Her Master's Voice Read online

  Raymond closed all the valves and went to stand out of the way in safety. Tim stood alone on the pump unit. The guys hid under the crane platform, out of reach of any rupturing pipes. Everyone wished for a successful test so they could go for their showers and evening meal.

  Tim ran the left-hand engine up to 800 rpm and locked the throttle. He snapped the Allison transmission into fifth and watched the pressure climb before the transmission stalled. The old fashioned Martin Decker pressure recorder showed nearly 2000 psi. He dropped gears one by one, allowing the transmission to kick the pump over before stalling again. The pressure stepped up over 5000 psi and he shut the engine down. Raymond climbed up beside him and together they stared at the Martin-Decker, willing it to stay put. It dropped.

  “Air,” said Tim, and started the engine again. He brought the pressure up a second time, hoping that the drop had been caused by trapped air leaking from one of the many seals and valves. This time, the pressure held. After two or three minutes they knew the test would succeed. He left Raymond to wait out the remainder of the 15 minutes and went to shower and change. He looked forward to meeting his friends over dinner and having a game of darts and a few beers.

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday morning and Sherry again followed Ranji as she pushed through the crowded pavements of Serangoon Road. She was alone in Singapore again and Tim was flying somewhere over Kalimantan, on his way to another two-week hitch in the oil patch. Kalimantan sounded mysterious and adventurous, and she wished she could travel with him. Singapore with its frantic crowds and overwhelming buildings sometimes oppressed her. She found herself missing Tim’s company and his relentless optimism.

  Ranji stopped at the foot of the ashram staircase and looked at Sherry. “You’re wearing your new top?” she asked. She reached for the hem of Sherry’s loose cotton shirt and lifted it. She smiled and started up the stairs.

  Oh dear, Sherry thought, here we go again. I feel like an animal in a zoo. In the large familiar room her friends chatted and slowly prepared for the class. Half undressed, they called out greetings. Ranji was already tearing off her clothes as she dived into the group.

  “Ooooo—sexy Ranji!”

  “New clothes again, Ranji? You must have a rich boyfriend.”

  “Turn around, girl, let us look at you. Ranji! Your bottom! I’m surprised your father lets you go out like that.”

  They admired her latest purchase, a lurid pink one-piece body. The colour looked good against her darkness. Stretched like a shiny second skin over her curves, it had little to it, and even less at the back. Cut high over her hips, there was nothing below the waist apart from a narrow pink strap running down to disappear between the heavy cheeks of her bottom. She wiggled it at her audience.

  “If her father sees her like that, he will forget he is her father!”

  “Mary! My father never sees me like this. I bought this for yoga only.”

  “And for your lover?”

  “Maybe for lovers too. Now look at Sherry. Isn’t she beautiful today?”

  All eyes turned to Sherry as she pulled her jeans off her feet. She freed herself and laid her jeans on the table. She was reluctant to undo her shirt and show them what Ranji had talked her into buying.

  The shirt fell from her shoulders. Underneath she had a lacy black slip, nearly transparent, held up by thin shoulder straps. It just reached down to her hips and the smallest black thong monokini that Ranji could find.

  “There!” said Ranji proudly. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

  The women crowded round to admire her. They stared at her breasts from only centimetres away. The slip hid nothing and Sherry felt her nipples tighten from embarrassment. She forced herself to keep her hands by her sides.

  “Beautiful, yes, very beautiful.” “So pretty.” “Good breasts, no babies yet.” “She’s pink…”

  They crowded round to touch her and run fingers through her hair. They were just curious, but it made her feel like a freak, especially when fingertips brushed and pushed her breasts.

  “Enough, enough!” ordered Ranji, “or you will make her too excited to concentrate.” Sherry settled gladly down into the lotus position, disconnected from today and opened herself to the cosmos.

  Papi Bombar spoke in English again today. He spoke of the Vedic scholar Sayana and his remarkably prescient statements from the fourteenth century on the sun and the speed of light. Sherry felt no sense of surprise that the ancients had known such things. She expected no less and found Papi’s enthusiasm vaguely unsatisfying. She let his words pass her by and concentrated on breathing and cultivating the sense of pure I-am-ness.

