In Singapore’s bookshops there were cartoons about the likes of George, the Ang Mo, the crude, rude, klutzy wallet with a beer gut. By rights he should lead around a skinny Indonesian girl three foot shorter than himself in tight jeans with diamante beading on her denim jeans. But he had his pride, and liked a gal who could fill out a spreadsheet and work her Asia Miles.
Consequently, he worked out. He wore Armani. He played mahjong and watched the latest Korean soap dubbed into Mandarin with English Subtitles. He shaved his chest to rid himself of grey hairs. He plucked his nose, plucked his ears, his eyebrows, and even trimmed the hairs on his knuckles, which grew at an alarming rate. He had once waxed his back except for the next twelve months in this heat the stubble caught up on his shirt and left him with a horrible rash. The back, he decided, made him a Silverback. That was what he was, a Silverback, the king of the jungle, the best of the beasts, and until some younger stud had the guts to kick him out of the troop he would have his pick of the women, shaved women! He drooled at the thought. He would blog the pros and cons at his office desk on Saturdays, much better than hanging about his pokey apartment off Orchard Road, within sight of four floors of whores, as they called one of the entertainment malls it backed onto.
He still had not fully unpacked. His new clothes he lay on the floor and allowed the humidity to iron them. Ironing was women’s work but Pudding, his Chinese girlfriend, who he made love to on a bedless mattress twice a week, never ironed anything. She had a maid back at her apartment. She had a career, another life, but twice a week she was Pudding because George called her that. She offered to send the maid round to iron for him and George thought how cool it would be to make love to the maid as well. He did not know the maid was fifty-eight years old; he assumed all Singapore girls were twenty-three. In ignorance, he agreed that Pudding’s maid could pay a visit and deal with his washing and ironing until he acquired his own maid, though that seemed a very permanent kind of decision to make. Anything permanent, since his divorce, was not on his agenda.
George liked the girls. Which was why he liked Singapore for there it was all so easy. He revelled in the happy conjunction of Chinese and Malay genes, steeped in a hot steamy brew of tropical humidity and soy sauce, creating complexions that went on for ever: milky coffee, blemish free, and well upholstered, beautifully finished, with on occasions MBA included. These girls were good to go and got all the better for the going. Surprisingly, George seemed to figure in the equation. Go figure!
For George was no hunk. He was slight, slightly successful, slightly happy, slightly bald on his head, less on his back, slightly overweight, and often slightly drunk: the ex-pat par excellence, lusting after young Asian flesh. He was a lust accountant with a column of opening lines carefully annotated with a percentage success rating: if you were sushi, which kind would you be? He was not so middle-aged that he could not be cute, but he knew his limitations. He could still be attractive by playing the line and letting them do all the talking. Nothing a woman likes more than talking about herself and nothing a man likes more than watching her, so he wrote in his blog, The Pussy Man Blog.
Which is how Pudding came across him. She knew where to find him and told him how fascinated she became by the thought of meeting a stranger who had exposed all his wildest fantasies to the world. She knew exactly what she had to do to drive him insane. He liked that and he knew it excited her. He could smell it on her as soon as she joined him at his favourite seat at Hooters, over beer, ribs and coleslaw. The game was perfect. He wrote his blog and then along she came to make it true, after the event. A diary that foretold the future! The effect was turned into the cause and his life was running backwards and he could feel himself getting younger.
As Pudding yelled, screamed, groaned, gurgled, pulled wild faces as her breasts flayed the air, during their twice-weekly sessions, he became younger and stronger and the condoms became weaker. It was the Year of Living Dangerously and he was Mel Gibson and she was the woman, the love interest, who was played by the actress that was not a dwarf. His memory failed him at times.
Despite the amount of noise Pudding made, she began complaining about other noises in the apartment. George heard nothing, which was hardly surprising. Nor did he sense that something was watching them, as she assured him there was. There were no cameras, he told her, no strangers lurking in a cupboard, no cupboards in fact. But she heard scuttling scratching sounds, somewhere beneath them, or above, or within the fabric of the building. He listened and maybe it was true something was there and it excited both of them all the more. There would be a hole in the ceiling with an eye watching them wrestling themselves into a lather that not even the most ferocious Singaporean airconditioning could dowse. This was nothing more than further proof that Pudding, half his age, at least, shared the same disease as he did, a gaping hole in the psyche.
He filled the hole by reading the Chinese subtitles to the dullest American blockbusters, but it allowed him to always say how he read Chinese. This was his best opening gambit with girls who really needed no opening gambit. He would turn up at Hooters, chat up the little waitresses in their industrial strength bras and tight silk shorts, and pick over his BBQ ribs, licking his fingers, worrying about the smear of fat and barbecue sauce that always gathered in the creases of his mouth, in the creases with the little grey stubble he could never shave without cutting himself.
