Authors: Emily Barr
I used to be surprised that Moses and the others let us go to school at all, but when I said that to Victoria, who was three years older than me, she said, ‘Oh, we’ve only been going to school for a few years, Cathy. Before that they used to home-ed us, but the council kept checking up and it pissed them off so much that they decided school was the lesser evil.’
I remember gaping at the casual way she said the rudest word I had ever heard in the Village. I heard far worse words than that at school, of course, but school was an alien world and the rules were different for those children.
Victoria said worse words, too, and then she died. I knew she would, as soon as I heard her say the f-word out loud, on the actual Village compound. God was going to punish her for that, I thought, and indeed he did. When she died, the Villagers put a death notice in the paper. It did not say she had been struck down for swearing and other behaviour. They just said she had ‘gone to be with Jesus’ and left it at that.
I have to work in the Village and in a couple of years I will marry Philip, and we will continue to live here and do God’s work, whatever He decrees that to be.
(I’m not completely sure I want to.)
I can’t believe that, lying here in my bed at night, in our girls’ cabin, I have had that thought. I could be struck down now: I really, genuinely could. I never swear, though, and I never have the wrong friends like Victoria sometimes did. All the same, if she could be struck down, I could be too.
I cannot help it, though. I
do
wonder what it is like, out in the world. It is, after all, God’s world. Every day I fight the urge to ask if I can go and explore. It would be a stupid thing to ask, because I know what the answer would be. It is not His will for me to go out and explore. If they knew I was thinking about it, they would be watching me like hawks.
I am lying on my bunk, staring at the shadows on the ceiling that are coming in through the light of the lantern outside the window. The others – Martha, Eve and Daniella – are asleep. Martha is the same age as me (eleven days older, in fact), so we have to spend all our time together even though we don’t like each other. The other two are younger, so one of our duties at school is to look after them.
I wish I could keep a diary. We are allowed to, but the Parents read them. As they only want to read about what we have done to serve God and the Village, that makes it pretty much the same as not being allowed to keep a diary. I need to write about my secret thoughts and fears, my fantasies about going into the world.
If I had a friend, I would be happier. Victoria was funny. I wish she was still alive. She wasn’t my age, but she liked me, and I loved her and she made me laugh.
Instead I have Martha, who is (whisper it) boring and fat. And Philip. I love him, and I will marry him, and we will have children together. All the same, he is not my best friend (and I am not completely sure I love him in the right way). There are a couple of girls I like at school – Sarah, in particular – but I am not allowed to be friends with people from outside the Village. I live in my head, all the time. Sometimes I am sure Moses can read my thoughts, and is displeased. I see him looking at me, and I look away.
All the same, there is definitely something in the air. My hopes are pinned on it. The Parents stop talking if they think we’re listening. Perhaps some new people are coming. New people would be brilliant.
The other girls are asleep. The shadows on the ceiling are moving a little. They are, I think, branches, swaying in the breeze. I will just lie here and stare at them, and sooner or later, I am sure, I will sleep too.
‘Hello!’ Two boys are balanced impressively casually on a small motorbike that may even be a scooter. The one on the back is waving to me with both hands.
‘Hello,’ I say back, and carry on walking. If I were in charge of this town, the first thing I would do would be to make all its pavements flat, and cover the holes that I presume lead down to drains and sewage. In a minute I am going to fall down one. I know I am. It is exactly what ought to happen next: the sole white woman in town will grant everyone a cheap laugh by dropping down a hole in the street and landing in poo.
Above me, hundreds and hundreds of birds are swooping and diving, performing aerial acrobatics. Perhaps they are eating mosquitoes: I hope so, because the atmosphere is so heavy it is almost solid, and I am sweating profusely. There is so much moisture in the air that I can hardly breathe. It is mosquito heaven. The very thought makes me itch.
I stare down at the pavement, and keep walking. My backpack pulls hard on my shoulders, and I am trying, ineffectively, not to be conspicuous. The guidebook called Kuala Terengganu a ‘pretty fishing town’. I have not found the pretty part yet. The bus station was concrete and functional, but bustling. There was a McDonald’s near it, and a KFC, both of which made me think I was spending the night in a metropolis of some kind, but they must have been for the sole benefit of the bus passengers, because as soon as I stepped away from the transit hub, everything became more challenging. More authentic, perhaps.
