Owen and Eleanor Make Things Up

by H. M. Bouwman

  Aimee and I have known of each other since she was around Kiama. She’s six years younger than me, and before I got to really know her, conversations were limited to ‘hi’ and ‘bye’. Then we met at a house party and started talking more, hanging out more. I was twenty-eight and she was in her early twenties. She was just about to move to Bondi, and I was working for Billabong, so I was all over the joint anyway, and we’d spend a bit of time together in Sydney as well as Kiama.

  In 2001 I bought a house in Kiama and we talked about her moving south, even though she was working for a shipping magazine in Sydney. In the end, she decided to move down and look for a local job because she was spending all her time going back and forth, from my place to hers.

  Aimee’s a real Aussie beach girl. She likes sunbaking, going for a quick dip, then sunbaking again. We’d spend a lot of time on the beach. Well, she would; I’d be surfing. (I can’t lie on a beach. I need to be doing something in the waves.) Then we’d go out at night.

  Aimee found a job at one of the local surf shops, and I began thinking about my future. The guys at Billabong wanted me to go to Sydney, and there was also talk of me going to Queensland to take on a different role in the company. But I was really happy with Aimee. It would be great to bring up a family in Kiama, so I started considering alternatives in the surf industry, something I could do to stay local and look after the family.

  That’s when I had the idea to have my own shop – I would work hard and Aimee would be able to bring our kids up. We had spoken about it, and I thought, Well, maybe one day.

  Then I went to see a local guy who had a chain of stores in the region. I used to work for him years ago, and we had a really good relationship. I asked, ‘Would you ever consider selling the Kiama store?’ I was thinking my plan could be hatched in a few years’ time, so I could get used to the idea, but he had a deal on the table for me the following day.

  Holy shit! I knew at the time that surfing was booming. I was working within the industry with another fifty retailers, so I knew the numbers.

  Aimee and I married in 2004, and the shop idea rumbled on for the next twelve months. We eventually decided to do it and took over the shop in March 2005. Then in 2007 Bowie was born, so it all happened quickly.

  A lot went on in those first few years. Life was great. The business was going well, I had started the family I’d always dreamed of, and I was going on a surf trip with my mates, like I’d done heaps of times. I was thinking, This is the best time of my life.

  And then it swivelled a hundred and eighty degrees, and everything fell apart.

  I felt myself getting really angry. The lights were still appearing, flashing by more and more frequently. We must be getting closer. I asked Michael again and he said, ‘Not long.’

  ‘Fuck, you’ve been telling me that. Where the fuck are we?’

  He just looked down at me and repeated, ‘Not long. Not long.’

  My hope was disappearing. I didn’t even know where they were taking me anymore.

  We drove on a bit longer, then we hit a tunnel and there were heaps of lights. I’d been in darkness for so long that I felt like we must have hit some sort of civilisation.

  I turned to Michael and asked, ‘Is this it? Is this it?’

  And he replied with a smile, ‘Yep. This is it.’

  We exited out of the tunnel and, with more and more lights appearing, my hope was coming back. ‘We must be nearly here.’

  Michael kept saying, ‘This is it. This is it.’

  But this continued for another hour or so.

  We began stopping more frequently, and I could hear more horns and other noises, so we were obviously in the city. By then I’d given up asking Michael if we were close, sick of getting the same answer. Then all of a sudden we came to a complete stop and the engine switched off.

  ‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘Is this fucking it?’ I just wanted the truth.

  ‘Yep. Yep. This is it. We’re here.’

  So I let myself go: I’m going to be rescued! But I’d learned by then that whatever could go wrong would go wrong.

  Everyone jumped out of the van and left me in there, shutting the door behind. All I could see was a bit out of the small windows in the rear doors, and I thought, Fuck! Just leave the door open. At least let me see something.

  I was lying there for ten, fifteen minutes, and I could hear all this talking outside, but it was really muffled. I felt relieved but still wary, wondering what would come next.

