by Rosie Thomas
‘Nothing to tell. Let me know if anything happens here, Dad.’
Bill stood back. ‘We’re all right.’ He waved until Noah pulled out of sight.
Jeanette went upstairs to her study and turned on the computer.
Back at the flat, Noah found nothing but darkness and silence. Roxana had correctly double-locked the flat door and the street door. He looked into his bedroom, and saw that she had smoothed the duvet and plumped up the pillow after her sleep.
He drifted back into the living room and stretched himself out on the sofa. He thought he would wait up for her, to make sure that she came back safely.
FOUR
Suitcases and boxes of film equipment almost filled the hotel lobby. Taxis and 4x4s were waiting to sweep them away, Angela and Rayner and Simon Sheringham, the complaining actress, the creative duo who were hiding their hangovers behind dark glasses, and all the rest of the cast and crew.
‘Thanks for coming to see us off,’ Angela murmured to Connie in the hubbub of departure. ‘Think about what I said, won’t you? I mean, it’s beautiful here, but it’s not home, is it?’
‘Yes,’ Connie said, ambiguously.
Miraculously, the mounds of luggage fitted into the vehicles and people variously scrambled for places in the cars that looked as if they would have the best air-conditioning. Only two minutes ago it had seemed as if the point of departure would never arrive, and now everyone except Connie had piled into a seat.
She stood back and waved. Angela blew her a kiss and Rayner Ingram lifted one hand before adjusting his Ray-Bans. People shouted goodbye to her and then hastily wound up their windows to keep out the flies and the gusts of hot, steamy air. The convoy of cars rolled forwards and Connie saw Ed looking at her through the rear window of the last 4x4. He touched two fingers to his temple in an ironic salute.
Connie stood still as silence descended. There was no clamour of mobile phones, no crackle of walkie-talkies, and no one was shouting. There was only birdsong, and the faint scrape of rough-edged leaves spreading in the sun’s glare.
She drew in a long breath and then exhaled.
The week had been like a runaway train ride. She had been right to be apprehensive. She had been very thoroughly shaken out of her equilibrium.
Maybe she should have gone back to Ed’s room last night.
She muttered to herself, ‘How many more chances d’you think you’re going to get?’
Then she saw that the doorman was glancing curiously at her. She gave the man what she hoped was a composed smile, and set off down the hotel drive towards the village street.
Connie didn’t have a car. As with her choice not to have a pool, her European neighbours (Kim and Neil who were in property and rentals, the French couple who owned a gallery in the main street, Werner Baum the sculptor, and all the others) regarded this as wilfully eccentric. But Connie liked walking, she had a bicycle for errands, and on the island she was never in a hurry. If she needed to go further afield there were the public bemos, small buses that ran fixed routes all over the island, and taxis were cheap.
The main street was quiet this morning. She passed a couple of dogs lolling in the shade, and a young woman sitting on her step with two smooth, plump toddlers playing at her feet. In front of the Café des Artistes a group of tourists in shorts and Birkenstocks were consulting a map and talking about a visit to the monkey forest.
‘They bite,’ one of the girls warned the others. ‘And then you get rabies.’
‘Noooo? They look so cute.’
Connie crossed the road and took her favourite route through the village’s central market. She loved the blazing colour and exuberance of the enclosed square. Two-storey buildings with open fronts were hung from ground to roof with dresses and T-shirts, ikat weavings and multicoloured sarongs, and the paved space in the centre was jammed with blue and red parasols. In the shade the stallholders were selling racks of beads and earrings, woven baskets in all shapes and sizes, plastic toys and cheap CDs. It was too early for the tourist crowds to be out in any force and the vendors were quietly gossiping with their neighbours. Connie was heading for the flower stall in the far corner. The blooms made a wall of brilliance beneath a sun-bleached awning.
Recognising Connie, the broad-hipped woman who owned the stall sprang up and began yanking stems of orchids and tuberoses out of buckets and pressing them into her hands. Business wasn’t good for any of these traders. Tourists had almost disappeared after the Kuta bombing, and they were still not coming to the island in the same numbers. Connie went through the ritual of praising the flowers for their freshness and the elegance of their blooms and at the same time firmly putting them back in their places.
