‘Yep.’
‘No bag?’
‘No bag.’
‘Okay. My friend watch motorbike so no stealing.’
‘Okay.’
‘Two thousand rupiah.’
‘Hey? I’ve got a job here, I start next week!’
‘Does Mister Shane know you coming?’
‘Yeah! Well, no. He doesn’t know I’m coming today.’
He sticks out his hand. ‘How about a cigarette?’
I pull a crumpled packet from the back pocket of my pants and offer them. The men inspect the pack and scoff. They’re poor-men’s cigarettes: filter-less, tar-full, smoked by becak riders, fishermen and kaki lima owners. Not the cigarettes smoked by employees of a bule.
‘Two thousand rupiah,’ the man says again. Grumbling, I fish out the money.
The man says something to his friend in a quick snicker of Lampung, then gestures for me to follow him. We cross a river on a swinging wooden bridge. It’s only wide enough for one person. I trail my hand along the wire railing for balance.
Shane’s Sumatran Oasis is just past the bridge. A dim bulb lights a back verandah. I’m at the door before I realise my guide is hanging back. I catch the crouching shine of his shins, the crumbling point of his cigarette.
‘What’s wrong?’
He shakes his head and waves his fingertips.
I turn and knock on the door. A muffled voice shouts for me to wait. There’s the sound of vigorous footsteps. Shane swings open the screen door and for a moment, looking up at him, I’m stunned. From the stories I had imagined a mean Aussie bloke in his fifties or sixties with a beer gut, in a blue singlet, flaunting a spray of stars across his bicep. But Shane looks like he was once an ironman, an Olympic swimmer, Laird Hamilton’s Aussie twin. His hair is surf-mag blond, thick not thinning, and it falls sideways over his eyes. His frame fills the door. He’s looking at me with frank, warm interest. No way, I think. This couldn’t be Shane. But there’s also no way it could be a Swedish backpacker – the bloke has the stubble and sun lines and brazen don’t-give-a-fuck look of an Aussie.
‘Shane,’ he says, sticking out his hand. ‘Welcome.’
I shake his hand mutely.
He looks amused. Must happen to him all the time.
I follow him down a corridor plastered with posters of waves: Raglan, J-Bay, Mavericks, Padang Padang. At the end, a huge wooden balcony serves as an open-air living area. I expected the place would be like a shipwreck, full of sand and green with mould. Instead, it’s modern, Western, and full of toys. There’s a flat-screen television playing bits of last year’s Quicksilver Pro, beanbags, padded board racks, low coffee tables stacked with surf magazines, a pool table, fussbal table, massage table, hammocks, a surf-check tower and a bar. Two-thirds of the balcony is shaded by a wooden roof, the other third is for the Bintang umbrellas, daybeds and deckchairs facing the surf. Off to the right, a corridor leads to rooms attached to the main building. Over the edge of the balcony, wedged between frangipanis and jasmine, are half a dozen bungalows.
‘So, what can I do for you this evening? You lookin’ for a room?’ Shane asks.
‘Not exactly …’
‘Not exactly? How about some dinner then, or perhaps I can tempt you with a drink?’
‘Actually, I’m your new manager. Penelope.’
‘Ah, nice. Penny. I can call you that, right? I heard you were in town. Shall we grab a drink?’
He doesn’t wait for me to answer, just strides across to the edge of the balcony and sets himself down in a chair.
The moon’s rising through scissor-edged palms. ‘Well?’ he calls back to me.
‘Sure.’
I’m wary. Wary of the charisma. Wary of the mismatch between the stories and the man.
‘Kristi!’ he calls out, sliding a kretek from the packet. ‘Rokok?’ he asks, nudging the packet toward me.
‘Nggak.’
His eyes are close together and focused. ‘So you speak a bit of Indo then.’
‘Yeah. I lived here for a year when I was a kid.’
He shoots a flame from the lighter, takes a drag. ‘Rotten habit,’ he apologises, aspirating clove-warm smoke. ‘Only in Indo.’
I laugh. He wouldn’t be the first non-smoker to get hooked here. Even I’m partial to the occasional kretek.
A girl is suddenly next to us. She wears a pale cotton dress. Her shoulders are bare. She wouldn’t be sixteen.
