Eroticism is on the march; or maybe it’s more apt to say, it’s on the slink.

Whatever the proper term, perhaps nowhere is that advance more evident than in Asia, which has by far the largest population of any continent. Asia practices eroticism in fascinating ways and, recently, Asian writers and writers based in Asia have been chronicling some of this eroticism.

In the second half of 2006, Monsoon Books (Singapore) published Best of Singapore Erotica, the first anthology of erotic fiction (along with a handful of erotic poems) ever released in Singapore. That volume proved to be a surprising success: not only did it dominate Monsoon’s own bestseller list for many months, but just four months after the collection first hit the bookstores, we were going into our second edition.

Strongly encouraged by the success of this venture, Monsoon decided a few years later to come out with a second collection of erotic short fiction.

This time, however, the company decided to cast its nets wider and brought out Best of Southeast Asian Erotica, in which four other countries were included. (The new territory included Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.) Although it only appeared in late 2010, this book, too, seems to be a success, both critically and commercially. Now we are taking our erotic sampling out into a new frontier: the world of ebooks.

The stories included in these first two e-collections represent a mix-and-match of the best works from the two earlier print volumes. We have dropped the flash fictions and poems from our Best of Singapore Erotica collection and then merged them in these first two volumes of ebooks with pieces from the Best of Southeast Asian collection.

As the first collection was composed entirely of Singapore stories, there is still a heavy presence of Singapore fiction in both of these first volumes.

Subsequent volumes feature first-rate erotic fiction (and some non-fiction) from throughout Asia.

But what we offer here is exemplary of the principles we employed throughout in selecting stories for the first two print collections: good stories, well-written, though with a definite erotic flavour. This is not pornography; it is a sub-genre of full-bodied literature which looks at and celebrates the sensual and the sexual in the human experience. These stories were not chosen simply because they titillate (though many of them do that as well), but because they delight, inform and sometimes even enlighten and ennoble.

We enjoyed putting both collections together (as you might well imagine). We think you will enjoy reading these stories and seeing why Asia is fast becoming the world centre of eroticism in all its richness and variety.

I lost my virginity to a man named Pierre two weeks after meeting him.

Well, of course, Pierre isn’t his real name. How many real Frenchmen do you know named Pierre? Enid Blyton names every other Frenchman

“Pierre” in her kiddie novels, but in real life, most Frenchmen have names like Philippe or Jean or something entirely unpronounceable. It’s never as simple as Pierre.

Anyway, Pierre isn’t French, he’s Belgian. He is whiter than white, has perfect skin (perfect enough, that is, to be remarkable for his age), brown eyes, sandy-grey hair, and a huge cock that swells up and sticks out perpendicularly from his very thin body like a rose-red battering ram.

I was saying that I lost my virginity to him two weeks after meeting him. I suppose you’re wanting an explanation of this somewhat extraordinary statement. It’s just not worth the bother. Therefore, feel free to fit us both into any convenient category of human behaviour. Rest assured, I will not complain. Complaining, I find, is the refuge of the weak and unimaginative who have neither the courage to put up with shit nor the wherewithal to get out of it.

However I will answer the usual round of questions.

1. Yes, he is married.

2. Yes, I knew it.

3. Yes, he’s a horny old man. Exactly 23 years older than me, if you like precise figures.

4. Yes, I am Asian-Chinese, if you also enjoy precise descriptions. And I therefore qualify, as my little brother pointed out with a shudder, as an SPG.

5. No, he didn’t dump me after one night of sex… BUT!

6. Yes, the relationship is pretty much all about sex.

By the way, yes, you are free to join my brother and think of me as an SPG. I like the phrase “Sarong Party Girl” really. Wear a sarong, go out and party. Of course, the SPG’s reason for wearing a sarong-or whatever conveniently unwrappable dress is in fashion these days-and going to a party is usually to pick up a White Man. Whether or not this was my specific intention while partying in a sarong, I’m not bothering to clarify. You are perfectly free to draw your own conclusions about me, as I am of you.

I became Pierre’s mistress without intending to. What I was intending was to do was sleep with him so as to get rid of my tiresome virginity, which had been left stubbornly on my hands for 26 years.

I was telling you Pierre had a cock like a battering ram. A virgin pussy becomes deeply startled when faced with the prospect of penetration by a battering ram. A pulse of sheer panic raced up and down me when the whole bulk of it emerged from between the silver teeth of his zipper.

“That’s not going to fit! It’s HUGE!” I bellowed, flinging all thought of seductive atmosphere, which I’d been carefully building up for three hours, to the winds. Pierre shook his head, disparagingly. “Average,” he murmured, “average.”

The average size of the male penis is six to seven inches erect.

Proportionately, Pierre was not wrong, though, for he is six foot tall. His problem is that he is underweight for his height, so that a penis which would have looked relatively proportionate for a six-foot, 180-pound man, looks preposterously gargantuan for a six-foot man who only weighs 135 pounds.

Now, I am very short, even for an Asian girl. I didn’t even know if I had enough piping for this plunger.

“Think of it as a baby’s head,” he persuaded me silkily, pushing me quite firmly down under him. “That’s what it’s built for, right?”

“I suppose so,” I replied dubiously, and gritted my teeth.

Pierre had been told by a friend that I was a virgin. He did not believe I was a virgin. I did not act like a virgin and I hadn’t bothered to tell him.

Because if I had, he wouldn’t have slept with me; it’s that simple.

“I shouldn’t have been your first experience,” he exclaimed in dismay when he finally asked and I told him.

This surprised me, because I had judged him at first glance very much the way you might have been doing up to this point. I had seen a nattily dressed, charmingly seductive older European man, freely discussing his experiences with many girlfriends. I had therefore fit him neatly into that handy category, the Horny White Man.

Oh, let me elaborate just a little. Horny White Man: Good in bed, generous with women, dislikes long-term relationships, probably divorced/ married, adulterous. The HWM is the antithesis of the SPG, which is why they are drawn to each other. HWMs are for the most part weak in character, strong in personality, easily led but difficult to pin down. It takes our strong-willed SPGs five minutes to lead a HWM to the altar, and an ensuing five years (or the equivalent in alcohol) to force them to sign the registry.

I suppose there are degrees of Horny White Man-ness, just as there are degrees of Sarong Party Girl-ness. Some are merciless, some are buoyant with random sincere affection, some are in-between. I am in-between; Pierre, as I grow to know him, is closer to the extreme of sincere, emotional attachment for every beautiful woman on earth, and some not so beautiful as well. (And a few who are not, technically, women. Don‘t ask.) But we were talking about the sex.

I believe the secret to good sex is enjoying your own body. I am inordinately vain about my body. I have perfect breasts, each one a nice firm but soft handful, set high and full against my ribcage; I have a splendid waist, nicely tucked-in, and very comfortable, plus round, dimpled arms and legs. I have little love for my ass, but Pierre turned out to like it best, so altogether I believe myself a regular Aphrodite, and knowing oneself to be an Aphrodite does wonders for one’s performance in bed.

A book called The Satanic Witch suggests that men are most turned on by underwear they’re not supposed to be seeing (i.e. not the half-naked stripper doing the pole dance on the stage, but the primly dressed girl whose thong might be just peeking out over the top of her jeans). Most importantly, one must make the most of what one has, whether it be sexual charisma, bedroom eyes, or a good set of tits. The important thing is to seem accessible without seeming easy.

I have always loved my tits. The first man to squeeze them was a fellow called Jeff. He watched me dancing on a platform with my tits on the verge of bouncing entirely free of my slightly exposed bra, until he approached me for a dance and took the opportunity to grope me, first one breast, then the other. Growing bolder, he pressed his fingers inside my blouse, then my bra, and fingered my nipples. That was rather nice, but then I decided he would be no fun as a First Experience (random gropers seldom are) and escaped.

On the whole, I am glad I waited for Pierre, who flirted before he seduced, and seduced before he groped, which is only polite.

The first part of me he saw naked was my left breast, which he peeked at by lifting the corner of my blouse. Being very pleased with my breasts, as I’ve explained, I allowed him.

“Now I can’t stand up,” he murmured, smiling faintly. “Everyone will see.”

I thought this rather complimentary, considering the vast number of tits he has seen in his career as a ladies’ man. We then progressed, after a great deal of impolite cuddling, to bed.

Having believed myself in possession of a perfect body for so long, it seemed a marvelous moment to finally show it off, in all its glory, for another human being’s appreciation. It was unwrapped by stages; it was rubbed first, through my clothes, through my bra, then under my bra, which was finally unhooked. I presented my naked tits to him for further attention, which he gave most obligingly. He then searched under my skirt, discovered perfectly ordinary white cotton panties and was extremely pleased.

This is not to say that I lay there like a blow-up doll. I had saved my virginity not out of a sense of sexual morality, but out of an abhorrence of waste; I didn’t want to waste that first, irretrievable experience on the male version of a blow-up doll. I therefore had no intention of being anything less than responsive. Being determined to leave my state of inexperience with a vengeance, I began with what would become my favourite beginning-a blow job.

Blow jobs interest me. I have a friend for whom sex has been a matter-of-fact affair since the age of fourteen. She has made love in all conceivable positions, licked, sucked, tickled and teased every easily accessible orifice of her longtime boyfriend’s body (and he hers), attempted interesting experiments with honey, wax, chocolate, whipped cream. Yet her imagination is not what one would call vast.

“What does cock taste like?” I asked her eagerly once.

She shrugged disinterestedly. “Like skin, lah,” she replied.

Admittedly, her simple answer made me a whole lot less afraid of giving a blow job, and when I finally had the chance to fit a cock into my mouth, I went at it with enthusiasm. Let it never be said that I give a sloppy blow job!

Oh no. The very idea of a blow job deeply entices me.

There is so much to a man’s cock besides the taste of skin, lah. There is the thin, silky texture of the shaft as your tongue slides over it, the soft, warm marshmallow of the head that quickly tightens into a hot, quivering ball when your lips close over it. I have longed to give a blow job ever since I read about it in my mother’s copy of Everywoman, to find all the tickly bits with my tongue and suck milk from the tip like an infant on a nipple. To feel the soft flesh grow hot and stiff in my mouth is an instant of the most irrevocable power a woman can have over a man. In short? Cock, basically, tastes pretty damn good.

Another question I asked my matter-of-fact friend: what does semen taste like?

“Salty,” she said.

Another, more descriptive girl said, “At first, it’s thick and goes goosh, goosh, goosh. After that it’s thinner and kind of watery and it just goes spurt. Splut. Sppt.”

And then she came.

Across the wet grass between the dormitory blocks, heralding herself with a strident, indrawn wail like the sound of darkness laughing.

If any of the wakeful inmates heard her, they did not look up. If they had seen, they would not have dared to believe. Only he knew.

For she was coming to him.

The tree outside his dorm window shuddered, shaking off a night fragrance that was not its own-a scent pungent to the point of rot.

The boy lay naked on his bed, knowing there was no point in being anywhere else. She would have him there and had been violent getting him there on previous nights; he did not wish to extend the struggle or invite her wrath. Her affection was terrible enough.

One night, months ago, returning late from a party where he had drunk almost too much, he’d glimpsed her-a pale stranger, standing on the edge of a dark field. Not sober enough to be superstitious, he had lingered and looked. As he ogled, overstepping curiosity and forgetting caution, his as-yet-untried manhood swelled with lecherous urges. Then he had stumbled on his way.

But she had sensed him. Had heard his unworded lust, felt his molesting thoughts as he passed into the night.

And she had responded.

Every night since.

Every single night since, he had refused all engagements, denied all company, in order to be in his room at this time, in his bed, waiting for her to come and claim him and take her pleasure.

He no longer even bothered to stay clothed. He knew how she wanted him and no longer had any desire to appear otherwise when she arrived. Her will was like white-hot iron-everything melted and cleaved to it before shrivelling to nothing in the heat. All his waking hours had yielded to the marauding night. Entire days shrank into a few sweaty hours. The nocturnal torments reverberated through his twenty-two-year-old mind all through the day. His body ached, his balls were knots of dull pain, taut with overuse. His cock, so unbelievably tender from having been so unbelievably hard, did not feel like it belonged to him any more.

And it didn’t.

The curtains fretted in the otherwise still air. She had arrived.

The fluorescent tube coughed briefly, spitting darkness, then recovered.

Two weeks ago, he had taken to leaving the lights on in the vain hope that this would either weaken her or strengthen him. Now, she liked it this way. It forced him to see his body being used, watch his cock take on the angles she imposed, watch it shiver uncontrollably as it spewed forth the essence she extracted from him with her mouth, her hands, her dead vagina.

