The Check Your Luck Agency

There’s one thing I hate more than being wrong, and that’s being right about presuming somebody is as big a scumbag as they turn out to be.

“Are you sure about this, Xiǎo Chong?”

A small cherubic face looked up at me and nodded vigorously.

Looking at us together, a casual passer by – if they noticed us at all in the crush of people – would think I was merely placing a takeaway order from one of the nearby stalls. The covered open-air food court was noisy with the chatter of hungry diners and the hard surfaces of concrete, plastic, steel and melamine kept all those voices bouncing off each other until they combined and reached a crescendo of sound. It was late, I was hungry and, between my growling stomach and the clattering din, I was getting a headache.

I hate eating when everyone else does, shoving elbows that have intruded into my personal space and my meal. I hated the case Fiona had handed me. But most of all, I hated that I was right.

“I was sitting next to them at the same table,” Xiǎo Chong explained. He held up a small vinyl bag full of round bulges, his gaze guileless. “Playing marbles.”

Xiǎo – or Little – Chong is one of my best assistants. Yeah, that’s what I call him. I’m sure others might have different names for it, usually incorporating the words “child” and “exploitation”, but he’s smarter than a lot of adults I’ve met. He has the face of an angel and the deviousness of a, well, child, and he can appear completely innocent in places where I would stick out like a sore thumb. I keep such pint-sized informants in most of the major food junctions around Singapore, like Chomp! Chomp!, Maxwell, Newton’s and Lau Pa Sat, but Xiǎo Chong is, without a doubt, the best of the lot.

Crap. What he’d just told me put a whole other spin on the situation. I almost wished I could blame everything on a ghost instead.

“Thanks Xiǎo Chong.”

I slipped him ten dollars and walked out of the food court, glad to leave the bustle behind me.

What my little nine-year old friend had told me wasn’t enough to solve the case, but it told me where to start digging to nail the real culprit. I could’ve gone back to Fiona with my news and that would have been the end of it, but I pride myself on my attention to detail. I like my cases closed so tight there are no little doubts hissing as they escape. In this particular case, I doubted the client would thank me, but that’s just how I work.

Considering the crush at Lau Pa Sat, Robinson Road was quiet and serene. On either side of the road, tall office buildings loomed, now half-emptied of their quota of wage-slaves. I had thought to be one of their number once, ascending the corporate ladder no doubt on the heads of those slower than me, but that was in a different life. In the past two years, I’ve become a woman of much simpler needs.

Speaking of which, it was high time I went home. At this time of night, just past seven-thirty, most of the Malaysian workers would be back across the border and at home, enjoying an evening meal with their family. The Causeway joining both countries would still be busy, but would have lost that anarchic edge from a couple of hours ago. I walked to the nearest MRT station and took the train up to Kranji.

Kranji is a strange kind of place, an anomaly in super-populated Singapore. Its only edifice of any note is the immaculately landscaped racetrack complex that takes up hectares of valuable land. The station and its surrounds were built with only one purpose in mind, and that’s to divest punters of as much money as possible as fast as possible. Competing with the long gleaming row of automatic turnstiles at the station’s boundary is a long row of ATM machines just beyond it. Having had opportunity to use one of them in the past, I noticed that they hand out more money than the machines in the rest of Singapore. I suppose fewer trips to the machine means fewer betting opportunities missed.

Usually the area is as quiet as a graveyard but, when my travel schedule coincides with race day, the truth is that I can hardly move in and around the station. The huge paved area that I normally consider obscenely large gets turned into a tightly squeezed mass of excited humans. People spill in and out of the brightly-lit shops along the short arcade and even the spaces along the walls are marked out by hawkers. Unfortunately, such people are not easy to spot until I’m almost on top of them, especially when there’s a crowd impeding my progress.

The budget-price entrepreneurs are usually elderly. The women dress in their Chinese floral pyjama outfits and the men in their white singlets and navy blue shorts. They stake out their space with a rug or sheet of plastic and arrange their knick-knacks on top of it in an orderly fashion. Packs of tissues, wind-up toys, herbal tinctures, small gee-gaws. I’ve never seen anyone actually stop and buy anything from these grandparents, but they appear like clockwork every race day, so they must be able to make a living somehow. I’m sure that it’s actually against the law to sell things from a cheap synthetic blanket on the floor of a public thoroughfare, but if the Singapore government decides to turn a blind eye to the practice, who am I to complain? I have enough gripes about what they do notice.

Tonight was not race day, so the station was its usual eerie quiet. Only three of us got off on the platform and the two young boys in front of me, laughing and still in their high-school uniforms, were energetic enough to make me feel old and jaded. They bounded down the stairs while I took the elevator, listening to the rhythmic whine of each mechanical wheel as it bore me down to the ground floor.

By the time I reached the turnstile the boys were long gone, although I could still hear their good humour recede into the distance. I slapped my card on the access panel, walked around the corner and came across a large food place, its white fluorescent lights obscenely blinding in such stillness. I call it a food place because calling it a restaurant, or even a café, would be gracing it with more ambience than it had. It was a place of cheap food on cheap furniture in cheap surroundings. I had passed it numerous times without a second glance but tonight was different. My stomach was rumbling and I was still an hour from home.

