Ten Pound Pom Read Free Page A

prawns, braised lamb shank, twenty different kinds of bread, runny and socky French cheeses. Literally hundreds of dishes, and you can try them all, as often as you want, for your initial plate fee, for as long as your guts holdout. All you have to buy is the drinks. And the puds! Tiny little artworks of chocolate and sponge and candied fruit and laceworked spun sugar. Large spikey fruits and odd nuts I don’t recognise. It’s brilliant. It’s tremendous. It’s wonderful. Apparently a tiger was shot beneath the pool table in 1902; he’d probably come in for the buffet. I could stay here for ever.
    I am loving Singapore. That food and the heat insisted on a siesta, and sliming heavily back to the hotel I realised that my blue shirt was now zebra-striped with streaks of dried salt. From the sweat. A new one was needed, but the sizes were designed for Asian morphology, so even the XXL sizes equated to a British M; that is, for me, nipple-outliningly tight. I buttoned one up in the department-store changing-room and looked at myself in the mirror and could see, distressingly delineated, everything I’d just eaten at Raffles. Deeply unpleasant. I take it off and return it to the shop-girl.
    –Too small still, I say. –Need big, big! Like a tent!
    I find one, eventually, a short-sleeved billowing green thing which also, by that evening, sports foully fancy white stripes. Had it been black, I’d be looking like a piano keyboard. That night we end up in Little India, dirty and hectic and frantic and cheap and brilliant, worlds away from the skyscrapers and malls of the city centre. In the Prince o’ Wales bar, the Cwrw Felinfoel y ddraig goch is up on the wall. The barmaid tells me that her boss is an Aussie of Welsh heritage; ‘name Davies, his’. She asks me where I’m from, where I was born: ‘Ah, you scouser!’ There’s a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks by the door and I scan it and find a copy of my third novel and an anthology containing an extract from my second; next to my name on the contents page, someone had ticked it with biro and written ‘YES!’
    Singapore gets better and better. I’m loving Singapore. This is going to be a good trip, I think, the food and the booze and the colours and the sounds and revisiting my self thirty years ago, meeting my own ghost, childhood me, on the other side of the planet, those formative years and would I recognise that place or that boy growing up 12,000 miles from his home? Will I know his voice, should I hear him speak? The roots of the neuroses and obsessions that burn in this boy, now just past forty, will I see them? And if I do, will I know what they are? Around a booze-bath in Singapore’s Little India, beneath a shelf bending with books with my name on some of them, a kind of delirium sets in and the planet contracts and expands as if it’s taking deep breaths, as if it’s tired, and I grow dizzy with discovery and possibility and every cell seems to hum in anticipation and I make for the riverside and drink still more in the salted haze and go back to the hotel and sleep and I’m liking Singapore very very much and then I get up and look at the ash still there on the railing and then I fly to Brisbane.

AUSTRALIA: BRISBANE
THEN
    The ground isn’t moving right. All those hours in the sky and the solid ground now feels to the boy like water, wobbling and unsteady, unable to be trusted. More heat, close and wet and heavy on his face. He’s gone beyond tiredness, and confusion; it’s as if all will and volition has left him and he is allowing himself to be steered and directed, his only response obedient indifference. This is Australia. He’s in Oz. He drifts through the airport with his family and picks up luggage and gets into a minibus that will take him to the Immigration Hostel. On the bus, he meets a friendly, bearded Scottish biker called Stuart, and a large, round, pink man called Tudor George who bangs his head getting into the van and yells: