by Unknown
Joyce was having a conversation on a mobile phone with a friend. As he listened to her, he mused that the intriguing puzzle of her brand of English was probably the only thing he would miss about her. When she was talking to people of her own age and culture, her language was completely different from the English in his textbooks—probably just what he needed to learn to write good popular books in that language, he thought. Well, mo baan faat. Never mind. Good riddance. He would be quite happy if he never met another Westerner for the rest of his life.
His eyes still narrow with fury, he glanced up at her and tuned in to her conversation, to see just how much of her language he had picked up in the past ten weeks.
‘Synth. In The Exploding Blowfish. Grunge. Grunge meets techno-jungle with a bit of rap really. Anyway, so we’re at Lippy’s, and he’s like, “Yeah?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “Getoutahere.” And I’m like, “Whatever.”’
No, he decided. Individual words could be understood, but put them together and they formed an incomprehensible code. Probably rubbish anyway.
Bin stepped into the scene, and cast his lovesick gaze upon his exotic foreign princess. She waved a greeting but did not consider his arrival worth interrupting her phone conversation for. She’d done her shopping.
The geomancer realised there was something new in the young man’s expression. It was no longer the face of a starry-eyed suitor, but the pained look of a wounded-but-still-loyal lover. Clearly the news of Wong’s apparent indiscretion had reached him. The teenage boy’s lips tightened as looked over at the Chinese man—his evil usurper.
‘Miss Joyce, I am ready to take you to the temple and afterwards to the airport,’ said Bin, and then nodded contemptuously at Wong. ‘And him.’
Porntip then summoned the geomancer to the phone. ‘For you. I think it is your boss.’
Wong hurried inside and stood to attention as he took the phone. But it was Winnie Lim, calling from his office in Wai Wai Mansions, Telok Ayer Street.
‘CF? Is Winnie. Mr Pun on phone this morning. He says he is very happy with you. His frien’ give him plenty big contrack-lah. Scratch his back for him. But you scratch his frien’s back, see? So all work out nicely.’
‘Do not understand. Say again please.’
‘Mr Pun. His frien’. Joyce’s daddy. Gave him a big contrack. Joyce’s daddy gave Mr Pun a big contrack. Mr Queeny very happy because you help his daughter with her school projeck. So now Mr Pun is very happy. He wan’ you to go to America.’
‘What? Me go to—? What for?’
‘Mr Pun got plenty work for you in America. Big property deal with Joyce’s daddy.’
‘I don’t like to go to America.’
‘You never been.’
‘I saw movies. Always police cars exploding in America. Very dangerous.’
‘Big money. Mr Pun is in very good mood. I think you call him now-lah, okay or not? You get good deal, I think.’
‘How big?’
‘You call him.’
‘When I get back. Afternoon.’
At 7.40 a.m., Joyce was sitting on the verandah of Porntip’s house examining and re-examining her purchases of the previous day. She had bought six CDs and eight VCDs. She knew they were pirate copies, but they were being sold at prices she couldn’t resist. She eased her nagging conscience by telling herself that she would play them a few times, see which ones she really liked, and then buy legitimate copies of the best ones.
Some combination of factors—a slight breeze, a distant bird-call, the sound of a car door closing—made her look up. The sight before her over the balcony railings was beautiful: a vista of palm trees, gently swaying as if doing a Mexican wave. The sky had not quite lost its morning pinkness, and there were a thousand tiny, rippled clouds, high in the vault of Heaven: a mackerel sky, her mother would have called it. There was the whining noise of a bus moving up a hill. A dog barked, its voice given a curious resonance by the rising wind. Then she heard a sound behind her.
Porntip’s servant woman brought her a vivid yellow drink. The old maid, whose face seemed to have melted on one side, spoke no English, so Joyce had no idea what it was. She nodded her thanks, and gingerly lifted it to her lips. The woman stayed to watch, so Joyce took a sip. It was oddly sweet yet it tasted thick and savoury at the same time. She smacked her lips, trying to separate the tastes. There was pineapple juice in it, she thought, and salt. A lot of salt. She decided it was disgusting—and then swallowed the rest of the contents of the tumbler. Disgusting in a rather nice way, she thought. The woman almost immediately disappeared into the shadows and re-emerged seconds later to refill it from a none-too-clean-looking jug.
