As always seems to happen, the very next day I was called into the office of the minister for tourism, who briefed me on seven large paintings he required, based on architectural sketches of proposed redevelopments that tourists might visit in future. He hadn’t forgotten the presentation that had originally won us the account and wanted these painted panels to form a backdrop on the town-hall stage for a presentation of the ‘Magic of People’ at a travel convention for a hundred senior international travel agents, flown in at the government’s expense, which would be held in a little over a fortnight. There was insufficient time but there was no refusing the minister, who had himself chosen the pen and ink architectural drawings we were required to bring to life.
It meant I could kiss my portrait goodbye. But then I got lucky. A freelance graphic artist, a young German bloke recently arrived in Singapore named Helmut Kraus, called me and asked if there was any work available. ‘Grab a taxi and bring your portfolio,’ I said. Maybe, just maybe, the gods would smile on me.
Helmut looked like a bit of a hippy, with a full blond beard and tawny hair down to his shoulders (the hair police hadn’t yet caught up with him), but his portfolio was good, very good – well disciplined with just the right artistic and commercial graphic touch. He assured me he could do the job in a week but needed a space to work in, as he was living at the YMCA.
I couldn’t quite believe my luck. With a solid week working late into the night I could almost complete the portrait, giving me the following week’s nights to do the finishing touches and have it framed in time to get it onto the plane to Hong Kong the following Monday. I needed to be at work the week before the travel conference to put the final touches to the international advertising campaign we had prepared for the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board (Sidebottom copy with Koo art direction and TV). It was a huge feather in our cap – the first locally produced campaign to go both to Europe and the United States.
I rented a cheap room for Helmut in the hotel across the road from the agency and proceeded to brief him thoroughly, taking him carefully through the architectural sketches. His style suited the precise rendering of the buildings and I took particular care to stress the importance of the outdoor recreational spaces, where the architects had indicated trees and greenery.
‘Fill the squares and spaces with people having a good time, eating and walking, and make sure there’s a lot of natural-looking greenery,’ I’d stressed.
‘I do vun every day. Hey, man, it’s cool job!’
I’d laughed. It was an expression that wasn’t common in Singapore at the time. ‘Cool is great! We want the scenes to have a nice cool feeling, like enjoying a gin sling on a lazy late afternoon, the feeling of cool shade and a soft breeze blowing in on a tropical evening.’
‘Ja, ja,’ he agreed, ‘spring I know, also gin. This is special in Singapore … gin spring?’
‘No, gin sling – it’s a tropical drink known as a sun-downer, because you drink it mostly in the early evening when the sun’s going down.’ I was beginning to realise his English comprehension wasn’t all that great and that I had been over-explaining. ‘Helmut, just keep the pictures looking fresh, eh?’
‘Like spring. Ja, ja, I do like spring!’
‘Well, no, not exactly, this is the tropics. The seasons don’t change all that much. Like I said, just keep the pictures looking fresh.’
While I wasn’t in the agency for the next week, I took the precaution of inspecting the first painting, after instructing Helmut to call me at home when he’d completed it. He’d called me early on Monday evening. Although the one he’d chosen to do was largely architectural, it was one of the most difficult and he’d done an excellent job. He was fast, accurate and the colour was good. I’d taken him out for a quick meal, and with that, satisfied he was up to the task, I’d foolishly left him alone for the remainder of the week, something I wouldn’t have done had I been working in my office.
He called me late Friday afternoon to say he’d completed the job, and I caught a taxi to the hotel, where I very nearly had a heart attack. While technically perfect, the paintings were full of trees and flowers from Europe, cold-climate deciduous varieties – oak, birch, beech, sycamore, plane trees and the like – and the squares featured daffodils and tulips and several pink or white flowering fruit trees. The pictures were ablaze with the spirit of an English spring. Not a strelitzia, palm, bougainvillea, poinsettia, frangipani or Singapore orchid to be seen. No tropical trees, no palms, no bamboo. He’d worked indoors and perhaps he’d been smoking funny cigarettes, because he certainly hadn’t bothered to glance out of the hotel window. Furthermore, the drawing featured no Singaporeans, only Europeans; he even had a white bloke pulling a rickshaw.
