Authors: Tiffany Tsao
“However?”
“However. Here’s my card.” With a quick flick of the wrist, a green card was produced out of thin air and slipped into the pocket of his waiter’s jacket. The woman turned her attention to arranging the crumbs on her bread plate into a seven-pointed star. “You’d better go, Murgatroyd. I imagine those salads you’re carrying are eventually meant for someone’s consumption.”
“Oh. Right.” Still in a daze, Murgatroyd drifted over to the Tans’ table to serve them their first course. On the way back to the kitchen, he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. It was a familiar sensation: as if a falcon had alighted there and dug its talons into his flesh. It was Shakti.
“Oi, Shwet Foo. Who was that woman?”
Murgatroyd feigned ignorance, though he wasn’t sure why. “Which woman?”
“The one talking to you for so long. Chinese. All in green.”
“Ah, yes. I don’t know.”
“What did she want?”
He hesitated. “Erh. Nothing really. Just to chat.”
“Well, guess what?” Murgatroyd waited for her to continue until she burst out impatiently, “Well?! GUESS!”
Murgatroyd always felt uneasy around Shakti, even though he knew he was her star employee. He always felt like a mouse being pawed about by a playful cat. He took a deep breath and uttered the most plausible thing that came to mind. “She’s eating her dinner?”
In return for his stupid reply, the talons grabbed his shoulder again and gave him a short shake. “No, idiot. She’s GONE!”
“Hah?”
“She didn’t even order anything! Drank our water, ate our bread, swallowed our amuse-bouche
and vanished without a trace! Bloody vagabonds, I tell you! Didn’t think there were any in Singapore! Thought economic prosperity had gotten rid of them all.”
“Gone?”
“Yes, gone! What, your ears aren’t working or something?” Abruptly, Shakti’s expression softened. She seemed to sense that she had been a little too rough on him, a little too cruel. She tried to make it all into a joke, and putting on a heavy Singaporean accent, she playfully wagged a scolding finger at him. “Oi, next time you want to flirt with customer, must flirt with paying one, okay? You remember, Shwet Foo: boss knows all!” Using the palm of her hand, she gave him a maternal pat on the cheek, and shoved him lightly in the direction of the kitchen.
Shakti could still remember the day she hired this strange
ang moh
boy as a waiter for the Colonial Table. Blonde as a Swede, but his speech was peppered with the Singaporean slang and accent of a local. He had puzzled her exceedingly. Shakti admitted that she had hired him purely for his looks. Well, not exactly his looks—he was rather pasty and sickly-looking, and had terrible posture besides. She had hired him purely for his race. A white waiter painted brown serving brown and yellow guests powdered white—it was all too absolutely bloody brilliant to be true. Other than that, he’d had no outstanding qualifications whatsoever. He seemed to have somehow gotten through the education system without learning very much at all. He was, frankly, rather dim-witted and uninteresting. When asked about his most memorable dining experience, he’d replied that the Tutti-Frutti Ice Cream Shop had served very good ice cream before they closed down. He also said that he liked the little paper parasols they gave him with his sundaes because they were very “high class.” He had never been a waiter before, and had been retrenched from his previous job as a shoe store clerk. He unconsciously picked his ears when he wasn’t talking. Despite all that, as Shakti’s red pen hovered over his application, waiting to mark it with a large red
X
, she could only think to herself: a white waiter painted brown, serving brown and yellow guests painted white. It was absolutely too bloody brilliant to be true.
“And your first name really is Murgatroyd?” she had asked.
“Erh,” he had replied uneasily, rubbing the nape of his neck. “Easier to call me Shwet Foo, lor. Everybody call me Shwet Foo.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that it
was
too brilliant to be true—mostly because the Colonial Table failed miserably, and Murgatroyd’s brown-skinned waiting career dressed as a turbanned Indian manservant came to an end. But by that time, Murgatroyd had been exhaustively trained by Shakti Vithani herself. She had urged him to imitate his parents’ speech as best he could (although he could never get rid of the Singaporean lilt.) She bought him volumes and volumes of the Jeeves and Wooster books by P. G. Wodehouse, insisting that he make the impeccable and witty butler, Jeeves, his role model. When it was discovered that a blind snail with a primary-two education could probably get through the Braille version of
Anna Karenina
faster than he could read a single page of Wodehouse, she bought him the BBC TV serialization of the stories on DVD.
