A few biscuits short of a packet perhaps…..

February 21, 2006

A few biscuits short of a packet perhaps…..

When I lived in Malawi I had this beautiful, entertaining, sweet and ultimately fucked in the head girl-friend called Debbie who was from Zimbabwe and liked drinking far more than necessary and smoking pipes of Malawi Gold Mari-jo during sex - once I left we kept in touch via letters and the odd phone call with promises to meet again one day - as you do - except she really took a hold of this youthful talk and i got a lot of drunken / stoned non-sensical phone calls at 3am where she would just basically scream, cry and sing down the phone at me while trying to fix a date for when we would be married and live haphazardly ever after.

This all came to a stop once she rang on valentines day in 2003 to tell me she was getting married and I reacted with a bit too much relief and exuberant joy - I soon after left for Vietnam and never heard from her again until returning to visit Uk shores and finding a letter telling me that in fact she wasn’t getting married and she only said that to gauge my reaction to such news and find out if indeed I really loved her.

This was a similar cunning ruse to the time she rang me out of the blue and pretended to be her sister and told me she was dead - you know, to erm..... gauge my reaction to such news and find out if indeed I really loved her.

Obviously the contact should of been cut off after the latter incident rather than the former as she was a bit of a psycho - but when she has all your relevant phone numbers and you live with your parents and they keep on answering the damn phone to her, there’s not much you can do apart from hang up - and I didn’t want to be cruel - so I moved to Vietnam instead.

Now then, my last three months in Jakarta I had this beautiful, entertaining, sweet and ultimately fucked in the head girl-friend called Yuni who was from Indonesia and liked drinking far more than necessary but thankfully didn’t make me smoke any really strong forms of Mari-jo during sex (it sounds like a good idea but I just end up forgetting what I’m doing).

Now I’ve left we’ve kept in touch via emails and the odd phone call with promises to meet again one day - as you do - except I’m wondering if she’s really thinking that one day I’ll fly her out to UK, with her daughter, we’ll get married and then I’ll pay for her whole damn extended family to live out the rest of their days in relative expat luxury - which isn’t going to happen, nor have I made any of the mistakes made with Debbie and led her up the garden path to believe such things (although truth be told there wasn’t much leading to be done - Debbie did live in a world of fantasy at times - and this was mostly to do with that really fierce Malawi Gold she was smoking) - we talked a lot about me leaving and we both knew that I wasn’t coming back to Indonesia anytime soon so we chalked it up to a good time had and agreed to never lose contact.....just in case....

Yuni and I had a good time together with the drinking dancing and late nights etc - we did the expat Jakarta scene with the fancy restaurants, clubs and cinema’s and I took up residence in the bar she worked in - but beyond that there wasn’t really too much to the relationship when it all came down to it. She does have a fierce independent spirit and she has got character in abundance but yeah.... she was a mental case sometimes.

Yuni rang up last week in a flood of tears asking me to call her back - I tried but couldn’t get through - texts and emails yielded no result - I figured I’d done what I could short of asking folk I knew to go see if she was at work and doing ok - then came the appendicitis and a week passed with no word - I was going to get one of my friends to call in and see if she was around when I got an email from her.

Turns out she is having arguments with the girls at work and she has lost her brand new mobile and thinks the security guards at the bar have stolen it - sure if the cost wasn’t pounds per minute then I’d gladly listen to her daily woes but at international call rates this is basically bullshit not worth bothering me with and certainly not the kind of thing to go off the radar after an out of the blue tearful phone-call.

Course she apologised in the email - but in the same text also wondered if I had been worried all week after not hearing from her.....

Spo | February 21, 2006