Free My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey Page A

lifts. He then accompanied me back down to the foyer, where he had the nerve to take me by the hand again.
    I could see the Sikh at the door watching us but did not care if I made an exhibition. Let me go, John, or I will make you very sorry.
    He knew me of old, and obeyed. Sarah, he said, do you really believe this fellow?
    I have no idea. You didn’t let me find out.
    He is totally bonkers. Can’t you see it in his eyes? Look at his skin—it’s all soapy like a priest’s.
    So? You think he is sexless? Castrated? What on earth do you mean about his skin?
    Micks, I know so much more about him than you do. Wouldn’t you like to know why he’s so dangerous?
    No.
    No?
    No.
    Please yourself, he said, and to my enormous relief he walked away. As the lift doors closed he was already heading out into Jalan Treacher, in the direction, as I found out much later, of the notorious Eastern Oriental Cabaret which had, long ago, lent its name to his enormously popular erotic poem.

14
    That night I dreamed that I was dead. My body lay in a potter’s field in the Essex marshes and all the contents of my Charlotte Street office were strewn about in the vile morass of mud. There was a sexton who soon turned into a tinker sorting through the remnants of my life. He snaffled the ugly little Staffordshire figure my brother had given me, but all my careful files he cast aside. Enraged that my estate was being handled by someone so uneducated, I grappled fiercely with him—but while scratching his face I saw it was Lord Antrim, and I understood my dream and began to cry.
    It was raining when I woke, so I called the desk to ask if I might borrow an umbrella. They claimed to have none. I ordered breakfast in my room where I would be safe from Slater. The bowl of cornflakes arrived on a big trolley with an orchid in a vase, and the waiter, perhaps driven by a sense of humour I did not give him credit for, wheeled it over by the window where the view was of a wall of water, the smudgy outlines of trees on a steep jungle hillside, and the drifting, ghostly fish which were the cars and trucks below.
    I called the desk again. They promised the rain would shortly cease and I sat down to await this miracle. I picked up my Milton but was far too agitated to concentrate. The rain was often rather green, and sometimes a yellowish white. One could occasionally make out more of the road below, or else nothing at all, but as I gazed out I thought I saw one of those huge black rubbish bags abandoned in the middle of the broken footpath. When I checked again it seemed to have shifted a little farther along the street.
    Sometime after nine o’clock, I looked up from my book and saw the bag move by itself. It did not travel far, perhaps a yard or so, and I was appalled to understand that a human being was living inside it, a kind of hermit crab. I waited for more movement. There was none. I had my shower, dressed, and went down to the Balmoral Gift Shop, where I bought a second-rate umbrella for twice what one would’ve paid at Asprey, but I had such a short time left in Kuala Lumpur and I was determined to reach that manuscript again.
    The doorman of course wanted to put me into a taxi, and only then did I realise I could’ve had ten taxi rides for the price of an umbrella, but having no more money to waste I grimly set off into the monsoon. In less than a minute my feet were soaking wet, and then a passing truck drenched my skirt with water.
    As I came splashing along the opposite footpath, carefulnot to slip on the big yellow flowers the storm was stripping from the trees, my useless little umbrella prevented me from seeing where I was going. Which is how I collided with the human rubbish bag. It had been almost comic from the imperial detachment of my room but was not in the least amusing on the street. I tried to step around the thing, but it would not let me. From deep in the folds of plastic, a pair of strangely determined eyes confronted me.
    It