by John Harris
‘John!’
I looked down with a start.
‘It’s excellent, man. Oof!’ Dave crashed into the side of the boat and threw a rope up to me. ‘Tie us up will you?’
I tied the dinghy and he climbed up, throwing his holdall onto the deck. ‘Man, this place has got everything,’ he said, bending down and unzipping the bag, ‘and so fuckin’ cheap. Check this out.’
‘More fishing gear?’ I sighed, seeing the things he’d bought.
‘Yeah, Rick says that other stuff I bought was too shitty. "Wouldn’t catch a herring," don’t you know? Anyways, it’s so cheap here I thought I might as well.’ He started to place the things on deck. ‘Here we go: pots, frying pan, knife for gutting fish – if we catch anything that is – instant noodles, more fresh water down there, fuckin’ tea bags for you two la-di-das – no more complaints on that score – sugar, tins of tuna, more rice, gaff in case we catch anything big. And, the crème de la crème... ’ He held up what looked like a mini torpedo. ‘Da-daa!’ Pulling the sheath off, he revealed a bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch whisky.
‘They got a bar in town?’ I exclaimed, touching the bottle.
‘They’ve got more than that, Johnny-boy. They’ve got a bar and a disco.’
‘No way!’
‘Way!’
I looked around and shook my head. ‘Where are we?’
Dave started to put the supplies back into the holdall. ‘Island’s called Bangka, don’t know what this town’s called. We weren’t aiming for it, but when we saw the boats in the harbour we thought it’d be a good place to restock.’ He puffed his cheeks and stood up. ‘Shit, John, we’ve covered some ground over the past twenty hours. Whoo-ee! Can that boy sail a boat. Man, I gotta tell ya, truthfully, I didn’t think we could get this far in one day.’ He looked around. ‘Where is my man?’
‘Sleeping,’ I said, glancing over the side at the porthole. ‘He must be shattered. You too.’
‘Haven’t had time to think about it really. Too excited.’ He paused to rub the tiredness from his face. ‘Need a shower though. Let’s get this gear stowed and get something to eat, then we can decide what we’re going to do later.’
‘Shower? I didn’t know we had one.’
‘Follow my lead.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’ll show you, come this way.’
Because we hadn’t filled the tank with fresh water, the shower was salt. A bit pointless really, considering that we were floating in it and could just as easily have jumped over the side with a bar of soap. The soap wouldn’t lather, which meant using almost the whole bottle of shower gel between the two of us. Nevertheless I felt a lot cleaner than I had before, and it was in a happy mood that I agreed to be the cook onboard.
Rice, noodles, tuna and fried patty of corned beef, all washed down with Coke. The battery was charged from running the engine the previous night so we even had ice from the fridge. Rick still wasn’t awake by the time we’d finished so we left a huge plate of food in the kitchen and went back on deck.
Dave checked the radio’s digital clock. ‘Ten o’clock,’ he said, coming up on deck and crouching down at the wheel. Idly flicking through the charts that had been weighed down by a large pebble, he slid the stone off and used it to crush a cockroach. ‘Fuckers. How do they get on here so quick, man?’ The insect waved its antennae about in its death throes.
‘Fly, don’t they?’ I suggested, looking over the side at the dark water. ‘Or swim.’
He stood up again and stretched. ‘Reckon we ought to hit the town, see what’s up.’
‘What about Rick, should we wake him?’
‘Naw, he’s only been down a few hours.’ Dave walked over to where the dinghy was tied. ‘Someone’s gotta stay onboard, he knows the drill,’ he said, stepping into the dinghy. ‘Security’s important.’
I jumped in behind, nearly capsizing us, and he rowed us over to the jetty, stopping only occasionally to drown a cockroach with his oar.
The whole place was like some kind of frontier town, and as we walked off the quayside into the main street I was surprised at the amount of activity. Every shop and street corner was bustling with people either buying supplies or getting drunk, and cars and motorbikes were zooming about everywhere with such reckless abandon that we frequently had to step into doorways to avoid being run down. There wasn’t a pavement to speak of, and when we did find pedestrian areas there were either bikes whizzing along them or they were cluttered with hawkers’ stalls.