Now into the room she came, and at once her presence pressed down on him. He sank into the sheets, paralysed. His eyes reeled, compensating for his body’s immobility, and in answer to his search, she took form. Out of the still air, a faint haze became a fog, then developed outlines and contours, grew solid and opaque… and then she was there.

She was beautiful, but not in a way the living or sane could possibly comprehend. What did that make him? he wondered-but the thought flickered away, terrified of itself.

She, too, was naked-but while his body shuddered with shame, hers was defiantly bared. Her skin shone faintly with a glow that made him think of shapeless, writhing plant-things, fathoms deep in the sea. She must have been young when she died and took this form-how long ago? Decades?

Centuries? Living death had drained her of moist youth and left her skin smooth but powdery, her breasts paler and colder than marble.

Her eyes were cruel and colourless. She rarely looked at his face or met his gaze-her obsession lay elsewhere, her control already complete. Her hair glistened but was not wet; moving in response to winds he could not feel. Her teeth were not sharp-she had bitten him often, yet he had never bled-still, they were a predator’s teeth. She never touched his lips or kissed him, those actions meant nothing when she could bite, suck, swallow every other inch of him.

She was now stretched out in the air above him, looking ravenously at his meticulously gym-toned body. The inches between them filled with lead, crushing him against the mattress.

Her hands reached down and began to touch him.

Her fingers, cold and raking, ranged across his torso. In the beginning, he had expected to be repulsed by the touch of death, to seek refuge behind stubborn flaccidity. Let her mangle his limp body till she shrieked her way back into the night in banshee frustration, he’d defiantly thought.

But his body was a traitor. While his mind recoiled, scrabbling away from all that she was and everything she did, his body responded to that ancient pact of flesh and lust. Even now, he shuddered and trembled at her touch; as his nipples tingled beneath her fingertips, humiliation rushed to his hot cheeks. He was more disgusted by his own raging flesh than by the outrage of her hands.

Her hands traveled downward, hard nails scraping faint red trails across his helpless abs. And still downward.

His humiliation was now complete. Even before he felt her touch on his cock, he had felt her desire; and already his cock strained towards her, mocking him. Was this the erection dead men had? The hardness of impassive death rather than vigorous life? Was it dead blood that was hardening in his veins, engorging his betrayed manhood?

Then she took him into her mouth, so deep that she would have choked if she could still breathe. With horror, he felt her lips touch his pubes, his cockhead rub against the flaking inside of her dust-dry throat. The only wetness was his-the shameful ooze of precum that his cock treasonously offered up to lubricate her impalement.

Would she drink his first load? She sometimes did, as if receiving a preliminary offering before the cruel consummation. She could afford to let a load or two go astray, as she seldom left him before he had surrendered his young seed three or four times. In the early weeks, he had felt as if she would empty his balls for good and leave him desiccated, but his body stunned him by repeatedly and consistently satisfying her hunger, against his will.

But this night, her hunger was acute, she wanted his warmth inside her.

Already now she was poised over him, her body gaping over his turgid cock.

Her eyes met his suddenly, pinning his frantic gaze, and her lips stretched into a merciless leer as she lowered herself onto him. Her cold clamminess drew him in, the emptiness of her pulling him deeper and deeper, as if she would suck his whole body into her — to fill her hollowness, to warm her from the core to the underside of her skin. As if his hot wet life could quench the death that raged in her.

She began riding him, taking him deep with every downward thrust, her body never touching the bed. He could feel the dryness of her vaginal passage rasping against his swollen, throbbing cock. Her silence terrified him: her body displayed all the abandon of lust, but she emitted none of the noisy breathing that underscored physical pleasure. The silence seemed to sharpen her intent, to take all of him, to rape his body until he lost his mind and she possessed his soul.

His young body was stiff against the bed-arms useless, legs unresponsive. He could not resist, could not pull back his groin to deny her.

Locked into place, his erection was like a skewed tombstone upon which her insatiable lust perched.

He was getting close. Soon he would offer up this night’s first hot libation, a fluid guarantee of his enslaved virility. Any minute now, the dead muscles would gulp at him as his life spurted out in creamy ropes, flowing upwards into whatever emptiness comprised her insides.

As she dragged him towards climax, he understood with searing clarity that he would never belong to anyone else again. Least of all himself. Before anyone else had had the chance, her touch had claimed him. What remained of his life would be spent in the burning shame of nightly surrender… until he had nothing left to offer, even to her.

And then?

Somewhere inside his head, plummeting downwards through the chasm that her lust had opened in his mind, his dwindling reason began to scream.

And then he came.

Syafiqah was not sure just where the old fragment of book came from, but she was bored and it was the only material to hand that she had not read. She had finished the American book about the teenage vampire, the slushy one that was made into a film, that one with that American girl whose father had been a mediocre country and western singer some years before. Therefore, as it was raining, she reached for the yellowing book, wiped the dust carefully from the first and last pages and the broken spine, sat on the corner of her bed and began to read.

Syafiqah noted that the book had no actual cover, only pages and a spine.

Several of the first stories, in what appeared to be a volume of short stories, seemed to be missing. All the information Syafiqah had about the book was in fine print at the top of the page facing her—page 62. This suggested that the book, when it was whole, had been The Best of Southeast Asian Erotica Volume 2, whatever that was.

She shrugged; the title meant nothing to her, but, a little intrigued, she began dipping into the story. At sixteen, with all the normal peculiarities of a mid-teen, Syafiqah readily found herself identifying with the main character, Farah, a Malay girl who, like Syafiqah, lived in a small rural kampong.

Eagerly, Syafiqah read on, but a little puzzled.

‘Shafts of Mediterranean’. Syafiqah had read about the Mediterranean.

It was in Europe, wasn’t it? Why were there shafts of European light coming into a kampong lean-to. Was it a kampong lean-to in Europe then? How odd.

With a combination of curiosity and the need to be engaged in something, Syafiqah decided that to enjoy the story, she must really put her questioning aside until she had finished reading it, otherwise there was no way she was going to enjoy it. So, on she read…

‘Eee-yuk, sweat,’ said Syafiqah with a mock shudder, then ‘Mmm… chocolate.’

Ten-what? What is tenaciousness, is it like nine-aciousness, but with one extra. Syafiqah reached for her Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and looked the word up. Ah, yes, okay. Well, why couldn’t they say that then? she said to herself, frowned and once more began to read.

Mmm, this is making me hungry; I wonder what Mak is making for lunch. Syafiqah tried to ignore her growing hunger pangs and returned to the text.

It was at that point that there was a knock on the door. ‘ Adik, what are you doing in there? You are so quiet.’ Self-consciously, Syafiqah dropped the book fragment to the floor, giving it a little kick so it slid under her bed-she was worried that her mother might catch her reading unsuitable material.

‘Nothing Mak, just tidying.’

‘Okay. Don’t forget that I will need help with the laundry later.’

‘No, Mak,’ said Syafiqah. Her mother had not entered Syafiqah’s bedroom, so, when she considered it safe again, Syafiqah got down on her hands and knees and dragged the tomb out from where it rested-under the bed amongst dust and black-and-white house lizard debris. With a tinge of excitement now, she began to read on.

Good grief, said Syafiqah to herself… and continued.

Turning on the electric fan for a little air, Syafiqah eagerly read on.

Prabhu Deva? Ah yes, Mak used to like him, but Michael Jackson was better. Syafiqah continued reading.

Guiltily, Syafiqah turned towards the door, checking to see that she had bolted it. She was excited, but a little wary too, lest her mother see what she was reading. Syafiqah had the distinct feeling that her mother would not approve. She turned her eyes back to the page she was reading.

Ignoring the fact that ‘xanthous’ was not in her English dictionary, Syafiqah skipped over the word intending to look it up on the Internet, at school. She did not want to stop the flow of her reading worrying about strange, exotic-sounding words.

Syafiqah stared at the book page, and then read the paragraph over again. ‘Coo,’ she said quietly to herself. Then she read it for a third time, just in case she had misread it the other two times. ‘Phew,’ she said as she read on.

Syafiqah stared at the book. Her heart was racing; she was scared and excited, scared to be caught reading such material, but also more than a little excited by the words. Once more, she checked the door, then turned to her bedroom window and made sure that the curtains were closed. With her heart sounding in her ear, she read more.

That was it.

As Syafiqah read, she noticed that the page opposite the one she was on had been torn out. The numbering jumped from page 82, the page she was on, to page 85. It was obvious to her that the story ended somewhere between those pages, and there was more than a little disappointment showing in her face with this momentous realisation. With some annoyance, Syafiqah sellotaped the yellowing fragment of book to the base of her bottom drawer in her chest of drawers, believing it to be safe there.

Later, as Syafiqah was at the back of the kitchen, helping her mother place the pinching pegs out onto the rinsed washing, on their makeshift washing line, she turned to the older woman.

‘Mak,’

‘Yes Adik,’

‘Where can I get a copy of an old book?’

My apartment in Singapore is immaculate. All the walls are clean and white, except for the one with the naked screw sticking out of it, where I took the wedding photo down. I’m the one who took the picture down; I know what that screw is doing there. But every day it catches my eye, and my brain needs to reassure itself again that the aberration on the wall isn’t a threat, a spider or a cockroach, a thing-that-shouldn’t-be-there. The broad windows sparkle, the pale grey-and-white marble floor shines so well it reflects perfect rectangles of sky. Now and then, the Singapore Air Force flies its planes overhead, and the reflection of the tiny fighters mimics running cockroaches so well I always speed over to see if I need to stamp on them, just in case.

Once, the shouldn’t-be-there thing was bigger. Much bigger.

I’d had my swim and my shower, and was making my usual undressed trip from my bedroom to my kitchen for some juice and yoghurt. I enjoy the cold marble on my feet and the hot sun on my belly and butt as I move through the room. I like to air-dry.

I’d forgotten the building was being painted. Three dark men, South Indians or maybe Bangladeshis, were standing on a suspended platform, staring at me through my living room window. I stopped to think: go to kitchen for food but get stuck there until they descend to paint the lower floors? Or retreat to bedroom and return clothed but still naked in their eyes?

I turned and retreated, but I’d had a good look at them in my moment of indecision. One was so shocked his heavy lower lip hung open, practically flapping in the breeze. One looked wicked to the core. One stared calmly, apparently unruffled, with something just a little fierce around the eyes. As I walked back into the bedroom I felt a strange urge to let these three chocolate men in through the window, into the refrigerated air of my home, so that they wouldn’t melt.

I dressed in a khaki skirt and T-shirt and crossed the living room again, aware of the men’s shapes suspended behind the couch but not looking at them. Once in the kitchen, I fought the urge to close the door, since I couldn’t stay there forever. The alternative was to close the living room curtains. I spooned out my yoghurt and poured my juice, left the kitchen to put them on the dining table, and crossed the living room to the window. I went to the corner where the curtain begins and pulled it across. When I arrived in front of the painters though, I had to stop.

I’d never come this close to a foreign labourer before, window or no window. I’d bought vegetables and ginger from shopkeepers in Little India, but those Indians weren’t new to Singapore, or temporary. My gas man is a Chinese Singaporean named Jacky Chan, who complains of having no girlfriends while the movie star has so many. My plumber is a Malay Singaporean named Rosli, who prays in the mosque near my apartment and appears to have no idea that his ring tone is actually the tune to Hava Negila.

I pass foreign labourers in the car and glimpse them digging roadside ditches or pruning the magnificent fecund trees that divide Singapore’s expressways. In the evening rush hour, I see them being returned to their sleeping quarters in the backs of open trucks, even when it rains. They have the richest, silkiest hair in the country, and the best hairstyles. They have the roundest muscles. They trump the bespectacled locals for sex appeal. But we don’t meet, and we don’t talk.

They were so funny, this trio of strangers with paintbrushes. They were working on the stretch of stone under the window, so I could see them from their shoulders up, and their heads were roughly level with my breasts. That’s where Mr Flappy Mouth was looking. The devil in the middle was talking, smiling, flashing his white teeth, gesticulating; I understood he was trying to convince me not to close the curtain. The third worker continued to consider me calmly. Even when I looked him straight in the eye.

He’s the one who came to the door at lunchtime.

He didn’t take off his shoes and make ‘may-I-come in?’ motions. He stood and stared at me again.

“Hello,” I said.

“You offend me,” he said. “I am a married man.”

“What? It’s my apartment.”

“Cover yourself,” he said.

“I am covered.”

