Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  He crawled across the floor, ruffling the thin rug, to the cabinet – dark polished wood – where he kept the whisky. As he extracted a tumbler it slipped from his grasp and then rolled in a semi-circle by his knee. He grabbed it and threw it to one side, meaning only to remove it from his immediate vicinity because he didn’t want it but it flew across the room and smashed against a wall. He unscrewed the bottle and threw the lid in the same direction, where it landed with a tinny clatter. He drank from the bottle, long and hard, and once he had started he did not stop. It was the closeness of everything. Here he was, and the floor was polished and clean because the maid had been in while he had been out in a city in which people were being beaten, killed, and there was a television and a sofa and a fridge with food in it, and all the normal business of a normal life, and a few minutes ago he had watched a boy come close to having his life snuffed out, beaten from him – and that could happen or nearly happen, and he, Harper, could then go home and put his key in his door and have a beer, or perhaps something to eat, just like all the other people who were doing things just like that, and minutes away, the world was ending for a boy, or for another boy like him, in the most horrible way. And it wasn’t long ago or in the middle of nowhere: it was now, in one of the modern cities of the world. And all at once, he realised that what he could not stand was the closeness of everything. Yes, that was it. There would always be horrors, perhaps. Perhaps there would never be a time in human history when they would not exist because it would take so long for Homo sapiens to develop to that stage that a meteor would have wiped them all out by then, like the dinosaurs, or a freak tidal wave would have washed them all away – darkness upon earth, cold and dark, before this sick soft race worked out how to live without huge numbers of it suffering cold and hunger and humiliation in order for the lucky few to live in something approaching peace and comfort. But the closeness of it: the fact that he could walk out of his clean, white apartment again right now if he wanted and a few streets away . . . and it rippled out, everywhere, beyond Jakarta, beyond Java – on Borneo the Dayaks hated the Madurese and the Madurese hated them back and why stop with these islands? They were far from unique. The Middle East – let’s not even go there – and the Pakistanis had tested those missiles and had India in their sights. And then Poppa and Nina, and Nina saying, ‘Go back upstairs, Poppa’s just clearing something off the lawn.’ And why was there something on the lawn? Oh, because Poppa’s skin was black, that was why. And then they couldn’t even walk up a path up a mountain without people staring at them and why not, not for anything you’ve done or even want to do, just because of what you are. And his mother, his mother as a slim girl, running down the road, and his father, who he had never met, killed for not wearing an armband. He saw Francisca weeping and weeping in the hospital: the face of their drowned baby, perfect in repose, mouth a little open – there had never been anything more perfect. He saw Bud’s face, lifted upwards, dreamily, skyward, and heard his own voice shouting, ‘Bud!’ as loud as it was possible to shout, at the same moment Bud’s eyes opened.

  He crawled around the polished floor: everyone, all over the world, knew these things happened and looked the other way and got the bus to work and collected children from school and at least those sickening soft ordinary sorts of people in Holland or England or America had the benefit of distance to blanket their ignorance. But him, and people like him. They knew how close it all was. They knew what burned flesh smelled like. He heard Komang’s children, screaming.

  And then the creatures started climbing out of the walls. He rang the twenty-four-hour emergency hotline at the Institute in Amsterdam, the one that was reserved for operatives or clients in imminent danger, and told them that cannibals were eating his legs while he was still alive. Soeharto would never resign. He would send out the cannibals. And they would slice the flesh off him and men like him and they would cook it over fires while they watched and everyone should get out get out get out now. He screamed it down the phone. Then he hung up and fell asleep on the floor.

  The next morning, he was woken by a tapping sound, the more intrusive for its lightness, on the apartment door. He opened his eyes. He was not in a bed. He was lying on a hard wooden floor. He lay very still. The tapping continued, lightly. He felt very calm.

