17 The Asian Option
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Fergal had a big week ahead of him. Al and Krystina, Imogen and Francois, and Rob and Georgina were due to arrive on Saturday morning to assist him in his thirtieth birthday celebrations. Miles had been due as well but had cried off a few days previously, citing business commitments. Happily, Fergal’s birthday coincided with the rugby sevens, an event that he had grown to love in the three years that he had lived in Hong Kong. But Saturday was a long way off. In the meantime, Fergal had to go on a business trip to visit some of DBHK’s major clients. There was no way out; and to cap it all, the markets were incredibly volatile. When he had spoken to Al on the phone a couple of days previously to check travel arrangements, all that Al had talked about were his long internet stock positions. The Nasdaq index had collapsed by 50% since Christmas 2000 and he made a point of saying that he hadn’t sold a share in the intervening period. He was clearly worried and trying not to panic but there was a very real sense that if the current situation continued he would lose a lot of money on a personal level. Fergal didn’t like to hear Al sounding so rattled. His nervousness was infectious.
As Fergal made his way to the airport for the first leg of his trip to Korea, he looked out at the hectic streets of his home city, the self-same streets that he had found so beguiling and full of promise when he had arrived three years before. Now he wasn’t sure what he felt about them. He was finding it difficult to cope with the increasing levels of responsibility that DBHK were expecting of him. Moreover, his relationship with Denise was tense at the best of times and monogamy was something he was finding increasingly difficult. It hadn’t been moonlight and roses for a long time now. His desire to stay faithful to Denise had been sorely tested on a number of occasions but so far, he had managed to stay true to his convictions – not that this afforded him any great level of pride. And Fergal knew that the trip he was about to embark upon would test his resolve to the limit as he was due to travel with his Korean colleague, DK Yoe – known to those who worked with him as Duck – a man who was notorious around the offices of DBHK for his insatiable appetite for whisky and women.
A stocky man in his mid-thirties, Duck greeted life with a permanent smile on his face. The joke in the office – Fergal had started it – was that Duck would most probably greet the information of his family’s demise in a car crash or recent immolation in a house fire with a grin. That morning at Hong Kong International was no different. If anything, the grin was bigger than ever and despite Fergal’s attempts to convince Duck that he was going to behave himself on the trip because he had a big weekend planned, Duck had ordered them both two large whiskies as the plane levelled out from its ascent out of Hong Kong. Given that Fergal was pathologically incapable of refusing a drink, by the time the plane landed at the newly opened Incheon International airport in Seoul three and a half hours and half a bottle of whisky later, he was feeling a good deal less wretched about their trip.
With no time to even check into their hotel, it was straight off to see KTC, a major Korean construction corporation and a big client of DBHK. After a lengthy meeting throughout the afternoon during which Fergal had managed to sip at some iced water in order to ease his burgeoning hangover, it was time for dinner. It was clear from the demeanour of the clients that they were looking forward to a big night out, their expectations having been raised by Duck’s assertion that a night out with the legendary Fergal Quinn was something that they would find hard to forget. Never had Fergal felt so much like a sideshow attraction as he did that night, joining in with the Santori boat races and becoming as drunk as was expected. He couldn’t do much else as the only phrases that he knew in Korean were ‘another whisky’ and ‘spectacular breasts’. As had become a recurring phenomenon of late, however, Fergal found that even when he was drunk and carousing, he seemed to have developed the ability to step outside himself and witness his behaviour and that of those around him from the point of view of a dispassionate witness. And he didn’t like what he saw.
The following morning, it was an early start with a mouth feeling like a Sumo wrestler’s jock-strap, and a taxi ride back to Incheon airport for the two and a half hour flight to Tai Pei and lunch with a major semi-conductor manufacturer who was a big currency hedger. Straight after lunch, it was a taxi-ride back to the airport for the two hour flight to Manila and dinner with the Central Bank of the Philippines. By the time they had arrived at a private room at Jools, a glitzy girlie bar in Makati City, Fergal’s smile was nothing more than a forced grin that made his cheeks ache.
Her name was Min. That’s what she called herself for Fergal’s benefit anyway. She attached herself to him the moment they arrived. She looked about as sad as he felt. Maybe it was that, more than any sense of lust, that made him arrange for her to accompany him back to his hotel later. He and Duck had been left alone after their clients had already paired off and disappeared into the night. Duck was greedy: two girls for him and when the time came, they all pushed their way through the scrum of people in the club’s reception area which was bathed in the sparkle of camera flashes. Maybe there was someone famous in town. Fergal couldn’t have cared less.
