Black Water

I Monkey Donkey Owl (1998)

He woke every night at the same time, the small hours — when it was darkest. His upper torso jerked; his eyes opened. His hand flailed for the lamp on the bedside table but met the impediment of the mosquito net. It took a moment or two to lift the net and find the switch on the base of the lamp, then he would sit upright, breathing heavily, absorbing the paradox of having woken so hot that he was damp and cold.

The electricity supply was unreliable during the day but at night the light came on immediately. The net was made of tough, opaque cotton and surrounded the bed. It was like being in a tent: outside, out there. The blood would rush in his ears so loudly that he could hear nothing else for a moment or two. He would breathe deeply, trying to still his heart and listening, then remind himself that he was not out there but in a large and comfortable hut, with ornate wooden doors and a rectangular block held in thick brackets barring them shut.

The hut was halfway up the hillside but the sounds of the rushing Ayung River filled the valley, the clamour and clamber of water over boulders. The rainy season had ended late that year and the river was still full. Night did something odd to the sounds around the hut: it was hard to tell how far or close they were — the scud and scramble of squirrels across his roof, the thump of something heavier, a monkey perhaps, also on the roof, or was it on the veranda? The veranda would creak, on occasion — it was supported by tall stilts and so impossible for anyone, or anything, to walk across it without making a noise.

Sometimes, he thought he heard a light scratching at the base of the wooden door. A river rat, perhaps? Did they come this far up the hill at night? He had seen several of them on his walks along the valley, black and quick, lolloping between the fat green leaves of undergrowth. At other times he would think, yes, there is definitely a creature on the roof. He would listen to the claw scratchings above him become more regular, and the scrit-scrit would turn into a pit-pit, pause, pit-pit-pit, which blossomed into the sound of rain. The clamour mounted rapidly then, until it was so deafening even the river became inaudible, water drowned beneath water.

In daylight hours, he liked to stand on the veranda and watch the rain, a wall of it so solid it seemed to fly upwards as well as down. In daylight it was beautiful — as long as you didn’t have to go out in it — but during the hours of darkness the torrent closed the world down, masked all other noises: there was nothing but rain.

He had only been in the hills for a week but it felt much longer. The errors of judgement he had made still filled his head. Henrikson, that knucklehead, walking in like he owned the place. Well, at least Wahid and Amber had seen through him; and that journalist — he couldn’t believe he’d let her play him — then, to cap it all, Amsterdam constantly questioning his ability. He went over and over his conversations with them in the hot dark hours when he lay awake, trapped in a maze of reasoning.

The last two nights, the fear had got worse. The noises on the roof had begun to mutate. He would wake now, more violently each night, certain that what he could hear was the sounds of feet on floorboards, not outside on the veranda but inside the hut, creeping closer and closer to his bed. At such times, his fear would mount so rapidly that all he could do was lift the mosquito net and climb down from the bed and patrol the hut, restlessly, looking under the table, opening the cupboard in the corner, peering into all the dark corners where the lamplight could not reach. Then he would need to urinate, and he would force himself to slide the block from its wooden brackets and push one of the doors outwards. He would defy the darkness by standing there for a moment, staring out at the pitch black, the dim light behind him casting a huge shadow across the veranda, and he would step over the carved doorframe towards the rail, piss mightily out into the dark, go back inside, slide the wooden block across and check every corner of the hut all over again, as if someone or something might have sneaked past him, although this time the ritual was calmer, because he had invited an intruder by opening a door and so it was less likely to happen. He had proved to himself that he was not afraid. They only came when you were afraid.

Eventually, he would get back into bed and turn off the lamp, his heart stilled. The ritual search, the bravado of opening the door, had convinced him that his fears were groundless, nothing more than the irrationality of night. He would lie back and close his eyes, pulling the sheet over his shoulder. He would just be drifting back to sleep. . And it would come, then, when he was at the point of sinking back into unconsciousness. Always then: the ghekko’s honking cry, on the roof right above his head, only feet away, sudden and loud in its malevolence and echoing above all the other sounds. Eh-ur! A derisive, taunting pause. Eh-ur! He would be upright again, sweating again, furious and terrified at its warning. Eh-ur!

He would cry out then, shout out loud, and bang the sides of his hut to frighten the creature away. Wasn’t it dawn soon? Where was Kadek?

That particular night, the night he knew, the ghekko’s call was so loud, so inevitable, that he didn’t even bother to bang against the walls of his hut, just sat up, breathing heavily, put the light on and slumped with his head in his hands, as if to say to the ghekko, okay, you win.

It came to him then, what was going to happen. They were going to kill him. Take a break for a while, Amsterdam had said. Go up to the hills, we have a little place outside of town, it’s been used before. Have a rest, you’ve earned it. When we’ve talked to the West Coast, we’ll let you know. He had wondered, at the time, why they had to talk to the West Coast at all. They had sent in Henrikson, after all. If Amsterdam was certain he was finished they should have recalled him immediately. Why send him up to the hills — unless they wanted him out of the picture if the press ran with that story? Well, that was what he had thought at the time. Now though, in the dark of night, the decision to send him here took on a different meaning.

So, that was it. He had become a liability. He had outlived his usefulness, even though it wasn’t him that had wanted to come back out here in the first place; they had had to twist his arm. How ironic was that?

This certainty was something new; something solid at last. He lay back on the bed and, for the first time since he had arrived on the island, allowed himself to close his eyes and listen to the ghekko without fear.

The roof above him creaked, the night insects chirruped and hollered — but there was no rain. One thing he was sure about: they would wait for rain.

In the morning, he was woken by the dawn light and the cicadas’ tuneless chorale. A dream had come to him in the night, just before waking, it felt like — he couldn’t recall it, but was sure he had dreamt. There was an image in his head of a man in an open-necked shirt, smiling at him in greeting, and a feeling of fear and horror. The image made no sense. He shook his head to rid himself of it.

As soon as he started to walk around the hut, heavy-footed and exhausted as he was each morning, he heard the sound of Kadek on the veranda. He was never sure what time Kadek arrived but it was usually as dawn broke, in order to be there when Harper awoke.

He went to the doors and slid back the wooden block, a task that seemed so easy and natural in daylight he didn’t even think about it. He pulled the doors wide open and stepped onto the veranda. Outside, it was grey and hot. The valley was flung before him: the hillside opposite his hut rose almost vertically, a vast steep wall of misted palm trees and in the distance, Gunung Agung, holy mountain, the volcano, its lower slopes wreathed in cloud so that it looked, as it often did, as if it was floating above the forest. His hut was kaja, it looked towards the mountain, which pleased him. Perhaps he was getting religious in his old age.

Kadek stood at the far end of the veranda as he did each morning, keeping a respectful distance until bidden. He was holding a bucket of water.

‘Good morning, Mr Harper,’ he said, with the slightest of bows. And then, the expressionless statement: ‘I hope you passed a peaceful night.’

Kadek’s vocabulary was not wide but he spoke English with precision. His plain oval face was open and concerned and Harper had the feeling that the man knew nights were bad for him. He wondered what Kadek really thought of him. The hut belonged to the Institute and must have been used by other operatives but there was no trace of them, not so much as a few battered paperbacks in the wooden cupboard in the corner. As a result, Harper felt possessive about the hut, and about Kadek, although he was not naïve enough to imagine his feelings were reciprocated.

He wanted to say to Kadek, take a good look: do I look like a bule to you? He had spoken Indonesian to Kadek when he first arrived but they had soon slipped into English. It was often the same on these islands. In Europe and America, those demanding lands, he was a man required to explain himself, his thick black hair, his large black eyes. On the plane coming here, he could feel his skin colour changing mid flight: he got whiter and whiter the further east he flew.

He would have liked to discuss this with Kadek but he didn’t want to embarrass the man, who probably thought that Harper looked pretty damn white to him and either way worked for a large and powerful organisation with some hard dollars to spend. Wasn’t trying to befriend Kadek as insulting, in its own way, as giving him orders? So he did indeed behave like all the other white men who came to this island and all the islands on this vast archipelago. Perhaps that was why he woke in the night. It wasn’t fear: it was hatred, hatred of himself. It was the knowledge that if — when — the men with machetes came, he, like all the other bule, would probably deserve it.

He nodded to Kadek. Kadek stepped forward with the bucket and poured water into the bowl on the small table to the right of the door, placed the bucket by the table, then lifted the towel that was hanging over his arm and folded it neatly next to the bowl, knowing that Harper liked his morning wash here, looking out over the valley. Later, he would pour more water in the bak mandi to the side of the hut.

‘Terima kasih.’

‘Shall I bring your breakfast, Mr Harper?’ Kadek replied.

He stepped up to the bowl and splashed his face with water, then stood upright again with his face dripping. ‘Thank you Kadek, if you could leave it on the desk. I’m going for a walk down to the river.’

Kadek gave another small bow, retreated. Harper pulled his T-shirt over his head, dropped it in a small crumple on the table, to the left of the bowl, and bent to finish his wash. He submerged each of his arms in turn, splashing water under his armpits, feeling, as he always did, the looseness of the muscles on the upper arms, muscles that had once been as taut as wire, or so he liked to think. He could pull his own weight up and down on a bar dozens of times in a row when he was a young man: not any more. He picked up the half coconut shell next to the bowl, filled it with a little water, rinsed it in case there were ants invisible against the dark grain of the wood and tossed the water over the balcony, filled it again and, bending his head, tipped it over his hair and the back of his neck, inhaling at the shock of it.

He dried himself with his T-shirt, then plunged it into the water, immersing it, pressing down on the blisters of air that rose in the fabric. A picture came to him, black water, long strands of hair, clinging like seaweed across his wrist: he dismissed the picture. Instead, he played the game of pressing at the bubbles of air beneath the T-shirt until they formed smaller bubbles, mobile beneath the thin material. Then he was impatient with the game and held the whole T-shirt down, crushing it between his fists. It was like drowning a kitten.

The path down to the river was narrow and steep. Black and yellow butterflies sprang amongst the foliage. It took ten minutes to descend but twice that to go back up, three times if you attempted it in the full heat of midday. After his disturbed night, it was calming to be walking in the grey, hot morning. His old boots — how many years had he had them? Expensive tan leather when new, from a shop on Oud Zuid, they were now so beaten and pale they were as comfy as slippers. The noise of the river rose to greet him, pure and deafening.

His favourite spot was a few minutes’ walk from the bottom of the path, with a large rock that protruded over a pool. It was inviting enough to bathe in but he knew the ticks and parasites that lived there could be as deadly as the gangs of men who, he was convinced, would soon be roaming the countryside at night, just as before. On balance, he would prefer to face the men: and again, it came to him, just as it had in the pitch dark, his certainty, his own calmness in the face of it.

He sat down on the rock, withdrew his notebook and pencil from his pocket and in his neat but tiny scrawl, began to write. He had never needed to use code for his notes, that was how tiny and dense his writing was, but in any case, he would tear this page out later. It was only a first draft, the first draft of a letter that he would transfer onto fragile blue airmail paper when he returned to his hut.

He wrote a few lines, then stopped. Francisca, how will she understand? But he had to write or at least try. His wife — well, ex-wife now — it would be yet another tragedy for her. She wore tragedy well, it suited her, but he felt bad all the same because he knew in some way, she would blame herself. That was what Francisca did. Then there was his mother, Moeder. Ma. Anika. At this thought, he groaned aloud. She was alone now, with her bitter memories, and him the only child living. She was still drinking herself to death in the old house but the harder she drank, the longer she seemed to live. When they told her he was missing, it might not even register, so far gone was she. He watched the cool water of the pool beneath where he sat on the rock and the insects zig-zagging above its surface and thought that, when they came, the men with machetes, they would be very young; no more than boys really, skinny boys with long fingers and wide eyes, red bandanas tied round their foreheads, faces smeared with paint. The black shirts would come later, when the militias had had time to get organised. Did anyone really believe Habibie could prevent that, with the Generals pulling the strings? The boys were more haphazard in what they did but just as deadly. Young men believed in violence, after all: it was their religion, all over the world, whatever god they nominally worshipped — and this time, three decades on from the last, it would surely be no different. He could picture the procession that would come up the side of the valley in the night. They would pass this very spot. He was fairly sure they would come in this direction because the river path led directly to the edge of town.

It will be night, of course, he thought, a moonless night. They will wait for rain to mask their tracks. They will come along the path, walking in silence, the rushing of the river and the downpour on the leaves loud in their ears. Before they begin the climb up the steep side of the valley, they will pause for a kretek, crouching down beneath the large leaves of a tree for shelter, sharing one perhaps, because they have no money and have to steal cigarettes from their fathers and uncles, something they do without compunction. Their fathers and uncles have never spoken to them about what happened before so they believe, like all youths, that they have invented bravado. Their fathers and uncles seem like foolish old men to them. Perhaps, as they crouch and smoke, the water dripping down their necks, there will be some giggling, the kind of cold giggling that boys do before they transgress: the kind he remembered himself doing as he bullied the smaller boys at school.

And all at once, as he sat on the rock above the pool, he thought, yes, at school, I was a bully. He had thought he was defending himself but actually, he was a bully. Black bastard from Batavia, that ginger boy two years older had called him — the final thump landing with extra emphasis on Batavia. But it wasn’t the ginger boy that Harper had beaten up, that boy had too many friends. It was a freckled kid in his own class who did no more than ask, are you part-something? Strange how that should come to him now.

