The Backpacker (25 page)

‘Don't matter, we're all in the same boat, Dave.' I slid the neatly folded notes out of my wallet. They hadn't been uncovered since I'd left England, apart from the occasional inspection during the Ta episode to make sure they were still there, and were still crisp and new.'

‘Pounds?' he exclaimed as I handed them over.

‘Yeah, pounds.'

‘Man, these are ancient. Don't you carry dollars like everyone else on the planet?' He inspected the note, holding it up to the light. ‘Wow, the Queen of England!'

‘They'll take them, don't worry. Money's money, they're not stupid. You'll get a lot of rupiah for that.' I put the other note back into my wallet. ‘That's worth a bit more than they're asking for, so don't let them tell you it's not enough.'

He smiled. ‘How about you, John? Not in the mood or what? Be the first time I've seen you turn your nose up at a beautiful girl.'

I downed the last of my beer and stood up. ‘I'll have a walk around town.'

‘Early night huh?' He put the note into his shorts pocket. ‘I've only got an hour, so wait on deck and I'll shout over for the tender.'

‘Tell you what, Dave, I'll wait on deck and you shout over,' I said sarcastically, and turned to leave.

‘Sure you won't join me?'

‘No, you go. I'll see you later.'

I left the bar and, after a ten-minute walk that led nowhere, decided to head back towards the harbour.

One of the streets I turned down led straight from the quayside inland, so I walked back via the base of the hills, where the suburbs rose gently towards the jungle, and had a clear view out over the bay. The town presented a series of concrete terraces, like hillside rice paddies, each building's flat roof a step down towards the sea, and I could just make out our boat among the many in the harbour. I stood and marvelled at its smallness against the huge, dark ocean backdrop beyond. What had been our world now looked just like that Monopoly piece on my papier mâché globe; a tiny toy on a huge, deep sea.

The town was also deceptive. In the same way that I'd stood on the boat earlier looking in and thought that the streets were deserted, so now, having walked out of town and looked down, I had the feeling that it was the centre of Indonesia.

For a bit of fun and the thrill of a near-death experience I paid a few rupiah to a motorcycle taxi and got driven down to the quayside where I waited for Dave. I thought I could easily pass a quiet hour watching the boats bob about.

However, the quiet hour turned out to be non-stop hassle as wave after wave of Girl's Angels pulled up in clouds of two-stroke exhaust fumes to offer their services. It became such a bind that I ended up walking to the end of the jetty and sat in our dinghy until Dave arrived, passing the time by crushing cockroaches and feeding them to the fish that darted about around the stone wall.

‘So,' I said quietly, pulling on the oars and looking over my shoulder to check our progress, ‘what was she like?' Dave had been almost silent since arriving back at the quay, and hadn't spoken at all about the prostitute, his head resting in the palm of one hand, deep in thought. The only sound, now that we'd left the town, was the plop and drip of each blade as I dipped the oars beneath the calm surface.

‘Mmm?' He looked up with his eyes only, the sound of his voice gentle and soft in the warm night air.

‘The girl. What was she like?'

He sighed heavily. ‘Like a young girl who shouldn't be doin' that kinda thing. I wanted to bring her with me, John, I really wanted to.'

‘You mean you wanted to save her.'

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe.'

We reached our boat and climbed up, hauling the dinghy up onto the deck. Just as I bent down to retrieve my flip-flops, there was a woman's laugh from down below, not loud, but startling in the silent night, like talk in a library. We froze.

The laugh came again.

‘Don't look at me,' I said in a hushed voice, ‘it's coming from down below.'

We tiptoed across the deck and went down the stairs. The smell of sweat was overpowering inside the confined space, and I saw Dave wince. ‘It's coming from Rick's room,' I whispered, inadvertently allocating quarters.

Rick's laugh came booming out just as Dave and I peeped around the door. He looked up and smiled, the girl lying next to him pulling the yellow oilskin over her bare body like a sheet. ‘Come in, have a drink. Found this bottle of scotch in the galley cabinet,' Rick said, pouring out another cupful, ‘the owner must have left it there.'

