The Air Hostess

All went well; I had her room number so I arranged for some massive flowers to be delivered there with a large bottle of expensive champagne. I also booked for the restaurant. I had in mind a midnight swim in the pool but would remain a bit flexible on that idea.

I have to say I thought arriving the day before was not a good idea I was so nervous I could not sleep. Next day it was difficult finding things to do to fill in time. I did go for a long Ocean swim. I had figured that by time her plane landed at Velana and she had reached the hotel it would be about 3:30pm.

I arrived early and sat at the back of the foyer waiting for her to arrive. I saw the shuttle arrive and 3 of her crew got out with her, milled around and then dragging their carry-ons started to make their way into the foyer.

Just as she got through the door I got up to approach her when some local guy stepped away from the reception and met her at the door. He stood in front of her they briefly stared at each other's eyes. Lauren did not see me she only seemed to have eyes for him. Then saying something he gestured toward the door and they both turned around and left. I rushed up to the door only to see her entering a very large black Mercedes, the door being held open by a chauffeur.

I was struck dumb. I pulled out my phone and tried to ring. It was turned off. I left a message saying I was in Male and to meet me at the hotel bar.

I was fucking miserable. I had no idea what was going on. I talked to reception. As far as they were concerned she was staying in her room but she had not collected her swipe card. I left a message for her to ring me when she got in. I actually rang the local office of the airline but they had no idea.

That night was the worst night of my life.

I tried ringing again and again.

I went for a walk along the beach

I went for another big ocean swim

I was tense and anxious.

It was a terrible night.

I had another swim in the morning and went in for breakfast.

I spied one of her crew members sitting by herself; a pretty Indian girl. I walked up to her and asked her if she knew Lauren. She said she did so I asked if I could sit down. She looked at me brightly and consented. I sat down and she asked me how I knew Lauren. I decided not to tell the truth and just said I know her from a long time back in New Zealand and was surprised to see her there.

We both ordered tea and I ordered a cooked breakfast. The tea arrived as she was at the breakfast bar. We sat quietly sipping our tea until my breakfast arrived. I asked her how well she knew Lauren.

"We shared an apartment with two other crew members," She answered.

"Do you guys go out together a lot."

"Ooooh she is way out of my league. She has lots of boyfriends. One in every port I think."

"She looks very beautiful."

"Ooooh She is too beautiful for her own good, I think."

"What sort of boyfriends does she have?"

"Rich ones."

"Has she told you about them?"

"She brags about hem all the time. She makes me mad."

"Is she an escort girl or something?"

"No, nothing like that."

"She does not get paid then?"

"No, No, No. She doesn't get the presents you would expect either. She gets a bit of Jewellery and clothes I think."

"Do you know her boy friends?"

"Only two of them."

"Can you remember their names?"

"There is Hussein in Dubai. He is a crown prince or something. There is Ben in London. He is really rich; he is a banker. I never met those two but they were the ones she talked mainly about' "

I really raised my eye brows at that one. Hell, I am London, I thought, how the hell can she have someone else there?

I was conscious that I was asking a lot of personal questions but she did not seem to mind so I carried on."Who was the guy at the door?"

"Oh him; he is new. He is Ali. He is son of the man who owns this hotel chain. I don't really like him."

"Is that all?"

"No, no, no there are a lot more, I have not known her long. She told me she used to be on the New York route at one time. She had a black boyfriend there. Something happened and she had to get out fast but she would not tell me what. She knows someone from New Zealand though. You might know him but I can't remember his name."

"Does she say much about him?"

"No but I think she is sweet on him."

"Is she going to marry him?"

"No. I think she is going to marry Ben?"

That really raised my eyebrows.

"Why do you think that?"

"Well his father is a lord or something and very rich. They have this big country house. He is the only white one she goes with and she told me on this flight that she just found out she is pregnant....are you all right."

"Sorry I just took a turn." I reached for the water.

"Is it your heart, you look flush?"

"No, no, no. It's a bit of a flash back. Iraq you know."

