osmoala

 

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated – Mark Twain

 

Everybody around seemed to have fever attacks and headaches, Toby, Mervin, Jade and Carolyn, to only name a few.

   I was down for two days with a temperature and a splitting headache that felt like having spikes hammered through my temples. Taking a walk to the balcony and back to my room was like climbing a mountain. So I stayed indoors watching Timeless, a series where the crew use a time machine to go back to different historical events trying to stop The Rittenhouse gang from changing the past in order to create a worldwide dictatorship in the present day. It is a great show and when I finished the last episode of season two it was like having to say bye to old friends. But the good thing was that I had recovered from whatever hit me.

 

Carolyn came back from work. She said,

   ”I had the most horrible day today – tired with no energy and this headache is driving me mad.”

   ”I told Toby that the Government is using Siem Reap as a test site to observe the impact of different viruses on the population.” It was a conspiracy theory even I didn't take that seriously. I gave her an Aspirin and we went down to the restaurant. We had a draft talking about important things, like where to eat tonight.

   Jade came by. She sat down and ordered a beer. ”I'm so tired today, and my head is a mess. I can't think straight.”

   ”We all have the same thing,” Carolyn said. They started the speed conversation I was used to with these two girls. They had known each other for only a short time but they chatted like sisters who have spent a lifetime together, and I thought it was lovely. It happened sometimes that people on Sok San Road mixed up these two happy ladies thinking Carolyn was Jade, and Jade was Carolyn.

   Then something else happened. Jade got a text from Hank, a friendly chap from Australia who has been around for years. She looked horrified. She said,

   ”Arthur is dead! Look!” She showed us the text that read 'He is gone, died last night'. I couldn't believe it. My longtime Dutch friend wasn't around anymore. She texted back: 'Are you sure?' and the reply was 'Yes, he was conscious for a while but then he just closed his eyes'. He apparently passed away in the hospital. We were in shock. I had met him only two days ago at Taste For Life, a restaurant where Arthur spent his mornings before going to Blue Bar, and he paid back the fiver he owed me.

   ”At least he gave me back the money I lent him before he died,” I said, but the girls didn't think it was that funny at all.

   ”They are having a memorial at Sway Away,” Jade said. ”Hank is there now. We must go there.”

   I had tears in my eyes, remembering the happy moments I'd spent with Arthur, and we were all sobbing quietly for a while. Arthur hadn't been well for some time – he had a bad leg, an infected foot the size of an American football, and he was all skin and bones, not looking healthy at all. We walked over to the bar and Hank was there. We were all hugging each other uttering sad words with sad faces.

   ”I'm so sorry to hear about this,” I said. ”Arthur was a dear friend of mine and he was too young to die.”

   ”What are you talking about?” Hank said. ”Arthur was my father and you never met him. He was ninety-four when he passed away.”

 

The next night when I was walking upstreams on Sok San Road I spotted Arthur sitting at Taste For Life. I walked in and shook his hand. He was probably on his sixth or seventh pastis because he was in a rhetorical mood.

   ”Obviously the rumours about your death are slightly exaggerated,” I said.

   ”Who told you I was dead?”

   I told him.

   ”Well, you can tell them to go and fuck themselves.” That was Arthur alright.

 

 

 

 

The lives of most men are determined by their environment – Somerset Maugham

 

When the occasional rains came they were brutal, viscious and unforgiving, so people were running for shelter where ever they could find it. Most people were laughing, watching the hard showers that were like alien attacks from the sky, and they hurt too. Huge drops, and they came down like bullets. There were those who did not laugh when nature showed some of its powers, but they were of the negative and misogynistic kind, so who cared about what they were thinking anyway.

   The monsoon always brought back happy memories, pictures I thought I had forgotten because they were buried somewhere in the back of my mind – only to be awoken by the thunder and the sudden showers, and after the rains the air was always fresh and clean, smelling like flowers, almost like a rose garden with the trees and the plants vibrating with joy. The tropical rains were my Madeleine cake.

   The Madeleine cake is a classic from the famous series of novels by the French writer Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Times where he discusses how your senses sometimes connect to memories from your past. Proust dips the Madeleine cake into a cup of tea, has a bite of the biscuit and the smell and the taste suddenly bring him back to his childhood days.

