Off the Beaten Track

by Frank Kusy

  Later on, having been up and down Bukittingi’s many steep steps many times collecting information, I chanced upon Steve again.

  ‘You’re just in time,’ he said, pulling me towards his hired motorbike.

  ‘In time for what?’

  ‘For something very different – the weekly big bullfight at Koto Baru. You won’t want to miss this. It’s not a blood sport, just a bit of fun.’

  ‘As in a funny bullfight?’

  ‘I think so,’ beamed Steve. ‘Two bulls lock horns in a muddy field until one runs away to fight another day. When the loser makes his break, the field is suddenly full of zig-zagging locals going “Ay yay yay yay!” and having the time of their lives.’

  Well, we went to Koto Baru, and I stood beside a bull to have my photograph taken, and the moment I took my hand off its back, it whipped round and nearly took my eye out with one of its horns.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that, mate,’ said Steve. ‘That’s one of the contesting bulls!’

  Talking of bulls, the next day found me at Tuk Tuk on Samosir Island, overlooking Lake Toba. The rains had come, and I was looking over the lake from one of the island’s traditional wooden adat houses with dwarf sized doors and large bull-horned shaped roofs.

  It was an idyllic situation, and I should have been enjoying myself, but I wasn’t. Heat and mosquitoes and long bus journeys had taken toll on my sleep, and I had become reliant on booze and Sominex to relax at night. Driven by a compulsion to work and to keep busy, I was now on constant hyper-drive, my mind buzzing away like a top.

  ‘Why am I so restless?’ I thought to myself as the shower drove a shimmering carpet of raindrops across the lake. ‘What is it that is driving me on from one place to another, from one country to another, from one set of experiences to another? What’s the hurry?’

  I supposed it had to do with my father, who had died when I was two. A Polish immigrant lawyer who could not ply his trade because continental law was not recognised in England, he had died poor, frustrated and full of regret when he was just forty-four years old – working long and badly-paid shifts in a railway office. ‘That’s not going to happen to me,’ I decided early on. ‘I’m not going to have any regrets. I’m going to pack as much life experience in as possible in case I die young too!’

  The other reason for my hurry was astrology. According to all reports, 35 was the most important year in a man’s life – the year when he was supposed to shrug off the identity of his past existence on this planet and carve out a new one. I had been planning on how to do this for a long time – ever since travelling with Kevin, in fact. We had hurried round India at such break-neck speed, not stopping in any one place for more than a day or two, that I ingested more life experience in four months than I had done in the previous decade. ‘Ah ha,’ I thought at the time. ‘Travel and writing, that’s my new identity!’

  But here I was, four years down the line, and I was so tired and wired, I was in danger of self-imploding.

  Chapter 8

  Big Blag in Kuala Lumpur

  By the time I flew into Kuala Lumpur, I felt and smelt like a well-laid turd. Ten days of travel in the most basic of conditions in Sumatra had left me completely burnt out. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t even walk straight. Driven by desperation – ‘One more night in a mosquito-infested backpacker hovel and I’ll go mad! – I reeled out of the airport, staggered a few paces to the left, and barged into the office of the nearest travel agent.

  The smart, coiffured lady behind the desk looked startled. ‘Can I help you?’

  I looked down, saw her name on the desk, and took a wild guess. ‘Yes, Mrs Leng, is it? Where is Mr Leng?’

  ‘He is in Singapore. Why, did you have an appointment?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, giving every appearance of massive disappointment. ‘Indeed, I did. I was supposed to meeting him here today. What’s he doing in Singapore?’

  ‘He got called away on urgent business,’ apologised Mrs Leng, looking flustered. ‘Can I help you?’

  I hesitated. I’d pulled a few strokes in my time, but this was something else. It was in fact the biggest piece of bullshit I’d attempted in my entire life.

  ‘Well,’ I said at last. ‘Mr Leng and I had an arrangement. My name is Frank Kusy and I am writing a new travel guidebook for the well-heeled business traveller in Malaysia. Mr Leng was supposed to be showing me around your beautiful city, and in return I was going to give your agency a full-page ad in my book and promote it to the hilt as the best one in K.L.’

