by Bunkie King
My mind fills with doubt. I have only spent one night with Chris and am not really sure what his feelings are for me. I don’t possess the confidence to imagine that I am someone he sees as being seriously worthy of his interest, his love. Jack reminds me of Maria’s insistence that he bring us back safe and sound.
‘Once we’re home,’ Jack offers, ‘I’ll buy you a ticket to London to meet up with Chris.’
Confused by the emotional turmoil, I can’t think for myself and decide that is the safer path. In case anything goes wrong, at least I’ll be in a country where they speak English
Spyforce is about to launch in Asia, so we fly to Bangkok for some publicity interviews and stay in a luxury hotel paid for by the local TV station. Jack arranges with one of the station executives to take us to a massage parlour. The young girl chosen for me is very reluctant. She keeps pulling back and shaking her head. But the Thai executive manages to explain to her that I just want a massage, no ‘funny business’. She runs a warm bath and washes me, dries me off and covers me in powder, then gives me the best massage of my life. There is absolutely nothing sexual in our encounter. Le and I wait a fair while for Jack and the TV exec to emerge.
Jack wants to visit Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand where he’d spent time filming Spyforce. The scary all-night bus ride from Bangkok is undertaken at top speed the whole way. I don’t sleep a wink. The driver refuses to give way to anything — his is the biggest vehicle on the road, which gives him right of way, apparently. His windscreen is covered in ‘good luck’ leis. I am quite concerned by this because they swing back and forth, obscuring his vision. As he drives, he furiously rubs Tiger Balm into his temples.
Love to see this guy in peak hour on the Harbour Bridge, I think to myself.
The driver’s team, if you could call it that, comprises two ‘co-pilots’: one stands in the middle of the bus and shouts to the driver what is happening on either side; the other is at the back, doing basically the same thing with the traffic behind us.
Every time we pass a shrine on the side of the road the driver claps his hands together and bows. There are lots of shrines, especially on bad corners. One is erected wherever someone has died. Sometimes there are a few in a row and the driver bows to each of them in turn. I panic at every bow and hope we don’t become part of the next monument. We stop once, for a pee break; the toilet is a hole in the ground inside a rusty old tin shed. I decide to hold on until we reach Chiang Mai.
Jack finds a hotel for us, then goes straight out. Over the next few days he disappears for hours at a time, night and day. He says he’s trying to score us some dope. He rarely comes back with anything.
We brave the return bus ride to Bangkok. Once back in the hotel room, Jack rues the missed opportunity to score some of the excellent ‘ganja’ grown in the northern region. And when we do eventually make a connection, we are ripped off, sold some worthless ‘chaff’. Jack is not happy about the money he’s lost, all of which stretches his limited resources.
A couple of days later we plan to catch the overnight train from Bangkok to Penang. But before leaving Thailand, we spend a wonderful and sometimes weird break near Phuket, at the invitation of Glen, an Aussie we meet who works with an advertising firm in Bangkok. A local fishing boat takes us to the island — and the place is paradise, absolutely beautiful. The bungalow is essentially a straw hut; the walls don’t reach the roof or the floor, but that doesn’t matter to us. We cook outside and swim naked in the ocean — our group are the only people on the beach. We settle down to sleep on the wooden floor, exhausted after a day in the sun.
But just as we extinguish the lamp and prepare to drift into peaceful slumber, there is a noise outside. We light the lamp and find that the hut is surrounded by the same group of Thai fisherman who’d ferried us out to the island. A young Thai man who is with us deals with the interlopers — it turns out they think he is involved with Le and/or me and they want a bit of the action for themselves.
The debate continues for a while; the locals tell our Thai companion that westerners had raped their women and now they want some payback. He tells them that Jack is a big star and could make things very difficult for them if anything happens to his women. Eventually we are escorted back to the beach where we were dropped off, all the while praying they don’t ambush us on the way through the jungle track. Here we join an American school group, who are camping on the sand; we gather around their large campfire and spend the rest of the night with them.
