Chapter 6
6
The evening went by quickly. It was only when a staff member came round to tell them they were closing up that it struck Ket Siong that his family might be wondering where he was.
He checked his phone, but it was dead.
“Wow, it’s almost eleven,” said Renee, blinking like she was waking up from a dream. “I didn’t realise it was so late. Is someone waiting for you?”
“My family,” said Ket Siong, putting his phone away. “My mother and brother.” The clarification felt important, though it wasn’t like it mattered if Renee thought he was married.
She swayed a little as she got up. Ket Siong put a hand under her elbow, steadying her.
“How are you getting home?” he said. He would have guessed they were at least half an hour’s walk from her flat. He hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going earlier, or he might have insisted on staying closer to her place.
Renee yawned—delicately, like a cat. “Cab.”
Ket Siong hesitated. “It’s late to be going back on your own. Let me see you home. I can get the Tube from High Street Ken.”
“I haven’t had that much to drink,” said Renee, amused. “It’s tiredness, not alcohol.”
He shouldn’t insist. Renee was an adult, and London was relatively safe. Broadly. Most women got home unmolested from a night out.
Just as most people lived out their lives with nothing too bad happening to them, no unexpected tragedy snatching them away from their loved ones. Ket Siong thought of Stephen, heading out to work in his ratty old Myvi, on the last morning he had been seen alive. Ket Siong’s own father, who had died in a road accident when Ket Siong was two.
“It’s late,” he repeated.
At least Renee wasn’t offended at his persistence. She smiled, her eyes sleepy. “OK. We can tell the driver to do a second drop-off. Save you a walk to the Tube station, if you think home’s too far,” she added, when Ket Siong started to protest.
He couldn’t have afforded the taxi fare home, but arguing over the five-minute ride between Renee’s flat and the Tube station would have been as ungracious as letting her send him back to Edmonton by black cab. He shut up.
They were quiet in the taxi. Renee was a million miles away, gazing out of the window. Ket Siong wondered what she was thinking.
Beyond this, he did not engage in much thinking himself. Images from the evening flitted through his mind. Low Teck Wee’s face when he was asked about Stephen; that spangled ballgown behind the glass; Alicia saying, Have fun.
Beneath these impressions sat the fact that Ket Siong might well not see Renee again after tonight. So he did not ask himself what the evening had meant, or what might come after. For now, he was simply existing in the moment, looking neither to the future nor the past.
He got out of the taxi when they arrived at Renee’s place, partly to help her out of the car and partly to say a proper goodbye, out of the driver’s hearing. Not that they said anything anyone could not have heard.
Ket Siong watched Renee walk up to the entrance to her building. She pushed open the glass door, then paused.
I probably shouldn’t do this, thought Renee.
But it had been a long day. She was so tired everything had taken on a sparkling clarity, and she hadn’t eaten quite enough to soak up the couple of drinks she’d had.
In this floating, light-headed state, it was hard to recover her daytime inhibitions. The Renee of this evening was perilously close to the Renee of ten years ago, around Ket Siong—her guard lowered, longing to touch. She wanted to run her hands over his forearms, feel the muscle shifting under smooth, warm skin.
If she was being sensible, Renee would accept this reunion as the gift it was. Let it slip through her fingers, fleeting and lovely.
But it was the self underneath her defences who was in charge right now. The lonely girl, yearning for something straightforward and sweet. She thought, If you walk through this door, you’re never going to see him again.
Renee turned around.
Ket Siong was standing by the black cab, looking woebegone. Renee was reminded absurdly of a dog waiting outside a supermarket, patient and consciously good, but just a little worried that its owner might never emerge.
The mental image made it easier to say, “Do you want to come in for a coffee?”
“I don’t take coffee in the evening,” said Ket Siong.
The sting of the rebuff hardly had time to make itself felt when he blurted, “But I could do with some water.”
He looked uncharacteristically flustered. This made Renee feel a little better, but she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.
The cabbie rolled down the window. “Not to rush you, but metre’s running, just so you know.”
“It’s OK,” said Renee. She could barely hear herself over the blood thumping in her ears, but what she could hear sounded surprisingly insouciant. It was as though her voice belonged to someone else. “My friend’s staying. How much does it come to? You might as well round it up. No worries. Have a good one.”
She watched as the taxi drove off, trepidation and excitement uncoiling inside her. When she turned back to Ket Siong, his eyes were fixed on her, as if he was trying to record every detail.
“Come on,” said Renee. “Let’s get you that water.”
Renee’s place was instantly familiar, though Ket Siong hadn’t seen it in ten years. The hallway was the same, with its walls panelled in honey-coloured wood, and the shining parquet floor necessitating the immediate removal of shoes (“Auntie Mindy will kill me if it gets scratched”). The air had the same faint, sweet floral smell, too—a scent he associated with Renee.
Some things had changed. Renee’s aunt had originally paid an interior decorating service to kit the flat out with a full set of furniture. The effect had been luxurious but neutral, everything in shades of taupe, beige, and grey. It had been almost oppressively free of personality, except for the occasional eccentric touch where the interior decorator had ventured to express themselves.
“You’ve kept the monkey,” said Ket Siong.
The monkey was about the size of a human baby and covered in an aggressively ugly hard-wearing paisley fabric. It sat eyelessly on a rattan console table in the hallway, facing the door. They had never been able to identify any useful purpose it might serve.
