Jalan Jalan

by Mike Stoner

  ‘How’s your jet-lag?’ Manchester with deep worry lines etched around his eyes and across his forehead.

  ‘Pak’s a cunt. Tell him to fuck off if you don’t want to do something.’ Big breasts again.

  A second warning about Pak. I force optimism; from previous job experience, slagging off your boss isn’t that unusual.

  ‘Where’s my class exactly?’ I ask the room in general as a way of ignoring more questions.

  ‘Which one you got?’ asks bearded Australian.

  ‘Dickens.’

  ‘That’s on third, next to Austen. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  As I follow Australian up the stairs, course book and pens in my hand, Iqpal is coming down with a mop and bucket in his. He shows us his wide toothy smile.

  ‘Apa kabar?’ asks Australian.

  ‘Baik-baik. How are you, Marty?’

  ‘Baik-baik.’

  ‘How you doing, Iqpal?’ I say.

  ‘Baik-baik. You? Good sleep?’

  ‘Very. Thanks.’

  He smiles and rests his bucket on the step as we walk past him.

  ‘Have good day with students.’

  ‘Thanks. I will.’

  We trudge up the next flight of blue-tiled stairs and away from the air-conditioning, footsteps echoing as we go.

  ‘He’s a happy little bloke, young Iqpal,’ says Marty. ‘Pak treats him like shit, but he keeps smiling,’

  We’re on the top floor and the air-conditioning is a long way behind. I wipe a bead of sweat from my temple.

  ‘Here we are. You’re in that one and I’m next door. Come give me a knock if you have any problems. Not that you will. These little kids are bonzer.’

  ‘Thanks, Marty.’ One memorised. Laura always says I’m rubbish with names; she’ll be impressed.

  No she won’t. Quit it, you, and learn to shut up.

  I open the class door and flip on the lights. They flicker and buzz and finally light up my green-and-white windowless room. Chairs sit on top of tables like swimmers lined up on the edge of a pool. On my desk is a remote control for the AC. I press buttons on it until at last the machine on the wall starts moving up and down and blowing cool air across the muggy room.

  I’m expecting thirteen kids any moment. All I know is they range from eight to fourteen. Should be interesting. Probably be embarrassing. Probably be painful. Probably be horrible.

  Turn and run.

  Get to the airport.

  Go home.

  Pull a duvet over my head. Cuddle pillows. Sniff them, try to get a hint of her. ‘Shut the FUCK up.’ I whack my chest with a balled fist.

  ‘Sorry sir. This Dickens?’

  The boy is about three feet tall, ethnic Chinese, in a red, blue and yellow stripy T-shirt and trousers that reach just below his knees, where they meet pulled-up white socks with red stripes around the top. I’m guessing he’s the eight year-old. He looks more uncertain than I feel.

  ‘Hello. Yes it is. And you are?’

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘Your name? What is your name?’

  ‘Dennis, sir.’

  ‘OK Dennis. Come in and take a seat.’

  He pulls one of the swimmers into the pool, just as a procession of little people comes through the door. I stand back and wait for them to choose their seats. Once they’ve sat, put their pads and pencil cases on the tables I start.

  ‘Good morning. I’m your new teacher.’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Does anyone want to ask me any questions?’

  Dennis puts his hand up. I nod for him to go ahead.

  ‘What does “fuck” mean, sir?’

  ‘Time isn’t successive.’

  ‘Explain, please.’ I place a little pebble in her navel. It fits almost perfectly.

  ‘I mean this moment doesn’t follow the previous and doesn’t precede the next.’ She lifts her head up and holds her sunglasses above her eyes for a moment, inspecting the jewel in her tummy button. ‘You want me to belly dance?’

  ‘Later maybe. So how does time work in your highly superior mind then?’

  She replaces her sunglasses and rests her head back on the pillow made of her clothes.

  ‘Everything is side by side. Now is next to my birth and your birth and Napoleon’s birth and Hiroshima and Christopher Columbus taking his first poo in the New World and the moment I said time isn’t successive.’

  I suck the pebble out of her and spit it onto the beach. It bounces off a stone and then another and settles into its own little crevice. I dig a little hole in the beach next to us and find a smaller one. This drops neatly into the oval dip in her stomach.

