The Backpacker (18 page)

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 half 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.

‘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.