Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

There was more warmth in the air now; the sun flooded the living room all afternoon, so that by sunset the green velvet sofa would be warm to the touch and the room would feel stuffy. He had taken to leaving the windows open on certain days, when he began to feel suffocated in his bedroom. With this simple act came a sudden awareness of the proximity of the other people in his building, of hundreds of other lives. The harshness of winter had isolated him from his neighbors; he had barely realized they were there. But the warmth of spring had brought them flooding into his consciousness.

One noise in particular began to force itself upon him by simple repetition, until he could no longer ignore it. Unlike most of the other noises in the building, which occurred at regular times of the day, this one was capable of starting up at any time of the day or night, often in mid-morning or midafternoon, or in short bursts late at night, when the rest of the building was still — always out of sync with the rhythm of the other noises. It was a lone female voice — a young one, Justin thought — singing to a karaoke set. The music dissolved strangely into the fabric of the building, leaving only the voice. In turns muffled and amplified by the layers of concrete, it would insinuate its way into Justin’s daytime slumber, making it impossible for him to remain in bed. He would get up and close the windows, but by then it would be too late: Like a dripping tap, the voice would have already registered its presence in his head and would not go away. He could make out the flat, almost tuneless voice singing old-fashioned love songs that he could often recognize. Sometimes, at night, this voice would be joined by another, slightly more melodious one, and together they would perform duets, taking turns singing verses before joining together in an earsplitting chorus that spoiled the peace of Justin’s evenings alone in the dark watching the lights of the city.

But it was the daytime singing that most disturbed Justin, for this was when he slept. Late one morning, long after the children had left for school and the mothers of the building were out running errands, he was just drifting back into a thin, sweat-coated sleep when he heard the voice again, singing “Little Moonlight Song.” He got up and made sure all the windows were closed before going back to bed; he put in his earplugs and listened to his heartbeat, quick and anxious in his chest. But suspended in this noiseless cavity was that voice, faint but distinct. Soon the room began to feel stuffy with the windows closed. He got out of bed, put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and went out of the apartment, keeping the voice in his head, like a tracker dog following a scent. He stood in the stairwell: It was impossible to discern where the music was coming from. He went down a floor but began to lose the trail. He walked up the dusty staircase until he was at the top floor, and at last he began to hear the cheap tinkling of notes played on an electric piano, the sickly-sweet melodies of violins, and, most obtrusive of all, the horribly off-key voice. He walked quickly down the corridor until he found the door, then paused for a moment, listening to the last strains of the song, the final notes now coming to an end. He tried to reach between the bars of the door’s grille to knock, but the gap between the bars was too small for his fist, so he slapped the metal bars awkwardly with the palm of his hand. The next song had just begun to play, but it suddenly stopped. Justin waited a few moments and listened for noise from the room: nothing. He leaned in closer, trying to discern movement from within, but the pile drivers in the adjacent building site had started again, and the deep rhythmic pounding obscured any noise from the room. He smacked his hand heavily on the grille again, and again: The metallic rattling echoed down the hallway.

As he turned to walk away, he wondered if he had imagined it all, if he had misjudged the source of the torturous music. The corridor was much narrower and darker up here, the apartments packed together tightly, unlike the genteel spaciousness of his floor. Many of the units had their doors open; each one was little more than a single room with a tiny kitchen in front, and each one was crammed with boxes, chairs, piles of clothes on the floor, electric fans, heaters. Their inhabitants spilled into the corridor, squatting on the floor or perched on low stools as they performed everyday tasks. An old man in an indigo worker’s hat sat on the threshold of his room, repairing a radio. A child with a bad cough copied out lines from a textbook onto a notepad; she wore fluffy slippers with a lamb’s smiley face imprinted on them. A few old women gathered around a piece of newspaper spread out on the floor in the middle of the corridor, peeling string beans, topping and tailing them and dropping them into an enamel bowl. They could have been in a village, Justin thought, not in the middle of the biggest city in the world. No one looked at him; they simply carried on with their lives — the same lives that had surrounded him for the last three months, lives he had barely noticed.

Diagonally across the hallway from the barricaded door sat an old woman stirring a pot of soup; the grille to her room was shut, but the inner door was open. A toddler sat on the floor not far from her, playing with an armless doll, shaking it in the air and pulling at its hair.

“Excuse me, Auntie,” Justin said, “but do you know if there’s anyone in that room over there?”

“You’re wasting your time,” the woman said, smiling. “She won’t answer the door; she thinks you’re here to collect the gas bill or the electricity bill or something like that.”

“In that case, maybe I should shout out that I’m not asking for money.”

“It won’t help you,” the old woman said, standing and coming to the grille to meet Justin. “She keeps to herself. Anyway, she’s a bit strange.”

“Strange?”

The woman twirled her finger around her temple. “You know, strange . She has mental problems.”

“I see.”

“Her friend is better, more talkative, but she’s always out working — working at what I don’t know. Young girls these days, you never know what they get up to. She comes home at all hours of the night — you should see the way she dresses — and sometimes I can hear her speaking on her mobile phone and it’s obvious she has men. Foreign, too, both of them — not sure where they’re from, Guangdong or Fujian or somewhere like that. Shanghai is full of foreigners these days; it’s not the same as before.” The woman’s friendly expression suddenly changed and she looked at Justin with a frown, as if something had occurred to her. “Anyway, what business do you have with those girls?”

“None,” Justin said. “I’m a neighbor from downstairs. I wanted to talk to them about the noise coming from their room, that’s all. The singing. It disturbs me.”

“What noise?” the woman said. “They might be strange girls, but they don’t make much noise.”

Justin shrugged. The sounds of lunchtime were beginning to start up around him — the cacophony of pots and pans, crying babies, irate mothers, an old couple arguing, their voices frail but angry. A small girl, maybe ten years old, paced up and down the corridor, speaking aloud and occasionally glancing at the notebook she was holding. On the cover, she had written: English Conversation . “At eleven o’clock, we have science. At eleven o’clock, we have science. At quarter past eleven, we have music. I like music. I like music. I-like-music.”

Five floors down, Justin was insulated from these lives; he had thought he could hear them but in fact he had heard little. He walked down the back staircase, pausing to look at the view from the rear of the building — a vast construction site with a hole that sank into a dirty bronze blackness; beyond it, a road lined with cheap shopping malls and food stalls, the crowds spilling onto the streets. Even from this distance, the road looked black with tar and cooking oil. He hurried back to his apartment; he needed the reassurance of the view he had from the front of the building, the unchanging view of Old and New Shanghai, the elegant stone buildings framed by the lavish skyscrapers beyond them. Their presence calmed him; he felt he belonged in that orderly cityscape.