She told him the various ways escargots
were prepared; the proper spoons to use with caviar (mother of pearl), the correct pronunciation of exotic words like
foie gras
(not “foy-ee-grass”),
entrée
(not “N-Tree”), and “Thai” (not “thigh”). Through it all, he still stubbornly insisted that the small paper parasols were the very pinnacle of “high class.”
Shakti’s rigorous education left him more than just a better waiter; it left him a fantastic one. And yet, whenever he changed out of his waiters’ garb at the end of evening (or depending on how long the patrons lingered, the wee hours of the morning), he was incapable of taking his improvement with him. It remained behind, hanging on a coat peg in the back room, along with his black waiter’s jacket. All of the attributes that made him the best waiter at the restaurant faded away—the quiet and collected sophistication, the flawless sensitivity to others’ moods and whims, the confidence and poise. Away from the restaurant, he was once again the hapless, witless Murgatroyd Floyd Shwet Foo in the photo on his government-issued identity card, staring stupidly at the camera through half-closed eyes, his mouth slightly agape.
As Murgatroyd sat on the late-night bus, he examined his IC to pass the time. Tonight he sighed, tracing his finger over his signature, and thought how much the photo made him look like an idiot. He remembered the strange woman in green and her question. Was this life where he belonged? He lifted his head and surveyed the pale yellow interior of the bus, as if looking around could somehow answer his question. The only other passenger—a beefy Chinese man who had fallen asleep with his head slumped against the window—gave a loud grunt in response. Murgatroyd sighed again and pressed the buzzer for his stop.
He continued to mull over this question as he disembarked from the bus and walked the length of the quiet, lamp-lit street to his flat, the shrill singing of the cicadas in his ears. He enjoyed walking home in the dark, cool night. And sometimes he pretended that the cicadas were singing just for him. As the waitstaff were never allowed to leave the restaurant before the last guest had departed, he normally returned to find that his parents had already gone to bed, but not before thoughtfully leaving some dinner for him waiting on the table. He entered the flat, turned on the lights, and shambled into the kitchen—quietly—so as not to wake them. Hands in pockets, Murgatroyd stared glumly at the plate of raw green beans smothered in peanut butter and strawberry jam, and thought of how odd his parents’ tastes had become since his job had prevented him from eating dinner with them. One night, it had been sausage slices floating in apple juice. The night before, it had been boiled garlic cloves and what looked and tasted suspiciously like shoe rubber. Still, he thought. It was nice of them to set aside some for him every night. It had been busy at the restaurant, and even though he was hungry, he felt queasy just looking at the beans. He sighed, stored them away in a Tupperware container to eat the next day, and made himself a comforting mug of hot Milo. Stirring in two heaping teaspoons of salt, he remembered the green card in his trouser pocket and placed it on the table in front of him. In stylish jet-black script, it read:
Ann.
THE QUEST
mobile: +65-97277055
Ann? Just Ann? What a funny name, thought Murgatroyd, pouring more salt into his Milo. And what exactly was the Quest?
Maybe a software or computing company? What could he do for them? He didn’t know anything about technological stuff. He hadn’t even made it to junior college. Maybe they were a magazine? What did they do? And what did getting a job with them have to do with making him happy? What a strange thing this all was! Nothing like this had ever happened to him before! It was probably nothing. But maybe it
was
something. Maybe she worked for a talent agency. Maybe she thought he had what it took to be an actor! Or a model! But wouldn’t a talent scout have been friendlier? Less abrupt? Less insulting? And how did she know his name? Except for his parents, nobody called him Murgatroyd anymore.
He wasn’t used to this much thinking. He felt dizzy. He gulped down the rest of his Milo, and the warm, salty chocolate sensation in the pit of his stomach stopped the world from spinning and reassured him. Anyway, it was too late to call her, especially for a Thursday night. Yes, it was far too late. Perhaps he would wait until tomorrow, when he could ask his best friend Kay Huat for his opinion on the matter. Kay Huat was smart. He always knew what to do. Yes, he would wait until tomorrow. He felt calmer now. Much calmer. As he washed his mug and placed it on the dish rack to dry, his mind wandered off into the stars.