  He sat up, propping himself up on one elbow. It was full daylight, the shutters open, the air in the room light and smoky. He hauled himself up to his feet, staggered a little, reeled towards the door, but before he reached it there was the small clatter of a key and Wahid let himself in along with two men Harper didn’t know. Wahid stopped when he saw him and with a look on his face said, ‘The old man has gone, John. Soeharto’s resigned. You’ve got to call Amsterdam now, then we are here to take you to the airport. You’re going on holiday.’

  He stared back at Wahid. The two other men stepped past him and began moving around the apartment. One bent and straightened the rug in front of him. The other began using the side of his foot to sweep some broken glass to the edge of the floor, against the wall. Only then did Harper look around the room and see that the small dining table was pushed at an angle, a chair overturned, papers and books and pencils on the floor.

  ‘I’ll get your things,’ Wahid said, and walked into the bedroom.

  Harper went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He bent over the sink and splashed his face with cold water. His hand slipped on the tap as he shut the water off – it was made of mottled brown plastic that was supposed to look like marble. In the mirror above the sink he saw his ravaged face, his hair damp at the edges, thinning. His eyes were large and watery like those of any man of his age – the tear ducts were not working properly any more. Of all the irritations of ageing, he had not expected that one to bother him so much. Even though he had not vomited, there was the taste of something bitter in his throat. He bent and ran the cold tap and tried to rinse his mouth, swilling and spitting, but the bitter taste was too far down his throat to be dislodged. Enough, he thought, his hands against the edge of the sink, letting his head drop, like a beaten dog, the bitter taste in his mouth, and the knowledge that would not be dislodged from his head stuck there, inside, like a growth of some sort. Enough. He would do whatever they said.

  Wahid tapped gently on the bathroom door. ‘John,’ he called, ‘John, you need to come out and talk to Amsterdam. They’re on the phone now.’

  It was daybreak now, all greyness gone, the sun was full and the valley glowing as if it had been sprayed with very fine gold paint. Still Kadek had not come. Harper wondered if he had observed him and Rita on the veranda together and was discreetly delaying his arrival, waiting in the lane until the coast was clear. Or – and here was a thought – returning to the village after spying on them, to report back that Harper had had an overnight guest at the hut?

  Back in Amsterdam, there had, no doubt, been a meeting about him. He had cracked up before and they had brought him back into the fold – but that was when he was in his twenties, newly trained, with decades of useful life in him. What was he now?

  He had probably frightened the young woman on the end of the twenty-four-hour hotline. The call would have been recorded. He imagined Jan and some of the other partners gathered in the office at the end of the building, the one with the curved glass wall and the bare brick. There were fourteen partners now – but not all of them would have been called in to deal with a personnel issue. There would be five or six of them in the room, perhaps, and the head of personnel, and the specialist personnel secretary to take the minutes – Hannah would have been kept out of the loop because they were friends, he thought: it was clear she had known nothing when he called her from the hotel in Sanur. He imagined the head of personnel reaching out and pressing the ‘on’ button on the tape recorder with a hard click, and the men around the table all listening to him shouting about cannibals, the young woman operative taking the call staying very calm and saying, ‘Would you repeat that for me, please?’ He imagined the he
ad of personnel leaning forward and turning off the tape, the small silence that would follow that second click and the glances that would go from man to man around the table, the faces they would pull. The senior partner in charge of Asia, a plump half-Japanese half-German who he liked a lot, would take off his glasses and rub at the bridge of his nose before replacing them, inflating his cheeks as he blew air out of his mouth, saying, with a sigh, ‘Well . . . this is an interesting one . . .’

  ‘So . . .’ he said to Rita, ‘here I am. Not on holiday, not exactly. Enforced leave. If you can call it that.’

  He was still holding her from behind, speaking into the back of her hair.

  ‘That tickles,’ she said, a smile in her voice. ‘I didn’t think you were really on holiday, you know. You didn’t show a great deal of interest in sightseeing. Have you been sacked?’