Pudding filled her psychic hole cruising Clarke Quay catching the eyes of his like and sparking a conversation. He would reply in Mandarin and be heralded as not only a brilliant man, but a stud too. His Mandarin was sexy, pronounced like a purring cat licking up the milk: pussy talk from the pussy man. Are you barbecue sauce or pesto? He always got a smile, always got a conversation, and then Pussy Man’s purring pussy talk got him into cahoots with Singapore Party Girl number eighteen, otherwise known as Pudding, a careless cleavage and a large smiling red lipped mouth who lived at home still. In short, George, running from the suburbs, collided with Pudding, aka Jenny Lee, determined not to be like her parents.
Run back in time a little and you find Jenny Lee, dutiful daughter, working in a bank, meeting no-one but shy Chinese boys worried about having to go for two years army service, or worse, after army service and desperate to catch up on their career and with little skill with women. How could one have a future with mere boys playing catch up with the girls? And the Chinese boys, so all her friends complained, did not kiss. The Ang Mo though, mature, moneyed, experienced, besmitten with even the dumpiest and hairiest and most uncouth, uncultured, unattractive of girls, stuck his tongue in all the strangest places. They could even be your ticket out of Singapore, the dullest town on the planet!
If you clicked backwards through George’s Blog, way passed the dead links, to the remnants of his divorce blog, you could find the fossil of suburban man: last coherent entry: “She even took the dog!” After that, blankness upon blankness, filled in with an all consuming two years of studying Chinese in order to blank out his mind, until one trip to Singapore and the night he never did get to Geylang where the legal brothels were, because what need was there? The girls came screaming into his arms. They leered at him in elevators. They wore next to nothing in the cool of the hotel lobbies. They paraded in little tight hot pants, navels bejewelled, cleavages exposed, long legs and high heels and ready smiles. Call me Big, George Big, he said, offering his hand by way of introduction. So was born The Pussy Man, his new non-boring self, his Pudding lure. If you were a pudding, which would you be? Ginger Sponge and Custard? Mango Pudding and Black Rice? Spotted Dick? Whoever said Singapore was boring was not a middle-aged Englishman.
One through to seventeen were a middle aged man’s folly, wet dreams when he had long forgotten what a wet dream was, and better than a day at the gym: a cardiovascular work out, an elixir of youth. He even began remembering people’s names again. Do you like deserts or the sea? Number eighteen preferred eating cheesecake to going on boats, confused as to what exactly he was asking her. And much to her bewilderment he called her Pudding thereafter. Ah, Pudding, he would say, take me shopping for some clothes for you to take off. His wife, ex-wife, would be jealous if she ever read about his shopping trips with Pudding in her pants, navel ring, butterfly tattoo, slave bangles, and high high-heels. For George it was rebirth and for her it was liberation.
Scroll forward through the nights of passion, the gymnastics, the role playing, the dirty talk, the toys, the quickies in strange places, the slow weekends in a spa on Sentosa Island – So Expensive, Nothing To See Anyway, as the Singaporean cynic had it – and then Pudding’s maid arrived. She was under strict orders to destroy the thing that lurked behind the walls. So she brought a huge tube of Be Gone spray and blasted the corners of George’s infested room. She tutted as she prowled about the semi-inhabited apartment, stomping the floors, banging the walls, and picking at the peeling paintwork. Everything would have to come off. That was all that could be done. The plaster should be removed and then everything sprayed and vacuumed for lurking within were animals, insects, or worse, something much worse! She sensed ghosts, spirits, and evil forces.
Pudding’s maid was from Malaysia, a true daughter of the soil, and had a magic wart that she rubbed and made a wish on. George shuddered at the thought of his fantasy where he and Pudding had a superheated threesome with the maid. He deleted that from the Blog just in case the rather dumpy fifty-eight year old slapped on a hormone patch and went berserk one day. Instead, she complained that George was ruining her mistress and could not understand how a man like him could live in such disgusting circumstances. She filled four bin bags with old newspapers and magazines and the odd box of half-finished pizza, and instead of ironing his underpants, threw them out and ordered him to purchase new ones. His shirts she thought were cheap and similarly should be disposed of and the only item in his suitcase she approved of was the Armani suit, because it was expensive. She also disapproved of it because it creased in the humidity of Singapore and made him look like a British Footballer, which for her was a lowly beast and not suitable for her mistress. He would, if he was to continue this folly, have to smarten up and not look like the third rate overpaid accountant he probably was, no offence sir!
