Alternatively, it might simply be a case of the phoney Chinese-Australian getting in the way of a routine, albeit nefarious, business arrangement in which Mercy B. Lord was involved, and they were afraid she might spill the beans on the pillow. Whatever it was, I reasoned she couldn’t be a big player because she appeared to receive little or no significant reward for what she did.
If Sidney had found a way to fire me that the Yanks would accept or could be forced to accept, I couldn’t have given a shit. A bit ego-bruising perhaps, but I was thoroughly jack of the Wings, and as long as Mercy B. Lord agreed to accompany me back to Australia, it would be a happily-ever-after ending.
All this stuff raced through my mind as I waited for my beloved to come home. They say the pheromones that make us fall in love finally wear off and are replaced by something more permanent, yet I couldn’t imagine my feelings for Mercy B. Lord ever changing. The idea that she might come to harm or even die was beyond my comprehension. I was possibly being melodramatic, but this was Asia, and even in a civilised society like Singapore, taking a life to conceal a crime or to avoid trouble was common among the Triads. While my disappearance might cause problems, hers wouldn’t. She had no relations, no important connections to speak of, apart from Beatrice and the Wings, nobody asking questions except an expat who was having an affair with just another pretty Chinese girl.
I had been plainly warned never to question her disappearances on Thursdays. But now, after Johnny’s threat, I knew I must. If we had to catch a flight back to Australia the following day, it wasn’t an issue. I had been given no reason for the order to give her up, but I knew there must be one. Unless she explained what was going on, there wasn’t anything I could do to help her – help us. I decided not to tell her too much, so as not to alarm her unduly. My fear was that she would leave me in order to protect me. I’d tell her the Wings had asked me to stop seeing her, but had given no reasons, that I felt compromised. Then I’d beg her to explain what the hell was going on.
Mercy B. Lord arrived a few minutes after 6.30 p.m. carrying a tiffin box. She had a way of lighting up a room. It wasn’t just for me; I’d heard others say the same. I guess it’s a quality found with truly beautiful women. ‘Peking duck tonight, very posh Chinese!’ she cried as she came into the kitchen, smiling. She placed it on the counter and ran to embrace me.
‘Lovely!’ I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
She stopped dead. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Let’s eat. I’ll tell you while we eat.’
We sat on stools at the kitchen counter while we ate and I told her about Ronnie’s initial warning when I was new to Singapore, then gave her an edited version of that afternoon’s exchange with Johnny. I concluded by saying, ‘Darling, I don’t know how serious this is, whether you’re in danger, or I am, but I couldn’t bear it if I was putting you at risk. Until I know what’s involved there’s nothing I can do, no plans I can make, no decision we can take. As I promised, I haven’t questioned your disappearances on Thursdays but now I feel I must. Please understand things have changed suddenly and dramatically.’
Mercy B. Lord was silent for what seemed like minutes but was probably less than thirty seconds. ‘Simon, I can handle this,’ she said at last. ‘There are certain rules, and as long as we don’t break them we’ll be safe.’ It wasn’t the answer I expected. There was nothing in her eyes that suggested she was unduly afraid.
‘Rules? Whose rules? The Wings’? Beatrice Fong’s? Who? How will I know if I’m breaking them if I don’t know what they are?’
‘Ah, but I know and I will be careful not to compromise you.’ ‘You knew you might be in danger if you stayed here, didn’t you?’ She shrugged, tilted her head and gave me a beseeching look. ‘I can’t answer that. Just trust me, Simon.’
‘I’m not sure I like that, your being the guardian of my safety. May I say, you’re making it very bloody difficult, darling.’ ‘No, believe me, I’m making it easy for you, Simon.’ ‘Bloody hell! That’s an answer? I’m supposed to walk around knowing I’m playing with dynamite but have no means of removing the fuse or knowing if it’s already alight?’
Mercy B. Lord laughed, although she sounded closer to tears than merriment, and she had lost control of her voice. ‘Simon, there’s only one rule you need to know and obey. If you don’t, I can’t and won’t be a part of your life. I resisted you for a very long time and it hasn’t been easy.’ ‘You mean Thursdays? Bloody disappearing Thursdays!’ ‘Yes. You may never question me. If you want me, then that’s the rule. If you break it, then you lose me.’
