Chapter 1
The Box in the Back Room
Madam Yeo Sook Peng was the company secretary of Selasih Ice Works for thirty-one years, and she was, by every account I have heard, the only person in that building who read the accounts on purpose.
I met her twice. The first time she came to the office where I filed invoices and asked, without introducing herself, whether we kept our delivery notes in date order or in customer order. I said date order. She said that was the wrong answer but the honest one, and left. The second time was at her wake, where I stood at the back of the room holding a paper cup of coffee, wondering why I had come.
Her nephew found me there. He was carrying a cardboard box, the kind that once held tinned milk, and he put it into my arms with obvious relief. “She wrote your name on it,” he said. “She said the boy who files things in date order should have these.”
There were forty annual reports inside. One for every financial year of the company’s life, from the first thin booklet stapled at the corner to the last, printed properly, with a photograph of the harbour on the front. She had kept every one, in order, and she had written on the inside cover of each in pencil: a single line, sometimes two.
I am going to teach you to read those reports, and to read any others you may ever pick up. But before we open Report One, I owe you an explanation of what an annual report actually is, because most people are never told, and the mystery does a great deal of harm.
