by Unknown
Wong just sighed and tried to focus on his work. Mo baan faat. What to do?
But as the afternoon wore on, the geomancer found himself starting to listen with interest to her phone conversations. He suddenly realised that his irritating new assistant might have a use after all. She was a free source of English conversation lessons, which were outrageously highly priced in Singapore.
Wong had started to operate in English late in life, having lived most of his life in Guangdong, moving to Hong Kong ten years ago, and five years later being transferred to Singapore. He prided himself on his ability with languages (he could speak six Chinese dialects). Yet he had long struggled with English idioms which he nearly always found baffling and totally lacking in logic. Ms McQuinnie, perhaps because of her age, used a great many English slang expressions. He recognised several from the book he had been studying the week before: How’s Tricks? Colloquial English II. He was adamant that the next book he wrote would be in English (he had already written two feng shui books in Chinese) but felt his grasp of English was not firm enough. He was convinced that a knowledge of modern colloquialisms was the key to being considered a good writer.
He asked her the meaning of several of the strange words she used, and she watched as he wrote them down.
She immediately adopted the role of a harsh teacher, correcting his every utterance. ‘It’s the only way you’ll learn,’ she said. His initial irritation started to dissolve when he learned that she generally explained things well, and could possibly enable him to impress his teacher and fellow students at the English Conversation Club.
Once, when she was on the phone to one of her friends, she came out with a string of terms which he did not understand at all. He jotted them down, and resolved to make enquiries later.
She said ‘cool’ all the time, which he knew. But she also said: ‘way’, ‘good fish’, ‘yo’, ‘hunky’, ‘ratted’, ‘soupy’, ‘pass the bucket’, ‘gloppy’, ‘wally’, ‘mega’ and ‘wowser’, none of which were in his textbooks. Her word for ‘yes’ appeared to be ‘whatever’.
He was furtively thumbing through a dictionary to translate something that sounded like ‘trip hop seedy’ when the phone rang. On the line was Laurence Leong, deputy chief executive of East Trade Industries.
‘I’m just sending you a fax,’ Leong said. ‘The brief, C F, is to give a swift opinion on an estate called Sun House, in a village just outside Melaka. The fax should be just coming through now.’ The machine next to Winnie’s elbow immediately began to growl.
Wong looked at the thin, curling papers for five minutes before phoning back. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a yin house. Very big problem. Very negative. Even if we really clean it up nice. People never forget. Very hard to re-sell. I recommend you not buy.’
Leong energetically attempted to change Wong’s mind. First, it had only been used as a mortuary for less than a year; some six to ten months, he said. Second, only two bodies had been dealt with at the building. Less than a month after the present tenants—a mature couple from Kuala Lumpur by the name of Wanedi—had bought the property, they had both fallen ill. ‘It was almost as if the building had bad feng shui before the morticians had moved in,’ he said.
‘Often this is true,’ said Wong.
Leong explained that the Wanedis’ ill health caused them to close the business—temporarily, they hoped. The local residents were pleased, as they had been uncomfortable with a funeral house so close to their village. The wife, whose money paid for the house and grounds (she had been a medium-sized heiress) had recovered, but her partner had not, and was continuing to be in extremely poor health. In other words, they were distressed sellers—always an attraction to property buyers.
‘The husband is at the door of death, in a figeral and literal sense,’ Wong had commented, delighted at being able to show off wordplay skills in English.
‘What? Oh yes, I see, that’s right,’ said Leong. ‘Listen, C F, I’d really like you to fly down and take a look at this. Mr P is really keen. The Wanedis are still really sick and last week made the decision to sell the place and go back to K L. That’s when our man in Melaka swooped. Hang on a minute, C F, I’ve got a call on the other line. Hel—?’ A monophonic tone played ‘Greensleeves’.
Wong knew the corporation would be more interested in the large plot of land surrounding the property than the house itself. The geomancer also knew that when they were dealing with a place of death, his services, normally seen as an optional extra, suddenly became essential. His mood brightened. He could claim to have a full schedule already booked, and charge a premium for an express reading.
And it might even be fun. Old Malaysian houses were often interesting from a feng shui point of view. It might be a Peranakan townhouse, or a Dutch colonial dwelling. Besides, he had a good friend in the area: Jhoti Sagwala, a former pupil of his who was now a senior police officer somewhere near Melaka. He thought about phoning to tell him to get the ingredients for banana-coconut curry—a dish for which Sagwala was justly famed.
‘Greensleeves’ stopped abruptly. ‘Wong, you still there?’ Laurence Leong’s voice was excited. ‘The old man’s died: Wanedi, the owner. That was our agent on the other line. The wife has agreed to let the surveyors and you visit the place, although the body may still be there.’
Wong nodded to himself, pleased that the corpse would be in place. Seeing precisely how and where the bodies were kept, and where the old man had died, would help with his reading and cleansing of the place. ‘Okay. I come.’
The following afternoon, C F Wong and Joyce McQuinnie found themselves in a rather run-down taxi, struggling up a hill near Melaka. Joyce had insisted on accompanying him, explaining that her daddy would pay her share. Although only a bridge away from Singapore, Wong felt that they were on a different planet, or at the very least, on the same planet in an earlier century. He looked out of the window and could not help but feel that the dazzling, mirror-glass skyscrapers of Singapore could not be the habitation of the same species which lived in this lush, green-brown land, pock-marked with a small number of charming old houses, a larger number of rather ramshackle huts, and a distressingly great number of small, new, ugly two- and three-storey blocks.
The geomancer gazed at the pestilence of new structures and despaired. Each was an identical rectangle, designed to squeeze into the ‘perch’ of the owner, and erected at high speed with no thought to feng shui or aesthetics. There was much pride in the speed of Malaysia’s development, but he was worried that some intangible spirituality was being lost forever.
‘Like, so many new buildings going up everywhere,’ remarked Joyce. ‘There should be loadsa jobs for local feng shui men.’
‘Very sad, these are beyond hope, I think,’ replied the geomancer.
They had some difficulty locating Sun House, and their spirits were not helped by the building’s namesake being too much in evidence.
‘Phew, what a scorcher,’ remembered Wong.
Joyce chuckled.
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Wong, insulted. ‘It means it is very hot.’
‘Yeah. It does mean that. It’s just—it’s just funny to hear you say it.’ She could not explain why it was funny, and they lapsed into uneasy silence. He noticed her looking sidelong at him over the next few minutes, and he leaned slightly to one side, where he could study her expression in the driver’s mirror. Underneath the girl’s loud, relaxed air of self-confidence, there was an unsureness, a nervousness, a palpable sense of discomfort. He could see it in the way her eyebrows moved together when she spoke to him; she seemed to be straining to communicate. Her movements were slightly awkward, as if all her limbs were 2 or 3 centimetres longer than she expected them to be. He decided that she was younger than Winnie Lim, despite being taller.
As they topped the hill, a Chinese-tiled roof showed through the trees a kilometre down the road, the driver gave a yelp of triumph, and Wong knew they had arrived. As they approached, he saw sto
ne walls surrounding the grounds, and realised Sun House was a relatively imposing residence. They turned in to gates which had been propped open, and pulled up outside a low but stately house, elderly rather than historic. It showed signs of having been recently spruced up, with several of the window frames looking new. He sighed. He could not help but feel sorry that his employer, as so often happens in the business world, was taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune. It must have cost money to convert this building (formerly a run-down farm) into a mortuary, and there was a poignant irony in the way that one of the very few bodies that the house had seen was its owner’s.
He ran his trained eyes over the facade. From the outside, the house was clearly built on the European model, although it had several features from the Peranakan terrace style. There were louvred window shutters, a design innovation originally introduced by the Portuguese, but adopted by the older generation of local builders. The house had pintu pagar, traditional Malaysian half-sized saloon gates, in front of wooden double-doors inscribed with Chinese couplets. It had a raised front porch that ran the length of the building, wood-clad sides, and a steeply sloping roof in dark red tiles. The upper windows, which were sharply arched, poked through this roof, slicing the ch’i. The curtains in all windows were shut. It appeared that no gardener was employed, as leaves littered the steps and the porch. However, there was a youngish man in work clothes visible near a shed on one side. He watched the arrivals with a blank expression, neither hostile nor welcoming, and then turned to enter the shed.
