Bellamy - Backpackers: Fear on a Shoestring

Andrew was a wreck. Gripping the sides of his dormitory mattress with his fingertips, he was bouncing and rolling on the sexual swell of an uncontrollable, exterior energy. The mattress in the bunk above him was inflating like gasping bellows and expanding towards his face, threatening to consume him with a heavy, hot breath. In the end it was only the straining, rusting bed springs, singing out their despair, which saved him from drowning.

Of course Andrew should have taken a different hotel for the night, or at least a different room. Had he done so, things might have turned out differently. But he didnt. Instead he remained in his bottom bunk and wallowed in misery. And who would have acted differently? Whenever was a fool in love the best judge of anything?

He was in pain. Kirsten was breaking his heart again. She was up there now, fooling around with a drunken bum shed met in a bar that evening. And here he was, her greatest, most loyal fan, trapped below, frustrated and helpless, going slowly crazy. The pressure was intense. It was 1988, long before email, and this was West Timor in Indonesia, the less troubled half of an island many thousands of miles from home. Andrew felt isolated. There was nobody to talk to, nobody to confirm his well held view that she was mad to reject him. How could she do it to him? She knew how he felt about her.

Their dormitory was how hed always imagined a tropical jail: too many iron beds in too small a space, laden with strangers, their arms and feet flopping over the sides, their bulk bowing their mattresses like hammocks. That morning hed scratched his name in the soft plaster wall with a wooden chopstick and, only an hour earlier, he had killed two fat cockroaches with his flip-flops. The heat was suffocating him. He could taste the heavy, earthy moisture clinging like moss to his lungs. Wet towels stuck to chairs where theyd been left to dry. The ceiling fan, his one potential friend, was rotating so slowly that mosquitoes had gathered in clouds around its blades. Any minute now those blood-sucking bastards would be coming for him, whining around his ears, snapping at his feet, tormenting him with their spiteful arrogance, sucking him slowly to death.

But the real cause of his misery was Kirsten. Shed looked right though him as shed helped her new lover clamber skywards. She was drunk, of course, a poor excuse, but were she sober it would have been impossible for Andrew to bear.

Then, like his washing machine back home, it was full spin in the bunk above. The bed lifted from the floor and Andrew imagined the crockery above his kitchen sink vibrating and smashing onto the linoleum, the old sash windows rattling in their frames. Then, with thoughts of the hose bouncing and unwinding out of the sink, like a rampant cobra, he heard her moan and he wished that he could do that to her. In desolation, he buried himself beneath his pillow.

*

Re-emerging from the pillow once things felt calmer, he glimpsed movement in the adjacent bunk. He rolled over to see what it was. A large, middle-aged man was grinning right back at him. The mans mouth was ajar and, like that of a thirsty cat, his tongue protruded from the corner. Saliva had dribbled onto his chin. Andrew felt sick. Unexpectedly, the man made a show of grabbing his groin; two quick shakes and then he winked at Andrew; a knowing, conspiratorial wink. Me next? the man joked, and he winked again.

You dirty bastard, Andrew whimpered, gasping for air, clawing at the bed frame, utterly defeated. He leapt from the bed and made his escape, past the rows of bunk beds and the piles of sweat-soaked sheets lying discarded on the floor. He tripped over a pair of sandals and dragged the sheets from a top bunk as he momentarily lost his balance. He was at the door when he heard a groan of finality and then Kirstens exaggerated sigh of disappointment. Lover boy mumbled, Sorry, and Andrew knew that the man would be devastated. Kirsten had enjoyed another great victory.

Andrew took a seat outside and immediately felt a whole lot better. The palm trees were dancing in the breeze and a bright moon glimmered somewhere beyond them. Andrew imagined Kirsten running her hands through his hair. He could hear bullfrogs and crickets or cicadas, or whatever they were, and wherever they were because hed never seen one. He could see the stars. In Asia you could always see the stars, that was one of the thrills of it all. It was nothing like the grey skies of London. Asia held everything for a dreamer, particularly a dreamer like him, but it held back, for him at least, when it came to love.

Andrew worshipped Kirsten. She was only twenty-five and shed been travelling alone for over a year. That was not easy for a woman what with all the wankers about. Hed seen them often enough, leering and groping and whispering Fuck you. Hed seen her terrify the life out of men who had pushed their luck terrified him, in fact and it always took an age for her to calm down afterwards. He once saw her punch a man who had stroked her arm as he walked past. The mans eyes had watered, not with sadness or pain, but with shock and fear. He had been mortally humiliated before his peers. But who could blame her for that?

Kirsten was a confident woman, strong too. Yet she could be weak. Something in the past had hurt her and nothing and nobody was going to do so again. It was her resistance that Andrew loved so much. She stood up to people, yet she was gentle around him. It gave him hope and made him brave. Her blonde hair was cropped short and, when she ran her fingers through it, to Andrew it was like watching a wheat field in the breeze. When she did that after a shower, if she was standing by the window on a sunny day, just for a split second he liked to dream that he could see a rainbow above her head.

As if hed conjured her up she was suddenly standing above him, grinning wildly. Her obvious freedom was glorious but threatening. With the flick of a hip she could be gone and that was what Andrew feared most of all. She placed a hand upon his shoulder and gave him a friendly squeeze.

As usual he let himself down. What do you see in these men? he whimpered.

You are right, she said in her seductive German accent, placing him back under her spell. He was no fun at all.

Thats not what I meant, he grovelled. I meant, whats so wrong with me? What have they got that I havent?