Tell it to The Dog

by Robert Power

  ‘Snakes,’ she said, as I suggested the only thing to do was to leave the path, aim for the other side of the valley in the hope of finding the cave where we were to spend the night.

  The others had lit a fire and after a while we spotted it and headed for the distant glow.

  All ended well and we had a story to tell, though I kept quiet about the snake that had flopped at my feet as I parted the grass in front of us. But that should have been the least of our concerns.

  Next day, exhausted, sunburnt, we headed out of the park. At the lodge-cum-shack, when we told the warden of our exploits, he sniggered and smiled.

  ‘Wild animals?’ he said. ‘There are only a few dozen lions and leopards and rhinos. But once you go off the track there are a million or so unexploded landmines from the war!’

  CIRCUMAMBULATING THE JOKHANG TEMPLE

  Some of the pilgrims will have travelled vast distances to Lhasa for a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Jokhang Temple. The hardiest will have walked. The most fervent of all will have prostrated themselves, body length after body length, over whatever terrain presented itself. These individuals arrive in Lhasa dirtied and bruised, their devotion apparent to everyone. The final leg of the journey is to circumnavigate the temple. Every day, dawn until dusk and on into the night, Tibetan Buddhists go round and round the temple, prayer wheels aspinning, chanting and praying. Always clockwise. In time-honoured fashion. Clockwise. Why then, although the answer is not hard to surmise, do the impeccably uniformed units of Chinese policemen insist on marching against the throng? Anticlockwise. Always anticlockwise.

  ACTS

  Smoking cigarettes. Wearing masks. Catching a ball. Throwing a ball. Riding a bike. Riding a bike backwards. Standing on their heads. Standing on each other’s shoulders. Prancing around with a colourful parasol. Chattering as if an arguing husband and wife. Each Sunday, Monas Park in Jakarta is awash with performing monkeys, their owners-cum-trainers vying for rupiah notes from the families and couples promenading around the monument.

  Jemaah and Basyir had travelled two hours on the bus to get to the park. They were new to the scene, but were excited at the act they had been perfecting. The other owners looked on at the two boys with a mix of contempt and suspicion.

  ‘Something new,’ shouted Basyir confidently, as Jemaah placed the tiny helmet on the monkey’s head and settled him on the wooden motorbike. The monkey rode off, then threw himself lifeless to the ground.

  ‘Traffic accident,’ yelled Jemaah, ‘roll up for the traffic accident.’

  BEIJING DOG

  Maybe it was the torrential rain, the tail end of the typhoon that lashed the eastern seaboard of China that unnerved the dog. It certainly looked disoriented when I first spotted it as I left my hotel on Shanghai Street. It was middle-sized, a crossbreed of sorts, and it had a man’s belt around its neck for a collar. The sun had broken out and the streets were full.

  I’d only recently got a dog myself and for the first time in my life understood the bond. So I was drawn to the dog and its plight. I followed it as it weaved its way through the crowds. It stopped every fifty yards or so, looking around in the hope of recognising some place, some person. Then it would take off again, faster than my walking pace. It crossed busy intersections, narrowly missing being hit, its tongue flapping from side to side. It seemed tired and distraught. I worried for it. Twice I caught up with it, but both times it scurried away as I approached. Once it sat down under the shade of a tree. I poured some water from my bottle into my leather bushman’s hat, but it recoiled at the offer, making its way towards the roadside.

  A few of the passers-by were also noticing the dog, especially when it chose to sit down in the taxi lane next to the kerb. One cab after another, plus bicycles and motorbikes, swerved past it as it lay on the cool, shadowed tarmac. It would surely be hit sooner or later. So I circled behind it, reckoning that it would either leap up and into the six lanes of traffic or else head back to the footpath. Staying where it sat was a death sentence in the offing. I walked slowly, purposefully, then shooed it from behind. The dog stood up, exhausted as it was, and walked to the kerb. Then, just before stepping onto the footpath, it stopped in its tracks and followed a swish black limousine that had indicated right. I heard a barrier open and the dog, my dog, trotted into the safety of the gated residential compound. I was certain it did not belong there, but as the gate closed behind it I felt confident that someone would look after it and see it came to no harm.

