However, brought up short by the gates, I realised that it was highly likely Mercy B. Lord would deny me entry. There was not a lot I could do from the wrong side of an eight-foot-high wrought-iron barrier. Even if I attempted to climb over the top, the five gambling guards were obviously capable of seeing off more than mere spirits. If they all resembled the two brutes I’d addressed, they were probably members of a gang – their tattoos were the giveaway – and by definition they’d be decidedly nasty types.
The mansion was impressive in the old style, a Victorian bungalow with a surrounding verandah of the kind built on the sub-continent for senior British civil servants. A high wall of quarried sandstone with most of the crumbling cement joints cushioned with moss appeared to surround the entire property. Tall palms fringed a gravelled driveway, which was bordered with pink and red cannas and led to the wide semi-circular front steps. What I could see of the mansion and grounds suggested old money of the settled British kind. Unlike the homes of most wealthy Chinese, no attempt was made by wealthy British colonials to impress the outside world. It was a big, solid, silent and permanent-looking house in a simple garden of clipped lawn and severely pruned shrubs. Two large white paper lanterns hung from either side of the front door with a gong on the right-hand side, as well as two broad strips of white cloth that dropped from the lintel to the verandah floor, on which there appeared to be Chinese calligraphy.
I was kept waiting for at least fifteen minutes and, inevitably, my anger began to cool, to be replaced once more by bewilderment. The thought of rushing in and yelling at her was, I realised, nonsense, entirely counterproductive. The unreasoning anger I felt still sat like a hard congealed ball somewhere between my chest and my stomach. Now I began to slowly take control, to work through the physical reaction and to make some sense of what was going on in my head, thereby attempting to overcome the rage and panic or whatever had taken hold of me and brought me to the point where I was standing with both hands white-knuckling two decorative circles in the gates’ design.
I knew that, come what may, I could never physically harm Mercy B. Lord, or, for that matter, any female. My brain was simply not wired that way. I loved her despite everything, but perhaps confronting her and hearing her motives might help me to walk away. I couldn’t bear the thought but knew I might have to accept the idea of losing her forever. I tried to see it her way. The orphan who had never known love or even kindness as a child, then the young adult who had been trained by Beatrice Fong to think that money alone was the true meaning of life, the girl who, I’d always thought, didn’t believe this and truly loved me. But perhaps I was wrong. Could it be that she actually didn’t know what love was? If you’ve never experienced the warmth and security of a mother’s love, or later the euphoria of having someone in your life who makes your pulse race every time you look at them, the sheer joy of loving, then maybe you learn to fake it? Had it all passed her by? Was she emotionally destitute? Perhaps she wasn’t just an orphan in the physical sense, but also in spirit, unable to trust an emotion over which she didn’t have absolute control.
Then again, perhaps my previous suspicion that I was being deliberately conned made some sense. Out of the blue, there’d been the big turn-around when the old bitch carked it and left her God knows how much money. Now she didn’t have to go ahead with her plans. Obviously she had sufficient cash to allow her to tell me to bugger off in quick time. She didn’t have to pretend to love me any longer, or make love to an ugly bloke with a build like a tree stump, just because he was rich!
As more minutes disappeared, so did any chance of my being allowed into the house to confront Mercy B. Lord and ask her for an explanation of whatever had transpired when we met. I was mentally preparing to leave, knowing it was pointless waiting, when to my surprise the gambler with the bung eye returned. I waited for him to tell me to bugger off, but instead he produced a key and proceeded to unlock the gate, explaining that the priests and the funeral people were in the front part of the house with the corpse and that we must go around to the back to meet the missy. He let me in, then chained and locked the gate behind me.
We left the driveway and turned right onto a red-brick path with the house on our left, crossing a lawn edged with shrubs so severely clipped that they must never have been allowed to blossom – a remorseless pruning, as if Beatrice Fong had been determined to punish the plants for their variety and vigour.
A tropical garden virtually creates itself and can be a gloriously colourful exotic environment all year round. Apart from the pink and red cannas, there seemed to be no colour other than the various shades of cowering greenery. This was a garden dedicated to uniform neatness and order, a silent place unvisited by birds, bees or butterflies.
