Five Star Billionaire

by Tash Aw

  As she shuffled closer to the shop to take shelter from the rain, she noticed that it had a curious awning made of wood, and when she looked up she saw that it was in the shape of the roof of a village hut, something rustic from Southeast Asia. It was similar to the roofs of the houses on the edge of the jungle from her childhood. The sign on the door was very small, very classy and discreet. It read, APSARA THAI spa. Inside, she could see walls lined with smooth dark timber and floors of expensive black marble. There was a bamboo cabinet with glass bottles displayed like artwork next to a counter made from gray stone. It was not the sort place for people like her, Phoebe thought, but all the same, she found herself walking through the door. She clutched at her purse; it was all that she had now. The money in it was not very much, just enough to pay her share of the rent for this month and buy food for her and Yanyan—not proper food but instant noodles and maybe some skewers or xiaolongbao or noodles from the stalls around Qipu Lu. Just once in her life, she would like to enjoy what other people had, Phoebe thought. Just once, she would like to experience life as a person of comfort and wealth, a happy person. And then she would never wish for anything again; she would become a poor person forever. She would accept it. After all, it was her destiny in life to be poor, as it was other people’s destiny to be rich. It had always been this way; she’d been foolish to think she could change her fate.

  She sat on a bench covered in fine silk, worrying that her damp coat would soil the beautiful cloth. There was no one around, and the place was in semidarkness. There were glass jars with unlit candles everywhere, and the air-conditioning was so silent you could not hear it. She heard music, stringed instruments and flutes whose notes were familiar to her ears. Flowing water. Sounds from her childhood. She opened her purse and counted the notes in it. What would Yanyan say if she saw Phoebe right now, about to spend all this money on a manicure, money they could use to buy food and warm clothes for the winter? The cold wind was already sweeping through the windows of their little room now; they could feel winter descending on them. In the mornings when they woke up, they would remain in bed, their bodies stiff and painful after a freezing night. They’d said that they would save money to buy a small heater or more thick blankets so at least they wouldn’t be cold at night, but they never seemed to have enough spare cash. Soon, Phoebe had promised, very soon.

  Just once. She wanted just once to know what it felt like to be rich, just for one hour.

  But she closed her wallet, feeling the buckle clasp firmly shut, and tucked it back into her coat pocket. Then she bowed her head and rested there for a few moments, while she gathered enough strength to go back out into the cold.

  10.

  NEVER LAPSE INTO DESPAIR OR APATHY

  MORNING: THE DISTANT NOISES OF CONSTRUCTION WORK; THE rhythmic pounding of pile drivers that seemed to travel up through the soil, into the fabric of the building, underpinning the growing hum of traffic; the beeping of scooters; the sounds of buses squealing to a halt. Afternoon: children’s after-school laughter echoing in the hallways and stairwell, and rising from the streets below. Dinnertime: the lively clang of steel on steel; the rushing fizz of hot oil; the scraping of plastic stools on bare floors; the ceramic clink of plates and bowls being laid out; the sound of happy families. Evening: off-key karaoke singing; the tangle of voices making it impossible to identify the tunes of the songs.

  This is how he marked his days—by the sounds drifting through his open windows, carried on the tepid spring breeze. This is how he knew that day was turning unhurriedly to night and he could emerge from his bedroom to sit in the living room and stare at the view of the skyscrapers, which were just beginning to light up against a mouse-colored sky. He would wait until it was dark before venturing out to the twenty-four-hour convenience stores at the end of the street to buy bottled water and instant noodles, for the city felt safer at night—fewer people, fewer stares, no one to notice his sallow complexion and too-long hair.

  There was more warmth in the air now; the sun flooded the living room all afternoon, so that by sunset the green velvet sofa would be warm to the touch and the room would feel stuffy. He had taken to leaving the windows open on certain days, when he began to feel suffocated in his bedroom. With this simple act came a sudden awareness of the proximity of the other people in his building, of hundreds of other lives. The harshness of winter had isolated him from his neighbors; he had barely realized they were there. But the warmth of spring had brought them flooding into his consciousness.

  One noise in particular began to force itself upon him by simple repetition, until he could no longer ignore it. Unlike most of the other noises in the building, which occurred at regular times of the day, this one was capable of starting up at any time of the day or night, often in mid-morning or midafternoon, or in short bursts late at night, when the rest of the building was still—always out of sync with the rhythm of the other noises. It was a lone female voice—a young one, Justin thought—singing to a karaoke set. The music dissolved strangely into the fabric of the building, leaving only the voice. In turns muffled and amplified by the layers of concrete, it would insinuate its way into Justin’s daytime slumber, making it impossible for him to remain in bed. He would get up and close the windows, but by then it would be too late: Like a dripping tap, the voice would have already registered its presence in his head and would not go away. He could make out the flat, almost tuneless voice singing old-fashioned love songs that he could often recognize. Sometimes, at night, this voice would be joined by another, slightly more melodious one, and together they would perform duets, taking turns singing verses before joining together in an earsplitting chorus that spoiled the peace of Justin’s evenings alone in the dark watching the lights of the city.