“Cover yourself all day,” he said. “Every day. Everywhere.” Then he turned to walk back to the elevator. Turning around released the body odour from his clothes. He stank so badly it made my nose itch. It wasn’t a street-person stink; it was stewed spices and garlic oozing through his skin on waves of sweat. It touched me that he held his head so high while smelling like he was fermenting.

“Wait a minute,” I demanded, wanting revenge.

He turned.

“Was your marriage arranged?”

He nodded.

“Were you allowed to see your wife before you married her?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it have been nice to see her through a window first?” His head started back as if I had thrust something at him-a snake, or a burning torch-and he turned the corner.

As I prepared my seminar outline that afternoon-I give a kick-ass workshop entitled “PowerPoint Perfection”-I kept thinking about the guys at the window. They live so far from their families if they are married and from potential partners if they are not. I just assumed that they were constantly randy. You can easily get that impression from their curly eyelashes and proud noses. They look imperious, ready to command a woman’s favour, even as they inhabit the lowest of the lower echelons of Singapore’s workers.

I never expected to be anything less than desired, particularly by guys from the sub-continent. Hindi movies make it clear that they’re not afraid of the bigger girl. And now here’s this guy telling me I’ve got it wrong. All afternoon, as I was getting the timing right on the section of my presentation entitled ‘Understanding the Human Attention Span’, I was thinking this guy must, from time to time, let his mind travel beyond the shores of his wife’s body. But I made myself drop the subject when it started feeling like that cliched argument you listen to at every third or fourth cocktail party in Singapore, the one about the superiority of arranged marriages or love marriages. Not only are these discussions boring, but I’m divorced so I’ve got no leg to stand on in either camp.

I didn’t plan to pursue the subject, with myself or anyone else, but in the early afternoon of the next day, I was walking back to my building from the parking lot when I passed the trio from my window napping on newspapers on the grass by the entrance. Well, the other two were napping. The offended one had his eyes open, and I stopped and looked down into them. I wondered if he’d been thinking about me.

“Why are you not married?” he asked after a moment.

I thought about it. “I’m too tall,” I told him.

He laughed. He actually guffawed. The wicked one’s eyes rolled a little, but he didn’t wake up. Mr Flappy kept on drooling into the sports section.

“Aren’t you lonely?” he asked. His consonants sounded as if he were bouncing them off rubber.

“Not really. Aren’t you?”

His face clouded over, and he looked away.

“Maybe you have pictures of your wife with you.”

He shook his head slightly.

“What about of other women?”

“Stop,” he said, and turned onto his side, facing away from me. Like my husband used to, at the end of a bad day.

I went inside. I hadn’t swum that morning because I’d been in meetings, pitching my workshop, so I hurried back downstairs in my Speedo, testing myself to see whether walking past him in a swimsuit and towel would make me feel ashamed.

He wasn’t there, which made me angry. I did twice as many laps as usual, took a bath, and had a cup of tea standing naked at the living room window.

Once I’d calmed down, though, I was ready to let it go again. He and the boys moved on to Block D, I shot up to Hong Kong to deliver my two-day intensive seminar to the sales team of a major clothing manufacturer, our paths didn’t cross. Then, when I got back, I saw him, coming out of the men’s toilet by the pool as I was approaching to do laps. When he saw me, he looked like he wanted to turn around, but pulled himself together. We walked toward each other and stopped.

“Hello,” I said. I had wanted to sound a bit cold, but it came out warm.

I was happy to see him.

“Hello.”

“Nearly finished with the painting?”

“No. It is ongoing,” he said formally.

“That’s work, isn’t it? It goes on.”

“You are not working.”

“I do work.”

“Sometimes.”

“It pays nicely. And I’m only supporting myself.”

“You are completely alone.”

“With my thoughts.”

He nearly smiled. We were quiet for so long that we either had to say goodbye or open a new subject.

“You went to university, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Technical college.”

“And what did you study?”

“Electricity.”

“Uh-huh? So, tell me, when you were studying, did they give you diagrams of electrical connections to help you understand?”

“Of course.”

“Pictures of women also help you understand.”

If his skin hadn’t been so dark, I’m sure I would have seen him colour in anger.

“We were having a nice conversation. Why did you ruin it?”

“We were having a boring conversation,” I said. “Think about it. Excuse me.”

I went around him and padded over to the pool. As I dove in and started to pull myself through the water, I had to wonder if I shouldn’t be a bit more respectful of his culture, a little more gentle with his sensibilities. But a few laps later I concluded that I was really thinking of his wife. I married a prude myself. They need lessons.

I was ready, then, when he appeared at the end of the pool as I approached for a turn. I stopped, and he asked me, looking straight down his nose, “What is it you want?”

I told him without hesitation: “I want to be your sexy photos.” He looked confused.

“Like in a magazine?” I said. “Do you understand what I mean?”

“I understand. I understand,” he said. Then he turned and left, pulling at his lip, looking at the ground.

“Wait!” I shouted.

He stopped without looking around.

“More like in a temple. Like in a Tantric temple.” He turned his head to speak to me over his shoulder.

“You know Tantra?”

“I went to an exhibit in a museum. I went twice actually.” It was a few seconds before he walked off again.

I was so excited by what I was proposing that I swam for longer than usual again. It wasn’t until I got in the elevator to go back home that I felt like the complete idiot I was. The headline behind my eyes read: SUPER-SIZED WHITE WOMAN OFFERS EDUCATION AND INSPIRATION TO INDIAN ELECTRICIAN, under which hung the tag line: He’s studied the Kama Sutra, lets her down lightly. I was red with horror at myself from forehead to shoulders by the time I closed my apartment door behind me. I should stick to multimedia presentations. I should go back to the States where we’re all as full of ourselves as I am.

And then the doorbell rings. This time I’m not at all prepared that it’s him; I’m sure I look just like his pal Mr Flappy when I open the door.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

He nods.

A beatific image forms itself in my head, and I know what to do. “Follow me,” I tell him, and lead him to the bathroom.

My bathroom is small, but pretty. You enter through narrow double doors and are facing the sink and mirror. Next to the sink is the toilet. If you sit on the toilet, you are facing the shower, which has two walls of tile and two walls of Plexiglas. I ask the painter to wait outside the door until I’m ready, and close the doors behind me.

Once I’ve stripped off my swimsuit, I brush out my wet hair so that it hangs down my back, and feel the need to adorn myself. I remember the Tantric statues at the Smithsonian-not only for their buxom figures, their hips cocked to rock against their consorts, and their peaceful, joyful eyes-

but also for the detail of their accessories. They were garlanded, with strings of beads or flowers which rested on the upper slopes of their breasts and hung around their rounded bellies, below the navel and above the yoni. I’ve never in my life seen stone breathe so forcefully.

I start putting on my jewellery, all of it. All my rings, all my bracelets, all my necklaces, pearls, Swarovski, gold and silver chains, and a long, green, beaded belt which I tie around my hips, the feel of which excites me more than a hand could right then.

I step into the shower, then tell him he can come in.

The painter sees where I am and comes to stand in front of the toilet, just a few feet from me. I’m a little nervous, but before I turn on the water, I remember what I teach all my clients about delivering their presentation with confidence and commitment. I look him straight in the eye, surprised to see that this is where he is staring at me as well. I hold up my hands so that he will focus on them, then lay them on my neck and glide them down my body, over my breasts and belly, just as I would have if I’d been allowed to touch the museum sculptures I desired so much.

When I turn the water on, I keep it tepid so that the Plexiglas won’t steam up and obscure me. The cool water assures that my nipples will stay erect and my breasts rounded. I soap myself luxuriously but naturally, thinking more of my own pleasure than of his, teaching him about women, about women alone. Then I take the showerhead off its hook to rinse myself. I pull my left leg up and press my knee against the wall, opening myself completely for view. For the first time in my life, I’m convinced beyond any doubt that my pussy is something sacred, something to be adored, worthy of sculpture and ceremony.

The painter thinks so as well. He sits on the toilet seat and opens his trousers, untangling his hard-on from his flimsy boxer shorts and letting his cock stand on view, like a statue, like me, before starting to stroke himself.

He watches as I move the showerhead all over my head and body. I want to touch myself as well, but I don’t. The sculptures don’t, so I don’t. They just look healthy and contented, so I am too.

The painter’s climax is a quiet event. I know that when I experience the pleasure of climax, my face shows pain. Ecstasy as excruciation. But his face remains calm, and his eyes stay on my body.

Whatever he feels when he comes, I certainly feel released from something.

While he cleans himself up, I turn off the shower and stand inside it, the light sparkling on the wet links and crystals, until he is finished. He fastens his trousers again, and stands in front of me with the clear door between us.

“Thank you,” he says seriously, just like a student would, and leaves.

Once I’m dry and wrapped in my towel, I go out to the living room, but he’s gone.

I don’t expect to see the painter again, and I don’t mind. He turned out to be a should-be-there thing. Like the screw. It’s an aberration, but it’s useful. I can put up a new picture whenever I want.

After removing her bra, Michelle slowly slipped off her more reluctant panties, then stood there holding both. She looked over at Dr Narain sheepishly, the underwear dangling from her hand.

“Anywhere,” Narain said with a generous shrug. “Just throw them over there.”

Michelle turned and tossed first the bra, then the panties onto a tawny brown plush chair squeezed next to the bedroom dresser. She then turned back to Dr Narain, arms folded lengthwise across her front, as if to attempting to cover her breasts and crotch-though very little of either was covered.

“It’s more comfortable here than in my office, isn’t it?” said Dr Narain.

“Not as cold, I think.” A knowing smile filtered in. “In any sense.”

“Yes,” Michelle giggled. “It is much more comfortable here. Very much.” She laughed again, then let her arms fall to her sides. After all, this was hardly the first time Narain had seen her naked body. The only difference was that this time they were in the doctor’s bedroom, not the office. After exchanging conspiratorial smiles with Narain, Michelle folded her arms behind her back, shifted her feet, threw her head back and posed, showing off her work-in-progress body.

Narain beamed, stepped forward and started caressing the edges of that delicate Chinese face, finally streaming skilled fingers through the patient’s hair. “Admiring your work?” Michelle asked with a nervous smile.

“Admiring your beauty,” Narain replied, with a more confident smile.

Michelle closed her eyes and leaned her head back further, allowing Narain to caress her more easily. She did, indeed, feel comfortable in the hands of this doctor. From that very first time she stepped into the office and saw Narain, she felt surprisingly at ease, glad that she had taken her friend Tania’s advice and sought out this particular specialist.

Michelle had been going to Dr Narain for just over a year now. She had started with botox treatments, then went on to collagen infusions, before moving up to minor surgery to give her the double eyelid that all affluent Asian women seem required to sport these days. Only recently had she decided to ask Narain about more radical procedures: body sculpting, breast enlargement, vaginal tightening. Though still anxious about this next stage, she was nonetheless determined to press ahead with it.

Narain had moved from stroking Michelle’s hair and face and was now skimming the tips of well-trained fingers across the patient’s neck. “Yes, you can use a little bit of work here. Don’t worry, we’ll get these lines gone completely. Very simple. We can do it next week at the office, if you like.”

“Botox?” Michelle asked. Narain gave another generous, reassuring smile, along with a shake of the head. “No, that won’t work here. What we’re looking at is just a short deep laser treatment. Fifteen minutes, tops, for this lovely neck of yours. And no down time really.”

Michelle nodded, just as Narain started grazing fingers lightly over her shoulders, before slowly easing them down to the outer curve of her breasts.

Michelle again closed her eyes and took long, deep breaths.

“I think your breasts are just… wonderful,” Narain told her. “They are so right for you. Why so many women here want those big, lumpy Western appendages, like the things poor Pamela Anderson has to struggle around with, I just don’t understand. It’s terrible.”

“Yes, I agree, Doctor. But my husband says they’re too small-

especially for the wife of someone in his position. He’d like something a little closer to Pamela’s problem.” During this exchange, Narain’s hands had cupped Michelle’s petite breasts and were now fondling them gently, working the palms dexterously along the soft, pliant curves.

“Well then, whatever… But like I’ve told you already, I think your husband is an absolute idiot.” For emphasis on this point, Narain started fondling the breasts with vigour. Michelle breathed deeply, bit her lower lip, then whispered out her reply.

“You are absolutely right. He is an idiot, A-list idiot actually, but he pays all the bills. Including all your bills.”

“For which, I am eternally grateful,” Narain answered, then leaned over and placed an eager mouth to Michelle’s nipples. First, the doctor’s lips gently grazed against the broad aureole and nipples, already hardened, before an ardent tongue started flicking against them. Soon, lips and tongue both began sucking in soft, measured pulls, as Michelle eagerly lost control.