“I thought of getting rid of it, but I felt it would be disrespectful to Auntie Mindy,” said Renee. “It’s probably good feng shui. Scaring off the bad spirits.” She patted the monkey on the head.
Respect for her aunt had governed Renee’s approach to decoration when she lived here as a student. Conscious of her status as a guest, she’d never so much as Blu-Tacked a poster to the walls.
But she was a guest no longer. Through the door to the living room could be seen a pink velvet art deco–style sofa, draped with a leaf-patterned throw, rattan chairs on either side. The sofa’s predecessor had been oatmeal coloured and weirdly shiny, heaped with fussy cushions that poked you in the back.
Renee had indulged her own taste, too, in the matter of art on the walls. As Ket Siong followed her into the kitchen, he passed a striking photograph of a woman in a cheongsam, the wall behind her divided into stark triangles of light and shade; a couple of Egon Schiele pieces; a nude of a Chinese woman with her back to the viewer, her face in profile haughty and remote; and a black ink painting of a crevasse between gargantuan mountains.
The kitchen used to be all white, a vaguely clinical room. It had been impossible to imagine making a spaghetti Bolognese there. Now the cabinets were a friendly sage green, with bronze handles. Half of one wall was covered with a large framed piece of green-and-pink batik, adorned with flowers and swallows on a latticework background.
“Javanese batik tulis,” said Renee, when she saw him looking at it. “The pattern’s hand-drawn.” Then, when he started to grin, “Don’t laugh at me! I didn’t grow up speaking Malay.”
“I wasn’t saying anything,” said Ket Siong mildly. He tapped the dining table, a round marble-topped piece in dark hardwood, with matching chairs. “My grandmother had a table like this.”
“I bought the set secondhand in Singapore,” said Renee. “Don’t ask me how much it cost to ship here, your grandmother would be ashamed of me. It reminds me of home. And,” she added, turning to the fridge, “my Instagram followers go crazy for it.”
It was a good thing Ket Siong had asked for water and not any other form of refreshment. Renee’s fridge was pristine, empty save for a row of bottles of mineral water in the fridge door.
Ket Siong made no comment, but Renee seemed conscious this was weird.
“I’m not home for meals much,” she said. “I have someone come in to do the housekeeping. Is Evian OK?”
She spilt some water on the counter as she was filling the glass. Ket Siong found a tea towel and mopped it up. The cloth was crisp, with an attractive graphic print of tigers on it. He wondered how much it cost, and if it had ever been used before.
“Thanks,” said Renee. “Maybe I am a little drunk.”
If she was inebriated, it wasn’t obvious. What was clear was that she was nervous. This made Ket Siong feel a little better about the adrenaline racing through his veins, but unfortunately it did nothing to calm him down.
Renee raised a hand to push her hair out of her face, looking self-conscious. “How about you?”
Ket Siong drank his water. It was fizzy, which he hadn’t expected, but he managed not to cough. “A bit.”
He realised Renee was watching him swallow. She noticed he was looking, and cast her eyes down, a pink flush rising in her cheeks.
“You should know I never do this,” she said, after a moment.
Ket Siong had been circling around the reason she’d invited him in, not daring to speculate on what it might be. So long as he didn’t think about it, he couldn’t be wrong, and disappointment couldn’t get any purchase on him.
Renee was making it hard to keep up this obvious and rational approach, however.
“Yap Ket Siong.” Her gaze was wistful. A wisp of hair had escaped from where she’d tucked it behind her ear. It made Ket Siong’s fingers itch.
“It must be destiny, us meeting again like this,” said Renee. “You know, you broke my heart.”
In this evening’s chance encounter with Renee, Ket Siong recognised a gift from the universe—the workings of an unexpectedly generous fate, beyond predicting or outmanoeuvring. If he did or said anything, he might shatter the magic, set the moment to flight.
But this was too much to endure in silence.
“Renee, I never meant to…”
She put a finger on his lips. He felt the touch all through his body, like the vibrations of a struck bell.
“It’s OK.” Renee smiled up at him. “I’m not a girl anymore. You don’t have to worry about me taking this too seriously. I’ll take it for what it is.”
There were questions Ket Siong should be asking, things that needed to be understood between them. He should clarify what this was, that she wasn’t going to take too seriously. He owed her an explanation of the reason he’d hurt her all those years ago. And though he was scarcely entitled to it, confirmation of the current status of her heart—engaged or otherwise—would have been welcome.
But these were all the demands of his brain, which was decidedly behindhand with events. His body was ahead of him; it knew the game. His arms were already sliding around Renee, his head bending.
Renee raised her face, her lashes veiling her eyes. He’d forgotten how small she was. She was as fine-boned as a bird in his arms. But there was nothing delicate about the way she met his kiss.
She put an arm around the back of his neck, pressing herself against him, her mouth bold against his. Her body locked perfectly into his, all softness and strength.
Amazing as this was, his neck was starting to ache from the angle. He gathered her up, hoisting her up onto the kitchen island without breaking the kiss.
Ket Siong was busy trying to get Renee’s jacket off her without allowing any distance between them when it struck him that he should probably check that that was OK. He pulled back.
Renee was breathing hard, her lips red. She didn’t seem inclined to talk. She drew him back in, wrapping her legs around him, and Ket Siong’s body told his brain in no uncertain terms to check out and come back later.
There seemed nothing for it but to comply.