‘Who . . . ?’
‘My assistant,’ the geomancer explained.
‘Hi guys! Sorry I’m late!’ Joyce said cheerfully. ‘I went through into the gym office instead of the gym and got talking to this guy—Jimmy? He’s one majorly cool dude.’
De Boer’s face twitched at the sound of the name. The corners of his mouth perceptibly turned down.
Wong wondered how to react. Who was Jimmy? One needed the birth dates of the managers of any facility to do a full reading of prospects for the business. ‘Mr Jimmy is who?’
De Boer snorted his breath out through his nostrils. ‘Mr Jimmy is no one. Today is his last day. He was the gym master here, but we feel his part in last week’s, er, incident, was not satisfactory. The reception staff will be running the gym for a while, and we’ll get a new personal trainer/manager as soon as possible. An advertisement goes in the paper tomorrow for a replacement.’
Wong nodded, pleased. So he could probably manage without Mr Jimmy’s birth date. One less thing to think about.
De Boer gave Wong and McQuinnie a short, Teutonic bow and marched off to the shower rooms.
‘Pants,’ whispered Joyce, stamping her right foot.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. It’s just—well, it’s just a shame that that Jimmy guy isn’t going to be sticking around. He’s like really nice! He’s got this dimple—never mind.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the dimple-chinned young man, wringing his hands. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be a very good lunch companion. I’m too, like, shell-shocked.’ Despite his exaggeratedly masculine body, Jimmy Wegner’s voice was light and somewhere in the alto range.
‘That’s all right!’ said Joyce, a little too cheerfully. I don’t mind if you don’t say anything. I’ll just sit here and gaze at you.
She suddenly felt her face tingle and wondered whether she had spoken out loud.
Jimmy did not react, so apparently she hadn’t. Phew. ‘Er. No worries! We can just sort of relax, and get into a state of, you know, like, relaxation!’ She seethed inwardly at her inability to utter a half-intelligent sentence in front of this young man.
‘Life stinks,’ Jimmy said.
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.
The feng shui master’s meeting with Dominique Alegre was not a particular success. For a start, he found it difficult t
o concentrate sitting in a small office with a woman in a leotard. There was a certain physicality about her, a thrusting animal vitality that made him uncomfortable. She was glistening with sweat, although she smelt only of some sort of flowery oil. He kept his eyes on his papers in front of him.
Wong explained that he heard there had been a death in the gym, and he wanted to offer to help. But as soon as she started speaking, a second problem emerged. Ms Alegre, thirty-four, explained that she did not take feng shui at all seriously. She said it ‘wasn’t for her’ although her mother-in-law was crazy about it and would be thrilled to know there was a real Chinese feng shui expert visiting town. ‘I will tell ma belle-mère, ze mother of my ’usband. If you don’t mind, I will give your number to ’er.’
As for her members, she said that it was true that they had been upset by the death of a woman being trained earlier that year, but an initial drop-off of attendance had only been temporary, and had barely lasted two weeks.
‘We got rid of ze personal trainer involved. After zat, everyone felt a beet more relaxed,’ she said.
‘Was it his fault?’
Ms Alegre considered the question very carefully before replying. She tilted her head to one side. ‘Yes and non,’ she said, slowly. ‘We always make sure older clients get medical clearance for personal training sessions. We have a tie-up wiz a medical agency called EDOC—Executive Doctors on Call —so zey get a full check-up before we start. And zen a doctor and ze personal trainer work together to design a suitable exercise programme. It was set up by Dr Frankie Brackish, who’s quite well known in Perth. Ees all kept on a database ’ere.’ She tapped her computer monitor.
‘So what went wrong?’
‘For ze club, fortunately, nothing. All clients sign a disclaimer zat removes any liability we may ’ave.’ She paused. ‘Sorry, zat came out badly. What I meant was, things went wrong very badly for ze client, of course, although ze club, fortunately for us, was not considered liable.’
She stopped there and folded her arms.
Wong was intrigued. What exactly had gone wrong? He said nothing, knowing that he could use his strangeness to get away with disregarding the rules of conversation. He said nothing but merely looked blankly at her.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 6