CHAPTER 6
Because L’Abattoir opened only for dinner, not lunch, Murgatroyd had to report for work at four p.m. Every Friday, he and Kay Huat would meet during Kay Huat’s lunch break. These days, Kay Huat was a jazz connoisseur, and they would spend most of the hour in CD stores, looking for new albums to add to his collection. Kay Huat’s jazz craze began about four months ago, when he’d had an amazingly expensive sound system installed in his flat. In addition to listening to CDs, he now had a vintage record player, and on weekends, he scoured trendy vintage record stores for trendy vintage jazz recordings. In his spare time, he surfed the Internet looking for rare albums to buy.
He was also now in the habit of making Murgatroyd listen to certain songs several times in a row, urging him to appreciate the brilliance of a certain phrase.
“Do you hear it? Genius, man. Pure genius.” Kay Huat would close his eyes, melting into a puddle of finger-snapping, toe-tapping delight. Murgatroyd would furrow his brow and try to figure out which part of what he was listening to was the genius part.
Of course, this hobby was far less physically taxing than one of last year’s hobbies. Last year, Kay Huat was a self-proclaimed yoga fanatic, and their noontime meetings involved rigorous Iyengar, Sivananda, and Bikram yoga sessions at a fitness studio near his office, followed by a lunch of nutrition bars and fruit juice.
Kay Huat picked up and dropped hobbies as easily and quickly as someone browsing through items in a store. Golf, polo, aikido, hang gliding, bungee jumping, scuba diving, knitting, the flute, the trombone, the violin, the pan pipes, swing dancing, tap dancing, line dancing, sculpting, painting, cake decorating, quilt making, taxidermy: the list went on and on. It wasn’t that he was bad at any of them—in fact, he was
very
good at
all
of them. Rather, none of them could hold his interest. It was as if he was searching for something that, in the end, no hobby could offer. His longest-running activity so far was his attempt to write the Great Singaporean Novel—a project that was still ongoing and that already numbered 1,300 single-spaced pages. Kay Huat worked on his novel in the late evenings and early hours of the morning. And nowadays, he did so while cultivating his newfound appreciation for good jazz.
Today, Kay Huat and Murgatroyd met at the Raffles Place MRT station—only a five-minute walk from Kay Huat’s office—and together, along with the hundreds of other office workers who were taking their lunch breaks, they braved the underground corridors connecting the subway stop with the surrounding buildings. Upon his return from university in America, Kay Huat found that the most difficult readjustment he had to make to life in Singapore was getting used to the crowds: people packed together like sardines in the trains during rush hour; people jostling and elbowing each other for space to enjoy a leisurely weekend at the shopping mall; people queuing up for half an hour to an hour outside popular restaurants; people hovering over you impatiently in the food courts, waiting to take your table. At certain times and in certain areas of Singapore, it felt as if people were water. They didn’t walk, they flowed. They poured out of buses and trains, they gushed through corridors, they rushed up and down stairways and escalators, they flooded open areas and plazas. But over the past few years, Kay Huat had gotten the hang of it again, and he and Murgatroyd skilfully navigated the current of humanity that rushed through the narrow, brightly lit corridors, hemmed in on either side by snack kiosks and cheap fashion boutiques, mobile-phone accessory stores and vendors selling CDs, DVDs, and VCDs.
Kay Huat took the lead, his tall, muscular body cutting a path through the crowd until they arrived at WyWy Music House. It was surprisingly spacious for a store in an underground complex: twelve aisles of music CDs arranged alphabetically and according to genre, and six listening stations where an attendant, armed with a razor blade, would slice open the plastic packaging of any album you desired to sample before making your final purchasing decisions and pop it into a CD player for your listening pleasure. The owner of WyWy was a skinny, pink-haired twenty-year-old named Cassandra Lim who wore black horn-rimmed glasses and pinstriped vests.
The Straits Times
had recently done an article on her and her store, calling it “a must-visit for jazz lovers.” Business had skyrocketed since.
A man on a mission, Kay Huat set to work collecting CDs to sample, only half listening to Murgatroyd recounting the strange events of last night.
“Her name is Ann, is it? What did she look like?” Kay Huat handed Murgatroyd another CD to carry.
Murgatroyd added it to the stack of ten he was cradling in both hands. “Erh. Don’t know.”
