The knife was about 29 cm long and 3 cm at the widest part of the blade with 'Prestige, Made in Taiwan' written on the upper part close to the wooden (or was it plastic?) handle. Up until now it hadn't had a lot of use. Usually it lay in the bottom of the drawer with the salad spoons, vegetable peelers and that funny shaped implement with the wheel that's something to do with cutting up pizza that actually might come in handy later in the story.

Perhaps the knife had been waiting for this moment, its moment of glory when it converted from a common kitchen instrument to something with a power of transforming from one state of being to another; not one of those minor moments like a slicing-succulent-pieces-of-chicken moment or even a carving-up-the-roast- turkey-at-Christmas moment. Those were all non-moments really compared to this moment when Karl's hand reached into the drawer lined with the pale blue plastic sheeting, which Paula had chosen especially to match the midnight-blue bench tops, and his fingers began to close over the handle.

This was his third investigation already in one of these new housing estates. This one was called Prestige Heights, the sort of place that Monique had her eye on, the ones springing up all over the outskirts of the city, full of those mock-Tuscan villas with five bedrooms and the Las Vegas billiard room and a good half-an-hour's walk from public transport, nice inside though, all smooth tidy edges in the kitchen and easy to keep clean except for that body on the floor with a knife in the stomach and thick pools of blood already congealed on the pale beige floor tiles, just as well it's easy to clean, Monique would love to live in a place like this, she'd know what colour these tiles were called, 'sunset beach' or some crap like that, she collects those colour charts and reads them in bed, and she's always wanting to move out of our inner city place to one of these estates, too bloody far for work, I'm on the job about eighteen hours a day as it is, I don't want to spend another two hours stuck in the middle of road-rage traffic, better text her I'm gonna be late again tonight, easier than having one of those one-way conversations, trying to explain how a dead body with a knife in it is going to delay a nice roast beef with vegetables, mmmm that knife with "Prestige-Made in Taiwan" just might be a clue.

Until the early 1960s, most quality steel goods for kitchenware were manufactured in Sheffield in

England

as a virtual monopoly. Then following the Second World War and with the rise of Japanese industry, inroads were made into this monopoly, principally by

Japan

but eventually by

Taiwan

as well. Due to cheaper labour in both

Japan

and

Taiwan

, steel goods companies expanded into Asia and

Australia

became flooded with these cheaper Asian goods. Shareholders too were demanding higher returns. As part of this market expansion, many Australian companies were forced to close their local operations and move offshore to Asia in order to take advantage of lower labour costs. It was the Asian workers as well as Australian who were often disadvantaged by these changes.

Meilin arrived back to her dormitory in the outskirts of Taipei around 8pm every evening. The bus trip from the 'Prestige' factory on the other side of the city usually took about two hours. If her friend Chiewhwa had already arrived home from her office job, she would be cooking the rice and vegetables they shared each evening in the small smoky kitchen overlooking the wall of the next-door dormitory. After eating and doing some washing and household chores, the two friends would watch television in their room before falling asleep around 10pm before Meilin woke again at 4am to be at the factory by the start of her shift at 6am . Meilin dreamed of her home in the south in Hengchun where her mother and two younger sisters still lived. She sent money home to them each month so that her two sisters could attend school and maybe, if their grades were good enough, go on to University. Their dream was to do well so that eventually they might all travel overseas, perhaps even to

Australia

. Meilin had heard that there were plenty of good jobs for conscientious people in the IT industry there.

It seemed like a good job in the beginning, well paid with flexible hours, all you had to do was sit in front of a PC, answer calls, go into peoples' files and make the changes they wanted, or at worse, tell some poor bastard why their payments had been cut off, the usual mutual obligation crap line, not very demanding really, that is until they brought in this quality control thingo and started checking up on how many clients you dealt with in an hour, it was some fucking crazy number like 13.25 per hour as a 'client satisfaction quota', however they worked that out especially the 0.25 bit, well what's a 0.25 person look like anyway? That's when I started feeling a bit sorry for some of those poor bastards on the other end of the phone and that was a big mistake, I actually started listening to their stories, and then my own fuckin' quota started to drop and my Team Leader, a frigid bitch who looked like she'd never been screwed in her life and never would be, started to get heavy, warning me about having to do 'skill management update seminars' unless my quota went up again, and all the time at home Paula was raving on about me not being much fun anymore, never wanting to go out and that crap, mate I felt so rooted most of the time, having to sit and listen to everybody else's problems and Miss fuckin' frigid bitch prowling up and down and giving me the look, then that day I went to work and was given a letter saying I was 'surplus to requirements', something snapped and when I came home and found Paula screwing that fucking bastard from the pizza place I just lost it.

It's all very well for everybody else to be whinging on about how sad their lives are. After all, I'm the poor bunny lying dead here on the tiles, which I'd only just cleaned this morning by the way, with a 29cm carving knife stuck in my stomach and still looking for the light down the tunnel and the voices and all that crap but it hasn't happened so I'm stuck waiting for a bus that hasn't arrived yet.

How was I to know that Karl was going to come home early? It was just meant to be a bit of fun, and I haven't had much of that lately, all I've had from Karl for the last few weeks is whinge, whinge, whinge and then that Rico keeps putting on extra anchovies and giving me the eye every time I go into Prestige Pizzas, well of course I noticed but I was feeling a bit sorry for Karl though and gonna do him a nice roast and there it was defrosting on the sink when Rico knocked on the door with home-delivery and I got a bit distracted. I was gonna have three kinds of vegies too and one of those frozen Laurel Lee cheesecake thingies.

Well now I guess you've worked out exactly what happened - the usual story of love, boredom, passion and murder in the suburbs. Boyfriend under enormous pressure at work, loses job, finds girlfriend screwing someone else, loses his cool, grabs knife etc etc. Seems pretty straightforward really but how do you know Karl reaching for the knife in the first section wasn't just going to make himself a sandwich and how do you know it wasn't Rico who did it, pissed off at having to come up with all the extra anchovies and this Paula bird not coming across? Time is irrelevant in this sort of story. How do you know which bit came first and that we don't all really live in parallel universes and that it all happened simultaneously anyway? How do you know Paula didn't slip on those freshly washed 'sunset beach' floor tiles when she was making herself a sandwich and got herself a sudden trip on the Styx without a booking? There are some statistics somewhere about more people being injured by accidents in the home than anywhere else. And what about that dopey detective? He was so interested in the colour of the floor tiles that he didn't notice that bit of propaganda from the old leftie economist about structural change being at the root of everybody's problems. I mean, how seventies can you get! And how do you know poor innocent Meilin doesn't turn out to be the frigid Team Leader bitch? Some other famous person said something about the oppressed having the potential to be the greatest oppressors and how do you know she didn't stab Paula because she was in love with Karl and her bitchiness was just her frustration at Karl's non-availability and I'm sure Freud had something to say about that? This is a totally unreliable narrative and I could rave on about why the story is called 'Prestige' too but I think you've probably had enough symbolist crap by now. And anyway how do you know I really exist as the narrator? Maybe I'm just a disembodied voice from outer space but I guess that's more of a UFO story and doesn't belong here anyway...