It was all heading into La-La Land and so I interjected. ‘Mum, give us a break, for God’s sake!’ I protested. ‘You can make anything mean something if you try hard enough.’
‘Oh, you think so, Simon?’ Chairman Meow said, plainly piqued by my interruption.
‘Of course. Look, let me show you,’ I said. ‘Mercy B. Lord was born on the 1st of May 1946. So, let’s do the numbers, shall we? Fifth month, that’s 5, first day, that’s 1, so 5+1= 6.’ I scribbled it down. ‘Now add 1+9+4+6 = 20, add the 6 = 26, and hey presto, 2+6 = 8. There you go, the number-eight gold chisel and also the luckiest number for the Chinese.’ I gave her a sardonic grin, complete with slightly raised right eyebrow. ‘See what I mean?’
Chairman Meow paused for a moment. ‘Simon, that’s brilliant!’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Why, of course! How stupid of me. It becomes immediately obvious! Simon, you knew all along, didn’t you? That’s why you painted the chisel into Mercy B. Lord’s portrait.’ She looked at me. ‘Now, don’t you deny it, Simon,’ she remonstrated. ‘Just like you deny being the yellow-beaked bird. Anyone with a nose on her face can see the gold chisel is directly associated with the baby, and that both cannot be anything other than Mercy B. Lord.’
‘Oh, that simple, is it?’
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact it is.’
‘Okay, if I’m the yellow-beaked bird, who are the other birds, the ones that cleaned the baby’s body? And the electric blue snake, who or what is the snake?’
‘Why, all your friends in Singapore are the birds.’ She spread her elegant manicured hands, ‘I would have thought the snake was obvious – Johnny Wing, of course!’
‘Okay, so who is Sidney?’
Chairman Meow was not the least fazed by the question. ‘Yes, I must admit he doesn’t feature directly, but he’s got something to do with the large box,’ she said confidently.
I sighed. ‘Christ, Mum. I don’t believe what I’m hearing. How can one of the smartest women in Australia be so deluded? So consumed by ignorance and superstition? All those tenuous connections you make with Little Sparrow’s dream are crap. Like I just showed you with the numbers, you can make almost anything symbolise anything else if you’re prepared to shut down the part of your brain that tells you it’s clearly all a load of codswallop!’
‘Simon, you shouldn’t talk to your mother like that!’ Mercy B. Lord said reprovingly. ‘Besides, who’s to say your mother isn’t right?’
I turned on her. ‘I am! It’s arrant nonsense, if that’s a more polite way of putting it.’
‘Oh, is that so!’ Mercy B. Lord exclaimed. ‘Then kindly explain the painting with the shattered head? You didn’t know what happened on board the oil tanker, you didn’t know how Johnny died, but you painted it exactly as it happened!’
‘Oh, Christ, not you as well!’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief.
‘Thank you,’ Chairman Meow said, smiling smugly at Mercy B. Lord. ‘Sometimes that son of mine is just a little too big for his boots. You’ll have to watch that in him, my dear,’ she warned.
So, there you go, humans seem geared to signs and portents and have been since time out of mind. Commonsense has nothing to do with it and few things in this world are wrought by logic alone.
Needless to say, Chairman Meow took over the wedding arrangements. She flew Mercy B. Lord to Paris to buy a wedding gown, and with diamond pendants dangling, Mercy B. Lord married me at St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, with Archbishop Gilroy presiding, in the early summer of 1970. No doubt this was agreed after a generous donation to some worthy church-related cause. The Catholic faith was chosen in deference to Mercy B. Lord, who was not all that fussed, but unlike my own iconoclastic family, she had at least some religion in her past.
I’m telling a fib. That’s not exactly why we were married at St Mary’s. The truth is that the alternative to a church wedding was the marriage registry office, directly across the road from the cathedral in an office with mullioned windows in Queen’s Square. Chairman Meow was damned if she was going to waste a magnificent raw-silk Paris original wedding gown encrusted with God knows how many seed pearls on a clerk in a stuffy government office with only two witnesses present. Huge stained-glass windows, an impressive high altar, incense swirling, Latin chants, choirboys singing, towering naves and arches, and the archbishop in his splendid vestments pontificating were the absolute minimum requirement.
