Spidermaid: The Finale

“You’ll soon have an entire apartment soap opera on your blog,” my boyfriend said, when I told him of my intention to wrap up the chronicles of Spidermaid online. And so I shall!

The conclusion to this tale is more prosaic than its exposition. A few weeks after the Spidermaid incident, I was working in my study when I heard a strange noise from the hallway. I went out to stickybeak – working at home is boring enough to welcome any distraction! At the end of the hall, silhouetted against the light, I saw a woman climb out over the low wall and onto the ledge on the other side. She was very angry – it was clear in the way she hurled her bag over onto the ledge and then swung her leg up. I think she saw me, but she ignored me, and I thought it prudent not to intrude. Here was a woman who would brook no obstacle, and as she disappeared around the corner of the building, it appeared that she knew exactly what she was doing.

A little while later I went out shopping. On the apartment driveway outside the lobby, two police cars were sitting. The shiny black car of the deputy minister who lives in our building was also there, so I dismissed the police as the official entourage.

When I returned with my groceries, the minister’s car had gone, the police were still there and the lobby had been thrown into disarray. In its centre was a pile of baby paraphernalia – multi-coloured blankets, cot, toys. A lift door opened to display two policeman and a woman clutching a baby. She was angrily telling the police in a broad Filipino accent, “No, you get out first, go on, you get out!” Eventually they all disgorged into the foyer and, not wanting to make my gawking too obvious, I took the next lift up.

So, I thought. I knew the white man who lived in the apartment at the end of the hall had a baby – I met him as he was moving in. I didn’t meet the mother, but clearly this was she, and she was Filipina. Now she was being taken off somewhere by the police – the husband not in evidence. Was she an illegal migrant being unfairly evicted?

The answer had to wait until the building’s next joint management body meeting, an event that is usually crushingly boring, but this time was alleviated by a little gossip. No, the management staff said, the police were helping her, not arresting her. The woman and the man were not married, but had a baby together. She had come home to find herself locked out. This had, apparently, happened before – her husband was probably entertaining another girlfriend in the flat. And this is where I imagine my piece fits in – furious at finding herself locked out, the mother of the baby climbed round the outside of the building, got in at the window, and caught them both in flagrante delicto. At which point, according to the management staff, she called the police, demanded to be sent back to the Philippines, and took her baby with her.

The only mystery that remains is this: who was the Spidermaid? Was it the mother of the baby, mistreated by her partner, possibly locked in and trying to escape? Or was it this girlfriend (or another) hurried out the window by the man when the mother returned home unexpectedly? When Brian looks back on it, he remembers that when our Spidermaid exited our apartment, he stayed listening at the door. Around the corner in front of the lift Spidermaid seemed to meet someone else, a woman, whom she spoke to in rather passionate but quiet tones, until one left. I wonder what these two women said to each other. “So we meet again, Spidermaid!”?

Spidermaid: The Return

Last night, while my boyfriend and I were watching TV, we heard a knocking sound coming from the study. My boyfriend went to investigate and found a young woman sitting on our open windowsill.

“Can I come in?” she asked. We backed up. She came into the living room. She had long hair, cut in a fringe, with expensive highlights. She was wearing a short denim skirt and high heels. She had obviously been crying.

“Can I leave please?” She sounded Filipino.

We were non-plussed, and she was embarrassed and anxious. She muttered something about her husband mistreating her and needing to get to the Filipino embassy. I made some flustered noises, asked her if she needed help getting to the embassy, if she was sure the embassy was open at that hour.

“Can I leave please?” she repeated. The last thing I wanted to do was to make a woman just released from bondage feel as if she was being held against her will! I escorted her to the front door. She hesitated at the door a moment, listening, and then rushed out.

It was all over in less than a minute.

It was a strange experience. We live on the fifth floor of an apartment building. The tiny balcony outside our study window is inaccessible from other apartments. It isn’t even very accessible from our apartment; it is only there to hold the airconditioning units, and you have to climb through the window to get to it. After the woman was gone, my boyfriend leaned out the window, and he couldn’t see how she could have arrived there. Two 6-inch vertical concrete pillars jutted out between our apartment and the next.

This morning, I stood outside on the street staring upwards. At last I saw that on the fifth floor the gap between the two pillars that separate my apartment from the next is crossed by a narrow concrete bar. She could conceivably have climbed out the window on her side, swung around the concrete pillar to put one foot on the concrete bar, brought the other foot around, and then repeated the process again to get onto my balcony. And she did it all in heels.

It was a strange enough experience, but what made it stranger was that a similar experience happened to a friend of mine in Singapore a few months earlier. In his case, he heard a small voice saying, “Help! Please! Help!” coming from the window of his apartment building on the eighth floor. Now, five floors is high enough, but eight is an unendurable panic-inducing height. The woman who came through his window was also Filipino, but claimed she had been mistreated by her employers rather than her husband. She was in great distress, and my friend succeeded in connecting her with both her husband in the Philippines and the Philippine embassy. He later determined through the Philippine embassy that she had been successfully sent back to the Philippines and reunited with her husband.

