Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (24 page)

But not him.

He keeps the TV on the Discovery Channel, for he finds it soothing to have a backdrop of constant motion, of constant savagery. Killer whales devouring seals, snakes swallowing pigs. He sees a shot of a lizard eating another lizard that looks identical, only a bit smaller. But the bigger lizard can’t quite manage it—the smaller one keeps wriggling out of its jaws, its hind legs jerking as if electrocuted. Gary does not know why, but he starts to laugh. Many of the things he watches on TV seem comical to him nowadays.

In front of him, little windows announce themselves on the screen of his laptop, popping into existence like beautiful, short-lived nighttime flowers. These are the numerous online chat programs he is on—about half a dozen at once. Most of the time he doesn’t bother to look at the messages, which are greetings from total strangers who don’t even know who they are writing to. They don’t care—they are all lonely and in need of someone to chat with. Everyone uses a false name, hiding who they truly are, just as he does. The only thing on display is their solitude.

A small chat window with a girl’s face on it pops up with a bright
bling
. Gary has seen her before. It is rare to see a photo of a real face on these chat sites. The last time Gary saw it, he decided that it must be a fake—no girl would place a picture on the Internet that showed her smiling straight into the camera. The photo was taken in a public park, not in a studio, and the girl in it was not even dressed up or prettified in any way. He thought it
must have been a stolen image—someone playing a joke, so he took no notice. Her message this time is the same as the last time: sassy and challenging.
Hellooooo, anyone out there? Any human being, alien, even a talking monkey would be okay!

Yes, it must be a fake, Gary thinks as he clicks on the window to close it. Besides, he is bored of these chat rooms now, bored of inventing stories about who he is, bored of lying about his age, job, hometown—bored of the flattery and flirtation, the banality of the chat that is always the same and never goes anywhere.

Around him: an orchid in a stone-gray bowl, beige-and-black furniture—the same room for over two weeks now. Near the door there are two trays piled high with dirty dishes and glasses, unfinished food clinging to the white porcelain. He does not call for anyone to take the things away, because he is ashamed of being seen even by the humblest cleaning girl. He does not want to know that she is sneering at him, sniggering with her friends down in the kitchen below. Every few days he waits until 3:00
A.M
., when even the lifts are silent, and then he pushes the trays out into the corridor. He collects his food in this way too, emerging swiftly to draw the tray into his den when he feels there is no risk of being seen, like a rat darting back into its burrow. For several days, therefore, while he gathers the courage to open his door and place the dirty dishes outside, the remnants of his meals sit in a pile, reminding him, just as his agent does every so often, that unless he gets some work soon, there will be no more money to pay the bills.

This is the reality of his life as it now stands: dirty, unchanging, helpless. There is nothing new or interesting for him to contemplate in his minimalist, sullied cell; he has exhausted all the possibilities of his life, cannot even look ahead into the future as those people down on the streets can. And so the only thing that can occupy his thoughts is the past, not because he wants to think about it but because he has run out of options. If the newspapers could see his past, maybe they would look more kindly upon him. But maybe not. Maybe they would see his childhood as a source of shame and ridicule, something else to make fun of.

He lived with his mother in a rural town called Temangan. If a town as small as Temangan were capable of having outskirts, the newspapers would probably say that he lived there, where the low rows of shophouses
and cheaply built houses bled into the countryside, fading into the thin jungle that stretched for miles until the next town. There was something ridiculous about country people like them and their neighbors trying to become modern city folk, saving up their money for a scooter, then a car, and dreaming of a job in the capital down south. Now that he has traveled so far in life, he can see just how futile that dream was, how justified those sophisticated cosmopolitan people were in laughing at their aspirations, because it was clear that they could never change their lives.

His father had walked out on them not long after Gary was born. “Don’t go looking for him,” his mother had once said. “It’s not worth it.” It was a superfluous thing to say, because Gary never had any curiosity about who his father was. When, recently, some of the newspapers cited a lack of a male authority figure as the cause of Gary’s delinquency, he had laughed. He was timid but self-contained as a child. Those who are born into a life of solitude learn to enjoy the space around them, he thought; they learn not to question the lack of love in their lives.

His mother never learned to embrace this loneliness; she had been married, she had had a husband, she had known love, and—above all—she had grown accustomed to having someone around her. Now she resented life, not because of her circumstances—“Look at me, I’m just a washerwoman,” she would sometimes joke, half bitterly, half blithely—but because of her solitude. The failure of her potential was reflected not by what she did for a living but by her aloneness. Life had taken away her companion, and even as she encouraged her son to forget his father, she could not let go of him.

Even as a small boy, Gary sensed the nature of her character—he sensed the way she had begun to absorb him into the ups and downs of her life. It went beyond the tasks expected of a young child in his position—helping her hang out the washing and deliver laundered clothes, or accompanying her when she needed help cleaning someone’s house, or running into town to buy a forgotten bottle of bleach. In fact, every sentence she uttered was intended to be shared with her son; everything she did was for his benefit. He could not escape the knowledge of responsibility for this, not even at his young age. “This is what I have to do now,” she would say, sighing, as if it were a joke, as if she had accepted her fate. “I just clean other people’s houses.” It was a comment that enveloped her son in
a shared intimacy and involved him in her struggles: She worked as a washerwoman to support him, and every demeaning thing she did was for his benefit.

