by David Nesbit
‘Why did you kiss her? Did she ask you to kiss her? Did she tell you to stop kissing her? Why didn’t you stop when she asked you? Why didn’t you think she was serious when she said to stop kissing her? Why did you put your arms around her? Did she ask you to? Did she tell you to let her go? Why didn’t you let her go when she asked you to? Why didn’t you think she was serious when she said to stop holding her?’
So many questions, so fast. I try to answer but can’t. Confused. Want to cry. Help. Make him stop. It’s not fair. It wasn’t like that.
He continues.
‘Why did you throw her on the bed? Did she ask you to do that? Did she tell you to let her get up? Why didn’t you let her get up when she asked you? Why didn’t you think she was serious when she said to let her get up? Why did you take off her dress? Did she ask you to? Did she tell you to stop? Why didn’t you stop when she asked you to? Why didn’t you think she was serious when she said to stop doing what you were doing.’
Help! It’s not fair. No! It didn’t happen like this.
Nobody helps me. Nobody makes Mr. Joko stop, until, finally, he does.
I am exhausted and dizzy. I don’t know where I am or what’s going on. I am aware of being led away and a few minutes later I arrive in a small room where I am left to sit on my own for a few minutes. I put my head on the table and it feels so cool.
What is happening? What is going to happen next?
The door opens and in walks Yusuf. Not happy to see him, and he is not happy to see me. He slaps me hard around the face twice and swears at me.
‘You fool,’ he hisses. ‘You told us you are innocent. That’s why Pak Neil agreed to help you.’
‘I am innocent,’ I insist.
‘No,’ says Yusuf: ‘You are not innocent. You know that and so do we.’
I am stunned. What to do now? Is Pak Neil going to stop helping me? Without his help I am surely going to hell, or at least prison.
‘You fool,’ Yusuf repeats. He adds nothing else for what seems an eternity; he just stares at me.
Finally he shakes his head and swears again.
‘It is going to cost Pak Neil so much more to get you out of this. If it were up to me he we would leave you to do the forty-year sentence the judge is surely going to hand down. However,’ he adds, giving me the slightest glimmer of hope, ‘Pak Neil thinks it will look bad for him and his businesses if any of his employees are sent to jail, especially for rape. So, against my judgement, I must confess, Pak is going to get you out of this.’
I don’t know what to say, and as it happens I don’t get the chance anyway as Mr. Yusuf clearly decides he’s had enough of my company and leaves the room without another word.
Afterwards I am taken back to Pak Neil’s office to see him. This is not a meeting I am looking forward to, but I have another surprise waiting for me when I get there.
I am ushered into his office and the first words he says to me are, ‘Get married.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I stammer.
‘Get married,’ he repeats. ‘Find a girl, maybe Devi, she is a nice girl, and get married.’
‘I don’t …’ I start, but he holds up his hand to cut me off.
‘Enough,’ he says. ‘I can’t have you making mistakes like this because your dick is ruling your head. Marry Devi. I will help pay for the wedding and to start you off somewhere.’
I realise that this is not a suggestion and it is not negotiable, so I just nod and try to stammer a thanks, but again Pak Neil cuts me off.
‘Don’t thank me, Jack,’ he says, ‘because you are going to pay me back out of your future wages. Just as you are going to pay back to me every last rupiah I had to pay to get the charges dismissed. Understand?’
‘Yes.’ I am shocked. That is why I was able to walk out of court a free man. Pak Neil paid for the right people to be bribed. Oh, my goodness!
‘One last thing, Jack,’ he looks at me.
‘Yes?’ I reply.
‘You will never be so stupid again. Will you?’ Just for a flash, the avuncular uncle act he likes to play disappears and I see ice in his eyes: the ice that has led him to the top of his world and mine.
‘No. I won’t. I promise,’ I say and I mean it.
So, that is me, Jack, and that is my story so far.
I am on my way now, I really am.
4
Tess’s Story
Hello everyone. My name is Tessinda Alya Avery and I am ten years old. People normally call me Tess or Tessy, but my daddy calls me many different names. These include: penguin, pixie, bebek (which means duck in Indonesian language), tesscot, tinkle, tixy, trouble, tussy, tusscy and Tesco’s. My daddy never calls me by my real name unless he is angry with me, and that is not often. My daddy loves me very much.
Anyway, I want to tell you the story of my life until now and so here goes. I will write down everything that I can remember about all the things that have happened in the ten and a half years that I have been alive and I hope you won’t get too bored reading my tale. After I have done that, I will tell you more about my life now, and then I will tell you what I hope will happen in my life when I am older and grown-up even.
I was born in a place called Sidoarjo in the country of Indonesia in November 1997, and although I don’t remember being born, of course, I stayed in hospital for just a few days before my mummy and daddy took me home with them. I was born in the middle of the night, and my mummy had to have a special operation to cut me out of her tummy because I was too big to come out the normal way. This operation hurt my mummy for a long time afterwards and she couldn’t walk properly for many weeks afterwards. I know this is true because my mummy has told me many times.
Usually she tells me this story whenever she thinks I am being naughty.
I am a girl from two countries because my parents come from two different countries. My mummy is from here, Indonesia, and her name is Yossy, and my daddy is from England, and his name is Neil. They tell me I am lucky to have two different countries and I think they are right, but sometimes it feels a bit strange, too. I am the only kid in my class at school who has two countries and I am the only kid who looks like I do but I am not the only kid in my class who can speak two languages, though.
When I was very little, my mummy and daddy and me lived in a house near the hospital I was born in. I don’t really remember that much about there, but I do remember some things. I have lots of photographs from that time because my parents liked to take pictures of me when I was small, and they are all in albums now. My mummy and daddy used to tell me lots of stories about that time, and also before then when they first met and got married, but they don’t do that anymore. I think that is a pity because I used to like listening to their stories.
If I look at the pictures now I can sometimes just about remember things, or at least I think I remember them. It could be that I don’t really remember them and my mind is confusing me, or I am just remembering the things my mummy and daddy told me about the events in the pictures.
I think I remember my first birthday party, though. I know I have many pictures of that day and I know I was wearing a white fairy princess dress. My house was very busy with lots of people coming to visit and play with me. My house was sort of a school as well as it had a classroom built into the garage and my mummy (and my daddy sometimes) used to give English lessons in there. On the day of my birthday, we had my party in there and we had a clown come and do some tricks, and then we ate some cake, and then everyone gave me lots of presents. This is my first real memory, I think. I remember we had lots to eat and my daddy was not happy about the food for some reason. I’m not sure why. My daddy often is not happy about food here in Indonesia and he often says that people ask for too much and then don’t eat it all. Maybe that’s what Daddy was unhappy about on that day. Who knows?
When I was very little, we moved house. We didn’t move very far away, just around the corner, and I still went back to see my old house all the time. This is bec
ause all of my old house became the school for my mummy and daddy and not just the garage. They had lots of students wanting to join the school and so finally they turned all the rooms in the house into classrooms and we had to find somewhere else to live.
My mummy usually was the teacher in the school at that time while my daddy got in his car and went to Surabaya every day. Surabaya is the name of the big city near where we lived in Sidoarjo. Now, my daddy was also a teacher but he didn’t teach kids much then. He told me he taught grown-ups in their offices and also big girls in an academy. At that time I was a bit confused about why grown-ups or big girls would want to study English, but Daddy explained that sometimes people didn’t get the chance to study much when they were little like me and so when they got bigger they would study again. I guess it kind of made sense, but I didn’t really think about it that much for very long, anyway.
Sometimes, but not often, Daddy used to take me to Surabaya with him when he went to teach the grown-ups. One day we went very early in the car to an office in Surabaya where Daddy had a lesson. This was fun for me because I didn’t usually get time to see Daddy that much during the week and so I was very happy. Our driver took us in the car and Daddy sat in the back with me and kept making me laugh. He kept playing silly songs on the car cassette machine and then singing along but making up silly words to the songs. Finally I had to tell Daddy to stop being silly because he was making my tummy hurt through laughing too much.
When we got to the office where Daddy was teaching there were some people already there. I remember the people there were very nice to me and gave me some orange juice and some drawing paper, but there was one man who was a bit annoying. I realise now that he was just teasing me, but at the time I was only a little girl and so when he kept telling me that my daddy was not a teacher and was really a ‘tukang becak’ (which means becak driver), I became very angry with him and said, ‘Ngak, kamu nakal’ – which means ‘No, you are naughty.’ When I remember that time now I smile to myself.
When I got a bit bigger, I started nursery school in Surabaya and Daddy and me used to go in the car together most mornings. As I said before, we had a driver because Daddy said he didn’t like driving in Indonesia. When I asked him why not, he just told me it was difficult for him because driving in Indonesia was different to driving in England. In Indonesia, he said, all the drivers were ‘bebek gila’ or ‘crazy ducks’. I laughed again when Daddy said this. Daddy always made me laugh a lot when I was a little girl, and he still does now.
In my nursery school I made many friends and I always had lots of fun. I have some pictures of my third birthday party at school, and I really can remember this one. The same as with my first birthday party, there was a clown and we played games and ate ice-cream and lots of other food. My mummy and daddy are both in these pictures. We are all smiling and looking very happy.
Because Mummy and Daddy were both very busy when I was little, I sometimes spent a lot of time being looked after by other people. For example, we had a maid or nanny who lived with us and she would help me to get ready for school and to have my meals. Her name was Sri, but we called her Mbak Sri or just Mbak.Mbak means Miss, and it is a polite way to talk to an older lady when you are a kid, or a younger lady when you are a grown-up. Mbak Sri always played with me everyday when Mummy and Daddy were busy, but she could only speak Indonesian and not English. This meant that when I was small I grew up speaking Indonesian better than I spoke English. Mummy used to talk to me mostly in Indonesian and Daddy used English. If I didn’t understand Daddy when he spoke English, he sometimes tried to use Indonesian but his Indonesian wasn’t very good and Mummy and me sometimes used to laugh at him and then he would pretend to be angry and tickle us both!
On Saturdays, my daddy was usually still working so even though I was not in school then, I didn’t see him very much. On Sundays Daddy played football very early in the morning near where we used to live and sometimes I watched him play with his friends. All his football friends were Indonesian but I think Daddy was the best player even though he never scored a goal and he fell over a lot. After he finished football, Daddy always went to lie down in his bedroom for a long time because he said he was very tired.
Mummy didn’t watch Daddy play football very often. She said that football was silly and was just a lot of old men running about getting hot and angry for no reason. I thought Mummy was wrong, though, and now I am (nearly) a big girl, I play football in my school for my school team. Mummy didn’t really like many sports when I was little, but she did sometimes join in the neighbourhood fitness club. This was a club that had aerobics in the road and any of the neighbours in our complex who wanted to, could come and join in. It was usually just the ladies in the complex who joined, but sometimes some men did, too. I joined sometimes if I didn’t go to watch Daddy play football, but I didn’t really like it that much.
Daddy told me when he was little he was a good runner too, and he used to run in races back in England. One time he showed me a picture of him running in a race in England. He looked very different in the picture he showed me, because he had long curly hair and he looked very skinny. When I was a little girl, Daddy never had long hair, and now he has almost no hair at all!
Mummy told me once she used to do karate before she met Daddy and one time she showed me some pictures of her, too. She also looked very different because in the pictures she had long black hair and also was very skinny. I asked her why she was not skinny anymore and she told me it was because I had been in her tummy and made her fat and she had stayed like that forever. When she said that, I saw Daddy smiling but later when I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me.
