Heaven's Light (13 page)

Now, in the front of the speeding limousine, Zhu half turned, gesturing through the windscreen at the distant
blaze of high-rise buildings that was the heart of downtown Singapore. After the war, he said, the place had been a mosquito-infested swamp, dotted with pig farms and tin huts. Now, just forty years later, it had become the world’s fourth biggest foreign exchange centre, third busiest oil-refining centre, second largest port. Not bad, he added pointedly, for a speck of land scarcely bigger than the Isle of Wight.

Barnaby smiled at that. Zhu rarely betrayed emotion but the last couple of months, in his more recent trips to Portsmouth, Barnaby had begun to detect in him an almost fatherly pride in the city. It didn’t begin to measure up to what he so obviously felt for Singapore, but on two afternoons he’d politely asked for a guided tour and both had turned into an unexpected pleasure. The man’s curiosity was boundless. In Old Portsmouth, he’d wanted to understand exactly how the first settlement had expanded, insisting on walking up and down the fortified walls until the plan was clear in his head, and later, when Barnaby had sat next to Mr Hua in the Daimler, directing him around the city’s rougher areas, Zhu’s interest had been no less acute.

The heart of Portsmouth was ringed by high-rise council blocks, brutal neo-Stalinist relics from the sixties, and Barnaby had done his best to explain how these bleak urban landscapes had become breeding grounds for poverty and petty crime. Zhu had listened to Barnaby’s careful analysis and later, at the foot of a particularly ravaged tower block, he’d told Mr Hua to stop the car while he went for a walk. Barnaby had got out too, offering to accompany him, but Zhu had insisted on going alone, shuffling away through the litter of abandoned shopping trolleys and drifts of broken glass, ignoring the cold stares of nearby youths. He’d returned ten minutes or so later, looking strangely
troubled. Back in the office, when he’d enquired about the state of the city’s schools, Barnaby had been glad to oblige with a brisk dissertation on the workings of the education system. People with money, he’d explained, could buy their kids a proper schooling with well-paid teachers and decent facilities while the other seven million took their chances with what was left. The result, predictably, was an early division into the haves and have-nots, with the lucky few making sure they repeated the trick with their own kids, thus widening the chasm even further. Zhu had listened to Barnaby with total incomprehension. For once, quite genuinely, he’d failed to understand.

The limousine was approaching downtown Singapore, the night sky hung with flashing Chinese characters, the air thick with the smell of garlic and frying pork. They paused at an intersection and Barnaby gazed out of the window, craning his neck, trying to count the floors on a soaring pagoda-shaped hotel. He’d got to sixteen, less than halfway up, when the traffic signals changed, and the limo surged forward again. Even at one in the morning, there were people everywhere, milling around the roadside stalls, and the place reminded him a little of New York. He voiced the comparison aloud but Zhu dismissed it with a shake of his head. Other cities, he said, were dangerous. Everyone knew it. New York had become a jungle, and even in London a sensible man stayed behind closed doors after midnight.

A mile and a half later, the limo pulled into the forecourt of a big hotel. Zhu muttered something to Mr Hua and motioned for Barnaby to get out. A uniformed concierge was already waiting on the pavement and greeted Barnaby by name, reaching for his bag. Barnaby followed Zhu and the other man into the hotel. The atrium took his breath
away. Glass elevators glided from floor to floor and, looking up, Barnaby could see tier after tier of balconies, each one stepped inward.

He joined Zhu in the waiting elevator. On the fourth floor, at the reception desk, an exquisite Singaporean girl had his room pass and security key ready. There were no forms to fill in, no passport to deposit, simply a succession of deferential smiles and murmured words of welcome. The concierge was back beside the elevator, holding open the door for Barnaby. Zhu was still at the reception desk, leafing through a copy of the
Straits Times.

Barnaby touched his arm. ‘Are you booking in as well?’

Zhu shook his head. He would be staying elsewhere. He’d only thought to provide a room for Barnaby. After a wash or a shower perhaps he’d like to join Zhu for a meal. The hotel had an excellent restaurant called the Cherry Garden. After all, UK time, it was only six in the evening.