He knew that she had been a musician. She had been a pianist, good enough to study with a famous teacher in Singapore. Her parents, who had been schoolteachers in Kota Bharu, had sold their car and the few bits of jade jewelry they’d owned and emptied their savings to pay for her tuition fees. In spite of the generosity of Singaporean cousins, who gave her a room for free, it was always a struggle—even in the seventies, Singapore was an expensive place to live. Her parents were optimistic but realistic about their hopes for her; like other people from modest backgrounds, they did not allow themselves the luxury of imagination and so did not heap the pressure of expectation on their daughter. Partly this was because they did not really know what a pianist’s life might involve and therefore could not envisage all the possibilities open to their daughter. Perhaps if they had been more worldly and sophisticated, they would have been more expectant and demanding. People like them—humble, hardworking, fearful—did not hope for very much. They had seen what happened in the sixties, not just in their country but in all the neighboring countries—the violence, the turmoil—and they knew that the lives of ordinary people could be changed in an instant. Solidity was the key to survival; ambition would lead only to heartbreak.

All they hoped was that she would have enough of an education to be able to teach music when she was older. Teachers themselves, they knew it was a decent profession. They could imagine what that sort of life would be.

The weight of expectation came from Gary’s mother herself. A diligent, technically able student, she allowed herself to dream about playing in concert halls in Europe. She was aware of her limitations, but that did not quell her fantasies. As she practiced her cadenzas, she felt the growing tension between imagination and reality: She wanted to perform with more brilliance, but her fingers would not obey her brain; she wanted to express more-profound sentiments, but she had nothing to say.

Worst of all, she allowed herself to fall in love with her music teacher. He was twenty years her senior, with a failed marriage behind him, but she didn’t care. He was kind, handsome, and attentive and had led the kind of life she still dreamed of. He had been a student in London and had given
small recitals in Paris and Vienna. She never questioned why he had returned home, never questioned his failure. Most important, he had also grown up in rural Malaysia, in small-town Pahang. She thought he understood her.

If you read this in the Sunday newspapers, you might assume that it was the beginning of a love story reflecting the spirit of the time, the fortunes of a country—the change, the optimism, people believing they could overcome all the disadvantages of their history and achieve happiness. And indeed it could have been.

When she announced, a few years later, that she was going to marry this man, her parents objected not only to his age and the fact that he had already been married. It was something else that troubled them. He was too ready with his smile, and his hair was always neatly combed, with a precise side parting. He knew the right thing to say and was too quick to say it, as if he had prepared the responses, had rehearsed them in a similar setting. He was a handsome man, there was no doubt about that—but his eyes were set a fraction too close to each other and his nose was slim, which lent him an effete air. Not feminine, just unreliable. These physical attributes, passed to his son through the filter of a generation, would produce a beauty considered rare and strange and delicate; but, unlike the son, the father lived in an earlier, harsher time, when a man who looked as he did was judged to be not desirable but suspicious. What was his
use
in life, other than to be charming?

They got married, drifted away from her parents, moved to KL, got a small link house in Cheras. He found another woman. Gary’s mother was four months pregnant when he left, almost too late to abort, not that she really wanted to; besides, it was illegal. Her life was beginning to feel full of choices she was free to make—but, at the same time, not at all free. She wanted to pursue her husband and reclaim him, or else make him suffer, but pride stifled all such vengeful intention; she wanted to go back to her parents and seek refuge in their care, but shame made that impossible; she wanted to abort the baby, but the possibilities of love made her keep it. She realized that so many things in her life had given her the illusion that she was in control of her destiny, but she was, in fact, not in control at all.

Her husband did come back, two or three times, but each visit lasted only a couple of weeks before he vanished again. Each time, he appeared
carrying his clothes in a small vinyl bag; he bore stories of new people he’d met, new things he was doing. He’d given up teaching, turned his back on music altogether. It wasn’t lucrative enough, and there were so many other things he could do to make money. He was getting involved in door-to-door selling—a friend of his told him he could make a thousand
ringgit
a month selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and even Tupperware sales could bring in a bit of cash. He had many projects in the pipeline: He was also dabbling in small-time politics, canvassing on behalf of a businessman from KL who was competing in the local by-election. He wanted to get into journalism, too, because he wanted to expose all the injustice around him, all the rotten things happening in the country—the politicians on the make, robbing and cheating their own people, letting down the ones who needed them most.

He seemed not to notice her labored movements or how heavy she had grown with the pregnancy. He rambled incoherently at times, and she remembered what her parents had said about him: an artistic temperament … unreliable. When he talked about politicians failing in their duties, she did not have the heart to say, Talk about letting down the people who need you the most. She could not explain why, during his brief stays, she continued to cook for him and lie down next to him at night, listening to his quick, shallow breathing, as if he were the one who needed looking after. Even when he left for good, she continued to worry that he was not eating properly, that he might not have anywhere safe to sleep at night, that he had lost his direction in life.

Not long after her baby was born, she heard that her husband had ended up in prison for organizing a political rally somewhere up north. He was in and out of jail for a while, and then she heard no more news from him.

For a time she gave music lessons to middle-class kids whose parents wanted them to become
“rounded individuals.”
As she watched her students bang through their pieces she wondered what being a rounded individual really meant. “If you want to go to Harvard,” one mother explained to her as her six-year-old son played “Chopsticks,” “you need to be a rounded individual. That means you have to play the piano, doesn’t it?” It was not what she’d imagined for her life, but it was okay—at least she was a teacher of music, even if she was teaching people who had no love of music.

But this did not last very long—eight months, a year maybe. Taking the bus to Bangsar and Damansara—all those smart suburbs, so far away—and then walking, always walking, through the wide lanes lined with split-level houses and decorative trees in the gardens: It meant she would travel for four hours for a lesson that lasted one hour, and all this time her small baby was at home. Sometimes she left Gary with a neighbor; sometimes she hired an Indonesian maid with glassy red eyes and a vacant smile, but this left her with very little money to spare at the end of each week. And then there was the worrying. So many things could happen to her and her baby in the city. The way men looked at her on the bus made her feel nervous and uncomfortable. She didn’t dare take taxis. She stopped working after dark. If anything happened to her, what would happen to her baby?