The Waking That Kills (19 page)

Every day. Relentless. Repetitive. The same. The same. The same. The fucking same.

Borneo. A magical word, like a word from a dream... a blurry, repetitive dream, in a long, hot night. The timelessness of sleep, punctuated by odd, mismatching, uncomfortable images.

My first day in school, I’d walked into the principal’s office and he’d waved me to sit down while he scanned my letter of introduction. He was a fierce-looking man, an Iban with a scowly moustache pasted onto his mouth, and behind him, through the window behind his desk, such a rain-lashed morning that the palm trees were thrashing as though they would snap. I was nervous and excited, I was in the tropics, in a rainstorm on the edge of the rainforest. But what did he say to me? What were the first words I heard in my employment as an English teacher in magical, mysterious Borneo?

‘Sut dach’i y bore ma?’ He’d looked up at me and grinned and asked me how I was this morning... in Welsh. He’d done his Master’s degree in Aberystwyth, and thought I’d be impressed.

My head-of-department, the most urbane of men, had a degree from Loughborough and a Master’s from York. Looking glum one day, he told me he’d been to a funeral at the weekend. His three-year-old niece had been killed. By a falling coconut.

The school cleaner, whom I befriended and teased as she swabbed the corridors with a fragrant mop, was recently widowed. With her husband, an official in a government department, she’d travelled to Venice and Rome and Florence, but now she was a cleaner, since he’d been half-eaten by a crocodile somewhere upstream.

Things didn’t match. The dream was a warm, friendly blur, but it was shot through with jarring, unfriendly images.

We would have a school assembly, all fifteen-hundred boys and girls and a hundred teachers gathered for a pep-talk from the principal. One morning, it was the turn of the discipline-teacher to rant about the scourge of drugs, the danger of un-Islamic substances smuggled into the country from the dangerous world beyond. He’d brought a unit of young policemen with him. To warn the impressionable teenagers of what might happen if they got mixed up with the infidels who were threatening the health of the nation, the policemen propped up a lifelike, life-size dummy of a man and thrashed it so hard with a rattan cane that the hall echoed with the thwack of it and a pall of dust rose into the slowly-swirling overhead fans.

But, at the back of the room, I noticed a group of teachers unimpressed by the display. They were huddled over something more interesting in the local newspaper: a full-page photograph of a python, so bloated it was unable to move and surrounded by sight-seers... protruding from its mouth, the feet and legs of a girl it had swallowed.

Marudi, Sarawak, Borneo. I got into my routine. It was a kind of hypnosis, so comfortable and all-enveloping that it might have been torpor. School, my goofy boys and the loveliest funniest girls. My colleagues, the meticulous Chinese with their staccato voices ringing from the classrooms, the diffident Malays whispering
insha’allah
to excuse their institutionalised procrastination. School, and a sleep in the afternoon, and then a bicycle ride through the
kampongs
, where the dogs snapped and snarled at my wheels and the kids called out ‘Hello Mr Chris’ as I went wobbling by. Home for a shower, the noodles I cooked. And alcohol.

Alcohol on my balcony. Alcohol, with the river slithering by, and who-knows-what-else slithering in the mangroves which tangled in the stilts of my house. The python? Replete with another child it had smothered and crushed and swallowed whole? The crocodile? Which took dogs and pigs and sometimes, on an especially bountiful day, a fisherman who’d leaned carelessly into the water?

I didn’t care. I’d perfected my gin
stengah
. With the supplies I’d got from Miri, on a hurtling ride to the city and back in the flying coffin, and with ice from the nearby
kedai
(ice was
ayer batu
,‘water stone’), I would settle on my balcony and relish my nightly three or four or five thirst-quenching drinks. More than thirst-quenching, they would sink me so deeply and blurrily into my easy-chair that the forest was a spangle of fireflies, the sky a sparkle of stars.

Much later, too late, off to bed... stark naked under the fan, more or less comatose and too pissed to be troubled by mosquitoes. A few hours of snoring, sweaty sleep, and the next day would start all over again – my alarm call at five o’clock, the muttering of the mosque and me cursing and rolling off the bed and under the shower, for another morning in school.

February? May? August? October? No difference. The mosque and the hangover were always the same. The same. The same. The fucking same.

