Chapter 22
22
It struck Ket Siong a second too late that he should have asked first. Offered Renee his scarf, instead of putting it on her, as though he had a right to touch her.
The lights overhead were reflected in her eyes. She’d looked tired when he saw her on Regent Street, but under the glow of the lights, her face smoothed out. The dark circles under her eyes and the minute worry lines around her mouth vanished.
Ten years fell away. They might have been students again, at the very start of their adult lives. She was his best friend, and he was in love with her.
He was still in love with Renee.
He hadn’t allowed himself to think it in so many words, before now.
Renee reached up to touch the scarf.
He should say something, apologise. But she spoke first.
“Oh, this is the good stuff.” She ran the scarf between her fingers, her face lit up with delight. “Is this real pashmina? The texture’s beautiful.”
“Oh. Yes.” That was what it was called. An image rose before him: Stephen on the sofa in their small, cluttered living room back home, unwrapping his haul from a work trip, talking about mountain goats. “It’s a gift. A friend got it in India.”
“Must have been a good friend,” said Renee. “Real pashmina isn’t cheap.”
“He was.” Stephen had got two scarves, white for Ma and beige for Ket Siong. Ket Hau, to his outrage, had received a box of chocolate truffles with durian filling, the kind found only in airports and tourist-trap souvenir shops.
Renee looked cosy in the scarf. Seeing her in it gave Ket Siong a pleasure so intense it felt almost sinful. He looked away to try to hide it, sweetness spreading through his chest.
What was it his brother had said? You and I know, better than most people.
It was incalculably precious that he got to be here with Renee, ten years after he’d broken her heart. It was the being here that was important. Renee had drawn her lines. It wasn’t his place to ask for anything more.
So he’d been telling himself. But what if Renee had changed her mind?
She didn’t want him to leave her alone, that much he felt he could conclude from the memes and the invitations to dinner. But was it simply that she was lonely, or enjoyed the attention? Despite the deceptive openness of her manner, he knew Renee found it hard to trust people. She hadn’t mentioned any friends in London other than Nathalie. Even during their university days, she had seemed strangely lonely, set apart from others, despite her retinue of male admirers.
She’d trusted Ket Siong back then. Did she trust him now?
The thought was not pleasant. He suspected he knew the answer.
He hadn’t wanted to force a discussion about their past, when she hadn’t seemed inclined to go over that old ground. But if he explained himself now, told her why he’d hurt her all those years ago…
Maybe it wouldn’t make any difference. But he wouldn’t know until he tried.
They were at the front of the queue now. The person behind them was on her phone, talking loudly in what sounded like Serbian. A sudden fit of recklessness possessed him.
“Renee,” said Ket Siong, and who knew what he might have said next, except Renee said:
“I saw Andrew the other day. You remember Andrew Yeoh?”
“Your ex,” said Ket Siong, after a moment.
Renee grimaced. “You date a guy for a few months one time and he’s your ex for life. Even if he threw your phone out of the window.” She blew out a rueful breath. “He’s on the other side of the deal.”
“On this pitch you’ve been working on?”
“Yeah,” said Renee. “I knew Andrew was Low Teck Wee’s nephew, but I didn’t know he’d started working for Freshview. Last I heard, he was at Morgan Stanley. I mean, you can’t blame him. It’s probably an easier ride working in the family business.”
“What?” said Ket Siong.
A waitress popped her head out of the restaurant and said:
“Table for two? Right, come on through.”
The bustle of getting seated suspended all private conversation. Once they’d been left with the menu to consider their choice of nine different varieties of ramen, Renee took off his scarf and held it out over the table.
“Thanks,” she said.
She’d be cold once they got out of the restaurant. But he didn’t try to insist she keep it.
“Your pitch,” said Ket Siong. “It’s to Freshview Industries?”
“Oh, you’ve heard of them?” said Renee.
The restaurant was tiny and achingly trendy: the walls were painted stark black, exposed pipes hanging low from the ceiling. Their table was shoved right up against their neighbours’. Renee glanced at them—East Asian university students on their phones—then leaned forward, lowering her voice.