I felt obliged to pay him – in theory he’d done what I’d asked him to do. Sidney complained bitterly, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was government business, he’d have refused to hand over the money. However, it meant I had to work until 2 a.m. in my studio at home for the next five days to redo the panels. I wasn’t as skilled as Helmut, and when I was through with them, they had a noticeable looseness about them. Compared to the original brief from the minister, a pretty straight up and down man who’d instructed me to bring the architect’s precisely rendered drawings to life, they might have looked brash or just plain slapdash. I’d used brilliant exotic colour, even mixing in a little fluoro paint I’d obtained to draw the eye away from the variations in style. Upon seeing the panels Dansford declared them simply splendid – not the most reassuring compliment as he was a ‘less is more’ person and the Chinese, as a general rule, favour ‘more is always better’.
I told myself I’d done my best in the time available, and it just couldn’t be helped. I’d screwed it up with Herr Helmut Kraus and had to complete the new panels by Friday or, as it turned out, Saturday morning at 1 a.m. They had to be in place by that afternoon for the dress rehearsal for the conference that was to open, trumpets blaring, at 10 a.m. on Sunday.
If questioned, I was going to bullshit that I’d taken my inspiration from the new international art movement coming out of tropical South America that was taking the West by storm. I didn’t have the time to find out which South American countries lay within the tropics but Brazil seemed like a good guess – Copacabana beach, bikini-clad brown bodies, the samba and all that jazz. As Sidney Wing’s office décor attested, the Chinese think foreign is always better than local.
One of the first principles of advertising is that if you’re going to bullshit, you may as well bullshit big. Inventing a trend that doesn’t exist sometimes works because it makes the other party look and feel ill-informed and behind the times. To explain, every new trend with a chance of succeeding is taken up by about 7 per cent of people, known as ‘early adopters’. If this group go for an idea, then it’s worth building on, and if the product or idea is a good one, it will have a better than even chance of making it in the marketplace. The key words in my bullshit explanation were ‘international’, ‘West’ and ‘by storm’, as the conference delegates were mostly Westerners from America and Europe, and ‘by storm’ hinted at a certain excitement, which we’d been sufficiently hip to be aware of in Singapore. Or, as Herr Helmut Kraus might have put it, ‘Bullshit uber alle!’
I was required to attend the conference, where Dansford and I were to present the international ad campaign we’d designed. I was dropdown-dead tired but thought that if I skipped the cocktail party after the conference and grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep, I’d have Sunday night into the following morning to complete Mercy B. Lord’s portrait. It had to be dispatched to Hong Kong by mid-morning on Monday. This would be only just sufficient time for it to make the final deadline.
I shall never know how I got through that week, and when I finally crashed, it was for fourteen hours. I reckon I’d averaged no more than three hours’ sleep per night all week, supplemented by a handful of half-hour naps. When the taxi arrived to take the portrait to the airport on Mond
ay I was practically hallucinating. I’d used the hairdryer Mercy B. Lord had inadvertently left behind to dry the last of the paint, and then, just as I was preparing to wrap the canvas, I was seized by a need to alter the neckline. I’d worked very carefully on some gold thread that outlined the dragon that ran around the mandarin collar of her cheongsam, its head and tail meeting at a gold wooden toggle that held the collar together at the front. But now I altered it and painted a tiny gold chisel, the blade of which ran through the dragon’s head. I cannot say why or how it worked, but the portrait suddenly came to life. It was as if I could hear Mercy B. Lord breathing.
Now I was running really late and the taxi had been waiting downstairs for forty minutes, as I desperately attempted to dry the fresh paint with the hairdryer. I wrapped the canvas in heavy cardboard and plastic bubble-wrap, hoping for the best. But of course I hadn’t realised that the picture would be too big to fit into the cab, and so finally – and, I feared, calamitously – we had to strap it to the roof.
