A Man Melting (5 page)

‘Me neither,’ she said.

‘What time is it?’

‘Late. Early. Both.’

‘Do you remember that night on Zanzibar?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ Penny said. 

In Kampong Som, Megan enjoyed a strange form of celebrity. She was not the only white person, but the others came in hand-holding pairs or giggling, uncountable packs. Perhaps, she wondered on her first day, the lack of females travelling alone was a fluke. A seasonal quirk. She had been to rougher places by herself, after all. But in Dar es Salaam or Khartoum people weren’t surprised — they were perhaps a little offended, but not surprised. Here she stood out.

Causing a Stir
, she thought as she rustled through the dusty streets in sarong and sandals, having fallen into the habit of thinking in subject lines suitable for her group emails.

Bruges the Hard Way

Trains, Planes and Auto-da-fé

Heart and Seoul

This was after leaving Tessa in tears on the lawn in front of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, and losing custody of their
travel blog,
Megan and Tessa’s World Tour.

World Tour? Back when they set up the site, still at work on the North Shore, Asia wasn’t in their plans. But here she was, alone in a Cambodian beach resort — closer to
last resort
than
luxury resort
— being followed by local children wherever she went. They didn’t pester like the touts: the young men who either knew nothing about personal space or pretended not to. The children seemed oblivious to her lack of money. Perhaps this was just inexperience, but Megan preferred to think of it as unsullied good nature. She walked around the streets of Sihanoukville, past the Americans in cane furniture sipping lattes, past the Australians buying fabric from movable stalls, past the French people applying sunscreen before braving the beach, trailing her entourage of ankle-biters and urchins two arm-lengths behind her like a benevolent Pied Piper.

At night, however, she was alone. Veasna, a friend she’d made in Phnom Penh, had hooked her up with a private room for only four US dollars a night. There were many of these one-favour friends in her wake; she faithfully added each to the email group for her weekly updates, but never received anything in return.

The nights passed slowly, but she couldn’t bring herself to plan more than one day in advance, nor could she fathom returning home any time soon.

From Phnom Penh, three nights in Kampong Som seemed like plenty. Enough to escape the boiling-pot-of-pasta humidity, read a trashy book and figure out where to next. But on the third day, instead of sitting in an internet café and sorting her next steps, she sat on the beach with her
entourage, teaching them to say, ‘My oh my, what pleasant weather we are having.’ In return, the children taught her, ‘
Knyom chmoah
Megan.
Coh louk chmoah
oy?’ Every time she said this, a different child would shout their name and the rest would giggle with their hands over their mouths.

It was the low season. Extending her stay at the hostel was simple.
Everything
was simple. It began to feel as if she had found a middle ground between travelling and home, a word which had become synonymous with settling down. Even before parting ways with Tessa, she didn’t know what settling down meant for her. No generic pictures came with this frame. And now — alone, out of work, of no fixed address — everything was so far from settled it was like the milk-and-two-sugars murkiness of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya. Perhaps, like the river, this was her natural state.

On the fifth day, her Single White Female novelty began to wear off: the children lagged a little further behind; the local women lost their concerned expressions, though they hadn’t yet found the courage or the desire to wave back.

On the sixth day, not a single child trailed behind her. She’d become like the stray dogs the locals never saw. But this was okay, too. Able to walk the streets at her own pace, she could feel the freedom, physically. As if the children had been woven into her French plait — now more of a Cambodian plait: beautiful but structurally unsound — and overnight someone had taken scissors to her hair. She felt empowered, a reverse Samson, though two hours later she was drinking at a tourist bar on Serendipity Beach to avoid being alone.

Subject line:
Drinking Angkor with Australians

At sundown the patrons drinking to pass the afternoon left in search of food, and were replaced by a new shift of tourists looking to pass the evening. She remained at the bar, eating nuts one at a time from a packet comped by the barman.

A guy sat down next to her. After half a beer he introduced himself as Vern. He looked Cambodian but sounded Australian.

