Byline: Ruby Smith

I love it when I can see that pouty bloke out of Game of Thrones strap on some sandals, oil-wrestle some muscly black guys, maybe ride a horse topless, have another fight this time with swords, have back-lit sex with a pert lass in a see-through nightie, and then get blown to kingdom come by a histrionic Italian mountain. I must have a sixth sense about these things because exactly that movie was playing at the mall last weekend.

Up front at the ticket counter a dad was whisper-shouting at his kids to act shorter and younger so they could share a seat. With three pre-teens to entertain, you can’t blame him for trying to save a few bucks. While he wheedled for a discount and dithered over row numbers, his Swensen’s-smeared male progeny viciously assaulted a life-size cardboard Robocop with their squeaker sandals. His little princess meanwhile stood akimbo in a Hello Kitty confirmation tutu and caterwauled at her brothers from three feet away, almost loud enough to drown out the noise of my grinding teeth. Certainly the dead were stirring. Passing shoppers smiled and laughed at those adorable tykes. I really wanted to pinch ‘em, which I know is probably wrong, and would have no doubt made things louder. But still. Instead I struggled to muster a half-arsed ‘benign indulgence’ face and dragged my X-ray death-stare from the cavorting demon spawn to the cashier’s touchscreen to see what heartwarming, family-friendly visual feast pops had planned.

Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m the wife and by some miracle the husband says: ‘Oh darling, let me take the kids off your hands this afternoon – we’ll go catch a nice movie to give you a bit of well-deserved ‘me’ time,’ I’m thinking they’ll be off to see some enchanted deer babies chatting with anthropomorphic insects or a charming penguin who can breakdance. At a pinch maybe a band of barely closeted single menfolk from mythical, culturally diverse backgrounds traipsing all over New Zealand looking for a fabulous ring. But the picture this parent had picked for his rambunctious offspring was a ghosty Thai terrorfest, complete with long wet hair over gouged eyesockets, institutional hallways with sickly flickering fluoros that reveal sphincter-twangling twin sister ghouls, lifts that are empty, empty, now not empty, empty, and holy fuck, don’t look up but that clickety click above your head is someone’s undead auntie scuttling crab-style across the ceiling.

This film looked particularly inappropriate for the under-tens because most of the characters, alive or beyond the grave, seemed all under ten. Except for the cackling spectre of a coal-eyed, gore-spewing 20-something in a blood-stabbed nightie. Oh, and the ever popular Arp, which is a pretty floating head with pulsing heart and entrails dangling by a skinless windpipe, and which everybody knows is a alive and well and materialising with pant-wetting frequency all over the Bodes. Even the vile little poppets gambolling next to me didn’t deserve a lifetime of the lights on after lights out.  Casper it wasn’t.

At home, Western wraiths keep pretty much to themselves. And unless we’re on a reality show or gothic, we generally avoid haunted houses and graveyards, especially at night. But here the supernatural, malignant and benign is, well, super natural. CharmingVille is spook city and everyone’s a believer.

There are the seven-day send-offs, hundred-day reminders and yearly revisitations. There are those meddlesome ghost toddlers who turn the taps on or bang the doors if you don’t bribe them with candy. No change there then. Just across the river and a tombstone’s throw from my in-laws, the neighbourhood phantom occasionally strolls past the pagoda and even buys a pastry. After he pays the vendor discovers the notes are fake. How anyone knows he is a ghost is beyond me, because apparently he looks like every other half-pissed bloke staggering home from the Bayon big screen. But anyway.

Back at our connubial HQ the dead are not only alive and well, they have expensive taste. One afternoon on my way home I met Hubster coming down the stairs. He had one of our good wedding platters, a bag of perfect mangos, a whole roast chicken and a bottle of chilled Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2012. He said it was for a haunted tree. Sure buddy. Where I’m from I’d give you 10 points for ingenuity but only after I’d run over your X-Box, keyed your car, and set everything else you own alight on the front lawn. But I’ve been here long enough to know that it really was for the massive banyan at the end of our street. I took back the plate and exchanged the wine for a can of root beer we got free from Sokimex. When in Rome.

 

I was on all fours in our kitchen yesterday. Not, as you might expect, reprising my erstwhile role as CharmingVille’s sauciest homemaker. I was arse-up, commando-crawling the underbelly of our jerry-built-ins to find the source of our interminable ant infestation and rout the little fuckers with extreme prejudice. This mission remains unaccomplished. Because instead I found a 15-inch steel bayonet in our Tupperware drawer. Maybe I watch too much History Channel but I knew straight away it was a sword-like stabbing blade, usually affixed to a rifle and intended to kill or maim during close-quarter combat, and not Björt, the elegant Starckian apple corer I threw in the trolley seven years ago while on a pear schnapps bender at IKEA Minsk. Disturbingly, one of these objects has been used, and we all know it wasn’t Björt. No one ever uses Björt.

