Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (57 page)

“You think so? I don’t see how that’s possible. That’s why I think you’re incredibly courageous.” Her gaze did not waver as she said this. “It means a lot to me that you’re doing this.”

“Um,” he said.

“I was really surprised, to tell the truth. But now that I think of it, you’ve never actually done anything bad. I don’t know why I’ve thought about you as one of them. I’m not even sure who
they
are. Just not us.”

“There’s lots of stuff about me you don’t know.”

She smiled; her eyes looked watery. “Yes, I’m sure there is. Thanks, anyway, for all you’re doing. It feels like … something personal. I know this sounds silly, but it makes me feel as if you’re doing it to make C.S. and me happy.”

Justin remained silent for a while. The clouds were beginning to lighten now, the velvety texture and soft folds becoming apparent. “It’s going to be dawn soon.”

“Yeah. I’m so sleepy.” She laid her head on his shoulder; it felt comfortingly heavy. “By the way, if you need any help, just let me know.”

The sky lightened, but there was no amber dawn, no dazzling color, only cloud on cloud, a marbling of cobalt and gray.

“Rain today,” he said, but her breaths were already sleep-heavy.

Early in the afternoon, when they’d about slept off their late night, Justin drove C.S. and Yinghui back to KL. The roads were busy with people driving in on a Sunday; it had started to rain, not heavily but enough to make the streets muddy and slow, and even the highways were stop-start with traffic. He dropped Yinghui at her parents’ house, stopping for a moment with the engine running as she collected her things from the trunk.

“Time for the usual Sunday evening dinner ritual,” she said as she leaned in through the window to give C.S. a quick kiss on the cheek. She reached her hand in and squeezed Justin’s forearm. “Thanks for the lift, Elder Brother.” He watched as she walked through the electric gates flanked on either side by a pair of scarlet-stemmed rajah palm trees. He waited until the gates had closed and she was safely inside.

“Can you step on it, please?” C.S. said, stretching and yawning. “There’s a TV show I want to watch. Oh, God, I drank too much last night.”

“She’s great, Yinghui,” said Justin.

“Yeah, but.”

“Things not going so well, then?”

“Yeah, it’s all fine,” C.S. said, yawning again. “It’s just I’m feeling a bit … stale. You know?”

Justin shrugged and drove on in silence until they reached home. He had been planning to spend the evening looking at the papers concerning the Cathay: On the drive back from the seaside, it had suddenly occurred to him that he might be able to make a viable financial case for turning it into a mixed-use development, the kind he’d heard of in cities like London or New York, where important buildings had been converted into five-star hotels and high-end apartments, alongside shops selling luxury brands. Why not the Cathay? It would make a splendidly situated boutique hotel right in the middle of town, where there was nothing of the kind, and would revitalize the area. Yinghui and her friends would complain that it hadn’t been preserved in its original use, but it wouldn’t take them long to realize that what he had done was better than nothing; at least the building would still be there.

It was entirely true what people would soon begin to say of him in his career: Compromise was his forte; he always found a way to sort things out.

He had just settled down to looking at some accounts when the phone rang—Sixth Uncle inviting him out to dinner, sounding bright and over-cheerful. In their family’s unspoken code, Justin knew that something was wrong and that this was not the casual invitation it purported to be.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m busy preparing for Monday. In fact, I’m looking at figures for the Cathay.”

“The Cathay, huh? Forget it for now; let your uncle buy you a chicken
chop at Coliseum. You used to love it there, all the old Hainanese guys fussing over you when you were a boy. See you there in an hour, okay? Take a taxi—big traffic jam here. It’s the rain, isn’t it?”

Sixth Uncle was right: The roads were terrible. Tired of waiting in the unmoving taxi, Justin got out and walked the last half mile in the rain, his sneakers growing damp even though he had a big golfing umbrella with him. The sky was darkening swiftly; what little light of the afternoon that remained was giving way to night, a deepening gloom urged on by the rain clouds. Scooters streaked through puddles, splashing muddy water onto his ankles as he walked along the broken pavements. Everywhere, people were walking in the rain, wearing plastic ponchos that hid the shapes of their bodies. Jostled by the crowds along the narrow strip of uneven paving, he stepped into the road, his foot sinking into a rivulet of water, the grit working its way quickly between his toes.

