by Dan Smith
None of the men in the other beds was talking. They either slept or sat and stared. The man beside me, the one with the bandaged face, caught my eye as I looked around the room, and he smiled, nodding his head once. ‘Salamat siang.’
I processed the words, remembering them from the phrase book I’d bought before leaving England just a day or two ago. I waited for them to digest, turned the sounds into written words inside my mind, searched for the translation as I remembered it from the pages of the book. Once that was done, I returned the words, pronouncing them as best as I knew how.
‘Salamat siang,’ I replied. Good afternoon. A polite formality, but contact was made.
The man smiled at me again, ‘Ah, salamat siang,’ he said again, giving me a thumbs up before launching into another sentence, which, to me, was nothing more than a jumbled collection of sounds.
The brown stain in the centre of his bandage was looking more and more like a strange and sinister eye, so I tried to concentrate on his good one.
I held up my hands. ‘Saya … tidak … bisa … bicara … bahasa … Indonesia,’ I said with my best accent, telling him I couldn’t speak his language.
He stopped talking and nodded knowingly. ‘Baik, baik.’
After that we just looked at each other, smiling and nodding, sharing the common experience of being strapped beneath tight sheets with bandages wrapped around a part of our body.
Then he had a thought. He leaned across and offered me his hand. ‘Muklas,’ he said. ‘I Muklas.’
I took his hand, surprised at his limp grip. ‘Alex,’ I told him. ‘Saya Alex.’
Once again we fell into an awkward state of smiling and nodding before his face lit up again as if he’d come to a sudden and significant conclusion. He took a hand of small bananas from his bedside table and ripped one from the bunch. He passed it to me saying, ‘Pisang. Pisang tuju. Ba-na-na.’
I took it from him. ‘Terima kasi’ – thank you – words I’d committed to heart – and opened it immediately, my stomach grabbing for the food. It occurred to me at that precise moment, though, that I didn’t know where I was, nor how long I had been there.
It was a strange realisation that dropped into me like a weight, especially when I remembered the fate of my rucksack. I stopped, with the banana touching my lips, and I put my free hand to my waist where my money-belt had been.
Gone.
I dropped the fruit on the sheets and turned to check the table beside my bed. I leaned down to open the small door, feeling the blood racing to my head where it pumped and pounded, beating in my ears. The cupboard behind the door was empty. The weight that had dropped into my stomach began to mutate. It was no longer just a weight, it was now a living thing, which was expanding and rising inside me, threatening to cause panic in every cell of my body.
The man beside me was speaking again but his voice sounded different as my breathing quickened. I had lost everything that gave me any identity. I had lost myself. Everything.
I wrestled with the constricting sheets and swung my legs from the bed. My ankles skinny and pale, dangling from the mattress as I lowered my feet onto the floor. The glossy paint covering the concrete was cold under my soles as I pushed myself up to stand. I crossed the ward as quickly as I was able to, my head numb and the sickness returning to my stomach. I didn’t know where I was going or what I would do, but I needed to do something. My clothes had been taken from me, somebody must have undressed me, put the gown over me, and that meant someone must know where my belongings were. My money and my passport. Without them I was nobody.
I leaned on the swinging doors, pushed my way into the corridor and stopped. I put out a hand, leaning against the wall for support, and looked around. One side of the long hallway was lined with beds and trolleys, many of them old and broken, all of them full. Men and women, some with limbs missing, blood draining from their bodies as ill-equipped doctors and nurses struggled to help them. The other wall of the corridor provided a place to lean on for yet more patients. They were sitting in the stifling heat, no fans above their heads to break the air.
I stayed where I was, taking it all in, the sounds and the smells and the sights overloading my mind. I put my free hand over my eyes, my head swimming, wondering where I was and what I was going to do. When I took it away again, a middleaged man in a long white coat was standing before me. He put his hand on my shoulder and spoke, but his words meant nothing. I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand.’
He tried to look sympathetic, nodding, still talking, but the look in his eyes was unfamiliar. His expressions were not like those I was used to. I tried to move away from him, but he smiled, taking my arm.
‘No.’ I snatched away. ‘No. I need to … I need to …’ I needed my life back. I needed to know where I was, but I didn’t know how to ask him and he didn’t know how to tell me.
Once again he reached out and took my arm, a reassuring look that I recognised.
‘No.’ I pulled away again, but with less conviction this time. He was trying to help. So I held up my hand and nodded, letting him take me and lead me back into the ward. He helped me to my bed and waited until I was beneath my sheets before he held out both hands, palms towards me.
‘You want me to stay?’ I asked him. ‘Wait here, is that it? You want me to wait here?’
He backed away, still keeping his hands up, making small movements with them, reinforcing the idea that he wanted me to wait.
So I waited.
For how long, I don’t know. From time to time I glanced at my wrist, forgetting that my watch had been taken from me on the road. So I waited a while longer, and a while longer still, staring at the door, wondering when the doctor was going to return, hoping he would bring my identity with him.
I ignored Muklas, the man in the bed beside mine. I avoided any contact with him, keeping all my attention on the swinging door.
