The Arms, Unravelled

The Arms were named as such because no one had ever seen them without their arms intertwined around one another’s waists. This despite the 100 degree heat and the culture’s disdain for such public displays. Though this limb locked couple lived and worked in the foreign town, they were anything but acclimatised. Rather than eat at the local restaurants or even the requisite Irish pub, they shopped daily at the foreign goods market and cooked their 7 euro bags of pasta and tins of sauce in the company provided flat. In the evening as the sun set a bright pink behind the palms and the other ex-pats were well into their third big bottles of Leo, the Arms walked past, tennis racquets in their free hands, the woman’s coiffed bob bouncing up and down and the flesh beneath her tennis skirt jiggling ever so slightly. At the local country club, separated at last by a low sagging net, they grunted and cheered their way to victory, the loser giving the loudest cheers. As the couple returned, they purposefully ignored the shouts and queries from the ex-pats who had moved on to Samsung and Coke.

After the couple had left the range of the ex-pats’ blurred vision, they ceased to be a topic and discussion moved on to other such matters of importance such as Harleys and the woes of being a homeowner in a foreign country. Occasionally regret would seep into the flow of the conversation but would be banished by the simple act of ringing the bell for more ice and beer to be brought to the table.

One day the man walked to the table and without saying a word, sat down. The ex-pats’ conversation stopped suddenly as they all turned in unison to stare at him.

“How does one procure a libation around here?”

The men began shouting so loudly for Mai that she came running out, terrified that someone had finally had a heart attack.

“What’s wrong??”

“Bring this man a beer.”

“That all? You men crazy!”

The ex-pats watched as the man filled his glass and drank the contents in one gulp. The others, more quietly this time, signalled for a round to be brought.

“So, uh, where’s the missus?”

“You mean the captivating damsel with whom I occasionally walk?”

“Yeah.” Nods all around.

“Well, a quite amusing thing happened. Hysterical, actually. I came home early. Threw the old back out during last night’s match, you see. Thought I’d have a lie down and watch a bit of telly. After all, I’ve been working 50 hour work weeks in this shit box of a country for six straight months now. Figured I deserved a break.”

The men grunted their approval as glasses were refilled.

“So, I shuffled slowly up the stairs like an old man in a nursing home. Without the drool, of course. At the door, my door, mind you, I could hear moaning, like someone at death’s door. I thought ‘My God! Something’s happened to Elaine’. I was frantic, terrified to the core, Gentlemen! For no reason at all, I thought of our wedding day and how utterly perfect it’s all been up to this point. Ah, what a fickle cunt the old memory is, am I right?”

“Fuck yeah.” More nods, grunts, and refills. Someone lit a cigarette.

“I fumbled with the lock like a drunken idiot for what seemed like ages and finally opened the door. And then. Ah, that sweet, sweet ass as the Americans would say.”

The man paused and poured beer slowly and deliberately, smiling as the level rose in the glass. He pointed at one of the boxes of cigarettes and silently asked permission with raised eyebrows. After coughing and sputtering a few moments, he sat back in his chair, folded one leg over the other and continued.

“The first thing I saw was my wife’s derriere, as milky white as the day she was born, or so I imagine. My first thought was, ‘how the hell did they get on that glass table without breaking it?’ Quite impressive, it was. And behind my wife’s behind was a young lad, couldn’t be more than 20 pounding away at her as if his very life depended on it. So utterly immersed were they in their recreation that they didn’t even hear me. Imagine!”

“Holy shit, Comrade. That’s some fucked up mess. Local?”

“Quite.”

“You need something more than this elephant piss. Mai! Get my bottle from the back. And the glasses. Five!”

The men exchanged glances, trying not to appear too gleeful that they were going to get some actual whisky tonight.

They sat in silence for a moment, savouring the slow and gentle heat from the Laphroaig, relishing in its smoky earthiness.

“Jesus. How long you two been married?”