When I got there they’d run out of ‘Fragile’ stickers, and while I’d written ‘Handle with Care – Fragile!’ all over the plastic wrapping with a black magic marker, it didn’t really stick. The luggage handlers couldn’t read English anyway, and I realised that it was simply the look of the orange and black stickers that warned them something should be handled with care.
I hadn’t even had time to have Mercy B. Lord’s portrait framed, so it’s safe transit was going to depend on the stretchers, the flimsy wooden frame and the struts used to hold the canvas taut. One bad bang on a corner and it would completely collapse. I was exhausted, which added to my feeling of anticlimax and worthlessness, and while it wasn’t yet noon, I went to the airport bar and had a stiff brandy, telling myself that painting Mercy B. Lord to help me get over her had been the paramount purpose and that the Hong Kong competition was merely incidental. Even if the painting arrived intact, it was an international competition and I probably wouldn’t even make the Salon des Refusés. I took a taxi home and slept, like I said, for fourteen hours.
The following day at work Dansford told me the conference had been a great success. He’d attended the cocktail party and said that people had congratulated him on our ad campaign, and that lots of them, two in the presence of the tourism minister, had commented on the splendid murals. One was a UK travel agent, who offered to buy three of them, and an American delegate standing close by, on hearing him ask if they were for sale, wanted another two, which pleased the minister no end. They were, of course, presented to the delegates in question, because one was a senior director of Thomas Cook and the Yank was the New York agent for American Express. The remaining two ended up in the foyer of the Tourist Promotion Board building, with the first panel painted by Helmut Kraus – the architectural one I’d originally okayed – chosen by the minister for his office wall. As the Malay Muslims say, ‘Allahu Akbar – God is the greatest’. At least I’d got something right, or got away with it without using the bullshit explanation.
With Mercy B. Lord’s picture missing from my studio, I realised that what I’d taken to be the first signs of my getting over her was merely the presence in my life of the portrait project. The concentration required to get it right, to attempt to capture that moment in Raffles, had made me feel almost as if she was with me during those nights and days I worked on it. I’d paint almost every night after getting home from work until very late, and I’d be dog-tired by the time I collapsed into bed, so that I didn’t lie awake thinking, drowning in my own pathetic misery. Furthermore, my libido went into the painting and the physical ache for her wasn’t nearly as bad.
But after I awoke from my giant sleep it all returned in spades. In the time that had passed while I painted, each month I’d send a large and expensive bunch of something with a note, not quite as desperately entreating as the previous ones but asking if we could meet somewhere, in this way begging for a response. But the flowers boomeranged back to the agency just as they had before. I couldn’t believe three months had passed and Chairman Meow was due for another visit in a couple of weeks’ time.
Then, two days before she was due and just as I was about to leave for work, the phone rang. It was Elma Kelly calling from Hong Kong. ‘Congratulations, Simon!’ Even over the phone her voice boomed.
‘Good morning, Elma … What for?’
‘You’re famous, my boy!’
‘Huh? Why?’ I replied.
‘You’re on the front page of the Morning Post!’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked, momentarily mystified. But then I thought it might be an ad, part of our international Tourist Promotion Board campaign. She’d know it was mine. Though it was unusual to get one on the front page of the South China Morning Post, if I was right, then Johnny Wing’s media buying was definitely improving.
‘You mean you haven’t been told?’
‘Elma, what are you talking about?’
‘You’ve won, Simon! You’ve won the International Portraiture Prize for “Thursday Girl”! I’m terribly, terribly proud of you!’
‘Oh, Jesus! What now?’ I heard myself exclaim.
‘Now? Why, dear boy, you’re the toast of Hong Kong! Wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a street parade! It’s the first time in thirty years of the competition that it’s been won by an artist in the region. Jolly good thing you look Chinese, what! Ha, ha. We’re all terribly thrilled. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘It was just a whim. I didn’t bother telling anyone. This is really very unexpected, Elma.’ It wasn’t an entirely truthful answer, but how could I explain that sending the painting to Hong Kong had been a metaphorical funeral of the heart? It wasn’t something you could talk about.
