by John Harris
I rolled up my jeans and took off my trainers. ‘It’s now or never.’
‘Never,’ said Rick, and did the same. ‘You coming or not, Tom?’
Tom looked out from the safety of the entrance step, left-right, left-right. ‘Can’t let you boys have all the fun now can I? Besides,’ he said, taking off his Gucci shoes, ‘I’m the only one who knows where the Bongo disco is.’
Earlier in the day, and in fact twice previously, Tom had invited us to go out on the town with him and we had refused each time, concocting poor excuses why we had to stay in, only to go out the minute he had left the guest house. The reason was simple: he was gay.
When Tom had first arrived at the guest house two days after us, I had been out eating some noodles, and on the way back passed a Danish guy who’d been sharing our dorm. He was carrying his backpack. ‘Where are you going?’ I’d asked, knowing that he’d only arrived the day before us and had said that he intended to stay in KL for a week.
‘To find another place, then I can sleep at night,’ he replied gruffly. ‘You will see. Goodbye to you, John.’ He shook my hand hurriedly and walked off. Mmm, strange behaviour.
Back at the guest house, however, everything became clear the moment I entered the dorm. All of the men, Rick included, were huddled in one corner, while the new arrival, Tom, stood in the other, unpacking his silk travellers’ bed sheet.
Typically, the girls fell in love with him instantly, buzzing around him and checking out his designer bits and pieces as though they were antiques, holding them with kid gloves and cooing longingly. Tom went through his essentials for their benefit, on a sort of guided tour of the stuff that he considered absolutely necessary for a successful world tour. He laid out immaculately folded silk socks and underwear, all monogrammed, crocodile skin diary with his name embossed on the front in gold leaf, gold fountain pen, lap-top and palm-top computers, and a baffling array of personal products, from anti-wrinkle eye cream to gold-plated shaving brush and matching traveller’s toothbrush. He even carried a solid silver knife and fork. ‘Don’t want to get caught eating with my fingers,’ he proclaimed, holding them up for us to see.
Rick, who’d been occupying the bottom bunk beneath Tom, immediately moved his gear to the other side of the room under the pretext of wanting to be closer to the window for fresh air; I think if he could have put a bed on the roof he would have slept outside. Tom brushed the snub aside with congeniality born out of familiarity. He unpacked his gear, and after a brief conversation with us, got ready to sample the best of the nightlife that KL had to offer, using the gay man’s equivalent of Lonely Planet as his guide. ‘Anyone like to join me?’ he’d asked as he slipped into a pair of Versace jeans. His reply was four vigorously shaking heads from people who looked like they’d been asked to witness an autopsy.
Two sisters who were also staying in the dorm went along with Tom that night, and rolled up drunk in the early hours of the next morning while the rest of us were just waking. ‘Fantastic,’ they both said, ‘the best party I’ve ever been to.’ They also said that the places they had been to were not excessively gay, though there were gay people in them, the same as in any straight place. Twice more the following week they went out together, and both times came back with the same glowing reports. ‘John,’ said my backgammon partner, ‘the women in these places are stunning, just stunning. Go with him. You’ll love it.’
The three of us tiptoed down the street, ankle-deep in warm brown water, and turned alongside an embankment of the so-called river that runs through the city. I say ‘so-called’ because it’s really just a concrete storm drain no more than thirty feet across.
‘It’s shown as a river on the maps to make KL look more impressive,’ Tom said in answer to my query. ‘Nobody’s going to write KL storm drain on a tourist map are they?’ Rick and I walked on in silence and Tom continued. ‘I mean, here they are trying to bring KL into what they think is the twenty-first century by cutting down all the trees and pouring concrete over everything, while the developed world is moving forward by doing exactly the opposite! Building roads through jungles, and concreting over the banks of a river isn’t going to convince anyone outside of Malaysia that they’re forward-thinking is it?’ He swept a hand through the air. ‘Look at it; one rainstorm and the place comes to a standstill. It’s just politicians and their developer friends playing their little games, that’s all.’
We stopped at a roadside stall to put our shoes and socks back on and, much to the proprietor’s disappointment, left without eating, only using his toilet paper to dry our feet.
‘Food here’s terrible anyway,’ Rick said as we walked on. ‘Wait till we get to Singapore; none of that fish-head curry crap down there, you’ll see, John.’
‘Are we going to Singapore?’ I said. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard.’
Rick shoved his hands into the pockets of his new marbled jeans and shrugged. ‘Might as well keep going south.’
While we walked through the shiny, wet, concrete streets to the disco, past shopfront after bland shopfront, Rick told us how his father, an engineer in the RAF, had taken him to a Singapore nightclub at the tender age of eleven and shown him what real men get up to at night. According to Rick’s memory there were more strip joints in Singapore than there were people to fill them, and you literally had to fight the girls off. We reminded him that the memory of an eleven-year-old, combined with the dramatic changes that had swept through Asia over the past decade might mean that Singapore wasn’t the place it used to be.
‘Bollocks,’ he retorted, ‘nothing changes out here. Least not deep down anyway.’
We crossed a busy main road, got lost, crossed the same road twice more, perspiring heavily as we walked down the humid streets, and eventually entered the Bongo disco. The club was a pretty standard affair, typical of all KL’s discos; serving as a pub for the business clientele at lunchtime and early evening, before the city’s young and trendy, either from work or home, descended and got the place moving at night.
‘You two ought to go to Australia if you’re running out of money,’ Tom shouted over the bass-line, putting the drinks on the table. ‘At least then you can earn enough to move on.’
‘Have you been there?’ I asked, taking my beer.
‘Loads of times, I love it.’ He offered a small cigar and I took it. ‘Sydney anyway,’ he continued. ‘The rest of the country’s OK; Gold Coast, Byron and what have you, but Sydney’s the only city.’
Rick took a cigar. ‘What about the other cities, what are they like?’
‘There are no other cities in Australia. Not as you’d imagine a city anyway. You’re from London, right, John?’
I nodded.
‘Then all the other places Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, they’d be like villages to you. Christ, Adelaide isn’t even a village!’ He leaned over the table and lit us all up. ‘No, your best bet, if you’re low on dough, is to get to Sydney and find a job. At least you won’t have to go home. All you’ve got to do is make it as far east in Indo as you can and then hop over.
‘Where?’ I said moving closer, unsure of the last part of his sentence.
‘Indonesia,’ Rick clarified. ‘From where?’
‘I usually go from Bali, but then I’m not short of cash. If you haven’t got enough money just keep going east.’ He took a sip of his martini. ‘Remember, the further east you go the nearer you’ll be to Australia, and the cheaper the fare’ll be. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s cheaper to fly from Bali because it’s not.’
I looked at Rick again. We hadn’t really discussed any plans other than saying, ‘when the money stops, we’ll stop’. He shrugged back at me, indicating that he had about as much idea of where to go as I had. I looked back at Tom and said, ‘What about boats? Can’t we get from Indo to Oz by boat and save on the airfare?’
‘Dunno. There’s a rumour, but I haven’t done it, and I don’t know anyone who has. Timor’s within spitting distance of Australia’s n
orthern coast, and Indo’s a sea-faring nation, so it seems likely.’ He waited and watched our expressions. ‘Surely you two have got the money for the airfare, it’s only a couple of hundred bucks.’
I gulped down the beer he’d bought. ‘Buy us another.’
‘Christ, are you really that strapped for cash?’
‘I reckon we’ve got enough to get through Indo,’ I said, ‘but that’s about it. We couldn’t afford a flight, no way. Remember, we’ve been on the road for over a year.’
He seemed taken aback. ‘Haven’t you worked in all that time?’
‘Nope.’ Rick and I grinned proudly and puffed on our cigars.
Tom hadn’t been the first person to suggest Australia as a possible goal. The two sisters at the dorm had also just come from there and, like many of the people we’d met in Thailand who were going in the opposite direction to us, said that they’d had a great time. Nobody had a bad word to say about the country; travellers from Britain to Israel gave it ten out of ten on all counts.
In fact the only people I’d heard giving Australia a bad press were the Australians themselves, who were either indifferent about the place or said that it was boring. One Aussie we’d met in Hat Rin had remarked that the country was OK but, ‘Mate, the women are dogs.’ When I queried his statement, suggesting that the ones I’d seen so far didn’t seem too bad, he just nodded wisely and said, ‘You haven’t been to Australia!’
I was going to ask Tom about the female situation but thought better of it, instead raising my glass and saying, ‘Cheers!’
THREE
Rick was half a dozen people ahead of me in the queue at the Australian embassy, and had already reached the counter by the time I’d finished filling out the form. His head bowed down to speak into the perforated glass screen that separated the interrogators from the interrogated and he disappeared from view, obscured by the queue.
The rest of the people in the queue were Malaysians, either businessmen or women with two or three kids in tow. Each time a person went up to be refused a visa, kowtowing their way to the front of the queue, the person who had just been turned away walked back down the line, head bowed, gazing down at their rejected pink application form as though they were holding a stillborn child.
The fat, pallid Australian woman who sat behind the screen looked at the people queuing as though they were insects. She was looking through the glass viewing screen as though staring at a giant experimental ant colony, and the look of thinly concealed distaste on her face said, ‘I hate insects!’ When another person had been turned away she would either go off for five minutes, pretending to do something in an adjoining office, or use the millisecond between customers as an excuse to make tea on the cabinet behind her.
There were four queues for visas, and locals staffed all but one. Partly for reasons of language, and partly because we knew that age-old prejudices were still alive and well in Asia, we chose the queue with the Australian woman behind the counter.
‘I’m sorry,’ I heard her say, and Rick came walking down the line screwing the pink form into a ball.
‘Who wants to go to that fooking country anyway?’ He stopped beside me, reading the look on my face. ‘"No, I’m sorry, sir, you can’t have a visa because you haven’t got enough money." Silly bitch.’
I stared at him. ‘Haven’t got enough money? But you wrote on the form that you had two thousand pounds; the requirement.’
‘They asked me how much money I had, so I said, "What, on me now you mean?" So I emptied my pockets and showed them twenty dollars.’
I held my head in my hands. ‘What the fuck did you say that for? Jesus Christ, Rick, they mean how much money have you got in your bank account, not in your pocket!’
He lobbed the ball of paper into a nearby bin. ‘Well they didn’t say that.’
‘Well maybe you should have realised,’ I said, holding up the form and pointing to the Independent Means clause. ‘Fucking hell, that’s like a spelling mistake on your CV. Unforgivable.’
Rick walked off and sat down without another word. The queue moved forward and I presented my form.
‘How much money do you have to support yourself during your stay in Australia?’ the woman behind the counter asked, unwrapping a chocolate biscuit.
‘Three thousand pounds,’ I lied.
‘Do you have proof of your means?’
I took out my Visa card and slipped it over the counter. The account that it pertained to had nothing in it. She glanced at the front and then the back of the card, as though my bank balance was written on it, before sliding it back across the stainless steel counter. ‘Everything seems to be in order, Mr Harris. Come back tomorrow before twelve to collect your visa. Next!’
‘Got it,’ I said when I’d returned to Rick, who was busy using his lighter to burn the leaves off a rubber plant, ‘no problem. Just showed them this old credit card and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘What about me?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you a postcard.’
He stopped burning the indoor landscaping and paused before saying, ‘Let’s go to Singapore, John. The bus goes at six-thirty, I’ve already checked the times.’
‘Aren’t you going to get a visa?’
‘There’s no point in trying here again is there?’
‘Mmm.’ I flexed my useless credit card between thumb and forefinger. ‘Anyway, I doubt there’s much likelihood of us getting as far as Australia. I haven’t got much money left, and your baht is about as useful as Monopoly money outside Thailand.’
He put his lighter in his pocket and stood up. ‘Let’s just get out of here, I’m sick of this place.’