‘So, you travelling alone?’

Megan nodded. ‘You?’

‘No. I’m with my mate and his girlfriend. They’re having an early one.’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘Third wheel, huh?’

‘My parents —’ he said, but stopped. ‘I was born in Australia, but Stu and Janna thought I should come with them. Be their guide.’

‘Can you speak Khmer?’

‘Like a four year old. I took to answering my parents in English once I started school.’

‘
Knyom chmoah
Megan.
Coh louk chmoah
oy
?’

He smiled, offered to buy her another Angkor. She accepted.

He wanted to know about the places she’d seen. She told him in no particular order.

‘And you’ve been alone this whole time? Man.’

She swallowed the impulse to correct him, topped it with another gulp of beer. Not talking about Tessa had become a way of punishing her. Megan tried not to think about how she might feature, if at all, in Tessa’s travel stories and the explanation for her early return to New Zealand.

She bought the next round, asked Vern about the places
he’d seen. He said he had nothing to tell. That this was his first time out of Australia.

‘But what’s it like coming to the country of your parents’ birth for the first time? What’s
that
like?’

‘I don’t know. I know I’m supposed to feel something, but I’m not feeling it yet.’ He placed his hand on hers.

She did not withdraw her hand but said, looking into his eyes, ‘No, thank you, Vern.’

He looked at their hands, still touching, his mounting hers, then back up at her face.
Then why don’t you move your hand?
he seemed to be asking.

Megan took a swig of beer using her free hand, then another to finish the bottle. ‘It was nice talking to you, Vern.’

An invisible drawstring pulled his lips tight. He lifted his hand.

As she got up, a little shaky from so long on the bar stool, perhaps drunker than she had intended, she placed her hand on Vern’s shoulder. ‘Everywhere you go, everyone is human.’ This had made more sense in her head than out loud, but she continued. ‘Everyone is human, but they’re not all looking for something. That’s my one big revelation.’

Under a full moon the colour of a blank page, she walked for half an hour to Otres, her favourite of the five main beaches. She liked it best because it had the biggest waves, which were not big enough to surf during the day, but at night she hoped they would make enough noise to quell her looping thoughts. But when she saw the waves breaking against the shore, she wondered if she had stumbled upon a sixth, as yet unvisited, beach. The swell was three metres, the waves holding their form all the way
in to the shore before they simply fell — like a bucket of water being tipped upside down.

But this
was
Otres. In the distance she could see the creek for which the beach was named.

The noise created by the monstrous surf pushed all other thoughts to the back of her skull. It drew her body in, and in, until her feet were getting wet. She inhaled a briny breath and stared down the first approaching wave — a wall of water three times her height.

In anticipation, everything fell silent.

The wave broke only metres in front of her, but there was still no sound. The water flowed up around her shins then receded inaudibly. No lap against her legs or suck against the sand. Another wave was building, not allowing her time to consider this anomaly, then this wave broke in silence, too. As it receded, she brought her hands together. She heard the clap perfectly.

Although Megan had sought out the sound of the waves, the bubble of silence in which she now found herself encased felt like the thing she had been looking for all this time. Through three continents and the cross-hatching of her fingers as she cried into her hands —

That there can be two worlds in one moment.

Silence and crashes.

That she could be alone, alone, alone, and now, on this beach in Cambodia, feel Tessa’s presence.

And, just like the waves, the scene in her head replayed on mute.

Tessa screaming ‘—!’ in front of the white church on the hill.

Megan’s hands held palm up, bouncing with every silent syllable. ‘— — —.’

Tessa with eyes closed, a sudden ceramic quality to her face, only her lips moving. ‘—.’

Over Tessa’s shoulder: the baffled but delighted faces of the gathering crowd.