‘The owner didn't buy that, I did!' Dave said, straightening up.

‘Oh, really? Well have a drink anyway.' Rick poured one out for the girl. ‘This is Titty,' he giggled, looking at her. ‘It's true, isn't your name Titty?' I immediately recognised the girl as the passenger of the motorcycle who'd first spoken to us in town. Her silver sequinned dress was draped over a chair.

‘Hello again,' she sang from behind the anorak, ‘it's me.'

Rick looked at the girl and then at me. ‘You know each other?'

‘Yes,' I said, turning to get two more cups from the kitchen, ‘we saw her in town earlier. D'you want water in yours, Dave?'

Dave was still standing in the doorway of the bedroom, either surprised to see the girl or shocked that his whisky had been opened. I was still a bit shocked myself at the speed with which the girl had managed to find her way onboard.

The last of the ice chinked into the mugs, and I turned to go back to the bedroom but jumped back at the sight of Rick, standing right behind me.

‘John. I haven't got the money to pay her,' he whispered, glancing back at the bedroom. ‘What am I going to do?'

I sighed, looking over his shoulder at the pair of naked legs on the bed. ‘So much for the crash fund... '

FOUR

Dave's credit card was accepted at the local bank, and that, along with the remainder of my crash fund, fuelled a week long stay in Bangka.

Dave went into the local bank that first morning, bright and breezy from his first proper night's sleep since leaving Singapore, and came back out a millionaire. A rupiah millionaire, that is. Hardly the same thing, but none of us had ever been one before, or were ever likely to be in the future, so we celebrated accordingly, getting well and truly wasted for the next five days.

The boat turned into Indonesia's (and possibly the world's) first floating brothel, to add to the hundreds already scattered about the town. With Dave having drawn the maximum amount possible on his credit card, we began to live life accordingly. Women were ferried backwards and forwards from the quayside at all hours of the day and night, crates of beer were brought over, food if we couldn't be bothered to go to town and, on one occasion, a freshly roasted goat was delivered to us by the brothel owner.

During the course of the week, Rick had a brain-wave and suggested that we change the name of our boat. None of us felt that its current, single word name was really appropriate any more, so, along with the help of some local girls, we racked our brains for a new title.

Dave suggested typically militaristic words with a sexual twist, like
USS Torpedo Lover
, or sci-fi names of a similar ilk, such as
Starship Lover
and
Meteor Power
. All a bit childish we thought, and told him that if he couldn't come up with something a little more mature, and a little less comic book, he shouldn't bother at all.

It seemed to be very telling of his character and I've since used the same ‘name-the-boat' game to see if it's a good indicator of other people's personality, to amazingly accurate results. Even sitting in a pub somewhere, nowhere near the ocean, I still ask people what name they would give a yacht if they had one, sometimes just to test the theory and sometimes as a chat-up line. It yields startling rewards.

My suggestions tended to combine being at sea with the essence of travel, and were usually names like
Free Spirit
,
The Compass
or
Joyrider
. I suggested calling it
Big Balls
as a tribute to the infamous Indian deformity but the others thought it was too obscure. The girls who were onboard at the time thought that we should name the boat after themselves, but we all agreed that sailing around in a yacht with the word
Titty
splashed across the side would make us all look like idiots. Rick pointed out that that's exactly what we were, but generally agreed that something else would better fit the bill.

That something else was Rick's suggestion, and it won the name-the-boat competition hands down. Dave and I went into town, accompanied by his young ‘girlfriend', Watti, to secure the services of the local sign-writer or, failing that, to purchase paint and brushes to do the job ourselves.

Watti came in very useful in town when it came to buying anything, not only because she spoke the local language but also because we found that, even though Bangka was far from any tourist destination, we were still being ruthlessly ripped off. Everything we'd bought, from tomatoes to ropes, cost us double what anyone else in town paid for the same item. All we did now was point to something in a shop, out of view of the shop owner, and ask Watti to buy it with our money.

