I knew that the week was truly getting the better of me when I discovered fish in my bathroom. Rather than submit myself to being spat at by the pressureless shower, I have taken to filling a mandi (large reservoir) in the bathroom and drenching myself with buckets of deliciously cold water instead; this being the norm for most of the population. On arriving back from work the other evening I found that my mandi was host to large, white and fleshy pieces of fish. It was just another episode in a rather turbulent week.
It’s hard to know where to begin, which is why I have rather randomly chosen my surreal aquatic experience as an introduction, but it started a few days before that; a week to the day since the Saturday that I had moved in. On that first weekend my girlfriend, Novi, had stayed over for the first time and we had gone to the beach on the Sunday; a good time had by us both. In a purely selfless gesture on my behalf to bridge the widening gulf between Islam and the West I have been seeing a sweet young Muslim lady. It is a relationship surely doomed to failure as I shall discuss, in a rather roundabout way.
I have already mentioned Marc and Sari whose school I am currently occupying the third floor of. Today is the grand opening of their new venture and there is currently a barbeque in progress up on the roof; I occasionally nip out to socialise and grab a beer. Their ambitions are entirely altruistic in that they wish to attract rich students and use the money that they make from this to subsidise teaching English to the poorer children. An admirable endeavour, especially since Indonesians have the misguided view that learning English will be the answer to all of their problems; a viewpoint which I’m not anxious to dispel.
Last Saturday (the one situated between the beach excursion and today), my ritual coffee slurping hour was rudely interrupted by a rap upon the door; I opened it to an abashed but resolute looking Marc. He came in and began with the words:
“I’m a fairly easy going guy Steve, but...”
I wondered what I could possibly have done.
The area in which I live is on the opposite side of the city to the one I moved from and is a community made up of people from Aceh. Aceh is well-known for its principal coastal city and the devastation which was unleashed upon it by the 2005 tsunami. It is also a province of Indonesia which has fought long and hard for its recent semi-autonomous status; its devotion to Islam being somewhat stricter than that practiced by the rest of Indonesia. It’s tricky to have a beer in my neighbourhood and even more difficult to have a girlfriend stay the night.
I don’t know if many of you remember him, but Les Dawson used to do a character on his shows where he played a nosy and gossipy housewife; his chubby and uncomely looks adding to the comic value of the character. If you can picture him and remove his top four teeth and give him an even uglier countenance, then you have the image of my girlfriend. I’m joking. Imbue this persona with Don Corleone’s powerful influence in The Godfather and you have the imposing, matriarchal vision of my next door neighbour. Upon discovering that Novi and I were not married and having seen her departing from the house with me on the previous Sunday morning with wet hair, it was decided that the neighbourhood should be told. I put with wet hair in italics because apparently a woman leaving a house with wet hair in the morning can mean only one thing in this country, and that is that she has been fornicating. I make no further comment on that particular observation and I have very little concern about what the neighbourhood thinks of me; neither, surprisingly, does Novi. If only it were so simple.
Marc and Sari have been arriving at the school every day for several months while renovations have been carried out; sitting beneath the large banner advertising their imminent grand opening, and enrolling new students. Since the weekend that Novi and I met for unlawful carnal knowledge, not a single student had been in to register and none of the neighbours had dropped by for a chat or indeed said hello. It was only through the quiet word of a real friend that Marc and Sari discovered the reason for their sudden unpopularity and hence the visit from Marc on that Saturday afternoon.
“You know us Dutch,” Marc said, “you can have five women in your room and we don’t care. But...” While I played this pleasing notion over in my mind Marc went on to explain what he thought the options open to me were:
I could move out. We shrugged our shoulders in a mutually dismissive manner and I waited eagerly to see what a more plausible choice might be.
Whenever we wanted to spend the night together, we could meet in a hotel; they’re very cheap. I frowned at him, hoping to convey how distasteful and impractical I found this, especially since I had moved out of my previous premises in order that I may have female guests in my own home. He moved swiftly on and I hoped he was saving the best till last.
“Or you could get married.” I like to think that ‘whithering’ is a suitable adjective to describe my answering look to that.
The neighbourhood had magnanimously decided that Novi could visit me at any time for as long as she liked, without a chaperone, as long as she did not stay overnight. I didn’t know which way to splutter. Did they believe that if she visited from seven in the morning until eleven at night then we would somehow refrain from intimacy? That we would just hold hands, exchange views on the weather (hot) and wash our hair during those long hours and only be consumed with illicit passion in the wee hours? It was either gross stupidity or criminal hypocricy, which I always felt was my area of expertise. This is a country which has one of the highest AIDS counts in the world; somebody isn’t keeping it in their pants when out of the family home.
