She said, “Raymond?”
Gulp. “Yes?” I shut my eyes.
She let me go, but then I heard her key inside the cell’s lock. I swallowed, hard.
Suddenly a harsh alarm began to clang. Jennifer screamed, “Shit! Why do the engineers need me now, of all times?”
Blowing a kiss and mouthing, “Later,” she left me.
In gratitude to the gods, I hit PLAY on the DVD and began to practise my brains out.
The chewing gum ban in Singapore was enacted in 1992 and really does ban the import and sale of chewing gum. The offense is punishable by caning.
When first introduced, the ban caused open defiance, but offenders were publicly “named and shamed” by the government to deter other would-be smugglers.
Origins: In his memoirs, former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew recounted that as early as 1983, chewing gum was causing serious maintenance problems in high-rise public housing. Vandals had been disposing of spent gum in mailboxes, inside keyholes and on elevator buttons. Chewing gum left on floors, stairways, buses and pavements in public areas increased the cost of cleaning and damaged cleaning equipment. However, Lee thought that a ban would be too drastic and did not take action.
In 1987, vandals stuck chewing gum on the door sensors in a new $5 billion metro system. The doors malfunctioned, causing disruption of train services.
In January 1992, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong decided on a flat-out ban. The import of chewing gum was immediately halted, but a reasonable transition period was given to allow shops to clear their existing stocks.
Yes, this really happened.
21
Morning came. Fucking hell. My feet were cheese-gratered and bloody from a night spent rehearsing the appalling routine in which little Billy lugs his twinkle-toes up and down the bricks of some failure-filled housing estate, which is, in the film, conveniently devoid of crack ampoules, used condoms and surgically licked-clean crisp packets.
I involuntarily dozed off at 11:30 a.m., only to be woken at noon by a gorilla of an MP. “Got orders to take you over to the canteen for your matinée performance.” The word “matinée” filled me with foreboding. Was this all somehow being engineered by Fiona?
I caught sight of myself in a mirror en route to the venue. Not my Bourne-iest moment. I was highly unshaven and putty grey—I mean, how can that even happen, skin turning grey? Blood is red. How hard is it not to even be pink? I asked the gorilla if I might stop to shave, and of course the answer was no. Fucking Americans.
I hobbled after him for maybe a quarter-mile to a small building housing the canteen. The sun was directly overhead; I had no shadow. The exterior humidity was like a proverbial wet towel, and I was soon drenched in sweat.
Now, I like to give life a go. I like family dinners. I like to see elderly people trying their hand at painting even though they couldn’t possibly have a career ahead of them because they’ll soon be dead. But in spite of my positive disposition, I was at a low point as I entered what for me could only be a dome of shame, the mess hall. Two stainless steel doors opened inward and …
Brrrrrrrr! Air conditioning! Extreme American air conditioning, one of the few things they’re good for! Thank fucking God.
Inside the mess, the tables were arranged in some sort of pecking order, not unlike at private schools: head table; peons; losers; victims; thugs; the doomed; the hopeless. Enter a room like this and you might as well not bother being born in the first place. And, of course, there at the head table, along with Elspeth, Neal and the flight crew, sat Miss Lieutenant, glowing with B vitamins and sunshine and whatever anthraxy sludge the U.S. government forcibly injects into its military’s bloodstream.
Some idiot up before me was juggling hatchets. The good thing, though, was the room’s atmosphere of … cheer … bonhomie, even!
I thought, You know, Raymond, how bad could this possibly be? This could be a lighthearted episode in your life’s journey. If I spun it properly, I could even turn it into a fundraiser for some dismal charity like Alzheimer’s or AIDS or poor people.
That’s when Neal saw me. He flew across the room, shouting, “Ray! You won’t fucking believe this! I know this whole island inside out!”
Okay, Neal’s a street nutter and all, but he totally lost me. “Come again?”
“Wake Island! I’ve been here a million times before in the video game Battlefield 1943! Except I was playing the Russian version, where it’s called Forceps 13, you know, in those backwards upside-down letters communists like.” Neal was wearing an ensemble of expensive resort wear and, unlike mine, his skin had colour.
“Neal, you lived inside a cardboard box slathered in human feces on the streets of West London. Where on earth did you play a complex video game requiring an expensive console and a place to play it?”