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  Instead I stepped into a hybrid, an eccentric cross between the Gothic curved ceilings of St Pancras railway station in London and the bland functionality of an aircraft hangar, with an anomalous canal carving its way through the middle. Cavernous, curved and contemporary, The Shoppes have been called a modern shopping mecca (by the writers of the Marina Bay Sands brochure I picked up at an information counter) offering every ostentatious brand worth handing to the maid to stick in the car boot. All the names were there under one roof. From one spot, I picked out Gucci, Chanel, Hublot and Salvatore Ferragamo. I had never seen so many designer labels in such close proximity since last visiting a Toa Payoh pasar malam. And this was the first time that all the brand names had been spelt correctly. Never have there been so many products in one mall that I could not afford. I peered into the Cartier window and nearly required a lie-down. I was struck by the same question that occurred to me as I bluffed my way through the Formula 1 racetrack. Who, exactly, are The Shoppes for?

  Bored within milliseconds, I decided to play a game: find a shop I could afford. I made it harder for myself by sticking to the higher levels. The layout of The Shoppes was not unlike that of the Titanic, with the lower levels being more financially accessible with a pharmacy, a supermarket and a food court (offering a standard plate of chicken rice for an eye-watering $6.80. For almost seven bucks, I’d expect Chicken Little on a plate.). Hidden among the Fendi and Ferrari boutiques, I chanced upon a shop within my price range: 7-Eleven. With chest inflated proudly, I yanked open one of the drinks fridges. A can of Coke Zero was $2.20.

  So I couldn’t really afford 7-Eleven either.

  But The Shoppes did offer hidden gems along its walls in the form of an imposing series of blown-up black-and-white photographs of old Singapore stretched across giant canvases. I recognised the more obvious images of Fort Canning, Boat Quay and North Bridge Road but one or two grainier portraits were more ambiguous. After checking for information panels, I made a misguided attempt to flirt with the petite, attractive Chinese girl behind the info counter nearby.

  “Hi there, I’m just wondering if there is any information on those photos,” I enquired. “Are there any information panels anywhere?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” she replied cheerily.

  “Please, call me Neil.”

  “I don’t think so, Neil, sir.”

  “That’s such a shame because the images are great, aren’t they?” I gushed, with far too much enthusiasm.

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “You see that one up there is clearly Boat Quay. I’m sure you recognise the sampans and the shophouses and that one over there is Fort Canning. Do you know what Fort Canning’s original Malay name was?”

  She struggled with her indifference.

  “I’ll tell you. It was Bukit Larangan. Did you know that?”

  She did not know that. She did not care. There was a pause. This was awkward.

  “Oh well ... Hey, do you know when that Louis Vuitton store opens in that glass pyramid thingy?”

  The girl’s pretty eyes widened, sparkled. Suddenly, she was a mask of concentration, focused and energised.

  “Yes, sir, Neil, it opens on 17 September. It’s going to be the largest LV store in Asia.”

  It did. And it is.

  “But it’s not the only LV store in Singapore, sir, Neil,” she continued breathlessly. “There is another LV store at ION in Orchard Road and a third store in ...”

  I think she was punishing me for the Bukit Larangan stuff. We had different priorities. It was time to go swimming in the sky.

  Two

  I WAS sidetracked by a sampan. I had headed down to the basement to take the underpass beneath Bayfront Avenue that connected The Shoppes with the hotel towers when I spotted a muscle-bound Malay chap guiding two giggling Japanese women and their shopping bags down a canal. This is not an everyday occurrence for me in a shopping mall. Growing up in Dagenham, our modern shopping mecca (to quote Marina Bay Sands) was Lakeside, which skirted the borders of both Essex and Kent. The Shoppes has Hermès, BALLY and MIU MIU. Lakeside had a Hammers shop, Boots the chemist and hoodies. So riding a Chinese wooden boat through the middle of a shopping mall had an impudence that appealed.