The fishermen trudge back to their village, but later on we can hear them playing Jack’s harmonica. The next day the same fishermen return us to Phuket; we negotiate the return of Jack’s sandals, which they’ve also swiped. They’re way too big for Thai feet anyway. It was a strange encounter.
The ensuing train trip to Penang is magical and will stay with me forever. I lie on the bunk looking out the window at a beautiful clear, starry night. I stay awake most of the night watching the passing scenery: villages, rice paddies and farmhouses. Fireflies illuminate the landscape.
Early the next day my reverie is disrupted when we stop at the Malaysian border and go through customs. Everyone picks up their luggage and piles out of the train. Of all the passengers, including other westerners, the customs officials single out the three of us.
We are bundled into a small room in a building near the station where the officials, who speak no English, check our passports and thoroughly search our baggage, inside and out. They converse constantly between themselves and glance at us with suspicion. It’s nerve-wracking. When they don’t find anything in our luggage, they search our clothing. When they again find nothing they usher us back onto the train.
On the journey down to Penang, we aren’t game to speak about what happened, but later, safely behind the closed door of our hotel room I blurt out, ‘Thank God we didn’t have any ganja on us!’ I guess, as it turns out, we were lucky to be ripped off.
In Butterworth, near Penang, we stay in a wonderful old mansion by the sea, once owned by a silk merchant’s family. A huge moth ‘adornment’ rests over the front door. I dream about how life must have been for the former owners, especially the women. We live just like tourists, going on daily outings to places of interest. However, I dread being back in our rooms at the end of the day as Jack keeps admonishing me for my indiscretions with Elton and Chris. He wears me down, damaging my sense of self-worth and any emotional strength I may have.
Once again I don’t have enough confidence to say that he has been unfaithful many times, that he has misled us from the very beginning, and is guilty of lying and cheating in our relationship. My heart has never felt heavier. I just can’t bring myself to say anything.
Back in Singapore, we stay with Levi Bloomberg in his penthouse apartment. It’s an odd place, an empty three-bedroom unit on top of a modern building. It’s totally empty; there isn’t a stick of furniture. We stay in an empty room with a hole in the wall, sleeping on an air mattress that we cover in sarongs and blankets, whatever we can find.
‘What’s with the hole?’ I ask Levi.
He tells me that the agent had asked if Levi wanted air conditioning. When he was told it would cost more, Levi said no, so the agent simply ripped the unit from the wall — hence the hole, which is now covered by a strip of flimsy cardboard. During our stay, a monsoon hits and tears the cardboard away, soaking our room. I peek through the hole and find I am looking down on a shared shanty dwelling next door; I see an existence that isn’t visible from the road. People are going about their business, exercising, making tea, preparing meals — when they make dumplings, all the women work together. It’s quite a thrill, this bird’s-eye view of day-to-day life in an Asian communal dwelling. I’m fascinated.
We make a couple of visits to Bugis Street (known to tourists as Boogie Street), Singapore‘s tourist mecca famous for its transgender sex bazaar culture. It’s a wild place where no rules apply. Sailors from all around the world and American GIs on leave from
Vietnam come for the thrill of sex with exotic, erotic Asian queens. Along with the other tourists, we are astounded by the flamboyantly dressed transwomen as they parade through the crowd, flirting with whoever might be interested in having a wild experience.
I am taken to visit an opium den, buried away in a hidden backstreet. Entering through a wooden door that opens on to a very steep staircase, I cram onto the first couple of steps as there is another closed wooden door blocking my way. Suddenly the roof opens and I am ‘checked out’. The second door opens and I continue up the staircase. The rooms upstairs are unfurnished, just straw mats spread out on the floor. I lie down and am offered the pipe and draw the sickly sweet smoke deeply into my lungs, then hand it back. As I haven’t actually felt any effect, I take it again and draw deeply on the pipe. I don’t realise that opium is a slow hit. As long as you stay where you are and don’t move you’re OK, but when I stand up and go outside into the fresh air I feel the effect in a big way. My head is spinning; I am really out of it. Wasted.
