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Chapter Four

Vic

2 February

I’ve been upgraded to First Class. That never happens. I’ve tried to sneak in there before, though. A friend’s brother does it all the time. He just walks into First Class from Economy, finds a spare seat and sits in it. The only time he’s ever been moved back to his seat was when he complained about the food. After I heard that story I tried it for myself, the very next time I flew. They frogmarched me back into Economy so fast I didn’t have time to put my seatbelt on. I’ve never tried it again, although I’ve flown to a lot of places since. Anyway, the upgrade today is simply due to an error; somehow they have overbooked and don’t have enough seats. I am choosing to see it as a good omen.

Looking out the window, everything is as empty and clean as I feel. It’s one of my favourite places to be – on a plane at the beginning of a long journey. For once you can focus on one simple objective – getting there – and that’s really the pilot’s job anyway.

But there are still a few things that can go wrong. It seems my good luck has not extended to getting an empty seat next to mine. A man exposes his large hairy stomach as he reaches for the overhead locker, like he’s saying hello in gorilla, and then plonks himself down next to me. He doesn’t look like First Class material. I wonder if he is in on my friend’s secret, or if he just got upgraded as well. He’s wearing shorts and rubber thongs – as though the plane is going to Bali, not Jakarta – and has one of those noses that could be made of soft, red putty. I can tell he’s on for a chat and am happy to oblige, until he spies my unadorned hand and asks:

Are you married, or are you a career woman?

This makes me jump. I have been asked this question in exactly the same words before, by a work colleague.

Are you married, Victoria, or are you a career woman?

At the time, I thought he was trying to insult me.

I give this man a Mona Lisa smile and ask him:

Are there any other alternatives?

Unfortunately he takes my discomfort as a slight. His shoulders stiffen and he shifts his attention to his in-flight magazine. I could try to make it better, but, instead, I decide to look out the window for a while.

To answer his question, I couldn’t say I’ve traded it all in for a career, because, after all, teaching English as a Second Language is more of a joke than a career, especially when it comes to salary, and some of the other people who are doing it. Still, I tell myself, it is a good job if you want to travel. And I do. Want to travel. I love being in new countries and finding out about different people and writing long letters home to people that I dearly miss but don’t seem to be able to live around.

The single most common question I have been asked in the last ten years is that one. Are you married? I can tell you how to say that in five languages. I have been asked this question by taxi drivers, tuk tuk drivers, shoeshine boys, businessmen, women selling me perfume, students, strangers on the street. In South-East Asia the standard response is ‘not yet’, as if it’s just developmental delay or a run of bad luck standing in the way, and that soon, please God soon, one’s luck will change. Sometimes I say, ‘Yes, I am married’, just to avoid the look of disappointment that I know is coming my way, and the feeling that I’ve let the nice, friendly stranger down somehow.

Actually, my parents’ marriage put me off the idea for ever and ever, amen, till the socks do us darn, till the laundry floor do we accidentally flood, till the children do we humiliate and betray, till the hidden beatings and vivisections do we blow the whistle on, screaming, finally, plastic boiling suburban rage and tearing it all down while still in brown school shoes.

I was not like my little school friend Annette Hume, who, despite years of living with her mother’s sour disappointment, spent a portion of her time daydreaming about her wedding day and smiling a knowing smile as she promised to be a bridesmaid at mine.

First of all, I told her, I wouldn’t have that kind of wedding, even if I did get married, which I never would.

I thought having bridesmaids was a stupid idea and a crappy word, even. It sounded like some weird cow-milking virgin from times of yore. If I did get married it would be in jeans, and not in a church and not with all of the hideous frosting, the flouncy dresses, the bows and ribbons, the men standing around in powder-blue tuxedos, hands folded awkwardly over their balls for the photographs.

And that’s just the wedding. Then there’s the children. I have six aunts with an average of 7.4 children each. Curly-headed balloon women with cotton tent dresses. Hello now pet, how are ye? High, tense Irish voices. Pulling up in the driveway in Holden station wagons loaded up with bouncinettes and bassinets, big tubs of talc for the chafing, and each year another one in the oven, all respect and thanks to the great Holy Father, divinely inspired leader of the Catholic Church.

