Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (13 page)

He peered into the narrow screen, and Phoebe was worried that he didn’t know how to work the camera. But as he held it out he said, “This phone is so old. My grandson had a phone like this three years ago when he was still in middle school.” It made her laugh, and in the photo she appears sunny-faced and natural, full of the promise of the bounteous years ahead of her.

As she looked at the photo on the computer screen, she knew it was just the right kind of photo to have on her profile—taken by someone else, a friend on an outing, maybe even a boyfriend. It made her appear desirable, unlike the kind of blurry self-shot images where the person was always looking up at the camera, the kind that instantly told the viewer: I have no friends. She wrote a few lines about herself,
a professional career-oriented young woman with experience of foreign work and travel
. She gave her true age and stated that she wanted to meet respectable, successful men. Within minutes of posting her profile, she began to get requests from men she didn’t know, who all wanted to get to know her better. She was overwhelmed; she never imagined she could be so popular. Suddenly the whole of Shanghai seemed full of friends and potential partners, thousands of them. She typed replies to the people she deemed the most suitable, her fingers moving across the keyboard, trying to keep up with several conversations at once, but it was difficult; she was not used to typing so much, and she knew she was making mistakes. Sorry for the delays in my replies, she said, as some of the men became impatient. It was thrilling to chat to people she barely knew, and she began to imagine what some of them might be like—rich, handsome, successful.

But very soon she saw that many of them were just high school and college kids who were having some online fun—they said so themselves. They had no intention of ever meeting up. She became angry that they were wasting her time, so she learned how to block them from contacting her. Young people were no use to her; she needed to meet successful adults. She was not interested in pimply adolescents. Some men seemed okay when they first started chatting, but gradually Phoebe would discover something wrong with them.

Some men became angry when she took a bit longer to reply. They were pushy and some said impolite things to her. But she couldn’t type very fast, and it was hard to keep so many chats going at once. She soon learned to tell which men were educated, because they were the ones who typed their answers very quickly, but she also discovered that educated men often used the most obscene words. And then there were men who seemed nice at first, but soon it was clear that they were just out to trick her. Even though she did not know what they could possibly cheat her out of, she sensed that they were bad people who were up to no good. She heard stories all the time, tales of swindlers and liars—
bamboozlers
. She did not want to be one of those poor victims who got bamboozled.

One by one, Phoebe began to delete her newly made friends, blocking each one until her contact list showed only a couple of guys—guys who had said hello, how are you, but had not yet had the chance to show how deceitful and black-spirited they were. She began to get random messages from men that didn’t even start with a greeting, just shameless suggestions for physical relations, most probably high school students, but who knew, maybe they were frustrated middle-aged husbands and fathers. She knew it was because she had a nice profile picture, which she should replace with something fake or a neutral image, something like a cartoon character. A
superhuman character with great strength, maybe. That would deter everyone with unsavory intentions. She would become like so many other people in cyberspace, hiding behind an image of something other than themselves. But as she looked at the photo of herself, she hesitated. Her eyes were glowing with laughter and promise, and the vegetation behind her was so lush it reminded her of her home. She could not bring herself to delete this image from her profile. When the rest of Shanghai looked at her, she did not want them to see just a gray shadow of a nobody; she wanted them to see her, Phoebe Chen Aiping.

She looked at her brand-new fake Omega watch. It was 6:55
P.M
. She had not realized how late it was—she had spent nearly four hours in the Internet café. She double-checked the time on the computer, in case the watch she had been sold was a dud. It was still 6:55. She looked one last time at the photo of herself, just as another message popped up on-screen.
Little miss, hello, I like your profile, would you like to chat? I think we might be compatible
. She closed the page and signed herself off the computer.

When she got home, the room was dark and Yanyan was asleep on the bed, wrapped up in a thin blanket. The windows were open and there was a slight chill to the evening air. Phoebe stood at the window and looked at the blinking red and pale-gold lights of the cars trailing their way through the traffic. The street stalls had their lights on now, the plumes of smoke from the little charcoal grills rising into the night air.

“Where have you been, you’re very late,” Yanyan said quietly.

“Trying to find work. Why are you in bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock.”

“I haven’t gotten out of bed all day.”

“Oh, Yanyan.” Phoebe sighed as she sat down on the bed next to Yanyan. “Not again. What are we going to do?”

As night fell, the giant hole in the construction site below the window looked black and infinite, as if it were ready to swallow up the cranes and bulldozers around it. Maybe Yanyan and she and everyone in their building would disappear into the hole too, Phoebe thought.

“Come, I’ll make some dinner,” she said.