Like every armchair rubbernecker, I read The Police Blotter. My first reaction was: ‘Holy shit I know I’m a battle-axe but this time I’ve pushed Hubster to the brink of emotional extinction with my relentless barb ‘n’ spat and now he’s going to extinct me for real with a couple of decisive pokes from a circa 1966 China-made pig sticker.’ Unsettled, I took a picture and Vibered him at work to see if this was on the cards. A rookie mistake, if one is to successfully elude a tether-end spouse with a massive shiv in his hand and murder on his mind. But still. A few tense seconds later he replied: “No. I heart you,” followed disconcertingly by one of those winky smiley faces. I remain alert.

Back in my antipodean motherland it’s not everyday you’re this close quarters with such offensive ordnance. Apart from youthful farmyard shenanigans with grandpa’s air rifle and the side of a barn, my brush with guns ‘n’ ammo has been mainly limited to winning a hideous octopus plushie at the 1992 Royal Show shooting gallery and watching my nephew play GTA5. Just the once I was instructed by an overseas teacher friend to dispose of something in a toolbox he’d asked me to store. He couldn’t tell me what it was over the phone. In my innocence I thought it might be exam answers or an embarrassing poem. It turned out to be a 9mm Ruger handgun loaded with a full clip but one. I squeaked with fear when it dropped out of its cloth wrapper and landed in my lap. As you would. I sat there for stunned minutes, frightened to move in case it went off. It took me eons to empty the bullets and carefully place them in separate saucepans, terrified they would somehow spontaneously explode. Unimaginatively I put the gun in my underwear drawer. Later in an empty VHS case. Still later in a shoe. And eventually in the hands of an officer of the law.

But here in the Bodes guns and shit are everywhere in plain sight. And not just with the Keystones on the corner or our TMNT mates bivouacked in Victory Park.

A few years ago a colleague returned the company Camry to the car park after a weekend down the coast. Knowing our workmate as we did, it surprised no one that the boot was aromatic with durian stink and the ashtray stuffed with well-sucked hand-rolled filters. There were lusty footprints on the ceiling. However, there was a bullet hole in the rear passenger pillar, which did raise a few eyebrows. I won’t go into that now.

And just last week, stuck in a schools-out mid-afternoon snarl in BKK1, I watched a spanking new black Lexus barge and honk and bully its way to the head of the line, ahead of patient parents and spit-polished kiddies. The lone passenger was a gormless pre-teen nose-miner. The plateless vehicle was flanked by four fat, black-safari-suited bodyguards, two to a moto like pigs on a circus trike. No one wore a joke ruffle, but one of them did have builder’s crack and two of them sported those laughable heelless slip-ons with the turned-up toes. I wanted to point and smirk. But I could only sneer on the inside. Because all four of them accessorised their ample muffin tops with chunky pistols poking grip out. That part wasn’t funny at all.

Even less funny is that the Type 56 fold-away bayonet sitting on my countertop is available on Amazon for $21.95. Luckily there is one less drunk tuk tuk driver in possession thereof, thanks to my bloke who brought it home for safety’s sake. Or so he says. As far as the gun it’s made for, everyman and his running dog has one in this neck of the woods. Blessed are the peacemakers.

This morning an iridescent boy dragonfly docked his slender bottom into the head of a predictably drab female of the species and fucked her brains out for about 10 minutes. I was afloat alone in the sparkly turquoise gym pool, tasteful whales mating on the outdoor speakers and birds chittering in the whispering palms. The sun was at my back.

Normally such a miraculous alignment of nature’s bounty would have me blubbing into my goggles with joy, but my tearstrings remained unpulled. No sexed-up insects could make me weep with the glory of Gaia’s oneness this sorry AM. It only made me resent the male dragonfly. Of course he’s prettier than her – he does nothing all day except eat, mate and titivate. Of course he gets to fuck her in the head. Creation invents some sick shit that doesn’t fit well with the feminist agenda. And, get this, he’s got six perfectly working legs but the arrogant little fucker does it all hands-free, for Attenborough’s sake! Meanwhile she’s supporting them both and once he’s got his admittedly tiny dragonfly jollies he swans off to the next poor nymph without a backward eye-swivel while she lays 100,000 kids and then her wings fall off or she dies within hours or whatevs, so who can blame her if she can’t be arsed to go out? Pff. This fine morning Nature called, but fucked if I was answering.

Foolishly optimistic, the universe pursued me with relentless eye candy in an attempt to divert my deepening sad sackery. Look! The serendipitous genius of a red chair leant against a turquoise generator! Regard! The flap of a hot orange robe against a weathered wood wall! Aha! Again with the sunburned nutter in the arseless denim chaps devouring a yellow mango! But neither an accidental act of visual artistry nor an inadvertently fashion-forward unfortunate had the power to colour me happy on my glum ride home across the rich tapestry we call CharmingVille. My heart remained eerily empty. There was even tumbleweed and some forlorn whistling. It could only be one thing.

Man trouble.

Whiny man-child trouble to be exact. Across the last week a succession of inexplicably ridiculous spats escalated to serious standoffs with three of my favourite, more youthful XYs: hubster, best friend and gym buddy. They left me sad, sleepless and lonely in the dark with all my lucky stars gone out. And since it had happened with all three, it must have been my fault. I began to cry with feeling, and not in an ‘I’m-high-on-life’ good kind of way. It wasn’t pretty.

Thank goddess for De La Gare. As I commanded the tuk tuk to head north-by-north-west to my favourite apothecary, I refreshed my shopping list by consulting Dr Google and arrived primed with a list of dos and dolls. Despite the youngest pharmacist wearing a Megadeth T-shirt, I put my order in.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for talking things through rationally and listening and understanding and letting go and compromise and using my inside voice and all that other important relationship shit but sometimes you just want everyone to stop being idiots, shut the fuck up and run you a bath. Failing that, nothing fixes you like prescription helpers OTC.

Years of abstinence, wagon riding, self-help books, crystals and a weird mushroom thing I grew in a fridge back in the ’90s have taught me something. In turbulent weather I always fly better with fuel in the tank. No gnomic Pinterest pith, religious text or full set of Thom Yorke lyrics gets me through a rough patch like a little cheeky something something. ‘Better living through chemistry’ is the mantra of my generation X after all. It was probably hormones from all provocateurs in this current little ménage a merde that got us here in the first place.

These days I avoid the illicit stuff. It makes me more paranoid and that’s saying something. So with Vic Rattlehead gurning from the chest of the white-coated 12-year-old serving me I calmly ticked off Zolpidem (sleep), Advil (post-cry headache), Murine (post-cry red eyes and post-Zolpidem wake-up), Nose Spray (ditto with the crying thing), Ventolin (anxiety, panic, too many puffs on the cig I have tucked away for moments like this), Omeprazole (reflux from not eating, smoking and all that crying), Xanax (um… well you never know). When the chips are down, and that’s not often these days, thanks to my favourite albeit currently feuding blokes, this will be bedtime chez moi this evening. As it always does, I’m sure everything will look brighter, maybe even iridescent, by the time I hit the pool tomorrow.

 

Rottweilers don’t give two fucks about fashion, which is lucky because at the pet shop on 163 they sell about 20 different styles of dog shoes and it’s all underarm-teacup-type sizes. It’s so hard to find stuff for the fuller figure in CharmingVille. But suck it up, Kaiser. That’s the Bodes all over when you’re a creature of size. Along with nanoscopic footwear for doglets you can get a weeny outfit and a matching clutch to put little Shitster in when you tire of him peeing down your kaftan at the next Meta House thing.

Apart from the canine clothes and accessories there’s little else for the rest of god’s creatures. Not a cat hat, lizard legging or beak warmer to be had for love or money. Snake belts are like hens’ teeth. I swung by there last weekend to purchase a tasteful merkin for my obscenely testicled rescue rabbit. He’s about 19 in human years with balls about the size of a 19-year-old human. Seriously. Those massive danglers are so completely out of proportion to the rest of his sorry physique that when they dropped I thought they were tumours and panic-Googled for an hour. Apparently it’s quite normal. But still. And he’s only got three working legs so his knackers just flap around in the atmosphere where a fourth leg would normally hide ‘em. I don’t judge him but it’s embarrassing when guests come over and Bunny’s just lying around, nuts out. They’re mesmerising and not in an attractive way. Plus he’s no oil painting – kind of a splotchy orange with hairless veiny ears and a mouth like a cat’s arse. So not the most attractive lagomorph on the block, then. It’s why we decided against a Facebook page.