  But it was the daytime singing that most disturbed Justin, for this was when he slept. Late one morning, long after the children had left for school and the mothers of the building were out running errands, he was just drifting back into a thin, sweat-coated sleep when he heard the voice again, singing “Little Moonlight Song.” He got up and made sure all the windows were closed before going back to bed; he put in his earplugs and listened to his heartbeat, quick and anxious in his chest. But suspended in this noiseless cavity was that voice, faint but distinct. Soon the room began to feel stuffy with the windows closed. He got out of bed, put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and went out of the apartment, keeping the voice in his head, like a tracker dog following a scent. He stood in the stairwell: It was impossible to discern where the music was coming from. He went down a floor but began to lose the trail. He walked up the dusty staircase until he was at the top floor, and at last he began to hear the cheap tinkling of notes played on an electric piano, the sickly-sweet melodies of violins, and, most obtrusive of all, the horribly off-key voice. He walked quickly down the corridor until he found the door, then paused for a moment, listening to the last strains of the song, the final notes now coming to an end. He tried to reach between the bars of the door’s grille to knock, but the gap between the bars was too small for his fist, so he slapped the metal bars awkwardly with the palm of his hand. The next song had just begun to play, but it suddenly stopped. Justin waited a few moments and listened for noise from the room: nothing. He leaned in closer, trying to discern movement from within, but the pile drivers in the adjacent building site had started again, and the deep rhythmic pounding obscured any noise from the room. He smacked his hand heavily on the grille again, and again: The metallic rattling echoed down the hallway.

  As he turned to walk away, he wondered if he had imagined it all, if he had misjudged the source of the torturous music. The corridor was much narrower and darker up here, the apartments packed together tightly, unlike the genteel spaciousness of his floor. Many of the units had their doors open; each one was little more than a single room with a tiny kitchen in front, and each one was crammed with boxes, chairs, piles of clothes on the floor, electric fans, heaters. Their inhabitants spilled into the corrid
or, squatting on the floor or perched on low stools as they performed everyday tasks. An old man in an indigo worker’s hat sat on the threshold of his room, repairing a radio. A child with a bad cough copied out lines from a textbook onto a notepad; she wore fluffy slippers with a lamb’s smiley face imprinted on them. A few old women gathered around a piece of newspaper spread out on the floor in the middle of the corridor, peeling string beans, topping and tailing them and dropping them into an enamel bowl. They could have been in a village, Justin thought, not in the middle of the biggest city in the world. No one looked at him; they simply carried on with their lives—the same lives that had surrounded him for the last three months, lives he had barely noticed.

  Diagonally across the hallway from the barricaded door sat an old woman stirring a pot of soup; the grille to her room was shut, but the inner door was open. A toddler sat on the floor not far from her, playing with an armless doll, shaking it in the air and pulling at its hair.

  “Excuse me, Auntie,” Justin said, “but do you know if there’s anyone in that room over there?”

  “You’re wasting your time,” the woman said, smiling. “She won’t answer the door; she thinks you’re here to collect the gas bill or the electricity bill or something like that.”

  “In that case, maybe I should shout out that I’m not asking for money.”

  “It won’t help you,” the old woman said, standing and coming to the grille to meet Justin. “She keeps to herself. Anyway, she’s a bit strange.”

  “Strange?”

  The woman twirled her finger around her temple. “You know, strange. She has mental problems.”

  “I see.”

  “Her friend is better, more talkative, but she’s always out working—working at what I don’t know. Young girls these days, you never know what they get up to. She comes home at all hours of the night—you should see the way she dresses—and sometimes I can hear her speaking on her mobile phone and it’s obvious she has men. Foreign, too, both of them—not sure where they’re from, Guangdong or Fujian or somewhere like that. Shanghai is full of foreigners these days; it’s not the same as before.” The woman’s friendly expression suddenly changed and she looked at Justin with a frown, as if something had occurred to her. “Anyway, what business do you have with those girls?”

  “None,” Justin said. “I’m a neighbor from downstairs. I wanted to talk to them about the noise coming from their room, that’s all. The singing. It disturbs me.”

  “What noise?” the woman said. “They might be strange girls, but they don’t make much noise.”

  Justin shrugged. The sounds of lunchtime were beginning to start up around him—the cacophony of pots and pans, crying babies, irate mothers, an old couple arguing, their voices frail but angry. A small girl, maybe ten years old, paced up and down the corridor, speaking aloud and occasionally glancing at the notebook she was holding. On the cover, she had written: English Conversation. “At eleven o’clock, we have science. At eleven o’clock, we have science. At quarter past eleven, we have music. I like music. I like music. I-like-music.”

  Five floors down, Justin was insulated from these lives; he had thought he could hear them but in fact he had heard little. He walked down the back staircase, pausing to look at the view from the rear of the building—a vast construction site with a hole that sank into a dirty bronze blackness; beyond it, a road lined with cheap shopping malls and food stalls, the crowds spilling onto the streets. Even from this distance, the road looked black with tar and cooking oil. He hurried back to his apartment; he needed the reassurance of the view he had from the front of the building, the unchanging view of Old and New Shanghai, the elegant stone buildings framed by the lavish skyscrapers beyond them. Their presence calmed him; he felt he belonged in that orderly cityscape.

