by Frank Kusy
Graham was an old Buddhist friend of mine. We’d had a couple of beers earlier, and he had let slip this vital piece of information on an ‘I think you ought to know’ basis. I wished he hadn’t.
Nicky’s shoulders sagged and then began to convulse with huge, juddering sobs.
‘OhGodohGodohGod!’ she wailed. ‘I knew I should have told you. But all the Buddhist women I confided in told me to say nothing. They said “How much do you love Frank? Do you really want to lose him?” And I honestly thought that if I told you, you’d do what any man would do and just up and leave. You wouldn’t understand, I thought. You’d think “Oh, there goes Nicky again – leave her alone with a bottle of a booze and a man, and she’ll do what she always did before you met her. Get her knickers off for a bit of love and affection.” I’m so sorry Frank, I just couldn’t risk that.’
I bit my lip and struggled hard to forgive those Buddhist women. I liked to think that if I’d known earlier, I could have been bigger than their assumptions of me. But in my heart of hearts, I knew they were right. The shock of discovery straight off a plane, after months of anticipation of seeing my loved one again, would have been too raw, too great. I would have walked out of Nicky’s life forever.
‘Well, maybe you should have,’ I said with a degree of sympathy. ‘Looks like I’m the last person in the world to know. What went on in that room?’
‘It was horrible!’ Nicky’s tears ran in streams. ‘I hadn’t drunk a drop all that time you were away – well, maybe the odd glass of wine – but then you rang from Bangkok and told me you weren’t coming home, that you’d taken that stupid second book on, and my heart just broke. That night, I thought “Sod it” and went to this party round Nina’s place – she’d just got back together with Graham, and they were celebrating. I didn’t mean to get pissed, I really didn’t, but all of a sudden I felt myself passing out and Simon helped me up and into a spare room. How was I to know he’d lock the door and take advantage of me while I was crashed out on the bed?’
‘He raped you?’ I was appalled.
‘Yes, and that’s not the worst of it. He used no protection, and I’d come off the coil while you were away. So, a couple of weeks later – surprise, surprise – I found out I was pregnant.’
‘What?’
Nicky staggered back to sit on the sofa. Mascara was running freely down her cheeks. She looked like a small and frightened panda.
‘That’s why I didn’t write you in so long while you were away,’ she blubbered. ‘I had to have an abortion.’
‘What?’ I said again. This was turning into the wildest kind of sit com drama. You couldn’t make it up.
‘I’m so sorry, Frank.’ Nicky was now snuffling into a hankie, her sobs dying away as she was overcome with exhaustion. ‘It was the last thing I had to give you that no man had taken. A virgin womb. And now I can’t even give you that. Can you ever forgive me?’
I was conflicted. On the one hand, all my suspicions had been realised – she had been with another man. On the other, I had to believe that it had not been her fault – she had been used and abused by that scumbag Simon. The same scumbag Simon who had apparently fancied her for years, who had been bothering her non-stop while I was away with his lewd and suggestive comments. So, while very fibre of my being screamed ‘Get out! This is what you’ve suspected for months, she can’t be trusted!’ the nobler part of me knew this was wrong. She had suffered far more than I. She had been bottling this up every hour of every day for the past six weeks. I was kicking myself now for taking on that bloody Thailand book. I had left her alone too long.
‘Of course I forgive you,’ I said, taking her in my arms. ‘But there’s one person I just can’t forgive.’
*
I am not a violent person. I abhor violence. It’s one of the main reasons I became a Buddhist. But a red haze descended over me then. Letting go of Nicky, I walked calmly up the hill to the pub, where I knew I would find Simon. And there he was, laughing with all his mates at the bar. He looked round and gave me a cheeky grin. I reached down and pulled his bar stool from under him. As he went crashing to the floor, I saw a glint of understanding in his eye.
‘Yeah, that’s right, you bastard,’ I said. ‘That’s from Nicky and me. That’s for fucking up our lives.’
