The garage was run out of a shophouse, with a sparse boneyard of cars next to it. Most of the shophouse was occupied by the owner’s burgeoning family, with a small room off the main staircase where Nam Teck and the other assistant, Seng, slept. There was never quite silence, as one or another of the children seemed to be having a screaming fit at all times—a relay race of shrieks and howls. The rent was cheap, though, and eating with the family meant he could keep almost all of his tiny earnings.

The boss, Mr Chiam, had done quite well out of the Emergency, with a nice sideline in bulletproof cars. Steel plates tacked onto doors, special reinforced glass for clients who couldn’t quite run to a fully-armoured car, but still fancied themselves important enough to be in danger of terrorist attacks. He had in his yard the wreck of a car that survived—there were holes all along the side, and the front was caved in where a grenade had landed on the bonnet. The glass was intact, though. He’d open the doors to show that the bullets never emerged into the interior, and the steel plates were only dented.

“The ang moh should have come to me,” he cackled, speaking of Henry Gurney, killed by the Ma Gong whilst driving up Fraser’s Hill. “His car—no protection, nothing, and he dared to drive through the jungle, with his wife next to him.” Lady Gurney survived the ambush, after Sir Henry walked straight into the snipers’ sights to draw fire away from her. “I wouldn’t do that. What for? Get a new wife.” He laughed again, pinching Mrs Chiam to show he
wasn’t serious.

The next High Commissioner, Gerald Templer, wouldn’t take the job unless he was given an armoured limousine—purchased second-hand, it was rumoured, from Éamon de Valera. He had it fired on by a machine gun, and was impressed to find every bullet repelled. Templer didn’t die in office, which could be considered a success.

Mr Chiam was full of such stories, which he told with the enjoyment of a born entertainer. Their dinner table was never silent, as he took advantage of the newcomer to recycle all his anecdotes, now embellished just enough to still be credible. Mrs Chiam laughed politely, but her mind was elsewhere. A thin, worried woman, she was always silently calculating if she’d cooked enough rice to feed these ravenous men, if there were enough buns for the children’s breakfasts the next day, how much of the housekeeping money she had left that month. Seng laughed too, though it wasn’t always clear how much he understood—he was Hainanese, while Mr Chiam, like Nam Teck, was a Cantonese-speaker.