On nights such as these we’d normally head to the cinema or for a simple dinner somewhere and unwind. Despite the hour or so it had taken Yossy to travel into town to meet me on top of a full day’s work, she never once complained of being tired. As for me, well my tiredness would always just melt away upon seeing her and, anyway, a little tiredness was a small price to pay for what I had.
I just couldn’t believe my luck and good fortune with the way things worked out. I knew I was taking a bit of a risk when I came out here to live in May of 1993, and things for the first few months weren’t exactly plain sailing, but after two years or so I really did feel blessed at how life was panning out.
We all have our little foibles and worries, don’t we? And for a long time my fear, if you can call it that, was that I was destined to be a ‘nice guy who’ll make someone a good boyfriend or husband one day’ without ever actually managing to do so. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t unhappy when I lived in England or a loner, or anything. I just had an unexplainable feeling that for some reason I was never going to really fall in love, and in all probability would be one of these unlucky sods that never really ends up with anyone.
Yossy changed all that. She was my world and all I ever dreamt of and certainly far more than I ever dared to hope for. Every minute I was at work and away from her I was thinking of her, or talking about her to someone (usually my long-suffering students or colleagues in the school).
Looking back now, I just can’t really reconcile the person I was then with the man I am today. I can’t believe that I am the same person, or, more importantly, that Yossy is the same woman. Looking back now it seems like those days were all a dream or a film and they bear no similarity to the reality of life. In comparison to what things were to become and are now, I can see that back then we were just playing at life and that everything was just
an illusion.
When things first went wrong, and for a long time afterwards, I would look back on this period of my life and feel immense pain, regret and heartbreak. I felt a pining and a yearning for what I had lost: for what I’d had in my hands and allowed to slip through my fingers. Soon I realized, though, that I had never really had what I thought I had, and that nothing back then was real.
Now I am older, whenever I find my mind drifting back to this stage in my life, I’m able to hold myself in check and pull myself out of my reverie before things get too maudlin.
Now, all these years later, I can honestly say I feel nothing at all one way or another concerning those years – apart from a tinge of sadness because I don’t feel anything, that is.
However, back then Yossy was always there for me.
In the summer of 1995 we took a short holiday to Bali together. This was the first time we’d been back to Bali since we met there five years earlier and in a nod to the past, we decided to stay at the hotel I had stayed in back in 1990 – a place called the Melasti.
Many years later this hotel was to gain notoriety for its role in the story of the ‘Bali Nine’ – a gang of nine young Australians who got involved in a drug smuggling ring. Evidently the Bali police, acting on a tip-off from the Australian Federal Police, became aware of a plot to smuggle heroin through Bali and onto Sydney. As a result the Bali police staked out the Melasti where some of ‘The Nine’ were staying and then arrested the entire gang at the airport as they attempted to depart to Australia with the drugs strapped to their bodies. Ultimately, charges were brought, sentences were handed down and two of the nine were finally executed with the rest being sentenced to between twenty years and life in jail.
However, back on that summer holiday of ours in 1995 drugs were the furthest thing from our minds and Yossy and I were still every bit as much in love as we’d ever been. We woke early most days and then walked around the open-air clothes markets where Yossy would engage in friendly haggling with the proprietors. Whilst I would either pay whatever exorbitant price I was first quoted, or haggle perhaps a five percent discount, Yossy had the ability (and the guile) to be able to secure absolute bargains at rock-bottom prices. She would charm, joke and smile her way into the hearts of the sellers so much that by the time a deal was finally struck she had them practically giving her their goods, and happy to do so to boot. I would be worrying that her stringent haggling was going to end up causing bad feeling, but I needn’t have worried because she had such a way about her back then that all and sundry in her presence couldn’t help but be charmed and feel that they were the most important person in her
