Living for Disco

June 1994.  I land at Subang Airport in Kuala Lumpur to begin a year of study.  I am carrying no guide book because my ex-boyfriend is coming to meet me at the airport, and so it has not crossed my mind that I may need one.  He knows K.L. well, and promised me that he’d look after me when I arrived.  I pick up my luggage and head towards the doors, looking out for him, expecting to see his face amid the throng, although there are so many people pressed against the glass, I wonder if I will see him. 

The doors open and I am hit for the first time by the heat and the smells of Asia.  Instantly, I am in love.  Bewildered and jetlagged, I take in the scarlet-flowering hibiscus and the palms towering against the blue.  I am breathing as if through a wet flannel, and sweat is trickling between my breasts already.  The heavy smell of durians mixes with petrol and kretek cigarettes.  I am spotted by a herd of taxi drivers, who gallop towards me, shouting, pushing, confusing.  I tell them, smiling confidently, that no, I am waiting for someone.  I do not need a taxi.  Terima Kasih.

For two hours I sit in the airport, watching the women in bright baju kurang sashay past.  I watch men in suits and kepis enter and leave the prayer room.  The day wears on.  I realize that he is not coming, but despite the fact that I know he is a total bastard, part of me refuses to believe that he would leave me here, half a world away from what is familiar.   

I’m a country girl; I am as green as the Welsh fields that I looked out on every morning as I grew up.  The biggest town I’ve ever lived in is Hull, for god’s sake, and that’s a metropolis as far as I am concerned, and one that smells a bit of fish when the wind blows west.  Now, here I am, hot and alone, with a bag of clothes, and a wilting orchid from the flight stuck in my stupid, impractical hat.  I’m surrounded by strangeness and strangers, unable to figure out what to do next.  I don’t know where to go.  I don’t know who to trust.  When I try to call my parents, the exchange inexplicably connects me to a family in Norway, who don’t appreciate being called at 2am by a tearful Englander.

I realize that I can either sit in the airport all day, and all night, and all week, waiting for someone to come and take care of me, or I can take care of myself.  So, cursing my errant ex, and wishing upon him a plague of boils (which I’m sure he managed to contract all by himself, shacked up in carnal bliss with a ladyboy on Koh Samui, while I waited disconsolately for him at the airport), I pick myself up, and wend my way taxi-wards.

Once they have finished fighting over me, and decided who will be the lucky beneficiary of my obvious gaucherie, I am ensconced in the back of a car and sucked into the city.  My taxi driver takes one look at my tear-stained face, and rips me off with aplomb.  He also does me the biggest service that anyone will do for me that year, and deposits me in the centre of KL’s red light district, palming me off onto a Chinese couple who run a busy brothel next to the 7-11, and speak no English. 

They instantly start to fuss over me, and install me in a cosy room, where I can smell frying noodles and storm drains.  The gentle click of mahjong tiles drifts up from the street, all but drowned out by the stink and blare of the distant traffic.  The tiny lift fits only one person, and smells perpetually of durians.  The balconies are full of ‘kupu kupu malam’, drifting around in flimsy dressing gowns, waiting for customers. 

Pathetically, I sit in my room and I cry.  Only my sense of impatience at my own fear spurs me to action.  I go next door, and buy some pak choi with garlic, some fried fish and a plate of rice, and am shouted at by the Cantonese waitress for speaking to her in Malay.  On the way back a man from Senegal speaks to me in French, asking me how to use the public phone.   I am reassured that at least someone in this town is as confused and as lost as me.

But, by the time my friend arrives two days later, I have explored the city by myself.  I eat on the street corner every morning, the rats and cockroaches running around my feet.  I know how to handle the taxi-drivers.  I have been pressed against sweating, groaning, groping humanity in the tiny pink busses that barrel around the city on endless circuits, canto-pop squawking from the speakers.  I have been horribly lost, but I have found my way home.

That night, both incandescent with excitement, we slip down to the 7-11 in our pajamas, to buy bottles of Anchor beer, which she opens with her teeth – a party trick that she has disappointingly since grown out of.  Then we get wildly drunk watching the World Cup, and listening to the unceasing babble and clamour of our new home.

