by Luke Horton
When the man left them alone with the menus, they exchanged looks. Tom’s look was to suggest there was nothing he could do, the man had run roughshod over them, but maybe it was going to be okay after all. In Clara’s gaze, there was no indication that she understood or was sympathetic to him, she simply looked at him steadily for a moment, then looked away.
The owner brought them their drinks, and, when Tom spoke to Clara, he felt he had adopted the man’s false good cheer, but couldn’t stop himself. He talked up the sound of the dishes, declared the beer delicious, chatted away, wondering if the place, with its outbuildings, all the same brick with the same arched walkways, was a backpackers’, or a place that accommodated Spanish tour groups, or what. Clara sipped her wine, which she said was very nice.
The food when it arrived seemed initially promising, but turned out to be mediocre at best. Confirmation that the food had in fact been reheated from the night before seemed to hang in the air: the potatoes were dry, the chorizo was tough, the prawns slightly spongy. That everything was drenched in garlic and tomatoes and olive oil helped. They had also ordered too much food. It just kept coming: small terracotta bowls of corn croquettes, patatas bravas, green beans, more chorizo. Clara stopped even pretending to pay attention to the man or his food, and he looked increasingly strained as he returned each time, clear as it was that neither of his guests was eating much and neither of them was happy.
How is it all? he asked, tentatively.
Delicious, Tom said.
Almost imperceptibly, Clara rolled her eyes.
You are not hungry, señora? the man said, turning to Clara.
We’re actually pretty full still from lunch, Tom said for her. Seeing her face set like that, he couldn’t be sure what she might say if he left it to her to reply.
Finally, the man left them alone.
After that, Tom found himself talking too much again. About the boat ride to Lembongan and how, for a while there, when the sea had become rough, he had started to wonder what they would do if the boat capsized. Wondered how far they would have to swim, or if they could hold on to something from the boat, perhaps, and wait to be rescued. No one had offered them life jackets, and he doubted anyone would come to rescue them in time. Is this what had happened to the people in the accident they’d heard the other passengers talking about? They weren’t that far from Lembongan when it got rough. They could see houses and other buildings in the craggy hills high on one end of the island, although distances over the water could be deceptive. Could they have swum it? Some people might have been able to, he said. Those Americans looked pretty fit.
How far was it from shore, a kay? he said. We wouldn’t make it. Especially in rough seas.
Unlike Emily, of course, Clara said, abruptly.
What? What do you mean?
She is an excellent swimmer …
Is she? I didn’t know that about her particularly.
Yes, you did. You told me, when we went camping that time, how she was this little surfer chick when she was a kid, and now could swim, like, fifty laps of the pool, and was this beautiful, graceful thing in the water.
I don’t remember saying that, or even if it is true, Tom said.
Clara drained the last of her wine and fell silent again.
He let it drop, but he couldn’t figure out why they were talking about Emily. Clara had never seemed jealous of her before. Not that she would let it show, of course. He was very tired. After the beer, and all the effort he’d put into being cheerful, he was spent. He couldn’t face an argument. Clara’s anger couldn’t be about Emily, anyway, not really. But he couldn’t figure out what it was about, at bottom. He knew he hadn’t been amazing about the fogging, but the whole thing just seemed insignificant to him. He couldn’t bring himself to care about it all that much. She was so morose, he couldn’t figure it out. He would talk to her about it this time, though. He would. Tomorrow, though, not tonight. Tomorrow he would ask her. He didn’t know what he was so afraid of.
15
Tom had prepared mentally for a day out of their holiday for the travel to Ubud, but they were there and installed in the hotel in two hours’ time, and then didn’t know what to do with themselves. It was more expensive than the hotel in Sanur, a bit of a blowout budget-wise, but they’d had to stay there, once they saw the pictures.
Located about half an hour out of town, the hotel projected vertiginously from the side of a deep gorge and hung cantilevered over jungle that was denser and greener than anything Tom had ever seen. At first, it was hard to distinguish much in the mass of green, but the more he stared at it over the coming days, the more things began to emerge: the grassy bank opposite, hidden behind a screen of palms; the silver thread of water far below on the jungle floor; patches of grey sand down there, too, in the shadows; and monkeys, or their wake, as they crashed down the hillside, the jungle closing back up behind them. There was a track high on the opposite bank, sections of which drew into focus for Tom as he watched from the banana lounges around the pool. He could see workers walking along it throughout the day, some riding bicycles, to the site of a new development being raised out of the jungle, further along the gorge — a sprawling complex of concrete foundations running over a swathe of cleared land.
The drive to Ubud had been quiet, frosty even, but they checked in and looked around the hotel a little, finding the infinity pool at the bottom of a winding marble staircase with a view over the jungle, and the mood lifted a little. It was maze-like, the hotel. It ran down the sheer side of the gorge in a series of buildings connected by zigzagging platforms and staircases and walkways, before finally resolving, with a narrow lap pool and massage hut, at the jungle floor.
