The Backpacker

by John Harris

  ‘Run over it again for me,’ he flicked his cigarette butt beneath the train and exhaled, ‘just to make sure I’ve got it right. You’re going to go in first.’

  ‘I go in first, six or seven people ahead of you, with your shirt in my bag. By the time you get to the front I’ll be cleared. They’re bound to ask you to put on a shirt, you know what these stamp-happy officials are like with hippies and–’

  ‘I ain’t a hippy.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t matter. Anyway, they ask you to put on a shirt, and you say?’

  ‘Ahem. Oh dear! My, friend, has, it.’

  I sighed. ‘Right, but with more feeling, that was a bit wooden. I’ll then come over, unzip my bag and give you my passport.’

  ‘Wrapped neatly inside my shirt,’ he completed. ‘It’s a crap plan.’

  ‘No it’s not. Anyway, if it looks too risky when we get to the front, just go to Plan C.’

  ‘Plan C? You didn’t tell me about Plan-fooking-C.’

  ‘That’s because I just made it up. Plan C is when you have a fit on the floor and start foaming at the mouth. They’ll take you to hospital and you can get in that way.’ He didn’t reply. ‘Right,’ I checked our progress, ‘we’re almost there, give me your shirt.’

  ‘Don’t make it dirty.’ He handed me a moth-eaten tie-dye shirt.

  ‘Phew, it stinks!’ I held it up to the light. ‘And I can see daylight through it!’ Quickly unzipping my bag I stuffed it inside. ‘OK.’

  ‘How are you going to get into the queue?’

  I stood on tiptoe and looked over the heads of the line of people. ‘Those three Austrian girls.’ Two of the girls turned their heads and smiled at me, recognising the familiar word.

  Rick leaned out, looked at the girls and smiled, then leaned back in and said, ‘How d’you know they’re Austrian?’

  ‘They’ve all got blonde hair,’ I said, still smiling back at them, ‘and the national flag sewn onto their backpacks. Here goes... ’

  ‘Wait!’ he held my arm. ‘What happens if it all goes wrong and I get arrested?’

  ‘We stick together whatever, Rick, you know that. Tell them you’re with me. They’ll have my passport so I can’t go anywhere anyway. I told you, if it’s too risky we back out, OK?’

  We shook hands and parted.

  Getting into the queue further down was the easy part, all I had to do was launch into a familiar chat-up routine with the three girls and I was in. At first we spoke about why they had sewn their national flag onto their packs for all to see; a good starting point as all Europeans are obsessed with national boundaries, especially northern Europeans. All I had to do was appear indifferent to their patriotism.

  ‘But you’re just born on a piece of land that happens to have been named by someone,’ I pleaded with the girls, ‘it’s just lines on a map.’

  ‘Oh surely not,’ one countered, ‘surely it is more. Is it not culture and... oh, so many other things that make us all different?’

  I put my bag down, thus staking my claim in the line. ‘You’re just another person born on this planet of ours,’ I said with contrived free spirit. ‘Imagine, if you had been born five miles to the left you would be wearing a German flag. Isn’t that a bit silly?’

  ‘German!’ she gasped. ‘Oh I think not. We can never be German.’

  The queue moved along and I pushed the bag up with my feet. ‘Personally,’ I said, entering the shade offered by the hall roof, ‘I’m from earth.’

  The girl started to argue her point again while her two mute friends listened, expressionless. I didn’t catch what she was saying because I was too busy calculating: summing up the distance between Rick and me versus the time it took for a person to clear the customs and go out through the door. Assuming I got searched, which was pretty likely considering my dress, I seemed to have judged it just right. Nine people were between the two of us, which left enough bodies in the line not only to allow me clearance in time, but also to keep Rick on the column-side of the queue when I handed over his shirt.

  The queue shuffled forwards and the first Austrian girl crossed the yellow line to get stamped. My hands were beginning to shake and the sweat was pouring in rivers down my back, but when I checked behind me Rick seemed as cool as can be. He stood smoking a cigarette at the edge of the hall, huge puffs of sunlit smoke rising up into the roof space like escaped gas. I looked back, more nervous than ever.

