Chapter Seven

The rattling was everywhere. I could feel it in my bones, my teeth, my hair, my ears. Any bumpier, I’d have spontaneously shattered like an opera singer’s glass.

And it wasn’t just me. The vibrations were being passed on to the coffins as well, which kept moving as long as the truck was in motion. Fortunately, they were too heavy to be flung about (like I might have been if I had not managed to hold on firmly to one of the side panels), but they did change position with each little jangle or shake of the truck, and it was disconcerting to see the trio of caskets edging themselves closer, sandwiching me between them and the rear wall of the bed. They hadn’t been tethered or roped into place, and had their wood chipping off in bits and parts, which made me wonder about the quality of the specimen that had been submitted to our house a little while ago.

It didn’t help that the back of the truck was extremely noisy and chokingly fume-filled; the first cloud of smoke the truck had let out had clearly not been the last of the vehicle’s expulsions, and its foul releases continued to creep in from underneath the tarpaulin. My eyes constantly watered, and I had to snort away all the mucus building up in my nose every few minutes. I figured the men in front wouldn’t be able to hear me through all noise the truck itself was making, so I didn’t care to hold back. To make things even worse though, my motion sickness had kicked in again. It was a little better than how I felt while reading in a moving car, but that spinning sensation was beginning to grow ominously in my gut and in my head. I knew that once it had started, it would be a while before the feeling stopped or even eased off a bit. All I could do now was close my eyes tightly shut and hope that this was as bad as it was going to get.

Now, a typical drive from my uncle’s house to Badir, in the absence of heavy traffic, would probably have taken a good twenty minutes. I opened my eyes to glance at Kevin’s phone and took note: it was half an hour since the truck had left the house, and there was no indication of stopping as yet. The truck hadn’t been making any major turns either, and there were plenty of cars passing us by, so we were probably still on the main road. Where exactly we were headed, I hadn’t the faintest, but it increasingly looked like it wasn’t Badir. There were other coffins inside the truck, so it seemed likely that these men would have a few more deliveries to make before returning to their home base.

The truck suddenly jerked to the right with a shrill screech of its tyres before coming to a complete stop, and the loud bursts of horns from the vehicles behind us blasted into my ears. I lost my grip and was thrown backwards; the sound was undeniably loud enough to reach the front, but hopefully the men were assuming it to be from one of the coffins tossing about. As I rubbed my sore elbow, I heard an engine rev up on the truck’s left. “Hoi! Kalantit! Kau punya palir!” barked the pink-shirted man from the front of the truck. Whatever vehicle had being trying to cut into our path zoomed off, but not before letting out a new cloud of smog in our direction. I almost gave myself away by breaking into a coughing fit, then buried my face into my sleeve just in time and choked it down as best I could.

The truck began moving again, slowly picking up pace, and I stretched out all my limbs like a spider, using each one to grab or press on to any available surface I could find, including the coffins. One of them, a rectangular light-brown model, had slid in towards me; it was still aligned more or less along the length of the truck bed, but had been pushed in so close that I could barely extend both of my elbows outwards at the same time, wedged in as I was and getting forced slowly into a tighter, narrower squeeze.

Before I could get comfortable with my new position, the truck started making a few winding turns, moving on to considerably rockier ground in the process. I realised that we had finally veered off the main road and felt relieved that we were probably getting closer to our destination. My relief rapidly turned to agony, however, when the vibrating that I’d just about got used to tripled-over in intensity as the truck rattled on along the rougher roads, and soon even the sound of my breathing came off like the buzzing of a horde of angry bees. The coffins, likewise, shook even more and made larger jumps, inching closer and closer and wedging me against the wall. I gritted my teeth and clenched my eyelids shut more tightly, but I knew that was hardly going to help. The first solid waves of proper nausea began rolling across my stomach and towards my throat, and I began to make small, intermittent burps.

The truck finally began to slow down, and the sounds of traffic I had been hearing around me all along faded out to almost complete silence. The tyres sloshed against the ground beneath us, and then the truck rolled to a stop. I heard the two men at the front of the truck open their doors, followed by the guy in the pink shirt barking out an order: “Hey, Ricky! Take off the cover and help them take out 235B!”

The words chilled me to my bones, as did the sound of the men stepping out and onto the ground. I had to think fast. There was no escape out of the truck, and there was no rational explanation I could give them about why I was hitching a ride with their precious cargo. One of them, presumably Ricky the driver, was fast approaching me; any closer and he would be able to hear me moving underneath the tarpaulin. There was only one thing I could do, and I jumped straight into it without a second thought.