‘Darling, it must be perfectly obvious that I love you. But you can’t just pop off every Thursday with a “See ya later” and expect me never to question you. I know I said I wouldn’t. Not now that I’ve been warned on two separate occasions. Sidney Wing is dangerous and Johnny is a fucking goon! I’ve heard Beatrice Fong described as a despicable creature. And you’re somehow involved with them and I’m supposed to stand by and play dumb-fuck lover! Mercy B. Lord, can’t you understand? I want to marry you! I want us to have children!’
Mercy B. Lord looked as shocked as if I’d slapped her face. ‘Marry me?’ she repeated in a shocked, incredulous voice, as if the idea had never occurred to her and was far from welcome. She shook her head. ‘No, Simon, you’ve got this all terribly wrong!’
I ignored her, gulping down my anger but still too pumped-up to really listen or register surprise. ‘My mum is paying one of her three-monthly visits to her prodigal son. I’ve told you before about her carry-on, her matchmaking me with Singapore’s finest virgin daughters. I want you to meet her, darling. I want her to understand that I’ve found the love of my life.’
‘No!’ It came out like a hammer-blow on rock. She jumped from the kitchen school and glared at me. ‘Simon! How dare you!’
‘What? You don’t want to meet my mother? Have I got everything completely wrong?’
‘Right both times!’ If I’d expected Mercy B. Lord to break down and sob at this point, I would have been disappointed. She looked me directly in the eye, her expression resolute, her right eyebrow slightly raised. ‘Well?’
This was someone I didn’t know. Her reaction to the news, the warnings from Ronnie and Johnny, had been totally unexpected, but now there was a second, even greater surprise. Or was it all a part of the same Mercy B. Lord I didn’t know? Steady on, Simon, cool it! Start to listen. When you don’t know what to say, stay silent (my dad’s advice). Listen with your eyes as well as your ears.
So much for the best laid plans of mice and men. In my mind I had set up the meeting between the two women in my life. I would warn Chairman Meow not to mention the family money, not that she would have done so anyway. She’d initially be horrified at Mercy B. Lord’s lack of background and connections, deeply suspicious of her beauty and, I dare say, her sexiness, but how could she fail to appreciate her and ultimately love her?
Now it seemed I’d got it all wrong. In my male arrogance I’d seen our living together as the prelude to marriage and spending the rest of our lives together, happily ever after. As I think I’ve said before, I’d warned my cousins Peter and Henry never to mention my family’s financial circumstances, so this wasn’t Mercy B. Lord playing hardball, putting up a sham resistance to keep me keen and then eventually appearing to make up her mind so everyone would know she was the genuine article. At least I was pretty confident she wasn’t one of the gold-diggers who kept Chairman Meow permanently paranoid. But then, you never know what people know about you, especially the Chinese, who regard information as money in the bank or the single greatest advantage they possess over an opponent. If Mercy B. Lord was a gold-digger, then she was ready for a leading role on Broadway.
Belatedly, my survival instinct kicked in. I wasn’t accustomed to being on the back foot, especially when I’d assumed that the outcome would be favourable. I’m usually fairly careful with speculation and don’t assume I have any extra rights, but I’d ne
ver seen any problems on the horizon from Mercy B. Lord herself, who was nothing but loving. I had concentrated almost solely on overcoming the resistance to my marriage that I felt sure would come from Chairman Meow. Nothing, I’d told myself, was going to prevent me from marrying Mercy B. Lord.
I’d never asked anyone to marry me before and so I’d never had a knockback, and while I didn’t have any tickets on myself and knew that my looks were pretty unprepossessing, I had no serious bad habits or addictions, wasn’t difficult, didn’t make unreasonable demands, worked hard and earned an above-average income. I also told myself that if Mercy B. Lord was not interested in me, then she wouldn’t have agreed to stay with me in the first place.
