘Okay-okay,’ he said. He nodded his head sharply to one side, and barked to a Malay woman with tea-coloured hair at a table on the other side of the curtain: ‘In. Four.’

As they entered the darkness, Wong turned with amazement to Joyce: ‘You tell him I am your father?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Sugar daddy. That’s like a rich old guy who likes to hang out with, er, younger people. We call ’em bankers or tickets.’

‘Complete bankers,’ said the small creature.

‘When we’re feeling polite,’ interjected spiky head with a laugh.

‘Ah,’ said Wong, thinking. ‘You mean—’ ‘
Haam-sup lo,
’ put in the small creature in the underwear.

‘I see,’ said the feng shui master again, shocked at being presented as a dirty old man.

He opened his mouth to ask a question, but at that moment, they entered the main room of the nightclub and the loudest sounds he had ever heard caused him to clap his hands tightly to his ears as his eyes tried desperately to acclimatise themselves to an eerie, red-tinted darkness.

They threaded their way through packed, sweaty bodies. Wong desperately grabbed a scarf-like piece of material that swept from Joyce’s shoulders so that he didn’t lose her. His intern was so unrecognisable in her off-duty guise that he knew he would never locate her again in this place, even if he were standing next to her.

And the noise! How on earth could anyone think of this as a place to meet and chat with friends? ‘Aiyeeaah,’ he said— or thought he said. The music was so loud that he couldn’t hear the sounds coming out of his own mouth, let alone anyone else’s. And surely music at this level would cause immediate and permanent deafness? How could these people stand it?

The noise momentarily took him back to an occasion when he was a teenager, helping his uncle unload shipments of rice from a tramp steamer at the docks in Guangzhou. He had been balancing precariously on the side of the ship, throwing sacks down to his uncle, when a cousin of his had mischievously sounded the ship’s foghorn. The blast had been so loud that Wong had thought the world had ended. It had thrown him off balance, causing him to fall forwards off the ship. He had landed half on his uncle and half on the pile of sacks beside him. The uncle cursed both young men, having cracked a rib. Wong had hurt his left hand, with which he had broken his fall, but had gone straight back to work to prevent his cousin getting into trouble. But that terrifying sound had been a single, deafening blast. In this bar, the noise was just as loud, yet it was continuous.

He felt himself being manhandled into a small, dark room. The door shut behind them. The room was partially soundproofed, so it was suddenly possible to talk, although the thudding music outside continued to surge through the floor and walls.

‘More quiet,’ he said. ‘Better.’

‘This is the karaoke room,’ said Joyce.

‘We call it the snogging room,’ sniggered one of the creatures accompanying her.

‘He won’t know what that means,’ said another.

‘Pashing,’ explained a third.

‘Makin’ out,’ translated a fourth.

‘
Yee-yee yup-yup
,’ said a fifth.

‘Oh,’ said Wong, none the wiser.

‘But karaoke’s
so
out these days. The room’s good for like talking?’ Joyce put in.

‘Out there, you can hardly hear yourself fink,’ said someone.

‘Yes,’ the feng shui master agreed.

‘Wait here, please,’ Joyce continued. ‘I’ll get him for you.

Wanna drink?’

‘Er,
ching cha,
’ said Wong. ‘
Bo leih.

’ Joyce looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t think they have Chinese tea. I’ll ask.’ She slipped out, a roar of drums surging into the room like a dragon as she opened the door.

Wong slowly shook his head. How could a Chinese drinking venue full of Chinese customers in a Chinese city not have any tea? The new Singapore baffled and discomfited him. It was not his planet.

The feng shui master had agreed to meet his intern at this bar because she had demanded he meet a denizen of the club scene whom she insisted had some useful information that would help Wong in one of his investigations. But what could any of these wild-eyed, androgynous young people have to do with his quiet world of offices and homes and floor plans? He sighed. She fouled up his days often enough—why did she have to waste his evenings as well?

Joyce was thoughtful as she queued impatiently at the bar to order drinks. Although she was happy enough when she was spending time with the group of friends she had acquired in Singapore—all of whom were borrowed from her flatmate Ling—Wong’s presence in the nightclub had reminded her of how she spent most of her days feeling like an alien. She could achieve a reasonable degree of intimate communication within Ling’s little teenage clique. But she knew that most of the people in the city that she was trying to call home were more like Wong: quiet, intense Chinese adults who drank absurdly watery tea, talked in incomprehensible non sequiturs and thought about business all the time.

Catching the bartender’s eye, she barked out: ‘Do you have Chinese tea?’

‘What? No,’ he shouted back.

