Black Water

III Black Water (1998)

He was sitting on the veranda of his hut, smoking, and watching dawn break across the valley above the Ayung River. The steep wall of palm trees emerged from the dark, grey at first, then lighter and lighter but still monochrome, then magically green. The call of birds in the trees; the humming stillness of the air; it was there. It had always been there. And here was the thing both mysterious and obvious, he thought: the relentlessness of dawn, the fact that whatever had occurred in the hours of darkness, the light came and illuminated it all.

After they had killed him, it would be silent inside the hut. His corpse would lie in the pitch black for a while. There he would be; motionless, unbreathing, alone. As dawn broke, the scene inside the hut would become colourised. The light would reveal that his skin had been rendered ashen by death. There would be a pool of blood, already oxidising, dark against the wooden floor — or more livid, perhaps, if he was lying on the white sheets of his bed. He thought of Kadek arriving that morning, finding the shutters smashed and heavy doors ajar and entering, slowly and carefully, surveying the scene. They would mutilate him, the boys. They would feel the need to kill him more than once. A gaping neck, limbs detached: he didn’t want Kadek to have images like that in his head. Kadek wasn’t even born when the massacres happened in 1965.

It was the pictures, the pictures in your head — you never escaped them. He knew that now.

He finished the kretek and held the stub for a while between his fingers, then rose and took the two steps to the edge of the veranda, leaning his elbows on it and looking out over the valley.

‘Smoking first thing?’

Rita stood in the doorway behind him, dressed only in her underwear and one of his shirts, unbuttoned to her waist and crumpled. Her face was pale and tired, a little puffy from sleep. She smiled and stepped over the threshold.

He glanced to the left. There was no sign of Kadek as yet. He reached out an arm and drew her to him, positioning her so she faced outwards to look at the valley, then standing behind her with his arms wrapped round her, pressing her against the wooden rail. They stood like that for a while, then he lifted his hand, cleared her hair from where it was tangled with the shirt collar, kissed the back of her neck.

‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said, softly. ‘It was a gift, from you, I think.’

He didn’t reply. The previous night, he had told her about ’65: I was a young man; I was a courier; I delivered a list of names. The Americans drew up lists of thousands of Communists or suspected Communists and then they gave those lists to the Indonesian military command and those people were taken out of their homes with their families and they were tortured and killed. I was one of the people who facilitated that process. I was just doing my job, you could say, but unlike a lot of people, I had an opportunity to not do my job. I spent a night in a shack by the black water of a Jakarta canal and in the chaos of that time it would have been easy to lose the particular list I was carrying; I had been caught up in a riot, after all. I would have returned home a failure but nobody would have known that I had lost it deliberately, no real harm would have come to me. Maybe it would have made a difference; maybe not. But I didn’t throw the list into the canal. I delivered it as I had been told to do, and those people were almost certainly rounded up the following day, while I was sitting having a beer with a man called Abang and watching the Bali Beach Hotel being built and feeling grateful to be off Java.

‘You were a spy?’ she had asked.

‘No, spies work for governments. People like me get hired to do the jobs that governments don’t want to give their spies, or don’t want to get caught giving them. We work for anyone, mostly, we work for oil companies, mining companies, banks.’

‘Mercenaries, then.’

‘My firm would be very offended if you called them that. It’s a lot more sophisticated than that, well it is now, back then, it was the Wild West.’

He had not told her about his visit to Komang, or what had happened in the night that followed.

He had told her about going home to Holland afterwards and having a breakdown, about leaving his company and living in the countryside for a while. He had not told her that, four years later, he went back to work for the same firm, that he had worked for them at a desk job ever since. Once you were in, you were in. He was hardly going to retrain as a schoolteacher or dentist.

He had told her about his years in Los Angeles, the time with Poppa and Nina and Michael and his mother. He had told her that his little brother had drowned — he had not told her that Bud had only been floating in the pool of icy water because he had dared him to do it.

He had told her his mother had been an alcoholic: he had not told her she was still alive. He had told her about his short-lived marriage to Francisca but not how recent it was or that they had had a baby — and, somehow, all these half-truths had combined in his head to form something coherent, whole, something he could maintain, if he stayed with this woman — the trick was to forget that you were lying.

‘Why did you come back?’ she had asked.

People talked about the past as if it was a thing, an object: the past, like the box or the house or the tree — as if it was solid and singular. But the past wasn’t an object with boundaries but something fluid and continuous, like a river. Nobody had one past. In 1965 he remembered 1950 in a certain way, and now in 1998, he remembered 1965 differently from how it was and 1950 differently from how he had remembered it in 1965. It was like standing in a box of mirrors and turning to see your reflection multiplied back and forth at you in endless iterations — except, in his case, each reflection was slightly different.

The last time he had seen his mother was a year ago, the summer of 1997. He had called in on a Sunday morning — Francisca made him go. ‘I’m going to see Aunty Lies, I’m going all that way, the least you can do is call in on your mother.’ Francisca, his wife, had adopted his elderly mother and aunt — in Harper’s view, they were poor substitutes for the children he and Francisca had been unable to have. Children got less time-consuming the older they became: with the parental generation, it seemed to work the other way around.

His mother lived in a huge and gloomy house on Noorderstraat; a mausoleum, he thought, full of the relics of a dead husband, a long-dead marriage. All her life Anika had been short of money, until the point when she was beyond having use for it. Now she lived in a house she could have sold for a fortune, bought herself a new apartment and had plenty to spare, easily enough for the clothes and make-up and nights out she had craved all her life. But she was in no fit state to make that sort of choice by then. She put her clothes on anyhow, in whatever mismatched form came most readily to hand. Her make-up frequently migrated from the part of the face to which it had been applied. She rarely left her home. She smelled.

It was a light morning, the sun still pale, the air fresh. He trotted up the stone steps, lifted and dropped the heavy knocker, stepped back. His mother was easily alarmed if she thought someone was trying to shoulder their way into the house — she had slammed the door shut in his face before now. The door opened a few inches and he glimpsed a straggle of grey hair before Anika turned and ambled back inside, leaving the door ajar. Harper stepped over the threshold slowly, pushing at the door, then closing it behind him with a small shove that, however gentle, thudded with the resonance of fifty years of accumulated filial guilt. His mother had wandered back into the sitting room. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning and, yes, she was drunk.

The hallway was dark but the sitting room darker still. It took a while for his eyes to adjust, then he saw the small figure of his mother, collapsed into the sagging chair in the corner, her tiny form swathed in a purple dress with a silver thread through it, once one of her favourites, and a huge green wool cardigan on top. She was barefoot and her gnarled ankles protruded from the bottom of the dress, like a wizened child dressed in adult’s clothing. She was only in her mid-seventies but at a glance seemed so shrunken, with thinning grey hair and bald patches, that she looked nearer ninety. Aunty Lies, ten years older, bulky, in a nursing home on account of her gout, was much more robust.

‘Let’s open the shutters,’ Harper said, walking over to them. ‘It is summer, after all.’

‘Don’t forget to leave the cake, you know, on the table, don’t forget, last time you forgot.’ Harper realised that in that particular moment — it could change at any time — she thought he was one of the home helps he hired to visit his mother, cook meals she rarely ate, keep her company for a bit. Wine and cake. He wondered what a diet of wine and cake did to your digestive system. He decided not to dwell on the thought.

The light from the tall windows illuminated the chaos of the room — the jars with rotting flowers glued into viscous brown liquid that sat in rows on top of the piano, the piles of yellowing newspapers on the sofa — she had yet to cancel her last husband’s subscription to a fishing magazine although he had been dead for nine years — the dirty plates and cutlery poking from beneath the chairs. Harper wondered briefly whether he should close the shutters again. His mother would forget to do it later and leave them open all night — but the thought of sitting in dusty darkness with her on a summer day made him feel as though he might suffocate.

‘Shall I make you a cup of coffee, Ma?’ he asked.

‘Don’t come here with your moaning and crying,’ his mother muttered, and Harper guessed that now she was referring to the occasion, many years ago, when the wife of one of her married lovers had turned up on the doorstep with two children and wept and begged Anika to leave their family alone. Anika had slammed the door in her face, then turned to Harper — fifteen years old, standing in the hallway — and said, ‘You should hear what he says about her, she nags at him all the time. She deserves to lose her husband if she behaves like that.’

He thought about going into the kitchen but the state it would be in would be even more depressing than the sitting room and his mother wouldn’t drink the coffee anyway. He sat and talked to her for a while but it became clear she wasn’t coherent and it would be a brief visit. Perhaps that was why he asked, that day.

‘Ma, do you remember Bud?’

Anika didn’t answer. She moistened her lips, clutching at the small glass tumbler that looked like it had recently held some sticky liqueur.

‘Bud, Ma,’ he repeated. ‘He was christened Joseph but we all called him Bud. Michael’s son.’ He wasn’t going to help her out by adding, your son too.

