Byline: Ruby Smith

This week I draw your attention to my sister, that saintly progenitrix who slavishly tends the alarming coven of teenage ne’er-do-wells she insists on calling “the kiddiewinks.” I think a few weeks back I may have mentioned her – she won a snack ‘n’ sandwich toaster in an Extreme Ironing Contest at the 1998 Sheepvention.

Ring any bells? The one who could start an argument in an empty house? You’d know her if you saw her. Anyway. She’s a frequent visitor to CharmingVille: enamoured, as we all are, by fresh coconuts for breakfast, affordable access to an outstanding roster of Indian melodramas on Star Plus, and $13 gin. Especially this last bit.

Scant minutes post touchdown and she’s lashing a careening tuk tuk eastbound on Russian Boulevard, taking a hard right at Bayon and bounding past the abalone display without a backward glance. Within seconds their booze aisle is alive with the sound of satisfied sighs as she skips into the embrace of bargain basement Beefeaters and those dazzling blue gems of Bombay.

More than once I’ve got the call from the Chinese lady who runs the joint like a retail Nurse Ratched; sis has been wet sampling the merchandise on site, and I’ve had to go collect her and her careworn My Little Pony wheelie bag from the massage chairs next to the trolley bay. Thai Huot may have a better dairy section but you can’t beat Bayon for discreet personal service. Being pleasantly hammered and manhandled into a mechanical shiatsu recliner by a couple of strapping stockboys may be the closest thing to a happy ending she’ll ever get. At least for free.

Aside from the cheap plonk there are the balmy morning strolls up Wat Phnom, an armada of disco boats on one of the world’s landmark waterways, and who doesn’t love a game of boules under the Museum’s stately trees.

Sis has fallen so hard for our fun-loving hamlet that she’s gone and bought a neat little flat near Psah Thmey. And since she’s still antipode-bound, rearing her snap-chatty millennials and working full-time to keep them in crop tops and weed, me and the Hubster are managing the renos.

It’s a shame you can’t choose your family. There are plenty of times I would’ve swapped my Dulux-chipping, Ikea-catalogue-referencing, polyurethane-specifying younger sibling for a ham fucking sandwich.

Luckily there were no colours involved. She’s insisted on white everything, though naturally the “right” kind of white, i.e., not too white. And like not chalky white. But like antique white. Don’t get me started.

On the bright side, her choice of a monochrome palette means that’s one less can ‘n’ string Skype call from an unairconditioned chemical warehouse in Takeo to discuss how to perfectly match and mix PMS 324 when all they’ve got is a container load of Jotun Tangerine Blast, some metal primer and a dirty old stick.

A small mercy though. Hubster and I have needed counselling over the still unfunny debacle that accompanied the installation of an exposed brick backsplash and waterproofing for the skylight. A vertiginous shitfight followed the fitting of a new balcony cage to avoid braining pedestrians with errant shrubbery. He went home to mum’s over the wood for the bar top. But eventually it all started looking like the “after” pix on Apartment Therapy. I even made a terrarium.

And just when we thought we could break out the moist towelettes, crack an ice-cold tinny and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, we discovered an alternate rat universe in the roof. Twenty-seven of the little bastards. Eating through newly laid wiring and pissing down that goddam skylight all over the freshly (white) painted drywall. It nearly sent us over the edge, and were it not for another family member’s timely intervention we may well have challenged each other to a duel down the shooting range. Good times.

Enter sister-in-law. A recent beauty school graduate and No. 5 in Hubster’s pantheon of seven handsome sibs, Sister is sweet and a little bit shy. She’s got flower pictures on her nails and terrific hair. But this rat fiasco revealed a hitherto unexercised facility for rodent annihilation – a steely backbone I suspect most Khmer women possess. She loves Bunster, and most other animals I’ve seen her with, but rats are a whole other can of verms. If the buggers are too wily or big for those Starckian cage traps that I want to make into a bedside lamp, out comes the glue on a plate. I’m not condoning. I’m just in horrified awe. Once those four-legged Typhoid Marys and their customary posse of enormous flying roaches hit the glug she spins them into a black plastic bag and dispatches them with one, decisive thwack of a foot-long two-by-four. Then she chucks the bags with their expired contents out into the skip.