She frowned. Sometimes it felt like everything here was a problem. But then she recalled that she had felt the same when she had lived in Hong Kong. She decided she was rootless—not just in Singapore, but on the planet as a whole.

Joyce assumed that her feeling of not being able to fit anywhere was a direct result of her having inherited the restless nature of her father Martin McQuinnie, a 53-year-old property developer. Born in Brisbane, he had expanded his business to Sydney and then London, where he had married Alison Smart, a regional television presenter from Nottingham. They had their first child, Molly, two years later. After another two-year gap, Joyce was born, first drawing breath at St Luke’s, London, a little under eighteen years ago. McQuinnie moved his wife and children to his home country to ‘Australianise’ them. She’d grown up in a drinking culture.

‘You want Long Island Iced Tea?’ the bartender hollered.

‘That’s tea.’

‘Is that like Chinese tea?’

‘Yeah. A bit. Well, not really.’

She chewed her thumbnail. What on earth should she order for her boss? What do old guys drink? She decided to ask the barman. ‘I wanna drink for an old guy. Chinese. But I think no alcohol.’

The barman handed her a drinks list and she scanned the pages. She couldn’t imagine Wong drinking beer, and didn’t want to insult him by buying orange juice. She flipped to the cocktails page.
Between The Sheets? Orgasm?
She couldn’t order drinks with names like that for her boss.

She had got the habit of hanging out in bars despite being underage from her time in Hong Kong, the first place where she had achieved a little independence. Her parents divorced in Sydney when Joyce was nine. Her father won custody of Molly and Joyce—to the great surprise of lawyers and Australian newspaper gossip columnists. The main reasons were that he told lies in court and their mother had not put up any sort of fight for them. Alison Smart had decided that both girls were far more like their father than like her. She moved back to the UK and quickly found a new boyfriend, a producer who got her a job as a newsreader. Joyce and Molly had lived with their father for the next four years, mostly in New York.

Since the lawyers weren’t looking, Martin McQuinnie was again never at home. Molly, on reaching the age of eighteen, had gone off to live with a boyfriend who worked in a five-star resort in Jamaica. Joyce had continued to follow her father around until he was persuaded that the constant moving was doing no good for her studies or her emotional stability. So he had sent her to live with an aunt of his in Hong Kong, which was reputed to have excellent international schools.

Asia had become her home. For a while, it had worked. Life at a school where each classmate had a different cultural background had been fun. There were plenty of young people as mixed up as she was. There was even a sociological term for them: Third Culture Kids. And she had quickly got into the habit of sneaking off to the bars of Lan Kwai Fong with friends who used make-up to make themselves look over eighteen.

But her time in Hong Kong had passed too quickly. Now the exams were over and the goodbye parties were just memories. Suddenly she was out of the safe and cosy confines of the international school system and out on the streets of the real world—and she felt more lost than ever. Would she ever be an Asian?

Joyce had an idea. ‘Do you have
chendol
?’ she asked.

The barman shook his head.

Wong wondered if the walls of the karaoke room were strong enough to prevent him suffering from permanent deafness. Suddenly the volume jumped as the door open and Joyce reappeared.

‘Sorry, no
ching cha.
I got you a virgin colada?’

He was alarmed at this. ‘No thank you. Not want bar girls.’

‘
No,
’ she scolded. She put a tall drink surmounted with a cherry and a little umbrella into his hand. The glass was painfully cold and slippery and the contents smelt revoltingly sweet. He took a sip of it. It tasted like a dessert. The umbrella went up his nostril. He hurriedly put it down on a counter.

‘The Iceman will be along in a minute.’ Joyce looked a little concerned about something. ‘CF,’ she said, slowly. ‘I have to tell you about something first.’

The other young people stopped talking, suddenly aware that Joyce might be about to say something important.

‘What?’

‘It’s a bit like hard to tune into what he is saying, know what I mean? He doesn’t just, like,
say
things, you know, straight.

He’s a bit hard to understand?’

‘Not like us,’ one of the creatures put in.

‘No waaay,’ said another, shaking its head.

‘Waaaay,’ said a third, nodding.

‘Jammo Ice J is a rap-singer?’ explained Joyce.

‘Wrap sinner,’ Wong echoed, without comprehension.

‘That means, like . . .’ she trailed off, looking to her friends for inspiration.

‘Like P Diddy,’ said one of the creatures.

‘He won’t know P Diddy,’ said another. ‘He’s way too old.

He’ll only know
old
music.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said a creature. ‘Old music. Public Enemy?

Grandmaster Flash?’