‘Michael. .’ she said slowly, savouring the word, the ghost of a smile on her face. ‘Michael. .’ She roused herself in her chair, using her elbows on the armrests to lever herself more upright, smiling openly now, looking at him, then lifting a bony finger.

‘You know, baby boy,’ she said. She hadn’t called him baby boy in a while. ‘The only one I ever really loved was Michael.’

Harper looked at her.

‘It’s true,’ she said, a little indignantly, suddenly lucid and seeing him, seeing his look. She pushed a few strands of grey hair back from her face, then patted at it, as if it was still bouffant. ‘He was the one, the one for me. Michael. Handsomest man ever, and so tall.’ Her face darkened again. ‘I was broken-hearted when he ran out on me. The Tatum Pole Boogie, now that was something. You think these old farmer types ever even heard anything like that?’ She waved her hand towards the window to encompass the various men since Michael, or the whole male population of Amsterdam, perhaps — possibly the European continent.

‘California. .’ she said in a singsong voice. ‘Now that was where we should have stayed. We only came back for your education. We should have stayed. I was happy there.’

Harper closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again to fix an expression on his face that would hide his despair. Was it possible that his mother, in her alcohol-induced dementia, had rewritten the history of their lives so comprehensively that she really believed they had come back to the Netherlands for his welfare? The thing about your mother is, Poppa had said, nothing is ever her fault. And he knew then that it was truer than it had ever been, that his mother, in her relentless quest for love, had gone crashing around the world wreaking havoc in other people’s lives and never once paused to consider that any other person had a right to happiness but herself. That included her own son. He was fifty-four years old. Maybe it was time to divorce his mother.

Bud had been a tall, solid boy, a little tank, Nina used to say. He liked sucking lemons, of all things. Nina would slice one in two for him and put one half face-down on a saucer to stop it drying out, then give him the other to chew on. He would wander around all day with it pressed against his mouth, eyes twinkling. ‘Nicolaath,’ he would say — he had a slight lisp as a toddler, he had already grown out of it when he died — ‘Nicolaath, why don’t you like lemonth?’ When he said this, he would beam, as if the existence of lemonth meant that all was right with the world.

‘But Bud, Ma, do you remember Bud?’

His mother stared at him, pursing her lips, frown lines two deep tracks on her brow, tipping her head to one side with a slightly coquettish air, rifling her memories of husbands and ex-husbands and other women’s husbands. . And he knew that the only thing he wanted to do was to run away from her as far and as fast as possible, and to be on the other side of the world when she died.

He walked slowly back down Noorderstraat after his visit to his mother — not because he was reluctant to leave her behind, alone in the mausoleum, but because he was unwilling to arrive back home. Francisca wouldn’t be there until later but once he got back, there was a small job he had promised he would do while she was out: fix the top drawer of the chest of drawers. It was sticking: it annoyed her every morning. ‘When will you fix this thing?’

The summer air was still light, not too hot, the sky still pale and fresh. It occurred to him that the most enjoyable part of this Sunday would be the walk from one obligation to another — that neither his mother’s large dark house or his wife’s small bright one held any sense of comfort for him, that the place he felt most at home was in the transition between the two.

His boss had been asking him for some time how he would feel about returning to Indonesia, given his background knowledge of the archipelago. They had just widened the currency trading band from eight per cent to twelve per cent: the rupiah was heading down and given what was happening elsewhere in the region, their clients were getting twitchy. He had been prevaricating — he hadn’t discussed the possibility with Francisca — and at one point his boss had said, ‘Is it because of what happened before, in sixty-five?’

‘No,’ he said, with a small smile. ‘That was thirty-two years ago.’

He liked his current boss; Gregor was long gone, Jan was solid and decent, had said to him once, ‘You know, I’m horrified what we exposed young operatives to back then, wouldn’t happen now, not on my watch.’

He had not thought about Jan’s suggestion too much at the time. He was an old man now; he had his commitment to Francisca. The Asia Department was huge in comparison with the sixties and in the intervening three decades the company had gone from a score of operatives plus back-up staff to hundreds of employees in Amsterdam alone — that was before you counted the offices in most capital cities in the world. There were plenty of other people they could send. Now though, as he walked back home, it came to him clear and clean. If he went to Indonesia, he would get away from. . everything.

He did a small inventory of his life. It was 1997 and he was fifty-four years old: fifty-five later that year: a middle-aged man, married with no children, who had had a disrupted childhood and a dramatic youth but had spent the last three decades behind a desk. His mother hardly knew who he was any more. His marriage was not in a good state: he had known it for some time but this was the first occasion he thought it out loud to himself. Interesting, that, how you could know something and yet take so long to acknowledge it in so many words.

As he walked, he also acknowledged to himself that he had known it wasn’t a good idea at the time. He had married for the novelty value: it was one of the few mistakes he hadn’t made yet, after all. And still, they had tried for the baby, and then after the baby had died, they had had their grief to nurse instead, to wean and to raise, until it became old enough for them to have a little more time to themselves. That was four years ago. The grief should be a bit less dependent by now, he thought, play on its own sometimes, sleep through the night. Why was it still giving them broken nights? What were they getting wrong?

As he walked back to the small house he shared with his wife, he thought about Jan’s offer to send him back to Indonesia. Francisca, brave and delicate and throwing herself into caring for his elderly relatives in the absence of a child to care for; their pleasant home, very much to her taste; their occasional dinners with friends, all Francisca’s; his one-sided conversations with his mother. . that was the inventory, that was the sum of it.

After they had lost the baby, his mother had gone through a short period of sobriety and, despite her dislike of Francisca, the two of them had come to some kind of accommodation. It was an accommodation that filled Harper with disgust. His mother’s love of tragedy was well established. When Francisca had been his pretty, happy girlfriend, then wife, Anika couldn’t have been less interested. Then Francisca became a weeping stick with a lost child and all at once his mother couldn’t wait to claim her as her daughter-in-law, to have a piece of all that drama. They even went shopping together a couple of times, met up for hot chocolate, until his mother’s relapse back into drunkenness.

Francisca’s response was, as ever, less cynical. ‘Oh Nicolaas,’ she sighed to him, when he expressed his exasperation at his mother’s sudden interest in their lives, ‘hasn’t it occurred to you, she lost her granddaughter? It was probably her only chance at a grandchild. Of course she has a right to grieve with us.’ His frank opinion was that Francisca was being far too generous.

*

Francisca returned from visiting Aunt Lies at the end of the afternoon and they cooked pasta together in the kitchen, him slicing garlic and tomatoes, her making the salad. They made companionable conversation about the relative states of health of the two old women and Francisca said, ‘You know, for some reason Aunty Lies got on to how your father first came to the house, in Leiden, and how crazy your mother was, how handsome he was, this army officer, it was really sweet. I didn’t know the rest of the family never spoke to her again, because she went back to Indonesia with him. Imagine. Her stepfather gave permission then cut her off without a penny. Crazy, huh? Did you know all that?’

‘Yeah. .’ he murmured, rinsing a tomato beneath the tap and placing it on a wooden chopping board.

‘You’ve never talked about it much, don’t you think that’s a bit… well. .’

He had his back to her. He rolled his eyes, knowing she couldn’t see him do it, and brought the knife down on the tomato, which was pale, unripe. The knife was blunt and the skin resisted the pressure of the blade, then parted. ‘I hope she didn’t tell you he was the love of Anika’s life and she’s never recovered. Anika was saying the same thing about Michael this morning. Michael was the love of her life, apparently. Next week, she’ll be saying it about Jan.’ Jan Aaltink was the barrel-chested farmer Anika had married on her return to the Netherlands in 1952, the second of four stepfathers she offered her son over the decades.

Francisca didn’t reply. She was standing over the salad bowl and turning lettuce over with her fine, pale hands. Harper knew that silence — it was the one that descended when Francisca was deciding how to phrase a criticism in the most non-confrontational manner possible. ‘Why are you so hard on your mother?’ she said eventually. ‘It was a brave thing to do, don’t you think? Marrying a mixed-race officer, in that day and age, going to the other side of the world with him, then a war breaking out, stuck there. Don’t you think you could forgive her for once? Everything she went through?’

He wasn’t in the mood for this. He slammed the knife down on its side on the chopping board, exhaling with a derisive ugh sound, turning.

‘Okay okay!’ Francisca said quickly, lifting her hands.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about everything she went through all my life, over and over again, I’ve heard about how awful it was, giving birth to me in the camp, her endless suffering. . Everyone, everywhere, has always let her down. .’ He glared at Francisca. ‘Funny, though, I’ve never once heard her say anything about how it might have been quite hard for me, her behaviour.’