Now that I was about to confront Mercy B. Lord, I began to have doubts. What if she was simply amusedly dismissive of our shared past? What if she enjoyed making a fool of me? I had always seen her as a strong woman with a mind of her own. Now she might well mock me, laughingly admit to her true motives all along. I’d be sent away with my tail between my legs, even more humiliated. I had been easily and willingly conned, a soft touch who had to restrain his puppy-panting eagerness by wearing a jockstrap. The poor little rich boy who had everything he could possibly want, except the knowledge that he could make it on his own without his darling mummy designing his life for him. The worst part was that this was not entirely untrue, for while I appeared to have done okay in the agency – the billing had quadrupled and not all of it had simply been business handed to us from the States – in my own opinion, I’d failed.
Sidney Wing had put every financial obstacle in my path to prevent me building a sustainable and skilled creative department. Everyone we used, the prime example being Mrs Sidebottom, was freelance talent and, furthermore, I had to prove I could cover their fees before I hired them. I had no permanent staff, no back-up and no facilities. I’d made absolutely no impact on the organisation, other than to make the Wing brothers richer and to satisfy the creative needs of clients in America wishing to expand in South-East Asia. In fact, apart from my own creative efforts, aided by the loyal support of Dansford (at least between nine and noon), I’d achieved bugger-all. The poor bastard coming from America to replace me would have to begin building a creative department from scratch. In fact, I’d been so fucking inadequate that when the ventilation system I had paid for in the toilets had broken down two years later, I’d been unable to persuade Sidney to pay to have it repaired. ‘I didn’t think it was necessary in the first place, Simon. Why then should I pay for it to be fixed?’ he’d declared.
‘Because the entire agency downstairs smells of shit!’ I’d protested.
‘Oh? This is my concern?’
‘I would have thought so,’ I’d answered, somewhat tight lipped.
He shrugged. ‘We have the directors toilet upstairs. It doesn’t stink. I can’t smell the toilets downstairs.’
‘So you don’t care?’
‘No.’
It was almost funny to think that the only thing the staff would possibly remember about me was that I’d eliminated the smell of shit from the agency. In the end it was I who paid for the repairs to the ventilation, and this would, to the Chinese way of thinking, have emphasised to the staff my weakness and Sidney’s dominance – he was top dog in the hierarchy and they all owed him respect.
We had reached the rear of the big old house where the path led to a stout wooden door set into a high brick wall, which looked to be part of a traditional walled compound that served as the servants quarters. In fact, it was probably the entrance Mercy B. Lord said she had always used to get into the house.
The leader of the gamblers reached out to slide aside the cover of a peephole. Seeing his hand flat against the door I noticed that its entire back carried a red, blue and green tattoo of a giant tarantula spider, with a single hairy leg running up the back of each finger and his thumb. He brought his good eye to the peephole to peer into the courtyard. Seemingl
y satisfied, he rapped firmly on the door. It opened inwards and he stepped aside to let me pass through. Whoever opened the door was hidden behind it, and I had only just enough time to see that two of the gamblers now stood a yard or so away directly in front of the open gate; the third had obviously opened it. They had their legs planted, their arms held lightly away from their sides, and were clearly there to confront me. I hesitated, ready to turn back, when a powerful kick to my spine propelled me forward to sprawl at their feet, whereupon they began to kick the living crap out of me. I attempted to rise to my knees, but a fierce kick to the ribs sent me tumbling over. I curled into a foetal ball facing the back of the house, my knees pulled up to my stomach, my arms wrapped about my head in an attempt to protect it from their furious feet. Judging by the rapidity of the kicks and the grunts that followed them, all of the five men were putting in the boot. It was less than two or three seconds before a brutal kick to the base of my skull rendered me unconscious, but in those few moments I saw Johnny Wing standing at a window of the big house, arms folded across his chest, looking directly down at me.