When he and Min arrived at his hotel room, they showered together and had perfunctory sex. It was the first time that he had played away from home since he and Denise had become an item. Whether he would feel any different about things in the morning was difficult to say but lying there next to Min, he felt decidedly guilt-free. She asked him whether he wanted her to leave and he kissed her on the cheek and told her no. He asked her how old she was and she told him nineteen which meant that she was probably about seventeen. Further conversation was difficult as she spoke almost no English but he felt happy lying in bed next to her, two strangers, enjoying the view out of the twenty-forth floor window and the sodium glow from the lights of Makati down below. Before Min left at five am the following morning, Fergal gave her one of his business cards along with the roll of Pesos. He couldn’t help himself; he felt some sort of connection with her – Manila prostitute that she was – and he couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing her again. He had felt like this before with some of the bar girls that he had met during his time in Hong Kong but had never felt the loss with such intensity.
Min had looked at the card, turned it over in her childish fingers then looked up at him and said: ‘Married?’
Fergal shook his head. He wasn’t married.
‘Maybe give me a call some time. Yeah? We could go out somewhere.’
Min smiled and it was her turn to shake her head as she slipped the business card back onto the bedside table. She kissed him on the lips as he lay propped up on a pillow and as she let herself out of the room, he couldn’t help himself as the tears started to flow. Moments later, he was sobbing. It was ridiculous. What did he have to be sad about? He had plenty of money; he had a beautiful girlfriend who might very well become his wife and he was still only in his twenties. Just. So why did he feel such a fraud? Was it to do with his infidelity to Denise? Was that what was making him feel so wretched? Whatever it was, he was inconsolable. He stood up and walked to the window, naked. He pressed his forehead against the cool of the glass and looked out at the milky dawn light as the rush hour vehicles swarmed through the Manila streets. After a couple of minutes, the tears stopped, but he didn’t feel any better.
On the flight back to Hong Kong, Duck insisted on telling Fergal the intricate geometry of the positions that he had assumed with his two companions from Jools.
‘Fucking incredible, I’m telling you Fergal, fucking incredible,’ he intoned, punctuating his story with ribald laughter.
‘Yeah, incredible,’ said Fergal, his desultory tone in danger of sounding like sarcasm. But Duck was in no fit state to register this, swept away as he was on his own stream of consciousness, reliving his activities of the night before.
Back home, as Fergal slid his key
into the lock on the door of his apartment, he felt a shiver of self-loathing about his behaviour of the night before and the subterfuge that he would have to enact for Denise’s benefit. What was he thinking of when he offered Min his business card? Thank God she hadn’t taken it.
‘Hello?’
No reply. The television was on so Denise had to be home. It was unlikely that a burglar would bother to switch on the television.
‘Hello?’ Still no response. Fergal put down his case in the narrow hallway, slipped his shoes off and made his way along the polished wood floor. As he did so, Denise appeared in the living room doorway.
‘Hey D, how you doing?’
Still no response. Fergal didn’t have time to consider the reason for Denise’s apparent reluctance to communicate with him. In her right hand she was holding a can of Guinness. He had a personal stash of his favourite brew that he kept in the kitchen. Maybe she was preparing a surprise welcome home party for him and was in the process of fixing him a drink. Fergal realised this was very much not the case when Denise raised up her arm and threw the can of Guinness at him. He could see it coming towards him at a brutal velocity; he even had time to take in the spin that she had managed to put on the can as it corkscrewed through the air. But such was his surprise that Denise was throwing Guinness at him that he didn’t take the necessary evasive procedures and the can struck him squarely in the eye socket sending needles of pain radiating outwards from the point of impact.
‘You fucking bastard.’
Once the initial shock had subsided, Fergal realised that he was sitting on the floor of the corridor. Dabbing at his rapidly swelling eye, he pulled himself to his feet and followed Denise back into the living room, checking as he did so whether she had any other cans of Guinness, or indeed any other form of beverage that might be heading his way imminently.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Fuck you.’
Denise didn’t swear as a rule, not outside work and even then when she did swear at work, it rarely sounded convincing, coming out as nothing more than an affectation. But now she had her intonation and timing down pat. She stood framed against the Hong Kong skyline, glowering at him. The pain in his eye socket was intense but his hunger to know the source of Denise’s anger masked it for the time being.
On the coffee table was Denise’s laptop computer. There was a web page open and on it were photographs. Denise gestured towards it.
‘Look! Go on, Fergal, look. You’re famous!’
Fergal moved closer, a warm sick feeling radiating out from his stomach. He looked at the screen, and there was an article on the CNN Asia web site. There was a photograph of him taken from the night before in Jools in Manila. There he was with his arm around Min, as they left the club on their way back to his hotel room. There was a lascivious expression on his face. That’s what it looked like in the picture. He hadn’t felt lascivious at the time, just tired and emotional. There he was, the big predatory westerner dragging off his defenceless Asian prey to submit her to his depraved desires. And whatever the truth of what he felt, that’s exactly what it was. The headline above the photograph read: ‘Manila’s sex trade booms.’ Fergal’s memory of the clicking camera as he left the club came back to him like a migraine flashback. Of all the myriad of images that the CNN editors could have employed to illustrate their research, they had chosen Fergal’s. The whole thing seemed to have a tragic car-crash inevitability to it. Fergal didn’t want to stop looking at the laptop screen because when he did he knew that he would have to look at Denise. Could he lie his way out of this? Could he tell Denise that he was passing and the photographer asked him to pose for the photograph with a random girl that he had never met before? It was never going to work. Denise was far too smart for that. Fergal’s reputation had preceded him. There was no escape. But as he turned back to Denise wearing an expression that he could only hope conveyed his sense of shame and regret, she slapped him across the face with a power and precision that was as impressive as it was painful. Denise was on her way out of the door; he could hear her struggling with a suitcase. Do something Fergal. He spun around, half-formed pleas and entreaties competing with each other in his mind.
