Louise Doughty: Black Water

It will be night, of course, he thought, a moonless night. They will wait for rain to mask their tracks. They will come along the path, walking in silence, the rushing of the river and the downpour on the leaves loud in their ears. Before they begin the climb up the steep side of the valley, they will pause for a kretek , crouching down beneath the large leaves of a tree for shelter, sharing one perhaps, because they have no money and have to steal cigarettes from their fathers and uncles, something they do without compunction. Their fathers and uncles have never spoken to them about what happened before so they believe, like all youths, that they have invented bravado. Their fathers and uncles seem like foolish old men to them. Perhaps, as they crouch and smoke, the water dripping down their necks, there will be some giggling, the kind of cold giggling that boys do before they transgress: the kind he remembered himself doing as he bullied the smaller boys at school.

And all at once, as he sat on the rock above the pool, he thought, yes, at school, I was a bully. He had thought he was defending himself but actually, he was a bully. Black bastard from Batavia , that ginger boy two years older had called him — the final thump landing with extra emphasis on Ba ta via. But it wasn’t the ginger boy that Harper had beaten up, that boy had too many friends. It was a freckled kid in his own class who did no more than ask, are you part-something? Strange how that should come to him now.

After their cigarette, he thought, the boys will begin the climb up through the undergrowth, the steep sides of the valley. They will use their machetes to push the ferns and creepers aside. That’s something that won’t be covered by the rain — it will leave a clear trail of their progress that would be appreciated by any investigator: except that there will be no investigation. Nobody investigated Joosten, after all.

As they near the hut, they will pause again, crouching down, observing the dark bulk of the construction above them, listening to the clatter of the water on the roof. And now the adrenaline will start to flow in their veins, and the smallest and youngest of them will be overwhelmed with a need to pee, and the one in charge, his big brother, will be most frightened of all, and so hiss urgent instructions to the others, hiding his fear in his commands. Perhaps the bule will make it easy for them, the boy in charge will be hoping: if he roars, or picks up an object to fight back, then it will be easy to cut him down, because then they will be threatened and have no choice. The big boy is hoping this is what will happen.

And he, Harper, alone in his hut, perhaps he will be awake, thanks to the ghekko — or perhaps, just for once, he will be sound asleep.

They will come through the window. The shutters will be easier to smash than the doors — it will make a racket, of course, even above the rain, but out here that won’t matter. It will be too late by then. There is only one window, and one door, and both lead out onto the same veranda. He will have nowhere to hide.

Will they send boys? Harper wondered. If they want him dead, better to send an experienced man, one of the black-shirted militia who knows what he is doing, there were plenty of them around last time although, like the boys, they tended to work in groups. But boys would be easier to finesse if, back home, they were going to portray his death as part of the general disorder that was going on: that would be simplest for them. That was how he would do it, if he were them. There weren’t any shopping malls to loot and burn out here in the forest, but people back home thought of whole countries as violent once they had seen a few television pictures. Yes, poor Harper, wrong place, wrong time. Could happen to anyone . Word would get around the office, just like it always did. And I hear he’d got careless, the drinking, you know. . At this, the person talking would lift a cup-shaped hand halfway up to his or her mouth and wobble it. Sending him back out there, after the problems he’d had, it was probably a mistake. He had had many of those conversations himself, over the years. Did you hear what happened to Joosten? They tied him to the wheel of his car and poured petrol over it. You don’t mess with those drugs lords, you know. Tales of bad things happening out in the field flattered those back home — look how dangerous our job can be, on occasion. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Joosten had been known to smoke a bit. Harper had seen him do it. There was almost always some basis to the rumours. That’s what they did in his line of work: took a thread of truth and wove a carpet out of it.

Once, when they were drinking together back in Amsterdam, Joosten had let slip he had a safe house: a flat somewhere in a foreign city, he wouldn’t say where, not a country that their firm operated in. It was stocked with tinned food in case he needed to lie low for a while, and money and a false passport. Harper had left the bar that night shaking his head at Joosten’s paranoia.

Beginning the letter to Francisca had convinced him that his calm during the night was due to more than exhaustion — he was sure, now, what was going to happen. What was it, to know you were going to die? We all carry that knowledge inside us, he thought: it is the one thing we know for certain.

The black and green water in the rock pool — how cool it appeared. How good it would feel, in the rising humidity, to slip his old boots from his feet and dabble his toes in that water. Up in the hut, Kadek would have placed his breakfast — rice and a little sambal , some chicken maybe and some fruit — on the desk by the window. It would have a banana leaf laid over it to protect it. Kadek would have opened the shutters, to air the room, and folded back his crumpled bed sheets, smoothing them neatly. He should go back. There was the letter he really should write, even though it would be full of untruths and he might not get the chance to send it.

He rose from the rock, stretched his arms upwards, performed a few loose movements from side to side with his hands on his hips, and turned to climb up the path.

*

It had already begun before Harper got there — that made it easier; it was well underway in fact. He was with Benni, that fat gangster. He liked his sweets, Benni, which was why he was down to three teeth, one front tooth and two incisors. Harper had spent months cultivating him when he got to Jakarta, on his first visit, back in ’65. Benni was said to have good connections with the military and like all the gangster-militiamen was fervently anti-Communist. The stallholders and shopkeepers in his area were terrified of him but whether or not he dined with Generals was another matter.

They were in the small front area of a disused bar down a narrow alleyway in Pasar Senen. It was mid-afternoon and the sun blazed outside. There was a garage or storeroom of some sort out back where a man was being held. He had been there since dawn; a Chinese merchant who sold bolts of cloth from a shop next to the picture house on the edge of a nearby kampong , one of the cinemas the PKI had closed down recently because they showed decadent Western movies. Benni’s friends had lost money because of the cinema closures. The Chinese merchant had no proven connection with what had happened next door to his shop but he hadn’t paid his protection money in a month.

Harper gathered this and other details as a group of them stood together in the front room of the bar — he and Benni had been lunching nearby when Benni’s driver had turned up and said they needed the boss. Six of Benni’s men plus the driver were gathered round and Harper got the gist, though they were all talking quickly and at once. The men were excited, competing for their boss’s attention. ‘BB! BB!’ they kept saying before they launched into their résumé of the story so far. The man was a Communist agitator who had been holding meetings in the back of his shop after closing hours, one of them seemed to be saying. Another mentioned a pile of chairs. The man was a liar, another interjected. He was worse than a nekolim . . At the word nekolim , Benni clapped Harper on the shoulder and gave a gap-toothed grin and the other men looked at Harper for a moment until Harper gave a short bark of a laugh and suddenly the men were laughing too. Then they went back to talking at once. Most of them had been drinking arak all morning, Harper decided. They were his age, mid-twenties, or younger, apart from Benni who was maybe ten years older.