‘I’m calling from a phone box across the road from the gallery, waiting for it to open,’ Elma continued. ‘There’s already a long queue forming. Dear, dear Simon, I am so proud of you … Must go and join the crush. Goodbye, dear boy!’
After Elma had rung off, all I could think of was that I hoped to Christ the news didn’t reach Singapore. I would have compromised Mercy B. Lord in one fell swoop – far worse than simply questioning her whereabouts on Thursdays. I’d almost given up on ever seeing her again, but if there had still been a tiny chance, I’d have blown it forever when the news of the win got out locally. For a start, the Tourist Board people would immediately recognise her – Molly Ong and Long Me Saw and a host of others had met her – and they would be bound to want to make a fuss. So would the newspapers and magazines and possibly the television stations. A pretty girl – correction, a beautiful woman – especially one of your own, is always news. I realised I would have blown my chances big-time. We’d have to be seen and, no doubt, photographed together, and that was not only going to be awkward, but would look like a conspiracy on my part to bring us together again. ‘Ouch!’ I could feel myself blushing at the thought, at the same time as my heart beat faster at the possibility of seeing her again.
I’d almost convinced myself that a portrait win in an art competition in another country wasn’t exactly world-shattering news to the people of Singapore, but on my way to work I stopped the taxi to pick up a copy of the Straits Times. The announcement might be buried somewhere in the back section of the newspaper. If so, if anyone approached me in the office, at least I’d know. I opened the neatly folded paper and there it was on the front page, the portrait taking up almost half the page. The headline read:
ASIAN ARTIST
WINS
INTERNATIONAL
PRIZE
Seeing Mercy B. Lord looking at me in miniature and out of context in the newspaper, I realised with a start that I really had captured that moment at Raffles. At the same instant I realised fully what I had done to her. Shit! Shit! Shit! What now?
The ‘What now?’ began to build on the horizon like a cumulonimbus cloud invading a clear blue sky. I arrived at the agency to find Alice Ho in a rare tizz. ‘Mr Sidney wants you to go up right away,’ she announced.
‘Did he say why?’ I asked, knowing she wouldn’t know but trying to appear casual.
‘He not happy, Simon,’ she replied. ‘You see newspaper? Also this morning radio!’ She was obviously impressed and shot me a look that was as close to sympathetic as she ever got.
I knocked on Sidney’s door. ‘Come!’ he called. I hated this imperious monosyllable and on past occasions I’d thanked him for his generous welcome, my sarcasm completely lost on him.
Alice Ho had, no doubt, alerted him, because as I entered I saw that he sat rigid with his stomach pressed against the edge of his desk, the Straits Times in front of him. He jabbed hard at the picture of Mercy B. Lord. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he barked.
I deliberately walked over to the side of the desk and looked down at his indignant finger resting on Mercy B. Lord’s breast. Attempting to keep my voice normal, I said, ‘Oh, that. What do you think?’ as if anxious to hear his opinion of the likeness.
‘Think?’ he shouted. ‘Think?’ he repeated. ‘How dare you!’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, my tone deliberately more surprised than defensive.
Sidney suddenly lost it completely. ‘She’s not yours to paint!’ He clenched his fist and banged it down hard on the desk. ‘She’s mine, you hear? She’s my property!’ He banged the desk a second time, the corners of his mouth spit-flecked with anger.
‘Oh? Your concubine? Your mistress?’ My heart was now beating furiously and I knew that in moments I’d be hyperventilating, my anger overwhelming me.
Sidney Wing pointed to the door. ‘Get out! Get out of my office!’ he screamed.
I only just made it with dignity, closing his office door behind me and bending double to suck in air, then straightening to take a couple more deep breaths. I’d won the most important art competition in South-East Asia and I was up to my eyebrows in excrement.
This was only the beginning of a very long day. I got back to my glass cage, stopping on the way to greet several of the staff members, knowing that they’d all be aware of the news but afraid to react, conscious, as if by some kind of osmosis, that the chairman was angry. And so, in a very Chinese way, they pretended not to know a thing. I’d barely reached my desk when the phone went. It was Alice Ho again. ‘Simon, people come.’
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