  Earlier in the day I’d attended a function at the embassy where the ambassador had applauded our work in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the impact it had made on the health and wellbeing of the population. As I walked back to the hotel I was filled with such a great sense of satisfaction with my day, the day in Beijing when I guided a stray and discombobulated dog from danger.

  GATE HANDLE

  The outreach workers have just returned to the office from their shift in Batang, on the outskirts of Jakarta. They report concern around the private doctors selling buprenorphine tablets to the heroin users.

  ‘They’re evil,’ says Nurlan, an ex-user who now dedicates her time to helping those who have such great trouble helping themselves. ‘The only thing these doctors care about is making money for themselves. They laugh at me when I challenge them.’

  I listen on as the others talk about the people they’ve met this evening, the desperation, the hopelessness. Deddy puts his hand up to speak.

  ‘When I gave Illi a pack of needles and condoms, she said why should I worry about getting sick, to die, when I have nothing to lose? If there’s only one needle and I have a choice of getting high or not, what do you expect? Of course I’ll use it with someone else.’

  ‘That’s why we have to keep working. Make sure they have enough needles. Enough condoms,’ replies Nurlan, earnestly, enthusiastically. ‘To fix this thing.’

  And with those words my mind wanders thousands of kilometres south to the gate in the fence of my front garden. The handyman had bungled the job and, as I left for the airport last week, I noticed it wasn’t closing properly. As Dr Widhiarto, the clinician from the local puskesmas, recounts the dangers of septicaemia and other injecting-related injuries, with the eager faces of the outreach workers sucking up the knowledge, it is the creaking gate and the malfunctioning handle that inveigle their way into my mind, to niggle and to gnaw.

  BASUCO IN BOGOTÁ

  You thought it was your idea. You, the addiction psychiatrist with academic pretentions. We’d been together a week in Bogotá, brought here by the British Council to assess the potential of La Casa for government funding. Professor Ronaldo Perez had set up his program two years ago on a shoestring, opening up the old house as a refuge for the street kids: somewhere to wash, somewhere to rest, somewhere to be safe, maybe even somewhere to learn about being a child. It was he who told you about basuco. Smokable cocaine (before crack, before ice). He said it was made from the scraps left over from the coke processing, mixed with sulphuric acid and brick dust, then rolled with tobacco. The street kids couldn’t get enough of it. Some bragged they smoked two hundred a day. Stealing wheels from cars, pimping, anything to get the money together. These wizened little ten-year-olds, wheezing and coughing like veterans in a military hospice.

  And you thought it was your idea when you asked me, would I try it? Smoke it. Describe it to you. For research purposes. Was it really the sharpest high? The deepest low? Would nothing else do from that moment on, from that singular experience? Would you kill for it?

  And you thought it was your idea? … as I reached out, lit it, eagerly inhaled. Waited.

  URALMASH

  There was never a void. The space was filled as soon as it appeared. The Communist Party elite lost power and the mafiosi found it. In Ekaterinburg (birth of Yeltsin; death of the Romanovs) the Uralmash took over. They ran the minerals from the mountains and the heroin trade in the city. They had no time for the bleeding hearts from the West and their harm reducti
on for drug users. Interfering with the Russian order of things. So they set up their own community response, to show how much they cared about the blight of drug use, how they would protect the innocents who were robbed in the street, in their homes. City Without Drugs, it was called. Any dealers who weren’t in their pay paid dearly and publicly. They’d catch them and tie them to trees at night, leaving them to sit out the minus-thirty degree frosts. Cold turkey indeed. That’s what our Russian public wants to see and we get to stay in control. No namby-pamby give-them-needlesand-teach-them-to-behave. No such chance to infect our sons and daughters. Get to the heart of this HIV disease and rip it right out.

