Psychogeography: 106

We stood next to a London cab on the forecourt of the Elizabeth apartments in the fast-falling dusk of south-east Asia. It was the latest model, a bulbous TX2. Roland Soh, the cabbie, was regarding his vehicle with a certain weary affection. “This,” he told me, “is one of the most expensive cabs in the world.” He ran me through the bill for it: $30K for the car certificate, 120% import tax, it all adds up to a cool 120K Singaporean dollars. “I’m going to sell it next year,” he avers, “and get a people carrier.”

We fell in with Mr Soh at Changi airport; and his London cab, complete with British Lung Foundation sticker on its glass hatch, helped to make landfall that much more uncanny. Singapore struck me immediately as Basingstoke force-fed with a pituitary gland. The island is low-lying, greenish and tricked out with corporate bypass architecture: skyscrapers like humungous conservatories hollowed out by truly hideous atriums.

At the Elizabeth Apartments, where we put up, we looked up from the lobby into a vertiginous cloudscape of 30-odd concrete balconies: the sky was a mirror, the vending machine offered soft drinks flavoured with chrysanthemums. The apartment itself was all tiled surfaces and heavyset armoires, the TV served up a state-sanctioned diet of Murdochian pap: mobile-phone commercials masquerading as news bulletins.

Still, we weren’t really in Singapore at all, only stopping over for 24 hours. Enough time to crank the kids’ body clocks halfway round, so that when they reached the fatal shore they weren’t bouncing off the walls with jet-lag. Singapore understands its own status as a 300-square-mile holding bay, an entrepot, a people-dock. The majority Chinese population throng the streets with their notorious orderliness, while in the lea of the skyscrapers dwarfish Malays in pyjamas sweep up very little.

Mr Soh explained to me the intricacies of the car certificate. Apparently, the government controls exactly how many cars there are at any given time on the island. In order for a new car to be born – an old one must die. It strikes me that this is a policy inflected by Confucianism: the orbital road of life whispering on through the eras, symbol and reality interfused. I said as much and Mr Soh smiled in a satisfied way. “There’s more to Singapore,” he told me, “than meets the eye.”

What does meet the eye is the Merlion: half-lion, half-fish. A chimerical symbol for a chimerical state. The Merlion is everywhere. There are Merlion cruets and mobile-phone covers, newel posts and carpet figures. Down at Merlion Park, where the Singapore River meets the sea, a giant Merlion squirted a jet of water into the gloopy atmosphere, while out in the grey bay the ocean-going equivalents of Singapore’s skyscrapers oozed along the horizon.

Hungry for the anchor of the past in this rudderless vessel of modernity, we headed for Chinatown. Along Smith Street there were reassuring, carved house fronts, the city hunching down to a human scale. Atop the Sri Mariamman temple a mosh pit of Hindu deities rose into the drizzle in a tangle of garish concrete limbs. Further down the street, gongs resounded outside the Buddhist temple, where great stooks of fake currency were being consumed by fire. It was easy to understand how the rogue bond trader Nick Leeson – who was based in Singapore – got the idea that money was worthless paper, mere vouchers to be shovelled into the incandescent belly of capitalism.

We ate at the Maxwell Road Food Centre, where all the old Chinese street vendors have been corralled under a cast-iron roof. Down aisles of tripe and along transepts of glazed chicken we strolled: little dumplings of humanity peristalsised by the stomachs of pigs. Full up, we were evacuated and headed for the Lucky Centre so the kids could buy many, many cheap wristwatches.

I retailed all of this to Mr Soh as we stood waiting for the rest of the family to join us in the cab and head back to Changi. He was keen to explain the commercial slabs along Orchard Road to me in terms that undercut psychogeography with more ancient and arcane concepts. “You see the Hyatt Hotel,” he pointed at a liverish porphyry dolmen, “they built it without consulting the geomancer. The reception desk was at the wrong angle, the entrance was set too far back from the road. It cost them millions in lost revenue before they gave in and had the entire building remodelled. I could give you tens of other examples…” He trailed off. It wasn’t clear to me whether Mr Soh was expressing credulousness or its opposite. Whether he thought bad feng shui was a function of people’s perception or a genuine ulterior reality.

As one we reached out to touch the black hide of the cab, so that it could reassure us both with its $180,000 bulk.