A huge marquee was erected in the grounds of the Vaucluse house, and every employee of the considerable Koo business empire – funeral, restaurant and property-investment arms – was invited to attend the church service and reception afterwards, catered for by three of our Little Swallow restaurants with two additional chefs flown in from Singapore.
Over a thousand guests attended from all over Australia and beyond: from Singapore, Dansford, who gave Mercy B. Lord away; Hilda; Long Me Saw; Molly Ong (now head of the Tourist Promotion Board); Mrs Sidebottom and Cecil; Willy Wonka; Louie da Fly (by the way, we made him my best man); Alice Ho; Harry ‘Three Thumbs’ Poon; Owen Denmeade; and of course my numerous Singapore relatives. From Hong Kong came the inestimable Elma Kelly. Then, from my former advertising agency in Sydney, Odette, from the switchboard; Charles Brickman, the chairman; and Ross Quinlivan, the creative director. From America, Jonas Bold and his glorious long-legged Bondi blonde bombshell wife, Sue Chipchase. In fact, there were so many guests that we were forced to book the entire first-class and business-class sections on a Qantas jet to bring them and my personal friends to Australia. Chairman Meow aka Mum had waited a long time for her son and heir to be hitched to a Chinese maiden, and she wasn’t going to allow a careless moment to intrude in the organisation of his wedding ceremony.
We honeymooned at Lord Howe Island, staying at Pinetrees – not posh, just a really nice traditional homestead – but it was wonderful to be completely away from the madding crowd. We now have two daughters, Charity and Faith, to complement their mother’s name, and a son, James.
That’s enough about us for the time being. Let me bring you up to date with events after the successful raid on the drug cartel. Sidney Wing was executed in Singapore jail in June 1970, and all the other members of the criminal cartel eventually followed him. Ronnie sold his share in the agency back to Samuel Oswald. He also sold the Nite Cap and his other girlie-bar interests in Singapore and moved to Bangkok, where he owned several more bars in Patpong Road and the area most favoured by US troops on R&R from Vietnam, New Petchburi Road. After the Vietnam War was over, he bought two ‘night clubs’ – read high-class brothels.
If you’re wondering what happened to Lotus Blossom, she avoided the hangman’s rope and lives in Taiwan, where she owns a string of French perfume boutiques she has aptly named after her daughter, Mercy B. Koo Perfumes. She never faced drug charges and got off scot-free because of a deal between Mercy B. Lord and the DEA via Dansford.
When, after learning the true nature of the Fong and Wing partnership, she’d agreed to be Dansford’s mole, she had made only one request: that if the DEA were successful in bringing down the drug cartel, her mother would be allowed to go free. It was an early example of her ability to plan well ahead.
Dansford kept his word and Lotus Blossom was allowed to settle in Taipei. As he explained to me, ‘Simon, politics is the art of compromise – exceptions are always the rule.’ Now, here’s a curious twist. Lotus Blossom was nominally a vastly wealthy woman. But, like all the other cartel bigwigs, she was stripped of all her assets; her money and property were confiscated by the various states, Thailand, Singapore and America, so that she was effectively dead broke. That is, until Johnny Wing’s will was read. He’d left his entire fortune, a sum of twenty million US dollars, to his boyhood sweetheart. But, as Mercy B. Lord would say of her mother’s acquired fortune, ‘All the perfume in the world can’t disguise the stench of that malevolent bastard.’
Beatrice Fong’s estate was also confiscated, with only her residence in Katong, originally le
ft to her by her mother, coming to Mercy B. Lord. We sold it (too many bad memories) and, together with my bonus cheque from the agency, financed the two businesses we were to start.
Sadly, our dear and wonderful Dansford Drocker, who took over the management of the now Wingless Samuel Oswald Advertising agency, died of obvious causes in 1978 – both lighted ends of the same candle had finally met and burnt out. He had requested that he have a very simple burial. ‘Don’t let a priest anywhere near me, Simon, unless he’s drunk and Irish. It’s been a great life, buddy; we don’t want it spoilt by making false promises to God on my death bed.’ I organised a plain granite headstone to be made and sent from Australia, on which I caused to be inscribed:
Dansford Metford Drocker
1924–1978
He lived life to its fullest
then
died happily, of everything.
