Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

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      Perform All Obligations and Duties with Joy

      The 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 cement floor of the balcony. Most of the time, though, the ice would stay hard and unmoving, glinting ever so slightly despite the absence of light in the pale, snow-shrouded afternoon.

      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. Realising 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 the 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 the wooden floor; 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 that always snagged on the rug as she closed it. Then he would be alone again.

      Occasionally she would leave 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 corridor. He heard people singing along to their karaoke machines, sometimes a family singalong 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 that 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 would be 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 organising 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 the confectioners, leaving the servants to deal with the deliveries and the 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 they 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 recognised – 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 each other 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.

      As he stood at the window and looked out at the strange frozen shapes of the city – the glass-ice trees, the streets scarred by snaking tracks of snow – he thought of the family holiday he had once had in Sapporo, when he was about thirteen, old enough to understand that the СКАЧАТЬ