Possession. It was a kind of madness. It was surreal, a very nice trap. I knew every sound and smell. I knew every ant and spider and
chick-chak
in my bathroom. I liked my colleagues, some of them liked me. I’d learnt the long, complicated names of all my students. I knew enough Malay to make them laugh and to rub shoulders with shopkeepers in the town, with the people in the
kampongs
, with people whose grandparents had been head-hunters. So who cared what day it was, or which month? The very language was unfussed by the importance of time. The verbs had no tenses. Why would you need them? In the present tense you’d say ‘I go’. In the past you’d say ‘I go’ and toss in the word ‘yesterday’. To express the future, you’d say ‘I go’ and throw in the word ‘tomorrow’.

Time... nothing but a gentle collision of yesterday and today and tomorrow. Its passing was marked by mosque and school and gin. Simple.

Possession. Sometimes the students were possessed. It happened now and then, frequently enough to be unremarkable. Without any warning, in the middle of a lesson, a girl would start moaning, and then shouting, and then screaming and pulling off her
tudong
. The other girls would start too, and it might spread from classroom to classroom until all the girls and even a few of the women teachers were screaming. They called it ‘hysteria’. The male teachers, led by the Islamic Religious Knowledge department, would quell it with barking cries over the Tannoy and prayers at full-blast. Prayers... they always worked, loud and long and dinning, to drive out the evil spirits which had crept out of the jungle and into the school.

At first I found it terrifying. I saw how frightened the boys were, big beefy boys who quailed at the sight and sound of hundreds of girls possessed, and I was surprised how frightened I was too. They would pray, to protect themselves from evil. I wouldn’t, although I was unnerved. One day it had started in my own classroom. Asked to do some English lit, I’d gone to the shabby, dilapidated school-library to dig out a story and come out with a collection by Guy de Maupassant. We were ‘doing’ a story: Maupassant, in English lit, in Borneo. It was very hot. A black rain cloud was rolling towards the school, fast and huge as a tidal wave. Just outside my window, a bulldozer was chewing at the trees, revving noisily and belching smoke and breaking them down, one after another, in a rude and ugly assault on the forest. The hysteria started in my lesson. Just as the crash of the rainstorm hit the roof, a sweet little girl called Dayangku Siti Hafizah Qurr’atul binti Hj. Mohammad Alimin fell off her chair and started crying. Despite, or because of, my attempts to comfort her, she got louder and louder. Within moments, nearly every female in the building was wailing.

It didn’t last long. When it was all over, thanks to the over-layering of male voices praying through the loudspeakers, a boy told me that a spirit from the trees collapsed by the bulldozer had come into our lesson and possessed Siti. That evening I had an extra big, extra swirly drink on my balcony, to settle my nerves and keep the spirits of the forest at bay.

Allah akbar
. Gordons is great. I heard it from the mosque five times a day and I celebrated it in the evenings. I didn’t know if the gin was keeping me sane or driving me mad. Rehab? After a year or six in Borneo, I wasn’t sure if I was running from something or I was sliding headlong into a trap I’d never escape.

I remember talking to one of my students, a girl called Fatin. We were practising for her oral exam and I was asking the usual questions about her family and friends and hobbies and hopes for the future. She told me her father was the
muezzin
at the mosque. In my imagination, I pictured the stern, sanctimonious man whose voice woke me and needled me every day, and I looked at her earnest, perfect little face. She had the smoothest brown skin, the most perfect teeth and the biggest brownest eyes a caricaturist could draw... except that she was real, a living human being swaddled in her crisp white
tudong
. Trying to tie the question into the kind of format she could expect in her forthcoming exam, I asked her what she might want to do in the future. Mischievously I asked her, could a girl ever be the
muezzin
in the mosque in Marudi?

With the greatest seriousness, she answered, no. If ever a girl or a woman did the call to prayer, the world would end.

The world would end. At least that would be something. It might awaken me. At least for a millisecond, in whatever cacophonous, tumultuous moment the end of the world might occur, I could awaken from my dream of swiftlets and fireflies, from the mumble of meaningless prayers, from the mosque and school and alcohol the same and the same and the same and the fucking same...