  The end of the session caught her by surprise and by the time she had returned fully to reality most of the other women were already changing back into their street clothes. Papi Bombar’s novice stood at her elbow, asking her and Ranji to come into Papi’s retreat. For a moment her heart leapt. At last Papi was offering her the opportunity to redeem her failure and show him her new skills, but when she entered his room, she found a pretty Thai girl already seated in front of him. She stood with Ranji and the novice, watching the girl open his clothes and lay them back around Papi’s brown and purple stem. She muttered to herself as she trailed her fingers up and down the teacher’s shaft.

  It felt exciting to watch the girl’s head bowing into his lap and her mouth swallowing up the rigid sex. For once Sherry could watch, learn, criticise. The girl worked enthusiastically, her hands deep in Papi’s clothes, holding his dependents and burrowing under him. She nodded her head vigorously. Papi leaned back against the wall and his eyes closed behind his glasses. Sherry watched his face with fascination. He had an expression of effortless calm that did not change when the girl’s movements accelerated until she drank deeply of his essence.

  His eyes opened again as the girl placed her palms together and bowed, and he returned the gesture. He reached out to touch the girl’s forehead and she got up to leave.

  Now he turned his attention to Sherry and Ranji. “Welcome, Little Sisters, welcome.” and he gestured for them to sit in front of him. “New clothes again, Ranji?” He smiled. “Rati must be fond of you, and you too, Sherry. Every week you come here, you are more woman. The Goddess is smiling on you too.”

  Sherry felt embarrassed at her top’s transparency and the fact that her nipples had again betrayed her, but Papi Bombar took no notice of her breasts. Something else was troubling him.

  “Sisters, Singapore is a difficult place for people who are not Chinese. You know this yourselves. The Government is fair to us, and protective. Still, there are some people who are not. These are the people who do not care for the Gods, ours or their own. Nor do they worry about their return in future lives. They think only of today and of money.” Papi paused to look at them. They did not know where this was leading.

  “One of these people is Yhee Lu Pat.”

  Ranji took a sharp intake of breath. She at least had heard the name before. “Who is that?” Sherry asked.

  “A bad man, Sherry,” said Papi Bombar. “He makes money from bad things. From drugs, by smuggling people from China into Malaysia, by selling children. Unfortunately, now we need his goodwill and the ashram does not have money to pay this man. So I am asking you, my Little Sisters, to help our ashram. Help us by going to this man and begging for his assistance.”

  Papi avoided their eyes. Sherry looked at Ranji who pursed her lips and gave a little nod. They would help.

  Ranji came by taxi to pick her up next day. She wore jeans and a tee shirt, and carried a small suitcase. Sherry was ready to go and wearing what she thought of as her working clothes, but Ranji still had to dress. Sherry took her up stairs and stayed to watch the fun.

  Ranji threw her jeans and shirt onto the bed and was left nude to fight with the lock on her suitcase.

  “Ranji! You’re beautiful,” said Sherry in surprise.

  Ranji immediately stopped trying to open the suitcase and stood up. “Really?” sh
e asked, “You don’t think I’m too fat?”

  Sherry had always known that Ranji was no skinny waif. Her yoga clothes never concealed her generously unfashionable hourglass curves, but Sherry had not seen her completely nude before. Now, naked apart from her jewellery, she showed Sherry what she showed her lovers.

  Sherry envied her smooth chocolate colour, unbroken by tanning marks. Ranji smiled as she stood there, one hand lifted uncertainly to touch her full, round breasts. Her gesture drew Sherry’s eyes to them. They looked almost too big for her shoulders. Her areolae were large wrinkled discs, very dark, almost black, with long proud nipples. Below her breasts, her figure tapered to a narrow waist before flaring widely over her hips. She had a soft and round tummy, and there, nestling between the tops of sturdy thighs, she hid her sex. Her mound looked fat and generous like the rest of her, and completely hairless. Its smoothness made it look intriguing, tempting, shy and vulnerable all at once. The groove between her lips was deep and dark, and Sherry could see the black wrinkled petals of her hidden flower bursting out.

  Ranji watched her stare. “You really like me?” she asked.

  “Of course. I’m jealous. You’re so sexy. I love your colour, and your figure.”