He sniffs at any sun-warmed local market greens but devours crisper-fresh Bayon herbs. Coriander and dill are favourites. God help us if they’re out of season in Latvia or wherever they come from. On the weekend the crinkle of homecoming shopping bags has him skittering to meet us, trying his best at those vertical joy jumps that rabbit-nerds call ‘binkies’. On three legs he’s not Nadia Comaneci. He only drinks Evian.

Despite the massive gobbets, the ginger-no-mates pelt and the champagne tastes, he’s quieter than kids and watches American Idol tucked up in my armpit, nibbling imported gluten-free muesli and Arnott’s water crackers. He grooms our furniture, which saves me half an hour dusting. He likes to host the occasional rice knees-up on the balcony for his chittering sparrow mates. He’s a literal party animal.

Most entertainingly he grimly and regularly fucks anything that doesn’t move. This could be a chair leg or an actual leg. Rabbits do have sex faces. They are eerily familiar. On frenzied completion he’ll swoon dramatically and wake up seconds later as if nothing had happened. Pff. No surprise since 94% of our genes rabbits also have.

And if the arsehole neighbour comes to our door muttering and unlocking his service revolver, Bunster bravely thumps the bejesus out of his solitary hindquarter to let us know shit’s going down. I don’t know how he knows it’s him and not the man with the water bill. Bunny is an actual pet detective with x-ray vision and supernatural powers. He may be a libidinous, unattractive three-legged Paul the Octopus, but I wuvs him.

Committing to a companion animal other than your other half is as strangely liberating and transformative as it is comforting. I stopped worrying about life being so much better somewhere I wasn’t. A little furry mate turns a transient stop in an alien land into a feel-good place to call forever home. I’m heartwarmed to see more and more foreign pet lovers here in CharmingVille. And not just the good folk who liberate bestringed kittens dancing for the tourist dollar at Wat Ounalom, or rescue wormy street puppies from a terminal game of chicken with the oncoming traffic (bless you everyone, by the way).

When I’m wondering what the fuck I’m doing here, I see some hot new bloke taking his beagle to the shops in a tuk tuk, or a French chick gamely dragging up and down Riverside on the end of a standard poodle. I’m not alone in my choice of one-horse hometown. CharmingVille is the cat’s pyjamas after all.

 

A giant flesh-crazed centipede viciously assaulted my mother-in-law. Hubster rang in a panic. “An animal like a snake but with plenty of feet” had crawled up her leg while she was gardening. Wielding her trusty machete she’d tried to flick the thing off, but the angry brute sunk its fat fangs gum deep.

I was born in that antipodean vipers’ nest otherwise known as Australia – a pitiless bastion of murderous fauna, where super-smart, venomous, heat-seeking arthropods and plagues of ill-conceived animalia are Hell-bent on relieving you of life and/or limb, or at the very least giving you a nasty bite. Having koalas and baby wombats comes nowhere near to making up for all the hideous shitty creatures we have to put up with. There are people far more qualified than me to give you the lowdown on our creeping pantheon of death. Some people even like them. Steve Irwin could tell you all about it. Oh, wait. He was stabbed in the heart by an ungrateful stingray.

Despite their deadly reputation, Australia’s bugs are generally elegantly built and usually reclusive. They look nice in a Perspex paperweight or the gear knob of a Monaro HT. If you poke ‘em or forget to check your shoes, of course they’ll get you. But with few exceptions they seldom attack unprovoked.

So I’m no fan of insects and shit but if I’m feeling righteous I do save errant bees, earthworms and skinks from the gym pool of a balmy Bodes morning. I’ve hooked a massive rhino beetle out with a stick. I’ve even given an overinflated toad miniature CPR, with my finger wrapped in a leaf. But have you seen those ghastly vinegaroons? Gothic matte-black whip scorpions with stingers like toothpicks and pincers that could drag a baby right out of a tent. I draw the line at these freaks. They can fucken well drown. Oh shit. They can swim.

There are those big black bumbling bees that love the smell of Elnett in the morning. If you’ve seen how high I like my hair you’ll know why I’ve got my own swarm. They have massive stingers but aren’t that smart. You can trick them by waving your arms around and running away.

Here, cockroaches suck the biggest of all. They are the worst. They chase you, or – help me, Jesus – fly at you. Sure they don’t bite, but their scuttling filthiness makes me squeal like a little girl and phone for help from atop the nearest chair. One can of Mortien is never enough for those disgusting bastards.

