Sixty Thirty Ten
25. The ease of something exact
The Vietnamese mill in Hall A was better than the Taiwanese one.
He found her at the booth next to it.
She looked up from a fabric swatch, unhurried.
“Wrong direction again?”
“The other direction,” he said. “You were right about Hall A.”
She turned back to the swatch. “The finishing isn’t as consistent. But the weight’s better.”
He stayed to look at the samples. They stood side by side without ceremony, both doing what they were there to do.
After a while she said: “Are you done for the day?”
“Nearly.”
“Find me when you are.”
He found her at four-thirty at the edge of the hall. Same posture — turned slightly inward, calculating something privately, removed from the noise.
“Dinner,” she said when she saw him. “Not drinks. I know a place.”
The restaurant was on a narrow street in District 3, in the kind of building that had accumulated purpose over decades — the ground floor a kitchen now but probably something else before, the walls still carrying the memory of it. Tiled floor. Ceiling high enough to breathe in.
She ordered for them both without asking. The broth arrived dark and fermented-deep — beef tendon, handmade pork balls. Both, where most places gave you one or the other. Fresh spring rolls alongside. When the server had looked uncertain she’d said: sixty percent cucumber, thirty celery, ten noodle. The server’s eyebrow had moved slightly. David had caught it. Neither of them said anything.
He asked about the brand she was building.
She told him. Natural fibres, small runs, made in Malaysia. Not fashion. The kind of thing made for people who had stopped wanting to be told what to want.
“Sounds slow,” he said.
“That’s the point.”
He thought about Bare. The label he was here to build — still new, still finding its weight. He thought about Jessa in Cebu, who handled the customer queries, who answered everything in the same measured tone regardless of what came at her. He thought about Fizal, who had figured out the fulfilment system before he’d asked him to. the way he’d found operators in Europe and North America — small businesses with storage — so that daily orders went out as if Bare was already there. The whole small architecture of people who made it possible for him to come to places like this and do only the part that required him specifically.
How keeping it small was a decision, not a constraint. How that had looked like contraction from the outside — and felt, from the inside, like breathing actual air.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand that.”
She looked at him across the table.
“How long are you here?”
“Two more days.”
She nodded. Went back to her food.
After dinner they walked. Not toward anywhere — the street gave way to another street, the neighbourhood quieter as they moved away from the restaurant. The heat had softened into something more bearable. Somewhere a radio was playing something slow, low, with a lot of bass.
Their hands brushed as they walked. He didn’t reach for hers. He didn’t move away either.
She noticed.
Their steps were unhurried. Without deciding it, they had fallen into the same pace — side by side, the street passing beneath them at the same rate.
She said: “Coffee. At mine, if you want.”
He said: “Yes.”
She turned and looked at him: “I want to be clear about something first.”
He waited.
“I’m not looking for something continuous,” she said. “I move too much and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. But I’m not interested in pretending this isn’t what it is either.”
She looked at the street ahead.
“I’m not asking for anything beyond that.”
Her voice dropped.
“And I won’t offer more than that either.”
He thought about Melbourne. The permission structure he’d dressed as honesty. The door he’d claimed he hadn’t opened.
He thought about Karen. I don’t know if that’s enough.
He didn’t answer in words.
He closed the small distance between them and her shoulder came under his arm and they kept walking, the street continuing beneath them, the radio somewhere behind now.
“Good,” she said.
He woke early to the particular quality of HCMC before the city fully started — the birds first, then the motorbikes beginning their accumulation, the light coming through the curtain in the particular pale of just-before-dawn.
He lay still for a while.
She was already awake beside him. Not restless. Just awake in the way some people are awake — already in the day, without urgency about it.
They didn’t talk much.
The curtain moved slightly in the draft from the ceiling fan.
She showered. Light powder, lemon in water. Gathered her bag. He got up and started stretching slowly.
She left at seven. She had a meeting.
At the door she said: “If you’re in KL in the next few months, let me know.”
“I will.”
“Pull the door till you hear a click.”
And then she left.
He found the moka pot in the dish rack. Filled it, put it on. Stood at the window while it came up, and watched the street below come to life. He wasn’t managing anything. He noticed that too.