Louise Doughty - Black Water

He shook his head. ‘If you’re an oil company who pays tens of thousands of dollars for a report, you expect a little more than that.’

She shrugged. ‘So, you’ve been sacked. Or you’re going to be. It happens.’ And he felt the small ache of loneliness he knew he would feel when he told her only a part of the truth.

She turned then, offered him the cigarette. ‘It’s making me dizzy. .’ she repeated, wobbling her head and rolling her eyes.

He took the cigarette, stepped back a little and smiled at her, drew on it, tossed it over the railing. They faced each other for a while, both smiling, and then the memory of his bad behaviour the night before returned to him and he reached out a hand, and, very gently, stroked her upper arm with the back of his fingers.

She lifted her chin a little then, gave him a cool look.

He exhaled.

‘It’s okay, you’re sorry, I know,’ she said softly, and stepped towards him at the same time as he moved against her, pressed his mouth to hers, lifted both hands and put them in her hair, holding her head still, his fingers entwined. Her mouth opened wide, their tongues mingled; smoke, sleep, familiarity. He pressed his groin to hers and ached with the desire to lift her knees, slip into the soft comfort of her right there on the veranda, with only the thin protection of a wooden railing stopping them from plunging, conjoined, into the lush thick valley below.

After a long while, he drew back, gave her a small smile of regret. Her gaze flicked to her right to make sure there was no sign of Kadek and she returned his smile. It was understood between them: their mutual need was enough.

He thought how short a time it was since they had first met, how few encounters they’d had, and he remembered how she had sat on the edge of the bed after their first night together at the guesthouse. He had looked at her then, had read her stillness — and concluded that there was something damaged about her, something that made mornings difficult. There was some knowledge in her life that she didn’t like to wake up to, he had felt quite sure of it.

He stared at her and, self-conscious beneath his gaze, she dropped her head, turned back to look at the valley.

How much could he trust his own judgement, any more? Perhaps he was wrong about her. Perhaps she had just been thinking of everything she had to do that day, whether she needed to go back to the family compound she stayed in and get changed before work. Perhaps she had just been thinking about the textbook she had promised to lend one of her students.

And all at once, looking out over the valley with his body leaning against Rita’s soft back, he was awash with hope, as clean as the dawn before him. If he was mistaken about Rita, then maybe he was mistaken about everything else. Maybe nobody was coming to kill him. Maybe there was no gathering of men in a glass-walled office, debating how to deal with the tricky problem he had become. Perhaps he could just say to her, ‘We’d better get dressed before Kadek comes,’ and Kadek could come and find them both on his balcony and he, Harper, would be nothing more than a man on extended leave from his job who had got lucky.

He thought of the rice fields beyond Jalan Bisma, where small plots of land were being divided up for villas. She could speak Balinese, she could negotiate for a lease. There was the matter of what they would use for a down payment as he’d signed the Amsterdam house over to Francisca and he doubted Rita had any resources behind her, but he had some savings in a dollar account. He wondered what the local bureaucracy was like, sometimes these things could take a while, but a bit of financing usually oiled the wheels and she would have good contacts with the local councils, they would be full of the parents of her students or perhaps some of her former students. She could walk to work from Jalan Bisma, even if they built a little way out of town. He could make shelves for her books: he bet she had a lot of books. He liked making shelves, had never done enough of it, in fact, he decided. In Amsterdam, their house had been too small for him to build anything, and too perfect, in a way. Francisca had made sure it was perfect.

He allowed these thoughts to dwell in his mind for a bit, to brew. Bali was peaceful. Soeharto had fallen, Habibie had taken over and the country was stabilising. Perhaps he had just been wrong about everything. Perhaps a life was possible here, with her. Now he had confided in her — to a certain extent — he had transformed so many difficult things; he had made them into stories. Stories could be put in boxes.

‘It’s so beautiful. .’ Rita said softly, her voice a murmur, as if she was thinking out loud. ‘Isn’t it? Don’t you think, you could look at this, the trees and everything, and for a bit forget everything? If I could wake up to this every morning, maybe mornings would not be so hard.’

There was something in her tone of voice. He was still. ‘Why are mornings so hard?’

She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she said, her voice low but even, ‘I have a son.’

He didn’t respond.

‘I don’t know why, mornings are worst. I wake up, and it’s just normal, but then I think of him, you know, that strange time when you are awake but not thinking? Only a few seconds, but it’s my only relief. Then I think, and I think about how I haven’t seen him since he was eight years old. He’s a teenager now. I think about him all the time. But for some reason, in the mornings, he’s in Belgium, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem so far when I’m busy, during the day, but in the morning, when I wake up and remember it, it’s so far it hurts. Every single morning.’

He rested his chin on her shoulder, leaned his head against hers.

She gave a little, false laugh. ‘Any idea what some people think about you if you admit you have a child you don’t live with, as a woman, I mean? I once made the mistake of telling a woman on an aeroplane and she spent the rest of the flight telling me how unnatural I was. We’d got talking during take-off. It was a seven-hour flight.’

She dropped her effortful facetiousness, then, and spoke plainly, with the tone of someone telling somebody else something they thought they ought to know, unembellished by anecdote. ‘I had some real problems, after he was born. Head problems, you know?’ She tapped the side of her head with one finger. ‘I was in hospital for a while. A lot of drugs. Then I was okay. Then when he was four I had some more problems. I didn’t get help when I should have done, you know. I was hospitalised again, eighteen months that time, nearer two years in fact. His father thought it was good I didn’t see him until I was better and then I didn’t get better for a long time and the longer it got, the easier it was to believe what his father said, that he was doing well without me, that it was disruptive for him, me coming and going. He’s got a stepmother now, Lucia. She’s Italian. I think about her cooking bacon for him because you know, he really liked bacon. But then I think, maybe she hates him, tells him his mother left him because he was no good. His father would back her up on that, that’s for sure. Maybe he cries at night when he’s alone, he won’t in front of his friends I suppose. Maybe he’s having a horrible life, and I’m not there.’

He was still holding her from behind. He rested his head against hers. He did not know how else to comfort her. He had no idea what it must be like, as a mother, to be separated from a child, but he knew enough to know that anything he said at that moment would sound crass. Touch was what she needed: closeness, him being close. At the same time, even as he comforted her, he could not help thinking a self-centred thought. You were right, there is something broken here. And if you were right about that, then maybe you were right about everything else.