by Sue Perkins
On the wall I noticed a strange scrawl in thick charcoal. I couldn’t make out the script in the gloom, but from the dense curlicues I figured it was either ancient Cham or Khmer. How authentic, I trilled, still trying to normalize the madness around me. How bloody authentic.
Once inside, our bristling sexual intensity simmered to a level of camaraderie – albeit he was still rather tactile. We bowed to each other once more, hugged a little, then let silence take the room.
The peace and quiet didn’t last; from under a brass offertory bowl, came the unmistakable ring tone of a Nokia 3310.
‘Is that your phone?’ I asked, somewhat incredulously.
He nodded and let it ring out.
Silence enveloped us again.
The idea of the Hermit Sequence was to illustrate the painful lot of the holy man during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. I expected him to tell me about the years spent on the run, how his spiritual belief kept him going in the face of persecution – but no. This is the Hermit. He doesn’t play by the rules of television.
Instead he grabs a photo and holds it up to the light. In it I see a group of Cambodians posing with an Elvis impersonator. I have no idea what this has to do with running from the Khmer Rouge but, nevertheless, I nod encouragingly at the image. Then he points at Elvis. A lot. It slowly dawns on me that Mr Vegas ’67 Comeback Special is actually the hermit – in disguise.
He senses my bewilderment.
‘I had to act like that in order to survive,’ he says, by way of an explanation.
This answer only serves to throw up more questions. You want to avoid detection as a holy man so you dress as ELVIS? Surely there were more anonymous outfits he could have opted for. Surely a simple peasant costume would have done the trick? But what do I know? Maybe the forest was full of holy men in fancy dress, with monks dressed as Neil Sedaka, David Cassidy and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Then, out of nowhere, he reaches across me and brings something into the light. At first glance it looks like a stuffed sable guinea pig. Then he raises it up to his head so I can see it properly.
The wig.
What I particularly enjoyed was that it wasn’t a full wig; it was merely a resplendent nylon hairpiece at the front, with a metal band to attach it round the back of his head. Essentially, it was a tiara with a quiff on it.
He pops it on. Ludicrous. I laugh out loud.
I try it on. It looks exactly like my own hair. No difference whatsoever.
I’m not laughing any more.
His phone rings again. I wonder if it’s his mum, asking where the hell he’s been for the last thirty years.
In the brief window between rings and pings, I ask him about the forest.
HERMIT: I love the forest, it is our parent.
His voice is gentle and sweet. Mild groping notwithstanding, I do really love him.
As I leave, I ask him to read my fortune. He is known for his power of prophecy in these parts. I’m not sure of the technique he uses, whether it be palms, tea leaves, cards. I half wonder if he’ll grab my buttocks again to divine my destiny. Instead he just looks at me and says:
HERMIT: I feel you are in a good place.
Even for a cold reading that’s one hell of a bland, generic start.
I wander outside. Our wonderful assistant producer, Kate, is standing there with a large bolt of fabric.
ME: What’s that for?
KATE: We asked him if there was anything he wanted – you know, to say thank you. He wanted a donation for the monastery, and a new robe.
ME: But it’s a leopard print …
KATE: Yeah, that’s what he wanted. A leopard-print robe …
The Hermit appears, giving the thumbs up. I bow, taking care to keep my distance this time, and hand him the fabric. His eyes mist with tears.
‘Call me,’ he motions, making the internationally accepted thumb-and-little-finger phone gesture. He then starts pointing at something inside.
‘OK,’ I say, bewildered as to what he is gesturing towards. And then I notice, as the candles change direction in the breeze, that the scrawl on the wall isn’t Khmer or Cham. It is plain, old-fashioned digits. It’s the Hermit’s phone number.
The Hermit widens his eyes and gives me the thumbs-up. I briefly consider adding him to my contacts list, but I know deep down that would merely open the door to a whole world of holy-man sexting.