Joyce thanked her with a smile and a nod. She looked at the salty-sweet drink and half-consciously began to realise how much she had changed in the past few weeks. She had eaten and drunk all sorts of strange things. And spent time with so many odd people. And helped crack criminal cases! And seen corpses. And been to Malaysia and Hong Kong, and India and Vietnam. And discovered a secret passageway in a Buddhist monastery.
And learned a bit of feng shui. She knew that a sheer cliff near a lake or the sea in the west was a ‘mountain star falling into water’. She knew that a semi-circle of mountains was an embracing road, a dragon’s lair. She knew that the Chien Kua was one of the Four West Houses. She knew that the numbers part of feng shui was based on the markings on a turtle’s shell seen several thousand years ago. She knew that soil ch’i damages water ch’i, and you need to place metal ch’i between them. She knew that soil-metal-water was the support cycle of the Later Heaven. She knew that things had their rightful places. She knew that it was important to arrange even the smallest things properly, because only then could larger objects find their correct space. She knew that things had unseen effects on other things. She knew that only when everything was in its right place did lasting harmony flow into a community.
One of the VCDs slipped from her hand, but she didn’t pick it up. She lifted the salty-sweet liquid to her lips, and took another sip. It was still disgusting.
By nine, the sun was high. Wong was sitting in Master Tran’s office. The chief monk was an old but sprightly man. His head was not fuzzy and shaven like those of his colleagues, but had the smooth hairlessness of advanced age. His skin was sun-browned and he had thick knuckles, like walnuts, on each gnarled hand.
Wong went through the details of his feng shui redesign in as much detail as time would allow. The head of the temple listened politely, and looked at the notes he had been handed. He then asked several questions, which were intelligent enough to show the geomancer that he took the business seriously.
Then Master Tran put the papers to one side. ‘ Merci bien. You have done well, and I have much to thank you for. Can I not persuade you to stay for lunch?’
‘I cannot. We have plane to catch.’ Wong looked down at his feet. ‘Master Tran, there is one more thing I have to tell you. There was a little problem this morning.’
‘I understand,’ said the old man. ‘You were caught in flagrante.’
‘No. I was in the sleeping room with my assistant. She is not a man.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
‘Oh. Yes. But let me explain. We discovered a route for smuggling things into the Vihara. A sort of opening in the wall. A tunnel in the roof space. I have marked the route on this map. You can see it. Decide what to do with it.’ The geomancer pulled another diagram from his file and placed it on the table. ‘You can block it. You will stop people bringing wrong things in. Also there is an escape of ch’i energy there. It acts as door in the northeast. Not good here. The ch’i of the northeast is cold. Cutting ch’i. Behaves in unpredictable way.’
‘CF, everything is unpredictable. If there is one thing I have learned in my life, that is it.’
Wong looked the old priest in the eye. ‘I must explain you something about last night. The reason girl was in my room. She was testing the route. This route which we disco
vered. She could not go back. It was too dark. She does not like rats. You have many rats. There was no other reason for her stay in my room. I slept on floor. I have witnesses.’
‘You certainly do have witnesses. You do not need to tell me all this. A monastery is the one place where gossip travels even faster than among shop women in a marketplace. None of this matters.’ The old man smiled.
‘But secret tunnel. This is an important discovery, no?’
‘To be honest, C F, no. We have known about that for years. I have sent junior brothers in and out through the hole myself if I needed some urgent supplies of something or other. I got someone to bring me a superb bottle of Taylor’s 1975 last year. For my health, of course. Would you like a drop now . . . ? No, okay.’
Wong needed a few seconds to ingest this information. ‘You knew about secret tunnel? Brother Wasuran said someone bring cigarettes and video machine in. And monks wanting to leave. These were problems, yes?’
‘Ye-es,’ said Master Tran slowly. He clasped his hands over his stomach. ‘This is true. But you have to understand how life works here. It is on a different scale to life in your busy-busy Singapore. Everything happens a bit more slowly. Yes, there was a case of cigarettes discovered, let me see, that was in 1988. And the video machine? That was discovered about five or six years ago, in the mid-90s. It was not really a big problem. You see, we have no television and no electricity, and I understand a video player needs both these things to work. These little incidents stick in the brothers’ heads because they are rare. We live a quiet life.’
‘So smuggling items not a big problem. But it is a feng shui problem. Changes flow of ch’i.’
‘I’m sure it does, and for that reason, it was good that you discovered that route and incorporated it into your report.’
‘Why you invite me here? What was the problem you want fixed?’
‘There was one particular problem, but it was a more general one. And it is one that you have already solved. Thank you.’