However, I was also aware that wealth was the potential enemy of true love. From childhood my sisters and I had been warned repeatedly to watch out for what my father called the ‘cheque-book sheilas’. Sometimes I thought I’d have to find and fall in love with someone whose family was as wealthy as my own to eliminate the money problem. In Australia that considerably limited the odds of finding someone suitable, which may have been another factor behind Chairman Meow’s thinking. Now, just when I thought I’d beaten the odds and found the girl of my dreams, she refused to marry me, or even to meet my mum. She’d declined with admirable economy, just a few words. If there is meant to be a script for this sort of thing, clearly I’d lost my place.
Mercy B. Lord headed for our bedroom and I followed, knowing with certainty that I was about to lose the best thing that had ever happened to me. I tried to think clearly about the sequence of events over the past ten minutes. We’d started with the warning I’d received and she’d fielded that, but insisted on her rule about disappearing on Thursdays. I’d spat the dummy. She wouldn’t budge. I’d declared my love, plans, our future and she’d gone ape-shit! How could I recover from this disaster? I was desperate.
‘Okay, no meeting Mother and no marriage plans.’ I sighed. ‘May I think about your disappearances on Thursdays?’
‘Of course.’ Mercy B. Lord glanced down at her wristwatch. ‘You’ve got twenty seconds, Simon.’
‘Hey, wait on – your watch doesn’t have a second hand.’ It was an attempt at a joke, perhaps because I didn’t really believe her.
She glanced up momentarily. ‘Seventeen!’
‘Hang on, this is ridiculous!’
‘Twelve!’
‘A moratorium?’
‘Eight!’
‘Can we at least —’
‘Five!’
‘Oh, shit! Can’t we talk this over?’
‘Zero! Your time’s up, Simon.’
‘What happens now?’
‘I pack up and leave.’
‘Ah, c’mon. What do you expect me to say? Am I so repulsive?’
It was a cheap shot but she was ready for it. ‘Oh, I see. I make a habit of sleeping with repulsive men, do I? What does that say about me? That I’m just another Veronica?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that!’
I hated the whine in my voice. She’d taken me by surprise. I was unaware that she knew about the Thai bar girl, but I should have known better. Come to think of it, I was unaware of lots of things about this truly glorious, kind, generous and now surprisingly tough creature. But she certainly had my measure.
Mercy B. Lord had opened the door to the built-in wardrobe where she kept all her things and removed her suitcase from the top shelf. It was cheap but served its purpose. Had it been bespoke or designer luggage, it would have raised yet another question. When she’d arrived she had just the one large suitcase and none of the usual paraphernalia that I imagined went with a young woman moving house permanently. It should have alerted me to the fact that this was a trial run, but I’d been much too excited to think about it at the time. She’d volunteered to stay and I was simply over the moon at the prospect.
Now she was going, and all because I’d broken my word about Thursday. Shit, it was a bit rough. Surely, after Johnny’s warning, I was entitled to say something? Surely that was the responsible thing to do? But now I realised that the control she’d shown upon hearing the news meant that she’d known all along what might happen. I’d broken my promise – in a sense I hadn’t trusted her. It was bloody tough-minded, but she obviously wasn’t going to make any exceptions. I simply couldn’t be trusted. Now it looked as if the test run was coming to a regrettable end. This, I knew, was a lot more than a lover’s tiff.
She started to plonk clothes into her suitcase and it was obvious, despite the defiant tilt of her chin, that she was upset. ‘Plonking’ wasn’t her style. She was neat in her person and in everything she did.
‘Mercy B. Lord, please don’t leave. I’m sure we can work this out. I apologise, for everything.’
She paused, a pair of lacy black knickers in one hand, then she let me have it, without raising her voice, but in a steady, emphatic tone, and with each statement she furiously stuffed another item of clothing into the suitcase.
‘Simon, I love you. God knows, I’ve been offered all sorts of inducements for sex, including work at the China Doll or as the concubine for some Chinese billionaire. Every time I meet a foreigner at the airport – French, German, American, English and now the Japanese – I can always be confident of one thing: within forty-eight hours he will be propositioning me. I told you about the German the night we had dinner at Raffles. He wasn’t joking, nor was he an exception. Many of these foreign visitors own or run large international concerns. They don’t care how much they have to pay – they work at the very top international rate in New York, Hamburg, London, Paris, and now, I suppose, Tokyo. They’re spoilt little boys accustomed to winning, and the more exorbitant the price, the better it is for their egos.
