Let Me Love You
The same dog a dozen times, sometimes kilometres apart, mewling through the streets, skin the colour of a vanilla muffin, bones I can count through the rain-flecked window.
Shower, shirt, shoes, taxi to the hotel. Yangon unfolds in front of me. The radio plays Let Me Love You, and the driver flicks through stations to find the same song again when it ends.
My chin is pink and raw from the razor, my hands are smudged blue from a carelessly handled fountain pen (a gift) and my arms itch from a new tattoo hidden under rolled-up sleeves.
Work, induction, introductions. Password, fingerprints, lanyard handshakes, signatures, phone numbers. The comforting smell of board pens and fresh ink is just a little different to somewhere I was before, just days ago.
My first invitation: 7.30 pm, drinks at the British Club, founded in 1966, the same year England defeated West Germany, a remnant of colonial miasma.
As I arrive, I feel my tattoo twitch; it’s scabbing over, flecks of black ink flaring red under chafing sleeves. A portly man in a blue blazer sips a large glass of wine, three Apple laptops glow and make up an eerie orchard, and the Times and Economist show a zombified Boris and May dancing themselves to death on top of the UK. The British Club is impossible, demented, a Fitzcarraldo serving Newkie Brow in a sea of rain and dogs and open sewers.
At my table: a man who works with the Attorney-General in Yangon, or perhaps is the Attorney-General of Yangon. I listen but say more than I intend. When I speak on subjects I know nothing about, I hear the voice of the Englishman who stood behind Boris Johnson as the country’s leader lets chunks of Kipling drip from his mouth like pig fat.
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', and it's there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.
I can hear both voices, yes, even the hardwired voice in the English soul that tries in vain to protect us all from embarrassment, collapse…
“Not appropriate, Boris.”
Two bottles of Newkie Brown and one of Spitfire, please. Where are we? Ah, the story is moving like a locomotive, like a train with no doors, flooded in the jungle of Burma, or Myanmar, or Ho Chi Minh, or Saigon, or Yangon, or Rangoon, either is acceptable, both are acceptable, the bloody train is leaking, the water is rising, heavy, heavy, rain…
Listen! The rising rents in Kuala Lumpur, the interminable governmental meetings with golden thrones and white doilies and bottled mineral water, travel plans and monsoons, rumbles of bloodshed somewhere very far from this wood-panelled room, the warm smell of beer and cigarettes that has been smuggled over in bottles and released like a gas makes me sleepy, a pleasure, a pleasure…
In the taxi on the way back, there are flecks of black ink on my forearm, like scattered punctuation spilt on unblotted paper. I stare out the window, looking for the dog, and fall asleep counting his hungry ribs.