Stranded (2 page)

Ninety per cent of me wants to spend the day in the spa, but this is my only full day in the city, and I have to see it. I have to do that so I can report back to Daisy, and so that Chris sees that I can not only manage without him, but that I can have adventures on a scale that would be entirely and unarguably beyond him.

I get over the main road outside the hotel, scurrying through the hot air in the wake of two young men. If I cross with people who look local, I am less likely to be crushed under the wheels of a bus. That is one of my maxims.

I have been staring at the Petronas Towers from my hotel room window, pleased to be opposite the sole Kuala Lumpur landmark that I had ever heard of. There is an air-conditioned mall at their base; its shops are Armani, Hermès and other designer names, far beyond my price range. The only place I can afford to buy anything is Starbucks, and I have had enough coffee for one morning. Instead, I buy a ticket to go up to the bridge later in the day, then exit the tower and head for the nearest Metro station.

All day I tick off the sights from the guidebook, and keep myself safe. I pound the streets, from one site of interest to the next. Yesterday I saw the area around the hotel, so today I ride on the Metro, which is inevitably cleaner and easier to use than the London version, from KLCC at the Petronas Towers downtown to Masjid Jamek. There I visit, first of all, a Hindu temple, where I watch people in brightly coloured clothes prostrating themselves before the shrine. Little girls with gold earrings smile diffidently, and I wave, as shy as they are.

I look at the confluence of two muddy rivers (and inform myself, thanks to the guidebook, that the words ‘Kuala Lumpur’ mean ‘muddy confluence’, so at that point I am properly at the centre of the city). On the spur of land where they join, there is a mosque, and while at the Hindu temple I felt welcome to hand in my shoes and join the throngs of people as an observer, I would not dare go anywhere closer to the mosque than I already am, leaning on a railing and looking at it across the water. I have no idea whether women are allowed in there at all, let alone unrepentant infidels who have just been divorced for unreasonable behaviour.

I walk around the old colonial cricket pitch, with its flagpole and its Christian church. I stroll into the church, where fascinating brass plaques commemorate young, dead colonists. Most of them died in their twenties and thirties, but only one memorial gives a cause of death, which is a fall from a horse. A honeymooning couple from the Punjab ask if I will have my photo taken with them. They make me feel like a film star. I try to smile a dazzling smile, though no doubt it comes out looking manic and odd.

The sun shines hard in the deep blue sky as I wander through Chinatown, where I am offered pirate DVDs and fake designer bags at every turn. I pause before a perfume stall, trying to figure out why anybody would buy a fake designer perfume. With a bag you can see the attraction, because it looks (presumably) like the Prada version. With a perfume, though, the bottle looks right but there could be any old rubbish inside it.

The stallholder mistakes my fascination for a potential purchase and starts haggling. I try to say no, but he calls me back with a lower price, and before I know it I have bought a bottle of pretend Britney Spears ‘Hidden Fantasy’ perfume for about four pounds, just to get away. This proves that I am still stupid and incapable.

I decide to stop for lunch, sitting at a table under an umbrella, at the edge of a food court. I order vegetable fried rice and a bottle of water, then on impulse add a can of beer. A few people say random hellos in passing, but I am left to get on with it, and I am extremely grateful for that. No one is interested. Everything I did in Brighton, everyone I was, has been left behind. For the first time in many years I have the space to breathe.

By the afternoon, jet lag is kicking in, so I take the Metro back to where I started and keep my appointment with the Petronas Towers. As I ride up in the lift with the fifteen other people in my group, I smile at a tiny beautiful girl of about three who is wearing gold earrings and a bright yellow dress, and she looks at me with frank interest. She is with her parents and a baby in a pushchair, who is so surrounded by blue things that there is no doubt about his gender. I seem to unnerve her, so she reaches for her mother’s hand, which emerges from the folds of a niqab with beautifully manicured fingernails.

The bridge that links the two towers gives a dizzying view over the sprawling city. You could come here every day for a year and notice different things each time. I see parks, buildings, people, cars, all vanishing into the distance. Everything is vividly, almost violently green. So far I have seen only sun, but I know that when it rains here, it really rains. My hotel is easy to spot, and when I look hard I can even see my window. I left my lovely new sarong on the windowsill; and that smudge of pink marks my spot in this unexpectedly welcoming city.