Subject line:
Parisian Blue

She laughed. Megan, on Otres Beach, in her bubble of silence, laughed at the scene in her head and heard this laugh echo like the plonk of coins in a Buddhist temple. Because it
was
funny. The worst argument of her life, and it had a funny side. She laughed and laughed herself to hopefulness and just like the very first eureka moment, there was spillage: a single tear loosed itself from the duct in the corner of her left eye, ran down her cheek and dropped into the swirling foam at her feet, bursting the bubble of silence as simply as someone pressing the mute button a second time.

Jason Stride is being wrapped in tinfoil and no one really knows why; it just has to happen. This is often the way with high school: deep down no one believes it is the real world, so no one insists that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. Embarrassment can happen without reason, violations can go unpunished and minding your own business can get you wrapped in tinfoil.

It was nearing the last weeks of the fourth and final school term of the year. Noah Kissick, the new principal, had started at the beginning of the third. Before arriving in Windswept Lakes, he’d set his sights on becoming town mayor: the post as principal was just one more drain in his trickle to success.

Kissick had handled the lead-up to his coronation as principal in the spirit of a local government election. He
made several highly emotive claims in the local paper,
The Lakes Gazelle
(no one was ever sure if it was a pun or a malapropism), about how he would right Boys’ High. Swaddled in the black academic cape he thought made him resemble Darth Vader in a good way, he derided the school once more in his inaugural assembly speech. ‘I see a lack of traditional values,’ he proclaimed from the rostrum, ‘a lack of order, a lack of decorum.’

Step one in Kissick’s action plan towards an ordered and decorous school was a return to school uniforms by the end of the term, thus ending the five-year mufti interregnum (long enough for no one but the front row of the first XV to have worn a high school uniform). The snivelling concerns of how to implement the necessary, nay, imperative measures were not foremost in Kissick’s mind, but it all fell into place when a ‘contact’ of his suggested he could supply the school with four hundred and fifty identical outfits for a ‘cut-price price’. And so Kissick was able to avoid tedious hours sifting through fabric swatches and reached for the school’s chequebook.

The uniforms, on-sold to families at a modest mark-up to assist renovation to the school pool, were a) formal and b) identical, and thus satisfied all of Kissick’s criteria. Waistcoats, though certainly formal, had become by this time almost exclusively the garb of croupiers and concierges (and perhaps a few other Francophile occupations). When they became compulsory apparel on school grounds, the principal was oblivious to the chilly reception, now fully immersed in his plan to cover the swimming pool to enable year-round swimming.

Ah, those intricate, luminous, Aztec-patterned
waistcoats
, with internal breast pockets for lifted gaming chips or hush money — what more could a thirteen year old ask for on the long, mixed-gender bus ride home?

The waistcoats were not just identical in design but size, which tended to highlight those at the extremes of puberty’s gauntlet. Grant Kapps, bully extraordinaire, looked like a trained gorilla when constricted in his waistcoat, especially to Jason Stride, who’d recently seen the original
Planet of the Apes
. Jason had spent a lot of time this last term looking out of classroom windows, checking if a lunchtime of scrummaging had finally unearthed Lady Liberty’s ice-cream cone at the centre of the number two ground. What was the worth of all that rucking and mauling, he had decided, if it wasn’t a scheme devised by teachers to gradually excavate the schoolyard?

Jason was another book-shaped kid in a ball-shaped school, collecting supporting evidence for his budding superiority complex. He found himself at the centre of his year’s coterie of outcasts, not through any force of character or intellect, but because of his mother’s generosity. She would overload his lunchbox with the latest in confectionery and portion-packaged snacks to fatten up her wheat sheaf of a son, but Jason would give most of it away to those whom he could tolerate. Many years later, Kirtain and O’Reilly (enduring last names but unfixed Christian ones thanks to another of Kissick’s
Traditional Schooling with Traditional Values
initiatives) will meet in an Irish pub in Prague, quite by chance, and the first thing they talk about will be Jason’s lunchbox.