I came to as I was being lifted onto a gurney in the forecourt of the accident and emergency department of the Outram Road Hospital. I had been brought there by ambulance and was later told I had been discovered in an alley in Chinatown and that the police had been informed. The hospital lights were on and it was obviously well after sunset. As it turned out, the beating I had taken could have been a lot worse. According to the physician who examined me, the blow that knocked me unconscious could well have broken my spine and left me paralysed. Five of my ribs were broken. It would take weeks for my face to lose its swelling, and as long for my black and almost completely closed eyes to return to normal. My broken nose, at present lost somewhere in the centre of the inglorious mess laughingly known as my face, would not reappear for weeks. Other than that, it was only a matter of bruises, though they seemed to cover almost every inch of my body, including my private parts. In other words, while I wasn’t going to die or become a cripple, and nothing was broken except a few ribs, everything hurt like hell. The evil spirit-chasers hired for the funeral arrangements had certainly kicked the daylights out of any demons that might have been lurking within me. At the same time, the Wings had clearly indicated that it was payback time for ignoring their warnings to keep away from their pretty little courier.
The doctor must have prescribed morphine for the pain and something to knock me out, because it was dawn when I surfaced to face the world – not a kindly place, under the circumstances. The painkiller had worn off and every bone in my body felt as though it was broken. I am ashamed to say that on this dawning of a new day I could bear no more and I completely broke down, my emotions overwhelming me, so that I blubbed like a child, my swollen throbbing face buried in the pillow to muffle my sobs. How long I lay weeping I’m not sure, but because of my broken ribs, every sob was excruciating. It was the pain in combination with my self-indulgent tears that eventually seemed to clear my thoughts. Or so I imagined. I was to learn that pain also plays tricks on the mind.
Black-eyed, barely able to see, swollen and bruised, I tried to pull myself together, to take stock and to attempt to think rationally about what had happened. I had clearly acted foolishly and had paid the price. In a curious way, the severe beating had brought me to my senses. It was my punishment for loving Mercy B. Lord, one that Ronnie Wing had first promised almost three years ago to the day. I couldn’t say that I hadn’t been warned.
Now, as I listened to the first of the birdsong, the quark of the ubiquitous Asian crow and the persistent double note of the indigenous koel in the hospital garden, I tried to gather my wits. This time I would attempt to be a little more analytical and less introspective and self-pitying. Blaming Mercy B. Lord for ruining my life was a cop-out. If she’d been behind the beating with Johnny Wing, then surely I was better off knowing it? Facing up to reality?
I had become convinced she was beholden to Beatrice and the Wings and I’d wanted to protect her from them, somehow weaken the hold they appeared to have over her. The research model I’d evolved with my professor cousin and Dansford was intended to ultimately get her away from the evil nexus. In my mind I had seen her running a market-research organisation I would help her build once I had quit the agency. I would also build a film studio together with Willie Wonka and Harry ‘Three Thumbs’ Poon. Mercy B. Lord would run the research outfit and Willie and Three Thumbs the film studio, and I – well, I wasn’t entirely sure yet, but I’d do something complementary, begin a small communications conglomerate, ancillary services to marketing and advertising. Then along came Molly Ong’s concept of the Singapore Girl and it provided Mercy B. Lord with immediate protection, the assurance that Fong and Wing wouldn’t risk harming her because of the possible consequences to themselves.
However, I now realised that her acting as courier for the Fong–Wing enterprise was something she willingly accepted as part of her training for the future. I was forced to acknowledge that she might have known all along that she would take over the Beatrice Fong Agency in the future. Now that this future had finally arrived, Mercy B. Lord would simply maintain the links between the evil empires of Beatrice Fong and the Wings. Despite everything, I knew that I could never love anyone as much as I’d loved her – alas, still loved her. How stupid is that!
The night sister came in on her final rounds and refilled my drip, adding a fresh charge of glorious pain relief that I concluded must be morphine, as it had the immediate effect of relieving the pain and once again changing my mindset. I now saw that I’d been quite wrong. If my previous attempt at a reasoned and logical explanation was correct, then why had Mercy B. Lord bothered to enter my life in the first place? She would have been far better steering well clear, brushing off my early advances. Her future was, after all, assured. Moreover, if she had never experienced love, why would she have submitted to it so willingly? If her destiny lay somewhere other than in a permanent relationship with me, she would have been crazy to place it in jeopardy.