“Eleven years next month. Eleven!! Oh the irony of it, really. Did you know that the anniversary gift for your eleventh year of wedded bliss is steel? Steel! Last year, the big 1-0, was diamonds, so Princess was given lovely rocks for her lovely lobes. Any of you lot married?”

The man with the bottle nodded and gestured towards Mai who sat watching soap operas inside the shop. “Five years with this one. Too many years with the one back home.”

The other men shook their heads and one spoke up, “No way. Never. No woman is going to take my freedom and half my wages.”

“What woman would have ya?” The men continued in the vein of insulting one another’s skills with the opposite sex until Mick, eager to get back to the story and hoping for more drama, and therefore another drop of whisky, said, “What did you do?”

“Do?”

“Yeah, when you caught your lady getting shagged in the kitchen. What did you do?”

“What any man would do. I beat them both to bloody pulps. And the best part. Ah, you’ll love this. With a 15 kilo dumbbell. Made of steel. Happy anniversary, Darling!”

From the Heartland

Jenny had spent two months preparing presentations for her teaching job in China. She had bought a county atlas and spent the summer taking photos of back roads, covered bridges, corn fields, and unenthused cows. She captured old men fishing in their plaid shirts and stained John Deere hats. She discovered bake sales and lemonade stands run by tanned towheaded children. At night, she waited in fields for the lightning bugs to emerge with their glowing coded messages after the sky had changed from blood orange to royal blue.

For the one entitled “Family”, she inserted Christmases with all the cousins huddled under the tree, family reunion pot lucks with its overabundance of fried chicken and Swedish meatballs and lack of greens. Snowmen waved to the camera with their stick arms flanked on both sides by her sisters. The last photo was of her father, years before cancer paled and shrunk his body, on a pogo stick, having more fun than the children who surrounded him.

When she arrived on her first day at the primary school, she was impressed with the modern building and its landscaping of flowers and exotic plants. The floors gleamed and the corridors were eerily quiet. She glanced into one of the rooms and saw a sea of black hair as the students all had their heads of their desks. She was surprised to learn they were meditating as part of the break.

As she waited outside the room, the teacher spoke to them and with their hands clasped and resting on their desks, they watched and listened and nodded in unison. Jenny felt a rush of enthusiasm and said a little thank you to God for giving her such a well-behaved class. The teacher left the room, nodded to Jenny and without saying a word, walked on past.

Jenny entered, smiled, and harking back to her cheerleading days, shouted “Good Morning!” The students looked at one another and laughed and something shifted in the air. They unravelled as she connected her laptop to the projector. Boys began throwing bits of eraser at one another and girls whispered behind their hands and didn’t take their eyes off Jenny. She wondered if they’d ever seen a white person before.

Her first lesson about Introductions was designed to practice questions that people ask one another when meeting for the first time. She showed the map of the US, took a deep breath, and began. After a few minutes, Jenny felt relieved that the noise had subsided but soon realised from the glazed over eyes that they were bored. They asked questions. They asked where the mountains, the Hollywood sign and the Empire State Building were.  They wanted to see her parents’ big house with a pool and pet tiger. Did she have a boyfriend with a Ferrari? Glowing insects and farmland did not captivate them the way she expected. “Nobody wants countryside” as one confident student put it.

One picture that received a gasp was of her ice skating and holding a medal. They cheered when she said “champion” but their faces and shoulders sagged when she explained she stopped at age 14 due to a broken ankle. By the end of the class, she hated the Midwest too.

During the break she was horrified to discover she had to use the same toilets as the students; a squatting trough with no doors. A steady flow of water carried the waste below to a drain at the end of the room. As she squatted low, she tried not to cry and told herself the next class was older and would be better. After five more chaotic classes she left the building, trembling. After a month, she found a new job.