Francisca’s voice became calm and measured then, with that placating wheedle that annoyed him so much. She would wheedle for the first half hour of an argument, then snap. It was always a relief when she snapped. ‘I know it was hard for you too. I’m able to see that because in comparison with you, I’ve had an easy life, but the things that happened to your mother. .’

‘Yes, yes, don’t you think I’ve had this conversation?’

‘She saw it, Nicolaas.’

They stared at each other across the small kitchen. Malachi, their thin grey cat, slunk through the small gap in the kitchen door, which was ajar, walked across the room with her tail in the air, leapt up onto the counter-top and then looked at them both, unblinking, waiting to be picked up and dropped back down onto the floor.

Francisca turned, reached out an absent-minded hand and stroked Malachi’s head. ‘She saw it, you know. I don’t think either of us can imagine what it must be like to see something so horrible at such a young age, how it must affect you.’

He looked at her.

‘Aunty Lies told me today. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not. I was thinking about it all the way home. I don’t know why she started talking about it now but she did. I think maybe she was upset. You never go.’

Francisca had always been much better at visiting Aunt Lies than Harper, or Anika for that matter.

‘I said something about how I wished that you and your mother got on a bit better, and we were talking about how angry you always are with your mother.’

He thought, you know, sometimes I get really sick of women talking about me behind my back.

‘And she said how your mum had always told you the heroic version of your father being killed in order to protect you, so that you would remember him as a heroic soldier, holding out in battle in the hills. She thought it was important for a boy to feel that way about his father, particularly one who died in the war, you know, that time, all the boys who lost fathers, they all had to believe they were heroes, died saving comrades or something, not real, not how things really were.’ Francisca stopped stroking Malachi, bent and kissed the top of the cat’s head, picked her up and put her gently on the floor.

Harper returned to chopping tomatoes. ‘Yes, well, Lies is forgetting she told me the real version. The end of the street, just because he was caught out after curfew. She told me when I was very young. And actually, I think it’s stupid to make out he was a hero. He was entitled to be terrified, in those circumstances, to try and save his own life and his wife’s life too, anyone was.’ He had always wondered why Aunt Lies had told him the real version of his father’s death. She had told him in great secrecy one day when his mother was out, and made him promise never to ask his mother about it.

‘She didn’t forget that actually. She remembered, she was halfway through telling you the whole story but you were only small and she stopped short. She remembered the whole conversation. What she didn’t go on to tell you was that your mother saw it.’

‘Saw what?’ he said, stupidly.

They were facing each other now, him still holding the blunt knife and Francisca’s fine, narrow features stretched, open-eyed, in an expression that swam with pity, but whether the pity was for him or his mother or simply all the suffering in the world, he couldn’t surmise.

‘Oh Nicolaas, your mother saw your father beheaded. She heard a commotion at the end of the street. Pregnant with you, just a girl, imagine that. She ran down the street and she saw her husband beheaded in front of her. She had no one but him. And you wonder why she has been drunk half her life and spent the other half trying to steal other women’s husbands?’

Harper turned violently then and stared down at the chopping board, so angry that he couldn’t speak. Malachi the cat had been winding round his legs while Francisca had been speaking but now slunk swiftly towards the door.

Francisca returned to the salad. ‘You think anyone ever really recovers? Seeing something like that?’

There was a moment then — he saw it briefly, like a narrowing shaft of light through a door that is swinging shut — when he could have told Francisca about some of the things he had seen when he was a young man, and some of the things he had done, but all he said was a soft, low, ‘No,’ and the door closed.

Jan asked him again the following week. The economic crisis was precipitating unrest across the region, the office in Jakarta could use someone who had experience in analysis and that was what he had been doing the last thirty years, after all.

This time, he didn’t even pause — he remembered that later; he didn’t ask for more details or wonder aloud what the package was. He just said, ‘Yes, sure. I’ll go.’

When he told Francisca that he was going to Indonesia and he didn’t know how long he would be gone, she stared at him for a while, then said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘You can’t run from the sadness inside you all your life, Nicolaas. Don’t you realise you just take it with you?’

Later that night, when the debate had become more shrieky, she jabbed him in the middle of the chest with her finger and snapped, ‘So you’re running out on everything, on me, your mother, your responsibilities, well go then, let’s see how happy you are when the only responsibility you have is to stare at your reflection in the mirror.’

That night, as he lay on the sofa with the soft bulk of the spare blanket over him, thick and woollen and pale blue, he thought, I’ll sign the house over to her, that’s only fair. How soon can I start packing? Not tomorrow, that would be unkind. I’ll leave it to the weekend.

In the departure lounge at Schiphol airport, he stared at the other passengers and tried not to enjoy it too much: that feeling, transience, as if three decades of settled life had been nothing more than the waiting room between one journey and the next. My life can be divided into threes, he thought. There was the first part of his life, before 1965, with its disrupted phases, its ocean crossings: Indonesia, Los Angeles, Holland. There was what came after ’65, the quiet decades, three of them, mostly sat behind a desk in Amsterdam. Then there was this third and final phase; his return. Indonesia was the three-legged stool on which his life was balanced.

Then, with one brief change of planes at Singapore, he was hauling his briefcase from the overhead locker and arching his back to ease its stiffness, shuffling behind an elderly woman in the aeroplane aisle and descending the steel steps of the plane onto the tarmac of Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta airport. Then shall a boat fly in the sky. The ancient prophecy had come true.

The Jakarta office had offered to pick him up but he said he’d get a cab from the rank at the airport: he wanted to arrive alone, to absorb his first impressions. As they hit the flyover, the driver began to drift inattentively from lane to lane at speed, and he remembered what it was like, the feeling that he was in a place where anything could happen at any moment. He stared out of the window with a small engine of adrenaline in his stomach. This was fun. The six-lane highways were still there, cutting a swathe through the city — pedestrian walkways had been built over them, that was an improvement, although they looked a little on the rickety side. And everywhere, the skyscrapers, the international banks, the hotels — yes, thirty years of human rights suppression had brought the foreign investment flooding in. He wondered what had happened to the huge expanses of kampong, crammed together, the rivulets of small canals and irrigation ditches, shacks and market places — later, he would discover they were just intersected by the freeways, squeezed between the twenty-eight or thirty-two or forty-seven storeys of the steel and glass buildings that stood like knives pointing upwards in the new Central Business District, stretching high to the white and clouded, dust-filled, sagging sky.

Each building seemed an oddity, as his car sped by. They passed one block where every floor had a balcony jutting out at a different angle and each balcony and roof above it had greenery in profusion, creepers and climbers and palms. He supposed it was intended to beautify the concrete beneath, but instead it looked as though the building was a remnant in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the humans had all fled, a jungle was reclaiming the city and it would not be surprising if pumas stalked the streets.

Then they were pulling up at the hotel he was booked into for the first few days of his stay, while an apartment was got ready, and a liveried doorman opened his door with a white-gloved hand, bestowing a smile. A porter hastened to lift his bag from the boot and as he got out of the car he was momentarily dazzled by the light striking the silent spin of the glass revolving door that swept him through to an air-conditioned lobby. Inside, a young woman glided towards him with a tray on which there was a damp towel rolled tightly in a cylinder shape and a perspiring glass of mango juice. He thought of the airless guesthouse he had stayed in as a young man, thirty years ago, and reflected that there were a few benefits to being middle-aged and a desk-based senior economic analyst rather than a young undercover operative.

The Institute’s Jakarta office was in a modern slab of a building in Setiabudi. He got a cab there to start off with, when he was staying at the hotel, but at the end of his first week he moved to an apartment that was walking distance from the office. He spent a lot of time in the apartment at first: it was a relief to be in a calm white box; silent, entirely his. His job was to acclimatise, read a lot of reports, make contact with the local clients and with government officials: he would be befriending civil servants rather than gangsters this time around. President Soeharto, Father of Development, had been in power for thirty-two years, but there was no sign that he, or the many relatives of his who held one office or another, would be vacating their seats any time soon.

He didn’t rush to prowl the streets in the way he had done on his last visit. He was an old man now. Instead of running with the youths or hanging out in expat bars talking to journalists, he worked at the Institute’s office or stayed at home in the white apartment, where a cleaner came daily and the brown leather sofa was cracked but pliant. For the first few weeks, he spent almost every evening there, doing his homework, watching the news and studying reports of how the Asian economic crash had come about. He brushed up his Indonesian, which came back to him with pleasing clarity. He continued to plough his way through a Dutch study of Prelambang Jayabaya: ancient prophecies had their uses at a time like this, in a country like this. He learned the Pancasila principles, which the politicians quoted endlessly. He took the paperwork part of his job very seriously. That was what he was, now.

Two weeks after his arrival, one Saturday, when he was reading on the brown leather sofa in the white apartment with the air conditioning on full, the telephone rang. It was Francisca. It was breakfast time in Amsterdam and he guessed, as soon as she spoke, that she had not slept well.

