Yes Man (47 page)

I felt as free as a bird
.

What I was doing was utterly unheard of—at least for me. This was blatantly a dive straight into level six. A once only-mythical level. A level I had never been in before.

I was going to Singapore …
because I could
.

That was it. That was all.

I had seen an advert, said yes to it, and now here I was … recovering from a lengthy flight to a whole new place for no reason whatsoever other than life had dictated that I should. Life had conspired to show me that advert. Yes had conspired to make me obey it. Marc had inspired me to simply sit back and enjoy it. I was at the airport when my phone rang.

“Dan? It’s Wag.”

“Hey, Wag, how’s it going?”

“Not bad. Where are you?”

“On my way to Singapore.”

“Singapore?
Why?”

I shrugged.

“No reason.”

Thirteen hours later and I jumped into a cab outside Changi airport and chucked my small bag onto the back seat.

I was happy. Living in total acceptance of my decision. I would be in Singapore for a little more than forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours in
Singapore!
A weekend! Who has a
weekend
in Singapore? Who comes back from a trip to Barcelona, finds a credit card he should never have taken out, and books himself on the next available flight to southeast Asia?

“Hello! How are you!” said the driver, more as a statement than as a question.

“I’m am incredibly fine!” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” he said, putting the car in gear. “An’ how are you?”

I balked. I was pretty sure I’d just answered that, but couldn’t be entirely certain. Singapore is many thousands of miles away, and I’d been in the air for many hours.

“I’m fine!” I said, again rather cheerily. And that should have taken care of that, really. But despite the fact that I already knew the answer, I felt rude not then asking him how he was. It’s force of habit, and I’m British.

“And … how are you?”

He looked at me happily. “I am fine.”

Good. End of story. We’re all fine.

“And …”

Oh no.

“… how are you?”

He turned toward me and raised his eyebrows expectantly. Well, what did I do now? I’d
definitely
already told him how I was, and I’d
definitely
already asked him how
he
was, but he was looking at me, waiting for me to say something. I could hardly change the subject—we were locked in a battle of etiquette. Mine ingrained in me from childhood; his learnt word-for-word from some kind of 1950s textbook.

“I’m fine,” I mumbled awkwardly, and then barely audible and toward the window, “You?”

“Fine,” said the driver quickly, now evidently satisfied. “Very fine, thank you.”

There followed a minute of silence, for which I thanked my lucky stars. I switched my phone on, and it beep-beeped, welcoming me to Singapore. It beeped again a moment later. A text message from Hanne.

HOW ARE YOU?

I texted back.

I’M IN SINGAPORE!

I waited for the reply. Within thirty seconds, it was mine.

WHAT? WHY?!

I laughed.

NO REASON!

It was hotter than I think I’ve ever been. The car’s air-conditioning system wasn’t the greatest in the world, and it blew hot, sickly air toward our faces. We were driving through downtown Singapore, past giant shopping malls and wide, tree-lined streets. I looked out of the window, drinking it all in, noting Serangoon Road and Little India, and gleefully revelling in what I was doing. Why was I
here? Because I happened to see an advert, when I was in Spain, meeting a man who says yes a lot, and been so inspired that I’d almost been looking for a level six. I had made this happen. Samten the monk had effectively told me that in life, anything can happen. I took that to mean there was no such thing as destiny. And if there’s no such thing as destiny … then I can make
life
happen!

“Where are you from?” asked the driver all of a sudden.

“London,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “Nice. London.”

Another pause.

“And how far is London from England?”

“Oh. Er … London is
in
England. It’s a city.”

“England or London is a city? Which is capital city of London?”

He looked at me with eager puppy eyes. I explained that
London
was the capital of
England
, and he said he felt silly, but I reassured him. After all, you can barely find a minicab driver in London itself who would’ve known that for sure. As it turned out he—Ong Chee Kieng—had been driving a cab for sixteen years, and he’d moved to Singapore from China to marry his sweetheart.

“We very happy,” he said. “Two children, also very happy. Singapore is a good place for children. Very clean. Very nice.”