Although related to lobsters, Cambodian centipedes are not delicious flame-grilled with a lime aioli on the side. I don’t know if you’ve seen one but they’re scary as fuck. Eight inches of red pointy aggression heading straight for you at speed. For once, this is not a good thing. According to Wikipedia, once they’ve stabbed you they ‘cut away at their prey’ with their ‘forcipules’. Fucken hell. This mother was hanging off mum’s leg. She must have been terrified.

She eventually kicked that devil’s spawn to the kerb and made it to the village healer who put a poultice on it. Three hours later she was prostrate in pain and I got the call from my lifemate. This wasn’t at all funny, or even a bit interesting like when they put a tarantula and a scorpion together in an episode of Japanese Bugfight. Mum’s leg had swollen and by the time we got her to a foreign clinic in CharmingVille she was barely conscious in agony.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re at the doctors and they keep you waiting for three hours even though you feel like shit or you’ve broke something and just 10 minutes of their care and some basic medication would fix everything and totally justify their fucking obscene bill at the end of it?

But never mind. I sat trawling the internet and seething loudly while Ma lay shivering in shock. Dr Google prescribed a codeine tablet and an icepack. Which is exactly what the lip-smacking-post-5pm-snack-returnee-cum-intern prescribed for her, two hours and 57 minutes later.

Like everyone, I’ve given crickets a try and sucked the hair off a spider leg for a YouTube video. Sometimes I guess it’s just payback time in bugland. Watch where you put your feet.

 

Trainer: OK, do 30 more now. Let’s go.

Me: You’re fucking joking me.

Trainer: Me, I am not joking. Come on. 10. Then 10. Then 10. Let’s go.

Me: But my back hurts and my vestigial tail is killing me.

Trainer: Let’s go. If you do them I will buy you a cow.

I thought he said: ‘I will buy you a car.’ I don’t know a) why I thought that was even true, or b) why it spurred me to grunt through those mothers like there was a brand spanking Lexus ticking over in the forecourt. And I don’t even want a car. If I had to choose, the cow would win. A big, creamy Cambodian cow. I could ride it freestyle, or tie a little cart on the back and nip off to Lucky or down the beach, as per the Lexus. Maybe ‘nip’ is ambitious. But still. And I could write COW in big letters on the side.

Neither beast materialised, but I was barely disappointed. To have sat up 50 times in a row was a fucking miracle. I’m a born horizontalist with a bacchanalian monkey on my back and, since the dawn of time, I’ve been enslaved by many an insidious menu item, including a homemade cheesecake jones that has generously furnished convex abs and an arse the size of a milking shed.  I’m that dessert’s bitch.

I’ve enabled myself into waddling middle age with whoppers like: ‘Cheesecake helps reduce the risk of osteoporosis.’ A silvery glimmer of Philadelphia in the Bayon dairy cabinet and my breath catches, my pupils dilate and chit-chatting trolley-pushing Parent Networkers should Get. Out. My. Fucken. Way.

I thought I was doing alright. Gym thrice a week and I’ve cut out those deep-fried banana snacks pushed on every street corner. I’ve been rising at sparrow’s to puff up and down Riverside in a singlet and Lycra pants even. I tried those exercise machines, by the way. They were all broken before I went on them, Officer. And then this last Australia Day I caved. A smug gwynethy kale expedition ended in a mammoth spoon-licking, crumb-sucking debauch behind closed doors, thanks to an innocent email greeting from my unscrupulous parents which contained an heirloom recipe from my Auntie Evie.

Before marrying rich, my mother’s elder sister was a spectacular cook and remained so until dementia made off with her recipes. In her heyday Evie was a stick-thin, glamorous, twice-married fashionista whose home, amidst the mustard carpets and avocado appliances of her neighbours, dazzled like a lonesome, wayfaring snowfield: Antarctic white from its knee-deep wall-to-wall plush pile to the sparkling sanitaryware you could just about eat dinner off. Unlike my sister and I, bolshy preteen heathens both, her children had spit-plastered hair and exquisite manners. Cousin Becky had a full Bo Peep mini cooking set. Cousin Roger wore an elasticated necktie to breakfast. The kitchen was Evie’s spotless domain. She wore heels and ironed aprons and ruled it like a culinary Nurse Ratchett. She scared us filthy little hippies shitless, but her cheesecake was legend.

At home here, with the blinds drawn in our shabby chic-less kitchen in the heart of CharmingVille, I baked the best cheesecake I ever tasted, which was all of it. It was a culinary masterpiece.

