Nury Vittachi - The Feng Shui Detective

This is a truth that all of nature knows.

Only humans do not know. A hungry puppy knows he needs food. But a hungry child thinks he needs toys.

The poet T’ang Yu said: ‘Tears can be lies. The rain cannot.’

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

by C F Wong, part 145.

Winnie Lim’s heavily mascara-ed eyes blinked fully open. She clamped her perfectly manicured hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘C F,’ she whispered. ‘For you. Madam Fu.’

C F Wong’s hand, which had been reaching for the phone, snapped sharply backwards on hearing the name of the caller. ‘Say I am not here,’ he said.

‘He is not here,’ said Winnie.

There was an asphyxiating silence in the office and a tinny version of Madam Fu’s screechy voice could be heard erupting from the office administrator’s phone.

‘Okay, I tell him,’ the young woman said.

Wong nervously picked at his lower lip. Winnie turned again to him. ‘I tell her you are not here. She say she wan’ to speak to you anyway.’

‘Okay, okay.’ The geomancer nodded and Winnie pressed a button which transferred the call 128 centimetres from her phone to his. He raised himself to his full 1.65 metres, and smoothed down his jacket.

‘Hello, Madam Fu. Very nice to call me.’

‘Wong? My cousin comes on Thursdays for tea. Every Thursday. That’s why you must do it now.’

‘Yes, Madam Fu.’

‘Immediately, if possible.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘This afternoon or at the very latest tomorrow morning.’

‘Yes, Madam Fu. What you want me to do this afternoon or tomorrow?’

‘No, tomorrow morning. You have to have finished by the end of tomorrow morning. Sometimes she comes just after lunch. Better for you to come now. For safety-lah.’

The geomancer decided to try a different tack. ‘You have some bad luck recently, is it? Or new extension in your house? Something you want me to look at?’

‘No, Wong, I want you to tell me whether I should take it away or have it thrown away or just leave it to rot. My cousin is very sensitive to these things.’

‘But what? What is it?’

‘The thing. I keep telling you. The thing in my garden.’

‘In your garden. What sort of thing?’

‘ Alamok! That’s what you have to tell me. I can’t do your job for you, Mr Wong.’

Winnie Lim, who was listening on the other phone, put her hand over her mouthpiece and said to Wong: ‘ Aiyeeaa. Give up. Sudah-lah.’

The geomancer realised the futility of continuing and ended the conversation with an obedient promise to drop everything and head to Fu Town Villa straight away. He put the phone down and then crashed into his seat with the grace of a warehouse being demolished.

His assistant, Joyce McQuinnie, lowered her book and looked over at him. She hadn’t failed to notice his deep disinclination for the assignment. ‘Why don’t you just tell her to get stuffed?’

‘Who?’

‘Madam Thing.’

‘Madam Fu.’

‘Yes.’

‘No, tell Madam Fu to get who?’

‘Get stuffed. It’s not a name. S. T. U. F. F. E. D. As in, have her internal organs removed by a taxidermist.’

‘She does not believe in Western medicine. Only Chinese medicine.’

‘Never mind.’

Once more, Wong felt that he was having a conversation with an unhinged person. Did everyone feel constantly surrounded by madness or was it just him? He decided to change the subject. ‘The book. Good or not?’

Joyce was reading a volume of ancient Chinese myths and legends that he had proudly recommended to her. She threw it down. ‘Well… to be honest, some of these are okay. But some are naff city.’

‘Hmm?’

She put her feet on the desk. ‘I mean, the girls always change into foxes or ghosts or something. That’s weird enough. But in this one, the guy changes into a chrysanthemum. I mean, puh-lease. A chrysanthemum? Who writes this stuff?’

‘P’u Sung Ling wrote it.’

‘He needs like a good script editor if he ever wants to break into movies.’

‘I think he does not. He is dead already.’

‘Yeah, well, not surprising.’

The geomancer was packing his bag. ‘I am going to see Madam Fu. Do you come?’ he asked, silently praying for an answer in the negative.

‘Sure,’ said Joyce. ‘A chance to see the loony upper crustaceans of Singapore society? I wouldn’t miss it for all the tea in Winnie Lim.’

The office administrator, hearing her name, momentarily lowered her eighteenth cup of gok-fa tea and glanced over at the speaker, but received no further information.

Suburban Singapore on a cloudy weekday in summer is a pleasant place. The traffic was snarled up in the centre of town, leaving the roads away from the business district clear, fast-moving and welcoming. The sky was an impossible shade of deep blue, made more rather than less beautiful by the white mountains of cirro-cumulus clouds standing over the horizon.

This was the sort of trip when Wong sometimes wished he had his own car. He watched rather enviously as free spirits in open-topped sports cars raced past, their hair whipping in the wind. But with tax on private cars in the city-state more than doubling their prices, it was out of the question for a small-businessman like himself.

On the other hand, if he were ever to save enough money for one, it would be through customers like Madam Fu. She was wealthy, required his services regularly, and paid in cash-usually more than he asked for. Putting up with a little madness was a small price to pay.

And, as for now, Singapore taxis were comparatively cheap and trustworthy-the one he was in at the moment was a Mercedes-Benz, a type of car associated with the highest grade of cadre in his hometown of Guangzhou. It took them less than fifteen comfortable minutes to travel from Telok Ayer Street in town to the open, residential roads of Katong.

‘Probably be an easy job. She sounds like a mad old bat,’ said Joyce.

‘Rubbish,’ said Wong.

‘She’s not mad?’

‘No, rubbish. The problem, I think is rubbish. In her garden.’

Madam Fu’s house was in a high-class low-rise housing estate just off Meyer Road, better known as Condo Valley, but her back yard faced a quiet country road, often used for mildly nefarious purposes such as lovers’ meetings or for the disposal of trash, which would simply be thrown over her wall. To be even-handed, observers would have to say it was partly her own fault, since her garden was so poorly tended and overgrown that any passer-by would assume that it was common land. But as soon as one person dumped an old fridge on the spot, every passer-by would seemingly pay the garden a similar compliment. In a week, a single item could grow to an entire town-sized rubbish dump. Sometimes the initial discarded piece of household waste was placed by Madam Fu herself. She never blamed anyone for the resultant mountain of trash, appearing to believe that unwanted items of furniture multiplied by high-speed asexual conjugation.

Wong guiltily felt that this sort of assignment was not really the work of a feng shui reader. The woman was eccentric, or even mentally disturbed, and he thought she needed to be looked after the traditional Chinese way-hidden away by her children where she could do no harm.

But his visits, every few months, had become a regular part of her tranquillity, and had also become an appreciated part of his income, so why complain? Both sides got something out of it. Besides, there was a degree of psychology in every geomancy case. The energy flows inside a house, however perfectly arranged, will not produce a happy household if the dwellers in the building are in a state of disturbance.