Two Tabs of Codeine and a bowl of Rogan Josh

I’m sitting in an Indian restaurant and there is a woman looking in at me from outside. The woman is sitting on a bus, wearing a brightly coloured floral face mask, just staring out from the other side as though watching television, as one does when sitting on a bus. As for me, I am doing the same: staring out at her, as one does, when sitting alone in an Indian restaurant. This restaurant that I’m sitting in has very good food but the house wine is deplorable. Deplorable! Even when served very cold. I’ve tried it warm and it is just no use. This isn’t my first glass of wine for the evening and it probably wont be my last. I’m looking out at this girl who’s bus is stuck in traffic. It is like looking at that old black and white photo of the street trolley car in America, with the people inside, frozen in a slice of time, in history, they look out towards me, as though they are trapped in another world, like looking out from a snow dome.

About an hour ago, I took a large codeine tablet, quickly followed by another large codeine tablet twenty-minutes later.
Right now, I hear you, saying to yourself, “Aha! Drugs! I knew it!”
These codeine pills are the size of a twenty-cent piece. I mean, an Australian twenty-cent piece, which is to say, huge. Australia, like its animals, and, quite possibly because of its animals, has very large, very heavy coins. I think that our forefathers got together and, wanting to make a grand statement, decided that our coins, like the land itself, should be really big. And, of course, there was the problem of trying to fit the animals themselves onto the coins. The Australian fifty-cent piece is enormous. I think this is partly due to the fact that it has to fit, on its face, a kangaroo and an emu; a coat of arms with the world’s largest bird, and the world’s largest mouse, all together in one scene. And though I’ve never been to Africa, I’m guessing that they are facing some very similar problems to Australia, having, as they do, quite a lot of large native animals to fit on their coins. So, perhaps it’s a blessing, in some ways, a blessing for the Africans that they don’t have as much money in their pockets as Australians. For one thing, would they have produced so many world champion long distance runners? I don’t think so.
In Australia, having three-dollars-fifty in your pocket, made up of fifty-cent pieces can be heavy, indeed, so heavy, that it can be difficult to walk to the bus stop. Which presents a conundrum, should you carry only notes to the bus stop, and risk upsetting the bus driver by not having the correct change, or be weighed down by a pocket full of cupro-nickel marsupials? This is one of the reasons I left Australia: large money (and not because of sharks, like every one seems to think). Not that any of this explains why the twenty-cent piece, which portrays a school of swimming platypi – our very own duck-rat – is also large.

I try to imagine what this girl is thinking. “What is she thinking?” I think. I have been told by a Vietnamese friend that the Vietnamese don’t like Indian food. Perhaps this is what she is thinking, how can I be eating this awful foreign food. Does this mean that all Vietnamese people don’t like Indian food?” I wonder. One hears such blanket statements all the time. And then, as the years go by, and every single Vietnamese person you meet, makes that face at the mention of Indian food, then, you know it’s true: all Vietnamese people don’t like Indian food. It’s like a genetic thing; like how Australian people can’t construct a sentence without employing an Australian colloquialism.

The last time I was in Australia, I was living in Melbourne. At lunchtime, I would sometimes go to the deli (the milk bar) to get a sausage roll. The guy behind the counter, a second or third generation something from somewhere was always suspicious of me. When I said,

“Excuse me, I would like a sausage roll please. Sauce?…no, no thank you,”

he would immediately start eyeing me suspiciously and his hands would go to cover the money in the cash register while looking at me blankly, not knowing exactly what my game was. For one, I wasn’t using any Aussie slang, which is just confusing the bejesus out of him, and, for another, I wasn’t having sauce, which, as every one knows, is the only part of the sausage roll event that actually has any taste. Now, if my phrasing was a little different, perhaps,

“Gidday mate! Geez, those sausage rolls look real bonza. Fuck a duck I could eat the pig skin off a footy. Gimme one of those wouldya matey?”

This…this he would understand, and not feel the least bit uncomfortable. Or maybe he was looking at me blankly because he was thinking, “Why did I have to learn to speak in this ridiculous manner while this guy gets to walk around talking anyway he pleases, like he’s English or something, like he’s better than me?”

So I eat alone in this Indian restaurant in Saigon, where the few other tables around me are occupied with fringe dwellers like myself: Sikhs, other South Asians…foreigners. This girl in a bus stares at me. We are from different universes. But, I like her, you know. I like her floral face mask and how her eyes give nothing away. I know that she is a good person and that she works hard and that she is bored with taking this bus everyday. Though, actually, I know nothing about her or what she is thinking, and though it’s arrogant for me to presume that I do, like anthropomorphism, it’s fun to create your own worlds.

The thing that I have been really ruminating on is pain, or, at least, the absence of pain. Last weekend, Friday night, I began to get a toothache, a rear molar with a bad abscess and infection (upper right molar number 2 for all you dental enthusiasts out there). By Monday morning, this pain had increased, by degrees, until it was so intense, that it was impairing my vision, an unrelenting, all-consuming pain. After a couple of days of futile visits to various medicos, on Monday at noon, I had it pulled. Once the offending tooth was gone, my recovery was almost instantaneous. So, now, in an Indian restaurant, three days later, I really have no excuse whatsoever to still be taking this codeine; I mean, I don’t like to waste things, sure, there is that, but I suspect that the real reason may lie somewhere in the fact that, together with a glass of wine or two, the effect is like…floaty.

It’s amazing how quickly constant and unrelenting pain - particularly if there is no set date for abate - can wear you down. One day you’re bench pressing a hundred kilos, you’re a tiger, and two days later, you can’t button a button, you can’t button a button’s button. You’re all alone in your little pain universe, something like a really bad basement apartment with no windows and a really low ceiling that leaks water on your head from rusty exposed pipes.

Now, where once there was a tooth, there is a big gap; my abscess has become an absence, and every time I open my mouth to say something, phrases like ‘sufferin’ succotash’ and you’re desthpicable’ bounce back to me like an echo off a wall; a new speech impediment that threatens my whole, already precarious, public persona.

Sitting in an Indian restaurant, wrapped in a codeine and wine duvet, a fluffy covering that seems to make everything just the right temperature and the sound of the overhead fan, like a swooshy swoosh swoosh, like that of a feather pillow, I wonder if my absent tooth isn’t symbolic of a deeper absence, perhaps the absence of over-sized money with marsupials on its face, and about whether this girl in the bus, her whole life contained in a pair of eyes, staring out at me, is symbolic of my now absent tooth, the extraction of which, freed me from my prison of pain, which is, itself, symbolic of an absence of oversized novelty coins with swimming platypi on them. And then there’s the Africans to consider; what are we going to do with them?

All these thoughts, like little fluffy ducks, like two tabs of codeine and a bowl of Rogan Josh, waddle around the other tables in the restaurant where, I know, my fellow diners, my compadres, are grappling with the same issues as I; issues that will not be resolved tonight, at least, not all at once. But, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Glenn Wyatt

My blog: http://glennn2000.wordpress.com/