I’m a bit scared, and also a bit proud. My sister knows I’ll get her home safely, no matter what. And it’s good to know that when rats shit down your skylight, you can count on family to have your back.

Crab sex goes on a lot longer than you’d think.

I admit I had no choice but to watch, Officer, but there was no tingle in my trunks this sunny A.M. I felt some objective admiration as those little critters went at it hammer and tongs on the plastic bag isthmus that passes for the Sihanoukville shore. It made a change from enjoying them tossed in a fingerlickin’ Kampot pepper sauce.

All the other crabs sat in a circle around les amoureux with their backs to the surprisingly vigorous action for privacy’s sake. I thought that was lovely of them. But I could only stare with purely scientific interest at those green-shelled hump-meisters – either that or burn my retinas to cinders glued to the exquisite buns of a coyly posturing devotchka trawling up and down the foreshore in a lime thong.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a peachy buttock as robustly as the next human. I myself have bounteous globes – back in my salad days I was a saucy burlesque with a penchant for the pole and my unequivocal rear assets meant a garter belt overflowing by dawn’s rosy crack. But there’s a time and a place for egregious Lycra cleft kecks, and on a public beach chockers with New Year families of every ilk, bending over to beachcomb in a co-polymer stringlet the size of Kaliningrad Oblast was not it.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful for a perfect sunkissed bum, or for nature’s jam packed cornucopia in general. Don’t get jealous, but as we speak I’m writing to you from an over-water cabana down on our patchy old south coast. It’s a breezy overcast morning. There are seafaring butterflies, silver fingerlings skipping away from some inept Korean tourists with half a million dollars worth of fishing equipment, a couple of lolling hornets that I got my one good eye on, and an unfeasibly fit Slavic couple with a rope-and-swing thing hanging from the rafters. I’m assuming it’s some new isometric Pilates workout but it might just be more Russians having sex. It’s always hard to tell. I’m impressed that they brought all their stuff with them though: they probably need to be that pumped to carry it all.

I thought a few days away from CharmingVille’s bustle and grit would help me blow away some life-muffling cobwebs and ponder my Goat Year resolutions with fewer distractions. Being a water rabbit, I love the sea, and Kep was fully booked, so while Hubster just gets on with it with nary a navel gaze, I’m here in this Onassian playground to take a good hard look at myself. I got some serious stuff to work out.

1. How to be kinder to people. The barking should stop.
2. Patience. Get me some. Right fucking now.
3. Perhaps it’s also time to get a proper job – a cube farm with a staff canteen and some kind of health plan that lets me drink the minibar dry in a luxury Bangers condo while I recover from increasingly urgent wattle surgery. Plus one can’t live on the miniscule compensation payout from last Easter’s tragic eyebrow incident forever. I’m down to my last furry 500 riel. Yes. A job might be something to consider.
4. Also, should I go back to my natural hair colour?

The tropical lullaby whispered by wavelets caressing the giant concrete octopus at the foot of the hotel garden has been most inspirational for these and many other ponderments. But I’ve turned to my internet for some of the answers that can’t be forecast by the intersecting lines of Sergey’s impressive six pack or counting the back hairs of the gold-toothed boozenik lights out and face down on the sand in front.

Apparently, terrariums are going to be super important for me in 2015. I like the look of macramé potholders too. There’ll be plenty of fruits. I’m urged on a couple of sites to curb my control freakery and delegate important tasks, or at least ask for help more often than I do. So instead of googling AskJeeves for a toothpaste recipe that’ll remove unsightly coffee and beetroot stains, I’ve made an appointment with my dental hygienist. I’ve given up on my self-styled exercise regime that counted my trips to the fridge as a “five second fat blaster” and enrolled in rope wars at the local gym. I’ve also enlisted the services of the tuk tuk guy who cleans our gutters. He happens to be a dab hand at wardrobe culling and has promised to do my colours. By June I should have nice white teeth, an even hotter body, and fewer but more important clothes.