Barnaby rode the elevator with the concierge. His suite was on the nineteenth floor. An elegant sitting room was decorated in soft peach colours, and the walls were hung with beautifully framed paintings of old Singapore. Barnaby paused by the bathroom door, peeling his jacket and loosening his tie. Beside him was a print of a British man-of-war. Officers stood in groups on the quarterdeck, peering upwards, while the rigging swarmed with matelots. In the foreground, a native stood in a long canoe, his raised arm pointing to the distant hump of a tropical island.

Barnaby studied the print a moment or two longer, dazed by the way the sheer opulence of the place had softened his own landfall. He was no stranger to good hotels but nothing in his experience had readied him for this and the impact was all the greater because it was so
closely associated with Zhu, a man for whom the trappings of material wealth seemed to have absolutely no importance.

Barnaby remembered the meal they’d shared aboard the chartered executive jet. In the tiny on-board galley, Barnaby had found caviar and hot blinis, and a delicious julienne of lightly smoked goose breast. There was more than enough for two but Zhu had made do with a couple of bread rolls, thinly spread with what looked like fish paste. The rolls had lasted him most of the leg from Zurich to Abu Dhabi, and he’d washed them down with half a bottle of Evian water, carefully storing the rest in the holder attached to his seat arm.

Barnaby stepped into the bathroom. The floor was paved in Italian marble and a television screen was inset into the tiled wall at the foot of the huge bath. The shower was separate and there were enough toiletries on the shelves around the sink to open a small pharmacy. Barnaby started to undress, reaching for the terrycloth bathrobe on the gold-plated hook behind the heavy teak door. As he did so, a phone began to warble. An extension stood on a plinth beside the shower. It was an old man’s voice.

‘I’ve invited a guest to join us for dinner,’ Zhu was saying. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

The Cherry Garden restaurant was at the back of the hotel. A wood-roofed pavilion with walls of antique Chinese brick enclosed a landscaped courtyard, and tiny alcoves in the brickwork housed carefully chosen works of art. Making his way towards Zhu’s table, Barnaby felt he’d stepped, yet again, into another world. He settled beside Zhu’s guest, who asked him how he felt after the journey.

He tried to make a joke of it. ‘I’m still dizzy,’ he said, making a corkscrew motion with his hand, ‘but it’ll pass.’

The woman’s name was Flora Li. She was young, no more than twenty-five, and wore an elegantly tailored two-piece trouser suit in soft blue leather. She had dark waist-length hair and the loveliest hands Barnaby had ever seen. She said she worked for the Ministry of Home Affairs. She’d evidently known Zhu for some time.

Food arrived at the table. Barnaby couldn’t remember ordering but the usual protocols didn’t seem to matter. For the time being, he decided, the real world had made way for a series of delicious experiences, each episode dissolving seamlessly into the next. Quite what he’d done to deserve such treatment he neither knew nor cared, and he bent over his bowl of minced-pigeon broth, picking out the tiny glistening scallops, following Flora’s account of her week in the government service. As far as Barnaby could judge, she helped front the PR set-up, organizing briefing sessions for visiting businessmen. Investment was pouring into Singapore and the last year or so she’d been working flat out.

She talked quickly, in a light American accent, using her hands a great deal, and Zhu followed the torrent of gossip with his usual grave attention. When, for the second time, she used the word ‘
kiasu
’, he stopped her in mid-sentence.

‘
Kiasu
means winning,’ he explained to Barnaby. ‘Very important.’

‘Winning?’

Zhu nodded, gesturing round. ‘All this,’ he said. ‘The things we’ve done to this island of ours. The things we mean to do.’ He nodded again. ‘
Kiasu
.’

Barnaby was looking at Flora. She’d abandoned her soup for what looked like mounds of fresh crab heaped in a basket of sliced yams.

She smiled at the expression on his face. ‘From Hong Kong this morning,’ she said, offering him a shred of crab-meat pincered between the ends of her chopsticks. ‘Delicious.’

Barnaby accepted the crab, still thinking about
kiasu.
The way Zhu had used the word made it sound like a philosophy, almost a guiding light.

‘Exactly.’ Flora jabbed the air with her chopsticks. ‘People laugh sometimes about Singapore. The way we’re so tidy, so well organized. The way we care so much about what we do. But that’s the point. We want to be the best. We want to win.’ She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a fingertip and then sucked it dry, eyeing a bowl of deep-fried bean curd.

Barnaby helped himself to slices of beef fillet bubbling in a black bean sauce. If
kiasu
helped produce food of this subtlety, he’d happily sign up for life. He grinned at Flora, trying to imagine how the pursuit of excellence would play back home. ‘You know England at all?’