She started running her hands wildly through the dark tangles of Narain’s hair, then, as Narain nuzzled upwards and started planting deep kisses on the neck, she dropped her hands to the doctor’s hips and rubbed vigorously, before gliding the hands around to clutch Narain’s well-toned butt. Narain responded instantly: the doctor’s crotch was pressed tightly against Michelle’s. As Narain took Michelle’s face and the two kissed fully on the mouth, their loins started grinding rhythmically against each other.

Then, as the tongues lashed in slow swirls upon each other, the twists of the loins grew longer, slower, more charged with purpose.

When they broke to seize a few breaths, Michelle gave a light push and stepped back. “Maybe we’d better change tactics here, or you’re going to have to rush those pants of yours right over to the dry-cleaners. And I have no idea how easy it is to get out those kinds of spots.” Narain again flashed that soft, reassuring smile. “To hell with it: I’ll just keep them as a souvenir of a very wonderful time in my life.” As Michelle grinned shyly, Narain leaned over and planted a quick, affectionate kiss on her lips. “But you’re right; it is unfair that I’m always ‘in uniform’ while you’re in various stages of undress.” The doctor then turned and indicated the bed with a theatrical flourish of the hand. “Anyway, it’s time we moved on to the next phase of the examination. So… shall we move to the… examination table, Mrs Tay?”

With an enthusiastic nod, Michelle padded over to the bed. Narain, already barefoot, followed just behind.

“Oh, I really like this examination table,” Michelle said, climbing onto the bed and sitting up, as her shapely legs (no work needed there) slid back and forth along the length of the bed. “Especially the 40-thread cotton sheets you’ve got on it.” Narain nodded. “Much better than those cold, metal stirrups in your office.”

“All in the interests of making the patient more comfortable, of course,” Narain said, starting to undo those pants Michelle had been so concerned about.

“Of course,” Michelle echoed, watching captivated as the doctor shed the other articles of clothing. Within moments, all of Narain’s clothing had been dropped to the floor, and the doctor spread both arms out like wings, showing off that very enviable body.

Although they’d had sort-of-sex several times in the surgery office, Michelle had never before seen Narain completely naked. She now found herself thoroughly aroused by the doctor’s well-sculpted form.

“God, you’ve got a great body there.” She smiled impishly, like a schoolgirl having happened upon an adult’s locked-up secret. “Did you go under the knife yourself to get there? Or get lasered, or whatever you can do these days?”

“That, my dear, is a professional secret. It would be a gross violation of the plastic surgeon’s code to reveal such details about a patient-any patient.” Michelle laughed. “And isn’t it maybe a teensy, weensy violation of the surgeon’s code to have sex with a patient-one still undergoing treatment?”

“Hmm,” replied Narain, “Now that you mention it, I think there is something about that in the code. But we don’t want to violate too many parts of the code all at once now, do we?”

Narain had by this point shuffled to the edge of the bed. Reaching down with the skill, tact and delicacy of a doctor starting a probe, Narain took Michelle’s right foot, raised it about six inches, then-while staring right into her eyes-started stroking the sole. “Now, what about these? Is your husband satisfied with your feet?” Narain started running two deft fingers along the easy curve of the foot. “Sure he doesn’t want the arches raised a little, perhaps lowered a little?”

“No, I think he’s fine with the feet,” Michelle answered, as her eyelids slid closed in enjoyment of this impromptu massage.

“Oh really? So he doesn’t want me to add a few dimples to the toes?

Make them even more delectable?” At this, the doctor raised Michelle’s foot slightly higher and started sucking on those toes. This sent Michelle into a slow spin of ecstasy, which only intensified as Narain turned the foot gently and started slowly licking the sole. The doctors’ tongue flowed along the pinkish skin, paused to give one spot special treatment, flowed again. In muted rapture, Michelle herself raised the other foot and rubbed it against the doctor, from the strong chin down to just below the waist.

Narain put the two feet together, kissed each one, then slowly lowered them back onto the bed. Michelle looked up with keen anticipation. When Narain answered this look with a feigned quizzical expression, Michelle reached for the doctor. Smiling, Narain took her hand, caressed it, then slipped fully onto the bed, next to her. With head raised, supported by the left arm, the doctor gave a slow, appreciative scrutiny along the entire length of her body. It was clear that Narain took both pride and delight in attending to Michelle and all her needs.

“So, Doctor, do you think there’s hope for me?”

“Oh… much hope; much, much hope,” the surgeon replied, allowing a hand to roll slowly over the slope of Michelle’s thighs. “It’s just a matter of determining what we want and then, you know, setting out the proper body drafts.”

“Body drafts?” Michelle was obviously amused by the term.

“Yes, my darling-body drafts. We examine the basic material, sketch out a working topography, then decide what we wish to create out of that. The actual surgery is the hard part, of course; taking body drafts is much easier and, I have to say, much more fulfilling.” At this, Narain leaned over as if to kiss her, but suddenly stopped short and delivered a playful tickle instead.

Michelle, of course, laughed and in the middle of her laughter managed to say, “Alright, Doctor, let’s see how you carry out your drafts.” She pointed a mock warning finger at the beaming face. “And I expect a thorough job here.”

“Of course; you should expect nothing less from me. Let’s see: we can easily sculpt a more svelte curvature here…” the doctor’s hand slid up the thigh, all the way to the place where it met the other, lingering there a few moments “… and here.” Narain now began squeezing the hips, which Michelle had long considered too well padded.

“And there’s no problem at all shaping this luscious part.” Narain had just swung one leg over the patient and was now straddling Michelle as the trained surgeon’s hands did a quick draft of the buttocks, kneading the soft flesh as if about to sculpt it into a splendidly taut masterwork. Michelle elevated her hips slightly, allowing the doctor’s strong fingers to slip in and then run along the crack of the ass from top to bottom. The fingers gently rotated as they made their way down the soft cleft. Like that first time it had happened at the office, Michelle was amazed at how much pleasure she could take from this ‘disgusting’ manoeuvre-when done by someone who obviously knew what they were doing.

Still arched over Michelle’s eager body, supported by elbows and knees, Narain bent down until moistened lips hovered maybe an inch away from the breasts. “And there are just… so many possibilities with these beauties here.” The tongue, the teeth, the lips now swept all over Michelle’s breasts, sending the patient into deeper ecstasy.

“And as for that vaginal tightening your idiot husband wants…”

“Yes, Doctor, yes-s-s?”

“Well, let’s explore the territory in question.”

As Narain said this, two skilled fingers were already slipping inside Michelle, testing pleasure spots Michelle herself had somehow always neglected until Narain had taught her a month and a half ago. The very willing patient rose slightly and began swivelling on these two fingers as Narain, now repositioned, eased the same two fingers from the other hand in and began rotating vigorously in close rhythm to Michelle’s gyrations.

Her eyes shut tightly, fingers squeezed into Narain’s shoulders, Michelle thrust herself on and around the fingers until, within maybe twenty seconds, she came. Then, clutching the doctor’s wrists, she pushed down, intensifying the pleasure as she swelled into a second orgasm. Oh God, I always come with Dr Narain, she thought-even those crazy times in the office, where it was so cold and rushed, with a pack of other patients waiting impatiently outside.

Always came. She told herself it was simply because Narain was a doctor, a surgeon trained in handling those most intricate-and intimate-

parts of the body that she could… She didn’t dare to try on any other explanation for Narain’s unfailing success at bringing her to orgasm. After another few moments, Michelle opened her eyes and peered with a swirl of love-lust at this highly skilled healer.

“And your husband wants this lovely passage tightened?” The doctor’s brow furrowed in mock bewilderment. “I don’t know. It certainly works for me.” The fingers started churning around again energetically. “And most important, Michelle darling, it clearly works for you. Oh yes: definitely.” The fingers still there inside the patient, Narain bent over to kiss Michelle gently on the lips. As their lips brushed against each other, Michelle grabbed the back of the doctor’s head, pulled it in closer and turned that gentle kiss into a long, urgent, passionate embrace.

At the end of the kiss, Narain rose off Michelle slightly, pulling the fingers back until just the tips were still inside. As those tips started rotating gently, Michelle was filled with a fierce urge to give the doctor as much pleasure as she had just taken, more if possible… yes, more and more-for both of them. More.

In high arousal, she pulled herself up slightly and reached out-reached out to take Dr Narain’s breasts, pulling at those gorgeous tits, much larger than her own, then rose and, while still massaging the breasts, started sucking desperately at one dark nipple, then the other. As she sucked, she also moved her left hand to the doctor’s own vagina and started stroking along the moist slit, caressing its cushion of tightly whorled hair.

As Michelle pulled back to see the mounting rapture on her physician’s face, she managed to push this larger woman down on her back and whispered,

“So, Dr Narain, do you like the taste of your own medicine?” The doctor put her hand over Michelle’s and started pressing hard against it. “Oh yes, yes indeed. I think I’d even enjoy a little overdose, if you don’t mind.”

By now, Michelle had slipped her own fingers into Narain. She bowed lower and before starting to trace her tongue along the sweet curve of the doctor’s lovely left breast, she replied, “Well, we’ll give it all we can. But you’ll have to tell me if I’m doing everything right. After all, you’re the doctor, Dr Narain.”

“Please,” she murmured, “call me Vivien.”

Michelle looked up from the robust mound of the doctor’s breasts.

“Alright then… Vivien. You know, Vivien, I’m beginning to see just what you mean about the fun of taking body drafts.”

Eduardo Cendrars Queral paid little attention to the usual landing announcements made by the flight crew as the Cebu Pacific Air jet began its descent over Mactan Island, its colourful yellow-and-orange livery flashing brightly in the tropical sunshine.

The Spaniard was more interested in watching Mi-chan’s reactions to the sea of green that was becoming visible as the plane began to descend below the clouds. Her hand was resting on his thigh, hidden by the salmon-pink newsprint of the financial paper which he had lowered rather quickly over his lap when, at 25,000 feet, she had begun to worry and tease the head of his batuta with her elegant fingers.

His feet in their dark socks were still locked discreetly around one of her ankles; a delicate bare sole was pressed against his instep, exciting him even more than her pretty toes, which were curling softly as she caressed his foot lazily with them.

They were not the only couple on the flight in that kind of mood. After all, Cebu was a popular honeymoon destination, and the flight from Singapore was carrying the usual numbers of foreign newlyweds in every row.

However, Eduardo’s honeymoon in Cebu was not going to be a typical tourist’s luna de miel, either. For the first time in his life, he was bringing a wife to meet the Filipino side of the family. He was well into his forties, lean, and worldly; Mi-chan was only 23, and even more worldly than he was.

He was proud of her, and not only on account of her exotic Eurasian features and her pornographic curves; she had been educated well by the cousin who had raised her after she was orphaned. However, he had been thinking of the Filipino saying may tainga ang lupa, may pakpak ang balita even before they boarded the aircraft. ‘The earth itself has ears, and gossip has wings.’

For his bride was gloriously and healthily pregnant, already in her second trimester, and the first time the family had ever heard of her was approximately three weeks previously, when he had telephoned his grandfather in Cebu to inform him that he was about to enter into a civil marriage with a young Frenchwoman who lived in Singapore.

Acting on a gut feeling, Eduardo had taken a deep breath and mentioned to his lolo that Mi-chan was very young, and was rather obviously embarazada; at least four months along, to be precise.

I open the door of my flat and step into my living room. It suddenly looks small and depressing. And lifeless. In this little slot in the sky, I am nothing more than a claustrophobic pigeon. Depression rules me within these four walls, which seem to be inching closer day by day like a sinister army, a tightening noose. My tiny apartment is known by the number 15–75, which fills me with a deep longing for homes that had names, religions, moods, ghosts, personalities, attitude… Here the walls creep in, the furniture grows, the air rots and silence splits my head slooowly. My block is a giant filing cabinet. Of people filed away to be forgotten.

In the last few months after my estranged wife Nisha had got this job she would be travelling often, leaving me within these carnivorous walls to get hypnotised by the TV. Not that Nisha was great company; our home had become an art-house movie in the recent months, with monosyllables hanging in the air like the Sumatran haze. But she was a presence nevertheless. She was a scent, a grunt, a flash of colour, a shuffle of feet, a word, an incomplete line… We spoke through Post-it Notes on the fridge.

When the TV became unbearable I got drawn into the Internet. Like God, I had 108 names in the many chat rooms I stalked. Like God, I could become male, female, genderless. Like God, I felt powerful, omnipotent. But the topic was always the same. The people were always sick. And the world was such a fake. I soon got sick of it and wondered how anyone could be addicted to this cyber-madness.