 

The monsoon season was over now and the rains were gone already, for a couple of weeks. There was a heat wave and we spent time in the pool at JaMe Hotel and Spa, where I had a room at the end of the corridor on the first floor. Carolyn was my next door neighbour and Toby had a room next to the balcony facing Sok San Road.

 

There was a ghost house next to us. It was a huge building painted in marine blue. It used to be a hotel too. Now it was closed and it must have a dark history, because in the evenings when you were sitting by the pool, haunted souls - invisible to the untrained eye, came flying out through the darkened windows of the ghost house. They would fly to our side of the wall and make swoops over the pool. Sometimes they could get into bodies and suck on the energies of people who were not aware of them and not being prepared for the attacks. I was immune because I could see them so they avoided me like the plaque. But I could also see the sudden changes with some of the guests who were being possessed by the disembodied spirits of former residents of the blue house.

   Carolyn for example. She had blue eyes, but when she was attacked by the demons her eyes turned gray and she became restless and argumentative, repeating her complaints about this or that, it could be about anything – about the staff adding things on her tab that were not supposed to be there, or me spending too much time on the computer, or me changing the corrections she made on my texts – giving monologues in a whispering monotonous voice. It was horrifying, and the first time it happened I tried to laugh at it,

   ”The bitch hour comes early this year.”

   The complaints would wear off as the spirits went back to spend the light of the day in their haunted house, ruminating on the energies from their feast on the previous night.

 

The balcony outside our rooms was facing the dusty Sok San Road.

   ”It's a dusty road,” I said. ”You can see the gray clouds of dust hovering over the street.”

   ”It's dusty everywhere in Cambodia,” Toby replied. He was from Denmark and I met him seven years ago when we both stayed at The Prom Roth Inn, on the other side of the river, off Wat Bo Road. He had spent the winter season in South East Asia for the last thirteen years.

   I was sipping from a can of Cambodia beer and Toby had a cup of coffee on the table. He has Lyme disease so he cannot drink any alcohol because booze makes him sick and bedridden for days afterwards. ”The restaurants and hotels keep watering the dusty dirt roads, which in turn creates huge potholes and erosion given all the traffic.”

   ”Yes. And I start coughing every time I walk out on the street.” I love Siem Reap, with all the familiar faces around you, but there is this dust that makes people cough and constantly blow their noses. It is fourteen hours to the beach, and sometimes I miss the ocean and the fresh air. But there are pools around here everywhere.

   ”I'm going down to the pool,” Toby said. ”Are you coming?”

   We went down to the pool and Lun, the local guy was there. He is one of the staff here, he confuses orders and sometimes he pours beers that are flat. Now there were also trainees, two young girls from some village in the outskirts of Siem Reap, and Lun was training these girls. So the beers got even flatter for a while.

 

It was a lovely place though, and Mervin the owner was a great guy. He is from Mauritius and he ran the hotel like the captain of a ship with a tight, but gentle hand. He was constantly training his staff and they needed the training too because some of them didn't speak any English and had never worked in a restaurant before. He is a good looking guy with a constant smile on his face and he goes to the gym so the muscles are bulging under his shirt. He has the same haircut as Bond in Dr No, with a fringe of black hair hanging down his left eye. He is always in the restaurant and his beautiful Khmer wife, Jamiefer, is often behind the bar.

   ”Hello Merv, how are you today?”

   ”Good! You?”

   He showed me pictures on his phone of two huskie puppies he was going to bring to the hotel in a few weeks. They were furry and loved the cold climate in Greenland. I had seen quite a few huskies around, but how could they stand the everlasting heat?

   ”They need ice. I put ice in a box and they lie there enjoying themselves.” He laughed.

   ”Can I get you something?”

   ”A draft, please.” I sat down next to Toby on one of the sunbeds facing the pool.

   ”So, how come you can't swim? Are you shitting me?”

   ”No, I'm not shitting you. I was occupied with other stuff when I was a kid.” He told me about playing computer games, driving rally cars, flying hot air balloons, and focussing on the stock market where he made enough dough to start the enterprises that gave him the money he has today. Sometimes he would stay up late waiting for the American stock market to open.

   He looked like a hippie though, with his gray hair in a ponytail, dressing in singlets, shorts and flip flops like the rest of us did. He has lost twenty kilos since I met him the first time. He has Lyme disease. Toby told me that some of the richest guys in the world dressed like bums.