When the doctor returned, he was not alone. This time he was accompanied by the angel I had seen on the road. But of course, she wasn’t an angel. She was quite real, and she brought with her a breath of fresh air, a relief and a beauty that made her the next best thing to an angel.
3
Everything around me was alien. I knew little of the language and the customs. These were things I had intended to experience first-hand, to soak up and infuse into my consciousness. I came here hoping that I would grow and find myself in the way I’d heard other travellers speak of. I’d intended to broaden my horizons, unsuspecting of how dark those horizons were going to be. If I had known that my journey was to begin and end in death, perhaps I would never have stepped foot from my empty home.
I imagined I’d return from my travels a different person. More rounded and experienced. A bigger person. I envisioned an improved me; someone who would somehow stand out from others because I carried a knowing and accomplished air, but so far I had reached no further than an hour or so beyond my first foreign airport. My intentions had been derailed by a manic driver and an incredible road system where the only law was the unwritten nasib saja. Only fate. A law that allowed overtaking on blind corners because if it was your time to go, it was your time to go and there was nothing anybody could do about it. When your time was up, Allah would take you.
So, instead of the worldly-wise individual I was hoping to become, I’d been obstructed at my first attempt. I was left as myself. An inexperienced, self-conscious individual who’d had just enough confidence to buy a ticket and tell the handful of people he knew that he intended to travel. I’d even managed to surprise myself by boarding the plane in England and making it all the way across the world.
That’s why she was a godsend. She wasn’t a familiar face, but at the same time she was a familiar face. She had the kind of face I was accustomed to seeing. She looked more like me. I knew, even before she opened her mouth, that she would speak the same language as I did.
She had an open and relaxed manner about her, not a trace of affectation or self-consciousness. A
n air that suggested overwhelming confidence in herself. She came in without much more than a glance around the room, unperturbed by her surroundings.
‘How ya feeling?’ she asked, putting down her bag and sitting on the bed, turning towards me, her body close to my waist.
‘You know what happened to my stuff ?’ I asked.
‘Sure.’ She lifted her bag onto her lap and took out my most precious belonging. ‘Managed to save it for you,’ she said. ‘I was there when they took your kit off, got you all cleaned up.’ Her eyes slipped from mine, an unwitting glance along my body. ‘The clothes, they’re gone, but this …’ She handed me the belt that I’d kept hidden under my shirt, and I immediately opened the pockets, relieved to see everything still inside. Cash, cards, passport.
‘I used some of the cash,’ she said, provoking no reaction from me. I was just happy to see the essentials were still present. I was me again.
‘It was the only way to get you a bed,’ she went on. ‘Money does a lot of talking here, you’ll learn that quick enough. You can have anything you want, long as you got the cash to pay for it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, zipping the pocket, and putting the belt on top of the sheet, gripping one end of it in a tight fist.
‘Quite a fuckin’ bump we had there, wasn’t it?’ If she’d been disturbed by the experience, she didn’t show it. She just smiled, reached up to deal with a stray hair that had crept round to hang over her forehead and across her right eye. It was fair but not platinum; a very light golden-brown, sun-kissed, waved and touching her shoulders. Like her clear brown skin, it had seen sunshine and felt fresh air. Beside hers, my own skin was pale, as if I’d been hiding from the world, holed up in a sunless place.
I nodded. ‘Yeah. Quite a bump.’ A bump that had separated people into individual parts. A bump that had left a stain of blood and viscera in its wake. She must have seen the expression on my face, or perhaps she felt the darkness of my thoughts, because she put a hand on mine.
‘Don’t think about it,’ she said. ‘You’ll get used to it. Happens all the time round here.’
I looked down at her hand. Her brown skin on my pale skin. Like the old woman at the crash, only this girl’s fingers were slender and strong, the knuckles not protruding like my own. Her short nails decorated with green varnish, a silver ring on her thumb. Blonde downy hairs on her forearms, bleached by the sun and standing out against her tan. She squeezed my hand in a familiar way. As if we knew each other.
‘You were on the bus, too?’ I asked, already feeling renewed. She had returned my identity and given me contact with the world.
‘One of the lucky ones, I guess. Not much more than a few scrapes.’ She pulled up the skirt of her dress to show me her right thigh, the skin broken. A raw patch no bigger than my hand.
‘That’s it?’ I asked.
‘That’s it.’ She smoothed out her dress. ‘Skinned leg, a few bruises. Bump on the head. Nothing like yours, though.’
I lifted my eyes to hers, feeling her smile radiate from her full lips to the corners of her mouth, to the very edges of her green eyes, and I thought of Rachel, the girl who’d outgrown me. She’d had eyes almost as green, but her features were not as fine and her manner had not been as welcoming. I had loved Rachel, or at least I thought I had. We were to stay together for ever. Her going to university while I stayed back to care for my mother would not break us apart. We were meant for each other. But while she moved on, I stayed the same. I was left behind to play catch-up in my own life.
‘Where are we?’ I asked the angel who had come to my rescue.
‘Rumah sakit,’ she said. ‘Hospital. Not a bad one either, to tell you the truth. I’ve seen a lot worse.’ I caught the accent now, not too strong, but it was there. Australian.
