Article: Cherating Reverie

The Shadow of the Moon at Half Past Four

Based on the true story...

The smoke rose in a lazy, oblique plume through the still, wet air as he leant on his rake. His morning ritual of clearing the stone pathways and sparse patches of lawn from the night's rain of leaves complete, he contemplated the smoke's slow spread and the tiny, fitful flames struggling in the leaf pile at his feet.

It's all so slow now. The smoke and flames of the fire are as indolent as the creeping mould that consumes the pictures hanging in the cottages and above the bar. So different to the flames of his youth. Back then smoke and flames in the trees were accompanied by staccato bursts of gunfire and the flying metal of home made bombs planted beneath the stilted hut he and his brothers in arms had spent the night in. Back then flames and smoke meant you were living on the knife edge. He looks at this morning's guttering fire and realised that even if he plunged barefoot into the middle of it, he would hardly even be burned.

Everything had been so different not that long ago. When he first came here, in the years after the rout of the rebels from the jungle, the town had been vibrant. These cottages had been the favoured haunt of the adventurous, a constant parade of colour and excitement. The buildings' rustic charm was fresh and the bar filled each night with travellers and their stories from roads that reached every part of the globe. He was host and raconteur, his repertoire of tales every bit as diverse and stimulating as the library mustered on the shelves adjacent to the barstools. In those days the waters along the town's strand had been clear and the streets thronged with colour and the hubbub of a score of languages.

No more. Now the days drip as slowly as the water from the town's taps. They drift with the slow pulse of jellyfish, just like the plastic bags in the nearby ocean's shallows. He raises his gaze to the jungle behind his domain, which conceals a place where the days have stopped. The place that was once the classy newcomer to the scene. One of the expensive resorts with swimming pools, manicured gardens and pebble-finished stone staircases winding down to private coves on the other side of the headland. Once a flower of corporate hospitality in the backpackers' garden, it has withered on the vine, unable to adapt to the changes and the slowing those changes have wrought.

He takes some satisfaction in that. Despite the money, despite the hilltop location and the private beaches in the coves, the airconditioned, serviced rooms and the swimming pools, all that remains is a place where time has crawled to a halt. All the pebbled staircases from the beaches are now truncated by the rusting wire fence encircling the villas' crumbling glory. They say it's being refurbished. They say they're building extra rooms, but no trucks loaded with construction materials ply the road up from the town. No ring of tools or tradesmen's voices emanate from behind the locked gates of the fence.

He smiles. So it's slow - he's a survivor and not in a hurry anyway. He survived the flame and smoke of the old days in the jungle and he's survived the turning of the tide in this seaside village. The cottages may no longer be filled with travellers from exotic climes and the books on the library shelves may be falling victim to the same inching decay that's slowly obscuring the pictures and threatens the blue baize of the pool table, but every night the tape rolls through the cassette deck in the restaurant and the familiar songs filter out through the vines that overhang the building's open facade.

Yah, the roof drips in the rain and the cottage beds are warped, but the local men and working girls gather at the bar every evening and occasionally there's the odd traveller or two with a story to tell, or at least some money to spend before they move on to the somewhere that the new hip folks have gone. It's still good, especially when the expatriate Halliburton employees with their oil money occupy the stools at the bar. The rotation from the rigs and fields of Kuantan brings them into town for rest and recreation and they can always be relied upon to drink a few Tiger or Carlsberg and order his house speciality - the wild boar based Devil Curry.

He is content. Bare chested and perspiring lightly in the early morning heat, he turns from the smouldering pile and props the rake against a tree. He goes to wash for breakfast, but there's no water in the pipes.

It doesn't matter.

That's what the pails are for - they hold enough to get us through until the water flows again...