Troppo

by Dickie, Madelaine

  At last, Matt holds up his finger. One more. He positions himself, takes off, pulls into the curl of the inside section. Then he stretches out, graceful but with a tenseness, an expectancy; he’s planning his next turn and from there everything flows, his body dark and fluid, tensing and relaxing, his board quick and loose and responsive beneath his feet. I turn and paddle for the wave after, jumping to my feet and chasing my reflection to the shore.

  On the way home I grin and whoop and Matt keeps looking over his shoulder to check I haven’t fallen off the back of the motorbike. If we’d taken separate bikes we could be racing each other, swinging around potholes, overtaking trucks, flying low around corners and scattering chooks. There’s the taste of salt on my lips, my hair crackles with it; I can’t believe I’ve forgotten what it feels like to surf. When I first moved to Perth, I gave it a break. Sometimes Scarborough got surf, but it wasn’t like Indo, or Fiji, or Albany. You either had to live it, or block it out completely – all or nothing. Sometimes, bored at the backpackers, I’d find myself indulging in surf porn, flicking through photos of Samoa, Nicaragua, the Maldives and Japan. Wondering if I should take off again, become a full-time surf gypsy.

  And then I met Josh. He didn’t surf.

  Gradually, the ocean loosened her grip. But not really.

  ‘You wanna drink?’ Matt asks over his shoulder.

  ‘For sure!’ We skid to a stop beside a plastic awning-covered warung at the side of the road.

  ‘Watch the knalpot,’ he warns.

  The inside of my right calf is shadowed with old, planet-shaped burns.

  I swing off the opposite side to the exhaust pipe. We lay the boards wax-down on the grass and then sit at a long wooden table. On the table is a pot of sambal, a plastic container of spoons and forks and a dish of red and green chilli. We’re the only customers.

  ‘They do the best smoothies in Batu Batur.’

  ‘That’s quite the call!’

  ‘They’re quite the smoothies. You hungry?’

  Not just hungry, but that intense, post-surfing-in-Indo hunger, where you eat yourself to bursting then fall asleep, skin rocking against your bones.

  We order banana and mango smoothies, plates of fried rice. We don’t speak until the plates are polished, the glasses drained. Matt crosses his legs, leans back and lights a kretek. He’s watching me, sideways, slyly, from behind the smoke of his cigarette. Today his eyes are a confident, coral green.

  Now that we’re sitting down together, I want to come straight out and grill him about this wife of his but I don’t get the chance, he’s asking, ‘So have you had a chance to check out Shane’s?’

  It takes me a moment to respond – his eyes have immobilised me. ‘Right, yeah. Shane’s. I went a couple of days ago. Just for a night.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And … I don’t think he’s gunna be that easy to work for, but then, he doesn’t seem like the psychopath Ibu Ayu describes.’

  Matt taps loose a crown of ash.

  I continue, ‘Maybe he’s come to the realisation that he’s not always that good front of house and that he needs someone to kick his marketing up a gear. It’s the wet season at the moment, so it’s pretty quiet, but I guess he’s hoping that by July his numbers will have really jumped. He’s promised me an extra five grand on top of the wage if I stay for six months. I’m thinking I’ll stick it out. I can’t go back to WA. Not yet.’

  ‘Just between the two of us, Pen, I don’t think Shane’ll still be here in six months. I wanted to talk to you about this at the party the other night. There’s some guys in town who really have it in for him. Things are gunna come to a head in the next week or two, I’ll put money on it.’

  ‘But Joni told me that he’s paying bribes to the police for protection. Doesn’t that count for anything?’

  ‘Yes and no. He might be paying bribes to the police, but you’ve lived in Bali, you know how corrupt they are. Do you reckon the fishermen whose beach he’s on are getting a cut? Do you reckon the other business owners like Bapak Joni are happy about the competition? The thing is, Pen, we’re all just hanging on here by the skin of our teeth.’ Matt stabs his kretek into an ashtray.

  ‘But to have a business here, you have to have a partner, right? Like, as a bule, the land has to be in the name of an Indo?’

  Matt nods, ‘Yeah, there’s a couple of ways to go about it. I don’t know what Shane’s situation is, but I imagine it’s in the name of a girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, or ex-wife, something like that.’