Somehow I manage to get back to Levi’s apartment, where I am overwhelmed by sleepiness. Nevertheless, I vomit many times during the night. The next day all I can do is lie around, not eating or even talking. In the evening, we are in a taxi when I suddenly feel the urge to puke. Jack asks the driver to pull over. The street is deserted, it is a Sunday evening and everything is shut. I run around trying to find a toilet, a building, a theatre, and fortunately manage to find one. Opium is supposed to have a euphoric effect but that’s not my experience. I never smoke it again.
We fly from Singapore to Jakarta and then on to Bali where we stay in Kuta for a few days. Jack befriends some of the street kids who are often covered in tropical ulcers. Trained in first-aid in the army, he treats their sores daily. He’s very compassionate towards them.
I love the people and the scenery, and mostly it is a peaceful interlude. We visit an Australian architect who is building a luxury hotel on the beach at Kuta and then go to his house up in the mountains at Ubud, a luxurious and serene fusion of east meets west. The house opens out to the garden; the furniture spills from the lounge into the palm-enshrouded patio. This, I realise, is my dream home. After Ubud we visit Kintamani; we walk down to the lake below and take a rowboat to the base of the active volcano. Here we bathe in the hot springs and at dawn walk to the top of Gunung Batur, a pretty hairy trek. The guide, used to the incline, maintains a lively pace, but the last part of the journey is through volcanic ash. Still, the sight is spectacular, something I’ll never forget.
Our time there could have been blissful but Jack’s recriminations start again each night. It is as if he loves twisting the knife — into both his heart and mine.
One evening he has me howling for hours as he assails me over and over about how much I have hurt him, how much he loves me, how I am his life and shouldn’t be so cruel; I should be a nicer person, not so flippant with his emotions, his love. In an attempt to defend myself I say, ‘I don’t care about you any more.’
He turns around and moans, ‘But I love you. How could you be so callous not to care about my feelings?’
I feel more guilt, more confusion. It seems like I am always the one to upset the balance. In a normal relationship, if one out of two is dissatisfied, that person feels they have the right to their feelings, but I am one out of three and the other two don’t seem dissatisfied. Jack is perfectly happy with the way it is and Le seems satisfied. This supports the notion that I am the problem, that my feelings are unjustified. I haven’t had prior experience with relationships and have no idea that it should be all right for me to say, Hey, I’m not happy with this. All I want is respect and equality between us. I just don’t know how to ask for it.
Several weeks after our return from Asia I still haven’t received any correspondence from Chris, who said he’d stay in touch and let me know about his journeys. I now can only assume Chris just wanted to have sex, and the ‘travel with me’ talk had been an elaborate pick-up line. Perhaps Jack is right; men might only want to have sex with me as a way to compete with him, not because they’re interested in me. Feeling insecure and convinced nobody else would want me, I allow Jack back into my bed.
Some time later I see Chris at a function in Sydney. I am so embarrassed I can’t face him and hurry away. I still mourn the loss of what might have been. For the brief time I was with him, Chris had made me feel special and treated me with respect. When discussing his travel plans he asked me what I wanted to do. This was so different to Jack.
Chapter 10
Right place, perfect time
I have often pondered the reason for Jack’s obsessive and possessive behaviour towards me. Perhaps it was rooted in the traumas he experienced as a child.
Born in Sydney in 1940, during World War II, Jack was 14 months older than his brother David. His father Harold was serving in the war and his mother Marjorie found it hard to manage. She placed Jack into a boarding-crèche in Redfern during the week until she felt capable of looking after a baby and a toddler on her own. Jack only saw his mother when she took him to their Manly home on weekends. When Jack was four, Marjorie died of a chronic heart infection. Jack said all that he remembered of her was being handed an ice cream on Manly Corso.