Other things conspired against Jason to make him stand out. He had the misfortune of Kissick being his new next-door neighbour, and the otherwise stern principal had fallen into the annoying habit of saying hello to Jason during school hours. Also, despite the fact Jason lived within walking distance (the locale was one of the selling points for Kissick), he caught a ride with Mr Kapps, the art teacher and father of Gorilla Grant, every day after school.

The Kappses lived on a lifestyle block twenty minutes from town near the Sunnyglen Hospice, which is where Jason’s mother worked. After being dropped off by Mr Kapps, Jason spent his afternoons at the hospice picking up custard spoons from the lino for the less nimble residents and condensing great works of literature into twenty-minute plot summaries for the younger terminals, who all seemed to be inflicted with the same dread of dying without knowing what happens in
Wuthering Heights
.

Every day Jason would sit and wait on the steps of the art classroom while Mr Kapps turped the tables and sent raunchy texts to Mrs Morton, the art history teacher. Mr Kapps hated abstract art, that’s why he became a high school art teacher — at least then he could make people paint things the way they actually looked. He even went so far as importing Mondrian toilet paper so he could wipe his arse on petty abstraction. But Jason knew this was all a front to hide his long-standing affair with Mrs Morton. He felt bad for Mrs Kapps, but since she had carried and successfully delivered his tormentor, Grant Kapps, he decided to keep the affair to himself.

The previous year, Grant would also ride home with his
father (though he didn’t deign to wait near the classroom, and especially not near Jason), but now that he was old enough to take his own car to school he could pretend his father didn’t exist. Grant had yo-yoed between victor and villain his entire school career. Mondays were for back-patting and teachers quietly dreaming of how good the senior team will be next year with Grant a year older, a year bigger, leading the pack. By Wednesday the weekend glow began to subside and his tardiness, indifference to schoolwork and treatment of his weaker school chums took ascendancy. By Friday, if he chose to attend school and not take his Escort down the lakes with a few honeys and more than a few tinnies, Grant was lectured not to throw his potential away and threatened with expulsion — only for all to be forgiven by the time sports results were read out at Monday’s assembly.

For friends, Grant preferred the lackey type. He once wrote an English essay on ‘What a good friend Iago was to Morpheus’, having only watched the first ten minutes of the movie and, even then, not particularly closely. At this time, his main accessories were Shawn Brummins, the school’s Ziploc-bag magnate, and Fugly (an elision of ‘Fucking Ugly’), who was the same weight as Grant but half his height. For this reason, Grant had taken to calling him Choad, forgetting Fugly already had a nickname.

Of a lunchtime, Grant, Shawn and Fugly preferred to walk around rather than frequent a particular haunt, the way pop stars err on the side of overexposure for fear of losing sway if not seen on a daily basis. They made a point of passing Jason’s Crew at least once a lunchtime, often
spending the period before lunch scribbling put-downs for the individual members of the Crew on the inside cover of their exercise books. They were beginning, however, to feel as if the swimmers were no longer afraid of the sharks.

On this particular day, Leon, good at maths, poor at English, arrived late to the Crew’s spot behind the prefabs and missed out on something sweet and compacted from Jason’s lunchbox.

‘Did you watch
Poison Ivy
last night?’ Jason asked.

Leon shook his head, even though he did watch it with the lights out and his door shut after saying good night to everyone. He pretended to be fascinated by his tomato sandwich. In fact, he
was
fascinated by his sandwich. It had reached that stage when the bread was too moist, the tomato too pulpy, but he was so hungry it transfixed him. He oscillated between putting it in his mouth and the bin, as Grant, Shawn and Fugly were released from a ten-minute detention for throwing iron fillings in the metalwork room and began their slow, inexorable progress towards the prefabs.

Jason turned to A.D. and O.P., who were fine with the names Oliver and Arnold until last week, but were now converts to Initialism after seeing an obscure manga film. They were playing paper-scissors-rock to decide whose phone they’d use to SMS the
instant win
code on O.P.’s Coke bottle. Rock broke scissors just as, over by the tuck shop, Grant punched the hare-lipped kid with the unquenchable curiosity and no sense of embarrassment for trying to look in the plastic bag Shawn Brummins was carrying. The kid did a triple-take and ran off with short, scuffing strides and arms flopping at his sides. Shawn and Fugly were still
mocking him when they rounded the corner of the first prefab and caught sight of Jason’s Crew. Grant, however, was silent.