  ‘But surely if it were an ex-missus she’d be demanding the place for herself, for the cash?’

  The waitress approaches our table. Matt stacks our plates, spoons and forks and hands them to her.

  ‘Yeah, who knows,’ he says, picking up a green chilli from the condiments bowl and popping it in his mouth. There’s a twinkle, a dare in his eyes.

  I’m impressed. The local kids pop chillies as if they’re lollies but I’ve never seen a bule go them whole. I reach over and take one myself, but go slow, in tiny nibbles.

  ‘So how did Shane seem to you? Like, health-wise?’

  What a strange question to ask. ‘He got crook toward the end of the night. He’d probably been on the piss since lunch.’

  ‘Breakfast.’

  ‘Yeah, well he’s a pretty big bloke. I imagine it would take a fair bit of beer to get him tanked.’

  We’re no longer alone. A few men are bent over bowls of fried rice and noodles. Between spoonfuls they watch us with cheerless, equivocal eyes. There’s none of the usual chat you get in warungs, none of the usual questions, the usual friendly banter.

  I turn back to Matt. ‘So do they know who threw the rocks at the party?’

  Matt finds my toes with his toes under the table. A moth hatches in my throat, in my belly, between my thighs. ‘We shouldn’t talk about this here,’ he says quietly, and his eyes move over my shoulder, then back to my face. ‘You ready?’ His toes shift away.

  I nod. ‘So when do you have to work again?’

  ‘Next week,’ he says as he stands.

  Fifteen minutes later we’re back at the bungalows.

  ‘Do you want to come up for a …’ It’s too early for beer. Idiot! I can feel the colour lift in my cheeks and I tighten my fingers around my board.

  ‘For a what?’ he teases. ‘Nah, it’s cool, Pen, I gotta go. But I’ll drop round tomorrow arvo for a drink. Hey, on a serious note. You should really think twice about taking up this position with Shane. In fact, you should leave Batu Batur. Get out of here. You don’t owe Shane anything.’

  22

  The dead hours. Surf sore. Full of conflict and lust. For Matt. I wet the tip of my finger with my tongue then lift out my undies and gently brush tingles into my clit. I imagined it’s the tip of Matt’s tongue, working me gently, slowly. I imagine my fingers meshed in his bright hair, imagine him lapping me while his hands find and trail the sensitive hollows of my back. We’re on a beach at sunset, we’re in his village shack, we’re locked under a tree; he’s sinking his whole mouth around me, sinking deep his hard white teeth. I imagine reaching that point where the moans are no longer just expressions of gratitude but well up and cascade and tumble over each other of their own volition, rising out of some primal part of me, uncontrollable, implacable, with a tone that’s so foreign, until the whole dark world behind my eyelids implodes, explodes.

  I roll over onto my side. Feel guilty. See Josh, sobbing, on the edge of the bathtub.

  23

  That evening I head to the other side of town with Cahyati to watch the soccer. If she thinks I should be worried for my safety in Batu Batur, then she never lets on. By the time we get to the field the game is already in full swing. Half of the football ground has been drummed to a swamp by boots and the forked prints of toes. The boys skid and yowl and sweat their way up and down the field. A crowd cheers them on – Cahyati tells me it’s the semifinal between Batu Batur and Bengkulu.

  �
��So which one is he?’ I ask.

  She giggles behind her hand and pulls me to a warung overlooking the field. She orders two iced coconut drinks but when I push some rupiah toward her she shakes her head and clenches her fists. We stir our drinks and watch the game. It’s hard to tell which team is which, but I’m infected by the enthusiasm of the crowd, the community-feel on the sidelines: toddlers teararse through the mud, teenagers with diagonal pop-star fringes stand in awkward groups, women nurse babies. Alongside the main field something else has started up. A bunch of primary school–aged girls are kicking a ball between themselves, making intimations toward a game of their own.

  ‘They shouldn’t be playing soccer.’ Cahyati has followed my gaze to the girls.

  ‘But they’re just kids.’

  ‘Girls don’t play soccer.’ Her voice is surprisingly firm.