It was a quick lie but seemed to cover my concern.

"Oh, you poor thing. Do you want to talk about it?"

"Nothing to say really; when are you flying out?"

"I leave here just after breakfast tomorrow morning."

"Do you think Lauren will be back here?"

"No she will go straight to the airport with Ali."

"Oh it's a pity I missed her."

"Can I tell her you were here. By the way my names Amoli"

"Thanks Amoli, Yes tell her Mike was here. Tell her that it is a pity because there will probably not be much chance that we will ever meet again."

"Ah, I can tell you are a bit sweet on her. Was she your one time girlfriend?"

"No I wouldn't say girlfriend."

I was starting to feel that Amoli was coming on to me a little. At that moment it was the last thing I needed. I was ready to explode.

I had to get to my room. I made my excuses to Amoli and near ran. Reaching my room I shut myself in. I grabbed pen and paper and sat down to work out the conception date. She had not told me anything about it. I figured this must be the earliest she could find out so it couldn't be me.

Ali perhaps? Hussein? What about this guy Ben? How the hell was she meeting him? Somehow, I agreed with Amoli that he had to be the one.

I thought of our sexual life. It was never what I would call normal. From the anal sex we began with; none it matched any behaviour I imagined for a woman wanting to settle into married life and children. Her manicured and hairless nether regions; it seemed that she paid as much attention there as she would her face care.

All these guys and marrying this English guy? I thought back to her wedding dance; was that something she did for all her men?

It was extraordinary, she seem to have some global polyandrous coterie of men; a reverse harem perhaps? Was she some kind of weird geisha, oiran or some middle east equivalent.

Despite what Amoli said she must actually be a high class whore, not that I have a particular prejudice about that but the deception and humiliation was so wilful as to be beyond belief. What explanation could she possibly have? How could a simple kiwi country girl like her turn into this?

That capped it. I felt I had to keep moving. If I stopped I would just stew. I rang to see if I could get a flight to Singapore that day and as luck would have it I could. I would not have been seeing Lauren back in London for another three weeks so I had that amount of time to get back and get out. She could then be free to do whatever she did with Ben as much as she liked.

I had to find some way of getting out of London. I would deal with that when I got back. Agitated, I could not stop walking back and forth in the room. I decided then that there is enough time for a long ocean swim before leaving for the plane.

A few hours later I sat waiting in the departure lounge waiting to leave. I decided to text Lauren. "I hope Ali, Hussein and Ben sent you lovely valentine wishes. Unfortunately mine are in your hotel room but you never did get to see those did you. I am sure that Ali, Hussein or Ben will be delighted with your pregnancy. I hope you are happy in your victory. I hope you have now got over your revenge of men following your breakup with your pilot beau. I hope you can now find peace with a man you deserve. I am moving on I am instructing my lawyer to serve you with our separation papers as soon as practicable. You will probably need your own lawyer.

Pass on my best wishes to Dan and your Mum. I was looking forward to a future that included them in our lives but I guess that was not to be."

Sitting in the plane on that flight was not a pleasant experience. I found myself staring out the window before take-off in a vain irrational attempt to maybe catch a glimpse of Lauren at the airport.

During the flight I hit the pits of depression and was glad to be surrounded by people.

I was yet to hate Lauren but I knew it would come. My feeling was of a deep visceral emptiness.

I felt as though that somehow I had discovered my life was not real; that there was no point to my life. I thought about my engineering career. I loved to build. I suddenly thought that the MBA had been a waste of time. I had done it for her and her life was just one giant con.

There was no rational reason for her to do what she did. It was like she had multiple personality or something. She had some kind of syndrome or disorder; multiple husband syndrome, maybe.

It made me sick; she had to be some kind of narcissist psychopath. Maybe this is what female psychopaths do. There she is off the pill, fucking men on a global reach.

