Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  He waited until late afternoon, changing into one of the shirts he had bought on his previous visit to town just before Kadek arrived with the moped. Rita would be working earlier in the day, he guessed, and his best chance of finding her would be around the same time as their previous encounter.

  He got Kadek to drop him at the corner of Jalan Bisma and walked up to the guesthouse but the bar was completely empty, not even any staff around. He went back to the main road and took up watch in the cafe again. When that vigil proved fruitless, he walked up and down the main street, stopping off in one or two shops, where it was easy to linger by the door and watch who passed along the road. There was no point at which he despaired of seeing her. It was only a matter of persistence. Where would someone like her go if she wasn’t getting some work done in a bar or cafe? Where would he himself go if he didn’t want to hang out with tourists? The night market, probably.

  At the entrance to the market, there were the food stalls. The first was serving yellowish chicken; a heap of them, each tied with string, sat on the counter-top. A young woman behind the counter was shredding one into a bowl, her hands flicking to and fro. In other bowls on the counter were roasted peanuts and tea-stained eggs with cracked shells, rice and sambal. Would Rita eat at a place like this, or did she normally eat with the family she stayed with? A gold maneki-neko sat upright on the end of the counter, beckoning with its lucky paw.

  Although it was still early, the market was crowded. He was careful to act like any other customer, in case Rita saw him before he saw her. He moved on from the food stalls to those selling plastic plates and bowls heaped high in bright green, pink, red, orange. Then the clothing stalls with hundreds of different pairs of flip-flops. He hated flip-flops – why walk around in something that left your feet so exposed? Ugly, as well. No foot, male or female, was ever flattered by a flip-flop. The only shoppers were locals. The occasional tourist was taking photos, thrilled by how the retail goods bought by poor people were so cheap and charming and colourful. Darkness had not lifted the smothering heat and the market was lit by white arc lights that hurt his eyes when he glanced up. Stallholders shouted to each other. Children pushed insolently against his legs. The noise and the crowds were beginning to oppress him. He wouldn’t find her here.

  The market took a dogleg and here the crowds thinned a little. He stopped in front of a small fruit stall selling the huge apples that he liked to eat in the evenings. He bought a bag of them and, as he paid, looked to his right and saw her, two stalls down. She was leaning over at a spice stall and pointing to a bamboo basket containing pieces of twisted turmeric root. The man behind the stall was leaning forward too, with a small wooden shovel in one hand. They were in intense conversation. As he approached, he guessed that she was pretending to be annoyed at the price the stallholder wanted to charge her. She was speaking Balinese but he couldn’t tell whether she was using the formal or colloquial form. The stallholder was pretending to be annoyed back but then a price was all at once agreed and they both broke into smiles.

  He stood quite close to her, waiting for her to finish, so that when she turned from the stall, she gave a small start at his proximity.

  He held up both hands. ‘I didn’t want to interrupt.’

  ‘Nyoman and I are old friends.’ She threw a smile at the stallholder and he smiled and inclined his head in return. ‘What are you after?’

  He was about to apologise and back off, then he realised what she meant and held up his bag of apples.

  ‘Have you had the food here?’ she asked. ‘It’s great, there’s a great stall at the entrance.’

  ‘I saw it.’

  They walked back through the market together, slowly, with her pausing at every other stall to look over what was there. She stopped at the plastic plates and bought six green ones in the shape of leaves. ‘My tutor group,’ she said, by way of explanation, slipping the plates into the large cloth bag she was carrying. As they turned from the stall, he reached out, hooked a finger beneath the strap of her bag and pulled it gently from her shoulder. She stopped. He took the bag, dropped his apples in it, put it on his own shoulder. They stood facing each other. Her expression was a query. She was wearing a short-sleeved cardigan over a vest top and it had slipped when he had taken the bag, exposing a soft, freckled shoulder. He reached out a hand and pulled the edge of the cardigan back into place. She dropped her gaze. They turned and continued walking.

  ‘It’s a long time since a man has carried my bag.’ She had been flustered by his gesture: she was commenting on it to diminish its power. ‘As you Americans say, it’s cute.’

  ‘I’m Dutch.’ They had reached a narrow gap in the crowds. He gestured for her to go through it first.

  ‘Dutch when it suits and American when it suits, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied, as he drew level with her again, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, you haven’t been treated right.’

  She spoke from the corner of her mouth as they walked side by side. ‘Stop trying to make me fall in love with you.’

  ‘No.’

  They slipped into it so easily; it was so fluent and meaningless. This was what he liked about her. You could say anything to her and it wasn’t freighted with significance. The gestures were important but the words meant nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry about the other morning,’ she said, as they paused by a stall selling fritters. ‘About rushing off, I mean. It was a little rude of me.’ A little rude: he liked that in her too, her precision.

  ‘Yes it was.’ Now, perhaps, would be a good moment to find out what was wrong with her, what was damaged inside. Once you knew that about a person, they were yours for the taking.

  ‘I did wonder, at that time, what . . . ?’ he started, but she spoke over him.