I was about to thank her for helping me, but my thoughts were interrupted by the doctor who began speaking. She listened to him, nodding, and when he finished, she turned back to me.
‘Doc here says you’ve had a concussion. Says you might feel sick for a while, a bit dizzy. Maybe even have a few blank moments, like you don’t remember what happened. Bit of a cut on your head, too, but other than that you’re OK. Looks like you’re gonna live.’
I touched a hand to the bandage on my head.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said as if she’d read my mind. ‘You look great.’
The doctor spoke again, then turned and left the ward.
‘He says you’ll probably need a couple of days, and after that you’ll be fine.’
‘A couple of days? I have to stay here for a couple of days?’
She nodded. ‘That’s what he said.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘What? You don’t want to get better?’
‘It’s not what I had in mind, that’s all.’
She made herself more comfortable, taking her hand away from mine. I could still feel the warmth of her on my skin; it was moist from the sweaty closeness of our touch. I had enjoyed the contact and I wanted it back.
‘I guess not,’ she said. ‘But what are you gonna do, eh?’ She rubbed her fine nose with the back of her hand, then flicked a few stray hairs from her face.
‘I suppose I could just leave.’ Back home, in England, the thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind. Here, though, I felt less bound by the orders of the doctors. Everything felt less real.
‘You could,’ she said. ‘But what if you collapsed out there? Somewhere nobody saw you? Concussion can do that, I reckon, and you might end up lying there all night.’
I shrugged. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘I am right. I’m always right, Alex.’
Her use of my name made me look up with a start. ‘How d’you know my name?’
‘I looked at your passport. You had long hair, eh?’
‘A while ago.’
‘You’re only twenty-five,’ she said. ‘That makes you a couple of years younger than me. Nothing was that long ago for us. Why d’you cut it?’
I ran a hand across my head, feeling the bristle of close-cropped hair. ‘Thought it would be better that way.’
‘Out with the old?’
‘Maybe.’ Rachel had liked it long. She wanted me to grow it that way.
‘Suits you better short. Skinny guy like you, it makes you look … I dunno … tougher maybe.’
‘Tougher?’
‘Yeah. Older, too. Goes well with this,’ she said, touching a finger to an old scar on my chin. ‘Oh, and I like skinny guys; it wasn’t an insult.’ She pursed her lips as if she were hiding a smile, then reached out her right hand. ‘Domino,’ she said.
I took her hand and shook it like we were business people meeting over lunch. ‘Domino? Like the song, you mean?’
‘Song?’
‘Van Morrison.’
‘OK, yeah,’ she said. ‘Like that then, I guess. Like the game. Or the Bond girl.’
I watched her eyes, wondering if she was winding me up. ‘For real? That’s your name?’
She smiled. ‘For real. My parents were kind of hippies, I guess.’ She kicked off a flip-flop and lifted her right foot onto the bed, her toes flexed. These nails were green, too. ‘See.’ She pointed at a small tattoo on the outside of her ankle. A single domino. Double six.
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It suits you.’
‘Thanks. I think.
‘So,’ she said after a moment. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘You mean Indonesia?’
‘Well, I know how long you’ve been in the hospital, so yeah, I mean Indonesia.’
‘About a day.’
‘A day? You crashed on your first day? Shit, you’re a veteran already. I know people who’ve been here years and never crashed.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’
‘Where you headed?’ She took her foot away.
It struck me that she asked where I was going, not where I’d come from, but then I remembered she’d seen my passport. She’d know e
xactly where I’d come from.
‘Lake Toba,’ I said.
‘Danau Toba? Any reason? Most people, they go to Brastagi first. It’s closer.’
‘I saw some pictures, photos on the internet, and it looked … I don’t know. Beautiful. As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to go.’
‘It is beautiful,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll like it there.’
‘You’ve been?’
She nodded and we lapsed into a comfortable silence. I considered asking her more about my destination, but instead I enjoyed the moment, watching her look out of the window. Domino sitting right there on my bed, a musky scent of sandalwood, sun cream and sweet body odour masking the stale air that pervaded the room.
I watched her profile, seeing the line of her narrow nose, the curve of her defined jaw, the rise of her cheekbones. A strong face. Striking and quite beautiful. The sweep of her neck dropping to her chest where the dress remained untied, showing the tiniest glimpse of the top of her small breasts.
She turned to look at me again, biting her lower lip and nodding before speaking. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I better get going. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.’
I hid my disappointment. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also my saviour and my translator. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’
Domino stood, straightened her dress and threw her bag over her shoulder. ‘Well, you look after yourself.’
I nodded. ‘OK.’
She flicked her hair back from her face. Her wavy, sun-bleached hair. ‘See you around, Alex.’
And with that, she turned and walked away. I watched her hips swing, the flesh of her buttocks firm beneath the dress, and a surge of desire ran through me.
‘Domino,’ I called after her.
She stopped and looked over her shoulder. ‘Hm?’
‘Thanks. For what you did back there. The bus, I mean.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘If I can do something for you …’ I said, not really knowing what I was saying or why I was saying it. I didn’t know anything about her more than her name and her tattoo. I had no idea whether I’d even see her again.