  The second girl went up and plonked her passport on the desk while the one who had just been cleared opened her pack for the two women to search. They gave only a cursory look inside before waving her on and beckoning the next one to step up, allowing the chain to move forward one more person.

  The officer who had been standing by the exit door suddenly went out again. ‘Great,’ I whispered to myself, and Rick and I nodded at each other, gently acknowledging the perfect timing. I’ll never forget his calmness at that point. Far from being nervous he appeared to be enjoying the whole thing. I knew from my activities as a schoolboy that breaking the law provided an adrenalin rush, but this was way beyond that. I was almost fainting from the exertion.

  ‘Hey!’

  I spun around and pointed to myself. Me?

  The rubber stamper stared, too tired and too bored with his job to do anything else. He had those customs officer eyes – the ones that look right into your soul and say, ‘You’re guilty, just admit it and save us all the trouble of checking.’ I stepped forward and presented my sodden passport, wet from the sweat that ran from my palms, and the customs officer held it by the corners to avoid touching its glossy surface. The edges were crinkled like corrugated cardboard.

  ‘First time Malaysia?’ he enquired with monotone efficiency.

  ‘Y-yes.’

  Flick-flick. Dhoom. Stamped.

  The two bag-checking women called me over with their eyes but I was stuck to the spot. ‘Go!’ I said to myself, and looked down at my passport lying on the table, its pages slowly closing by themselves, the corrugation softy falling back into place seated crest-to-groove. There was a loud sigh in my right ear as the stamper lost his patience at the hold up.

  ‘I think you are clear,’ someone behind me said, and peeped around my arm. ‘You can move along now.’

  ‘Um, oh yeah, thanks.’ I snapped out of the stare, snatched the passport and moved on. I was given only a token bag search before moving along to the end of the slab, doing a U-turn and walking back towards the column and the exit door. The officer had finished his cigarette and was now back inside the hall, standing, hands behind his back, looking bored.

  The next part went like a dream. As I approached the column, the officer snapped his fingers at someone in the queue and held the lapel of his jacket. Quickening my pace and at the same time pretending to unzip my bag, I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got it!’ and took out Rick’s shirt. The officer looked me in the eye and held out his hand, but so that he wouldn’t get a chance to handle it, I immediately slid the shirt over the counter to Rick, trying to clear up any confusion by saying, ‘It’s his shirt. Him.’

  ‘OK, you go now,’ the officer barked as Rick snatched the shirt, and pointed at the exit.

  Counting down the nine people before Rick was awful; like waiting for a long-lost relative who never arrives. When the tenth person came out into the car park and it wasn’t him I sank, staring vacantly down at my wrists and imaging the hand-cuffs on them. I looked back up and there he was, walking through the doorway, smiling like a Cheshire cat.

  ‘Your passport, sir,’ he said, walking out into the Malaysian sunshine and holding out the little maroon book.

  I stood up. ‘My God, what happened?’

  ‘Got chatting to that bird who checks the bags. Shall we go and have a cup of coffee? There’s a tea stall over there.’

  ‘Coffee?’ I snatched the passport from him. ‘Never mind fucking coffee! Let’s get out of here.’ I pointed across the car park. ‘Those buses go to Kuala Lumpur, I think.’

  ‘Th
ink?’

  Picking up my bag, I started to stride towards the buses, trying desperately to control my temper. ‘I don’t care where they fucking go. I’ve been looking over my shoulder for a week now and I’m developing a stiff neck. As long as they go south we can end up in Timbuc-fucking-tu for all I care.’

  The buses did go to Kuala Lumpur, and by early evening we were standing outside the main city bus terminus in the middle of a rush-hour river; a river of people going home from work. We were lost but happy; the anonymity afforded by the crowd swarming around us filling me with warmth.

  Of all the lasting, snapshot images I have, I think the one of Rick and I standing in that busy main street is probably the most vivid. It seems strange to me that something as mundane as that can take precedence over much more significant events. How can one compare standing outside a bus station watching the pedestrian traffic to seeing a freshly severed human finger? Or allow it to take precedence in the mind over the sight of a beautiful Thai stripper in a Patpong bar?