“They’re leading a redevelopment project here, converting an old factory site in South London. It’s a huge job, major investment by the Malaysian government. We’re hoping to win the construction work. Dad’s an old hand. Chahaya built half the high-rises in Singapore.” Renee paused. “It’s not public yet, though. We’ll only announce if they decide to go for us.”
Ket Siong stared fixedly at his menu. Competing aromas crowded the room: tonkotsu broth, pickled ginger, green tea, and soy sauce. Underneath these, the faint scent of roses wafting from his scarf felt like a secret, something Renee had confided to his particular care. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“I know,” said Renee. “I’m not worried about that .”
“How was it?” he said. “With Andrew.”
“Oh. Fine,” said Renee. “He was kind of a creep. But it wasn’t as bad as I feared. He’s married with a kid now. He showed me baby photos.” She settled back in her chair, sagging a little. “Hopefully I won’t have to spend much time working with him. I’m sure he mostly supervises the people doing the actual work. His staff seem nice enough.”
She was probably right. Freshview’s employees would be people with bills to pay and families to support, doing their best to get along. Ket Siong was in no position to judge their choices.
The smells of the restaurant had gone from enticing to oppressive. The black walls felt like they were closing in. He took a shallow breath, tamping down on a surge of nausea.
“Ket Siong.” Renee’s face was concerned. “Are you OK?”
The waitress came to take their order before he had to answer. Ket Siong was glad of the reprieve. It gave him a few moments to think about what he should say.
He had no evidence regarding Freshview’s role in what had happened to Stephen. But Renee wasn’t a judge sitting in court. He didn’t need to prove his suspicions beyond reasonable doubt. Surely anyone, hearing what he knew, would have reservations about doing business with Freshview.
He had to tell her. Ten years ago, he’d broken her heart, and his own, in part because he hadn’t trusted her with the truth.
He’d always wished there had been something else he could have done. Well, here he was again, knowing something Renee didn’t about her family and his own. He could do something different, this time. He could decide to trust her.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.
Her eyes flicked up. There was a question in them, one Ket Siong would have liked to answer. “Yes?”
Ket Siong felt a sudden overwhelming surge of protectiveness. He wanted to stand between Renee and anything that might hurt her—including himself. It would be so easy to be quiet, change the subject, tell her something different. Something she wanted to hear.
Curiously, it was not Stephen he thought of then, or Ket Hau, or their mother. It was Clarissa Low whose face appeared before him. Her expression when he’d said to her, Maybe it’s time you started asking.
“You’ve never asked why my family came to the UK,” he said.
Renee blinked. She looked away, smiling wryly, as though she was laughing at herself. He knew she felt foolish.
Before he could say anything else, their ramen arrived—bowls of noodles coiled in cloudy broth beneath slices of pork belly and generous shavings of black fungus and spring onions, a large square of nori tucked in at the side of the bowl.
Ket Siong had been hungry when he arrived, but his appetite had vanished.
When he looked up, Renee’s habitual poise was back in place.
“I didn’t like to pry,” she said, as though there had been no interruption. “People have different reasons for moving.”
“We weren’t thinking of migrating originally,” said Ket Siong. “My mother didn’t want to leave my father. We used to visit him in the columbarium every few months. And… it was her home. She wanted to make it better.”
“Why’d you change your mind?”
“It was to do with my brother’s job,” said Ket Siong. “He used to work for an NGO in KL, it did a lot of work with partners in Sarawak. He got involved in a campaign trying to tackle log ging on native customary land in Ensengei, in Sarawak. They were supporting the villagers in a lawsuit against the company doing it.”
Renee’s eyes widened. “That’s terrible.”
Ket Siong couldn’t look at her, or he wasn’t going to be able to keep speaking. She’d worked so hard on this pitch to Freshview. So much rode on it for her.
“Yes,” he said. “My brother’s co-worker Stephen was involved in the same campaign.” He swallowed. “He got kidnapped.”
“The co-worker?” Renee sat up. “Oh my God. What happened?”
Why had he called Stephen a co-worker? It was hard to explain all Stephen had been to the family, even if he avoided mentioning his suspicions about the nature of Stephen’s relationship with his brother.