Besides the marble, the hotel was all dark wood, and when the sun fell behind clouds, the wood and the cavernous buildings and the shade of the palms made the place feel a little gloomy. But the rooms themselves, at the top of the hillside, were light-filled, with glass doors, skylights in high ceilings, white marble floors. Tom was impressed by it all, but there was something about this version of luxury that he resisted. It was cold. There was an austerity to it that wasn’t entirely hospitable.
After the tour of the hotel, Clara seemed kind of dazed. She sat slumped on the bed, staring out through the sliding doors to the wading pool and ferns in oversized, glossy pots.
This is where Tasha and Henry stayed, then? he asked, knowing the answer.
Yes, she said.
I thought they mentioned amazing views from the rooms. Why doesn’t ours have amazing views? he joked.
I think some of the rooms look over the gorge, she said, picking up an information sheet and turning it over. There’s a spa a few doors down from us.
Want to go look?
Not right now. I’m tired.
He looked at her, and she looked back at him, glassily.
Maybe have a rest, then, he said. We’ll go and have a look later.
Maybe I will, she said, already flicking the straps off her dress.
Tom hesitated.
Clara had made that dress. It was one of her early successes. The sewing hobby was suggested to her by her supervisor, Anna Haywood, an intimidatingly accomplished academic who had somehow produced a PhD, twenty years ago, while her first child was a toddler and her second had just arrived. But how? Clara had asked her, for the third time in several minutes, at a supervisor meeting she told Tom about once. Oh, you find the time, Anna had said, finally, when she could no longer avoid the question, and she told Clara she’d written a lot of her first drafts on the floor in the hallway while the baby slept! And then, as they get older, she’d said, there is child care. God knows, no one else was helping. (Why didn’t she want to talk about it? Clara had wondered to Tom. Why isn’t she proud?) But then she told her, as she picked up papers and moved them around the desk, that you just do it every possible moment you can. And she’d loo
ked at her, Clara felt, pointedly.
While Anna had been a wonderful advocate for Clara’s work, and Clara hung on to her every word, sometimes these conversations were just depressing. This time, at a low point in her resolve about her research, Clara was more honest than usual. She told her: Some weeks, I can’t bring myself to even look at it, let alone work on it every possible moment! She’d said that jokingly. Anna hadn’t laughed, but that’s when she suggested the hobby.
Baking? Sewing? Running? Anna said. Do you run? I run three times a week, an hour at a time, and it’s wonderfully mind-clearing — meditative. It gives you time to think. You can work out the problems with the work, get some air … You need to do something in between the reading and the writing where you feel productive, but which also allows you time to think. Thinking’s half the thing. Well, an important part, anyway.
Clara didn’t run and wouldn’t be starting, but she could sew. She used to make her own dresses in high school, and she’d sewn other things later, while at uni and living in share houses — a patchwork cover for an ugly but comfortable armchair she’d found on the street one day, some cushion covers. Perhaps she could get back into that. So she’d tried and quickly remembered how much she loved it. It wasn’t time to think about other things, though. It was occupying. But that was what she needed, really. She needed something to be distracted by for an hour each day that wasn’t research, wasn’t the organising of thoughts, material, the endless revision of drafts. It was also something she could talk to her mother about, she joked. And this dress, a patchwork of coloured squares, was one of the first things that really worked. It was light, airy, and, although simple, almost crude in its design and shape, like a child’s drawing of a dress, it hung off her frame in just the right way and showed off her lovely shoulders.
Seeing the straps fall off those shoulders now, Tom had the urge to watch her undress fully, but he knew she didn’t want him to, so he turned away and went over to the windows. All he could see was the courtyard, bordered by a high sandstone wall that he imagined monkeys scampering over at night. Under the blanket of clouds everything was blanched white. The marble, the sandstone, all surfaces hard and reflective. The large ceramic pots contained the only colour — bright pink and red and orange flowers, green leaves.
What would these places be like without the fogging, he wondered. Filled with all sorts of horrors … he didn’t know what … scorpions, snakes, swarms of mosquitos? Spiders the size of your face?
When he turned back, Clara was lying on the bed, turned away from him, on top of the covers. He went down to the pool.
There was one other guest down there, a young woman, lying on a banana lounge, reading a book. She was shaded by the sail-sized fronds of a palm tree that had grown up and around the pool, as if to give her precisely this amount of shade. The area around the pool was not large. The grand marble steps everywhere took up a lot of space, and there was just enough room for the row of banana lounges off to the side. And the pool itself — while beautifully designed, curving with tiny pale-blue tiles around a water garden, and extending out into the air with a graceful sweep, a bit like a huge jutting lower jaw, Tom thought, or like a pregnant stomach — was not large, either. He could either get in the pool and float about in full view of the girl or sit down quite close to her, and, at the last moment, decided on neither and entered the hotel library instead. Like most hotel libraries, it was disused. It was a mostly empty space with a few rows of tattered paperbacks on one shelf, a few travel guides, a set of encyclopaedias, and a huge ripped and stained coffee-table book on Ubud. He went back outside, the girl was gone, and he settled into her shaded lounge.
