by Frank Kusy
‘Wake now!’ announced my host at 8am, jumping into my room and casually flicking the spider to the floor. ‘Sleep more when dead!’
He didn’t need to repeat himself.
I was out of that room in three seconds.
Chapter 9
How to get the Death Penalty in Malaysia
‘Where is stamp?’ said the angry little man, flicking through my passport and tossing it back at me. ‘Why no stamp?’
I was standing at the Malaysian border, desperate to get into Thailand, and some idiotic border official was blocking my way. For what reason, I couldn’t imagine.
‘What stamp?’ I said with a chirpy grin. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘Is there a problem?’ he sneered at me dangerously. ‘Oh yes, there is big problem. If you not get stamp come in our country, how can you get stamp to get out?’
He had a point. And light began to dawn. Ah ha, so this was Steve of Trailfinders’ idea of a joke, was it? Letting all his crew get out of the bus when we entered Malaysia to have their passports stamped, and leaving me snoozing on the back seat? I wondered why he had that crafty smirk on his face when I woke up.
‘So sorry,’ I mumbled awkwardly. ‘I…err…sleep on bus. Come into Malaysia sleeping, sleeping. Nobody tell me “Wakey, wakey, time for passport stamp.” What can I do?’
The policeman pulled out his gun.
‘You are illegal alien,’ he declared, summoning another fierce little man to his side. ‘You know what is penalty for illegal alien?’
‘No.’
‘Death is penalty for illegal alien. You must come with us.’
The colour drained out of my face. Death? For falling asleep in the back of a bus? Could they be serious?
How serious they were soon became clear. I was led away in handcuffs and shoved rudely into a tiny, hot, humid holding cell with a noose hanging off the ceiling. Yes, a real noose. And as they took the cuffs off, one of them tugged the noose suggestively and ran a finger across his throat.
‘Blimey,’ I thought. ‘They’re going a bit over the top here. What’s their beef?’
Two hours later, after my knees had gone numb from chanting, it came to me.
Ah ha, I thought, I must be paying for the sins of my original fore-father, Baron Kusy von Mukodel!
No, I wasn’t crazy or imagining it, Baron Kusy von Mukodel had been a lot on my mind lately. Only a few months before, I had paid a trip to Krakow in Poland and the tour guide I had engaged to show me round the grand palace there had asked me my name.
‘It’s Kusy. Why?’
The guide’s face went ashen. ‘Don’t tell anyone here this,’ he said in a hushed whisper. ‘They will kill you!’
‘Oh, and why’s that, then?’ I said, amused. He was obviously pulling my leg.
‘No, no, they will kill you, for sure. In 1596, the first Kusy, Wilhelm, tell King Sigismund to move his capital from Krakow to Warsaw. The king make a baron of him for his advice, but in one night the whole of Krakow lose half their business. The people of this town still call Kusy’s ‘blackbird’ or the Devil. That is the meaning of your name!’
‘And they’re still holding a 400 year old grudge? Are you joking?’
‘I am not joking,’ the guide said, in between showing me the miraculously well-preserved hand of some obscure martyr. ‘They will take your blood.’
Well, by the rough way those Malaysian border policemen flung me in that cell, and the joy they took in confiscating my passport and pronouncing awful judgement, they were definitely after my blood. In fact, looking at their grim, unsmiling faces, they would have liked nothing better than to hang me from that noose on the ceiling and personally kick away the chair.
‘Whoa,’ I thought, ‘they must be reincarnations of those disgruntled Krakowians. It’s so obvious!’
My agony only turned to ecstasy three hours later, when – my knees having gone numb from chanting again – I stood up to peer through the barred window of my cell.
There, getting off another bus in the near distance, were a pair of bright-red plastic booties. ‘Nobody wears bright-red plastic booties in this heat,’ I thought excitedly, ‘It must be Rachel!’
And indeed it was Rachel, one of the girls on the same bus that had escorted me into Malaysia six weeks earlier. She heard my wailing cry for help, came over to identify me, and in two minutes flat my passport was both stamped into and out of the country.
‘You were lucky, Frank,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I nearly wore sandals.’
Chapter 10
Love Shack
By the time I got to the idyllic little island of Koh Samui in Thailand, my dread concerning Nicky had turned to paranoia. Was she okay? Had she changed her mind about me? Didn’t she want to get married anymore? These questions went round and round in my head, and drove me half crazy with worry and fear.
I was also one of the war-wounded. I’d torn an ear on a fence in Malacca and it had got infected, I was covered in mosquito bites from the one time I’d forgotten to spray myself at night, and the cold I’d contracted in Sumatra had gone to my chest and I was barking like a dog. How long could I keep this up, I wondered? Ten more places to see, and only 20 days to do it in. The clock was running…
On a tip, I made my way to Chaweng beach at the south of the island and checked into the small but friendly Moon Guest House. This comprised about a dozen shacks, crude and wooden and raised on stilts to keep out creepy-crawlies. The whole compound—built to put up the hippy backpacker crowd—was set just back from the beach in some kind of tropical rainforest.
Too tired after another week of baseline travel to think, let alone unpack, I flung my mosquito net down over my primitive Spartan bed and fell into a long, dreamless sleep. Six hours went by, and when I awoke at last, it was dark and the sound of wild cicadas was filling the air with a soothing drone. ‘How wonderful,’ I thought, transferring myself into the cosy hammock outside. ‘I’ve finally found a piece of Paradise. I’m staying put here for a while!’
The guest house had a small café overlooking the beach, and the menu offered some truly tantalising snacks. I was particularly intrigued by the ‘Magic Omelette’, which had lots of shooting stars and grinning faces drawn in biro around it.
Just as sat down, a hand clapped round my shoulder and there was Nick, one of my old buddies from the Trailfinders tour. ‘Hey Frank!’ he enthused. ‘I didn’t expect to find you here!’
‘Well, same goes for me,’ I replied, getting up to give my long-lost pal a hug. ‘Last I saw of you, you had a pile of snakes wrapped round your camcorder in Penang!’
‘Yeah, that was weird. Little fuckers scared the bejasus out of me. What were they doing dropping out a ceiling anyway?’
‘Hey, we got to celebrate!’ I suggested brightly. ‘How about sharing one of these omelettes? I think they got magic mushrooms in them.’
Nick looked at me dubiously a moment, and then broke out in a laugh. ‘Okay, mate. Bring it on!’
An hour or so later, we were in hysterics. Well, I was anyway. Like all the other guest houses along the beach, ours had a ‘Video Night’ going on, and this evening’s offering was The Party, starring Peter Sellers. The opening scene – with Sellers as an Indian bit-actor in a Raj-style movie who refuses to die (just keeps getting shot and coming back to life again and blowing his trumpet) – had me falling off my chair in paroxysms of laughter. Indeed, I was so stricken with mirth that I rolled off the floor and into a ditch below the stilted cafe, and had to be helped back up by one of the waiters. ‘Blimey, those omelettes are strong stuff!’ I cackled madly, in between catching my breath. ‘How long do they last?’ The waiter looked at me meaningfully. ‘Sometimes you go up, sometimes you go down, and sometimes you go up and never come down.’
I should have been panicked by this, but one more look at the video screen, with Sellers giving one last forlorn toot on his trumpet, and I was off again. And as I hugged my r
ibs with uncontrollable hilarity, convinced that I had cracked at least three of them, other guests from other beach bungalows, attracted by my braying laugh, began filtering into the café and joined me on the floor. Yes, they’d all partaken of the local shrooms too, and before long, the entire café floor was full of writhing, wildly cackling, participants, all flailing their arms and legs about like upturned beetles.
Finally, we all sobered up a bit, and I looked around for Nick. But Nick was gone. Well, not quite gone, I eventually spotted him way off in the distance…on a lilo. Yes, Nick wanted to paddle across eight miles of open sea to Koh Tao, the neighbouring island, on a lilo! So I ran out to him on a local motorboat, only to be shooed away by my still high-as-a-kite friend. ‘Leave me alone!’ spluttered Nick as we dragged him to safety. ‘I can make it!’