‘Hi. .’ she said, her voice still slurred with sleep. He pictured her standing in the kitchen in her lemon-yellow robe, waiting for the coffee to brew — she drank it black and piping hot, pouring small amounts each time into her favourite blue demitasse. He felt certain she had decided to call him on impulse.

‘Hi. .’ he replied, thinking of her thin frame and the belt on the robe pulled tight, the tumble of curls on her head. He felt the tug of familiarity. He had liked to hold her head against his chest in bed — or was it simply that she had liked to rest her head on him and he had put his hand there, on the back of her head, instinctively, because it was expected? All he knew was that in that moment, he felt the allure of that — the picture and feeling of it seemed suddenly clear across the thousands of miles that separated them. A relationship as long as theirs could not help but have a half-life, however certain they both were that it was over.

‘How’s it going. .?’ she asked, softly, and they talked of nothing for a while. She had woken lonely and had rung to comfort herself with the sound of his voice. ‘How’s work?’ she asked, but he could hear her moving around the kitchen and knew she wasn’t really listening to what he was saying any more than she had done when they were together, any more than he had done to her. That was what it was like, after a few years: you could conduct a relationship on automatic pilot, thank God.

‘Local firms are really suffering now,’ he said, just making conversation. ‘The devaluation’s showing up in their balance sheets, can’t get rid of their own currency fast enough, buying what few dollars they can while they can buy any. It’s bad.’

‘Mmmm. .’ replied Francisca. She had, over the years, perfected the art of the non-committal, encouraging noise that kept him talking while her mind was elsewhere. ‘Always is, though, isn’t it?’ He heard her take a sip of coffee.

‘This one’s different,’ he replied. ‘Nobody can buy anything imported any more, think what that means.’

‘Mmmm, really?’

Francisca worked as a personnel manager for a medium-sized clothing import business out at Muiderpoort. She knew plenty about how currency rates affected businesses, but he had never been able to persuade her to debate the wider picture with him. It had always annoyed him that a woman as intelligent as her didn’t take more interest in global affairs, but then people who lived in countries with hard currencies couldn’t grasp it: the idea that your job, your home, your life could be as vulnerable to currency changes as they would be to a tidal wave that engulfed your house in water.

‘It’s Christmas soon. I miss you,’ she said then, a catch in her throat, and he knew that was a lie, and that he didn’t miss her either. It was just the ghosts of their former selves on the phone to each other, mimicking the past.

It wasn’t Christmas in Jakarta, and by January, you needed more than eleven thousand rupiah to buy yourself one single dollar.

Each morning, Harper rose with the dawn and set off early — the hot walk to the office was infinitely preferable to the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car. It was either wet or dusty, rarely sunny. The anti-government or pro-government protest demos were mostly further north, on the Hotel Indonesia roundabout or Merdeka Square. The old Hotel Indonesia was showing its age and era; it had been declared a national heritage site. Sixties architecture wasn’t chic and modern these days but a relic in need of preservation. What it really needed was a big multinational to come in and modernise and restore it, but who was going to do that now, with everything so unstable?

There was a six-lane dual carriageway just before his office. Before he crossed it, he would stop by a food stall on the corner, outside a blue shopping mall, and eat standing up, then buy all the newspapers from the stand next to it. He was often first in at their unlovely, grey stone building, sandwiched between two much more glamorous, gleaming towers. He would unlock, open the shutters in his office, the only one that had any natural light. There were six local staff now — the three Harper worked with were a man the same age as him, Wahid, and two young women who acted mostly as translators and administrators, well-educated young people who were hoping that if they worked all hours then one day this Western firm might actually start paying them properly. Wahid reminded Harper a little of his old colleague from before, Abang, a phlegmatic type, did his job, fed his family, rarely passed judgement. What had happened to Abang? He must be in his seventies now, or dead.

Amber and Wahid would arrive not long after him and Amber would make them all coffee while Harper spread the papers across his desk and turned his computer on to this thing called email that he still didn’t like, messages that took forever to fill the screen, line by line. It was, in his opinion, a lot less efficient than picking up the phone.

The local client base still worked mostly by phone and every day Amber was fielding more and more calls from companies wanting to know what was going to happen, what should they do? In February, the government announced a twenty-five-day ban on all street protest. Such bans always led to an increase in whatever activity they were trying to prevent. Amsterdam started to get twitchy: well, the clients started getting twitchy and that communicated itself to Harper and his team via Amsterdam. Harper advised that the large-scale companies, the important international clients, should sit tight. This kind of instability had been going on and off for years — Soeharto would never allow chaos on his watch.

‘Are you sure?’ Jan in Amsterdam kept asking. ‘Our credibility is at stake here. If things are going to go belly up out there, our clients want to be warned, they don’t want to get caught out.’ Nobody knew what was going to happen in Jakarta well in advance, least of all people who lived in Jakarta.

Then in May, something did happen: a protest at Trisakti University, four students shot dead. Later, they would call it the Trisakti Incident — but it wasn’t an incident when it happened, it was the army shooters getting trigger-happy after months of unrest and, possibly, just the beginning. Jakarta exploded.

That was when Amsterdam sent in Henrikson.

When it all kicked off, Harper was in his apartment, watching the riots on a small TV sheltered by the doors of a walnut cabinet opposite the brown leather sofa. He had been at home writing a report all day and only turned on the television that evening. The commentary complained of forces conspiring against the people as the camera showed a street where young men were aiming sideways kicks at shop fronts, flying it seemed, their bodies at improbable horizontals, and then suddenly, at the front of the screen, two women were laughing and rushing toward the camera, carrying something heavy between them. Harper sat upright, thinking for a moment they were carrying a human torso, then realised that they were struggling with a huge, frozen joint of meat, heavy enough to bend them double and threatening to slip from their grasp as they ran. They passed behind the cameraman and beyond them was revealed a man who lifted something and shook it in the air triumphantly. It looked like a plastic mop handle. Beyond him, there were the hurrying figures of a crowd criss-crossing the street, each person carrying something, and, dimly, beyond them, black smoke pouring out of a shop. This was what happened when you made people’s lives harder and harder: eventually, things got so hard there was nothing to lose. Why fear retribution when your life is a punishment already?

He picked up the phone and tried to get through to Wahid: he tried the office line but there was no answer, then tried him at home but his line was engaged. All this was going to make a nervous client base very unhappy — there had been stories of people fleeing to the airport and getting carjacked by looters on the flyover. Failing to reach Wahid, he wondered if he should check in with Amsterdam. Then he had another beer and went to bed.

He knew, as he turned off his light, that that was not what he should be doing: but he told himself that what was going to happen would happen, and the best thing was to get a good night’s sleep, then call Wahid for an update as soon as he woke up.

His pager went off before dawn. As soon as he heard the beep, he knew he had made the wrong call the night before. He called the office back home, as the message demanded. Jan — solid, unflappable Jan — was not happy. He wanted to know what the hell Harper was doing in his apartment, why hadn’t he gone straight to the office as soon as word of the riots got out? Why hadn’t he spent the night at the office on the phone? There had been an emergency meeting of the Asia Department, he told him. They were sending in an extraction team for the clients. It would be led by an Extraction Specialist, Henrikson.

Harper sat on the side of his bed, the room very dark and stuffy and the sheet clinging to his thighs. He was still sweating from the sudden awakening. ‘If there’s an extraction plan, I can arrange it,’ he said firmly. ‘We’ve got the contacts.’ Perhaps if he was adamant enough he could convince his boss the clients were being melodramatic and he had it all under control.

‘It’s a long time since you’ve had to organise anything like that.’

Why not just say it, Harper thought. I’m old. I’m unreliable. You don’t trust me to manage an emergency. ‘I’m on the ground, and I have Wahid to help.’ He wasn’t going to lose this battle without arguing back.

‘Henrikson will be on the ground too, later today. Wahid has booked the car from the airport, he’s going to check into Le Méridien first and he’ll be at the office for a briefing early afternoon. We’ve told the clients to prepare their staff.’

‘We’re going to need SUVs, lots of them, there’s no point in trying to be discreet, people are getting carjacked, that’s why I haven’t. .’

Jan was in no mood to acknowledge Harper’s expertise. ‘Wahid is on the case with transport. Henrikson will do security. Your job is to liaise between them.’

‘But this. .’ Harper began.

‘Give him all the assistance he needs,’ his boss snarled then, dropping any pretence that this was a collaborative discussion. ‘Don’t get in his way. You’ve been telling us for weeks to sit tight, well the clients won’t sit tight any longer and now we’re having to extract them in an emergency situation. They’re not happy and neither am I.’

Henrikson showed up at the office later that day, in chinos and a polo shirt, fresh from his power shower at Le Méridien. He was medium-height and medium-build, white, brown-haired — everything about him was medium. He looked like a man designed by a committee whose specification was someone who would never, ever stand out in a crowd. The committee had got one thing wrong though: the directness in his grey-eyed gaze. When he greeted you, it was obvious he was just a little too well trained to be real.

‘Henrikson,’ Henrikson announced, to each staff member in turn, shaking their hand and looking them right in the eye.

‘Henrikson,’ Henrikson said to Harper, and when he shook his hand, he placed the other hand on top, to demonstrate a special affection — but only briefly. He didn’t want to come across as creepy. Harper imagined his boss telling Henrikson, ‘Harper might be a little funny about you taking over there, he’s old-school, so just go in slow and get him on side.’

‘Well,’ Henrikson said, after he had greeted them all, lifting his hands a little either side of his body in an expansive gesture and letting them drop, ‘it’s so good to meet you all. I hear you’ve all been doing terrific work out here.’ Harper was reassured by the certain knowledge that every other person in the room had taken an instant dislike to Henrikson as well.

In Harper’s office, Henrikson sat the other side of Harper’s desk and nodded very sincerely while Harper went through their client list, telling him which ones had already left. When it came to diplomatic staff, each government’s special forces had dealt with their own people, of course, immediately after Trisakti. The remaining clients were all commercial. Priority was getting families out. They debated whether spouses should be discouraged from giving press interviews when they arrived at their airports in London or Sydney or New York. Nothing made a better news item than an attractive and distressed wife clutching a child in her arms and talking about burning buildings. The media adored a white, articulate refugee.

Harper’s view was, let them talk. ‘You can hardly suppress the news coverage of what’s happening here. There’s nothing we can do about that.’

Henrikson placed the fingers of both hands to form a pyramid shape and nodded very sincerely. ‘Well, you’re the local expert,’ he said. Oh fuck off, Harper thought. ‘But I have to say that we had this discussion back in Amsterdam and company policy now is firm discouragement of anybody talking to the press; staff, clients, families. The potential for misrepresentation is just too high. We don’t want our client base thinking we let this become an emergency.’ The criticism of Harper’s sit tight policy was clear.

He chose to ignore it, thinking, he even talks like a training manual. I can’t believe I have to play these games at my age. ‘Well, the press can be very useful too.’

‘Agreed, agreed. .’ Henrikson nodded, firmly and repeatedly, quite dogged in his insistence on how much he agreed. ‘You’re quite right there. Well, I guess I’d better find me a desk and a phone so I can get going calling the clients.’ He clapped both of his hands on his knees, clamping down firmly. Harper noticed how muscled Henrikson’s legs were beneath his trousers. On one side of his neck, a thick vein pulsed and the purposefulness in his grey-eyed gaze was touched with the smallest hint of psychosis. God help us, Harper thought. This is what the Institute produces these days.

There was a light tap at the door and Wahid opened it. ‘Boss?’ he said to Harper.

‘What is it?’ Henrikson asked.

Wahid said to Harper, ‘Amber says we should go and take a look from the roof.’

Amber stayed in the office fielding calls while Harper, Henrikson, Wahid and two staff from the other team traipsed up the interior staircase until they reached the top floor. Wahid pushed open a blank door to the service corridor, where the pretence of the building’s painted walls and tiled floors fell away to reveal breezeblocks and a short iron staircase leading up to the roof. The light was bright white as they emerged, blinking. Wahid pointed and Harper saw immediately, looking north, the palls of black smoke rising from Old Jakarta, four columns, huge and black and billowing. To the right, further in the distance, was the blur of many more.

‘Amber took two calls at once,’ Wahid said. ‘Doesn’t sound all that spontaneous.’

‘Doesn’t look it either,’ Harper replied. ‘More than yesterday, you think?’

‘Lot more.’

Henrikson hitched his trousers, clapped his hands together, leaned towards them, then actually said, ‘Right, team.’

It was a week after the students had been shot. The shopping centre riots had died down, it seemed, but rumours were rife that soldiers were going round in plain clothes killing Chinese and raping women in gangs. They were saying hundreds dead — Harper’s staff thought it was far greater. Most of the families of their clients had been extracted and only essential personnel were left: even they were on standby. The Institute was taking the precaution of closing the office and moving ops to Le Méridien, a move that Harper thought a colossal waste of money. They were all working round the clock now.

As Harper came into Wahid’s office that morning, closing the door behind him, Wahid was standing by his desk, holding a claw hammer. He waved it at Harper.

Harper pulled a face. ‘As personal protection goes, that looks a little basic.’

‘It’s strong enough for a skull — but in fact, it’s for these.’ Wahid gestured with the hammer at his desk, which was scattered with floppy disks in blue plastic cases.

‘Is that necessary?’ Harper asked. They weren’t very big. Surely they could be hidden somewhere?

‘Henrikson’s orders,’ Wahid replied, tipping his head on one side and pursing his lips.

‘Where is that lump of meat this morning?’

‘One of the embassies or banks, he wouldn’t say.’

Harper and Wahid looked at each other then and both tapped the sides of their noses — a gesture Henrikson used when he didn’t answer a question.

‘Amber said he left some instructions for me, with you?’

‘Oh yes, this.’

Wahid put the hammer down and unlocked a small drawer in his desk. He withdrew a black, hardback notebook. ‘Client list, handwritten, did it last night. We’ve wiped the computers and the floppies are going.’ He gestured at the floppy disks with his hammer. ‘You’ve to take charge of this, Henrikson wants you to keep it at your apartment and take it to the hotel tomorrow, where he will personally place it in the safe inside his room.’

Harper groaned. ‘Why didn’t he just take it with him?’

‘He said he wants to interview hotel security before he lets the notebook into the building.’

‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ Wahid tapped the side of his nose again.

As Harper turned to go, the notebook in his jacket pocket, Wahid added, ‘By the way, there’s an Englishman here. He’s been waiting for you over an hour. Amber made the mistake of saying you’d be in at some point. He asked for you by name.’

‘What sort of Englishman?’

‘A client-type sort. But local commerce, small.’

‘Extractive industries or import and export?’

Wahid frowned down at the floppy disks. ‘Do you think this will damage my desk?’

‘Well, you aren’t going to damage the disks if you don’t.’

Wahid lifted a finger. ‘Good point,’ then picked up a handful of the disks, bent to put them in a neat pile on the floor and knelt beside them. ‘Extractive,’ he said, ‘but small-time and nearing his pay-off, I would say, I’m not even sure if he’s still paying subs.’ He brought the hammer down on the disks and the top one skidded across the room and smacked into a wall where it span and came to rest, undamaged.

‘Good luck with that,’ Harper said, as he reached for the door.

The Englishman was waiting in the small, empty room they used for meetings and interviews. The only decoration was a crispy-looking cactus plant in a red bowl on the windowsill — the window was frosted; it looked out over the internal corridor of the building — and a tattered, bleached map of Indonesia hanging from two bamboo poles and a piece of string slung over a nail on a wall.

In the middle of the room was a rectangular table with four chairs and the Englishman, whose stomach put his suit jacket under a certain degree of strain, was leaning back on one chair with his feet up on another. He had his eyes closed. On the table was a bottle of cheap whisky and two glasses, one half full.

‘Have you been waiting long?’ Harper asked politely. Damn, what was the man’s name?

The Englishman sat up quickly, put his feet down and shook his head as if he had been asleep. ‘Oh Harper, there you are, what took you?’ His voice was very slightly slurred.

‘Small matter of the city in uproar,’ said Harper, sitting down on a chair opposite, pouring himself a whisky and topping up the Englishman’s glass. ‘You want some coffee with that?’

‘Terrible habit,’ the Englishman replied, ‘very bad for you. Only drink green tea now.’

Harper half-turned back towards the door but the Englishman said, ‘Don’t bother your young ladies, they have enough to do tearing all those papers up.’

‘What can I do for you?’ Harper asked. They had met three or four times, he remembered now. He was a local vice president of some company or other, did he export sandalwood?

‘I’m just here informally,’ the man said, sipping his whisky. ‘Just informally, as, you know, just wondering what your opinion is on the way things are. . going, you know,’ he waved a hand in the air, ‘going.’

Ah, free information. That was why the man had brought a bottle of whisky, a gesture from one chum to another.

‘Well, let’s just hope that whatever the outcome is, it leads to improved stability for the Indonesian people,’ Harper said, in a tone formal enough to indicate that he had no intention of giving anything for nothing. If this man wanted a report, his company could pay for it.

The Englishman groaned. ‘C’mon Harper, you’re an experienced man, don’t go sentimental on me, I have decisions to make. You like fishing?’

He’s more drunk than I realised, Harper thought. Ten minutes of politeness, no more, then he would have to lever him out of the door. ‘Yes, don’t get much time for it, but yes.’ He had never fished in his life.

