Monkeys in the Dark

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  ‘No. I hired it.’

  ‘You’ll have to pay to have it washed out.’

  They’re going to want to come with me. I must get rid of them, Sinclaire thought. ‘Could you lead the way to the hospital on your motor bikes and I will follow?’ he said.

  They nodded and sauntered off towards the Harley Davidsons.

  Sinclaire looked down at Usman. His hand was a knob of gore, but the most profuse bleeding was coming from his legs. Sinclaire guessed he would lose consciousness in a few minutes, because already he was panting and his eyes were wonderfully large and soft. For Sinclaire, all the exhilaration of courage had spent itself in effort; he felt sick and resentful as he watched the boy.

  ‘Usman, we’ll be at the hospital in ten minutes. I’ll pay for all your treatment, but you must tell me the truth now. Does Mr Maruli write the pamphlets?’

  ‘He writes them.’

  ‘Do you have arms—machine-guns, rifles, grenades—at the Pusat?’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘When is the counter-attack? Is it this week? Next week?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does Mr Maruli know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who would know?’

  ‘Only Babe. And Almighty God.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ There was a loud whistle blast behind them. The police had their white gauntlets on and their whistles in their mouths. ‘You little shit,’ Sinclaire muttered at Usman, as he put the car into gear. Usman’s head slumped backwards on the seat and rolled from side to side as the car sped after the cycles.

  I should never have done this, Sinclaire was thinking. I should have driven off and left him to the cops. They would have fooled around for an hour and he would have bled to death. Now I’ve got to give a statement at the hospital. But still, I have done something remarkable—anyone else would have run for it. And the incongruous thought came into his head, ‘Alex will be proud of me.’

  He spoke more gently to Usman. ‘Not long now, Us. But how am I going to get away from the coppers a second time?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Usman said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The chicken Itji had cooked for Alex’s dinner that night had only one leg.

  ‘Where’s the other leg?’ Alex asked.

  Itji became thoughtful. ‘It was born with only one, Non.’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘Itji won’t buy chickens like that again, Non. Very silly.’

  ‘Itji, if you need money for food, ask me for it,’ Alex said. The servants’ wages were humiliatingly low—a rice ration and a black market dollar’s worth of rupiah a week: enough cash for one Coca-Cola in the Ramayana Bar or a swim at the Ha Ee pool. However it was the going rate for domestic staff and to pay more was to break faith with one’s colleagues. Competition for good servants was intense, but regulated by the laws of group self-interest: to steal servants away by offering high wages was considered poor form. Alex turned a blind eye to the discrepancies between Itji’s shopping expenses, written up by Bagong, the guard, and the food that actually arrived at her table. Inflation was running at 300 per cent and on some days her servants all looked haggard and sleepy; Alex would call in a noodle man and buy them each a bowl of noodles and soup. One could not do much more than this, for the system was so ancient and so accepted that the servants themselves regarded with contempt employers who over-paid them.

  After dinner Alex called Itji and Aminah, the wash maid, to the table and asked for their ID cards. They fished in their brassières, produced old letters, bus tickets and photographs of children, and at last the cards. Both cards were in order, with photographs, place and year of birth and thumb prints for signatures. Itji had sworn that she was twenty-eight, which was fanciful, and Aminah had claimed to be seventy. Few people of their class knew exactly how old they were, so the cards were acceptable.

  ‘May I have yours now?’ Alex said to Bagong.

  He had been hovering in the doorway from the back garden. Being an outside servant, he was timid about entering the house; Alex had heard Itji ordering him to wash his feet before she would allow him inside to write down a telephone message. Alex beckoned him forward, but Bagong continued to hesitate in the doorway, smiling and vague.

  ‘It’s in the generator room, Non,’ he said at last. He began to back away.

  Alex got up and followed him into the garden. She had never visited the generator room. It was a concrete structure at the far back of her compound, past Itji’s quarters and the washing lines and close to the high whitewashed wall that was topped with broken glass. There was a tall jackfruit tree growing close to it. Like all the big trees in her garden, it had nails hammered into its trunk. This was a precaution against evil spirits, Itji said; evil spirits liked to live in large trees, but not if the trees had nails in them.