Psychogeography 107

At the Trocadero, under the disconcertingly shabby, yellowing facade of the Palais de Chaillot, a group of demonstrators are coagulating into a clot of protest. They all have a certain monumentalism about them. Men and women alike are broad-cheeked with heavy-lidded eyes and jug heads. I suspect a tribal affinity. They’re carrying flimsy homemade placards: “Bas Gbagbo!” the slogans cry. A man hands me a flyer detailing President Gbagbo’s perfidy. As far as I can tell, he has hung on to office despite UN resolutions calling for him to step aside so that free and fair elections can be held. A large BMW comes stuttering round the roundabout and the anti-Gbagboists gather in its train. Bluey exhaust fumes lift and curl in the sparkling wine light. They head off down the Avenue Kleber towards the Arc de Triomphe.

I wonder if the Cote D’Ivoireans’ protest is going to make any waves in Sunday afternoon Paris? They’ve acquired a couple of police cars, and the drivers held up by their surprisingly chipper shuffle are, naturally, honking, but beyond this the city goes about its business of relaxation. On the terraces of cafes, tourists form cats’ cradles with the soft-cheese toppings of their indifferent onion soups. The steps down from the palais are the proscenium for an astonishing display of football control by a man in a Brazilian strip. A boom-box skitters and flumps as he flicks the leather globe on to the back of his neck, rolls it along his outstretched arms, whirls it into the air, and catches it on his boot.

The long, ramp-like roads that run down to the Seine are coursing with inline skaters, who wiggle in between a row of cones so fast that their legs blur like those of stridulating insects. Up ahead, the Eiffel Tower scoots into the sky. The closer we get to it the more preposterous it seems. I’ve been coming to Paris once or twice a year for a long time now, yet I haven’t stood beneath the tower since I was a child. It is, quite simply, too iconic to be neared. It has spawned a billion model knick-knacks – and so its scale is problematic. It isn’t until we’re right beneath its pantagruelian legs that I’m moved to consider quite how deliriously useless this jangle of steel is. This isn’t a signature building – it’s a signature coat tree or newel post. The Eiffel Tower pinions the map of Paris like a paperweight, preventing the pop-up apartment blocks from blowing clean away.

I’ve been tormenting the 15-year-old with an Oxford “mini-school” French dictionary. He’s a glutton for travel and style, so he couldn’t refuse a trip trans-Manche. “We’ll put up in Saint Germain,” I told him airily “and have cocktails each evening at the Café Flor, discussing existentialism and the semiotics of haute couture.” He looked at me as if I was a cafard – and I was driven deeper into one. True, we have done the Rive Gauche thing, but everywhere we’ve gone I’ve called upon him to translate signs, speak to waiters and even essay the leader articles of Le Monde.

He maintains that while French may be a beautiful language, it has little relevance to his MaciPod lifestyle, and that far from asking him to expatiate on Contre Sainte-Beuve in his GCSE oral exam, the questions will be more of the “Where did you go on your holidays?” type. He sees the French exam as a portal into the joyous and undifferentiated realm of the globalised monoglot, rather than a cultural milestone to be hugged to his breast.

I began the weekend determined to challenge his apathy. However, the more I’ve wielded the mini-school dictionary, the more disorientated I’ve become. Like many lackadaisical English Francophiles I labour under the delusion that I can “get by” in French. I’ve worked hard on my accent so that I can enunciate a few key phrases and demands with sufficient clarity for them to be heard. Beyond this, I now realise, my French consists of strings of nouns which I haphazardly combine. Basic grammar, verb tenses and even conjunctions are, in truth, quite beyond me. My France is a country jumbled up with things happening at once.

I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by how complementary the French are when I rip out their mother tongue. “All you have to do is make an effort,” I say, “and they aren’t in the least patronising or huffy.” Why the hell would they be? What can confirm someone in their innate superiority more than listening to a poltroon say: “Va. Boit. Bar. Train. Moi. Et. Vous. Avant?” No wonder they nod sagely, then reply in perfect English with a pleased expression.

By Sunday evening I’m considering letting the 15-year-old in on this devastating insight into paternal frailty, either that or sending him to the Ivory Coast.

Psychogeography 108

Where is Osama Bin Laden? I only ask because he’s been on the run for years now, and despite the best efforts of the World’s Top Power — its heat-sensors and attack dogs, its agents and bounty hunters — they seem no nearer to capturing him than they were five or even 10 years ago. After 9/11, Bin Laden footage was a staple diet for building up our crusading zeal. There he was: the beardie bogeyman, moving with leisurely awkwardness between the rocky defiles of an Afghan moonscape. A stick-insect of a man with a Kalashnikov in lieu of a cane, his aquiline — yet bilious — face lean beneath his turban. They seek him here! We cried: They seek him there! They seek him bloody well everywhere! Is he in Heaven? Is he in hell? That damned elusive orchestrator of worldwide terror!

The consensus among informed commentators is that Bin Laden and al-Qa’eda never really functioned in quite the manner that we’d like. Despite his appearance — straight out of central casting — this softly spoken fanatic was and is no Dr No, his sensitive fingers poised to activate thousands of loyal henchmen, but instead a kind of venture capitalist of terrorism. If you want to spread anthrax on the metro or port an incendiary backpack, you can apply to the Bin Laden organisation for funding and technical know-how. Befitting his background as the scion of a Saudi Arabian construction dynasty, Bin Laden is a money rather than an ideas man.

Still, he and his associates do have one implacable idea: that by wreaking death and destruction on the infidel they will awaken the torpid Muslim masses and force them to overturn their corrupt rulers and impose the rule of God. Getting captured would put a severe crimp on this plan, for, so long as Bin Laden is at liberty, no matter how circumscribed his personal influence, he acts as a potent figurehead for every ragged man who raises a rocket-propelled grenade launcher to his shoulder and lets fly. His face is on a million T-shirts, his name is constantly on the lips of Iraqi insurgents and Hammas fighters. When Al Jazeera receives a scratchy videotape or a creaking recording, his omniscience is only confirmed. Nothing is more fitting than that he should be thus: exiguous, wavering, a smoky djinni billowing above the apocalyptic battlefield.

We want him up there in the debatable lands of north-western Pakistan. The savage landscape that swallowed the Great Gamers and spat out the bones. We picture him guarded by fearsome Pathan tribesmen armed with 15-ft-long rifles. Although the chances are he’s probably in Reigate. In Reigate and spending his days shuttling across to the Crawley general hospital for a little gentle kidney dialysis. In Reigate, and far from bothering with a shave and a haircut — let alone radical cosmetic surgery — I bet he still looks exactly the same. “Who’s that old geezer then?” ask those who see him sitting on a park bench, or abrading a scratch card. “He don’t ‘alf look like that Bin-whatsit bloke.” To which his unwitting protectors reply: “Oh him? He’s harmless enough — he drinks down the Chequers and plays bowls in the afternoon.” Hardly what you’d expect — his entire disappearing act resting on phenomenal chutzpah.

We want fugitives though. We like the idea that Lord Lucan, Butch Cassidy and Martin Borman are playing gin rummy at a beachfront bar in Mombasa. We urge the bad guys on across the Rio Grande, we supply plane tickets to Sarf London faces so they can take off for the Costa del Crime. So long as there are fugitives in the world, there remains a certain mystery at its margins; all has not been discovered, snooped into, X-rayed by the CIA. The capture of the fugitive is always intolerably prosaic — in an instant he is transformed from a figure of dreadful potency into an unshaven old man with plaster dust in his unkempt hair. This phenomenon is perfectly illustrated by Saddam Hussein, and ever since his capture the media have been willing him to assume his former guise: the coal-black mustache of tyranny.

Thus flight is only a good career move if you’re prepared to stay on the run indefinitely. Don’t end up like Kim Philby, whingeing and drunk in Moscow, or Ronnie Biggs bartering your freedom for the National Health, or Adolf Eichmann, displayed in a plastic box in Tel Aviv, and such a prosaic figure that Hannah Arendt coined the expression “the banality of evil” purely in order to describe his showroom-dummy features. Better not to go on the run at all; be like Slobby Milosevich, throw your arms up, make them build you a special courtroom in the Lowlands, then spend the next few years on your demented high horse, forcing them to spend billions simply in order to give you a slap.

Psychogeography 109

Such a lantern jaw I have never beheld before! It shines with steely stubble – nay coruscates. Its owner sports a wide-brimmed hat, a short-sleeved shirt which shows off his bulging biceps, and still shorter shorts that display his mountainous thighs to even greater effect. He wears Blunstones, the toughest of Australian work boots – all in all he is a most rugged specimen. He’s pulling a dinky little electric cart to which, with a grabber as delicate as a pair of tweezers, he’s adding dry leaves. The contrast between his macho appearance and his effete manual labour is quite entrancing, and I watch him for a while until he straightens up and comes across.

“Oi mate,” he says conversationally “you’d better put some bathers on your lad there.” He gestures at a notice that details the playground rules: No this, no that, no the other – the usual crimps on juvenescence, together with a couple I haven’t seen before: no nudity, and no smoking within 20 metres of the playground. I call over the four-year-old, who’s frolicking unconcernedly in the water feature, and shackle him into a pair of pants. It’s difficult to imagine his genitals being that offensive to anyone. However, I know better than to argue the point with Crocodile Dun-Parkie. For this is Northern Queensland, and while the playground furniture is identical to stuff in London, Paris and Munich (we’ve swung and scampered on them all), in these parts the skin of liberality is stretched far tighter over the skull of bigotry.

Cairns, gateway to the Barrier Reef. To the north the fastness of Cape York, to the west the Great Divide. Cairns is another little scrape of civilisation on the edge of the great southern continent. I say the playground equipment is the same as the stuff I’ve seen in Europe, but the truth is that it’s far superior. The water feature is a little river full of spinning wheels and spurting jets; there isn’t one climbing frame – there are ten, once of which is a giant fish covered in handholds. There’s even a swing for children who are confined to wheelchairs, the gate of which can be opened with a special key. There are clean and functioning toilets, and the paths are immaculately maintained.

The only glaring difference is that in London there would be nonce-seeking CCTV cameras, whereas here a number of overweight, middle-aged men are hanging around the kiddies armed with cameras featuring phallic telephoto lenses. They’re not paedophiles – they’re twitchers. On the other side of the esplanade lies a broad mudflat, the remains of a mangrove swamp. Beyond this the Coral Sea winks on the horizon. Pelicans flap and flotch on the mud, while signs on the esplanade itself – a modular-constructed boardwalk stretching for several kilometres and featuring ‘information nodes’ – warn the strollers of the presence of crocodiles.

This is all of Australia in the span of a few paces: nature red in tooth and claw and humans piggy-pink in bathers and suncream. Not all the humans are pale – some are copper-brown. These are the descendants of the kanakas, South Sea islanders brought to Queensland in the late 19th century to harvest the sugar cane. Still others are café-au-lait Malaysians and Indonesians – more recent immigrants; while a very few are that very matt black peculiar to Australian Aboriginals. Here they are, gathered in the spiky shade of the palms, the dag-tail of a once mighty people, 40,000 years of continuous oral culture confronted by the legends of the playground rules.

In truth, Queensland still has a bad vibe. This is a place where well over 20,000 Aboriginals were massacred – and thousands more destroyed by European viruses – as the pastoralists took over their land. The last massacres of the Aboriginals took place as recently as the 1920s. As late as 1987, Queensland was the fiefdom of the corrupt, racist, misogynistic, demagogue Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and the state was closer to apartheid South Africa than any other polity in the so-called ‘developed’ world. No wonder the spectacle of public four-year-old nudity is so destabilising to this nervous collective psyche, grounded as it remains on a quaking fear of the other.

Now nose flute players strut the air-conditioned malls in heliotrope harem pants, and gap-year backpackers sign up for scenic cable-car rides and snorkelling trips on the reef. The child and I stroll through the playground to the café. It’s called ‘Skippers on the ‘Nade’. A typical white Australian contraction this; they love their diminutives as well, their ‘wrinklies’ and ‘sickies’. I ask for a cup of tap water. “I’m afraid we can only sell you a bottle,” the friendly sugar dispenser tells me. “It’s against the city ordinances to give out water – we might be sued.” Sued for giving out water in a semi-arid continent. A safety-mad playground on the edge of a crocodile-infested mangrove swamp. A triangle of cloth constricting an entire race. There’s nothing for it, I buy the bottle of water and we sit drinking it in our pants.