In all my travels since then, I have never been able to recapture that feeling of life just beginning, and adventures beckoning, and trust me, I have tried.

Incidentally, my ex turned up some weeks after we arrived, looking like a lobster, and asking for money.  His friends all tried to warn me off him, knowing how he’d been employing his manhood while in Thailand.  There was no need.  He was, and remains, simply a festering piece of my life’s garbage, who, sadly, would continue to waft his foulness over my life for the rest of the year.  He’s a wretched and loathsome human being, for many, many reasons, but what he did went a long way to making me who I am, and so I suppose I could thank him.  I won’t though.

Where were you in ’94?

Woe. Loss and pain, etc. I will spare you most of the gory the details of my current emotional anguish. I wish it was about something worthwhile, like the imminent extinction of the cheetah, or the plight of London’s street pigeons, but no, it’s just over a stupid man*. It’s pretty grim though, and I’m costing the office a fortune in Kleenex. Thank god I now have my own office, and can cry in relative privacy.

It’s a strange old process, this break-up lark. I seem to have gone from ‘Oh, goody, I’m over it. That was reassuringly quick. Pass the ketchup’, which was the state of play midweek last week, to ‘Every second of the day is an exercise in mental torture. Bring me a variety of classified pharmaceuticals and a trough of vodka immediately.’ When will it end?

On the upside, I’m going to see Mission Impossible 3 tonight. I’m quite excited. I haven’t been to the cinema for a while. Also, the Da Vinci Code opens on Friday. I have so much to look forward to.

Right. I’m going home now, to clean up the half pint of cream I accidentally sprayed all over the living room furniture/my clothes/the bedroom door this morning, after shaking it enthusiastically without checking the lid was on. Can’t wait.

That is all.

*Not that the man in question is at all stupid. Just men as a whole.

Firstly, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who gave me such lovely advice after my last post! I did decide not to go (it was only going to be a two week holiday in any case), because I was worried that if I went, the feelings I’d be trying to hard to leave behind would probably throw a wild party, and trash the house while I was gone. I went away for the long weekend with a friend, who was endlessly patient in listening to my extremely one-track conversation, and salving my wounded emotions with red wine. It was grand, and now I feel much better.

Anyway, check this out… I went into my local bottle store on Wednesday, to buy a 3 litre vat of wine (4 quid! And it’s nice!) into which I intended to throw myself in order to drown my tortured soul, etc. etc. After I had braved the Giant Walk-in Fridge and was thawing out at the till, I noticed this little gem on sale for a grand total of 7.5 Namibian Dollars.

I had to do a triple take. First of all I thought it was just a coincidence, and that the name just sounded like ‘sperm’, but then I looked more closely at the delightful little cartoon on the label. Oh, and in case you were wondering, ‘Saug Mich Aus’ means ‘Exhaust Me’ in German.

What a quaint and charming idea! I’m still completely gobsmacked that anyone would produce this and expect it to sell. As it appeals to my puerile sense of humour, it cheered me up no end.

I’m not going to drink it though.

UPDATE: Apparently, according to Zenta, (see comments) it doesn’t mean exhaust me at all. Alta Vista must be run by a bunch of prudes. It means ‘Suck me dry’. Which is even better. But I’m still not drinking it.

I’ve just been dumped by the love of my life. How’s that for a dramatic opening? Good, no? Thought so.

Whatever. The fact is he’s just too busy for me right now. Actually, he’s too busy for everything right now, including tending to his own sanity, so it’s not a surprise that I was sacrificed, but it makes me feel no better. At least my heart was only figuratively ripped out – it could have been a lot worse if I’d been born an Aztec.

Anyway, my point in writing this post is not to express how utterly shitty I feel, but to ask some advice*.

A big part of me wants to go home for a couple of weeks. I want to sit and drink wine with my friends, I want to meet my nephew, and I want to eat bacon and eggs in a greasy spoon while reading the News of the World. I want to drink a pint in a pub. I want to travel on a bus. I want to go into a bookshop, just to see if it’s as magical an experience as I remember, having been starved for so long of real bookshops, and lumbered only with charlatans that sell wall to wall Wilbur Smith. I want sushi.

