The Backpacker (21 page)

THREE

We'd been in Singapore about ten days, and were planning on catching the boat to the Indonesian island of Batam before our limit of stay expired, when something happened that changed the course of our plans completely. All the talk of Australia had gone out of the window for the time being, and none of us could see beyond the Indonesian island that was visible from the top floor of a CBD skyscraper on a clear day.

None of us were bored with Singapore, in fact quite the opposite. Despite all other backpackers' advice to the contrary, we were having a good time, spending the nights in Raffles, playing our James Bond game, and spending the days in one of the open air public swimming pools in town. We had discovered that for one Singapore dollar a day it was possible to stay out of mischief and spend very little money lounging around a spotlessly clean, almost empty pool, which also kept us cool in the tropical humidity that constantly hung over the city.

Our tenth day in the city started out no different to the rest, and after managing to wake at nine for a breakfast of one boiled egg and two slices of bread with butter
or
(not
and
) jam, we grabbed our shorts and headed to the pool in the park near Raffles Place. As usual I took my pocket radio along to listen to the day's pop on Singapore FM, while Rick went off to the bank to change some money, saying that he'd meet us at the pool later.

‘Don't know why you bother with that thing, John,' Dave said, standing over me as he emerged from the pool.

‘Dave, d'you mind?' I picked up the radio quickly to stop it from getting wet. ‘You're dripping on my trannie!'

He slumped on the sunbed next to me. ‘Fuckin' trannie. Jesus! We're putting men on Mars and you British are still listening to the wireless.'

I put the radio down on the opposite side to Dave's spreading puddle of water and squinted at the swimming pool. A woman was breast-stroking up and down, and I watched as the ripples from her wake caught the light of the morning sun before they spread out, hit the sheer tiled sides and made their way back into the middle.

Most of the other travellers staying at our guest house had declined this morning's offer to go to the pool – they always did. ‘Go to a swimming pool?' they'd baulk. ‘You should go to Thailand or Malaysia, to the beautiful beaches. Why do you want to spend more than one day in this city?' They all said the same thing, day after day as one left and another one came. As soon as they put their backpack down and sat on the bunk bed, out would come the guidebook with the possible routes in and out of the city. ‘How long have you been here?' they'd ask me. The look on their faces when I told them two weeks was one of utter shock and disbelief. Of course, they would only be staying one day, two at most. They had only just arrived and had never been here before ‘but the guidebook said...' Sometimes I wanted to shove their book down their throat.

Guidebooks have got a lot to answer for – guidebooks and the bush telegraph. Word of mouth can often be worse than a book for spreading misleading information. Backpackers gossip like old women, and all it takes is a word from one traveller to another, overheard in the reception of a guest house, to guarantee continent-wide broadcast. And that's exactly the way it was for Singapore. One person went there and told somebody else that it was only worth a day, ‘just to say you've been there', the word spread and eventually became written in stone.

I looked from the glimmering water up to the geometric patch of hazy blue sky. It was like lying beside a rectangular pond in the valley of a canyon, the buildings appearing to lean inwards, allowing only a piece of sky the width of a football pitch to shine through the top of the canyon. The only gap in the canyon wall was where side streets separated one row of buildings from another, producing V shaped ravines in the crisp line between rooftops and sky.

‘John!' I snapped out of the daydream. ‘Listen!' Dave shouted, picking up my radio. At the end of all the hourly news bulletins, Singapore FM always has a couple of items of local news; nothing earth-shattering, usually a cat stuck up a tree, or local boy saved in storm drain drama, but today's local item was different. ‘It's about us!'

‘Shh,' I said, leaning closer.

The over-concerned radio presenter was explaining to the listeners that some men, pretending to be involved in the latest James Bond movie, were conning locals out of money. He said that the ‘gang' was potentially dangerous.

‘No way! Dangerous? That's bullshit, man.' Dave stood up and waved my radio in the air. ‘All we did was talk to girls and have some fun, that's all. We didn't take any fuckin' money!'

‘Dave, do me a favour and give me the radio will you.'

‘Sorry.' He handed it over. ‘But, hey, that's bullshit, John. We didn't hurt anyone. I've never broken the law in my life.'

‘What, never?' I asked doubtfully.

He hesitated. ‘Well, at school I maybe stole some candies from other kids, but that's it.'

‘Yeah, same as me really.' I held the radio to my ear, expecting it to crackle out an apology. ‘It must have been the staff at Raffles who reported us. Why d'you think they're making such a big deal about it? Propaganda?'

‘How's that?'

‘Well, you know how over-protected the Singaporeans are. Maybe the government just blows everything out of proportion to keep everyone in check. Scare them into thinking that the government's watching.'

‘Conspiracy theorist huh?' He nodded, turned and dived into the pool, swimming a full length underwater before surfacing.

‘They're probably watching us right this minute,' he shouted back from the other end.

I looked up again at the buildings around us and nodded. ‘A few thousand office workers are that's for sure.'