Chapter 22
The Neighbours from Hell
The day I started writing my Bangkok to Bali book, the worst neighbours in the world moved in.
God, they were loud.
First, the television went on in the flat above us and began booming out an endless stream of soaps and game shows. Our banging on their door and broom handles to the ceiling elicited no response whatsoever.
Then came the bonking.
These two individuals had obviously not had sex for a long time. They went out (loudly) each night around 9pm, and came back (even more loudly) at 4 in the morning. Then they set to it with a will.
It sounded like a farmyard full of animals. Grunts, snorts, honks and blood-curdling howls suggestive of a wolf at bay floated down to us through the thin ceiling – punctuated by a high-pitched, sex-crazed narrative that had us jamming our pillows to our heads. ‘Yes, yes, yes, YES! …No, no, not there, THERE! …Oh yes, that’s it…Oh my God, oh my God, YESSSS!’
This nightly activity killed our own passion stone dead. We couldn’t possibly hope to compete with it. And before too long, we were too stressed out and sleep lagged to even try. Nicky was given pills for her nerves by her doctor, and I began sleeping in the kitchen. Well, only my head was in the kitchen (it was a very small kitchen), the rest of me was still back in the bedroom.
Then, just as I was about to report them for aggravated social behaviour, it stopped.
The television went dead, the constant scraping of chairs above our heads came to a halt, and the torture bed which had woken us up every night for six long weeks bounced and sprang no more.
‘Have they gone?’ I enquired cautiously. ‘What do you think happened there?’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ smirked Nicky, her perky, pink nose turned up in amusement. ‘She must have wore the poor bastard out.’
*
Needless to say, I hadn’t got very far with the Bangkok to Bali book. Let alone the one about Thailand.
‘Where’s my copy?’ Paula shouted down the phone, and when I told her of the neighbour situation, she snapped back ‘Are you a professional? Professionals always get their copy in on time. I was in Afghanistan as a field journalist when the bombs were going off and nobody got any sleep. I always got my copy in on time!’
It was no good telling her I’d have much rather been in Afghanistan, she would never have believed me. Instead, I bought myself an expensive golf-ball typewriter (state of the art in those days!) and set to work.
I had a big bag of tapes from my travels to transcribe. That was my first job. Then, having literally thousands of tiny snippets of information down on paper, I had to cut them all up (yes, this was before copy and paste on a computer) and re-assemble them on the carpet. It was like the biggest jigsaw in the world – before too long, not one inch of the carpet was visible and even the kitchen floor was papered over.
‘I can’t live like this!’ complained Nicky bitterly, ‘I want my flat back!’ But she was living with a man on a mission – with a near-impossible deadline to meet – and as the paper trail grew into a mountain and I started falling asleep with exhaustion at the typewriter, she started staying out at night…
*
It was three months later, in August, when I came out of my trance. I was happy. Paula was happy. The only person who was not happy was Nicky:
‘If this is going to be our life together, with you “absent” half the year – either on the other side of the world or writing about being on the other side of the world – I don’t like it. And where’s our bloomin wedding? You’ve postponed it twice already!’
She had a point. But I was still waiti
ng for the second half of my big advance from Paula. It would be a pretty poor wedding without that.
‘Yes, I know, darling,’ I reassured her. ‘Let me just finish editing these final proofs and I’ll phone Paula.’
But I didn’t need to phone Paula. She phoned first. And what she said rocked my world.
‘Hey Frank,’ she greeted me. ‘Have I called at a bad time?’ I assured her that it wasn’t, and then she said, ‘Look, you better sit down. I’ve just had some unfortunate news.’
I knew Paula well enough to know that ‘unfortunate’ meant pretty much disastrous. I drew up a chair.
‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she continued in an uncharacteristically hushed voice. ‘But we can’t pay you that second five grand advance on your royalties. That big distributor from the States has backed out.’
‘What?’ This was about as disastrous as it could get.