Still, I must nearly be there. I am following the road down to the sea, and when I get close, there should be a hotel called the Seaview, which has a nice write-up in my book. I plan to take a room there, look at the view of the sea and exhale.
‘Hello!’ shouts another boy, who is also on a moped with his friend. All the women here are covered up, with full headscarves and arms and legs totally clothed. My longest, most drapey clothing does not look as modest here as it would at home.
‘Hello,’ I say back, worrying as I do so that I am being terribly brazen and slutty. They cannot possibly be viewing me in a sexual way, I reason, because I am thirty-nine and they are about seventeen, and I am doubtless older than their mothers.
A group of three girls, teenagers with pastel-coloured headscarves, are walking towards me. I try a smile, in their direction, and the closest girl smiles shyly back.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘Where are you from?’
‘From England,’ I tell her.
‘Oh, England,’ says another one. ‘You like Malaysia?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘Have a nice stay.’ They all giggle, in a nice way.
Where the Seaview Hotel must once have stood there is a building that is clearly not a hotel. It does not look as though it has ever been a hotel. It is a slab of a building, made from brown bricks, with shutters and bars over the windows and a few people sitting outside. I carry on walking, but now I am at the seafront, and there is definitely not a hotel anywhere nearby.
I turn back and walk past the spot again. My destination is still not there. I am crushingly hot and horribly sticky, and I want to put my bag down.
I passed a grimy-looking ‘business hotel’ back up the road on a corner. As I no longer trust the guidebook, I drag myself back to it, hoping that ‘business hotel’ is not a euphemism. I manage not to fall into a drain on the way, and though I can feel mosquitoes air-bombing me, I am hoping they might be paranoia-produced imaginary ones.
The business hotel is just about affordable, and they laugh when I ask if they have a room: I get the impression that I could book a separate room for every item in my backpack and the hotel would still be half empty. The man hands me a key attached to a huge slab of plastic and directs me to the lift, and then I am on the eighth floor, and then in my very own room. My tiny piece of Kuala Terengganu is small and crowded with furniture, with a view of the town and a tiny sliver of sea visible between buildings. I go directly to the window to contemplate the birds, which are still diving crazily out there under the leaden sky, but step swiftly back, because the window is smeared with something unidentifiable, right at my eye level. Someone else has stood here and looked out, and left a smear of what might or might not be snot or saliva. Someone else has not done a wonderful job of cleaning the room.
I retreat to the bed and try not to wonder when the sheets were last washed. The bathroom looks all right, but I give the loo seat a brisk clean with a cleansing wipe all the same.
I realise I am starving. In spite of the hearty bowl of curry and rice I had for lunch, I have built up a massive appetite by doing nothing but sitting on a bus, in a state of great excitement, all day. Even the secretions on the window cannot dent my need for food, so in some trepidation I decide to go out into what is now dusk, and see the town.
According to my unreliable guidebook, there is a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Dragon, where, in this very Muslim town, I will be able to find a beer. I would like one of those very much. After trying hard to to memorise the route, I grab my shoulder bag, and set off.
It feels more intimidating at nightfall, and before I have been outside for five minutes, it is properly dark. I stumble around, worried about the sewer portals in the pavements, and try to go the right way. Two men on a moped slow as they pass me and shout ‘Hello!’ I say hello back, but I don’t look at them for long because I have no idea what that might mean, in a town this religious.
Around the corner, on a street that is almost deserted, the same thing happens, and again I return the greeting with some reluctance. This time, however, the teenager on the back of the moped spits at my feet, and they roar off, laughing.
I stop, frozen to the unreliable pavement. There are tears in my eyes but I blink them back, furious with myself and with those boys. I see, suddenly, that every ‘hello’ has been sarcastic. Everyone here hates me. I am wearing a long skirt and a long-sleeved top: I am not acting wantonly. Yet they probably know, just by looking at me, that I drink alcohol, that I have had sex (though not for a while, I want to tell them) without being married. And that is immoral to them; and they have let me know about it.
