a little too much and I’m finding it more annoying than alluring.
Kim pays and we all fall out the back of the taxi. Before we’ve taken two steps away from the car, two boys with trays covered with various makes of cigarettes and lighters hanging around their necks come up to us. One of them is about eight years old and the other maybe ten. The eight-year-old has big black rings under his eyes and his shoulders sag as though he’s ready to be carried to bed. The others try to sidestep around them, but the boys move from side to side trying to block them. They look like they’re practising dance steps.
‘OK. Give me twenty kretek,’ Kim says to the smaller boy, but the bigger boy is there first with a packet. Julie also gets a pack as Marty and Jussy sneak past.
‘Please mister, buy my cigarettes. Marlboro, kretek, menthol, Davidoff.’ The young one is in front of me, banging my thighs with his tray, looking up with child’s eyes that have lost their wonder.
I ask for a pack of Marlboro and a pack of kretek. The older boy is suddenly there, jostling the younger one out of the way with his shoulder.
‘Eh. Back off. I’m buying from him,’ I tell the bigger one. He tuts and heads off to another taxi as it pulls up.
‘Thank you, mister, thank you,’ says the young boy. ‘And a lighter? You need a lighter?’ He is following us across the street to the hotel.
‘OK. Yes. How much?’
He tells me and I pay him with some notes and tell him to keep the change. I want to give him the contents of my wallet, but hold back. We go up the steps to the over-lit building. I still want to turn back and give it to him. I’m not sure if the reason I don’t is because of wishy-washy Old Me or ‘don’t give a shit’ New Me or just because I know that it won’t really help the boy.
The hotel is glass-fronted, alight with sequenced flashing bulbs, decorated in fresh paint and attended by a doorman in full London Mayfair Hotel doorman garb. The rest of the street is peeling and crumbling colonial Dutch facades, rubbish piles and potholes. The hotel looks as out of place as a diamond in a cowpat.
‘Those kids always put me in a downer,’ says Julie as we enter the hotel. The reception hall is large and wide with a marbled floor. An antique becak and a grand piano are centrepieces, reflecting expensive lighting in their polished surfaces.
I too feel on a downer, although I haven’t exactly been off one.
As the group of us climb a curving staircase to the first floor, taking two steps at a time, I ask, ‘Does that always happen?’
‘Fucking mafia-run kids, man. Always on the streets, all night.’ Kim leads us along the corridor towards the sound of Bon Jovi coming from behind double doors at the end. ‘Forced into selling cigs and then the older kids hide around a corner somewhere, take all the cash and hand it to the local mafia errand boy. He then probably hands it to his boss who then probably gives it to the Godfather or Big Boss or whatever the fuck they’re called in this country.’
‘Kids are abused all over the place here. It’s depressing but you have to get used to it.’ Naomi is walking at my elbow. Her closeness is making me uncomfortable.
‘No one should have to get used to that,’ I say and take a longer step to get ahead of her.
Kim pushes the double doors open and we enter yet another world: smoke and drums and guitar solo and a packed room of about three hundred people. They sit around tables and stand in groups facing a stage. A guitarist kneels on one leg while his hands dance up and down an electric guitar. Three girls with cleavage and skirts that stop where their legs begin swirl their orange-dyed hair in perfectly timed circles to their version of ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’.
We walk through the smoke-filled room and a waiter comes to us. He takes us to a table right at the front. It is already occupied by a group of Indonesian men. He says something to the group and they nod their heads and smile at us and leave the table.
‘Please, please sit,’ shouts the waiter.
We’re right in front of the stage. The lead singer smiles down at us.
‘Us bules always get the best seats,’ Julie says through cupped hands over my ear.
‘Why?’
‘We’re good for business apparently. Get white people in or sitting next to you and everyone’s happy. We’re like status symbols. And they think we’re loaded of course. Everyone wants a bule as a friend.’
I’m not sure everyone would want us as their friends, if they really knew us, but I nod anyway.
‘What is a bule anyway?’ I shout over last bars of the song.
‘Albino. They call us albinos,’ she yells back.
‘Cheeky bastards,’ I laugh.
We order drinks and light cigarettes and watch and listen as the band starts a perfect intro to Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.
—The best rock intro ever, Laura shouts from my left. I look, expecting to see her eyes wide and alive and head moving to the music, but Naomi smiles back.
Now you’re happy; now you’re not. Music: the magician of nostalgia and emotion.
The first two or three notes are sometimes enough. The needle is placed on the record, the crackling starts and the notes line up and form their clever little refrain of a moment of life. Another track from Old Me’s Greatest Hits. Rock on.
She runs back into the room, all naked white flesh, and jumps in beside me just as Slash starts playing, a little scratchy, a little worn, but still impressive. She presses her body against mine, throwing a leg over my thighs and an arm across my chest and around my neck. My arm around her back pulls her even closer.
‘Strange choice of music for waking up to, Appetite For Destruction?’
‘It is and it does just that, wakes you up.’ She kisses my chest and we lay there silent for the duration of the first track. I smile at the ceiling. I’m lying in bed with a beautiful girl who I don’t know, yet I feel as relaxed with her as I would when I’m alone with myself.
‘You haven’t even asked me what my job is,’ she says.
She’s right. What the hell we have been talking about?
‘You’ve known me all of a day and not even interested in what I do.’ She flicks my nipple.
I ask her what she does.
‘I pick up ice-cream salesmen, shag them and get a lifetime’s supply of Mr Whippys, Mivvis and teas.’
‘Well sorry. I’m only selling ice creams for the summer, then I’m hoping to train to become a teacher. Your Mivvis will dry up.’
‘Oh well. You can leave now.’ She makes no attempt to get off me. ‘No Strawberry Mivvis, no more rumpy-pumpy.’
‘If you like Mivvis, I’ll buy you one every week.’
‘OK, in that case you can stay.’ Her hand rests on my abdomen and the warmth of her touch spreads across my stomach and down to my