After their cigarette, he thought, the boys will begin the climb up through the undergrowth, the steep sides of the valley. They will use their machetes to push the ferns and creepers aside. That’s something that won’t be covered by the rain — it will leave a clear trail of their progress that would be appreciated by any investigator: except that there will be no investigation. Nobody investigated Joosten, after all.

As they near the hut, they will pause again, crouching down, observing the dark bulk of the construction above them, listening to the clatter of the water on the roof. And now the adrenaline will start to flow in their veins, and the smallest and youngest of them will be overwhelmed with a need to pee, and the one in charge, his big brother, will be most frightened of all, and so hiss urgent instructions to the others, hiding his fear in his commands. Perhaps the bule will make it easy for them, the boy in charge will be hoping: if he roars, or picks up an object to fight back, then it will be easy to cut him down, because then they will be threatened and have no choice. The big boy is hoping this is what will happen.

And he, Harper, alone in his hut, perhaps he will be awake, thanks to the ghekko — or perhaps, just for once, he will be sound asleep.

They will come through the window. The shutters will be easier to smash than the doors — it will make a racket, of course, even above the rain, but out here that won’t matter. It will be too late by then. There is only one window, and one door, and both lead out onto the same veranda. He will have nowhere to hide.

Will they send boys? Harper wondered. If they want him dead, better to send an experienced man, one of the black-shirted militia who knows what he is doing, there were plenty of them around last time although, like the boys, they tended to work in groups. But boys would be easier to finesse if, back home, they were going to portray his death as part of the general disorder that was going on: that would be simplest for them. That was how he would do it, if he were them. There weren’t any shopping malls to loot and burn out here in the forest, but people back home thought of whole countries as violent once they had seen a few television pictures. Yes, poor Harper, wrong place, wrong time. Could happen to anyone. Word would get around the office, just like it always did. And I hear he’d got careless, the drinking, you know. . At this, the person talking would lift a cup-shaped hand halfway up to his or her mouth and wobble it. Sending him back out there, after the problems he’d had, it was probably a mistake. He had had many of those conversations himself, over the years. Did you hear what happened to Joosten? They tied him to the wheel of his car and poured petrol over it. You don’t mess with those drugs lords, you know. Tales of bad things happening out in the field flattered those back home — look how dangerous our job can be, on occasion. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Joosten had been known to smoke a bit. Harper had seen him do it. There was almost always some basis to the rumours. That’s what they did in his line of work: took a thread of truth and wove a carpet out of it.

Once, when they were drinking together back in Amsterdam, Joosten had let slip he had a safe house: a flat somewhere in a foreign city, he wouldn’t say where, not a country that their firm operated in. It was stocked with tinned food in case he needed to lie low for a while, and money and a false passport. Harper had left the bar that night shaking his head at Joosten’s paranoia.

Beginning the letter to Francisca had convinced him that his calm during the night was due to more than exhaustion — he was sure, now, what was going to happen. What was it, to know you were going to die? We all carry that knowledge inside us, he thought: it is the one thing we know for certain.

The black and green water in the rock pool — how cool it appeared. How good it would feel, in the rising humidity, to slip his old boots from his feet and dabble his toes in that water. Up in the hut, Kadek would have placed his breakfast — rice and a little sambal, some chicken maybe and some fruit — on the desk by the window. It would have a banana leaf laid over it to protect it. Kadek would have opened the shutters, to air the room, and folded back his crumpled bed sheets, smoothing them neatly. He should go back. There was the letter he really should write, even though it would be full of untruths and he might not get the chance to send it.

He rose from the rock, stretched his arms upwards, performed a few loose movements from side to side with his hands on his hips, and turned to climb up the path.

*

It had already begun before Harper got there — that made it easier; it was well underway in fact. He was with Benni, that fat gangster. He liked his sweets, Benni, which was why he was down to three teeth, one front tooth and two incisors. Harper had spent months cultivating him when he got to Jakarta, on his first visit, back in ’65. Benni was said to have good connections with the military and like all the gangster-militiamen was fervently anti-Communist. The stallholders and shopkeepers in his area were terrified of him but whether or not he dined with Generals was another matter.

They were in the small front area of a disused bar down a narrow alleyway in Pasar Senen. It was mid-afternoon and the sun blazed outside. There was a garage or storeroom of some sort out back where a man was being held. He had been there since dawn; a Chinese merchant who sold bolts of cloth from a shop next to the picture house on the edge of a nearby kampong, one of the cinemas the PKI had closed down recently because they showed decadent Western movies. Benni’s friends had lost money because of the cinema closures. The Chinese merchant had no proven connection with what had happened next door to his shop but he hadn’t paid his protection money in a month.

Harper gathered this and other details as a group of them stood together in the front room of the bar — he and Benni had been lunching nearby when Benni’s driver had turned up and said they needed the boss. Six of Benni’s men plus the driver were gathered round and Harper got the gist, though they were all talking quickly and at once. The men were excited, competing for their boss’s attention. ‘BB! BB!’ they kept saying before they launched into their résumé of the story so far. The man was a Communist agitator who had been holding meetings in the back of his shop after closing hours, one of them seemed to be saying. Another mentioned a pile of chairs. The man was a liar, another interjected. He was worse than a nekolim. . At the word nekolim, Benni clapped Harper on the shoulder and gave a gap-toothed grin and the other men looked at Harper for a moment until Harper gave a short bark of a laugh and suddenly the men were laughing too. Then they went back to talking at once. Most of them had been drinking arak all morning, Harper decided. They were his age, mid-twenties, or younger, apart from Benni who was maybe ten years older.

Benni’s face became still as he listened further. In his meetings with Harper so far, he had been jovial and hospitable, giving him lunches and imported whisky, but when he was with his men, Benni liked to affect an air of seriousness. Then, without saying anything, he strode towards the back of the bar, his men following anxiously. Harper decided to wait where he was, wishing the bar was still operational. It was the first time Benni had involved him in his daily activities, which was good, a sign he was beginning to trust him — but he would hang back until he was called, let Benni initiate his level of involvement. He rubbed his palms together quickly and tried to ignore the small thumping in his chest.

The others disappeared behind a door that clanged shut, leaving a metallic silence in its wake. Harper went to the front of the building, which was open to the alleyway, and looked down at the cement step to see if it was clean enough to sit on: it wasn’t. The alleyway was lined with drainage ditches that smelt of shit and piss.

While he waited, a very young boy wearing nothing but a dirty T-shirt came and stood opposite him and stared, fearlessly, three fingers of one hand in his mouth and the other hand supporting his elbow, little round stomach protruding. Harper stared back at him. After a moment or two of appraisal, the boy turned and ran, kicking up dirt, shouting out something high-pitched and triumphant, as if he had fulfilled a dare.

The door behind him clanged again. One of Benni’s men was standing at the back of the room, gesturing. ‘Mr BB says come.’

When Harper entered the room, a filthy storage place with a low ceiling and one high, barred window, he saw in the dim light that there was a Chinese Indonesian seated on a low chair, with a table in front of him and his hands tied behind his back. It took Harper’s eyes a moment or two to adjust. It was hard to tell the man’s age. His face was covered in blood, and part of his scalp had been removed: what lay beneath was gleaming, wet and bare. His head was slumped a little to one side, as if he knew that he was going to be killed anyway, whatever he said — which was true — and had simply given up, resolved to endure what must be endured before his final moments.

Benni was standing in one corner. ‘Come, you come stand next to me,’ he said to Harper in English. ‘Stand next to me, watch for a bit. He sees white man, he thinks someone. He thinks maybe, things maybe okay. Maybe he talk.’ Harper understood that his presence was, in effect, to extend the man’s torture. Perhaps they were hoping that by accident they had picked up a Commie after all. He might give them names. Nothing was as valuable as names, back then in ’65, as Jakarta simmered higher and higher, everyone was collecting names — they were a lot more valuable than the plummeting rupiah, which was worth so little now you had to walk around with a duffel bag of the stuff on your shoulder if you wanted to buy a beer. Even he, Harper, the man with access to the hardest currency of all authorised by his organisation, even he was dealing in names.

The man had raised his head as Harper entered. He was staring at him, eyes wide in his bloodied face. Harper stared back. He tried to communicate that there was no hope, that the man should simply go back to wishing, waiting to die, make his peace with whatever god he might worship, say goodbye in his head to his family. The man lowered his head.

This seemed to enrage one of Benni’s men, a small moustachioed type who stood nearest to the Chinese merchant and who was, Harper guessed, Benni’s number two in these matters. He snatched a pair of bloodied scissors from the table in front of the man and began to wave them in the man’s face and scream. It occurred to Harper that this was a test, that Benni had invited him in here to see how he would react — Benni was, after all, under the impression that he was recruiting Harper rather than the other way around. He glanced at the other men. They were all striking various poses around the room — two of them were mimicking the man with the moustache, staring at the merchant, teeth bared, faces gleaming with sweat. Two others were leaning against the wall, arms folded, staring, trying to look as hard as possible; one of the others was turning restlessly to and fro. The last one, the driver, who was about eighteen, Harper guessed, a tall boy with sloping shoulders, stood close to Harper and Benni, motionless but with his arms raised and his fists clenched, his gaze flitting this way and that, as if he were engaged in a high-speed race on a dangerous road and needed to be hyper-alert. Some of them had been drinking but they were all, all but Benni and himself, possessed by a kind of pseudo-sexual excitement. It came off them like a scent. Harper guessed these boys didn’t get much, if any. This kind of activity had to do instead.

The man with the moustache carried on screaming, his face contorted, his voice high-pitched, and Harper found this screaming more unbearable than anything. Just die, Harper thought, looking at the merchant, just close down, make your thoughts leave your body. He wondered if it was possible to make yourself die, in extremis, to will it to happen but of course it wasn’t. Dying was a giving up of will. You could no more will it than levitate.

He wanted to think about something other than the bloodied man in front of him so he thought about his own end. He would like to be able to see the sky, he thought. A perfect death would come in an arbour of some sort, with trees and flowers around, with a woman beside you who loved you and laid a cooling hand on your forehead. Your last thought as you slipped into unconsciousness would be that you were loved; the air full of sunshine, a blue and infinite sky.

Not somewhere like here, alone but for the people who wanted you dead. Not this darkened room, with dank walls and a stinking dirt floor and a little grey light scarcely strong enough to illuminate the faces of the people who were about to kill you. Not like this. Not circling in water, either, unaware — how’s that for fresh air, Bud?

The thought that he pushed to the back of his mind, as he stood and watched a man in pain and did nothing because his handler at the embassy had told him to win the trust of a filthy gangster who may or may not have good contacts with the military, was that he would never know what the look on his own face was like in the minutes before he died. He would never see it mirrored in a loved one. It felt like the most profound of premonitions, that there would be no witness to his departing, or no benign witness, but it was only three decades later, sitting on a rock above a green pool on a beautiful island, with a notebook on his lap, that he remembered it.

That night, he slept better than any night since his arrival on the island. The irony of this did not escape him. He rose early and greeted Kadek, told him that he would like to go into town later, pick up a couple of things. The roads to town were so potted and poor that he could have strode along the river in the same time it would take them to bounce there together on Kadek’s moped, the weight of Harper on the back flattening the tyres.

He told Kadek to finish his duties first and then get the moped and return for him later in the morning. It didn’t look like rain that day. When he stared at a man across a desk or in a prison cell, he could assess with cold accuracy not only whether that person was lying but whether later he would give up the truth. When he looked up at the sky, he knew what it was hiding too, what it would yield later that day.

By the time they got to town, the sun was high. He got Kadek to drop him on the main street and told him to meet him there at five. He would walk around a bit to get his bearings, then find somewhere to drink coffee and watch the street, see what he could glean from a couple of hours observing who was in town. He would probably drink several coffees. Kadek brought a flask of hot water in the mornings so he could make it with powder but it didn’t really do the trick.

*

The main street of town was scarcely wide enough for two lanes of traffic and lined with cafes, overpriced jewellery and art shops for tourists alongside fruit and veg stalls and mini-markets; the Museum, the Palace, a Chinese restaurant that blared American rock. He spent two hours in a new, Euro-style place, jazz tinkling from speakers but barely audible above the noise from the street. He ordered a coffee and a cinnamon roll and, in an impulse he felt himself regretting even as he conceded to it, a packet of kretek cigarettes. The cigarettes came first, on a plate, the packet opened for him and propped up on its own lid, one cigarette helpfully extended and a frangipani blossom tucked in by its side. He smoked it slowly, waiting for his coffee and his roll, then closed the packet to discourage immediate consumption of another. He sipped the coffee, tore small pieces from the roll. It was sunny, the street was teeming; small trucks, tourist vans, locals on mopeds. Even the grandmothers drove mopeds these days. He had just ordered his second coffee when, right in front of him, a white municipal truck pulled out to go round a parked car and blocked the road. There followed a brief comedy of chaos as some moped drivers tried to circumvent the truck only to meet others trying to get round the other way. These things were always conducted with an orchestra of horn tooting and calling, much as the Italians did but without the undertone of aggression. He watched and, for a moment, the traffic jam made him miss Jakarta, then it was over and the cars and trucks and mopeds flowed again in their congested, casually dangerous way.

