Finally the chanting stopped and, miraculously, so did Tess’s cries. That was strange, but still not enough to entice me from my place of sanctuary and my coffee.
When I finally did venture out of my hiding place, Yossy brazenly informed me she had taken two hundred thousand rupiah out of my wallet to pay the man. This less than shame-faced admission was met with another snort of derision from me and I was just about to remark that was nice work if you could get it, when Yossy cut me off by putting a finger to her lips in a shushing manner and nodding in the direction of
Tess’s room.
There was a sound coming from there: the sound of a little girl snoring.
In addition to coercing dukuns into compromising positions, Yossy seemed to be going through a stage of experiencing some kind of predilection for young men barely into their twenties. She appointed four or five of them to work as teachers in her school and she then took a shine to one guy in particular. His name was Arin and he was promptly installed as her ‘school manager’.
Goodness only knows what his actual job description or responsibilities were, but all I knew was he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in the presence of my wife. They were together all the time, morning, noon and night. When not in the schools there they were in our house having ‘meetings’ or forever setting off somewhere together, both within Surabaya
and outside.
One of their most favoured spots in those days was Malang. This is a resort a couple of hours drive to the south of Surabaya and is a kind of weekend retreat where you can go and rent a villa for the night or weekend. The weather there is a bit cooler and it is actually quite a pleasant place to stay. Although it was a basically a weekend-retreat sort of place, they didn’t ever stay there overnight, not in the early days of their, ah, partnership, anyway – instead they travelled up and back on the same day. In their rare communications with me I gathered they were ostensibly looking at properties in which to open a new school, but I had my doubts.
After they’d made a few journeys there and back, I found myself actually being invited to join them for the weekend. We all went there and stayed one gloriously sunny weekend. By ‘all’ I mean Yossy, Arin, Tess, and a load of other teachers from her school and it really was the weirdest thing.
As soon as we got there Yoss practically dragged me into the bedroom and insisted I give her a royal rodgering. Now, considering we hadn’t exactly ‘known each other’ in the Old Testament way on a regular basis for some time, I was somewhat taken aback by her rather uncharacteristic enthusiasm, Nevertheless, I made little headway when I brought the matter up and was practically called a wuss and told to put up and shut up.
Indeed.
Three weeks later. We went to the doctor’s. The test was negative.
Hmmmmm. What was all that about, I wondered.
Anyway, I was soon to find myself in a position of no longer being able to take the moral high ground, even if I could be bothered to do so. Yep, you see, muggings just had to go and do it again. Without sense or sensibility, and when I least expected or indeed wanted to, I fell in love with someone else. You would think that with everything else that was happening in my life at that point in time, combined with my age and my experiences, I would know better, but there you are.
Her name was Jolie and I met her through my teaching a few months after Yossy started disappearing up to the mountains of Malang on a regular basis. I guess the normal thing to say in circumstances like this is that at first I didn’t plan on anything occurring between us, that she was purely my student and that things just started happening without either of us realising our planning it.
That would be wrong, though. Right from the outset I felt something click and I just had a weird and wonderful feeling about things. She was blessed with the appearance of an angel and the only truly fitting adjective for her was lovely.
Right from the word go I felt something for her, and not just lust or desire or any other yucky emotion. On the contrary, I felt something warm and right and nice and good stirring inside me.
I knew it was early days yet and there was no way of being able to tell how things would pan out but for the first time in many years I felt excited and nervous.
And alive.
And not the slightest bit guilty.
In fact, she would be the one often asking me if we were doing the right thing, if we should be feeling guiltier than we were, and if there was any future in it all. I did my best to reassure her, of course, but it was all somewhat unchartered territory for me too, and I’m afraid I wasn’t always able to assuage her fears, but I did my best to encourage and support her and let her know how serious I was about her and how much she had done, and was doing, for me.
Six months later, though, I was back living in England.
London, November 2002
I don’t want to go back to Indonesia. I am happy.
There was no one calling me ‘stupid’ (if they were talking to me at all, that was). There was no one calling me in the