  For the next few days, he attempted to re-create the existence he had had until just recently: the long dank days in bed, windows shut and curtains drawn against the noise of the city; quiet evenings gazing at the skyline, his mind perfectly empty, his body inert. But it did not work. Sunlight eased its way into his bedroom, and even through the thick velvet curtains he could sense the gathering intensity of spring. Then there was the noise, which would not go away now. The outside world had forced itself into his existence; the safety of his winter retreat was over. He would have to find somewhere else to live.

  He began to search on the Internet for apartments to rent, but there were thousands of pages full of boxy places that looked identical. In the past he would have asked his secretary to do it for him, but he no longer had one; he no longer had an office or a car or a network of friends whom he might have rung, people who knew people who knew people. Three months was all it had taken for these friends to disappear from his life. As he scrolled through the pages of bare, featureless apartments, he felt a shallow wave of nostalgia for his former life, the ease and commodity with which small tasks such as this would have been accomplished. But remembering the interiors of the offices—a world of veneered wood and padded black leather and hearty men in suits—he felt stricken, too, by a sense of panic. He remembered his father’s voice, solemn, unyielding, remembered the sickening weight of responsibilities, and he was glad because all that had vanished. Convenience and obligation. That was all his life had been.

  He clicked on his in-box to look at his emails—the first time in weeks that he had done so. He calmly waited while the emails loaded, not panicking as he had done before, feeling strong enough to deal with whatever appeared. Even when he saw the number of unread emails—3,281—highlighted in bold font, as if to emphasize his negligence, he felt unruffled. He scanned the pages swiftly; he could sense three or four calling out to him, like ailing antelope in a herd of thousands whose weak bleating drew the attention of the predators. They were from his brother, imploring him to come home. Justin went back to them and read them slowly, appreciating C.S.’s facility with the written word: One message was curt, hurt, accusing; the next was generous, understanding, forgiving; the next was matter-of-fact, newslike; the last one was cajoling, vulnerable. They were exercises in style for his brother, who had wanted to be a writer but now—in Justin’s absence—was forced to run the family business. Every email was designed to carry one message: Their family was ruined; his brother was hapless, did not know how to run a business; Justin had abdicated in the hour of greatest need and had to return to save them. One email ended poetically with a single line: I am drowning.

  He stared at this line and remembered his brother once saying, “The thing about you is that you have no fantasy. You can’t imagine being anything other than yourself.” It was true: He had not been able to conceive of life in any other way.

  In a few deft clicks of the keyboard, he had selected all 3,281 emails in his in-box and, without hesitating, deleted every one of them.

  He had been working on the sofa, the laptop balanced on his knees. He leaned back and sank into the plush velvet, feeling heavy and immobile. He did not have to try very hard to imagine what the atmosphere in his family home might be at the moment—it came to him at once, clear and true as daylight: silent corridors, the whisper of accusation hanging in the air; the wary tread of the servants’ feet on marble floors; wordless dinners, the array of dishes smaller now because of Father’s diabetes and Mother’s growing worry about maintaining a pleasing shape. Or maybe they would be at the old house by the seaside at Port Dickson, where the breeze and darkness would make the silence more tolerable and the foamy hush of the waves would calm Mother’s nerves. The bamboo blinds on the veranda would be frayed and brittle, awaiting a replacement that was long overdue; the sea would wash plastic bags and beer bottles and other debris up onto the beach, leaving a dark snaky trail along the sand; and on the hills overlooking the bay and behind the house, there would be yet another of those newly constructed condominium blocks that had been springing up over the decades, white and featureless. Father would grumble about all these things, and Mother would say, It wasn’t like thi
s when the boys were small.

  Contained in their small gestures—Mother’s failure to prepare afternoon tea; Father’s firm refusal to go for his usual evening swim, which he used to perform proudly in front of his wife and young children, splashing powerfully through the low waves—was an intricate dance of blame, in which each would take a turn to play victim and accuser. In her unwillingness to take part in the rituals of domesticity, Mother was blaming Father for the position they were in now—they could no longer afford the staff, no longer had the power or influence to buy the adjacent land to save their precious view—and in remaining housebound and static, he blamed her for the loss of his vigor and pride. They had always found ways to avoid the inescapable fact that they had ground each other down over the years, but now they would be forced together, in a house that was falling quickly into disrepair, with a view that was ruined, with children who were ruined. They had had to sell the penthouse apartment in Hong Kong, the giant pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side, and the bolt-hole in Regent’s Park. There was nowhere for them to escape each other now. He wondered for a moment where Sixth Uncle was right now, whether he had escaped to a farm in Tasmania as he was always threatening to do—or whether he was where he had always been, at his family’s beck and call.

  Justin closed his eyes, glad that his parents did not know where he was, glad that there was a huge distance between them.

  He reached for his laptop again and typed the name of the building he had wanted to buy several months earlier, on which they had pinned all their hopes. The first news item confirmed what he had assumed: