Louise Doughty: Black Water

‘I’m not scared of them back home,’ she said quickly, ‘they are trained there, but here, they are just strays. You never know what they will do.’

‘They are doorbells. Wouldn’t you want your dog to bark at strangers?’

‘Yes, well, one of those things bites you, you have forty-eight hours to get to Jakarta for the rabies jab. .’

‘The dogs here don’t have rabies, the monkeys maybe.’

‘I know. I just don’t like them, that’s all.’

*

At the entrance to the Monkey Forest, there were two women with a small portable stall, which they had set up in front of the ticket office, selling bunches of tiny bananas and packets of peanuts.

‘Want me to get some?’ he asked, gesturing.

‘Are you crazy?’ Rita replied.

One of the women was behind the stall, the other stood at the side holding a catapult ready loaded with a stone. He queued for their tickets at the kiosk and watched as the cluster of monkeys close to the entrance gate split to form a pincer movement and began to knuckle-walk towards the stall, tails in the air, gazes flicking from the bananas to the woman with the catapult. As soon as a monkey got too close to the stall, the woman raised the catapult and, at the sight of it, all the monkeys scattered back to the gate. He wondered how many shots the woman had had to fire to teach the monkeys what a raised catapult meant: not many, he guessed.

‘Can you believe I’ve never been here?’ Rita said, as they passed through the gate and entered the green heat of the Forest.

They were only a hundred yards in when a tiny grey monkey ran at them and she flinched again. The monkey stopped a few feet away and began to groom itself, as if it had proved its point, but after that, Rita stayed close to him as they walked.

The path led upwards through the trees until it reached a central area with a pond surrounded by a low stone wall and moss-covered statues. A man in a uniform was holding a short rectangular machete and hacking at a scattering of coconuts on the ground. As soon as he moved away, a dozen monkeys lolloped towards the broken pieces — the smaller ones making a dash then retreating with a piece to a safe distance, the larger ones approaching more casually, making their selection, then sitting where they were to shred it with the defiant air of playground bullies.

‘Look at that one,’ Rita said. A young monkey too afraid of the other monkeys to approach the shards of coconut had hold of a small, unbroken one that had rolled some distance away and was lifting it and bashing it on the ground. He had the feeling she was trying to recover her dignity by pretending she thought the monkeys cute: they weren’t. The baby monkeys had the faces of little malicious old men.

As they watched, another adult monkey approached a mother and baby sitting on the stone ledge of the pool and grabbed at the baby’s tail, trying to drag it from its mother’s grasp. The mother swung the baby underneath her stomach, and lolloped away on three legs. The other monkey pursued and tried to snatch the baby again. The mother moved once more, but never quite far enough to deter the other monkey from trying again.

As they stood watching, Rita said, ‘Monkey, donkey, owl. You know that saying?’

‘Three ages of man.’

‘Donkey, or owl?’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Still donkey, although sometimes I think I’m ready for owl.’

‘I don’t think anyone is ever ready for owl, do you? On your deathbed maybe.’

‘Isn’t it wisdom rather than death? What about you?’

‘Definitely still donkey,’ she replied, with a sigh in her voice. ‘You have no idea.’

They watched the monkeys for a little longer and he wondered how soon he could suggest they leave — there was an awful lot of forest still to walk around, not to mention the holy stone carvings. He hoped she didn’t want to look at all of it.

‘I don’t have to work on Monday,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘There’s another trainer coming in. Normally I stay and watch but I’ve seen this one before.’

What else was there to do, while he waited for news? With Rita, he felt he had been wrong: of course no one was going to kill him. With Rita, he felt his anxieties to be mistaken, no more than the inevitable result of his work. Could he not allow himself this a little longer? Work would still be there waiting for him, after all. If he hadn’t heard from Jakarta or Amsterdam by the end of next week, he would take the initiative then.

‘How about we go to the Tirta Empul Temple?’ she said. ‘Been there yet?’

‘I’m not a tourist!’ He could not keep the scorn from his response.

‘You’re here on holiday, aren’t you? Don’t you want to look at places? Anyway I didn’t mean as a tourist.’

‘You’re a practising Hindu?’ Now the scorn was mingled with disbelief.

‘No, I just think, well, you put on your sarong and you bathe in the Holy Waters and what you feel is. .’

‘Wet,’ he interjected.

She bore him with an indulgent sigh. ‘. . Inspired, really, you feel inspired. You pray for someone each time you get under a spout and after a while you run out of the obvious people to pray for and there are still a lot of spouts left and. .’ Sensing he was unimpressed, she hesitated. ‘Makes you think, that’s all.’

Of all the forms of faith that humans indulged in, the one he hated most was this sort of freelance spirituality — a belief that it was okay to pick ’n’ mix your rituals, try a bit of this and a bit of that and feel better about yourself. At least belonging to an established religion required action and sacrifice, visit Mecca once in your life or don’t cut your hair — even Protestant Christians were obliged to go to church at Easter. But this: I’ll do a bit of what the locals do and feel good because I’m getting some of the insight with none of the sacrifice. All he said was, ‘I don’t think it’s for me, thanks all the same.’

‘Okay,’ she said lightly. She turned away from the pond with its stone wall and they began to walk further up the path. Another man with a machete came past the other way, carrying a huge sack made of rope net and full of coconuts. There were other exits, Harper thought: he’d seen them on the map at the entrance. If they followed the curve of the path round, they could leave by the other route, head back into town. She had taken his rejection of the temple pretty well. Was it too early to suggest they go to a bar?

‘The beach, then,’ she said.

He was about to object to that one too, then he thought, if they went south, down to Denpasar, maybe he’d be able to find out a bit more about what was going on in Jakarta. Amsterdam wouldn’t like it but then Amsterdam wouldn’t know. ‘There’s an Intercontinental at Jimbaran Bay.’

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. ‘Only someone like you could want the Intercontinental. You’ll get your scrambled eggs there. You’ll probably get cornflakes if you want. I know a much better hotel, a bar on the beach, great cocktails, Balinese enough for me and international enough for you. How does that sound?’

‘Our relationship in a nutshell,’ he said drily and they both made ironic sounds in mutual acknowledgement that his use of the world ‘relationship’ was a joke.

They turned back towards the entrance and, as they did, a monkey ran from behind them and with one swift movement, leapt up and clung with its hands and feet to the bottom of a woven shoulder bag worn by a woman in front of them. The woman shrieked and let the bag fall, then ran a few paces before turning and pointing. The monkey upended the bag and another half a dozen monkeys ran forward to inspect its scattered contents. One ripped open a purse, another seized a pair of sunglasses, another snatched up a plastic water bottle and sank its teeth into the bottom while lifting it up to suck from it. Rita gave an amused exhalation and a shake of her head as they passed and Harper noted briefly that even she was entertained rather than alarmed when the monkeys’ victim was someone else.