The Truncated Blister

Lovelorn Wally Trebble tries to walk from Kuala Lumpur back to Brisbane.

In the early to mid sundown of his sorry years Wally Trebble met a lady named Splendid Maree and fell into loving emotions. As conditions prevail in the merely mortal realm, however, complexity intervened and he lost her again and walked away one lonely night of barely committed rain. Next thing he was a thousand miles away and watching yatching on a river in bright green Malaysia. There was a birthday party for a little boy. The outline of the mosque quivered on the water. Smiling Malays by the busload descended on the barbaques and sang happy birthday with balloons. Then he saw her face.  He was certain it was her. Splendid Maree disguised as a Malaysian woman in sky-blue hijab. She was talking to an older lady, both of them walking off into the humid Sunday afternoon. He dropped his travel brochures and gulped. His heart crowded into his throat. He jumped up. He took a few steps and corrected himself. The back-up voice in his cerebelum told him he was dreaming. Elsewhere, though, the moods of olfaction cycled back and he could smell her skin, smell her hair, smell her sweet breath when they kissed beside the phone box on Heatherton Road the day they decided to be together forever. Forgetting himself Wally raced to follow her but as she turned the corner he lost her again - again.

Shaken by this compelling nostalgia and the whole negligence of distance he returned to his hotel that afternoon and asked the desk-clerk to book him a taxi to the Chandrabanoo Airport the following day. "I am going home," he declared, "to claim the love of my life!" The upshot of his experience was that one thousand miles means nothing to a true connection. If anything, as the saying goes, it makes the heart grow fonder. Too late, and a journey into Asia, he realised what he'd thrown away. He determined then to  do whatever it takes and to persist however long, because destiny has plans for certain men and women. He fancied himself as a martyr to broken affections. He specialised in the unrequited kind. But this was different. This time he ached in places where his own self-regard should have been.

The desk clerk looked at him and shook his head.

"No sir," he said.

"No? No taxi?" asked Wally.

"No," said the clerk, "no airport."

"No airport?"

"No sir."

"What do you mean?"

"The airport. It is shut sir. It has been shut for six months."

Incredulity.

"What? The airport is shut?  Chandrabanoo Airport?"

"Yes sir. There is no such airport."

Wally looked at him and wondered if they were having a communications breakdown.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "Are you saying that the Chandrabanoo Airport is closed?"

"Yes sir. For the last six months."

"But I have tickets to fly out from that airport tomorrow."

"No sir."

"No?"

"No sir. It is shut."

Wally was going to raise objections but instead said "Hang on a minute" and raced up to his room to fetch his airline tickets. "You see here," he said, pointing to the print-out. "It says here, Chandrabanoo Airport. Leaving Chandrabanoo Airport, tomorrow's date."

The clerk was unimpressed.

"No sir," he said. "There is no such airport."

"Are you saying," asked Wally, still getting his mind around it, " that I've been sold airline tickets to an airport that no longer exists?"

"Yes sir," said the clerk, emotionless.

Three hours of awkward English on the Kuala Lumpar telephone system failed to correct this situation. A recorded message from Gold Dragon Airlines merely confirmed that the airport in question was no longer in service and wished him a pleasant stay.

 

He first decided to deal with this calmly but by the middle of the usual thunderstorms he had talked himself into a vicious urgency. He could see Splendid Maree sitting at her kitchen table maybe thinking wistfully about her Wally Trebble. But then another thought arrested him and he remembered the dark and handsome Gavin who had been lurking in the background and who now, of course, might be knocking on her door. Wally was suddenly hot and consternated. Standing on his balconey, overlooking palm trees and a shopping mall, he beset himself in aphroditic panic not unlike Dustin Hoffman in the final scenes of The Graduate. If your sports car runs out of gas and Simon is no longer talking to Garfunkel, the only thing to do is start running and hope to make it to the church before the fixed "I dos". He didn't even pack his bags. He set out, itinerate loner, step by step, penance for his lady's heart. By the morning he had traversed all the suburbs of the sprawling city and was on the roads towards the Penang land bridge. With every step he looked ahead and cried out lonesome "Hang on baby, I'm comin' home!"

Unfortunately, this really only works in the movies. By the time he reached Johar he was nearly crippled with an ill-fitting pair of sandals. He hobbled up to a roadside warung and sitting down for some satay ayam he couldn't get up again. The propriator, a kind and moon-faced man, decided to ring the district nurse. She was an ageing Chinese lady with limited English but who, when she heard that her patient was Australian, was pleased to be able to say the words "Licky Ponting" over and over along with a big grin. She stopped grinning, though, when she peeled away the cloth and had a look. Her face went pale. She immediately fetched Dr Ravishenda. He peeled away the cloth and made an alarming diagnosis. "Whoa!" he exclaimed. "A truncated blister! I haven't seen one of those since the Burmese Railway!"

Wally couldn't see it. It was on his blindside but the look on the faces of the medical attendants gave him grave concern. "Is it bad, is it Doc?" he asked.