  “I’d better get dressed quickly, or we’ll be late for the Irishman.”

  “Irishman? I thought he was Chinese.”

  “Oh, it’s just his name. Yhee Lu Pat, Paddy Yhee, The Irishman. Same person, and the same evil bastard. But we’ll be all right. The taxi driver’s been told to stay and wait, and telephone Papi if we’re not out in an hour. Now, let me get dressed and we can go.”

  Ranji brought a sleeveless choli from her case. “Look at this. I had it made just for times like this.” She held it up for Sherry to admire. The choli was white and silky. There was very little to it, and it seemed too small to restrain breasts like Ranji’s. “It’s stretchy. You wait until I get it on.”

  She pulled it up onto her shoulders and around her breasts. There were four silver hooks and tabs at the front that left her cleavage open. She fastened them and settled her breasts comfortably in their confinement. “There! What do you think?”

  The white stretchy material cuddled her exactly, and the blackness of her nipples showed clear where they tented the fabric. Her breasts looked even more nakedly on offer than they had been before. “Ranji! You can’t go out like that! All the men will want to touch you.”

  “Of course they will. That’s why I had it made from stretchy material and not some boring old cotton drill, but my sari will cover them, more or less.”

  She had a white and gauzy sari, a single light length of printed muslin with stylised flowers in purple, grey and black at its hem. Ranji deftly tied a ribbon around her waist and started to tuck the sari into it. A quick weaving of her outstretched fingers formed the pleats and she tucked them in too. She wound the tail around her and threw it over her shoulder, pinning it to the choli.

  Sherry smiled at her transformation. “Houri!” she said. “From a distance you look like a proper Indian lady but when you get close enough, well, this Irish man is going to love you.”

  “Probably,” said Ranji, “and if he’s got the energy, he will probably want to love you too. Come on, let’s go.”

  An elderly Sikh driver waited by the black and yellow cab. Sherry felt embarrassed by his white beard and moustache. She just knew his grandfatherly eye could see through their sexy clothes, but he held the cab door open for them without comment and drove them out onto Holland Road.

  The Irishman had his lair in the Telok Blangah industrial estate. The taxi wound into the labyrinth of Government rental workshop units, crowded with vans and people. Amid the chaos, welders cut steel on the workshop concrete aprons and fabricated complex steel structures. The cab worked its way to an anonymous four-storey concrete terrace. They drove past the busy workshops on the ground floor and stopped at a small door at the end marked ‘Fire Exit, Keep Clear’. Inside bare concrete steps led up and the girls started to climb.

  Ranji was breathing heavily as they finally reached the top and put her hand on Sherry’s arm to hold her back. “Wait a minute. I don’t want to go in panting.”

  “What are we going to do? Is this another lesson?”

  “No, I shouldn’t think so. I don’t know what Papi’s promised him, so we’ll just have to do what he tells us. I’ve heard he’s quite conservative about sex, but you can never tell.”

  Sherry felt increasingly uneasy. She had finally adapted to the idea of flute playing lessons. She no longer felt uncomfortable playing with strange flutes under Ranji’s critical eye, but this afternoon seemed to go beyond that.

  “Why are we doing this?” she whimpered.

  “I’ll tell you later. Now, smile and let’s go.” Ranji pushed the heavy fire door open and went in.

  They stood in a long room. In front of them a strip of worn carpet ran under frosted windows, into the distance, diving into a corridor and away. On their right the large room was filled with rows of desks, all facing the windows. At each desk sat a Chinese girl, working on papers, like a university examination room. Rows of black heads and white blouses, all looking at them.

  Ranji spoke to the nearest girl and she jumped up to lead them on. Sherry followed Ranji, aware of the whole room watching them. As they reached the corridor, she looked back. Expressionless Chinese faces stared at her. She hurried after Ranji. At the end of the corridor, the girl gestured for them to wait and went through the door marked ‘No Entry’, closing it behind her.

  “Those girls,” whispered Sherry, “they looked at us like dirt.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Most of them wish they could be like us. Which would you prefer, flute-playing or working in there?”

  The door opened again and the girl waved them in. “Mr. Yhee will see you now.”