‘Kristi, some drinks. What do you drink, love?’ he asks me. ‘Beer? Vodka?’
‘You got gin?’
‘Gin it is.’
The skin around the girl’s eyes is black, as if pinched; the eyes themselves are as blank as unhatched eggs. She blinks.
‘You heard our guest. A gin and tonic. And another beer for me. And please, Kristi, serve it properly this time, yeah?’ When Kristi’s out of earshot he says conspiratorially, ‘You gotta watch ’em. If you’re not careful they’ll fuck everything up.’
‘Mmm,’ I murmur, in what I hope is a neutral tone. ‘So you guys don’t talk in Indo?’
‘Nope. These people don’t know I can speak their language. It’s better that way.’
‘Right.’
Beyond the trees I can hear the dark heave of the ocean. The sound is always more distinct at night. ‘So you’re pretty close to the surf here then?’
‘Thirty-second walk to the water, fifteen-minute paddle to the best dry-season right-hander you’ll find on mainland Sumatra.’
‘What a spot!’
‘Yeah, well, I guess like anywhere it has its challenges.’ He glances over his shoulder. ‘What’s taking her so long?’
Five minutes in and already, inevitably, I’m baited to placate him. ‘I’m sure she’s not far,’ I say quickly. Then, ‘Do you still surf?’
‘Be mad not to,’ he says. ‘But not as much as I used to. Had a couple of years on the tour when I was younger but ended up getting dropped. Blew it. Got distracted by beautiful women and drugs.’
He gives me a guileless grin and I find myself grinning back.
The girl is behind us again, waif-like, balancing a tray. She sets my glass on a low wicker table and fits Shane’s beer to his hand.
‘Thanks sweetheart.’ He takes a long swing. ‘I probably had more time in the water when I first moved here. But at the moment all my energy is going into keeping this place together. Keeping myself out of trouble.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The locals here are fanatics. It’s not chilled out, like Bali. I was seeing a girl for a while. She was from Bandar Lampung. A couple of days after I brought her here, a group of blokes from the mosque came round demanding to know who she was and where she was from and if I’d married her. They said no woman was to turn up and live with me unless she’d signed their book first.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Told ’em I’d do as I fucken well pleased!’
‘So is it worth it then, staying here? You know, if the local crew aren’t that friendly?’
Shane pulverises the kretek stump, adjusts a paw around his beer. ‘When I first came here, to Batu Batur, I saw potential: great waves, cheap land, unbelievable location. I started with a losmen, extended that to some bungalows, then to this … but it’s been an uphill fucken battle. Do you know why?’
He’s not interested in an answer. I put my mouth to the cool edge of my gin.
He gestures in the direction of Kristi. ‘The locals,’ he says in a low voice. ‘They’re either fanatics, lazy cunts or thieves. And you’ve got no idea how much money it costs. You think it’s cheap to live here? Wrong. Something breaks, I gotta get it fixed, right? Even now, after livin’ here for nearly ten years, they charge me twice the amount the locals pay!’ The neck of his beer glistens. ‘Then there’s the issue of staffing. They’re always complaining they don’t get enough money. But why would I pay them any more? They hardly work as it is, the men especially. They spend most of the day squatting around sm
oking durries while the women do all the work. I only employ women now but, Christ, don’t get me started on the local women!’
My steely silence gets him started; he mistakes it for attentiveness.
‘Dolls to look at, the most beautiful women in the world. When I first came to Indonesia, to Yogyakarta to study, I rented a house opposite a local high school. When I wasn’t at uni I sat out the front and watched the girls.’
He shifts in his seat. A giant hard-on swells against the fluoro polyester of his board shorts.
‘Those legs, those firm little breasts, that hair!’ His voice is husky. ‘But all they want’s your money. You’re not a leso?’
‘No,’ I manage.
‘Well, alright.’
‘So if it’s all that bad, why do you stay here?’ I can’t quite keep the challenge from my voice, can’t quite keep my eyes from sliding back to his crotch.
Rain starts to fall. There’s the gentle splash of rain in gin. The palms chafe, necks stretched tall in sacrifice, fronds ragged as the heads on effigies. He says nothing for a long while. Then, just at the point when it seems he’s forgotten what I asked or has chosen to ignore me, he answers simply and without self-pity.