All the same, his heart was ever yearning and a strange little voice told him that if he was lucky they might amputate and Splendid Maree will then come running, moved by love and pity to be by his tragic bedside. On any other occasion delusions like this might have suggested malaria but Dr Ravishenda pointed out that self-absorbed romantic fantasies almost always go with trunctated blisters. The only known cure for an attack of the Splendid Marees, he said, was rest and Buddhism.

"I've got to get home, doctor," said Wally, imperative.

"You're not going anywhere with a truncated blister I'm afraid," said the medical man. He was so intrigued he rang a cliche of his colleagues and four of them arrived on a small Honda motorcycle to have a closer look.

"O my God!" said one of them, an older Muslim chap, and he did a quick prayer to Allah. 

"Fascinating," said one of the others, poking it with a stick. 

"Does this hurt?" asked another one, giving it a squeeze, and sending Wally into paroxyms of agony. 

"How did it happen?" asked the fourth, scientifically curious.

Wally explained that he had started seeing Splendid Maree in every face in every bazaar and in every flower, in the face of the moon, the rays of the sun, the swans on the rice pond overflows, the first glow of orange dawn waving through the canefields, the peasants turning the manure of the water-buffalo into the grateful soil. Face of the Beloved! Omnipresent obsession! Much punishing mania!

"Sounds like a job for a dervish," said Dr Ravishenda, and he wrote out a referral. Being old-fashioned, he believed in getting to the cause of the problem rather than just treating the symptoms. The referral was quickly relayed to the nearby village and preparations were made.

Meantime, the other doctors packed the aforementioned abrasion in ice and decided to go in. "We're going to have to pop it!" said one grimly and the others took a step back. It was at this point that fever set in. With a semi-conscious malaise Wally was transported to a day the winter before when he knocked upon her splendid door and she gave him splendid loving. He could smell her skin. He could smell her hair. He could taste her lipstick on the bus-ride home. Splendid Maree, an appartition, did lay down beside him as the pethadine took hold and she explained in whispers that she'd said the things she said because she was fearful of her feelings and she never meant for it to end up like a huge mat of old spaghetti.

"I know," said Wally, "I didn't mean it either. I told you I wasn't any good at love." And he wept into her shoulder and said he didn't know what happened or where it all went wrong. With this torment he fell asleep in his dreams and it seemed as if he'd never wake up again, but then, in the middle of the night, the dervish came wearing goatskins and rattling a rattle and took out the patient's heart, beat it with a big bamboo stick and threw it in the river and left him to grow a new one.

***

 He didn't know at first but he was then tended by a small Malay woman named Fedula who sat through the hot days and mopped his brow and said sincere duas for him in Bahasa-laden Arabic. At length he woke up and when she smiled he remembered that he was an ocean away from the ones he loved. "You're very kind," he said, humbly, homesick. Respectfully, she disagreed. She brought him rice soto and sweet ginger tea. She was maybe twenty-five years old. Pretty. Intelligent eyes. A button nose. Her whole family had died in the tsunami some past Boxing Day. She had been due to marry but - as conditions prevail in the merely mortal realm - a thirty foot wall of water intervened and her betrothed - like her brothers and her sisters and her mother and her father and her grandparents - was never seen again. Wally frowned and shook his head. He wanted to ask her, 'How do you cope with that?' He watched her wrapping rice into banana leaves, her hands content in their smooth busy-ness.

He regained his perspective over the coming months sharing a hut with Fedula beside a ragged clutch of date trees. Then, finally, as his travel visa neared its expiry date, he determined to be going, but not by foot this time. The wound healed. The bouts of sepsis waned. But more essentially his heart had been refurbished and there was no mad clammer anymore.

"You know," he said as much to himself as to dark-haired Fedula, "Splendid Maree is probably warm and cuddly with her Gavin by now, while I'm happy sitting here with you watching the thick brown river of time." What a rush to the head! It took him two months to catch his breath. He felt like he'd walked three times the width of the planet. Only a truncated blister had prevented him from trudging all the way back to Brisbane.

At length he fixed a balsa raft that he bought off a boy named Mazanan and set it near the rope bridge at the far end of the village. There were clouds. He had to beat the monsoons. He stepped off the bank. "Fedula, are you coming?" he called. Secretly, she had been crying all night, but now she looked up and her eyes shot with rainbows rippling in the humid air. Wally smiled. It was different now. She climbed onto the raft and he held her hand and together they drifted off in search of the rumbling sea. She confessed that she was frightened. She would always be frightened of the sea.

The sea? In his plans to walk back into the arms of his one-time darling Wally hadn't even figured on the sea. What was he going to do when he got to Singapore? Why hadn't that problem even crossed his mind? Against all his scientific habits he wondered if the dervish wasn't right that Love is a wicked jinn that makes a mockery of lonely men, and lures them into phantasms, and must be exorcised with chanting babble to a rustic tambourine. In some serious infatuations nothing else will work.

"You've got to confront your demons," said Wally. He wasn't good at this himself but he had learnt that there is no other way.