  I wandered across to the canal, which had a strange blue-green hue suggesting it had been filled with Listerine. The Singaporean gondolier (technically, if he’s an oarsman in a sampan, he’s not a gondolier, is he?) helped the Japanese ladies alight and handed them the shopping bags containing enough garments to clothe an impoverished village in Prada for a week. I waited for them to totter off before approaching a counter filled with the usual tourist tat.

  “Good morning,” I said brightly. “I see this is the counter for the sampan rides. How’s your day been? Up and down?”

  She didn’t laugh either.

  “How much is the sampan ride?” I asked, desperately hoping it might be free with every purchase in The Shoppes (I had relented and finally bought a banana from 7-Eleven and kept the receipt).

  “It’s $10, sir,” replied the petite, attractive Chinese twenty-something. A theme was developing here. Did Marina Bay Sands ban fat, ugly people from everywhere but the casino?

  “It’s only for me,” I pointed out. “I’m not bringing a family of six.”

  I craned my head and peered down the canal. The Listerine lake was less than 50 metres and five minutes long. Money is just not expected to be an issue to the type of visitor attracted to Marina Bay Sands. Opposite the canal was an art gallery selling photo collages for up to $50,000.

  Toto, we’re not in Toa Payoh anymore.

  “But when you get to the end of the canal, you will go around the Rain Oculus,” the counter girl continued brightly.

  “There’s a rhinoceros down there?”

  “No, no, the Rain ... Oculus. It’s like a water attraction. Every hour, swirling water is released through the hole, from two storeys above.”

  Unique, perhaps, but I passed on the sampan ride. It really wasn’t the money in the end. It was the sight of the expectant gondolier (I’m sticking with gondolier now, we’re almost done) smiling back at me and holding up his oar. Suddenly, the thought of me lying back on a luxury sampan while a grinning gondolier stood over me working up a sweat was rather disconcerting. Instead, the wonderfully helpful and courteous counter girl guided me through the underpass, across the hotel’s ridiculously extravagant lobby and directed me towards the Sands SkyPark.

  I had high expectations as I handed over $20 for a ticket. The Sands SkyPark defies logic, common sense and even the naked eye. Do you remember when you were at kindergarten drawing your first houses? The windows floated inside the square unsupported, the door was slanted and the roof was a circle. The teacher would give you a patronising pat on the head, privately giggle at your drawing and leave you in the reading corner eating the pages of some Biff and Kipper books. Well, that irreverent, rebellious, anarchic, nonconformist drawing is the Sands SkyPark. There is nothing sensible, rational, practical, mundane or clinical (adjectives so often associated with old Singapore) about the alien architecture.

  Picture yourself again as that wide-eyed kindergarten kid explaining the fanciful features of his latest dysfunctional design to his jaded teacher as you consider the modern engineering marvel. The observation deck, designed to resemble a ship, is above three 55-storey towers, some 200 metres above the sea. Thanks to one of the largest and most daring cantilevers in the world, the park stretches 66.5 metres beyond one of the towers, making the platform longer than the Eiffel Tower lying down. (I’ve never fully understood such cocky proclamations. Who wants to see the Eiffel Tower lying down?) Hundreds of trees traverse the perimeter to provide shelter from the wind for visitors, joggers, hotel guests and swimmers, all of whom can number almost 4,000. It is a garden city poking out beneath the clouds and peering down at that slightly older, more established garden city below. I was thoroughly excited to see one from the other.

  The gl
ass doors parted on the 56th floor and an oppressive gust of blistering hot air battered me about the face. I tiptoed outside but could only squint towards the ground. The heat was intolerable and the sun’s glare inescapable. I had neglected to bring sunglasses. Do not make the same mistake. It took my cowering eyeballs, fearful of being scorched, several minutes to adjust before being able to peek out from my scrunched-up eyelids. As I took a slow, tentative step towards the fence, a sticky wind decided to roar across the observation deck. I retreated and readjusted my underwear. The relentless sweat had trickled mercilessly down my back and made its way to my buttocks. The heat from 56 floors produces perspiration in unfortunate places. The vertigo almost produces something else entirely.

