It Never Rains On National Day by Jeremy Tiang

Author:Jeremy Tiang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814655651
Publisher: Epigram Books
Published: 2016-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Harmonious Residences

THEY FOUND HIS decapitated body on the forty-first floor. Earlier, his head had travelled down in the lift and rolled out to meet two startled showroom girls, who had come in early to preen themselves before the first customers. They became understandably hysterical and had to be given the rest of the day off, which would have been quite inconvenient if the police hadn’t closed off the site.

Foul play was suspected until closed-circuit footage from inside the lift showed no one present apart from the man himself, staying back late to finish a particular job—nobody knew what, there were so many things to be taken care of every day. His hands full, he tried to stop the lift doors with his head, but a sensor was faulty and the doors kept closing, trapping and then severing his neck.

I was on secondment to the Housing Development Board at the time, and had been sent down to the site as a kind of floating officer. These placements were usually uneventful, but I knew this incident would be seen as a test for me. Harmonious Residences was supposed to be a flagship project, an Executive Condominium with the kind of sleek, imposing design that wins architectural awards. It was in nobody’s interest for the new buildings to seem unsafe.

Mercifully, press reception the next day was sombre rather than outraged. The blood had been cleaned up as soon as the police left, so the photographs showed nothing more gruesome than an ordinary lift landing—even if it was, as The New Paper insisted on calling it, “An Elevator to Death”.

The deceased was a construction worker from China, surname Chen. Not much was known about him; we don’t keep files on these people. “At least there’s no family to make a fuss,” said Li Hsia. When I pointed out that he must have one somewhere, she amended that to: “No family with access to the media.”

Li Hsia was also a scholar. The HDB had sent her to Oxford to read Geography, and now she was on a fast-track to the top. She would clearly not be spending much longer hanging around construction sites, but the Party always makes you spend a bit of time getting to know people on the ground before you leave them behind, so if you do well enough to stand for election you can claim to have grassroots support.

She was quick off the mark, as expected, and arrived at work having already drafted a press statement on her Blackberry. Meanwhile, I was showing the police around and trying to get things back to normal. It was agreed that the chain of unfortunate events was clear enough and, there being nothing to investigate, we would start work again the next day. Of course, no one would use the lift until it had been safety-inspected.

None of us wanted to talk to the workers, until finally Soong volunteered. They seemed to like him—some evenings he kicked a football around the site with them, not something I could imagine myself doing.

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