I don’t really know any more, you know. I need to find Alba.

Sumi took a look around the room, pursed her lips and snapped back.

You can’t find Alba, Del. The cops will find her.

I was filled with a sense of violence, of wanting to smash the white ceramic cup which held the rest of my coffee, of wanting to punch Sumi and thrust her head onto the table again and again, of wanting to draw blood.

Fuck you. I said. Fuck you, Sumi.

I got up to leave and she pulled at my arm. I’m sorry… I’m such a fucking idiot, I know.

I looked at her straight in the eye and said, Yes, you are.

And walked right out of the café into the afternoon light.

Six

Year of the Monkey

All cities run on sex, on what is penetrable and what is not. KL is no different. At night the city breathes into a different kind of life, conflagrations of the possible and impossible, inhabited by beings of light and darkness, elegant and decaying, who scour the streets for temporary emancipation, whose needs are alleviated by wild fumblings, alcohol and opiates. Bukit Bintang, Star Hill, is at the heart of KL’s vices and dens. This half-mile strip of shopping malls, hotels, brothels, restaurants and beggars where dreams are made and trampled upon.

Every day millions of ringgit exchange hands: from exhausted Bangladeshi construction workers who fuck thin Indonesian prostitutes, to millionaires who have cocaine-fuelled orgies with Russian and East European models, to drug pushers and transsexuals who loiter in dark alleys, to fat, rich housewives who buy endless handbags, clothes two sizes smaller and pearls with their platinum cards, to nubile teenagers who score everything from cocaine to E to marijuana, to bankers who sign blank cheques, to politicians who deposit those cheques. Everybody comes into some kind of slaughter, people leave bits of themselves on the streets, and try to pick up the pieces the next time they return.

But the city had not changed, the city had become bitter, bloated from greed, pestilence, rot. There was a poison, a vileness that had penetrated the skin of it. People no longer looked at each other on the streets, their eyes were sullen, jaded, there was unbridled anger, a hostility that was a contagion. There was cruelty, a disregard for manners, there was selfishness. People got into their cars and drove to work and back, single persons in luxury cars, clogging the roads. People honked to get past, flashed their lights to bully slower drivers, screamed and shouted at each other for parking spaces, dodged red lights, raced like madmen in the dead of night. Cut lines in queues, lied to their husbands and wives, all to get ahead, to feel happier, less lonely, less trapped, less afraid.