There were three coffins available for me to choose from, and only one would be unloaded by the men. Which one was 235B? There was no time to look for numbers or codes. I had to act quickly. The light brown one that had been displaced the most during the drive, nearly squashing me flat as a result, was the nearest one within my reach, and also looked the least heavy of all. I prised open the lid (which was a lot weightier than anticipated but just about manageable) and shot straight inside the coffin, pressing myself against the white, cushioned interior and closing shut the casket after me, hoping with all my might that my hiding place wasn’t 235B.

The driver climbed onto the truck bed almost as soon as I’d made my move. I heard the muffled sounds of him grabbing on to the handles of the coffin I was lying in, and then I felt the sensation of being dragged across the truck bed. Shit! This was it. He was going to take this coffin out of the truck, and I would be caught out in front of a grieving family, and they’d all find me lying there, looking stupid and scared. I started desperately coming up with a number of excuses to give them as to how I got inside the coffin, while also considering the option of making a break for it the instant the lid came off. I’d have the element of surprise, I reasoned, and this might help make up for my uselessness as a speed-runner.

Fortunately, the need for that never came to pass. The shifting halted before I was moved out of the truck completely, and instead, I felt another person clamber up onto the bed to drag out one of the other coffins. I relaxed.

It was pretty warm inside the coffin, and the cushions weren’t exactly the most comfortable to lie on, but there was plenty of room for me and it was almost 100% soundproof – it felt much better in here than the noisy rattling of the truck bed outside.

Perhaps, I should just stay in here, I considered. I brought out Kevin’s phone to light up the interior of my coffin: nothing but white cushion everywhere, including overhead, lining the lid. This might just be the last thing I would ever see, I thought suddenly, on the off chance that I couldn’t get out and was buried alive in here. My mouth went dry, and I didn’t feel very comfortable anymore. I had to get out of the coffin as soon as I could. Some minutes later, the hum of the truck’s engine revved back to life, and we headed off again, although I still didn’t know where exactly we were going. I waited until I was confident that the vehicle was well on its way, and then I gently pushed the lid off, stepping back out onto the truck bed.

The tarpaulin has been re-draped but not secured properly, and it was left wide open at the back where I was, a couple of feet from the truck’s rear. As I scrambled out, I noticed that a white sports car was tailing us quite closely, and it seemed for a moment that its driver would see me and my game would be up. But then I saw that the man driving the car was too busy texting on his phone to be paying attention to the road or to the boy standing on the truck bed right in front of him. I rushed to grab on to the free end of the sheet while I had the chance, pulling it down just as his eyes flicked forwards, and managing to catch a brief glimpse of him tossing his phone into the back of the car in shock and jumping up in his seat violently enough to knock his head on the car roof before I was fully covered once more, and out of sight from the outside world.

Hopefully, this was my last near-miss, I thought to myself, curling back down against the side of the truck’s bed, and feeling the adrenaline rush from all the recent excitement ebb away, only to be replaced again by the rather familiar feeling of motion sickness that was threatening to make me puke my guts out. It was just my luck that the only cure for it seemed the prospect of a near-death experience or some such. Regardless, I started trying to think about how I would make my way to Badir. The phone provided a sobering wake-up present: it was 11.15, over an hour into my journey. We could’ve been almost anywhere in Brunei right now, and almost certainly not anywhere near where I was meant to be. The bleakness of the situation was dawning on me the further we kept driving. Was the truck even going to Badir? What if it was taking me in the opposite direction? And even if it did end up in Badir, how long would it take for us to get there? How I wished I’d brought along something for luck, like my trusty G2 black pen. That would surely have offered some protection against the gods of misfortune.

The truck slowed down and turned to the left, again moving over an uneven earthen track. Like before, the increased bumpiness made my motion-sickness skyrocket in intensity. One way or another, it was time for me to make an exit, before I got any further away from Badir, and before the nausea could kill me by either making me vomit out my organs or making my head explode. Perhaps both at the same time; it was that bad.

But how was I going to walk out of the truck unnoticed?

We come to a stop, and the men climbed out. There was no detectable chatter this time around, but I did hear the sounds of someone approaching the truck bed, so I scurried back into the brown coffin. This time, the urgency of the moment did not help alleviate the problem rumbling in my stomach, and a salty-sour taste began to grow at the back of my throat. Vomiting was imminent, and it was going to be inside this small space.