As I walked back down the hill, I turned and saw the Hermit winding the leopard-print cloth round him. We’d bought way too much – ten metres, to be precise. He kept winding and winding, like a Buddhist bobbin. In the end, he resembled a mummified Bet Lynch silhouetted against the lush forest.
I looked at him and laughed. I was sad to leave. And as I wandered off, I couldn’t help thinking, D’you know what? He’s right. I am in a good place.
11. The Pig of Kratie
I woke the following morning with a bag of nails in my throat. It was hard to swallow, and what was left of my voice floated up through my engorged tonsils, like mist through a pothole. I was, to quote freely from Withnail and I, drifting into the arena of the unwell.
Getting up was worse, my legs heavy and my brain fogged. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as rough in my entire life – and that comes from a fully paid-up member of the Hypochondriacs Club. By the way, if you’re thinking about joining the Hypochondriacs Club, most of the meetings get cancelled, so don’t knock yourself out if you’re too ill to attend.
The filming schedule was as tight as a jazz musician’s snare drum, so there was no hope of staying in bed and resting up. I rolled into the car, moaning. Rather annoyingly, no one noticed the difference between Well Susan and Ill Susan. It transpires that both of them are whingers. Thankfully, it was a short trip to our next location. As we parked up, I completed my make-up routine in record time. It was hard to hold the brush to my face – it felt like I was carrying a ten-kilo hammer. I rubbed make-up round my eyes and ran some coconut oil through my quiff. I’m camera ready, baby.
Sod’s Law dictated that this was not to be an easy morning. There was no dancing in a rainforest with a shaman, or learning the recipe for barbecued rat. No. That morning, I was tasked with conducting a serious interview with a gentleman whose life’s work had been championing the preservation of the endangered Irrawaddy Dolphin. Yes, I needed to know and elicit facts. Mr X (I didn’t catch his name as I was semi-delirious during the briefing) was responsible for changing local fishing techniques so that these beautiful creatures didn’t get caught as collateral damage. I was looking forward to it – I mean, what’s not to like about a conservationist?
I got out of the car to say hello to him.
‘Who is this?’ said Mr X, pointing, but not looking, at me.
‘This is Sue, our presenter,’ said Claire – somewhat confused by his manner.
‘Oh.’ He paused, still determinedly not looking at me. ‘I thought presenters were blonde and beautiful.’
There was an awkward, shocked silence – made worse by him delivering a mime to illustrate his point. His hands traced the outline of a curvy Barbie-doll figure with unfeasibly large breasts.
Oh, I thought. You want an albino Jessica Rabbit. Well, I’m afraid she’s busy running our current-affairs department, so you’re stuck with me.
As conversational ice-breakers go, this kept us still firmly at the 32°F mark. I had rolled out of bed, bundled my aching limbs into a car and smeared eye-shadow round my face and this was my reward. Part of me laughed at his stupidity and bare-faced rudeness, but a little part of me – the part deep inside – bristled with a familiar shame.
Personal affront notwithstanding, the interview had to be done. I’m not a stormer-outer, I’m more of a grit-your-teeth-and-get-on-with-it kind of a girl, so I resolved to carry on.
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I’m Sue,’ extending my hand for him to shake, partly out of politeness, but mainly in the hope that whatever virus had gripped hold of me was contagious through skin contact.
We climbed onto the fishing boat. I wasn’t sure if it was swaying or I was. Once onboard, things took a further turn for the worse. It turned out that the only thing Mr X liked more than insulting strangers was the sound of his own voice. Who would have thought that ‘misogynist’ and ‘bore’ would share some of the same space in a Venn diagram?
The interview ran like this: I’d ask a simple question, and fifteen minutes later he’d pause for breath. The sun was up, and the water was millpond still. What a waste of a beautiful day.
The babble continued. Listen, I thought, you might know a lot about the river dolphin, mister, but you don’t know anything about television. An hour’s diatribe about your personal journey through the rank and file of the Cambodian civil service isn’t going to zing its way into the edit. To be honest, mate, we just want a couple of soundbites about the real star of the show here: the Irrawaddy Dolphin.
