Louise Doughty: Black Water

He looked down at her and said, in English, ‘I’m sorry, please excuse me, you’re busy I can see, but I’m new in town, could I join you, for a short while?’ As he spoke, he took a small step backwards, to indicate that he wasn’t going to cause any trouble if she said no, which would make it that little bit more likely she would say yes.

She looked up and gave him a sceptical smile, eyebrows slightly raised. Her rounded cheeks made her look girlish. Her eyelashes were long; no make up, good skin. ‘Sure,’ she said, taking the reading glasses off her nose and folding them, ‘rescue me from my homework.’ He couldn’t quite place her accent, a hint of something north European.

He turned and lifted a hand to the man behind the bar, beckoning him over, then sat. He looked at the papers, which she gathered into a pile and lifted to tap their edges on the table, neatening them, he noted, in the manner of someone who had concluded her work for the night.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I’m in education, training,’ she said with a light sigh. ‘You?’

‘I’m an economist, based in Jakarta, taking a break.’

‘If you’re an economist,’ she said, leaning back in her seat, regarding him steadily with her wide-set eyes, ‘can you explain why the IMF has put forty billion dollars into this region but the families of my students are still having to mix hard old corn kernels with their rice every morning, so that their stomachs won’t rumble in my class?’

‘I could,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t believe me.’

Her smile was a yes.

Several whiskies later, he had almost forgotten his nights in the hut, and that he was on enforced leave after a catastrophic error of judgement. He had not forgotten who, or what, he was — he never did that.

‘John Harper. .’ she said. ‘John Harper. .’ She repeated it slowly, as if turning the words over in her mind and examining them for plausibility. ‘Your sentence construction is interesting, John Harper. I’m usually pretty good at this but I can’t quite place you. You sound like a European,’ she said, ‘but there is occasionally an Americanism.’

‘Is there?’ His surprise was genuine.

‘There was a “gotten” a few minutes ago.’

She was on her third cocktail. She raised the glass, closed her mouth over the straw and sipped from it while flipping a look up at him through her long lashes. He found the gesture silly from a woman her age but then she stopped and laughed out loud and he suspected she was not so much flirting as taking the mickey. Taking the mickey. Where did that phrase come from?

‘You’re making me self-conscious,’ he said.

‘That I doubt.’ She put her cocktail down and stirred it with the straw. The mint leaves whirled amongst the ice cubes. ‘So, the Americanisms?’

‘I work for a company that’s owned by Americans so I deal with them a lot. . and I spent a few years in California as a kid, when I was young, I mean.’

Her look invited him to continue.

‘I went back to the Netherlands, I was sent back, after my brother died, so I spent my teenage years in Europe.’ He stopped. A few whiskies and some congenial company and then this, he thought: the truth. I’m losing my touch.

She gazed at him a while, her look soft, then said, ‘I think we can give each other permission to leave out the sad bits.’

He stared back at her and felt such gratitude that he wondered, for a moment, if this could be what falling in love was like. Seeing as he had never done it, he had no way of knowing.

‘Are you staying here?’ he asked, looking at her directly, a catch in his throat that he wanted her to note.

She shook her head, replying casually, as if she had not picked up on his change of tone, ‘I live in a family compound on Monkey Forest Road,’ then, without missing a beat, ‘and I certainly can’t take you back there. Where are you staying?’

‘Out of town,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask about a room here.’

As he rose she said, ‘The rooms here are nice but pricy by local standards. It’s mostly older tourists.’

‘I have money.’

The room they were given was on the ground floor at the back of the compound, a short walk along a stone path turned into an alleyway by thick vegetation. Frogs croaked unseen; the air was heavy and scented. He could feel that his shirt had become glued to his back. The carved wooden doors were similar to the ones on his hut, with a solid frame that you stepped over to enter. Inside, he felt along the wall and flicked the switch for the ceiling fan. It turned slowly into life, then picked up speed until it rattled round with a tick-tick-tick that stirred the air above them. On a chest of drawers beside the bed, there was a table lamp. He walked over and turned it on, noting that the bed was high and wide, neatly made, with a frangipani flower on each pillow. The mosquito net around it was fine and translucent, much more delicate than the one he had in the hut.

He dropped the key to the room next to the lamp and turned to Rita and although she was a tall woman her expression seemed suddenly small and shy. She said, ‘I’m just going to use the bathroom.’

He went over to the shutters and opened them to look out at the night and listen to the frogs and the insects in the greenery below the window. There came the chirrup of a ghekko, a smaller, sweeter one than the ominous animal that woke him out in the forest. He heard her flush the loo and run the tap, then return to the room. He stayed where he was, his hands on the windowsill, his head dropped slightly, the whisky swimming pleasantly inside him. Despite how long it had been, he felt empty of lust at that moment. He wanted to put the encounter on pause, to enjoy the fact that he was here and it was about to happen. This is the best bit, isn’t it, he thought, just before?

The next morning, she would hold him after they had had sex for the second time and say, ‘This is my favourite bit, afterwards,’ and he would smile to himself thinking how that was what separated men and women, before and after: and joined them, of course, as if the act of sex was a border that cleaved them together and asunder in the same instant.

But right that moment, standing there looking out into the garden — or rather, listening — he felt no physical desire at all and wondered if she would mind if they didn’t do anything, just slept. His younger self would never have believed he could reach this point but here he was, a man in his fifties, who had successfully picked up a strange woman in a bar (or she had picked him up, it didn’t matter which), and what he really wanted was to stop the evening and just be in a room. No one knew where he was. No one would disturb them: but he was not alone. It was perfect.

She came up behind him, slowly. They had both removed their shoes as they had entered the room and her bare feet scarcely made a sound against the tiled floor but he could feel that she was standing right behind him, very close, without touching him. They stood like that for a moment and he listened to their breathing. They both began to breathe a little more deeply. Still, he did not turn. Their breath deepened further. They were breathing in unison, both waiting to see who would move first. He went from feeling no desire to being suddenly, painfully hard, just at the sound of her breath behind him, at the long gap between her approach and any contact between them. He and Francisca had not had sex for the last two years of their relationship. His body had forgotten what it was like to be in physical contact with that of another. She lifted both hands and placed them very gently on his upper arms, right at the top, almost on his shoulders. He could feel the heat of her palms through the cotton of his shirt. He turned.