  ‘Did you do that?’ Alex asked Bagong, indicating the nails.

  ‘No, Non. I don’t believe in it.’ He opened the generator room. As Alex stepped through the doorway she saw that the room housed not only the generator, but Bagong also. A sleeping mat was on the floor and there were clothes, cooking pots and some magazines. The ginger kitten was curled up on his clothes. Alex was irritated to see the cat. The Haji who owned it had already sent her a note, complaining that Bagong was stealing his cat, and the Haji was street captain, in charge of arranging garbage collections for the residents. Alex had told Bagong a week ago that he was to send the cat home at night.

  ‘But where is your kampong? Where do you normally live?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘I was born in Java, Non. I don’t come from Djakarta.’

  He had been looking through his clothes and had found the card. He stood up. ‘Here is my identity, Non,’ he said. His expression, as usual, was blank.

  Alex felt her hair creeping as she looked at the card: the photograph was certainly of Bagong. He was twenty-nine, born in a village in Central Java. But instead of Bagong’s elegant, spidery handwriting, the signature on the bottom was the thumb print of an illiterate.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly as she handed it back.

  ‘Thank you, Non,’ he replied. There was the slightest puckering of the skin around his eyes.

  Alex felt the shock roll over her as she walked back across the lawn to the house. Bagong was the gentlest human being she had ever met. She thought, What should I do? What’s right? What’s proper?

  She drank a glass of coffee, watching him from the living room as he drifted around the garden, watering the plants. After a while she went outside again and called him over.

  ‘Where did you work before you worked for me?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘In Java, Non.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I was a mathematics teacher.’

  ‘Do you have any family?’

  He smiled as if remembering something from childhood. ‘I had a wife and two sons.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘My wife was shot in January. The boys are with their grandparents.’

  Alex nodded and returned slowly to the house. Clearly his wife had been a member of the Communist Party. Alex had not been able to bring herself to ask him if he were also—his faked card seemed enough proof. There was some specified gaol sentence for having phony papers; if he had been a member of the Party as well, it was a lot worse. Nobody knew how long the arrested communists were going to be kept in gaol. It might be a few years, or until they recanted, or for ever. The New Order had been too busy to worry about those details yet: the communist party had been banned only since March. New laws were coming out every day, but they were the blunt instruments of essential control, not fine-detail legislation to cover sentences for say, a branch secretary communist, an active cadre, a paid-up member who never went to meetings, an unfinancial member …

  Alex groaned aloud. She decided to ring Anthony.

  Wagimin, Anthony’s intolerably insolent houseboy, answered the phone.

  ‘Tuan is not at home. You rin
g back,’ he said. Wagimin loved Sinclaire. He told his friends that his boss looked like a film star. Rock Hudson, he thought. He also hated Alex. She made Tuan upset and nervous. One day Wagimin had been rude to her and Tuan had taken him aside. ‘Never speak to Miss Alex like that. She is my family. Understand?’ he had said. He had used the rough language that important people used when they spoke to peasants and Wagimin had cried with shame. Since then Wagimin had moderated his manner to Alex; it was now borderline impertinent.

  ‘When will Tuan be home?’ she demanded. There was a silence. Alex thought she could see Wagimin making faces at her through the receiver.

  ‘Min is very worried about Tuan,’ he burst out. ‘He told me he would be home one hour ago and now his dinner is ruined. It’s not Wagimin’s fault … Tuan always rings up when he’s going to be late.’

  Alex paced up and down the sitting room. The night was still and very hot; the cries of the street vendors rang like ghost noises. She thought she should try to ring Maruli to ask his advice about Bagong, but just as she began to dial she heard Itji shriek.

  9

  Itji was clasping Anthony by the arm and moaning in Arabic.

  ‘You’re bleeding!’