While we had been inside the embassy it had rained again, and the wet streets were rapidly being dried by a crisp new sun. The moisture was slowly evaporating, pulsating from the ground in waves of heat and hanging in the air like a hot, wet blanket, pushing back the sweat that was trying to escape from our perspiring bodies. My hands were freezing cold from the air con but were running with sweat; a really strange sensation that made me feel a bit like a piece of meat, recently removed from a deep-freeze.
We walked around the centre of the city for a while, one minute gazing up at skyscrapers and the next down at the beautiful women, and bought tickets for the next day’s bus to Singapore before going into a bar to cool off. Also I’d purchased a pocket atlas and wanted to check exactly where we were and where we were heading. I still turned my nose up at guidebooks but thought that an atlas was an acceptable compromise: falling somewhere between educational and awe-inspiring, without being of assistance.
The atlas I bought was called the Collins Gem World Atlas. It’s a great little reference book containing not only maps of the world, both physical and political, but also time zones. The world environment, including sea currents of the world’s oceans is shown in glorious colour, along with the different shipping lanes, and journey times between New York, London and Singapore by every type of modern boat and aircraft. It has a hundred pages of maps and another hundred for the index, all in a book the size of a cigarette packet.
‘D’you realise how far we’ve come?’ I asked as Rick came back with the beers. Using thumb and forefinger as dividers, I measured Goa to Kuala Lumpur on the page and held them up. ‘That far.’
‘Yeah, what scale’s that map?’
‘Hang on,’ I measured again and held my fingers an inch apart, ‘that’s five thousand kilometres.’
‘Has it got populations in there?’ he asked, taking a seat.
‘Think so. Yep, here it is, "Major Cities by Continent". Which one do you want to know about?’
‘Jakarta.’
‘What, Indonesia?’
‘Of course Indonesia, unless you know another place called Jakarta.’
I quickly ran a finger over the page. ‘Umm, here we go, nine and a half million people.’
He nodded. ‘And what about Singapore?’
I flicked though the pages. ‘One and a h
alf million. About fifteen hundred kilometres by land. Why?’
He leaned back in his chair, picking up his bottle of Beck’s and grinning. ‘D’you know that women out-number men in Singapore by three to one?’
FOUR
My Australian visa was issued the next morning and, as expected, was given a stingy three-month limit. We bussed it down to Singapore that evening, arriving around midnight in some obscure part of the city. The underground railway system had all but shut down for the night so we decided to stop at a roadside food court to sample some of the famous cuisine that Rick had been going on about, before heading into town to find a place to stay.
‘What you like?’ The Chinese waitress asked. I looked at Rick.
‘Um, we’ll have what those people are having.’ We both swung round to see where Rick was pointing. ‘Whatever you’ve got,’ he added, putting the menu back onto the plastic table. ‘A general selection. And two Tiger beers please.’
She nodded.
‘I used to live here. Up at Changi.’ Rick said airily.
She mouthed, ‘Oh?’ And went back to the kitchen.
‘Well that really impressed her,’ I said.
‘Fook off.’
We sat in silence for a moment, taking in the deserted shopping arcade, and I said, ‘This stuff had better be good, I’m starving. Bus journeys always make me hungry.’ I leaned back on the plastic garden chair and patted my stomach. ‘First impressions?’
He looked around and smiled weakly. ‘I hope it’s not all like this concrete. When I was here as a kid it was all bamboo housing. All I’ve seen so far is concrete tower blocks. It’s like a giant fooking council estate.’
‘Mmm, well, it’s dark, it’ll probably look better tomorrow. And I’m hungry, that always makes everything look crap.’
Two cans of beer were eventually brought over, and after another five minutes the food arrived. It was horrible. Rick tried to put a brave face on it, swallowing large amounts so that he didn’t have to chew, trying to let it slip down without touching the sides, but I could see that he was struggling. One bowl contained what looked like eyeballs in green stew. The waitress was summoned and asked to identify the spherical objects bobbing about in the bowl, but all we got was a Chinese name.