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‘Ah, Wong- saang , how are you?’ Tik Sin-cheung, a small man in his late fifties with a barrel-shaped body, stepped out of the oak-panelled front door and shook both Wong’s hands. ‘Glad you came. Like the new place?’
    The feng shui master forgot all the apologies for lateness that he had been rehearsing in the taxi. ‘New place very nice. Very big. Very expensive.’
    ‘Business has been good,’ gushed Tik. ‘Come inside. There are lots of nice things to show you.’
    Wong wandered dazed into the marble entrance hall. In his mind, he had begun rehearsing a speech in which he asked Mr Pun for a fat surcharge on his original quote for the assignment, since the new premises were considerably larger than the old one. And he was feeling positive for another reason— amazingly, he could not detect the slightest smell of fish.
    The apartment had water features in many rooms—far too much water, he realised. But he knew it would not be smart to say anything negative just yet. ‘Ver’ nice. You did a good job with new home.’
    ‘I chose the colours and stuff myself,’ Tik said proudly, showing his visitor into a room in which pink furniture clashed dramatically with orange walls. The hues were all wrong. It was a southeast living room, and there was lively ch’i energy in it. The room needed pale purple or lilac to calm the energy down, matched with fittings in light green or pale blue. It was obvious that it needed vertical stripes of green to support the tree energy present. But Wong kept his mouth shut.
    There were fish motifs everywhere, of course, and the geomancer counted three separate aquariums in the main living area alone. Thankfully, they were not particularly odorous, although Tik himself smelt rather high.
    On the upper floor, the client’s homegrown colour-matching skills were again much in evidence. The master bedroom featured particularly dramatic hues. ‘I did it purple and red. The two colours go together very well, don’t they?’
    ‘Hmm,’ Wong replied. ‘Very, er, something.’
    ‘Yes, quite something, aren’t they?’
    The bedroom was in the northwest, which was a good location for a master bedroom, with its mature and steady energy. However, the feng shui master knew that Tik was single and a bit of a playboy, so using a bedroom to the west would have been better for his love life. He would eventually get the householder to switch bedrooms and decorate them in more suitable ways: rounded patterns in bronze, grey or pink would maintain metal energy.
    After a fifteen-minute tour, during which Tik pointed out a number of innovative features, such as a bathroom with hessian walls already starting to turn green-blue with fungus, they returned to the dining room (full of spiky plants—very negative), where the householder laid out copies of the floor plans he had obtained from his interior designer.
    ‘There. Now you can do your stuff. The first thing I want you to do, of course, is to look at the fish. I have fabulous new fish. I want you to check the security, too—especially of the fish on the terrace. You know there have been so many fish thefts in Singapore in the past few months. Any tea?’
    ‘Bo’lei, please,’ said Wong. As the client left his room, the feng shui master allowed himself the pleasure of a little cackle, and rubbed his hands together. He had completely forgotten about his pestilent assistant.

    Joyce woke up. She was cold. She was wet. Her head hurt. It was dark. It was smelly. She appeared to be in a bath of some sort. There was something soft and spongy beneath her. Then something slimy and alive moved against her foot and she screamed.
    ‘Aaa!’ She reached for the edge of the bath, or whatever it was, and yanked herself out. She jumped onto the floor and stood shivering, miserable and wet on a hard wooden surface, trying to get her bearings. Water poured off her. What on earth was she doing, fast asleep, in the dark, in a cold bath? And the place stank of