Louise Doughty - Black Water

Francisca’s voice became calm and measured then, with that placating wheedle that annoyed him so much. She would wheedle for the first half hour of an argument, then snap. It was always a relief when she snapped. ‘I know it was hard for you too. I’m able to see that because in comparison with you, I’ve had an easy life, but the things that happened to your mother. .’

‘Yes, yes, don’t you think I’ve had this conversation?’

‘She saw it, Nicolaas.’

They stared at each other across the small kitchen. Malachi, their thin grey cat, slunk through the small gap in the kitchen door, which was ajar, walked across the room with her tail in the air, leapt up onto the counter-top and then looked at them both, unblinking, waiting to be picked up and dropped back down onto the floor.

Francisca turned, reached out an absent-minded hand and stroked Malachi’s head. ‘She saw it, you know. I don’t think either of us can imagine what it must be like to see something so horrible at such a young age, how it must affect you.’

He looked at her.

‘Aunty Lies told me today. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not. I was thinking about it all the way home. I don’t know why she started talking about it now but she did. I think maybe she was upset. You never go.’

Francisca had always been much better at visiting Aunt Lies than Harper, or Anika for that matter.

‘I said something about how I wished that you and your mother got on a bit better, and we were talking about how angry you always are with your mother.’

He thought, you know, sometimes I get really sick of women talking about me behind my back.

‘And she said how your mum had always told you the heroic version of your father being killed in order to protect you, so that you would remember him as a heroic soldier, holding out in battle in the hills. She thought it was important for a boy to feel that way about his father, particularly one who died in the war, you know, that time, all the boys who lost fathers, they all had to believe they were heroes, died saving comrades or something, not real, not how things really were.’ Francisca stopped stroking Malachi, bent and kissed the top of the cat’s head, picked her up and put her gently on the floor.

Harper returned to chopping tomatoes. ‘Yes, well, Lies is forgetting she told me the real version. The end of the street, just because he was caught out after curfew. She told me when I was very young. And actually, I think it’s stupid to make out he was a hero. He was entitled to be terrified, in those circumstances, to try and save his own life and his wife’s life too, anyone was.’ He had always wondered why Aunt Lies had told him the real version of his father’s death. She had told him in great secrecy one day when his mother was out, and made him promise never to ask his mother about it.

‘She didn’t forget that actually. She remembered, she was halfway through telling you the whole story but you were only small and she stopped short. She remembered the whole conversation. What she didn’t go on to tell you was that your mother saw it.’

‘Saw what?’ he said, stupidly.

They were facing each other now, him still holding the blunt knife and Francisca’s fine, narrow features stretched, open-eyed, in an expression that swam with pity, but whether the pity was for him or his mother or simply all the suffering in the world, he couldn’t surmise.

‘Oh Nicolaas, your mother saw your father beheaded. She heard a commotion at the end of the street. Pregnant with you, just a girl, imagine that. She ran down the street and she saw her husband beheaded in front of her. She had no one but him. And you wonder why she has been drunk half her life and spent the other half trying to steal other women’s husbands?’

Harper turned violently then and stared down at the chopping board, so angry that he couldn’t speak. Malachi the cat had been winding round his legs while Francisca had been speaking but now slunk swiftly towards the door.

Francisca returned to the salad. ‘You think anyone ever really recovers? Seeing something like that?’

There was a moment then — he saw it briefly, like a narrowing shaft of light through a door that is swinging shut — when he could have told Francisca about some of the things he had seen when he was a young man, and some of the things he had done, but all he said was a soft, low, ‘No,’ and the door closed.

Jan asked him again the following week. The economic crisis was precipitating unrest across the region, the office in Jakarta could use someone who had experience in analysis and that was what he had been doing the last thirty years, after all.

This time, he didn’t even pause — he remembered that later; he didn’t ask for more details or wonder aloud what the package was. He just said, ‘Yes, sure. I’ll go.’

When he told Francisca that he was going to Indonesia and he didn’t know how long he would be gone, she stared at him for a while, then said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘You can’t run from the sadness inside you all your life, Nicolaas. Don’t you realise you just take it with you?’

Later that night, when the debate had become more shrieky, she jabbed him in the middle of the chest with her finger and snapped, ‘So you’re running out on everything, on me, your mother, your responsibilities, well go then, let’s see how happy you are when the only responsibility you have is to stare at your reflection in the mirror.’

That night, as he lay on the sofa with the soft bulk of the spare blanket over him, thick and woollen and pale blue, he thought, I’ll sign the house over to her, that’s only fair. How soon can I start packing? Not tomorrow, that would be unkind. I’ll leave it to the weekend.

In the departure lounge at Schiphol airport, he stared at the other passengers and tried not to enjoy it too much: that feeling, transience, as if three decades of settled life had been nothing more than the waiting room between one journey and the next. My life can be divided into threes, he thought. There was the first part of his life, before 1965, with its disrupted phases, its ocean crossings: Indonesia, Los Angeles, Holland. There was what came after ’65, the quiet decades, three of them, mostly sat behind a desk in Amsterdam. Then there was this third and final phase; his return. Indonesia was the three-legged stool on which his life was balanced.

Then, with one brief change of planes at Singapore, he was hauling his briefcase from the overhead locker and arching his back to ease its stiffness, shuffling behind an elderly woman in the aeroplane aisle and descending the steel steps of the plane onto the tarmac of Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta airport. Then shall a boat fly in the sky. The ancient prophecy had come true.

The Jakarta office had offered to pick him up but he said he’d get a cab from the rank at the airport: he wanted to arrive alone, to absorb his first impressions. As they hit the flyover, the driver began to drift inattentively from lane to lane at speed, and he remembered what it was like, the feeling that he was in a place where anything could happen at any moment. He stared out of the window with a small engine of adrenaline in his stomach. This was fun. The six-lane highways were still there, cutting a swathe through the city — pedestrian walkways had been built over them, that was an improvement, although they looked a little on the rickety side. And everywhere, the skyscrapers, the international banks, the hotels — yes, thirty years of human rights suppression had brought the foreign investment flooding in. He wondered what had happened to the huge expanses of kampong , crammed together, the rivulets of small canals and irrigation ditches, shacks and market places — later, he would discover they were just intersected by the freeways, squeezed between the twenty-eight or thirty-two or forty-seven storeys of the steel and glass buildings that stood like knives pointing upwards in the new Central Business District, stretching high to the white and clouded, dust-filled, sagging sky.