As Wong gazed at the house, the front door swung open and he became aware of a figure in the shadows. Mrs Elmeta Wanedi was a small, thin, fussy woman with a mass of untidy hair barely visible under a hood which formed a sort of nunlike mourning garb. Although he had been told she was a Roman Catholic, she looked more like her Muslim sisters, in her ground-length black mourning robes.
There was a certain fidgettiness about the way she stood, and this effect was redoubled when she spoke: ‘ Selamat tengah hari. Are you the East Trade people? Feng shui people? Come around the front here. No, let’s go through the back first—no, which do you want to see first?’ She spoke in a cultured, contralto voice, with an accent which was a mix of Malaysian and something else—Sri Lankan, perhaps? For the letters V and W she used a single sound somewhere between the two, giving the listener the impression that she used the wrong one in each instance. The words tumbled out so fast that Wong found her hard to understand. ‘What do you want to see? The section where the—the—the work is done, or the main body of the house?’
Wong was slightly thrown. ‘Er, I first want floor plan and deeds.’
Joyce stepped forwards. ‘Please accept our condolences on the loss of your husband. We’re like, really sorry and stuff.’
‘Oh, oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘The sooner you people do your checking and sign for the house so that we can get away, the better. The surveyors have been and gone. They told me you would take a day or so. Did I say “we”? Oh, I keep doing that. I can’t get used to “I”, oh dear.’
The widow shook her head and looked down, momentarily at a loss. Then she raised her eyes and smiled. ‘Saya minta ma’ af, I’m sorry, I am not behaving with the common courtesy here. I understand that you must have had a wery long journey, coming from Singapore. Please come in and have a cup of teh or kopi first, Ms . . . ?’
‘My name’s Jo. This is Mr C F Wong. He’s like the real geomancer. I’m like, just his assistant, helping out, you know? Cool house.’
‘Joseph and Mr Wong.’ Without a further word she marched to the front of the house. Wong paused to tell the driver to take a few hours off but keep close to his phone.
Inside the gloomy, dusty house, the woman, who seemed to be about fifty, began to relax. At first Wong thought she must enjoy entertaining, because she energetically busied herself getting tea and teacups, quickly overcoming the lack of focus which had been so evident outside.
But she knocked over the teacups and splashed tea everywhere. She explained that she used to have a woman who doubled as cook and maid, but had dismissed her two days ago, on the morning that her husband had died. ‘It seemed ridiculous to have a cook when I didn’t feel like eating anything, ever again,’ she said. ‘And I needed quiet in this house. Ms Tong—that was her name—was a noisy soul, always banging away wit’ the pots and pans, you know?’
‘You have a servant outside?’ Wong asked.
‘What? Oh, that boy in the shed? That’s Ahmed Gangan. He’s from next door, a few miles. There’s a farm down the road and the Gangans asked if they could borrow the old trailer—what he meant was could they have it, now that the man of the house was . . . Of course, I told them to take it away and keep it.’
She made an extraordinarily bad cup of tea—amazingly, it tasted of wet goat—and then sat down opposite Wong, throwing herself back into an armchair in an inelegant way, almost as if she had been pushed.
Then she suddenly sat up. ‘Forgive me for my manner,’ she said. ‘But I am not myself these days. Hen—Hen—Henry and I did everything together and it is so hard to start again, when you have no one to help you.’ The utterance of her husband’s name had immediately caused her face to crumple and her voice to crack. She rubbed her eyes with a handkerchief and began to cry.
Joyce immediately went over and sat next to her, taking one of her hands and squeezing it. ‘Aww, don’t cry. It’s an awful thing to lose somebody. My mum left my sister and me when I was nine and I still cry for her. Losing a husband must be like, even worse.’
