Page 30 of The Friend Zone Experiment

“I’m not mixed up in anything,” said Ket Siong. “Nothing came of it.”

“So far,” said Ket Hau, but he did seem mollified by the anticlimactic ending to Ket Siong’s story. “Leave it, OK? There’s nothing we can do about what happened.”

Ket Siong had accepted this as the truth when they’d first found out about Stephen and decided they needed to leave Malaysia. For the first time, he found himself doubting it.

There was, perhaps, nothing to be done about the forests of Ensengei. Much of the land had been cleared, to be planted with oil palm. The villagers were suing for compensation, supported by the NGO that had formerly employed Ket Hau and Stephen.

But Stephen himself… he had been kidnapped in broad daylight, out of the decrepit Myvi he used to drive everywhere. There was a reason whoever had arranged his disappearance hadn’t been more discreet. They wanted people to know what happened. They wanted Stephen’s associates—people fighting, like him, to thwart the exploitation of the land for the benefit of a narrow elite—to be afraid.

It had worked, on Ket Siong’s family, at least. But that very lack of discretion, that indifference to publicity with which the atrocity had been committed, meant that multiple parties must have been involved. Someone had to know what had become of Stephen.

Probably he was dead. But if so, why had his body never been found? They could have had the police discover his body and invented a story—said that Stephen had borrowed money from loan sharks and suffered the consequences, or something like that. Similar cover-ups had been effective with other such murders.

Ket Siong felt like he’d been sleepwalking for years—in shock, alienated from himself and the world—ever since they’d left Malaysia. But whether it was seeing Low Teck Wee in theflesh, or that run-in with Renee, bringing something of Ket Siong’s old self back to life, now he was awake.

And it seemed to him there might still be something to be done about Stephen. Just toknowwhat had happened would be more than they had now.

Ket Siong’s family no longer lived in Malaysia. They had distant relatives there, but nobody closely connected enough to be at risk of retaliation. On one view, he couldn’t be better placed for looking into the matter.

“They’ve stripped the land bare,” Ket Hau was saying. “I send some money for the villagers’ case for compensation. But apart from that, what can we do? We’re over here. We’ve got our own problems.”

“You send money?”

Ket Hau shrugged, a little embarrassed. “When I can.” He leaned back, propping himself up on his palms on the lumpy mattress. The bedsheet under his brown hands was a cheap one from Primark, faded from many washes to an indeterminate yellowy-grey. “Stephen was a practical guy, you know. You remember, when you came over here to study, he said, ‘Tell Siong, better not come back. Who wants to stay in this country if they can get out?’”

Ket Siong thought about this. “Hewasn’t planning on leaving.”

“He wouldn’t.” Ket Hau snorted. “Even Kuching was too far. He wanted to move back to Ensengei and start a Sarawak pepper-export business.”

“Do you…”Miss him,Ket Siong had been about to say, but that was a stupid question.

He stole a glance at his brother. Ket Hau’s eyes were fixed on the window by his bed, his expression uncharacteristically sombre.

They were all agreed that one of the great benefits of their location on the outskirts of London was that they could see trees out of the window. They lived on the converted first floor of a narrow terrace house—what estate agents referred to, grandiosely, as amaisonette. The landlady, who owned the house, lived downstairs. In theory they had access to part of the garden, but she got a little funny about any of them being in it for too long.

Watching his brother gaze out at the trees, Ket Siong wondered, not for the first time, what it was that Stephen had meant to him. Colleague and best friend, yes. But whether there was anything more to their connection had never been said out loud.

They were not the sort of family that discussed such matters. It might have been possible to ask, sometime, if things had stayed as they were—as they were meant to be. But Stephen’s loss had put certain topics out of bounds, made certain conversations verboten. Ket Hau as he was now, weathered by grief, was not as easy to talk to as he had once been.

It didn’t matter, anyway. It was enough that Ket Siong knew they had been a refuge for Stephen, and Stephen had been a refuge for his brother.

“Do you think about him?” said Ket Siong.

“I try not to,” said Ket Hau. “We have to move on.”

“I think about him a lot,” said Ket Siong, because it was true, and he knew it would comfort Ket Hau.

They sat in silence.

After a while, Ket Hau passed a hand over his face and looked up, as though he was returning to the present day from another time. “Don’t you have teaching to do?”

Ket Siong’s classes had gone clean out of his mind. He glanced at the clock and leapt off the bed. “I need to change.”

It was a good thing he’d showered at Renee’s place while waiting for her to wake up. Even if it meant he kept catching evocative nosefuls of her scent—a delicate floral fragrance, for which Ket Hau had fortunately not yet mocked him.

“I’ll get out,” said his brother. He paused at the door while Ket Siong was pulling clothes out of the chest of drawers.

“I know it’s not always easy,” said Ket Hau, “but we’ve got a good thing going here. We’ve been lucky. Don’t forget that.”

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