When I was young, I divided my many cousins into ‘reds’, ‘dark reds’ and ‘oranges’ – referring to their hair, of course. I’m a dark red, which made me a commoner in my family growing up. There was one blonde, who might as well have been the Queen of Sheba, and a few smug browns and blacks. The lowest of the low were the lemony-oranges, with their big square freckles that piled up on top of each other, and their inability to go to the beach. When I was seven, my mother had my dark-red curly hair cut into a boy’s crew cut ‘for the convenience of it’. I looked like a boy, and instead of ‘Victoria’, my brothers started calling me ‘Victor’, which eventually became ‘Vic’. There’s nothing else to say about that, except that my freckles disappeared in adolescence and, these days, my hair comes down to my waist.

Now that I’m writing this down, I can see that it’s possible that I have overreacted. Not to the haircut but to the other things. I ran away from two men who tried to marry me, and no matter how careless I was with my life, which was pretty careless, I never made the mistake of falling pregnant. When I was thirty-five, I started to panic a little, but told myself there was still time to seize the bull by the horns (so to speak) and have a baby. I was a bit averse to sharing it with anybody who might scratch his arse on his way to the kitchen, growing less and less attractive to me as the weeks rolled into months and into years. On the other hand, I could see the steep, narrow road of the older, childless woman stretching out in front of me and it didn’t look all that enticing. But I’m only thirty-five, I thought. No need to rush into anything.

One thing I’ve done is travelled a lot. I’ve lived in a lot of places, but strangely, I’ve never been to Indonesia, even though (or maybe because) Australians flock to Bali the way the British overrun Spain. But I’ve found a job that looks pretty good on the internet. So, finally, in my thirty-ninth year of not yet being married, I’m going to Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, to work for twelve weeks.

The first glimpse of the city is a shock, even at ten thousand feet. We are descending into a filthy grey haze with the light falling flat on a brown ocean that is choked with ships and prawn farms. It is a sunny day, but nothing shimmers or sparkles.

The plane doesn’t quite make it to a gate, but comes to a stop in the middle of the tarmac, and we pile on to a bus that crawls off towards the terminal. Outside, the buildings struggle up through the stifling air. Bougainvillea droops dejectedly over the gateway as the taxi leaves the airport. Welcome to Indonesia. Jesus Christ.

Something happens when you arrive in a place like this. It’s like meeting an old interesting friend that you haven’t seen for a long time and realising they are dying. You want to cry out: My God, what’s happened! Who did this to you? But everyone around is you acting as if the situation is perfectly ordinary and acceptable. The strange thing is, you can feel it even when you have never even set eyes on a place before. It has happened to me in Saigon, Delhi, Guangzhou, and here it is again. On arrival, the filthy sky and the sad trees tell the same terrible story.

A taxi driver takes me on some crazy rampage through the traffic, past depressed people sitting by dead rivers. When we stop for a red light, children rap at the windows trying to sell small toys and newspapers and foam aeroplanes.

I get to the hotel at sunset – the burnished light has softened the initial shock of smoke and I am in a tree-lined street. The call to prayer is ringing out across the city – it’s the first time I’ve heard it and I am enchanted. The hotel is a modest, three star affair – far superior to the noisy kost the company will shift me into the next day.

I get the money mixed up and tip the doorman and the man who brings me a coffee and some clean towels about twenty dollars each. This brings a string of smiling hotel staff knocking at the door at fifteen-minute intervals to ask if I need anything. Gado gado is the only Indonesian meal I know, so I order that and, after double-checking my calculator, tip a severely disappointed maid a couple of dollars.

The call to prayer comes back again at about eight o’clock. Next morning I am woken at five by the same call. I have never lived in a Muslim country and, before I even step out onto the streets, I have been reminded three times. After a few weeks, the call will be etched into my mind like a tattoo – the male voice proclaiming the greatness of Allah. The Arabic prayer ringing out over the Asian city, seeming to claim dominion over everything. I walk to the breakfast room where about fifty men are smoking clove cigarettes, and decide to go outside and find breakfast somewhere that I can breathe.

The first thing I notice is that the streets are dotted with clusters of shabby men, who stare at me as I walk by. I’ve been travelling a long time, but I still get a rush of fear and embarrassment when people are staring at me en masse, especially a group of men. I wonder what they see. Once, in Saigon, a man who had been watching me said:

You are quite nice, but not as beautiful as some Hollywood movie stars.

Is that what they are doing here? Comparing me to a movie star? Or are they just looking at my breasts, large by Western standards, bazookas over here in this country?

The only way for me to feel better is to walk up really close and smile and say hello. The men transform from a belligerent mob into some people that live nearby and are curious to find me walking through their streets. Handshakes all round. Contact.