After thinking things through, although I knew I didn’t want to come back here to stay, I had to concede it might be for the best. So the following lunchtime I had my ‘sort of’ interview with a guy I used to know vaguely years back in Surabaya. He had opened an English school in Jakarta in the mid 90s and had tried to persuade me to move with him then, but stupidly at the time I thought Yoss and I were happy where we were and so I turned him down.
Anyhooo … we met up and had a nice lunch and chat together and he offered me a job teaching with him and talked vaguely about also needing a manager for a new school he was opening. I told him I was very interested in the teaching position, but didn’t push myself forward too much regarding the management job. An hour or two later and I was on the plane heading to Surabaya to see Yoss and Tess for the first time in eight months.
Finally I arrived, got my bags and made it out of the terminal. I was feeling hot, tired, none too happy to be back and generally a bit miserable.
That all changed the moment I saw Tess.
She’s sitting on a steel barrier as I come out the terminal and immediately she starts yelling my name and tries to jump down.
‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ with her little hands waving twenty to the dozen.
She jumps down and runs to me. I sweep her up in my arms and just hold her.
She’s mine. I love her. She’s my girl and I need her, love her, and can’t be without her.
No matter what.
So, with a weariness and a sense of dread we made an appointment and went to the doctor. The same one we’d visited six years previously almost to the day under much happier circumstances and, as I expected but hoped against hope, got the news confirmed. There it was on the little telly. Look, the doctor pointed out to us, there’s the little dot that is to be sprog number two chez Neil.
Oh dear, oh dear.
I arched an eyebrow at Yoss. It was about all I was capable of right then. She looked devoid of any emotion whatsoever, while I couldn’t wait to see how she was going to tap-dance her way out of this one and lay this particular conundrum at my feet.
That’s the magic of the girl: you just really never knew what she was going to come up with next.
After a day’s silence, she had the answer. A good night’s sleep was all she needed to come up with a thorough explanation for the growth inside of her. Panic over, everyone, all has been explained.
A miracle conception.
She had, she explained with the straightest of straight faces, no idea how she had managed to reach her current state of having a six-week-old foetus growing inside of her, and so, she informed me, it is clear that the Almighty chose her to deliver a, presumably, pure and heavenly child into the world for some divine, if as yet unspecified, purpose.
Hey-ho.
I went to sleep. I had nothing to say to Yossy, so I simply went to the spare bedroom, the one I had spent most of the last two years I’d been in Indonesia sleeping in, and curled up and went to sleep.
The next day I woke up and played with Tess and helped her with her breakfast, and then without saying a word to Yossy, we left for her school. On the journey to school Tess chattered away incessantly about this, that, and the other. She asked me a million questions about England, her cousins there, the weather, when I would be going back, did I have any presents for her, her school, her friends, and … Mummy’s new friends.
Tess told me innocently how her mum was very busy now and in fact often so busy that she didn’t have time to even come home at night. ‘But it was ok, Daddy, because Mummy’s new friends always look after her and take her everywhere she wants to go.’ I just listened without interrupting and let little Tess babble on. She babbled all right. She babbled about the man who let Mummy come with him to Singapore and to Bali a few weeks ago. She babbled about the phone calls Mummy often got late at night and the she babbled about the people who came to the house looking for Mummy when she was not there. Mummy was very lucky to have so many friends, Tess told me gravely, because she, Tess, only had a few friends at her school. I just listened.
After I dropped Tess off at her school I went to see Jolie.
I tell Jolie I’m leaving Yoss. I lay it out there, convinced she is going to fall into my arms, kiss me, and start planning our life together.
She doesn’t.
‘Things have changed,’ she mumbles.
‘How? What’s changed?’ I ask.
‘Well … I can’t do this anymore. I feel so guilty.’ Dead eyes stare at the floor.
‘Guilty to who? To my wife? Why? She doesn’t love me. She will be glad to see the back of me.’ I’m gushing now, near to pleading.
‘No. Not to her. To you, to Tess, to me … ah, it’s difficult to explain.’
So she doesn’t, and I go.
Heartbroken.
Again.
I just didn’t know what to think anymore. I mean, I know it must sound ridiculous, but I actually got to thinking maybe it was true; that it really was some kind of unexplainable