  ‘Humans have created the concept of time moving forward, but it’s never really been seen or proved. We could have taken another concept on board just as easily.’

  ‘Perhaps we haven’t, because other concepts are wrong.’ My finger traces a circle around the grey gem in its pink setting and her stomach quivers.

  ‘Einstein didn’t believe it.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’s right.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but all right.’ She sits up and my pebble disappears in the fold of her stomach, ‘Look at this beach.’

  I look. It’s packed. Little children run in and out of the waves where the sand is just making an appearance at low tide. Groups of foreign students show off their continental tans and husbands stare from behind sunglasses at breasts of Scandinavian-looking girls who light cigarettes and glance sideways at Italian boys. The pier is cooling its front legs in the water, skin peeling and old frame creaking.

  ‘How many pebbles?’ she asks, using her sunglasses to hold her hair back.

  ‘Seventy-two billion, three hundred and twenty-three thousand and four.’ My eyes scan the length of the beach again. ‘Maybe five.’

  ‘Exactly. And they all sit next to each other going off in every direction. Now imagine that each pebble is a moment in time.’

  I realise this is going to be an explanation that requires attention. I sit up and adjust my position so I’m sitting comfortably.

  ‘Right, now watch.’ She picks up a stone and drops it. ‘This is now.’ She picks up the stone next to it, it drops. ‘This is now.’ She does it again.’ This is now.’ She does it again. ‘This is now.’

  I consider not interrupting just to see how many times she’s going to do it, but my question wants to be heard.

  ‘So where is yesterday?’

  She picks up the stone next to the one she’s just dropped.

  ‘Napoleon’s birth?’

  She picks up the next, drops it.

  ‘Or maybe,’ she turns around, crawls up the sloping beach two feet and picks up a stone from there, ‘maybe this one.’

  I look at her bottom raised in the air towards me. One half of her bikini is being eaten by it, exposing a pale half-moon of flesh. It contrasts to the golden brown of the rest of her. I think about biting the over-exposed backside. As a small boy with ice cream dripping off his mouth and hands is watching us, I decide it’s probably best not to.

  ‘The point,’ she says, as she slides back down onto her towel, her feet prodding my chest as she moves, making me back away, ‘is that I could move the pebbles around, or maybe they get kicked about or the sea jostles them about, and all those little moments get jumbled up and suddenly this moment isn’t next to the moment it preceded or succeeded and suddenly, whoosh.’ Her hand slices the air.

  ‘Whoosh?’

  ‘One moment we’re on the beach and the next moment we’re watching Napoleon pop out of his mum’s cannon, and the next we’re back on the beach. Time gets jumbled.’

  ‘Don’t you think if that was possible, more people would have experienced it? More people would be having glimpses of the past and the future?’ I grab her red-painted toes and want them between my teeth, ice-cream-covered boy watching or not. I suddenly have a hunger. She yanks her foot away.

  ‘Perhaps they have or perhaps the moment
is so quick we don’t notice it. How long is a moment, how long is now?’

  ‘You’re a head fuck.’

  ‘I’m going for a swim. I need to think about if what I just said makes sense.’

  She stands and pulls her bikini out of her cheeks, lays her shades on her towel, leans down and kisses me.

  ‘I love you,’ she says and tiptoes across the little hard and uncomfortable moments of time to the water.

  I hold a stone in each hand and decide the one in my left is now and the one in my right is next month, when she plans to pack up and move to Prague for nine months. I put now in my bag, hidden under my jeans, and weigh up next month. It’s heavy and misshapen and feels wrong, so I throw it and just miss a dog chasing a Frisbee.

  VISAS AND VINYL

  W e’re sitting in Mei’s bar. Seven of us around pushed-together tables. It’s Thursday evening and the first week is over. Mei is perched on a stool behind the counter, smiling at no one. She’s Chinese and doesn’t say much. She only comes out from her smiling place to clear bottles away and to deliver a full one to a Canadian with big glasses at the table next to ours. He stares at Mei almost without pause. The rest of us help ourselves to bottles of Bintang beer from the fridge when we like. She makes a little note on the piles of paper in front of her every time we do it. In front of me is a Bintang and my newest addiction: kopi susu. It’s thick dark coffee in a glass mug with an inch of condensed milk in the bottom. I slide my spoon down the side of the glass and scoop some of it up through the coffee, trying hard not to mix the two together. It’s the best coffee and the best thing to happen to coffee in my lifetime.

