Something about a Crocodile

(a sister post to 'Sky High' on commission! For Wendy Varley)

Something about a Crocodile

It was 2014, March and my son Rowan's 30th birthday. So I flew to Malaysia where he was working in Kotakinabalu. I was lucky to get there on Malaysian Airlines on the flight immediately before the fated MH370, which disappeared without trace. I'd booked into a swanky hotel with air-conditioning.  I don't remember seeing where Rowan was living. He'd come to the hotel, drink everything in the mini-bar, eat everything I'd brought (24 packets of frazzles and 24 Boost bars) and then we'd decamp for a tour or two.  Bonny, his sister, came too, flying in from Cambodia, arriving shortly after me to share my room and celebrate her brother's birthday.

We were all three obsessed with the big screen at the end of the huge bed, showing endless maps of flight paths as people spoke in languages we struggled to understand about the missing plane. Worse was running into the Malaysian-Air crew in the hotel lobby, people who'd looked after me on my way over and who now were stricken over the disappearance of the plane and their colleagues. They didn't want to talk to tourists. I didn't want to think about what they were feeling. I wanted to be with my kids and huddle up. But my kids don't do much huddling. We had places to go and things to see.

Rowan had a motorbike and Bonny hired a slower one. I was Rowan’s pillion passenger and we spent days touring, high in the hills, stopping at small cafes which were really nothing but unsteady platforms poised over valleys where large blocks of muddied ice dripped from sacks and monkeys chattered on corrugated iron roofed lean-tos. Tension was high; Bonny's bike had half the power of Rowan's and he'd lose her while he teased me, leaning hard into bends, revving too high, dicing with danger (his speciality). On other days perhaps we'd take a tuk-tuk to meet a boat and meander along a failing river, its banks lined with one single line of leaf-free trees remaindered from palm-oil farms' deforestation.  The probiscus monkeys, scabbed and scrawny, jumped from bark-stripped branch to bark-stripped branch and the boatman cried. This was no happy trip.

In contrast to the poverty of the vegetation and the lives of those who camped under curved iron shacks on the bend in the road beyond sight of the hotel, Kotakinabalu has fabulous (and empty) shopping malls, where tall, thin, white manikins wear the latest white leather skirts and t-shirts with cherry motifs; we played the latest computer games there and were moved on when we couldn't find the coins for the leather auto-massage chairs. Rowan wanted sunglasses - there was every brand. Life there otherwise was hot and hard.

This wasn't the tropical paradise I had found him in when I visited him at Scuba Junkie in Sabah Borneo and on Mabul where we stayed when he taught me to dive at Sipadan - in the fabulous conservation sea-scape where the reef, alive with marine life shelves deeply to a dark-blue cavernous secret world. This in contrast was a place of shipping containers, oil and banging generators; we did not dive in Kotakinabalu, but we did visit a Crocodile conservation centre.

It was hot - we felt we were being tumble dried on the motor-bikes. I remember the size of the grand domed entrance where you could buy tickets and so gain access to living crocodiles and to the shop, where you might buy a new belt, bag, purse or pair of shoes, made of course from crocodile skin. I was reminded of my grandmother's snappy hand-bags with their soft suede linings and special hand mirrors, made in Shanghai in the 1920s and of the two tiny, dried alligator babies, which ornamented her dressing table. Here in the foyer, also, taxidermists displayed fine specimens 'all die natural' and 'see, try, touch, is ok madam' and so it is there is a photograph of my head inside a dead croc's mouth. Poor creature.

The conservation centre would not go down well with your regular summer holiday visitor to Whipsanade zoo where animal welfare is, they say, the first of all concerns. Crocodiles curled in tight concrete pens where dark brown sludge stood in for water. 'Hospital, see?' our guide explained. 'We make him well. Is ok Miss. Is ok. Come look!' Rowan, a long-time resident of Malaysia and so able to converse, chatting to our guide, gestured to Bonny and me to follow them and help.  They took us to a large, blood specked shed - it seemed many murders might have been carried out there - where in a vast trunk a putrid stash of chicken carcasses were stored ready for feeding time.

'Come! Come!' said the guide, handing ten dead birds to Rowan, grabbing ten himself and smiling a curled smile.  We followed to a slight and seething lake where hungry crocodiles slid and slithered, frenzied by the smell of blood and leaping, gnashing jaws as the keeper and as Rowan let the chicken carcasses fly, each fierce prehistoric beast sliding over another in the struggle to survive and several times snapping what I felt was far too close to Rowan's thirty year old hand. It was a shocking, terrifying scene but soon the beasts, replete, slid back to laze in the ghastly thick and gloomy glupe, trapped in the manmade lake.

Just as macabre were the fish, which swirled and leapt as we fed them pellets while otters fed on them.  I remembered Rowan's joy when, for his second birthday, we had borrowed my mother’s car to go to Woburn Safari Park. Driving through the Bear enclosure, while the leader of the monkeys’ pack tugged and twisted the windscreen wipers, he twirled in my arms on the back seat, tapping the window squealing: 'Mummy! Mummy! Teddy! Teddy! Baby! Baby!' spotting the huge brown bears lurking under pine trees, and tiny monkeys swinging from branch to branch. He had a thing for animal parks from very early on. 'Come on Mum. Put your head in its mouth - go on' he urged as we moved past the awful handbags and turned down all reductions offered, desperately, to find our bikes beyond. 

On the big day I remember handing over a bottle of champagne, which Rowan popped open and drank all by himself and in one go (I realise he's sounding here like he's got some kind of drink and sugar addiction: remember, he had by then been starved of all things Western for quite some time - and it was his birthday).  But then, to my horror, he took off, telling me and Bonny he had a record to beat - his own - in circumventing the mountain on his motorbike.

And later there was a proper party - in his friend's bar where, the DJ played Pharrel’s ‘Happy’ and Robin Thicke's 'You know you wan’ it' and Rowan picked me up, to make like a helicopter propeller above his head, spinning and spinning in the middle of the dance floor, as the disco ball whirred above.

30 years and one day old, over a very late, high-carb breakfast the next day Rowan said, 'I don't know what's wrong with my arms, Mum. My shoulders are buggered. Is it age?'

'It could be, I guess, although it might have something to do with the fact that you had me spinning like a catherine-wheel above your head last night.'

'Jesus. Did I? Oh fuck, no.'

He was 40 this year. He said he didn't want a party. It must be Bonny's turn

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