It was decided, for Marc’s sake, that I should apologise to Les; which turned out to be more difficult than you would imagine.
And anyway, it still didn’t explain the fish...
A number of things were on my mind when I awoke on the Monday of that tumultuous week. I was, of course, bothered by the fact that the Secret Sex Police had put a stop to any nocturnal activities with Novi and I wondered what I would do about that. I also had to apologise to The Godmother, Les Dawson for lowering the moral standards of the neighbourhood; in turn confirming myself as hypocritical as the rest of them. I couldn’t, however, apologise until I had somebody to translate for me. This was tied up with the next niggle upon my waking mind.
Tom, one of the teachers from the school, was on holiday this week and I was covering most of his classes. This meant I would be rising early each morning to work ten or twelve hour days; I would be leaving the premises before Marc or Sari arrived in the morning and returning after they had left, leaving no time for Sari to translate my heartfelt apologies to Les. This resulted in me exiting and returning to my home furtively without catching the eyes of The Don, or if I did happen to glance in her direction, it was with an expression which attempted to say “Oh hi, I have an apology to make to you but am unfortunately not fluent enough in your language to do so without an interpreter and so would appreciate your patience in this matter until I get one, and could you by the way stop your destructive campaign of silence and hostility towards Marc and Sari’s charitable business venture until I do so please, thanks.” An expression which probably came across as merely idiotic.
The next item fighting for precedence that morning was to do with my future at work. I’ll try not to bore you with the details, but there was no head teacher or Director of Studies in control of the place and consequently no organisation and very few pupils. That coupled with general incompetence and a failure to secure a work visa for any of the teachers so far had led me to giving them an ultimatum. Seven years sharing the responsibilities of running a business had left me with no desire to be just an employee, I NEEDED POWER! My natural tendency to patronise, condescend, bully and resort to sarcasm may well be the ideal qualities for being a teacher, but what about outside of the classroom? I informed them that unless they gave me more money and the power to make the academic decisions in the school, then I would leave. It was a bit of a gamble really; having very little experience at teaching and my only organisational experience being with what has been described as a slapstick removal business, I had no relevant qualifications at all. I would be getting the answer to my ultimatum early this week.
Another thing that was really bothering me that morning, and the reason that I finally climbed out of bed, was the over-powering stench of petrol pervading throughout my home. Realising that my ruminations had meant that I was now running late for work, I hurried down to the ground floor of the school to where the source of the fumes were coming from. There could only be one explanation and it stood leaking in front of me as I reached the bottom. I park my motorbike inside the school at night and it now stood sheepishly dripping the last few drops of fuel that it had haemorrhaged all over the floor. I knew how it felt; the other thing that had been on my mind most recently was an unfathomable nausea and weakness of the bowels.
I rushed upstairs and threw on some clothes, filled a bucket with water and detergent, wheeled my bike out of the door, mopping myself out behind it while keeping my expression suitably humble for Les and jogged as best as I could with a cumbersome motorbike in tow to the nearest mechanic. I flung my arms about in an expressive manner which I hoped conveyed my problem to the several mechanics who nodded sagely in return and gestured for me to sit down. I sat. Being a bule (foreigner) means that you get a lot of unwanted attention here in Sumatra, but it can sometimes work to your advantage in that you may get preferential treatment ahead of others; something I have not been ashamed to use to my advantage in the past. After sitting fidgeting and looking at the time frequently I realised that I was not going to be afforded that privilege this time. Finally, knowing that I could wait no longer, I stood up, handed my keys to the most honest looking mechanic, shrugged my shoulders, pointed at a non-existent watch on my wrist and hailed a becak. I looked back over my shoulder to take a last look at my motorbike as we got swallowed by the hungry rush-hour traffic. I wondered if it would still be there tomorrow.
If there was fish in my mandi on Tuesday night I would not have seen it.
On arriving home on the Monday night, the mechanics were closed and so I had no idea of the health or whereabouts of my bike. Just to put things in perspective, I know of someone who once got off his motorbike to open the gate to his driveway and turned back to see his bike being ridden away by some opportunist, never to be seen again. As it was, I returned there in the morning and found that it had been repaired and seviced for the princely sum of £1.20. Elated to be reunited with my bike, and so cheaply, I rode off to work with a silly grin on my face. An expression to be wiped off when I received news of the answer to my ultimatum.