‘Yes, I’m still furious about it. He seemed to think that we were putting colour pictures in your books – I don’t know where he got that idea.’
‘I had the same idea,’ I said, slightly irritated. ‘You know what I think of those cheap line drawings of cows and temples in my India guide. India is colour. Why do we have to portray it in black and white?’
My wily publisher sidestepped me. ‘We’re doing the best that we can!’ she snapped. ‘God help that you ever have to publish your own books! Have you any idea how much colour costs? If we put three sections of colour pics in, as that distributor wanted, it would jump the retail price of every book by two pounds…cutting our profit to practically zero.’
I hardly believed that, but let it pass. ‘So what happens now?’
‘What happens now is, we do a reduced print run on both books – say, 2000 each – and hope for the best.’
‘Hope for the best?’ I came off the phone in shock. With Paula in such obvious trouble and with no more guidebooks in the offing, my future as a travel writer looked grim.
There was no doubt about it. I needed a new direction.
Chapter 23
A New Direction
If I have to be grateful to Nicky for one thing, it was for starting me into business.
‘I’ve just been listening on the radio about Margaret Thatcher’s new Enterprise Allowance Scheme,’ she said one day. ‘It’s supposed to encourage new businesses. You’ve done well selling those few trinkets you picked up in Thailand and Indonesia, haven’t you? Why not try doing it on a larger scale?’
I blinked. ‘Do you really think I could? I hate selling stuff, and I hate salesmen, but anything’s better than sitting around waiting for another guidebook commission. Here I am, aged 35, and I’ve got five books in print but not enough money to pay the rent….let alone afford a wedding!’
In the back of my mind, I knew that Nicky’s suggestion was a good one. I had no qualifications in business, had indeed failed Maths at school repeatedly, but, having been born into poverty, I had been making my own money since the age of six: trading rare pennies with geeks in mackintoshes, charming old men to take me into stamp auctions as their son, even swindling one-armed bandits at amusement arcades by memorising their complicated sequences. Yes, I was no stranger to making a profit.
And this was not the first time the subject of international trading had come up. Only the previous year, I had been sitting on the lawn of the Megh Niwas hotel in Jaipur when my old friend Colonel Fateh Singh – the jolly owner of that establishment – had broached the subject.
‘You should try business, Frank,’ he had chuckled. ‘It would be a most spiritual experience!’
I had sniffed at the time. Spiritual experience? What was he talking about?
‘I am talking about India,’ he said airily, when I voiced my doubts. ‘We Indians like to do business. It is in our blood. It is the key to our soul. It could be the key to your soul too, Frank. What have you to lose?’
Well, the answer to that question was now ‘nothing’. I couldn’t go back into Social Services – all the old people in my care in my last job had told me to get out while I could – and Nicky was right about the travel writing. One more guidebook could tear us apart.
*
They say that life has a plan for some people, that when they step out of their comfort zone and take a parachute leap of faith, someone turns up to take the jump with them.
So it was with me and Bernard.
September 12th 1989 saw both of us sitting in the waiting room of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme in Enfield. My mum had wanted to come, and so had Nicky, but I had put them both off, saying: ‘It’s about time I got responsible. I don’t want anyone holding my hand.’
Then Bernard had reached over and offered his hand. It seemed rude to refuse it.
‘Hi,’ he said, a shy smile crossing his dark brown features. ‘I’m Bernard. Are you here to start a new business?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ I replied. ‘I’m thinking of importing jewellery and handicrafts from India. How about you?’
Instead of letting go my hand, Bernard started pumping it furiously.
‘Wow, that is a coincidence!’ he crowed enthusiastically. ‘That is exactly what I am planning to do also!’
I took in the madly grinning figure before me. Tall and thin, with huge buck teeth and a few strands of black hair combed over a balding pate, he looked just like Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers.
‘I’m guessing you’re from India?’ I ventured. ‘Have you family over here?’