  Heights are rarely an issue. I once climbed to the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge without hesitation, my only concern was being dressed in a billowing blue boiler suit that left me looking like Barney the Dinosaur’s brother. But standing on a suspended cantilever that juts out from a hotel tower is difficult for the brain to compute. There is something in the subconscious constantly grasping around for the comforting familiarity of terra firma. I foolishly placed my hand and arm through the bars on the fence to get an unblocked panoramic phone camera shot of Singapore’s skyline. The breeze tugged at my arm and loosened my sphincter at the same time. I did not shove my arm through the fence again. I noticed that most of the other visitors were also keeping a respectable distance from the deck’s edge. There was a shared, unsaid experience among the majority of Sands SkyPark observers that day. We were all slightly shitting ourselves.

  The view from the top is heady (and even hedonistic from the swimming pool) but overly familiar. I listened to the unbridled enthusiasm of an Italian family and actually envied their sense of awe. For the first-time visitor, the Sands SkyPark offers an intoxicating, unique 360-degree vista of glittering business and residential skyscrapers that is surely unrivalled by any other metropolis on the planet. A futuristic panorama that is always going to be more Blade Runner than Bishan. For many Singaporeans, it’s their workplace. I picked out Clifford Centre, where I had once worked when the old, dowdy building (compared to its loftier neighbours) still housed newspaper offices, and thought about Egypt. I recalled an Egyptian mate from university who told us how he used to travel to work every morning and never look up from his magazine when the bus passed the Pyramids. I’m not suggesting the Sands SkyPark qualifies as one of the modern wonders of the world but the sentiment is the same. Overseas visitors scan the horizon and see a series of picture postcards. Singaporeans see their workplaces and favourite makan spots.

  Ironically, the real pleasure from atop a sky bridge that defines new Singapore is outlining the map of old Singapore. Forget the high-rises. They can be spotted from beach barbecues along the East Coast. From its vantage point south of Singapore’s business and colonial district, the observation deck allows the onlooker to block out the modern and trace the historic by following the Singapore River as it snakes its way through the city. The Fullerton, Boat Quay, Raffles’ landing site, Clarke Quay, North Bridge Road, the former Supreme Court and parliament buildings, Chinatown and Fort Canning Park are all easily discernible from such a dizzying height. Like an archaeologist digging with a shovel 56 storeys deep, the 21st-century Sands SkyPark has managed to carve out 19th-century Singapore for all to appreciate.

  I tried to locate the rough spot where my wife and I had sat on the rocks back in 1996 and posed for daft photographs at the (old) water’s edge. The traditional fishing haunt had long since been swallowed by one of the Esplanade’s theatres. Peering down at the Esplanade on my right, the Sands SkyPark also allowed me to put a stubborn argument to bed. The Theatres on the Bay are known locally and affectionately as the durians but I have always harboured misgivings over the nickname. From the observation deck, there is no debate. The two theatres are the bulbous eyes of a bluebottle fly.

  I climbed to the highest point of the observation deck on the 57th storey, which houses the inevitable exclusive rooftop nightclub called KU DÉ TA (Get it? Cool right?), and heard the distant splashing of rich people. My timing was perfect. The midday sun offered no respite and a refreshing dip 200 metres above the sea in a pool beneath the heavens seemed very much the cut of my jib. I picked up the pace along the tree-lined path, with the Singapore Straits on my left and the city skyline on my right, and followed the splashing.

  And there it was, the sexiest swimming pool on the planet— desirable, captivatingly curvy and, ultimately, unobtainable.

  Being an infinity pool, the water gives the impression that it extends to the horizon, trickles over the side and falls 57 storeys below. Of course, the water is gathered in a catchment area and then pumped back into the main pool. My sister and I managed to replicate the effects of an infinity pool when we were kids in our Dagenham back garden. Whenever we sought to create the illusion of the water running off the horizon, we sat on the walls of our blow-up paddling pool. On more than one occasion, we underestimated the basic laws of physics and weight distribution and the paddling pool would ping up from the other side and bury my sister.

