by Mike Stoner
I’m smiling.
—You’re weird.
—Not as weird as you. You’re completely inexplicable.
‘You attempt to put her anywhere, and I’ll put you in the hospital.’
—Did I just say that?
—Corny.
—Sorry.
‘I’m with him on that, Barry,’ says the British businessman as he falls off the fence and lands on his feet, on the side of the righteous and messed-up.
‘You lay one finger on her and I’ll take that baseball bat to you. Business interests will be forgotten.’
Barry looks at him and his facial muscles twitch as though he has just stood on a nail.
—He’s going to say “et tu, Brute?” now.
—He hasn’t the brains.
He looks to the German for backup, who looks around the room and does a quick mental calculation. His eyes linger on Mei, run up and down the bat, pass back to me, his mouth turns up, a nod, back to Barry.
‘Ja, fuck you, man. You are a dick.’
‘But I own this bar. You lot get the fuck out before…’
‘Before what? You take on everyone in here? I’m playing with the idea that we do all leave, except for Mei, the baseball bat, and you.’ I turn. ‘You’d be happy with that, wouldn’t you, Mei?’
She nods, her eyes thin and focussed on her prey, lips drawn tight.
‘I like much. But most I like is Barry sign me my bar back, and then never come again here.’
‘I think it is possible.’ British businessman gets businesslike. ‘As it’s part my money you’ve invested here, Barry. And since you’ve invested, the profits seem to be suffering, so I’m pulling out. We’ll have the contracts ready next week, won’t we, Barry?’
Barry rubs watery eyes. A lost and scared and lonely boy. He replaces his glasses, then removes them again as if he doesn’t like what he sees, mutters something that might be an attempt at being defiant, but only sounds like ‘faggot,’ and he starts walking out.
‘What about the apology, Barry?’
—And still you persevere.
—Now I’ve started…
Barry stops with his back to the room. Shoulders rise slowly.
‘Now, Barry. To Geoff and Mei.’
Barry turns, and as he does so his head sags as though his body is exhausted from carrying the weight of it and the rubbish held within. He is running on emergency power only. Geoff, however, has had a recharge bolt shot up his arse and gets up, puts his arm through Mei’s and leads her to where Barry stands.
‘Mei first, please, Barry.’
A momentary flash of anger lights Barry’s eyes as they meet Geoff’s, but when they see whatever is there, the light goes out and they move on to Mei, but not her eyes, they rest on a point just below her mouth.
‘I’m sorry, Mei.’ His shoulders slump. ‘Really.’
Really? Genuine remorse?
Mei stands with straight back, chin up.
Barry looks back to Geoff, but before a word leaves his mouth, Geoff’s fist is shooting through the air. It hits his chin, carries on, pushing with the wound-up tension of a released coil, sending Barry’s head back on his shoulders, causing the rest of his body not to fly backwards but to collapse almost silently to the floor. His hands don’t have time to even attempt to break the fall. He is creased up on the tiles like a feeble foal freshly dropped from its mother’s rear. Then his hands find ground, push up slowly until he is standing on legs that wobble like the same newborn foal and, without another word, he staggers from the bar.
‘Bugger the apology,’ says Geoff, ‘that felt better.’
‘You have free beer, Mr Geoff. And you too, Mr Newbie.’ Mei surveys her kingdom and subjects like a queen. ‘All of you. Free beer.’
‘Fuckin’ A.’ says Kim.
‘But only one.’
The Chinese backup, who haven’t backed up anything, stand and throw notes on the table. ‘Not for us, thank you. The football was very good. Liverpool win.’ And they leave.
‘Who were they?’ asks Marty.
I watch their dark-jacketed backs disappear into the night outside.
‘Passing trade, I guess. And who,’ I say to Geoff, who examines his knuckles with a smile I never knew could fit on his face, ‘are you?’
‘A happy man,’ he laughs. ‘And thanks for that very surreal and satisfying moment.’
The British businessman downs his beer and raises his eyebrows to the German, whose wife checks the room for blood and guts as she comes back from the toilet.