It took a few moments for the line to clear. When it had, he saw that at the end of it was a low jeep that bumped past slowly — it was stuck behind the last moped in the build-up, a very old-looking machine with a woman and three children; a young girl on the back, a small boy standing on the foot panel in front and a baby strapped to the woman’s chest — and he had time to observe the four young men in the jeep. They were dressed a bit more smartly than the local men, in white shirts and loose pants. Their faces were not as rounded as the typically Balinese face, he thought: they were sharper. One of them sitting in the back caught his gaze briefly and returned it. The truck moved on.

A very tiny, elderly woman with a tree-bark face approached the step below where he was seated, holding a woven tray on which she was carrying twenty or so offerings. She gave him a single-toothed smile as she knelt to arrange one of the offerings on the ground, to appease the demons, the rice and flower petals in the little basket made of a stapled banana leaf. He returned her smile and tried not to think what he always thought when he saw locals of that age: what were you doing, back then? Where were you? Were you out in the middle of the night, joining the hunting parties in the rice fields? Or did you simply raise your hand to point at a neighbour’s house and whisper to the men in black shirts the single word that would slaughter the entire family asleep in there: gestapu? A young woman tourist in white shorts and a tight yellow vest stopped and watched the old woman as she placed three incense sticks at angles in the offering and lit them with a cigarette lighter. The young woman took a step back, respectfully, then lifted her camera to her face.

A newspaper seller wandered past with piles of thin broadsheets over his arm. He stopped when he saw Harper and raised one but it was the International Herald Tribune. Harper shook his head. That wouldn’t exactly fill him in on what was going on in Jakarta. None of the local bars had televisions: how was he supposed to know what the latest was? Normally, he would check in with the Jakarta office or Amsterdam but he was officially taking a break. Taking a break, so far, meant being kept in the dark.

Smoking hard and drinking coffee was making him feel both hazy and alert: the contradiction was pleasant. There was a certain merit in doing these things infrequently. He wanted a whisky but he hadn’t touched a drop since that disastrous night in Jakarta a week ago, even though he had an unopened bottle at the hut. He had bought it for himself as a kind of test, which — so far — he had passed. He wanted it now, though. That’s okay, he thought. Acknowledge to yourself that you want it, and then move on.

He walked back to the meeting point with Kadek still intending to return to the hut. But as he approached and saw him waiting by the moped, chatting with the other drivers, he was filled with an overwhelming desire to stay in town, even if it meant breaking protocol and sleeping in a guesthouse room. (Did it matter any more, how many protocols he broke? Not if he was right, it didn’t.) He had been going to bed early at the hut in an attempt to get some rest but however early he retired, the evenings were still long.

He handed Kadek a thin plastic bag with two shirts he had bought at a roadside stall and another with some biscuits and cans of Coke, and asked him to take them back to the hut, saying he would make his own way back later on a taksi moped. Kadek offered to return for him whenever he wanted but Harper was firm in his dismissal. He wanted the freedom to play the evening by ear. Then he turned and walked back along the main street. It was time to find a bar.

It was his first trip to Ubud since he had arrived in the hills, so he took his time, walking down to the bridge in the heat, where he came to a small row of food shacks: maybe I’m hungry, he thought to himself. He stopped at the second one and ate a plateful of nasi goreng, then thought about carrying on to the far end of the street where the road climbed upward again out of town. Every minute or so, a man with a car or a moped would call out to him, taksi! He could hail one and go exploring for a bar, but the coffee and the nasi goreng had used up his loose change and paying a fare of a few rupiah with a hundred thousand note might draw attention to himself. Maybe it was simplest just to walk back into town.

If it hadn’t been so hot, if he had had some small notes in his pocket, then he would never have met her. Rita.

The bar was on Jalan Bisma, five minutes or so from the main street. It was one of those bars that doubled as the restaurant and breakfast room of a guesthouse. He noticed it because of the string of yellow lights that wound around the coconut tree at the stone archway entrance. There were seven or eight round tables and wide wooden chairs with patterned cushions. A lone barman in a leafy-patterned shirt nodded and smiled to him as he stepped up from the street.

He spotted her as soon as he entered, sitting in a far, dim corner, alone at a small table with a cocktail containing mint leaves in a long glass. Her head was bent and reading glasses balanced on the very end of her nose. She was going through some papers with a stub of pencil. The only other customers in the bar were a couple of hippie-student types nursing bottles of Bintang and a small group of local businessmen, probably the owner and his friends. Nobody looked up as Harper approached the bar. He took in, briefly, that she was white, very white, a few years younger than him, late forties perhaps, long, light brown hair, a solidly built figure in a cotton shirt, loose trousers and flat sandals, absorbed in what she was doing. There were no bar stools but after he had been served, he stood leaning on the bar with his whisky in front of him, his back to her, to allow her to notice him. During that time, he chatted to the man behind the bar in Indonesian. The waiter smiled and chatted back, as if he could foresee the encounter to come and was happy to play his small part in the pantomime. After half an hour, Harper turned, took his almost empty whisky glass and approached the woman’s corner table.

He looked down at her and said, in English, ‘I’m sorry, please excuse me, you’re busy I can see, but I’m new in town, could I join you, for a short while?’ As he spoke, he took a small step backwards, to indicate that he wasn’t going to cause any trouble if she said no, which would make it that little bit more likely she would say yes.

She looked up and gave him a sceptical smile, eyebrows slightly raised. Her rounded cheeks made her look girlish. Her eyelashes were long; no make up, good skin. ‘Sure,’ she said, taking the reading glasses off her nose and folding them, ‘rescue me from my homework.’ He couldn’t quite place her accent, a hint of something north European.

He turned and lifted a hand to the man behind the bar, beckoning him over, then sat. He looked at the papers, which she gathered into a pile and lifted to tap their edges on the table, neatening them, he noted, in the manner of someone who had concluded her work for the night.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I’m in education, training,’ she said with a light sigh. ‘You?’

‘I’m an economist, based in Jakarta, taking a break.’

‘If you’re an economist,’ she said, leaning back in her seat, regarding him steadily with her wide-set eyes, ‘can you explain why the IMF has put forty billion dollars into this region but the families of my students are still having to mix hard old corn kernels with their rice every morning, so that their stomachs won’t rumble in my class?’

‘I could,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t believe me.’

Her smile was a yes.

Several whiskies later, he had almost forgotten his nights in the hut, and that he was on enforced leave after a catastrophic error of judgement. He had not forgotten who, or what, he was — he never did that.

‘John Harper. .’ she said. ‘John Harper. .’ She repeated it slowly, as if turning the words over in her mind and examining them for plausibility. ‘Your sentence construction is interesting, John Harper. I’m usually pretty good at this but I can’t quite place you. You sound like a European,’ she said, ‘but there is occasionally an Americanism.’

‘Is there?’ His surprise was genuine.

‘There was a “gotten” a few minutes ago.’

She was on her third cocktail. She raised the glass, closed her mouth over the straw and sipped from it while flipping a look up at him through her long lashes. He found the gesture silly from a woman her age but then she stopped and laughed out loud and he suspected she was not so much flirting as taking the mickey. Taking the mickey. Where did that phrase come from?

‘You’re making me self-conscious,’ he said.

‘That I doubt.’ She put her cocktail down and stirred it with the straw. The mint leaves whirled amongst the ice cubes. ‘So, the Americanisms?’

‘I work for a company that’s owned by Americans so I deal with them a lot. . and I spent a few years in California as a kid, when I was young, I mean.’

Her look invited him to continue.

‘I went back to the Netherlands, I was sent back, after my brother died, so I spent my teenage years in Europe.’ He stopped. A few whiskies and some congenial company and then this, he thought: the truth. I’m losing my touch.

She gazed at him a while, her look soft, then said, ‘I think we can give each other permission to leave out the sad bits.’

He stared back at her and felt such gratitude that he wondered, for a moment, if this could be what falling in love was like. Seeing as he had never done it, he had no way of knowing.

‘Are you staying here?’ he asked, looking at her directly, a catch in his throat that he wanted her to note.

She shook her head, replying casually, as if she had not picked up on his change of tone, ‘I live in a family compound on Monkey Forest Road,’ then, without missing a beat, ‘and I certainly can’t take you back there. Where are you staying?’

‘Out of town,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask about a room here.’

As he rose she said, ‘The rooms here are nice but pricy by local standards. It’s mostly older tourists.’

‘I have money.’

The room they were given was on the ground floor at the back of the compound, a short walk along a stone path turned into an alleyway by thick vegetation. Frogs croaked unseen; the air was heavy and scented. He could feel that his shirt had become glued to his back. The carved wooden doors were similar to the ones on his hut, with a solid frame that you stepped over to enter. Inside, he felt along the wall and flicked the switch for the ceiling fan. It turned slowly into life, then picked up speed until it rattled round with a tick-tick-tick that stirred the air above them. On a chest of drawers beside the bed, there was a table lamp. He walked over and turned it on, noting that the bed was high and wide, neatly made, with a frangipani flower on each pillow. The mosquito net around it was fine and translucent, much more delicate than the one he had in the hut.

He dropped the key to the room next to the lamp and turned to Rita and although she was a tall woman her expression seemed suddenly small and shy. She said, ‘I’m just going to use the bathroom.’

He went over to the shutters and opened them to look out at the night and listen to the frogs and the insects in the greenery below the window. There came the chirrup of a ghekko, a smaller, sweeter one than the ominous animal that woke him out in the forest. He heard her flush the loo and run the tap, then return to the room. He stayed where he was, his hands on the windowsill, his head dropped slightly, the whisky swimming pleasantly inside him. Despite how long it had been, he felt empty of lust at that moment. He wanted to put the encounter on pause, to enjoy the fact that he was here and it was about to happen. This is the best bit, isn’t it, he thought, just before?

The next morning, she would hold him after they had had sex for the second time and say, ‘This is my favourite bit, afterwards,’ and he would smile to himself thinking how that was what separated men and women, before and after: and joined them, of course, as if the act of sex was a border that cleaved them together and asunder in the same instant.

But right that moment, standing there looking out into the garden — or rather, listening — he felt no physical desire at all and wondered if she would mind if they didn’t do anything, just slept. His younger self would never have believed he could reach this point but here he was, a man in his fifties, who had successfully picked up a strange woman in a bar (or she had picked him up, it didn’t matter which), and what he really wanted was to stop the evening and just be in a room. No one knew where he was. No one would disturb them: but he was not alone. It was perfect.

She came up behind him, slowly. They had both removed their shoes as they had entered the room and her bare feet scarcely made a sound against the tiled floor but he could feel that she was standing right behind him, very close, without touching him. They stood like that for a moment and he listened to their breathing. They both began to breathe a little more deeply. Still, he did not turn. Their breath deepened further. They were breathing in unison, both waiting to see who would move first. He went from feeling no desire to being suddenly, painfully hard, just at the sound of her breath behind him, at the long gap between her approach and any contact between them. He and Francisca had not had sex for the last two years of their relationship. His body had forgotten what it was like to be in physical contact with that of another. She lifted both hands and placed them very gently on his upper arms, right at the top, almost on his shoulders. He could feel the heat of her palms through the cotton of his shirt. He turned.

*

There were surprises in store. In the bar, he had observed her big-boned frame, her solid torso, and during their conversation, she had laughed at her size and told jokes against herself, about her clumsiness when she was a girl. ‘A great galumphing girl, I got called once, by an Englishman,’ she had said. ‘You know this word? Galumphing! Something that gallops along but is heavy, no? A rhinoceros, perhaps.’ Horizontal and unclothed, she did not feel great and galumphing, but pillow-soft and comforting, in a way he would not have expected from her ironic way of speaking. Hers was not the kind of body he normally enjoyed. Most of his other lovers — with few exceptions, short-lived — had been slim-limbed, fragile even. And it was not the kind of sex he had had in the past. There was no battle. It was neither hurried nor teasing. They fondled each other and took it in turns to come and smiled, slightly mockingly, during it. He did not feel that he was doing it to her, or she to him, but that they were doing it together, much as they might have washed one another’s backs in the bath. Her breasts were small for her overall size, low-slung, wide apart. On her abdomen, there was a caesarean scar. Her pubic hair was sparse and going grey. Afterwards, they turned the light off by mutual agreement and even kissed each other goodnight. He fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning, there was another surprise. He found that he didn’t want to leave as soon as possible.

He woke first, before dawn, a slow and easy awakening, the kind that comes only when you have slept deeply. He was just in time to hear the beginning of the dawn chorus — that bird, what was that bird? There was one that acted as a kind of outlier for the others; the single, hesitant cheeping, like the lead violinist tuning up before the full orchestra began. Then would come the whole, delightful cacophony, breaking out all of a sudden, like prisoners fleeing the dark. Here in town, he could identify individual sounds a little more easily than out in the valley. In the midst of the chorus, loud and assertive, came the bird he loved most of all, the one that sounded like an old man convulsing with laughter, trying and failing to withhold it. Cheep! Cheep! Two loud exclamations came first — then a cascade of smaller notes, tumbling over each other in a descending scale.

Dawn: to hear dawn coming, to breathe in and feel the lift of it and know yourself to have survived another night.

He lay still, listening to the birds and Rita’s breathing beside him, and watched as light began to stripe the slats of the shutters.

After a while, he needed the bathroom, slipping from the bed as quietly as he could. As he returned to the room, he stopped and stood for a moment, looking at Rita beneath the mosquito net, the fine soft-focus of it blurring her features so that she could have been any age; a face made featureless by sleep, a smudge of hair. She turned as he came around to his side of the bed and the sheet slipped, revealing the slope of one breast, and her eyelids flickered open and she half-smiled, then turned away again as he climbed back into bed, shuffling backwards towards him so that he could spoon against her.

They lay together, dozing, for some time. She rose to use the toilet, then they had sex again.

Afterwards, they lay together some more, facing each other this time, him with his arm around her shoulders and her with one arm resting across his waist. He envisaged going to breakfast with her, in the same bar they had been drinking in the night before, sitting opposite her at a table, discussing what to have. He wondered if they did black rice pudding here, thick with palm sugar. He hadn’t had that in a while. They wouldn’t speak much until after they had had their tangerine juice and coffee, then the conversation between them would come slowly to life. They would discuss how to spend the coming day.

Perhaps this was what marriage was like when it worked. He couldn’t remember ever feeling like this with Francisca; lust, yes, an argument of some sort here and there, a hum of low-level tension between them even when they weren’t arguing — but not this restfulness, not even at the weekends, not like this.

She rolled over onto her other side, away from him. He propped his head up on one elbow and, for a few moments, watched her back, the plump pale flesh, the curve of it where it creased, the doughy hillocks formed at her waist. Her shoulder blades stood out, hard nubs in the soft flesh of her back, like the buds of wings. Still turned away from him, she pushed her long hair back over her shoulder and a curl of pale brown, strung with strands of white, swung briefly between the shoulder blades then came to rest in the shape of an upside-down question mark.

She said, quietly, ‘I need to go. I’d prefer it if you left first.’

He didn’t reply.

‘We can’t leave together,’ she said. ‘It’s a small town.’

They had walked along the path together the night before: but that was in the heat of darkness. Now, it was day.

She rose from the bed, pushing the mosquito net out of the way and standing for a moment, facing away from him, before moving towards the small desk against one wall, where she had thrown her underwear, carelessly, the night before.

He sat up in bed and watched her get dressed. He wanted a cigarette. He couldn’t remember what he had done with the packet — he thought he might have left it on the table in the bar. He watched her until it became apparent she would not speak again, then he flung the sheet back in a sudden, hurried-to-be-gone sort of gesture. The sheet flew away from him, making the mosquito net billow outwards. She did not turn round. He swung his legs off the bed and reached for his own clothes, lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.

He walked along the path, which in daylight revealed itself to be a side path that ran along some other rooms set back behind the bushes. Somewhere, out of sight behind the foliage, he heard a swimming-pool splash and a child’s voice calling out in German. As he reached the reception and bar area he paused for a moment before remembering that he had paid for the room in cash the night before — it had been incredibly cheap, he had thought. He must have done that because he was anticipating having to make his excuses in the morning and perform a swift but gracious getaway. He passed beneath the stone archway and out onto the street.

The morning was underway: it was late by Indonesian standards. Opposite the guesthouse, a man in a vest was showing two young Westerners how to start their hired mopeds. Small restaurants lined the street as it dipped back down towards the main road. It would be the most natural thing in the world to stop and order himself some breakfast — he could have stayed in the guesthouse and had it there, if he’d wanted. It was probably included in the room price. She wouldn’t have any right to think he was loitering for her. So determined was he to make her think herself mistaken that he went over to the tiny place opposite and asked for a coffee with the intention of sitting in full view of anyone who stepped through the archway. It would disconcert her, he thought, to see him sitting there as she emerged. The woman behind the counter smiled broadly and tried to push a laminated menu on him but he shook his head. She gestured to the table nearest the street but he sat one back from that and then, after a little pocket patting, found the cigarettes he hadn’t left in the bar after all, and his sunglasses.

The moment he sat down, he wished he hadn’t. If she came out while he was there, he would ignore her. Or maybe he would simply nod, then look away and light a cigarette. She would think that he was waiting for her and he could turn his head to indicate he wasn’t, or, if his coffee was finished, rise and stride off in the opposite direction, up the rise and out of town. He took some small notes out of his pocket and put them on the table.

Next to the drinks shack was a concrete step with two boys sitting on it. They were looking at him and smiling, then speaking quietly to each other. He wondered if they were boys from the queue of mopeds parked diagonally at the bottom of the hill but they seemed too young and there was something in their smiles he didn’t like.

His coffee arrived. The woman who placed it in front of him eyed the money on the table but didn’t take it. He lifted the cup to his lips and stared back out at the street, thinking to himself, those boys are not moped drivers. He knew a hired hand when he saw one, an inexperienced young man or woman paid to do a particular job without being given any information about the significance of that job. They were always kept in the dark because they were the ones paid to trail a target and so had to get close. As a result, their chances of being spotted and caught were high, which was why they were never given any information they could divulge when the target’s henchmen were burning the soles of their feet. Their inexperience meant they were rarely subtle — and in fact, the people who hired them often didn’t want them to be subtle, they wanted the target to feel followed. But more than that, they had a small, excited glow to them. It was possibly the first time they had been asked to do something secret, and overpaid for it to boot. They believed it was the first step towards becoming something more than a waiter or cleaner or moped driver — they were flush with their own sense of importance.

So why were these two watching the guesthouse?

Rita emerged. She did not look left or right, or even across the road at him, but set off immediately down the hill. She had a confident walk; a slightly mannish stride. The normal thing would have been to see him — and then either acknowledge or ignore him, but she had deliberately not seen him, which made him think she had peered out of the stone doorway before she exited.

He finished his coffee and watched the youths from the corner of his eye, waiting to see if they rose and followed her down the hill, but they stayed seated. Harper gave it five minutes, then got up, and it was only then that the boys stood. Harper turned in the opposite direction to the one Rita had gone, uphill, towards the edge of town. He would stride up past the rice fields and see how far the youths stayed behind him, just to be sure. They hadn’t been watching the exit to the guesthouse for Rita. They had been waiting for him.

He walked steadily up Jalan Bisma, out of town. The shacks ended and there were few people about. A pair of middle-aged tourists in khakis were walking slowly ahead of him. The Monkey Forest was up this way, if he remembered correctly, which meant that he would be able to turn left when the road became a footpath and curve back down into town the other way. When he reached the main street, he would get a moped back to the hut. It had been an overnight adventure, nothing more, a break from his own thoughts: but his thoughts were waiting there, out in the valley above the rushing river, thoughts that turned inside his head while the water tumbled below. He realised he was dehydrated after the whisky. The coffee had been a mistake, or at least he should have had a glass of water with it. Here on the hot exposed path, with the khaki-clad tourists in front of him and the boys behind, there was no water to drink, not one drop, and like any thirsty person he suddenly starting noticing all the undrinkable water around him, the fields of brown irrigation in which the rice-plant shoots stood green and tender — the water tower in the middle of the field, tall, with an open platform at the top and a roof for shade: water towers or watchtowers — at first glance, it was hard to tell the difference.

He had started smoking again. And drinking. He might have known. Sex and smoking and drinking — the Holy Trinity. Was it possible to have one without the other two? They kicked each other off. They joined hands and danced ring-a-roses in his head. Ring-a-roses. Emma, the English girl, sang it to him when she was drunk — Emma, the girl he met in Singapore. She hit him once; he couldn’t remember why.

Over the following two days, smoking was what he did mostly, although there was a certain amount of whisky involved as well. He knew that if he took the smoking seriously, did it with the kind of calm intensity it warranted after a break of several weeks, then it might forestall the booze. Forestalling the booze would be a very, very good idea. He sat on the veranda of his hut, looked out into the forest, drank whisky from a coffee cup, pictured Rita’s back turned away from him in bed with her hair between her shoulder blades; and he smoked.

Christ, he thought, I survived a rioting mob in Jakarta not long ago and then began to wonder if my life could be in danger from the people who have employed me for three decades — yet one encounter with a woman and I’ve turned into this. He realised that he was enjoying this image of himself: the hard-bitten man on the veranda in the jungle with his whisky and his cigarettes. If you couldn’t be with a woman, then this was surely the next best thing, drinking and smoking and thinking of her. Thinking about a woman was a great excuse to throw your head back as you tipped the last drops of whisky from the cup into your mouth, and then to swing the bottle as you refilled the cup. You could imagine what you might look like to her as you lit up your next cigarette, shielding the match from the wind with one hand, flicking it between two fingers so that it somersaulted into the air and extinguished itself at the same time. Have you ever seen a match burn twice? Ah, that was why Emma had hit him, he remembered now. He hadn’t pulled that stunt on a girl again. They couldn’t take it.

Kadek brought him his supplies, from time to time, and handed them over looking concerned. Harper became garrulous and started asking Kadek about his family, even once suggesting he join him in a drink, to be rewarded by a brief look of shock, a small bow, refusal.

When Kadek wasn’t there, he took to mumbling to himself. He wasn’t really mumbling to himself, though. He was mumbling to Rita.

He wanted to tell her how pleasant it had been and how that wasn’t usual for him. He wanted to explain to her that although that sounded like a meagre compliment, it really wasn’t. It hadn’t felt like a first time, that was what struck him. There would be no second or third time, of course, let alone a continuing relationship — but it also hadn’t felt like a first time because it had seemed so natural and inevitable, from the minute he had seen her sitting in the corner of the bar.

There had been many times in his life when he had felt the pull of a woman — and a fair few of those occasions had occurred in bars — and yet there was always a tussle to be had, an elaborate game of pursuit or persuasion, of drawing back then reasserting, of uncertainty almost up until the very moment you were entwined. A woman could pull out at any minute, of course, and some of them did. In many ways, the tussle was the point. The act itself took only a short while, after all, and when it was done it was done. There could never again be a first time with that particular woman, never again the excitement and absorption of uncertainty.

But with Rita, there had been no tussle, just calmness and pleasure, and as there had been no heightened excitement before, there had been no let-down after. The calmness and pleasure had both outlived the act.

Perhaps it was about age. The more he thought about it, rocking back in his wooden chair on the veranda until he was balancing on the two back legs of it, it wasn’t so much his age as hers. Women of forty-five plus, he reflected — and after one night with Rita, he was now an expert, obviously — were endearingly like men. He thought back to some of the conversations he had had with young women when he was young himself — still young enough, that was, to be sized up as potential husband or father material. There were so many ways to disappoint a woman at that stage. You were never going to be in love enough, or committed enough even if you were in love, or solvent enough even if you were committed. And even if you were in love, committed and solvent, you were never going to help enough around the house. When he looked back on his marriage to Francisca, that was his overwhelming feeling, that he had always disappointed her, right from the start — taking so long to get around to marrying her hadn’t helped. And then her quiet fortitude in the face of how he was: she always made him feel that she was being noble, good. His mistake had been to marry a woman ten years younger. Older women, he felt, with his new-found experience, had got being disappointed by men well and truly out of their system. They had had their husbands and children, if they were going to have them — they had been through the mill of family life and come out the other side. If they were available for sex then they viewed it as men had always done, as recreation.

People like himself and Rita: their attitude to sex was arguably symptomatic of their other deficiencies. They were comfortable with casual encounters at their age only because they were uncomfortable with the conventions that discouraged them in others. They were odd or unusual in so many other ways, in fact, that sex was the least of it.

He had always had an uncomfortable feeling around men who chased after younger women and now, fresh from the comforts of Rita, he was able to say to himself precisely why. To pursue a younger woman was an act of deceit — you knew they wanted something different from what you wanted and you had to con them into not realising that until you had got your way. But with women like Rita, what made it so calm, so relaxing, was the knowledge that you were offering them nothing and they knew that, so you were not deceiving them. How had he got to his age without understanding this? If he had known it earlier, maybe he would have tried nailing the older ones years ago. Why had he been so obsessed with the women — young, pretty, or both — who reflected well on him in the eyes of other men? Had it all been about what other men would think of him, even when he was acting in private? How stupid was that?

It was early evening, suddenly, on the second day of drinking and smoking — where had two days gone? Maybe it was more. He wondered what day of the week it was, how long he had been here, on the veranda? There were blanks in his head. He couldn’t remember what he had done earlier that day and he couldn’t remember eating at all. The light was commencing its swift and steady slip into dusk. The wall of palm trees on the other side of the valley was growing darker and darker — soon, the gathering gloom would be upon him, then blank, ineluctable night.

Rita. He wanted her; there, at the hut, with him, as darkness fell. The thought came to him clean and unalloyed by doubt. After one encounter, he was missing her. Her absence was a kind of bodily discomfort. He ached — just a little but all over, like the very early stages of the flu.

He wanted to know everything about her. She had deflected questions about herself every bit as deftly as did he, as if they were just swatting flies together across the table. In the past, he had made a point of pressing women for facts about themselves: usually you didn’t need to press. Most women wanted to tell you their most intimate tragedy within about five minutes of meeting you and those who didn’t were easy to persuade; a hard stare usually did it. Rita had been happy to keep their encounter determinedly shallow, which to him implied she had something to hide, something she didn’t like to talk about.