Singapore certainly is very clean. And very nice. Mainly because it’ll fine anyone for anything, and fine them heavily. Gone are the days when tourists with long hair would be turned away as they arrived at the airport or offered a short back-and-sides haircut by a burly customs official with a pair of blunt scissors, but it’s still a place that looks down on scruff. There’s little else you can get away with, either; you’ll be fined for jaywalking, for smoking in a public place, for dropping litter. Eating a sandwich on the subway will considerably lighten your wallet, too. According to Ong, radicals used to urinate in lifts as a way of making a statement against the system, until they started putting cameras in lifts. Either that or the radicals ran out of urine. And perhaps most famously: Chewing gum is expressly and forcefully forbidden. It seemed to me that Singapore was a little like a nation of rather religious aunties; you love them for their affable strictness and sense of fair play, but you just wish they’d overdo it on the sherry and try and get off with the vicar once in a while. Funny, how a life of Yes had led me to a place of No. Their chewing-gum fury is particularly harsh. Those found selling it, importing it, or even using it, face a one thousand dollar fine. It was as Ong was explaining this to me that I suddenly realised with some degree of horror that somewhere at
the bottom of my bag was a half-full bumper pack of Wrigleys that Wag had given me one night. There were at least twenty sticks left. Twenty! Essentially, in the eyes of the law, I was now some kind of drugs mule! There are some things you know are going to happen when you decide to say yes to everything, but being arrested for smuggling isn’t one of them.

“So, why you come to Singapore?” said Ong before repeating a phrase he’d obviously learnt off the telly. “Business or pleasure?”

I smiled.

“Neither, really,” I said. “I’m just … here.”

Ong looked confused.

“Pleasure,” I said. “Just pleasure.”

I thought about it. It actually really was. Even my other trips abroad had had a vague point—whether to win the Spanish lottery or meet a Yes Man. The travel was just a by-product of a Yes. But this … this was a Yes in itself.

Ong dropped me at my hotel, Traders, and gave me a small yellowing business card, saying that should I need driving anywhere, I should give him a call. I promised him that yes, I would, then checked into my room, flushed my Wrigleys down the toilet, and slept for a very, very long time indeed.

Later I wandered out of my hotel and into the kind of heat that quite instantly robs sweat from every inch of your body. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going, and neither did I need to. I had nowhere to be, nothing I needed to do, and so instinctively I walked down the very stylish, very long Orange Road; a shameful celebration of capitalism and really nothing more than dozens of vast shopping centres linked together by underground tunnels and air-conditioned walkways.

I found a McDonald’s and bought myself breakfast. I was slightly surprised to see that this month’s specially featured dish of choice was called the Chicken Singaporridge. Porridge doesn’t appeal to me at the best of times, and less so when it appeared to be chicken-flavoured porridge in a bap. I wasn’t convinced by their slogan, either: For that breakfast taste. Yeah, in
prison
, maybe. Still, Singaporridge was at least a catchy name. Presumably over in Little India, you’d be able to buy a BK Whoppadom.

Relieved that I was under no direct orders to buy Singaporridge, I bought a Big Mac, said yes, you
could
SuperSize me (some Yeses are the same the world over) and studied my map. But it was just words and drawings to me. What
should I do? How do you let the wind take you, when there’s no wind?
Literally
no wind, in the case of Singapore. I sat there for a moment, and then realised the solution. I would have to
create
the wind. Ong. I would call Ong.

“So what you want to see? Tourist place or real Singapore?” he said. He had an apple, and he’d brought one for me, too.

“Well …,” I said. “What do
you
recommend? What should I do?”

“I drive you round some places first,” he said.

I had booked Ong and his car for a couple of hours for an almost embarrassingly small fee. He’d drive me round, show me the sights, act as a guide. And so he took me round the classic tourist spots—the CBD, the statue of Raffles, the proud alabaster-white Merlion, a Chinese temple—and stopped at a supermarket to buy us both water. We wondered what to do next. But I had an idea. Yes was all about experiences. New experiences, at that.