Of course, there were the plus points of the Internet, like email and free pornography. But then again, my email account started receiving more and more spam than regular mails. Daily emails promised me fourteen inches of masculinity; all-I-can-eat Viagra; a thousand “sure-fire” ways to make money, lose weight, grow younger, get out of debt, etc. Even the pornography became boring. There are only so many ways the human anatomy can be arranged and juxtaposed. To me, the Internet was just a shooting star.

So when the television and the Internet died their deaths in me, I started wandering after work, in order to avoid the frozen shadows of home as much as possible. I drove past the seedy underbelly of Singapore: places like Geylang, Desker, or Changi Village where the transsexuals were prettier and curvier than the female prostitutes. But that was as far as I could go with those night creatures.

But the massage parlours, “health centres” as they were euphemistically called, were a different thing altogether. Since most of them were located in shopping malls, they bore a facade of respectability. My first such “healthy” experience was in a massage centre in the fourth floor of a shopping mall off Orchard Road. For almost a week, I had been loitering around the mall mustering up the courage to open that door of Passion Touch Health Centre.

On that night I had downed two pegs of whiskey at a nearby pub, so I had some courage flowing fast through my veins.

After spending twenty long minutes gazing at the lingerie on a mannequin in a boutique next to the health centre and getting some dirty looks from the boutique’s salesgirl in the process, I held my breath and turned the door knob of Passion Touch. The opening of the door immediately set off some kind of chime that startled me for a moment and made me want to run away. The brightly lit lobby, though small, was, to my surprise, quite plush and even pleasant. I had expected a dark and dingy place with women hanging in the shadows, smouldering cigarettes between their lips.

The cheerful old lady behind the reception desk was watching a Channel 8 Chinese drama from a small wall-mounted TV beside the door. She looked at me and gave me a very bright, “Hallowelcome.” She opened a register and asked me to write my name and identity card number. I hesitated for a moment, feeling suspicious as to whether this was some kind of a blackmail racket. “No worry, lah,” the lady said, slapping my arm. “You so malu, hor.

Everyone write, see. You go any health centre, also write.” She flipped the pages to show me lines and lines of scribbles, most of them unintelligible.

I scribbled “D. Nair,” and for my IC number, I jumbled up three digits.

Thankfully, she didn’t bother to ask for my identity card.

“You first time, haah?” She gave me a motherly smile.

“First time in Singapore,” I said proudly, pushing out my chest and placing my arms on my hips. “I go London, Paris, New York, Bangkok.

Everywhere I go massage,” I said, looking at her over the tip of my nose.

“You tourist, haah?”

I nodded impatiently.

“So how come you have IC number?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Um… I… I… That’s my passport number,” I blurted out finally.

She nodded understandingly, then added, “For tourists, thirty dollars extra, hor. So, seventy dollars.”

I cursed myself under my breath and placed a fifty and two tens on the desk.

“Wait, hor. I call masseuse,” she said, putting on a toothy smile. As I waited, I took a good look at the lobby. In a niche in the wall were three large porcelain statues of Fu, Lu and Shou, the Taoist gods for happiness, wealth and longevity. They seemed to be looking at me with a what-a-stupid-boy-you-are expression. I ignored them and shifted my gaze to the high Chinese altar made of blood-red rosewood on which stood a few burning joss sticks emitting a thick scent and lazy fumes that rose up to the ceiling. Behind those joss sticks was a large statue, also porcelain, of Qwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, sitting on a giant lotus and holding a small vase on her lap. On her face was an expression of such equanimity that it disturbed me and prompted me to look away.

Within minutes, another woman who looked like the old hag’s elder sister appeared. The woman was fat, ugly as well.

“She, Jane, your masseuse,” the reception hag told me brightly, pointing to the fat woman.

I looked at her, wide-eyed, from top to bottom. “I… ermm… I… um… Can you get me someone younger? If you please?” I asked politely, while-in my mind-I said, “She Jane or maybe Jane’s elephant, but I no Tarzan, lor. Gimme someone young and soft for my young and soft muscles, alamak!”

“She vely good! Vely vely experience,” the receptionist said.

“I can see she is ‘vely experienced.’ But please… No offence… but, I want someone younger,” I said firmly.

The two exchanged something fast in Hokkien. Jane looked at me blankly and disappeared inside. “Hokay,” the receptionist said finally, “I give you vely chio ger. Vely young. But cost thirty dollar extra, hokay?” For a moment, I was shocked and didn’t know what to say. But having come this far, I was not going back without the “passion touch” of young, girlie hands. I nodded, halfheartedly, and placed three crisp ten-dollar notes on the desk. She pocketed them and said, “Good. You wait for thirty minutes, hor. She no here. I telephone,” she picked up the phone.

“You go in. Make comfortable. Sauna, TV all inside. Jane show you.

Jane make Chinese tea for you,” she said, covering the mouthpiece.

Jane appeared again and led me through a narrow corridor, which had numbered doors on either side. She opened door Number 8 for me and handed me a large, freshly laundered white towel. “You take shower, change towel and wait. You want moe towel, inside cubberd. I bling Chinese tea.

You want sauna, TV, you go end colido, turn light,” she said, motioning with her right hand.

The room was small and dimly lit with a clean single bed in the middle.

There was a cupboard placed against one of the walls and another door, which I guessed led to the attached bathroom. Although the air was stale and reeked of dampness, the room was clean. I closed the door, undressed and, after wrapping the towel around me, stepped into the bathroom. I was initially a bit reluctant in touching the towel-you never know what things it may have been used to wipe off. But then, it appeared clean and crisp and felt nice in my hands. Luckily, there was a fresh bar of soap in the bathroom; the tiny type you find in hotels.

I had a leisurely bath; the water was hot and refreshing. By the time I stepped out of the bathroom, there was a cup of hot Chinese tea waiting for me. I hung the wet towel in the bathroom towel rack, took a dry one from the cupboard, and wrapped it around my midriff. The hot tea helped in warming me up since I was finding the air conditioning inside the room too chilly for my skin.

By the time I finished my tea, there was a knock on the door, and before I could say “Come in!”, the door swung open and in came one of the prettiest Chinese things I have seen in Singapore. At that moment, all my feelings of having been fleeced out of my hard-earned money vanished in a trice. She could have been mistaken for a Shenton Way babe except for her skirt, which showed too much thigh for a bank teller.

She crushed her cigarette butt in the ashtray and gave me a sweet,

“Hello-how-are-you-I-am-Linda-oil-or-powder?”

“What?” I gaped at her.

“Oil or powder. For massage, you want oil or powder?” she replied with amused eyes.

“Oil,” I said.

From the cupboard, she took out a bottle of baby oil and gestured for me to lie on the bed. I lay on my stomach and became like a lump of chapathi dough in her hands. She started kneading me, and I started needing her. Ooh so badly! I moaned like I had never moaned before. “Aaaahhh… that’s it…

yesssss… ooohh… a little to the left… that’s the point… hmmm…” And she was going like, “Good muscles… not too much… not too little…”

“What’s your name?” she asked casually.

“James Bond,” I replied. She giggled.

She removed my towel with an expert flick and started on my buttocks and thighs.

“You married?”

“James Bond’s not married,” I replied.

She pinched my butt.

“Ow! Hope I don’t have to pay extra for that.”

She giggled again. “You’re a joker… You’re also a liar.”

“And you speak good English for a Passion Touch girl.”

“Was a remisier once upon a time… with the Midas touch… earning big bucks…” She applied light karate chops on my thighs with both her hands.

“Aaah… that feels good…” I said, letting off a sigh of pleasure.

“Now a masseur… with Passion Touch… earning big fucks,” she said with a chuckle and quickly added, “Have no regrets anyway. Now turn over.” I turned over and lay on my back. She deftly laid the towel over my middle. I looked at her straight. The dim ceiling light was behind her head and I couldn’t make out the look on her face. She leaned closely to massage my chest after sprinkling oil on it. Her hair fell on my face. I could smell her shampoo mingled with a faint scent of sweat. Garlic sweat.

“So what’ll it be? Hand job, blow, sandwich or the full course?” she asked; her tone was very professional.

“Sandwich,” I said confidently, although I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. I felt like a snack anyway.

“That’ll be forty dollars extra, okay,” she said softly.

“That’s one expensive sandwich!” I thought, and swallowed spit. But I didn’t want to give her the impression I was a cheapskate. So I nodded my head impatiently and asked her to get on with it.

She lifted my towel like a magician lifts the cloth over the caged bird.

She took one look at my manhood and said, “Now I know why you called yourself James Bond: that’s a nought-nought-seven-inch — nought-nought much!” she giggled.

“Nought-nought little either,” I said crossly.

“Just kidding. Don’t worry, you’re average,” she said, taking off her clothes. In no time, she was stark naked. She wore absolutely nothing under her natty outfit. She had a slim body with perky tits-very playful, like twin puppies, jiggling at the slightest movement, topped by tiny cherry nipples.

Her skin was like milk.

She unscrewed the spout on the bottle of oil, poured a generous amount on my chest and applied it thickly all over. Then she handed me the bottle and said, “Now it’s your turn.”

I raised myself to a sitting position and poured a handful of oil into my cupped hand. I then applied the oil on her chest and stomach. She gently pushed me back onto the bed, whispering, “Lie, you liar.” She then lay on me, skin on oily skin, like two slithering snakes. “No sex, okay. Only touch touch. For sex, my rate is a hundred.” Hundred bucks for a blasted fuck! I knew my wallet had only a fifty-dollar note. Not this time anyway, I thought. “Not that I don’t have the money, but I think I will pass this time,” I said.

She looked at me but said nothing. She hugged me tight and continued rubbing her body on mine. Her breath came hot on my lips. I could catch the whiff of Fisherman’s Friend mints, apple and cinnamon, I guess. Her hair fell around my face like a black curtain. My whole body tingled with sensations never felt before. Primal moans rose in my throat. Down below, I was hard as rock. Feeling my hardness, she asked breathlessly, “Do you want sex?”

“Do you… take Visa?” I asked between gasps.

“Cash… only cash,”

“But…”

“Yeah… many others do, but we don’t… Never mind,” she said, getting up, “There’s always a next time.”

“But where’s my sandwich?” I asked innocently as she was putting her clothes back on.

She looked at me blankly before saying, “Oh! I forgot to tell you-

usually a sandwich massage is an oily guy between two girls. But I didn’t think you wanted to lie on top of Jane. After all, you’re only James Bond, not Tarzan,” she chuckled.

“Oh yes-the sandwich massage!” I exclaimed. Suddenly things were a lot clearer.

She gave me another blank look and said, “My time is up. Forty dollars please.” A month later, I rang up Passion Touch and asked for Linda.

“She go Austalia. Myglate myglate. With ang moh boyflend,” the reception hag said.

This is the truth, the absolute truth, cross my heart and hope to die, as true as I’m sitting here. I can barely believe it myself, but it happened and it happened to me. The name’s Adrian, better not tell you my surname because it’s a small world. A bloody small world as it happens. I’m a stockbroker; usually I deal in shares, but I dabbled in bonds for a few years. Just on my way to my new job, and the company’s paying, which is why I’m up here in Business Class and not in the back of the plane with the plebs.

I’ve done all right over the last few years, though I have had my share of setbacks, truth be told. I worked for Barings before they went bust, even worked in the same office as Nick Leeson for a while. Nice lad, was Nick, just got a bit out of his depth, that’s all.

I worked for Lehman Brothers for two years, not long before they went out of business, and I was with a subsidiary of RBS in Hong Kong when they had to be bailed out by the British taxpayer. That’s why my mates they call me Jonah. They reckon I’m cursed. They’re joking, because I always make money for my bosses. Lots of money. I’m a rainmaker, that’s why. I bring in the business. When I move, most of my clients move with me. That’s what’s going to happen this time, as sure as night follows day. Most of them, anyway.

Years ago, I occasionally made trekking expeditions to Sabah in East Malaysia, a more intriguing state than those on the peninsula itself. These expeditions involved a few days’ walk in a wilderness, usually with a mountain to scramble up. At the end of such a trip, I found myself in Kota Kinabalu, staying in a more elaborate hotel than I normally bothered with.

Down in the basement, near the car-park area in the nethermost region of this grand establishment, was what was euphemistically termed a “health centre”.

