208 days ago
208 days ago
Half an hour into the flight, I turned my weary head and peered out one of the aircraft’s small windows. The dark sky was devoid of clouds and I could see the lights of Amsterdam sparkling away in the night, 30,000 feet below me. Or, at least, the co-pilot’s announcement told me it was Amsterdam. From my vantage point it could have been any city, anywhere in the world. The lights appeared to mirror the thousands of stars I could see when I ascended my gaze.
Sitting in a cramped economy seat on this near empty flight, I had time to develop a plan. For I had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to, once the pressurized metal tube graced the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International. I also had the time, thanks to the lack of any onboard entertainment whatsoever, to reflect on why I was taking this journey and try to make sense of the first three months of my 2010…
I woke up in a Birmingham hospital on New Year’s Day 2010 and barely had time to register the IV drip in my arm or the sound of heart monitoring equipment beeping away at my bedside before a tall and smartly dressed man stood up from his chair and walked over to my bed. I looked down at the plastic tag on my wrist where a hurried nurse had scrawled ‘Tom Day’ in black ink. “Hello” mumbled the man, “I’m DC Harris…” I tried to take in more of my surroundings amongst the bright fluorescent light of my private room; the unmatched brown and blue plastic chairs in the far corner, the green curtains concealing the view from a solitary window, and focused once more on the detective standing patiently above me. I wondered, ‘why does this man have my clothes in a clear plastic bag? And, why on earth are they covered in blood?’
The memories of last night rapidly began to surface and break on the shores of my drug-addled mind. I remember now. I remember the party, the one with the incident with girl in the bathroom and the same one where at 11pm, I found myself playing wingman to my friend Paul’s advances on some previous but uncherished conquest of his.
“These things happen on New Year’s Eve” I told the girl’s friend unenthusiastically as Paul and I made excuses, put on our coats and prepared to head to his brother’s house in time for midnight celebrations. We poured some more vodka down our throats and stepped out into the bollock-shattering cold of the night in a drunk but cheerful mood. I looked up and down the sludge covered street and the rows of red-brick terraces. Birmingham was the second most heavily bombed city during WWII, it would have been the first, but for the first few months of the war rumour has it that the Luftwaffe flew over the grubby industrial town and assumed it had already been dealt with. It is a place where even the pigeons fly upside down, realizing there is nothing worth shitting on. Successive decades of poor political leadership and a rapid fading of the manufacturing heartbeat meant the place improved little aesthetically or otherwise for the estimated three and a half million inhabitants.
Our taxi turned into the street. We climbed in and directed the Pakistani driver to our destination. Paul’s brother and his mates were having a mini party and we duly celebrated the passing of 2009 and sunk two or three beers with them before Paul suggested we check out a third party happening a couple of streets over. Paul and I were friends from Lancaster University and Birmingham was his city, not mine. While it had been 2 years since graduation, I still had faith in his ability to hunt out a good party. In fairness, he had warned me earlier that this area of Birmingham could get pretty dodgy. However, since I wasn’t planning to muscle in on any drug or prostitution rackets during my 24 hour visit, I wasn’t overly concerned about any perceived dangers.
The party was shit. In the way any party lacking a decent supply of booze and women is. This one, sadly, was not just lacking, but completely barren. I phoned for a taxi to take us back to the first house where we would arrive armed with our last two bottles and a bumper crate of excuses. I was in danger of sobering up so I flung on my scarf and long grey coat and rushed outside to signal the taxi I’d seen crawling past the front window. The black taxicab stopped 20 yards from the house. The temperature was still below freezing as I walked up to the passenger side door, huddled in my overcoat and my hands in my pockets, when 3 black lads, aged around 19-23 stepped out.
“Eww da fuck are yew?” said one, “Yeah, yews in our fookin street, yews in our street, yews gotta pay bruv” chimed another. Their street? Hmmm, I wonder if these gentlemen have the deeds to back up their claim’ my brain thought, then, ‘Oh!, hold on a tick, I see what’s happening here, I’m being mugged…’
“Fuckin Pay up bruv!” They repeated. It was at this point that an untimely (and ok, vodka-induced,) surge of righteous indignation came over me, ‘WHY DOES NOBODY EVER STAND UP TO THESE PEOPLE!’ my mind roared. “Look, it’s not your street and I’m not going to fucking pay” I said, trying to convey as much self-confidence as possible. They looked stunned for a moment, and as they did so, I turned on my heel and started to walk the dozen or so steps back to the house party. The victory was short lived. I barely managed to reach the driveway of the house before I heard footsteps hurrying after me. I turned around and immediately, one of the black lads was in my face shouting and screaming something undecipherable but clearly not pleasant. I tried to remain calm but before I could figure out what to do, I caught a flash of something in his right hand as he raised his arm.
That’s when his weapon gouged out a chunk of flesh from my face. The next three seconds were a blur of fists and limbs as I struggled to protect myself from more blows. The first strike had landed on the left side of my face. I felt only a reticent pain, the adrenaline doing its job, but the force of the blow had made my knees buckle and as I grabbed the attackers clothing, simultaneously trying to pull him down and keep my balance, I feared I would crumple down onto the icy concrete and become wholly at the mercy of the wild eyed attacker above me. I could feel my face getting wetter and wetter, I knew it must be blood. The neurons governing my fight or flight response unanimously and quickly voted in the favour of flight. I swung my right forearm upwards as I turned 180 degrees to face the front door of the house, my place of retreat. Mercifully, my arm blocked one last lunge, aimed at my neck. I felt something catch and slice open a part of my forearm. The damage from this contact was less but the pain raced toward the serrated cut and my arm burned intensely, causing me to gasp, hiss and screw my eyes up tight.
I managed to stagger, as quickly as I could, back to the house. The door swung open before I could open it myself. Five people, realizing something had just occurred outside, rushed out to confront my three attackers. Covered in the red wetness still pulsing out of me, I caught my reflection in a mirror and saw my flesh hanging off the left side of my face. The blood stung my eyes and made it difficult to see. I sat on the foot of the stairs as the commotion engulfed me. I calmly made my own emergency call, still in shock, and within minutes I was back out on the street, this time, in the back of an ambulance.
In the ambulance with me was another lad from the party, bloodied bruised and concussed. I learned later, that after I reached the sanctuary of the front door, the pack of assailants had turned their attention on him. They joyously stamped on his head and body once he fell to the ground and they didn’t stop until his screams of pain became muted gasps.
As the sirens wailed, the paramedic placed a mask over my head and tried to stem the bleeding. The pain ebbed its way further into my consciousness but I already knew I was lucky, if that is the right word, that it didn’t go down slightly differently and lead to a much more tragic ending. On arrival at Accident and Emergency, my fellow victim and ambulance companion was sent for head scans whilst I was transferred from ‘Birmingham Good Hope hospital’ (also known locally as ‘Birmingham No Hope hospital’) and referred to plastic surgery at nearby Selly Oak hospital at around 4am on New Years Day.
I sat up in my hospital bed in Selly Oak, post-surgery, unnerved by the bottomless hospital gown and accepted the nurse’s offer of more painkillers. I fidgeted under the scratchy polyester blankets and gave the detective a brief statement. He said he would return the next day, once he had visited the crime scene and spoken to other officers. I drifted in and out of sleep for a handful of hours, occasionally woken by the medical team as they checked my recovery. At 4pm, Paul and his parents, Bill and Gill, turned up to keep me company. I rang friends in Leeds to apologise in a hoarse and broken voice, for my absenteeism at the planned New Years Day meal and then, made the dreaded phone call to my own parents. My mother answered the phone and I tried to play down the incident, insisting that it was just a minor stabbing and not anything to fuss over at all, really. The news was not received calmly and I could picture the family communication lines entering crazy mode as the news spread to my father, four younger sisters and extended family. I made strenuous efforts to have myself discharged as soon as possible.
This being Britain though, the four inches of overnight snow had paralysed the country’s travel networks and the nation held her breath as the good people struggled with snow drifts as high as their ankle tops. The ‘great blizzard of 2010’ meant I had little choice but to stay one night at Paul’s parents’ house until I could get a lift back home to my dad’s place in Cambridge the following afternoon.
The next month, I spent my days tucked away in the Cambridgeshire countryside, off work and on opiates. Which is nowhere near as fun as it sounds. My face was bruised, swollen and cut but the main damage, the ‘inevitable scarring’ the surgeon had warned about, was still hidden behind the white gauze bandages and dressings. It was the personal aspect of such an attack that really caught my fury. I was going to have to live with this for the rest of my life, those three bastards had imposed this unjust punishment on me and there was no way of hiding it. When the bandages and stitches were removed two weeks later at a local doctor’s surgery, I apprehensively looked into the treatment room mirror. My body tensed as I peered at a different reflection. ‘’OK, not bad’’ I considered. There was a long red scar from my eyebrow to the bottom of my ear, the proximity of the wound to the eye itself was shocking.
