Off the Beaten Track
Page 15
‘Look!’ I glowed in exultation. ‘Over a thousand pounds!’ And as I threw the banknotes in the air and they floated slowly downwards, we both tore our clothes off and made love – for the first time in months – on the crinkly, wrinkly carpet of our new-found wealth.
Just before Christmas, as I stood in a shoebox full of snow counting yet more cash, Bernard turned up – miraculously recovered from his terminal illness – and demanded half of my takings. ‘Here,’ I said, wheeling out the useless tea services and even more useless chess sets. ‘That, plus your original stake of three grand, is all you’ll get out of me. Now, sod off!’
Nicky and I had a lot of good things going for us, but the age difference wasn’t one of them. She could have passed for a schoolgirl, and I looked old enough to be her dad. Indeed, when it had come round to Father’s Day, the waiter who served us food at an expensive restaurant in Soho looked at us both and said, ‘Here’s a menu for you, young lady. Now, where would your father like to sit?’ And Nicky’s mother, who was ultra-protective of her after finding out what her real dad had been up to, was fond of referring to me as ‘the old Jew’. ‘Who’s that old Jew getting out of the car?’ she’d asked Nicky when I first came round the house. ‘Look at him. Black hat, black coat, black beard, and thick, round spectacles. I bet he’s on his way to the synagogue!’
On the plus side, we had Buddhism. We had after all met at a Buddhist meeting – where everyone but Nicky had laughed at me over the Polish biker chick – and we had this strong, rather naïve, belief that a couple who chanted together stayed together. I still remembered, for instance, the night in Bali – three days after our ‘wedding’ – when Nicky had talked me out of a jealous mood (she had gone off somewhere without telling me) by making me chant ‘in harmony’ with her. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she’d scolded me. ‘You’re deliberately chanting out of tune. Come on, pull yourself together, you’re better than this. Try and tune in with me!’ And tune in I did, and half an hour later, we were making mad, passionate love again.
But love, lust and Buddhism was never going to be enough.
As I was about to find out…
Chapter 28
The Final Curtain
‘Who’s Maria?’ said Nicky, shoving the letter in my face. ‘What have you been up to, you sneaky, two-faced bastard?
Maria? What was Maria doing writing me a letter? And what did it say? It had to be bad – there was no mistaking the flash of ice in Nicky’s cold, green eyes.
‘Err…I don’t know what you’re talking about. And what are you doing, opening up my letters?’
‘Good thing I did, mister. I was expecting something important in the mail this morning, so I opened up all the letters. You’ve got some explaining to do!’
‘Like what?’ My mind was racing.
‘Like having an affair with another woman in India, for one. I knew I should have gone out there with you!’
‘I squirmed. ‘Err…well, yes, maybe you should have. Look, see things from my side – we’ve been like strangers for months, with you staying out practically every night. And the only time you wrote while I was in India was all about Bernard and the business. I was both angry and lonely. Things just…happened.’
‘Like shagging her and telling her we were over?’
‘I did not tell her we were over!’ I replied hotly. ‘I just said…erm…that we were having problems.’
‘Well, we’ve certainly got a problem now,’ huffed Nicky, her pretty, doll-like features twisted into a grotesque leer. ‘She’s been trying to track you down for weeks – she wants to come see you here in the U.K.!’
‘Oh God, no.’
‘Oh God, yes. Ironic, isn’t it? All this time, you’ve been giving me hell – no, not in words, I know you’ve been buttoning your lip – but in cold, distant looks and holding back from making love to me – when you’ve done the very same thing. You said I was staying out all those nights, do you think I enjoyed that? Anything was better than sitting at home while you wrote your bloody books, eating all my meals alone. I know the real reason you found someone else – you’d fallen out of love with me, and didn’t even know it!’
‘Well,’ I snapped rather brutally. ‘It was getting very difficult to love someone who didn’t love themselves. You’ve been punishing yourself ever since you told me about Simon, haven’t you? Didn’t you realise you were punishing me too?’
We looked at each other, I mean really looked at each other, for the very first time.
‘It’s not going to work, is it?’ said Nicky at last. ‘I thought I had trust issues, that I could never make a commitment to a man, but you take the biscuit. Okay, so I let the side down with Simon, I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. But come on, actually falling in love with someone else – because that’s what happened, isn’t it? – is the cruellest kind of payback. When were you going to tell me about all this? Never?’
I had no answer, and all of a sudden – through a few scrawled lines on a piece of paper from the other side of the world – it was over. The very next day, despite my protestations for her to stay, Nicky silently packed her bags and moved out of my life forever.