The biggest change of the year will be for our pet. Bunster‘s days of squiring the chesterfield are over: he’s scheduled to get his bits done in the first quarter. Hubster’s not too happy about it but we tried a girlfriend and he just ran away. He might be gay, the Rabbit I mean, but I’m over his raiding my wardrobe and chewing the bejesus out of my black t-shirt collection. His hormone-fuelled sofa-rooting shoe-feasting days are so 2014. Like me, he’ll just have to get along without his damn biscuits.

Gird your loins, Pleasurers. Just because you’re in CharmingVille for the holidays doesn’t mean you get to miss out on polyester reindeer jumpers and Boney M. You’ve been here long enough to know you’ll take a day off on a boat-top wingding for far flimsier excuses than Lord Jesus’ big day (Paris Peace Accord booze cruise, anyone?). So dig up your dusty tree and sharpen your MasterCard, because it’s robot-snowman-playing-plastic-saxophone-fire-hazard season and there are only so many purple-glitter-pony door chimes that play Away In A Manger to go around.

If you miss out on those actual things, there’s plenty of other heartwarming Xmas-ish memories-in-the-making at this apparently sacred time of year. For sure there’ll be an awkward Secret Santa moment at work, like when you see the driver who got the joke Viagra sharing his blue candy down the car park with his chess buddies. Or that squirrelly chick from Accounts gives you a clock in the shape of a winking teddy bear wearing a festive sombrero that is obviously a regifted Aeon Club present-with-purchase with her phone number taped to the bottom. Just what you’ve always wanted.

Guaranteed there’ll be plenty of parties chockers with backpacking flimpets in babydoll elf drag if that’s your stein of glög. I’ve got a nice brandy ball recipe if you want one. Even you nay-saying Ebenezers grumping home alone will feel your cockles thawing at the sight of a copper in a Santa hat dinking his granny to the chicken shop or a pert-bottomed Wat Phnom temple lion sporting a fancy tinsel merkin. Our tropic hamlet is snowed with twisted Xmas cheer and useless yuletide tat created by those who have no clue for those of us who have everything. If you’re stuck for unique gifts I bet no one does a gold-spraypainted durian-shell manger with upcycled Psy action figure as sweet baby Jesus quite like the folks at Psar Kandal. You can practically taste the nog in the air down there. If you’re a god botherer, or even just a bit of a stickler for tradition, you might balk at IBC’s selection of Mickey-as-Messiah gift cards, but let’s be honest, none of us were there. Along with the shepherds and the donkeys and soforth, who’s to say there weren’t anthropomorphic singing mice?

Many of us either don’t know much or give two shits about Mary’s glabrous boychild, a.k.a. The Son Of God. If you’re a bit shy, cynical, or alternatively faithed, it might seem easiest to avoid the whole shebang. This can work if you’re clinically misanthropic, but anything less and come the 25th you’ll be no-mates sobbing into your yoghurt. Whatever yer ilk, don’t be a stranger to the other things that make this time of year strangely worthwhile, i.e. people. If at first you’re not feeling the twinkly glow of fairy lights and Home Alone marathons, I would still make the effort. My best suggestion is to find some Filipinos.

I know some and those krazy carollers celebrate the shit out of Christmas. If you’re out of luck in the Pinoy department, it won’t hurt to pony up for the turkey buffet brunch or the seafood boat-ride with the odd collection of mates and acquaintances you’ve collated BodeSide. Because, apart from a good reason to skive, making cheery times together is what it’s all about.

Even if it’s a little bit sad that your real kith and kin might be sharing hot toddies and a lame cracker joke 10,000 miles away without you, there’s always Skype. So put down those 27 vodkas, hush those tear-strings. You actually have your own little dysfunctional family of sorts right here in CharmingVille to help you make it through those not so merry FOMO moments. After all, that’s what friends, a felt-covered plastic-reindeer-with-flashing-red-eyes-and-a-peach-on-its-back, and a humongous box of sangria are for. Jingle on.

This time last week I was at Changi, kipping on a beferned slumberette in ‘The Sanctuary’, otherwise known as the arse-end of gate E5 near where they park the disabled golf carts. It wasn’t my first choice for a seven-hour transit bask waiting for my flight home to Charmingville. In the not-so-distant past, I was a bewheeled corporate hamster gainfully employed by a London consortium of pre-crisis profligates who had us all flying Business or – if you were a skilled lickspittle – First to PowerPoint training sessions in the Algarve. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. These days I kill time airside hoiking my crazed Russian Market wheelie bag round the Duty Free, pilfering eye-cream samples, taste-testing flavoured vodkas or going round and round on the Skytrain just for larfs.