Mrs Wanedi nodded tearfully, but said nothing. She gripped Joyce’s hand tightly and then leaned over and put her sobbing head on the young woman’s shoulder. Wong watched with interest, noting with amazement how quickly women can conjure up intimate relationships.
‘This must be an awful time for you,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m sorry we have to like, intrude and all that. Do you have any family members here . . . ?’
‘No, no, no,’ said the woman, suddenly ceasing to weep with a long, wet sniff. ‘I’m fine. I wept for two days solid and finish this morning. I couldn’t believe how much I could weep. I have eight blouses, all sodden wet with tears. Mr Wong, you would not believe how many tears there are in a wife’s body—are you married, Mr Wong?’
‘Not married.’
‘Well, your ibu’s body, in that case. But this morning I woke up and I said, to myself, El—El—Elmeta, old woman, you have wept quite enough. Get up and do what you need to do. Sell up this old house and go back to the old kampong. And you, Mr—Mr—Mr—are part of what needs to be done, so your presence here is good. And you, dear, thank you for being so kind. I’m sorry about your ibu.’ Mrs Wanedi squeezed Joyce’s hand.
‘We’ll just be as quick as we can and then scram like sharpish,’ the young woman said, with a reassuring smile.
‘Yes, let us begin,’ Wong said, gratefully putting down his still-full teacup. ‘Do you have any papers on the house which we can see? Floor plans, ground plans, deeds and other things? Anything like that? I want to know the date it was built, so I can make a lo shu chart.’
The old woman retrieved a fat file and left the visitors looking at the papers in a stuffy, odorous drawing room. She told them to take as long as they needed, and to feel free to wander around the house to take measurements or photographs.
‘We don’t wanna disturb you,’ said Joyce.
‘You won’t. I’ll be in the front bedroom, packing suitcases.’
‘Do you want me to help?’
‘Thank you, dear, but no need. My niece is coming tomorrow to help me move the bags and boxes, and, and someone will take Henry away. I’ll be fine.’
She left the room with a curious noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
Wong looked at Joyce in a new light. She had been good, talking so nice-nice to the old lady, holding her hand and all that. Sort of thing he couldn’t do. Perhaps she could be useful in certain circumstances, as
a sort of public-relations girl. He wondered whether he could send her out onto the streets of Singapore in a sandwich board or something to drum up business. She was certainly more polite than Ms Lim.
He turned to the plans and perused them with pleasure. The house, actually, was beautiful. It was a real find, with large rooms, big windows, and a natural flow of energy. It was a Hum Kua House, with its back to the east and full of water energy. The presence of so much wood ch’i in the walls of the building kept the water ch’i beautifully supported. The main problem was that its major living area, a large, open-plan room, was in the northwest, the direction of the six shars, leading to loss and delinquency, if the negative influences were not properly countermanded.
After drawing up a lo shu diagram following the Flying Star method, he found that the house was entering a positive phase, with a pair of sevens at the entrance. It was thus quite possible that it could be turned into a residence with highly positive feng shui, as long as its brief period as a yin house could be dealt with.
The plans showed it to be an unusually old structure, built internally in the Dutch style, with an open air-well section designed in the middle of the living area. This had since been roofed over, but something could be done with it, he was sure. The Dutch had always been his favourite of the European house builders. He believed there was such a thing as natural, instinctive feng shui, a basic, low-level skill which needs little teaching or training, and he thought several of the Dutch designers of the past centuries had it.
Nevertheless, he knew that the building’s age and design made it unlikely that East Trade would save it. Far more likely would be a quick razing, and then the erection of a block of flats on the spot. In this sort of situation, it was hard for Wong to decide what to do. Should he do a detailed analysis of all the rooms of the house, in the hopes that his report might inspire one of his corporate overlords to use the premises as they were? Or should he simply do his work more like a spiritual exorcist, help the company to get rid of any dark forces here, so that nothing negative would remain if the grounds were cleared and a new, inevitably uglier structure went up in the space?