The evening should have ended there, but it didn’t. Still buzzed up on psilocybinic chemicals, I went to a disco…
I normally hate discos, all that sweaty, frenetic pumping of the air and pointless shouting at people for drinks and dances, but this one – held in a small open field with lots of fairy lights and a booming sound system – was different. Not only was I still giggling like an idiot and imagining that everyone was wearing pink underpants, but I somehow hooked up with a girl called Barbara, who seemed to find my antics amusing. ‘Oh dear,’ I found myself thinking through my hallucinogenic haze, ‘I’ve got to watch it. My love life is complicated enough already!’
Barbara, or ‘Babs’, was a very smiley girl with masses of bouncy orange hair. I wanted to touch that hair, it was lovely and orange and bouncy bouncy, but I knew that if I did, it would open me up to a world full of trouble. Instead, I walked – or rather, stumbled – her back to her shack, which just happened to be right next to mine. ‘Do you want to come in for a nightcap?’ she asked sweetly and I summoned up every ounce of self-restraint and said, ‘No, you’re alright. Let’s just have a chat on the veranda.’
The veranda was up a short flight of stairs to one side of the hut, and since there was only a single chair I made her sit in that and attempted some polite conversation.
‘Did you see that film back there?’ I giggled foolishly. ‘The one they were showing in the field, on that piece of white cloth strung between two poles?’
‘Oh, you mean the pornographic version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?’ she giggled back. ‘It didn’t end well, did it?’
‘Especially for Snow White.’ And we both fell about laughing.
I wasn’t laughing a few moments later. My left hand, which was resting against one of the veranda supports, had something cold and slimy crawling over it. I looked up and whoa, there was a big green snake staring back at me. I shook my head in case it was another mushroom hallucination, but no, it wasn’t. It was a fully grown python with black tattoos running all down its body. If I moved a muscle, it was going to bloody eat me.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come in for a night-cap?’ Babs said again, and all of a sudden, yes, I did, nothing would have made me happier than going in for a night-cap. But first, I had to wait for the king of snakes to wind over my arm and down the veranda post and finally set me free.
‘Mind if I just finish my fag?’ I said, trying to look cool and unconcerned. ‘Go inside, I’ll be with you in a minute.’
I breathed a sigh of relief as she got up and opened the door to her hut. I did not want her looking up and spotting that snake and freaking out. I wanted to keep that snake nice and quiet and untroubled.
But then she went and freaked out anyway.
‘AAAAAR!’ came her voice from inside the thin bamboo walls and I—ripping off the last few inches of sleepy snake—dashed in to see what appeared to be, in my altered state, a spider the size of a dinner-plate on her pillow. It was enormous, and my eyes bugged out of my head. How the hell did it get up those stilts? And what was it doing on her pillow—having a kip?
Terrified, Babs dashed into the toilet, and then dashed back out again.
‘You won’t believe this!’ she shrieked. ‘But there’s a newly-hatched batch of baby scorpions running around in there!’
I thought and considered.
‘You want to try out my place, then?’
‘What’s it like?’
‘A lot safer than yours. And there’s a double-sized mosquito net in there. We can both crawl under it and escape this horror-show.’
Later on, as she coiled her way round me like a much friendlier snake, and the flickering candle in our love shack slowly faded into darkness, I had a big smile on my face and a single thought in my head:
‘I wonder if someone knows how to bottle those omelettes?’
*
It was only when I was in Australia that I realised I shouldn’t be there.
Babs was mad. Quite mad. Having lured me away from the safety of my carefully planned itinerary – ‘You can can spare a few days in Oz, can’t you? We got beaches and barbies and beer and everything!’ – my smiley, orange-curled temptress put me up in her pad in Sydney and revealed herself nuttier than a Snickers bar.
They say you can’t escape your karma, that wherever you go in the world, you take it with you. Indeed, as my mentor Daisaku Ikeda once wrote: ‘We can lose ourselves in romantic attachment, the euphoria is unlikely to last for long. As long as we remain unable to redress our own weaknesses, we will be miserable, no matter where or to whom we may take flight.’