Am I mad or is she. I am an engineer. I just want I nice woman to marry have some kids grow a garden. Perhaps I aimed too high. Maybe this is the world of celebrities, whatever it is I want out. I cannot handle that kind of shit. I am not into swinging or polyamory or whatever they talk about these days. I haven't got time or inclination for that shit. I hate her. I hate her. She destroyed all my dreams; I hate the bitch.

At Singapore I made myself busy. The first of Laurens Texts and E-mails came flooding in. I deleted the lot. I phoned through to my lawyer in New Zealand and set in motion a separation agreement. The whole process was going to take 2 years so I determined I would find a nice remote building project and disappear. I needed something tangible to devote my life to. I was lucky that being an engineer and building something could give me that.

Returning to London I went to see my employers and explained my situation. I also explained my management aspirations were on hold and that I needed a meaty design and construction project to rebuild my sanity. As luck would have it there was a large hydropower scheme under design for Papua. Our firm was partnered with a local. They were having difficulty in staffing it locally as it was a contentious project. It had the attention of a separatist movement. If I had known then what I became to know I would not have gone.

Essentially it was a project in a war zone. The government were viciously hard on the local indigenous populous and inevitably an equally vicious response came and so it descended into a cycle of utter inhumanity. The saving grace is that the project would benefit both sides and on the whole the separatists saw that and would leave it alone. But there would always the extreme minority who would see it as a product of the illegitimate government, and despite its benefits, should be stopped at all costs.

My employers were surprised that I would be interested but at the time I thought it was exactly what I wanted. I had the option of leaving almost straight away. I needed to get away to somewhere remote free of any semblance of my recent life.

Lauren had been trying to reach me through the firm. I instructed them to tell her to contact my lawyer and that all communication should go via that route. They should not disclose where I am. I contacted my own family to tell them I will not be back in New Zealand for some time. I told them that Lauren and I had separated. Following that communication I felt so embarrassed and ashamed. I had bragged about this woman and all the time she was treating me like an absolute fool. I was a proud man.

I found myself reverting to the nerd I had been in my youth. I was not worthy of a quality woman. Was Lauren really a quality woman? No she was insane. How could a sane woman do what she did? The trouble and detail planning she must have had to do to get away with it. It must have been obsessive-compulsive personality disorder or something. She would have to be nuts, nuts, nuts!

What was she getting out of it? What gratification could she get from such a cluster fuck of relationships?

I flew initially into Osok airport at Sorong. I presented myself to the overall head office of the dam and transmission line project. Sorong was the polar opposite of Singapore which I had visited only two weeks previously. Singapore was an Asian city without a hair out of place. I am not sure that Sorong had ever been combed.

I was inducted onto the project at the Sorong office and after two weeks flew to Jayapura where the main design office was situated for the Hydro complex. I was installed as a resident project design engineer overseeing civils and structural. After several months I moved up to the hydro base camp.

I had spent a small amount of time working in the tropics previously so I had some advance idea what to expect. Our office was the upper story of a plastered block building close to the centre of Jayapura. Our office building was air conditioned although the power supply was not always reliable. I took to the food quite quickly but the food did not take to me. After a while I settled, along with my stomach, to life in the tropics.

I am blessed with a talent for languages. Actually it goes back to my mother. She had masters in Arts and languages were her forte. She brought them home to life on the farm. We often practiced at the dinner table. There was Maori, French German and a bit of Spanish. My mother started on Sarah and I when we were toddlers. It must have been a bit confusing for us kids but we use to have fun at school using our language skills as code.

It certainly helped me in my job. Arriving at Jayapura I immediately set out to learn Papuan Malay and Indonesian. There was not a lot of English spoken there apart from the missionary community so learning the language was a matter of survival. Later on lonely nights I even started to learn Mandarin on line. There was never much to do at nights especially after we moved inland to the dam site.