  ‘It’s not my blood. Make Itji shut up and get me a drink,’ Sinclaire said. ‘And some clothes.’

  His trousers and shirt were patterned with blood. ‘I’ve been in a car accident,’ he said to Itji. He took off his clothes in the living room and put on the sarong Alex had rushed to the bedroom to find. ‘Wash these, please, Itji.’ He sat down and accepted a cognac. ‘Cheers,’ he said to Alex, then suddenly started to laugh. He laughed and laughed, until tears ran down on either side of his long nose.

  Alex had shooed the servants out and sat on the edge of the settee beside him. She had never seen Anthony so unnerved.

  ‘Alex,’ he said at last, ‘there was no blood in the hospital. No blood for a transfusion. I should have realised! Of course there would be no blood in the hospital and no doctors on duty and the night nurses all eating bakmi and too bored to come into casualty to see if there was anything they could do to save him—just a fucking tourniquet might have helped. “This is arterial blood. He will die,” they said. And so he bled to death, right there on the casualty room floor while everyone stood around and said, “There is no blood for a transfusion. He will die,” and “Let’s find a Holy Koran for him.”

  ‘And do you know what I did? I said, “Gentlemen, this is not a hospital, it’s a slaughterhouse,” and I turned round and walked out and I heard them all saying, “What’s he expect? Blood is very expensive. This is a poor country. We do not have money to buy blood for every emergency.” I should have realised! The coppers were looking as glum as hell because the kid was dead and I’d done my block and I wasn’t going to give them any more money.’ He gave a long sigh. ‘It’s been a great night. Lost one friend and one motor car. Poor bloody Usman. Christ! His hand looked like, oh God, something out of Hollywood.’

  He stopped talking and poured himself another cognac. ‘I’m sorry I came round here. I dumped the car and had to get a betjak. This was the closest address I could remember.’ His expression was rueful.

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Alex replied softly. She, too, was embarrassed by this first meeting since their fight. She bent towards him awkwardly and stroked his forehead. ‘How awful for you … Anthony, did you say the boy’s name was Usman?’ she asked. ‘I know someone called Usman—he’s a student at Maruli’s cultural centre.’

  Sinclaire was lying with his head resting on the back of the settee and his eyes closed. For a moment he could not believe what she was telling him. But it was blatant, in the gratuitous, familiar mention of Maruli’s name: lovers couldn’t help themselves—they made these slips of the tongue constantly, even deliberately, to ease the pressure of their obsession. Sinclaire opened his eyes slowly and stared at her.

  ‘Different Usman,’ he said, adding, ‘Do you know the guy who runs that cultural centre? Maruli?’

  Alex nodded.

  Sinclaire sat up. His wide mouth was slightly agape and the skin around his eyes was creased with squinting. ‘How well do you know him?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Quite well.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, by any chance, have gone to Bandung with him last weekend?’ Sinclaire said carefully.

  ‘Maybe.’ Alex knew she was turning red.

  ‘Maybe! You bitch. He’s your fancy man! You little bitch. You must be out of your mind.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know anything? That guy is not a music teacher, or whatever he’s told you he is. He’s a politician and a guerilla-trainer. He’s a nationalist fanatic and he’s playing for high stakes, sweetheart. For real power in a real, big country, full of oil and minerals and very strategically placed. He’s got big ideas, pet, and they’re not ideas you can live with. If you stood in his way for three minutes he’d have you dumped, carved up, kidnapped. Anything. What’s he been asking you?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s not interested in the embassy.’

  ‘What’s he been telling you, then?’

  ‘That he loves me. That he wants to leave Indonesia and go to France.’

  ‘Does he, now? That’s interesting.’ Sinclaire put his head in his hands. ‘Alex, why didn’t you tell me it was Hutabarat? Do you know how much danger you’ve been in? Of all the people you could have been going to bed with. Christ.’ He felt like turning and lashing out at her with his hand, remembering how he’d wanted to tell her about risking everything to get Usman to hospital. Recalling the thought, ‘Alex will be proud of me,’ he gave a snort of self-disgust.