I had not patronised such an establishment before and was not quite sure what to expect. The room was poorly lit, the effect intended obviously being a sombre tranquillity or, perhaps, seductive gloom. It contained a mattress and a washbasin and not much else. I undressed, except for my underpants, then lay down, as only seemed sensible. Eventually a smallish woman appeared; because of the dark, I couldn’t make out anything about her looks other than her size. In due course, as I grew more accustomed to the dim lighting and as we grew acquainted with each other, I came to discover she was a Filipina, working overseas like so many others.

This masseuse was a woman of around thirty with longish hair. It was difficult to judge her features because of the sombre ambiance, but her manner appeared stern, perhaps the consequence of reserve or shyness. Nonetheless, she gave my near-naked body a good hard look, especially the middle zone, and indicated that I should remove my underpants, which she presumably found more offensive than my genitalia. She then abruptly offered me coffee or tea. Thereafter, reluctantly emitting a few gruff pleasantries, she began to massage me, working a little indifferently with oil over most of my torso and limbs. Conversation was limited, partly because of mutual miscommunication and partly because the manner of this particular Filipina (her name, she reluctantly conceded, was Concepcion) was initially very serious, as if she were a doctor confronted with a terminal case. She did not seem very sure of either me or herself. Her voice sounded low, almost gravelly. I could hardly see her, even when I looked back over my shoulders, lying as I was in the typical massage position, face down on the mattress.

Concepcion set to work in a perfunctory manner, as if she were none too keen to touch human flesh. She avoided my shoulders, which happened to be sore and blistering from sunburn; not, as she told me afterwards, out of consideration for any pain I might have felt, but because she thought they might be infected. We talked a little about her life and family. She was divorced; divorced, moreover, with two youngish children who required a maid to look after them while she was at work. “Hundreds and hundreds a month,” she griped. Twisting my head over my shoulder, I could see her grimace. Concepcion leant forwards to judge my reaction to this disclosure.

Now I could see that she bore a slight scar at the corner of her mouth, as if she had been slashed by a knife. Perhaps reflecting on the injustices of the world, she lapsed into silence. Uncertain as to how matters would develop, I myself slipped into a doze.

I woke to feel a finger tracing a circle or two round my anus. A small, oily hand then moved forward a little to brush my testicles. Meeting with no opposition from me, the small hand began to knead them and then, increasingly emboldened, pushed further still to work on my male member, squeezing it more and more confidently as it responded and I lifted my body a little to accommodate this pleasant procedure. Suddenly it was clear to me that a new chapter was about to open in my sexual life, which had never proceeded in a smooth, unfolding manner but in fits and starts, like events in the quantum world, lurching randomly into sudden life and equally sudden annihilation.

Concepcion now seemed more urgent and interested. She suggested, though still nervously, that I might like something in addition to her halfhearted massaging of my back and shoulders. I turned to face her and asked what she had in mind. She made her offer of an extra, her special. This was to mouth my penis which, although it had originally met with her diffidence, was nonetheless erect. “But you must wear a condom,” she said, with the firmness of a primary-school teacher instructing a child. She then disappeared for what seemed a long time. Returning suddenly, she pointed to my trinity.

“You washed it just now?” she asked, pausing a moment. I nodded. Kneeling before me, she tried to unroll a condom onto the relevant part of my body, making a hash of the job. “Quick, you do it,” she said, giving me a small push with one hand while offering the rubber with the other.

I obliged and she started to work with her tongue. Abruptly changing her approach, she told me to lie down on my back, straddling me on all fours and swivelling her body around so that I was staring at her rear. She peered at me between her legs. “You do to me.”

“What?” I said.

“You…” She contorted her upside-down face, searching for the right word. We looked at each other for a few seconds, mutually non-plussed. She waggled her bottom and stuck out her tongue, making circular movements with her head. “Ah”, I said and focused on her backside, my nose level with her entry and exit points. Her anus, a few centimetres away, was pinkish-brown and puckered round the edge. It was neat and charming enough as far as anuses go, and apparently very clean, but I was not greatly attracted to the reciprocal tongue exercises she had proposed. “No,” I said. Peeking through her legs, her face registered an upside-down version of disappointment.

Anus-licking or something of that nature was apparently her particular domain, being relatively safe and uncomplicated.

I renegotiated for a more conventional mode of sexual expression, in which I could be more vigorously engaged.

The lady illustrated an extreme nervousness over actual intercourse: not repulsion or inhibition at the deed itself, but fear that someone would walk into the room which, following the perverse rule in these places, could not be locked. She was equally anxious that the business arrangement be carried out. “I haven’t done this before,” she announced breathlessly, meaning that she had never participated in full commercial sex. This surprised and slightly disconcerted me, as neither had I.

We embraced awkwardly in a standing position, but not without my somehow standing on one of her small feet. “Ouch,” said my partner, recoiling and then re-embracing. Almost immediately, she had a hasty afterthought and disappeared. She scurried across the room and put the cubicle’s pouffe against the door, first stuffing a towel underneath the door so that it would jam if anyone attempted to open it from the outside. This was a cautionary practice which I subsequently found to be near universal. She had obviously consulted her peers on this, even if she were feeling her way in a new field.

All this stumbling and bumbling did nothing to help me sustain my erection… My partner obliged by poking and pulling at my trinity until vigour was restored. She lay down on the mattress. “Quick,” she said again, hastily raising her short skirt and removing her knickers. We clumsily engaged after some more fumbling with limbs, clothes and organs. “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly, expelling me in a peremptory manner before wriggling away, “the sheet will be stained.” And indeed, the sheet was rucked up between us, part of our coital tangle.

She repositioned herself on the edge of the mattress so that the crucial zone was off the sheet and my lower limbs on the carpet. We started again.

Meanwhile, somebody was clunking something down the passageway and talking in a low voice; probably the cleaning lady dragging a vacuum cleaner.

“Oh,” she said, over my shoulder, “they’re coming in!” and ejected me once more. “No, its alright,” she said as the noise passed. “Quick, come back,” and she reinserted me.

We resumed our love-making which, despite her injunctions, was relatively prolonged. I had caught some of her nervousness and could not concentrate on the act. Also, my knees were getting sore from the friction from the carpet. “Can’t we use the mattress?” I asked. “Yes, but I am so worried,” said my partner. She pushed me away yet again and spread a towel, turning over to do so, and we re-engaged in that position. More indeterminate noises could be heard from outside the cubicle. Immediately, she squirmed and tried to say something about the door, but I held her tight despite her wriggling and, after some more confused communication, at long last consummation-at any rate, my consummation-was achieved.

“Phew,” Concepcion said, getting up immediately and looking relieved, as if she had delivered a speech at some important occasion, like a wedding or college speech day. She seemed quite glad that it was all over. She scuttled about, straightening the sheet and restoring her underwear and so forth. I laughed at her amateurishness. “If you find it all so terrifying, don’t do it.” She smiled at me happily. She was obviously relieved that I was not cross, considering the inelegance of our congress. “You should give me more because it was the first time”, she said, taking advantage of the good humour.

“You should be my boyfriend”, she went on, persisting gently and repeating herself, “I have two children. I have to employ a maid to look after them while I am working here”.

Concepcion then sat down next to me and began an unflattering examination of my body. “What’s that?” she said suspiciously, pointing to some blemish in my groin area. “And that,” she continued, looking critically at the sore patches on the inside of my knees, still stinging from the carpet.

“I didn’t want to touch your back,” she said candidly, “It doesn’t look nice.” Then, worried that she had offended me, she said, “Sorry, don’t mean that.

You’re not cross?” She peered at me intently, her face pushed close to mine to judge my expression in the gloom of the cubicle, like a cat hoping to wake its owner and be fed.

“Be my boyfriend.” She leant forward enticingly. “Be my boyfriend,” she wheedled again, pressing her body against mine. I leant back, but Concepcion moved further forward until she lay on top of me, her face still close to mine. She came off as much more confident with her clothes on. I found her urging appealing and instinctively wanted to protect her from her past mistakes and present predicament, but afterwards, my natural impulse to incorporate her into my life wore off. Her insistence might have indicated some stronger need for money for drugs than for her children. This thought made me wary of entering into a relationship because I was new to the guild of massage women like her and could not easily judge how stable or controlled they were. In any event, she lived in Sabah and I in Singapore, and my romantic urge to be involved with her soon faded in the pragmatic light of day outside the centre.

And so I entered into the world of the massage women-a twilight, windowless world, not of the extremes of eroticism but of the fumbling accommodation of desire with commerce… and sometime intimacy, however awkward and confused.

This world was not, of course, the centre of my existence, as I had loves, work and interests outside the twilight. But it was much of their world. My experience in it was maybe five, at most ten per-cent of my life, if such things may be quantified. But it was significantly more emotionally, for I liked the massage women very much and saw in them as pleasant a division of my fellow human beings as any. Since I inevitably preferred some of the massage women much more over others and spent my time mostly with this preferred subset, my overall impression of them is no doubt a little slanted and rose-tinted, just as their experience of men was skewed towards the sensual and the strayer… with not a few of the inadequate. Still, I felt soft towards them all and forgiving of their frailties, more forgiving than I would have been of people in other occupations.

On my return to Singapore after my encounter with Concepcion, I set about visiting the local ‘health centres’ and massage parlours , the first time I had ever set out on a campaign of exploratory promiscuity. Initially, I was a little wary of these twilight women, expecting drug-dependency, perhaps a parasitic or clinging tendency, or-worse-hell-cat behaviour and thievery.

However, the first local centre that I visited was very reassuring. Situated in the middle of a big hotel, it was much better appointed than the car-park den in Kota Kinabalu (as behoved this clean and clinical Republic). It had its own shower with an expensively tiled floor and was pleasantly decorated, looking organized and neat with stacked towels, a high massage bed and almost no cigarette holes in the carpet. All this bespoke an almost domestic respectability, an efficient, business-like atmosphere with a faintly medical flavour because of the stacked towels and the general emphasis on hygiene.

While I was in the shower, a female entered the room and offered me a drink. I could not see her because of the frosting on the shower-cubicle door. She disappeared again while I lay down on the massage mattress. My masseuse appeared and started talking at once, firing off questions and setting to work on my back. She announced herself as Honey or Pussy or some such absurd professional name, but eventually, after a little pressing, admitted to being Caroline.

She was, as far as I could tell peering back over my shoulder, an ethnic Chinese woman in her thirties. I did not want to swivel round to stare at her rudely, as if assessing the quality of the goods I might consume. Caroline herself was quite formal in her interrogation, asking me at the beginning how she should address me and taking it on from there. Thus, we were both careful to preserve the ordinary decencies of social intercourse.

In time, I got to know Caroline a little, although my acquaintance with her was not as deep as with subsequent lovers in this particular twilight zone.

She possessed a nondescript face but a pleasing figure and radiated sexual energy.

Caroline, as loquacious as Concepcion had been reserved and as experienced as the latter had been relatively innocent, gave me a rapid, light massage over my back and legs, accompanied by a lot of slapping as well as continuous chatter of interrogation. After less than ten minutes of this process, she ran her fingers and thumbs like a pair of five-legged spiders over my rear and inner thighs, circling my anus and tickling my testicles before kneading them slightly while groping for my penis.

“Do you want to turn over?” said the spider-lady. “That’s a very quick massage,” I said, though I was not complaining at the way proceedings were developing, just commenting on her directness. “Oh no,” said Caroline,

“there’s more to come.”

“Your approach is different,” I noted.

“Oh no,” she persisted, “I do not have an approach, I just do whatever is necessary. What do you want me to do?” Since she already had a proprietary grasp on my erect member, this was a polite but rhetorical question. So I asked her for full sex without a condom. She looked at me surprised. This was a test that I applied to the twilight women in my early days to see how sensible they were. Later, I dropped this insult to their intelligence and sense of responsibility.

“Oh no,” said Caroline, not haggling and thus passing the test with flying colours, “you must wear a condom.” She withdrew her hand. I explained my purpose. She congratulated me on my intelligence and responsibility.

We praised each other for being so sensible. In the course of this mutual admiration session, Caroline reinstated her right hand on my penis and added the other, as one might when wishing to convey strong fellow-feeling on comforting the bereaved.

After a short pause, she produced a condom from somewhere about her person. “Come,” said Caroline. She applied the condom, stripped off a garment or two and we engaged immediately. “Slowly,” she cautioned, although she herself was hurrying the process, “I am small.” She eased me in, making slight gasping noises-whether genuine or for effect, I could not tell. Whatever the case, she came rapidly to a climax, her legs and arms clasped tightly over my back. “Wait,” she said, and slowed my movements, bringing down her legs and closing them under me. “Come on then,” she commanded, and appeared to have another orgasm. “Do what you like now,” she then conceded and so, having pleasured her, I took my own pleasure and concluded our commercial “act of love”.

