Twilight in Kuta

by David Nesbit

  No, she assured me, that wasn’t the case. He was calling her.

  Was he ever!

  On coming home particularly late after work one night, I was feeling pretty tired and not on top form and so I just wanted some food and then to get to bed. I got home to find Yoss on the phone to our mate Satria, but rather than finish up the phone call (quickly) to him, she simply smiled a greeting at me and proceeded to carry on yapping for another forty minutes or so.

  By the time she finally got off the phone I was not best pleased, to put it mildly, and even less so when she informed me that there was nothing in the house for me to eat. This really did put me in an uncharacteristically bad mood and it prompted me to let loose a bit on my feelings regarding her excessive phone chats with Satria.

  She was a bit dismissive of my complaints and said, once again, that as he was calling her there was no problem. This really wasn’t the crux of the matter as far as I was concerned, but I did sort of use it as a stick to attack her with.

  I told her I didn’t believe her (even though I did) and I wanted to see the phone bill. I didn’t wait for her to find it or, more likely, to tell me she didn’t know where it was, and started rummaging around for it in the dressing room table’s drawers.

  When I found it I immediately wished I hadn’t, as I almost did myself an injury upon seeing the amount.

  ‘250,000 rupiah!!!!!’ I screamed: ‘How the hell could it cost this much?’ That is over eighty quid! I then yanked out all the phone bills going back six months or so and found them all to be much the same, except for one month which was double that!

  Yossy had been telling me our average monthly phone bill was a princely 50,000 rupiah at most.

  Unbelievable!!!!

  I set off on a tirade at her. For the first time in the six years we had known each other I really lost my temper because even with my still somewhat less than perfect Indonesian language proficiency I could understand the statement showed that calls to a certain mobile phone number accounted for the vast majority of the amount.

  I was ranting and she was silent. She didn’t say a word, and the only reason I can give for this unprecedented muteness was she must have been in shock at the extent of my anger.

  I was shaking with fury and then it occurred to me to ask her something. No, not ask, but demand. I demanded to know there and then exactly how much money we had saved in the bank, to the penny with no fudging, or maybes, or don’t knows.

  The look on her face told me what I needed to know.

  We had nothing. Not a pot to spit in!

  Surabaya, August 1996

  We moved on.

  As I said, it hurt as much as if she had had an affair, but we moved on. We had to. It was either that or give up on our marriage, and I didn’t want to do that.

  Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and perhaps it’s true that everyone makes one almighty humdinger of a mistake in their life; a mistake so big, bold and bad that there can be no possible explanation for it and all that can be hoped for is that no irretrievable lasting damage is caused and that anyone in a position to grant forgiveness does so.

  I told Yoss that this was her humdinger, there could be no repeat and now we would move on.

  I still kept up my work here, there, and everywhere and slowly I started getting my groove back. I went through a relatively short period where I wondered what it was all for and whether or not I simply could be bothered or motivated to keep going, but gradually I got rolling back into the swing of things.

  Then, a few weeks on and more drama. I was in my office at the institute planning my lessons as normal and the phone rang.

  ‘Hello, Mr. Avery?’ asked a pleasant-sounding female voice.

  ‘Yep, can I help you?’

  ‘Yes, this is Clarrisa at MasterCard,’ she said. I was momentarily caught in a flux between slight annoyance and confusion. I had no credit card nor wished to have one and felt marginally vexed that I should be disturbed by what was obviously a cold selling call.

  ‘Mr. Avery,’ said Miss Pleasant Voice, ‘The reason I’m calling is …’

  She ended the conversation and hung up. I held the receiver in my hand and stared at it. The room had gone mute. I began to shake. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run and escape.

  I did none of those things and instead I just quietly put the phone down and walked out into the car park.

  There, heartbroken once again, I broke down and lost it, big time.

  Later, when we were in the car together and without saying a word, I handed her a piece of paper with the figures written down on it She looked at them blankly. Is it a mask, I asked myself, or did she really not know what they related to?

  Evidently not.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked in all innocence.

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘No idea. You tell me. I don’t have time for your games.’ This is Yossy on the attack. A fearsome sight at the best of times.

  ‘Got a phone call this morning,’ I told her. ‘Those figures there are the amounts you have run up on your credit cards. I didn’t even know you had one card until this morning and now I find you have two and owe more than eight million rupiah!!!!! That’s almost three grand!!!! Not only are we skint, but we owe fucking millions!!!’

  ‘Neil,’ she started.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I finished.

  Three months of not talking followed. Not much anyway.

  To give her some due, she actually had the grace to appear contrite and, dare I say, even ashamed of what had happened.

  I, on the other hand, just had no idea what I was supposed to say or do from there on in. I knew from watching films and reading books containing plotlines such as the one I found myself in, I was supposed to be feeling a moral outrage and throwing things while ranting and raving.

  I should have been packing my bag, or hers, or at least threatening to do so.