‘Got nowhere else to go.’
I drain my gin.
‘Kristi! More drinks!’ The rain comes down heavier. ‘Move ya chair.’
We resettle under a red and white Bintang umbrella. I wonder how I’m going to get home. Knowing my luck, I’ll probably end up falling through one of the holes in the bridge, land in that slow-moving river churning with dysentery, typhoid, catfish fat on turds.
‘You can stay tonight,’ Shane says. ‘I wouldn’t be driving back in the dark if I were you. And this,’ he gestures to my empty gin glass, ‘this is all on me. I’m happy for the company. Can get pretty lonely out here this time of year. There’s the occasional Euro backpacker who comes through, clutching their fucken Lonely Planets and water bottles. All they do is complain about the bloody price. “Vair is the cheapest nasi campur?” I usually dump them in the dorm. The other crew are the Aussie surfers. Rough cunts. No conversational scope.’
I bite my tongue. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, what did you do at uni in Jogja?’
‘Language, arts, the usual. One of those exchanges. Wasn’t at uni much though. Spent a lot of time down around Pacitan surfing spots that weren’t even on the map then. Outrageously heavy spots.’
Rain drops a pale screen in front of us. ‘So, Shane, I mean, I haven’t seen the rooms but from what I have seen the place looks great, it looks like it’s being managed really well. Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question, but why did you hire me?’
‘Jeez, I’m starting to wonder that,’ Shane teases. ‘Basically I need someone in here I can trust. Someone who’s not gunna steal money from my guests or take weeks off because their uncle or great-grandmother’s sick.’
Kristi arrives with our drinks.
‘And I hired you because you were the only chick who applied. Didn’t want some hungry young gun in here from the Goldy who’d end up competing with me and my guests for waves.’
Shane doesn’t seem like a guy who would get on too well with other guys. He might have a few close mates, bonded by stupidity and youth, but it seems more likely that he’d stockpile women. If he had men around him it would be omega men, malleable and docile.
‘So … I know you said in the ad on the internet that the starting rate was –’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Shane cuts me off. ‘You want me to tell you about the benefits, right?’
‘Right.’ Already the starting rate was reasonable. More than reasonable, in fact, it was almost as much as I was getting paid at the backpackers and the pub combined. Given that the cost of living here was a tenth of the cost of living in Australia, I stood to save some serious money.
‘Like I said in the email, you’ve got free accommodation. You can have any guest room of your choice – except for the bungalows. Free food. A lend of one of the motorbikes provided you pay for petrol and maintenance. I’ll pay you every fortnight. And …’ he pauses, his trump card. ‘If you stay for six months, I’ll swing you an extra five grand.’
The glass nearly slips from my fingers. ‘Are you for real?’
‘I’ve had a high turnover of staff. I need someone steady who’ll help lift the profile of this place in the community, who’ll be on the internet putting ads on Wannasurf and Magicseaweed, do some guerrilla marketing, basically work their guts out. I want this place fully booked from May to September. You work your guts out, you stick around for six months, the bonus is yours.’
A cool five, plus free creative reign over the marketing side of things. That’s a challenge. That’s another trip. That’s freedom.
Shane also doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad as the stories would suggest. Matt probably badmouths him because he’s an alpha male. Ibu Ayu and Bapak Joni are probably concerned because Shane’s Sumatran Oasis is the only real competition. But although he certainly has problems respecting the local culture, I can’t imagine him cutting the fingers off his staff.
My gin swallows an insect.
‘Sounds unreal,’ I say.
He responds with an almost imperceptible wince. His hand goes to his stomach, where once-chunky abs are slack from misuse.
‘Well. Thanks for an awesome night. I’m looking forward to having you on board. But for now, I reckon it’s time for me to hit the sack.’ He puts down his beer. His hand trembles. ‘Kris –’ She’s there before he squeezes out the last syllable.
Kristi draws him to his feet.
‘Night, then.’
‘Night.’
They walk together down the wooden corridor, past the guestrooms to the private arm of the resort. She doesn’t come up to his armpit. His fingers slide down her spine, edge between her bum cheeks.