I was now in full fever, and losing a grip on my surroundings. Fortunately, Mr X was so emotionally invested in his own brilliance he had failed to notice that the entirely non-glamorous TV presenter opposite him was slumping heavily to one side, eyes closed. I don’t know about you, but such signals have always proved enough of an indicator that I am boring the tits off someone for me to stop. Each to their own.
His monologue hit me in waves as I faded in and out of consciousness.
MR X: I was a remarkable child … They said they had never seen someone with that level of skill before … The board gasped in amazement at my ingenious suggestions … Then I was honoured with the highest prize in all the land …
I made my peace with the fact I was never going to make it off that boat alive. I was going to die there, in the heat, with the sound of a braying bureaucrat in my ears. This is how it ends. Not with a bang, but with a lecture in Khmer on departmental restructuring.
And then, something extraordinary happened. At the end of a particularly long ramble about his distinguished academic career (trailblazing intellect, staggering insight), I saw a sleek grey head poke from the river’s surface behind him and blow water into the air. The impossibly rare Irrawaddy Dolphin. Mr X turned round, but by now it had submerged, out of sight.
I smiled to myself and carried on. I acted as if nothing had happened as, in truth, I wanted this dolphin all for myself. I teed up another info-dump:
ME: So, Mr X, tell me about the changes to fishing in this area.
MR X: Well, I was commended many times by officials for my great work, so it was no surprise to me that I was given this task. After all, every job I take on I complete perfectly. I was the natural choice. I have always been excellent as a leader …
Again the dolphin emerged behind him and fired a shower of droplets into the air.
MR X: … And if you ask anyone, they will tell you I am the best choice for this project because of my impeccable pedigree …
Another glorious marine fart erupted, just behind his head.
Three or four times that happened – each time Mr X embarked on a monologue, the cheeky dolphin would appear and spew water into the air, then disappear when he turned to look for it. It was as if the dolphin was making a point. In my febrile state, I imagined it talking to me. For some reason, it talked in a broad Brummie accent. Don’t ask. I was off my face.
DOLPHIN: Hey, Sue, how’s it going?
I smiled, my dry eyes rolling in my head.
DOLPHIN: This guy’s banging on, isn’t he?
MR X: I could have been a world beater at anything. Anything. But someone of my abilities is best placed to save an entire species, which is what I am doing.
DOLPHIN: I’m gonna let you into a secret. This guy is an absolute joke. Me and the lads take the piss out of him constantly.
MR X: I expect, after this project, that many nations will be interested in my work and I will probably be called into high office elsewhere.
DOLPHIN: I mean, I know that life isn’t fair – but surely the wrong species is facing extinction here. Surely this wild bore should be eradicated from the planet – not me.
And with that, the dolphin, that strange, exotic beast, dived into the water for the final time. Gone. I never saw it again.
Soon, none of us will ever see it again.
I became so sick, that finally it was decided I should get seen at a hospital in Phnom Penh. I am not good with hospitals, following a psychologically scarring trip to A&E I was forced to make in the early nineties.
I was at Cambridge studyingfn1 at the time. My particular college was a hotbed of political activity, and we’d spend long nights discussing how we’d take down Thatcher and Pinochet, just as soon as we’d put on our pants and finished that pint of snakebite and black. Demonstrations were a constant feature of student life – you name it, we’d make a banner about it. The best thing about a march, of course, was that they invariably happened in London, on a Saturday, so you could hop on a free bus first thing in the morning and be in the capital for the day.
Mel was all about the free bus ride to London – after all, politics was one thing, but an all-expenses-paid trip to Oxford Circus and back was another. She joined a demonstration about education and managed to hold her placard upside down, all the while chanting, ‘Loans not grants! Loans not grants! Loans not grants!’ before someone kindly corrected her. Minutes later, she surreptitiously peeled off to the King’s Road to look for a pair of acid-pink Dr Martens.