At the new equally shiny school in an equally concrete part of the city, Jenny quickly became popular as she told animated tales of her Beverly Hills life, most of the details stolen from The Real Housewives series. Students were silent and awestruck by her astronaut father and they swooned over her mother, the heiress. When she told them that her fiancée had been killed in Iraq, the girls cried and drew sad faces inside hearts on their homework. Selfies of her with students received hundreds of likes.

After living in the city for nearly a year, Jenny was elated to find out that her mother and aunt were coming to visit. They had begun saving after she left, foregoing taco Tuesday nights and Saturday matinees at the cinema. Neither of them had ever been further east than Washington D.C. or seen an Asian in person. As the time neared, their emails became more jubilant as they expressed their readiness to be shocked, to eat chicken feet, and to climb the Great Wall.

For a week Jenny, her mother, and aunt walked on walls, saw hutongs from the comfort of rickshaw bicycles, gazed at Yellow Mountain, wandered the old neighborhoods of Shanghai and gasped every other minute. They took photos of everything and everyone and their childlike joy was infectious.

During their last weekend, Jenny brought them to her city to show them where she lived and worked. As they walked the busy street near the school a large group of young teens suddenly surrounded them. Because they were wearing jeans and t-shirt and not their pressed trousers and white shirts, she didn’t immediately recognize them as her students.

She turned to introduce her mother and aunt and suddenly saw them as her students would: the overly permed hair cut too short, the discount khakis and the “Proud to be American” t-shirts from the local drugstore. Not the Beverly Hills heiress the students were expecting. As she mumbled, “This is some of my family,” she felt her face burning and worse, felt eyes searching for hers. When she looked up and into her mother’s eyes, she saw a hurt that was forever captured that day in a multitude of selfies, requested by the group of adoring teens.

 

 

Lost and Found

The driver watched as the foreign woman crossed the road, a half dozen plastic bags digging into her pale, sweaty arms. He had considered helping her but didn’t trust leaving the tuk-tuk on the side of the busy road. So he carried on, beeping and pausing, half-heartedly looking for fares. It was that calm part of the afternoon when students were still in school and it was too hot for anyone else to be out, save foreigners who seemed to follow their own agendas. He bought a bag of pineapple and parked beneath a cluster of trees in one of the parking lots near the beach.

As he climbed in the back for a short nap, he noticed the brightly coloured backpack. Though he couldn’t say how, he knew it was expensive and immediately recalled the farang he had dropped off nearly an hour ago. He considered going back but had no idea which building she had been heading for.

As if opening a ribbon on an ornate gift, he gingerly opened the zippers that neatly met at the top of the bag and feeling the anxiety of childhood curiosity, peered inside.

The first thing he noticed was a shiny metal container. Pulling it out, he recognized it from many American movies where men kept it in their cars and drank deeply from it when particularly stressed or sad. He unscrewed the cap and smelled the contents which reminded him of earth and smoke. He did not take a drink.

Also inside were several books, some of which appeared to be for children. He felt a sharp pang of fear, thinking of a little boy or girl who may not be read a story this night. But there was something about the woman that made him think she did not have a child.

At the bottom of the bag was a small plastic folder which contained several photographs. He quickly flipped through them, occasionally glancing out the window to make sure no one was watching. He feared he looked like a strange man who peered through windows to watch women sleep. Dropping the objects back into the bag and zipping it shut, he decided the best thing to do was to pick up dinner for the family and go home early.

When he walked in the door, he had the plastic bags of food slung over his right arm and the backpack over his left shoulder. He briefly imagined that this is what the women would have done if she hadn’t left behind her bag. His daughter, Nit, came running from the back room where cartoons screeched and honked.

“Papa! What did you bring me?”

“All your favourites, Little Mouse. Snake liver, duck knees, and water buffalo brains!!”

“Papaaaaa!!” She yelled, pouting and giggling the way only a seven year old can do.

That night, as he put her to bed, he showed her the children’s books with the strange animal in a giant red and white hat. Inside one of the books was a lone creature the size of a child who was visiting strange lands of bright colours, balloons, and fantastical vistas.

