Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

before he left he took some photos of the empty plot of land. In the pale winter light the earth looked so dry it could have been in a desert. The only patch of colour was the electric blue of the plastic bag that had fallen open, revealing a few plump oranges. He walked around a little bit more, coming across more and more pieces of land that looked to him to have been recently cleared – some tiny and compact, some vast and unbounded, hollowed out by bulldozers. He took pictures of each one, and walked until it began to get dark. The winter air felt sharp and icy in his chest, as if he was inhaling tiny shards of glass.

      The following week his cough seemed to get worse again; the long walk in the damp January air seemed to have weakened his lungs, and he found the mere act of breathing an effort. In a meeting with potential bankers he was unable to finish his sentences because of a tickling in his throat that rose as he spoke, swiftly triggering a rasping cough that left his chest and ribcage feeling hollow and achy. The doctor prescribed another course of antibiotics – his third since the new year – and ordered some X-rays, which came back clear. He just needed rest, the doctor said; he was run-down. But his days and nights did not get any shorter – the gruelling meetings lasted all day, bleeding into the evening’s social round of banquets and bars. Once he got over the initial few days of feeling ill, the exhaustion became familiar, almost reassuring. It was always like this: whenever a big project was on the table he would slip easily into the grinding nature of this routine, finding comfort in the constancy of his fatigue. When he woke up each morning he could feel the puffiness of his eyes, knew that they would be bloodshot; his breathing would already be desperate, the air feeling thin in his lungs. His limbs would be heavy, but after a shower and a double espresso he would feel better, though he would never satisfactorily shake the mild headache that was already descending on his skull, already escalating into a migraine. He would work through it – it wasn’t a problem.

      Besides, he didn’t have a choice. There was a problem with the deal. All the arrangements that had been slotting obediently into place just before Christmas were now looking shaky. Someone was refusing to take a bribe – an official in the municipal Urban Planning Department, a mid-ranking engineer who had found an irregularity in the paperwork, a discrepancy, it seemed, between the proposed project and the preliminary drawings. More buildings would have to be demolished than had been declared in the proposal, and this was a problem because many of those buildings were in the local vernacular. This engineer – a glorified technical clerk – was resisting the pressure placed on her by her superiors, most of whom were sympathetic to the Lim family venture. It was awkward when someone acted out of principle; it would take more than money to solve the impasse. And now the delay was leading to further complications: another party was interested in the piece of land, and there was talk of an imminent bid to rival theirs.

      He pressed for emergency meetings with high-ranking officials for whom he had bought Cartier cigarette lighters and weekend trips to the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. There was nothing they could do for the moment, they claimed: his project had to work its way through the system, there was a formal procedure which they couldn’t alter, it would just take a bit of time. Each official he spoke to reassured him gently without committing himself; they were sure the other bid would come to nothing. They said this in a way to suggest that they would do something to prevent it, but now he was not so sure. He was not sure about anything in Shanghai any more.

      In the meantime his secretaries began to speak of an internet campaign – a blog site entitled DEFENDERS OF OLD SHANGHAI. They showed him pages and pages of angry commentary under the discussion thread: Save 969 Weihai Lu from destruction by foreign companies!! It was full of accusations that wildly exaggerated the effect of the project on the existing buildings, so, using the pseudonym ‘FairPreserver’, he personally wrote replies to the most outlandish claims. It was not true that the Lim family company were uncaring capitalists wanting to take advantage of China, he said; he had heard from insiders that they cared greatly about history and would do everything in their power to preserve what they could. They had a long record of restoring heritage buildings and would never dream of destroying anything the city deemed to be important. They cared greatly about the lives of the common people and always sought to be considerate and fair when dealing with property belonging to people of modest means, never forcing anyone to move against their will and always providing compensation where necessary.

      HAHAHAHA, came the first reply, within minutes of his post. What a joke, are you paid by the Lim family to say these things???

      Everything he argued was met with contempt, but still he battled on. No, it was not true that the Lim family had made their money by kicking people off their land in Malaysia; no, they were not going to do the same here. He began to spend hours each day posting replies on the blog site, rushing back from meetings to check what had been said in response to his posts and to write something himself. But then, one day, all of his posts suddenly vanished – he could find no trace of any of them. Every single one had disappeared in the space of an hour, and he was forced to read from the sidelines, marginalised, silenced. He tried inventing a new pseudonym, but every time he posted something it would last less than a day before disappearing. He felt powerless, and was often almost overcome by the urge to scream as he read what was being said about him. He did not know who these people were, and had no way of getting in touch with them. He could only watch helplessly as the blog pages grew longer and more animated with each day; soon all this chatter about his property deals would be in the newspapers. Once it became public the project would be doomed – none of the officials who had been expensively recruited to help facilitate matters would be willing to support his bid openly.

      Frustrated by the lack of news, his father rang him on his mobile one evening, catching him by surprise. He tried to explain that it was not his fault, that things in China moved so quickly that it was impossible to anticipate every development in advance. It wasn’t like Indonesia or Singapore; China was at once lawless and unbending in its rules. He talked and talked, his speech cut to ribbons by his cough; he felt the dryness of his throat and mouth and realised he hadn’t drunk anything for hours. His father listened patiently and then said, ‘I see. But I know you will make a success of this deal.’

      Soon he was spending all night monitoring the blog site. Sleep evaded him; it was superfluous to his current state. All that seemed relevant to his life now was this torrent of words written by unseen, unknown people. He felt he knew them now, felt he was somehow linked to them, and just before the first of the comments citing him by name appeared, he had a strange presentiment in his stomach, a sensation of exhilaration mixed with nausea, as if he knew what was to come. Justin Lim has been trained by his family to be uncaring and ruthless. From a young age he was already displaying these tendencies. Justin Lim is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he smiles to your face but is ready to eat you up whole. Justin Lim is handsome but like all handsome men cannot be trusted one inch. Justin Lim is a man with absolutely no feelings whatsoever, he does not possess a beating heart. Justin Lim is not human. Justin Lim has committed some terrible acts in the past. Justin Lim will stop at nothing to fulfil his aims, he will crush you like he crushes insects.

      His father began to ring him more frequently – every other day, then every day, then several times a day. Each time the phone rang he could sense his father’s anxiety in the ringtone, swelling with every beat. At first he made excuses – he was just going into a meeting, he couldn’t speak. But then he stopped answering the calls altogether, letting the phone ring on to the voicemail; he never checked his messages. He stopped going to the office, for there was nothing left to do now except look at the things people said about him on the blog site. He never strayed far from his laptop, and even if he had to go to the toilet he hurried back as quickly as possible. Taking a shower made him anxious, made him fear that he was missing a new comment on the blog.

      One night he managed two hours’ sleep. It had made him groggy but strangely lucid, and his head filled for a moment or two with a painful awareness of the weakness of his body. He went into the bathroom and stepped onto the scales out of curiosity: he had lost even more weight. He splashed his face with water and looked in the mirror. His eyes were sunken and dark, glassy and staring, like a fish’s at the market, his lips chapped and sore: a simulation of life. When dawn broke he packed a few things into a suitcase and checked into a hotel. From there he rang a friend of a friend of