Chapter One

If it had been anyone else, he might have smiled.

But this was Julia.

“It is an independently verified review. Julia. Your complaints about Alex Whiteley’s lap chole have been thoroughly investigated, as the seriousness of the allegations required.

The Medical Director turned his attention to the document on his desk, pushed his glasses further up his nose and spoke even more quietly than usual. Julia was forced to lean forward to hear him.

Chapter One

It was a woman’s voice. Tracy fought back.

“And your point is?” she said, emotionless – always the best way.

“You sprained your wrist on Tuesday and now you need emergency treatment? At…” she glanced at the clock “Eight o’clock on a Saturday evening? Four days after the event.” Tracy hoped the dramatic pause that followed would have an effect, but she was wrong. Again.

“Does it hurt? … Not really but you’re first reserve for the ladies darts tonight …. Are you left-handed? … There’s no problem then, is there? …. Well, our current waiting time is…” she winced at the writing on the wall in the waiting room, “… between four and five hours, unless you’re an emergency. Which you are not.” End of. She put the phone down.

Her sigh extended out into the waiting room and circled languidly, looking for somewhere to roost. But all the chairs were occupied, even the one with the deformed leg. It’s occupant, an impossibly slender woman with eyes hidden behind celebrity status aviators had perched herself at the stable side of the seat and was precariously balanced at an angle designed to counter the deformity and to achieve balance. As long as she did not move it would work. Tracy could not remember exactly what the woman had said she had come in for – something euphemistic that a receptionist was not supposed to understand. Certainly not for the dazzling sunlight, she had remarked. It had seemed like a joke but it wasn’t, as they both knew. But the woman was not in apparent distress or bleeding over anything so that would have to do. On her face, what was left of it outside the sunglasses, she wore the same expression as the rest of the assembled throng, something between resignation and forlorn hope, carpeted with resentful endurance

Chapter One
Singapore 1973

Sweat or humidity? It was impossible to tell. Edible air. Suffocation born of heat and unfiltered cigarette smoke. Lizard-tongue roll ups dangling like serpent breaths, licking Chance, tasting Fate.

Four men sit at the square table in the small room, playing Mah-jong. Eyes open, faces closed. Everything that matters is in the dry, bone tiles chattering about them – stippled white noise in a dim room. It is scene from forever set down here, now, for the men in singlets and flaccid shorts. Three are young and the other is slightly older, but none as far as middle aged. They gamble in the present for their future and the tiles will decide. An unholy way to choose, perhaps, but as sacred and binding as the discreet tattoo they all wear on the soft skin of the inner right elbow, where with every bend and crease the silent black lines shriek out their allegiance as the tigers’ jaws blend with their bones. They were born and then they chose. Now they belong until they die.

Chapter One
Our Door Is Always Open

“It’s closed.”

“Leave it outside then.”

“But what if someone takes it?”

“So? What’s it to us? We don’t want it. Anyway, we’re not the first. Look. Someone’s already left stuff there.”

She looked at the doorstep, festooned with torn bin bags and a soiled quilt, piled up untidily against the double-glazed door.

“You sure it can’t be traced back to us? What if someone sees us?” She looked around at the deserted street, slumbering still, defiantly clinging to the last moments of rest. Not even the litter was moving.

“They won’t. Just shut up and dump it.”

“What if it moves?”

“For God’s sake, just put it down and get back in the car.”

They drove off, he at the wheel, foot down, without a backward glance. She would have liked to, but did not dare.