No More Tomorrows (7 page)

He seemed nice enough, but after I’d paid for my groceries I said goodbye again and went to catch my bus. A few minutes later as I was about to board, he came running over and asked for my phone number. As I’m not used to saying ‘no’ and still thought he was kind of cute-looking, I gave it to him.

When he called me two weeks later, I invited him to come to my eighteenth birthday party the following night. After that, he shadowed me almost everywhere, every day, just as I used to do to Merc. I liked him and really enjoyed his constant company, but it took almost six months before we became boyfriend and girlfriend. By the time his visa ran out a few months later, we were in love.

He was my first love and I guess my first real boyfriend. I’d had a boyfriend in high school, but we didn’t actually even kiss because I had braces on my teeth.

Kimi and I decided that the simplest solution to his visa expiring was for both of us to move to Japan. Being so young and in love, I had no doubts, and I knew Australia would always be home and I could always come back. As it turned out, I could only get a maximum three-month holiday visa, so we regularly returned home to allow me to renew it. By this stage, Merc was no longer living in Japan; she’d moved to Bali with her Balinese boyfriend, Wayan.

Kimi and I moved to an old fishing village called Omaezaki, which is about four hours south of Tokyo by car. The village gets very strong winds and, as a result, is renowned for its windsurfing. It’s even on the pro circuit. Each year during the pro event, the town would transform into an international hot spot, and in the years I was there, I was given the prestigious job of timekeeper: holding the stopwatch, giving the countdown and blowing the horn as I sat with the judges. The honour had been passed on to me from an English friend who’d had a baby.

Omaezaki is also well known for its energy windmills and, unfortunately, its nuclear plant. Once a year, we’d get a knock on the front door from the plant’s reps, giving us a thank-you cardwith 50,000 yen (about $60) inside. Every home in the town got the cash and card as a little goodwill token/bribe, to say thanks for not protesting. But we should have protested. It wasn’t healthy. I’ll never forget the day when I was surfing with Kimi and some friends on a popular little break just in front of the nuclear plant. I had an appalling reaction to what must have been chemicals in the water. Within minutes of being in the surf, my face blew up like a puffer fish, turning my eyes to slits. I was sneezing uncontrollably and the pain in my sinuses was so excruciating I thought they’d explode. I got out fast, refusing to ever surf there again.

We lived a simple life in a very old and traditional Japanese house, which we shared with a couple of Kimi’s windsurfer mates. The amenities were so basic that they were remarkably similar to the ones here in Kerobokan, but the big difference is I kept them pristine and we didn’t have to share with fifteen others. We had an old squat toilet and used a bucket and ladle for showering, just like I do now. It’s almost like I had training.

Though it was basic, Kimi and I loved our little house and enjoyed making it into our home. We had two rooms in the attic, which we spent weeks doing up, one as our bedroom and the other as a TV and living room. Being completely immersed in another culture, I felt free and creative and spent a lot of time painting. Kimi would drive me to Tokyo to buy canvases and paints to do oil paintings. I was also into painting glass bottles and asked every guest to our home to take a seat and paint a glass bottle, too. I had a big collection, which I displayed in the toilet in an optimistic attempt to distract from the toilet itself. The house was so decrepit that as soon as we moved out it was demolished.

Kimi worked as a seasonal tea farmer and also as a surfboard-shaper in his mate Mitchi’s surfboard factory and shop. We all spent a lot of time hanging out there, usually before and after a surf. We lived to surf in those days, and I became pretty good a tit, easily dropping to one knee, doing 360s and catching the big powerful waves that came through during the cyclone season. I’d come to really love my boogie-boarding.

At first I couldn’t get any work and spent the days cooking Kimi lunch and hanging out at the surf shop with him. I had two Western girlfriends who lived in the town, one from England, who was married to a pro windsurfer, and the other from Canada, who taught English. But generally it was a bit boring.

Eventually I found a job at the town’s hotel. It was gruelling, as I started at dawn preparing breakfast and rolling up the futons, then cycled home for a quick lunch, before returning to help prepare dinner and roll out the futons. I also got some work doing seasonal farming for small farmers of strawberries, melons and tobacco. Kimi and I would spend days out in a field working with a team of really old, hunchback Japanese women.

We lived frugally. Our rent was only $80 a month and surfing costs nothing, but we were always struggling to save enough money for air tickets back to Australia. Within the first two years of living in Japan, we came home about six times to renew my visa and see my family. We’d sometimes stay in Australia for a couple of months so I could spend time with my family, and I’d get a casual job. During these trips, we’d often drive down the coast for a week or two, just camping and surfing. Merc was still living in Bali during this time, so we sometimes took advantage of the Garuda stopover to drop in to see her.

But immigration both in Australia and Japan were starting to give us a hard time when it came to obtaining our visas, and we were also getting tired of the constant expense. So it reached a point where it was either split up or get married. I hate saying it like that, because it sounds like we got married just for a visa, but the truth is we were really in love and neither of us wanted to let go.