I think about Chris, and instantly hate myself for letting him into my head. I have spent years struggling against him, but now, as I stand forty-two floors up, looking down on a cosmopolitan city thousands of miles from home, I find I can think of him kindly. Being magnanimous pleases me, because he would hate it.

Marrying Chris was one of my worst ideas. Had things unfurled in the normal way, I would barely remember him. We were two irresponsible slackers drawn together by a shared preference for speed when everyone else was taking Ecstasy. We would have stuck together for several weeks, for long enough to realise that when we were sober we had nothing in common, and then we would have gone our separate ways.

Chris was beautiful when I met him, with light brown hair that would have reached his collar had he worn one. His face shone with the possibilities of youth, possibilities that he was efficiently extinguishing by living solely for hedonism. His features were perfectly arranged, his cheekbones high, his eyes a warm dark brown. Now his hair is thinning on top and he has grown it long in compensation and wears it in a Slade-style ponytail. Then he was thirty-two. Now he is forty-three. Much has changed.

Neither of us could ever look back and regret Daisy’s unplanned appearance in the world. I thought about aborting, but I wanted to be a mother, and when Chris drunkenly declaimed that we would be ‘amazing parents’, I decided to pretend he was right. We made all the conventional decisions, up to and including a pregnant wedding, in a rush of excitement at being grown up.

The thing that is inexplicable, when I look back from this distance, is the fact that we stayed together until last year. We managed to stretch out the misery like an implausibly elastic piece of old chewing gum; one that should have gone into the bin long ago. I suppose neither of us wanted to be the one to give up. I wanted to make him leave so that I could blame him. He, I am quite sure, wanted the exact opposite. We stubbornly waited in that limbo for a decade, until we succumbed together, six months ago.

I was afraid that when we told Daisy we were splitting up she would be upset. I was sure she would be insecure and worried. Instead, she grinned for days and kept saying: ‘I thought you’d never do it. Thank you!’

Now we are actively divorced. I am keeping his name because I share it with my daughter, but that is all I have of him now: his genes in my child, and a surname.

I have never walked into a bar alone before. I have drunk on my own many times, but always closeted away at home.

I am drenched with warm rain so that my hair (carefully washed and dried in anticipation of this outing) sticks flatly to my head and cheeks, and my long skirt and cotton top cling and look lewd, even though I chose them because they were the most modest clothes in my arsenal. As soon as I am across the threshold I close the door behind me to keep the driving rain out of this sanctuary. It shuts with an unexpected bang.

I look around, take in the battered leather chairs, the high ceiling with its fan lazily stirring humid air, the aged framed newspaper cuttings and cartoons on the walls, and smile to myself.

‘This will do,’ I mutter, and I squeeze the worst of the rain out of my hair by wringing it with both hands. A small puddle appears at my feet, and this makes me laugh.

There are three men sitting at the bar on high stools, and two men behind it. Otherwise, the large room is solely populated by empty chairs, sofas that would be called ‘vintage’ at home, and tables that bear the rings of glasses that have stood on them over many years. All five men are looking at me, and all laugh along with me at how wet I am. I sit on the stool they offer rather than retreating alone to one of the comfy chairs, and look at the laminated cocktail list that someone slides into my hand.

‘Margarita!’ I say, as my eye falls upon the word. I think I am safe having a margarita here.

Daisy would like this room. Daisy likes things that are straightforward and interesting. She hates anything girlie. This place is not girlie at all. It is overwhelmingly, testosterone-heavily male.

There is a room adjoining the bar, a dining room, and although the bar is nearly empty, the dining room is almost filled with people eating. The clatter resonates around, echoing off the high ceiling. I think I will be able to sit at a table on my own and get some dinner there myself: it does not look threatening. That will cement my triumphant day.

The barman is, I think, much older than me, and he looks as if his origins are Chinese. He smiles and inclines his head.

‘Margarita? Certainly,’ he says, in perfect English. He barks something at his younger colleague, who immediately starts to assemble blender, ice, salt and the right-shaped glass.