“Papa, this book is English. Is this what England is like? Or is it America?”

“I don’t know, Little Mouse. Maybe it’s wherever you want it to be.”

Over the next few weeks, both the driver and his daughter spent hours looking at the books, saving the best for last. The photo album. Here were not drawings or make believe. And though they knew they were real, they might as well have been from a cartoon book. They spent hours discussing the possibilities of the secret kingdoms the photos revealed. A family made of clouds stood before a garden, their white hair, white skin, and bright white smiles glowing amid a blue sky. Nit loved the picture of eight teenagers standing on a hill, a setting sun illuminating the women’s long gowns and the armour of the men’s suits. She imagined a land where children become princesses and princes when they turned 16, so much better than just moving onto a bigger school, with uglier uniforms like here. Other pictures showed hills made of cotton with children in astronaut suits sliding on picnic mats. Perhaps they were in space. And next, a military camp or ghost town, brick houses lined up next to each other square and neatly symmetrical. These dynasties must love playing with blocks. But the fact that there were no shops, no motorbikes, no people around—just smoke coming from the tops of the houses saddened the young girl. “Papa, do you think all the people left because the houses were burning?”

Each night, the girl visited dreamscapes of stone temples with coloured glass, where people made shrines above fires in their homes, where giant chickens were sacred birds on feast days, and kitchens sparkled like silver and diamonds. Before she awoke, she waved good-bye to a prince standing on a hill in the fading sunlight.

Perhaps sensing the power of his daughter’s imagination, he had hidden the other books from the teacher’s bag that he recognized as textbooks of English. If Nit learned English, she could become a CEO in New York, an actress in Hollywood, or a doctor in Australia. Though his selfishness shamed him, he could not shake the premonition that if given a chance, she would flee to the lands of castles and giant houses. This home and this life would become too small.

But just as he often encountered more traffic by trying to take a shortcut, this decision could not bend the line drawn by fate.

“Papa!! You’re not going to believe what happened at school!”

“An elephant taught mathematics.”

“No, silly! SHE is my teacher! She has come for me!!”

“Who, Little Mouse?”

“The woman in the photos. She’s here.”

The next day as his daughter raced towards the school, colourful backpack over her shoulder, he waited for a glance and a smile that never came.

 

 

Cancer of Character

When Marion mentioned she was moving to Southeast Asia to cure herself of cancer, she was only partly lying. She had developed and perfected this habit of telling half-truths in childhood—stating the true part out loud, and the other negating part, in her head.

“Did you finish your homework?”

“Yes.” (for one class)

“What time did you come home?”

“Midnight” (eastern time)

“How many beers have you had tonight?”

“Six” (since I arrived)

“Did you file your taxes?”

“Yes” (away in a drawer)

“You have cancer?”

“Yes” (of character)

Taken together, the spoken and mental statements were complete truths, and so it was with complete ease she was able to answer her co-workers’ questions that the cancer was in her brain, the prognosis was uncertain, and she was going to try alternative therapies.

Marion knew the cells of misanthropy had always been within her. She had always preferred to be alone but had in general, been neutral towards others.  But in the last few months, her mind was a stream of nasty commentary directed at the unsuspecting inhabitants around her. “Go the gym, Lardass”; “a face like a box of hammers”; “ditch the schoolbag, Future Stripper”; “paedophile”; “eat a sandwich, Twiggy”; “1990 called, they want their Mom jeans back”; “closet drunk”.

When no one was on the streets, as was the case in the early hours before dawn, the unstoppable verbal assault was directed inwards. “waste of space”; “socially retarded”; “fraud”, “albatross”; “talentless loser”; “closet drunk”. As the voice became louder and the monologues longer, she ended each day feeling exhausted and alone. She couldn’t accept that she was inherently a terrible person and had begun to believe the vileness was a cancer that had been secretly and silently spreading within her.