‘Come on, Erich. Let’s leave this lot to their not-so-faggotty ways.’ He pats me on the back as he goes. ‘Well done. I never really liked him.’ And they too are gone.
—Want to go get a drink somewhere quiet? she asks.
—Yes. I do.
—You’ve grown a nice set. I knew they were there somewhere. I always knew that.
Despite the noise of laughing and celebration and of protest at my wanting to depart from Mei’s, we leave together, hand in hand, stepping out into the warm enveloping night, where people are as invisible as ghosts.
We lie in the grass of the housing-compound playing field together and look to stars and constellations. I hold her hand. She holds mine. Our mouths are still as our lives together speed through our minds. I am plugged into her and memory and moments flow between us in powerful currents. There are things she remembers clearly that only lurk in the dark, dusty areas of my brain. They are cleaned off and brought into the light thanks to her. Important moments to her. Important moments to me. Some match, some don’t. But they are all equal here. We are one under this foreign sky. One life created by moments we share.
Lightning soundlessly cracks the clear sky. It starts near the horizon on the right and spiders across the night, shattering its wholeness in less than a second.
—Not a cloud to be seen.
—Anvil lightning, I do believe, she says, smug in her complete lack of smugness.
—How do you know so much?
—Because I’m me. It’s probably travelled from a storm cloud miles away.
It does it again, spidering across the sky at such a speed that it’s nearly impossible to follow its journey.
—Wow.
—Don’t see them like this back home.
—Clouds will roll over in a few minutes, then it’s going to pour down.
—We should move.
—Why? Scared we might get hit and die? Because I’m already dead, remember.
She leans over my face and blows in my eyes. I blink. Then she kisses me, forcing her tongue between my lips.
—If only all dead people were like you.
—Over her shoulder I see the blackness of a cloud bank rolling over the top of the houses that encircle the playing field. Another bolt escapes, lighting up the cloud and shining through Laura so that she disappears in the light. I blink. I blink again.
She is gone. You idiot, she’s gone because she isn’t real. Control this madness. Control it.
—If that’s the case, how come you now know about anvil lightning?
She is lying beside me again, as solid as the trees and houses around us.
—Subconscious memory. I learnt it at school and it’s been lurking in the recesses ever since.
—Could be.
—But I hope it’s because you are here.
—I am. And so is the rain.
Big, heavy drops arrive, random and far apart, landing on us and around us. But we lie there, more drops slowly filling the spaces between the first, until I am blinking water from my eyes.
—Let’s go clubbing. Celebrate the coming together of Old Me and New Me. Celebrate the birth of a don’t-give-shit hero.
—Sounds good to me. To both of me.
I laugh.
We run from the field and the compound to the main street, where we flag down a taxi. By the time we are in, I am soaked. Laura is dry. I ignore the possible meaning.
SEASICK
‘Yes, it seemed to do the trick.’ I decide his way of eating is better than mine, as I have splatters of sauce over the front of my T-shirt. Trying to eat noodles with dignity doesn’t work. I bend my head low down over my bowl and slurp up too. Inelegant, but it isn’t a social issue here. Get those noodles in no matter what noise you make. And why not?
‘So now you must do your part of the deal.’
Cars crawl past outside the window. I squint as white sunlight reflects off them.
‘But your men didn’t do anything.’
‘Exactly what I told them. Only if you were being killed would they step in. I am an excellent judge of people, and there is something in you, or perhaps not in you, that I knew would deal with the problem without too much help.’
‘I’m a coward, so I don’t know what you saw.’
‘It’s what I didn’t see. Something is missing in you, and when people aren’t whole, they get on and do what they must without worry for themselves.’
‘Like you.’
Charles nods, then slurps up the last of the noodles. He dabs his mouth with a fine handkerchief he pulls from the inside of his jacket, then his hand goes to the pocket on the other side and he pulls out a small, worn, black book. He flicks through some pages, eyes squinting, until he finds what he is looking for.