She was rather fascinating in a weird hairy-footed hobbit like way. Her wart was all the more wondrous for being magical! It was magic, she told him, because it was heart shaped. It was her protection in this evil world and Allah obviously wanted to keep her pure. He had also wanted to keep her mistress pure but George had unleashed her vanity and she could not fight it as she had no wart and a penchant for renovation work. Then Pudding’s maid offered to tattoo him, which was another skill beside mass slaughter, ironing, and interior design, which she was blessed with. It was her that had tattooed Pudding’s butterfly in place, an act she regretted as it was meant to destroy evil but only seem to fuel it. Pudding, she said, had lost all self-respect since meeting George. She had been such a sensible girl, an office girl with an all too charitable nature. Allah would punish him for taking advantage, unless she tattooed him. Then he and Pudding would be as one and this, apparently, was OK by Allah, for marriage would surely follow. It would be a heathen marriage though because Pudding was an idolater, who would pop into a Buddhist temple now and then, and George was an accountant, but even so, marriage would be some protection against the evil spirits, no offence sir!
Now he had an insight into the other life of Pudding. She was an office girl! He had wondered if she worked the escort agencies, or even the Geylang Brothels, but no, she was a Singapore Office Girl, the sort of girl that the Singapore Government’s Social Development Unit tried to loosen up and get close and personal with the clueless geeky guys straight out of national service. So Damned Ugly, was the usual joke about the SDU and its clients. Except George had met the office girls and yes, tight they were, tightly packaged, black jacketed, sensible tight, hair tied back tight, often born again Christian tight, spouting a love of the Blessed Mother Teresa, but eyes ablaze and alert for whatever was happening: tight but fit to bust. And Pudding had busted, so George discovered, most likely under the influence of her maid reading her the collected works of the Bronte Sisters as a child. All of which made sense of Pudding’s strange conviction that George’s ex-wife must have been mad.
In Singapore, Pussy Man wrote, he was no alien, no intruder, no extra in the drama but a player, playing the role long assigned to all male, middle aged ex-pats with hypertension and fat wallets. This was no England, this was no dull suburb with husbands grunting and snoring before the telly, kids resentful and spoilt, wives believing men to be jokes, boys, children, pets, or pests. Pussy Man might have more chips on his shoulders than those of a Tesco’s delivery boy, but here in the tropics they melted and so here he would stay! Here for the first time he found love, true love, the love that knows no bounds, love agape, love passionate, love spiritual, love lustful, lewd, loud and ridiculous, love actually, cute love, rough love, blind and blissful and indiscriminate, and most certainly not the watery whimpering dog love of the commuter belt. He would marry every Singaporean girl, everyone different, everyone delicious, everyone his best friend, simultaneously!
Pudding read it of course and asked him, if he could decorate his soul, what colour would he paint it? He had no idea and so Pudding suggest the colour of the moon! Pudding was a published poetess, published on the Internet that is, by herself. But a poet writes poetry and she wrote it, accompanied by animated smileys because she knew poets used a lot of similes. Poets were also sensitive to their environments and Pudding could no longer make love in a room surrounded by evil spirits, even if she did not believe in them. So, as his home should reflect his soul, what colour would he paint it? George hummed, haahed, harrumphed and eventually agreed that moon was a good colour.
Consequently George and she would have to forego all carnal pleasure until her maid ripped off the plasterwork - another talent of hers - cleared the infestation, and then redecorated. Instead of sex they now pored over design catalogues and colour charts. If you were a furnishings catalogue which would you be? IKEA? Habitat? G.O.D?
George realised why his marriage had been shortened once the children started going out on their own. His wife was dull! She would never have dreamed of painting anything the colour of the moon. It would have just been plain yellow to her. She was so dull that she ran off with another guy who was an exact replica of himself and married him. No interesting woman would do anything as pointless. An interesting woman would get a tattoo, a Brazilian wax, and hire a professional Sex Goddess to orchestrate a hot night of nooky. (He had read that a woman in Camden had set up a consultancy.) How he became interested in his wife in the first place was a mystery. It happened somewhere between finals and qualifying as an accountant. They dated, she moved in, he met her parents and her parents met his and it went through the house unopposed and she became pregnant and that was that. Damp cold mud, piles of mulching leaves, smoky garden bonfires, sunless drizzly skies, and the smell of paint from the endless B and Q-ing came to mind at the very thought of his wife, his life, her life. That was it! He lived her life and not his. Her Indoors dictated everything. What do you want to eat, she would ask, and he would say, I don’t know, I’m not hungry yet. But what do you want, she would say. Well, he said, I could go a takeaway. And she would say, we’ve got a chicken pie in the freezer that has to be used up. And he would say, I suppose we’d better use it then. And that would be their big conversation of the day.
