The Backpacker (19 page)

FIVE

Changi Yacht Club (or Sailing Centre as it's now called) turned out to be a huge disappointment, mainly for Rick but also for me because I'd heard him talk about it so much over the past week or so. He'd spoken of his childhood memories: how he used to dive off the pier and hold his breath underwater, swimming along in the crystal clear sea. How, once, while swimming alone by his dad's boat, a bunch of schooling fish had started to leap and dance all around him, jumping over his head and darting about in circles, glimmering in the sun like silver discs. He'd splashed about with joy trying to catch them, before looking up at the beach and noticing the horrified look on the faces of his father and friends. ‘Don't move, son,' his father had shouted, and came running down the pier to his rescue. After being pulled from the water, the infant Rick had turned and looked back down as the stealthy grey shadow of a fifteen-foot tiger shark glided past.

‘Moral of the story?' Rick bent down and picked up some sand from the beach, watching it sift through his fingers. ‘When schooling fish start to behave erratically, get the fook out the water.' He released the sand with a huff.

I looked out at the collection of boats moored offshore. Sleek white yachts stood next to decrepit old wooden schooners that looked like they had already sunk and been brought back up. ‘Disappointed?' I asked, shoving my hands into my shorts pockets.

‘Look,' he bent down and scooped up another handful of sand and we both watched as it ran through his fingers, ‘even the beach is man-made now.'

‘How d'you know that?'

‘Because it was always a black sand beach, not golden.'

I cupped a hand and caught some grains as they fell. ‘Maybe it was golden, you just don't remember it that way.'

He looked at me as though I'd accused him of insanity, and gestured towards the clubhouse. ‘Let's go up there and see if they've got any old records of my dad's boat.'

Walking through Changi Village when we'd arrived from downtown hadn't been any less of a let-down for Rick either. The wooden house he'd lived in for three years as a kid was no longer there, and the whole main street was now a row of sharp, three-storey concrete blocks with shopfronts at ground floor level and flats above. He had conjured up an image of bamboo houses on stilts, each one different from the next, but all that stood in their place now was a bland concrete terrace, a mile long and as straight as the cross hairs on a surveyor's theodolite.

To top it all off, when we tried to get to the yacht club along what Rick said used to be a winding jungle path, we found that our way was blocked by a newly built golf course. Fat businessmen pulled up in their Mercedes to spend the afternoon whacking balls around on the land that Rick said used to be his jungle playground. He pointed out to me where, on the exact spot now taken up by the first tee, an old Chinaman's house used to be, where Rick and his sister spent endless lazy afternoons watching the old man repair boats.

‘D'you know what I'd love to do, John?' Rick stopped on the steps leading up to the clubhouse and looked out at the yachts rocking in the harbour. ‘Have one of these boats. Then we wouldn't need money; we could just take off around the world, stopping when we wanted, moving on when we felt like it. Imagine,' he turned to face me, both hands held up, ‘all the islands in Indonesia. How many?'

‘About fourteen thousand,' I said, remembering the appropriate sentence from my atlas.

‘Fourteen thousand. Fourteen-fooking-thousand islands to choose from. Imagine the birds!' He whistled. ‘And if we ever got bored with those we'd just move on to the Philippines, there're another seven thousand islands there!'

I nodded in agreement, squinting against the bright sunlight reflecting off the shimmering sea. ‘D'you think you could sail one of those things?'

He snorted. ‘Are you kidding? See that one on the end? The one with the red tarpaulin over the boom.'

‘Over the what?'

‘Can you see the red tarpaulin?'

I scanned the bay, wishing I had a pair of sunglasses. ‘Umm, yep, got it.'

‘That boat's forty-two feet long and it's made in England. I know because my dad had exactly the same one. I learned to sail it when I was twelve, and by the time I left here I could sail it single-handed around Singapore. I know that boat like you know your car.'

I was impressed.

‘You've probably forgotten how to sail it by now,' I said after a pause. ‘That was years ago.'

‘Have you forgotten how to drive?'

Good point. I sighed. ‘Well there's nothing we can do about it, we'll never have the money to buy something like that, not unless we steal it.'

I remember what he said next as though it was yesterday. I remember the look in his eyes as though it was today. ‘We can dream,' he said, going misty-eyed. ‘Let's make a deal John. That'll be our dream: to dream the impossible dream. If we get to Australia and make enough money, we'll buy that yacht.'

I waited for what I thought would be the negative of the sentence but it didn't come. ‘And if we don't get the money?' I prompted.

