“Flowers,” he said, and narrowed his eyes at me, “are you a ponce?”
“Me? Hyah-mn! What a thing to say!” It was a loud hollow protest with a false echo. Prostitute, he had said, pimp, whore, queer, ponce — words people use to name the things they hate (liking them they leave them nameless, the human voice duplicating the suspicion that passion is unspeakable). “I’m a sort of pornocrat,” I was going to say, to mock him. I decided not to. His incredulity was a prompting for me to lie.
The waitress passed by.
Leigh said, “Wan arn!” greeting her in vilely accented Mandarin.
“Scuse me?” she said. She took a pad from the pocket of her dress, a pencil from her hair. “Anudda Anchor?”
“Nee hao ma,” said Leigh. He had turned away from me and was looking at the girl. But the girl was looking at me “Nee hway bu hway—”
“Mister,” said the girl to me, “what ship your flend flom?”
Leigh cleared his throat and said we’d better be going. In the taxi he said hopelessly, “I was wondering if I might get a chance to play a little squash.”
“Sure thing,” I said, pouncing. “I can fix that up for you in a jiffy.” Squash? He was wheezing still, and red as a beet. Carrying his suitcase to the taxi rank he kept changing hands and groaning, and then he put his face out the taxi window and let the breeze blow into his mouth, taking gulps of it the way dogs do in a car. He had swallowed two little white pills with his beer. He looked closely at his palms from time to time. And he wanted to play squash!
“What’s your club, Flowers?”
We had agreed that I was to call him William if he called me Jack. I liked my nursery-rhyme name. Now I felt he was cheating.
“Name it,” I said, and to remind him of our agreement I added, “William.”
I had an application pending at the Cricket Club once, or at least the “Eggs,” two elderly bald clients of mine, who were members, said I did. I had been trying to join a club in Singapore for a long time. Then it was too late. I couldn’t apply for membership without giving myself away, for I often drank in the clubs and most of the members — they knew me well — thought I had joined years before. There wasn’t a club on the island I couldn’t visit one way or another. I had clients at all of them.
“Cricket Club’s got some squash courts, but the Tanglin’s just put up new ones — you may want to have a look at those. There’s none at the Swimming Club so far, though we’ve got a marvelous sauna room.” I thumped his knee. “We’ll find something, William.”
“Sounds very agreeable,” he said, pulling his head back into the taxi. He was calm now. “How do you manage three clubs? I’m told the entrance fees are killing.”
“They are pretty killing,” I said, using his dialect again, “but I reckon it’s worth it.”
“You’re not a squash player yourself?”
“No,” I said, “I’m just an old beachcomber — drinking’s my sport, nyah!”
That made him chuckle; I was laughing too, and as I shifted on the seat I felt a lump in my back pocket press into my butt: two thick envelopes of pornographic pictures I had brought along just in case he asked. Their reminding pressure stopped my laughing.
The taxi driver tilted his head back and said, “Bloomies? Eshbishin wid two gull? You want boy? Mushudge? What you want I get. What you like?”
“Just a game of squash, driver, thank you very much,” I said in a pompous fruity voice to this poor feller for the benefit of the horse’s ass next to me. Then I smiled at William and tried to tip him a wink, but his head was out the window and he was blinking and gulping at the breeze and probably wondering what he was doing on that tedious little island.
3
I WALKED into a bar where they did not know me well and I could hear the Chinese whispers: “Who does that jackass think he is?” And then it ceased; my face made silence. It was not the face you expected in Ho’s or Toby’s or the Honey Bar, in the Golden Treasure or Loon’s Tip-Top. Years ago I had not minded, but later my heart sank on the evenings all my regulars were tied up and I had to go into these joints recruiting. I got stares from round-shouldered youths sitting with plump hostesses; and the secret society members watched me — in Ho’s the Three Dots, in the Honey Bar the Flying Dragons. There was no goblin as frightening as a member of a secret society staring me down. He first appeared to have no eyes, then the slits became apparent and I guessed he was peering at me from somewhere behind the slits. I never saw the eyes. The slits didn’t speak; and it was impossible to read the face, too smooth for a message. I turned away and slipped the manager a few dollars to release the girl, and when I was hurrying out I heard growls and grunts I didn’t understand, then titters. On the sidewalk I heard the whole bar crackle and explode into yelling laughter. Now they had eyes; but I was outside.
One night a thug spoke to me. He was sitting up front at the bar eating a cold pork pie with his fingers. He was wearing the secret society uniform, a short-sleeved shirt with the top four buttons undone, sunglasses — though it was dark — and his hair rather long, with wispy wing-tufts hanging past his ears. I didn’t think he saw me talking to the manager, and after I passed the money over and turned to go the thug put his hand on my shoulder, and rubbing pork flakes into it, said gruffly, “Where you does wuck?”
I didn’t answer. I hurried down the gloomy single aisle of the bar, past eerily lit Chinese faces. The thug called out, “Where you wucking!” That was in the Tai-Hwa on Cecil Street, and I never went near it again.
Who is he? they murmured in the Belvedere, the Hilton, the Goodwood when I was in the lobby flicking through a magazine, waiting for one of my girls to finish upstairs. I could have passed for a golf pro when I was wearing my monogrammed red knit jersey — the one with long sleeves — and my mustard-colored slacks and white ventilated shoes. No one knew I had a good tan because I worked for Hing, who refused to pay for taxis in town and who sent me everywhere, but always to redheads, with parcels. In my short-sleeved flowered batik shirt, with my tattoos displayed, they took me for a beachcomber with a private income or a profitable sideline, perhaps “an interesting character.” Once, in the Pebble Bar of the Hotel Singapura, an American lady who was three sheets to the wind said I looked like a movie actor she knew, but she couldn’t think of his name.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
I smiled, to give her the impression that I might be that actor, said, “Take a guess, sweetheart,” and then I left; leaving, I heard some hoots, from the gang of oil riggers who always drank there, and I knew who they were hooting at.
My appearance, this look of a millionaire down on his luck, which is also the look of a bum attempting to be princely, was never quite right for most of the places I had to go. I was the wrong color in the Tai-Hwa and all the other Chinese joints — that was clear; at the Starlight, strictly Cantonese, they seated me with elderly hostesses and overcharged me. I was too dressy for the settler hangouts and never had enough money for more than one drink at the Hilton or Raffles, though I looked as if I might have belonged in those hotels. I certainly looked like a member of the Tanglin Club, the Swiss Club, the Cricket Club, and all the others where my chits were signed for me by fellers who liked my discretion. I was always welcome in the clubs, but that was a business matter. And they did not laugh at the Bandung: they knew me there.