  Yet, I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  It’s not that I didn’t feel anything at all or that I was numb, it was just that I seemed to have lost the power of speech or movement. Now I can relate to how some people experience something so harrowing or jolting that they go into a kind of shock and, although remaining perfectly mentally stable, are unable able to ever speak or relate to anyone or anything in the same way ever again.

  Not that I am comparing what I went through to that experienced by those poor souls, I’m just saying I can understand that kind of catatonic state.

  Yoss tried to engage me a few times over the days and weeks that followed but I would always just shake my head and wander away from her. I knew at some stage we would have to sit down and have this out and see whether or not we could sort this one out, or if we even wanted to try to do so, but I just couldn’t face it and so I put it off more and more. I just didn’t know what would happen.

  The one thing I knew I wanted was to never feel like that again the rest of my life.

  Time is a great healer, so I’m told anyway.

  I guess things did start healing in the sense that I eventually started getting used to the idea of having no money, of not being able to afford to go anywhere or do anything, of having no sense that my life was any sort of a success, of knowing the marriage and life I thought I had was nothing more than a bucket of spit.

  Through this, though, the real pain, the real kick in the nuts, came from the realisation that Yossy wasn’t, had never been, happy. I thought we had it all, I really did. I really thought we were both so happy and that pain, the pain of knowing that I wasn’t making the person I loved, love, happy is the one that cut me most.

  Even now, all these years later, I find myself thinking, wishing, if only I could turn back the clock and make Yossy happy again, make her love me again as she used to. If only I could get her to look at me as she used to do, to be the centre of her world as she was mine. That yearning will never diminish, no matter where I am or what I do in life.

  In the misery of the weeks and mo
nths that followed all of this, however, I would sit up late at night with my thoughts after Yossy had gone to bed alone. Full of regret and self-pity, I’d think to myself, if only I could go back in time and make sure we’d never met then I would not know this bloody pain.

  These were the saddest of thoughts. The crushing of dreams, the realization that things had changed and forever, and that the life I had was gone.

  I felt so alone. Living in a foreign country with hardly a friend in the world, or so it seemed, these were once more desperate days. I had never found it particularly easy to make friends when I lived in England, and so now thousands of miles from home I felt truly isolated. Every day was groundhog day: drag myself up, stagger out the door, take public transport to work as we could no longer afford to run a car, race around the city looking for work, take public transport home again fourteen hours later, and stagger into bed. Next day, wake up and do it all again.

  And all the time Yossy and I were at best being cordial, at worst ignoring one another.

  What was there anymore?

  Awwww … this is just not fair, I’d think to myself late at night. This is not what I signed up for and I just don’t think I deserve this. I mean, what did I do wrong, what happened? All I ever did was love her, right?

  Come on, I don’t act like a knob head, do I? I don’t go out drinking or chasing other women, or spending all our money. I don’t abuse her or be mean to her in any way or do anything a million other useless husbands do.

  So why-oh-bloody-why??????

  I guess this sounds like the pathetic whinging of a sap; a sap that like millions of other saps before him sapped himself into sapdom, if there is such a place for us losers.

  Bollocks!

  I tried. I really did. I was not going to be beaten by this. I had worked too hard and sacrificed too much to just walk away from Yossy, our marriage, and our happiness and so I made a conscious effort to really try and get things back to the way they were before.

  I let go of the resentment I had been feeling and I resolved to work even harder in an effort to get back the life we had before. Rather, the life I thought we had had before. However, it wasn’t easy, and sometimes I felt that she was being deliberately obtrusive, as if she was trying to push me away; trying to get me to be the one to call time on our marriage.

  Her whole demeanour told me she was still nowhere near happy and she seemed to blame me for this. In fact, she seemed to hold me singly responsible for every slight misfortune or setback we experienced. Every time things didn’t run quite to plan or as smoothly as she would have liked that was the sign for another tirade of how all it was all my fault, of how I had brought misfortune and bad luck into her life, of how stupid and thoughtless I was.

  An example: it seemed Yossy had transgressed in age by about fifteen years and all of a sudden become extremely childish. I’m not exaggerating when I say she would blame me if the weather was bad. Really. If it rained she would use her womanly logic to conclude it was my fault for being such a miserable person and so God was acting accordingly in sending mood-appropriate weather.

  Another example: If we went shopping I would often find myself cast in the role of a parent trying to deal with an errant child. She would walk the aisles of the supermarket picking up superfluous items and putting them in the basket even though she knew we had barely any money for true necessities let alone nonsense like ornaments for the house or boxes of chocolates ‘in case we get visitors’.

  It was so soul destroying to see her so unhappy and to think, if even for just a minute, that I was to blame for her unhappiness. Every day was just a haze of unpleasantness, indifference or inherent sadness for the pair of us and I really didn’t know why.

  It got to the point I was scared to look at her, let alone talk to her. I could see the resentment coming off her in waves, and I just knew she was spoiling for a fight: an excuse to let rip at me again.