  On the outskirts of town stands the Uralmash cemetery with tombs to the fallen soldiers, beautifully crafted headstones and mausoleums with life-size imprints of the dearly departed. Look carefully and you can see a car-key fob in the hands of the dead: BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, Alfa Romeo, depending on rank and status. Heroes one and all. Defenders of the poor, torturers of the recalcitrant. No space for bleeding-heart liberals. This is Russia. This is now.

  MISS BALI

  As if there wasn’t enough trouble already without infighting. Each had faced many a battle to come to be the woman she was destined to be. But yes, I could see their point straight away. She was truly gorgeous, standing there on the little bridge that led to the few shacks where the waria lived together. A cinematographer could not have set the scene more sweetly, nor a director have placed her in such exquisite light. We had been driving all day north from Denpasar and the night had set in. We parked the car on the other side of the river and walked towards the bridge and our designated meeting spot. Sophie was there, leaning over the rail of the bridge, looking down to the water. Her slick black hair shone in the full moonlight. She turned, clearly surprised to see us. Her beauty and grace were breathtaking, in much the same way as anyone described coming across the youthful Marilyn Monroe. But this was Asia and not Hollywood and these transsexual women were preparing for the dangers of their night’s work on Sangaraja’s main traffic route. There’d be drunks to contend with, roughhouse truck drivers and others who believed the waria were disposable, freaks of nature, outcasts with no rights. Objects to be bought and used as the buyer desired.

  The trouble was that Sophie was not from the island. Six months ago she had been exiled from her village in Sumatra for being who she had become and for how she supported herself. When she arrived in Seminyak in the south of Bali, a kindly taxi driver told her about the women in Sangaraja. So she took the bus to the coast and they welcomed her as one of their own. The group had only just found this place to settle after being pushed from one village to the next. They needed to stick together and to look out for each other. In their tiny huts they were safe, playing with each other’s hair, giggling and cuddling. But Sophie sat alone on the small decking at the front of the huts. I left the others inside and went out to be with her. Her skin shone like porcelain; her oval-shaped eyes were mesmerising.

  ‘I will have to leave here,’ she said sadly. ‘Waria from other parts of Bali have told these women that I must be made to go.’

  Earlier that month Sophie had entered the Miss Bali competition. The judges were community leaders, expats, local businessmen. It was an event designed for the women to come out from the shadows, to break down stigma, to dress up, to have fun. Her beauty and radiance shone out. She was bound to win and she did. She showed me a photo of her smiling on the podium, the sash being placed around her by the outgoing queen. But then word got around that she was not from Bali. That it wasn’t fair. That she cheated. That she came here deliberately to win the prize.

  ‘But I didn’t,’ she said, with that Monroe mix of innocence and aloofness. And she looked at me, held my glance, touched my hand. Asking for something. Pleading for something, this Miss Bali, marooned with no island to call her own.

  MANILA

  ‘Don’t take the backstreets.’

  So I can’t say I wasn’t warned. But after a day in the sterile, fluorescent-lit surroundings of the WHO compound, the vibrancy, the random smells and sounds, the hustle and bustle of the side streets of Manila hold such an allure. I’ve spent an hour or two in one of the many small cafes thereabouts, playing chess with a grizzled old man with a withered arm. We shared little language in common, but the pieces on the board, the familiar black and white squares, provided a common bond and understanding.

  On leaving the cafe, my mind still dizzy with the endgame, I’m unaware of the woman and her child until she’s upon me.

  ‘Mister, food for my baby,’ she says, thrusting the baby forward, repeating her request.

  ‘Dollar for food, please, please.’

  So I reach into the breast pocket of my shirt and pull out some notes that I hand to her. She grabs them from me, turns and rushes off. The street is poorly lit, but I notice the two men on the next corner. Something about the way they stand tells me to be wary.

  It’s two hours later, back in the sanctuary of my hotel room. A bit bruised, a bit battered. The fan spins unrhythmically above my head, which in its turn whirls through the night’s events. Knight takes bishop. The man stepping out of the shadows. Castled too early? Pushing the cardboard in my face, shouting ‘homeless’, blocking my view. The fork with the queen and the rook. Then another man appears, his hand in my shirt pocket, then the hole in the road, the trap. Like the chess game in the cafe. And he pushes me down, the depth and the height of a man. Far enough to fall onto the broken metal pipe and the soft red mud.