Babs was the Polish biker chick again, but with bells on. Not only did she torment me with nightly barbecues – where all her friends talked about nothing but real estate and house prices – but every minute of the daytime she was on my case about joining some pyramid scheme into which she’d sunk all her money and which even an idiot could see was a blatant fraud. I tried to get away for a little ‘me’ time once, locking myself in the toilet to do a bit of my Buddhist chanting, but she unlocked it from the outside with a spare key and started dancing about in front of me, waving her arms about and screaming, ‘You’re here to see me. Not to do that rubbish!’
The final straw came when I went for a shower. ‘Phew, at last,’ I thought, ‘a few minutes peace and quiet away from that loony person.’ But no, I turned the tap on and a huge, black spider dropped down from the shower-head and landed on my left shoulder. ‘OHH…MY…GOD!!’ I shrieked as I scraped it off, and then ‘WHAT…THE…FUCK!’ as I noticed it was not alone. The whole shower was full of them.
Babs giggled as I fled into her arms. ‘That’s Henry,’ she said, as Henry scuttled back up onto the shower-head. ‘He likes it up there.’
‘You keep a family of tarantulas in your shower?’ I gasped, incredulous. ‘And you give them names?’
‘They’re not tarantulas,’ said Babs, a little irritated. ‘That one on my pillow back at Samui was a tarantula, or something like it, that’s why I was scared. These are Huntsman’s, they’re lovely, they’re my little babies.’
Every inch of my body was crawling. I was sharing a hot, humid flat with a madwoman and about a dozen furry ‘little babies’.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Either they go, or I do. Don’t think me a pussy or anything, but ever since a kid I’ve had a thing about spiders. I even kept a plastic one the size of one of your little babies on my pillow at night, to scare away any real ones.’
‘But they’re not doing any harm,’ protested Babs. ‘They only come in to cool off in the shower. It’s too hot for them out in the garden.’
It was a Mexican stand-off, and it was only broken when I grabbed up my towel again and went off for a swim. The swim was on Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach, and I was looking forward to ticking off one thing on my bucket list – surfing a big wave on Bondi.
But, as with everything else about Australia (and this was just tough luck), I was to be disappointed. I bobbed up and down on my body-board for six hours waiting for ‘The Wave’, but it never came and I dragged my sorry ass home again.
Here I found Babs, a
ll dolled up and looking very nice. ‘I’ve had a talk with Henry,’ she said, ‘and he’s promised to not come in the bedroom if little diddums is scared of spiders. Though you’ll have to be careful with Roger, he gets a bit upset if you step on him.’
‘Who’s Roger?’
‘Oh, he’s the family pet. My mum dropped him over earlier on.’
I looked in the bedroom and a sleepy, slit-eyed Roger stared back at me. A three foot Monitor lizard in the bedroom? I didn’t think so.
*
‘Paula? Paula? Can you hear me?’
‘Yes Frank, how’s it going?’
The line crackled. I prayed to Buddha it would not go dead.
‘I’m in a real fix. Can you wire some money over?’
‘Sure thing. Where shall l sent it?’
‘Err, well, not Thailand.’
‘What do you mean, not Thailand? Where are you!’
‘Err, well, I met this girl. I’m in Australia.’
The phone went silent. I tapped it once or twice to make sure the connection was still there.
‘My God, Frank,’ said Paula at last. ‘That’s an awfully long way to go for a shag!’
It was no good telling her I hadn’t had a shag – had in fact stopped just short of a shag out of respect for Nicky. She wouldn’t have believed me. But she sent the money over anyway, bless her, and in a few short hours I was shot of Babs and her barbies and beaches forever.
Chapter 11
Stressed out in Samui
Back in Samui, I began doing what I should have been doing in the first place – touring the island by motorbike, picking up information as I went. Though once again I was distracted, this time by a van-load of happy Brits who thought I’d be better off with them. Several mud fights and bottles of Mekong whisky later, I was not so sure. And the van, which had started off pristine white, was now so caked in mud from the recent rains that it resembled an army camouflage jeep.