“How about things I would never normally see?” I asked him. “Can you show me that?”

Ong thought about it.

“I show you paradise!”

I was glad Ong was married, or I might have got the wrong idea.

“Paradise?” I said. “What’s paradise?”

“Paradise is
kampong—
Pulau Ubin.”

There were two words I understood in that sentence.

“Sorry?”

“Kampong
is paradise for people. Pulau Ubin is island of paradise. For me.”

“But what’s a
kampong?”

“Traditional village. Very quiet. Lot of nature. No hurry, no hurry. Pulau Ubin is best island.”

I scrutinised my map of Singapore to find Pulau Ubin. And there it was, north of the airport. It turns out that Ong, like 90 percent of Singaporeans, lives in a high-rise. There’s little space in Singapore. Nowhere to relax around nature. Rapid urbanisation and a relentless onslaught of shopping malls made sure of that. And while much of rural Malaysia still has that traditional
kampong
feel, Singaporeans fear they’ve lost it forever. Pulau Ubin is their last chance. Their last glimpse of local paradise. The one place they’ve got that remains untouched.

“Business want it already,” said Ong. “Not long now before it goes. Two year, maybe. Maybe one. So sad.”

I put my map down, and Ong said, “So you want to see?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to see.”

Ong dropped me off by the harbour and told me to give him a call when I got back. No hurry, no hurry, he said. I sat on the hard wooden bench by what Singaporeans charmingly call the “bumboats.” I sat there and I sat there and I sat there. And nothing happened. But it didn’t matter to me. I was perfectly relaxed. Perfectly happy to just
be
. I was there with four other people, and we sat in silence, staring into the distance, just waiting for the captain to finally invite us on board. But after thirty minutes, I’d had enough of just
be-
ing and turned to the girl next to me.

“Excuse me,” I said, slightly startling her. “This is the queue for the boat to Pulau Ubin, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “But we have to wait.”

“What for?”

“We have to wait until there are enough people. There are only five of us. It must be twelve before we can go.”

I’m glad that the British bus system operates in a far different way. Imagine a coach bound for Swindon that needed twelve people before it could set off. It’d sit there for months.

We continued to wait in silence.

Finally, thankfully, from around a corner, we were joined by two elderly men. Presumably even the captain of the bumboat was bored off his tits by this stage as he decided that he’d cut his losses and take just the seven of us.

We set off for paradise.

Twenty-five minutes later, and we were there.

I stepped off the bumboat and onto a long, wooden pier. Ong had been right about the island’s natural beauty. On first sight the place was virtually untouched. A sandy beach with lush green trees and bushes and just a few rickety wooden piers leading from small, neat houses to tiny, barely seaworthy fishing boats. I walked toward the island with the others until we passed a carved wooden sign, reading
WELCOME TO PULAU UBIN
. I stopped to look at it while the others overtook me, and then they were gone, and I was left deserted with no one around me and no idea of where to go. It felt good. It felt random and …
free
. Where would I be if I hadn’t said yes all those months ago? Would I be at home, sitting
in a dark flat watching
Trisha
as the winter evenings drew in? Wherever I’d be, I’d never have been
here
.

I considered just setting off, but noticed a sign reading
VISIT THE TOURIST INFORMATION KIOSK
and a big pointing hand, so I obeyed. It was a large wooden building that I imagined contained all sorts of useful information and handy hints on where to go and what to do. I walked through the door, however, to find one vast, virtually empty room. There was a desk to one side with a door behind it, but apart from that, nothing. I decided I’d probably found the wrong kiosk, but just as I was leaving, a man walked through the door. Wordlessly he tossed a leaflet onto the desk, looked at me, then turned around and walked back through the door. I picked the leaflet up. “Pulau Ubin: An Island Getaway, Just a Bumboat Away.” There were a couple of pictures, but it was rather sparse as leaflets go.

“Er … excuse me?” I called out rather pathetically.

Nothing. I tried again, louder.