  We turn our attention back to the main game. There’s a penalty kick, ‘For Bengkulu,’ Cahyati tells me. The crowd’s shouting, waving fists, revved up on sugary coffee and localism. The kick flies wide and the shouting becomes cheers, the volume trebles. Then Cahyati tugs at my sleeve. ‘Look.’

  A man in white is striding toward the girls.

  ‘Come on, let’s see what he says.’ She pulls me from the warung and across the grass toward the girls. Other people have gathered around, curious. By the time we’re in earshot, the girls are all looking at their feet and the soccer ball has been dribbled off by a boy. The man’s tone is unbearably patronising.

  ‘Who is he?’ I whisper.

  ‘Abd al Hakim. The head of the big mosque, the one near the market.’

  The man has the distinctive hooked nose of an Arab and stands a head taller than me. The rest of his features are Indonesian; he’s probably from Aceh. There’s something uncomfortably shrewd in his long, distinct face. He senses he’s under scrutiny.

  ‘Ah!’ he says. ‘Bule! Did you persuade these girls to play?’

  Cahyati’s nearly breaking my fingers with her grip but luckily, at that moment, there’s a roar from the crowd and the man’s attention swings. Batu Batur has won. She pulls me away toward the sideline and one of the players, number seven, glances our way, just briefly. Cahyati’s mouth twitches into a wafer of a smile, then her face becomes impassive again.

  We get back to Ibu Ayu’s on dusk. Cahyati slips into the laundry to catch up on the chores she’s missed and I head straight to my bungalow to put on mozzie repellent – dawn and dusk are the worst times for mozzies and I’m not keen to start a six month stint with malaria shivering through my blood.

  Ibu Ayu sees us return. She’s sitting at one of the tables on the dining deck, slowly fanning herself with a yellow flap of newspaper.

  Later that night, on the cusp of sleep, I hear her cursing Cahyati for something, for some stupid thing that Cahyati’s forgotten to do.

  24

  It’s just after 4am and the gas lamps of the morning market wink warm as fireflies. Here in Indo, I never get that feeling I’m the only person alive. If you want to head out for a snack and a chat at 11pm, at 2am, at 4am, there’s always somewhere open, there are always people around.

  As a teenager in Kuta I often woke up before dawn, when the nightclubs locked the tills and drunk Aussies swung their legs over rental bikes and went screaming and careening through the alleys. If I couldn’t get back to sleep I strapped my surfboard to my bike, hit a morning market for a hot bowl of bakso, stuffed fat parcels of sticky rice into my pockets and then headed north to Canggu, or east to Serangan, or south to the Bukit Peninsula: reckless, restless, suntanned and scab-kneed.

  Up ahead there’s a kaki lima selling deep-fried banana.

  ‘Pagi Bu,’ I greet the kaki lima owner, ‘boleh minta pisang goreng?’

  ‘How much do you want?’ she replies.

  ‘Dua ribu.’

  The woman looks at me and firms her mouth. ‘We only sell five thousand rupiah worth of pisang goreng.’

  ‘You don’t sell two thousand worth?’

  Ibu Ayu paid two thousand rupiah only a few days earlier.

  The woman shakes her head and goes back to flipping the bananas.

  A moment later, a man approaches with his son and orders two thousand rupiah worth of pisang goreng. The woman spoons it into a white paper bag.

  I turn away.

  Batu Batur’s market is a typical honeycomb of alleys, wooden display racks and plastic awning. Not big enough to get lost in but big enough to explore. This morning it seems to be crawling with beggars, touts and thieves. I move my bag around to my chest and clutch it, edging my way between the narrow stalls. Women argue over the price of spice, tongues like the tails of stingrays, hands deftly guarding a cornucopia of old cloves, vanilla beans, saffron and nutmeg. Slabs of raw beef, chicken and fish are lined up on the concrete floor and seasoned with cigarette ash and flies.