Another good thing about the one-dollar swimming pool was that it allowed us to catch up on the sleep we weren't getting at night, and to the sound of Dave's splashes mixed with the hum of the traffic I closed my eyes and started to drift off. Like pink shutters my eyelid membranes went down and warmed, heated by the mid-morning sun. The smell of chlorine mixed with the odour of freshly cut grass from the nearby park reminded me of the lido where I used to live in London, and the warmth, smells and sounds all came together at once, so perfectly, and in such harmony that I would have slept and dreamt if I hadn't heard a voice.

The next thing I knew I was being shaken. ‘Sir. Excuse me sir, your friend is outside. Sir?'

Wiping away a sliver of dribble from the corner of my mouth, I turned over and looked up, squinting hard at the bright face.

‘Sir, your friend is outside,' the pool attendant repeated.

‘Well tell him to come inside,' I said sleepily.

‘He has no money. Cannot come in.'

I crawled wearily off the sunbed and stood up, going dizzy from lack of blood to the brain. Dave was still doing lengths underwater, his brown figure wobbling with each thrust of his arms, and I cursed him, following the attendant to the turnstile where Rick was waiting.

‘Didn't you hear me shouting?' he said as I arrived.

‘I was asleep, sorry.'

‘Where's Dave?' he puffed, wiping the sweat from his face.

‘Underwater.' I rubbed my eyes. ‘Haven't you got any change?' I said, handing him the dollar coin I'd brought, correctly assuming that he didn't have any.

‘Worse than that,' he said, pushing through the turnstile, ‘I haven't got any dollars. You know all that baht that I knocked off from Ta? It's forged.'

‘You're kidding?' I said, suddenly waking up. ‘
Forged?
'

‘Yeah, I'm kidding, and I just stood out here for the past five minutes for the fun of it.
Of course I'm not fooking kidding!
'

At first I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything, and we walked over to the sunbeds in silence, Dave following alongside in the water.

‘Dave,' I said as we reached the other end, ‘you'd better get out and come over here. We've got some serious thinking to do.'

FOUR

We were still thinking about the forged baht that night when we walked along the well-lit streets towards Little India. I hadn't yet told Rick where we were going because I knew that if I did he'd flip. He had never liked India, and the idea of wasting a night on the town in what would probably be the dirtiest part of Singapore wouldn't make him happy. I was mildly interested to see if it would live up to its name, and we could hardly go back to Raffles. In any case, I needed a change from five-star luxury and rich women; their perfume always made me sneeze.

At first none of us spoke, we just trudged along the streets wondering what came next. The whole episode with the forged money had really put the dampers on everything, including Rick's birthday, which we should have been celebrating that night. Rick told Dave and me what had actually happened at the bank that morning, and it was amazing that he had returned to the pool at all; he could easily have been behind bars.

Thinking that we were soon going to Indonesia, Rick had decided, after some deliberation, that he would be better off with a fistful of dollars and not Thai baht. He stood to lose some money, changing from one currency to another and then back into rupiah later on, but we all agreed that it made sense in the long run. None of us had ever been to Indonesia before and therefore had no idea how easy it would be to change Thai currency there. Singaporean banks were happy to take it, so better to be safe than sorry.

Rick told us that he'd walked into the bank, first customer of the morning, and plonked the wad of cash onto the teller's counter. They agreed the exchange rate, and were about to start counting out the US dollars when the woman who was serving him noticed something odd about the pictures on the notes. She put one under an ultra-violet lamp, frowned, and then tried another. And another, and another. ‘What's wrong?' Rick had asked. The woman ignored him and whispered something to a colleague who then went out the back, presumably to fetch the manager.

By now, Rick said, it was obvious that the money was forged. He sweated, his heart pounding as he looked nervously around for his escape. There was no point in waiting about to find out what would happen next so he just said goodbye to the clerk and walked very casually out of the bank. When he hit the street he ran, and didn't stop running until he got to the swimming pool.

Dave naively suggested that Rick should go back to the bank and explain that he had received the money from a licensed money changer in Malaysia. Pretty ridiculous considering that our passport stamps would show that we were heading south and not north. Why the hell would he be changing money into Thai baht?

‘You're a businessman doing deals in–'

‘Shut up, Dave!'

He shut up.

Rick looked up as we went to cross the road and then looked back down as we walked. ‘Where're we going, John?'

‘Just have a walk around,' I said, momentarily looking up to check that the road was clear. Dave looked up at me but didn't speak.

We walked half a mile or so before Rick noticed a change in his surroundings, and then only because a rat ran across his feet. He looked up with a start, left, then right and finally doing a three-sixty spin and sniffing the air. ‘Fook, it stinks around here. Where are we?'

I didn't answer.

‘And there's loads of rubbish!'

‘There's a little bar over there,' I said quickly, pointing down an alleyway. ‘There're lots of them. Shall we have a drink?'

He eyed me cautiously before turning into a bustling side street, crammed full of tables and chairs. People, mostly Indians and a few Chinese, were sitting outside shops eating noodles or curries and swigging bottles of beer.