  Mei’s is open on three sides to the warm night air, allowing the noise of crickets to play background music to conversation. It’s at the end of a small parade of shops in the housing estate where most of Medan’s expats and well-off seem to live. The housing estate is more like a guarded ghetto for the wealthier of the city. It is full of detached and semi-detached white-painted houses, all with little front gardens and fences and placed in quiet roads and cul-de-sacs. There are security guards as you enter the estate on the main entrance, but there are plenty of little cut-through alleyways that take you out into the real mad Medan, which is deceptively close.

  Here in Mei’s where the traffic can’t be heard and Europeans, Antipodeans and North Americans sit and chat, the relentless noise and fumes and overcrowded city seem a continent away. I’m not sure I like it. I feel naked, open to questions, open to reality. I’ve been New Me for over a week now, on and off, but Old Me and Laura still like to poke their heads up every now and then, wanting some attention.

  ‘So, what d’ya reckon? Staying?’ Marty is sat opposite me in a tattered and stained grey T-shirt, swigging the last froth out of his bottle.

  ‘Yep. It’s all OK so far. Takes some getting used to though.’ I stir the remaining centimetre of condensed milk into my coffee and take a mouthful.

  ‘You never get used to it. Always something weird and bizarre every day.’ This is Julie, the English teacher with big breasts and wide eyes from my first day in the staffroom.

  ‘Good. That’s what I want.’

  ‘It wears thin sometimes,’ she says as her fingers dance on the table, doing some sort of twitchy can-can. Her eyes dart around looking for agreement from the others in our group. She doesn’t get any so she nods in self-agreement.

  ‘I fucking love it here,’ says Kim, who’s sat next to me. ‘We’ll take you out and show you the night life later, man. Fucking unbelievable. Ain’t that right, Jussy-boy?’

  Jussy-boy is sat on the end of the table in a white shirt done up to the collar and a Donald Duck tie. He’s another teacher, in his early twenties. He’s from Montana or Virginia or somewhere.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Jussy-boy, ‘just the way Kim tells it.’

  I’m not sure I’m ready for a night out yet. Daytime Medan has already given me enough to think about. It almost completely lacks personal space and is rich with poverty. It bears no resemblance to anything English whatsoever. But I’m going to go with them. I’ve got to let New Me be free before Old Me gets control of things and turns the pair of us into a self-pitying blob. I wish I could hold Laura’s hand under the table.

  —Well, I can’t do that because of these odd-jobs sitting either side of you, but how about this?

  Laura puts her arms around my neck from behind and nuzzles behind my ear.

  —You’re not real. Get off.

  I twist my head.

  —Well, I feel real and I’d like a cuddle.

  I try to shake her off again.

  —You’re just my sick mind messing with me, now OFF.

  A sudden head jerk. She lets go.

  ‘You OK, man?’ asks Kim.

  ‘Yeah. Stiff neck is all.’

  ‘Just wait ‘til you get out to the jungle. We’re planning on going in a couple of weeks. Go and see some real monkeys instead of drinking with these ones, eh?’ This is Naomi. She is sat next to me. Naomi is twenty-three, Canadian, beautiful, blue-eyed with light-brown dreads. She works at another school somewhere in the city. Her knee keeps knocking mine.

  —I can see what she’s doing down there. Watch it, mister.

  —Not there.

  —Am.

  ‘Yeah. Get out to Bukit and see the orang-utans. Eh?’ Kim walks over to the beer fridge.

  ‘Yeah, eh?’ says Jussy-boy.

  ‘Fucking eh, eh?’ says Julie.

  ‘Eh?’ says Marty.

  ‘Leave the girl alone, you racist twats,’ says Geoff, the worried-looking Mancunian, sat at the other end of the table.

  ‘Who wants a Bintaaang?’ Kim yells from the fridge.

  We all examine our bottles and answer ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it with the “eh” anyway?’ I ask Naomi.

  She twists towards me in her chair and smiles.

