Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

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СКАЧАТЬ he argued was met with contempt, but still he battled on. No, it was not true that the Lim family had made their money by kicking people off their land in Malaysia; no, they were not going to do the same here. He began to spend hours each day posting replies on the blog site, rushing back from meetings to check what had been said in response to his posts and to write something himself. But then, one day, all of his posts suddenly vanished – he could find no trace of any of them. Every single one had disappeared in the space of an hour, and he was forced to read from the sidelines, marginalised, silenced. He tried inventing a new pseudonym, but every time he posted something it would last less than a day before disappearing. He felt powerless, and was often almost overcome by the urge to scream as he read what was being said about him. He did not know who these people were, and had no way of getting in touch with them. He could only watch helplessly as the blog pages grew longer and more animated with each day; soon all this chatter about his property deals would be in the newspapers. Once it became public the project would be doomed – none of the officials who had been expensively recruited to help facilitate matters would be willing to support his bid openly.

      Frustrated by the lack of news, his father rang him on his mobile one evening, catching him by surprise. He tried to explain that it was not his fault, that things in China moved so quickly that it was impossible to anticipate every development in advance. It wasn’t like Indonesia or Singapore; China was at once lawless and unbending in its rules. He talked and talked, his speech cut to ribbons by his cough; he felt the dryness of his throat and mouth and realised he hadn’t drunk anything for hours. His father listened patiently and then said, ‘I see. But I know you will make a success of this deal.’

      Soon he was spending all night monitoring the blog site. Sleep evaded him; it was superfluous to his current state. All that seemed relevant to his life now was this torrent of words written by unseen, unknown people. He felt he knew them now, felt he was somehow linked to them, and just before the first of the comments citing him by name appeared, he had a strange presentiment in his stomach, a sensation of exhilaration mixed with nausea, as if he knew what was to come. Justin Lim has been trained by his family to be uncaring and ruthless. From a young age he was already displaying these tendencies. Justin Lim is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he smiles to your face but is ready to eat you up whole. Justin Lim is handsome but like all handsome men cannot be trusted one inch. Justin Lim is a man with absolutely no feelings whatsoever, he does not possess a beating heart. Justin Lim is not human. Justin Lim has committed some terrible acts in the past. Justin Lim will stop at nothing to fulfil his aims, he will crush you like he crushes insects.

      His father began to ring him more frequently – every other day, then every day, then several times a day. Each time the phone rang he could sense his father’s anxiety in the ringtone, swelling with every beat. At first he made excuses – he was just going into a meeting, he couldn’t speak. But then he stopped answering the calls altogether, letting the phone ring on to the voicemail; he never checked his messages. He stopped going to the office, for there was nothing left to do now except look at the things people said about him on the blog site. He never strayed far from his laptop, and even if he had to go to the toilet he hurried back as quickly as possible. Taking a shower made him anxious, made him fear that he was missing a new comment on the blog.

      One night he managed two hours’ sleep. It had made him groggy but strangely lucid, and his head filled for a moment or two with a painful awareness of the weakness of his body. He went into the bathroom and stepped onto the scales out of curiosity: he had lost even more weight. He splashed his face with water and looked in the mirror. His eyes were sunken and dark, glassy and staring, like a fish’s at the market, his lips chapped and sore: a simulation of life. When dawn broke he packed a few things into a suitcase and checked into a hotel. From there he rang a friend of a friend of a friend who referred him to an estate agent who found him an apartment within three days. It was just off the Bund, on the edge of Suzhou Creek, in an Art Deco building that seemed semi-derelict. The rooms were large and sombre and quiet, the furniture sparse and nondescript; outside, the corridors were badly lit and deserted. He moved in late that afternoon, and when night fell he discovered that he had a view of the skyscrapers of Lujiazui, framed in the sweep of old windows that ran the length of the apartment. From this side of the river, the opposite to the one on which he had lived previously, the towers of Pudong seemed beautiful and untouchable. Before, they had been functional and dull, filled with ballrooms and boardrooms, each one indistinguishable from the others; now they trembled with life, intimate yet unknowable.

      That night, his first in the apartment, he slept almost all the way through to the morning. His new bedroom was cavelike in its darkness, and he could hear nothing except the vague metallic creaking of pipes in the night, a comforting faraway echo. It was the first proper sleep he had had in over two months. When he woke up he looked at the mounting number of messages and emails on his BlackBerry. He turned it off without looking at any of them and went back to sleep.

      In the days that followed he spent much of his time in bed. Often he would not be able to sleep, his mind completely empty, his body alternating between aching and numb. Sometimes he was afraid he was going mad. He had never been like this before, and the thought of madness panicked him. Yet he could do nothing about it. He lay in bed with the curtains drawn during the day, feeling the dampness of his sheets as he sheltered in his lightless room. At night he would open the curtains and watch the lights of the skyscrapers glinting until he began to recognise their rhythms, the exact hour they would come on or off, when they became brighter and how long it took for each sequence to repeat. When he had stared at these repeating patterns long enough they became abstract, divorced from the real world. Once or twice he felt strong enough to venture out for a stroll along the creek, and sometimes he was compelled to go out to buy drinking water from the convenience store down the road, but the slightest effort weakened him, filling him with a sickening anxiety. He longed for the safety of his bed, and decided not to leave the apartment again. He had his meals delivered to him once a day, deposited at the door. He would sometimes hear the doorbell at lunchtime but could not summon the energy to get up until the evening, when it was dark. The bag of food would still be on the doormat, cold and unappealing. Twice a week his ayi would come to clean the apartment, and from behind his closed bedroom door he would hear her gently moving the furniture and washing the dishes. He told her he was sick. She said, ‘I guessed that.’ One day he emerged from his bedroom to find that she had double-boiled a chicken with medicinal herbs to make soup for him. He sat before it at the kitchen counter, unable to eat it. He found himself crying – hot streams of tears flowed down his cheeks. He hated crying and didn’t know why he was doing so. The strangest thing was that he felt nothing – no sadness or bitterness or loneliness. And yet he was unable to stem the tears.

      He felt the walls of the apartment draw in on him, encircling him, making everything beyond their confines seem irrelevant, reducing the city to a mere idea, a vague memory.

      Late one sleepless night, the hundreds of messages on his BlackBerry did not seem so terrifying, so he began to work his way through the emails and voicemails, deleting most before getting to the end of them. There were dozens of messages from his family – his uncles, father and brothers – whose title headings charted a growing sense of worry. It was fine, he thought: he was immune to their anxiety now. A few weeks ago he would have been panicked by their panic, but now none of it touched him. It no longer bothered him that he was uncontactable.

      But among the more recent messages, one caught his attention: a voicemail from his mother, who rarely rang him. It began calmly, saying they missed him, and whatever wrongs they might have committed against him, would he please forgive them. They needed him now, he was the only one who could save them, his brother was not good at this sort of thing. His father had become very ill because of the situation, and there were creditors hovering like vultures. She sounded as if she was beginning to cry: she didn’t understand this sort of thing very well, but she knew the situation was very grave.

      The situation. What situation? He checked earlier emails from his father. His tone was, as always, dry, the messages СКАЧАТЬ