Her accent was so faint — Belgian by birth, as it turned out, she was fluent in English and probably several other languages: a teacher, but one who was now training other teachers, she had told him; a specialist in developing parts of the world. She was well-travelled, had been in the archipelago some time: a woman comfortable in almost any culture but her own, he thought. She belonged to the same nation as him, in that sense, the nation of people scattered and diffused all over the world, citizens of nowhere.

And what about that scar on her abdomen. .? He remembered how she had sat very still on the side of the bed the morning after, just before she had risen and pushed aside the mosquito net, in the moment before she had said, ‘I need to go.’ Something about that moment of stillness had stuck in his head, the image of her naked back. He had known at once that something was wrong. There was something broken there; something that needed fixing.

He remembered a young woman he had been keen on from the office, many years ago, back when he was eligible. Alida, she was called. He had liked her because he thought her unusual in the same way that he was. She had a Taiwanese grandmother, although she had been born and raised in the Netherlands and was more Dutch than the Dutch girls he knew. She also had one eye that was slightly off. Long straight hair, a slim physique — when they first met, he couldn’t stop looking at her face to work out exactly what it was that was out of kilter. Later, he found out that there had been speculation round the office that they were perfect for each other, him being part-Asian too.

She was from the typists’ pool, as it was called back then. The girls in the typists’ pool were interested in men who had been out in the field — in those days, it was always male operatives and women office staff, although the total staff was still tiny in comparison with what it would grow to be. His line of work was still in its infancy, or rather the corporatisation of it was. Most of the operatives were young men fresh from their military service, like Harper. There were rumours their three directors were all ex-Nefis, although Harper thought probably only one of them was, a small, wiry man with grey hair and the relaxed air of someone so efficiently trained he had absolutely nothing to prove. The other two had a bit more bluster, threw their weight around: they were just army men.

It was 1969 and Harper had been back in the business for a year. He had returned from Indonesia at the end of ’65 — via Los Angeles, his last visit there, although he didn’t know that at the time — to be put on indefinite sick leave. Indefinite turned out to mean four years. When he came back to the office, no one was allowed to ask for an explanation. You’re being given a second chance because of how young you were and because of how much money we spent training you, Gregor had said. I hope I don’t need to tell you that there won’t be a third. On his first day back after a four-year break, he had been greeted with ‘Hey, welcome back,’ by people who hardly lifted their heads, as if he had only been gone a fortnight. An aura of mystery clung to him, he knew, and he did nothing to dispel it — an aura of mystery made bedding women easy. Even before what happened in ’65, he had had plenty of material in that respect. There was always the enjoyable moment, with a woman, when he dropped in the fact that he had been born in a camp, and the confusion in their eyes as they calculated that he certainly didn’t look Jewish.

One of the reasons he had liked Alida was that such subterfuges had seemed unnecessary — they worked in the same business, after all. Their conversation beforehand had been mostly work-related. Their sex had been noisy and enthusiastic. Afterwards, she held him against her on her single bed in her flat-share and moved her fingertips in slow circles over his back — the sort of stroking that was ticklish before sex but calming after. He was half-dozing when she said, ‘You know what they say about you, round the office, don’t you?’

He thought she was about to tell him some pointless bit of gossip: that you hate Aldemar because he earns more than you (untrue, there were lots of reasons to hate Aldemar), or you slept with Lotte in European Accounts and she took pills when you refused to marry her (true). That sort of gossip was daily currency when a group of people worked together on one floor of a building, in their case given a twist by the fact that they couldn’t tell their friends about the sort of company they worked for. He was only half-listening.

‘They say you were terribly tortured.’

Her fingers became still. He raised his head and looked at her face. She was smiling. She shuffled down the pillow a little and propped her head up on one hand, the arm bent at the elbow. Her fine dark hair fell down, a waterfall that flowed over her bare shoulder and upper arm. The expression on her face suggested she was not only amused by this rumour but expected him to be amused as well.

‘They say when you were captured in the jungle in the Indies. .’

‘It’s called Indonesia now.’

‘Indonesia. They say when you were captured when you were out in the jungle that you had your back slashed to ribbons with sickles. That’s why you don’t speak much round the office and keep yourself to yourself. That’s why you left the firm for four years. You cracked up and were in a loony bin for a bit and then tried to be a farmer, they set you up, but it didn’t work out and so you came back to the firm.’ That bit was true, at least. The firm had looked after him well. It was in their interests, after all. The last thing the company needed was a mentally ill ex-operative raving about his experiences to anyone who would listen. She lifted a finger and traced his shoulder. ‘They say your back is covered with terrible scars.’

So that was why she had been stroking his back, only to discover it was as smooth and flawless as hers. How disappointed she must have been.

‘Well,’ he said, looking back at her, ‘as you can see, it isn’t.’

On the third day, he rose late — thanks to the booze and the cigarettes he had returned to sleeping badly — and decided he would not drink or smoke that day. It was disgusting, actually, what he had been doing, it was weak; time to get a grip. He would go to town and track down Rita.

Kadek took him into town again, silent on the journey. Kadek had grown a lot quieter during the last couple of days and Harper wondered if he was obliged to report back to the firm. Was Kadek’s job to bring him breakfast or to spy on him? Probably both. But in truth, despite his doubts about the organisation, the thought of finding Rita was distracting enough for him to think that, maybe, his nighttime fears were born of simple exhaustion. Maybe Amsterdam was right — this was a new thought — maybe what he needed was rest and recreation. He was even beginning to feel a little foolish. He would not be the first operative to see shadows where none existed, along with people lurking in those shadows who were looking at him, meaning harm. Some habits became a way of life. Is it possible that what happened before is clouding your judgement? Amsterdam had asked him, just before he submitted his final report from Jakarta. How vehemently he had denied it.

He waited until late afternoon, changing into one of the shirts he had bought on his previous visit to town just before Kadek arrived with the moped. Rita would be working earlier in the day, he guessed, and his best chance of finding her would be around the same time as their previous encounter.

He got Kadek to drop him at the corner of Jalan Bisma and walked up to the guesthouse but the bar was completely empty, not even any staff around. He went back to the main road and took up watch in the cafe again. When that vigil proved fruitless, he walked up and down the main street, stopping off in one or two shops, where it was easy to linger by the door and watch who passed along the road. There was no point at which he despaired of seeing her. It was only a matter of persistence. Where would someone like her go if she wasn’t getting some work done in a bar or cafe? Where would he himself go if he didn’t want to hang out with tourists? The night market, probably.

At the entrance to the market, there were the food stalls. The first was serving yellowish chicken; a heap of them, each tied with string, sat on the counter-top. A young woman behind the counter was shredding one into a bowl, her hands flicking to and fro. In other bowls on the counter were roasted peanuts and tea-stained eggs with cracked shells, rice and sambal. Would Rita eat at a place like this, or did she normally eat with the family she stayed with? A gold maneki-neko sat upright on the end of the counter, beckoning with its lucky paw.

Although it was still early, the market was crowded. He was careful to act like any other customer, in case Rita saw him before he saw her. He moved on from the food stalls to those selling plastic plates and bowls heaped high in bright green, pink, red, orange. Then the clothing stalls with hundreds of different pairs of flip-flops. He hated flip-flops — why walk around in something that left your feet so exposed? Ugly, as well. No foot, male or female, was ever flattered by a flip-flop. The only shoppers were locals. The occasional tourist was taking photos, thrilled by how the retail goods bought by poor people were so cheap and charming and colourful. Darkness had not lifted the smothering heat and the market was lit by white arc lights that hurt his eyes when he glanced up. Stallholders shouted to each other. Children pushed insolently against his legs. The noise and the crowds were beginning to oppress him. He wouldn’t find her here.

The market took a dogleg and here the crowds thinned a little. He stopped in front of a small fruit stall selling the huge apples that he liked to eat in the evenings. He bought a bag of them and, as he paid, looked to his right and saw her, two stalls down. She was leaning over at a spice stall and pointing to a bamboo basket containing pieces of twisted turmeric root. The man behind the stall was leaning forward too, with a small wooden shovel in one hand. They were in intense conversation. As he approached, he guessed that she was pretending to be annoyed at the price the stallholder wanted to charge her. She was speaking Balinese but he couldn’t tell whether she was using the formal or colloquial form. The stallholder was pretending to be annoyed back but then a price was all at once agreed and they both broke into smiles.

He stood quite close to her, waiting for her to finish, so that when she turned from the stall, she gave a small start at his proximity.

He held up both hands. ‘I didn’t want to interrupt.’

‘Nyoman and I are old friends.’ She threw a smile at the stallholder and he smiled and inclined his head in return. ‘What are you after?’

He was about to apologise and back off, then he realised what she meant and held up his bag of apples.

‘Have you had the food here?’ she asked. ‘It’s great, there’s a great stall at the entrance.’

‘I saw it.’

They walked back through the market together, slowly, with her pausing at every other stall to look over what was there. She stopped at the plastic plates and bought six green ones in the shape of leaves. ‘My tutor group,’ she said, by way of explanation, slipping the plates into the large cloth bag she was carrying. As they turned from the stall, he reached out, hooked a finger beneath the strap of her bag and pulled it gently from her shoulder. She stopped. He took the bag, dropped his apples in it, put it on his own shoulder. They stood facing each other. Her expression was a query. She was wearing a short-sleeved cardigan over a vest top and it had slipped when he had taken the bag, exposing a soft, freckled shoulder. He reached out a hand and pulled the edge of the cardigan back into place. She dropped her gaze. They turned and continued walking.

‘It’s a long time since a man has carried my bag.’ She had been flustered by his gesture: she was commenting on it to diminish its power. ‘As you Americans say, it’s cute.’

‘I’m Dutch.’ They had reached a narrow gap in the crowds. He gestured for her to go through it first.

‘Dutch when it suits and American when it suits, perhaps?’

‘That’s right,’ he replied, as he drew level with her again, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, you haven’t been treated right.’

She spoke from the corner of her mouth as they walked side by side. ‘Stop trying to make me fall in love with you.’

‘No.’

They slipped into it so easily; it was so fluent and meaningless. This was what he liked about her. You could say anything to her and it wasn’t freighted with significance. The gestures were important but the words meant nothing.

‘I’m sorry about the other morning,’ she said, as they paused by a stall selling fritters. ‘About rushing off, I mean. It was a little rude of me.’ A little rude: he liked that in her too, her precision.

‘Yes it was.’ Now, perhaps, would be a good moment to find out what was wrong with her, what was damaged inside. Once you knew that about a person, they were yours for the taking.

‘I did wonder, at that time, what. .?’ he started, but she spoke over him.

‘What did you do after you left?’ she said.

‘Went for a walk,’ he replied. Maybe she hadn’t seen him waiting in the cafe opposite the guesthouse after all.

‘I had to get home and get changed, I was already late. And I felt a little guilty, I guess.’

‘For being late or for having sex with me?’

She gave a half-smile. ‘Well, that’s not what I’m here for, is it?’

‘I don’t think you should feel guilty for giving yourself a night off.’ He did not add: that’s what I was doing, after all.

She looked away, at the market, then gave a sigh so heavy he presumed she was about to make her excuses and leave but instead she said, ‘A drink?’

‘How about we go back to Jalan Bisma?’

‘You are a bad man, John Harper.’

‘Yes I am.’

The morning after their second night together, they had exactly the kind of breakfast he had fantasised about before. The guesthouse didn’t do black rice pudding — it was a Sunday speciality only — but the tangerine juice was sharp and sweet, the coffee hot.

‘The sambal is great here, really spicy,’ Rita said, as they studied the menu.

When the young woman came with their dishes, she put the eggs and toast in front of Rita and the nasi goreng in front of Harper. They waited until she had turned away before exchanging plates with small smiles of collusion.

They took the same route that he had the other day, walking up Jalan Bisma out of town until the guesthouses and little warung fell away and the road became a track through the rice fields.

On his previous walk, the boys had fallen behind, then disappeared, and he had wondered if he was mistaken about being followed — but even so, he glanced behind them. This time, there was no sign of anything suspicious, no one on their trail. The tall wooden constructions in the middle of the field looked just like water towers. The sheen of light brown water in which the rice plants stood was nothing more than irrigation. In Rita’s presence, he realised, everything was no more than it seemed. If she were in the hut with him at night, the men would not come, rain or no rain. They would not even exist.

They passed beyond the edge of the town and along the stretch of dirt road that led up to the Forest via a winding rocky path. The edges of the rice fields were dotted with construction sites, the town stretching itself to accommodate its growing number of visitors. They passed a site where the bones of a building, a small hotel or guesthouse, were in place; the concrete pillars and the horizontal beams: a bare-chested man knelt on the ground chopping fiercely at a pile of wet cement on a board. Bamboo ladders lay in rows across one of the horizontals and several men were halfway up the ladders in a row, hauling another beam upwards between them by ropes slung over the top. At the bottom of the ladders and directly underneath the bones of the building, a large concrete base had already been filled and hardened. A pack of three dogs were lounging on it, all exactly the same shape, a cardboard-cutout mongrel shape: small, skinny, with disproportionately large ears. One of the dogs was dark brown, another a sandy colour, the other dirty white. They lay on their sides in the sun as motionless as if they were dead. Harper thought how sinister that sort of dog always seemed to him, all the same shape but different colours, as if they had been made, not born, cut from paper with scissors then magicked into life like the skeletons that jerked around the animated films of his childhood.

‘So many rice fields disappearing under concrete,’ Rita said. ‘Until recently, Jalan Bisma was a dirt track leading out of town.’