Over my time in Papua I amused myself scuba diving. As well as the local sea life there were also the relics left over from the Second World War. My favourite spot was Raja Amput where I became a regular at a local resort, spending my time sailing and scuba diving. The white sand and jungles of the hundreds of island were incredibly beautiful and serene drawing me back time after time. It was all therapy for me. Most of my diving however, was around the Cenderawasih Bay . Experiencing the joys of communing with whale sharks and turtles, it was the best diving I had ever done anywhere,

Work on the dam moved on. In the first year there was little interference from the separatists.

There was one issue on which the separatists had some influence. There were three villages that would be affected by the flooding when the dam lake filled. We had to relocate them to higher ground. We also had to develop some commercial activity and means of growing food. A scheme to create fish farms in the lake was devised.

As with all these enterprises there are some that embrace the change and those that push back and it was this separatists exploited. I had some sympathy for the separatists but I daren't get involved in any way with the politics. The area goes back a long way to the Sultanates, the Dutch, the Japanese and now the Javanese. The locals regarded themselves under occupation so the friction was on going. A result was we had a contingent from the Indonesian army permanently based in the base camp and patrolling the construction site. This project was going to be pivotal to the economy and reduce the provinces reliance on diesel. The irony was that the separatists themselves would benefit from the project so their aim was to be disruptive more than stop the project.

I directed a small design team on site as well as the supervising team. There were other engineers including a young woman from Lombok named Surya. I mixed a bit with a number of expat engineers. They made eager diving companions. But expats came and went frequently so my stronger relationships were with the Indonesian.

I guess by this stage I was going a little troppo but Surya in particular gave me a warm feeling. She was always pleasant to me and we often ate lunch together. She was tall for an Indonesian and her hands had long expressive fingers. Surya was lonely as I was. She had a couple of women friends in administration but they were both Javanese.

Surya had been a traditional dancer in her youth and would occasionally dance for us. We had an old CD player and she would put on a CD of some gamelan music and sway and gesticulate to the rhythmic sounds of the gongs and other percussion. I would be mesmerized by the movement of the fingers on her long expressive hands. I loved these sessions and grew to love her in a way. But we never touched or kissed. We would just talk or gaze at one another. When we did so we were never alone by her choice. She would choose one of the men to be a chaperone.

I felt a sexual tension with her in an atmosphere I thought comparable to a Jane Austen novel. As beautiful as it was, my love was unrequited. I never knew what she really felt and the cultural divide was so great I could not bring myself to make a move. As it was, it was all a bit short lived and fate would intervene in a way to make it never happen

We worked in a compound surrounded by razor wire. The compound also included our sleeping and eating arrangements. This particular evening had been a special and memorable one. It was not an anniversary or anything like that. The head company cook had just flown into the camp from the coast. He had brought with him some coconut crab and cooked a special meal with the crabmeat and some beche de mer, thinly cut and prepared in the Asian way lightly fried with sesame oil and served with rice. After dinner Surya danced for us or should I say for me as it was obvious where her attention was. She had on her tan grey skirt and her cream blouse she habitually wore for work. As she danced her eyes were flicking, as she flowed and pointed with the music. I felt at that time that I could not be more in love.

It was a normal sweaty, sultry evening and after the dance we settled into the large comfortable chairs in the lounge to watch satellite television. We were suddenly interrupted by the clatter of gunfire.

It soon appeared that some separatists had got through the wire somehow .We had some private security personnel and we saw that they had gunned down two at the gate and others were scattering.

Somebody activated an alarm to alert the army. We could see a group moving around to where our offices were. They were obviously trying to set fire to the buildings. A couple of security guards appeared from somewhere and started firing at them which broke the group up and they disappeared into the shadows.

Abruptly two appeared in front of the lounge where we were. They had seen me and I was obviously their target. Surya jumped up and ran to the door shouting at them in Indonesian and shielding their view of me. That was the wrong thing to do. I knew she was doing it to divert their attention from me.

One of them appeared to be carrying some kind of traditional sword. And he started hacking at her. An English engineer, George, a recent arrival to the site, was standing to one side of the door. He had the presence of mind when the shooting first started to grab a chair leg and seeing two guys approaching he stepped to one side so that they would not see him.