ESCAPE
Achilly late-spring day on the seafront in a preseason coastal town; a few couples meandering hand in hand, hatted grannies on Zimmer frames, granddads in electric carts tied to black Labradors, kids wobbling on Rollerblades, wearing fingerless gloves. People trying out the sun’s weak warmth for the first time of the year, looking through winter-softened eyes at a cold calm sea. The blue-white pier tinged with the brown-orange of rust and rotting wood, is dipping its toes in the spring-tide water. Small waves whisper as they curl in on the pebbled beach.
Drinking tea with a tiled counter between them. The young man and the young woman, leaning into each other. Hands almost touching. Two people who have just met, talking about everything like best friends. All early uncertainty and awkwardness gone, evaporated in the steam of half a dozen cuppas. She steps away every now and then to let an elderly lady buy her own tea, or a young mum with pram and toddler buy the first ice cream of the year; a mini-milk, it’s too early in the season to turn the Whippy machine on. And then she moves back in, leaning across the counter further, until finally she takes that first kiss, rips it right off his face like a plaster and he’s left there, licking his lips, feeling for damage, wanting more.
The sun is now midway between midday and sunset.
‘I need to go,’ she says.
‘And I need to close up,’ I say.
We look at each other. She is back-lit in silver with ebony hair tumbling from under a green hat onto a green scarf. Green eyes blink once from under thick black lashes. A smile appears briefly at the corners of her lips.
‘Well?’ she says.
‘Well,’ I answer through a mouth of dry, crumbly clay.
‘The tea?’
‘The tea?’
‘The tea.’
‘Oh the tea.’
‘Yes. The tea.’
‘On the house. Free.’
‘Thank you.’
She raises one eyebrow. I smile not knowing what I’m supposed to do in response, not sure what she even means with this gesture. Why is she raising her so very fine and utterly black eyebrow at me?
‘So?’ she asks.
‘So,’ I reply. I move straws and spinning windmills and a postcard rack carrying pictures of cliffs and lighthouses and gardens full of flowers off the counter.
An afternoon has passed too quickly and now my mouth has reached a point of immobility. My mind races to think of what I should say to her now, before she goes, so that this is more than an exceptional afternoon, so that it is to be repeated. I must think of something and force it down and along the muscle of my tongue.
‘Eight o’clock,’ she says with an eyebrow raised once more.
‘Yes.’
‘In front of the pier,’ she tells me.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘Good.’ I smile. I reach across. I put my hand into the softness and warmth behind her neck and guide her forward. I kiss her. She kisses me. We kiss.
It is…
It is…
Beautiful.
It is Painful.
It is Hurtful.
Mean.
I open my eyes and a tear falls, landing on the back of my hand. I wipe it on my trousers.
Oh, you hurtful bastard, taking me by surprise again. Why do you make me relive it? It’s done. Laura’s dead. Forget it.
I blink and look from the window and through rain that batters the car. I see night, and that is all. Darkness and water stick to the glass like oil, thick and viscous.
You will not get in my head anymore. I want you gone. Enough of you and your pain and pathetic sentimentalities. You and her stay down in my gut where it’s dark. Be quiet and be forgotten. Lie there, cuddle up and wrap yourselves together in your self-pity. Sleep next to the beating of my heart and leave me be.
My hand scrunches the front of my shirt, wishing it could reach under, through the flesh, and rip them out forever.
‘Is first time in Indonesia?’
I look to the man driving this four-by-four. His name is Pak Andy and he has just collected me from Medan’s airport on Sumatra. He’s a Chinese Indonesian with a swirl of thinning hair and a large mole under his lip. My new boss.
‘Yes.’ My blunt answer does the trick and doesn’t lead to any more questions. As he was late in meeting me at the airport and his voice hints at boredom, I don’t think he cares anyway.
The silence returns. I try to focus on and imagine where I’m being taken; an apartment, a house, a hostel, a hovel? I haven’t got a bloody clue where. I haven’t got a clue about this country. And I’ve just signed up for a year. The first year of the new millennium and I’m here, lost mentally and geographically. How messed up is that?
After five minutes of more silence the rain has stopped and billboards appear along the roadside, lit up in the car’s beams like TV screens being switched on; happy Indonesian faces drinking condensed milk, coffee, driving Nissans, smoking cigarettes without health warnings.
Then the city starts coming at us. First little roadside shacks appear, made of bamboo with blue plastic tarpaulin roofs and young shirtless men frying food under them. I open my window to let in the after-rain air. The bittersweet smell of soy sauce and chilli rushes through the car and the boomph boomph of music increases, decreases, increases as we pass various roadside sound systems. Behind the shacks houses start appearing: low white buildings with white perimeter walls and trees sprouting over the top of them. As the houses increase in number the smells start to vary and mingle. Old rubbish, fried chicken, rotting fruit, dust from the already drying roads, coffee.
‘Close your window,’ says Pak, ‘we are coming to traffic lights.’
I wonder why an open window should be a problem, but I close it anyway.
The flight from England via Singapore is finally taking its toll on me and a yawn escapes. Through watery eyes I see traffic lights ahead trickle from green to red. In front of us two lines of three or four cars are coming to a stop. We pull up behind them. I’m looking to see what it is that worries Pak Andy so much when there’s a tap on my window. A boy stands there, face pressed up to the tinted glass and hands cupped around almost-black eyes trying to look in. At first his eyes move and flutter like a blind man’s while he tries to focus on the inside of the car. Finally they find me and a big toothy smile appears like a cleaver’s cut through flesh to the white of bone. His hands quickly shape themselves into a bowl and I hear muffled words through the glass, ‘Please, bule. Please, mister.’
I look at Pak Andy and he is just staring straight ahead while waving his hand and shaking his head at two young boys tapping on his window.
I shift in the seat and slide my hand into my front pocket and feel around. When I touch the hexagonal sides of a fifty-pence I remember I only have some English change in my front pockets and large Indonesian notes in the wallet in my back pocket. The boy has his face pressed to the glass again. Shrugging my shoulders at him I show him empty hands. I feel like a cheap bastard sitting in this monster of a car, pretending I have no money. I wear skin the colour of—and thanks to the air-conditioning, the texture of—uncooked chicken. He must know I’m no poor man compared to him. He cups his hands again, tilts his head and stares so pitifully from under his lowered eyebrows that I can’t help myself. I pull my wallet out from under my bony behind. As I fumble out a crisp, clean, not sure how many rupiah note, the car starts pulling off.