He thought, well, when a farmer probably gets the same for selling his land as he would for three decades of threshing, can you blame him?

Rita stopped and looked at the site, the fields beyond. ‘You know, I have wondered. .’

Something about her tone arrested him. ‘What?’

‘Oh, you know, about buying a lease, a piece of land. It would feel big, though, a big thing to do.’

‘Why? You could always sell it on, couldn’t you, if it was a mistake?’

She frowned. ‘It would mean I was saying goodbye, to other things, other options, going back, and so on. I would be saying something, to myself I mean. Alone.’

He wasn’t sure what she meant: saying something only to herself? Or buying a lease, alone? But the bit about saying goodbye to other options, that bit he could understand.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Eight years. Long enough, to decide I mean. If I was going to move on, I would have done by now. Building, you know, it’s saying something, no? Building something. Frightening.’

Of all the things in the world there were to be frightened of, buying land leases or building property did not strike him as particularly scary: but no sooner had he dismissed her remark than he paused for a moment. I have never built anything, he thought. How strange, at my age, to realise that only now. ‘Aren’t you scared of the Invisibles?’

She shook her head, smiling. ‘These fields are the land of Dewi Sri, don’t forget.’ She paused. ‘If this is your first time on Bali, how do you know about the Invisibles?’

‘Look,’ he said, pointing. ‘What kind of bird is that?’

She lifted a hand to shade her eyes.

While she scanned the trees on the other side of the rice field for the non-existent bird, he watched the man on his knees mixing the concrete and thought how he could buy a lease here too. With the political situation so unstable, it would be dirt cheap. Local labour would be next to nothing. You could throw up a small villa in no time. He wondered what colours Rita liked. He wasn’t into all that fancy folk art but he didn’t feel that she was either: she was too practical. In a couple of seconds, as they stood looking out over the field, he pictured their whole lives from now on. A small villa, together. Peace. Coffee on the veranda each morning as dawn broke over the fields. The view would be less dramatic than the one over the valley but, in its own way, just as beautiful.

The sun shone through the edges of her hair where it lifted slightly. He had the idea — which he knew to be stupid — that she had just had the same fantasy.

A shadow crossed his thoughts then, as he remembered what the rice fields were like at night. How far was he from it, two hours’ drive, perhaps? Two hours and thirty-two and a half years, that’s how far from it he was. What was he thinking? He turned briskly. Rita looked round at his sudden movement and, as she did, the dog nearest to them on the concrete slab, the white dog, lifted its head and with no warning other than a brief, preparatory snarl, roused itself and ran at them, barking in a rusty fashion, toenails skittering in the dirt. Rita let out a small, alarmed sound and grabbed his left arm while positioning herself behind him, pulling him to one side. He flinched but at her action, not the dog. The dog ran at them but stopped just short, then began following along the path. It loped beside them for a stride or two, jumping and snapping its teeth in the air, then, happy it had seen them off, lowered its head and slunk back to its indifferent companions.

Rita was walking on the other side, close to him, clutching at his right arm. He used his left hand to detach her grip, then took her left hand in his right and squeezed it. ‘If there’s one thing I can protect you from, it’s dogs.’

‘I’m not scared of them back home,’ she said quickly, ‘they are trained there, but here, they are just strays. You never know what they will do.’

‘They are doorbells. Wouldn’t you want your dog to bark at strangers?’

‘Yes, well, one of those things bites you, you have forty-eight hours to get to Jakarta for the rabies jab. .’

‘The dogs here don’t have rabies, the monkeys maybe.’

‘I know. I just don’t like them, that’s all.’

*

At the entrance to the Monkey Forest, there were two women with a small portable stall, which they had set up in front of the ticket office, selling bunches of tiny bananas and packets of peanuts.

‘Want me to get some?’ he asked, gesturing.

‘Are you crazy?’ Rita replied.

One of the women was behind the stall, the other stood at the side holding a catapult ready loaded with a stone. He queued for their tickets at the kiosk and watched as the cluster of monkeys close to the entrance gate split to form a pincer movement and began to knuckle-walk towards the stall, tails in the air, gazes flicking from the bananas to the woman with the catapult. As soon as a monkey got too close to the stall, the woman raised the catapult and, at the sight of it, all the monkeys scattered back to the gate. He wondered how many shots the woman had had to fire to teach the monkeys what a raised catapult meant: not many, he guessed.

‘Can you believe I’ve never been here?’ Rita said, as they passed through the gate and entered the green heat of the Forest.

They were only a hundred yards in when a tiny grey monkey ran at them and she flinched again. The monkey stopped a few feet away and began to groom itself, as if it had proved its point, but after that, Rita stayed close to him as they walked.

The path led upwards through the trees until it reached a central area with a pond surrounded by a low stone wall and moss-covered statues. A man in a uniform was holding a short rectangular machete and hacking at a scattering of coconuts on the ground. As soon as he moved away, a dozen monkeys lolloped towards the broken pieces — the smaller ones making a dash then retreating with a piece to a safe distance, the larger ones approaching more casually, making their selection, then sitting where they were to shred it with the defiant air of playground bullies.

‘Look at that one,’ Rita said. A young monkey too afraid of the other monkeys to approach the shards of coconut had hold of a small, unbroken one that had rolled some distance away and was lifting it and bashing it on the ground. He had the feeling she was trying to recover her dignity by pretending she thought the monkeys cute: they weren’t. The baby monkeys had the faces of little malicious old men.

As they watched, another adult monkey approached a mother and baby sitting on the stone ledge of the pool and grabbed at the baby’s tail, trying to drag it from its mother’s grasp. The mother swung the baby underneath her stomach, and lolloped away on three legs. The other monkey pursued and tried to snatch the baby again. The mother moved once more, but never quite far enough to deter the other monkey from trying again.

As they stood watching, Rita said, ‘Monkey, donkey, owl. You know that saying?’

‘Three ages of man.’

‘Donkey, or owl?’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Still donkey, although sometimes I think I’m ready for owl.’

‘I don’t think anyone is ever ready for owl, do you? On your deathbed maybe.’

‘Isn’t it wisdom rather than death? What about you?’

‘Definitely still donkey,’ she replied, with a sigh in her voice. ‘You have no idea.’

They watched the monkeys for a little longer and he wondered how soon he could suggest they leave — there was an awful lot of forest still to walk around, not to mention the holy stone carvings. He hoped she didn’t want to look at all of it.

‘I don’t have to work on Monday,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘There’s another trainer coming in. Normally I stay and watch but I’ve seen this one before.’

What else was there to do, while he waited for news? With Rita, he felt he had been wrong: of course no one was going to kill him. With Rita, he felt his anxieties to be mistaken, no more than the inevitable result of his work. Could he not allow himself this a little longer? Work would still be there waiting for him, after all. If he hadn’t heard from Jakarta or Amsterdam by the end of next week, he would take the initiative then.

‘How about we go to the Tirta Empul Temple?’ she said. ‘Been there yet?’

‘I’m not a tourist!’ He could not keep the scorn from his response.

‘You’re here on holiday, aren’t you? Don’t you want to look at places? Anyway I didn’t mean as a tourist.’

‘You’re a practising Hindu?’ Now the scorn was mingled with disbelief.

‘No, I just think, well, you put on your sarong and you bathe in the Holy Waters and what you feel is. .’

‘Wet,’ he interjected.

She bore him with an indulgent sigh. ‘. . Inspired, really, you feel inspired. You pray for someone each time you get under a spout and after a while you run out of the obvious people to pray for and there are still a lot of spouts left and. .’ Sensing he was unimpressed, she hesitated. ‘Makes you think, that’s all.’

Of all the forms of faith that humans indulged in, the one he hated most was this sort of freelance spirituality — a belief that it was okay to pick ’n’ mix your rituals, try a bit of this and a bit of that and feel better about yourself. At least belonging to an established religion required action and sacrifice, visit Mecca once in your life or don’t cut your hair — even Protestant Christians were obliged to go to church at Easter. But this: I’ll do a bit of what the locals do and feel good because I’m getting some of the insight with none of the sacrifice. All he said was, ‘I don’t think it’s for me, thanks all the same.’

‘Okay,’ she said lightly. She turned away from the pond with its stone wall and they began to walk further up the path. Another man with a machete came past the other way, carrying a huge sack made of rope net and full of coconuts. There were other exits, Harper thought: he’d seen them on the map at the entrance. If they followed the curve of the path round, they could leave by the other route, head back into town. She had taken his rejection of the temple pretty well. Was it too early to suggest they go to a bar?

‘The beach, then,’ she said.

He was about to object to that one too, then he thought, if they went south, down to Denpasar, maybe he’d be able to find out a bit more about what was going on in Jakarta. Amsterdam wouldn’t like it but then Amsterdam wouldn’t know. ‘There’s an Intercontinental at Jimbaran Bay.’

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. ‘Only someone like you could want the Intercontinental. You’ll get your scrambled eggs there. You’ll probably get cornflakes if you want. I know a much better hotel, a bar on the beach, great cocktails, Balinese enough for me and international enough for you. How does that sound?’

‘Our relationship in a nutshell,’ he said drily and they both made ironic sounds in mutual acknowledgement that his use of the world ‘relationship’ was a joke.

They turned back towards the entrance and, as they did, a monkey ran from behind them and with one swift movement, leapt up and clung with its hands and feet to the bottom of a woven shoulder bag worn by a woman in front of them. The woman shrieked and let the bag fall, then ran a few paces before turning and pointing. The monkey upended the bag and another half a dozen monkeys ran forward to inspect its scattered contents. One ripped open a purse, another seized a pair of sunglasses, another snatched up a plastic water bottle and sank its teeth into the bottom while lifting it up to suck from it. Rita gave an amused exhalation and a shake of her head as they passed and Harper noted briefly that even she was entertained rather than alarmed when the monkeys’ victim was someone else.

Nearby, the baby monkey sat, alone now, looking at them.

*

There had nearly been a child. That was the way he thought of it. It. How unconscionable, that small word: it. But what was the alternative? He couldn’t do what Francisca did: Francisca, his wife, the fragile beauty from Friesland — the woman his mother had hated so much it was inevitable he would marry her eventually. She had started choosing names for the baby in the early stages of her pregnancy, convinced it was a boy. She had bought piles of soft cloth diapers and little knitted vests. She had the cot they would bring him home in all ready with a yellow bow tied to the handle. He would watch her sometimes, when she was sitting on the window seat in the sitting room, unaware of his gaze, reclining on a pile of fat firm cushions and staring out at the canal while running her hand over her taut belly, a small smile of knowingness on her face. He thought how perfected she seemed then, in her happiness, in the knowledge that something was coming that she would love beyond all else but for the moment was safe inside her, enclosed in the wet wall of her womb; the repository of all her hopes and dreams; entirely imagined, entirely protected.

When he saw that expression on his wife’s face, what he felt was fear. Fear gripped his stomach like a fist. The helplessness of babies disturbed and disgusted him, that was why it had taken him until his middle years to consider having one. He told himself he would feel differently when it was his own, but looking at other people’s he just thought, at what point do they become human?

Then he said to himself, you’re fifty years old. She’s forty and it’s probably her last chance, which is your fault because it took you eight years to agree to marry her. This thing has come to you both at a time in life when, for most people, there are no more surprises. Be grateful. Put the past aside, let go of the convictions you have nursed ever since you came back from Indonesia as a young man, broken. Okay, so you’re not sure about her, not sure at all about the baby — but she seems sure enough for both of you. Maybe her certainty will be enough.

Francisca went into labour in the middle of the night, eight weeks before her due date. It was a girl. She lived for two days. The doctor explained later: it was an aspiration problem, something to do with the baby swallowing or inhaling something in the amniotic fluid that blocked its — her — airways. It caused the pneumonia that killed her. She lived long enough for them to hold her, name her — Anika, after his mother, Francisca’s suggestion. They had watched her breathe in the tiniest, most shallow of ways, her small chest labouring — but Harper still thought of her as having drowned in the womb. It made more sense, somehow. How could a baby float in fluid for nine months, anyway? When he sat next to the cot in the incubation unit, Francisca clutching his hand and weeping, he remembered his mother’s story of how he had been born during a monsoon in an internment camp in the Dutch East Indies and the rain running down the sides of the hut and the dirt road turning into a brown river and wondered if this story had somehow been there inside him when he thought of his baby daughter as having drowned, as if a story like that could be passed on to his baby, like a genetic disease.

Francisca had sobbed in his arms at night for weeks afterwards, and said things like, ‘I know you are suffering too but you aren’t able to express it, it’s okay, I understand that.’ He did not tell her that when their tiny baby had died he had thought — in the moments before his own grief and disappointment had taken hold — at least you have been spared life.

The day started well enough. He had arranged to pick Rita up at two pm and although she had told him to park outside an electrical shop on Monkey Forest Road and wait for her there, he got out of the car and wandered up and down a few paces each way, curious to know which compound was hers. He was standing right outside it when she emerged alongside a young Balinese woman who was holding a pile of textbooks with both arms wrapped beneath.

‘You are here,’ she said simply. ‘This is Ni Wayan.’

He nodded and the young woman nodded back, then she looked at Rita and said, ‘Ibu Rita,’ with a bow and smile, before turning towards town.

‘I thought today was a day off,’ he said, as he led Rita to the car. It had pleased him to hear the girl call her ibu with such affectionate emphasis: she was a well-liked teacher, held in affection and regard. He had thought as much.

‘Wayan came to me yesterday and asked for an extra lesson. It happens often. That’s why I said after lunch. My days off usually start after lunch.’

‘Are you good to all your students?’ He opened the passenger door for her.

‘They are all good to me.’

As he climbed in his side, she said quietly and seriously, ‘God bless the Balinese.’

They bumped slowly down Monkey Forest Road and turned right onto the main street. Rita leant forward and opened the car’s glove compartment.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

She pointed at the tape deck between them. He glanced at it and said, ‘I’ll be really surprised if that works.’

Rita pulled out a handful of tapes, loose with no cases. She lifted a couple in turn then shrieked, ‘Superman Is Dead! Suckerhead? Where did you get this car?’

Kadek had got the car for him. He had wanted a local vehicle, nothing identifiable as a foreigner’s hire car. ‘What’s Suckerhead?’

Rita was still looking through the cassettes. ‘Local death metal. Big underground scene here. Even Balinese youth need to rebel sometimes. They rioted in Jakarta when Metallica came, you know.’

It occurred to him to mention the riots in Jakarta that had recently led to the downfall of the Sustainer of the Universe, which he thought a somewhat more significant event, but it would be hard to discuss the political situation in the capital without it becoming clear that his knowledge of it was a little more detailed than your average economist; although she would know if some of the Chinese families fleeing the capital had come here, she would know what the talk was amongst her students — she could be a useful source of information. Stop it, he said to himself then.

Once in Sanur, they went straight to the hotel and parked in the car park at the entrance to the gardens and walked down a pretty lane to reception and Rita laughed at his irritation that there was no valet parking. He resisted her attempts to show him round the grounds; they headed straight to the beachside bar.

Two perfect seats were waiting for them, low and comfy, facing the sea, with a small table between. As they settled into them, Rita leaned forward for the cocktail menu, making a small noise of satisfaction. It was a cloudy day. Down by the water, a row of red, blue and yellow jukung boats were ranged in a row, painted in bright colours, with outrigger legs, raised and bent like spiders, for decorative purposes only, he presumed: the fishing and the coral harvesting on this stretch of beach must have ended many years ago. On a neighbouring terrace, a group of small boys were having their dance practice, the warrior dance — whatever it’s called, nothing to do with battle, these days, he thought.

Rita lifted a hand. ‘Across the bay, there, you know that’s where they built the Bali Beach Hotel in the sixties, first of many, Western triumph or monstrosity depending on your point of view.’

I know, he thought, I watched it being built.

A waiter had materialised at his shoulder and Rita sat upright in her seat, holding the cocktail menu sideways so that he could see.

‘Choose for us,’ he said. Before she even spoke, he knew she would order something that included fruit.

After taking their order up to the bar, the waiter returned with some tiny glass bowls containing toasted biscuits. Rita picked up a bowl and tipped some into her hand. ‘Want some?’

He shook his head, staring out at the beach where, between them and the fake fishing boats, three young women in bikinis were lying very close together on a large grass mat, like sausages in a pan. Wandering past them was a young white couple in patterned baggy trousers, the man bearded and tall, the woman skinny and short; hand-woven bags slung over their shoulders, bracelets on their wrists. They would not be sunning themselves all day long, nor would they buy cigarettes or alcohol in Duty Free on the way home. They would go home with luggage full of sarongs and woodcarvings. They would learn please and thank you in Indonesian and use them on every possible occasion, whether it was appropriate or not. They would tip as generously as their backpacking budget allowed and they would always, always, behave respectfully in temples.

But when they got home, the young couple would do exactly what the three young women would do. They would buy houses, cook food, drive cars. The fuel for those cars would come from somewhere and it would come via the pipes built by the sort of company that employed companies like his in order to ensure the safety of their investments and their staff.

He remembered first arriving on the island, November ’65. It had been a relief to get off Java, the Jakarta job done. At Tuban airport, as it was called back then, he had handed over an extortionate bribe to a man in a suit and sunglasses in order to evade a queue that had built up in front of a group of soldiers whose purpose in questioning passengers disembarking from the domestic flight was unclear.

The operative doing his handover was waiting for him outside the low building, his car parked at an angle halfway up the kerb. He shook Harper’s hand, said, ‘Welcome to Bali. Call me Abang. You got through quickly.’

‘It wasn’t easy,’ said Harper, pushing his glasses back up his sweating nose.

The area around the airport was surrounded by construction in the shimmering heat. No amount of political chaos ever stopped the building works. The new regime would be hoping for international flights as soon as possible, once it had defeated the Red Menace — and he had no doubt it would all flow, flow on the shiny new planes landing on the shiny new runways. First came the massacres, then the arms and the money and the economic advisers, then the runways — then, the tourists.

‘Congratulations,’ Abang said. ‘A good start. They should make it some kind of test.’ He meant the Institute.

‘Well,’ Harper said, ‘there’s a lot more people trying to get out than in.’ He had passed through a huge crowd of families on their way to Departures.

They got into the car. He didn’t know much about Abang at that point but later found out he was an Indo like him, mixed-race, an older man who had picked the right side in the war and, unlike Harper and his mother, hadn’t had to flee back to Holland in ’46 — useful to the Institute in the same way he was, for being a bit brown. He was based in Sumatra but had been touring the Eastern Islands to do an advance report while Harper had been doing Jakarta. Although they had never met before, Harper felt an instant affection for him, reciprocated by the invitation to call him Abang: big brother.

Abang nodded at Harper’s observation as they joined the queue of cars trying to get in or out or go round and round the airport — in the crowd of vehicles, it was hard to tell. The smell of aeroplane fuel mingled with exhaust and cigarette smoke. Everyone had their windows rolled down, their arms hanging out — occasionally, a driver would shout or gesture in a desultory fashion. It was a slow kind of chaos.

As they sat looking straight ahead, Abang said, ‘It’s going to be just as bad here, you know, it’s on its way. Funny how people know and don’t know.’ He nudged the car forward a couple of feet. ‘You want to go and rest a bit? Do the briefing after?’

‘No, let’s get on with it.’

‘Okay, good, let’s go and do it with a beer.’

They drove straight to Sanur. Abang wanted Harper to see the Bali Beach Hotel, under construction for two years now. They had a beer together in a bar opposite the site while he explained how the building of the hotel had caused trouble locally ever since it started. Suteja had given the best contracts to his friends in the PKI, which had led to a lot of resentment. Control of the tourist industry was going to be as hotly contested as control of the rice harvest. ‘The PKI have got it all wrong. They are putting all their effort into land reform for the peasants but the peasants aren’t even grateful and the foreign dollars aren’t going to come for rice, they’re going to come for sand.’ Abang indicated the beach in front of them with an open, palm-upwards gesture.

Harper thought of the charred corpse he had seen hanging from a tree by the side of the road at a crossroads just before Jakarta airport. The sign around the neck read: Gerwani. ‘You really think anyone is going to want to come here, after what’s going on here hits the news in Europe and America?’

Abang had given a humourless yelp. ‘Hits the news? In any case, you’ll find blood sinks into sand really fast.’ He lifted a copy of Suara Indonesia from his bag, folded to the editorial. He tossed it onto the table between them and jabbed a finger.

Harper looked at the paper and Abang translated the headline of the editorial out loud. ‘Now It Is Clear Who Is Friend and Who Is Foe.’

He looked at Abang and raised his eyebrows. ‘How long do you think we have?’

‘You mean in general, or here?’

‘Here.’

Abang wobbled his head from side to side, a small balancing movement. ‘Two weeks, three at most, maybe less, maybe a lot less.’

‘Really?’ Harper had been assuming he had a little more time. What was the point of him coming over from Java to do reports if it was almost underway?

‘Rumour has it the Brawijaya Units are due next month.’

‘Who’s in command?’ Harper asked.

‘Sarwo Edhie.’

Harper was silent for a moment.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought too,’ Abang said. He lifted his beer bottle to his lips. Harper did the same. He felt something, then, some thrill of fear — had it been a premonition of what was to come? Or was it simply that the adrenaline of witnessing what had happened in Java had drained, just a little, with his arrival on the island, and he was now feeling a shiver of weakness at the thought of the danger that would soon be evident here? He had better get his adrenaline levels back up pretty soon, particularly if Abang moved on and he was the only one reporting back. If they closed the airport it would mean a boat to another island, dangerous enough in itself, or more likely lying low in the hills until things blew over.

‘Have they started collecting names?’

Abang shook his head. ‘They’ve been doing that for some time. Anyone in the PKI or any of the other Communist groups is out of a job, in the government sector anyway, schools, civil service, they’ve all gone, family members too, any association will do. They are building up the lists, village by village. Two weeks I reckon, before it starts. They may not even wait for the army.’

‘The lists.’

Abang lifted his beer bottle in a dry salute. ‘There’s always a list.’

There was an unspoken acknowledgement between Abang and himself, Harper thought. There was always a list; often more than one. The army, the Islamists and the nationalists were all drawing up lists of Communists to kill. The Communists would have their own lists, and if the 30th September Movement had succeeded, Harper had no doubt that he and Abang and anyone else with European or American connections would have been on it. Their brown skin wouldn’t have saved them, not considering who they worked for, not now it was clear who was friend and who was foe.

Blood sinks into sand really fast. The waiter arrived with their cocktails, some large red fruit-filled thing. He wished he had asked for something short and whisky-based instead of telling Rita to choose. He looked at the young women in bikinis lying just a few feet in front of them, then stared out beyond them at the sea. He could tell that Rita was watching him and sensing he had sunk into silence and after a moment or two of watchfulness, concluding it was best to leave him to it. She leaned forward for the cigarette packet that he had dropped onto the table as they sat down and he reached out and grabbed her hand, grasping it in his, pressing her soft fingers. They both looked at the hands.

‘Can we get a room?’ He could hear, in his own voice, a different tone from their previous encounters, something else mixed with the desire, a kind of need. He heard it without understanding it.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I said, remember, I need to be back tonight.’

He released her hand. She shook it a little then reached for the packet and withdrew a cigarette but then sat holding it, as if she had thought better of lighting it. Her fingers were trembling. She hadn’t smoked in front of him before.

He stood, took his lighter from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. ‘Why don’t you order some food?’ he said. The cocktails were strong and they would be drinking several.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To talk to the concierge.’

He turned and walked back down the path to the main building. She had been right about one thing, it was a beautiful hotel. He couldn’t remember it from before. It was a low, discreet collection of Balinese bungalows set amidst gardens. You could come here as a wealthy Westerner and hide in decorous seclusion from whatever was going on in the outside world.

He could have asked the waiter in the bar about what was happening on Java but the waiter would only have given him a polite answer, ‘Everything is fine, sir.’ The concierge would be a much better source of information.

The deputy manager was on the desk. Harper straightened himself as he approached and spoke in English.

‘Can you help me? My company has closed our Jakarta office and I can’t get through. What’s the latest?’

The concierge turned to the pile of newspapers on his desk and reached out a hand but Harper said, ‘I’ve got yesterday’s news. Put a call through to the concierge at the Mandarin or the Four Seasons, or the Grand Hyatt, any of them.’

It took the man six calls to get through to someone he could talk to and at first, he only got bland answers: order would soon return, the army was in control, there was no need for anxiety.

After a polite interval, Harper intervened. ‘Ask him if any more shopping precincts have been set on fire.’

The man spoke into the phone, returned the answer, ‘No sir, no more commercial premises have been attacked.’

‘Are the Americans and Europeans still evacuating their nationals?’

‘I believe so, yes.’

‘And what about elsewhere, Surakarta and Medan?’ The conversation following this question took a little longer.

‘There are no further incidents, the army is in control, sir, there is no need for alarm.’

‘Ask him if there are still tanks parked on the Hotel Indonesia roundabout or Merdeka Square?’

‘My friend does not have that information, sir. The streets are clear. The banks and schools are closed only as a precaution.’

‘Is there a phone in the lobby I can use to make an international call?’

The deputy manager took him over to a booth with a small stool in it and a wall phone.

‘Shall we charge this call to your room, sir?’

‘I’ll pay cash.’

It was Hannah who picked up the phone, that was good. Hannah was his boss’s secretary and had worked for the company for years. Every now and then, they had a beer and exchanged notes on Jan’s peculiarities. Unlike some of their colleagues, they would never use this information against each other. ‘Good morning, Institute of International Economics.’ Hannah wasn’t particularly attractive but he loved her voice, slow and low, gravelly.

‘Hannah, lieveling, it’s your favourite brown guy. Ninety kilos of sheer muscle.’

There was a slight delay on the line. ‘Well, hello stranger.’

‘Is Jan in?’

After a pause, ‘No, I’ve only just got in, haven’t taken my coat off. How’s Jakarta? Sounds pretty bad.’

‘I’m not there any more, I’m on leave, enforced leave. Henrikson is running the show.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Hasn’t there been talk?’

‘News to me, my friend. Why haven’t you been recalled?’

It was exactly the same question he had asked himself.

The pause before each of her answers implied she was being careful in what she said but he was fairly certain she wasn’t. All the same, it was odd that his predicament had not been discussed. Hannah knew everything that happened in the Asia Department and normally Jan would be sure everyone in the company knew it too. That was what the partners did if you messed up.