Mummy and Daddy say that I was a smart little girl and that I always liked books and watching TV when I was a little kid. I don’t really remember that too much, but I do remember always being around the school that Mummy and Daddy used to have. Like I said, it was in our old house at first and then Mummy and Daddy opened another one or two schools (I forget which) also in Sidoarjo, and so everyday after I finished in my nursery school, Mummy’s driver picked me up and took me to whichever school Mummy was in and I would stay there the rest of the day. If Daddy was not too busy in Surabaya, he used to come to the school later. I decided at that time that I wanted to become a teacher too when I was grown up. I watched the way Mummy was very friendly when she was teaching and I decided that I would also be a friendly teacher. She was always laughing with the students and playing games with them, but Daddy was a bit different. When I saw Daddy teaching his lessons he always seemed to be more serious and his lessons were always quieter. I don’t think the kids enjoyed Daddy’s classes as much because they always seemed to have to do lots of writing. This actually was a bit strange for me, because I didn’t understand why Daddy was always so serious in teaching, but so funny with me at home. At home he was always laughing and telling silly stories and singing silly songs, but at school he never smiled very much. I wondered why that was.
There were lots of other teachers at the schools Mummy and Daddy owned, of course, but Daddy was the only teacher from a different country. All the other teachers were from Indonesia and some were women and others were men. I liked them all because they were all nice to me and all of them played with me if Mummy and Daddy were teaching or busy. Because we knew them well and they were close to us, I called them all either ‘um’ which means uncle, or ‘tanta’ which means ‘auntie’ together with their first names. For example there was: Um Didik, Um Kasi, Um Yanto and Um Arin and Tanta Ida, Tanta Della, Tanta Tine, and Tanta Nurul.
Mummy was very good in training the other teachers to be good teachers and she helped them with lots of things. They didn’t just teach English language, like Daddy did, but also physical activities for the little kids. It was like a kind of nursery or playschool as well as a language school and I sometimes joined the classes too, but not often.
When I was maybe three or four years old, my mummy and daddy and me went on a long plane journe
y to England. I remember we stayed with my Nana for one or two weeks and we did lots of exciting things there. We went to London (I think) and we went to many famous places there – but I forget the names of these places now. I will ask Mummy if we have some photos somewhere and then I will describe them more later. Also, I know we went to the beach even though it was quite cold and I rode on a donkey for the first time. Daddy said he used to ride on a donkey sometimes when he was a little boy living in England with Nana, too. I wonder what Daddy looked like when he was a little boy? I have never seen a picture of him when he was little. I wonder why.
England was nice, I think, but it was very cold. I think we went there in winter maybe. I met my English cousins and played with them, but I think they didn’t understand me much because I couldn’t really speak English very well then.
When we came back from England, Mummy opened a new school and was very busy getting everything ready for that. There were many things to buy and she had to go to many places so she wasn’t at home or in the schools much when I got home every day from my nursery school. Luckily though, she had Um Arin to help her. He used to go with her in the car everyday and they would drive around for ages buying things for the new school while the other uncles and aunts did the teaching in the old schools.
I liked Um Arin especially, as he was always nice to me and Mummy. He had funny curly hair and I always teased him and called him ‘Um Cribo’. Cribo is the Indonesian word for ‘curly’ you see, so I was really calling him ‘Uncle Curly’. Funny, right?
Um Cribo and Mummy and me went one time to a place called Malang. This is a town which is near where we lived in Sidoarjo but it is a bit cooler because it is in the mountains. When we were there, Mummy and Um Cribo met some people and talked about something connected with Mummy’s job, and then we spent the rest of the day playing and walking around. It was a lovely day and we played in the park and ate ice-creams together and Mummy and me laughed a lot at Um Cribo’s jokes. It was nice because Mummy was so happy then. Sometimes Mummy was not happy in Sidoarjo, I know, and so it was a good day for us all there. The only pity about that day was that Daddy wasn’t there because he was busy working again. I told Mummy that I missed Daddy, and she just said that he could come with us next time.