So having scoffed my pocket-linted plane loot of breakfast rolls and mini milks from the last 12 hours aloft, I malingered in an $8 shower at the Traveller’s Lounge, then searched for one of those free foot-massage chairs. But my plans – to doze, earplugged and masked, in a fragrant fug of perfume testers while having my feet shiatsued gratis by a mechanical finger wizard – were thwarted at every turn. Bickering Chinese grannies in rhinestone Christmas knitwear with no socks on and way too much inexplicable hand luggage (salad spinner, jumbo pack of Pampers, beets) hogged every chair in the terminal. I eventually settled for the aforementioned garden nook, which had a view of the control tower framed by a massive moss ‘n’ orchid studded carved styrene sculpture of a glitter-spangled turtle couple holding hands and standing on their hind legs in a bed of weeping fig. Oh, Singapore. Anyway. Two of the contoured recliners were occupied by giggling Indian gents and a third by a ginger woman snoring like a walrus. She was only slightly louder than the tannoyed Kenny G, whose saccharine noodles have had me reaching for my sidearm on more than one occasion. Too jetlagged to give a shit, I settled in despite the aural distraction and the felonious garden art and soon drifted into a perfect, blissful snooze.

It was the best sleep I’d had since undertaking my stint as the only female person on the ill-fated MV Nanjing Pluck. Battered to death by an enraged polar wind, the old girl ran aground on an uncharted igneous atoll. I’m sure you saw it on the news. It was a life-threatening but not unwelcome diversion; every failed Murmansk-Spitsburgen Sturgeon Muster has a silver lining after all. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been stranded for 10 days on a volcanic outcrop surrounded by apocalyptic ocean with a crate of 100-proof aqvavit, 17 thumping great twentysomething Norwegian deckhands and a litre of rubbing alcohol, but there wasn’t much sleep for this little puffin, let me give you the tip.

Meanwhile, back in the Lion City’s vaunted aeronautical hub and coaxed into consciousness by the afternoon glare bouncing off those gigantic loved-up chelonians, I dragged myself and my flabby air-pillow off to the departure gate for the uneventful leg home.

After a rather invasive but not unpleasant Ebola screening at Pochentong, I hauled my souvenir meerschaum collection and vintage Minke harness through Customs to see The Hubster’s beam light up the arrivals breezeway. At first I thought he might be drunk – you’ll know by now he’s not the most demonstrative helpmeet in Love’s collection. But a month is a long time to spend with a relentlessly priapic rabbit and a broken fridge with the instructions in technical Dutch.

“I have a surprise for you, darling,” he gushed as we loaded up the aircon taxi – another first (I usually hail a tuk tuk and get home to find a ‘Gone to Mum’s’ note, which means he’s actually playing boules with a slurry of Phnom Penh’s finest, up to his eyepits in sangria cask). As I dumped my Nordic souvenirs in the hallway, he made me close my eyes and led me into the bedroom. Taking up space once reserved for our ancient round (don’t ask) Ikea nap sack was a brand new, king-sized Sealy Posturepedic. It would’ve cost an arm and a leg. Certainly a round trip to the Algarve flying Club Class. But with a bed like this, who needs lie-flat seats? I’m not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, unless you count the Land of Nod.

By the time you read this, I won’t be here. Hush now. I’m not ‘going to Belgium’. This Pchum Ben I’ve booked three weeks of Me-Time aboard a Liberia-registered beam trawler to join the infamous Murmansk-Spitsbergen sturgeon muster. It’s a notion I’ve been woolgathering since childhood: the sting of gale-smacked salt on my cheeks as I stuff them with snus. A hearty cod mulligan at the end of a long haul, whipped up by an avuncular yet somehow sexy ex-legionnaire with an uncanny resemblance to Jean Reno. Sat round the wireless whittling scrimshaw and listening to the shipping news with Ronnie, the bosun’s cat. Chunky cream cable knits. Lashings of rum. From the brochure I understand that my real-life shipboard adventure will be somewhat more taxing. On the MV Nanjing Pluck there’ll be just me, the doomcrack of icebergs calving as the polar caps melt us all to hell, and 18 trainee deckhands from Norway wearing thigh-high rubber wellingtons. So not much Me-Time, then.

