she said, with a small, cool smile. “But only after I’m dead.” I have to admit that this was not precisely the answer I’d been expecting when I made my rather incoherent proposition, and if I hadn’t been a bit the worse for wear due to a combination of vodka and spray-on opiates, I doubt whether I’d have had the courage to proposition her in the first place. She was so far out of the league of blokes like me as to be practically out of sight. She was one of those international girls: tall, with skin like suede plastic and a slight crease to her long eyelids that made me suspect Asian ancestry – unless, like so many of the fashion set these days, she’d had her eyelids tucked to give her that essential Pacific Rim mystique. The accent was neutral; anywhere between Sydney and Beijing. It did not occur to me that she might be native to Singapore Three; only the poor remained where they were born these days and the franchise city was full of voyagers. I’d been here for almost eighteen months now, which made me virtually indigenous.