She saw what she wanted at the back of the stall. They were scarlet cannas, blisteringly bright, offset by ribbed bronze leaves. When she had chosen an armful and told the stallholder what she wanted them for, the woman wrapped them in a swathe of white tissue brought out from a special hiding place, and finished off the bouquet with a stiff crepe-paper bow. Connie counted out rupiah notes, worn as soft and floppy as thin cloth.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She ducked out of the market, waving to two or three of the shoppers, and walked on towards Kadek Daging’s general store. He was back in his usual place after his week of driving for the movie people. As soon as he saw her coming he bustled out from between his sacks of rice and drums of oil.
‘Selamat siang, Ibu,’ he beamed. ‘Glamour all finished for you and me. Back to ordinary life.’
‘Selamat siang, Kadek. I don’t know about glamour. We had a busy week, though, didn’t we?’
Kadek glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘I did not see her myself, but she was here, wasn’t she? Working in the film?’
‘Who?’
He checked again to make sure that there was no one eavesdropping from behind a tower of detergent packets and then whispered,
‘Penelope Cruz.’
Connie considered this. ‘I’m not sure. In a bank commercial? I certainly didn’t see her.’
Kadek stood back with a satisfied nod. ‘Yes. I knew that she was. I heard it from the mother of one of the young girls. Very beautiful. Not as beautiful perhaps as Angelina Jolie, but still. I expect you didn’t get the chance to work with her?’
‘No,’ Connie agreed. ‘I didn’t, unfortunately.’
‘Never mind,’ he consoled her. ‘Films are being made all the time, here in Bali. Perhaps next time. Those are very good flowers. Are they a gift, wrapped like that?’
‘I’m taking them to Dewi. Wayan Tupereme told me last night that she has a son.’
‘Yes, the birth was yesterday. I hear the baby is very small. You will be needing some first-quality rice.’
‘That’s exactly why I’m here, Kadek.’
They spent five minutes debating a suitable choice, and then Connie made her way onwards with the two-kilo package under her other arm. The quickest way to Dewi’s husband’s family house, on the far side of the village where the paddy fields opened up, was to cut through the monkey forest. She walked briskly to where the street petered out in a clutch of little shops and open stalls.
The same group of tourists was now at the margin of the forest enclosure, negotiating with a small boy over the price of bunches of finger-sized bananas to feed to the monkeys.
It was cool and shady under the canopy of tall trees and the dirt tracks were easier on the feet than the uneven paving of the village streets. Connie often walked here, enjoying the quiet and the scent of damp leaves and trodden dust. She slowed her pace to a stroll, but she always kept an eye on the monkeys who sat in the branches or knuckle-walked at the edges of the paths. From behind her came a thin scream of alarm and then a chorus of shouts. She smiled; without even turning to look she knew that a troop of monkeys had executed a classic distraction manoeuvre followed by a pincer attack, and had successfully snatched the bunch of bananas from the grasp of the most monkey-friendly of the tourists
.
In the middle of the forest was a temple complex. It was a mossy group of red-brick structures, open to the sky, the stone facings fleeced with lichen. A few people were on their way to or from prayer, women with baskets of fruit balanced on padded headpieces and men in the obligatory sarongs and bright sashes. Those who were returning had flowers behind their ears and grains of rice pressed to their cheeks, and their hair was beaded with moisture from splashing with tirta, holy water.
Monkeys prowled along the temple walls and sat in rows on the steps, picking fleas from one another’s backs. Several of them bit into the hijacked bananas. They were macaques with black-faced babies clinging to their fur. Connie noticed with sudden dismay that instead of a monkey baby, one male had a tiny, bedraggled ginger kitten. He detached the little creature from his chest and flipped it over the back of his hand like a set of worry beads. Then he tossed it in the dust at his feet, yawning as he poked at it with his prehensile fingers. The kitten gave out almost soundless mews of distress when the macaque upended it and delicately scratched its pale-pink belly with black hooked fingernails. But when the monkey withdrew its hand the kitten righted itself and crawled back towards its tormentor, searching for protection.