   ”I do too, but it's not because I'm rich, and when I was a kid we used to lie down in the tall grass, run through bushes and spend the whole day in the fields and the forest, but we never got any ticks on our bodies.”

   ”There are more of them today and the number is increasing rapidly.”

   ”Perhaps because of the climate change?”

   ”Possibly. And they are evolving. You can get different diseases from ticks today. I got a number of different strains from the tick bite and Lyme is the worst in my case,” Toby said. ”But the climate change alarmists are talking a lot of bullshit. Where are all the scientists they are referring to? You get numbers, but no names.”

   ”In my country they are banning plastic straws and increasing the tax on plastic bags. But ninety percent of the plastic in the oceans come from the ten biggest rivers in North Africa and Asia. There is something to work on here. Instead, the politicians in Europe are trying to make everybody feel guilty about the climate change – so they can tax them even more to pay for whatever is going on there. They are holding the voters by their necks.” I was thinking of the breakfast we had earlier.

   ”Somebody came from behind and he twisted my neck in the middle of a 'hello'.”

   ”Nico.”

   ”Yes. It was really nice to see him again. But I can still feel the twist.”

   ”Oh, I feel so sorry for you.”

   ”Yeah yeah yeah... Want to take a walk to the cinema? Just to see what they are showing,” I said.

   We did, and a few days later we went to see the new Jumanji.   

   Afterwards Toby said,

   ”How the hell did you manage to fall asleep in the middle of the movie? You were out for half an hour.”

   ”Really? I thought it was only five minutes.”

   ”It was not five minutes.”

   Apoa's was on the left now. We made a stop here.   

   Apoa was a fine looking local woman in her late thirties and she shook my hand,

   ”Hello. How are you?”

   ”Cold. We went to the movies.” The air conditioning at the cinema was always set at super cold.

   ”Oh, I see... but I want to ask you a question. Do you want to come here and play the guitar on the twenty-seventh? It's going to be a party and there will be somebody else playing the guitar too.”

   ”Maybe...” I was hesitating. ”Okay. Of course.” She had a guitar inside the restaurant and I had been practising on it for a few hours in the last weeks. Sometimes I got a free beer for playing for her customers. And she really knew how to cook meatballs. I'm talking food here, and the meatballs with mash and onion cream sauce was always delicious.

 

When Carolyn came back from work I mentioned the party. She had the dish a couple of days ago, and she said it was the best meal she'd had in Siem Reap. Ever.

   ”Ever?”

   ”Yes. Ever.”

   ”Good. Toby ordered the meatballs for the three of us. He didn't even ask me about it, he just assumed things. Do you think we should go?”

   ”Of course,” Carolyn said. ”Let's do it.” Two days later we were supposed to be there at four, and we eventually arrived at quarter past eight. Toby was there and he was not so happy about it, because he had arranged the whole thing. But it was only rock'n'roll and later he said that most of the artists never showed up on time anyway.

 

The restaurant downstairs at JaMe had dressed up for Christmas – there were lights, decorations, the happy smiles and every staff member was wearing jingle bell hats, including Mervin.

   ”I'll have a double Jagermeister,” I said. ”What will you have?”

   ”I'll have a double vodka,” she said.

   Mervin sat down. He talked like there was nothing to worry about. But there was something. Carolyn would explain later. She said,

   ”He wants to have a baby but his wife doesn't want to. She already has two children of her own.”

   ”The young boy and the girl always around the restaurant? They look like happy kids.”

   ”Yes, and yes. I think they are.”

   The burgers came to the table. It took a while, they had to go out to get the cheese because they had run out.

   ”I had a swim today. I might actually be the best swimmer in the house.”

   ”In your dreams.” She showed me pictures on her Facebook page about the beach life in Cape Town and she was surfing on some of the photos. She looked great.

   ”What else are you good at?” she said.

   ”I might also be the best bullshitter in the house.”

   ”Well, that I know already.”

 

JaMe was a nice place to stay at. Then Carolyn and I met Jade on Sok San Road. She was back in Cambodia for months. She and Carolyn connected immediately because they both have Irish blood. And the next day Jade moved into Carolyn's room for a few nights. It was hard to find a room during the holidays and Carolyn never spent much time there anyway so it was a convenient arrangment. My life was slowly turning into being determined by my surroundings. So I decided to learn how to make compromises again.   

   But that is not what happened. Somehow the unholy spirits had also found their way into my room.