In an effort to outfox impending midlife entropy I’ve embarked on a personal rewilding project that includes this jaunt to points North: I’m thrilled to my Stubings to be setting sail for the high seas. But my Life Partner isn’t as ecstatic about his first mate leaving CharmingVille for so long just to chow down on puffin or circumnavigate icy bollards or some such with a bunch of steam-breathing Yngwes. For the seven years we’ve been together, we’ve spent just two days apart. Actually I was watching TV and he was sleeping off a rice-wine bender in the next room and time got away from us.  But we’re having to think for three now that we’re saddled with our partially-abled furry albatross, The Bunster. So mainly because I’m bigger than him, my heart’s captain gets the short straw and stays behind to tend the needy Long John lagomorph. To help them make it through I’ve been up till sparrow’s, freezing 21 days worth of microwaveable casseroles, grown a pot of dill and there’s a case of Bombay Sapphire chilling in the vegetable crisper. Odds on neither will notice I’m gone till I’m back and unpacking 30 kilos of salted Minke cheeks on the lounge-room floor.

Hubster’s the strong silent type, with a romantic bone not instantly visible to the naked eye. I’ve come to accept empty vases on Valentine’s Day, though he does take out the bins every Tuesday night and I can’t say fairer than that. But I know my upcoming absence must be sinking in somewhat because for the very first time he suggested we overnight at Kep together. He even organised the car. Maybe I watch too much Law & Order – and I do; don’t judge me – but the suggestion of a romantic trip away was so out of character I looked for any concealed weaponry and/or the scent of bitter almonds in the curried-egg sandwiches he made for the trip down. All clear. Miracolo. So last weekend we left our furry faux child thrusting manfully at the chesterfield and eating his own poo and went to Kep for 24 hours.

Our driver, Lot, put up with an unacceptable number of shit jokes about his name once the license-plate game had palled. We managed the journey without hitting anything. Excellent. And then, voila, we’re there. The weather was rather dramatic, so we repaired to the relative shelter of a seaside crab temple.

Have you ever seen a windspoon? I never had until then. As my burly hammocked arse gently grazed the floorboards in a post-prandial nap-fest, I lapped in and out of a warm Angkor reverie, listening to the ardent bicker of two rambunctious geckos getting on each other’s tit-end in the palm-thicket roof above. Considering they’re really just tiny flesh tubes with no teeth (though admittedly supernatural suckery feet), those little buggers can wake a person right up. I was about to launch an immaculately Hoovered crab shell in their direction when I noticed a dirty old rice spoon tied to a bit of string under the eaves on the sea side.

We were all stumped, including Hubster, my erstwhile oracle of Cambodian-ness. The waitress said they protected against storms and calmed the wind. I don’t believe in that stuff, but admit it was quite blustery out – enough to blow the White Lady’s skirt right off her dimpled bum. In our little sea shanty, we remained fully clothed and unruffled. A while later we hauled ourselves into the Camry and headed for the hotel. Tucked away in my overnighter was my own personal windspoon, gifted me by the crab lady: a humble plastic talisman to protect me from whatever the Barents might have on its briny mind.

All aboard and see you soon, me hearties.

Who doesn’t love an old pile? If you’ve just flounced into Pochentong from one of those mid-year holidays, you might have eaten cake off a marble dolphin while gazing up Versailles’ frothy petticoats. That dreamboat Gaudi and his loopy landmarks were possibly on your summer To-Ogle list. Maybe you paid through the nose to lollop past Giza’s famous tetrahedrons on a stinking dromedary. The pipeystripey Pompidou might be more your bag, and you don’t have to be French or Tom Hanks to crack le Canon at les Pyramides. The Great Wall, the Grand Canal or even the comparatively medium-sized but still imposing Big Pineapple are worthy exemplars of humanity’s knack with a brick. And don’t get me started on the eye-watering erections in Petra, Atlantis (just testing), Kathmandu, MacchuPichu and everywhere Greco-Roman. Closer to home you’ve got yer luvverly big wats: Angkor, Bayon, Ta Prom and the regrettably underrated Wat Phnom. If you haven’t gone there early on a soft CharmingVille Sunday, I think you should. Totter up the easy back way, round by the museum (those front steps are a publicly humiliating myocardial infarction just waiting to happen.