Caroline rinsed and dressed, then recommenced massaging me; much more vigorously this second time round, as if stimulated by the intercourse.

“How good is business?” I asked. “Alright,” she replied, and rattled away cheerfully about customers and tips. “The desk takes most of my fee as protection money,” she said, “so I depend on tips.” I assumed that she meant the woman at the reception desk would not allocate her clients unless she got a cut in advance.

“Most men are generous,” she carried on, “even if I do not give them a special, they give me a tip.” She named a sum about the equivalent of twenty American dollars. “For specials, of course, the usual.” Caroline’s ‘specials’

were not very special at all-almost the rule, it seemed. Most massage women were coy about how much full sex they had, but Caroline more or less admitted to a norm of at least a couple a day, assuming that she was getting her fair share of customers in good times.

Caroline was frank about earning most of her money through her amiable and often enthusiastic prostitution. She commented just as explicitly on the range of masculine virility and the size and consistency of organs . Fat men tended to have small penises, while those smaller or comparatively athletic were more generously endowed. A long penis when flaccid might promise much (including alarm to its intended recipient), but often the owner failed to erect it beyond a certain soft engorgement. Small penises, on the other hand, could expand disproportionately into relatively large, hard organs, she noted.

Caroline’s centre was located deep inside what she termed a family hotel, which gave the massage women some security both against the anti-vice authorities and the rougher or more drunken element among their potential clientele. Despite the domestic atmosphere there, she was occasionally called to a hotel room where proceedings were totally safe from outsiders or time limits and could be quite prolonged.

She recounted one such experience with an old New Zealander of eighty-nine. Concerned that she might break his ancient bones, she treated him lightly until he scolded her for her half-heartedness. “Let me massage you,” he said and so she submitted to his attentions, which proved very robust. It seemed he had been a chiropractor or an osteopath. “You’re a nice girl,” he said and gave her an enormous tip: two hundred American dollars.

“He was a nice old man,” she echoed, casually adding that he was incapable of an erection.

At the other end of the age scale, Caroline recalled having serviced spoilt-brat teenagers, children of rich men who were inclined to let their male offspring do as they pleased in the purchase of sex. The youngest in this category was seventeen, an Indian national who claimed he had his first sex at eleven. Caroline was not greatly enamoured of intercourse with young men as they tended to be hasty and force themselves into her before she was properly aroused, despite the lady’s own rapid approach. Once or twice, a father-and-son team had visited the centre, though they did not patronise the same woman. Sometimes, a man whose wife and family were staying in the hotel would pop in for a quick one: appointment, intercourse, clean-up and tip all over within ten minutes.

I asked Caroline for examples of violence or criminality that she had experienced in her profession. She replied that she had had an unpleasant encounter with a Japanese who insisted on having sex without a condom.

“Oh no,” Caroline said, whereupon the Japanese threatened to violate her willy-nilly, claiming that he was a gangster in order to make her more inclined to submit. Caroline exited the cubicle fast and sought the help of the receptionist. The Japanese followed her and banged his fist on the reception desk, which the two women were soon cowering behind. Eventually, they called hotel security and the man was escorted out, still threatening all and sundry with the wrath of the mafia.

Another Japanese subsequently informed Caroline that no respectable Japanese gangster would ever admit to being a gangster-at least not in such a vulgar manner. He knew this because, he modestly conceded, he was a bona fide gangster himself. His penis contained three or four hard little lumps of jade, or some such semi-precious material, inserted to give greater pleasure to the fortunate women that he deigned to copulate with. Apparently, they were also an indication of rank, so a super-gangster would be permitted up to ten. I expressed some incredulity at all this, but Caroline said that she could feel the little lumps both with her fingers and her vagina.

Caroline herself had a medium-sized tattoo, a butterfly, her trade-mark, strategically located around the upper area of her protuberant little rump. The butterfly’s abdomen thus fused with her rear cleavage and its wings spread a good six centimetres on either side. This decoration was presented as an aesthetic bonus to her customer’s gaze if he were approaching its owner from behind. I found this feature engaging; as, indeed, I found much of Caroline.

The greatest reward that Caroline had ever enjoyed came not from a member of the mafia, but from a young, indecently rich pawn-shop owner. I thought at first she was referring to a pornographer and wondered where in Singapore such an enterprise could make its owner a fortune. But this client obtained his money more ruthlessly than by peddling pictures-extracting money from the impoverished or the desperate or the improvidential by charging usurious interest, illustrating that greed is more harmful than lust.

Certainly, he had money to throw around as he gave Caroline thirteen hundred American dollars for one session. I asked Caroline if this was generosity or a form of sexual exhibitionism. She did not understand my question, but described her reaction — which was mostly alarm. She feared she might be accused of theft if such a large sum were found on her. To allay her panic or conscience, she treated all the women in the centre to a meal and gave them a share of what was left-including even the rapacious lady at the reception desk.

We are not the products of our circumstances, but we are surely the sum of all the stupid choices that our parents have inflicted on us.” Shun told me this when he took me to my first client.

“And there is nothing we can do to undo this damage — not you, not me,” he added emphatically.

Shun liked to spout pop-psychology babble like this, off the top of his head, given any opportunity. He spoke freely, without any fear of consequences, and he was not afraid of offending anyone. Least of all me.

How he derived all these sage-sounding maxims that he liked to toss around so much was well beyond me. But he did tell me once that he enjoyed reading the works of writers like Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk because, according to him, they tell truths — “dark sickening truths of our depraved times” — that other writers are incapable or unwilling to write about.

How true that was, I did not know. I hated to read. Beyond the textbooks and all the assigned reading materials given out by my lecturers and tutors each week, I barely had time for other forms of reading, nor did I read for leisure.

I considered it a waste of time. I had better things to do.

“And treat this client well, you hear? Big fish like him are hard to find, especially since he’s paying top dollar for a virgin like you,” Shun said in jest, throwing a snickering look in my direction.

“Fuck you,” I replied caustically.

“I don’t think so tonight, my dear. He-” Shun emphasised the word, while pointing to the hotel door in front of us, “will be fucking you tonight.

And do everything he says. He says fuck, you fuck. He says suck, you suck.

He wants to rim you, by all means, spread your legs wider and let him rim.

Don’t say no, don’t ever, or we’ll lose him. Remember, it’s easier to retain an existing client than scout for ten new ones.” Shun grinned at me and gestured for me to knock on the door.

I hated him when he spun out this kind of tough talk, like I was the novice and he was the professional. As if this was my first time fucking or sucking or rimming. Fucker. But on a deeper level, I knew that I did not want to disappoint him nor be angry with him for long. I hated this mixed feeling, this anger combined with an eagerness to please him and do what he said. I hated to admit it because I knew exactly why I reacted in this way. Because I knew that I had grown to like Shun a lot. Damn it, damn me.

“I’ll pick you up when you’re done, or when he’s done with you. Give me a call later,” Shun said, flashing me his killer smile and nudging me again to knock on the door.

Before I could say anything more to him, he had turned and begun to walk away, down the quiet corridor towards the lift. I stood and watched him saunter away from me. He turned the corner and disappeared from my sight.

I stared at the room door — 235 — and gathered my random thoughts.

This was not my first time fucking another guy, so why was I feeling this way? This dreaded sense of inevitability? Had I made a wrong choice here?

And if so, why did I agree to Shun’s idea in the first place?

I took in a breath, and felt the sharp intake of air lifting away some of my anxieties. I knocked on the door. It opened almost immediately and I entered the hotel room.

I sold beautiful curiosities in my shop, so it was only fitting that one walked in.

However, it was not an antiques shop. My merchandise was a living example of years of human manipulation in enhancing specific genetic traits in fish.

I stocked common goldfish, black goldfish supposed to guard the family home from bad chi, calicos, neon tetras, comets and bubble-eyed imported specimens. I rented a corner lot squeezed next to a dim sum restaurant in a neighbourhood shopping mall; contrary to what you may have overheard in the management office, my fish did not end up as fillings in the wantons served up for the lunchtime crowd. A week after I had expanded the shop to include marine fish, Andie sauntered through the door.

I tried not to stare at her. Beautiful women are often defensive and accompanied by protective items such as boyfriends and husbands. But she was alone, a towering, slim beauty whose physique almost blended in with the narrow shelves that overlooked the reef tank. With a Harley-Davidson biker’s cap tilted over her face, she lured me out from behind the counter.

‘How much?’ She tapped the glass of the tank to indicate the black-and-white cleaner wrasse, darting around the bigger fish in the tank like harried waiters. For a natural tank janitor and a collector’s item, I recommended a cleaner shrimp, a miniature automaton coloured like a barbershop pole and equipped with six jointed legs.

‘I am not a beginner,’ she stated in a lilting accent that was definitely not local. Her green contact lenses flashed in the fluorescent light. I was naive to think she was referring to her fish-keeping experience.

‘Come back in three days. Those wrasse are reserved.’ I lied.

Three days later, when I arrived at my shop, she was standing outside the shutter at a quarter to eleven. With those narrow hips wrapped in tight snakeskin jeans, she looked like a boy when viewed from behind. When she turned at the sound of my jangling keys, I saw her breasts constricted under a Boy London T-shirt. ‘Please wait outside, miss.’

I learnt her name after I had bagged a cleaner wrasse. The fish flailed as I handed her the plastic bag ‘It only has one hour before it suffocates.’

‘Kinky,’ she muttered as she took the bag. She was not wearing the green contact lenses this morning. I preferred her eyes naturally tawny. She told me her name because she was fed up with my calling her ‘Miss’ as if I were giving inept instructions to an artillery unit.

‘Andie,’ she said. ‘Like the actress, Andie Macdowell.’ She paused and waited for my response, as if I had flubbed a line of dialogue.

‘I wasn’t named after someone famous.’ I told her after some hesitation. I wished I was called Jacques as an alternative to my pedestrian moniker, Jack.

When I was young, I saw a documentary on TV about Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer. But local mispronunciation would flub the Gallic inflection of Jacques, and make it sound more like Jock.

Andie laughed and removed her biker cap. Her black hair fell to the waistband of her jeans. She looked like a mermaid, the black tresses and their green iridescence shimmering above the scaly faux snakeskin.

So I’m in Phuket, Thailand, just a few weeks and I get a job teaching English.

I need a clock to remind me to wake up. I want a big damn clock on the wall ticking like crazy. I go to Tesco in my tie and blue silk shirt and see an amazing Thai girl, about 27. Hair cut to the shoulders, wide mouth, a narrow waist that makes her hips and heavy breasts pull your eyes. Some women have this sexual power, like a love potion that people drink up. Karl Jung says it is a projection of the soul or anima. Walt Whitman says steer for the deep waters only.

Enter Goy and my first chance at exotic True Love. A long neck.

Yearning in the face and dark eyes. A relaxed, nurturing vibe amplified by our struggle to communicate as she shows me how to work the clock. My arm brushes against her nipple as she winds up the mechanism. I’m happily swimming out to dark waters. A puff of her cream and cinnamon smell rises to my nostrils. But when I take the clock home, I just can’t get it to work.

A few days later I come back, see her in jeans and a red blouse with SAME SAME on the curvy front. Somehow I get her in the mood and a short while later we’re upstairs in the cafeteria eating Japanese dumplings and fish sauce. She crosses her legs and laughs at me staring. Her toes are painted black. Even her feet are candy.

He kept thrashing and crashing around on top of her, making the required efforts to reach his record-time orgasm. If there had been an Olympic category for ‘wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am’ sex, he would have easily made the team, she thought. It happened all too often: the big build-up over dinner and hanging out at Bar None had led to another unsatisfying conclusion. Now the performance was over. He withdrew himself, limp and spent, rolled off to his side of the bed, sweating on the sheet. Francisca had learned not to expect fireworks, yet she did hope for slow, practiced arousal-or perhaps a little humour along the way.

He let out a deep yawn. “Very tired, lah.”

He looked across the room, taking in the easel next to the dresser. “Hey, you also paint, ah. Very sexy! This one, who, ah?

She cringed. Oh God! What to tell him? But before Francisca could answer, he had turned over and was off to count sheep or naked pole-dancers, or whatever he did to fall asleep. She half-muttered to herself, “Yes, why don’t you make yourself at home, ‘Stud’!”

He was asleep now, but his words echoed on like the ghost of an insincere idea. Did he not see her resemblance in the unfinished portrait?

Well, what do you expect! You didn’t hook up with an art lover, did you?

If you could, would you choose the way you were going to die? What would it be? More importantly, would you use it when the time was right?

