Singapore Swing by John Malathronas Read Free Book Online Page A

in a medical apron who fans herself by the till. They talk sotto voce and the woman disappears through an inside door. She reappears with a wrestler build-alike and leads him hurriedly through the exit. I wouldn’t like to be in the drill operator’s flip-flops when they meet him.
    Lillian makes a move mid-foot and I jump.
    â€˜Shoulder,’ she says and points at my sling.
    As she works her way in a small semicircle, starting between the fourth and fifth toe and ending at the edge of my foot’s arch, I feel pins and needles on my two rotator tendons. The bottom of my heel hurts a bit. I look at the explanatory leaflet – it is my sciatic nerve. ‘Bad posture?’ Lillian offers in return. And so on to eyes, brain, lymphs, kidneys, pancreas – all my insides are being stroked through my soles. Dammit, if this really is working, I can’t wait till she reaches the penis reflex.
    The drill stops and everyone breathes in. The wrestler and the till woman return and smile at the patients. Well, she does; he grunts. We can now distinguish those sustained synth notes again. Not that there was any chord change since the drill started, mind you.
    I close my eyes and enter a dream state of pleasure. There is the odd pain here and there, which never goes above four out of ten, but it disappears under Lillian’s considered pummelling. The muscles above my cuneiforms hurt particularly badly. They correspond to my lungs and my chest and yes, I have the odd allergic wheeze. I take a deep breath in the wet, Singaporean weather as Eno changes two chords dramatically in the space of ten seconds. I surrender to the comforting, sonic warble, for this is what ambient muzak demands: total passivity. This is music for meditation to offload your brain: don’t try any knee-jerk tap against the beat. (What beat?) Don’t follow melodic lines – they don’t exist. This is minimalist musical nirvana and in the circumstances it’s perfect; I like its hypnotic rumble, though I’d never download the MP3.
    Lillian has now finished one foot and is massaging my calf to half way below the knee; then she bursts out laughing. I feel awkward and so does she because she stands up until her throaty chortle subsides. Then she sits down again and starts symmetrically on the toes of the other. But then she stops as if she’d forgotten something, picks up both my feet and raises them.
    â€˜You feel this lighter?’ she asks and points at the foot she’s been working on. I do and tell her so. She starts laughing again, this time uncontrollably. I bet she’s discovered something embarrassing about me. I try to remember: when was the last time I checked myself at the clinic?
    Lillian catches my eye and beams like an enlightened bodhisattva. Such a strange job, massaging people’s feet. Does she enjoy it? Would she rather be a proper nurse? Does she get paid enough? Why did she laugh before? I look at her smiling eyes whose sole purpose are to keep me relaxed and I can’t tell. It is not that oriental expressions are inscrutable. It is that orientals try not to break the mutual harmony by allowing you to scrute them.
    Raffles left Singapore on 7 February 1819, having founded in ten days one of the most important British colonies, and returned to Penang to confront a fuming Bannerman who had heard the astonishing news. Soon after, an official Dutch protest arrived: since Johore was a dependency of Malacca and Singapore belonged to Johore, Singapore was obviously Dutch.
    It was then that Raffles knew his bluff had paid off: the mere fact that the Dutch were protesting diplomatically and had not gone to capture the British outpost straight away was excellent news. Nowhere more so than among the expat box-wallahs of Calcutta. Money talks and in this case it crowed dithyrambically about the opportunities opened up by the founding of a British port halfway between Canton and Calcutta. Hastings