He didn't reply and continued up the steps towards the clubhouse. No answer was all the answer I needed. No answer was as good as saying, ‘Then we'll just have to steal that beautiful little boat some day.'

I knew that Rick often said things that had no real link to possible actions in real life, but there was something in his eyes this time that told me he meant what he said. Just as he had once said in India that we would meet up on Koh Pha-Ngan, and I'd thought: how fucking ridiculous; so this time I thought: how very fucking likely that we'll one day have a yacht and sail around all fourteen thousand islands of Indonesia.

I followed him up to the clubhouse reception with the silence of his answer still ringing in my ears like a bell. The woman who staffed the counter in the well-appointed lounge looked so far down her nose at us that I'm surprised she didn't tip over, her head was tilted so far back. We persuaded her to get the old log books out, but there was no record of Rick's dad or his boat. It turned out that servicemen were never official members of the club and therefore didn't need to register.

‘If you want to trace an old friend from days gawn by,' she said with a plum in her mouth, ‘you should speak to Mr Chan, the boatman. He's just dine thar in the chandlery.'

Chan-the-boatman? I thought, and suppressed a giggle. The pressure forced a fleck of mucous out of my nose, making her look down her nose at us as though we were vagrants. She probably already thought we were tramps but the snot didn't make us look any better, and I quickly wiped it onto my sleeve.

‘Oh, Lord!' she said, handing me a tissue. I thanked her, and we started to walk out when she called after us, ‘I say, are you members?' We feigned deafness and went back out into the hot midday sun.

‘Have you noticed, Rick, that people keep staring at us?' I said as we went back onto the sand. ‘Like that woman.'

‘Silly old cow.'

‘Yeah, but it's not just her.' I studied my battered old shorts swinging to and fro as we went down to the water's edge. ‘Maybe we should smarten ourselves up a bit.'

‘You should, not me. I've only just bought new gear.'

He slapped the thigh of his new jeans and I burst out laughing. ‘Marbled jeans went out with the Ark. Why didn't you buy normal ones?'

‘I thought these looked pretty cool. Plus they were half price. Anyway, who cares?'

I pointed down the beach. ‘Not Chan-the-boatman, that's for sure.' Just a short distance down the beach a wizened old Chinese man was sitting on the ski of a Hobi Cat smoking a cigarette. When he saw us approaching he immediately stood up, extinguished his cigarette and tried to look busy. ‘I bet they treat him like shit,' I commented as we walked up to the old man.

‘We used to.' Rick held out his hand. ‘Chan my man, good to see you again.'

The old man didn't know what to do. At first he ignored us, but then, realising we were talking to him, he did a little bow and nervously shook Rick's hand, ‘Hello sir.' Rick told the old man that he didn't need to call him ‘sir' but I could see that he was quaking in his boots. Or he would have been if he was wearing any. Rick launched into his familiar ‘I used to live here' stuff, this time adding a ‘do you remember me?' and Chan nodded vigorously, his tired old eyes darting about as though he was looking for an exit. The old man said that he remembered everything, but I could see that it was just out of a sense of duty, or politeness, and nothing else. He was probably too scared to say no.

‘Who does that belong to?' I asked, referring to the boat Rick and I had discussed.

‘Japan man,' Chan replied, and swept his hand through the air. ‘All Japan man now. Own everything,' he snorted dismissively. How sour it must have tasted for a man like that: someone Chinese who'd probably been in Singapore under the occupation and witnessed all of the aggression and brutality, only to have to serve the same people years later. ‘They never come here,' he continued, ‘never use boat, only for tax dodge.' He broke off abruptly and turned to leave. ‘OK, sir, I go now, thank you.' He did another little bow and was gone, disappearing up the beach into a little wooden shack.

‘Shall we go?' I said, turning back to Rick. He was still staring fixedly at the boat. ‘Rick, shall we? Or d'you want to stay here?'

Silence.

‘Rick?'

SIX

Our first encounter with the Raffles Hotel wasn't a very good one either; Rick and I were turned away at the entrance.

‘Well what's fooking wrong?'

‘Rick, hold on hold on!' I put a calming hand on his shoulder to stop him punching the doorman's lights out. ‘This poor guy's only following rules, it's not his fault.' The turbaned Indian man looked relieved and instantly broke into a sweat. People were pulling up the driveway in Rolls Royces, dressed for dinner, and the last thing the doorman wanted to deal with was us. He anxiously left our side to open the door of another car and greeted the occupants, ‘Welcome madam, sir,' before coming back to us.