  The door opened and Michael climbed back into the van. ‘We’ve made it. We’re at the airport. Look – we’ll show you.’

  The driver turned the van around so the open side door faced the airport. Michael pointed and said, ‘There’s your plane.’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ I said. It was a beautiful jet, with lights on inside, like something you see in the movies – a VIP jet.

  My joy lasted a few seconds, before I sensed that something was wrong. I looked around. All I could see was a vast, empty car park and this lone jet sitting on the tarmac … and nothing else. The place was deserted.

  Michael looked down at me and sighed. ‘We’ve got a problem.’

  ‘What’s the fucking problem?’

  ‘We’re in the car park, but …’

  ‘But? BUT?’

  ‘The medical team isn’t here. They’ve gone out looking for us.’ And I just threw everything out: You know what? This is fucking ridiculous! I’ve had so much hope that this is it, and then it’s not. What more can I do? I’ve tried to be calm, I’ve tried to keep positive, I’ve done everything you want of me, Jesus, you piece of shit. Why is this happening to me? You’ve just confirmed my journey from agnostic to atheist, you kook!

  I finally calmed down enough to ask Michael, ‘What do we do? What happens now?’ And he replied, ‘Well, we’ve got to wait.’

  ‘You fucking serious? We’re here!’ The driver got back in the van but they kept the door open. ‘What the fuck’s going on? What’s happening?’

  I snapped back to reality: ‘Just get me to the fucking plane. Carry me to the plane.’

  But Michael shook his head. ‘We can’t do that. We’ve got to wait until the medical team returns. They won’t let you on board unless they’re accompanying you. And anyway, the airport’s closed.’

  I struggled to grasp what he was telling me. ‘What? The airport’s CLOSED?’

  ‘Yep. The airport’s closed. Everyone’s been expecting you but, because we’ve been hours late, maybe they’ve given up hope. Or maybe they decided to shut the airport so that all the staff could go home. For whatever reason, it’s shut.’

  I kept thinking how lucky I’ve been to live in a First World country. I’d never considered that this could happen. This whole dilemma was bouncing around in my head and, being the problem solver, I was trying to find solutions.

  ‘Well, just carry me there.’

  ‘But we can’t get through the gates.’

  ‘Well, cut the fucking fence then!’

  ‘No, no, we can’t do that.’

  I was forgetting we were in Indonesia where the sentence for something like that would probably be life in prison, regardless of whether I was injured or not. Every solution I came up with, based on what little I could see, Michael would knock back: ‘Nuh. Look, we’ve got to wait. We’re trying to get in contact with the medical team now.’

  ‘How are you trying to get in contact? Your phone doesn’t work; we’ve got nothing.’

  But apparently the drivers of the van, being locals, had found someone near the car park and borrowed a phone. They were a couple of villagers themselves, so they weren’t prepared for this kind of situation, but they were trying to call any sort of emergency number they could find.

  I’ve always been told, right from when I was a kid, that if you get lost you should stay where you are so people can find you. If two people look for each other at the same time, the probability of them meeting up drops dramatically. Why would they go searching for us if
they didn’t know where the fuck we were? In retrospect, maybe they did know where we were. Maybe the red and blue lights in the jungle had been the local police? I just had to lay there and wait.

  I really wanted to go to sleep. It’d been about eighteen hours since the accident, and I’d had no food, no drink and no pain relief (even though I wasn’t really in any pain, as far as I could tell).

  I was probably more tired from thinking about what I needed to do to survive and how to get help, and my mind was exhausted from being on the verge of really losing it.

  I kept staring out at the lone plane sitting on the tarmac, gleaming. I realised there wasn’t much more I could do other than keep as calm as possible. I was pissed off. Why can’t people just tell the truth? I wasn’t really talking to Michael.

  We were sitting there for about an hour and a half when a sweep of headlights appeared and a vehicle pulled right up next to us. Michael jumped out, and I could hear him talking in English.

