“I’ll go to Little Chung’s,” she said, naming a shop down the road.

“Be my guest.”

Little Chung would speak kindly to her, call her “sister,” and offer condolences for her recent loss. She’d be lucky if she could bargain him up to three dollars.

She didn’t have time for this. “Four fifty,” she countered.

He wasn’t having it. Perhaps she wore her desperation too openly, like a layer of dirt she couldn’t slough off. Perhaps it clung to her like the grease in her long plait or the grime around her collar.

She left the store with three dollars and seventy-two cents tucked into the pocket sewn in her sleeve. Outside, the heat of the midday sun blazed down upon one of the few roads important enough to be paved in asphalt. A Sikh traffic warden stood at the intersection, over-sized white mittens on his hands for visibility, rattan “wings” enlarging his profile. She followed a bare-chested hawker across the road, keeping close behind one of the large, covered baskets he held balanced across his back.

A few blocks away, she bought a new shirt and trousers. She had no idea what a lady’s companion was meant to wear, but these plain clothes would be acceptable for any other job she was even remotely qualified for.

She returned to her lodging house in the early afternoon. The narrow alleyway was dusty with red laterite, crowded with long poles hanging out of windows, sagging with laundry. Voices called out in a handful of languages over the clatter of steel pans and the sizzling of hot oil, the air pungent with raw sewerage and burnt grease.

A man stopped her beneath the shadow of an awning, his face lightly splintered with wrinkles, graced with a gap-toothed grin, hair shaved close to his head to reveal the outline of his skull. In those last awful few weeks, she’d seen him enough to recognise him by sight. He’d been one of those men hovering about her father, speaking to him in hushed tones, waiting for the old man to drop.

“Teo’s little girl, isn’t it? My deepest condolences for your loss,” he said in Hokkien.

Sim Lai Hock was being facetious. She was already nineteen, of an age when most women were married with one child on the hip and another on the way. “Thank you. You’re too kind.”

He shook his head. “I shed a tear when I heard about your father. But what a life, no? Drink all day, smoke all night. Not a bad way to end.”

Somewhere distant came the thud of a mosque drum, summoning the faithful to prayer. A quick series of beats at first, leading into an extended rhythm like a pulse. It was already over an hour past midday.

“I should go—”