Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw

on his hands. Now that he was rested and feeling better he could not stand the hours spent watching DVDs or Korean TV dramas. He tried strumming tunes on his guitar or tinkling on the piano, but the apartment was too dark and oppressive, and he could feel no enthusiasm for music. He began spending too much time on the internet, on websites he shouldn’t have been looking at. In fact, it was during this period of imprisonment that he first discovered sexually explicit sites. At first he hated himself for trawling endlessly through them, but he was surprised at how his initial feelings of wariness and guilt soon gave way to an unthinking numbness, and he would spend hours sitting in the semi-dark staring at images that were initially shocking but quickly became dull. He would fall asleep at odd hours because he could not stop sifting through the pages for new images of graphic sexual acts, even though he felt nothing when he looked at them. He went to bed feeling empty and full of anger at his fans outside, for they were the ones who had forced him into this position.

      Finally his management company called a press conference at which Gary appeared, happy and smiling, saying that he had taken some time off to return to Malaysia to spend time with friends and family following a ‘sad occurrence’ which he would rather not discuss in public. Relieved that he was alive and in good health, his fans did not press any further, assuming that his temporary disappearance was somehow linked to the fact that he was an orphan, raised by distant relatives with whom he had enjoyed no closeness. His troubled youth following the death of his mother was well documented – it was something that made him appear human and vulnerable to his fans. As his manager once told him, his childhood tragedies were a great selling point. But though he was grateful for his fans’ loyalty and adoration, when he looked at the mass of jubilant teenage faces at his next concert, he found their joy so empty and unquestioning that it unnerved him, and he could not get rid of the feeling that had entered his soul during the ten days of confinement in his night-dark apartment. It was unmistakable. He had started to hate them.

      That three-week period of internment and difficult public relations upset his tightly packed schedule and cost him in many ways. Not only was the cancelled concert an expensive write-off, but the negative publicity surrounding his sudden and mysterious disappearance caused several projects to be suspended, and one or two sponsors even doubted whether they should continue to support him. His calendar became compressed to the point where he could not fulfil his obligations, and his scheduled participation in the Beijing Olympics music video was cancelled, depriving him of a chance to be seen widely by the biggest audience of them all.

      Now he had to work twice as hard to penetrate the Mainland market, his management team said. Everything they did over the coming year would be geared towards establishing him in China – every song he recorded, every TV show he appeared on, every commercial he shot, every hour he slept, every meal he ate. He had everything it took to be a superstar in China, but it would be hard. He had to be ready to sacrifice everything. Gary thought about all the things he had already sacrificed – friends, a social life, family commitments, love, relationships. And he was not at all frightened by what he was about to embark on, because he had none of the things that people normally hold dear. He had nothing to sacrifice.

      The giant billboards that stood along the elevated highway bore the poster announcing Gary’s ground-breaking concert in Shanghai. Music Angel has arrived! The Angel of Music is here to save us … His image was spread across each billboard, his newly gym-toned torso showing through a shirt that had been strategically slashed to display his abdominal muscles, the result of eight months’ work with a personal trainer. His head was bowed to show off his thick black hair, that looked slick with sweat, and computer trickery had provided him with a giant pair of angel wings, giving the impression that he was landing gently on earth after a celestial journey. It was impossible to miss these posters. As his car drove him along the busy highway, he reckoned that they appeared every couple of miles, each time positioned in the middle of a cluster of three billboards. On one side of him there was a young woman dressed only in underwear, her index finger to her lips, which were pursed in a hushing shape; on the other side were washing machines and refrigerators.

      He had just performed a sell-out concert in Wuhan which had been widely covered in the local press and gained enormous publicity for his principal sponsors, a soft-drink company. They had shot a TV commercial to coincide with his tour, a big-budget production involving sophisticated computer graphics, in which the Angel Gary flies over a devastated landscape defeating gruesome monsters by shining a light that emanates from his heart. As Gary flutters softly to earth, the desert around him turns lush and green. The power to turn darkness to light, he whispers, looking at the camera with his trademark sideways glance before taking a sip of soda.

      It was remarked within the industry and by the public alike that Gary was looking great. After many months of limited public appearances, during which he was rarely photographed, he had unveiled his new image – muscular and with a streak of danger. He was still boyish and innocent-looking, but his presence now carried a faint physical threat, as if he had a dark side to him. His stylists and costume designers were showered with praise, as were the people at the record company who had devised the new marketing strategy.

      ‘Thank goodness we invested so much in your gym work,’ his agent said as they drove past the fifth billboard. ‘Your physical condition is crucial. We can’t afford to have a repeat of Taipei last year.’

      Gary did not answer. As usual, the previous night’s concert had left him both exhausted and unable to sleep. It was always like this. The adrenalin of the performance would rush through his veins, and he would feel the deep pounding of the bass notes reverberate in his chest and ribcage hours after the concert had ended, when he was lying in bed trying to sleep. Every tiny light in the room – the green numbers showing the time on the DVD player, the red dot on the TV set – seemed noon-bright and blinding even when his eyes were closed. Often he would just sit in front of the TV with the remote control in his hand, staring at the black screen. He could not even summon enough enthusiasm to turn it on. Sometimes he would eventually fall asleep at around three or four o’clock, but often he would just count the hours until dawn, which would come as a relief, because daylight brought with it activity, and he would not have to sit alone with only his thoughts for company.

      In Wuhan the night before, he had tried to surf the internet for the porn sites he had become addicted to, but had failed. That was the problem with China – he could not access any of his usual sites. It had become a late-night ritual for him: turning on his laptop and idly searching for new, more dangerous sites each time. He did this after work or a concert, when he was alone in his apartment or hotel room and the night ahead seemed very long. He was not even excited by these sites any more; they had simply become something like a calming reassurance after a long day. Even the nastiest failed to provoke any response from him. The moment he arrived on the Mainland, however, he was deprived of this source of comfort. He had spent several frustrating hours after the concert searching for the kind of hard-core images he was used to, but the best he could find were women who, though immodestly dressed, wore more than the models he was now seeing on billboards in Shanghai. So he had opened the mini-bar and drunk all the vodka in it, and when he finished he rang to order some more.

      Drinking was a recent thing. It helped him sleep, that was all.

      He had now been on the road for sixteen days, and in that time he had played fourteen concerts.

      ‘But, Little Brother,’ his agent continued, ‘you need to sleep. I don’t know what you are doing at night – probably chasing girls, I suppose – but we need to do a lot of public appearances, and you can’t wear your sunglasses all the time. The photoshoots, they’re OK because we can always adjust the photos later, but in public – that’s different. You know what these Shanghainese are like. They will scrutinise your appearance to the very last detail! Please remember what a huge investment we have made for this album – who else gets concerts like the one you’ve just had? Don’t waste this opportunity.’

      Gary adjusted his sunglasses. They were becoming his trademark – oversized black plastic shades that gave him a mysterious, futuristic appearance.

      ‘We