  Could this be it? I asked myself. Nuh. Nuh. I was sitting on the glass-half-empty line at that point, protecting myself from getting my hopes up. I could hear more voices, the sound of things being removed from the other vehicle, and then footsteps.

  These guys appeared in the doorway of the van, and they looked professional – at least not dressed in a t-shirt and shorts like the drivers and everyone else I’d seen that day. They looked in and said in heavily accented English, ‘Mr Longbottom? We’ve been looking for you.’

  And I threw back, ‘Well, it’s about fucking time.’

  They jumped into the van with their medical supplies, some of the kit sporting a red cross. I was thinking, This just can’t be … this can’t be … FINALLY! And then another guy came rushing in with a proper spine board. One of them spoke pretty good English, and he went through the same assessment procedure that the French doctors had done back on the boat a million years ago. ‘What can you feel? What can you move?’

  I was in a little bubble of relief, drifting in a fog, not really registering what he was saying. It was almost like a rush of endorphins had been released, because medical help had finally arrived. Even though Michael was a doctor, he hadn’t done anything medical. Yes, he’d flown a helicopter, fucked off into the jungle and tried unsuccessfully to hold me still in a van. He didn’t seem like a doctor to me, more like a person trying to help me out.

  After a minute or so my mind clicked back into gear, but because the injury was so recent I couldn’t really tell what I could or couldn’t feel. It was like a phantom limb sensation – I kept thinking I could feel something, but I wasn’t really sure.

  The doctor went through his checklist and I realised quickly the assessment wasn’t good, so I said, ‘Look, I think I’m fucked.’

  He turned towards me as he was taking equipment out of his kit, then he reached back and grabbed an oxygen mask. My breathing must have been irregular. He put the mask on me and it calmed me a bit. Then he ran out of the van, and I could hear him talking in another language to some of the other guys. I couldn’t tell if he was talking fast out of urgency or if it was just the change in language.

  He came back and said, ‘Right. We’re here now, the plane’s here, but we’ve got to get the airport open.’

  ‘What?’ I whispered, and he leaned in to hear me through the mask. ‘Surely there’s someone with a key to the gate who can let us in. Everything’s there, the plane … We can just get in and go.’

  ‘No. This is Indonesia. We’ve still got to get the jet cleared to leave, so we need the authorities to open the airport to get us all out of here.’

  Oh, for fuck’s sake … But at least I had a doctor there, so I could deal with it. I lay there and tried to compose myself. Again, I went back to my calm space: visualising my family, remembering what it felt like when I was surfing on my own. I drifted in and out.

  After a while the doctor came back to tell me that staff were arriving at the airport. So I got a bit more hopeful, until the doctor asked, ‘Where’s your passport?’

  ‘WHAT?’

  I hadn’t touched anything for twenty hours – I had no idea. Then I remembered Sparkesy talking about packing a bag for me. ‘It’s in my bag.’

  ‘You don’t have a bag with you.’

  Michael was the only other person around who had been there when I was loaded into the helicopter, but he was outside the van. He would never have heard me if I’d tried to shout.

  ‘Well then, I don’t have a passport. It must be on the boat … I was surfing … I don’t need a passport to surf … I just need to get out of here.’

  ‘You don’t have a passport?’

  The doctor went out and Michael came in. He started fiddling with my leg.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  Then I remembered back to when I’d first been lifted out of the helicopter. I was lying in the jungle, and Michael had fiddled with my leg in the same way then. I hadn’t taken too much notice of it at the time.

  Most board shorts have a pocket on them, and he undid the pocket, pulled out my passport and held it up to my face with a grin.

  ‘Oh, thank fucking God,’ I said. ‘At last, something right’s happened.’ I realised Michael must have put my passport in my pocket when he decided to leave and find the van, knowing that my bag would probably disappear.