Yanyan sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, shielding her eyes as Phoebe turned on the light. The single fluorescent strip bathed the room in a harsh white glow.

“Only instant noodles again, sorry,” Phoebe said.

“It’s better than eating a banquet on your own,” Yanyan replied quietly.

Later, once Yanyan had settled back in bed, Phoebe opened her “Journal of My Secret Self.” She had not written in it for some days. She paused, knowing that Yanyan was not yet asleep—her breathing was even and almost soundless. Phoebe needed solitude when she wrote in her journal; she had become used to being alone when confronting her fears. It was easier that way, for she could be as weak and fearful as she wanted and there would be no one to witness it. She turned off the light and waited in the darkness. When she heard Yanyan’s breaths turn heavy with dream sleep, she held her mobile phone next to her journal and began to scribble a few lines in the ghostly blue light.

T
HE WEATHER TURNED COLDER AND SHARPER AS SPRING FESTIVAL
approached. Most days, Justin spent the morning staring at the ice that had formed overnight on the balcony, bizarre shapes hanging from the railings in jagged shards or clinging to the drainpipes like brilliant shiny fungus. The leaves of the potted plants were coated in ice—fat glassy bulbs that reminded him of Christmas decorations. On brighter days the sun would be strong enough to start shrinking the icicles, and he would stand at the window watching the water drip slowly onto the concrete floor of the balcony.

He had not left the apartment for five days, not even to walk to the convenience store at the end of the street to stock up on bottled water and instant noodles. The apartment felt too warm and cosseting to leave, and the weather outside too harsh. Realizing he had stopped going out altogether, his
ayi
came every other day now, leaving him enough food and water to live on—more than enough, it turned out, for she worried about him—so he did not have to venture out, did not have to see or speak to anyone, which suited him. If he happened to be in the living room when he heard his
ayi
unlock the first of the heavy double doors, he would retreat to the dark safety of his bedroom, knowing that she would not enter his lair. He would lie in bed and chart her movements by the sounds she
made: the breathy exclamation on entering the overheated apartment; the running of the tap in the kitchen; the expressions of shock and even mild revulsion when she discovered and disposed of leftover food festering on the kitchen counter; the clink of porcelain; the scrape of chairs on wood floors; the gentle tread of her feet as she dusted the coffee table. And, finally, the moment of relief when she left the apartment, pulling once, twice, three times at the door, which always snagged on the rug as she closed it. Then he would be alone again.

Occasionally she would leave him a note asking if he needed anything else, and he would scribble a reply—
all still fine
—and leave it with some cash on the kitchen table. He was thankful she came, but he could not bear the thought of interacting with anyone, not even someone as unobtrusive as a bespectacled middle-aged
ayi
.

All around him he could hear the sounds of families preparing for Spring Festival—children’s footsteps upstairs, the occasional burst of excited chatter, the rumble of wheeled bags heavy with treats being dragged along the corridors. He began to hear people singing along to their karaoke machines, sometimes a family chorus with croaky old voices mingling with cartoon-happy children’s voices, other times a lone female voice, surprisingly pure and sad, falling flat from time to time. He hated this voice; it wriggled into his head and cut into his innards, forcing its way into his space as if it wanted to be close to him. It was not like the other noises, which were impersonal and distant; this voice was intimate, intrusive, and he was thankful it never lasted very long. He did not know where any of these noises came from, for they echoed strangely, rebounding in the walls and pipes.

He thought about what his own family was doing at that precise moment—their New Year celebrations were a well-rehearsed ritual, comforting in their predictability. In the family mansion they would be taking delivery of inhuman quantities of food, and the caterers would be setting up for the open-house party that would take place over the first few days of the festival, following the family dinner on New Year’s Eve. His mother would play at being stressed by the pressure of organizing affairs, even though her distaste for physical work meant that she rarely performed any function more strenuous than making phone calls to the florist or confectioners, leaving the servants to deal with the deliveries and setting up of tables and chairs. In recent years the family had even taken to having the
New Year’s Eve dinner in a hotel—the servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn’t trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she’d heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to Manila, people being killed in their own homes). So the family would book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, twelve of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. How lucky we are to have a family like this, his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. He’d said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird’s nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn’t even recognized—perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more-modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming uncle—for the loss of their fortune, for the loss of their eldest son.

But he was deluding himself. They would not be blaming one another for their misfortune; they would be blaming him. He had disappeared, he had let them down, he would not answer their calls for help, he was selfish—that was why they were in this mess now. It was a line of reasoning he had heard many times before, so often that sometimes he, too, believed it. It was all his fault.