Chapter 8
8
It was quiet when Ket Siong let himself into the house where he lived with his family.
Maybe Ma and Ket Hau were out. Ket Hau often took their mother out on the weekends, for a meal and a wander around London. Otherwise, he said, she’d never leave the house.
Or they might be having a lie-in. Ket Siong took off his shoes before climbing the stairs that led from the front door up to their first-floor flat, wincing at every creak.
He was tiptoeing towards the bedroom he shared with his brother when Ket Hau said:
“Where have you been ?”
Ket Siong let out a strangled yelp. His brother surged out of the shadows like a vengeful ghost, grabbed him by the arm, and rushed him into their room, kicking the door shut behind them.
“Shh! I don’t want to wake Ma,” said Ket Hau. “She was so worried, she would have stayed up all night if I didn’t make her go to bed. What happened to you?”
His face had relaxed upon seeing Ket Siong, but Ket Siong could see the marks of a night’s worry scored across it.
Ket Siong hadn’t been thinking about anything except Renee till now. Guilt twisted in his chest. “My phone died.”
“Yeah, I told Ma that must have happened,” said Ket Hau. “Probably you lost your wallet and couldn’t get back home, so you had to stay over at your student’s place. And you couldn’t remember our numbers, so you couldn’t borrow a phone to tell us. All kinds of nonsense. I had to say something. Ma was terrified, she thought… I was thinking the same things. Couldn’t make up my mind whether to call the police or not. Are you OK?”
Ket Siong could well imagine what they had been thinking. The same horrors would have been parading before his mind’s eye, had either of them gone missing. After what had happened to Stephen, his family had lost all faith in the safety or predictability of the universe.
How could he have forgotten them? He could have borrowed Renee’s phone to give them a call. Though if they knew the full story of what he had been up to, they would scarcely have found it comforting.
Ket Siong’s encounter with Low Teck Wee at the V whether friendship was all he wanted from Renee; and where, at the end of the day, he thought he was going with everything he’d said and done in the past twelve hours.
They were reasonable questions. Ket Siong did not feel ready to answer any of them, even to himself.
“You used, uh—you were safe, right?” said Ket Hau, with the expression of a man seriously weighing up the possibility that he might need to give his thirty-one-year-old brother an explanation of the facts of life.
Telling him about Low Teck Wee was appearing more attractive by the minute.
“There’s something else,” said Ket Siong. “I saw Low Teck Wee at the museum. Chairman of Freshview Industries.”
The clarification was unnecessary. Ket Hau was not likely to have forgotten Low Teck Wee, or anyone else connected to the Ensengei debacle. His face changed. “What do you mean, you saw him?”
“I talked to him,” Ket Siong admitted.
Ket Hau took a deep breath and let it out. “OK.”
Ket Hau was rarely genuinely angry with Ket Siong, but then again, this was a day of rare and unusual events. Ket Siong could practically hear his brother counting to ten in his head.
There wasn’t much space to move around in, with both of them in the room. It was a decent-sized bedroom for two to share, by London standards, but it held too much furniture, which the landlady had declined to remove. Besides their two single beds, there was a built-in wardrobe covering one wall, a desk, a chest of drawers on wheels under the desk that had an unpleasant habit of rolling over one’s feet without warning, and a large metal shelving unit.
Ket Hau sank onto his bed, avoiding banging his head on the shelving unit with the ease of practice.
Ket Siong sat on his own bed opposite. He could always be sure that he would have mercy over justice from his brother, but sometimes that was worse, somehow.
“So that’s why you wanted to go,” said Ket Hau. “I thought it was the girl.”
Ket Siong shook his head, thinking of Alicia’s pink-haired amour. “I told you she’s not interested in me.”
In other circumstances, Ket Hau wouldn’t have been able to resist interrogating him about the stranger who had been interested. Now, he merely nodded.
“You said.” He paused. “What was Low Teck Wee doing at the V an advert for water bottles. He cleared his throat. “It’s in the bathroom. I’ll go get it—”
“Didn’t even know you had a Facebook account,” Ket Hau marvelled. His eyes widened. “Wait. Are you stalking that woman, the one you met at the V&A?”
Ket Siong opened his mouth to issue an indignant denial. But his being on Facebook was sufficiently out of character that it demanded an explanation, and the real reason wasn’t one he wanted to share with his family.
He shut his mouth.
Ket Hau took this as a yes. He sat down on his bed, nail care and legal studies alike forgotten. “Find anything interesting?”
“No,” said Ket Siong firmly. He shut his laptop. “It doesn’t look like she’s active.”
“How old is she? Around your age? Younger?” When Ket Siong refused to be drawn on this, Ket Hau said, sagely, “Try Instagram. Facebook’s for old farts like me.”
After he left, Ket Siong reopened his laptop and looked up Renee’s Instagram.
He tried to ignore the voice of his conscience, pointing out he was overstepping a boundary. Renee had made it clear she wanted to be friends, nothing more. She’d drawn a line. He should respect it.
The voice of his conscience spoke in vain.
Renee’s Instagram was an attractive collection of selfies, images and videos of food and places of interest around London, and Virtu hype.
Ket Siong paused on a recent selfie. The timestamp said the image had been shared the day of their encounter at the V&A.
Renee was wearing something pale blue that she must have changed out of for the evening. She was illuminated by morning light, smiling. She looked beautiful, but there was something distant about her expression, her true self guarded behind it. It was similar to the smile she’d given Ket Siong at the museum, before she’d realised who he was. The face she showed the world at large.
That he got to see anything else was precious. He couldn’t risk that. This time, he needed to make sure he was what Renee needed—no more and no less.
But he kept staring at the photo. Renee’s hair coiled over her collarbones, the tender hollow of her throat. Ket Siong was hijacked by a sudden sense-memory, extraordinarily vivid, of leaning into Renee, pressing his lips to her throat and hearing her sigh.
Arousal whiplashed through him. He jolted upright and closed the browser.