‘I am from Goa, which is the Portuguese part of India. And it is my family who is making me do this thing. I am 38 and still not married. My mother wants me to make some money and settle down.’
That sounded like a familiar story. My mother wanted exactly the same thing. And as we kept talking, a lot of other things in common came to light – we’d both worked in Social Services, we’d both worked in publishing, and – this was more than just a coincidence – we had both lived in the same street a few years before. But it was our common love of India, and of the Indian people, which really sparked our new friendship. By the time we got sent in for our interviews, we had already started planning a partnership together…
*
The first inkling I had that Bernard and I were not going to work out was when he missed our plane to India. The dodgy Indian travel agency he had booked the flight with had sold his seat to someone else. So I flew on alone, and waited…and waited…and waited for my new partner to turn up.
At 4.33am on my third day in Delhi, a dusty, beaming figure sprang into my hotel room. It was Bernard. After 22 hours in transit, he had finally arrived! He proceeded to tell me all about his flight and then, just as I came awake, he fell asleep. What a shit. I lay awake for three long hours while Bernard snored and grunted in brute slumber.
The second inkling I had that Bernard and I were not going to work out was when we started buying stuff. The idea was that we should pool our resources – three thousand pounds apiece – and take joint decisions on all purchases. That did not happen. First off, Bernard wanted to spend all his money first – ‘I am going back to U.K ahead of you, I will get the ball rolling!’ Secondly, he wanted to choose all his own stuff himself. My eyes rolled as he picked up, in quick succession, six marble chess sets from Agra, a dozen silver-plated tea services from Fatephur Sikri, and a big bag of cut gemstones from a dodgy-looking jeweller in Jaipur. ‘God, I hope he knows what he is doing!’ I thought to myself. ‘Where on earth is he going to shift that stuff?’
My old pal Colonel Fateh Singh thought the same thing. ‘Why are you making partners with this fellow, Frank?’ he said. ‘He has no idea of the English market!’ But in my inexperience I had a kind of blind faith in Bernard. He said he had ‘contacts’ to sell to in London, and I was silly enough to believe him.
*
I stopped believing in Bernard about two weeks later. By this time, I had travelled the length and breadth of Rajasthan looking for stuff to buy, and was looking f
orward to going home.
One letter from Nicky changed all that: ‘I phoned Bernard tonight – he has been mega-ill since his return but has struggled around trying to flog his gemstones, unfortunately to no avail. He says that most places only want uncut stones if they are high grade and that is too much of a risky business because you have to buy them by the kilo and cannot judge the quality. Anyway, he has a couple of places left to try so I’m chanting like buggery that he can get them shifted. He suggested maybe moving into silverware export and is waffling about doing all of this only for a hobby…you’ve gotta get back here and talk to that man!’
‘Well, that sucks!’ I thought. ‘I knew he shouldn’t have had that last curry at Delhi airport.’ But the die had been cast, and they had fallen against me. Christmas was coming up fast, and if I had to have any chance of recouping our losses, I would have to get back to London as soon as possible. Christmas, I knew, was big business.
Business, however, was the last thing on my mind when I received that letter from Nicky.
The main thing on my mind was guilt.
They say in Japan that a man is not a man until he is forty. Before that age, he is still considered a boy – still subject to the whims of immaturity, still blown by the winds of passion and desire. And so it was with me.
I hadn’t meant to fall in love with Maria.
It just happened.
Chapter 24
Maria
Maria came into my life just as I had finished most of my buying and had decided on a bit of R & R in Rajasthan. There was a small village called Khuri, way out in the Thar desert, close to the border of Pakistan, that I wanted to re-visit.
Call it Fate, call it karma, but sharing the small jeep bouncing out of Jaiselmer to Khuri was a small, blonde, breathtakingly beautiful Hungarian pop singer. This was Maria. She had read about Khuri in my India guidebook, she said, and had made it number one on her ‘still to do’ list before she returned home to Australia.