It was easy to trot out the excuses, harder to fool himself. Ket Siong knew the reason. He didn’t want to make this worse for Renee than it was already going to be.
Though who was he really trying to protect? Was he trying to minimise Renee’s upset for her sake, or his own? She had already invested so much in the pitch to Freshview. Bound up in this deal was everything her family meant to her, all she’d ever wanted from them and failed to get. How much could he mean to her, compared to that?
He was about to complicate her life. Renee could dispose of that complication easily—by cutting him out of it.
“He was never seen again,” said Ket Siong. He went on, quickly, before Renee could speak or he could lose his nerve: “When we met at the V&A, I was there because I saw Freshview Industries in the list of supporters of the exhibition. I went because I wanted to ask Low Teck Wee if he knew what happened to Stephen.”
Renee’s eyes were huge in her face. Dread roiled in his stomach as he watched understanding dawn on her. He couldn’t bear to see her face shut down, not when he’d just told her about Stephen.
“Freshview was the company,” she said.
She’d barely had any of her ramen. He should have waited till she’d finished. She wouldn’t eat anything now.
“Freshview won the legal case,” said Ket Siong. “The forest in Ensengei is gone. They’re planting oil palm there now.”
Renee took a sip of her genmaicha, placing the cup back on the table with deliberate control. “But your brother’s co-worker—what was his name?”
“Stephen. He was a good friend.”
Renee’s eyes slid past Ket Siong. “The one who got you the scarf?” He’d slung his scarf over the back of his chair.
“Just a guess,” she added. “There was something about the way you said the person who gave it to you was a good friend. You know, in the past tense. Like it was someone you’d lost.”
She glanced around at their surroundings. The crowd had thinned out a little since they’d arrived. Their immediate neighbours had vacated their table. At the next table over, two men were having an amiable half-shouted conversation in Italian.
“You think Freshview was involved?” Renee said, in a near whisper. Ket Siong had to strain to hear her over the general buzz of conversation. “What did Uncle Low say, when you asked him?”
“Nothing much,” said Ket Siong. “He wouldn’t have told me, no matter what he knew.”
“But you think he does know something.”
Ket Siong remembered what Ket Hau had said about his run-in with Low. “There’s no way he didn’t know. If he wasn’t involved, he was complicit.”
Renee’s expression changed. She said, in a new tone, “Do you have any evidence of that?”
“He wouldn’t have left evidence I could find,” said Ket Siong sharply.
He regretted this the moment it was out, but Renee gave him no opportunity to soften it or row it back. Her back straightened.
“It’s a very serious accusation to make without evidence,” she said.
“If Low were an innocent man, Renee, he would have told me he doesn’t know what happened to Stephen,” said Ket Siong. “He wouldn’t have walked away.”
“Sometimes all you can do when you’ve been accused is walk away,” said Renee. “If everyone’s decided you’re guilty, you’re not going to change their mind. The only way out is to refuse to engage.”
Ket Siong knew what she was talking about. “This isn’t like that.”
“Like what? You mean, the time my brothers trumped up some bullshit allegations about me and everyone fell over themselves to believe them? Because I was successful and that’s the one thing people can’t forgive.” Renee crossed her arms. “Ket Siong, why did you tell me this? Why now?”
“I didn’t know you were planning on working with Freshview before.”
“You knew I was working with Chahaya.” Renee’s eyes were hard. She would give no quarter, would expect none from him. “How do you know Chahaya hasn’t done equally bad things? That’s what business is like.”
Ket Siong frowned. “You don’t believe that. It’s not how you do business.”
“Isn’t it just a matter of degree?” said Renee. “Our makers in Cambodia get, say, forty dollars a piece. We apply a three times markup before it gets to the consumer. And I live in the most expensive city in the world, in a flat that could set our makers up for life. Money’s never really clean, Ket Siong.”