However, I have no money, and very little time. I don’t know if running away for a wee while is wise, or whether I should just weather the storm and hold my head up as if nothing is wrong. Not that I’m managing that much right now. I’m sure most of the shoppers in pick’n’pay yesterday thought I was some crazed lunatic who was really, really upset with the potatoes.

So, seeing as I am incapable of making a rational decision myself, please advise me. What do you think? To go, or not to go, that is the question…

*do old teabags really reduce puffiness of the eye area?

I am jolted awake into the dark by a crash. I don’t know where it’s coming from. I am disoriented, but I’m sure the whole neighbourhood can hear my heart trying to escape from the confines of my ribcage. I look down at my chest, almost expecting to see a Roger Rabbit style heart pounding out a foot into the room.

Lying in my bed, alone in my little flat, I feel very vulnerable. I am glad that I remembered to lock the burglar bars – something I have done every night since my friend Michael told me about how he found a man with a gun in his living room at 2am, trying to steal his laptop.

Another crash; it’s very close. I hear laughter. My neighbours are all elderly. I can’t imagine they would be throwing a wild party at 1.30am, or asking builders to dismantle the house in the dead of night.

As the crashing continues, I become increasingly frightened. There is no-one here who could protect me if someone broke in. Cocooned in my web of burglar bars, I am reminded once more that should someone successfully gain entry into my haven, my safety net would become a trap.

I am afraid to turn on the light, in case I attract attention to the fact that someone has heard what is going on. The crashing continues. There are shouts and screaming. I stumble into the living room to retrieve the phone book, and then I lock myself in the bathroom to call the police. They promise to send someone round. I crawl back into bed, and wish desperately that I was at home, safe, in London. The thought makes me laugh, particularly in the light of a recent email from my friend, who told me that she looked out of her window in Camberwell the other day, to see a group of boys firing guns into the air.

As the crashing and shouting escalates I wonder who I can call. I left David, the security guard next door’s number at work, and in any case, he might not be working tonight. I don’t know my landlord’s phone number – a fact that strikes me suddenly as ludicrous – and they are not listed. Also, I don’t know what I would hope to achieve by waking two pensioners in the night with stories of armed robbers.

I would call my bloke, but he’s had a horrendous and tragic day; he’s sick, and he’s tired, and he’s heartbroken. He could do nothing from where he is, and I can’t bring myself to call him and wake him up, just because I am scared and I feel alone. So I call the police again, and weep down the phone at them. I feel pathetic that I am so frightened of burglars who aren’t even trying to get into my house, but the police are very kind. Apparently they are outside my house – can I go outside to speak with them?

I am flabbergasted. ‘You want me to go outside?’, I ask. All my senses are telling me not to do this, but I unlock my gate, and go up to the main gates. As I walk up the drive, I hear laughing, two loud bangs, and the silver confetti of breaking glass from the house next door. I let the policeman in; again, he is helpful and friendly, although he refuses to get out of the car because Boris is bounding around, delighted at the opportunity to make a new friend. I suddenly feel enormous affection for this fat, stupid dog, who just wants to love everyone. If he wasn’t so hairy and moulting, and if he didn’t wave his pink doggy penis around so arbitrarily, I would drag him into bed with me, for something warm to hold.

The police car departs on a tour of the block, sirens wooping in the dark. I draw all my curtains, curl up into bed, and cry, although I’m no longer sure what it is I’m crying about. Soon, everything becomes quiet, and I drift into a fitful sleep, my dreams populated with would be burglars and thieves, their hyena faces at my window, snarling and laughing.

This morning, in the warm sunshine, my fear seems completely out of place. David the security guard next door steps out to greet me as I leave for work, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. Everything is normal.

He asks me about last night. When he arrived for work this morning, his colleague told him that he had seen two men standing quietly, either side of my front gate, at 2am. He didn’t shoot them; David seems disapproving of this. He tells me that if he had been there, he would have at least threatened to shoot them. He says it is his responsibility to protect not only the house he works at, but all the houses he can see from his post. He shows me his gun. I feel oddly comforted, until he tells me I shouldn’t have left the house.

Those robbers, he says, his face concerned, they could shoot you.