  The brain, however, is a funny thing, and I still have this image: Rick, dressed in tie-dye shirt and trousers and wearing sandals, with shoulder-length blond hair, standing next to me. I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and my bag, containing what few valuables I have, is at my feet. Our skin is darker than any of the Malaysians who are walking past. Yuppies in suits, beautiful secretaries, grannies and school kids, all turn to stare at us.

  Looking back at that crowd and nodding to each and every one of them was a tonic. The memories of recent events in Thailand seemed to float out of my head, as though washed in the river of people, and carried downstream. The longer we stood and stared, the less I remembered.

  ‘A change is as good as a rest’ are words I now live by ever since that time we first arrived from Thailand. Life on Koh Pha-Ngan had become the norm and city life was something that we’d forgotten even existed. A change is as good as a rest providing it’s a real change of lifestyle and not just location. There’s no point going from Hat Rin to Phuket, because they’re both beaches, and, likewise, it isn’t a change if one spends six months in Phuket and then goes to a beach in Goa. I actually looked forward to breathing in the diesel fumes from the clapped-out buses and taxis that only city life has to offer. I wanted to be lost in the crowd and get pushed and shoved by people who were too busy to show any manners.

  I remember feeling like Tarzan when he was brought out of the jungle and taken to the developed world. All the sounds and smells were different but vaguely familiar, having their origin somewhere in the natural world, and somehow refreshingly new. The people that walked past me looked refreshingly new too, like apes wearing clothes, as though it had taken a stark change of our lifestyle to become receptive enough to see it. It was like a short-sighted person being given a pair of specs for the first time in their life and suddenly everything coming into focus.

  CHAPTER 6

  TALES FROM TWO CITIES

  ONE

  Although not expensive by Western standards, Malaysia was still a shock after Thailand and India, so we limited ourselves to a cheap guest house and only the essentials, such as beer drinking and the occasional disco. Our main task while in KL was twofold: to get Rick’s stolen passport replaced and to get my camcorder repaired. I’d missed a lot of photo opportunities since it had packed in and didn’t want to let any more once-in-a-lifetime experiences pass by my lens unrecorded.

  Obtaining a passport turned out to be easy: Rick filled out a form, paid some money and a week later it was issued. Getting a camcorder repaired, on the other hand, was like asking them to build the space shuttle. Eventually, I resigned myself to missing out on any film-making opportunities that Malaysia had to offer, and convinced myself that memories of a cerebral kind were more meaningful and longer lasting then celluloid anyway.

  A week into our stay in the Malaysian capital we came across a young traveller who’d also just left Thailand. He checked into our guest house one rainy afternoon and took the bunk-bed next to me, settling in without saying a word to anyone. His traveller clothing of khaki army shorts and baggy shirt gave him an air of experience that belied his youthful features, and upon first glance I took him to be in his early twenties. However, when I had a chance to study him closer I could see that he wasn’t any older than twenty. He later revealed his age to be seventeen.

  Tom, a gay Englishman who was also staying in the dorm, started the ball rolling. Jumping off the top bunk and holding out his hand, he introduced himself.

  The boy looked up as the body went past. At first he didn’t seem to realise he was being spoken to and immediately looked back down at his hands.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Holland,’ the boy replied sheepishly.

  Everyone in the room continued with what they had been doing but listened with pricked ears at the two soft voices.

  ‘Been here long? Malaysia I mean.’

  ‘Just arrived, from Thailand.’ The boy lowered his eyes when he said the ‘land’ of the word ‘Thailand’.

  Tom, picking up on the body language, pretended to busy himself with something before continuing. ‘Been there myself. Didn’t like it much, though, I had really expensive pair of designer jeans stolen from my washing-line on Koh Samui.’ He paused, waiting for a reply, and said, ‘How about you?’