‘Well, you have a bag of big fish, I don’t know, some large trout or something, and there’s one fish you want to let go, maybe it’s small or sickly, but even so, you’re hardly going to make a hole in your net, are you? Next thing you know, all the damn fish are going to wriggle out of it.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Well, the big man is hardly going to let the protestors have their way. You’ve heard Kopassus is involved?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Oh c’mon, Harper, there’s a few too many “students” with military haircuts milling round, don’t you think?’

The Englishman suddenly bent forward and clapped his hands on his knees. ‘Right! Right you are!’ as if he was replying to something Harper had said, rather than just agreeing with himself, as if he had got the information he came for. He stood, a little unsteadily, his centre of gravity shifting over one foot so that he tipped into a slight diagonal before righting himself. He turned, and Harper thought, great, but instead of heading for the door, the Englishman wheeled round to the wall to face the faded map and stood there, waving his glass at it.

‘It looks as if God just took a few rocks and a load of pebbles and went. .’ The Englishman made a sweeping gesture with the glass. ‘But beautiful. A whole country made of islands. Fifteen thousand. . can’t exactly. . push them all. . together I mean.’ He turned to Harper and gestured with his hands, holding both palms apart then pushing the air between them, as if Harper was personally responsible for making sure that the islands of the archipelago did not drift apart in different directions, floating off irresponsibly to join other continents. His tone was a little accusatory. ‘How do you expect to hold it all together?’

It was seventeen thousand islands, actually. Harper wasn’t sure if the man was just stupendously drunk or discovering his mystical side. He must hide his drinking from his firm back home — not hard to do when you were thousands of miles away — but even British firms were getting better at sacking drunks these days. Harper made a mental note, just in case the information should prove useful. He would have to check what the man’s name was when he was gone, what relationship, if any, Harper’s firm still had with his.

‘I thought God had abandoned me back then. .’ the man mumbled, looking down into his glass, ‘. . they believe in so much here, you know, sure not what we believe but at least. .’

Next he was going to start telling Harper how Timor was created by two small boys and a crocodile.

Instead, the Englishman took a vicious swig of whisky, turned and glared at Harper, his voice becoming harsh. ‘Now the great Soeharto, Sustainer of the Universe, is on his way out, they are all at it.’ He coughed heartily. ‘Face it, Harper, these people just like killing each other.’

It occurred to Harper to remark that, in actual fact, they weren’t killing each other, not really. The people being burned alive in shopping malls in the north of the city weren’t burning anyone back. When an elderly woman got lynched for being a witch in East Java, she didn’t lynch another person in return. This was the way killing worked: there were perpetrators, and there were victims. It wasn’t a two-way process.

‘You think he is on the way out?’ Harper asked politely. ‘Then who is giving Kopassus their orders?’

The man looked down. ‘No you’re right, he’ll never go, not without a fight anyway, not without a few more thousand bodies piling up in the streets.’

Harper stood up. The man’s voice had lost its energy. Harper needed to get him out of the office before he sat down again otherwise they might never get him up. ‘I have to agree with you there,’ he said, moving to the man’s side and gently placing one hand beneath his elbow, to edge him towards the door.

‘You think so, really?’ the man said, looking at Harper earnestly. He looked down again. ‘You’re the expert. Well, thanks for the drink.’ He put his glass down then unbuttoned his jacket and used both hands to hitch his trousers before buttoning his jacket again.

Harper got the man to the corridor and administered a small shove. The man paused, swayed, then gave a farewell salute by touching his own forehead and flicking his hand upwards.

Back in the office, Harper raised his eyebrows at Amber. She was on the phone and mouthed, ‘Sorry’ over the receiver.

Harper went to his own office, sat behind his desk, unlocked his drawer and took out his large notepad and a pencil. Even a drunk Englishman could see President Soeharto was never going to go of his own accord. He leaned forward in his chair, over the notepad, but when he put the sharpened pencil to the pad, the point snapped off. Suddenly, his breath was short in his chest. He sat in the chair, staring at the pencil, and realised he had pressed it down on the pad with such force that his hand was shaking. He put the pencil down, carefully, then gripped his shuddering right arm with his left hand. He squeezed lightly. That only seemed to make the shaking worse. He relinquished his own arm, then leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes and made himself breathe deeply. . one, two, three, in. . one, two, three, out. . His left leg was shaking too, juddering beneath the table.

Henrikson was absent all day, a fact that Harper was grateful for. Outside, a three-hour downpour saturated the city but when it lifted Harper went into Wahid’s office and said he was going to get a car to take him round some of the bars, just have a drink in each, see which expat communities were still around, talk to a few people. People became loquacious at a time like this — that much he certainly remembered from ’65, they closed ranks but amongst those ranks, they talked. At least, he told himself that was why he was doing it.

Wahid looked at him and Harper saw concern behind the man’s small round glasses. ‘Is that a good idea?’

Harper shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve been sitting in the office for days while Henrikson runs around the city like he’s James Bond.’

‘Going to check with him first?’

‘Of course not. If he asks where I am, say I tried to call him and couldn’t get through.’

He was woken by the bleep of his pager. Shit, he thought, reeling in bed, his hand outstretched, simultaneously registering that it was bright daylight at the edge of his blinds. What time was it? The apartment seemed unnaturally quiet. Normally, the traffic noise from outside was a blur of sound. Even though he was only half awake as his hand scrabbled amongst the keys, phone, water bottle and tissues on his bedside table, he knew that the streets outside were deserted. He hadn’t a clue where he was, though, or what time it was. Then he thought, the apartment. But how come it was so bright? Oh, he hadn’t closed the blinds when he got in last night.

Last night?

The pager had gone silent. He sat up and looked around. It wasn’t on his bedside table. Damn, he couldn’t afford to miss an emergency. Then it bleeped again and he located it on the floor. His trousers lay in a crumpled heap next to the bed — the pager must have fallen out of a pocket. Call Motorola. He called the office message system but instead of Henrikson or Wahid there was a female voice he didn’t recognise. ‘Hi, it’s Alison from the FT, hey, thanks for the mojitos, give me a call when you’re awake, super-discreet as promised. Ciao, buddy!’ The last two words were said with a friendly flourish.

Why was a journalist sending him messages on his emergency pager? Perhaps she was a client and keeping the tone light. He grabbed the trousers from the floor and pushed his hands into the pockets until he found a business card: Alison Rutgers, Asia Correspondent, Financial Times, and a local number.

When she answered the phone, she didn’t sound like a client about to request an emergency evacuation.

‘Hey, great to hear from you, how’s the head?’

He mimicked her tone. ‘Hmmm, well, let’s say it’s been better, how’s yours?’

She gave a little laugh. ‘It was pretty hard getting up this morning.’ And he knew instantly that she was not hungover at all — that however many mojitos they had drunk together the night before, she had been on a non-alcoholic variety, probably by saying quietly to the waiter, skip the rum in mine. He’d been caught out like that before. ‘Café Batavia mix them pretty strong when the owner’s having one of his party nights,’ she continued, ‘he’s an Aussie, think I told you? The real place is the Tanamur, though, can’t believe you haven’t been there yet.’ He was well aware of the Tanamur’s reputation, which was why he had steered clear. But he had confided in her last night that he’d never been? Who the hell was she and what did she want? ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘sadly this isn’t just a call to check you’re still alive.’

‘How did you get my pager number?’ he asked, cutting her off.

There was the briefest of pauses. ‘You gave it to me last night.’ He felt hot, and sick. ‘But listen. .’

‘I have nothing to say to you.’ He hung up.

Five minutes later, the pager, the highly confidential one reserved specifically for work emergencies, bleeped again. He called the Motorola number. This time, Alison’s tone was very different. ‘Hi John, me again, sorry if I disturbed you, look, I’ll call your head office in Amsterdam and do this officially. I’m just looking for a quote, attributable or otherwise, on the Institute’s evacuation plans, it’s the major banks we’re interested in, but I understand what you told me last night was off the record.’ Her sign-off was unmistakeably spiteful. ‘If you’re all tied up today, I’ll take it through official channels.’

Shit shit shit. He put his head in his hands. He could call her back. She would probably leave it an hour or so to see if he did. Then she would promise him anonymity in return for the information she needed. But the information would be traceable back to him: she knew that and she knew he knew it too. The Amsterdam office would be closed at this hour but the twenty-four-hour hotline monitored the regular office answering machine and if she left a message they might call her back straight away, head her off at the pass. Damage limitation. Did the bosses have any contacts at the FT that would kill the piece? His head reeled with solutions. Was she working on a feature or a news story?

He had no idea. He couldn’t remember her at all: a vague image, perhaps, a swoop of dark hair? A hand on his knee, at one point? He thought hard and a little came back to him, but only a little. He had hailed a car and gone to some of the hotel bars first, then headed to Kota. There were still curfews and cordons everywhere, but to his surprise Café Batavia with its photos of Hollywood stars in dark wooden frames covering the walls was still open and quite busy with an influx of journalists and operatives new to Jakarta. There was some kind of party night going on. Someone nudging his elbow, apologising. . He had turned. . A smile, that swoop of hair. .

