The Backpacker

by John Harris

  ‘They’re mushrooms I think.’ I was laughing so much at the eyeballs that I almost gagged on the noodles that were lodged in my throat. ‘Try one.’

  He tried to pick one up with his chop-sticks but it rolled onto the floor. ‘Fook it, you can have them,’ he said in disgust, and pushed the bowl towards me. ‘It’s shite.’

  We stayed for another beer and watched the Asian version of MTV as it blurted out an endless supply of the latest pop videos accompanied by a running commentary from a slick local teenager. For all his trendy clothing and state-of-the-art grooming, he sounded like he had about as much of a clue about the music he was playing as my granny does.

  We paid the bill and hailed a cab, handing over a piece of paper with the address of a cheap guest house written on it in Chinese by the food-stall owner.

  The driver cowered against his door, holding his hands out, palms forward, as though fending off a punch.

  ‘What’s up with him?’ I asked, looking at Rick.

  Rick shrugged and leaned into the passenger window. ‘Can you take us here, please?’

  The driver peeped between his fingers and slowly reached out to pluck the note from Rick, his hands trembling with fear.

  ‘OK?’

  He read it and flicked his eyes up and down from the paper to us, his bald head running with little glassy beads of sweat even though the cab was air con.

  ‘OK?’ I repeated, trying the back door. Rick was already in the front seat. The driver nodded until I thought his head would fall off, and pushed a button. The back door swung open. ‘Did you see that Rick?’

  He peered around the headrest. ‘No, what?’

  I shut the door and stood outside, rapping on the window for the driver to give a repeat performance. Push, click, swing.

  ‘Fooking hell, they only had rickshaws when I was last here, and they didn’t have doors. They didn’t even have a roof come to think of it.’

  During the twenty-minute journey downtown we became friendly with the driver and he told us why he’d been so scared. Rick broke the ice with his standard ‘I used to live in Singapore’ routine, and the driver gradually started to talk. As it turned out his English was quite good, and he told us that he thought we were football hooligans who were going to beat him up and steal his cash. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so hard, and shaking so much that it gave the car premature speed-wobble.

  To calm him down, for our benefit as much as his, I told him our story, with particular emphasis on the world-wise love and peace stuff, chucking in a touch of poverty for good measure. I probably over-played our hand a bit, because by the time we’d arrived at the guest house he was feeling sorry for us.

  ‘Hippy is good,’ he proclaimed, ‘you no pay fare,’ and gave a wrong way round V sign with his fingers. I was going to say that I was no fucking hippy but didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, and thanked him instead, superficially agreeing to meet him in his favourite bar one night over the coming week. He drove off waving his two fingers out of the window and honking his horn.

  The woman at the food-stall had understood us perfectly: the guest house was two illegally converted flats in a government tower block, right in the centre of the city. I knew it was a government block because the clanking metal lift that took us to the fourth floor guest house stank of stale piss and there were prostitutes hanging around on the walkways.

  We were shown quietly into a dorm of a dozen or so occupied beds, each one with a backpack stowed underneath, and allocated a space.

  ‘Breakfast is at nine,’ the Indian man said gruffly as he turned to leave.

  ‘Till when?’

  ‘Nine-fifteen.’ He disappeared down the darkened hallway.

  Neither of us were expecting breakfast to be included so that was a bonus. After smoking a cigarette each in the toilet and having a quick, silent game of backgammon in the hallway, we turned in, undressing in the dark before creaking our way into the bunks. As I climbed into bed I had the distinct feeling that ten pairs of eyes were watching me, and began to wonder what the other people in the room were thinking. Another fucking hippy from Thailand? A football hooligan who’s going to come back drunk every night and wake us all up, then beat us up for looking at him?

  I lay awake for hours that first night, sweat tickling me as it ran down the nape of my neck before being soaked up by the damp pillow. Moonlight came in through the window and lit the face of the girl sleeping beneath it, making her face a blue mask, frozen in a smiling, sleep-filled expression of awe. Actually it was probably street lights reflected off the ceiling that caused the effect. Anyway, light came through and lit the girl’s face, and as I watched her she turned onto her side and opened her eyes slightly.

  I quickly shut mine, counted to five and then opened them, hoping to turn the tables, but when I did she had turned back. Shit, now I’d be awake even longer wondering if she’d noticed me watching her. I turned over in the damp bed and, in an attempt to take my mind off being awake, started to think about what we were going to do over the next few days.

  There were two things that were high on our list of ‘things to do’ while we were in Singapore: to have a Singapore Sling in Raffles Hotel and to visit Changi Yacht Club. In fact they were our only things to do; neither Rick nor I were particularly interested in sightseeing.

  My mother still has the postcard of Raffles that her brother sent her from Singapore in the forties, after the allied forces had liberated it from the Japanese. I’d always looked at it as a kid, wide-eyed, wondering what Raffles meant, and who the funny-looking people were standing outside beneath funny looking trees. I grew up with the impression that her brother was the owner of some kind of gambling house or bingo hall, where the main source of activity came from selling raffle tickets.

  Coincidentally, Rick had an almost identical story to tell. A member of his family had been there in Singapore in the forties, and had had a photo taken in the Long Bar: Sling in one hand, Asian beauty in the other. It was our aim to re-enact these memories.

  As far as Changi Yacht Club was concerned, Rick’s dad had been posted in Singapore while in the RAF in the seventies, and he used to go there as a kid on his dad’s boat for day-sailing. He wanted to see his old stomping-ground, roll back the years and try to relive old memories.

  Rolling over onto my side for the twentieth time, the bed sheet stuck to my back with sweat, I turned to face the wall and accidentally head-butted it, squashing my nose. When I opened my eyes and looked closely I could see that everyone who had previously occupied the bed, had written minute graffiti all over the plaster, like lines left by tiny spiders. Names, dates, places, even the odd traveller joke was there. That’ll give me something to do, I thought, and began to read them.

  I discovered something mildly important about myself that night: reading books in bed doesn’t help me sleep; reading graffiti does.

  FIVE

  Changi Yacht Club (or Sailing Centre as it’s now called) turned out to be a huge disappointment, mainly for Rick but also for me because I’d heard him talk about it so much over the past week or so. He’d spoken of his childhood memories: how he used to dive off the pier and hold his breath underwater, swimming along in the crystal clear sea. How, once, while swimming alone by his dad’s boat, a bunch of schooling fish had started to leap and dance all around him, jumping over his head and darting about in circles, glimmering in the sun like silver discs. He’d splashed about with joy trying to catch them, before looking up at the beach and noticing the horrified look on the faces of his father and friends. ‘Don’t move, son,’ his father had shouted, and came running down the pier to his rescue. After being pulled from the water, the infant Rick had turned and looked back down as the stealthy grey shadow of a fifteen-foot tiger shark glided past.

  ‘Moral of the story?’ Rick bent down and picked up some sand from the beach, watching it sift through his fingers. ‘When schooling fish start to behave erratically, get the fook out the water.’
He released the sand with a huff.

  I looked out at the collection of boats moored offshore. Sleek white yachts stood next to decrepit old wooden schooners that looked like they had already sunk and been brought back up. ‘Disappointed?’ I asked, shoving my hands into my shorts pockets.

  ‘Look,’ he bent down and scooped up another handful of sand and we both watched as it ran through his fingers, ‘even the beach is man-made now.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘Because it was always a black sand beach, not golden.’

  I cupped a hand and caught some grains as they fell. ‘Maybe it was golden, you just don’t remember it that way.’

  He looked at me as though I’d accused him of insanity, and gestured towards the clubhouse. ‘Let’s go up there and see if they’ve got any old records of my dad’s boat.’