And what about the portrait? Having left me and then at first rejected Molly Ong’s offer to be the Singapore Girl, why then had she changed her mind and agreed to appear at the awards dinner and afterwards celebrate our loving reconciliation in the suite at the Peninsula, even agreeing to move back into the flat when we returned to Singapore?
I was forced to conclude that her rejection, on more than one occasion, of my pathetic offer of a permanent relationship was the only real clue to the situation.
I’d been through all the variations and permutations of everything without getting any closer to the truth than I had been moments after hearing the dreadful finality of the phone receiver clunking down. I’d been nearly beaten to death attempting, unsuccessfully, to discover some kind of plausible explanation. Nothing made sense. I’d carefully examined my angry emotional reactions, but the cold, calculating, logical analysis had more holes than a kitchen colander. I still couldn’t convince myself that any of it explained what had happened to shatter the future I’d imagined sharing with Mercy B. Lord.
Throughout all this I kept hearing her anguished voice and her choked-back tears, then her cold dismissal and the unexpected and sudden clunk of the receiver being replaced. Almost immediately there followed the image of Johnny Wing at the window looking down at me a second or two before I lapsed into unconsciousness from the beating. While it was entirely possible to arbitrarily connect the thought with the image – her anguish and cold dismissal over the phone with Johnny’s face at the window – there was no possible way of knowing whether they belonged together.
Johnny was the executor of the old crone’s will and so had a perfect right to be in Beatrice Fong’s home. Ronnie had mentioned that he was away from the agency for the day and couldn’t sign my cheque. Furthermore, I had no way of knowing whether he was entitled to withhold Mercy B. Lord’s inheritance if she continued to stay with me, or if this might, as I’d previously speculated
, be simply a convenient invention by Mercy B. Lord.
The only fact I could be certain about was that I had been warned to stay away from Mercy B. Lord. The beating I’d received had almost assuredly been instigated by the vile Johnny Wing, but not necessarily only as a warning to stay away from her. It would also have been an unexpected but opportune payback for my assaulting him in Sidney’s office.
But then again, I was forced to conclude he wasn’t alone in the house. While I hadn’t seen her witness my beating, it was difficult to believe Mercy B. Lord would have been unaware of it taking place in the courtyard. Frankly, having looked at it from every possible angle, nothing seemed to make sense. I still didn’t know what I thought about the whole immense fuck-up, all of which I was forced to admit I had personally initiated by turning up uninvited at the gate.
With the night shift concluding and the day shift coming on, the ward radio was turned on, ostensibly to get the seven o’clock news. What I didn’t know was that it remained on all day, blaring out popular songs. Ironically, the first of them after the morning news was Nat King Cole singing ‘Love is a Many Splendored Thing’. While I don’t remember the whole song, the lyrics I clearly recall on that grim, tropical and far from ‘splendored’ morning claimed that love turned a man into a king.
There are times in everyone’s life when a distant unheralded storm causes dry riverbeds to fill then to merge in a confluence that brims then overflows and floods, taking everything with it – when a love seemingly tranquil and benign turns unexpectedly into a fiercely destructive force. ‘Love is a Many Splendored Thing’, a hit song when I was in my late teens, doesn’t mention that the act of loving somebody may suddenly become an utterly miserable, confusing, bewildering, maddening, saddening betrayal.
Amusingly, though I wasn’t laughing at the time, to further diminish the prospects of everything being bright and beautiful, the day sister in charge was the corseted, big-bosomed, stiffly starched and veiled virago who had sent me packing when I’d attempted to con my way into the ward to see Mrs Sidebottom after her accident. Fortuitously, my face was such a mess that it was doubtful my mum would have recognised me, and in the unlikely event that the sister had remembered I was called Koo, it is a very common Chinese surname. She’d only glanced at the clipboard at the foot of my bed. ‘I say, we have been in the wars, haven’t we, Mr Koo!’ Then, turning to the ward nurse, ‘Nurse, see that the patient gets his painkiller every four hours.’ And back to me. ‘Time will mend you, Mr Koo, but we’ll try to make it pass as comfortably as possible under the circumstances.’
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