‘On Tuesday you must be in Lampuuk near Banda Aceh. Teddy will meet you at the next cove north from Lampuuk beach during the afternoon. You will do everything he says.’ He closes the black book and puts it on the table next to his coffee.
‘Why?’ I dig around under the thick black coffee with a teaspoon, looking for condensed milk. I manage to recover some. This is the taste of Indonesia. Strong thick coffee and sweet milk.
‘Because he will help you replace the missing bit of you.’
‘If you’re so sure, why don’t you use him? Use him to help you and Su-Chin sort out your problems.’
‘Because Su-Chin does not want to be helped. She does not want me.’ He lights a cigarette and rubs his eyes. ‘And I respect her for that. I am not good for her.’
‘Well, I think—’
‘I do not care what you think. It is not your business, so do not talk about her again.’
My mouth opens to tell him that I’m not his business either, but I yank the words back down from the top of my throat. He can’t help his wife, so he wants to help me. Although why me, I’m not sure. Maybe he just wants to help anyone.
‘Neither you nor Teddy know my problems. I’ll do what you want, but you can’t help me either. It’s impossible.’ I move my packet of cigarettes on the table around like I’m thinking chess moves, then I take one out and light it. I draw in the smoke and hold it, let it burn my lungs, get in my veins, do its business, before blowing it from my nose in two long straight grey lines.
‘Teddy sees you have problems. You are like a glass man to him; you can’t hide anything from him.’
I study him for once, stare at him like he stares at people. Look at the straightness of his mouth, into the lines around his eyes and the darkness within them. He looks back and for the first time we hold each other’s gaze as equals. His pupils seem to quiver for a moment and then they break away from me. They scan the room as if searching for something.
‘Excuse me.’ He gets up and heads to the toilets.
I blink, move the cigarette pack around the table with index finger again, until it nudges Charles’s notebook. The notebook that holds the details of my future appointment and, as he normally keeps it close to his chest, probably details of many of his appointments, meetings and, perhaps, contacts.
I look over my shoulder: waiter scribbling a couple’s order, people dotted around the high-class restaurant slurping noodles, a corridor leading to toilets. No one paying bule any attention; that’s one thing about expensive places, the Westerner is left alone.
I flip the book around to face me and flick through its pages. Chinese characters everywhere and no order or headings to pages. But at the back, just as I am about to replace it as I found it, a page of numbers, each one preceded by characters. The numbers look like phone numbers, and some have international prefixes. Quickly checking behind me again, I reach into my school bag and pull out a scrap of paper and a pen and scrawl any number that starts with 00. I scrawl quickly and copy ten numbers. I fold the paper and slide it into my shirt pocket with the pen and then return the notebook to where it was. Five seconds later Charles returns and sits. His hand goes to the book and puts it back in his jacket.
‘You have been running while I was in the bathroom?’
My eyes can’t meet his. I force a laugh.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You have sweat on your face.’
‘It’s hot.’
‘There is air conditioning.’
‘Perhaps it’s the thought of Teddy and his voodoo.’
‘You will see it is not voodoo. But you will see. You have no excuse for not going.’
‘But Tuesday is only three days away. My teach—’
‘I must see Pak Andy later today. I will tell him you must have time off. Do not worry about him. His debt has made him my bitch.’ He manages one of his almost-smiles at this. I manage a whole one.
‘Your American English is really good.’
‘I thought this phrase was universal English.’
‘It probably is, but it started in the States, I’m sure.’
‘Most things do these days. Most things do.’ He stands up and looks down at me. ‘Go there. Lampuuk. That is almost the last thing I want you to do.’
‘Almost? What else?’ I prepare for the drug-dealing bit, or the smuggling, or whatever strange something this man is going to ask of me.
‘Pay the bill. It is your turn.’ He leaves without another word, steps out into the heat in his black suit, sun reflecting off slicked-back hair. I watch through the window as a car pulls up beside him. He climbs in and is gone.
I ask for the bill, wondering if I have enough cash on me.
