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home, ninety minutes, an X-ray, and a tentative diagnosis of an infected tooth later. Conchita had been right in that the culprit seemed to be an abscess in the right molar, with the pain showing up elsewhere.
    ‘Okay, so what the fuck is going on?’ I said to Michael. ‘It’s my head that feels like it’s exploding, and it’s you that sits there like I’ve done some unforgivable evil deed. The smell of burning martyred flesh is so strong that it’s nearly taking my mind off this sodding tooth.’
    This, by the way, was a lie. I was by now feeling no pain. I had been given some hospital-strength analgesics by the nice Chinese dentist, with more to take over the next couple of days until the antibiotics kicked in.
    Michael was on a slow burn; he looked pale and quiet and it took me a few moments to take in that he was as angry as I had ever seen him.
    ‘How long do you think it would have been before you realised?’ he said as we crawled up Magazine Gap Road behind a number 15 bus.
    ‘Michael, what the fuck are you talking about?’
    He didn’t turn to look at me.
    ‘You’ve been here almost a year, and Conchita comes three times a week. She spends three hours in the flat each time. You’ve known her that long and yet you never once asked her a single question about her life? You’re swanking around sucking up to rich shits and going out on boats, boat parties, and finding this madly cheap little place where they sell frigging Prada espadrilles and whatever it is, and no more Bollinger for me please, it’s only Wednesday, and don’t you like my new mobile phone it plays the “Marseillaise” as a ring tone, and who’s the richest person you’ve ever met, all this fucking shite, this shite , yet you’ve never asked Conchita, who picks up your fucking knickers off the bedroom floor and washes them and puts them back in the drawer where they belong, and you’ve never asked her a single question about her life, you know fuck all about her, you hardly even see she’s there?’
    ‘Hang on a minute, Michael, I …’
    ‘The truth is I don’t know who you are any more. That’s the kind of thing you laugh at when people say it on TV or in films, isn’t it? It’s the kind of line that really cracks you up. But I’m saying it and it’s fucking well true. You’ve turned into this … this person I just don’t recognise. You used to laugh at people obsessed with success and money and with having stuff . It was a real thing about you. Now you’ve got a Filipino maid and you won’t give her the fucking time of day.’
    ‘Well, Saint Michael rides in on his fucking chariot, kisses the leper’s sores, takes a couple of arty black-and-white photographs, and goes home thinking well of himself.’
    ‘What did you want when you came out here? What did you think you wanted?’
    ‘To get away from you, mainly, you stuck-up useless shit,’ I said. We had stopped at a traffic light by Happy Valley Road and I got out of the car, slamming the door and catching a brief glimpse of a very worried-looking driver in the front seat as I did so. I hoped his English wasn’t any better than it seemed to be. Iheaded for the path at the top of Bowen Road, with no plan other than to walk for an hour or so, and hope that Michael died horribly in a car accident. Then I went to see Casino at a Wanchai cinema . It was so-so. By the time I got home, Michael had moved his return ticket from next Sunday to the preceding Wednesday, packed, and checked into a hotel.

Chapter Six
    If I hadn’t been so pissed off about Michael I probably wouldn’t have done what I did next. Berkowitz had been nagging me, on and off, to write a series of profiles of local billionaires – the term defined as someone with a capital value of US$1,000,000,000. (We would have a little box inset in the first piece to help our readers calculate in which currency they were billionaires. Good gag. In those days, I didn’t qualify even in Italian lira.)