There isn’t anything unusual about a woman, especially a mail-order bride from the Philippines, being imprisoned by her abusive husband. It is also fairly common for migrant domestic workers in Southeast Asia to be locked into the houses of their employment by their employers. With the world full of poverty and misery, poor desperate women will continue to take whatever opportunities they can to improve life for themselves and their families. These opportunities are often very risky, and single migrant women often fall victim to abuse and exploitation.

It did seem strange, however, that both my friend and I would be privy to two such similar risky escape plans. What do they teach these Filipinas on their training course before they go overseas to be maids, nannies, waitresses and shop girls — advanced building scaling and rappelling? Or do the women, in desperation, climb up on their windowsills hoping to end it all, and then, oh wait, there’s a step there, I could climb down, I could hold onto that – I could be free!

Not all such bids for freedom conclude with a safe re-entry into an apartment full of well-meaning, if baffled, neighbours. After this incident, I Googled it. The coincidence seemed too pat. I must admit that my first reaction had been, “This has to be a scam! While she engages our pity she’s scoping out our apartment! She’s going to take us for all we’ve got!” And the Internet is justly reliable in reporting the prevalence of scams and cons. But all I found was a news article from Singapore, reporting that an Indonesian maid locked in by her employers had attempted to climb out of her apartment building on the eleventh floor. She made it down to third floor, where she slipped and fell, breaking her back. When the article was written, it appeared that she would never walk again. When asked why she had done it, she replied that she was very homesick, and she was overjoyed to hear that the hospital would transfer her to Indonesia. As the article reported it, it seemed as if she thought her broken back was worth it.

It really is a measure of the depths of poverty and deprivation – that your prospects can be so slim and so dark that the small promise of homecoming can overcome the terror you must feel when looking out an apartment block window and down eleven storeys.

The news article on the Indonesian maid. There are also numerous accounts of maids forced out windows to hang washing or wash windows, and then falling to their deaths, which one news site calls “the phenomena of falling maids.”

Brood parasites

When I heard my first Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopacea), I thought it was an Argus Pheasant. How could I make such a mistake — koels go ko-el while Argus Pheasants go kuau-waau! Very wishful thinking on my part. Now koels have become such common birds in KL, thanks to their habit of preying on nesting common crows, that their misidentification is impossible, even though they are seldom seen.

Bear Stearns on duty. He really doesn't blink.

My kitten Bear likes to look out the window (left). He is also a keen student of wildlife in the city, and the habits of man. Unfortunately, he isn’t very clever, so when a big black crow swooped down on him out of the blue, he didn’t have the sense to run away. Luckily I was there to frighten the crow away, and now the big cat Huki and I keep an eye on him.

I think the crow was so protective because it had a nest nearby. The second time the crow attacked, there was a strange creature perched in the tree beneath our window. The crow was protecting it, but the creature didn’t act like a crow and didn’t look like a crow. It could have been a juvenile koel that the crow had raised, which was beginning to leave the nest except that all the websites indicate that the juvenile koel is brown and barred like the adult female koel, but and this one was definitely black. Couldn’t see the colour of the eye from so far away, but it didn’t appear red. After a while it got nervous of our attention and flew off down the street.

Strange bird in tree.

Bear Stearns on duty. He really doesn’t blink.

So how?

Saw V — Nocturnal KL Botanical Massacre

11pm. Rrrrrr. Silence. RRRrrrrr! Silence. Like a delinquent teen gunning his recalcitrant bike. We lay in bed listening to it go on and on and on. I finally went into the living room to have a look, climbing onto the back of the couch to get a better view down onto the street. Then I almost fell over — a few metres beneath me was a man in a cherry-picker, clutching a chainsaw, which he was applying to the trees outside our window. Thankfully he didn’t see me, clad only in night shirt, so I crouched on the sofa and watched for a while, wondering why the hell they choose to perform kind this activity in the middle of the night. His friend beneath would occasionally shout out that useful word, “Hoy!” which can mean anything or nothing.

Beware the man who comes in the middle of the night with a chainsaw!

Voices in the night

Woken at 4 am by voices outside my window. In bleary half-sleep, thought there was a tidal wave of French men rioting on my street. Turned out to be only five or six African guys, leaning on a car outside, engaged in energetic conversation. About football, I suspect. I vaguely wished that the police would arrest them for illegal assembly, to make up for them disturbing my sleep, but couldn’t help admiring what seemed like witty repartee accompanied by vigorous gesticulation. Oh, and arrest them for drinking on the street, too. Back to bed.

Arrests in the middle of the night

I woke up at three am to see five dark blue trucks outside my window, being filled with protesting immigrant workers. Beware the government who drags us from our beds in the middle of the night!

Yelling man runs down street

Those snatch thieves are getting bolder. In the middle of the day, I saw a man in office clothes run yelling down the street, clearly chasing something. I suspect that someone drove off with his lap top with the total sum of his work for this month. Beware those snatch thieves!