The incident with the security guard at Damansara Heights had rattled me more than I imagined. I felt like an intruder, and the way I had skulked around nannies and their prams, peering into babies with dummies in their mouths was simply wrong. But I was a desperate mother, looking for desperate measures, what was I to do? After that day, I had a terrible sense of foreboding, which kept me anxious and awake at night. I had not had a drink and I was determined not to, but when I got home that evening, my hands were shaking.

I called Shah and asked if he wanted to hang out. In an hour I was at his apartment and bent over my second line of coke. He came up behind me and started caressing me, I missed you. I really did. After I did three lines, the panic had subsided but I still felt like there was a light bulb going off in my head, every ten minutes. I paced up and down his apartment and stared out the floor-to-ceiling glass panes.

The city spread out in front of me. I saw the gleaming Twin Towers to my immediate right, the KL Tower to my left yet, a chasm of humanity in between. What untold horrors lay beneath those buildings? What scale of human misery was there? Were there young girls who were being forced to have sex with twenty, thirty men in one night? Was Marina still spreading her legs for some filthy man with unwashed hands? How many beggars were being tortured for not bringing back enough money from the streets? How many Bangladeshi workers were lining up to fuck a Burmese woman at twenty ringgit a pop?

How many people were begging for their lives; for more leniency, more compassion, more mercy at the hands of gangsters, loan sharks, cruel traffickers, cops? The city stewed defiantly right back at me, right at the top of another building that was the folly of thousands of workers. Slave labour, that’s what it was. We were a nation that was built on the sweat and tears of slaves. Just like so many developed countries, just like most of the bloody world.

You look tense, what’s up? Why you keeping away from me? You know I like hanging out with you.

Sorry, been trying to stay clean…

Come here baby… just come here.

Shah was kind, he really was. He knew how to make me feel at ease, and it wasn’t just when we were high, he just knew how to talk to me, that low-slung purring of his, so feline, so utterly sexy. Come here, come here, my sweet, sweet Del. Sometimes I just wanted him to talk to me, in that low sonorous timbre, it was so relaxing it could put me to sleep. I walked towards him, and for a moment I wished that it was Omar I was walking to.