  Inside a secretary sat in a small office, an older lady with curled hair. Beyond her an open door. Ranji led the way.

  The Irishman’s office looked huge. It filled the whole width of the building. On one side, a long conference table of solid rosewood sat on heavy carved pillars. On the other, Mr. Yhee had made himself an alcove from packed bookshelves. His desk was black and modern, decorated with telephones and a computer. A carved name block announced him as ‘Yhee Lu Pat’ in Roman characters, and presumably the additional Chinese characters said the same. This touch added to the impression that an office, no matter how grand, was not Mr. Yhee’s natural environment.

  Yhee was a small man seated in a big black chair behind his desk. At first sight he looked Chinese, but as Sherry looked closer his long nose and wavy hair made her uncertain. Mixed blood, perhaps. He watched them closely as they crossed the carpet and came to stand in front of his desk. He gestured them down into the armchairs facing each other in front of him. Sherry found herself sitting uncomfortably low, with Yhee’s desk above elbow level. She had to look up to talk to him.

  “So,” he said in a sing-song voice, “Miss Ranji and Miss Sherry. Very good. Very pretty. Now, speak to Bombar first.” He picked up a phone and dialed.

  “Mr. Bombar. Yes. The girls have arrived. Yes. Maybe, not bad in a cheap sort of way. Yes. I shall insist on it. Now I give you Ranji.” He thrust the phone at Ranji and Sherry listened to another half conversation.

  “Yes, Papi. No, she’s dressed very well. I shall, Papi. Don’t worry, Papi, we shall be good. Yes, Papi. See you soon,” and she handed the phone back to Yhee who hung up.

  He looked at them and chuckled. “Very beautiful. Now we shall have a very interesting time, no?” Sherry liked his smile and relaxed immediately.

  “First, what will you drink? Beer, whisky? No, no tea. I shall give you my very best cognac.” He opened a compartment in the bookshelves behind the desk and Ranji grimaced behind his back. They listened to the sound of ice and glasses. There was a click and soft Chinese music filled the room. He brought them two tumblers of ice and cognac, and went back to sit behind his desk.

&
nbsp; He raised his glass to them, and they sipped together. The cognac tasted strong and rich, almost making Sherry cough. “Now, ladies, what are you going to do for me?”

  Ranji smiled at him and said, “We are here to do anything you want, Mr. Yhee.”

  “Very good. Very, very good. In that case, I would like you to dance for me. Together. Just stand up and dance.”

  Sherry found herself holding Ranji and trying to find a rhythm in the Chinese music. “Mmmmmh, sexy Sherry,” whispered Ranji and reached around her with both arms to pull her closer. Over her shoulder, Sherry could see Yhee watching them closely. Ranji felt live and exciting in her arms, and her exotic perfume filled Sherry’s senses. They continued swaying and Yhee came out from behind his desk, to lean against it and sip his cognac. Sherry felt Ranji’s hand slip upwards, drawing her dress up, exposing her bottom. Then Ranji turned her as they swayed, turning her back towards Yhee. A shiver ran through her and she fought to remain calm as they slowly rotated.

  She heard Yhee clapping as Ranji exposed her. He came nearer, still clapping. “Bravo, bravo. Let’s take her dress off, Ranji.” Sherry held her arms up as the two of them bunched her dress up and lifted it over her head. Yhee took it and threw it onto his desk. “Dance some more!” he ordered.

  Resigned but excited, Sherry danced slowly. Ranji held her away now and turned to allow Yhee to look between them. She felt his eyes on her nudity. Ranji lifted one hand above her head and spun her round, showing off everything she had to Yhee. She blushed and her ears burnt.

  Perhaps Yhee sensed her embarrassment, or perhaps he had seen enough dancing. “Come over to the conference table,” he commanded. He took Sherry’s hand and led her over to the other side of the room. He pulled back one chair as a step and said, “Sit on the table.”

  Sherry climbed up and sat down with her legs hanging down. “Move into the middle of the table,” he said, “and open your legs. So we can see you.”

  Sherry shunted backwards and brought her feet up. She felt uncomfortable sitting on the flat surface wearing high heels. She let her legs fall open as he wanted. Yhee and Ranji stared at her centre.