“I know you try to be fair,” said Ket Siong. “It’s not easy to build a business the way you have. There’s a difference between that and Freshview stripping Iban and Bidayuh land. Look, this isn’t about you or Virtu—”
“How could it not be?” said Renee. “Tomorrow I’m going to be standing up in front of Low Teck Wee’s nephew, trying to persuade him to give us a job on the development. There’s millions of pounds of Malaysian state funds invested in that project. How much dirty money do you think is sloshing around in there? Or were you hoping I’d pull out? Tell Su Khoon and Dad, ‘Oh no, I can’t do it, Freshview is morally suspect’?”
“It’s not for me to tell you what to do.”
Renee met his eyes. “You’d judge me for making the wrong decision, though.”
Ket Siong looked back steadily. Part of him wanted to reassure her, tell her it would make no difference to him what she did.
In a way, it was true. There was nothing he or Renee or anyone could do to change how he felt about her. That was one lesson he’d finally learnt, even if it had taken him ten years. But it wasn’t an answer to what she’d said.
“No more than you’d judge yourself,” he said.
“You don’t understand,” said Renee. “Your family’s different. You know what mine’s like. If I make the call you think I should make, I piss off my dad, my brother—”
“You’re not afraid of that.”
“Not afraid. No.” Renee swallowed. Ket Siong saw, to his horror, that she was fighting back tears.
“I’m sick of it,” she said, her voice ragged. “I’m sick of being the outcast. I’m sick of always being in the wrong. This is the first time I’ve gone so long without fighting with Su Khoon. He offered to buy me dinner this evening, of his own free will. You were the one who said it’s natural to want to have a good relationship with my family. Why are you making me choose?”
His heart ached for her. “I’m not trying to make you choose.”
“So you’d be fine, whatever I decided?” snapped Renee. “Even if I told you we pitched Freshview and won the deal?”
“You keep saying ‘we,’” said Ket Siong. “But you are not Chahaya. You are not your father. You are the decisions that you make. I would not tell your father or your brother what I’ve told you.”
“How do you know I won’t tell Dad?” said Renee bitterly. “I could tell him he needs to warn Uncle Low there’s a PR storm brewing. Win some brownie points that way.”
Ket Siong was getting annoyed. There was no need for Renee to make out that she was worse than she was. It verged on self-indulgence, given the seriousness of what he’d revealed.
But love and pity tugged him the other way. He’d put Renee in a difficult position, and picked the worst possible time to do it. It was impossible not to see her point of view.
“I haven’t gone about this the right way,” he said. “Give it time. You aren’t seeing clearly right now. When you’ve had a chance to think…”
“No.” Renee looked around the restaurant, desolate, like someone who had woken from a dream to find themselves abandoned, surrounded by strangers. “I’m seeing clearly now, for the first time.” She shook her head. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got an early start tomorrow. You stay here and finish your dinner.”
“Renee…”
“You should get them to pack mine up. Don’t want it to go to waste,” said Renee. Her cordiality was implacable. Behind it, she’d absented herself. She rummaged in her bag, producing her phone. “She said we could pay by QR code, right?”
“You said I could pay,” protested Ket Siong.
Renee wiped her eyes, as though she hadn’t noticed they were wet. “Right. I did say that.”
She let him cover their dinner with troubling docility, making no objection when Ket Siong said he would leave with her. The waitress took one look at them and refrained from making any comment on the fact she was packing up two untouched bowls of ramen.
He trailed Renee out onto the street, the bowls of soup—no longer even warm—knocking against his outer thigh. He was trying to think of something to say to hold off the conclusion the waitress had read in their faces.
There was one moment of hope, one moment when it might have gone either way. Outside, Renee paused, lifting her face to the night sky and the lights strung between the shops. She said:
“I’m sorry about your friend. I should have said that earlier.”
She wouldn’t look at him, but her sincerity could not be doubted.
“Renee,” said Ket Siong. “I didn’t mean…”
But what could he say? He’d thought it right to tell her what he knew. Which meant he had intended to upset her. If she had not been upset by what he’d had to tell her, she would not be the person he knew her to be.
Renee had made up her mind, anyway.
“I don’t think we should see each other again,” she said. “Good night, Ket Siong.”
Before he could answer, she turned and walked away, with a ruthless, unhurried step—as graceful as ever, every movement perfectly judged.