‘So,' I said calmly, completing Rick's sentence without the expletives, ‘what's wrong with our clothes?' I must have sounded resigned, as though I'd been turned away a thousand times before.

He looked sheepish. ‘Please, sir, no shorts allowed, thank you, sir.' Rick began to speak but the man cut him off. ‘And no sandals also, sir, thank you.'

Rick looked down past his marbled legs at his tatty old leather footwear, and swore.

‘OK,' I counted out the conditions of the dress-code on my fingers, ‘so it's no shorts, no sandals. Anything else? Can I wear a T-shirt?'

‘That is OK, sir, thank you.'

‘Then that's it,' I said, turning to Rick. ‘We toddle off back to the guest house, get changed, come back here and blow this joint apart. What d'you say?'

Rick agreed.

FAST FORWARD

Twenty minutes later we were back, dressed in our dirtiest clothes but meeting the requirements laid down by the management. We sauntered through the swing doors and asked for the Writers' Bar.

‘Over there, sir,' a worried looking waiter replied, ‘but–'

Through another set of teak and glass doors, silently across the carpeted main hall with its three-inch thick pile, beneath the huge chandelier and over to the small bar where a dozen bloated, red-faced businessmen and their wives, dressed in DJs and gowns, sipped martinis before eating in the adjacent dining room.

‘This looks all right,' I said, taking in the opulence. ‘You make yourself comfortable on that sofa and I'll get the drinks. What d'you want?'

‘Sling,' Rick replied without hesitation.

‘That's easy.' I turned to go to the bar and ran straight into the manager, who'd obviously been alerted by the doorman.

‘Umm, wouldn't you rather go to the famous Long Bar, sir?' he said nervously. He was Singaporean but his English was perfect.

‘Two Singapore Slings,' I said over his shoulder to the barman, completely ignoring the manager's presence. The barman started to panic, unsure whether to wait for an instruction from his boss or not. Unfortunately for him there were no other people waiting to be served so he started to polish some glasses instead.

‘Sir?'

I faced the manager.

‘Wouldn't you much rather go to the famous Long Bar, sir?'

This business of wearing the wrong clothes was beginning to get on my nerves; clothes that were de rigueur on the beaches we'd stayed on were about as welcome in the real world as a tuxedo on Hat Rin. I was beginning to feel like I was being firmly but politely put in my place; it seemed as though everyone was saying, ‘Yes, well, you may have been a big-shot back then with the other wasters and party animals, but here you're nothing. Get a life!' I could feel the anger boiling up inside me.

‘Wouldn't you, sir?' he repeated, his nose almost touching mine. There was complete silence all around us as everyone stopped chatting to watch the stand-off. It was me against him,
us
against
them
, fat businessmen against travellers, down-trodden workers like him versus the pricks that push him around.

‘You're taking the wrong side,' I said evenly, staring into his eyes.

He blinked once, the tension beginning to show. ‘Sir?'

I didn't repeat it, instead letting the air escape from my lungs. My head was pounding with built-up pressure. I turned to walk away, catching my own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and got the shock of my life. The person staring back at me was tanned, young and full of life, while the people around me were dead, like over-stuffed, over-cosmeticised corpses. The contrast between us couldn't have been greater if I'd walked into the bar stark naked. My reflected image and I patted both Ricks on the shoulder and said, ‘The Long Bar it is, then.'

The Long Bar, as you might expect, is little more than a theme pub; a modern replica of the one where my uncle and Rick's relative had once sat all those years ago sipping cocktails. Nowadays the Singapore Slings are ready-mixed in a large plastic barrel, so that the barman doesn't need to strain himself with a cocktail shaker, and cost more than double what we were paying per night for a bed at the guest house.

‘One Singapore Sling or two extra nights' kip?' Rick asked himself sarcastically after ordering them. ‘So we choose the drink. How sensible.'

‘That's a dollar a gulp,' I said, taking mine from the bar top. ‘Sips only, it's got to last.'

We sat at the bar for a while listening to the band; Rick took a couple of photos to send home to his mum and dad as a keepsake.

‘Find a girl,' I said, before he could take another picture. ‘Any Asian girl. You said that your mum's photograph was of a man with an Asian girl on his lap.' I scanned the bar, settling on two girls sitting in a corner. They must be tourists, I reasoned, they're drinking Slings. ‘Those two look OK.' Without waiting for a reply I walked over to them. ‘Excuse me, do you speak English?'

