The Feng Shui Detective - By Nury Vittachi Page 0,3

be heard by his friends on his phone, and he feared they would think he had moved his office to a slaughterhouse.

He examined her out of the corner of his eye as he prepared his reports that afternoon. Ms Joyce McQuinnie was somewhere between fourteen and thirty (Wong had always found it difficult to tell the age of Westerners), and she was highly social, spending a lot of time on the phone organising a get-together to celebrate her new ‘job’. She had been an inch or two taller than he when she had arrived in the office, but shrank to his size when she settled in, having removed her shoes. She had very pale skin with a light covering of freckles, and shaggy hair that was a slightly reddish shade of brown, like a squirrel-fur coat. She wore men’s work boots with thick rubber soles, above which he noticed dark tights, a short skirt and a large, shapeless sweater. She seemed to have five metal studs in one ear, and seven in the other. She wore no rings, but had giant Indian bangles on both wrists, which jangled as she moved, and threatened to tip her coffee over.

‘Is she pretty?’ asked a friend of his, on the phone from Kuala Lumpur.

‘She’s a mat salleh,’ Wong whispered.

But she made some effort to demonstrate an interest in her subject. The young woman spent the morning looking through books on feng shui, and the afternoon attempting to get to grips with the filing system—no easy task, since Winnie made it up as she went along, the main reason why she could not be replaced.

Wong just sighed and tried to focus on his work. Mo baan faat. What to do?

But as the afternoon wore on, the geomancer found himself starting to listen with interest to her phone conversations. He suddenly realised that his irritating new assistant might have a use after all. She was a free source of English conversation lessons, which were outrageously highly priced in Singapore.

Wong had started to operate in English late in life, having lived most of his life in Guangdong, moving to Hong Kong ten years ago, and five years later being transferred to Singapore. He prided himself on his ability with languages (he could speak six Chinese dialects). Yet he had long struggled with English idioms which he nearly always found baffling and totally lacking in logic. Ms McQuinnie, perhaps because of her age, used a great many English slang expressions. He recognised several from the book he had been studying the week before: How’s Tricks? Colloquial English II. He was adamant that the next book he wrote would be in English (he had already written two feng shui books in Chinese) but felt his grasp of English was not firm enough. He was convinced that a knowledge of modern colloquialisms was the key to being considered a good writer.

He asked her the meaning of several of the strange words she used, and she watched as he wrote them down.

She immediately adopted the role of a harsh teacher, correcting his every utterance. ‘It’s the only way you’ll learn,’ she said. His initial irritation started to dissolve when he learned that she generally explained things well, and could possibly enable him to impress his teacher and fellow students at the English Conversation Club.

Once, when she was on the phone to one of her friends, she came out with a string of terms which he did not understand at all. He jotted them down, and resolved to make enquiries later.

She said ‘cool’ all the time, which he knew. But she also said: ‘way’, ‘good fish’, ‘yo’, ‘hunky’, ‘ratted’, ‘soupy’, ‘pass the bucket’, ‘gloppy’, ‘wally’, ‘mega’ and ‘wowser’, none of which were in his textbooks. Her word for ‘yes’ appeared to be ‘whatever’.

He was furtively thumbing through a dictionary to translate something that sounded like ‘trip hop seedy’ when the phone rang. On the line was Laurence Leong, deputy chief executive of East Trade Industries.

‘I’m just sending you a fax,’ Leong said. ‘The brief, C F, is to give a swift opinion on an estate called Sun House, in a village just outside Melaka. The fax should be just coming through now.’ The machine next to Winnie’s elbow immediately began to growl.

Wong looked at the thin, curling papers for five minutes before phoning back. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a yin house. Very big problem. Very negative. Even if we really clean it up nice. People never forget. Very hard