But now: it was ribs at Hooters and call me Big, George Big. Ni hao! He was liberated. He could not understand why he had never left England before. At least his adventure had started, no longer a chronicle of Warholish, Pooterish, Adrian Molish banality, a list of the contents of his fridge, a list of what he liked and did not like, a list of his favourite bands, and dream football team, instead, rip roaring piratical adventures in swampy seas of dusky women: Love and Lust in Singapore! Tremendous stuff! Publishers, real publishers who did books and stuff, would spot his blog and turn him into a household name. If you were a household appliance, which would you be? How could he fail with a big Hoover?
For some reason the maid was slow ripping out the plaster. Pudding would turn up, always looking ready for sex, though carrying her catalogues and tape measures, and then the Maid would come and rub her wart to see if the spirits were angry. The two of them would then knock on the walls, listen, and confirm what the colour scheme would be and what kind of man George was. Was he a black leather upholstery man or a cushion man? Did he want the feminine touch or would the gleaming chrome and wide screen TV of the bachelor pad suit him? George would brew up a bowl of soupy noodles for everyone, eat it while pretending to listen, and then attempt a nuzzle hoping the maid would turn a blind a eye, but apparently even this was forbidden by the magic mole, unless he had the tattoo. He was still thinking about it.
Unfortunately, Pudding did not seem to read his blog any more. When he declared it was the most auspicious time of the year for Singapore Party Girls to wear short skirts and parade through the streets without their knickers, Pudding wore her jeans and delivered a box of paint rollers. This was sacrilege. Singapore Party Girls and Pussy Man do not decorate apartments, they trash them! On cue Pudding’s maid slipped on a mask, white overalls, raised a jackhammer and began hammering the plaster off the walls. As the plaster fell, the wart twitched and Pudding was ready with the Be Gone! Any mad wife walled up would be chased away and Mr Rochester, dear reader, would have to tuck in his batik shirt.
George backed away, defeated by the clouds of dust, and then the souls of the dead appeared to be released along with a howl and a shriek as Pudding let loose with the spray. Around George’s feet the cockroaches clustered, as if trying to find sanctuary beneath his protective shadow. Fine specimens they were too. Gloriously brown, shiny, and very family orientated. There was something commendable about their glorious beauty and astonishing staying power.
The maid ripped the walls and the floors off, her biceps bulging amidst the clouds of poison and white gypsum. Roaches flew everywhere. George had never seen Roaches flying before. Shambling, untidy wings, that once extended could not return beneath their brown canopies without reference to an instruction manual, flapped, fluttered, and beat about his face. Somehow, this was not what Pussy Man was all about. This was plain George and very disturbing it was too. He had to grab his laptop and run in search of a margarita, which he found at the Iguana across the Singapore River, opposite Hooters, not far from where the bungee jumping machine was – you can’t miss it. When girls failed George, only drink could restore his equilibrium. He blamed English literature.
The SPG, he wrote, got him! The Singapore Party Girl got the Pussy Man, or at least did not care whether they got him or not because essentially they paraded him as a trophy at plush restaurants, hotels, and deafening clubs where they danced with their girlfriends and he got drunk watching them all. They would surround him, ooze over him, soak in the finest margaritas, stew in the outside heat, grab a bite at Boat Quay, spidery crabs, skate and ray, clams and prawns, picking fingers, sucking out the brains, cracking a joke and a crab claw all in one movement. He was in there, hand on one thigh, tongue in another’s ear, flirting with all and them discussing the price per square foot of Singaporean property, the Straits Times pretending to be a newspaper, bureaucracy, news on the Internet, censorship and its uselessness for they all travelled, knew what was happening. Despite, or maybe because of the Government’s nannying, tough stances, refusal to allow racial abuse, public debate on religious differences, security issues of a tiny island in a sea of potentially hostile countries, they were smart. The savvy awareness of the SPG compared to the bored and desperate housewives of Croydon, who think Big Brother merely a stupid TV program, gave him a perpetual hard on.