On one dark morning while waiting for the bus, the sight of a poster on the side of a passing bus silenced the inner voice. It was a typical holiday poster with a montage of beach, traditional dance, and exotic food and cocktails. And under the picture, “Come to the Land of Smiles”. She spent the bus journey imagining being in a place where everyone smiled and was happy. Though the thought made her feel a bit ill, she could picture the cells of negativity being zapped with the radiation of a thousand smiles.

Marion took a three month unpaid leave of absence to avoid dealing with fussy management and their love of documentation and “certified medical excuses”, accepting that there might be no work if she returned cured or not. She booked an open return ticket and rented a serviced apartment in a small town, where small money went far.

The first two weeks, Marion felt the misery of her character manifested in the heat and noise of the country. It felt as if she were a transplanted organism and the body of the town was trying to repel her. Buses that notoriously stopped anywhere and for anyone, saw her and sped on by. Soi dogs, the gentlest and meekest of rejected creatures, growled as she passed. Street children who would normally surround and cling to a white woman, ran away and hid behind dumpsters when she approached.

Sweating and heaving, Marion lay down on her small bed, and cried. The cancer was getting worse.

One morning after the time when the children went to school and the streets were quieter, Marion headed to 7-Eleven, a place of fixed prices and no cheating, to buy a steamed bun and a soda. She noticed a small woman, so bent over her back seemed like a table. She wore an assortment of bits of coloured fabric that together made her look both regal and homeless. Over one arm, hung several battered plastic bags. As Marion stood across the street and watched the woman, she became aware of strange noises coming from all directions. Suddenly cats of all sizes and colours emerged from crevices and corners of the street to surround the woman, who with lots of gestures and singsongy words took fish from a bag and gently placed them in front of the eager felines.

The woman continued down the road and Marion followed close enough to see how the woman greeted every shopkeeper, pulling out a bunch of bananas, a branch of lychee, a pencil for a small boy or girl. The people responded with wais, smiles, and words of obvious affection. Marion watched in amazement and felt a group of malignant cells just under her ribcage break apart.

The next day Marion rushed to Tesco and loaded up her cart with kibble and candy. On the way to the bus stop she paid too much for a shirt with a design of dolphins and flowers on a turquoise sea background.

At first the dogs growled at the pile of kibble set on the pavement and the children shook their heads side to side at her offer of sweets. On the second day, though it felt false and forced, Marion tried smiling and began speaking.

“Look at your beautiful brown fur and floppy ears. I bet you’re hungry after that long hot night we had. Here take some good boy. You’re the best, loveliest boy.”

“This one is strawberry. Try it! Sweet candy makes you feel like a million bucks. Go on!”

She wasn’t sure when the shift occurred, but by the second month, words were flowing from her spontaneously and without the usual internal amendment. When she passed people on the street, kind words came to mind and she found herself speaking them aloud.  At night, Marion returned to her small room, shocked to catch that in her reflection, she was still smiling.

“This is real,” she remarked.

When Marion returned to her office three months later to see if she still had a job, her former colleagues gasped at the tanned and smiling woman before them. When asked if she had been cured, the only voice she heard was the one she spoke aloud.

“Yes.”

 

 

The Canal

Sean stared blankly at the long hair that sprouted proudly from the mole next to the officer’s mouth. As the mouth moved—lips widening to make short vowels and rounding for the long—the hair moved too, bobbing and vibrating in agreement. Sean was vaguely aware the mouth and its sidekick were addressing him rather sternly. Although he wasn’t concentrating on the words, he knew the policeman wanted to know how Christa ended up in the canal.

The day before, they had had a massive row at the “meat on a stick” place. Sean remembered thinking how he could have stabbed her then—25 skewers—two in each eye and the rest in each organ, and the heart last. She had started her usual litany of how he had ruined her life by bringing her to a hellhole of smog, lack of queueing, and rampant animal abuse.

“I piss in a door-less trough while the students watch! In class, they throw erasers at me and then post pictures of me yelling about it on facebook!”