I am sure this place has more to offer, but I turn around on the spot, and walk straight back to the hotel. I need to feel safe much more than I fancy a beer.
The hotel’s restaurant is bland and shabby, and I am its only customer. My longing for familiarity is suddenly so strong that I order something the menu calls ‘fish and chip’. The fish is breadcrumbed and cardboardy, but the chips are plural, and they are fine. I drink a glass of 7 Up, which I don’t think I have ever done before, pay the bill and head to bed.
There I lie on top of sheets that do not smell particularly laundered, and listen to the occasional car that passes on the street outside and wonder how I came to be so far from my comfort zone. I wanted to leave it, but now I realise that I have come much too far. I don’t even lie in bed and cry. This is just bleak: I need to get out of here.
I pick up my phone and look at photographs of Daisy – sensible, dependable Daisy, who is so much more grounded than her mother – until I fall asleep, wishing I was with her, back at home, wishing I was still married, for all our faults, to Chris.
As I step down from the bus, into the sunshine, I laugh out loud. I draw attention to myself, but I don’t care. This is why I came here. I have swung from misery to joy, because I have got out of that town, and now I am exactly where I ought to be: I am in the salt-scented, sun-baked town of Kuala Besut, the gateway to the Perhentian Islands.
As I laugh, I see a Western woman, sitting at one of a number of white plastic café tables next to the bus stop, look up and smile at me. I grin back. This woman has short brown hair and big dark eyes. She is wearing a white shirt and a long batik skirt, and flip-flops, and she is about my age. This is my genre of person: I have finally found my place. She looks back at the postcard she is writing, still smiling.
‘This way to buy a ticket,’ says the bus conductor, pointing to a semi-covered concrete corridor lined with stalls selling sarongs and garishly patterned beach towels. I follow the Scottish boy, Edward, who sat across the aisle from me on the bus, into an office. He gestures to me to go first, but I refuse: I don’t want to be deferred to like an old lady. I am, after all, still in my thirties, just.
Edward is cheerful, and I know from our basic conversation on the bus that he is easy-going and chatty. This is the kind of person I should be hanging around with. He is, I hazard, about thirty. I look at his shapely legs, poking out from under khaki shorts, and listen to him buying a boat ticket to the island, from an extravagantly relaxed and friendly woman. He is, I think, a lovely-looking boy. I smile at my thoughts, because they fall somewhere between the maternal and the salacious.
‘Where you going on the island?’ the woman asks him, leaning back in her chair and putting her feet up on a nearby table.
‘Long Beach,’ he says. She nods and takes his money.
‘Call us the day before you come back,’ she instructs him.
I buy a ticket from her too, and thrill inwardly as I say the words: ‘Paradise Bay, please.’
I want to sing. I am tingling all over. I wish I could keep this moment, bottle it up and get it out to examine whenever I need it.
The boat will be leaving at half past one. It is now, according to a wonky clock on a wall, nearly one o’clock. I sit at a white table, smiling again at the woman-like-me and trying to guess her nationality. Her hair is, somehow, too short for her to be English, and too geometrically cut. I am ready to guess that she is German or Dutch when she leans over.
‘Are you on the half-one boat?’ she asks, in a Radio Four English accent.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I thought you were Dutch.’
She laughs.
‘London all my life. But I think I’ll take that as a compliment. You?’
‘Brighton.’
‘Oh, lovely. I’ve been there, of course. We all have, haven’t we? Beach destination of every Londoner.’ She looks around. ‘If not quite as idyllic as this one. Where are you staying on the islands?’
I get to say it again.
‘A little place called Paradise Bay. It was recommended to me by the niece of a friend.’
‘That sounds nice. Random. I’m going to one of the more mainstream places, I think. Coral Bay. For the moment, anyway. I’m really just going to hang out and go where the fancy takes me.’ She smiles. Her smile is warm and beautiful. ‘I’m Katy,’ she says.