Geomancer CF Wong walked morosely along the street, believing that nothing could worsen his mood, which was pitch-black and vivid crimson at the same time. His life had suddenly turned dark with horror and red with drama. Small and round-shouldered, he stooped even further than usual, his eyes fixed on the ground, a puny Atlas carrying an invisible planet on his shoulders. And the burden he was carrying might as well be as large as a world, given the impossibility of his finding any way to lift it from his back.
What had just happened was so nightmarish to be almost beyond his ken. He had just committed to spending a vast sum of money that he did not have on the purchase of a large number of tiny, ugly, fruit-shaped pens that he could not possibly use. He had experimented with the repulsive plastic bananas after Ms Crumley had left. They produced solid black lines that were too thick to write with, and too black to use for highlighting. Who would want them? They were useless. Harmoney Private Limited of Singapore was set to go bankrupt with its very first deal. Not exactly auspicious. If news of this got round to his rivals…It didn’t bear thinking about. How could everything have gone so dramatically wrong? He blamed the unidentified Singapore bigwig who had ordered the ship be moved. But to whom could he complain? It was useless. Nothing could be done.
Arun Asif Iqbal Daswani had ended the meeting by saying he would give Wong ten days to make the payment. Daswani had handed him a fresh copy of his business card, pointedly calling attention to the line that described him as ‘The World’s Only Indian Member of the Chinese Mafi a’. He had then made some not very deeply veiled threats about getting his triad partners to ‘take an interest’ if the full sum was not delivered on time. He had become hard-eyed and stone-faced. It was the end of an ugly friendship.
Where could Wong get that kind of money at short notice? He kept very little money in the bank accounts he used, and his savings consisted of some tiny investment properties in Guangdong province, all of which were handled by a relative to he talked to once a year. It would take weeks or months to arrange a sale. There were no liquid assets that could be cashed in to raise the sum Daswani was demanding.
The feng shui master wearily propelled his miserable bones to his run-down office on the cheaper bit of Telok Ayer Street, just off the main business district of central Singapore, and went up the stairs to the fourth floor—yes, he knew that number four meant bad luck, but it was the only one he could afford. He kicked open the office door, startling Winnie Lim, his office manager. She glared at him with naked hostility.
‘Aiyeeah. You break the door, I no fix it,’ she warned.
He returned her dagger-filled look, narrowing his eyes and muttering curses under his breath. It was nothing short of tragic that a man could not even find sanctuary from the pain of life in his own office. He glanced around the small, cluttered room, with its cheap, mismatched furnishings and broken wall clock. It was not a suitable office for a feng shui master and he knew it. No clients were allowed to visit.
The only consolation was that the desk which normally housed his beyond-irritating assistant, Joyce McQuinnie, was empty. The young woman had been inflicted on him by Mr Pun, the property developer who kept Wong’s business going by paying a regular retainer. She had arrived as a ‘temporary’ intern, but had become horribly, scarily permanent. Wong spent a significant amount of his time dreaming of ways to get rid of her without upsetting his paymaster.
Ignoring the spitting, hissing Winnie, he marched past his desk and headed for the meditation room—a rather grandiose name for what was really an ill-designed room, too small for any purpose beyond being a stationery cupboard. When Wong had initially leased the premises, he had made sure that that room had been kept completely empty except for a meditation mat and a flickering candle—red, electric, purchased from a Roman Catholic trinket shop. Then he had placed a handcarved hair stick from an ancient branch of the Qidan tribe on the alter, a small table at one end. The hair stick was a sort of ugly, miniature totem pole topped with thick, dreadlock-like tresses. Its purpose was to dismay evil spirits, and to that end it had wide staring eyes and a sticking-out tongue. Wong was fond of it for a number of reasons. First, it reminded him of his mad Uncle Rinchang, who lived in a cabin in the Kunlun Mountains. Second, the Qidan people were reputed to have used real gold leaf in their objets d’art, so he felt it might be valuable. And third, it was so ugly that it put the women off entering the space or using it for anything.
The idea of having a meditation room in the office was well-intentioned but had proved to be impractical. There was always so much pressure to make money to pay the rent that he rarely used the room, and neither Winnie nor Joyce appeared to be interested in meditation, although Joyce occasionally went to yoga and some sort of church. Winnie’s only interest in life was nail varnish. She used the office computer to subscribe to RSS email alerts informing her of the launch of new nail colours or appliqués. In contrast, Joyce’s main interest was wearing iPod headphones and nodding her head up and down to tsch-chika-tsch-chika-tsch noises while idly scanning celebrity magazines.
These two women had grossly tainted the purity of his office—after all, it was supposed to be the headquarters of a practitioner of an ancient, mystical, male-dominated spiritual art. But what could be done? Mr Pun paid the retainer and had given him no choice but to accept McQuinnie as an assistant. And Winnie Lim had organised the files under a system so arbitrary that she was the only one who could find anything. He was stuck with them. His temporal life was cursed. He needed to retreat to a better place to recharge his spiritual batteries. If there had ever been a time when he needed the meditation room, this was it.