Gorging on my creamy, lemony nemesis took two hours of a fight with Cellcard Customer Service and the tail end of an Animal Hoarders episode (no cows, but 129 cats crapping all over).

And now I fear the floodgates have opened: all the things I love to eat are ambling home to graze. The new Burger King in BKK1 is just asking for trouble. It’s like Beelzebub, dressed as Channing Tatum, has walked up to me at a party full of Victoria’s Secret models and told me I am the most beautiful girl in the world and that everything will be OK if I just lay down in his arms. I know he’s the devil incarnate, but how can I resist The Tater?

 

Usually I shun any event en plein air, especially those that involve sitting next to massive speaker stacks in someone’s yard wearing my only dress, a lot of make-up and grinning desperately at strangers. I’m dog’s balls and I know it. I’ve tried to fit in by hand-dancing round the fruit display but my face goes red. Cool, slim, pretty girls in spangly dresses don’t mean to be mean but make it worse: ‘Wow, your face is really red!’ If old people are invited there’s usually a lot of polite sitting on wood and my knees are fucked from spending too much time on them in the ’90s. Plus there’s duck-web salad.

But the weather has been so fat-friendly lately; even I’ve succumbed to the whispering lure of a breezy day out with remote family members in bucolic settings. The unseasonal cool has lulled me into a perspiration-free figment. I imagine twinned bluebirds fluttering past bearing trays of glacial mimosas. I’ll miraculously understand Khmer, or there’ll at least be smatterings of convivial backslappery in my mother tongue. With down-soft, tickless puppies gambolling at my feet and the scent of sun-warmed limes wafting past my marshmallow chaise, hope springs eternal that there’ll be something nice to eat.

One recent and delightfully temperate CharmingVille Sunday I put a cardigan over my pyjamas and accompanied husband to his fri’s place on Cow Island for a bev or two hundred thousand. I call it Cow Island. It’s not really an island, but you get there by ferry and there’s a bunch of cows there. There’s a couple of giant concrete prawns guarding a wat, and a charming lad with a monkey on his shoulder walking down the main drag. French or not, you should go there if you like riding a bike with a picnic in the front basket.

They’d put on a real spread and the knees-up was in full hammer by the time we arrived. There were no speakers, which augured well. The all-bloke party had assumed the position: cross-legged on the daybed under the house with t-shirts rolled to underboob and tube ice tonged into glasses after every second ‘cheers’.  In mid cavort, rosy cheeked and shiny, the fellows invited me to dig in.

The scales dropped from my eyes at once. There were portly rats – roasted inflatably plump with little stick legs at each corner. Actually they looked quite good. But, still, they were rats.

To be polite I put a tiny bit in my mouth. I don’t know which bit it was and I’ve had worse things in there (I think I alluded to this in an earlier paragraph). But nothing chases a rat better than a whole can of warm Klang. There was also a dark, goat-like chunk on a plate.

Me: “Darling, what kind of meat is that?”

Darling (carefully): “It’s an animal from the forest, but I’m not sure what it’s called in English.”

Giggling succubus sitting next to me: “Woof! Woof!”

Hysterical guffaws all round, except for husband, who could see where this might lead. His genius ruse in tatters thanks to the feckless pillock next to me, hubster watched keenly for signs of dummy spit. I do not chow down on puppies and I would never eat bushmeat. Would I up sticks for an early exit and the seething ferry standoff home? Just for once, could I ignore the little poppet’s whole roast head in a pot, his rictus underbite snarling defiantly up at me, pissed off but yapless? Perhaps it was the sniff of cowpat commingled with barbecue and jasmine that moved me to stay. Or my husband’s big, brown, pleading eyes. I made a cushion of my cardigan and poked at the mixed pickle salad. Dog is $3.75 a kilo at the market, in case you were wondering. Sokapeap l’or.

 

“What’s the haps?” asks my tousled, recently pleasured 20-something housemate as she stumbles from bed and fridge hangs, poking for treats. I’m deleting last night’s filthiest Instagrams and rehydrating with a tremendous bloody mary. There’s fresh coffee, lashings of Royal D and the AC’s cranked to ice planet Hoth. Jenna* is wearing nothing but a manshirt and panda eyes. Thank you, God. Even after her signature ‘U Care Cocktail’ – 13 Jagerbombs and a cheeky zolpidem chaser – and three hours’ Pon-twerking on the two Korean missionaries now lights out and wuffling on the couch, this self-confessed ‘slert’ looks fresh as a kitten.

“Parpcorn! Advil!” she croaks adorably in American, just as our resident ebony/ivory man-child chick magnets, Pavel and Ben**, slap in naked from the pool. We found them in Lucky Soriya loading up on ramen and Red Bull to take back to their egregious $6 guest house. I say something droll and fabulous, honeybadger cool despite their dowsing tonks. Group hugs. The turquoise pool twinkles through the patio palms. I sigh. Oh, yes, these are my beautiful friends. But this is not my beautiful house. This is my sitcom dream pad.

It’s 10 years since I shared a dwelling with someone other than my significant other. I’m now comfortably domiciled in a rejigged 18×4 in the heart of CharmingVille with bloke, pet and, in a nod to cross-cultural connubial compromise, a bunch of sticks fermenting in a wee-like but apparently drinkable liquid on our balcony. It’s a man thing (I’m told). Despite this and other inexplicable personal habits that dare not speak their names, there are perks to monogamous cohabitation. Like waking up next to someone whose name I remember (Jenna wasn’t the only slert around these parts). It’s also nice to have someone to hold your hair back in the most undignified moments, or pull it a little bit during the other ones. But the grass is always greener for those of us fenced in, hitched-up malcontents, and it’s not cheating to indulge in some free-for-all sitcom housery daydreaming.

As I salivate through pool-villa porn on Bong Thom, or tut tut enviously at footloose friends’ Jack-juiced war stories down 136, I sometimes hanker for the heady single sleaze of Lakeside before the ’dozers, or skinny dips in BKK before the betrothal. Pontoon was still an actual pontoon. Thanks to a contemporaneous shitload of happy pizza, my rose-coloured memory screens images of sweet-smelling wayfarers with walnut-cracker arses and Fibonacci dimensions who fell like Parkway ninepins for my potent charms. Like my sitcom dream roomies, these travelling phantasms came for a night and stayed for months, generously sharing their NGO pay cheques and picking up their towels. OK, so, no one actually did that. But spare an old Digger, wouldja?

So while the perfect share house is off my personal shopping list, Phnom Penh’s cheap rents mean there’s no need for you to inhabit a rattan-filled underwater pineapple or squat-share with a bunch of harem-panted students who put their names on their tofu. Throw a bagel from any Browns and you’ll hit a vacant pool villa aching to be desecrated by hot Norwegians in Miley bear costumes. If you get sick of them, they’ll be gone soon anyway.  The ever-changing human scenery in our town means we’re chockers with Spanish Schmidts, French Joeys and Bolivian Vyvyans. Just turn on your Tinder and see what I mean. Near you right now there may be a) someone you know really well who’s married with kids; b) a white rasta who likes to ‘vibe with the tribe’, or c) a like-minded nowhereian looking for a place to lay his or her hat.

*Her real name
**Not their real names

 

I usually love a man in uniform. I’m a democratic regalia ogler: chefs, firefighters, zookeepers, bikie gangs and Captain Kirk. Throw in those smoking hot priests from the 2014 Vatican Calendar. I hanker for scrubs, white coats, chaps and strips, busbies, bellbottoms and blokes dressed up as singing chipmunks. There’s a wing of hot doormen in ridiculous hats at Naga. And don’t get me started on pilots. Changi Airport is my crack.

So you’d think in law-abiding CharmingVille, where there are so many more cop-like enforcers than there are actual laws, I’d be happy as a pig in shit. But I like my blokes burly. And at least able to run for a bus, if we had them. And sober. Those Asahi police boxes were a poor, though hilarious, PR choice.

Plus I’m not a lover of big guns, unless they’re perched atop the arms of Channing Tatum and he’s handcuffing me in a holding cell while I struggle bravely. Weaponry and ordnance are a little bit sexy intellectually, but mainly not in real life. Even liquored up, paintball hurts. And I’ve seen those tuk tuk ads for the shooting range. I just ain’t got the cojones to stand next to a bunch of rheum-eyed Balkan sexpats on a yabba lark waving loaded AK47s. Plus you have to wear those ridiculous earmuffs pre-moistened with someone else’s hangover sweat.

Laser tag at Kid’s City is fun after a few quick bevs down the Golden Mile. But with the traffic how it is since Freedom Park became a blockbusting soap-box suburb and the fact that these days you might actually get shot by an overzealous 12-year-old Glock-wielding ‘crowd controller’, I reckon it’s just safer – and sexier – to lock yourself in, load up on the snake snacks and ride along to One Police Plaza for some virtual GBH with – dun dun DUNNNN – the body cocking, head-tilting, suit-sweating, crime-busting bear-man that is Detective Robert Goren of Law & Order’s NYPD.