I contemplated the outcome; I was relieved the nurse did not have to clasp a hand to her mouth, stifle a scream and flee the room in a torrent of tears, yet, I knew that the disfigurement, no matter how minor, would be permanent. I was as vain as a high-school beauty queen for the next fortnight, constantly looking in the mirror and getting used to my new marks. I was determined not to self-indulge in pity. For the idiotic question ‘why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to reply, - ‘why not?’. It was shitty luck, wrong place, wrong time and I was just going to have to deal with it. By February, I quietly returned to my job in the blood testing labs at Leeds General infirmary for my last month’s employment, and resolved myself to cast away from my homeland and explore life elsewhere.
The aircraft hit turbulence as we sailed over the Himalayas. I quit the reminiscing and after rating the stewardesses from least to most attractive in the categories of face, breasts, arse, hair, skin and general je ne sais quoi, I began to look to the future. I found the prospect of being free in an entirely new continent thrilling. Sure, I wasn’t going to be the first to wander South East Asia after suffering disillusionment in my home country, and neither was I unique in wishing to set myself apart from the well-trodden trail of previous travelers. My initial solution was a primitive one.
As there were no jungles unmapped, islands left to explore, peoples unreached or towns undiscovered, the only way to resurrect the primal urge to explore would be to try to avoid the preconceived conclusions that fill the guide books and arrive everywhere with an open mind so that the experiences of my senses; sound, sight, smell and taste, would appear to my mind, without prior knowledge or warning, as a fantastic, unique and personal discovery. I planned to use the maps to take that detour down the unknown track and cast away from the tourist tide, but at the same time, I didn’t wish to miss out on the more renowned attractions of the continent. ‘Does what’s popular with the usual backpacker equal what is good?’
Only one of many things I hoped to discover. More than anything, I craved the freedom travelling solo offers. Slipping the surly bonds that had come to bind all areas of my post-university life was exhilarating. And not nearly as scary as some would have had me believe. The term ‘primal urge’ above is employed for reasons beyond literary pretentiousness. Many family members, as well as some friends and colleagues, were bemused by my decision to abscond to impoverished countries sans any kind of itinerary, citing everything from exotic parasitic diseases which send minute fish swim up ones urethra to tourist scams and apocalyptic levels of crime as good reasons for staying behind in ‘Great’ Britain. I joked and fooled around with them as to the reasons for my departure but I privately maintained that despite it all, travel to the unknown is as natural as a desire for food, sex or shelter. It is rooted in a very ancient place in our psyche, belonging to a time when our ancestors numbered only one or two thousand before they made the great decision to leave the savannahs of Africa in search of a brave new world.
At the most reductionist level, I was a young male primate, barely evolved in natural history terms from those early humans who ventured forth into unknown habitats, and I guess I still shared that same biological desire. Motivation though, wears a camouflage, and the New Years Eve incident combined with some ancient genetic compulsion for travel, doesn’t seem to offer a complete or satisfying explanation. Other reasons clearly stalked my subconscious unnoticed, and most of these, I will probably never uncover. Not the least of reasons being that I am way too short of money to afford the therapy to do so!
I can suppose however, without the aid of professional psychoanalysis, that a 20-something complex smelted with post university disillusionment formed part of the motivation And it is this, that seemed to produce, above all, a white hot desire to deviate from the standard trajectory and slip the surly bonds of the middle-class non-identity. I had only been 18 months out of university and into the real world, but I disdained to see my peers gravitate towards the starter homes and collar and tie vocations. I didn’t know much, but I knew I wasn’t ready for that. It scared me, possibly still does. To me, the tie is, and always will be, nothing besides a symbolic and cunningly disguised noose. As I neared the end of my flight, only the self-reflection I ironically, loathe so much in others, combined with the turbulence and eccentric engine noises had preserved my attention. The aircraft taxied to the terminal and darkness had already enveloped the airport. My next tasks were to negotiate customs, find my way to a hostel in KL, and begin the adventure.