My personal penchant, bricks ‘n’ mortar-wise, are the mainly public buildings with noble Sangkum bones that tremble on the brink of extinction with every ominous, pile-driven thud. I’m not the sharpest angle on the floorplan, but I know what I like and I like anything by that home-grown architectural alpha and omega Mister Vann MolyVann and his mid-century band of swingin’ draughters. His buildings are smart and considered and lyrical. Every wing and buttress is designed with so much care for us tropical humans and our hot, soggy surrounds as to seem empathic. His lecture halls at RUPP’s Faculty of Foreign Languages sit amidst venerable banyans, up on their haunches like elegant space-frogs. They have shutters like gills and voids on top and rain spouts that will help cool a building faster. To capture the light or not, as needed. To soothe and breathe with a pleasing spaciousness. Each of MolyVann’s remaining buildings is precisely crafted to serve complex demands – perfect for its purpose – meaningfully composed with dignified, elegant simplicity at precisely the sweet spot where natural law, practical need and sheer beauty get it on. They give me shivers.

Yet as this town’s philistines plumb mediocrity’s dumb fundament and the venal clamour grows for another preposterous Angry Bird Bank or monstrous blot on our riverine horizon, it seems that my favourite quietly cool, almost sentient structures are not long for this unlovely, unloveable, shoddy new landscape.

Which is why, every month or so, I collect on The Hubster’s doghouse points (he gets them for things like coming home pissed as a lord on the night we were ‘sposed to go to that Meta House thing. OK, so, fair play. But still). His penance is to help me prise open rusty gates, slash through poison ivy, wake hysterically barking dogs and tiptoe through an arse-ton of nameless ordure to snap away at little gems of architectural genius. Actually, in the case of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, we just walked through a freshly painted gate as the security guy tipped his fedora. But anyway.

So last Sunday, early, we went to the White Building, aka the Bodeng, designed by Lu Ban Hup and Vladimir Bodiansky and overseen by Mr V. It’s not the first time I’ve been inside. When the elections were on, our little mates in Law Enforcement wheeled out their spanking new razor wire and put up barricades between the side of town I live on and my work. After a bit of argy bargy with a succession of nadless tuk tuk drivers, I found my own way through: in one door, up the stairs, across the breezeways above the blockades and back down the other side. It was like Grand Central Station in there. They even had buskers and a stern old bird sitting in her doorway keeping things tight with her palm fan and a vicious, yappy little underbite on legs.

This last visit I could see how wide and long these dark corridors really are. At that time of day strips of light dazzle under east side doors like the alien arrival, the busy open breezeways cut with hard morning angles and shadows. You can feel your pupils dilate and contract over and over adjusting to the mad, relentless chiaroscuro. Some apartments were locked and shuttered, some people had just their grilles pulled across: kids watching TV, a lady sewing magenta cushions in a royal-blue room, a madhouse of arguments and one dim place with nothing but a solitary rooster crowing inside. Drop cloths and scaffolding stood near a wall swathed in fresh Tiffany blue. Murals and kids, little shops and monks paying visits, pregnant mums chit-chatting in doorways. And those damn yappy dogs.

Though I know there are dark stories inside, the life domestic triumphed on this sunny Sunday am. You applaud the tenacious foliage cascading from cracks three storeys up and ignore the shit piles in the odd derelict stairway. Though its face needs a damn good wash, the White Building’s heart beats strong and regular and it breathes in living, vibrant colour despite its name. The foundations seem as sturdy as any other living place in town. It was built for the long haul, but like Olympic Stadium and the 100 Houses and all the good people who have no place like home, it’s in for a fight. As I stood on the roof amid billows of freshly laundered kramas, I felt the Building’s roots, like toes in sand, burrow deeper, hanging on for dear life.