  ‘It’s a Canadian thing. Have you never heard it before? We have this habit of finishing sentences with an “eh.” Eh?’ She smiles, all thick lips and straight white teeth.

  —God, those teeth. Bleaches her bloody teeth. Get over yourself, girl.

  ‘Didn’t know that.’ I gulp down half my bottle of beer, willing Laura to shut up. My head swims a little.

  ‘Yeah, same as septics say “fuck”, we Canadians say “eh?”’ She looks at Kim when she says this.

  ‘Fuck. Now who’s being racist? I fucking hate being called a septic.’ Kim slides into his chair and slams two fistfuls of bottles on the table. White froth erupts out of their necks.

  ‘You started it, Kimbo.’

  ‘Alright you lot,’ says Geoff, ‘let’s change the subject.’

  ‘Septic?’ I whisper to Naomi.

  ‘Septic tank.’

  ‘Fucking Yank, man,’ says Kim. ‘Geoff’s right, let’s leave it.’

  Silence follows for a few seconds and I wonder if, and what, the rest of the people around this table have run away from. I can feel some sort of tension from nearly all of them: Julie with her twitching fingers, Geoff with the worry lines of a bomb-disposal expert, Kim with his overuse of sexual adjectives, Marty seeming almost over-relaxed, Jussy-boy with his dodgy taste in clothes and even Naomi with her starting-to-get-annoying overzealous knee-knocking.

  —And shiny bright teeth, don’t forget her shiny bright teeth. They’re annoying too.

  —Yes, and those.

  If she insists on being here, I might as well let her for the moment. I quite like her little show of jealousy.

  ‘Anyway, has Pak asked you to teach his mate’s kids yet?’ asks Marty.

  ‘He has mentioned it. Sounds alright.’ I answer.

  ‘Don’t trust him.’ Julie’s fingers pause in their dance. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Pak’s a cunt.’

  Geoff sighs. ‘Julie, do you have to swear so much?’

  She ignores him.

  ‘He asked me and I went ‘round this guy’s house and there’s armed guards and dogs and camera
s as soon as you get through the gate,’ explains Julie. ‘I walked straight back out. If Pak’s got friends with places like that, he’s a cunt.’

  ‘I taught them for a week,’ says Geoff, ‘and it’s true about the guards but the kids are lovely. Fitri and Benny, lovely kids. Pak paid me cash for it too.’

  ‘Pak pays cash for everything, man. That wasn’t anything special,’ says Kim.

  ‘It was extra. Paid my beers for a week.’

  ‘Yeah, but the kids hated you.’ Julie swallows a mouthful and coughs half of it across the table. ‘Said you were a boring tosser or something similar, I heard.’ She wipes her mouth with her sleeve.

  ‘It is true, Geoff. That’s why Pak asked Julie to go.’ Jussy-boy dabs his brow with Donald’s beak.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, suddenly wanting peace and quiet, ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘It’s bad news. Any friend of Pak’s is bad news.’

  ‘Let the newbie fucking find out for himself.’ Kim sticks a cigarette in my mouth. ‘Welcome to Mei’s and welcome to the Friday night gang. Bunch of freaks that we be. Anyone who ain’t here ain’t worthy of our company.’

  —Oh, I am honoured.

  —But you aren’t here.

  ‘Where are all the other teachers?’ I cut across her before she has a chance to reply. I’ve met the rest of them at work, but not everyone is here.

  ‘Scared,’ Kim answers. ‘At home watching TV and talking long-distance to the people they miss. Or, in the case of some, spending their money on pretty girls or ladyboys. They keep themselves to themselves.’

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘Of this country. Realised they made a mistake. Wanna be home watching whatever shit it is they watch on TV back home.’

  ‘So why don’t they go home?’

  A glance is passed around the table. Julie sniggers, Marty scratches his beard and Geoff’s lines deepen.

  ‘You haven’t checked your fucking passport, man?’ Kim takes my nearly finished cigarette from my hand, lights another with it and sticks the newly lit one in my mouth. ‘You need to check your fucking passport, man.’

  ‘Why?’ I draw on the cigarette. It goes well with the beer.

  ‘Single-entry visa,’ says Julie. ‘Methinks you haven’t noticed.’