Louise Doughty: Black Water

*

The main street of town was scarcely wide enough for two lanes of traffic and lined with cafes, overpriced jewellery and art shops for tourists alongside fruit and veg stalls and mini-markets; the Museum, the Palace, a Chinese restaurant that blared American rock. He spent two hours in a new, Euro-style place, jazz tinkling from speakers but barely audible above the noise from the street. He ordered a coffee and a cinnamon roll and, in an impulse he felt himself regretting even as he conceded to it, a packet of kretek cigarettes. The cigarettes came first, on a plate, the packet opened for him and propped up on its own lid, one cigarette helpfully extended and a frangipani blossom tucked in by its side. He smoked it slowly, waiting for his coffee and his roll, then closed the packet to discourage immediate consumption of another. He sipped the coffee, tore small pieces from the roll. It was sunny, the street was teeming; small trucks, tourist vans, locals on mopeds. Even the grandmothers drove mopeds these days. He had just ordered his second coffee when, right in front of him, a white municipal truck pulled out to go round a parked car and blocked the road. There followed a brief comedy of chaos as some moped drivers tried to circumvent the truck only to meet others trying to get round the other way. These things were always conducted with an orchestra of horn tooting and calling, much as the Italians did but without the undertone of aggression. He watched and, for a moment, the traffic jam made him miss Jakarta, then it was over and the cars and trucks and mopeds flowed again in their congested, casually dangerous way.

It took a few moments for the line to clear. When it had, he saw that at the end of it was a low jeep that bumped past slowly — it was stuck behind the last moped in the build-up, a very old-looking machine with a woman and three children; a young girl on the back, a small boy standing on the foot panel in front and a baby strapped to the woman’s chest — and he had time to observe the four young men in the jeep. They were dressed a bit more smartly than the local men, in white shirts and loose pants. Their faces were not as rounded as the typically Balinese face, he thought: they were sharper. One of them sitting in the back caught his gaze briefly and returned it. The truck moved on.

A very tiny, elderly woman with a tree-bark face approached the step below where he was seated, holding a woven tray on which she was carrying twenty or so offerings. She gave him a single-toothed smile as she knelt to arrange one of the offerings on the ground, to appease the demons, the rice and flower petals in the little basket made of a stapled banana leaf. He returned her smile and tried not to think what he always thought when he saw locals of that age: what were you doing, back then? Where were you? Were you out in the middle of the night, joining the hunting parties in the rice fields? Or did you simply raise your hand to point at a neighbour’s house and whisper to the men in black shirts the single word that would slaughter the entire family asleep in there: gestapu ? A young woman tourist in white shorts and a tight yellow vest stopped and watched the old woman as she placed three incense sticks at angles in the offering and lit them with a cigarette lighter. The young woman took a step back, respectfully, then lifted her camera to her face.

A newspaper seller wandered past with piles of thin broadsheets over his arm. He stopped when he saw Harper and raised one but it was the International Herald Tribune . Harper shook his head. That wouldn’t exactly fill him in on what was going on in Jakarta. None of the local bars had televisions: how was he supposed to know what the latest was? Normally, he would check in with the Jakarta office or Amsterdam but he was officially taking a break. Taking a break, so far, meant being kept in the dark.

Smoking hard and drinking coffee was making him feel both hazy and alert: the contradiction was pleasant. There was a certain merit in doing these things infrequently. He wanted a whisky but he hadn’t touched a drop since that disastrous night in Jakarta a week ago, even though he had an unopened bottle at the hut. He had bought it for himself as a kind of test, which — so far — he had passed. He wanted it now, though. That’s okay, he thought. Acknowledge to yourself that you want it, and then move on.

He walked back to the meeting point with Kadek still intending to return to the hut. But as he approached and saw him waiting by the moped, chatting with the other drivers, he was filled with an overwhelming desire to stay in town, even if it meant breaking protocol and sleeping in a guesthouse room. (Did it matter any more, how many protocols he broke? Not if he was right, it didn’t.) He had been going to bed early at the hut in an attempt to get some rest but however early he retired, the evenings were still long.

He handed Kadek a thin plastic bag with two shirts he had bought at a roadside stall and another with some biscuits and cans of Coke, and asked him to take them back to the hut, saying he would make his own way back later on a taksi moped. Kadek offered to return for him whenever he wanted but Harper was firm in his dismissal. He wanted the freedom to play the evening by ear. Then he turned and walked back along the main street. It was time to find a bar.

It was his first trip to Ubud since he had arrived in the hills, so he took his time, walking down to the bridge in the heat, where he came to a small row of food shacks: maybe I’m hungry, he thought to himself. He stopped at the second one and ate a plateful of nasi goreng , then thought about carrying on to the far end of the street where the road climbed upward again out of town. Every minute or so, a man with a car or a moped would call out to him, taksi! He could hail one and go exploring for a bar, but the coffee and the nasi goreng had used up his loose change and paying a fare of a few rupiah with a hundred thousand note might draw attention to himself. Maybe it was simplest just to walk back into town.

If it hadn’t been so hot, if he had had some small notes in his pocket, then he would never have met her. Rita.

The bar was on Jalan Bisma, five minutes or so from the main street. It was one of those bars that doubled as the restaurant and breakfast room of a guesthouse. He noticed it because of the string of yellow lights that wound around the coconut tree at the stone archway entrance. There were seven or eight round tables and wide wooden chairs with patterned cushions. A lone barman in a leafy-patterned shirt nodded and smiled to him as he stepped up from the street.

He spotted her as soon as he entered, sitting in a far, dim corner, alone at a small table with a cocktail containing mint leaves in a long glass. Her head was bent and reading glasses balanced on the very end of her nose. She was going through some papers with a stub of pencil. The only other customers in the bar were a couple of hippie-student types nursing bottles of Bintang and a small group of local businessmen, probably the owner and his friends. Nobody looked up as Harper approached the bar. He took in, briefly, that she was white, very white, a few years younger than him, late forties perhaps, long, light brown hair, a solidly built figure in a cotton shirt, loose trousers and flat sandals, absorbed in what she was doing. There were no bar stools but after he had been served, he stood leaning on the bar with his whisky in front of him, his back to her, to allow her to notice him. During that time, he chatted to the man behind the bar in Indonesian. The waiter smiled and chatted back, as if he could foresee the encounter to come and was happy to play his small part in the pantomime. After half an hour, Harper turned, took his almost empty whisky glass and approached the woman’s corner table.