  No chance of that happening at Marina Bay Sands. At 150 metres in length, the pool is the longest infinity swimming pool in the world, affording unrivalled views to the north and cooling breezes (for Singapore) from the south. It was a credit to my self-restraint that I refrained from stripping off right there in front of security staff and taking the plunge. I waved my SkyPark admission ticket pompously in the air and approached the pool counter. I was dazzled by a blinding array of gleaming white teeth. The counter girl was ridiculously pretty. She was Malay this time. Same Marina Bay Sands rule, different race.

  “Good afternoon, I’d like to go swimming, please,” I said, with an air of confidence I felt befitted the surroundings. “Where are the changing rooms?”

  “Hello, sir, are you a hotel guest?” she enquired gently, in a measured, rehearsed voice that hinted that this was not her first time asking the question.

  “Er, no, but I’ve got my ticket right here,” I continued, still upbeat.

  “Yes, sir, but that’s only for the Sands SkyPark.”

  “But we’re on the Sands SkyPark. It’s a bit hard to pop anywhere else right now,” I reasoned, still jovial, but wavering ever so slightly.

  “I understand, sir, but the ticket only gives you access to the SkyPark’s observation deck. The pool is reserved for hotel guests.”

  “But I’ve got my ticket,” I pleaded, and held it aloft like Charlie and his Wonka bar. “And I’ve brought my towel. Look.”

  I produced my Beatles towel from my rucksack to somehow prove that I wasn’t a liar. I still cannot believe that I brandished my Beatles towel and displayed it under the nose of the pretty girl.

  “I can see that, sir, but the pool is only reserved for hotel guests,” she reiterated, steadfastly professional and reasonable throughout. “If you booked a room, you could use the pool.”

  “How much are the rooms then?”

  “Well, we’re usually fully booked over the weekends but during the week, if it’s off-peak, you might be able to get a room for $400.”

  The world’s sexiest swimming pool is also one of the most expensive. I did not have $400 to hand. At that particular moment, I did not have 400 cents to hand in cash (the 7-Eleven banana had cleared me out). I had one weapon left in my armoury—desperation.

  “You see, the thing is, I’m trying to write a book about new, sexy Singapore,” I rambled. “You know, how the city-state, particularly the Marina Bay area, has been transformed in the last five years and what could be newer or sexier than an infinity swimming pool on top of the world?”

  The sexy reference piqued her interest. At least, I thought it did. I covered my eyes from the glare as she smiled at me again and then offered me a positively Dickensian crumb of comfort.

  “You can watch if you like, sir,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You can watch the ho
tel guests swim for a while if you want.”

  On that observation deck, the temperature exceeded 35 degrees, the southerly breeze felt like volcanic ash splattering against the back of my neck, the sweat was making my genitalia behave like a couple of hard-boiled eggs in a simmering saucepan and I had been cordially invited to watch wealthy tourists sip Singapore slings and grope each other on poolside sunloungers. How could I possibly refuse?

  Feeling like a Victorian manservant invited up from the scullery to watch the aristocratic feast, I slumped on a bench and peered through a gap in a sunshade (the real function of which, I believe, was to separate the hotel guests from the SkyPark gawkers) and reminded myself that I had paid $20 for the privilege.

  There is something disturbingly voyeuristic about ogling holidaymakers at a swimming pool. I thought of the British holiday camp swimming pools back in the 1980s when it had been briefly fashionable to build colossal windows along pool walls that faced into a restaurant or bar. The original, quaintly naive idea for such viewing windows was so that young swimmers got to perform forward rolls and back flips for their gushing grandparents and restaurant patrons were entertained by the balletic images of athletic breaststroking bodies gliding effortlessly through the water. Of course, what they usually ended up seeing was a couple of teenage boys dropping their shorts and jiggling their spotty arses from side to side while diners chomped on their sausages.

  I fixed upon a plump Caucasian guy carving a trench through the middle of the rooftop pool. He had plenty of room to manoeuvre, not so much because of the pool’s exclusivity but because his attempts to show off his butterfly looked more like a fat caterpillar flailing around in a puddle. Judging from the other SkyPark ticket holders who had gathered around me, he had drawn quite a crowd and treated us to a bit of a butterfly show. Our respective positions were clearly delineated. He was rich. We were not. He was cool. We were not.