‘Fooking hell,' Rick said, stopping in his tracks, ‘now that's what I call a birthday present.'

Dave and I followed his gaze past the tables, and noticed to our astonishment that the whole street was wall-to-wall brothels. Little doorways with a tatty curtain across them were cheek-by-jowl, the glow of a red light warming the first few feet of the pavement outside each one.

‘Happy Birthday,' I said, surprised at the discovery. ‘Now let's sit down and have a drink.'

‘Thanks, lads, I knew I could rely on you two to cheer me up.' Rick patted our backs. ‘Nice one.'

Dave looked at me, raising his eyebrows as if to say, ‘What the fuck's he on about?' and sat down at the nearest table.

I ordered three beers and they were on the table being opened before I'd even sat down. ‘So,' I said, pouring mine into a glass, ‘what are we going to do?' The cold beer hit the humid air and foamed. ‘I've got some money, not a lot, but enough to get me into Indo. What about you Dave?'

He looked up mid-pour. ‘I've got to get a job if I don't want to be on the next plane back to the States. Let's face it, we've all got to get jobs, otherwise, boom!'

Rick suddenly stood up, looking down the street. A beautiful Indian girl, five feet ten and dressed in a full length, red evening dress was walking towards us. Her full, round breasts were almost falling out of a V-shaped slit in the gown that ran from her collar bone down to a point just above her navel. She looked like she was wearing it back-to-front.

‘Look at that!' Rick gasped, putting his glass on the table and nearly missing.

Dave looked, proclaimed himself in love, and went to stand up but Rick pushed him back down.

The woman in red approached our table, her red high-heel shoes clip-clopping along until she reached Rick. She was even more beautiful close up, no pimples or pock-marked skin, just the perfect woman. She stopped, put one hand on Rick's crotch and kissed his lips.

‘Jesus,' I said, staring and trying to form another word.

Dave's month was hanging open, and the beer in his hand was spilling onto the table so I nudged it upright. ‘Thanks,' he managed to say, still spellbound. ‘My God, have you ever seen anything like her before?'

We watched Rick float down the street behind the woman, led like a balloon on her string, and disappear into one of the doorways. A moment later he was back, asking for money, his face smeared with lipstick.

‘Only if I can share her,' Dave replied as he put his hand into his pocket to cover half the cost.

Rick placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘I'd do the same on your birthday, Dave, you know that.'

‘I had my birthday on Koh Pha-Ngan, remember? Fuck, you only rolled me a joint!'

‘Yeah I remember that,' he said, laughing nostalgically. ‘Toomy made you a seashell necklace, how romantic. Cough up.'

Dave begrudgingly put his money on the table. ‘Whose idea was it to come to Little India anyway, man?'

Rick looked down his nose. ‘So, that's where we are. No wonder you wouldn't tell me. Well, serves you two right then.' He scooped up the cash and turned to walk off. ‘Back in an hour.'

Dave and I sat and drank, and waited. Occasionally we talked about what we were going to do next, but mainly we just got drunk and speculated as to what was going on in that room down the street. The more drunk we got the more jealous he became. ‘D'you think she's a he?' he slurred, pouring out yet another beer that neither of us could really afford. ‘I think so. I think Rick's got more than he bargained for.'

After nearly two hours Rick came back down the street with a look of awe on his face. That's the only way I can describe it. He wasn't smiling, which was strange, but he looked totally at peace with the world, and totally in awe, as though he'd seen an apparition.

‘Well?' Dave said as Rick sat back down at our table. ‘Spill the beans, man.'

I nodded and leaned forward, eager to know the ins and outs. ‘C'mon, what happened?'

Slowly Rick took hold of his warm beer and poured out a full glass, as though in a dream. He seemed to be staring right through the table. ‘We're leaving. Tomorrow night.'

Dave and I were gagging, leaning way over the table, willing him to give us more information. I swallowed hard. ‘Yeah?'

Rick glanced at both of us. ‘She read my palm.'

Dave burst out laughing. ‘Read your fuckin' palm, man? Ha! Is that it? Didn't you fu–?'

‘Yeah of course I did, but
then
she read my palm.' He took another drink and looked starry-eyed at his hand. ‘We're leaving tomorrow night. On a boat.'

Dave looked at me, and then at Rick, his white eyes swivelling like ping-pong balls against his face. ‘Says who?'

‘Her.' He pulled a business card from his pocket. ‘
Lady Mysta Geng
.'

‘Gimme that.' Dave snatched the card.

‘We haven't got a boat though,' I said dismissively. ‘She's not a very good palmist.'

There was a moment's silence as Rick smiled to himself before saying. ‘We will have tomorrow. Remember that boat we saw in Changi Yacht Club, John. The same as the one I said my dad used to own?'

Dave frowned at me in confusion, unable to follow the sudden change in the course of the conversation. ‘The one owned by the Japanese businessman who's never here,' I said, ‘yeah?'

Rick leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. A broad grin spread across his face. ‘Well I'm going to steal it.'