He opened the door and peered inside. He hadn’t entered the room for several weeks and expected it to be stuffy and smelly. But something was wrong. It was full of something.
He turned on the light. It had been turned into some sort of sanitation store cupboard. It contained two foul-smelling mops, three red plastic buckets, and a solid wall, taller than Wong himself, of what looked like several hundred toilet rolls. He backed out of the room and turned to face his office manager.
‘Winnie,’ Wong barked. ‘What is in my meditation room?’
‘Mops and toilet rolls and those things,’ she replied, without looking up from her hands. She was applying miniature representations of Old Masters onto her fingernails.
‘I know that. But why?’
‘Because I need to use the toilet cupboard for something else. All full up. No room for that stuff.’
‘Why do we need two hundred toilet roll?’
‘Is not two hundred.’
‘Well, how many is it?’
‘Five hundred.’
‘Why do we need five hundred toilet roll?’
‘Special offer. Twenty per cent off for orders of five hundred rolls. Cheaper to buy five hundred than to buy four hundred. Also we get a bonus ten thousand points on our loyalty card.’
‘But we don’t need five hundred toilet roll. We don’t need four hundred. In one week, we only need one or two.’
‘Well, then, we have enough for a long time.’
‘Ten years.’
‘Right, ten years.’
‘But the lease for this office only has eight month left.’
‘We can take them with us to the next office.’
Wong was speechless, incensed by the image of his having to hire a van and a driver merely to transport several hundred unwanted toilet rolls from one set of premises to another. Then something occurred to him: where was his ancient gold leaf Qidan hair stick? This worry caused the power of speech to return. ‘Where is my totem?’
‘What?’
‘My totem. My hairy totem.’
‘You mean ugly toilet brush thing? In the toilet.’
He opened his mouth, and then shut it again. Sometimes there were no words.
‘You always complain, even when I save you money,’ Winnie muttered.
Wong would not put up with that. ‘You buy five hundred toilet rolls we don’t need and you say you are saving money? You are one crazy woman. You waste all the money.’
‘We got ten thousand points on our loyalty card,’ Winnie thundered. ‘That’s not a waste.’
Wong thought about this for a moment. Ten thousand points might actually be enough to buy something with. What did he need? So many things. For a start, the office clock was not working. It was not just mildly embarrassing, but utterly humiliating that a feng shui master’s office clock had not worked for two years. A standard part of the introductory feng shui speech he gave to clients was an exhortation to make sure the premises contained no stopped clocks, no dark light bulbs, no dripping taps and no dead plants. Yet he had examples of all four in his office. This was not magic, but an important symbolic change that he made his clients go through. It was simple psychology, really: you take control of the tiny, physical things in your life, and you find yourself subliminally sorting out all the big, non-physical things, too.
‘Go back to store,’ he barked at Winnie. ‘Use ten thousand points to buy new clock for the office. We need clock. Our clock broken.’
Winnie looked sideways at him, a guilty, furtive stare. ‘Very busy,’ she said. ‘Too much paperwork today.’ As if realising that her argument was rather weakened by the fact that she was sitting at her desk doing her nails, she gestured vaguely at the pile of papers and envelopes on her desk.
‘Open envelopes. Then you go buy clock.’
‘Cannot,’ she said quietly.
‘Why not?’
Winnie paused reluctantly from her operations and looked up. She cast her eyes around the room as if she was seeking advice from the wobbly desks and rickety chairs on how to reply. In truth, it was pretty obvious to Wong that she was having trouble deciding just how honest she should be. Eventually she turned to face him with a hardened expression, daring him to object to what she was about to say: ‘Already spent the ten thousand points.’
‘What?’
‘You hear me. Already spent ten thousand points.’
‘Buy what?’
‘This.’ She gestured at the lamp on her desk. Now that she had pointed it out, Wong noticed that it was unusual—it looked vaguely like a miniature version of a light you might see over your head while you were in a dentist’s chair.
‘Lamp?’
‘Not a lamp. A Pro-Manicure Set.’
‘What is pro-manicure set?’
‘This.’
‘Why you buy that?’
‘This office has no Pro-Manicure Set. So I buy. Besides, special offer on pro-manicure sets this month. Fifteen per cent discount if we buy two.’
‘You buy two?’
‘Of course. Fifteen per cent is good discount.’
Wong drew himself up to his full height, which was one point six metres. ‘You go back to shop. Return pro-manicure sets. Buy clock.’
‘No exchanges, no refunds,’ she said. ‘But I go out anyway. You in bad temper. I need a break.’
She blew on her nails, gathered up her handbag and headed out of the door, slamming it hard as she left. He heard the frosted glass crack. One day, very soon, it would fall out. That would be another expense he’d have to deal with. Aiyeeah.
Well, look on the bright side. Both women were out of the office. At least he’d get a few minutes’ peace.
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