After a while, the girl emerges.
‘Is he okay?’ I ask her. ‘Is he crook?’
‘Nggak,’ she says, ‘ ’gak begitu.’ It’s not like that.
‘So what is it?’
Those blank eyes register distrust. She shrugs. ‘He’s not sick.’ Then, with a haughtiness, a disdain she wouldn’t dare display around Shane, she asks if I’m staying the night.
‘Yeah, I guess so.’
She throws me the key to room twelve. It lands at my toes.
17
‘Matt already come looking for you,’ says Ibu Ayu. ‘He say he come get you for the dawnie. I tell him you didn’t come home last night, that you probably stay with some local boy.’
‘You didn’t!’
She gives me a wicked grin.
‘You did!’
‘Iya! Anyway, where you sleep last night?’
‘Shane’s,’ I tell her.
‘Kenapa kesana? Why you go there? You not happy here? You no like your bungalow? Still over a week, no, before you start?’
I laugh. ‘Your bungalows are fine, Bu. I just went to Shane’s to check the place out.’
‘Ahh.’ She changes the subject. ‘Mau kopi?’
‘Sure.’ I pull up a seat and rest my forearms on the table. Anaemic sunlight leaks through the palm fronds. When I left Shane’s earlier, the place was still damp with shadow. I couldn’t find the girl, Kristi, and I wasn’t keen to go poking around for Shane just to say goodbye. He wasn’t at all like I expected; I was imagining a psychopath. Instead, he seemed reasonable enough, for a drunk.
Ibu brings out my glass of coffee and sits opposite me. She’s silent for a while. Then all of a sudden she asks, ‘So how come Matt looking for you here? Penny no have boyfriend in Australia?’
‘Yeah, sort of. But we’re having a break.’
Ibu looks perturbed. ‘A break?’ She shakes her head in incomprehension. ‘Anyway, I don’t know why this Matt always visiting you. He already have wife!’
‘What?’ I blurt. Then to cover my shock, ‘Yeah of course. I know that. We’re just mates. You’re allowed to be just mates in Au
stralia, it doesn’t mean that …’ I trail off.
Satisfied she’s warned me, she switches topic, asks me a question that makes me feel even more uncomfortable.
‘So you already here one, maybe two week. What you think of Lampung people?’
Under the cap of her jilbab, her eyes are sharp as kitchen knives.
I think about the men in the bushes, the stalker on the beach. Similar things have happened to me in other parts of Indonesia, and in Mexico, Sri Lanka. Nothing ever really happened in Fiji. And the last time something happened in Indonesia, it wasn’t a local at all, it was another traveller. It was the year after I finished high school and it was my first time back in Indo since I was a kid. I decided to go to Kalimantan, where there were rivers and gorillas and no chance of getting distracted from travel by the surf. On the flight from Denpasar to Balikpapan the only other bule was an American in his forties. We got chatting. I must have intrigued him, entranced him, naively. Do you want to get a taxi together to look for some accommodation? Sure. Cut the cost. Why not? We found a road of ‘cheap’ accommodation. Everything was overpriced. And at every intersection there were whores in bras and undies, jutting their hips, half-covering their faces with cloth. I had never seen this in Indonesia before; even in Kuta the girls were usually wearing dresses, were propped up at bars. It filled me with apprehension. In one losmen, the rooms glowed red from the lights of the Chinese brothel opposite; cigarette butts were compressed onto the concrete floor and the bin was still overflowing. The staff didn’t plan to clean it. Shit, let’s step it up, said the American, so we did; agreed on sharing a room at a reasonable hotel. The American didn’t speak Indonesian. Tempat tidur terpisah, I stressed more than once to the receptionist. We need a room with separate beds. Please, two beds. Please.
In the middle of the night the American tried to edge onto my single bed. I wasn’t scared. I had my knife under my pillow. Fuck off! I unflicked it. That first knife was a beauty. A blade that could’ve halved a tongue. ‘I thought you were masturbating,’ he said. ‘I thought you were masturbating over me.’
He slunk back to his bed.
I learnt a valuable lesson: never trust a bule just because you’re also a bule in a foreign country.
Troppo Page 5