A
ND NOW
? A
ND
now, I’d flown seven thousand miles to England. From the sweet, seductive pitcher-plant entrapment of Borneo, to the Lincolnshire wolds.

Same difference. The days and weeks of June and July and August blurred dreamily together. What did we do, the three of us, me and Juliet Lundy and Lawrence Lundy? Was it real, or part of my dream? Were they real, this woman and her boy, or had I conjured them, in my fumey, sweaty sleep?

I tried, one morning, to call my father. I remember trying to re-connect with the reality of my returning to England. While Juliet was changing the bed upstairs and the boy was in his tower, I went into the living-room and plugged the phone into its socket. A cheery nurse picked up, in Grimsby. I could hear a radio playing a pop song in the background, and then, when she turned it off because she couldn’t hear what I was saying, I could hear the seagulls. She said sorry, no, Mr Beal was resting comfortably in his room, but he wouldn’t be able to talk on the phone. He was quite alright, but his speech was... she tried to think of an acceptable euphemism... his speech was compromised. Mr Beal was alright in himself, he was eating and sleeping, he had the television and the daily newspaper, but he couldn’t speak. Come and visit him anytime, she said, he would no doubt be very happy to see me.

I thanked her. I listened to the gulls for another second, long enough for me to imagine my father at the open window of his little room, the salty air and the fustiness of his own smell, before she rang off.

A brief encounter with the outside world. Yes, it was still out there, somewhere, not so far away. But when I pulled the plug of the telephone out of its socket so that Juliet wouldn’t know I’d made a call, the sense of isolation was so intense that I could hear the falling of dust around me and feel the weight of it on my shoulders.

Another day... was it the next day or a week later?

I found myself wandering deep into the woodland and past the hearse and onwards to the end of the drive. I was going, for only the second time since I arrived, to set foot outside the limits of Chalke House. Not sure why, because my ribs were still aching and I had no intention of plodding up the lane and surfacing into the upper world, except maybe to gulp at the air like a drowning man whose clothes were utterly waterlogged... and there was Juliet, with the boy.

He was carrying a big, heavy cardboard box. She was carrying a smaller one. She was radiant, and her voice chimed among the trees as madly as the laughter of the yaffle. ‘Hey, Christopher, where are you heading off to? Up to the village again? No need... we’ve got enough supplies of everything to keep us going for a month, maybe more.’

I turned and trooped back to the house, behind her. She wouldn’t let me take the box. I could hear the clank of bottles, but she insisted she could manage. She’d made a call to the supermarket in Alford, she’d quoted her bank card number and they’d delivered her order to the end of the drive. She was bubbling with the success of such a simple
fait accompli.
There was a triumphant note in her voice. ‘No need for any of us to go anywhere...’ a bit out of breath as the box bumped against her chest as she walked, ‘I heard you on the phone the other day and I guess your Dad’s ok or else you would’ve said something... and now we’ve got food and drink... we’ve got gin!... So we’re alright and the rest of the world can go hoot as far as I’m concerned... what d’you think?’

It didn’t seem to matter what I thought. It was a rhetorical question.

Meekly, I followed her and the boy through the French windows and into the kitchen, where I was told to sit down and keep out of the way while they unpacked the groceries and re-organised them into different cupboards. They were in cahoots, the woodland elf and her ogre-son. I felt a deliberate sense of exclusion. I was, just then, as superfluous as if I’d never called from Lincoln railway station and never blundered into their life. And the satisfaction with which they stacked the shelves... they were so smug, as if the outside world were smitten by plague and yet they were safe, they would survive, some invisible benefactor had smuggled in the life-saving supplies and they would be alright.

N
O NEED TO
go anywhere. So what did we do?

I coupled with the woman. I engaged with the boy. But everything we did was tinged with a strange, desultory madness, as though we were simpletons... droll, harmless inmates of an asylum, with tasks assigned to fill our time between eating and drinking and sleeping.

Everything was pleasantly pointless. Even the sex.

Me and Juliet, we did it like children who’d discovered a new game, a game so marvellous that when we got the urge to play, we went at it in a frenzy which blanked out all the other games we’d played before. And then, when the game was over, we lost all interest in it. Like spoilt children, who could have whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it, we pushed the game aside, not bothering about its bits and pieces and who might tidy up afterwards.