Louise Doughty: Black Water

People like himself and Rita: their attitude to sex was arguably symptomatic of their other deficiencies. They were comfortable with casual encounters at their age only because they were un comfortable with the conventions that discouraged them in others. They were odd or unusual in so many other ways, in fact, that sex was the least of it.

He had always had an uncomfortable feeling around men who chased after younger women and now, fresh from the comforts of Rita, he was able to say to himself precisely why. To pursue a younger woman was an act of deceit — you knew they wanted something different from what you wanted and you had to con them into not realising that until you had got your way. But with women like Rita, what made it so calm, so relaxing, was the knowledge that you were offering them nothing and they knew that, so you were not deceiving them. How had he got to his age without understanding this? If he had known it earlier, maybe he would have tried nailing the older ones years ago. Why had he been so obsessed with the women — young, pretty, or both — who reflected well on him in the eyes of other men? Had it all been about what other men would think of him, even when he was acting in private? How stupid was that?

It was early evening, suddenly, on the second day of drinking and smoking — where had two days gone? Maybe it was more. He wondered what day of the week it was, how long he had been here, on the veranda? There were blanks in his head. He couldn’t remember what he had done earlier that day and he couldn’t remember eating at all. The light was commencing its swift and steady slip into dusk. The wall of palm trees on the other side of the valley was growing darker and darker — soon, the gathering gloom would be upon him, then blank, ineluctable night.

Rita. He wanted her; there, at the hut, with him, as darkness fell. The thought came to him clean and unalloyed by doubt. After one encounter, he was missing her. Her absence was a kind of bodily discomfort. He ached — just a little but all over, like the very early stages of the flu.

He wanted to know everything about her. She had deflected questions about herself every bit as deftly as did he, as if they were just swatting flies together across the table. In the past, he had made a point of pressing women for facts about themselves: usually you didn’t need to press. Most women wanted to tell you their most intimate tragedy within about five minutes of meeting you and those who didn’t were easy to persuade; a hard stare usually did it. Rita had been happy to keep their encounter determinedly shallow, which to him implied she had something to hide, something she didn’t like to talk about.

Her accent was so faint — Belgian by birth, as it turned out, she was fluent in English and probably several other languages: a teacher, but one who was now training other teachers, she had told him; a specialist in developing parts of the world. She was well-travelled, had been in the archipelago some time: a woman comfortable in almost any culture but her own, he thought. She belonged to the same nation as him, in that sense, the nation of people scattered and diffused all over the world, citizens of nowhere.

And what about that scar on her abdomen. .? He remembered how she had sat very still on the side of the bed the morning after, just before she had risen and pushed aside the mosquito net, in the moment before she had said, ‘I need to go.’ Something about that moment of stillness had stuck in his head, the image of her naked back. He had known at once that something was wrong. There was something broken there; something that needed fixing.

He remembered a young woman he had been keen on from the office, many years ago, back when he was eligible. Alida, she was called. He had liked her because he thought her unusual in the same way that he was. She had a Taiwanese grandmother, although she had been born and raised in the Netherlands and was more Dutch than the Dutch girls he knew. She also had one eye that was slightly off. Long straight hair, a slim physique — when they first met, he couldn’t stop looking at her face to work out exactly what it was that was out of kilter. Later, he found out that there had been speculation round the office that they were perfect for each other, him being part-Asian too.

She was from the typists’ pool, as it was called back then. The girls in the typists’ pool were interested in men who had been out in the field — in those days, it was always male operatives and women office staff, although the total staff was still tiny in comparison with what it would grow to be. His line of work was still in its infancy, or rather the corporatisation of it was. Most of the operatives were young men fresh from their military service, like Harper. There were rumours their three directors were all ex- Nefis , although Harper thought probably only one of them was, a small, wiry man with grey hair and the relaxed air of someone so efficiently trained he had absolutely nothing to prove. The other two had a bit more bluster, threw their weight around: they were just army men.

It was 1969 and Harper had been back in the business for a year. He had returned from Indonesia at the end of ’65 — via Los Angeles, his last visit there, although he didn’t know that at the time — to be put on indefinite sick leave. Indefinite turned out to mean four years. When he came back to the office, no one was allowed to ask for an explanation. You’re being given a second chance because of how young you were and because of how much money we spent training you , Gregor had said. I hope I don’t need to tell you that there won’t be a third. On his first day back after a four-year break, he had been greeted with ‘Hey, welcome back,’ by people who hardly lifted their heads, as if he had only been gone a fortnight. An aura of mystery clung to him, he knew, and he did nothing to dispel it — an aura of mystery made bedding women easy. Even before what happened in ’65, he had had plenty of material in that respect. There was always the enjoyable moment, with a woman, when he dropped in the fact that he had been born in a camp, and the confusion in their eyes as they calculated that he certainly didn’t look Jewish.

One of the reasons he had liked Alida was that such subterfuges had seemed unnecessary — they worked in the same business, after all. Their conversation beforehand had been mostly work-related. Their sex had been noisy and enthusiastic. Afterwards, she held him against her on her single bed in her flat-share and moved her fingertips in slow circles over his back — the sort of stroking that was ticklish before sex but calming after. He was half-dozing when she said, ‘You know what they say about you, round the office, don’t you?’

He thought she was about to tell him some pointless bit of gossip: that you hate Aldemar because he earns more than you (untrue, there were lots of reasons to hate Aldemar), or you slept with Lotte in European Accounts and she took pills when you refused to marry her (true). That sort of gossip was daily currency when a group of people worked together on one floor of a building, in their case given a twist by the fact that they couldn’t tell their friends about the sort of company they worked for. He was only half-listening.

‘They say you were terribly tortured.’

Her fingers became still. He raised his head and looked at her face. She was smiling. She shuffled down the pillow a little and propped her head up on one hand, the arm bent at the elbow. Her fine dark hair fell down, a waterfall that flowed over her bare shoulder and upper arm. The expression on her face suggested she was not only amused by this rumour but expected him to be amused as well.

‘They say when you were captured in the jungle in the Indies. .’