These were questions Koh Kwan How and his friends often tossed around when he was much younger. Now almost all those friends were gone, and Kwan How was looking at joining them soon. At eighty-three, he had seen a lot of life and too much of death. And now he knew, very much so, which way he would choose. And yes, he was ready to use it. He knew what constituted the perfect exit. And he also knew that it was just about the right time.

All his pleasures were being snatched from him: old friends, loved ones, places he had known and loved. And now even simple, everyday pleasures were being stripped away. It seemed every time he went to his doctor, the man had another list of things he had to deny himself. Kwan How had begun calling the man Dr No: no spicy food, no Kopi-O, no alcohol, no pets… no, no, no. And, of course, no major physical exertion. His heart was far too weak, his doctor warned, just couldn’t take sudden exertion. “No sex, of course,” the pompous shit had instructed him. Then he had the gall to add, with that smug grin men like him seemed to take pleasure in, “But I guess in your case, that hasn’t been any real temptation for a long time, has it, Mr Koh?”

That ass! Koh was tempted almost every day, at least twenty times. Just because he could no longer act on it… Until about ten years ago, maybe less, he would make his way to Geylang once every fortnight. He’d look around, see what was on offer, then head off to a massage parlour or take a hotel room with one of the pretty China girls who trawled the coffee shops there, looking for old men like him with their plump pensions. What mainly transpired with these girls, at either the parlours or in the hotels, was what Koh and his friends used to call “a quick, helpful handshake below the waist.” Well, he was an old man, even then.

But he still yearned, achingly, to make love to lovely young women as he had many years before, when he himself was much closer to their age. But that, he knew, was just the faint buzz of a dream he could never act upon. Or so he thought.

He met her through the Internet. A nephew had shown him how to connect with the contact groups; after several rounds of exploring, Kwan How came upon the kinkier groups himself. And with that, the one he wanted: the Beyond the Borders group.

He was quite surprised that so many women replied to his blunt request:

“Older gentleman seeks lovely young lady to help him kill himself through sex.” He was worried that at least half of them were police agents who might see this endeavour as a form of assisted suicide. But for Kwan How, it was simply a matter of “imposing a natural death”; as Dr No took delight in reminding him, vigorous sex would almost surely be the end of him. Which was exactly what he wanted. It was, for Koh, the perfect exit.

And this one was perfect in her own way. He had scanned through at least a dozen photos sent to him on the Net, and they all looked interesting, but he was jolted when her picture came up. Su Lon. No, it wasn’t her, couldn’t be; but it looked so much like her, as he remembered her, from over sixty years earlier.

Su Lon was the first love of his life. In some ways, still the only special love. His first love, his first sexual experience. And now this one — what was that name? Sharlayne, this Sharlayne looked so much like his Su Lon. As if she had somehow sprung over all those decades, as lovely as ever, preserved simply by his memory of her. Incredible.

He made contact and they bounced several e-mails back and forth before he sent her his telephone number. Then there was nothing for four days. He began to think she was just playing with him, using him as a joke she could share with her gleefully callous friends. But late that Sunday evening the phone rang, waking him up. “Mr Koh, this is Sharlayne. From that Beyond the Borders group? You wanted me to help you with your project?”

“Yes, yes,” he replied. “That’s right. I… I would like your help. Very much.”

They arranged to meet the following weekend, at his place. He would take care of all the formalities, he assured her, including any necessary legal precautions. There would be no way any authorities would associate her with his death. This would be seen as purely a consensual act between two adults — with very unfortunate consequences. He was surprised that she didn’t seem too concerned about this part of the arrangement though.

When she arrived around 4 pm Saturday, he was waiting nervously for her. In fact, Koh was perched on a metal chair facing the front door, reading fitfully from a newspaper while throwing glances at the open door. He had almost convinced himself that she wasn’t going to come after all. Fool, why would such a lovely young woman want to do something as perverse as this anyway? With someone like you?

When the bell rang, he couldn’t see her through the grill: evidently, she was standing off to the side. Koh quickly threw his paper down, hauled himself up, went to let her in. When he opened the grill, she peeked from around the corner. “Mr Koh, is it?”

“Yes, yes,” Koh replied. “Koh Kwan How. Just Kwan, if you like. Kwan is fine.”

She nodded and stepped in. She seemed strangely shy at this point, considering how they had met and what she was there for. She was even looking down, demure in a way he would never have expected from this new, anything-goes generation. When she glanced up, this girl looked even more like Su Lon than she had on the monitor. He was staring at her, transfixed, until finally she peered at him nervously. “What?”

“Incredible,” Koh said in a raspy voice. “Oh, sorry, it’s just… You look very much like someone I… I knew. A long, long time ago.”

“Do I? Oh yeah, thanks. You look like a lot of people I know too, uncle.” Koh winced at her calling him uncle, but not enough for her to notice.

He offered her a drink, then found her a can of the Yeo’s chrysanthemum tea she had asked for. After taking a long draught, she frowned and looked around the room, as if assessing his taste in furnishings or sense of feng shui.

For a moment, he was even afraid that she was about to tell him that she had reconsidered and now just wanted to call the whole thing off. But instead, she said something that stunned him. “You want to, like, take our clothes off, uncle, see what we’re talking about?”

“Yes, yes, that might be… That’s a good way to start, I’m sure.” He was still a little stunned by her directness when she started to pull off her shirt, then removed her pants. As she stood there in only bra and panties, he mechanically put his hands to his shirt and began fumbling with the buttons, still staring at her, enthralled.

Curiously, she removed her panties first, then thrust her hips forward slightly, as if displaying some unusual wares to a prospective buyer. He was still fumbling with that same top button as she reached back, unhooked her bra and let it drop to the floor. Koh’s fingers froze on the button. Dear God, even her body looks like Su Lon’s. Or at least the way he remembered it. The compact, tight breasts, the neat, dark triangle of pubic hair with the delicate slit in the middle — everything, so close to how he remembered it. He reacted immediately. It was… he didn’t want to think how many years since he was able to even get this hard without considerable manual or oral stimulation.

“You… you have a fantastic body,” he gasped.

“My tits are too small,” she replied, looking down as if to test his evaluation. “My friends keep telling me I should go and get them enlarged. It doesn’t cost that much at this one place I heard about.”

“Oh no. Oh no, no, don’t… don’t do that. They’re incredible. They fit your body perfectly. You couldn’t ask for a better pair of breasts than what you’ve got there.”

“Well, they’ll do for now, I guess,” she concluded, giving a soft shrug.

He had just managed to get the first button undone at that point and was trying to concentrate intensely on the rest of the task when she stepped forward. “Here, let me help you with that,” she said.

Again, he was taken aback as she reached those delicate hands — so like Su Lon’s — out to touch him. His fingers were frozen again, and she had to move his hands away gently, then she slowly undid every button. He stared at her now deeply intent face, not wanting to peer at his own body. He was deeply ashamed of it, even repulsed at its wattles of loose flesh, its liver flecks splashed sporadically all over his torso and arms, its wrinkles even in what he once thought unlikely places.

After removing the shirt, she reached down and unbuckled his belt, opened the trousers and eased them down over his hips. When they sagged around his knees, he reached down and hastily pulled them off himself.

Again, he was embarrassed: the elaborate webbing of varicose veins made his legs an unpleasant sight, especially to himself.

But again, she was being generous, or just polite. She ignored the varicose legs and began staring directly at the sharp rise in his shorts. She looked at him, smiled, nudged the near-erection slightly up and forwards, then pulled down the briefs.

“Oh look, you’re almost ready for action, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t intend to make your trip over here wasted, la. Bedroom’s over this way.”

He pointed to the room at the end of a hallway, and guided her towards it. Along the way, he grabbed a towel off a nearby chair and drooped it in front of his crotch. He felt giddy with this wholly new experience, but still couldn’t help feeling funny walking around naked in his own flat, especially with a young woman present.

As they headed towards the bedroom, Koh suddenly stopped near the bulky Peranakan table standing guard in the middle of the room and pointed to a small leather bag perched near the edge. “Those are for you by the way.

Don’t forget to take them when you leave.”

“What is it?

“It’s… I know we said no money, no payment, but it’s presents. Some presents I got for you. Just thought it will be nice, lah. The money won’t do me any more good anyway, will it?”

Before he could say anything else, she’d darted over to the table and started fumbling through the bag. “Hey, those are surprises, lah. For later.

Afterwards.”

“Can’t I open one, just one? That’s all.”

Even her little-girl manner when she asked reminded him of Su Lon.

He smiled back at her. “Alright, just one.” He raised an admonishing finger.

“But no more!”

She smiled and chose something in a long, narrow box. “Ooo, what’s this one? Something we might be able to use in there? Looks like it.” He chortled. “No, it’s just for you. It’s all things I thought you might like.”

She slid the top off the thin box, reached in and pulled out a slender gold necklace. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” she whispered. “It’s… wow, just so sweet of you.” Koh smiled sheepishly. She stepped over and gave him a warm kiss, one that actually tasted of mild affection. He was embarrassed — and very pleased. She then broke into a wide smile. “Can I put it on now? Right now?”

“Now?? But I thought we’re going to — ”

“Oh, please, Mr Koh! I want to have something like this to wear. I’m always a little shy when I’m totally naked with some guy for the first time.” She then cast a quick, playful glance down at his towel.

This made him laugh again, after which he nodded and watched as she placed the necklace against her smooth throat. She then turned, holding the ends behind and just off her neck, inviting him to latch it. Which he did, with care and some affection. She rushed over to the smeared mirror a few feet away and observed herself, making funny faces, as if she were suddenly the only person in the room. Koh himself admired her naked back, the nicely framed shoulders. “This is just so nice. So sweet.” She turned with a deeply set smile, and Kwan How suddenly felt as close to her as he had to any woman, any person, in a long time. It was good that it should all end like this.

This was becoming more and more perfect.

When they reached the bedroom, she jumped onto the bed as if she needed to try it out first. She pounded it with her fists, then started kicking her legs up and down. Koh was standing just inside the doorway, the towel still dangling over his private parts. “Suitable?” he asked, his eyes slowly surveying the arch of her back, the slopes of her buttocks, her nicely formed legs and feet.

“Very suitable,” she replied.

She then rolled over on her back, propped her head up on the three pillows and spread her legs. “Going to join me, Mr Koh? It’s nice down here. Very nice.” As she said those last two words, she started stroking herself, at the same time slipping her tongue out and gliding it slowly over her lips.

Koh laughed again; she looked so much like Su Lon, but was so different in her behaviour. She was — what was that word he liked? — frisky. Yes , so frisky. Su Lon had been so wonderfully shy, right up until the moment he first entered her. Of course, that was expected of girls, especially Chinese girls, in those days.

But part of Su Lon’s reluctance with Kwan How stemmed from the fact that she was engaged to another man at the time. Oh, there was nothing like love there — on either side apparently — but it was a good match in most other ways. The war and the Japanese occupation had stranded that fiance in Ceylon. Meanwhile, Kwan How’s position at the docks enabled him to get his hands on extra goods: contraband rice, salted fish and cooking oil — some of which he gave to Su Lon’s family. That’s how they started to get close.

And then there was that keen natural attraction that happens between two young, good-looking people.

Had there been no war, Su Lon would have surely remained a traditional Chinese woman, going to her wedding bed a virgin, with a man she barely knew and had no great affection for. That was the deal back then: sex as duty, marriage as transaction, love as a possible bonus — but only later.

Except that she and Kwan How found themselves more and more drawn to each other. Besides, Su Lon didn’t know if she would ever see this fiance again; it was all up to fate whether any of them would survive that war and the occupation. Which is why she and Kwan How became lovers, their daily flirts with arrest and death only intensifying the passion and tonic release of their couplings. Yes, being so close to death, Kwan How had lived more intensely than he would ever again in his life.

Everything could have been different, should have been different. But the war ended, Su Lon’s betrothed returned, they married, and Kwan How saw or heard very little of her for the next year and a half. Until he got that note from her brother. Sweet, delicate Su Lon, who had survived the storm of perils thrown up by the Japanese occupation, stepped in front of a Bentley driven by some blur Dutch woman. She was dead by the time they got her to a hospital. Publicly, everyone said it was an accident, but under the soothing drone of officialese, there was a swarm of dark rumours.

“Is everything alright?” Sharlayne called from the bed.

Koh looked up at her and nodded. Yes, everything was alright; maybe that was the perfect exit Su Lon had chosen for herself. “She heard another music,” was the cryptic way a friend once described the way she died. And now Koh was there, at the edge of grasping an amazing dream for his own departure. Perhaps this was what she’d meant by another music?