‘This is crazy, Dave.’
‘Told you it’s a mad place.’ He jumped behind a food-stall, dragging me with him, as a moped carrying two women screeched to a halt beside us. ‘Gotta watch your step around here.’
The two women blew us a kiss. ‘You want good time, handsome boys?’ one said, running a hand seductively up her leg. They both wore long sequinned dresses with huge splits up to the top of each thigh. With her feet high on the footrests of the moped the split was fully open, revealing stockings and suspenders. I couldn’t stop staring at the sight, and one of the women lunged forward with one hand, trying to grab my crotch. ‘C’mon!’
‘No!’ I screamed, so stunned that I almost stumbled. ‘I-I’m going for a drink first.’ I put both hands over my fly and backed away.
‘Where you stay?’ she pouted.
‘Out there on–’
‘Up there,’ Dave interrupted, ‘on the hill.’
The woman winked at him. ‘I think you on that boat. I see you before.’
‘Not me,’ Dave said, shaking his head.
The driver leaned forward. ‘You no want play with me? OK. See you later.’ She turned to her friend and said something in Indonesian, before winking and roaring off. The high-pitched noise of the clapped-out engine was so loud that I had to cover my ears.
‘What a place!’
‘Mad ain’t it, John? Whoo-ee! Have you ever seen so many girls? So many hookers?’ He shook his head. ‘I ain’t.’
It was just like the Wild West, and to complete the scene a plastic bag blew down the street, rolling over and over like a tumbleweed. Every car that went past stopped to ask if we wanted a ride anywhere, before bombing off, and every bike either did the same or carried two prostitutes. One bike went past with three women on it, all wearing bikinis!
‘I thought Indonesians were Muslims,’ I said, watching as the three ladies waved at me and nearly totalled themselves on an oncoming car. When I turned back to Dave he was gone, disappearing into a doorway up the street, only his afro and one arm sticking out as he beckoned me to hurry up. I walked up towards him, checking out the houses along the way.
Most of the buildings in the town seemed to have several businesses going on in them at one time. Restaurants with bowls of fried snakes in the window shared floor-space with people mending ropes or repairing outboard engines. Shipping clerks and agents ran an office that was being used partly as a garage and partly as a barber shop, while another place that looked like it was tailoring suits shared its cluttered floor space with a furniture manufacturer and a guy selling pots and pans. All of the buildings had brothels on upper floors with rooms for rent by the hour.
In just that short five-minute walk from the quayside, up the street to the Star Trek bar and disco, a hundred girls called out to me. Sometimes it was hard to pinpoint the direction of a voice, and I stood looking around gormlessly before noticing the waving hand on a third-floor balcony. I always waved back, and by the time I walked into the bar my arm felt like it was hanging off.
The ache disappeared the moment I walked through the door.
Dave was sitting on a purple velvet sofa, his arms stretched out either side along the top of the cushions, grinning at me. Surrounding him were dozens of beautiful young girls in bikinis, all posing as through I had a camera aimed at them. A girl by the doorway with a number pinned to her bikini strap slotted her arm through mine and led me over to the table.
The darkness of the room was pun
ctured by strategically placed spotlights that lit the bar, a small stage, and each table. It seemed fairly small for a disco but that could have been because of the amount of girls standing around. They were everywhere. So many in fact that they lined the walls like wallpaper, their light-coloured skin and luminous bikinis brightening an otherwise gloomy atmosphere.
‘There’re dozens of them,’ I finally managed to say, sitting down beside Dave as two ice cold beers arrived, delivered by a girl who must have been no more than fourteen. The spotlight caught her features as she grinned, outlining her button nose and shiny, jet black hair.
‘Seventy-five to be precise,’ Dave replied. He took his beer and toasted the girl before adding, ‘Each one has a number, look: twenty-two, thirteen, nineteen... ’
I peeled my eyes off the girl and looked around at the smiling faces. ‘They’re so young.’ I wanted to tell Dave that we shouldn’t be in here, that it was wrong to take advantage of these girls, all of whom had probably been dragged away from their home towns all over Indonesia to earn a living by sleeping with men. I wanted to say that we should forget the beer and go now, before we got sucked in by their beauty, but I couldn’t. They were forcing me to stay just as surely as if they’d held a gun to my head. The least I could do was to have a drink and talk to a few of them.