  Next morning, awake just before dawn, my body sore, my mind still spinning. I decide a walk in the park close to the hotel will be calming. When I enter the gates the first light is kissing the treetops. In this hugely busy city, in this moment, there’s a quality of tranquillity to the park. I’m alone except for a man on the ridge. As I look towards him through a haze of sea mist and pollution he appears to be walking a large dog on a lead. I don’t want to pay him or anyone, or anything else, any heed. I want some peace to reacquaint myself with something tranquil, something healing. The craziness, headiness, of last evening, chess, robbers in the shadows, linger still and need a remedy.

  The sky overhead is tinged with pinks and reds; the air is yet to be too stifling and a whisper of a breeze caresses my skin. I stretch my neck to breathe it all in. Close my eyes to focus inwards. Some moments pass. Still. Peaceable. Then, abruptly, my meditation is disturbed by a tap on my shoulder. When I turn and open my eyes I am confronted by a man, dirty and bedraggled, palm outstretched. He tugs on the rope and the figure that appears from behind him is not a dog but a man. He is in rags. His hairless, earless head is dripping from its wounds as if the skin on his skull has been burnt afresh by the rising sun. His master pulls him forward, to display him to me, to show him in all his misery. His eyes stare wildly, starkly in their lidless sockets. They neither plead nor implore, but they hold my attention, telling me something about this place, this time, and something of the vast distance between us.

  A NIGHT AT THE EMBASSY

  I promised the Sober Psychiatrist that I wouldn’t drink. He’s been clean for ten years and can spot the danger signs. Not that much signage is required: we’ve been working together for two years now and he’s seen me in action in enough bars and at enough functions to require no further verification to back his intuition.

  ‘This is a big night,’ said the Sober Psychiatrist (SP for short) as the car pulled in to the embassy compound, ‘the mayor of Bogotá will be at the dinner and we’re hoping to get him to cofund the work with the street kids.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be mineral water for me, Ryan,’ said I. (Of course, I never called him SP to his face.)

  Next morning I come to on the floor of my hotel room. I’m fully dressed. My cheek feels like it’s cemented to the carpet and my head refuses to move (in any direction). Focusing along the line of the floor, I see an empty whisky bottle (from the minibar), a shoe (from my foot) and, very close to my face, a mirror smear
ed with cocaine (from the 100 per cent pure gram I was holding back for a special night).

  Then the events of the evening at the British Embassy come back to me as shards of shattered glass: reaching for a tumbler of mineral water, but then taking a gin and tonic … a riotous conversation with the ambassador’s wife about cheddar cheese and Marmite … sitting with the ambassador, smoking cigars and drinking port … then, and this is the incident that stands out above all the others, a misty recollection of staggering across the room to where the mayor of Bogotá sat on a sofa with one of his bodyguards, me swaying uneasily from side to side, I ask: ‘Mayor Guzman, what’s in the story of you setting up your own kidnap?’ (Which, by all accounts, he had done as part of his electioneering campaign for the country’s presidency. Not only that, but the judge who was ‘kidnapped’ with him was killed, whereas the heroic mayor was delivered, several days later and unharmed, to a police roadblock on the outskirts of the city.)

  As I ponder the horrible repercussions of the night, the sun trickling through the blinds, the phone on the table begins to ring. It must be the SP. I extend my arm, stretching my fingers in a vain attempt to uncradle the phone. But it rings on and that, in itself, is enough.

  CROATIA

  It was after the Balkan war, that maelstrom of ethnic madness. The young doctor was driving due south from Zagreb. In the passenger seat was his new girlfriend, who was visiting from London. The UN offices had remained within the military compound, so they’d decided to get away to the coast for a few days and were heading to Split. The long north–south road was the main thoroughfare through the country, the one the armies had marched up and down, destroying villages and farmland along the way. On either side of the road were signs of the mayhem that had ensued: crumpled buildings, burnt-out fields, treeless meadows.