  Walking through Changi Village when we’d arrived from downtown hadn’t been any less of a let-down for Rick either. The wooden house he’d lived in for three years as a kid was no longer there, and the whole main street was now a row of sharp, three-storey concrete blocks with shopfronts at ground floor level and flats above. He had conjured up an image of bamboo houses on stilts, each one different from the next, but all that stood in their place now was a bland concrete terrace, a mile long and as straight as the cross hairs on a surveyor’s theodolite.

  To top it all off, when we tried to get to the yacht club along what Rick said used to be a winding jungle path, we found that our way was blocked by a newly built golf course. Fat businessmen pulled up in their Mercedes to spend the afternoon whacking balls around on the land that Rick said used to be his jungle playground. He pointed out to me where, on the exact spot now taken up by the first tee, an old Chinaman’s house used to be, where Rick and his sister spent endless lazy afternoons watching the old man repair boats.

  ‘D’you know what I’d love to do, John?’ Rick stopped on the steps leading up to the clubhouse and looked out at the yachts rocking in the harbour. ‘Have one of these boats. Then we wouldn’t need money; we could just take off around the world, stopping when we wanted, moving on when we felt like it. Imagine,’ he turned to face me, both hands held up, ‘all the islands in Indonesia. How many?’

  ‘About fourteen thousand,’ I said, remembering the appropriate sentence from my atlas.

  ‘Fourteen thousand. Fourteen-fooking-thousand islands to choose from. Imagine the birds!’ He whistled. ‘And if we ever got bored with those we’d just move on to the Philippines, there’re another seven thousand islands there!’

  I nodded in agreement, squinting against the bright sunlight reflecting off the shimmering sea. ‘D’you think you could sail one of those things?’

  He snorted. ‘Are you kidding? See that one on the end? The one with the red tarpaulin over the boom.’

  ‘Over the what?’

  ‘Can you see the red tarpaulin?’

  I scanned the bay, wishing I had a pair of sunglasses. ‘Umm, yep, got it.’

  ‘That boat’s forty-two feet long and it’s made in England. I know because my dad had exactly the same one. I learned to sail it when I was twelve, and by the time I left here I could sail it single-handed around Singapore. I know that boat like you know your car.’

  I was impressed.

  ‘You’ve probably forgotten how to sail it by now,’ I said after a pause. ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘Have you forgotten how to drive?’

  Good point. I sighed. ‘Well there’s nothing we can do about it, we’ll never have the money to buy something like that, not unless we steal it.’

  I remember what he said next as though it was yesterday. I remember the look in his eyes as though it was today. ‘We can dream,’ he said, going misty-eyed. ‘Let’s make a deal John. That’ll be our dream: to dream the impossible dream. If we get to Australia and make enough money, we’ll buy that yacht.’

  I waited for what I thought would be the negative of the sentence but it didn’t come. ‘And if we don’t get the money?’ I prompted.

  He didn’t reply and continued up the steps towards the clubhouse. No answer was all the answer I needed. No answer was as good as saying, ‘Then we’ll just have to steal that beautiful little boat some day.’

  I knew that Rick often said things that had no real link to possible actions in real life, but there was something in his eyes this time that told me he meant what he said. Just as he had once said in India that we would meet up on Koh Pha-Ngan, and I’d thought: how fucking ridiculous; so this time I thought: how very fucking likely that we’ll one day have a yacht and sail around all fourteen thousand islands of Indonesia.

  I followed him up to the clubhouse reception with the silence of his answer still ringing in my ears like a bell. The woman who staffed the counter in the well-appointed lounge looked so far down her nose at us that I’m surprised she didn’t tip over, her head was tilted so far back. We persuaded her to get the old log books out, but there was no record of Rick’s dad or his boat. It turned out that servicemen were never official members of the club and therefore didn’t need to register.

  ‘If you want to trace an old friend from days gawn by,’ she said with a plum in her mouth, ‘you should speak to Mr Chan, the boatman. He’s just dine thar in the chandlery.’

  Chan-the-boatman? I thought, and suppressed a giggle. The pressure forced a fleck of mucous out of my nose, making her look down her nose at us as though we were vagrants. She probably already thought we were tramps but the snot didn’t make us look any better, and I quickly wiped it onto my sleeve.