‘Denise, please. Let me explain.’
But he was talking to the door that Denise had just slammed. What could he say to her that would possibly make what he had done palatable, even worthy of consideration? Reaching for the door handle, he listened to Denise making her way down the corridor. Fergal sank to his knees and rested his head against the door. On the floor next to him was the can of Guinness that Denise had thrown at him, an act the consequences of which he was only now beginning to come to terms with as his eye socket throbbed to an aching metallic beat. The can’s recent flight and sudden impact would have rendered its contents unstable – a loaded chamber. Not that he cared if it did blow his head off for real instead of just squirting Guinness all over the polished wood floor – which it did. The first woman he had ever truly loved was gone. He had always hoped that Denise would save him from a lifetime of playing the joker. She had loved him despite his behaviour.
By the time his friends started to arrive the following day for his birthday celebrations, he had only slept fitfully for an hour at most. Never had he felt so paranoid and twitchy in his life. After he had drunk the can of Guinness that Denise had thrown at him, he had started on a bottle of Jameson’s which had made him maudlin and he had sat looking out over Hong Kong, smoking one Marlboro Light after another. He didn’t even usually smoke but had bought some Duty Frees for colleagues in the office. Every time he nodded off, a sense of self-loathing and loss would ambush him and make him wake up panting and sweating despite the air conditioning. At one point, he thought he might be having a heart attack. The way he was feeling, a stab of heart burn was easily mistaken for the onset of a coronary and he felt sure that the pins and needles in his left arm were proof positive of his condition until he realised that he had been lying on it for the past ten minutes. Where the lights of Hong Kong down below had appeared so full of hope when he had first set eyes on them those few years before, now they felt malevolent, threatening, hinting at impending doom, and just as the sun started to appear from out of the black crenulated horizon beyond the harbour, Fergal threw up. There was no preamble, no warning, no hint of nausea whatsoever. After he had cleaned it up, he poured the rest of the bottle of Jameson’s down the sink and returned to the sofa and the lights on the Star Ferry as it slid across Hong Kong harbour.
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The seven of them sat together on a cluster of leather sofas and armchairs in the Captain’s Bar of the Mandarin Hotel. Judging by the warm welcome afforded Fergal by the members of staff, Imogen could see that he was a familiar face. It was the first time Imogen had met Krystina although she’d heard plenty of stories about her from Fergal. She was beautiful, no doubt about that, but she couldn’t help but feel that Al was more interested in the reportedly great sex than whether they were soul mates. He looked well if a little over-dressed. His clothes were more expensive than before. She preferred him slightly scruffy, unshaven. Maybe that didn’t sit so well with his new self-image; maybe that’s what three years at Hartmann Milner had done to him – or was it Krystina’s influence?
‘Now that Denise has decided to call time on things, I suppose I can tell you what happened.’
Imogen watched Fergal. He had changed and not just in his wardrobe choices which were very unFergal, stylish even. There was a sadness about him. Clearly he was upset about what had happened with Denise, something that he had made a point of telling them all about when they first arrived. This was an awkward moment in itself. It felt like a normal Fergal story, a funny one, eliciting plenty of laughter at yet another of the mad Irishman’s exploits; but what set this story apart from all the others that she had heard over the years was that Fergal wasn’t laughing. He smiled at the absurdity of the coinci
dence that had given away his infidelity. Rob and George clearly didn’t pick up on Fergal’s angst – still thought of him as the Fergal of old – and laughed when Fergal had described the can of Guinness being hurled at his head and were still laughing when he launched straight into another story from some years before. But Imogen could see that he was putting a brave face on things and his storytelling was part of that, a way of papering over the cracks. She knew all about that in her relationship with Francois who sat on the sofa next to her, even held her hand by way of contriving to make it appear that they were happy together. Francois was nothing if not a stickler for keeping up appearances.
‘I was confused as to the exact etiquette involved with attending a swingers’ party,’ said Fergal, ‘like if you go to a dinner party you take flowers and wine perhaps so I thought I should get a gift of some sort. So I popped into a sex shop in Soho and picked up some bits and pieces.’ Seeing Rob’s and Al’s impending enquiries as to the specifics of his purchase, Fergal said, ‘I’m not going into the gory details.’
‘Please do,’ said Krystina.
‘No, no, suffice to say that I thought I’d got a decent cross-section of stuff. Something for the ladies and the gentlemen.’
‘The mind boggles,’ said George, laughing.
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