The temples had colonies of wild cats as well as monkeys. Connie stared around her, wanting to rescue the little creature and restore it to its proper mother. But if she tried to swoop in and snatch it away the monkeys would certainly attack her. The tourists were right about that; they did bite. The monkey picked up the kitten again, perhaps in response to its mewing, and tucked it against his chest. It glared at Connie and the kitten hung on like the other babies, blinking its pale gummed-up eyes at the world.
Connie walked on. Trying to get the little scene out of her mind, she told herself that without its mother’s milk the kitten wouldn’t have to suffer for very much longer. The back of her neck and her shirt where the packet of rice pressed against it were clammy with sweat.
The path out of the forest crossed a small gorge by way of a plank suspension bridge, the metalwork crusted with decades-worth of wood-pigeon droppings. The planks creaked and swayed under her feet and she broke into a laden dash for the safety of the opposite side, stepping onto solid ground again and then laughing at her moment of panic.
Out here was the real village. Tourists never penetrated this far from the centre and there were no coffee shops or galleries. A sprawl of smallholdings and palm-thatch houses were separated by rank ditches clogged with refuse. Connie ducked under the silver filaments of a spider’s web and noted the impressive size of the tortoiseshell-mottled spider gently swaying at the centre. She stepped over another ditch and made her way up to Pema’s family house. Today it was distinguished from the others by penjors, tall bamboo poles with curled bark and flags to denote a special occasion.
There was no one sitting on the frayed rattan chairs drawn up against the wall, only a line of washing suspended between two palm trunks. Underneath the laundry a row of woven bamboo cages the size and shape of large bell jars each housed a dusty brown hen. The dried mud around the cages was starred with the prints of chickens’ feet and speckled with scattered corn.
Connie tapped on the door jamb. After a moment a woman bobbed up out of the dimness of the interior. She was big, wearing a pink blouse and a faded sarong. Connie recognised Pema’s mother. She placed the flowers and rice on the nearest chair, pressed the palms of her hands together and bowed over her fingertips before murmuring the expected greeting and congratulations.
Pema’s mother returned the salute.
Connie handed over the traditional gifts, flowers for fertility and rice for prosperity.
‘Thank you. Please come inside.’
Connie left her sandals in the row beside the door and went in barefoot. A small fan churned the air, but the room was still stuffy and as hot as a furnace. It seemed to be crowded with people, most of whom were pressed between the two weaving looms that occupied two-thirds of the floor space. A very old woman, perhaps Pema’s grandmother, sat at the bench in front of one of the looms. Her brown hands rested on the unfinished length of ikat cloth, and she was so small that her feet dangled six inches short of the treadles.
Everyone bowed to Connie and she returned the salutes, working from the oldest down to whoever appeared to be the youngest. One of the teenaged girls, a sister, held a baby of a few months, a round-faced infant with the heavy-lidded stare of a miniature deity.
Dewi lay propped up on cushions on a wooden divan. She held a swaddled bundle in her arms. Two or three years back, Connie remembered, she had been hardly more than a little girl, and even now she looked far too young to be a mother. There were purple rings of fatigue around her eyes but her small, even white teeth showed in a broad grin of pride as Connie stooped beside her.
‘Well done,’ Connie smiled.
Before her marriage Dewi had often come over to Connie’s house to drink Cokes or make herself imaginative snacks from the sparse contents of Connie’s fridge, and to giggle over Western magazines. She had a good voice, and loved to sing or la-la the lyrics of pop songs while Connie sat at her keyboard playing the melody and joining in the choruses.
Pema’s mother asked if Connie would care to drink a glass of green tea, and Connie politely accepted. There was a stir of large bodies in the crowded room.
‘Would you like to hold him?’ Dewi whispered.
‘Yes, please.’