There was also a tantalizing employment opportunity waiting for a handful of students. The boss? M15: the national security service tasked with keeping the UK safe. It’s pretty good at it, too, from what I’ve read: scoring a total of 4.1 out of 5 on Google Reviews – meaning we’re mainly safe.
Cambridge was not only a recruitment hotspot for M15, but M16, the Secret Intelligence Service. Since the days of Philby, Burgess, Blunt and Co., the rumour was that undergraduates were being monitored and covertly enlisted, with a Fellow in every college tasked with identifying potential candidates. Word got out that our mate Jez had been approached on a park bench. Quite what he had been approached for is beyond me, but the gossip spread that he was being tipped for a job as an international spy.
I wanted to be an international spy. I was already competent in most of the major disciplines – I liked martinis, I enjoyed a good game of poker, and pretty much every woman I’d ever slept with was dead. Or at least they must have been, because every time I called them I got no dial tone.
Sadly, my turn on the park bench never came. There was no whispering in corridors. No clandestine meetings in Whitehall. No ‘for your four-eyes only’ documents placed down in front of me. On reflection, I think the reason might lie in M16’s motto: semper occultus. Always secret. Let’s face it, I would have told Mel within thirty seconds of being recruited. And thirty seconds after that she would have told half of Lithuania. So it was probably for the best.
I digress. Outside of shouting and marching, I spent the rest of my time at college trying to make jokes in the comedy club. Every year, the Cambridge Footlights put on a pantomime. It was fashioned as a wry sideways look at the genre, and much more politically correct than its traditional antecedents. The audience responses were less ‘He’s behind you!’ and more ‘He’s behind you, but that shouldn’t unduly concern you unless you’re a latent homophobe.’
I was playing the part of Head Nun. I thought I’d given a rich resonance to the role, but I seem to remember a rather unkind reviewer saying he wished I had been in silent orders. We were coming to the end of the week-long run, and I won’t lie, I had had a few – but there are no laws, after all, about being drunk in charge of a habit. There is no ‘Thou shalt not drink own-brand vodka while in a wimple’ in the Ten Commandments, although there might well have been if God and Moses hadn’t got so caught up in Ox Coveting.
Anyway, there was a dance routine at the end of the first half, during which I managed to get my feet caught up in my outfit. In the ensuing ker
fuffle, my friend Nick (dressed as a jester) accidentally punched me in the face. I crashed downwards in spectacular fashion, cracking my head against the floor. I got up, and immediately saw stars, but tried to work my dizziness into some kind of extemporaneous jazz dance routine. By the time the interval came, I felt sick and very, very sleepy.
I won’t lie, the speed at which I was replaced was galling. It really was as simple as pushing one of the props guys onstage. They didn’t even put the outfit on him. It was one of many ego-levelling moments in my professional lifetime.
The theatre management decided that I was to go to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, where I lay waiting on a bed for several hours, still dressed as Mother Superior, listening to some toff-shaped turd called Rupert getting his stomach pumped in the neighbouring bed.
I was so concussed I couldn’t speak – so at first the nursing staff took it at face value that I was a bona-fide member of the religious community. After all, why else would I be in a habit, wimple and twelve-inch crucifix? Staff would come by and say, ‘Are you all right, Sister?’ and I would give them a woozy thumbs-up. One visitor even genuflected and crossed herself as she passed by my bed.
It was only when they asked how I had sustained the head injury – ‘Well, Doctor, it was the Act One finale and I was a bit pissed, a jester punched me in the head and I tripped over my habit’ – that it became clear I was some way short of the full Bride of Christ.
This new information prompted not only a change of tone but a sudden downturn in my treatment plan. Now, I was just another drunken student. Now, I was just like Rupert next door.
DOCTOR: So, you’ve been drinking, yes?
ME: Yesh, jush a little. My teeth are furry. Ish that a sign of something?