They both giggled into their hands and hunched their shoulders. ‘A 'ittle,' said one, holding her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

I mimed taking a picture. ‘Can
you
[point at them] take a
picture
[close one eye, wink and cluck tongue] for
me
[point at myself] and friend [point at grinning Rick].'

‘Yes yes.' She stood up and bowed twice, one for each ‘yes'.

At first she stood ten feet away, expecting to be the one holding the camera, but I explained that I wanted her in the picture, on Rick's lap, and she moved forward timidly and leaned against him. Rick immediately grabbed her around the waist and deposited her soft bottom squarely on his groin. ‘Weh-hey!' Before she could protest I took the picture.

I've never seen that photograph, but to this day Rick's mum is probably looking at a lovely shot of her son cuddling with a cute Asian girl in Raffles hotel, Singapore, blissfully unaware that two seconds later he was wincing from a slapped face.

‘You won't do that again in a hurry will you?' a voice behind us said as the girl walked smartly back to her friend. Rick stopped rubbing his cheek, surprised to have suddenly heard an Irish accent, and we both spun around to locate the voice. The woman was sitting alone at the bar, Sling in one hand, camera in the other. ‘How long you been here?' she asked, turning her attention to me in an obvious attempt to alleviate Rick's embarrassment.

‘Two days. You?'

‘Same. Just came down from bloody Thailand.'

I picked up my drink. ‘Didn't you like it?'

‘You could say that.' She took a deep breath. ‘I spent one night in Bangkok, hated it, so I went down to the islands.'

‘Just left home then?' Rick added.

‘Yeah. I've only been away,' she looked at her watch, ‘one week tomorrow.'

‘One week!' I put my glass down. ‘How'd you get this far in one week?'

‘Got a round-the-world ticket. Flew Bangkok to Samui, spent one night on,' she paused to remind herself, ‘no, two nights on Koh Pha-Ngan, hated it there, went back to Samui and flew here via KL. Kuala Lumpur was all right,' she sipped her cocktail, ‘spent two nights there.'

‘Hated Koh Pha-Ngan?' Rick said, incredulous, and glanced quickly at me. ‘We loved it.'

She raised her eyebrows as if doubting Rick's sanity, and said, ‘It's all right if you like being in a war-zone, I suppose, but personally I want to relax, that's why I left Northern Ireland.'

By ‘war-zone' I took it that she wasn't into the party and drugs scene on the island. ‘Yeah I suppose the nightlife can be a bit of a shock for someone who's expecting a deserted island,' I said, and popped the glacé cherry from my cocktail into my mouth.

‘Nightlife? I'm talking about all that other stuff that's going on there; all that Mafia bullshit.' She shifted on her stool. ‘I don't mind parties day and night but I draw the line at gang warfare.'

I swallowed the cherry whole. ‘What?'

‘When were you last there?'

I looked at Rick and he answered. ‘About three weeks ago; something like that.'

‘Well,' she continued, taking a peanut from a bowl on the bar, ‘maybe it was different then. I don't know what it was like when you were there, but the Thais are shooting each other on Hat Rin beach now.'

Rick's mouth gaped open, I could see his fillings and I'm sure he could see mine too as we looked at each other in silence, forgetting the woman beside us. Images suddenly flashed past my eyes like the dramatic headlines in a newspaper, the same way they do in the movies when a blank screen is filled from infinity with a spinning tabloid:
Dhoom!
"Koh Pha-Ngan in Mafia Bloodbath!" Or,
Dhoom!
"Massacre At Blood Beach!"

‘Shit,' I finally managed to say, and bowed my head. ‘What about poor Dave?'

The woman's mood seemed to brighten. ‘Oh, they weren't touching the tourists, the Thais were only killing each other.' She gulped down the last of her drink and ordered another. ‘Dave?' she said, frowning and cracking a peanut shell between her teeth.

I looked up at her.

‘You said Dave. There's a guy at my youth hostel here called Dave.'

‘So?' I didn't mean to sound rude but it came out sounding like a rebuff, and she frowned to remind me of my curtness. I couldn't quite make the connection between what she was saying and what I was thinking.

‘Well, he's just been on Koh Pha-Ngan. Black guy.'

My heart stopped. ‘With an afro?' I said, leaning forward and inadvertently placing a hand on her thigh.

‘And about seven-foot tall?' Rick chipped in excitedly, also leaning forward and putting a hand on her leg. ‘Including the hair I mean.'

She moved back instinctively, surprised at the intimacy of the gesture. ‘Yeah, used to be in the Marines I think.'