Louise Doughty: Black Water

Next to the drinks shack was a concrete step with two boys sitting on it. They were looking at him and smiling, then speaking quietly to each other. He wondered if they were boys from the queue of mopeds parked diagonally at the bottom of the hill but they seemed too young and there was something in their smiles he didn’t like.

His coffee arrived. The woman who placed it in front of him eyed the money on the table but didn’t take it. He lifted the cup to his lips and stared back out at the street, thinking to himself, those boys are not moped drivers. He knew a hired hand when he saw one, an inexperienced young man or woman paid to do a particular job without being given any information about the significance of that job. They were always kept in the dark because they were the ones paid to trail a target and so had to get close. As a result, their chances of being spotted and caught were high, which was why they were never given any information they could divulge when the target’s henchmen were burning the soles of their feet. Their inexperience meant they were rarely subtle — and in fact, the people who hired them often didn’t want them to be subtle, they wanted the target to feel followed. But more than that, they had a small, excited glow to them. It was possibly the first time they had been asked to do something secret, and overpaid for it to boot. They believed it was the first step towards becoming something more than a waiter or cleaner or moped driver — they were flush with their own sense of importance.

So why were these two watching the guesthouse?

Rita emerged. She did not look left or right, or even across the road at him, but set off immediately down the hill. She had a confident walk; a slightly mannish stride. The normal thing would have been to see him — and then either acknowledge or ignore him, but she had deliberately not seen him, which made him think she had peered out of the stone doorway before she exited.

He finished his coffee and watched the youths from the corner of his eye, waiting to see if they rose and followed her down the hill, but they stayed seated. Harper gave it five minutes, then got up, and it was only then that the boys stood. Harper turned in the opposite direction to the one Rita had gone, uphill, towards the edge of town. He would stride up past the rice fields and see how far the youths stayed behind him, just to be sure. They hadn’t been watching the exit to the guesthouse for Rita. They had been waiting for him.

He walked steadily up Jalan Bisma, out of town. The shacks ended and there were few people about. A pair of middle-aged tourists in khakis were walking slowly ahead of him. The Monkey Forest was up this way, if he remembered correctly, which meant that he would be able to turn left when the road became a footpath and curve back down into town the other way. When he reached the main street, he would get a moped back to the hut. It had been an overnight adventure, nothing more, a break from his own thoughts: but his thoughts were waiting there, out in the valley above the rushing river, thoughts that turned inside his head while the water tumbled below. He realised he was dehydrated after the whisky. The coffee had been a mistake, or at least he should have had a glass of water with it. Here on the hot exposed path, with the khaki-clad tourists in front of him and the boys behind, there was no water to drink, not one drop, and like any thirsty person he suddenly starting noticing all the undrinkable water around him, the fields of brown irrigation in which the rice-plant shoots stood green and tender — the water tower in the middle of the field, tall, with an open platform at the top and a roof for shade: water towers or watchtowers — at first glance, it was hard to tell the difference.

He had started smoking again. And drinking. He might have known. Sex and smoking and drinking — the Holy Trinity. Was it possible to have one without the other two? They kicked each other off. They joined hands and danced ring-a-roses in his head. Ring-a-roses. Emma, the English girl, sang it to him when she was drunk — Emma, the girl he met in Singapore. She hit him once; he couldn’t remember why.

Over the following two days, smoking was what he did mostly, although there was a certain amount of whisky involved as well. He knew that if he took the smoking seriously, did it with the kind of calm intensity it warranted after a break of several weeks, then it might forestall the booze. Forestalling the booze would be a very, very good idea. He sat on the veranda of his hut, looked out into the forest, drank whisky from a coffee cup, pictured Rita’s back turned away from him in bed with her hair between her shoulder blades; and he smoked.

Christ , he thought, I survived a rioting mob in Jakarta not long ago and then began to wonder if my life could be in danger from the people who have employed me for three decades — yet one encounter with a woman and I’ve turned into this. He realised that he was enjoying this image of himself: the hard-bitten man on the veranda in the jungle with his whisky and his cigarettes. If you couldn’t be with a woman, then this was surely the next best thing, drinking and smoking and thinking of her. Thinking about a woman was a great excuse to throw your head back as you tipped the last drops of whisky from the cup into your mouth, and then to swing the bottle as you refilled the cup. You could imagine what you might look like to her as you lit up your next cigarette, shielding the match from the wind with one hand, flicking it between two fingers so that it somersaulted into the air and extinguished itself at the same time. Have you ever seen a match burn twice? Ah, that was why Emma had hit him, he remembered now. He hadn’t pulled that stunt on a girl again. They couldn’t take it.

Kadek brought him his supplies, from time to time, and handed them over looking concerned. Harper became garrulous and started asking Kadek about his family, even once suggesting he join him in a drink, to be rewarded by a brief look of shock, a small bow, refusal.

When Kadek wasn’t there, he took to mumbling to himself. He wasn’t really mumbling to himself, though. He was mumbling to Rita.

He wanted to tell her how pleasant it had been and how that wasn’t usual for him. He wanted to explain to her that although that sounded like a meagre compliment, it really wasn’t. It hadn’t felt like a first time, that was what struck him. There would be no second or third time, of course, let alone a continuing relationship — but it also hadn’t felt like a first time because it had seemed so natural and inevitable, from the minute he had seen her sitting in the corner of the bar.

There had been many times in his life when he had felt the pull of a woman — and a fair few of those occasions had occurred in bars — and yet there was always a tussle to be had, an elaborate game of pursuit or persuasion, of drawing back then reasserting, of uncertainty almost up until the very moment you were entwined. A woman could pull out at any minute, of course, and some of them did. In many ways, the tussle was the point. The act itself took only a short while, after all, and when it was done it was done. There could never again be a first time with that particular woman, never again the excitement and absorption of uncertainty.

But with Rita, there had been no tussle, just calmness and pleasure, and as there had been no heightened excitement before, there had been no let-down after. The calmness and pleasure had both outlived the act.

Perhaps it was about age. The more he thought about it, rocking back in his wooden chair on the veranda until he was balancing on the two back legs of it, it wasn’t so much his age as hers. Women of forty-five plus, he reflected — and after one night with Rita, he was now an expert, obviously — were endearingly like men. He thought back to some of the conversations he had had with young women when he was young himself — still young enough, that was, to be sized up as potential husband or father material. There were so many ways to disappoint a woman at that stage. You were never going to be in love enough, or committed enough even if you were in love, or solvent enough even if you were committed. And even if you were in love, committed and solvent, you were never going to help enough around the house. When he looked back on his marriage to Francisca, that was his overwhelming feeling, that he had always disappointed her, right from the start — taking so long to get around to marrying her hadn’t helped. And then her quiet fortitude in the face of how he was: she always made him feel that she was being noble, good. His mistake had been to marry a woman ten years younger. Older women, he felt, with his new-found experience, had got being disappointed by men well and truly out of their system. They had had their husbands and children, if they were going to have them — they had been through the mill of family life and come out the other side. If they were available for sex then they viewed it as men had always done, as recreation.