Louise Doughty - Black Water

‘Anyway,’ she said, a note of briskness entering her voice. ‘I just wanted you to know, when I was a little rude on that first morning, it wasn’t your fault. I had enjoyed our time together. If I hadn’t had to go to work, I wouldn’t have rushed off, but when I wouldn’t talk and didn’t even say goodbye properly, it wasn’t your fault. I was thinking about my son. Thinking how he gets up every morning and knows nothing about me except I live abroad. I don’t know if he even reads the letters I send. I have to send them to his father. I never get anything back. I tried calling last year, it got too much. He refused to come to the phone, he was angry I’d called, his father said.’ She shrugged, then turned round to face him. ‘You’ve never had children?’

He shook his head.

‘Well, it’s hard to describe but when you wake up and you are without your child, it’s like you’ve woken up and remembered that your arm or leg is missing. That’s what it’s like. So,’ she said, kissing him lightly on the mouth. ‘So we got each other’s sad stories after all. Serves you right, John Harper.’

They kissed then, but not as deeply as before: now, he was just kissing her.

After a while, he stepped back and said, ‘I want to take you back to bed but Kadek could show up any minute.’

She smiled her ironic smile. ‘You’re worried what the man who looks after you will think about you having had a woman for the night? They are used to the funny ways of foreigners, you know.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get dressed.’

She was light-hearted on the drive back to town, happy to have unburdened herself a little. Everyone has their own parcel of unhappiness, he thought, like the bundles people carry on their heads, each person has their own bundle in its own particular shape and size — but if you talk to someone, you give them your bundle to carry for a bit. It was only temporary, though, that feeling. He pitied her, as she chatted to him about being hungry and about how she couldn’t believe she had to work that day and she really shouldn’t have stayed the night, she hadn’t meant to. She was cheerful because of the temporary relief, because she had handed him her bundle for a short while. But, he knew — and if she thought about it for a moment, she would know too — the next morning, alone in her room in the family compound, she would wake feeling just the same as she always did.

He’d better not see her again. It wasn’t safe. If Kadek had come while they were at the hut together, she might have been linked with him, in the eyes of the organisation. What if they had come for him last night? He had endangered her already.

As they pulled up outside her compound, she said, her hand already reaching for the car door to open it, ‘You know, you haven’t told me the really bad thing in your life yet, don’t think I didn’t notice.’

He looked at her.

‘You really think I couldn’t tell when you were skipping bits?’ She gave a throaty laugh, her eyes shone with amusement. ‘Just because you are mister well travelled and live in big cities? You think I am some village schoolteacher? Well, you underestimate me.’ She leaned over and kissed him. ‘I’m going to ask later, you know.’

‘Go and get your things,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to the school gates.’

He watched her as she ran into the family compound — her solid figure graceful in its haste. An outside observer would think of her as a self-contained, competent sort of person, not beautiful but handsome in a Nordic kind of way, the kind of person you would want to look after you if you had a cold. How hard was that air of briskness won? How different it was, when she sat on the edge of her bed each morning, a few moments after waking up, awash with grief for her lost child and wondering how she would find the strength to rise, to face the coming day?

She emerged from the compound within minutes, dressed in clean clothing and wearing a hat — the sun was bright that day — beaming at him as she walked back to the car, a large wicker bag over her shoulder. She opened the car door and slid into her seat. He gunned the engine as they drove off, even though they went a few yards and then were stuck behind a delivery truck.

‘You’ll have to give me directions,’ he said.

‘Back to the main street then up Jalan Hanoman,’ she replied.

She got him to drive past the school and then pull up at the far end of the road, away from town, so her students wouldn’t see her getting out of a strange man’s car. He climbed out of his side as she was lifting her bag from the footwell and went round the car to open her door. As she climbed out, she gave him the same small smile she had given when he insisted on carrying her bag in the night market. How long ago that seemed. It was as if they had had a whole life together.

They kissed politely, on the cheek, as they were in public, and as he turned to go she said, ‘You know. .’ then petered out. He heard in her tone a desire to arrest his departure. How often that impulse came, he thought. Even when we want to leave or want someone else to go, that moment just before the separation, when you or the other person can’t help saying, pause a while . When he had been a young man, he had always thought that the one who asked for the pause was the one in a position of weakness. He had always made sure it wasn’t him. Now, though, he wondered. The folly and pride of youth: that was all those power games had been? Rita was asking for a moment more with him before he got back in the car and drove away. That didn’t make her weak or subservient; on the contrary.

He turned. ‘What?’ he asked, hearing the softness in his own voice and hoping she would hear it too, so that if this was the last time they saw each other, she would remember it and know that this had meant something to him.

‘You know, I know there’s lots more you haven’t told me, not just your little brother, lots. It’s up to you, I didn’t mean what I said then, I’m not going to press you, it’s up to you. I just wanted you to know I know.’

He looked at her. ‘I told you lots of things,’ he said.

‘I know you did,’ she replied.

There was a look in her eyes that might have been pain were it not for her smile, and then she broke his gaze for a second by glancing back into the car to check she hadn’t left anything and he took advantage of that second, that brief snapping of the thread of spider-silk that held them, to turn away.

He watched her in the rear-view mirror as he drove away, a large woman with an oversized wicker bag on her shoulder, walking slowly in the same direction as him but growing ever more distant, her floppy hat hiding most of her face.

Back at the hut, he found Kadek on the veranda shaking out a pillowcase. The bed sheets were hung over the rail. He wondered if he and Rita had left traces of her overnight stay but then remembered that Kadek changed the bed linen once a week anyway.

‘Morning, Mr Harper,’ Kadek said with a small bow and a broad smile. ‘It is a good morning, yes?’

‘Yes, Kadek,’ Harper replied, stopping at the top of the veranda steps and casting his gaze across the valley. There was no trace of haze in the sky today: it was a perfect blue, the valley full of light. It was the sort of day that people from all over the world paid thousands of dollars to come to Bali and experience. ‘A fine day.’

‘A fine day,’ Kadek repeated, as if he was experimenting with the word ‘fine’, trying it out for size in that particular context. Fine , as in beautiful; fine as in good; fine as in delicate, perhaps: certainly not ‘fine’ as in just about okay, oh alright, that’s fine : and not fine as in payment due , penalty. Ever since he had arrived at the hut, Harper had been waiting for his fine day.