Jack’s father had no way of looking after his two young sons while he was flying around the South Pacific. From 1943 Harold served as a purser with Qantas, seconded to the RAAF in the southwest Pacific. After Marjorie died, and Harold was about to fly out once more, his younger sister, Beverley, then aged 24, sought advice from their father Dr Albert Pain who had attended Jack’s birth.
Beverley had married a US serviceman and was about to leave Australia with her new baby to live in America. While she loved her brother and dearly wanted to be a mother to his children, it was impossible. They’d have to put the children in an orphanage. Dr Pain suggested they speak with a medical associate of his, a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist understood that children sent to state or church-run orphanages were often emotionally crippled and had their young hearts, minds and spirits permanently damaged. He suggested they take the boys to Lake House School at Narrabeen.
When Harold arrived at Lake House with four-year-old Jack and his little brother David, he introduced them to the people in charge — and then said good-bye, promising he’d be back next weekend.
Jack didn’t see his father again for five years.
It was likely that nobody explained to the boys that their mother had died. Even if they had, they couldn’t have comprehended that they would never see her again. Now their father was leaving them in this strange place. Harold met another woman and moved to Western Australia to live with her. The false promise of his return and subsequent rejection must have been shattering.
Lake House was part-orphanage and part-boarding school; it also took in day children. It was situated on a narrow strip of land between Narrabeen Lakes and the famous beach north of Sydney. The main building was a stately old stone house with French doors that opened out onto a full-length verandah, and a large grassy area where the children played freely. On hot days they ran around under the spray of a hose dressed only in their swimmers. Rain, hail or shine the children were taken swimming and went for magical nature walks around the lakes.
The school was run on progressive educational theories. Geyda Campbell, the principal, had trained in England with AS Neill at Summerhill. Neill believed that the school should be made to fit the child, rather than the other way around. He ran Summerhill as a democratic community. On her return to Sydney in 1940, Geyda transformed Lake House into an environment where children’s personal development was valued and nurtured.
However, the ‘democratic’ principles may have extended too far. Jack told us that when he first arrived at Lake House, he had to surrender his toys into a communal store where everyone could play with them. That way, the children who didn’t have toys of their own wouldn’t feel deprived. He had to wait in line to use his own peddle-car and play with th
e treasured soft toys he had always slept with and were like his own special friends. He was distraught at the treatment they copped from the other children. After a while his toys were so knocked around he didn’t care any more.
The staff did their best to create a family environment to compensate for the children’s lack of parental love and affection. Jack had especially fond memories of Geyda, but had to compete for attention with all of the children, some of whom had special needs.
There was a catatonic schizophrenic boy who was much older and bigger than Jack and used to drag a dog chain around behind him wherever he went. But in the end, Jack regarded them as mates. From the age of four he quickly learned what he needed to do to survive.
Lake House was pretty special as far as orphanages go. The orphan children were called ‘sons and daughters of the house’ and shown consideration. They weren’t stigmatised. They were also treated like adults and had regular chores. They were on a mostly vegetarian diet. Strangely, given that most of the teachers were women, they only bathed every few days in a few inches of water that wasn’t changed between children. It really helped to be the first one in.
They were plenty of creative activities at the school. The children were encouraged to create stories; a teacher would then write them down in the children’s words. They made puppets out of papier-mâché and produced their own plays, accompanied by an orchestra. Jack performed in school plays the teachers produced and also devised one-man shows where he played all the parts. Occasionally the boarders were taken to Saturday afternoon movie matinees. As the theatre descended into darkness and the projector’s lamp lit up the huge screen, the images were burned into Jack’s imagination.
He escaped his emotionally deprived reality by creating his own fantasy world. He used to enthral the other kids in the dormitory at night with his impromptu stories of ‘Jack the Wonderboy’. He made it into an ongoing serial, always conjuring up a closing cliffhanger, the other children hanging off his every word. Jack played up to them — they had to wait until the following night to hear the next thrilling instalment.