Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, a note of briskness entering her voice. ‘I just wanted you to know, when I was a little rude on that first morning, it wasn’t your fault. I had enjoyed our time together. If I hadn’t had to go to work, I wouldn’t have rushed off, but when I wouldn’t talk and didn’t even say goodbye properly, it wasn’t your fault. I was thinking about my son. Thinking how he gets up every morning and knows nothing about me except I live abroad. I don’t know if he even reads the letters I send. I have to send them to his father. I never get anything back. I tried calling last year, it got too much. He refused to come to the phone, he was angry I’d called, his father said.’ She shrugged, then turned round to face him. ‘You’ve never had children?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well, it’s hard to describe but when you wake up and you are without your child, it’s like you’ve woken up and remembered that your arm or leg is missing. That’s what it’s like. So,’ she said, kissing him lightly on the mouth. ‘So we got each other’s sad stories after all. Serves you right, John Harper.’

  They kissed then, but not as deeply as before: now, he was just kissing her.

  After a while, he stepped back and said, ‘I want to take you back to bed but Kadek could show up any minute.’

  She smiled her ironic smile. ‘You’re worried what the man who looks after you will think about you having had a woman for the night? They are used to the funny ways of foreigners, you know.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get dressed.’

  She was light-hearted on the drive back to town, happy to have unburdened herself a little. Everyone has their own parcel of unhappiness, he thought, like the bundles people carry on their heads, each person has their own bundle in its own particular shape and size – but if you talk to someone, you give them your bundle to carry for a bit. It was only temporary, though, that feeling. He pitied her, as she chatted to him about being hungry and about how she couldn’t believe she had to work that day and she really shouldn’t have stayed the night, she hadn’t meant to. She was cheerful because of the temporary relief, because she had handed him her bundle for a short while. But, he knew – and if she thought about it for a moment, she would know too – the next morning, alone in her room in the family compound, she would wake feeling just the same as she always did.

  He’d better not see her again. It wasn’t safe. If Kadek had come while they were at the hut together, she might have been linked with him, in the eyes of the organisation. What if they had come for him last night? He had endangered her already.

  As they pulled up outside her compound, she said, her hand already reaching for the car door to open it, ‘You know, you haven’t told me the really bad thing in your life yet, don’t think I didn’t notice.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘You really think I couldn’t tell when you were skipping bits?’ She gave a throaty laugh, her eyes shone with amusement. ‘Just because you are mister well travelled and live in big cities? You think I am some village schoolteacher? Well, you underestimate me.’ She leaned over and kissed him. ‘I’m going to ask later, you know.’

  ‘Go and get your things,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to the school gates.’

  He watched her as she ran into the family compound – her solid figure graceful in its haste. An outside observer would think of her as a self-contained, competent sort of person, not beautiful but handsome in a Nordic kind of way, the kind of person you would want to look after you if you had a cold. How hard was that air of briskness won? How different it was, when she sat on the edge of her bed each morning, a few moments after waking up, awash with grief for her lost child and wondering how she would find the strength to rise, to face the coming day?

  She emerged from the compound within minutes, dressed in clean clothing and wearing a hat – the sun was bright that day – beaming at him as she walked back to the car, a large wicker bag over her shoulder. She opened the car door and slid into her seat. He gunned the engine as they drove off, even though they went a few yards and then were stuck behind a delivery truck.

  ‘You’ll have to give me directions,’ he said.

  ‘Back to the main street then up Jalan Hanoman,’ she replied.

  She got him to drive past the school and then pull up at the far end of the road, away from town, so her students wouldn’t see her getting out of a strange man’s car. He climbed out of his side as she was lifting her bag from the footwell and went round the car to open her door. As she climbed out, she gave him the same small smile she had given when he insisted on carrying her bag in the night market. How long ago that seemed. It was as if they had had a whole life together.

  They kissed politely, on the cheek, as they were in public, and as he turned to go she said, ‘You know . . .’ then petered out. He heard in her tone a desire to arrest his departure. How often that impulse came, he thought. Even when we want to leave or want someone else to go, that moment just before the separation, when you or the other person can’t help saying, pause a while. When he had been a young man, he had always thought that the one who asked for the pause was the one in a position of weakness. He had always made sure it wasn’t him. Now, though, he wondered. The folly and pride of youth: that was all those power games had been? Rita was asking for a moment more with him before he got back in the car and drove away. That didn’t make her weak or subservient; on the contrary.

  He turned. ‘What?’ he asked, hearing the softness in his own voice and hoping she would hear it too, so that if this was the last time they saw each other, she would remember it and know that this had meant something to him.

  ‘You know, I know there’s lots more you haven’t told me, not just your little brother, lots. It’s up to you, I didn’t mean what I said then, I’m not going to press you, it’s up to you. I just wanted you to know I know.’

  He looked at her. ‘I told you lots of things,’ he said.

  ‘I know you did,’ she replied.

  There was a look in her eyes that might have been pain were it not for her smile, and then she broke his gaze for a second by glancing back into the car to check she hadn’t left anything and he took advantage of that second, that brief snapping of the thread of spider-silk that held them, to turn away.