  ‘Terrible.’ His reply was barely audible but was said with such heart-rending sadness that the other half-dozen of us in the room immediately stopped what we had been doing and turned to face him. He blinked hard as a tear formed in his eyes and nervously picked up a pen that had been lying on his bed. ‘Just terrible,’ he repeated, fiddling with the cartridge. ‘I’ve lost all my money.’

  ‘What d’you mean, stolen?’

  He nodded, looking down at the floor. ‘In Bangkok.’

  Tom looked at each of us and tensed the veins in his neck.

  I put down the dice I’d been playing backgammon with. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was at the Palace in Bangkok, on my first day, last week.’ He took a deep breath, fighting back the tears. ‘I was just taking a look around, and this man came up to me and asked if I needed a guide. I said... ’

  ‘What, a Thai?’

  ‘Yes, he was Thai. And I said no, but he follows me.’ He twiddled the pen between his fingers as though lost in the bad memory.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I allow him to show me around. He did not want money, and I say to him, "Look, I will not pay you for this," and he agrees: no money, just friend. So, around one o’clock he asks me to go for lunch. He says that he knows Thai restaurants, and if I go with him he can get a good price for the food. So I think, OK, I am hungry, why not?’

  Everyone in the room was now facing the boy, listening to the story.

  ‘Then we go to a cheap restaurant and have some nice food.’ He looked at the floor and shook his head. ‘I don’t know why I did it, I ask myself many times, "Joseph, why do you do this stupid thing?"’

  ‘Fooking hell, you only had something to eat.’

  He looked up. ‘No, he put something in my food. I do not know what, but something bad. One hour later we are in my room and he tells me, "Get your passport and your traveller’s cheques and come with me." So I do what he says and go to the bank with him and cash all of the cheques. I sign each one because he tells me to, I give him the cash because he tells me to, and I go back to the room because he tells me, "Go back to your room and say nothing".’

  We were dumb-struck; eyes like saucers, mouths agape.

  ‘He even give me back the passport,’ the boy continued. ‘The next day I wake up and remember everything. I go to the police but they can do nothing. I go to the bank but they tell me, "You come here yesterday and sign the cheques, so we issue cash."’

  ‘Shit, you remember doing all of these things?’ I said, and leaned closer.

  ‘Everything.’

  I turned to look at Rick who was watching the distant lightning through the
window. ‘What kind of drug can do that Rick?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing I’ve heard of. Except maybe that datera–’ Rick caught himself saying rape and corrected the sentence, aware that the boy may have left out some less choice details of the tale, ‘that stuff they’ve got in America. I’ve heard that can be pretty weird.’

  The boy looked embarrassed and took the pen apart with trembling hands. Tom tried to step in. ‘So,’ he said breezily, ‘how long are you travelling for?’

  ‘Supposed to be three months. But now, after losing my money, I will be lucky if I can have three weeks.’

  There was a deafening clap of thunder and the room was lit up by lightening. Tom walked over to the open door that led out to the roof and shut it, looking up at the brooding sky, his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘I was thinking of going out tonight as well. Does anyone want... ’ He turned to face the room but stopped speaking when he saw the boy, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  TWO

  ‘He’s been raped.’ Tom undid another button on his shirt as the three of us left the guest house and walked out into the wet humid night air. ‘No question about it. Either that or he’s a good actor.’

  We had decided to take up Tom’s offer of a night on the town. The weather had improved, but more than that we wanted to be free of the atmosphere that had descended upon the guest house since the Dutch boy’s arrival. Everyone in the room had done their best to cheer him up but it was a lost cause; he’d probably be better off if he went back to his family in Holland and forgot all about Asia.

  ‘He should write if off as a bad dream,’ I said, stepping over a black bin-liner full of rubbish that floated past in the street. A minibus went down the road, the spray from its wheels fanning out in four shimmering arcs of gold under the glow of the yellow street lights. ‘Jesus, what happened to the road?’

  The street outside the guest house was now a river that ran shopfront to shopfront, a foot deep, the wave created by each passing vehicle lapping against the doors and window panes before being sent back like an echo. There were black bin-bags floating everywhere like mines, menacing, ready to go off when struck by an unwary moped.