~ THE END ~
Postscript
Christmas Day found me back at my mum’s, counting all the money I had taken from the market stall. It was a jaw-staggering amount– over ten thousand pounds. ‘Well, this is ironic,’ I thought to myself. ‘Now I have lots of money for a big wedding…but nobody to get married to!’ Nicky was out of the question now, and unfortunately, Maria also. I had read Maria’s letter over and over, and with increasing anger and frustration. What was she doing, writing to me at Nicky’s and breaking her promise not to interfere in our relationship? Not to mention inviting herself to the U.K. unbidden? Why on earth hadn’t she phoned me? I had left her my mum’s number – she could easily have got in touch with me there. But no, now that I thought about it, I had scribbled that number on an old fag packet as we’d hurriedly parted ways at Delhi airport. I could easily have missed a digit or two.
Whatever, if I had learned anything from this year by now, it was that ‘GURs’ (geographically undesirable relationships) were not a good thing for me – I wouldn’t have been happy living in Australia, and Maria, with her music career just taking off there, would never have put down roots in England. I had to be realistic (for once) – Maria and I just didn’t have a future.
As 1989 slid into 1990, another future opened up to me, however.
I was about to become a rupee millionaire…
To subscribe to my mailing list just paste http://eepurl.com/bvhenb into your web browser and follow the link. You’ll be the first to know when my next book is ready to be launched!
Hi folks – Frank here!
Thank you so much for reading my book, I do hope you enjoyed it. If you did, I’d love it if you could leave a few words on Amazon as a review. Not only are reviews crucial in getting an author’s work noticed, but I personally love reviews and I read them all!
I’d also love it if you checked out my other travel memoirs: Too Young to be Old: From Clapham to Kathmandu smarturl.it/TooYoungToBeOld Kevin and I in India http://smarturl.it/KevinIndia15 and Rupee Millionaires http://smarturl.it/RupeeM15 Not to mention (though I just did!) my two award-winning cat books Ginger the Gangster Cat http://smarturl.it/Gingergangster15 and Ginger the Buddha Cat http://smarturl.it/Ginger15 Thanks!
Oh, and if you like reading memoirs, there’s a really cool Facebook group called ‘We Love Memoirs’. We’d love it if you dropped in to chat to the author and lots of other authors and readers here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/welovememoirs/
P.S. Here’s where you can find me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Wussyboy
And where to catch me on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/frank.kusy.5?ref=tn_tnmn
And if you get the urge, you can always email me:
s
parky-frank@hotmail.co.uk
Acknowledgements
Big thanks to Ida of Amygdaladesign (for my lovely cover), to my wonderful wife Madge (for saying ‘Yes, that’s good,’ or ‘No, that’s crap,’ in all the right places), to Cherry Gregory (for the final beta read), to Nick Kenrick (for the pukka Pushkar pic), and to the amazing Roman Laskowski for yet another round of meticulous editing and formatting. Top job, mate!
Oh, and a special mention to my good friend Philip Moseley, for inspiring me to write this book. I don’t dare meet with Philip again in the near future – every time he says ‘Jump’, I find myself saying ‘How high?’
About the Author
FRANK KUSY is a professional travel writer with nearly thirty years experience in the field. He has written guides to India, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Of his first work, the travelogue ‘Kevin and I in India’ (1986), the The Sunday Tribune wrote: 'Relentlessly honest, refreshingly uncontrived, this diary really works!
Born in England (of Polish-Hungarian parents), Frank left Cardiff University for a career in journalism and worked for a while at the Financial Times. India is his first love, the only country he knows which improves on repeated viewings. He still visits for business and for pleasure at least once a year. He lives in Surrey, England, with his wife Madge and his little cat Sparky.
GRINNING BANDIT BOOKS
A word from our sponsors…
If you enjoyed Off the Beaten Track, please check out these other brilliant books:
Too Young to be Old: From Clapham to Kathmandu, Kevin and I in India, Dial and Talk Foreign at Once, Rupee Millionaires, Ginger the Gangster Cat, and Ginger the Buddha Cat, – all by Frank Kusy (Grinning Bandit Books).
The Ultimate Inferior Beings (Grinning Bandit Books) and The Worst Man on Mars by Mark Roman ( ).
Weekend in Weighton and Warwick the Wanderer – both by Terry Murphy (Grinning Bandit Books).
Scrapyard Blues and The Albion – both by Derryl Flynn (Grinning Bandit Books).
The Girl from Ithaca, The Walls of Troy, and Percy the High Flying Pig – all by Cherry Gregory (Grinning Bandit Books).
Flashman and the Sea Wolf, Flashman and the Cobra, Flashman in the Peninsula, and Flashman’s Escape – all by Robert Brightwell (Grinning Bandit Books).