  ‘What did you do after you left?’ she said.

  ‘Went for a walk,’ he replied. Maybe she hadn’t seen him waiting in the cafe opposite the guesthouse after all.

  ‘I had to get home and get changed, I was already late. And I felt a little guilty, I guess.’

  ‘For being late or for having sex with me?’

  She gave a half-smile. ‘Well, that’s not what I’m here for, is it?’

  ‘I don’t think you should feel guilty for giving yourself a night off.’ He did not add: that’s what I was doing, after all.

  She looked away, at the market, then gave a sigh so heavy he presumed she was about to make her excuses and leave but instead she said, ‘A drink?’

  ‘How about we go back to Jalan Bisma?’

  ‘You are a bad man, John Harper.’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  The morning after their second night together, they had exactly the kind of breakfast he had fantasised about before. The guesthouse didn’t do black rice pudding – it was a Sunday speciality only – but the tangerine juice was sharp and sweet, the coffee hot.

  ‘The sambal is great here, really spicy,’ Rita said, as they studied the menu.

  When the young woman came with their dishes, she put the eggs and toast in front of Rita and the nasi goreng in front of Harper. They waited until she had turned away before exchanging plates with small smiles of collusion.

  They took the same route that he had the other day, walking up Jalan Bisma out of town until the guesthouses and little warung fell away and the road became a track through the rice fields.

  On his previous walk, the boys had fallen behind, then disappeared, and he had wondered if he was mistaken about being followed – but even so, he glanced behind them. This time, there was no sign of anything suspicious, no one on their trail. The tall wooden constructions in the middle of the field looked just like water towers. The sheen of light brown water in which the rice plants stood was nothing more than irrigation. In Rita’s presence, he realised, everything was no more than it seemed. If she were in the hut with him at night, the men would not come, rain or no rain. They would not even exist.

  They passed beyond the edge of
the town and along the stretch of dirt road that led up to the Forest via a winding rocky path. The edges of the rice fields were dotted with construction sites, the town stretching itself to accommodate its growing number of visitors. They passed a site where the bones of a building, a small hotel or guesthouse, were in place; the concrete pillars and the horizontal beams: a bare-chested man knelt on the ground chopping fiercely at a pile of wet cement on a board. Bamboo ladders lay in rows across one of the horizontals and several men were halfway up the ladders in a row, hauling another beam upwards between them by ropes slung over the top. At the bottom of the ladders and directly underneath the bones of the building, a large concrete base had already been filled and hardened. A pack of three dogs were lounging on it, all exactly the same shape, a cardboard-cutout mongrel shape: small, skinny, with disproportionately large ears. One of the dogs was dark brown, another a sandy colour, the other dirty white. They lay on their sides in the sun as motionless as if they were dead. Harper thought how sinister that sort of dog always seemed to him, all the same shape but different colours, as if they had been made, not born, cut from paper with scissors then magicked into life like the skeletons that jerked around the animated films of his childhood.

  ‘So many rice fields disappearing under concrete,’ Rita said. ‘Until recently, Jalan Bisma was a dirt track leading out of town.’

  He thought, well, when a farmer probably gets the same for selling his land as he would for three decades of threshing, can you blame him?

  Rita stopped and looked at the site, the fields beyond. ‘You know, I have wondered . . .’

  Something about her tone arrested him. ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, you know, about buying a lease, a piece of land. It would feel big, though, a big thing to do.’

  ‘Why? You could always sell it on, couldn’t you, if it was a mistake?’

  She frowned. ‘It would mean I was saying goodbye, to other things, other options, going back, and so on. I would be saying something, to myself I mean. Alone.’

  He wasn’t sure what she meant: saying something only to herself? Or buying a lease, alone? But the bit about saying goodbye to other options, that bit he could understand.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Eight years. Long enough, to decide I mean. If I was going to move on, I would have done by now. Building, you know, it’s saying something, no? Building something. Frightening.’

  Of all the things in the world there were to be frightened of, buying land leases or building property did not strike him as particularly scary: but no sooner had he dismissed her remark than he paused for a moment. I have never built anything, he thought. How strange, at my age, to realise that only now. ‘Aren’t you scared of the Invisibles?’

  She shook her head, smiling. ‘These fields are the land of Dewi Sri, don’t forget.’ She paused. ‘If this is your first time on Bali, how do you know about the Invisibles?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, pointing. ‘What kind of bird is that?’

  She lifted a hand to shade her eyes.

  While she scanned the trees on the other side of the rice field for the non-existent bird, he watched the man on his knees mixing the concrete and thought how he could buy a lease here too. With the political situation so unstable, it would be dirt cheap. Local labour would be next to nothing. You could throw up a small villa in no time. He wondered what colours Rita liked. He wasn’t into all that fancy folk art but he didn’t feel that she was either: she was too practical. In a couple of seconds, as they stood looking out over the field, he pictured their whole lives from now on. A small villa, together. Peace. Coffee on the veranda each morning as dawn broke over the fields. The view would be less dramatic than the one over the valley but, in its own way, just as beautiful.

