Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw
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‘Don’t worry, you’re just like the other boys,’ Karl said as he took Adam to school that first day. He spoke in a calm voice, yet Adam knew that Karl himself was not convinced by what he was saying. ‘You’ll enjoy being with compatriots your age. If ever you feel scared, tell yourself, ‘I’m just like everyone else here.’’
The school was a one-room shack on the edge of town, a squat concrete block with a roof of corrugated iron. Adam loathed it from the beginning; its very appearance made him feel sick, and spots of colour appeared in his vision, as if he was going to faint. (I’m just like everyone else here.) There were about eighteen or twenty children crammed into the small classroom, all boys, save for one girl whose roughly cropped hair made her look like a boy. One side of her face was obscured by a birth-mark, a purple-red cloud that stretched from her temple to her jawbone. Adam had to stare closely before deciding that she was indeed a girl; she stuck out her tongue and threw a scrunched-up piece of paper at him. The other boys gathered round him and examined the contents of his new canvas satchel: an exercise book with buff-coloured covers, a pocket atlas and a new box of coloured pencils. His classmates tore the pages from his books and folded them into paper airplanes that they launched into the air with sharp spearing motions. Adam watched as bits of the atlas glided past him: the pink-and-green of the United States floated dreamily in circles until it stubbed its nose on the blackboard and fell abruptly to the ground; the whiteness of the Canadian tundra swept out of the window in an arc, into the dusty sunlight; and the silent mass of the Pacific Ocean that Adam loved so much, dotted with islands (Fiji? Tahiti?) lay on the cracked cement floor, waiting to be trampled upon.
At the end of that first day he did not have the strength to cycle the entire journey home; he pushed his bicycle along the final sandy stretch, too tired even to cry. When he reached the house he let his bicycle fall to the ground; he sat on the steps to the house watching the pedals spin lazily to a stop. There were sea-eagles hovering against the powder-blue sky, barely trembling in the wind. Karl sat with him and put his arm round his shoulders. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s a privilege, you know.’
‘What is?’
‘Education. You saw those kids at school? What kind of families do you think they come from?’
Horrible ones, Adam wanted to say. Filthy, mean, horrible ones.
‘Poor ones. Farmers or fishermen who can’t read or write, and yet everyone has had to pay to get into that school. They take a small packet of money or a carton of cigarettes to the education officer and beg him to put their child’s name on the school list, and if they don’t have cash they take a goat or some chickens or sacks of rice. There isn’t space for everyone, so the kids whose parents pay the most get in. I had to do the same – I paid the most because I’m, well, they look at me and their minds are made up.’
‘Because you’re foreign?’
‘Because I’m rich. Or at least that’s what they think.’
Adam watched as Karl lifted the bicycle and set it upright; its handlebar and pedals were covered thickly with sand that fell to the ground in clumps. ‘The point is,’ Karl continued, ‘none of those people can afford to send their children to school. They’d rather have their kids with them, working in the fields or out at sea with them. Then they have to pay for uniforms, shoes, books. Why? Because they want their children to read and write, to have nice jobs in offices and drive cars in Jakarta. They might not realise it, but they believe in the future of this country.’
The next day he sent Adam back to school again.
The teacher taught them simple grammar and rudimentary arithmetic. She made them practise the letters of the alphabet and introduced them to new words, writing them out on the blackboard in short sentences that no one but Adam could make sense of. It did not seem to matter to her that almost everyone in the class was asleep or staring red-eyed out of the window at the grassy plains pockmarked with blackened heaps of half-burnt rubbish, where skinny goats picked through the piles of waste, dragging plastic bags out of the cinders. CITIZEN. REPUBLIC. PRESIDENT. REVOLUTION. WESTERN IMPERIALISTS. I am a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia. The President of the Republic of Indonesia is President Sukarno. President Sukarno led the revolution against the Western Imperialists who destroyed…
‘It’s hot,’ someone whispered, ‘I have to go home.’ Adam turned around and saw the girl with the birth-mark slumped on her desk, twirling a dry strip of coconut leaf in her fingers. She brushed the leaf lazily against Adam’s back. Are your parents expecting you home too?’
Adam nodded. Close-up, he could see that the discoloured patch of skin on her face was not a birth-mark but a scar, an inky mass of tissue that looked almost smooth, like a pebble on the riverbank, crisscrossed by long-dead veins. She was a few years older than Adam but no taller; her fingernails were dirty and worn.
‘Actually, I only have a mother at the moment,’ she said.
‘At the moment?’
‘Yeh, my father’s in jail. Don’t know when he’ll be out. I’m an orphan! That’s what my mother says when she gets in a mood and starts crying. “I am a widow! I am nothing! My daughter is an orphan! O, my daughter is an orphan!”’
Adam giggled. She was much darker than he was, yet she did not seem entirely like the other kids; she spoke with a different accent too.
‘My name’s Neng. What’s yours?’ She tickled his neck with the leaf.
‘Adam.’
‘I have to go and collect this month’s rice from the district office later. Want to come with me? It’s not a long walk. Besides, you have a bicycle…’ Her smile showed off two gaps in her teeth.
‘Umm, I don’t know. My father will be worried if I don’t come home.’
‘Come on, it won’t take long.’ She reached out and brushed the leaf softly across his cheek, giggling as she did so. ‘I know a shortcut back to where you live.’
By the time they left school the sky had dulled slightly with patches of silver-blue cloud, and it was no longer oppressively hot; the sea breeze had picked up, signalling the possibility of the sudden sharp showers for which Perdo is famous. Adam and Neng had just reached the end of the track that led to the main road when they saw a group of boys from school waiting for them, squatting at the edge of the broken tarmac in the shade of a sea-almond sapling.
‘Hi, friend,’ one of them said, standing up. He had taken his shirt off and tied its arms around his forehead so that it fell down his back like the head-dresses of Arab sheikhs that Adam had seen in books. This boy was bigger than the others, and when he spoke his voice cracked, alternating between a child’s high-pitched squeak and a manly croak. ‘This is the little orphan who lives with that European man. You’re his servant, yeh?’
‘No,’ Adam said, ‘he’s my father.’
The older boy threw back his head and laughed. There was a circle of dried-up spittle around his lips. Behind him Adam noticed that one of the other boys was playing with a dead bird, stretching its red-and-black wings across the sand as if willing it to fly. ‘Yeh, yeh. You lick the shit from his toilet.’ He pushed his fingers into Adam’s collarbone with a rough jabbing motion, making Adam lose his balance; his bicycle fell from his grip and dropped to the ground. The other boys laughed. ‘What a weakling,’ the gang leader said.
Adam tried to pick himself up but found that his legs had turned to jelly; his face felt hot and he could not speak. Pressure filled his head, and he felt like vomiting. His ears filled with a great rushing noise, the kind you might hear if you are standing on the seashore before a violent storm, when the froth of the waves blanks out all other noise and makes you lose all notion of where you are. He lay on the ground, kicking feebly at the coppery leaves of the sea almond that lay scattered on the ground. The people standing over him seemed blurred, wobbling as though shaken by gusts of wind. He began to shiver.
I am just like everyone else I am just like