Leon, the Initialists, Kirtain and O’Reilly (they were there, as always, but never really worth the mention) all tsked and rolled their eyes. Jason, being a nervous preener, buttoned up his waistcoat, pulled up his socks and let his trouser legs fall back over his shins.

Grant walked up to Jason, who remained seated. ‘Get the rolls out boys.’ Behind Grant, Shawn and Fugly removed two rolls of tinfoil from the bag and revealed them with a symmetrical flourish. Grant grabbed Jason by his waistcoat and pulled him to his feet.

‘Do you like rap music, Jase the Ace?’

‘Not really. I don’t really like any music.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame, Mixmaster Stride, coz I think you’d really like rapping if you tried it.’

Jason Stride is being wrapped in tinfoil and no one really knows why; it just has to happen.

As Shawn and Fugly mummify him, Grant makes sure Jason’s arms are tightly by his sides and his henchboys aren’t missing any spots. Jason tries to hold his chest out so he won’t be too constricted once entombed, but this only succeeds in making him short of breath when they start wrapping his head, and he is unable to stop them wrapping him completely.

There is a moment of stillness.

And then he is suddenly hot — there is no warm, no period of acclimatising to the heat, he is hot and can’t breathe
and his eyes are covered and he can’t hear the laughing over the crackle of the foil that sounds like a herd of elephants trampling a beach of seashells. The only way to breathe is to chew through the foil.

The sensation brings back other memories — licking batteries with a next-door neighbour, blowing out those birthday candles that always relight — but they do not displace or insulate him from the experience he is having now. The gride of his teeth, braces and tinfoil being forced to co-exist in his moist, chomping mouth.

Bits of foil are wrapped, coiled, spooled in his braces as Jason gags with relief. More intense than the rush of cool air into his staticky mouth is the relief that the weight of his superiority has suddenly lifted.

How absolutely ingenious to wrap someone in foil and leave them to chew their way out!

And with braces!

He swells with pride for his tormentors, his equals, whose difference from him has squinted away. He rubs his cheek against his shoulder, peeling the foil from the right side of his face. A juicy earlobe of a tear runs the slalom of his blemished skin.

‘He’s crying,’ Fugly observes, appalled at the lack of restraint, the disrespect.

Tears of joy, Jason thinks.

Someone — Jason’s eyes are still covered by the foil — shoves him in the chest. His feet still bound, mermaid-like, he topples over; his arms, bound likewise, cannot break his fall, and the tinfoil mummy capsizes. Butt, back, head smack the concrete in sequence and he’s unconscious.

While waiting for the nurse-slash-receptionist (a Kissick cutback parading as a promotion), Leon sets about peeling the rest of the foil off Jason. It is a source of unlikely bliss. The feeling links back to peeling layers of dried PVA glue off his hands after an afternoon of card-marking when he first started school. Revealing this friend he hardly knows, freeing him, Leon begins to own the scene for himself.

While Arnold and Oliver are getting help.

While Kirtain and O’Reilly pool their loose change in the hopes of buying a Cookie Time.

While Grant Kapps and Associates embark in his Escort for the lakes to hotbox while things cool down at school.

While Mr Kapps the art teacher opens his desk drawer and rubs his hand over Mrs Morton’s lace-embroidered brassiere.

While Kissick leans back in his desk chair and pokes his abdomen with his thumb, wondering if he has a hernia and, if so, can he push it back in?

While Jason Stride dreams of the ride home with an awkwardly diffident Mr Kapps, whose car turns into a giant lizard that starts eating schoolchildren as they get off the kind of yellow school bus you never see around these parts.