  ‘I don’t know, probably, they just haven’t told me yet. They are working out how to get rid of me discreetly.’ He had made the Institute sound harmless enough.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

  He leaned over to the packet, which sat on the edge of the rail, lit a kretek for her, passed it forward. She stayed where she was, looking out over the valley. ‘I don’t really understand why you’re in so much trouble.’

  ‘I was sent out here to draw up a report on the devaluation of the rupiah, the unrest it might lead to. I said things would stay stable, I said Soeharto would never resign. Badly wrong on both counts. Then the students were shot, and the riots.’

  ‘Terrible . . .’

  ‘I guess at that point I went to the other extreme, after before, I mean, once it got going, I thought it was all going to kick off like it did before.’

  ‘In sixty-five, you mean?’ She shook her head, leaned it back a little against him. ‘The world is different now.’

  He rested his chin on her shoulder. ‘They thought the world was different then.’

  She drew on the kretek, exhaled. ‘Smoking this early is making me dizzy.’

  ‘And I got drunk and broke client confidentiality to a journalist.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m guessing that isn’t very cool.’

  He sighed, lifted both hands and began to massage her shoulders. ‘Truth is, I’m old.’

  ‘You’re not old, Donkey.’

  ‘In my business, I’m old. And my boss will hate me now, my fuck-up will reflect badly on him. Makes his judgement look poor. If my intuition is shot to bits I’m no use to anyone.’

  ‘Intuition is nothing more than experience, surely, just guesswork, anyway?’

  He shook his head. ‘If you’re an oil company who pays tens of thousands of dollars for a report, you expect a little more than that.’

  She shrugged. ‘So, you’ve been sacked. Or you’re going to be. It happens.’ And he felt the small ache of loneliness he knew he would feel when he told her only a part of the truth.

  She turned then, offered him the cigarette. ‘It’s making me dizzy . . .’ she repeated, wobbling her head and rolling her eyes.

  He took the cigarette, stepped back a little and smiled at her, drew on it, tossed it over the railing. They faced each other for a while, both smiling, and then the memory of his bad behaviour the night before returned to him and he reached out a hand, and, very gently, stroked her upper arm with the back of his fingers.

  She lifted her chin a little then, gave him a cool look.

  He exhaled.

  ‘It’s okay, you’re sorry, I know,’ she said softly, and stepped towards him at the same time as he moved against her, pressed his mouth to hers, lifted both hands and put them in her hair, holding her head still, his fingers entwined. Her mouth opened wide, their tongues mingled; smoke, sleep, familiarity. He pressed his groin to hers and ached with the desire to lift her knees, slip into the soft comfort of her right there on the veranda, with only the thin protection of a wooden railing stopping them from plunging, conjoined, into the lush thick valley below.

  After a long while, he drew back, gave her a small smile of regret. Her gaze flicked to her right to make sure there was no sign of Kadek and she returned his smile. It was understood between them: their mutual need was enough.

  He thought how short a time it was since they had first met, how few encounters they’d had, and he remembered how she had sat on the edge of the bed after their first night together at the guesthouse. He had looked at her then, had read her stillness – and concluded that there was something damaged about her, something that made mornings difficult. There was some knowledge in her life that she didn’t like to wake up to, he had felt quite sure of it.

  He stared at her and, self-conscious beneath his gaze, she dropped her head, turned back to look at the valley.

  How much could he trust his own judgement, any more? Perhaps he was wrong about her. Perhaps she had just been thinking of everything she had to do that day, whether she needed to go back to the family compound she stayed in and get changed before work. Perhaps she had just been thinking about the textbook she had promised to lend one of her students.

  And all at once, looking out over the valley with his body leaning against Rita’s soft back, he was awash with hope, as clean as the dawn before him. If he was mistaken about Rita, then maybe he was mistaken about everything else. Maybe nobody was coming to kill him. Maybe there was no gathering of men in a glass-walled office, debating how to deal with the tricky problem he had become. Perhaps he could just say to her, ‘We’d better get dressed before Kadek comes,’ and Kadek could come and find them both on his balcony and he, Harper, would be nothing more than a man on extended leave from his job who had got lucky.