He could just about remember her now: brown-eyed, small, vulnerable-looking. He couldn’t remember how long he had stayed or what he had said. He couldn’t remember how he had got home.

He had told Wahid he was going out on the streets, against protocol, to ask a few questions. Instead, it would appear that he had done the talking. If he had broken client confidentiality, the Institute would sack him on the spot: he was finished.

And then he thought to check his jacket pocket. The jacket was slung over the foot of the bed. The pockets were empty.

The taxi didn’t get much beyond Glodok — they were still several streets from Fatahillah Square — when they were forced to stop at a police cordon; official barriers, officers in white helmets. The one who approached the driver’s window had a whistle in his mouth and his hand already resting on the gun in his holster. He and the taxi driver had a hurried conversation.

‘Tell him I’m a journalist,’ Harper said from the back seat. ‘Tell him I just need to get through to the square, I left something at Café Batavia last night, it isn’t important but tell him, obviously, I’d be very grateful.’ If he wanted to try getting a bribe into the policeman’s hand, he would have to wind down the rear window.

The taxi driver was already putting the car into reverse as he shook his head. ‘Sorry, sir, no further.’

‘Okay, go back, then right, the end of the street and around.’

The driver reversed slowly back down the street.

After two more right turns, Harper said, ‘Pull up here.’

The driver did as he was bid but then sat with his hand on the gearstick, looking straight ahead, clearly not wanting to offend a customer. ‘Sir, I think good if I take you back to where you came from. Sir?’

‘I’ll get out here,’ Harper replied, lifting his backside so he could reach inside his trouser pocket for some money.

‘I don’t think that is good, sir,’ the driver replied, as he took the money, but Harper was already reaching for the door handle.

He took the backstreets, deserted but not cordoned: the roadblocks were to stop vehicles and large assemblies, not individuals. On foot, it was not hard to get to the square. Down one street, there was even an elderly lady calmly sweeping dried leaves and twigs into the ditch outside a crumbling, deserted-looking building, as if nobody had told her the city was in chaos. Most of the buildings were shuttered, though. People were still staying at home.

Fatahillah Square was deserted but for a single jeep outside the Jakarta History Museum. A few men lounged in it, smoking. Harper could see from across the square that Café Batavia was closed but he went up to it anyway, lifted a hand and pressed his nose against the glass. In the gloom at the back of the ground floor, he thought he saw movement, although it could just have been a reflection of some sort, but he banged on the glass anyway and rattled the doorknob. When he glanced behind him, he could see he had caught the attention of the young men in the jeep, who were watching him.

If any staff were inside Café Batavia, then they had no intention of opening up — but Harper knew in his bones he had come on a wild goose chase. What were the chances of the notebook being on the floor somewhere? Alison Rutgers was probably studying it right now, running a manicured finger down the list.

As he turned away from Café Batavia, one of the young men jumped down from the jeep, landing neatly with both feet together and bending at the knees, and began to walk casually across the square towards him. He turned left and walked swiftly but calmly towards the opposite corner. It was too far to walk all the way back and the sky was heavy and dark; another rainstorm was on its way. He would head south and hope for a cab somewhere beyond the cordons.

He was half an hour’s walk south of the square when he heard it, the unmistakeable clamour of a crowd with its blood up: it was a collective sound, both ancient and familiar, a mixture of shouts and calls, the clatter of things breaking, chanting. He stopped to listen: it sounded as though it was coming from the road parallel to the one he was on. He turned down a side street that linked the roads. He hadn’t eaten anything before he left the apartment and not a single stall or shop was open. His stomach was hollow. The gathering storm made the air close and humid. It was like breathing in soup.

The parallel street was full, a big crowd gathered, milling, a denser patch towards a small shopping centre located to his right, on the other side of the road, on a corner. No one paid him any attention. As he pushed through, he could see that there was a thick swarm of people in front of the mall. Most of the people had their backs to him, a group intent upon something in their midst. Foreboding clutched at him, but only briefly. There was a note of hysteria in the shouts of the men and women, a rising inflection in their voices.

As he approached the group, three men on the edge of it turned. One started shouting and gesturing but the other next to him laughed and Harper laughed back, so they turned away from him again. He was tall enough to see over their heads but because the crowd was mobile, he had to shoulder his way into the midst of it. It was mostly young men, two or three young women — they didn’t look like students, though, shop assistants or factory workers, perhaps, in plastic shoes and loose, plain shirts. Above their heads, the sky was now very dark.

There was a young man sitting on the ground, in the middle of the group. He had thick straight hair that hung down over his forehead and he was light-skinned, possibly Chinese Indonesian or possibly someone who just had the bad luck to look like one. His hair was matted with blood, and blood ran down his face. His shirt was torn and he was naked from the waist down. A pair of dirty trousers lay scuffed and ripped beside him. He had his arms raised and bent above his head as if to ward off blows and one forearm was gashed and grazed. As the men around Harper fell back a little, the young man on the ground lifted his face. He looked up at Harper and his wide eyes recognised him, with a glimmer of hope and fear, as a figure of authority.

The crowd pulled back a little, looking at him, waiting for him to react. Harper knew that all he had to do was nod, and draw back, and the crowd would beat the young man to death. He estimated him to be around seventeen.

‘He’s the shop owner’s son!’ said a man on Harper’s left, defensively, angrily, although Harper had not asked for any explanation. ‘You know what they are like! This one insulted my sister!’ The man drew his foot back and aimed a kick at the young man on the ground but misjudged it and his foot swung in the air.

Harper stepped forward into the crowd in three bold, wide strides — the two people pressed either side of him fell back. He grabbed the young man by his injured arm and pulled him roughly to his feet. The young man called out in fear and pain, a high, whimpering cry. He was small and thin and as soon as Harper hauled him up, he slumped in his grasp. As he did, an older man in the crowd lifted his foot high, to thigh level, and aimed a vicious, hammer-like kick that connected with the young man’s torso just above his hip. The kick nearly knocked the young man from Harper’s hands.

He knew he had seconds. He pulled the limp young man round, away from the man who had kicked him, shouting, ‘Ayo! Nèk wani!’

The young man then did the right thing for the wrong reason — out of sheer panic, he started to kick at Harper, feebly. This meant Harper could pull roughly at his arm and shout at him in fury, which got the crowd’s support. A couple of them cheered.

He dragged the young man back the way he had come as fast as he could but several of the crowd followed and the road ahead was wide and clear, a row of concrete shop fronts with their shutters smashed and household goods spilling from them; plastic buckets, towels, shoes and sandals. Lying on its side in the middle of the street was a white metal object that might have been a storage chest or fridge. Broken glass surrounded it. It was a few minutes’ walk back to the side street that Harper had emerged from and there were no alleyways or small turnings down which they could escape. Harper felt the first fat drops of rain on his arms and looked up just as the grey skies above crashed open and the downpour began.

The crowd of young people shrieked and laughed at each other. The two young men on Harper’s left, who had been following them closely, ran into a looted shop for shelter, where they discovered a pile of tea trays they snatched up and held above their heads, calling out to their friends — and in the minutes this took, Harper watched until he was sure the crowd was sufficiently distracted before pulling at the unwilling young man and saying, ‘Ayo!’ again but this time hissing rather than shouting.

Still, the young man did not understand he was being saved. Harper had to clench his upper arm in his fist with all his strength as he dragged him along until, finally, at the end of the street he was able to turn right and shove him up against a wall and hold him there for a minute, by the shoulders, looking into his face. ‘Go home. Don’t go back that way. Do you understand?’ he said in Indonesian, but the young man seemed too shocked to comprehend and the minute Harper took his hands away from his shoulders, he reeled from him, back the way they had come.

Harper called out as the young man turned the corner — he was damned if he was going to have gone to all that effort only for him to endanger them both by running back to the crowd — and the young man stopped, staring back down the main street, then finally understood, reeled round again and, half bent double and with no acknowledgement to Harper, staggered off down the side street.

It was pouring with rain now. Harper stood for a moment, the adrenaline of the incident draining from him. Already, a small muddy river was flowing down the drain on the other side of the street. He lifted his shirt, untucked from his trousers in the chaos, and wiped his face. People would be taking shelter in the looted shops now, all but the most determined rioters that was. It should be safe to find his way back to his apartment but it would be a good idea to avoid the main streets until he was well clear of the old quarter and could find a cab. He lifted his face to the heavens, closed his eyes and opened his mouth, letting the hard raindrops fall on his tongue and sting his face. They were right to send in Henrikson, he thought, I’m too old for this.