  The next job was to roll me over and slide the spine board under me, which they did quite easily. One of the medics held up the broken surfboard that had been my support for the last eighteen hours and asked me, ‘What do you want to do with this? Do you want to keep it?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’ve got lots of surfboards. Just chuck it.’

  He threw it out into the car park. I’ve always had fluoro-painted surfboards, and this one was fluoro yellow, fading into white. It was pitch-black outside, and I looked at the half-board skidding across the car park with the lights hitting it and thought to myself, Wow. That looks really good. Maybe I should’ve kept it!

  The medics took my passport and I stayed in the van with the doctor monitoring me while the rest of the team went to the airport terminal to sort the logistics out.

  I saw some lights turning on, and I heard vehicles. I didn’t actually have to go through immigration, but the whole process took an hour, with people coming out to see me, asking me a few questions, doing the paperwork through the van doors.

  The medics put the passport back in my pocket and picked me up on the spine board with a stretcher. The guys in the van said goodbye, all smiles, and then took off the same way they had when I was their fragile passenger – at a hundred miles an hour – and I had a giggle to myself.

  As the plane came closer, all I could think was, What a cool-looking plane! They carried me up the stairs, into the aircraft and onto a bed, and the pilot appeared. He looked like Colonel Sanders. He had exactly the same hair, the same goatee, but all dark brown. Oh, awesome – the Colonel is here!

  Then he started talking, and he had an Australian accent. ‘We got you now, buddy. You’re all safe. We’ll get you to Singapore super-quick …’ And I felt such relief – his accent reminded me of home.

  They put in an IV, and once I heard the Colonel say, ‘You can relax now,’ I finally let go of the day and drifted off.

  9

  Under the knife in Singapore

  The next thing I remembered was waking up in a hospital.

  It felt like a movie, just a series of images flashing on and off. A doctor was shining a light into my eyes and performing other medical examinations. People floated in space, appearing and disappearing. None of the staff was speaking English. People were poking and prodding me again, but this time I knew I was in a hospital, so I felt pretty safe.

  I still couldn’t talk, so although I tried to ask what was going on, no-one really responded. It was like I wasn’t there. Never having needed hospital treatment before, other than stitches, I wanted to shout, ‘C’mon, just make me better! Can’t you give me a pill or something?�
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  I knew that I’d broken my neck, but couldn’t they put it in plaster and send me home? Didn’t they have a fibreglass cast, so I could go under water, still surf?

  I was at that level of awareness of my situation, thinking, I’ll be right. I just need time. I didn’t know that my relatives had already been informed.

  The flashes kept coming, and it all felt quite frenetic, but that was probably because I kept drifting in and out of consciousness. I really don’t know how long this lasted for, not knowing what was real and what wasn’t.

  Among all the other initial medical tests they had to put me through, I was X-rayed. God knows how long that went on for. Finally, they admitted me into a room. As I lay there alone, I glimpsed new things, like the machines surrounding me.

  I don’t know if a nurse came and told me that my brother-in-law, Matthew, was coming to see me, because at that time my sister, Kelly, and Matthew were living in Singapore, but I remember lying in bed and for some reason expecting someone to be there. I was in ICU, and suddenly I saw his figure at the doorway.

  ‘Ah, Matthew!’ I said. I got a burst of excitement seeing the first familiar face since the boat, but everything was still very foggy. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing or thinking straight. He stood by, not knowing what to do. He’s a nervy sort of character. ‘Come in, mate!’ He didn’t move; he probably couldn’t hear me. ‘Come in, Matthew, come in!’ I hadn’t heard any English-speaking people since I had arrived in Singapore, so I really wanted to have a talk.

  Matthew came in and stayed for a while, and that’s when he told me that Mum, Dad and Aimee were on their way to Singapore.

  Aw, fucken hell. Everyone knows. Why are they coming over here? All I’ve done is break my neck. My plan to get out of there before anyone realised I was injured was ruined. I must have drifted off again, and Matthew left soon after.