Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

“Would you like a drink?” Justin asked.

She nodded but did not make any effort to appear pleased. When she looked at Justin, he could see how tired her eyes were. “X.O?” she said.

Justin signaled to the girl behind the bar. “Two Coca-Colas, please.”

The woman laughed. “ Ya , I’ve drunk too much tonight. Your friends, they are a crazy bunch; they bought me lots of drinks. I’m not used to it.”

“I can see.”

“So,” she said, reaching across to rest her hand on his thigh. “You really look lonely, you know. You out-of-towners, you need company. I know you do. I’ve had experience of life.”

Justin felt the heat of her hand through his jeans. Between his legs: the beginnings of an erection. He moved away from her touch and felt her hand lift away.

“Are you from Kota Bharu?” he said. Their Cokes arrived, and they raised their glasses to each other in a brief toast. The first bars of a sugary old love song started playing from a nearby room.

“Hey, I love this song,” she said. “It’s one of my favorites. You don’t know it? It’s called ‘Just Like Your Tenderness.’ I love classic old songs like this.” She started to hum along, her voice surprisingly fine and perfectly tuned. “… just like your tenderness …” she added with a little flourish at the end. She listened quietly until the song was over; all along she kept staring at the fish tank. “I live a few miles outside town,” she said eventually. “Guys like you would call me a kampung girl.”

“Married? Kids? Family?”

She looked at Justin with watery eyes. He thought maybe he had gone too far, asked too familiar a question. But she smiled and shook her head. “Divorced. You? A handsome young guy like you is sure to have someone.”

Justin shook his head. “I’m a bachelor.”

“Bet you have a lot of girls everywhere you go.” She reached for her small handbag and fumbled with the clasp; on its flap it read GUICCY. She took out a pack of Winstons and reached for the box of matches that was perched on the edge of a plastic ashtray on the counter. It took her several strikes of the match before she managed to light it, the sudden amber glow of the flame illuminating her face. As she took a long drag on the cigarette, Justin noticed the lines on her neck, the flesh pallid and waxy. He wondered how her skin would feel, whether it would be clammy and maybe a bit cold or warm and smooth. “What are you looking at?” she said, peering at him sideways as she exhaled a gentle stream of smoke in the opposite direction.

“Nothing.”

He felt her hand on his thigh again, and this time he did not move away. A song had just finished playing in the background — a long final off-key note accompanied by raucous men’s laughter and hearty applause. “Can we go into a private room?” she said. “It’s a bit noisy here.”

He ordered two more Cokes and arranged for a small room to be opened up especially for them. When they were inside, settled down on the velour sofa, he began to scroll through the menu of songs, pretending to choose something they both liked. “What do you want to sing?” he asked, even though he knew that they had not come into the room to perform duets.

“Anything,” she said, sitting close to him. She eased her hand up his thigh until he felt it between his legs, warm and insisting. He placed his hand on her thigh but hesitated. The heat of her body and the slight stickiness of her skin excited but also sickened him; the purple glow of the TV set accentuated the blank look on her face, the absence of any intimacy. He was alarmed and a bit frightened at the thick knot of desire in his throat, which made his breath heavy and coarse. He hated that he could get aroused in a place like this, a small musty room that smelled of cheap air freshener and old tobacco — and yet he did not leave or ask her to stop. She was just doing what she thought he expected of her, what all men like him expected — he knew that she didn’t really want to be there with him. He felt like saying, I don’t want this either — but, then again, he thought, maybe I do. Maybe I am like all the other businessmen who pass through this small sleepy town, guys who want a quickie and who might leave a couple of hundred ringgit for her at the end of the evening, so that she could buy herself some clothes in the night market on the weekend. This is what his life had become, he thought: That was the kind of existence that awaited him, stretching infinitely into the future.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said softly. “It’ll be nice, you’ll see.”

After she had gone, Justin sat in the gloom with his head resting in his hands for a few moments. The Coke had left a sickly taste in his mouth, like cough medicine, and made him feel like throwing up; his head began to spin from all the alcohol he had drunk throughout the evening, and he wanted to go back to the hotel. He thought of Yinghui and C.S. again, reclining on the sofa at Angie’s, facing each other with their ankles lazily interlaced as they leafed through magazines. It was Saturday night — they might be listening to the Velvet Underground at that very moment; once it got past midnight, Yinghui would get up and put on “Sunday Morning” and start to sing along. Yeah, yeah, I’m so predictable, she would say, laughing as she returned to the sofa. She knew all the words; just the previous Saturday, Justin had watched her mouthing the words to “Pale Blue Eyes,” her lips moving gently even though her eyelids were half closed with slumber. When she sang, “Sometimes I feel so happy,” she really did look completely contented. She and C.S. would never know what it was like to be in Justin’s place, here in a karaoke bar in a small town up north — and Justin was glad, because he didn’t want her to experience all that men were capable of inflicting on others in this world he inhabited.

“You dirty rat,” Sixth Uncle said, patting him heavily on his back. “Chatting up old women — I didn’t know you liked the mature type. Naughty boy!”

“It wasn’t anything, we were just talking. And singing.”

“Talking, my foot! All the guys were taking bets on whether or not you were going to score with the old woman. I said, man, he’s going to score a hole in one. I had fifty bucks on you, big brother.”

“She wasn’t old.”

“You shoulda invited her to the hotel, bit of takeaway — imagine, that poor woman, she’d be still talking about it in ten years’ time if you’d taken her back to your room.”

Justin stood up and pushed past Sixth Uncle on his way to the exit. He wondered if, in the morning, Sixth Uncle and the rest of the men would remember the musty-sweet smell of Ichiban Karaoke Bar, its darkened corridors and worn-out carpets; whether they would recall the rising alcohol-induced nausea in their throats, their overfed guts, the feeling of women’s flesh through synthetic fabric; and whether they would regret it.

The walk back to his hotel was not a long one, and he began to stroll through the muggy night, thinking that the warm air would do him good. He stood up straight, trying to get fresh air in his lungs, but after twenty paces or so he bent over and threw up violently in the drain along the road. In the dark, against the oily-black tarmac, his vomit appeared pale and milky and copious. Trails of bitter spit dripped from his chin.

It was this that he remembered now, as he settled into the padded room with Little Tang and his friends late on this early-summer evening in Shanghai. Acrid sick, luminous, like a starburst against the night sky.