The car doesn’t stop. The boy is jogging beside us, still trying to get his face back against the glass, and manages a glance at the note in my fingers. He’s running and alternately tapping at the window and pointing to my hand. Pak turns the car right and the boy loses the race. I look over my shoulder and see him in his shorts and button-less open shirt raise his hands to the black night sky and shake his head.
‘Very bad people. Always asking for money. They should get a job. I have a job. You have a job. They should get a job.’ Pak is shaking his head. ‘Very bad.’
I return the note to my wallet. I just hope my bed isn’t much further. I don’t want to sit next to this man for any longer than I have to.
‘We will be at the school very soon,’ he says.
I turn my reddening and tired face towards him.
‘I will give you your timetable for classes before I take you to your house.’
There is a little smile touching his mouth. It isn’t warm.
I close my eyes. Try to make my mind wander to irrelevant places. Ignore the fact that I’ve taken a dislike to my new boss, that I’ve made another glorious fuck-up in my life. My stomach grumbles. Lack of real food? Or the two additions to my innards?
The pair of them, muted and gagged. Shoved down in my gut and not allowed to interrupt my ‘new’ life until I’m ready for them, which I might never be. Old Me isn’t as clear-cut as New Me. I can push moments of life aside. He can’t. He dwells and sobs on the things which I try to ignore. He’s pathetic. He wants to share his moments in time. Relive them like they’re still now. Well he can just shut up about his moments with Laura and the times that the two of them want to regurgitate.
I’ve had enough. That’s why I’ve got rid of him, of them. She is dead and he needs to shut up about the past. Shut up saying that it is still there. That those moments still exist. That if they happen in the first place then they must still be there, like an object to revisit. He needs to stop telling me that if those moments still exist, then, maybe, so does Laura..…
Just stop.
There is no point. Not to his questions and not to her constant amateur philosophising. Her quotes from head-fucks like Einstein. Stupid fucking gems like, ‘… the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.’ Blah blah blah.
She messes her hair up like Einstein when she does it.
Bullshit.
He drives me fucking mad with his hope. She drives me mad by showing up in my head, talking her rubbish. So stay in the dark, both of you. For good. You, Old Me, are as dead as her. A ghost. Stay with the ghost of her.
I rub my eyes and look at the outside. We are now moving slowly through traffic. The city has enveloped us. Cars and motorbikes spew black smoke and edge along on either side of the car. Then we pull off of the road and onto the forecourt of an ugly building.
‘We are here.’
I look to Pak Andy, and something in me wants to hurt him.
HUNGER
T he school is green and white under flickering floodlights. It is three storeys tall. Above it a green and white sign spells out ‘English World’. In front of the building stand about ten people, smoking, talking, but mostly just smoking. They are older teenagers, some dark-skinned Indonesians, some Chinese, all holding books under their arms. Others walk out of the glass doors: attractive dark-haired girls; Chinese boys dressed like James Dean popping cigarettes into their mouths as they flick back their amateur quiffs; younger kids, about fifteen in white-shirted and grey-trousered school uniforms. They cross the two-car-sized forecourt we have just pulled into, passing by my window, and disappear into the mayhem of the road we’ve just left.
‘The classes have finished,’ says Pak. He turns off the engine, opens his door and is gone.
‘Righto.’ I stare after him, open my door and climb down from my seat.
I enter an airless outside; the smell of diesel and two-stroke engines sticks to the atmosphere like a greasy film. I look behind me at the road. Motorcycle taxis putt-putt and leak black fumes, car taxis beep at them to move, bicycle taxis ring their bells for lazy pedestrian attention and nothing moves at more than ten miles an hour on the constipated road.
‘Hey. You. Hello,’ one of a group of four sitting in front of the school shouts.
I smile back, but am too tired and too unsure how to reply. Confidence and energy are dripping from me like oil from a sump. It won’t be long before I seize up.
‘You are the new teacher?’ He is strutting towards me, a Chinese boy in leather jacket, white open-neck shirt and a bouncing quiff.
‘Yes. I am.’
‘I am Johnny,’ he announces as if he is the MC at his own concert, all stress on his name. Pulling his collar up around his neck, he flicks a white filtered cigarette between his lips.
‘Nice to meet you.’ I wonder if I’ve accidentally flown Time Machine Airlines and travelled back to the ’50s. I half-expect him to start singing an Elvis song and the people on the forecourt to start jiving.
‘What’s your name, man?’ he asks, looking at me from under his quiff.
‘I’m…’ A piercing two-fingered whistle, louder than the noise of the traffic, kills my introduction. Pak Andy is standing in the door to the school waving his hand for me to go away. I look about, trying to work out where he wants me to go to. I point a finger at his car. He shakes his head and waves his hand some more.
I point to the street, lost by his directions.
‘No, man. He wants you to go in,’ says Johnny.
‘So why’s he shooing me away?’
‘I don’t know what “shooing” is, man, but what he does means come here.’ He waves his cigarette at a scowling Pak.
I point to my chest and then to the school to get confirmation from Pak. He nods and waves for me to go away like he’s trying to lose snot stuck to his hand. Even unspoken language is foreign here.
‘Thanks. Maybe see you later,’ I say to Johnny.
‘Yeah. See you, man. Watch out for Pak Andy. He’ll take your last rupiah.’
I step from the heat and stench of the street into the skin-prick-ling coolness of the school reception, all green and white with plastic plants gathering dust. Pak is standing with an elbow on the reception counter. Seated behind it is an overweight Chinese guy of about twenty-five. Even with the fridge-like air conditioning there is a wet patch spreading out from under each armpit. He studies me through long thin eyes that are hardly there.
Pak introduces him as Albert the receptionist. Albert hoists himself off his stool and lays his hand in mine like a piece of wet fish which lies there for a second before sliding off.
‘You are hungry?’ Pak asks me.
Am I? My stomach rolls and turns, but I’m not sure if it’s hunger or him trying to throw some more Laura my way.
What does she think of me standing here now in a completely foreign place trying to be not me? Probably raising an eyebrow and poking me in the side and saying something like, ‘Nice move, numbnuts.’
And I laugh or poke her back and try to lick that irritating, sexy, ebony caterpillar over her left eye.
‘Yes or no?’
Oh, well done, you crafty bastards. I swallow down on them and the broken fragments of pain they’ve left. Perhaps I do need to throw some sort of foreign food down me to stop the heartburn.
‘Yes. Food would be good. No meat, please. I’m vegetarian.’
He snorts and is then yelling out something that sounds like ‘Eepooo.’