Within an hour of asking around town we rowed back to the boat accompanied by an eighty-year-old man who said he'd once had the job of repainting the name on the side of the
QE II
when it had docked in Jakarta once for refuelling. Credentials aside, he had the right equipment: pots of paint, brushes and a two-foot long stick with a rubber ball on the end so we assumed that he knew what to do and let him get on with it. He also had his own floating platform that we towed out, consisting of planks of wood strapped on to three oil drums, which he stood on to do the work, only occasionally falling into the water.

Every so often, while we lay around on deck drinking beer and sunbathing, the old boy's head would pop up over the prow of the boat, ‘Beer, beer,' he'd say through his gummy, one-toothed grin, and one of the girls would top him up. I checked his progress to make sure that he wasn't too drunk to write, and to make sure he had the piece of paper with the name on the right way round. The last thing we wanted was an upside-down name on the side of the boat.

When he'd completed the task, we made the mistake of telling him how great it was, each of us thanking him profusely for a job well done. He asked for another beer as a bonus, which we thought fair considering how little we were paying him, and said he'd like to come aboard to drink it. One beer, as ever, led to another, and before long the old man was falling about, apparently pissed out of his brains. He even started to fawn the girls, grabbing their bottoms as they walked past and falling onto the deck with a dull thud as they brushed him off.

The girls hated it. To them, I suppose, he represented everything they were trying to get away from: poverty, filth and poorly paid manual work, among other things, and they eyed him with barely concealed contempt. The more they pushed him off and tried to appear above his level, the more ironic it seemed. There they were, lounging around in bikinis, trying to convince themselves that they were high-class women who had rich boyfriends, while all along they did a job that was far less noble than the old pervert's.

Whenever they shoved him away, one hand clawing feebly at their breasts, he would turn his nose up and say something in Indonesian before moving back in and getting his wizened old hand slapped. I asked the girls what he was saying but they wouldn't let on, the old man just pointed to the town, tapped the glass face of his wristwatch and laughed. It was pretty obvious that he was reminding them where they worked and that he could go into the bar and buy their affections any time he wanted to. He just laughed at their haughty behaviour, his one tooth going up and down like a baby without a dummy, and they hated him for it.

Half a dozen bottles of Bintang later we found him crashed out on one of the beds (my bed) and decided, rather than have to carry him off, that we'd let him sleep and leave under his own steam. He slept for six hours, and when he did wake up, all previous payment of his services was a mystery to him, and we had to go through a long, drawn-out argument over the amount of money he'd been paid. Or, rather, Titty did.

The whole thing ended rather badly, with the two of them nearly coming to blows and the old guy slipping and falling into the water. Dave rescued him and we paid him again, much to the anger of the girls, who thought we should have let him drown.

Over the course of that week, we had all but forgotten about travel, and the boat became nothing more than a floating hotel. However, the money began to run low and our thoughts eventually turned back to moving on, and our possible next destination before Bali. Considering our penchant for spending money at the most inappropriate times we all thought it best to keep moving, and Rick reminded us that we hadn't really moved very far from Singapore. ‘This boat may be carrying our name but it belongs to someone else,' he said, wagging a cautious finger.

We were fully stocked up with food and water, and, given the constant wind conditions that were forecast, Rick reckoned on making the journey to Bali in just over a week. I had no idea about boat speed and nautical miles, but said that it just looked like a long way. Dave countered by saying that because we were three-handed (well, two and a half), and because he and Rick could both sail, we would effectively be on the move around the clock, only one person sleeping at any one time.

None of us knew exactly what we were going to do when we got to Bali, but Rick suggested that if we grew bored of the ocean (which was very likely according to him) we could sell the boat. I thought that was a little unlikely seeing as how we didn't hold any of the necessary proof-of-ownership documents. It was possible that the legitimacy of three foreigners wouldn't be questioned, especially if the boat was at a rock-bottom price, but Dave and I dismissed the idea, saying that we wanted to sail around the world for ever and a day, and not just a week.

There was, however, one more pressing problem to consider, and that was the relationship between Dave and Watti.