Dewi handed the tiny bundle into Connie’s arms. It weighed almost nothing. She looked down into the baby’s sleeping face. One purple-grey fist was bunched against his cheek, and two tiny commas of damp black eyelashes punctuated the wrinkled mask. He looked premature, and also prehistorically ancient. Connie’s throat tightened.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Wayan.’
Wayan or Putu for the firstborn of Balinese families, depending on caste; Kadek or Madé for the second; Komang or Nyoman for the third and Ketut for number four, then back to Wayan again. That was how it went. No fanciful baby names, even for a girl who pored over second-hand celebrity magazines as eagerly as Dewi did.
‘He’s beautiful,’ Connie told her.
Pema came in with another group of visitors in tow, also carrying flowers and packets of rice. Everyone in the room edged up to make space, and Connie thought that she would certainly melt if it got any hotter. She pressed her lips to baby Wayan’s forehead, breathing in the scent of fresh birth. There was an urge inside her to hold the child more closely, feeling his damp skin against her own, but instead she replaced the bundle gently in Dewi’s outstretched hands.
‘I’ll go outside. To make some room,’ she mumbled. Through the thickets of flowers and staring faces she made it into the air. She was sitting on one of the rattan chairs and watching a large black pig, tethered by the leg to a sapling, when Pema came out with one of his sisters behind him. The sister poured green tea into glasses and handed one to Connie and one to Pema. Pema sat down and they sipped their tea while the pig rooted in the ditch and contentedly grunted to itself.
‘You must be proud, Pema,’ Connie said.
He smoothed back his thick hair. He was small but quite good-looking. Before he and Dewi fell in love with each other, Connie had often seen him with a group of his friends, circling on their motorcycles like a flock of two-wheeled birds and eyeing the tourist girls in their shorts and bikini tops.
‘I am. But I am also worried about being responsible.’
Pema was an apprentice mechanic at a small garage on the road that led down to the coast. He would be earning very little money, which was why he and Dewi were living with his parents. Until the two of them could save enough money to buy or build their own house, they would have to stay here among the stepped generations of grandparents and brothers and sisters and the various other babies.
‘That comes with being a father,’ she smiled at him. Pema was a good boy, she thought. He was looking at her in that unspecifically hopeful, speculative way
that meant he was wondering if her immense, uncountable Western wealth might somehow be harnessed to his advantage.
‘Do you have children, perhaps?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Connie told him.
‘That is a shame for you,’ Pema said, all sympathetic awareness of the divide that now existed between the two of them. He was probably thinking that piles of her money wouldn’t compensate for not having a baby son like day-old Wayan.
There wasn’t much else to say, and neither of them felt the need to make further conversation. They drank the rest of their tea and sat looking thoughtfully at Pema’s mother’s garden of peppers and chillies and coconut palms. Behind a small hedge flies swarmed around the brown haunches of a tethered buffalo.
More people kept arriving. When Connie went to say goodbye, she could only manage to wave to Dewi and blow a kiss from the edge of the crowd. Later in the day, according to custom, the washed placenta would be wrapped in a sacred cloth and the visitors would all witness its burial inside a coconut shell near the gateway to the house.
By the time Connie made it home the afternoon had reached the point where the light was at its ripest. It lay like melted butter over the vast swathe of gently stirring leaves, gilding the fronds of tree ferns and shining on the stippled trunks of palm trees so that they gleamed like beaten silver. Connie went out to her chair on the veranda and sat listening to the trickle of water and the various layers of birdsong.
She let the questions sink slowly to the bottom of her pool of thoughts. In time, as the shoot receded, the sediment of habit would cover up her memories.
Peace lapped round her once again.
She sat for a long time, until the tropical twilight swept up again from the depths of the gorge. As the sudden darkness fell, she wandered back into the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Connie seldom drank alone, but tonight she felt the need for just one drink.
There were no telephone messages. She took a long swallow of wine, and set the glass down on her desk as she switched on her computer. It was days since she had checked her emails. Broadband hadn’t yet reached the village and she wandered out to the veranda again while the unread messages slowly descended from the ether and filtered into her inbox. She drank some more wine and then, counter to her intentions, topped up her glass.