‘Are you sure? He hasn’t said anything?’

‘Not a word. I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from you though. The office is still closed, Henrikson’s calling in from Le Méridien. I thought you were with him. I was wondering why you hadn’t called. The news reports, it’s calmer, but. .’

‘I know, still in the balance, looks like. What’s the word your end?’ The pause this time was a little longer than the mechanical one on the line. Hannah was hesitating about how much to tell him. ‘C’mon, I’m going crazy stuck on an island, being kept out of the loop. You’ve no idea how hard it is to get news here.’

The pause shortened again. ‘More of the same. The Americans have got all non-essential personnel out but they’ve left staff in place. British the same. Things are much calmer on the streets but nobody’s taking chances. Most of our existing clients are out now but we’ve got a whole load of new ones, people still panicking. Chinese families still fleeing in droves. Everyone’s waiting to see if Habibie can stabilise things but who knows.’ So Hannah’s opinion on the way things could be heading wasn’t so different from his own.

‘Beijing made any pronouncements?’

‘No, they’re sitting on the fence. There’s demonstrations outside the Indonesian Embassy there, though.’

He emerged from the booth and pulled his wallet from his pocket as he went over to the reception desk. The deputy manager had gone but a young woman took payment for the call.

As he turned back to walk through the gardens, he stopped, patted his pockets and regretted that his cigarettes were sitting on the low table next to Rita. He was right, he knew it: things could go either way, but the oddest thing of all was that his suspension wasn’t official. As far as his colleagues were concerned, he was still out in the field.

As he walked back along the tiled path, back to the beach, Harper thought, the rest of the day is spoiled now. He had brought the real world into the bubble he and Rita had been in during their encounters so far. He had liked the bubble: the enclosed space of a room in a guesthouse, the car — they could exist as long as they had a wall of some sort around them. They existed best of all beneath the fine gauze of a mosquito net.

As he sat down next to her, she said, ‘I’ve ordered.’

Summoned by her words, a plate of satay with a sticky coating arrived, some rice cakes and a bowl of water spinach.

They ate in silence. ‘This satay is really good, spicy,’ he said at one point but it was such an obviously small-talk remark, she ignored him. She ate the satay and the spinach but only picked at the rice.

After they had eaten, they walked along the beach. They talked about whether it was worth going for a drive around Sanur and decided it was mostly hideous and touristy. It grew greyer; the light was dull as they returned to the bar — as though the sky’s heaviness matched his mood.

Without discussion, they sat down in the same seats and both ordered soft drinks: she had watermelon juice and he a Coke, then they sat in silence, looking out at the sea where the waves crested apricot, the beach almost empty. He noticed a long trail of ants that were processing up the leg of the small table between them and clustering around a speck of satay sauce. The table hadn’t been wiped down properly while they were on their walk and he considered calling the waiter over.

In front of them on the sand was a pair of loungers in a reclining position. Between them was a standard lamp with a wooden stem and white lightshade of the sort you would find in any domestic sitting room. Even though they were still some way from dusk, a white-coated member of the hotel staff approached and turned the lamp on, and only then did Harper notice the cable that led from its base to the bottom of a nearby coconut palm. There was an electricity feed in the palm tree, a socket in its trunk. He glanced at Rita and saw she had noticed too and was also amused by how that small patch of beach had been transformed into a lounge. They smiled at each other. He wished he hadn’t made the call to Amsterdam, or asked about Jakarta. He wished he was no more than what Rita thought him to be.

*

As they walked back to the car, Rita perfectly happy, he felt annoyed with himself, and so did what most people do when they are upset about their own behaviour — he got upset with the person he was with. In the middle of a conversation about her work training secondary-school teachers, he interrupted with, ‘Of course all the good stuff here was built by the Dutch. The irrigation ditches in the fields used to be wood and bamboo but they went rotten. There’s a stone aqueduct in the highlands above town, you know, transformed the villages. You should go and see it.’

Why was he provoking her? He didn’t even believe it was true.

‘You mean the aqueduct above Keliki,’ she replied, her voice light. ‘I’ve seen it, of course, irrigation is everything. Only us Westerners take water for granted.’

‘Yes but the point I’m making is that if the Dutch hadn’t. .’

‘Oh, c’mon,’ she responded.

When he unlocked the car door for her and opened it, she slid herself down diagonally without looking at him.

He jammed the key in the ignition. She worked in education, so what? How about looking a little deeper? What about that caesarean scar on her abdomen, where was that child? He imagined a boy, a small boy, dying young perhaps — whatever it was, some common but excruciating tragedy that had led her to flee cold northern Europe and end up here, in a country so hot and full of flowers that sweat smelled sweet, deep greens and monsoon rains and slowly swaying people — the sort of country a white woman could run to because it was beautiful — because yeah, that’s right, I’ll go and live somewhere with lots of frangipani then I can convince myself the world isn’t ugly after all. He thought this last thought in a high-pitched voice in his head, a mockery of a female voice, of optimism of any sort.

They drove in silence.

They continued to drive in silence for an hour, the ribbon development along the road thinning little between villages: the open shacks with people sitting on the steps selling wooden tools and carvings and beads. They were most of the way back to town when Rita spoke and when she did, all at once with no preamble, it was obvious that throughout that hour of driving she had been continuing the debate between them to herself in just the same way he had. It was the worst kind of arguing: the silent kind.

‘How many killed in the Holocaust?’ she came out with. ‘How many? Six million, right? Everyone knows that. Even you know that.’

Thanks for that ‘even’, he thought. Thanks a lot.

‘Want to take a guess on how many of that six million were babies? Go on, take a guess. Of course the total dead was fifty million, in total I mean, everybody on all sides I mean, biggest category probably Russian soldiers but let’s stick with the babies shall we, the babies gassed and burned, out of six million people who just happened to be Jewish, no, how many babies?’

He conjured the image of a family being rounded up by the Gestapo. He watched the image in his head, like a flash of archive news footage in black and white, a sturdy father in a long black coat, a mother white-faced with fear, six or eight children, perhaps? A baby, clutched in the arms of the eldest daughter because the mother had her hands full helping the smaller children into the back of a truck with its tailgate down. The father and the eldest boy were lifting up suitcases and then turning to assist a group of elderly people who were waiting patiently behind the family. A young soldier stood next to them, holding a rifle. One baby, perhaps, in a group of twelve or fourteen?

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he said, allowing — and that was a mistake — the hint of a sigh to enter his voice. Six million divided by fourteen. Did she really want him to do that particular calculation? Why was she bringing this up anyway?

‘Guess,’ she insisted.

‘I don’t know, three hundred, four hundred thousand. Are you serious?’

‘One million,’ Rita replied. ‘In the war on our continent in the middle of the century we happen to live in right now, the continent of the Renaissance and mass industrialisation and the vote and penicillin, we killed one million babies. Not out of ignorant prejudice at all, it was perfectly knowing and industrial. We put all that progress we’re so proud of to very good use. In living memory.’

Harper allowed a silence to speak the phrase, and your point is?

The village street was busy and he had slowed the car to a crawl because there was a man on a bicycle just ahead and to his left. The bicycle had two wooden cages of squashed chickens with dirty-white feathers slung either side of the saddle, held together by string. The man was standing up on the pedals as he cycled in his sarong and as they drew level, he glanced over his shoulder, slowed, then wobbled and fell against the side of the car. The cage scraped against the car door, sending the poor skinny chickens into a constrained flurry of panic.

‘Fuck!’ He braked more savagely than he needed to. He was flung against the steering wheel then back in his seat, momentarily winded.

Rita was wearing her seatbelt. She jerked forward a few inches before it caught her and pushed her back again. She sat while he recovered his breath, then said in a low, conciliatory voice, ‘A million of them, John, in living memory, and with industrial efficiency. Do you really think Europeans are in any position to lecture any other culture about barbarism?’

He drove straight through town and out the other side. She did not question where he was going. The road remained good for twenty minutes after town and then he turned the car off onto the poor, potted track. He wouldn’t be able to drive right up to the hut. The track ran beneath, and then they would have to cut up on foot along a narrow path that joined the one down to the river.

When he parked the car, she was still silent, so to break the tension he said, ‘Here’s where I am staying.’ He was about to ask, politely, if she wanted to see it or go back to town but before he could, she had opened her door. He had parked on a steep camber and she had to lever both hands against the doorframe to clamber out.

The hut loomed above them, a dark shape visible through the trees at the top of the steep path, about to disappear into dusk. She paused for a moment, turned to the valley. He thought, she feels it too, the singing stillness, alive with so much that is invisible

After a while, she said, ‘The villages are like this too. A short drive, and suddenly. .’ She was feeling the isolation of the place — and yet, for him, bringing her here had made it much less isolated. That was all you needed, one person, newer than you, to make a strange thing feel owned.

They looked at each other in a moment of truce. He gestured up the path.

As she walked ahead of him, he watched the slow side-to-side movement of her hips and wanted, very badly, to put his hands on them. He wanted no more talk.

On the veranda, he stood for a moment, looking around for any sign of Kadek, but he rarely came late afternoon or evening unless by prior arrangement. There would be a basic meal left on the desk, under a banana leaf.

The ornate doors were kept padlocked — not that that would make much difference to a determined intruder, or intruders. He took the small silver key from his trouser pocket, unlocked the padlock and placed it on the veranda table, pushed back both of the narrow doors and gestured for her to go in. She stepped over the threshold.

They were silent while she wandered around the hut, casting her gaze slowly over each object and item of furniture, looking round and seeing how it all added up to a kind of comfortable barrenness. He remembered what Francisca had said the first time she came to his bachelor flat in Amsterdam, many years ago. ‘You know, you should have tidied up, don’t you know what a woman thinks when they see a man’s habitat, is this the kind of life I would lead with this man?’ What was Rita gleaning about him from the few objects in the room?

‘It’s only a forest toilet outside I’m afraid, and a bak mandi, although I usually just wash with a bowl on the veranda in the mornings, to watch the sunrise. Kadek brings water from up the hill, there are streams that feed into the river.’

She looked at the ceiling. ‘No fan?’

He indicated a rusty desk fan that sat in the corner. ‘Only that, but the electricity is pretty poor. I have a couple of kerosene lamps if I need them.’

‘I love the smell of those.’

Stay with me, he thought. Stay here tonight. We can share the food that Kadek has left. We can sit cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, and I will feed you rice balled up between my fingers.

‘You know I can’t stay the night,’ she said, as she turned.

He thought of the possibility that he would be visited during the hours of darkness by a killing squad. This was ridiculous, this fantasy of his, that she was looking round the hut and imagining a life with him. They hardly knew each other. She knew nothing, nothing about the world and certainly nothing about him. A million babies. Who the fuck did she think she was? ‘I wasn’t going to invite you.’

‘Okay, there’s no need to be rude about it.’

And suddenly, it was as if they were having a full-blown marital row, facing each other full on, speaking too loudly and too quickly; as if they had, all at once, reached the stage that couples who have known each other for many years eventually reach, where the arguments are always the same argument and the victor merely the one who is most vehement on that particular occasion.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you today and I don’t know where your cynicism comes from,’ she said, ‘but most of the people who live in this country are lucky if they eat each day, and maybe we should. .’

At that point, without any conscious decision to escalate things between them, Harper shot out his hand and grasped her upper arm and spat, ‘How can you be afraid of some dog in the street, some starved dog you could kick aside, one foot, in your strappy sandals, and he would slink off? Some mangy little monkey, who would run away backwards just if you. . if you. . lifted your hand? Do dogs and monkeys have knives or guns? You think your Ni Wayan is so charming or your driver so kind because he takes you to the water temple? How can people like you be so stupid? Now? At this time? Don’t you know what’s going on in Jakarta and the other cities? People have been burnt to death in shopping malls, beaten to death in the streets. You live in this country. Don’t you even follow the news?’

This speech poured out of him and all the while he continued to grasp her upper arm, just to ensure her attention he thought, but then he realised that instead of wrenching herself away and spitting back — something like of course I do — she had let the arm go limp in his grasp and cast her gaze to the ground. Francisca would have been yelling at him by now, jabbing her finger in his chest — for all her mild manners, she was snarly and argumentative enough when she chose. Rita was behaving quite differently. He saw the neutral look on her face and realised it was the look of a woman who had extensive experience of a man with a temper, a woman who knew how to become perfectly still.

The scar on her belly, the absence of any mention of her past or a child dead or alive and her reaction to him now conjoined to form an image of her particular tragedy. It came to him in one piece: a man who hit her, a child taken away or left behind, the price she had to pay for her own freedom and sanity, perhaps — and he thought, oh no, and let her arm drop, expecting her to turn away or rub the arm but instead she stood motionless before him, still staring at the ground, as if she was waiting to see whether there was any more where that came from. He had done much worse than this, as well as witnessing worse and doing nothing — but watching this large, soft woman standing carefully in front of him, he could not have felt more ashamed.

He took a step back, to indicate that he was not going to touch her again. Please look at me, he thought. If you look, you will see it in my face. I am not like him. I think men who hit women are scum, beneath contempt.

She would not look at him and he did not want to speak until she raised her gaze. When she did, she did not look him in the face. Instead, she stared into the corner of the room behind him, then said very quietly, ‘John, what happened to you?’