Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Tash Aw 2019
Design by Jack Smyth. Figure © Plainpicture/Saam Riwa. Texture: Upsplash.
Tash Aw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Information on previously published material appears here.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008318581
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008318567
Version: 2019-12-22
Dedication
For Francis
Epigraph
Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?
Primo Levi, If This is a Man
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I. October
October 2nd
October 4th
October 6th
October 10th
She sits and
October 13th
She stares at
October 15th
The thought comes
October 19th
I recognise the
October 24th
II. November
November 2nd
Bang bang bang.
November 5th & 6th
Lets go out,
November 7th
III. December
December 4th
Im writing a
December 7th
December 9th
Every time we
December 12th
What strikes me
December 15th & 16th
A noise. Nothing
December 20th
Youve been smoking.
December 30th
But its illegal,
IV. January
January 2nd
The drive is
About the Author
By the same Author
About the Publisher
IOctober 2nd
You want me to talk about life, but all Ive talked about is failure, as if theyre the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I cant separate the two like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town. Roots clinging to the outside of the walls, holding the bricks and stone and whatever remains of the paint together, branches pushing through holes in the roof. Sometimes theres almost nothing left of the roof, if you can even call it that just fragments of clay tiles or rusty tin propped up by the canopy of leaves. A few miles out of town, on the other side of Kapar headed towards the coast, youll find a shophouse with the roots of a jungle fig creeping down the front pillars of the building, the entire structure swallowed up by the tree the doorway is now just a shadowy space that leads into the heart of a huge tangle of foliage. Where does one end and the other begin? Which one is alive, which is dead? Still, on the ground floor of these houses, therell be a business or a shop, some kind of small operation, an old guy wholl patch up your tyres for twenty bucks. Or a printing press that makes those cheap leaflets advertising closing-down sales at the local mall. Or a cake shop with nothing in the chiller cabinets except for two pieces of kuih lapis that have been there for three weeks. The packets of biscuits on the shelves are covered in the dust that drifts across from the construction sites nearby, where theyre building the new railway or shopping mall or God knows what. These people havent made a decent living for twenty years. Theyre seventy-five, eighty years old. Still alive, but their business is being taken over by a tree. Imagine that.