The Jade Figurine Read Free Page B

throughout with no semblance of schematic placement; the bar, which is set along the rear wall, ends abruptly two-thirds of the building’s width—for no apparent reason, since the other third is blank. Over the backbar and on the walls of the room, fat pink ladies, naiads in diaphanous wisps of silk, pose obscenely amid blue names—an unintentional caricature of a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Eerie blue light from tiny lanterns on each of the tables gives an odd and ethereal quality to the people and to the furnishings.
    You would think, then, with all of this, that the clientele of the Old Cathay would be of a singular type—the lower, native class, perhaps, such as the habitués of the Seaman’s Bar—and that it would be relatively quiet, and never quite full even on the weekends. But you’d be wrong, and therein lies the enigma.
    Inexplicably, the Old Cathay attracts almost everyone in Singapore at some time or other. On any given night of the week, you consider yourself most fortunate if you can find a place to stand, let alone sit. And if by some miraculous stroke of luck you manage to get a table, it is an unwritten but strictly adhered to rule that you share it with the other patrons. You can, as I have, find yourself sitting next to a very proper and very drunk official in the British Embassy (“The Ambassador and I were discussing the Common Market situation this forenoon; about the bloody time something was done, don’t y’think?”); or a group of middle-aged, spinsterish schoolteachers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A., laughing nervously and casting furtive looks into shadowed corners (“We found the most marvelous wood carving today—a pair of hands, can you imagine, but they were from the Ratanakosin Dynasty, seventeenth century, and genuine, of course, I just couldn’t believe it when the man told me they were only . . .”); or a small, doe-eyed Dutchman with no fingers on his left hand, who will tell you, smiling proudly, that he once killed two men in a fight over a stolen pocketbook in an Amsterdam slum (“Mijnheer, I barely escaped with my life, do you know they are still looking for me and it has been ten years now . . .”); or a tall, handsome, splendid-bosomed Chinese prostitute, ludicrously named Gussie, who wears a brightly colored cheongsam and is adorned with every conceivable type of costume jewelry, and who smiles coquettishly with scarlet lips in a chalk-white face (“Five Straits dollars, Joe, what you say? I teach you all the tricks I know for five Straits dollars, you never be the same man again, eh, Joe?”).
    The Old Cathay caters to them all—and more. They flock there, night after night, to drink tall, cold stengahs, or Malayan arrack, or gin-and-quinine, or an oily, foul-tasting and cathartic native wine, or—in my case—an iced Anchor Beer that is so cold you can taste the ice crystals. And they pay, depending upon which, outrageously expensive or surprisingly moderate prices for the privilege. I go there mainly because Anchor Beer falls into the latter category, and because the atmosphere and the people you meet are never dull.
    It was midafternoon when I arrived. Even at that time, it was crowded with customers and alive with noise—the clink of glass against glass, the excited, high-pitched call of the multilingual Chinese waitresses as they shouted their orders to the three barmen, the heavy buzz of conversation. All of the tables were occupied, but I found an empty chair at a corner table. The two men there were drinking beer, and judging from their boisterous laughter and slightly thick voices, they had been at it for some time.
    I ordered my Anchor from one of the waitresses, and my choice of beverage solicited immediate approval from the two men. We introduced ourselves, and they were Allenby and Wainwright, two English tin miners down from Kuala Lumpur on a holiday. We told a lot of off-color stories and traded lies about our virility with the women we had