  ‘Oh, that sounds wonderful,’ said Mrs Leng. ‘Let me just phone my husband and let him know you are here.’

  My heart stopped. If Mr Leng answered the phone, I was dead in the water. ‘Nam myoho renge kyo, Nam myoho renge kyo,’ I chanted urgently in my head. ‘Don’t answer the phone, Don’t answer the phone…’

  A minute passed, and then another, as Mrs Leng tried to reach the man with my life in his hands, and then she put down the phone.

  ‘Typical lunch-time traffic,’ she sniffed. ‘All lines busy. But no worry, I will speak to him on his return. Now, please relax and take a glass of water. A.K. Travels will not let you down!’

  And she was true to her word. Ten minutes later, a huge white limousine pulled up and I was whisked away to one of the top five-star hotels in the city. They even gave me a suit.

  But as I lounged luxuriously in my sunken-bath jacuzzi and watched all the scum and filth of baseline Sumatra disappear down the plug-hole, I was not happy.

  I had in fact not been happy since Nicky and I had parted ways in Bali. On our last night together, she had dropped a bombshell on me the size of Mount Bromo.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she’d said, her eyes not meeting mine. ‘I’ve had…erm…quite a few boyfriends before you.’

  Well, this was a turn up. She was only twenty-four years old. How many could ‘quite a few’ be? So I asked her this, and she came back with ‘Well, over forty as a matter of fact.’

  My eyebrows soared. ‘Forty?’ I said incredulously. ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘It’s possible because I was abused as a child. By my father. And then by his friends. I grew up thinking that the only way to get love and affection was to let men use my body. I’m sorry, Frank, I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it is. Or was. All I can promise you is the one thing that all those other men never took from me. A virgin womb. I’ve never been pregnant, thank God, so now I say to you: if you want our children as much as I do, you’ve got it. How does that sound?’

  I wasn’t sure how that sounded. I needed time to think. But even as she boarded her plane in Bali and I waved her goodbye, I’d felt this strange, fearful voice in the back of my head.

  It was saying: ‘I don’t trust this woman.’

  I felt horrible for thinking like this, I knew it was wrong, but as each day of my tour went by my sense of suspicion and paranoia had grown. ‘She won’t be able to wait six weeks. She’ll get tired of me long before then. She bounced onto me on a whim – what’s stopping her bouncing onto someone else?’

  Now, with no word from her for over a month, I knew something was wrong.

  *

  Then, the very next day, I did hear from her. I got to K.L. post office at 10am, and found two letters waiting for me. One from Nicky, one from – of all people – Anna. The one from Nicky made several references to her ex-boyfriend Ian, whom she was spending a lot of time with, and hardly any reference to missing me. The one from Anna, by contrast, nearly made me cry:

  ‘Losing you has made me appreciate just how precious to me you are. I am filled with a deep sense of absence – a numb, aching hollow inside, a small, locked room which will open again only on your return. Please, won’t you come back to me?’

  Maybe it was because I was far away in a foreign land, tired and lonely after so long without close human contact, but these two letters really confused me. I was starved for
affection, I needed to be needed, that was the truth of it, and with Nicky being so strangely distant I was a hair breadths away from picking up a phone and calling Anna and patching things up with her.

  But no, what was I thinking? That would have been crazy. I had already hurt Anna once. I could not, in all conscience, risk hurting her again.

  I had to face the sad fact. I didn’t like being in love. It made me feel weak and vulnerable and out of control. For the first time in my life, I was not in control of my relationships – this girl, Nicky, had me by the gonads and was squeezing tight. Why was she being so cold and distant? Why were her few words so devoid of love and affection?

  I began to dread going home.

  *

  Driven by worry and anxiety, I left the comfortable environs of K.L. behind and stepped up the pace. Having (finally) received some money from Paula, I thought ‘blow the expense, no more torture buses for me!’ and bought a £40 plane ticket over mainland Malaysia back to Singapore.

