The Feng Shui Detective Goes South by Nury Vittachi Page B

smiled nervously.
    ‘Wot about married peeps?’ said a tall thing with short spiky hair and dangly earrings. ‘They have to sleep in the same bed. What if the feng shui chart says they have to sleep in different directions?’
    ‘Yeah?’ said someone else.
    ‘Sixty-nine,’ said the one in the undergarments.
    This baffling reply caused the spiky-haired thing to howl with laughter and pretend to fall over clutching its stomach.
    Wong did not know how to give any sort of answer other than a serious one. ‘Usually I tell married people to sleep with their heads to the north. From the north is winter. Also is sexuality.’
    ‘Ooooh,’ giggled several creatures simultaneously at this last word.
    Wong shut his mouth tightly and looked away.
    The queue moved forward again and the group found themselves at the door.
    The bouncer, a large man of Chinese origin wearing a badge that said ‘Commissionaire-In-Chief ’, peered at Wong with puzzlement. ‘Who’s he?’ he barked at Joyce, whom he apparently knew. The geomancer realised that he did not fit the image of the people who normally entered this club. He wondered whether he should retreat before he was humiliatingly refused entry.
    ‘My banker,’ Joyce told him. ‘My ticket. My sugar daddy.
    He’s loaded.’
    The bouncer looked Wong up and down. ‘Loaded?’ he asked, suspiciously.
    ‘Check out the clothes,’ said the young creature who had told Wong to watch someone. ‘Would he dress that slack if he wasn’t?’
    The bouncer looked at the feng shui man’s shabby Chinese suit, threadbare shawl and well-worn shoes. He nodded.
    ‘Okay-okay,’ he said. He nodded his head sharply to one side, and barked to a Malay woman with tea-coloured hair at a table on the other side of the curtain: ‘In. Four.’
    As they entered the darkness, Wong turned with amazement to Joyce: ‘You tell him I am your father?’
    ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Sugar daddy. That’s like a rich old guy who likes to hang out with, er, younger people. We call ’em bankers or tickets.’
    ‘Complete bankers,’ said the small creature.
    ‘When we’re feeling polite,’ interjected spiky head with a laugh.
    ‘Ah,’ said Wong, thinking. ‘You mean—’ ‘ Haam-sup lo, ’ put in the small creature in the underwear.
    ‘I see,’ said the feng shui master again, shocked at being presented as a dirty old man.
    He opened his mouth to ask a question, but at that moment, they entered the main room of the nightclub and the loudest sounds he had ever heard caused him to clap his hands tightly to his ears as his eyes tried desperately to acclimatise themselves to an eerie, red-tinted darkness.

    They threaded their way through packed, sweaty bodies. Wong desperately grabbed a scarf-like piece of material that swept from Joyce’s shoulders so that he didn’t lose her. His intern was so unrecognisable in her off-duty guise that he knew he would never locate her again in this place, even if he were standing next to her.
    And the noise! How on earth could anyone think of this as a place to meet and chat with friends? ‘Aiyeeaah,’ he said— or thought he said. The music was so loud that he couldn’t hear the sounds coming out of his own mouth, let alone anyone else’s. And surely music at this level would cause immediate and permanent deafness? How could these people stand it?
    The noise momentarily took him back to an occasion when he was a teenager, helping his uncle unload shipments of rice from a tramp steamer at the docks in Guangzhou. He had been balancing precariously on the side of the ship, throwing sacks down to his uncle, when a cousin of his had mischievously sounded the ship’s foghorn. The blast had been so loud that Wong had thought the world had ended. It had thrown him off balance, causing him to fall forwards off the ship. He had landed half on his uncle and half on the pile of sacks beside him. The uncle cursed both young men, having cracked a rib. Wong had hurt his left