  The sun shone through the edges of her hair where it lifted slightly. He had the idea – which he knew to be stupid – that she had just had the same fantasy.

  A shadow crossed his thoughts then, as he remembered what the rice fields were like at night. How far was he from it, two hours’ drive, perhaps? Two hours and thirty-two and a half years, that’s how far from it he was. What was he thinking? He turned briskly. Rita looked round at his sudden movement and, as she did, the dog nearest to them on the concrete slab, the white dog, lifted its head and with no warning other than a brief, preparatory snarl, roused itself and ran at them, barking in a rusty fashion, toenails skittering in the dirt. Rita let out a small, alarmed sound and grabbed his left arm while positioning herself behind him, pulling him to one side. He flinched but at her action, not the dog. The dog ran at them but stopped just short, then began following along the path. It loped beside them for a stride or two, jumping and snapping its teeth in the air, then, happy it had seen them off, lowered its head and slunk back to its indifferent companions.

  Rita was walking on the other side, close to him, clutching at his right arm. He used his left hand to detach her grip, then took her left hand in his right and squeezed it. ‘If there’s one thing I can protect you from, it’s dogs.’

  ‘I’m not scared of them back home,’ she said quickly, ‘they are trained there, but here, they are just strays. You never know what they will do.’

  ‘They are doorbells. Wouldn’t you want your dog to bark at strangers?’

  ‘Yes, well, one of those things bites you, you have forty-eight hours to get to Jakarta for the rabies jab . . .’

  ‘The dogs here don’t have rabies, the monkeys maybe.’

  ‘I know. I just don’t like them, that’s all.’

  *

  At the entrance to the Monkey Forest, there were two women with a small portable stall, which they had set up in front of the ticket office, selling bunches of tiny bananas and packets of peanuts.

  ‘Want me to get some?’ he asked, gesturing.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Rita replied.

  One of the women was behind the stall, the other stood at the side holding a catapult ready loaded with a stone. He queued for their tickets at the kiosk and watched as the cluster of monkeys close to the entrance gate split to form a pincer movement and began to knuckle-walk towards the stall, tails in the air, gazes flicking from the bananas to the woman with the catapult. As soon as a monkey got too close to the stall, the woman raised the catapult and, at the sight of it, all the monkeys scattered back to the gate. He wondered how many shots the woman had had to fire to teach the monkeys what a raised catapult meant: not many, he guessed.

  ‘Can you believe I’ve never been here?’ Rita said, as they passed through the gate and entered the green heat of the Forest.

  They were only a hundred yards in when a tiny grey monkey ran at them and she flinched again. The monkey stopped a few feet away and began to groom itself, as if it had proved its point, but after that, Rita stayed close to him as they walked.

  The path led upwards through the trees until it reached a central area with a pond surrounded by a low stone wall and moss-covered statues. A man in a uniform was holding a short rectangular machete and hacking at a scattering of coconuts on the ground. As soon as he moved away, a dozen monkeys lolloped towards the broken pieces – the smaller ones making a dash then retreating with a piece to a safe distance, the larger ones approaching more casually, making their selection, then sitting where they were to shred it with the defiant air of playground bullies.

  ‘Look at that one,’ Rita said. A young monkey too afraid of the other monkeys to approach the shards of coconut had hold of a small, unbroken one that had rolled some distance away and was lifting it and bashing it on the ground. He had the feeling she was trying to recover her dignity by pretending she thought the monkeys cute: they weren’t. The baby monkeys had the faces of little malicious old men.

  As they watched, another adult monkey approached a mother and baby sitting on the stone ledge of the pool and grabbed at the baby’s tail, trying to drag it from its mother’s grasp. The mother swung the baby underneath her stomach, and lolloped away on three legs. The other mon
key pursued and tried to snatch the baby again. The mother moved once more, but never quite far enough to deter the other monkey from trying again.

  As they stood watching, Rita said, ‘Monkey, donkey, owl. You know that saying?’

  ‘Three ages of man.’

  ‘Donkey, or owl?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Still donkey, although sometimes I think I’m ready for owl.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone is ever ready for owl, do you? On your deathbed maybe.’

  ‘Isn’t it wisdom rather than death? What about you?’

  ‘Definitely still donkey,’ she replied, with a sigh in her voice. ‘You have no idea.’

  They watched the monkeys for a little longer and he wondered how soon he could suggest they leave – there was an awful lot of forest still to walk around, not to mention the holy stone carvings. He hoped she didn’t want to look at all of it.

  ‘I don’t have to work on Monday,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s another trainer coming in. Normally I stay and watch but I’ve seen this one before.’

  What else was there to do, while he waited for news? With Rita, he felt he had been wrong: of course no one was going to kill him. With Rita, he felt his anxieties to be mistaken, no more than the inevitable result of his work. Could he not allow himself this a little longer? Work would still be there waiting for him, after all. If he hadn’t heard from Jakarta or Amsterdam by the end of next week, he would take the initiative then.