‘Gift of feng shui is given me by Heaven. Am happy to share with you.’
Master Tran moved over to a sideboard and took out a bottle of port. ‘Don’t mind if I have one, do you? C F, you have helped in ways that perhaps even you do not realise. For example, the fact that you were accompanied by your attractive girlfriend—’
‘Assistant.’
‘I’m sorry, your assistant, has had a very interesting effect on the men. And not a negative one. She is an interesting person, Brother Wasuran tells me. He had a chat with her before you went off to Porntip’s house for breakfast. It is always interesting to see something from another person’s point of view, particularly if that person is very different from oneself. It broadens the horizons. This is particularly important in something as closed as this monastery, where we don’t go out and mix much.’
‘My temporary assistant,’ added Wong. Tran’s words reminded him of his journal, part 73, his philosophy about the size of a person’s world. Only when you meet someone who doesn’t fit into your world is there an opportunity to make your world bigger. He had to admit, his dreadful assistant’s different point of view had proved slightly useful in a few cases. There had been many difficult times, but her impact had not been entirely negative in certain cases, he had to admit. Last night was a typical example. She had got him into the most awful trouble, yet at the same time, she solved one of the feng shui problems of the Vihara by discovering the secret passage. His reading would have been disastrously incomplete if she had not found the unofficial northeastern opening to the enclosure.
Master Tran returned to the table. ‘Your feng shui readings are greatly appreciated. We will attempt to implement as many of your suggestions as we can. I am quite sure they will have a beneficial effect on the temple. But let me tell you how your visit has really helped us.’
The old man looked out of the window of the dark room at the men, who were travelling across the yard to gather at the bo tree for a ritual.
‘This is a Zen Buddhist temple. Our work deals with the inner peace of the soul as well as the outer peace of the body. I have become aware over the past year or so that there has been some loss of faith here, some general disillusionment. Some of the brothers were getting curious about life outside, about the modern world, about women. This is natural. Naturally they were intrigued by your visit with a young woman.’
Tran turned from the window and sat down again. ‘When they saw you this morning after you had spent one night with a Western woman, they were shocked. You looked very tired. “Close to death,” Brother Wasuran said. They saw how much energy had been drawn out of you, and were left with an extremely negative impression of the delights of a free life, of life with members of the opposite sex, in the world outside.’
‘I did not sleep much last night.’
‘This is what they assumed.’
‘No. I mean I did not sleep much last night because I was uncomfortable on the floor. Not because . . . Not because of anything else.’
‘It does not matter what the truth is. What matters is the effect of the truth. This is a Zen principle. If a non-truth has the effect of the truth, then maybe it has made its own truth. This is possible. Whatever happened, the result was that the brothers were shocked at the draining effect of what they saw as your sinful behaviour. They did not want to be like you and lose their life energy, and die young.’
‘I had no sleep last night, and I am an old man. I was born fifty-six years ago.’
‘Interesting. Be that as it may. To be frank, I told the brothers this morning that you were twenty-seven.’
‘I see.’ Wong nodded. Truly, the way of Zen was mysterious and impossible to fathom.
He put his papers in his bag. The geomancer was happy to feel they had helped the old man, although he was still unclear about precisely how they had done it. Never mind. The problem was solved, that was the main thing. Tomorrow would be a new day and a new challenge. He suddenly frowned. Unless they sent him to America, which would certainly be the end of life as he knew it. He decided then and there that he would simply refuse to go. Let Mr Pun take away his retainer, if he wanted. He glanced through the old man’s window and noticed the activity in the grounds.
‘What the brothers are doing?’ the geomancer asked.
‘They are all in front of the bo tree. We had a little miracle last night.’
‘A miracle.’
‘The oldest brother was praying at the eastern altar last night and a small but perfect imagine of the Buddha fell into his hands from the sky. It is small, but it is really quite a marvellous thing. Like a tiny picture, but also like a little round door to Nirvana. You can look deep into it and see the Buddha inside. The brothers are worshipping it.’
‘Understand.’
The honk of a car horn outside reminded him that Joyce and Bin were waiting in Porntip’s Nissan at the front door, ready to go to the airport. The sun had risen to the height of the temple walls and was beginning to shine into the office, its light dappled by the leaves of the bo tree.
NURY VITTACHI did not win the Vogel for his first novel, was not shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with his subsequent books, and has never been nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘I hope to make it a clean sweep by not winning the Pulitzer next year,’ the Hong Kong-based novelist said.