  She interpreted the noise as derision of Maruli.

  ‘Anthony! You have never met him. You don’t know what he’s like. You go sniffing around, listening to what those New Order creeps tell you and believing their paranoid stories about conspiracies, how anybody who is slightly left-wing is making a revolution. You used not to be like this. You’re turning into a fascist. This revolting job you’ve got is turning you into a nut like Greaves. And Colonel James. And you don’t even seem to be doing it very well, if you’re getting people killed in car accidents. You only took this bloody awful job for “experience”, anyway. Because you wanted a few years “in government” and you didn’t like the man you would have had to work for in the Treasury. Why are you getting yourself so involved?’

  They had had arguments about Sinclaire’s job before. He could trot out a string of excuses for the need for espionage in Djakarta: the importance to Australia of Indonesia; the possibility of a hostile Indonesia blockading Australian shipping and air routes; the lunatic Right in Australian politics becoming hysterical and forcing excessive defence spending when Indonesia appeared aggressive; the trade relationship, particularly oil; New Guinea border problems; the military threat to New Guinea and the panic that would cause in Australia. He could barely be bothered defending himself now.

  ‘If things go bad here we have got to know what they might do,’ he said. ‘If they were to close the Sunda Straits and the Malacca Straits to our ships, for example, the arse would fall out of our trade with Asia. Do you get that small point, Alex?’

  She sniffed.

  ‘Don’t sniff, pet. You and I wouldn’t have as much money to spend, because our shares wouldn’t be worth as much, because the merchant banking business would be depressed. Don’t think I’m merely patriotic in doing my job, sweetheart. I’m keeping an eye on the family interests as well. Yours and mine.’ He had struck the hard, flippant tone which most distressed her, and had struck it from his need to hurt her, to make her feel foolish and naive. Since he had learnt about Maruli no other response was possible for him.

  ‘If anything, that makes it more disgusting,’ she replied sullenly, which made Sinclaire realise he had won the argument. Like most women, she had never learnt debating skills and the ease with which Sinclaire could defeat her in words never ceased t
o surprise him.

  For all that’s worth, he thought, now.

  Sinclaire sat with his hair falling through his fingers. This affair of hers was the worst thing she had ever done to him. And she’d not done it out of malice, or even stupidity, but from that terrible romantic and wilful streak, the thing that had made their grandmother elope. His mind was churning; images from a decade earlier came back to him … summer holidays at Palm Beach … The others had gone swimming, Alex and I were lying on the sundeck up at the house, when she said to me, ‘You’re so handsome, Anthony. You’ve got golden hairs running down here, in the hollow of your back … Your skin smells beautiful, like warm apples … I won’t see you after the holidays. I’m boarding at Frensham next year. Mummy thinks I need discipline. Does my skin smell beautiful, too? … I can see myself in your eyes.’ I spent two years just waiting for each holiday; sometimes I couldn’t bear it and I drove down to the school and they’d let me take her out for the day. But the abortion finished everything. It was as if none of it had ever happened. And since then I’ve sometimes hated her and wished she would marry some fat barrister with dandruff and have three dandruffy kids.

  ‘Have it your own way,’ Sinclaire said. ‘My job is irrelevant and disgusting. Your Maruli is a simple music teacher, who will take you off to France where you can enjoy café society and meet a lot of painters and writers, and live on the Rive Gauche and get a job on Le Monde—when your French improves—to supplement the rather slender earnings of emigre music teachers. And you can have three lovely black-and-white children, little minstrels … Your dear mother will be delighted.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Just ring up Wagimin and tell him to bring you round some clothes, then go away.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I might borrow a few of Mr Hutabarat’s things. Surely he leaves some clothes here?’

  ‘He doesn’t and they wouldn’t fit you, and I wouldn’t lend them to you if they did.’

  ‘He’s small, is he? You always did fancy runts. Has he got dandruff, too?’