The year before when they were planning their next contract, Sean was enamoured with the idea of being in the mouth of the Sleeping Dragon, of experiencing first-hand how the inhabitants regard that infamous former leader as “70% good, 30% bad” when the 30% led to millions starving and dying. And even though the other teachers couldn’t manage a “ni hao”, he believed that he would eventually crack the code.

Each day was an hour commute in a bus with a hole in the floor, arriving giddy with carbon monoxide poisoning to teach 60 pre-pubescent students who knew only a few words at most and wanted to learn none. When they arrived home in the evenings at the accommodation provided by the school, the building’s guards pointed and shouted what could only be a string of curses judging from the amount of spit involuntarily and voluntarily coming from their mouths. Once, they greeted them with absolute silence until Christa noticed they were all eating her Aunt Ruth’s signature peanut butter cookies and sipping Tremont Rye made near her hometown. When she called to thank her aunt, she said nothing of the theft.

The night before, she had outlined her plan to do a runner—take the laptops issued by the agency, pack their stuff, and take the next available cheap international flight. She ordered a bottle of baijiu and another round of meat.

“It’s only been six months. You just have culture shock.” He was disgusted by her weakness and said as much. “What happened to you? You used to have such a sense of adventure! Remember the shithole bungalow we lived in in Thailand with the million ants? Or what about that lech in Poland who was always grabbing your ass? And don’t get me started on Korea. Remember working 47 days straight without a break?”

Christa filled and emptied her plastic cup twice before speaking again. Her voice low, eyes unfocused.

“I’m not wasting another day of my life here. I know ultimatums are toxic to relationships but here it is: China or me.”

Sean’s sense of self-importance in the world tended to grow proportionately with the amount of alcohol he consumed. It struck him that giving in to this woman, whom he loved but not in a soul-defining way, would be a grave error. He was on a mission to know China. He too filled and emptied his glass twice before speaking again, matching her tone.

“There’s a lot more to China than to you. And China doesn’t bitch all the time.”

He didn’t bother to tell any of this to the officer in the tiny grey room. Only that they argued, she packed her bag and left.

“With body no bag. No passport. Nothing.”

“Probably stolen?”

“Maybe.” The hair twitched.

Sean closed his eyes. There was not going to be any good end to this. Nobody would believe him and fleeing would suggest guilt. Staying would lead to jail. He put his head in his hands.

She was drunk. She probably fell in. I wasn’t with her.

“But why bag and passport in rubbish?”

Worried that the man had been able to hear his thoughts, Sean removed his hands from his eyes and looked at the officer, finally seeing his face as a complete composition for the first time. The officer looked bored.

Any residual drunkenness Sean had been feeling since being roused from his bed before dawn was suddenly gone. He found he couldn’t swallow and spots were appearing on the sides of his line of vision.

They had gone home together; that he was sure of. The guards had barricaded the entrance as they always did at 11:00 pm and he distinctly remembered Christa climbing on it and shouting for the guards to “wake the fuck up”. When one of them emerged from the tiny office, vulnerable looking with his shirt untucked and rumpled hair, Christa began poking him in the chest and releasing six months’ worth of resentment.

She had trampled into the apartment, slamming doors, and throwing things into a suitcase. Sean had stayed a few feet behind her and had settled on the sofa with a beer. When the room suddenly became silent and filled with the familiar stench of tobacco, he knew she was in the kitchen drinking whisky.

Sean waited for the next moment of the narrative and realised that the smell of the smoke and the taste of the warm Tsingtao were the last things he could remember. When did she come out of the kitchen? It would have been typical for her to go down to 7-Eleven for more booze or had she taken the suitcase? And did I follow her?

“Rubbish?”

“Outside your apartment”

“Near the guard station?”

Something flickered for just a moment in the officer’s eyes, Sean’s body unclenched, and a story was born. A story that would forever remain unchanged, even in his darkest and quietest hours.