  He thought of the rice fields beyond Jalan Bisma, where small plots of land were being divided up for villas. She could speak Balinese, she could negotiate for a lease. There was the matter of what they would use for a down payment as he’d signed the Amsterdam house over to Francisca and he doubted Rita had any resources behind her, but he had some savings in a dollar account. He wondered what the local bureaucracy was like, sometimes these things could take a while, but a bit of financing usually oiled the wheels and she would have good contacts with the local councils, they would be full of the parents of her students or perhaps some of her former students. She could walk to work from Jalan Bisma, even if they built a little way out of town. He could make shelves for her books: he bet she had a lot of books. He liked making shelves, had never done enough of it, in fact, he decided. In Amsterdam, their house had been too small for him to build anything, and too perfect, in a way. Francisca had made sure it was perfect.

  He allowed these thoughts to dwell in his mind for a bit, to brew. Bali was peaceful. Soeharto had fallen, Habibie had taken over and the country was stabilising. Perhaps he had just been wrong about everything. Perhaps a life was possible here, with her. Now he had confided in her – to a certain extent – he had transformed so many difficult things; he had made them into stories. Stories could be put in boxes.

  ‘It’s so beautiful . . .’ Rita said softly, her voice a murmur, as if she was thinking out loud. ‘Isn’t it? Don’t you think, you could look at this, the trees and everything, and for a bit forget everything? If I could wake up to this every morning, maybe mornings would not be so hard.’

  There was something in her tone of voice. He was still. ‘Why are mornings so hard?’

  She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she said, her voice low but even, ‘I have a son.’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘I don’t know why, mornings are worst. I wake up, and it’s just normal, but then I think of him, you know, that strange time when you are awake but not thinking? Only a few seconds, but it’s my only relief. Then I think, and I think about how I haven’t seen him since he was eight years old. He’s a teenager now. I think about him all the time. But for some reason, in the mornings, he’s in Belgium, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem so far when I’m busy, during the day, but in the morning, when I wake up and remember it, it’s so
far it hurts. Every single morning.’

  He rested his chin on her shoulder, leaned his head against hers.

  She gave a little, false laugh. ‘Any idea what some people think about you if you admit you have a child you don’t live with, as a woman, I mean? I once made the mistake of telling a woman on an aeroplane and she spent the rest of the flight telling me how unnatural I was. We’d got talking during take-off. It was a seven-hour flight.’

  She dropped her effortful facetiousness, then, and spoke plainly, with the tone of someone telling somebody else something they thought they ought to know, unembellished by anecdote. ‘I had some real problems, after he was born. Head problems, you know?’ She tapped the side of her head with one finger. ‘I was in hospital for a while. A lot of drugs. Then I was okay. Then when he was four I had some more problems. I didn’t get help when I should have done, you know. I was hospitalised again, eighteen months that time, nearer two years in fact. His father thought it was good I didn’t see him until I was better and then I didn’t get better for a long time and the longer it got, the easier it was to believe what his father said, that he was doing well without me, that it was disruptive for him, me coming and going. He’s got a stepmother now, Lucia. She’s Italian. I think about her cooking bacon for him because you know, he really liked bacon. But then I think, maybe she hates him, tells him his mother left him because he was no good. His father would back her up on that, that’s for sure. Maybe he cries at night when he’s alone, he won’t in front of his friends I suppose. Maybe he’s having a horrible life, and I’m not there.’

  He was still holding her from behind. He rested his head against hers. He did not know how else to comfort her. He had no idea what it must be like, as a mother, to be separated from a child, but he knew enough to know that anything he said at that moment would sound crass. Touch was what she needed: closeness, him being close. At the same time, even as he comforted her, he could not help thinking a self-centred thought. You were right, there is something broken here. And if you were right about that, then maybe you were right about everything else.