R.I.P.
Elma Kelly sold her share of Cathay Advertising to Bill ‘Long Socks’ Farnsworth, who could now claim to own in his own right an international organisation. He then sold his now multinational agency to Ted Bates Advertising in New York, at a considerable profit. Elma never forgave him, not for the pass-on profit he’d made, but simply for outsmarting her, because she could as easily have bought Farnsworth’s Australian organisation, George Patterson, and made the same deal with New York herself. ‘Simon, my dear, his convict ancestors probably pinched that Gainsborough he owns. Haw, haw, haw! Can’t trust a man who’s always punctual and orders steak and chips to eat alone in a Singapore hotel room, can you?’
Now, perhaps a little about us – that is, Mercy B. Koo and yours truly. Well, very briefly, Mercy B. Lord for the first six months, then Mercy B. Koo for the next six, became the first Singapore girl, a very successful concept that has continued ever since. Then, despite Dansford asking me to stay in what was now simply Samuel Oswald Advertising, I decided I’d had my fill of working for someone else, so I declined. The tourism minister then called me into his office and asked me if I was willing to start my own advertising agency, saying that the government was thinking of cutting its partnership with Malaysian Airlines and starting Singapore International Airlines, based around customer service and the concept of the Singapore Girl, adding that they would like me to do the advertising. It was attractive – more than that, it was a truly great offer and I was sorely tempted – but finally we decided we’d develop the two ancillary businesses we’d more or less planned all along: market research and commercial film. The airline account eventually went to a terrific young Australian ad man named Ian Batey, who consequently did an absolutely splendid job.
Mercy B. Koo developed the first truly Asian market-research organisation, which grew to be the biggest in Asia (still is). With Willy Wonka and Harry ‘Three Thumbs’ Poon, we developed a film studio that, I’m glad to say, has prospered mightily. Not that I can take the credit for either organisation. Mercy B. Koo was initially the exceptional financial manager, and Willy and Harry are both highly talented film men. I’ll never know how she did it. Somehow we financed both businesses without borrowing from my dad and Chairman Meow. After ten years we were moderately well off, and Mercy B. Koo was becoming bored and wanted to stretch her business wings.
Enter the ever-vigilant and opportunist Chairman Meow, and soon we shared a funeral business, under my wife’s direction, with the Australian family company. The two women worked together and it wasn’t all that long before they were opening up Blue Lotus Funerals in Hong Kong, Taipei, Bangkok and Manila. In the mid-eighties, Mercy B. Koo was spending a week every month in Sydney on business involving the deadly female duo.
As for me, I’d opted out of business altogether by the late seventies and was beginning to earn a reputation as an artist. It all started to happen when the Tate Gallery in London bought the painting of Mercy B. Lord’s execution. In fact, that was what I’d named it: ‘The Execution of Mercy B. Lord’. This brought to light the Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery’s purchase of what was now named ‘Woman in a Peacock-tail Chair’. The Guardian wrote a bit of a story saying nice things about both paintings, devoting a page to them. It was picked up and reprinted by the South China Morning Post, and for the next week long queues formed at the Tate as well as in Hong Kong. Several commissions followed and now that’s what I do. I paint and have been fortunate enough to have my work exhibited in several major galleries around the world.
The irony is that Chairman Meow is my biggest supporter, and the reason for this is her business partner and fellow entrepreneur, Mercy B. Koo. Which brings me just about to the end of my story.
Two years ago we moved back to Sydney with the kids. Both Charity (Masters degree) and Faith are attending Macquarie University, and James is doing his last two years at Cranbrook. But they are not the reason for our return. The schools and universities in Singapore are absolutely first-class.
The reason is that Mercy B. Lord had to learn the business from the Australian side of Koo International Pty Ltd. On the 2nd of January 1991, Chairman Meow, now a sprightly seventy-six, and my dad, a rather battered seventy-seven, retired. And guess who is to be the new chairman? Not surrogate, but your actual chairman, no ifs or buts. You got it in one, the glorious, wonderful, should-have-won-the-US-medal-of-honour-for-bravery Mercy B. Koo, née the mighty and still incredibly beautiful Mercy B. Lord! I’ve ordered a black cheongsam and red stilettos for her to wear on the day the board appoints her.
