Page 12 of Behind Frenemy Lines

Kriya

We were going to Hong Kong for business, not fun.

Arthur was giving a talk and I was speaking on a panel at the conference.

Around that, we’d booked in client meetings and training sessions.

Every spare moment was crammed with networking coffees, drinks, lunches, and dinners.

For the next four days, I was basically going to be a dancing bear with legal training and horrendous jet lag.

Yet I still felt a thrill of excitement as the island came into view through the plane window: clusters of tall buildings, winding roads amid verdant hills.

It was all kdramas and BTS nowadays, but when I was growing up, it was Hong Kong my Chinese friends had looked to.

That was where cool came from, in those days.

(It was very clear to us that “cool” was not locally produced in Malaysia.)

I remembered the little girl I’d been, playing on the scuffed parquet floor of our old house, while some Hong Kong cops and gangsters movie blared from the TV.

Appa preferred English and Tamil movies, but he’d watch Hong Kong films if they were on, like at Chinese New Year.

It would have blown tiny Kriya’s mind to know she’d be coming here someday.

What with the bustle and excitement of arriving, it took me a while to clock that Arthur was being weird. His luggage came out first on the carousel at baggage reclaim. Then I spotted my purple hard-shell suitcase. “That’s mine.”

“I’ll get it,” said Arthur, and took it off the conveyor belt for me.

Arthur had never bothered helping with my luggage before, on the several business trips we’d taken together. But I was too tired from the flight, and too distracted by the novelty of being in Hong Kong, to take notice.

There was something intensely familiar about the place, though it was my first time visiting.

The deep green hills, the bright sunshine, the blast of air-conditioning as we walked through the airport, the red-threaded charm dangling from the rearview mirror in the taxi.

Cantonese was being spoken all around us.

Hearing it was triggering and soothing at the same time, like being back home.

Arthur didn’t get a chance to be weirdly chivalrous at the other end of the journey.

As the taxi pulled up outside the hotel, a uniformed attendant leaped to open the door for us.

He passed us on to a second fellow, who led us through the hotel lobby to reception.

I glanced over my shoulder to see our luggage being wheeled in on a trolley, pushed by yet another attendant.

I’d never stayed at such a fancy hotel before.

The floors were tiled in shining red marble.

Light streamed in through vast floor-to-ceiling windows.

There were giant Chinese paintings and lush potted plants everywhere, contrasting with the gleaming reflective surfaces of floors and walls and mirrors.

I should have pushed Amma and Appa harder to fly over to join me here, after the conference.

I could have got a room for the three of us for a couple of nights.

But then again, they would have tormented themselves the whole time, calculating the cost of every second spent breathing this rarefied air, and converting it into ringgit. Maybe it was for the best.

I couldn’t wait to get to my room, have a shower, and crawl into the soft, roomy batik kaftan rolled up at the bottom of my suitcase. An evening vegging out in bed with room service sounded like bliss.

After we’d checked in, I was turning towards the lifts like a sunflower towards the sun, when Arthur said:

“Do you want to get a drink?”

“Right now?” I said. The vision of my hotel room slid away, a mirage in the desert. “Oh, do you want to talk through the training slides?”

I’d sent Arthur the slides for the training sessions we were going to be doing a week ago, but he hadn’t looked at them.

I’d been prepared for this, so I’d brought along printouts for him to review on the flight.

Presumably he’d had the chance to glance at them at some point during the thirteen hours we were in the air.

Luckily we hadn’t been sat together, so I had been able to relax and watch a couple of movies.

“We should probably talk about timing, and who’s covering which slides,” I said.

Arthur blinked. Then he said, “Yes. Let’s talk about the slides.”

We found a table in the lounge, a flight of stairs down from the lobby.

The high ceiling arched above us, held up by vast mirrored pillars.

The guests at the tables were reflected in the glass: people in suits; affluent families on holiday.

Through the windows I glimpsed the leafy tops of trees, snaking roads, high-rise buildings, and in the distance, behind the Hong Kong skyline, the vague shapes of hills.

Arthur had a beer. I ordered chrysanthemum tea.

The vibes were off. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Arthur was being normal enough: He’d got our drinks and was now flipping through the slides, scribbling notes as he went.