“Eh, what do you mean, ‘don’t know’? Figure? Face? Doth she teach the torches to burn bright?” Kay Huat chuckled at his great literary wit. “That’s from Shakespeare,” he explained to Murgatroyd, who could only remember that Shakespeare was someone important mentioned in school at some point. “Here are some more CDs.”
Murgatroyd tried to remember in greater detail what Ann looked like before concluding that he couldn’t. “She was sitting down. How to tell figure, meh?” Then Murgatroyd told him about the missing left eye and the green right eye.
Kay Huat gave a mock shudder. “Sounds like a fright to me. Ooh. I’ve heard good things about this one.” He handed Murgatroyd a Taiwanese bossa nova album.
Murgatroyd shifted uncomfortably under the weight of his musical burden. He peered out from the side of the stack at his friend who had just finished with the F section and was now eagerly thumbing his way through the Gs. “So do you think I should I call her? What is this Quest? Do you think it’s safe?”
Kay Huat frowned. “Let me see it again.”
Carefully shifting the stack of CDs to one arm, Murgatroyd fumbled about in his right pocket for the green card and handed it to Kay Huat.
Kay Huat examined it closely. He held it up to the neon light overhead. He turned it over several times in his hands and ran his finger lightly around the corners. Then he began sniffing it, first caressing the edges with his nostrils, then pressing the card flat to his nose and inhaling deeply. The other patrons turned to stare at Kay Huat. The owner, Cassandra Lim, had been gazing dreamily at him since he walked into the store, but now she gazed with even more intensity. He looked like some eccentric business-card connoisseur, savouring the scent of the card’s ink, the card’s texture, its rectangularity.
Abruptly, he flicked the card in Murgatroyd’s direction. It hit him in the nose and fluttered to the floor.
“No need to call,” Kay Huat said, turning his attention back to the CDs. “It’s a scam.”
Murgatroyd’s face fell. He’d dreamed big things last night because of this card. He had dreamed of modelling Bata-brand shoes and of being an astronaut going to the moon.
Meekly, he couldn’t help but ask, “Are you sure?”
Kay Huat stopped what he was doing and put his arm around his childhood friend. “Eh, Shwet Foo. I’m your best friend, right?”
Murgatroyd nodded vigorously.
“You trust me, right?”
Murgatroyd nodded even more vigorously, sending a destabilizing shiver through the stack of CDs in his arms.
“Then trust me, lah! It’s a scam! I’m going to listen to these. Be right back.”
Clapping his friend on the shoulder, Kay Huat liberated him of the unwieldy stack and went off to the store’s listening station to sample a few of the tracks. He left a forlorn Murgatroyd in the middle of the aisle. Even though Murgatroyd had known that the strange woman and the strange card probably didn’t mean anything, he couldn’t help but feel as if a heavy man in football cleats had placed a foot on his heart and given it a good, firm press. Nevertheless, Murgatroyd squatted down to retrieve the green card from the floor and carefully slid it into his back pocket. Perhaps Kay Huat was wrong, he hoped to himself. But he knew Kay Huat was right. Kay Huat was always right.
Murgatroyd wasn’t the only one who knew this; the rarefied universe of private wealth management was beginning to catch on as well. After a mere two years into his career, Seng Kay Huat had acquired a reputation in the Asian banking world as a fast-rising young investment advisor with a track record nothing short of flawless. He possessed a natural, God-given talent for finding out when and where money was to be made, and for shifting around his clients’ funds appropriately. He had an instinct for determining which investments would profit and which would lose, which companies would suddenly turn belly up and which would unexpectedly skyrocket to success. He seemed to know when markets would turn bullish or bearish, when a stock would peak or plummet, when a country was on the verge of economic boom or collapse, and when to ride out a storm and when to cash in one’s chips. It was this talent that was causing the denizens of the exclusive world of regional private banking to nod in admiration at the mention of Seng Kay Huat’s name. It was this talent that had compelled dozens of other banks to offer him gainful employment among their ranks, and that had forced his own employer to raise his position, salary, and benefits to levels positively absurd for such a relatively new employee.
Of course, it was apparent to all, even from the moment of his birth, that Seng Kay Huat was destined for success. By age five, Kay Huat was reading better than his father. His primary and secondary education record had been a long list of various awards and achievements, leadership positions, high marks, and so on and so forth. Even beyond his talents and achievements, there was something else about him. There are some beings in this life who possess an aura of greatness about them, who—when they move and speak—emanate a golden haze of brilliance, as if they were gods and goddesses deigning to live in the world of men. Seng Kay Huat was one such being.