  Among the stalls of clothing there’s a group of women selling textiles, including the woman whose weavings I looked at a few days ago. When they see me their chat becomes frenzied and one woman sings out, ‘Hello Mister, hello Mister! You looking, looking, okay?’ The others quickly join her, singing, ‘Duduk, duduk!’ and so I sit with them, cross-legged. Someone brings me a steaming cup of black coffee. Someone else asks if I’d like a chair. As I look through the pieces I talk to the women about their families, their children, their husbands, their goats. They tell me they caught a bus to Batu Batur from the mountains this morning.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Pagi pagi benar!’

  ‘How early is very early?’

  ‘Three thirty this morning. We left at three thirty,’ they tell me.

  ‘No way!’

  I pretend to faint with tiredness and they slap my arms and laugh. It’s so different to shopping in Australia; I love the pace of it, love the laughter, love how when I offer a price, the women roll their eyes and wail too low! too low! we’ll go broke! and then they change the subject. We go back to talking about men or goats. Then after a while one of the women offers another price, a little lower than the last, and I shriek, too expensive! kok mahal? and the whole thing starts again.

  I think about grocery shopping in Australia. The plethora of choice. The sterility. The waxy, tasteless fruit. The indifferent or surly or bored staff on the checkouts, blowing their noses, checking their watches. Sitting with these women yarning, arguing and bartering, I feel so much more comfortable, so much more alive!

  After another half-hour of riotous laughter and lascivious yarns – through which I assemble a romantic history of their village – I buy two pieces. As money changes hands, they invite me to the mountains to meet their children and their husbands and their goats. I thank them, but Matt’s swinging past this afternoon and I don’t want to miss him.

  God I’m a disgrace!

  ‘Maybe in a couple of days.’

  ‘Of course! Anytime! You are welcome, Mister, you are welcome.’

  While I felt safe and shielded by the warm gossip of the women, on my way out I have an unnerving feeling that I’m being followed. It’s not uncommon for bules to be shadowed through markets by thieves – the Pasar Badung in Denpasar is notorious for its hard-eyed ‘guides’ – but although I look over my shoulder a few times, there doesn’t seem to be anyone lurking behind the scaly mounds of snake fruit.

  Out on the main street two young men in skullcaps lean loose-limbed over a motorbike. One of the young men holds a monkey on a chain. The monkey is barely recognisable – it wears an obscene and eyeless mask. Music trickles from a box and the monkey strains against its chain in a rhythmless desperate dance. A child claps. The monkey dances. Then the men see me and make a hissing noise between their teeth and tongues. Lust and violence in equal parts. I keep walking.

  25

  I borrow a bucket from Ibu Ayu and head to the kamar mandi to wash my clothes. The bathroom here is communal and about fifty metres from my bungalow. There’s something grounding in the rhythm of scrubbing clothes. It’s the sam
e rhythm you find when you’re kneading dough, or working with earth or clay.

  I’m just about finished when I hear a man’s voice outside the bathroom.

  ‘A week. Maybe ten days. No more.’

  I can’t quite place it. It’s quietly authoritative; almost patronising, suggestive of someone who is used to having his orders obeyed.

  ‘That’s not enough, we need longer.’ This time it’s Bapak Joni, his tone gently persuading. ‘It won’t happen overnight. They say he’s already sick. At least this way the police won’t get involved. A little more time and then we won’t need to –’

  ‘We don’t have more time,’ the man says.

  Bapak Joni sighs.

  Their footsteps fade.

  Thunder jars above the coconut trees. Shadows, sticky as tar, spread beneath palm and awning. I gather my wet clothes and run for my bungalow before the rain. Hopefully the afternoon will bring wind or muggy sunshine so my clothes will dry.

  Just as the rain starts to lash down over the thatch, it occurs to me who the other voice might belong to. I’m not certain, won’t put money on it, but it sounded like Abd al Hakim, the Arab-Indo looking guy from the soccer game.

  26

  There’s a restless energy in Matt’s movements. He leans over the balcony rail, face turned toward the evening ocean-roar, hands clenching and unclenching in excitement.

  ‘You alright?’

  He doesn’t answer, just grins.

  ‘Get any waves today?’

  ‘Yeah.’ There’s a manic junky gleam in his pupils. It’s obvious he’s been in the water all day: the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes have whitened against his flushed, dark skin like the roots of tiny plants in soil. I want to brush them with my fingertips, to kiss them.