Louise Doughty: Black Water

*

There were surprises in store. In the bar, he had observed her big-boned frame, her solid torso, and during their conversation, she had laughed at her size and told jokes against herself, about her clumsiness when she was a girl. ‘A great galumphing girl, I got called once, by an Englishman,’ she had said. ‘You know this word? Galumphing! Something that gallops along but is heavy, no? A rhinoceros, perhaps.’ Horizontal and unclothed, she did not feel great and galumphing, but pillow-soft and comforting, in a way he would not have expected from her ironic way of speaking. Hers was not the kind of body he normally enjoyed. Most of his other lovers — with few exceptions, short-lived — had been slim-limbed, fragile even. And it was not the kind of sex he had had in the past. There was no battle. It was neither hurried nor teasing. They fondled each other and took it in turns to come and smiled, slightly mockingly, during it. He did not feel that he was doing it to her, or she to him, but that they were doing it together, much as they might have washed one another’s backs in the bath. Her breasts were small for her overall size, low-slung, wide apart. On her abdomen, there was a caesarean scar. Her pubic hair was sparse and going grey. Afterwards, they turned the light off by mutual agreement and even kissed each other goodnight. He fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning, there was another surprise. He found that he didn’t want to leave as soon as possible.

He woke first, before dawn, a slow and easy awakening, the kind that comes only when you have slept deeply. He was just in time to hear the beginning of the dawn chorus — that bird, what was that bird? There was one that acted as a kind of outlier for the others; the single, hesitant cheeping, like the lead violinist tuning up before the full orchestra began. Then would come the whole, delightful cacophony, breaking out all of a sudden, like prisoners fleeing the dark. Here in town, he could identify individual sounds a little more easily than out in the valley. In the midst of the chorus, loud and assertive, came the bird he loved most of all, the one that sounded like an old man convulsing with laughter, trying and failing to withhold it. Cheep! Cheep! Two loud exclamations came first — then a cascade of smaller notes, tumbling over each other in a descending scale.

Dawn: to hear dawn coming, to breathe in and feel the lift of it and know yourself to have survived another night.

He lay still, listening to the birds and Rita’s breathing beside him, and watched as light began to stripe the slats of the shutters.

After a while, he needed the bathroom, slipping from the bed as quietly as he could. As he returned to the room, he stopped and stood for a moment, looking at Rita beneath the mosquito net, the fine soft-focus of it blurring her features so that she could have been any age; a face made featureless by sleep, a smudge of hair. She turned as he came around to his side of the bed and the sheet slipped, revealing the slope of one breast, and her eyelids flickered open and she half-smiled, then turned away again as he climbed back into bed, shuffling backwards towards him so that he could spoon against her.

They lay together, dozing, for some time. She rose to use the toilet, then they had sex again.

Afterwards, they lay together some more, facing each other this time, him with his arm around her shoulders and her with one arm resting across his waist. He envisaged going to breakfast with her, in the same bar they had been drinking in the night before, sitting opposite her at a table, discussing what to have. He wondered if they did black rice pudding here, thick with palm sugar. He hadn’t had that in a while. They wouldn’t speak much until after they had had their tangerine juice and coffee, then the conversation between them would come slowly to life. They would discuss how to spend the coming day.

Perhaps this was what marriage was like when it worked. He couldn’t remember ever feeling like this with Francisca; lust, yes, an argument of some sort here and there, a hum of low-level tension between them even when they weren’t arguing — but not this restfulness, not even at the weekends, not like this.

She rolled over onto her other side, away from him. He propped his head up on one elbow and, for a few moments, watched her back, the plump pale flesh, the curve of it where it creased, the doughy hillocks formed at her waist. Her shoulder blades stood out, hard nubs in the soft flesh of her back, like the buds of wings. Still turned away from him, she pushed her long hair back over her shoulder and a curl of pale brown, strung with strands of white, swung briefly between the shoulder blades then came to rest in the shape of an upside-down question mark.

She said, quietly, ‘I need to go. I’d prefer it if you left first.’

He didn’t reply.

‘We can’t leave together,’ she said. ‘It’s a small town.’

They had walked along the path together the night before: but that was in the heat of darkness. Now, it was day.

She rose from the bed, pushing the mosquito net out of the way and standing for a moment, facing away from him, before moving towards the small desk against one wall, where she had thrown her underwear, carelessly, the night before.

He sat up in bed and watched her get dressed. He wanted a cigarette. He couldn’t remember what he had done with the packet — he thought he might have left it on the table in the bar. He watched her until it became apparent she would not speak again, then he flung the sheet back in a sudden, hurried-to-be-gone sort of gesture. The sheet flew away from him, making the mosquito net billow outwards. She did not turn round. He swung his legs off the bed and reached for his own clothes, lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.

He walked along the path, which in daylight revealed itself to be a side path that ran along some other rooms set back behind the bushes. Somewhere, out of sight behind the foliage, he heard a swimming-pool splash and a child’s voice calling out in German. As he reached the reception and bar area he paused for a moment before remembering that he had paid for the room in cash the night before — it had been incredibly cheap, he had thought. He must have done that because he was anticipating having to make his excuses in the morning and perform a swift but gracious getaway. He passed beneath the stone archway and out onto the street.

The morning was underway: it was late by Indonesian standards. Opposite the guesthouse, a man in a vest was showing two young Westerners how to start their hired mopeds. Small restaurants lined the street as it dipped back down towards the main road. It would be the most natural thing in the world to stop and order himself some breakfast — he could have stayed in the guesthouse and had it there, if he’d wanted. It was probably included in the room price. She wouldn’t have any right to think he was loitering for her. So determined was he to make her think herself mistaken that he went over to the tiny place opposite and asked for a coffee with the intention of sitting in full view of anyone who stepped through the archway. It would disconcert her, he thought, to see him sitting there as she emerged. The woman behind the counter smiled broadly and tried to push a laminated menu on him but he shook his head. She gestured to the table nearest the street but he sat one back from that and then, after a little pocket patting, found the cigarettes he hadn’t left in the bar after all, and his sunglasses.

The moment he sat down, he wished he hadn’t. If she came out while he was there, he would ignore her. Or maybe he would simply nod, then look away and light a cigarette. She would think that he was waiting for her and he could turn his head to indicate he wasn’t, or, if his coffee was finished, rise and stride off in the opposite direction, up the rise and out of town. He took some small notes out of his pocket and put them on the table.