Sixth Uncle was waiting for him outside the restaurant, taking a final drag from the stub of his Benson & Hedges.

“It’s packed in there. I said we’d come back in a few minutes—they’re going to keep a table for us,” he said. “Why don’t we take a walk round the block?”

“But, Sixth Uncle, it’s raining.”

“Fuck the rain,” Sixth Uncle said as he lit another cigarette. He began walking slowly away from the restaurant. “Stop being such a pussy.”

Justin noticed that the traffic was still tightly packed and had been for some time—even the honking and jostling had calmed down, as drivers resigned themselves to the situation. Some roads had been cordoned off—a fire engine blocked one of the main roads.

“What a mess,” Justin said. “Something must be going on.”

“Uh,” Sixth Uncle grunted. “So how was the weekend? The old house still standing? I haven’t been down to Port Dickson in so long—I keep thinking maybe the old caretaker down there is dead.”

“No, all is fine. Yeah, it was cool.”

“Good.”

They rounded the corner and saw a small gathering of fire engines in the distance. Here, too, a calm had settled over the proceedings: Firemen were standing in small groups, drinking
teh-tarik
from plastic bags, the lights of the engines still flashing but the sirens silent; shopkeepers were standing at the front of their shops or sitting on rattan stools, looking
vaguely in the direction of the fire engines. Everywhere there was the sort of lassitude one feels when a moment of great danger has passed and one realizes that life will continue as it always has. Beyond the fire engines, a thin spire of smoke rose into the sky, barely discernible in the damp gloom.

“Lucky thing it was raining,” Justin heard a shopkeeper say to a passerby. “Otherwise I think all these shops around here also
kena
burn to the ground.”

“Ya-lah, nasib.”

Justin began to slow as they headed toward the fire engines, allowing Sixth Uncle to walk ahead. He paused by a group of shopkeepers who were standing at the entrance to a Chinese medicine shop, the shutters pulled halfway down. “Morning already it started, what time I don’t know—ten, eleven? After lunch only the firemen can put it out. Over thirty firemen, you know. You see? Now also still got smoke and all that.
Wah
, it was really big, man. Old buildings like that, not surprising, what. The electric wires all
rosak
already, isn’t it?”

Obscured by the fire engines, there was a perfect square of charred timber jutting at odd angles, rising half a story into the air—it looked like one of those ghostly pictures of redwood forests after a fire, silent and still. It took Justin a few moments to recognize this as the site of the New Cathay cinema; above the quieting hush of the rain and the low, respectful rumble of the traffic, he thought he could hear the sizzle and fizz of the ashes.

“What?” Sixth Uncle said. “What are you giving me that look for? You just spend all your time relaxing with your friends,
lepak-
ing down by the beach, and I have to end up sorting out your shit.”

“I said I was going to figure things out.”

“Figure things out, figure things out. How damn long was it going to take you? You’re still such a mommy’s boy. You need to grow up, stop being a sissy.” He put his arm around Justin’s shoulder. “Sometimes we have to do stuff we don’t like. I’ve tidied things up for you this time, but next time you’ll have to do it yourself. Come on, the table will be ready now. I’m hungry. What are you going to have, chicken chop as usual?”

They walked slowly back toward the restaurant. Sixth Uncle took out his pack of cigarettes but found it was empty; he scrunched it up and threw it into the drain. “Dammit, I’m getting too old for this,” he said, and went into the restaurant.

Justin stood outside for a moment, looking up to try to find the spire of smoke again. The rain was clearing and the twilight was tinged an ash-brown, otherworldly in appearance; the traffic was still solid, people were still walking about wearing plastic ponchos, there were still scooters weaving their way between the stationary cars. Time, Justin thought again: how it expands to fill the spaces that life creates, how it stretches brief moments and makes them last forever.