‘London, very well.’

‘Portsmouth?’

‘Yes. But only from Mr Zhu.’

‘He’s told you about us?’

‘A little. I know he likes it there. He told me that.’

Barnaby looked at Zhu, who had got no further than a steaming mound of rice in a woven bamboo basket. He was peering across at Flora in a faintly abstract way, picking delicately at the rice. ‘Nice city,’ he said. ‘Nice place.’

There was a silence and Barnaby sensed at once that it was his cue to tell Flora about Portsmouth. Etiquette, at the very least, demanded it. He wondered where to start. ‘It’s an island,’ he said. ‘Like Singapore.’

Flora nodded, as vigorous as ever. ‘Big?’

‘No, five miles by three. Like this.’ He sketched the city’s outline on the tablecloth. ‘Pretty small. And very crowded.’

‘Many people?’

‘Two hundred thousand. Give or take.’

‘But beautiful?’

Barnaby thought about the question. Just occasionally, on windy days, the views across the Solent could be sensational but, if he was honest, those rare moments were a trick of the light, a sudden fusion of towering cloudscapes and the boiling green sea beneath, nothing at all to do with Pompey.

‘It’s ugly,’ he said. ‘Not like this.’

Zhu and Flora exchanged glances. ‘This is a hotel,’ Zhu said. ‘With money you can do anything.’

‘Of course. But I meant the rest of it, the island.’

‘Singapore?’ Zhu shrugged. ‘Singapore is mostly flat, just like Portsmouth. And wherever you go you see people.’

‘Just like Portsmouth.’

‘Yes. We live in a very busy place, Mr Barnaby. Maybe an ugly place, too. But we make it work.’

‘Kiasu?’

‘Exactly.’

Flora pushed her bowl of crab to one side and began to tell Barnaby what Singaporeans could expect from life in this bustling little republic. Work hard, pay your taxes, and you’d quickly earn yourself a nice place to live, good health care, clean streets, wonderful public transport, a safe environment, excellent educational prospects, and the satisfaction of knowing that you belonged to one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Singapore had the good fortune to be straddling one of the great international trading
routes, she said. Not to take advantage of that would, in her opinion, be extremely foolish.

Barnaby listened to the endless list of accomplishments, a paean to civic virtue, wondering just how much of it she had to repeat every day. In her job it must have become a mantra, semi-religious, an hourly evocation that kept the uglier aspects of the human condition at bay. What about poverty? Crime? Injustice? Was there nothing that
kiasu
couldn’t erase?

‘Nothing,’ she confirmed. ‘We find a problem, we solve it.’

Barnaby had heard the travellers’ tales of Singapore. How spitting on the street or dropping litter or chewing gum attracted huge fines. How drug trafficking or murder could send a man to the gallows. As a result, according to one or two businessmen he knew, the place was both safe and eternally spotless, a rather spooky experience after surviving the menacing slum that parts of London had become.

‘I envy you,’ he admitted. ‘I envy your faith and your energy. Maybe we gave up trying to change people. Maybe that’s where we went wrong.’

‘You don’t believe in progress?’ Flora made it sound almost sinful, the breach of a Commandment. ‘You don’t think things can get better?’

‘I hope things can get better. In my country, I certainly hope things can get better. But there’s a world of difference between hoping and doing.’

‘You mean you’re lazy? In the UK?’

‘No, not lazy personally. We’re not idle. But we’re lazy in other ways, yes.’

‘What other ways?’

Barnaby was trying to gauge the direction this strange conversation had taken. There was something over-developed
in her interest in Portsmouth, something that suggested an altogether less casual agenda. Did she want to settle there? Buy a nice little house in Old Portsmouth and make her peace with the traffic, the weather and the weekend drunks? Or was it something else entirely, something he’d yet to fathom?

‘We’re lazy,’ he said carefully, ‘because we’ve given up caring about one or two things that really matter.’

‘Like?’

‘Like the way we’re governed. Like the fact that we ought to have some input. Like taking control of our own lives.’

‘That doesn’t happen?’

‘No. Not locally. Not where it matters. In the UK everything comes from London. The laws that Westminster makes are the laws we have to obey. What Whitehall civil servants tell us to do, we do. Some people say that makes us puppets.’