Henri Lee slouched on the side of his hotel bed experiencing the softness of a worn mattress under his naked buttocks, the lurid hotel bed-throw coarse under his supple white-collar hand. Henri’s nude toes nestled in the tousled pink mat adjacent to an aged hardness of cigarette burnt fibres and petrified minutiae of chewing gum, caked solid onto the mat. The twelve by ten hotel room was increasing claustrophobic as Henri mused upon the rasping of a cockroach.
The aphasic rhythm of flashing neon light threw punitive blue light upon Henri’s middle-aged frame revealing the deathly pallor of a Lucian Freud painting - a lumpish carcass, flabby and ill-used. Henri had never been initiated into the cult of body, his only exercise had been the gentle daily walking of Chester, his aging tan Labrador, hence the extra kilos gracing his midriff.
A scratched and scarred silver Samsonite suitcase lay supine on the wooden hotel rest. From its bowels spilled the detritus of Henri’s life. Black Marks and Spencer underpants leaked like Dali watches over the case’s rim melting into still wrapped Pagoda brand vests purchased in Kota Raya Plaza. Fawn socks nuzzled worn Rael Brook shirts as they fondled cotton Gordon Bennett and polyester Van Heusen, cotton Farah slacks petting brown Ecco shoes, all individually and collectively cavorting.
A frowning Henri scanned the melange under the bitter neon light seeing the sum total of his life mirrored in the presenting chaos - Henri wanted to weep, but delayed. It wasn’t yet time.
A middle-aged and middle-class Henri Lee had arrived at the age of 60 two days before arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Sometime between the ages of 50 and 60 something had disappeared from Henri’s life - he ascertained a lack, absence. Henri’s marriage was unravelling gradually as he took early retirement from his career. The couple had no children and Henry had shied away from letting friends into his life. Then from retirement somehow being alone metamorphosed into loneliness, and a meaningful chasm opened in Henri’s life - this he sought to plug with fragmented shards of ill-recalled memory.
For Henri sixty became a chronological marker, a period when life’s accomplishments and failures are evaluated. Being sixty induced Henri to take life’s yardstick, measure, and having measured find him-self seriously wanting.
The return to Malaysia - back to the land of his origin, in this sense was not a home coming. Henri had made his home in London many years earlier, so for him this was an immersion into sepia tinged nostalgia - obscure and oblique reminiscence swaddled in his own gloriously conjured retrospective illusion.
The MAS flight from Heathrow to KLIA was misspent self-medicating -Henri consumed blended Irish whiskey and then lounged bombarded by twelve hours of programming from a minute TV screen attached to a mechanical arm on his seat. Henri’s headphones obscured in-flight clatter and chatter until the tedium and the alcohol drugged him comatose.
Henri had been grateful to pay extra for a seat with additional leg-room and with the adjacent seat being empty Henri spoke with no-one but the air-stewardess – successfully cocooning himself within his anonymity, safe in the knowledge that no one knew him or of him. To all intents and purposes Henri had become not just invisible but intangible curled foetal position inside his mind, secluded from human interaction.
The normally tedious and time consuming dance of baggage retrieval, immigration and customs control were, on this occasion, not an obstacle as Henri slipped quietly into Malaysia and onto the express train bound for KL Central and the Pearl Dragon hotel. While still in England Henri had booked the hotel from its alluring website and, as it was convenient to both Petaling Street and China Town, Henri had not reserved his usual caution thereby landing himself with a twelve by ten foot roach infested shoebox, sans even minimal comforts
Henri’s mother had been deceased fifteen years, and his father five, leaving Henri, an only child, now also an orphan, he had steadfastly avoided aunts, uncles, cousins, and not bothered with family, kith, kin but, instead, had quietly got on with his own unadventurous life in Roman Road - London’s East End.
Nursing had not been so much of a calling for Henri but more of a means to escape family and the identical Malaysian provinciality which he now sought. When at eighteen Henri had applied for and received a place to study nursing in the UK he was away, literally flying into his perceived real world, escaping nosey neighbours, meddling aunties, punishing teachers and pushy parents.
Chen Ri Lee became Henri Lee and successfully flew away from all that he was, reinventing himself as an adventurous new-world citizen hailing a future incipiently pregnant with a myriad possibilities and excitement conjured from the dubious promises of a brighter future, all engendered by western novels, film and TV.
Henri, however, was to discover that ‘real life’ was not as it was depicted in Life magazine or endlessly slick Rock Hudson movies replete with mandatory happy endings. Real life for Henri was about getting up at a ridiculous hour of the morning, braving the aching cold, shivering as he brushed his teeth and missing just about everything he had when he was in Ampang, Malaysia.
Henri’s bravado had soon worn off and longing for Nasi Ayam and Cantonese dim sum soon took over. Weeks of longing turned into months and then years while gradually Henri settled into a British nursing career, first as a student nurse, then as an enrolled nurse and later to become a State Registered Nurse (SRN). In the years which followed Henri climbed the career ladder from staff nurse to charge nurse, ward manager and eventually as a nursing officer and departmental head.
After a life of service to his adopted country, and having completed the requisite number of years in the British National health Service, Henri was in the happy position of either being able to work on until the age of 65 or retire early due to his length of service - he chose the latter. Henri retired to a chorus of farewells from his former colleagues at the London Chest Hospital - who forgot him the moment he passed through the heavy plastic doors exiting the hospital, and returned home to Jane (previously Jin Chiew) his wife of the previous twenty years.
Walking Chester on the same route he had taken to work every morning –down Driffield Road, out onto Old Ford Road and skirting the inviting green of Victoria Park past the wrought iron gates and along the Hertford Union Canal, Henri found retirement difficult. The stress of his new home-life and the adjustments it had required from both Jane and Henri began to tell in their relationship - after a couple of years it was obvious that the marriage was ill and probably would not survive- it didn’t.
After four years of muddling through retirement Henri discovered himself alone. Jane had found it preferable living with Mark - a consultant surgeon, his knighthood, his antique furniture, his vases and paintings, his St John’s Wood apartment and his sleek two-cylinder Jaguar, to being with Henri in the basement flat in London’s East End, and no car.
Entropically existing, walking Chester, drinking alone down The Young Prince and watching young couples flaunt their youth and vibrancy weighed heavily on Henri. He didn’t miss Jane, the last months of that relationship had obliterated all the good that may have gone before, but he did feel something - uneasiness. Gradually the notion of getting away, escaping, fostered itself in his increasingly uneasy mind.
Now Henri was feeling alone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - the world.