  I was looking forward to exploring Singapore on my own. The previous visit, with Trailfinders, all I’d done was go shopping and hit a few bars and discos. Steve, already obsessed with Edie, hadn’t even laid on a sightseeing tour of the island.

  But Singapore and I didn’t get on. First off, I accidentally dropped a sweet wrapper on its new, squeaky-clean subway and was immediately set upon to by three angry commuters demanding I pick it up again. Then I discovered that Bugis Street (where all the transvestites used to hang out) and Chinatown – the two sights I was most keen to see – had recently been demolished.

  ‘The city is cleaning itself up,’ a stern lady tourist officer told me. ‘It is trying to discourage hippy visitors and to attract a ‘better class’ of foreign tourist.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ I replied, politely declining the deer’s penis soup she wanted me to sample. ‘But aren’t you in danger of losing those well-heeled travellers who’ll think the city is losing its character and who come precisely to see old Asian-style places like Chinatown?’

  Her voice became snippy. ‘Oh, tourists may say they don’t want to see just skyscrapers and shopping complexes. But then they come here, get caught up in all the glitz of Orchard Road, do a day’s shopping, take a quick organised island tour, and then they leave!’

  I considered bringing up the sweet wrapper business, plus the fact that one of the Trailfinders crew had been thrown out of a high-class disco for wearing a pair of trainers (a brand new pair of Stan Smiths, mind you), but thought better of it. This lady, like Margaret Thatcher, was not for turning.

  It was difficult, near impossible, to find anything off the beaten track in Singapore. ‘Hmm, this is no good,’ I thought as I listlessly sipped on my Singapore Sling cocktail at Raffles Hotel. ‘They’ve even closed the actual hotel for renovation. What’s next for “improvement”?’

  I was so depressed, I bought some ‘Mighty, Loving and Happy Tablets’ from a street vendor. The label said they were ‘good for gentlemen whose nerves are not strong’.

  My dismal mood lifted when I wandered into the area known as Little India. Here, I was instantly transported back to Delhi or Calcutta! The aroma of spices hung languorously in the air, small, wizened men in dhotis peered out at me from the dark interiors of narrow shops, and crimson blotches of betel nut juice stained the ground. ‘This is more like it!’ I rejoiced as I tucked into a delicious banana leaf meal. ‘They haven’t managed to ruin this place yet!’

  My mood improved further when I came across a Bird Singing Concert at the junction of Sengpoh and Tiong Bahru roads. This featured rows of caged birds ‘training their voices’ while locals looked on over a breakfast of rice dumplings and strong black coffee. A madhouse of activity, the owners were constantly hopping up and down as they looked out the more experienced birds and moved their own younger birds next to them – to improve their voices, pick up new tunes and sometimes to compete. A good songbird, I learnt, could fetch up to £100…but it had to eat at least two grasshoppers, or two cockroaches, every day, or it wouldn’t sing well!

  That night, staying at the Why Not Homestead (Singapore’s one and only hippy dormitory), I could have been singing pretty myself. I reached out, half asleep, to have a swig of beer from the bottle at my side…and downed a large, wriggling cockroach right along with it. There was a moment’s pause as the surprised insect – which had been guzzling beer from the top of the bottle– made a brief appearance in my oesophagus, and then it was jettisoned, along with half the contents of my stomach, out again and onto the floor. Yuk, it took hours to get the taste of roach out of my mouth!

  From Singapore, I burned up the east coast of Malaysia. I was expecting a lot from the east coast – not many travellers made their way here – but had to confess to being a little disappointed. The historic port of Malacca was well on its way to being ‘beautified’ like Singapore, Tioman Island was nothing like the idyllic Shangri La portrayed in the film South Pacific (I couldn’t even find a cold beer) and the lure of Cherating – the opportunity to spend time with a typical Malay family in a fishing village – was gone when I found out the advances of the sea had washed the fishing village away. Okay, I found something good and positive to report on all these places (even on Cherating, which now had a new fishing village 5kms up the road), but my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was back home with Nicky. ‘What is it about this woman?’ I thought to myself angrily. ‘I’ve got to stop thinking about her!’