  He watched her in the rear-view mirror as he drove away, a large woman with an oversized wicker bag on her shoulder, walking slowly in the same direction as him but growing ever more distant, her floppy hat hiding most of her face.

  Back at the hut, he found Kadek on the veranda shaking out a pillowcase. The bed sheets were hung over the rail. He wondered if he and Rita had left traces of her overnight stay but then remembered that Kadek changed the bed linen once a week anyway.

  ‘Morning, Mr Harper,’ Kadek said with a small bow and a broad smile. ‘It is a good morning, yes?’

  ‘Yes, Kadek,’ Harper replied, stopping at the top of the veranda steps and casting his gaze across the valley. There was no trace of haze in the sky today: it was a perfect blue, the valley full of light. It was the sort of day that people from all over the world paid thousands of dollars to come to Bali and experience. ‘A fine day.’

  ‘A fine day,’ Kadek repeated, as if he was experimenting with the word ‘fine’, trying it out for size in that particular context. Fine, as in beautiful; fine as in good; fine as in delicate, perhaps: certainly not ‘fine’ as in just about okay, oh alright, that’s fine: and not fine as in payment due, penalty. Ever since he had arrived at the hut, Harper had been waiting for his fine day.

  Kadek moved to let Harper pass. Harper saw that beyond the billowing linen was a young woman in a sarong and sash kneeling on the wooden planks at the far end of the veranda. She was lighting the incense sticks protruding from the offering in front of her. Beside her on the wooden planks was a bamboo basket. She did not look up.

  Kadek glanced at her and said, ‘The ghekko, Mr Harper.’

  Of course. He had forgotten that, a few days ago, he had mentioned being woken by the
ghekko every night, its relentless chant. Kadek would have arranged for the young woman to come and place offerings on the veranda, to appease the gods and demons. It was all about signs and portents: everything signified. If you believed that, he thought, then didn’t it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Whenever anything happened, good or bad, you could always look backwards for the sign.

  He watched the woman bend over the offering, the care and attention with which she arranged the flowers. At first, he thought he was watching sceptically, but then the image came into his head of Rita in the rear-view mirror of the car that morning as he pulled away from her, her floppy hat, the way she had smiled when she had said, ‘I’m not going to press you,’ as if to undercut the sincerity of her own words: and from somewhere inside him came a sonorous, rattling sigh, the kind that comes involuntarily. He felt it in his ribcage and thought, now where did that come from? Kadek was folding the pillowcase, the young woman intent upon her duties – neither of them looked at him.

  What should I say to this young woman arranging flowers on my porch? he thought then. There is nothing? No one cares? Your diligence is pointless? Go home and worry about all the other things there are to worry about because that’s all there is? No, the woman’s offering was valid, just not in the way she thought. He did not believe in the Invisibles: there were no ghosts or demons. He believed in men with machetes. But Kadek arranging for the woman to come, and the woman making the trek up here, was a way of them saying, we are concerned for you. He wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t come, after all, wouldn’t have remarked on it – what was he to them, a rich bule? They would be paid the same wage whether the offering was made or not. The offering was made because they believed they had a duty of care to the stranger in their land. The spirits were their spirits, just as the gods were their gods. And he thought of Rita saying, as she got into his car on the day they went to Sanur, ‘God bless the Balinese,’ and he thought, for all my travelling and my knowledge and my world-weariness, I am the fool, perhaps, yes.

  Inside the hut, he ate the breakfast that Kadek had left for him, thought briefly that Rita hadn’t eaten before she went to work, then opened the drawer of his desk and found the half-written letter to Francisca. He placed the letter on his desk and smoothed it out.

  At the back of his desk, there was a metal ashtray, a copper-coloured one with semi-circular indents all around its edge, as if there was any chance a dozen people might want to rest a cigarette on it at the same time. Using that ashtray on his own had always struck him as a little poignant. There were two cigarette stubs in the tray, both bent and broken, nestling amongst the fine grey ash, very faintly kretek-scented. He wished there was a blush of lipstick on one of them, even though Rita didn’t wear lipstick. They would have looked touching, nestled together, if there was. In fact, they were both his. He had risen from bed after she had gone to sleep the previous night, very late, and sat at the desk and smoked two in a row, thinking that to go out onto the veranda might disturb her: and for the pleasure of sitting on the chair at the desk and hearing her breathing in the darkness as he smoked. He had thought the smell of smoke might wake her, even though he was in the far corner of the hut, but it didn’t. She sleeps so well, so deeply, he had thought. She’s really good at it.

  He patted his pockets, located his lighter. He leaned forward and drew the ashtray towards him, then carefully shredded the letter to Francisca. He held the lighter downwards and set light to the shreds. The paper was so fragile the small flame made it dissolve into powder and smoke: one second a blue butterfly’s wing with blackened edges and the finest glowing orange rim, then nothing.

  Outside, on the sun-struck veranda, he could hear Kadek and the young woman talking softly to one another. The door was wide open but because they were at either end of the veranda, he couldn’t see them. He heard the low murmur of their voices cease.

  Then he heard Kadek say in English, loudly and firmly, ‘If you will excuse me, sir, I will see if Mr Harper is available.’ There was something protective in his tone.