He checked his phone. Madeleine had replied to his email about work visas in France. It was just idle chat, daydreaming on his part, but she took everything like this seriously. He clicked on it, and, as he did, his hand spasmed, perhaps from the awkward way he was holding the phone above him on the lounge, angled away from him to avoid the glare from the marble floor. He dropped it, and it fell on his face. He picked it back up and saw that she had sent through a couple of links, one to an article about working in France, another to a page on the embassy website, but then she had written something else, at the end, a kind of a farewell message: Sorry we didn’t get to say a proper goodbye! she wrote. It was so lovely to meet you. And then this:
And I really hope everything works out for you two! You have time now to think about what you really want. Both of you. Clara told me everything. It will happen of course (if you really want that), I had a couple of false alarms (!) myself, before Ollie. You are maybe disappointed or maybe relieved, but you have time now to really figure this all out. Actually this has been a good thing for you, I think. You will both realise this at some point. No one wants that kind of awful toxic shit hanging over their pregnancy, or their baby. Anyway, talk soon xxx
He found himself just staring at it. The lines, the words. Thinking about the tone of it, what might be lost in translation. What she thought he knew but he didn’t. What had happened and how, when. The words separated, and then came back together. They made sense, and then they didn’t again.
In the end, he put down his phone — it was heavy in his hand, his arm was sore from holding it above him like that — and looked out at the jungle. Wondered if he should take a dip in the pool, after all. Wondered if he could order drinks down here.
His eyes fell on the steady stream of workers coming and going along the path on the opposite side of the gorge, and followed the figures to the trucks and cranes and diggers all in motion around the building site. It would have quite the view when it was finished, the new resort, sitting high on the bend in the gorge like that. What was beyond that bend? More jungle, no doubt. But resorts were going up at an incredible rate, he had read, something like one a week. And they were being cut ever deeper into the jungle so that they’d just be one development after another along here until all the jungle was overlooked by someone sipping drinks from an infinity pool, marvelling at the view, trying to ignore the other resorts either side of theirs and all the other marvelling going on around them. What could you do about that? Not come? He didn’t think he was selfless like that. He wanted to see the jungle. He was glad he was here to see it.
When he went back to the room, he wasn’t sure what he was going to say, how he might broach it. All he knew was that he was going to say something to her, he had to. But he wasn’t given a chance, because Clara was gathering her things. She was going for a massage at the ‘wellness centre’ at the bottom of the gorge, she said, and took a towel and her swimmers and left him alone in the room.
Slipping off his shoes and lying down on the still-made bed, his feet resting on his still-rolled towel, he decided that was a good thing. He could get his thoughts straight. He didn’t know how he really felt about it, hadn’t given himself enough time, maybe, to figure it out. He felt some anger, yes, but he wasn’t sure he had a right to be angry, or not primarily, not as the main thing he felt about the whole thing. He wasn’t entirely sure what had even happened. He found himself thinking about her cocktails, how Clara never seemed to drink them. Not until after the fogging, at least.
He began collecting in his hand the pink petals scattered over the bedspread that were within his reach. He put the petals in a neat pile on the bedside table, straightened the finely embroidered gold and maroon bed-runner beneath his feet, and smoothed out the indent from Clara’s body on her side of the bed. He rested his head on the high pile of soft pillows and tried to meditate. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t quieten his hands. He opened his eyes and looked down at them. They were spasming, twitching gently on the bedspread, like they were creatures independent of him. Like they had a life of their own.
16
When Tom woke up the next morning, the room was alive with light. It blazed through the glass doors onto the marble floor and, as he got up and made his way to the bathroom, it flashed into his eyes
from all the hard surfaces in the room — the gilt-framed mirror, the marble coffee table, the highly polished dressing table.
It was only when he came back into the bedroom that he realised Clara wasn’t in the bed. She usually got up earlier than he did, of course, so he figured she was out for breakfast. He checked his phone. It was nine thirty-five am. He considered getting back into bed; he considered sitting outside in the courtyard. But what he really wanted to do was find her, so he pulled on his shorts and T-shirt from next to the bed and left. He made his way down the narrow path bordered by high bamboo walls that concealed the other bungalows. He passed reception, which was unmanned, and took the marble steps down to the restaurant and the pool, passing on the way a collection of gamelan instruments under a pergola, their mallets lying beside them in the dirt.
She wasn’t in the restaurant. No one was in the restaurant. No one was by the pool, either.
He took a swim, sat for a bit on one of the banana lounges, and then made his way back up to their room. Finally, he came across another person, a young woman, the one from the day before by the pool. She passed him on the stairs. Clara still wasn’t back in the room, however. He was checking his phone again and thinking she must have gone back to the massage hut, or else she must be in the lap pool down there on the jungle floor — they were the only places left she could be — when he realised their suitcase was gone. All that was left behind were his clothes in a small neat pile against the wall, next to where the suitcase had been. He went into the bathroom. All her things were gone. Every sign of her was wiped from the room. As if she had never been there. He stood quite still for a few moments, in the middle of the room, unable to think what he should do next.
He went back down to reception. Someone was there now. Yes, they had seen her, they said. This morning, around six. She had ordered a taxi, had sat out in the carpark with her suitcase, and was gone by six-thirty. She’d paid half the bill. She was alone and didn’t seem in any way distressed.