Oh, by the way, talking about chairmen, Louie da Fly is the new managing director and chairman of Samuel Oswald Advertising, Singapore. He has proved to be a ‘very vallabil employ’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is the twentieth book I’ve written over the past twenty-one years, and when I think about the effort it’s taken I am immediately aware that I have needed a large support cast, people who have volunteered information, know-how and help, invariably giving selflessly of their knowledge and expertise. So, I decided to go through my other books to see just how large this supporting cast, to whom I am abidingly grateful, has become. The number is, to my mind, staggering –1017, at least the teaching faculty of a small university. They are the people who have helped me to become a recognised novelist.
I am told that it is unfashionable to include acknowledgements in works of fiction. Why is that? How can this be? Who possesses such arrogance? Without the knowledge and help of others, we fiction writers would be rendered almost mute. We ride piggyback on the life experiences and stories of others and then claim the approbation and rewards. The limp-wristed cliché by lazy literary critics ‘an original work of fiction’ is seldom true. We storytellers are dependent on the collective lives and experiences of others. We beg, borrow and steal shamelessly.
It is with gratitude and humility that I thank you all for your help, even such as comes to me mute but no less appreciated. Writing is a lonely job and so it’s nice to have the presence of several writer companions who don’t feel the need to talk. On my desk, designed long and in a U shape for the very purpose, rest the baskets of three of our four cats. Alas, Ophelia, the kitten, is illiterate. I sometimes wonder what’s going to happen to our next generation of young felines who no longer read books. Princess Cardamon is onto her fifth book that she claims to have mostly written herself, with a smidgin of help from me; Mushka, the bush cat, her fourth; and Pirate, who blew into our safe harbour one cold winter’s night, his very first, and the jury is still out as to whether he’s going to make it as a writer.
All, with the exception of Cardamon who comes from a long line of Burmese royalty, just dropped by, liked the sniff of the place and decided to stay. RSCPA-acquired Timmy the dog of dogs lies at my feet. He’s not much of a writer but he’s good for an opinion, an excellent barking-board with a finely tuned snore.
I usually work ten or twelve hours, six days a week. Except to occasionally tap-dance on my keyboard to remind me that cats have to eat or to go outside to do what a cat needs to do, or when Timmy is taken for his daily
walk, the purr and bark elements seldom leave my desk. So there you go, thank you for your collective good company and help.
And now to the mortals who helped variously and with enormous generosity.
My beloved partner, Christine Gee, takes the brunt of the book I’m writing. It’s never easy being the general factotum in a writer’s life. She takes care of the myriad details, feeds me, comforts me, listens, acts as a second researcher, suggests, protects and comments, all with unerring patience, intelligence and love, so that my needs often crowd out those of her own. I thank her with all my heart, and, in addition, for her selfless dedication and encouragement. I’m quite sure I couldn’t do what I do without her.
Good editors are charged with the task of making books sing and words dance. When some of the notes are flat and the words clumsy, this is usually due to a pedantic or over-precious writer. Nan McNab is my editor, and, yes, she is almost always correct in her comments, which, in turn, can be very bloody annoying. Nevertheless I cherish her and thank her enormously for her talent, patience and dedication. Editing a writer as each chapter evolves while not knowing how a story ends must be very frustrating. But she invariably adds more than the sum of this author’s ability.
Anne Rogan, my managing editor at Penguin, is less front-of-house, but an invaluable contributor to the book in more ways than I truly understand. Along with Bob Sessions, my publisher, she rides shotgun on every chapter, and I am truly grateful for their insights, experience, forthright opinions and honesty. While writers work in the foreground it is those who labour with them at the rear who add greatly to the end result. The sheer knowledge and perspicacity of Bob Sessions are gifts to any writer. I am most fortunate to have him as my publisher. I must add thanks to Julie Gibbs who, while not my publisher, has always taken an interest in what I do, and I invariably benefit from her involvement.
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