Being the Fool

Sometimes being the butt of the joke is self-care

I am currently 12 days postpartum and I’m missing writing a lot. I’m missing the weekly ritual of thinking up something vaguely noteworthy and throwing at the wall to see if it sticks. In the haze of milk and love and night-waking, I don’t yet have the brain power to write something from scratch (although many thoughts are percolating in the ether!).

But I do have a bank of stories that I wrote for the original manuscript of my memoir, which don’t quite make sense in its current version. Instead of letting them wither and die on the vine (my hard drive,) I’m going to make use of them here, on Substack.

This story was also shortlisted for the San Diego Writer’s Festival Memoir Showcase in 2023.

---

On our second night in The Phillipines, Sam and I woke to the sound of roosters crowing loudly. Their collective noun is a “bachelor flock” and one such flock of unwed males was situated directly below our hotel room window. Strangely, this didn’t come as a huge surprise to us because the previous night, with nothing else to do on the island of El Nido, we watched hours of cock-fighting on TV.

We did this not because there was nothing in English airing that night, but because we were enraptured by the footage. Hundreds of cocks, up to their eyeballs on steroids, thick necks and plush auburn feathers practically dripping in cock-sweat. Close ups of the roosters’ eyeballs transformed otherwise static black pupils into fearsome peepers. Visual effects made their bodies glimmer with hints of green, as though bolts of lightning had entered their plumage, electrifying their nape, back and wings. Known as e-sabong, these fights were held in empty arenas and streamed 24 hours a day. And we could see why. It was like watching a marvel movie that had cross-pollinated with a mediaeval blood-sport.

As the sun rose and the bachelors howled, we had little chance of returning to anything resembling sleep.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me with these motherfuckers’ I said to Sam, as I stared at the ceiling fan.

‘It’s all that testosterone and no ladies to peck’ she replied dead pan, fully awake.

After peeling ourselves out of bed, we made our way to the bottom floor of the guest house where breakfast was being served. The breakfast spread was exactly what one would expect to find at middling to low-end accommodation: a smattering of overcooked scrambled eggs, cold, hard burnt toast, cardboard parading as muesli, various fruit juices of unknown origin and pots of unspeakably disgusting black coffee. I gathered up a plate of food and, bleary-eyed, searched for milk. Defeated, I returned to the table with a sachet of powdered milk instead, plonked my plate down on the table next to Sam, and sighed.

‘You know, you’d think with all these fucking roosters crowing that we could get some fresh milk around here’ I huffed indignantly, looking to Sam for agreement.

She stared at me with the bottom of her mouth open, suggesting I had said something stupid.

‘What?’ I replied, perplexed, ‘do I have food on my face?’

I touched my chin and cheeks, searching for the source of her embarrassment.

‘Tessa….’

I paused to consider what I had said. The penny dropped.

‘Oh my god, oh my god… Roosters and chickens are different things!’ I laughed, ‘hello sleep deprivation!’

‘TESSA!’ Sam nearly shouted, unable, it seemed, to believe what I was saying. ‘Milk - where does it come from?’

I paused for several more moments. I looked at the coffee and then at the sachet, where the face of a cow stared back at me.

‘Cows, cows!! Cows make milk!’ I bellowed through the tears of laughter that were now streaming down my cheeks, made worse by Sam being unable to breathe through hers. Naturally, the rest of the morning was spent discussing how one would milk a chicken, its tiny its teets would be, and how its milk would taste. Slightly more tart than cow’s milk, we decided, for reasons that now escape me but made perfect sense at the time.

Later that day, we were setting foot on a 5-night island hopping tour of the Palawan Isles. We arrived at the dock in the afternoon along with the other passengers who were constituted of:

• The Gay French Couple, Bastian and Phillipe. Bastian was already indignant at being asked to remove his loafers upon boarding the boat which I took to mean we would likely enjoy his antics for the duration of the journey.

• The Canadian Adventure Couple. Decked out in Patagonia-esque clothing, as though we were setting sail back to the Americas on a catamaran.

• The Belgian Backpacker. So beautiful, I hated myself for worrying about her travelling alone.

• The Disgruntled German Lady. She seemed more than a little upset to be in the company of other people making it unclear whether she realised she had booked a group experience. Or that was just her face, it was hard to tell.

• The South African Brother-Sister Duo. Christianity oozed from both of them which made me excited to see how quickly Bastian might offend one of them. (We later learned the brother was saving the loss of his virginity for marriage– information which made Bastian visibly recoil as though he had swallowed poison).

As our unlikely group of 10, plus the crew, sailed off into the morning sunshine, we settled in and got to chatting. Of course, Sam regaled the group with my chicken-milk story which firmly cemented my role in the group as the Complete Fucking Idiot. We also had the pleasure of meeting Berghain, the dog of our captain, Hari.

On the second day of the trip, Bastian, while sipping gingerly on a glass of rose in his tiny little French striped swimming trunks, inquired about the origin of Berghain’s name.

‘Hari, ‘ave you been to Berlin?’

‘No, why do you ask me that?’ said Hari.

‘No rezon. ‘Ow did you choose ‘iz name den?’

‘Well a German man was on the boat when I get Berghain and he say to me “I love this dog! You must call him Berghain!” And so… I call him Berghain!’

When Sam, Bastian, Phillipe and I all broke into laughter upon realising that we were the only people in the group who understood that Berghain was the most hedonistic nightclub in Berlin, we knew we would be friends for the next five days.

Never did this prove truer than the following evening after we docked on an island that was apparently the largest and most sophisticated of the ones we would see (it had its own permaculture farm, equipped with a pig named Gwen Stefani). After eating dinner, we followed the sound of Whitney Houston’s voice to an open-air gondola with a karaoke machine and a few island locals belting out top 40 hits and knocking back shots of tequila.

‘It’s our Berghain!’ we cried before flooding the dance floor, where we stayed until the wee hours.

***

The image of me as the Complete Fucking Idiot was not helped when, on the third day, the Canadian Adventure Couple told us one of their various adventure yarns.

‘We were in Peru, staying in an oooold monastery, carved into the mountain top. By nightfall, we realised that we didn’t have anywhere to sleep,’ the Canadian man began.

‘We would need to sleep on the floor,’ his wife followed, taking her cue like clockwork (letting us know this was not the first time they had told this story together).

‘But then – we saw an ant infestation of the biggest scale we had ever seen. And we’ve seen some ants! Let me tell you!’ He chortled.

‘We did not know WHAT to do. If we fell asleep, we would be covered in the ants but it was far too cold to be outside. Minus ten celcius, maybe less,’ she said.

‘Then I realised that we had masking tape in our supplies,’ he said, breathless.

At this point, I noticed the Disgruntled German Woman was nodding her head sagely.

‘So we lay masking tape out around us and slept within its borders! The tape caught the ants!’ He exclaimed.

‘That is so clever!’ Said the Beautiful Belgian Backpacker.

‘And it really worked?’ Asked Sam.

‘Yes, completely!’ The Canadian Adventure Couple cried in unison.

A little perplexed, I interjected.

‘But what I need to know is how the ants knew to stop walking at the masking tape?’

‘The masking tape was sticky side up,’ the sweet young Belgian girl kindly informed me, while the rest of the group howled with laughter.

Sam spent the last days of the trip trying to convince everyone that I was not a Complete Fucking Idiot. She kept saying things like “I don’t know where my friend has gone! She is actually very bright!”

No one believed her, and the thing was, I couldn’t have cared less.

I was with my best friend, sailing through crystalline waters, eating hand caught sashimi and sleeping under a sky so full of stars, I thought it might burst. I was happy in the way that makes you not care about being the fool, because it feels like the joke is on everyone else. Because I get to laugh about the chicken-milk and Berghain and the ants with my friend, every day, until we are old.