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ she said, handing me a tissue. I thanked her, and we started to walk out when she called after us, ‘I say, are you members?’ We feigned deafness and went back out into the hot midday sun.

  ‘Have you noticed, Rick, that people keep staring at us?’ I said as we went back onto the sand. ‘Like that woman.’

  ‘Silly old cow.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not just her.’ I studied my battered old shorts swinging to and fro as we went down to the water’s edge. ‘Maybe we should smarten ourselves up a bit.’

  ‘You should, not me. I’ve only just bought new gear.’

  He slapped the thigh of his new jeans and I burst out laughing. ‘Marbled jeans went out with the Ark. Why didn’t you buy normal ones?’

  ‘I thought these looked pretty cool. Plus they were half price. Anyway, who cares?’

  I pointed down the beach. ‘Not Chan-the-boatman, that’s for sure.’ Just a short distance down the beach a wizened old Chinese man was sitting on the ski of a Hobi Cat smoking a cigarette. When he saw us approaching he immediately stood up, extinguished his cigarette and tried to look busy. ‘I bet they treat him like shit,’ I commented as we walked up to the old man.

  ‘We used to.’ Rick held out his hand. ‘Chan my man, good to see you again.’

  The old man didn’t know what to do. At first he ignored us, but then, realising we were talking to him, he did a little bow and nervously shook Rick’s hand, ‘Hello sir.’ Rick told the old man that he didn’t need to call him ‘sir’ but I could see that he was quaking in his boots. Or he would have been if he was wearing any. Rick launched into his familiar ‘I used to live here’ stuff, this time adding a ‘do you remember me?’ and Chan nodded vigorously, his tired old eyes darting about as though he was looking for an exit. The old man said that he remembered everything, but I could see that it was just out of a sense of duty, or politeness, and nothing else. He was probably too scared to say no.

  ‘Who does that belong to?’ I asked, referring to the boat Rick and I had discussed.

  ‘Japan man,’ Chan replied, and swept his hand through the air. ‘All Japan man now. Own everything,’ he snorted dismissively. How sour it must have tasted for a man like that: someone Chinese who’d probably been in Singapore under the occupation and witnessed all of the aggression and brutality, only to have to serve the same people years later. ‘They never come here,’ he continued, ‘never
use boat, only for tax dodge.’ He broke off abruptly and turned to leave. ‘OK, sir, I go now, thank you.’ He did another little bow and was gone, disappearing up the beach into a little wooden shack.

  ‘Shall we go?’ I said, turning back to Rick. He was still staring fixedly at the boat. ‘Rick, shall we? Or d’you want to stay here?’

  Silence.

  ‘Rick?’

  SIX

  Our first encounter with the Raffles Hotel wasn’t a very good one either; Rick and I were turned away at the entrance.

  ‘Well what’s fooking wrong?’

  ‘Rick, hold on hold on!’ I put a calming hand on his shoulder to stop him punching the doorman’s lights out. ‘This poor guy’s only following rules, it’s not his fault.’ The turbaned Indian man looked relieved and instantly broke into a sweat. People were pulling up the driveway in Rolls Royces, dressed for dinner, and the last thing the doorman wanted to deal with was us. He anxiously left our side to open the door of another car and greeted the occupants, ‘Welcome madam, sir,’ before coming back to us.

  ‘So,’ I said calmly, completing Rick’s sentence without the expletives, ‘what’s wrong with our clothes?’ I must have sounded resigned, as though I’d been turned away a thousand times before.

  He looked sheepish. ‘Please, sir, no shorts allowed, thank you, sir.’ Rick began to speak but the man cut him off. ‘And no sandals also, sir, thank you.’

  Rick looked down past his marbled legs at his tatty old leather footwear, and swore.

  ‘OK,’ I counted out the conditions of the dress-code on my fingers, ‘so it’s no shorts, no sandals. Anything else? Can I wear a T-shirt?’