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.
‘No. Wait,’ I say.
Pak Andy steals a quick sideways glance at me and looks forward again. The car doesn’t stop. The boy is jogging beside us, still trying to get his face back against the glass, and manages a glance at the note in my fingers. He’s running and alternately tapping at the window and pointing to my hand. Pak turns the car right and the boy loses the race. I look over my shoulder and see him in his shorts and button-less open shirt raise his hands to the black night sky and shake his head.
‘Very bad people. Always asking for money. They should get a job. I have a job. You have a job. They should get a job.’ Pak is shaking his head. ‘Very bad.’
I return the note to my wallet. I just hope my bed isn’t much further. I don’t want to sit next to this man for any longer than I have to.
‘We will be at the school very soon,’ he says.
I turn my reddening and tired face towards him.
‘I will give you your timetable for classes before I take you to your house.’
There is a little smile touching his mouth. It isn’t warm.
I close my eyes. Try to make my mind wander to irrelevant places. Ignore the fact that I’ve taken a dislike to my new boss, that I’ve made another glorious fuck-up in my life. My stomach grumbles. Lack of real food? Or the two additions to my innards?
The pair of them, muted and gagged. Shoved down in my gut and not allowed to interrupt my ‘new’ life until I’m ready for them, which I might never be. Old Me isn’t as clear-cut as New Me. I can push moments of life aside. He can’t. He dwells and sobs on the things which I try to ignore. He’s pathetic. He wants to share his moments in time. Relive them like they’re still now. Well he can just shut up about his moments with Laura and the times that the two of them want to regurgitate.
I’ve had enough. That’s why I’ve got rid of him, of them. She is dead and he needs to shut up about the past. Shut up saying that it is still there. That those moments still exist. That if they happen in the first place then they must still be there, like an object to revisit. He needs to stop telling me that if those moments still exist, then, maybe, so does Laura..…
Just stop.
There is no point. Not to his questions and not to her constant amateur philosophising. Her quotes from head-fucks like Einstein. Stupid fucking gems like, ‘… the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.’ Blah blah blah.
She messes her hair up like Einstein when she does it.
Bullshit.
He drives me fucking mad with his hope. She drives me mad by showing up in my head, talking her rubbish. So stay in the dark, both of you. For good. You, Old Me, are as dead as her. A ghost. Stay with the ghost of her.
I rub my eyes and look at the outside. We are now moving slowly through traffic. The city has enveloped us. Cars and motorbikes spew black smoke and edge along on either side of the car. Then we pull off of the road and onto the forecourt of an ugly building.
‘We are here.’
I look to Pak Andy, and something in me wants to hurt him.
HUNGER
T he school is green and white under flickering floodlights. It is three storeys tall. Above it a green and white sign spells out ‘English World’. In front of the building stand about ten people, smoking, talking, but mostly just smoking. They are older teenagers, some dark-skinned Indonesians, some Chinese, all holding books under their arms. Others walk out of the glass doors: attractive dark-haired girls; Chinese boys dressed like James Dean popping cigarettes into their mouths as they flick back their amateur quiffs; younger kids, about fifteen in white-shirted and grey-trousered school uniforms. They cross the two-car-sized forecourt we have just pulled into, passing by my window, and disappear into the mayhem of the road we’ve just left.
‘The classes have finished,’ says Pak. He turns off the engine, opens his door and is gone.
‘Righto.’ I stare after him, open my door and climb down from my seat.
I enter an airless outside; the smell of diesel and two-stroke engines sticks to the atmosphere like a greasy film. I look behind me at the road. Motorcycle taxis putt-putt and leak black fumes, car taxis beep at them to move, bicycle taxis ring their bells for lazy pedestrian attention and nothing moves at more than ten miles an hour on the constipated road.
‘Hey. You. Hello,’ one of a group of four sitting in front of the school shouts.
I smile back, but am too tired and too unsure how to reply. Confidence and energy are dripping from me like oil from a sump. It won’t be long before I seize up.
‘You are the new teacher?’ He is strutting towards me, a Chinese