But hadn’t he been taken aback when I’d assumed he wanted to talk about work? Did that mean he’d had something else in mind, some other motive for suggesting drinks?

The hairs rose on my forearms.

I shook myself internally. Arthur wouldn’t. I’d worked with him for eight years and I’d never seen him do anything inappropriate. He was old enough to be my father—a young father, but still.

Even the thought was unsettling, unlikely as it was. I’d never been one of the parade of trainees and NQs who got crushes on Arthur. I knew too much.

I rubbed my arms.

“Cold?” said Arthur. “They’ve really got the air-conditioning on blast.”

“Yeah, I should have layered up.” I opened my laptop. “I’ll make the amendments now. What was the change you wanted to the title?”

My unease faded as we worked through the slide deck. Arthur was being fine, not leaning in too close or anything like that.

Why should the poor man come under suspicion simply because he’d helped me with my bag and wanted a chat?

If his ex-wife was any guide, I was nothing like his type.

I was dark, fat, and frizzy-haired. Whereas Kelly looked like a rich man’s wife: a slim, blonde woman who’d made all her clothes look exactly as expensive as they were.

I shut my laptop when we’d got through the slides, getting up. “I’ll go ask about getting these printed off.” Arthur preferred having hard copy notes to refer to when delivering presentations.

Arthur seemed disconcerted. “There’s no rush. You haven’t finished your drink.”

I glanced down at my glass, half-full of chrysanthemum tea.

“I’ve had enough,” I said. “It’s a bit too sweet for me.”

The weirdness with Arthur faded away after that first day. He was being completely normal. We talked exclusively about work.

We kicked off each morning with a pre-brief over breakfast, running through the agenda, talking about what we were going to do and who we were going to see.

This was Arthur’s idea. I would have preferred to have breakfast by myself.

The breakfast buffet was amazing, a holy grail of fancy Asian hotel buffets.

Besides the cereals and English breakfast and cured meats and cheese you might have found at any decent English hotel, there was fried rice, fried noodles, fresh tropical fruit, congee, eggs cooked to your liking by a man in a giant chef’s hat, dim sum, mini pastries, waffles, spring rolls, deep-fried bao, a salad bar, a juice bar, and another man in a giant chef’s hat who would make you noodle soup to your precise tastes, from your choice of a dizzying selection of noodles, green leafy vegetables, mushrooms, meatballs, fish balls, and wonton.

Faced with all this bounty, Arthur chose to eat, every morning, a bowl of oat porridge with a banana sliced into it. White people!

I made sure I ate well, since we didn’t always get to have lunch.

The days were long. After the conference panels and training sessions and networking events and coffees with people who might at some point prove useful, there was always a dinner to entertain some client or other.

After that, we went on to drinks—our local contacts all seemed to have some hip bar in Lan Kwai Fong they took proprietorial pride in showing us.

Arthur gave a good impression of enjoying himself. He might never have heard of jet lag. I could only do my best to keep up, swallowing my yawns and my yearning for my hotel room. It was an incredibly nice room. I had a king-size bed all to myself, and a view of the sea.

Our final client dinner, on our last day in Hong Kong, was with the GC of a Chinese tech company, a Dutch woman who’d been hired in recently and was still making sense of lo cal office culture. At eight p.m., she did something miraculous. She looked at her watch and said:

“I must get going. Thank you for dinner.”

“Oh,” said Arthur. We’d only just finished our mains. He’d ordered a second bottle of wine, which hadn’t even arrived yet.

“You carry on,” said Karin airily, getting up and settling her handbag on her shoulder.

After she left, Arthur looked over at me. “Do you want dessert?”

I was pleasantly buzzed. I’d drunk my fair share of the first bottle of wine, but it was mostly the relief of being nearly done with the trip. Now, thanks to Karin, it was even looking like I might get back to my room before ten p.m., for once.

So I said, “I’ll take a look at the menu.”

I decided on tiramisu. Arthur deigned to order a scoop of lemon sorbet.

We chatted idly about Karin and the job she had ahead of her, whipping her company’s in-house legal function into shape. The conversation drifted on to the conference and the various people we’d seen over the past week.

Arthur was feeling optimistic about the business we were going to get from the trip. We had already had a couple of verbal instructions, as well as an invitation to deliver training to a client’s European colleagues.