O
N THEIR RETURN FROM BEIJING, BOTH YINGHUI AND WALTER
were swept up by other business and could not concentrate on figuring out the terms of their joint venture, as they promised each other they would. Yinghui tried to think of their collaboration solely as a business enterprise, but it was not easy now; things had changed.

In Beijing, she had made a fool of herself. Sitting with Walter on a bench on the edge of a canal with the walls of the Forbidden City as a backdrop, she had become tired and teary, alarmed at how rapidly she had lost her composure. She thought that she had mastered her emotions, had dealt with everything that happened with her father a long time ago. Her frantic work routine, her multiple award-winning businesses, her yoga—all these things had helped her pack away the messiness of the past in neat little trunks, but suddenly they had been strewn across the space of her memory, swirling around as if carried by swift-flowing floodwater. She had leaned over and placed her head on Walter’s chest, expecting him—needing him—to wrap his arms protectively around her; when he did not, she clutched at his shirt with one hand, sobbing silently. His body felt hot and damp and unmoving. And after a while—she wasn’t sure how long exactly—when it was clear that he was not going to embrace her, she pulled away from him, still breathing in short heavy breaths, her nose
runny and slightly sniffly. He was looking at her with a faint smile on his face: He found this funny, she thought.

It took her a few moments to gather herself; her cheeks and eyes felt puffy, and her carefully styled hair stuck to her face in wisps. She remembered the breathing techniques she had learned in her various forms of exercise, from tai chi to vinyasa to half-marathon running, and after a few minutes was able to calm down again. But what she could not shake was the acute embarrassment, the feeling of having exposed herself as someone lacking in grace and strength—and, above all, as someone needy. Need equaled shame, she had always thought; to need someone was shameful, the opposite of respect. Even the word itself sounded weak, wheedling: “need.” The thin, elongated vowel signaled an emptiness of the imagination—the cry of a damsel in distress or a hapless child who needed protecting. He had been so keen to dig out stories from her past, as if he had wanted to humiliate her by making her remember all the things that made her weak, as if he was trying to put all her fragility on display for the entire world to witness. She struggled to understand why he was doing that, until she realized that it was not his fault but hers: She was the one who couldn’t deal with the past; it was nothing to do with him.

Love, of course, was out of the question—why had she ever thought that might be possible?

By the time they got back to the hotel, after a taxi ride that seemed extraordinarily complicated—the driver had lost his way—she was sufficiently in command of her emotions to be able to make a joke or two. Lucky they made it back, she said; she was worried that the cabdriver was going to abduct them and take them to Tianjin to sell their kidneys to underworld gangs. Walter laughed politely, and they took the lift back up to their rooms in silence, staring at the ascending numbers, feeling that the count from one to five had never before seemed so long. He got out and stood looking at her as the glass doors closed. As the lift carried her up and away, she wondered if that would be the last time she saw him.

Back in Shanghai, she was glad for his text saying that he would be very busy in the coming days leading up to his charity concert for the Sichuan earthquake orphans and that he would not be able to see her much. It suited her that he was otherwise occupied, for it gave her time to reassert her boundaries and restore her independence. Whereas just a short time ago she had found her businesses limiting and suffocating in their narrow
scope, she now found them reassuring in their cheerful familiarity. When she saw the new ads her team had produced for the FILGirl clothes range, she smiled at the images of small children playing in sunlit fields. The posters shone with garish primary colors: The sun wore a smiley face, the pastures were plastic-y green, and the robin that perched on one of the children’s fingers looked stiff and flightless. It was rudimentary, almost tacky in its effect, but its simplicity made Yinghui feel happy. The girl in the middle of the picture wore a colorful pinafore printed with red flowers; she smiled openmouthed with wonder and delight, reaching out to touch the unmoving bird. Yinghui spent all afternoon discussing which posters should be used for their next online campaign. The entire team sat for three hours drinking tea and eating egg tarts that Yinghui had bought.