Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

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СКАЧАТЬ such as a much bigger site in Pudong, large enough to accommodate a skyscraper – a genuine, brash, half-kilometre-high Asian behemoth, but his father and uncles had preferred the old-fashioned prestige of this address. ‘It’ll make more of a statement,’ his father said, his voice measured and steady, but tinged with excitement nonetheless. In the coming year they would make a bid for the site and decide what they would do with it – something outstanding, of course, a future landmark. There was still the matter of greasing palms, identifying the officials who might need to be persuaded to allow the deal to go through, but he was not worried about that – it was something at which he had years of practice. It had become his speciality, people said, making things happen that way.

      One cold, crisp morning, during a lull in negotiations – it was that dead time in January when the Westerners were still lethargic after their return from Christmas and the locals were beginning to prepare for the Spring Festival – he woke up to brilliant sunshine and a day off: the first of either that he could remember in a long time. His joints did not feel swollen as they usually did, and his lungs craved air. He called for a taxi and set off vaguely in the direction of the lane he had seen all those months ago, and when he felt he was in the general vicinity he alighted and continued on foot, strolling along the streets lined with low stone houses. The air was cold and sharp in his lungs, almost cleansing; the streets were busy with crisscrossing bicycles and electric scooters, merchants pulling carts of winter melons and oranges. The branches of the trees had been pruned heavily for the winter, and stood sentinel-like before the handsome old European-built houses. On foot he noticed the stone ornaments and moulded window frames that adorned the upper floors of these small buildings – it was impossible to see any of this from a car: all he usually saw was the ground floor, invariably occupied by a featureless shop selling down jackets or mobile phones. He stopped to buy a bag of oranges for the old woman, just in case he saw her again – he wasn’t far now; he recognised a few shops, a familiar curve in the road.

      He rounded the corner of where he thought the lane was, but all he saw was a wide, empty square of dirt dotted with pyramid-shaped piles of rubble. The shops had disappeared, and the lane with it. He paused and looked for things he remembered – an old barbershop, a strange Bavarian pebbledashed house on the corner: this was definitely the place. But all that was left of the houses was the faintest imprint of where their foundations had been – shallow, barely discernible. He had his camera in his backpack and wanted to take a photo, but he had the big bag of oranges in his hand and didn’t know what to do with it; all at once it seemed redundant. He looked around, hoping to give it to someone. But for the first time he could remember since arriving in Shanghai, the streets were almost empty – no bored young woman leaning out of a shop entrance, no street vendor watching him suspiciously, not even a child on a tricycle. After a while an old man cycled past, his face creased and leathery – in the basket between his handlebars there was a small poodle wearing a pink quilted coat. It looked at Justin as it went past, its mouth drawn wide as if in a smile, but there were streaks running down from its eyes, like black tears. Justin stood in the brilliant winter sunshine, the bag of oranges cutting into his hand. He had forgotten to wear gloves, and his fingers were getting numb.

      He left the oranges by a pile of rubble and walked into the middle of the cleared space. It wasn’t very large, bounded on three sides by old houses. It would have made a lousy building site; he was glad he wasn’t the one developing it. It had seemed larger when those few houses and shops were still on it, so full of life and potential. Maybe he wasn’t a property genius after all. He looked around one last time, hoping to see the old woman he had photographed – it was stupid, he knew, for she had gone.

      Just before he left he took some photos of the empty plot of land. In the pale winter light the earth looked so dry it could have been in a desert. The only patch of colour was the electric blue of the plastic bag that had fallen open, revealing a few plump oranges. He walked around a little bit more, coming across more and more pieces of land that looked to him to have been recently cleared – some tiny and compact, some vast and unbounded, hollowed out by bulldozers. He took pictures of each one, and walked until it began to get dark. The winter air felt sharp and icy in his chest, as if he was inhaling tiny shards of glass.

      The following week his cough seemed to get worse again; the long walk in the damp January air seemed to have weakened his lungs, and he found the mere act of breathing an effort. In a meeting with potential bankers he was unable to finish his sentences because of a tickling in his throat that rose as he spoke, swiftly triggering a rasping cough that left his chest and ribcage feeling hollow and achy. The doctor prescribed another course of antibiotics – his third since the new year – and ordered some X-rays, which came back clear. He just needed rest, the doctor said; he was run-down. But his days and nights did not get any shorter – the gruelling meetings lasted all day, bleeding into the evening’s social round of banquets and bars. Once he got over the initial few days of feeling ill, the exhaustion became familiar, almost reassuring. It was always like this: whenever a big project was on the table he would slip easily into the grinding nature of this routine, finding comfort in the constancy of his fatigue. When he woke up each morning he could feel the puffiness of his eyes, knew that they would be bloodshot; his breathing would already be desperate, the air feeling thin in his lungs. His limbs would be heavy, but after a shower and a double espresso he would feel better, though he would never satisfactorily shake the mild headache that was already descending on his skull, already escalating into a migraine. He would work through it – it wasn’t a problem.

      Besides, he didn’t have a choice. There was a problem with the deal. All the arrangements that had been slotting obediently into place just before Christmas were now looking shaky. Someone was refusing to take a bribe – an official in the municipal Urban Planning Department, a mid-ranking engineer who had found an irregularity in the paperwork, a discrepancy, it seemed, between the proposed project and the preliminary drawings. More buildings would have to be demolished than had been declared in the proposal, and this was a problem because many of those buildings were in the local vernacular. This engineer – a glorified technical clerk – was resisting the pressure placed on her by her superiors, most of whom were sympathetic to the Lim family venture. It was awkward when someone acted out of principle; it would take more than money to solve the impasse. And now the delay was leading to further complications: another party was interested in the piece of land, and there was talk of an imminent bid to rival theirs.

      He pressed for emergency meetings with high-ranking officials for whom he had bought Cartier cigarette lighters and weekend trips to the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. There was nothing they could do for the moment, they claimed: his project had to work its way through the system, there was a formal procedure which they couldn’t alter, it would just take a bit of time. Each official he spoke to reassured him gently without committing himself; they were sure the other bid would come to nothing. They said this in a way to suggest that they would do something to prevent it, but now he was not so sure. He was not sure about anything in Shanghai any more.

      In the meantime his secretaries began to speak of an internet campaign – a blog site entitled DEFENDERS OF OLD SHANGHAI. They showed him pages and pages of angry commentary under the discussion thread: Save 969 Weihai Lu from destruction by foreign companies!! It was full of accusations that wildly exaggerated the effect of the project on the existing buildings, so, using the pseudonym ‘FairPreserver’, he personally wrote replies to the most outlandish claims. It was not true that the Lim family company were uncaring capitalists wanting to take advantage of China, he said; he had heard from insiders that they cared greatly about history and would do everything in their power to preserve what they could. They had a long record of restoring heritage buildings and would never dream of destroying anything the city deemed to be important. They cared greatly about the lives of the common people and always sought to be considerate and fair when dealing with property belonging to people of modest means, never forcing anyone to move against their will and always providing compensation where necessary.

      HAHAHAHA, came the first reply, within minutes of his post. What a joke, are you paid by the Lim family to say these things???

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