My head was full of contradictory thoughts when I arrived home that night but they were all extinguished by the pannicked patting of my pockets before I attempted to open the door. Where were my keys? When I’d left that morning there were builders finishing off the last of their work so I hadn’t needed my keys to lock up and consequently hadn’t checked that I actually had them; I stared up at my distant balcony and realised there was no hope of getting in. I called Marc, apologising for the lateness of the hour and asked if I could come and collect his spare keys.
“I don’t have them,” he said, “the builders have them and they live over on the coast somewhere.”
I began to calculate who I could reasonably turn to. Novi lived out of the city and with her family; out of the question. There was the teachers’ house that I had moved out of, but I no longer had the key and nobody’s telephone number; it was also a fortress and almost impossible to be heard from the outside if you were to try yelling.
“Ya, come over here,” said Marc. I thanked him profusely, “Well, what else are you going to do?” he replied simply. It was hardly the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but I rode over there gratefully and painfully aware that their new resident was proving to be more trouble than he was worth.
Marc and Sari were extremely hospitable and I spent the rest of the evening chatting with them and their friends until retiring to their spare room. I woke early, rode back home in time to catch the builders as they arrived, found my keys, quickly changed and headed back to work. When I returned in the evening there was fish in my mandi.
There was no question about it as I poked at the large, fleshy pieces of white meat; it was definitely fish. I tried to imagine how it could have got there. During the day there were builders who had no reason to be up on my finished floor. There was the receptionist, Tia and then Marc and Sari who were there most of the day, enrolling (when there were candidates) students to their courses. I knew that Tia cooked lunch for them all in my kitchen, but left the place clean, tidy and free from acquatic products. Even if she were to be preparing fish, why would she put these raw pieces into the water reservoir, in my bathroom that I used for bathing? Was it a joke? Was it a warning? In mafia movies a potential victim would often be told that he ‘would be sleeping with the fish’. Had Don Les Dawson Corleone left a message for me? Did Marc and Sari want me out? After their friendly hospitality the night before it seemed unlikely. I peered at the tap positioned over the reservoir to see if there was any possible way that these fist-sized pieces could have been forced through there, but no, there was a filter fitted into the orifice. I stared at these pieces of fish, greyly floating in my bathing water for quite some time; occasionally I let out a disbelieving chuckle and shook my head. And then, because I could think of nothing else to do, I went to bed. I lay there for some time, mulling over the fact that, fish or no fish I would have to leave the school where I worked by Monday of the following week.
A Tumultuous Week 5: Solutions
“Fish?” repeated Marc, as he blearily stirred his coffee, “Where?” I impatiently gesticulated at my newly acquired aquarium-for-the-deceased. “Why are they in you mandi?” he enquired. It was a long and drawn out conversation but we eventually came to two conclusions; the first being that neither of us had the faintest clue as to the fish, and the second was that I was poisoning myself.
As I was aware, there were two types of water plumbed into the house; the clean water for washing in, and the dirty water which was drawn up, untreated from below the ground for the toilet etc. I had thought that the two different types were automatically channelled through to the appropriate outlets; a notion that was shattered following my early morning conversation with Marc. It turned out that you had to manually switch from one to the other using the lever under the stairs. I had been bathing and brushing my teeth in dirty, polluted water. I had also been making my morning coffee with this bacteria-laden concoction. My frequent trips to the toilet could now be attributed to something a little more serious than a dodgy sate. It would also explain why the toilet and mandi were beginning to stain brown. On further investigation we discovered that the water pressure when switched from dirty to clean was not sufficient to propel it around the school. This would not be a problem for the school generally, as it provided coolers of drinking water for the students who had no other requirements for clean water; but for their one and only resident it was a somewhat different situation. The only resolution, Marc informed me while expelling air from puffed out cheeks and reminding me of some car-mechanics I had dealt with, was to completely replace the water-pumping system; a costly and inconvenient solution.
My present situation now looked something like this:
The first two problems had been unexpectedly and unsatisfactorily resolved by a telephone call from my boss the day before. There are two schools run by our company in Medan and I was informed that I had been promoted to Senior Teacher for both of them. I was elated, I had only wanted a bit more of a say in the school that I was presently teaching in; this was entirely unexpected... the fools...it was just one step closer to world domination...
“... and Jambi.”
“Hmmm?” I said, interrupted from a reverie about how I would begin to abuse my new found power.
“You’re Senior Teacher of Jambi too. You’ll have to go there next week. We’ll need you there for three months.”
It was a clever ploy really. Three of the teachers from the Jambi school had just gone AWOL and they needed someone there fast. ‘Give Darrington a promotion to shut him up and send him down to Jambi’ had been the obvious wisdom. And so here I am, several hundred miles away from Medan and Novi, and beginning to realise why the other three teachers left...
Never did find out about the fish.