This, I am beginning to remember, is how life used to be. In my twenties I relished everything. I lived. I worked, I spent time with friends. I was outward-looking and sunny. I was not vindictive, nor bitter, and I was free.

When I concentrated, I was able to see my pregnancy, coming along serendipitously at the end of my twenties, as an exciting move up to the next stage. When we decided to make a go of it, we did it properly. We dashed headlong into playing at being grown-ups. Chris would stroke my bump and coo at the baby. I filled the cupboards with nutritious food and cooked dinner for us every night.

If I could go back, that would be the first thing I would change. No one tells you that if you think it’s fun to play at being a wifey person, owing to the novelty factor, the recipient of your attentions will happily settle into the role of the waited-upon husband, and will become phenomenally grumpy when you get bored of pretending to be a woman from the 1950s and want to split the workload fairly. Whenever I hear of anyone planning marriage now, I want to tell them that. It is my sole piece of advice, apart from ‘Are you sure?’ Do not become besotted with the idea of yourself as someone’s wife. Start living together in a way that you could imagine sustaining for decades. The novelty of being able to say ‘my husband’ wears off much more quickly than you might imagine.

My horizons narrowed. The world closed in. We had a daughter, and we were both in love with her and bewildered by the new world she brought with her. At first we would change her nappy together, wash her in a little basin, marvel in unison at her tiny nails and the complicated whorls of her ears. I would breastfeed her, sitting in splendid sloth on the sofa, while Chris brought pint glasses of water and bars of chocolate and plates of toast.

Then he started to go out. He would go for a drink, and come home later and later. Life settled down. Chris got a boring job at a bank, and resented me for it with every fibre of his being, every moment of every day. I cooked and ironed and washed up and resented him right back. Occasionally we went on holiday to miserable cottages in rainy villages, and both of us mainly communicated with, and through, Daisy. We rarely had money, and we never did anything. Part of me was bored senseless, but I subdued that part and lived in my imagination. I constantly planned ways to escape, but I never did anything about it, because I was certain that Chris was making the same plans and I assumed he would effect an exit first. In the end we gave up simultaneously, with a surprisingly fiery flourish.

I sit on my bar stool and look back through the window, splattered with raindrops, to the dark street. My clothes are still clinging, my hair is bedraggled, and outside the rain is still falling. I do not know a single person on this continent. The men sitting at the bar with me are the best friends I have.

‘Where are you from?’ asks the man on the next stool. He has a thick black moustache.

‘From England,’ I tell him, and hope he does not hate me for being an ex-colonist. This, I imagine, is the constant niggling fear of the liberal Englishwoman abroad. I instantly wish I’d said Britain, because people like Scotland and Wales better.

‘Ah,’ he says, beaming. ‘England. Where do you live – London? Which team do you support? Manchester United?’

I think of Daisy, thousands of miles away, and I remember the way she forced herself to be a football fan as part of her quest for a bond with her father. I say what I know she would want me to say.

‘I support Chelsea,’ I pretend, hoping for no follow-up questions. I have no idea who is the manager, or the captain, and I could not name a single player. ‘Stamford Bridge,’ I add, sharing the sole piece of information that comes to mind.

‘Ah, Chelsea.’ He nods. ‘Me, Aston Villa.’

‘Aston Villa? Really?’

‘Really. In Birmingham. You know Birmingham?’

‘I’ve been there,’ I tell him. ‘Not for a while, though. And I don’t live in London, but I live near, in a place called Brighton. Hove, actually.’ I smile to myself as I say that, the local phrase that describes a particular area west of the boundary between the two towns. Hove-actually is a million light years from here, and all the better for it.

The older barman, who turns out to be the proprietor, is awe-inspiringly well informed. He grills me on British politics, and the royal family. He asks what I thought of Tony Blair and ‘the one after Tony Blair’. I am shamed to realise that I have few equivalent questions about Malaysian politics for him. I ask about religion. ‘The huge majority are Muslim, though KL is very cosmopolitan,’ he says. Then he tells me about the history of his bar, which has been around for years and years. I am unexpectedly lost in tales of communism and colonialism, of men checking their guns in behind the bar.