Kimi was five years older than me and had often said ‘Let’s get married’ during our first two years together. I was a bit daunted by the idea and kept stalling, saying, ‘Yeah, OK, one day . . . later.’ I clearly recall the night I finally agreed. There was no diamonds-and-champagne proposal and big ‘Oh, I will! I will!’ reaction. We were in our TV room, talking about our future, and he said, ‘Ah . . . maybe we’ll get married now?’ This time it was do or die, so I said, ‘I’ll just call my mum and my sister.’ It was important to me that they thought it was a good idea. I might have seen Mum marry and divorce, but for me marriage was for ever. And I really believed Kimi was ‘the one’, which was a bit naive, I guess, given that he was my first boyfriend and I was only twenty.

I phoned Mum and Merc, and they both just excitedly said, ‘Congratulations.’ So it was as low key as putting the phone down and saying, ‘OK, let’s get married.’ And that was that.

We started making plans, but then things began to unravel. Though we hadn’t set a date yet, I got quite excited about our wedding day and went and bought a pretty mauve silk slip dress with a chiffon cover and ordered some wedding invitations. I thought we’d have a small wedding party in Japan and then a bigger one in Australia with all my friends and family: after all, I was the bride. But Kimi had other ideas, which was the first sign that the two of us wouldn’t work out. He’d been brought up in a culture where men controlled and women obeyed, especially once they’re married.

One morning, a couple of weeks after we’d agreed to marry, we were enjoying our usual early surf when Kimi abruptly said to me, ‘Let’s go.’ I assumed he needed to get to work early, so we paddled in, loaded the gear in the car and drove off. We weren’t heading home, but he refused to tell me where we were going, which he had started to do a bit and which annoyed the hell out of me. He pulled up at Omaezaki’s town hall and leapt out of the car, calling back, ‘Aren’t you coming?’

So with my hair still soaking wet, and dressed in my board shorts and bikini top, I traipsed behind him into an office and unwittingly signed our marriage certificate. I didn’t know what I was signing and just assumed it was some bank document. As we got back into the car, he said, ‘We’re married.’ My jaw dropped and tears sprang to my eyes as I looked at him. We drove home in silence, and I refused to talk to him for the next two weeks. His best friend saw how hurt I was and gave me a beautiful bunch of flowers, saying, ‘Congratulations.’

I guess the only way to explain it is to say that it was very Japanese.

Things went downhill from there. Once I was his wife, Kimi became more controlling, always wanting to know where I was. The cultural and language differences were becoming more of a problem rather than less. And combined with the nagging loneliness I felt, and homesickness, little things started to annoy me, like having to explain a simple joke.

It wasn’t all bad. We still had some good times together – otherwise we’d never have stayed together for another two years.

I tried to teach him not to control me so much, and he tried. He was also sensitive to my loneliness; he’s a nice guy and did want to help me feel less homesick, taking me camping in the Japanese countryside or on a surfing trip for a few days. We still really enjoyed each other’s company most of the time.

Looking back, I think most of Kimi’s friends could see how homesick I was, even more than I realised myself. They always tried their best to speak with me and help me to feel comfortable, although we struggled to understand each other. I spoke a decent amount of Japanese by this stage, but most of Kimi’s friends weren’t Omaezaki natives and spoke different dialects, which were often like another language.

But in the end, the loneliness, the language barrier and homesickness got the better of me. I didn’t want to feel so lonely for the rest of my life, which at that time I had the feeling I might, especially if I got stuck there with kids. I missed my mum and I missed Australia, and I just wanted to go home. We decided it was best if I did; it was a mutual thing. Kimi and I had stayed married for two years, although if there hadn’t been a piece of paper involved, I might have left earlier. My belief in marriage as a lifelong commitment had kept me holding on, but eventually I realised I was young and unhappy and I didn’t have to stay. I’m just grateful we didn’t have babies.

It was late June 2000, just two weeks before my twenty-third birthday, when I called Mum and told her the news, and asked if she’d meet me in Bali for a break on my way home. My devoted mum didn’t hesitate to jump on a plane, and we spent two happy weeks together enjoying each other’s company, snorkelling and dolphin watching. It was so good to see her and, rather than being sad, I was simply relieved to be going home.

I had packed up my life fairly neatly, taking with me just a suitcase full of clothes and my bag with my new $400 yellow boogie board, which I’d bought in Japan, and my flippers. I used the board to surf in Bali while Mum sat on the beach watching and having her nails painted. The next trip I made to Bali was four years later, with the same boogie board, same bag and same flippers.

This time, though, the board wouldn’t make it into the water. It was incinerated instead.

Although Kimi and I stayed in touch for a year or so, sending Christmas cards and birthday presents and talking on the phone sometimes, all contact gradually died off as we both moved on with our lives. I haven’t heard from him while I’ve been in Kerobokan, nor do I expect to. It’s been eight years since I left Japan and he’s got a new life with a new wife and kids. The first he knew about me being in jail would most likely have been when one of the women’s magazines tracked him down to get the story of my ‘secret life’. According to the article, we were married for just three months.

By the time I arrived back in Queensland, Merc was living there again with her new husband Wayan. After being together for five years, they’d decided to get married when Merc learnt she was pregnant. Kimi and I had gone to the wedding, which took place in Bali in March 1999, along with all of my other siblings, Mum and Dad, and various aunties, uncles and cousins. It was a huge event, and in marked contrast to mine. Merc and Wayan were already living in Australia by the time they were married and flew back to Bali for the ceremony. It was a Hindu wedding, lasting a month, as Merc had decided to convert to Wayan’s religion.