Which is why his deep and abiding friendship with the hapless Murgatroyd (or as Kay Huat knew him, Shwet Foo) was such an unlikely one. The teachers at Da Qiao Primary had never ceased to marvel in disbelief at the oddity of the pair walking together down the school corridors. Even now as adults, they managed to turn heads wherever they went—the handsome, well-built, confident Chinese man and the gangly, hunched-over
ang moh
at his side, absentmindedly picking his ears. The impression was that of a magnificent superhero who had somehow gotten stuck with a defective and shabby sidekick. It seemed too impossible to be real, and yet, their friendship was genuine.
Admittedly, his treatment of his friend wasn’t always the most considerate, but Kay Huat had been truly fond of his hapless friend—inexplicably so—ever since the day he first rescued Shwet Foo and put an end to the torment the latter endured every day at the hands of the other children.
Three weeks after Murgatroyd’s disastrous debut at Da Qiao, the boys still had not tired of hurling his shoes into the Angsana tree in the schoolyard during recess. By then, Murgatroyd had learned how climb up the tree and retrieve them, but he could only do so at the end of the school day, otherwise they would be promptly hurled into the branches again. After three weeks of this, however, Murgatroyd had decided to take preventive measures instead, and was desperately scuffling with the boy who had just stolen his shoes. Or rather, Murgatroyd was doing all the scuffling, while the larger boy simply stood there, grinning as Murgatroyd lightly pummelled him about the waist, and dangling the white canvas sneakers out of Murgatroyd’s reach before swinging them lightly into the leaves overhead. It was when the young Murgatroyd crumpled into a sobbing heap on the ground that the young Kay Huat, who had been looking on from the sidelines all the while, suddenly felt unspeakably moved. The boy obviously needed protection. Kay Huat decided that the right thing to do, the heroic thing to do, was to take action.
“Oi! Leave the
ang moh
alone!” he bellowed, pushing his way past the now silent knot of boys who had surrounded the weeping Murgatroyd and were peppering his little body with light kicks. (They’d learned their lesson the first time and nowadays kicked softly, but with great rapidity.) They stopped and stared in astonishment as Kay Huat climbed the tree and retrieved the shoes.
“Hey,
ang moh
!” Kay Huat shouted at the blubbering boy on the ground below him. “Don’t cry! Don’t cry, okay! See? I got your shoes!” Tossing the stolen footwear to Murgatroyd from on high, Kay Huat must have seemed to Murgatroyd an angel sent from above.
Gaining a firm foothold in the crook of the tree, Kay Huat issued a command to the crowd of boys gathering below him in the yard. “From now on, nobody tease the
ang moh
!”
The boys who had been bullying Murgatroyd slinked away, silent and embarrassed. Kay Huat nimbly clambered down to help Murgatroyd to his feet.
“Eh, what’s your name? I’m Kay Huat. Primary Five.” He extended his hand.
Wiping away the tears from his eyes, the other boy had at first mumbled a funny-sounding name in a British accent. Something like “Muhka Toi.”
“Hah? Say again?”
Then the boy seemed to remember something. “Shwet Foo. My name is Shwet Foo. Primary One.”
Kay Huat had laughed heartily at the name before giving his new friend a clap on the back that almost sent him tumbling onto the ground once again. But then he frowned. “Only Primary One? You don’t look like Primary One. How old are you?”
“Nine.”
Kay Huat mulled silently over this for some time before deciding that it might be acceptable for him to continue associating with the younger boy, despite this rather large two-year age difference.
That incident had been the start of an enduring friendship—perhaps, if Kay Huat were truly hone
st with himself, the only true friendship he had ever really experienced. Certainly, Kay Huat had
many
friends, accumulated over the course of a lifetime—the contingent of other old school chums from Da Qiao and Raffles Institution; the buddies he’d acquired during National Service; his fellow Stanford alumni; a select handful of work colleagues—but none of them could hold a candle to Shwet Foo, who seemed to understand him and care about him more deeply than anyone he had ever known. And in turn, no one else could elicit in him, Kay Huat, the same brotherly concern and affection he felt for his best friend.