One drink, as usual, led to another, then another, and soon we were ordering shorts, along with bar snacks for the girls, with money that neither of us had.
Like Dave and Rick, I’d almost run out of money after Singapore, but I still had what I called my ‘crash fund’. The other two didn’t know it, but I had kept a small amount of money hidden in my wallet, in case of emergencies. It wasn’t through deceit that I kept the knowledge of it from them, just common sense. If they knew that there was still some cash floating about it would eventually get spent on something useless. I was determined that the money should only come out in a life or death situation, such as medical care or transport, and not on getting pissed.
So when, an hour later, Dave came back from the toilet and told me how he had just fallen in love with the prettiest of Indonesian girls, and that he only needed a few dollars to spend an hour with her, I tried to look helpless. The more innocent I behaved the more obvious it was that I had some money stashed away. I felt myself blush.
‘Look, they won’t take Amex,’ he said holding up his card.
I put my glass on the table. ‘Where did you get that from?’
‘Still got a few dollars back in the good ol’ US. Well, a credit limit at least. Shit!’ He tapped the card on his palm, ‘if I could only use this now.’ He looked at me like a wounded puppy and I looked away. ‘John?’
‘I told you, Dave, I haven’t got any money left, it all went in Singapore.’ Once I’d started the sentence I couldn’t stop, I just didn’t want to lie. ‘All I’ve got is a few quid for an emergency. Any emergency for any of us. We’ve got to have a little cash in case we have a problem.’ Fuck, I immediately thought, why did I tell him?
‘John, this is an emergency. And anyway, there’s a bank in town, I saw it. Tomorrow I’ll go in and draw up to my credit limit. What’s the big prob’ man?’
I drank some beer, trying to ignore the figure standing over me. He was asking for about half of what I had in my crash fund, so if I was going to give that away, I figured the best I could do was hang on to the rest. Whatever I did, he knew I had the money so it was going to get spent sooner or later, and definitely not on an emergency. I would keep the other half for myself, to buy myself a gift or something.
‘John?’
I sighed. ‘All right, Dave.’
‘John, I love you, man.’ He leaned over and kissed my head, much to the delight of the girls standing around. ‘I promise, soon as the bank opens tomorrow morning... ’
‘Don’t matter, we’re all in the same boat, Dave.’ I slid the neatly folded notes out of my wallet. They hadn’t been uncovered since I’d left England, apart from the occasional inspection during the Ta episode to make sure they were still there, and were still crisp and new.’
‘Pounds?’ he exclaimed as I handed them over.
‘Yeah, pounds.’
‘Man, these are ancient. Don’t you carry dollars like everyone else on the planet?’ He inspected the note, holding it up to the light. ‘Wow, the Queen of England!’
‘They’ll take them, don’t worry. Money’s money, they’re not stupid. You’ll get a lot of rupiah for that.’ I put the other note back into my wallet. ‘That’s worth a bit more than they’re asking for, so don’t let them tell you it’s not enough.’
He smiled. ‘How about you, John? Not in the mood or what? Be the first time I’ve seen you turn your nose up at a beautiful girl.’
I downed the last of my beer and stood up. ‘I’ll have a walk around town.’
‘Early night huh?’ He put the note into his shorts pocket. ‘I’ve only got an hour, so wait on deck and I’ll shout over for the tender.’
‘Tell you what, Dave, I’ll wait on deck and you shout over,’ I said sarcastically, and turned to leave.
‘Sure you won’t join me?’
‘No, you go. I’ll see you later.’
I left the bar and, after a ten-minute walk that led nowhere, decided to head back towards the harbour.
One of the streets I turned down led straight from the quayside inland, so I walked back via the base of the hills, where the suburbs rose gently towards the jungle, and had a clear view out over the bay. The town presented a series of concrete terraces, like hillside rice paddies, each building’s flat roof a step down towards the sea, and I could just make out our boat among the many in the harbour. I stood and marvelled at its smallness against the huge, dark ocean backdrop beyond. What had been our world now looked just like that Monopoly piece on my papier mâché globe; a tiny toy on a huge, deep sea.
The town was also deceptive. In the same way that I’d stood on the boat earlier looking in and thought that the streets were deserted, so now, having walked out of town and looked down, I had the feeling that it was the centre of Indonesia.
For a bit of fun and the thrill of a near-death experience I paid a few rupiah to a motorcycle taxi and got driven down to the quayside where I waited for Dave. I thought I could easily pass a quiet hour watching the boats bob about.
However, the quiet hour turned out to be non-stop hassle as wave after wave of Girl’s Angels pulled up in clouds of two-stroke exhaust fumes to offer their services. It became such a bind that I ended up walking to the end of the jetty and sat in our dinghy until Dave arrived, passing the time by crushing cockroaches and feeding them to the fish that darted about around the stone wall.
‘So,’ I said quietly, pulling on the oars and looking over my shoulder to check our progress, ‘what was she like?’ Dave had been almost silent since arriving back at the quay, and hadn’t spoken at all about the prostitute, his head resting in the palm of one hand, deep in thought. The only sound, now that we’d left the town, was the plop and drip of each blade as I dipped the oars beneath the calm surface.
‘Mmm?’ He looked up with his eyes only, the sound of his voice gentle and soft in the warm night air.
‘The girl. What was she like?’
He sighed heavily. ‘Like a young girl who shouldn’t be doin’ that kinda thing. I wanted to bring her with me, John, I really wanted to.’
‘You mean you wanted to save her.’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
We reached our boat and climbed up, hauling the dinghy up onto the deck. Just as I bent down to retrieve my flip-flops, there was a woman’s laugh from down below, not loud, but startling in the silent night, like talk in a library. We froze.
The laugh came again.
‘Don’t look at me,’ I said in a hushed voice, ‘it’s coming from down below.’
We tiptoed across the deck and went down the stairs. The smell of sweat was overpowering inside the confined space, and I saw Dave wince. ‘It’s
coming from Rick’s room,’ I whispered, inadvertently allocating quarters.
Rick’s laugh came booming out just as Dave and I peeped around the door. He looked up and smiled, the girl lying next to him pulling the yellow oilskin over her bare body like a sheet. ‘Come in, have a drink. Found this bottle of scotch in the galley cabinet,’ Rick said, pouring out another cupful, ‘the owner must have left it there.’
‘The owner didn’t buy that, I did!’ Dave said, straightening up.
‘Oh, really? Well have a drink anyway.’ Rick poured one out for the girl. ‘This is Titty,’ he giggled, looking at her. ‘It’s true, isn’t your name Titty?’ I immediately recognised the girl as the passenger of the motorcycle who’d first spoken to us in town. Her silver sequinned dress was draped over a chair.
‘Hello again,’ she sang from behind the anorak, ‘it’s me.’
Rick looked at the girl and then at me. ‘You know each other?’
‘Yes,’ I said, turning to get two more cups from the kitchen, ‘we saw her in town earlier. D’you want water in yours, Dave?’
Dave was still standing in the doorway of the bedroom, either surprised to see the girl or shocked that his whisky had been opened. I was still a bit shocked myself at the speed with which the girl had managed to find her way onboard.
The last of the ice chinked into the mugs, and I turned to go back to the bedroom but jumped back at the sight of Rick, standing right behind me.
‘John. I haven’t got the money to pay her,’ he whispered, glancing back at the bedroom. ‘What am I going to do?’
I sighed, looking over his shoulder at the pair of naked legs on the bed. ‘So much for the crash fund... ’
FOUR
Dave’s credit card was accepted at the local bank, and that, along with the remainder of my crash fund, fuelled a week long stay in Bangka.
Dave went into the local bank that first morning, bright and breezy from his first proper night’s sleep since leaving Singapore, and came back out a millionaire. A rupiah millionaire, that is. Hardly the same thing, but none of us had ever been one before, or were ever likely to be in the future, so we celebrated accordingly, getting well and truly wasted for the next five days.