‘I’m half Chinese, and in this culture, the only one I know, money matters. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times when I was tempted. I think that even if I had been born into a good middle-class Chinese family, I would have yielded to temptation. The Chinese are ambivalent about these things, especially if you operate at the very top and command outrageous sums. But I was born a nobody, a half-caste, with no future, no education to speak of, no guanxi. Being a prostitute, a high-class whore, makes me no different from your Veronica. Worse! She is taking the only way out she knew. She may have had no choice. While I was expected to do the same, I didn’t have to do it. I had a basic European education. If opening my legs was the only way, even if it was very profitable, then I would demonstrate to myself that you start as rubbish and end as rubbish.’
‘Mercy B. Lord, you don’t know how to be rubbish. It’s not possible.’ I was anxious to steer her away from her background and the way she thought about herself. I’d been born with a silver spoon halfway down my throat, but with a face that looked as if it had been hit repeatedly with the back of a spade, so I knew all about those moments of self-doubt. I also hoped that if I could keep her talking I might think of a way to keep her here with me. ‘And so you what? Started with Beatrice Fong? By the way, I can’t deny Veronica, but I want you to know that since you and I have been together, that’s all over.’
‘Yes, I know. And yes, I started work in Beatrice’s office at sixteen. She’d come to the orphanage the previous year and selected me, urging me to finish my schooling and paying the nuns to send me to typing and bookkeeping lessons after school. I matriculated at sixteen and won a scholarship to university.’ She shrugged. ‘That was the first time I was approached to go on the game. Working university vacations only. It was tempting and would have paid for my education. But in the end I took the Beatrice Fong Agency job.’
‘Is that because you were brought up as a Catholic?’ I will never know how I came to ask such a stupid and insensitive question.
She picked up a carved wooden box. ‘You bastard!’ she cried, and flung it at me with all her strength.
The box hit me square in the stomach and fell, landing on a corner so that the lid flew open and a piece of khaki fabric spilled out. I stoope
d quickly to recover it and saw that it was a man’s short-sleeved shirt. I picked it up.
Mercy B. Lord gasped, then cried, ‘Give that to me!’ and snatched it from my hand. ‘The box!’ she demanded.
‘Darling, how can I apologise?’ I begged.
‘You can’t,’ she said quietly, her sudden recovery remarkable under the circumstances. This was a girl who could hide her emotions, and I sensed that she was mortified by her sudden loss of control.
She spread the shirt out on the bed and smoothed it carefully. There seemed nothing unusual about it, except that the sleeve nearest me had been removed, hacked off with a sharp pair of scissors in a deliberate zigzag pattern, and on the right pocket was a round disc picked out in tiny needle holes like carefully unpicked embroidery. There are some things you just know for sure, and this was one of them. I dared not ask about or even comment on the severed sleeve. How long the shirt had been in the box, I couldn’t say. She silently folded the shirt and laid it back in the cheap wooden box, closed it and placed it carefully in a corner of the suitcase as if she were apologising for having used it badly. Then, wordlessly, she reached under the pillow on the neatly made bed to retrieve her pretty cotton nightgown. I recalled that she hadn’t arrived fully equipped with femme fatale lingerie. As far as I knew, she possessed one pair of black lacy panties and a sexy black bra that she’d laughingly told me she’d bought at Robinsons the afternoon she’d decided to seduce me. All her other stuff seemed to be what my sisters had worn every day, undies they called Cottontails and white cotton bras.
When she finally spoke, she did so quietly. ‘Simon, I just want you to understand I came to you because I wanted to. Excluding the boy at school, you are the first.’ She closed the suitcase with a click of the cheap tarnished locks. ‘You don’t own me and I don’t want you to make plans for us. There are things in my life you don’t know about and never will. I haven’t made any demands except for one, and you’ve known it all along. The proviso has always been there – I’m away on Thursday until late afternoon Friday. If you can’t accept that, and you obviously can’t, then you can’t have me.’
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