Bobby. Oh, Bobby. My afternoon detective. My grizzled, wounded shambler. I crave your pigeon-toed ponderings, your ever-so-slight buckyness, your off-the-rack shab. No beKevlared GRK stirs me the way you do when you’re protecting and serving. Fearful witnesses respond to your assured older manliness and sensitive winkling. Persons of interest are becalmed by your meandering bumble as you circle your prey, closer and closer…

And then BANG! That nose-to-perp booyah moment: the brooding incandescence that flares and explodes, complete with a little bit of Stanislavski spit, once every three or four episodes. “How do you like them apples, motherfucker?!!” I shout inside my head, snake snacks awry, as the smug ne’er-do-well unravels before Bobby’s super-shaggy physical magnetism and mad dot-joining skillz. I know it’s gonna end this way. It always does. But it’s hotter than my top-hot Banderas/Pitt dungeon scene three-quarters of the way through Interview With A Vampire, and that’s super hot. But I digress…

Turn on the TV any weekday morning and you can see the local ‘news’:- his ‘n’ hers hosts, flanked by feminine wash and muscle wine product placement, giggling over a parade of terrified sex workers being hauled off to some hellhole by grinning plain-clothed coplets and bespangled brass.  Meanwhile, in CharmingVille’s war on crime, the worst criminal offenders are rarely pursued by the detectives of the major case squad (some would say they’re one and the same). In uniform or undercover, where’s Bobby Goren when you need him?

 

On the way home from the pub this afternoon I saw a 20-something couple spit-deep in a whisper fight on 178. They were impossibly shiny, possibly Scandinavian, obviously mad as Odin. I was giddy with joy. Me and the hubster altercate like two cats in a bin bag. In rare moments of self reflection I Google ‘checkerboard romance’, ‘mixed marriages’, ‘doomed to failure’. Seeing the elven Agnetha and Bjorn hissing hammer and tongs was most reassuring. If they’re having problems, there’s hope for the rest of us.

The smallest things get our goats. In the case of our connubial HQ in the heart of CharmingVille, it’s the family of rat children living inside our couch. They’re noisy little fuckers and the means of their imminent demise is a bone of contention we gnaw with gusto. I’m ashamed to say I’m a first-world coward. By that I mean I want him to do it, which is hardly fair. We don’t have kids so we can’t delegate the task. For the moment it’s rats 7, us 0.

Our cross-cultural shitfights don’t stop with pest control. There’s the ever popular ‘Please stop giving our money to strangers at their weddings.’ Every few weeks when I’m out on the piss and come back with some bawdy Instagrams, it’s ‘What’s wrong with two girls kissing?’ But ‘Honey, it’s a barang thing’ just doesn’t seem to cut it.

And don’t get me started on, do I HAVE to say it ONE more time, the fucking barbecued snakes in the crisper. I’m a flexitarian. It’s not that the things are tubes of dead meat. It’s that they’re fucking snakes. Next I’ll be reaching for the Vegemite and there’ll be owl tots in the freezer, or a wing of spiders holed up in the egg compartment. Oh… Wait…

Given my love of the spat, I’m sure my hubby hankers for a bit of single shoosh away from the bickering shrew he hitched his life wagon to. Despite his stoic demeanour, he occasionally cracks. When he’s really had it with the old ball and chain he’ll stalk out and stay there till sparrow’s fart, then stagger home wreathed in booze-reek and snuggle up with cha cha cha on the box. Which makes me want to barney even harder. How is it young Cambodians with their whole lives ahead of them enjoy repetitive hand dancing to tone-deaf lounge crooners and drippy, ersatz ’50s American music?! Honey? HONEY?

Though I said ‘I do’ with the fervour that only another unwed cougar-on-the-cusp will understand, even I occasionally daydream about nirvana on the other side of the nuptial fence. Like, how Channing Tatum could finally come over in his gimp outfit without having to answer any awkward questions and we would sit up in bed, watch New Girl and drink cups of tea.

I’m possibly making our multi-cultural mismatch sound worse than it really is. Or not. But we rub along in our own way, clinging to the odd peaceful date minute together.  Just a tip, a tuk tuk ride to Takmao Wildlife Sanctuary is not one of them. Rather, I can highly recommend a breezy breakfast moto cuddle with your other half to #26 Street 108. Because the best part of fighting is the make-up noodles. Nothing says I’m sorry like a bowl of steaming hot pig organs.