He ate and drank his fill and waited for Pudding. He waited and hoped for Pudding to Party but he knew the truth. The Pussy Man was just George. He tried writing more of his blog but started writing about how bad his back had been lately. He started writing about how the pain to pleasure ratio slipped a little in the wrong direction and how he largely forewent the more energetic forms of sexual activity, trusting to the good nature of the girl, her underwear, and expert mouth. George was still Pussy Man, but suffering pangs of age and Pussy began to mean something entirely different. Doubt flooded his mind. How long would it be before the Singapore Party Girl tired of him? Would he be a joke, a pet, a convenience to be used as a manipulator of paint brushes, a disposer of rubbish bags, a cash cow, the guy who had to complain to the neighbours, discipline the children if he ever saw them, and be the stranger in the house unable to relate, unable to talk to anyone but the dog? And would she take the bloody dog! Her indoors, far away, now with another who had a pension plan, had said she loved him. No SPG uttered such words and they were George’s pension plan.
The girls at the Iguana smiled, served him margaritas in a jug, and warily danced around pussy man who no longer seemed so intent on working on his laptop. In the steam of the night, he watched the model aircraft flown by the children across the river, remotely flying, lights on their wings, like big glow worms. He felt controlled by invisible forces, flying in what he assumed was a free and easy manner, but always twitched back away from crossing the river where if he did, he would crash, and be eaten by the Singapore crocodile that cleaned the canals of the bodies of suicidal over-worked students and rejected old men. He felt a long way from nowhere. No pudding for him, he thought. And Pussy Man died. Another scheme for re-invention drying up and failing to make the breakthrough he deserved. The girls would be bored with him. He would have no history with them, no point of contact, no cultural resonance, no shared CD collection. If you were an iPod, which ten tracks would be most frequently played? It made no sense. The lines were down. The bandwidth too small and nobody would ever understand because the middle-aged, clapped-out, hairy-backed, pot-bellied blokes from the suburbs with mediocre minds, mediocre careers, trying to grab a little bit of glory, adventure, and passion were despised jokes that young blades could never imagine themselves becoming.
Twelve margaritas later he returned to his apartment, sans floor, sans plaster, still being sucked clean by an industrial cleaner wielded by Pudding’s maid. She would finish the plastering first and then do his tattoo, to match the Trompe L’Oiel design that she had decided would make a true feature wall in his new living environment.
There was nothing else for him. He would have to allow Pudding’s maid to tattoo him. She was a traditionalist, she explained, and that pain was all part of the ritual. The tattoo was a magical one, as her wart was, and he would be protected from all manner of evil thoughts let along evil spirits and she began the process of pricking in the ink using a sharpened bamboo stick and a little mallet. As far as he could work out she was tattooing something that looked like a blood clot into his arm. It would, she told him, settle down and become a component in the overall design of his life, making him as one with his environment. His soul would thus be restful and he and Pudding would be forever joined together in a spiritual mystical bond no matter wherever they were in the world. If some horrible flesh eating infection managed to get in, he should contact her immediately, as she had an array of antibiotics available on the off chance of such an occurrence. It was rare, but she was prepared with a supply bought in Thailand as they manufactured generics there at a tenth of the price you would have to pay at the doctors in Singapore. But don’t worry, sir.
Pudding and her maid moved into his apartment, leaving her mother and father. George was told that he would have to meet her parents and he would not be allowed to call her Pudding in their presence. He had also better bring along his CV and photocopies of his qualifying certificates, as her father would interrogate him, especially as he was so much older. He would have to leave a large amount of money to keep his young widow going for some time, and pay for the college education of his children. Pudding patted her stomach and her maid explained that for the best results this Pudding had to be kept cool. She outlined a course of windswept moors, cold blasting rain, Wellington boots full of mud and the smell of cows in a barn munching hay. She had read the collected works of the Bronte’s to Pudding when she was a child, and so the northern climes were implanted in her soul and needed now to make the connection. The maid would also like a trip to Howarth and it would be most useful for her to accompany them as she would organise the details of the trip and let them develop a good relationship with their new baby, which had to be born in Yorkshire. The Wart never lied. And Pudding thought all this extremely exciting and exotic. It would be like stepping into the pages of a fairy tale, or at least the set of guidebooks on tours of Great Britain that she had recently purchased.
George was from Watford, which was about as far north as he cared to go, but the predilections of the Londoner were probably lost on Pudding, and so he resigned himself to going along with whatever she had planned. If she wanted wind swept heaths, then that is what she would get. This, he mused, was the inevitable punishment for lust and decided to call it love. She would put a collar on him and look after him, feed him, water him, put a nice blanket in his bed and one day, old and decrepit, hair falling out, incontinent, and too tired to go for a run, she would have him painlessly put down. His tattoo reminded him of a dog once the swelling had gone down, though it was supposedly a Sun and Moon. He decided it was more like a Wolf though. And so began work on his new Blog: The Wolf Man Blog.