  Harper looked up as Kadek’s silhouette, dark against the bright blue of the sky, filled the doorway and he said, with no inflection in his voice, ‘There is a gentleman here to see you, Mr Harper.’

  Harper stepped over the doorframe and out onto the veranda. Kadek did not return to folding sheets but stood a few feet back, respectfully. The young woman had disappeared. The offering she had left was glowing on the far end of the veranda, the scent of incense drifting out over the valley.

  A white man of around forty stood at the top of the wooden steps that led up to the veranda from the path. He was dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt and holding a black briefcase with steel clasps. There was something familiar about him.

  Harper gave him a slow look.

  He smiled at Harper but did not advance towards him or hold out his hand. ‘Goedemorgen,’ he said. ‘Hoe gaat het met je?’

  Harper turned to Kadek and said, ‘Kadek, do you need to return the car or can I use it today?’

  Kadek stood nearby. ‘That will be fine, Mr Harper.’

  Harper looked at the stranger and then said in Dutch, ‘Goedemorgen, I don’t have any decent coffee, or anything in fact, out here. Did you get a taxi from the village?’

  ‘I’ve come straight from the airport,’ the stranger replied, mildly.

  Harper thought, at least they’ve sent someone businesslike, polite. At least we won’t have the bluster and false bonhomie of Henrikson.

  ‘Well, if you’ve come straight from the airport then at least I can take you to a decent restaurant,’ Harper said. His Dutch sounded odd and guttural to him now, as if he was speaking through a mouthful of small stones. ‘I’ll come down to the lane and tell your driver where to go, then I’ll follow.’

  He could have taken the man to the cafe on the main street or the guesthouse bar on Jalan Bisma but he wanted to keep him away from anywhere that he associated with Rita. She had mentioned a new restaurant she hadn’t tried yet, a smart one, on the other side of town over the bridge. He couldn’t remember what it was called but he described the location to the man’s driver, then followed in the car Kadek had borrowed for him.

  At that hour of the morning, the restaurant was deserted. They walked straight through to where a huge stone balcony overlooked the valley on the edge of the town, a broader view than the one Harper had from his veranda; the valley split wider here. Birds flew in the bright light as the greenery plunged beneath them, the river hidden by a density of banana trees and palms. They sat down at a table with a pink tablecloth, already laid for lunchtime later in the day, and a young woman brought them menus. Harper didn’t look at his, just put it down on the table and said to the young woman in English, ‘Black coffee, please.’

  ‘I’ll have the same,’ the man said, also putting his menu down on the table and leaning back in his seat. The young woman picked both menus up and turned away.

  ‘Fabulous view,’ the man said. He had put on sunglasses in his car but removed them now, leaned forward in his seat again and extended his hand. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself properly. Johan.’

  They shook hands across the table.

  ‘You don’t need to wait for the coffee,’ Harper said, glancing at the floor to the side of Johan’s chair and nodding towards the briefcase.

  Johan pressed his lips together, moved his head to the side in a cheery little right you are gesture and pushed his chair back, grimacing at the scraping sound it made. He lifted the case onto his lap, flipped open the clasps with two loud hard clicks, then extracted a manila envelope.

  ‘Well,’ he said, as he took a sheaf of papers out of the envelope, ‘obviously, the main thing we need to address in the light of recent events is the confidentiality clause in your contract of employment. I’m sure you don’t need reminding but I’ve brought a copy along just in case. There’s the confidentiality, ah, issue . . . and of course the non-competition clause. And this piece
of paper here . . .’ he laid another sheet on top, ‘is just an additional clause. It specifies new media, world-wide web, and so on.’ He gave a small laugh. ‘Of course none of all that existed when your contract of employment was drawn up!’

  The young woman returned with their coffees. Harper withdrew a packet of kreteks from his pocket and held it out to Johan but Johan shook his head and said, ‘Ah, no, thanks, I don’t smoke.’

  I bet you don’t, Harper thought. He did not look down at the bit of paper. He looked at Johan. After a moment or two, he turned his head to one side to exhale away from Johan, then took a sip of coffee. Johan lifted his cup at the same time.

  Harper let the silence between them continue for long enough to force Johan to speak.

  ‘Look . . .’ Johan began and Harper interrupted immediately, ‘Just tell me what the deal is.’

  ‘If you sign, and stay away, we mean completely away, from the business, including but not exclusively our competitors in the field, then we are calling it redundancy. With all the benefits that accrue, including this.’ The briefcase was still on his lap. The envelope he extracted this time was long and white and unsealed. He handed it over and gestured to Harper that he should look inside. Harper pushed a finger in to widen it and saw that there was a cheque, a more generous one than the Institute was obliged to offer, under the circumstances.

  Harper put the white envelope down on the table. ‘Do you have a pen?’

  Johan gave a terse, grateful smile. Harper wondered if this young man had expected more trouble. If so, he had been inadequately briefed.

  ‘Oh, the Institute does have one more request,’ Johan added as he lifted the lid of the briefcase for the third time. ‘We would like you to vacate the company accommodation facilities within three days. Is that reasonable?’