Lost Women by Neil Humphreys

Author:Neil Humphreys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 33

The rat disturbed Stella’s momentum. Geylang’s crumbling alleys were overrun with rodents. They were getting bigger, too. Bolder. This one even stopped to watch.

“Fuck off,” she hissed, stomping her stiletto into the concrete.

The rat obliged, eventually. Stella returned to her night job. His groaning was a little over the top, but at least he drowned out the squeaking from nearby dustbins.

The bright side of Geylang’s roads belonged to families gorging on beef kway teow and duck rice. The dark side was reserved for rat-infested bins and blow jobs. Stella respected the divide in her adopted home. In Singapore, everyone knew their place.

And she accepted hers. On her knees. One foreigner servicing another.

Of course, he had thought about haggling. The migrant workers usually did.

Stella actually empathised. They were all saving for families back home. They needed to cut corners wherever they could.

He fiddled with his wallet, seemingly searching for hidden cash. He stuttered. He looked around, considering his options.

Of course, he didn’t have any, not in Singapore. As foreigners, neither of them had any tangible rights. But one of them had a pimp. And a migrant worker could not return to his construction site with broken bones.

Of course he was going to pay. “Next week?”

“Can,” Stella said, pocketing the cash.

He zipped up and disappeared into the only lorongs with insufficient lighting. Geylang’s darkness served its purpose. Singaporeans saw only what they needed to see.

Stella took a swig from the Listerine bottle. The night had started well. She gargled hard before directing a mouthful towards the loitering vermin.

“Eh, cannot tekan our wildlife.”

Stella wiped her mouth. “Who’s that?”

“Vice squad.”

The sudden light left her momentarily blinded. She covered her eyes. “Eh, I’m not working, OK?”

The light went off. Footsteps approached. She blinked hard to make sense of the two blurry images. One brown and bashed up, the other rodent-like, moving quickly through the alley.

“Yeah, you spend your off days behind Geylang shophouses, spitting mouthwash at rats,” Low said. “Relak lah, Stella, Not here for you.”

“Ah, it’s you. But I’m still not working, OK?”

“Never,” Low said, winking at the slim Chinese woman. Stella was older than he remembered.

She straightened her mini-skirt. “Who this ah?”

“This is my good friend, Ramila Mistry.”

“She look like shit. Need a good pimp.” Stella grinned as she gargled again.

“Yeah, I probably do,” Mistry agreed, stepping back as a mouthful of Listerine splattered against the pavement.

Mistry felt like shit, too. The paracetamol mostly took care of the swelling around her nose. But the dull headache above her eyes remained and she could barely move her shoulder.

The location hardly brightened her mood. Mistry knew all about Geylang. Low had once taken her there, three decades ago. He had tried to impress her, intimidate her even, convince her that Singapore was a wild island, too. Just like England.

But Singapore wasn’t anything like England. Nobody called her a ‘Paki’ in Singapore. The multiracial city-state was far too polite for such abuse. Singaporeans kept their best ethnic slurs behind closed doors.

Mistry knew that, then and now.

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