  But I couldn’t. My OCD was now operating at full pelt. It had been bad enough at the beginning of the year, when all I had to worry about were fluffs on the carpet. Now, I was obsessing about a much more troublesome ‘piece of fluff’ thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. And what was I getting in such a strop about? Well, Nicky was no beauty in the classical sense – her nose was a little too big, her chin a little too wide – but what she lacked in looks she certainly made up for in charisma. Witty, cheeky and funny, she had that indefinable ‘it’ which turned heads and had men walking into lamp-posts and falling off pavement stones. What was really worrying me was that when she drank too much – which she’d promised not to do in my absence – she wasn’t responsible for her actions. Most of those boyfriends she’d told me about had wandered into her bedroom instead of a lamp post when she’d had a few drinks.

  *

  It was all very well my mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, saying ‘The person who keeps moving ahead is eternally youthful, his heart is filled with flowers and shines brilliantly,’ but I was so stressed out now, I had no choice. I didn’t know how long I could keep it up, even whether I should be keeping it up. All that I knew was I had to keep moving! And it seemed to be working – the busier I got, the less time I had to brood about Nicky. Rantau Abang, Marang and Kuala Trengganu all flashed by in a trice, and then I came to Kota Bahru, close to the Thai border, and all of sudden something happened which stopped me in my tracks.

  ‘You are travel writer?’ exclaimed the happy little owner of the New Town Guest House. ‘You no stay here. You stay my house!’

  I surveyed the beaming figure before me. I had no reason to believe that he was going be an agent of torture.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If that’s not too much trouble?’

  ‘No trouble,’ he replied, still beaming. ‘I am making one guest house for travellers. If you like, you can put in your book?’

  Getting onto his small 50cc moped was tricky. My rucksack now weighed close to 30 pounds. But we eventually hauled it on board and puttered slowly out of town.

  A long way out of town.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I began to silently panic. ‘It looks like he lives in the jungle!’

  And so he did. His ‘house’ was a hot, steamy, ramshackle shack perched right over a dank lake dangling with creepers and dense tropical foliage.

  We talked for a bit, and his wife served up some palatable food, and then, around 9pm, he jumped up and showed me my room.


  Actually, he didn’t so much show me it – he practically shoved me into it. ‘Have good sleep!’ he said jollily, and retired for the night. I turned round to protest, but he had closed the door behind me. And locked it.

  There was a moment’s pause as I digested my new surroundings, and then shock horror set in. The room was small and dark – there wasn’t even a candle – and it was alive with wildlife. It was bad enough in the gloom – I could only imagine where all the buzzing and chirping and slithering was coming from – but then I turned on my torch and it got a whole lot worse. Ants, cockroaches, and spiders were running up the walls, and the floor was alive with snakes and scuttling scorpions. ‘This is a guest house?’ I thought incredulously. ‘I’ve got to get out of here!’ But my banging on the door and feverish cries for help were ignored. My host was either deaf or had left the building. So, shaking my legs about frantically to stop anything going up my trousers, I whipped out my trusty mosquito net, swept the bed clean of its carpet of creeping, crawling things, and dived under it, praying that there was nothing under the pillow.

  ‘There is no way I am going to get any sleep tonight,’ I thought, but in the end, I did. And opened my eyes to find a gigantic spider bouncing on the mosquito net, about an inch from my nose. ‘Hello,’ it seemed to be saying. ‘Do you want to be friends?’

  Well, no, I didn’t. I had an uneasy relationship with spiders which went back to my childhood: at the tender age of four, one of the skin-crawling creatures had dropped down the back of my shirt from the ceiling. My mother had spent days calming me down. Then, a few years later, when we were staying in a boiler room ‘flat’ underneath an expensive hotel in Austria (it was all my mum could afford) I cut my knee while learning to swim and woke up the next morning to find a whole tribe of spiders feasting on the wound. That traumatised me for a lifetime.