Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

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СКАЧАТЬ quiet half-light seemed welcoming, irresistible.

      ‘What are you doing?’ Zhou X cried.

      But he was already up the stairs, treading across the uneven floorboards, the deep graining of the wood inviting him to bend down and trail his fingers over the smooth, worn surface. There were signs of life – pots of scraggly herbs and marigolds, towels draped on banisters, lines of washing strung up across the small square rooms. And yet there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it; as if the present was already giving way to the past. The small windows on the landings allowed little light in, but Justin could nonetheless see that there was dust on the surface of some cardboard boxes that lay stacked in a corner of the room, and also on the handrails of the staircase. He could not decide whether the house was decaying or living. He retreated and joined his companion outside. In spite of her huge black sunglasses she was squinting, shielding her face from the sun with her handbag.

      ‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You can’t just go poking your nose into other people’s houses like that.’

      Justin looked at her and smiled. ‘I’ve paid for this, haven’t I? I need to get my money’s worth.’

      At his insistence they drove from longtang to longtang, their SUV cruising through the narrow streets lined with plane trees, the balconies of the old French-style villas occasionally visible over the tops of stone walls. Some of the larger houses had shutters that were tightly closed, and in their gloom these mansions reminded him of the house in which he had grown up, full of silence and shadows and the steady ticking of grandfather clocks. He remembered the hallway and staircase of his family house, the ceiling rising so high that it created a cavelike gloom.

      As the car crawled through the traffic he began to notice the number of people on foot: a group of middle-school kids, spiky-haired and bespectacled in tracksuits, rushing to beat each other to the head of the queue to buy freshly made shengjian, exclaiming gleefully as the cloud of steam billowed from the pan; an elderly couple crossing the road just in front of the car, walking arm in arm, their clothes made from matching brocade and velvet, worn but still elegant; and at an intersection, about fifty construction workers sitting on the pavement, smoking on their break, their faces tanned and leathery, foreign-looking – Justin could not place where they were from. He wondered why, in the many weeks since arriving, he had not noticed how densely populated the city was. All that time driving around in his limo, he thought, he must have been working on spreadsheets or reading reports.

      ‘You’re so easy to please,’ Zhou X said, tapping away on her phone without looking at him. ‘All I have to do is show you old houses.’

      They stopped the car because he had seen a small lane of nondescript houses that seemed derelict at first glance. It was the property developer’s instinct in him that spotted the lane, he thought, for it was barely distinguishable from the dozens of others they had seen, and in fact a great deal less attractive. Tucked behind a row of small fruit and vegetable shops, the low brick houses had not long ago been rendered in cheap cement and now looked, frankly, ugly: low residential value, ripe for development. Wires sagged along the façades of the buildings, competing for space with lines of washing hung up to dry; a small girl came out of a doorway carrying a basin of grey-hued water, which she splashed into the street. There was something about the way of life here – families living at close quarters, spilling into one another – that reminded him of the slums not far from where he used to live: hundreds of identical, flimsy houses, thousands of lives that seemed to blend into one. Sometimes they would catch fire and the entire area would be razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt a few months later. He had never known any of the people who lived in that world, and even before he became an adult, the shanties were cleared to make way for a shopping mall.

      He’d remembered to bring his little digital camera, and began photographing the narrow, sunless alley and the shabby shops that surrounded it; as he did so, an old woman emerged from one of the houses, carrying a few plastic bags bulging with clothes. On the LCD screen of his camera she appeared smiling, gap-toothed, spontaneously lifting her bags to the camera as if displaying a trophy.

      ‘Hey, people don’t like you interfering with their lives,’ Zhou X called from inside the car. ‘Can you hurry up? I’m late for my next appointment.’

      For days afterwards he looked at the picture of the old woman, even putting it on his laptop so that every time he turned it on she was there, smiling at him. There was something about her thin hair, dyed jet-black and set in tight curls, that reminded him of his grandmother – the attempts at vanity making her seem frailer, not younger. He remembered his grandmother’s room: the chalky smell of thick white face powder and tiger balm interlaced with eau de cologne. He would sit on the bed and watch her undo the curlers from her hair; she liked having him around, liked talking to him, even though he could not yet understand all of what she said. He must have been no more than five or six and she was already in her eighties, already weak. And he was surprised by the glassy clarity of these memories, the way they settled insistently on his waking days like a thin, sticky film that he could not shake off. He had never even been close to his grandmother.

      With the photo enlarged, he could make out the colour of some of the clothes through the translucent plastic bags the old woman was carrying: a jumble of cheap textiles proudly displayed to the beholder. Her cheeks were red and coarse, her remaining teeth badly tea-stained. He wanted to go back and try to find her, maybe take more photographs – and who knows, on further inspection (and without a nagging actress on his back) he might get a clearer view of those small houses and the neighbouring shops. A thought flashed across his mind: maybe he could restore them, save them from further degradation by thinking of some clever scheme whereby the residents could continue paying low rent and the shops could be run on a cooperative basis. The entire site would become a model for modern urban dwelling in Asia; young educated people would want to come and live cheek by jowl with old Shanghainese.

      He jotted down a few rough figures, arranging them in neat columns: how much financing such a scheme might take to work – nothing serious, just the vaguest estimate, and yet, as always, the moment he thought about money, the project began to feel real, crystallising into something solid and attainable. He kept the piece of paper on his desk at work so he would not forget it.

      But the whole of the next week was taken up with meetings with bankers and contractors, dinners with Party officials, preparing a presentation to the Mayor’s office; the following week he had to go to Tokyo, and then Hong Kong, then Malaysia. When he finally made it back to Shanghai it was turning cold and damp with the onset of winter, and he did not feel like venturing out much, did not have the energy to track down the old woman and her little lane, for he did not know where it was exactly – maybe somewhere between a highway and a big triangular glass building? He barely had any time to himself these days. Most evenings he was so tired it felt too much of an effort even to shower and clean his teeth before he went to bed; all he wanted to do was fall asleep. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry all the time, and his head felt cloudy, as if set in thick fog on a muggy day, a headache hovering on the horizon. He got the ’flu and was laid up in bed for over a week, and then bronchitis set in and he couldn’t shake it. His bathroom scales showed he had lost nearly ten pounds, but he wasn’t too worried – he was just overworked; it had happened to him before. Whenever he worked too much he got sick. But still he got up every morning, put on his suit, went to meetings, studied site plans and financial models.

      After months of planning his family had decided on their masterwork, a project that was to announce their arrival on the Mainland and define their intentions for the coming decades. All his groundwork – the endless days and nights of negotiations and entertaining – had finally unearthed a potential site befitting his family’s ambitions: a near-derelict warehouse built around the remains of a 1930s opium den, surrounded by low lane houses, between Nanjing Xi Lu and Huaihai Lu – СКАЧАТЬ