It would be at least an hour before the helicopter was due back on the ship's deck. Until then, Mike and the rest of the Ground Crew would have some idle time on their hands. As the sea effortlessly swayed the 8000 tonne warship back and forth, Mike's mind began to wander to thoughts you'd never hear him speak about.
He wondered if Jessica Ching remembers him fondly, if at all. She was his teammate in their university's debate team. Mike had a monster crush on her at the time, but was too chickenshit to act on it because he used to think she was out of his league.
He remembers one debate tournament where their team had lost the make-or-break round which would decide whether or not they would qualify for the octo-finals. As they left the hall after congratulating their Filipino counterparts, Jess suddenly broke down in tears.
A guy can have nerves of steel and remain unfazed in any situation, but the moment a girl starts crying, he loses all sense of what to do. So Mike asked himself the same question he always did when he found himself in a sticky situation: What would James Bond do?
Mike put one arm around her and cradled her drooped head in his other arm. He didn't say a thing, he just let her sob in his arms.
The reason that memory in particular stood out was because that was the only time he had ever seen her like that. Most other times, she was a wiseass to Mike. At one tournament held at a local university, they had lost their way in the maze of corridors and courtyards. Mike, despite having no clue where they were, had insisted they were not lost.
"Trust me," he said. "I'm sure this is the way. I was born with a compass inside my head."
"Makes sense," Jess quipped, rolling her eyes. "Who else could go on functioning with a chunk of metal lodged inside his brain?"
Mike couldn't recall the last time he had heard from Jess. He wondered what she was up to, wherever she was.
He also wondered if Mr Stanley Lim still remembers him, or if Mr Lim was even still alive. Mike had met Mr Lim at an investment fair at PWTC years ago. Mike at the time was a dynamic young investment salesman, although still wet behind the ears.
The rich taukes who frequent these fairs to scout for new investment opportunities tended to avoid Mike. He was a boy with a killer smile wearing a sharp suit. Which is also why he usually went home with the contact details of more young women instead of their fathers.
Mr Stanley Lim, however, stopped to listen to Mike. He had all the signs of a big time investor: cheap t-shirt tucked into cheap slacks, belt line under his chest, cheap PVC sandals on his feet, and of course a 3 thousand dollar Cartier watch on his wrist. Ka-CHing!
Mr Lim was a man who had been battered around by life quite a bit, one could tell. But there was no bitterness in his eyes, just a strange brew of warmth and loneliness.
The bond that Mike and him developed was not really friendship initially. Mike was just being nice to the old man, building plastic rapport so that Mr Lim would feel confident enough in Mike to invest with him. Whether or not Mr Lim saw through this scheme, I don't know. But he enjoyed Mike's company and liked having him around because for a 19 year old, he was a patient listener.
He would tell Mike all sorts of interesting stories from his youth: high stakes gambling losses at Genting, how the miscarriage of his first child led to the failure of his marriage, the disappearance of his wife, starting up his catering business, being bullied by Australian customs officers when visiting his sister in Perth.
Mike grew fond of the sad old man. He visited Mr Lim at Plaza OSK in Jalan P.Ramlee every Wednesday morning, bringing with him 2 packets of tau-foo-faa. Mr Lim spent every weekday at Plaza OSK. He didn't work there. Heck, he didn't work anywhere - he had all his money in the stock market.
So it came to be that every Wednesday, Mike and Mr Lim would sit in front of 8 giant TV screens eating tau-foo-faa and watching the stock prices fluctuate as they chatted about anything and everything. Then, Mr Lim would take Mike out for banana leaf lunch at the cafeteria.
From these weekly conversations with Mr Lim, Mike learnt a lot about the value of youth and what it means to be a man in this world. Mike knew full well that Mr Lim was not going to invest with Mike's company. Mr Lim had been a victim of the overnight stock market crash that year and spent his days waiting to recover his losses.
Mike lost contact with Mr Lim when he left KL that same year to further his studies. Now Mike doesn't even remember if he had said goodbye before he left. Or even if he'd called the old man to say thanks for all the shared wisdom.
Sitting on a floating structure of steel in the middle of the sea along with 250 other men, why was Mike suddenly missing these random people from his past? He couldn't tell.
From the horizon came the high-pitched purring of twin turboshaft engines, followed closely by the distinctive thud-thud-thud of rotor blades. Mike crumpled the empty cigarette packet into his pocket and got to his feet.