I looked in through the large windows and noticed that, as usual, the place was three-quarters empty. Dallying for a while with indecision, I finally succumbed and entered.

The floor was cheap vinyl, blackened at the edges where it met the walls. The few customers already in the shop didn’t even look up as I walked to the counter. Behind the stretch of scratched white, the serving woman jerked her head sharply upwards in the universal signal for “what do you want?” She looked tired and angry. I didn’t blame her.

After a quick perusal of the menu on the back wall above her head, I ordered a nasi lemak and iced lemon tea, figuring it was a combination that was hard to screw up. The food came while I was still fishing for change and I took my tray to an empty table next to the wall but still close to the counter. From that angle, I could see everyone entering and leaving through the door and even movement at the cash register. Of course if someone decided to climb the glass display case at my back, they’d be in a great position to ambush me, but I figured they’d slip on the ever-present layer of grease and do themselves an injury before they got within striking distance.

The food, presented in the traditional pyramid of a folded banana leaf, was surprisingly good. The ikan bilis sambal, made from dried anchovies, was the right mixture of hot and sweet. Of course there weren’t enough peanuts to accompany the coconut-milk rice (there never are) and the egg was fried. That bothered me because I’m a traditionalist who likes my nasi lemak with a hard-boiled egg, not this quick and dirty fried version but, for a couple of bucks, what could I expect? The iced tea was too astringent, with a bitter after-taste. Either they were using low-quality tea or it had been sitting there for at least half a day. No matter, it filled a hole and meant I didn’t have to go scavenging when I got home.

I left my tray on the table after I finished and walked out towards the road. The air was still hot, with little relief from any stray breezes, and there was the ever-present aroma of diesel fumes in the air. The road around Kranji is always busy with buses and lorries plying their route between Singapore and Malaysia, and a lot of the vehicles were not that well maintained, but the smell always made me feel nostalgic. It’s the smell of home, a scent that was written into my very psyche during my formative years. I breathed in the smoke. Between the heat, lush greenery and the smell, it somehow felt…right.

It was getting dark fast so I hurried to the tall pedestrian bridge and descended to the far side of the road just in time to catch one of the fuel-belching monsters on its way back across the Causeway. Mine was the last stop in Singapore so it was obvious I wouldn’t get a seat. I stood, jammed up against other impassive workers on their way home, watching the monotonous darkness go by.

There are two points of near-panic during any journey across the Strait, both at the border points. It doesn’t matter which way. In this particular case, the first occurred as the bus neared the Singapore Customs & Immigration stop. There are always the craned looks from the passengers up front, sizing up how many buses are ahead of theirs and how it will translate to waiting times inside the checkpoint building.

Sometimes the bus will stop metres away from the platform and people will dash madly from the exits, dodging between scooters and other pedestrians on their way to the scanner gates and passport line-ups. On the approach to the entrance of the Singaporean complex, eagle-eyed officials stand and watch the hordes mill past. Sometimes the guards are accompanied by several German Shepherd dogs straining on the leashes beside them. Everybody is careful not to run if the dogs are there.

I’ve always wondered why the young men with severe crew-cuts care so much. After all, we’re leaving the country. But this is Singapore, so appearances must be maintained. After navigating the concrete pathway, there are the escalators. At least they work, which is more than can be said about the equipment on the Malaysian side of the border, and we are finally disgorged into a giant processing area.

Despite the number of people wanting to get out of the country, not every Immigration booth is manned. Sometimes the officials like to toy with the crowd, making it appear that they are getting ready to open another aisle. They have their little cases of stamps with them, a clipboard, maybe a binder or two. They approach a vacant booth, stare at it for a few minutes, then move off. The more experienced travellers will shuffle their feet and take furtive looks around, calculating their chances of being first at the new queue, should it open. I’ve seen old white-haired grandmothers wrestle with the best of them in such a melée. With age comes sharp elbows. And surprising nimbleness.

Must be all those tai chi classes.

In the meantime, the Immigration official can feel the desperation in the damp hot air as something tangible. Anxiety, tension, humidity, the press of bodies, all combine with the failing air-conditioning to produce an ego-boosting meal for our little Immigration officer to feast upon. He or she will cast a bored look around, as if contemplating the architecture, then retreat to a point near one of the far offices. Sometimes this ploy of forward, pace, touch barrier, retreat, can occur several times, an exquisite torture for all those waiting in lines that easily stretch fifty or more individuals long. And while we wait, the buses fill up outside the complex and carry on their journey across the border to the next Customs and Immigration complex, but this time on Malaysian soil.

I had only come to Singapore that night on a hunch, so I wasn’t carrying any bags or backpacks with me. That meant that, once I was through the formalities, I could dodge through the workers who were more laden and exhausted than me.

As I reached the top of the queue, I took a look around. Towering above the majority of people were Western tourists, pale and sweating even in their strappy tops, thin t-shirts and cotton shorts. They looked shell-shocked, as if they had been expecting the cool efficiency of Changi airport and had instead got…us. I remained impassive while the Immigration official checked my passport before waving me through.

The air in the transport bays felt even hotter after the feeble air-conditioning in the building, compounded by the smoking exhausts of the idling buses.

I scrambled my way onto the closest one taking passengers, flashing my paper ticket at the driver as I boarded, sank onto the nearest seat and headed home.