No! I had to resist, or at least avoid doing it in there. I clamped both hands over my mouth and focused hard on mentally pushing down what was rising back. I was salivating profusely now, and beginning to feel that telltale gagging at the back of my throat. At the same time, I managed to catch the faint sounds of the tarpaulin being unravelled, but I was now past worrying about being discovered. Throwing up in three, two, one …

With an almighty retch, I gave in and let it all out onto the coffin’s interior. Almost disappointingly, there didn’t seem to be that much to expel; I’d only had half a sandwich for breakfast and a glass of water. Most of it was the saliva that had been pooling in my mouth, and I could feel a generous amount of residual drool dribbling down my lip. Instinctively, I brought a sleeve up to wipe it away, but then changed my mind and instead rubbed my mouth against the coffin’s lining closest to my face. It was already soiled so a little more wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Having a good hurl had greatly relieved my nausea, but after coming to my senses, I realised that the unpleasantness was not over. The men had not done anything about the coffins since removing the cover. I was in the dark, quite literally, as to what was going on outside and how much longer I could afford to remain inside the coffin. Add to that the growing stuffiness and the idea of being surrounded in my own sick, whose rancid smell I was starting to pick up and getting a bit queasy about … No, I couldn’t stay a moment longer.

Slowly, I lifted the lid up. A thin ray of light streamed in, along with a faint but refreshing burst of air. There were no startled exclamations or frightened shrieks, so I felt safe enough to open it a bit more.

Further up went the lid, enough for me to peer through the gap. The tarpaulin had been taken off as I’d suspected, and I looked out: I saw a clearing with what looked like a small warehouse and fencing at the far end. The ground was also visible and had the appearance of yellow-brown mud, grainy like sand and gravel mixed together. Otherwise, the place was devoid of any visible signs of life, and all was still around me. There wasn’t going to be a better moment to escape, so I decided to brave it and get myself off the truck.

I crawled out carefully, feet first, leaving my back and shoulders to prop up the coffin’s lid as my lower half worked to gain a foothold on the truck bed. My heart was pounding and even the tiniest suggestion of noise or movement from beyond my very restricted field of view brought me to the brink of abandoning my attempt to flee and return to the confines of the casket.

Then, in an instant, I was out. The coffin lid snapped shut behind me as I dropped onto the truck bed, and I made a leap off it, landing with a loud “thump” on the hard-packed dirt of the crude parking lot, the impact nearly forcing my feet out of their sandals and causing me to almost topple over. Without looking back, I broke into a run, stumbling a little, my sandals throwing up gritty dirt everywhere and wedging the stuff in between my toes.

When I had reached a reasonably safe distance away from the truck, I allowed myself to slow down into a walk. I was on a track leading out of the area, and was looking back at the truck that was still parked in front of the small warehouse. It seemed like I had made a successful escape after all; the continuing lack of activity behind me was clear proof of it.

It was only a few metres more before I had cleared the gateway set into the surrounding wire fence. Several signs hung from the open gate, listing among other things the name of the company, the Badir office address that had led me to get on the truck in the first place, and the address of a warehouse – probably the one I was in, and it was definitely not anyplace close to Badir, or even the district I lived in. Served me right for making such a big assumption with the name and the address. Kevin’s phone read 11.25, and here I was in the middle of nowhere and with no clue as to how to get to Badir. Maybe I could ask the guys who had driven the truck here? They wouldn’t know that I was a stowaway, and I could just give them the address and maybe they’d take me there.

I turned back to the warehouse, almost decided on going back, but saw just in time that the men were re-entering the truck and starting the engine. The vehicle roared back to life and hurtled towards the gate at full speed, unconcerned with the potential damage to the coffins on board or the boy standing in front of them, about to be run over. I could have tried getting in front of the truck to get them to stop for me, but I instead went with my instincts and scampered to the side, out of the way of the truck, which then sped by, leaving behind a cloud of dust in my face.

Hacking out grainy spit, I stood there, trying to bat away the dirt out of my eyes and cursing those crazy idiots who had either not seen me or had not cared about squashing me into road-kill.

Well, if they’d killed me, they’d probably have simply scooped me off the road and packed me in one of their coffins, just one more customer to add to their books, and gone ahead on their merry way.