‘No bill,’ says the waiter, stern-faced and polite. ‘Always free here for Mr Charles.’
I put a generous tip on the table and leave, confused, guilty for looking at his book. There is a grumbling in my stomach. I feel something else. Excitement? No, but something. Tingling. Perhaps about this meeting with Teddy, maybe about travelling to Banda Aceh, or maybe about the numbers in my pocket.
Or is it about Laura? This is all to do with Laura. Everything: my confusion, my situation, my unhappiness, my anger. My anger at myself for hoping again, for letting her in when she doesn’t exist. For the other night I spent with her in the storm. And why does she only come when she feels like it?
Yes, why does she only come when I don’t expect her? The selfish, selfish bitch. I wince at the word and for using it for her, but fuck, she’s ruined me. I don’t know who I am now. One minute strong and confident and somehow sort of happy, and the next miserable and alone. She has made me mad. Clinically mad. Bitch.
I don’t believe it’s possible, but I hope Teddy will sort me out, rid me of her. Give me a reason to carry on and maybe enjoy life again. I am suddenly feeling empty, gut-twisting empty; I haven’t even got Old Me or New Me down there; I’m not sure who or what I am anymore. I’m rubbing my head, aware that a dull throb is behind my eyes. I walk down the street, the busy, hot, stinking street where dust sticks to me and everyone watches me. Watches the foreigner. The strange man who is so big and awkward-looking. Out of place like an elephant in a field of sheep.
She just fucks with me. Plays with me. She died and now all she does is mess with my head. And that is not what Laura was. Laura was understanding, wise, kind. Alive. Whoever it is that comes to me now, it is not the Laura I know. It is a Laura changed by death, made bitter and hurtful.
Fuck, it’s so hot today. The traffic is so noisy and the smell o
f rotting rubbish burns my nose. Getting so deep up my nostrils I won’t be able to get rid of it. It will stick like the stench of vomit. And the throbbing behind my eyes has started to spread through my head.
‘Well, fuck you, Laura. If you don’t come now to discuss this, fuck you.’
I wait for a response.
‘Exactly. Point made. I fucking miss you, and when I really want to see you, you don’t come.’ Bule, big, awkward, talking to himself. What do I care?
Ah, is that her next to me? I sense her as I walk along the pavement. But when I look, she isn’t there.
I miss my old girlfriend. ‘My solid, funny, annoying girlfriend.’ My lips are moving while I walk. I’m willing her to come to me, but with each step I take, she still doesn’t appear, and I grow angrier.
‘Don’t give a shit. Don’t give a shit. Don’t give a shit.’ Each time louder. I shout the last and people around me stare. ‘Don’t give a shit.’ Suddenly I run into the road, forcing a motor becak to stop. Sunlight is scalding my eyes, giving strength to the fire that now burns in my head.
‘Crazy bule,’ the driver yells and before he has time to do or say anything else, while taxis and yellow buses beep horns behind him, I jump in his sidecar with such a force that it nearly overbalances him and the bike.
‘Hotel Garuda,’ I tell him. It’s the only place I can think of to dull my head, to dampen the burn in my skull and to get pissed up in the afternoon. And I want to get pissed up.
I am pissed up. The skull pain has been numbed by drinks at Garuda. But I’ve moved on from there. I stumble through the doors at Memphis into a world of spinning lights and forced deafness. A thumping, repetitive drumming hits my ears like a boxer punching and punching them. It’s a different assault to the headache. This repetition aids the numbness. It feels good. I’m looking at everything as though through coloured sweet-wrappers. Everything is crinkly and unclear and yet vivid. And I’m angry. The bitch still hasn’t made an appearance. One day she’s all over me like life was never whacked out of her and the next she’s roadkill, dead and empty and rotting.
Well what about me, you cow? Getting my hopes up for something that’s impossible. Pretending you never died, just so that you can break me apart again when you want. Make me crazy and force me to run away and live in this other world just to get over you. And then you follow me here and mess with me so I can’t move on. I can’t change.