  I really didn’t know what I could have done to shatter her so. I could only hope and pray that all of this passed and one day we could get back to being how we were before. We were happy back then; really happy. I would have done anything to go back to how things had been.

  As much as I fought for it, though, I didn’t hold out much hope. I truly believed, and spent many a tearful night trying to accept, that my marriage was over in all but name. I knew she wanted to be free of me but there was no way she would say as much. To ask for a divorce would result in massive loss of face for her in front of her family, and there was no way she would go through that, so to try to push me into leaving of my own violation seemed her only way out.

  Oh, what a nightmare!

  I was devastated, absolutely heartbroken. You see and hear other people talking about their failed marriages and they seem to just brush it off as ‘one of those things’ or a ‘tough break’ and they get on with their lives.

  Not me. I was in despair and literally didn’t know what to do with myself at times. I never knew pain like that and I hope I never do again.

  Three years later – Surabaya, 2000

  I watched as Tessy burst into tears for what was already the fourth time that morning and it was still only 6.30 and I couldn’t help but smile. Not that I took any pleasure in her distress, I hasten to add. It’s just that the simple act of watching her in action, any action, has always been capable of filling me with pure joy and happiness.

  Since her birth, she has been my light, my love, my feelings, my heart, my hope, my happiness and my life. I have loved every hair, muscle and sinew of her being with an intensity that at times has threatened to have me self-combust at any given moment. When she was little, especially, I couldn’t bear to be out of her presence or sight for even a second and goodness only knows how I ever got any work done in those days.

  What’s more, what was even better, was I knew the feeling was mutual. That was one little girl who loved her daddy with a passion.

  She always wanted to be with me, to sit with me, to have me hold her or feed her or talk to her. No one seemed to be able to calm her when she got one of her little tantrums like she was having now, but just the sight of me always seemed to do the trick and once she spotted me and opened up her arms with tears rolling down her little face and she implored me, ‘DADDY …’ the deed was done.

  I was hers and she was mine and all was well in the world for us both again.

  Tessy came along as a surprise, to say the least. Without going too much into detail, at the time of Tessy’s conception there wasn’t a lot of detail to go into, if you get my drift. Yossy and I had not exactly been enjoying an all-thrusting, rip-roaring time of things in that department during that particular period in our lives, and added to the fact that during the first few years of marriage when we were, uh, more regularly intimate, nothing had happened on the reproduction front, it was all the more a wee shock when Yossy fell pregnant.

  It shames me (almost) to confess when I first heard the news I was minutely tempted to stop and ponder the child’s paternity for half a millisecond. After all, Yossy didn’t exactly have an unbeaten batting average when it comes to the honesty and truth stakes, but after the aforementioned period of contemplation I realised what I was suggesting and the remoteness of its possibility even after all the problems we had experienced.

  There was also the matter of Yossy’s reaction when she found out she was pregnant. Nobody can feign the happiness and delight she displayed then. It’s just not possible. If she’d had anything to hide or anything to feel guilty about then it would have shown then.

  Anyway, who cares? I was as delighted as her.

  Tessy really brought us back together and gave us happiness and hope again. The dark days of those bleak years or so ago seemed to belong to another lifetime. Little Tess was such a funny, sweet, happy, inquisitive, lovely little girl and gave us so much joy, fun and happiness.

  Hark at me, the first man to ever become a father, going on like this. Well, I tell you what, no man has ever loved his kids
more, that’s for sure.

  Everyday I would take her to her playschool or else try and pick her up and always make sure there was another period of what our American friends would term quality time in the afternoon or evening with her.

  We had a full time maid, or pembantu, who helped take care of Tess, but Yoss was a good mother and also liked nothing more than being with Tess. She really was a little ray of sunshine.

  Yoss became happy in her work now, too. We opened a small English language school when she was pregnant and that developed and expanded in the first two and a half years or so after Tess was born.

  We started by simply renovating the garage in our house and turning that into a single classroom. We soon had so many students sign up that we ended up renovating the whole house into a small school with three or four classrooms and having to rent somewhere else to live.

  The school continued to grow and in no time we had two schools and plans for a third. As good as it was, I didn’t really have too much to do with the business side of the school, leaving most of that to Yoss, and I just taught there a couple of hours a day if I could as I was still spending most of my time running (well, driving actually) around Surabaya chasing the big bucks teaching in companies.

  We seemed to have finally sorted out our finances and even started the process of buying our own house. We actually started saving quite regularly and were able to afford to finally go to England the year Tess turned two.

  It was my first time back since I came out here in ’93 and, obviously, Yoss and Tess’ first ever experience of Blighty. I think they both enjoyed themselves, although they found it rather cold and the food a bit strange.

  I must confess that although I also enjoyed the trip, it felt very much like what it was: a holiday. It didn’t feel in any way that I was coming home, as it were, and I actually felt a bit of a stranger in my own country.