His apartment was on the fifth floor and the lift had broken down several months ago — the maintenance company couldn’t afford the replacement parts, which were German, so it had stayed broken. He climbed the stairs slowly and by the third floor, his legs had started to shake. He paused for a moment, thinking, how hopeless. Then he thought, no, it isn’t just stairs, you’ve climbed these stairs many times without difficulty. It isn’t just the heat or humidity either — it’s the draining of the adrenaline, come on, you know this one.

His hand shook as he put the key into his apartment door. He closed it behind him and leant against it. The maid had been while he was out and the apartment was tidy, swept. The pile of books and papers he had left on the small dining table was neatened, the pens next to it laid out in a row. His legs were still trembling. How odd. And then, he was shuddering from head to foot, so much it was shaking his lungs, and he began breathing in great gulps. He had saved a boy. Without any part of his body alerting him to what was about to happen, apart from the trembling that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, he sank down onto the polished wooden floor, crashing onto his knees. He had saved a boy. It was a fissure. It was enough.

He crawled across the floor, ruffling the thin rug, to the cabinet — dark polished wood — where he kept the whisky. As he extracted a tumbler it slipped from his grasp and then rolled in a semi-circle by his knee. He grabbed it and threw it to one side, meaning only to remove it from his immediate vicinity because he didn’t want it but it flew across the room and smashed against a wall. He unscrewed the bottle and threw the lid in the same direction, where it landed with a tinny clatter. He drank from the bottle, long and hard, and once he had started he did not stop. It was the closeness of everything. Here he was, and the floor was polished and clean because the maid had been in while he had been out in a city in which people were being beaten, killed, and there was a television and a sofa and a fridge with food in it, and all the normal business of a normal life, and a few minutes ago he had watched a boy come close to having his life snuffed out, beaten from him — and that could happen or nearly happen, and he, Harper, could then go home and put his key in his door and have a beer, or perhaps something to eat, just like all the other people who were doing things just like that, and minutes away, the world was ending for a boy, or for another boy like him, in the most horrible way. And it wasn’t long ago or in the middle of nowhere: it was now, in one of the modern cities of the world. And all at once, he realised that what he could not stand was the closeness of everything. Yes, that was it. There would always be horrors, perhaps. Perhaps there would never be a time in human history when they would not exist because it would take so long for Homo sapiens to develop to that stage that a meteor would have wiped them all out by then, like the dinosaurs, or a freak tidal wave would have washed them all away — darkness upon earth, cold and dark, before this sick soft race worked out how to live without huge numbers of it suffering cold and hunger and humiliation in order for the lucky few to live in something approaching peace and comfort. But the closeness of it: the fact that he could walk out of his clean, white apartment again right now if he wanted and a few streets away. . and it rippled out, everywhere, beyond Jakarta, beyond Java — on Borneo the Dayaks hated the Madurese and the Madurese hated them back and why stop with these islands? They were far from unique. The Middle East — let’s not even go there — and the Pakistanis had tested those missiles and had India in their sights. And then Poppa and Nina, and Nina saying, ‘Go back upstairs, Poppa’s just clearing something off the lawn.’ And why was there something on the lawn? Oh, because Poppa’s skin was black, that was why. And then they couldn’t even walk up a path up a mountain without people staring at them and why not, not for anything you’ve done or even want to do, just because of what you are. And his mother, his mother as a slim girl, running down the road, and his father, who he had never met, killed for not wearing an armband. He saw Francisca weeping and weeping in the hospital: the face of their drowned baby, perfect in repose, mouth a little open — there had never been anything more perfect. He saw Bud’s face, lifted upwards, dreamily, skyward, and heard his own voice shouting, ‘Bud!’ as loud as it was possible to shout, at the same moment Bud’s eyes opened.

He crawled around the polished floor: everyone, all over the world, knew these things happened and looked the other way and got the bus to work and collected children from school and at least those sickening soft ordinary sorts of people in Holland or England or America had the benefit of distance to blanket their ignorance. But him, and people like him. They knew how close it all was. They knew what burned flesh smelled like. He heard Komang’s children, screaming.

And then the creatures started climbing out of the walls. He rang the twenty-four-hour emergency hotline at the Institute in Amsterdam, the one that was reserved for operatives or clients in imminent danger, and told them that cannibals were eating his legs while he was still alive. Soeharto would never resign. He would send out the cannibals. And they would slice the flesh off him and men like him and they would cook it over fires while they watched and everyone should get out get out get out now. He screamed it down the phone. Then he hung up and fell asleep on the floor.

The next morning, he was woken by a tapping sound, the more intrusive for its lightness, on the apartment door. He opened his eyes. He was not in a bed. He was lying on a hard wooden floor. He lay very still. The tapping continued, lightly. He felt very calm.

He sat up, propping himself up on one elbow. It was full daylight, the shutters open, the air in the room light and smoky. He hauled himself up to his feet, staggered a little, reeled towards the door, but before he reached it there was the small clatter of a key and Wahid let himself in along with two men Harper didn’t know. Wahid stopped when he saw him and with a look on his face said, ‘The old man has gone, John. Soeharto’s resigned. You’ve got to call Amsterdam now, then we are here to take you to the airport. You’re going on holiday.’

He stared back at Wahid. The two other men stepped past him and began moving around the apartment. One bent and straightened the rug in front of him. The other began using the side of his foot to sweep some broken glass to the edge of the floor, against the wall. Only then did Harper look around the room and see that the small dining table was pushed at an angle, a chair overturned, papers and books and pencils on the floor.

‘I’ll get your things,’ Wahid said, and walked into the bedroom.

Harper went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He bent over the sink and splashed his face with cold water. His hand slipped on the tap as he shut the water off — it was made of mottled brown plastic that was supposed to look like marble. In the mirror above the sink he saw his ravaged face, his hair damp at the edges, thinning. His eyes were large and watery like those of any man of his age — the tear ducts were not working properly any more. Of all the irritations of ageing, he had not expected that one to bother him so much. Even though he had not vomited, there was the taste of something bitter in his throat. He bent and ran the cold tap and tried to rinse his mouth, swilling and spitting, but the bitter taste was too far down his throat to be dislodged. Enough, he thought, his hands against the edge of the sink, letting his head drop, like a beaten dog, the bitter taste in his mouth, and the knowledge that would not be dislodged from his head stuck there, inside, like a growth of some sort. Enough. He would do whatever they said.

Wahid tapped gently on the bathroom door. ‘John,’ he called, ‘John, you need to come out and talk to Amsterdam. They’re on the phone now.’

It was daybreak now, all greyness gone, the sun was full and the valley glowing as if it had been sprayed with very fine gold paint. Still Kadek had not come. Harper wondered if he had observed him and Rita on the veranda together and was discreetly delaying his arrival, waiting in the lane until the coast was clear. Or — and here was a thought — returning to the village after spying on them, to report back that Harper had had an overnight guest at the hut?

Back in Amsterdam, there had, no doubt, been a meeting about him. He had cracked up before and they had brought him back into the fold — but that was when he was in his twenties, newly trained, with decades of useful life in him. What was he now?

He had probably frightened the young woman on the end of the twenty-four-hour hotline. The call would have been recorded. He imagined Jan and some of the other partners gathered in the office at the end of the building, the one with the curved glass wall and the bare brick. There were fourteen partners now — but not all of them would have been called in to deal with a personnel issue. There would be five or six of them in the room, perhaps, and the head of personnel, and the specialist personnel secretary to take the minutes — Hannah would have been kept out of the loop because they were friends, he thought: it was clear she had known nothing when he called her from the hotel in Sanur. He imagined the head of personnel reaching out and pressing the ‘on’ button on the tape recorder with a hard click, and the men around the table all listening to him shouting about cannibals, the young woman operative taking the call staying very calm and saying, ‘Would you repeat that for me, please?’ He imagined the head of personnel leaning forward and turning off the tape, the small silence that would follow that second click and the glances that would go from man to man around the table, the faces they would pull. The senior partner in charge of Asia, a plump half-Japanese half-German who he liked a lot, would take off his glasses and rub at the bridge of his nose before replacing them, inflating his cheeks as he blew air out of his mouth, saying, with a sigh, ‘Well. . this is an interesting one. .’

‘So. .’ he said to Rita, ‘here I am. Not on holiday, not exactly. Enforced leave. If you can call it that.’

He was still holding her from behind, speaking into the back of her hair.

‘That tickles,’ she said, a smile in her voice. ‘I didn’t think you were really on holiday, you know. You didn’t show a great deal of interest in sightseeing. Have you been sacked?’

‘I don’t know, probably, they just haven’t told me yet. They are working out how to get rid of me discreetly.’ He had made the Institute sound harmless enough.

‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

He leaned over to the packet, which sat on the edge of the rail, lit a kretek for her, passed it forward. She stayed where she was, looking out over the valley. ‘I don’t really understand why you’re in so much trouble.’

‘I was sent out here to draw up a report on the devaluation of the rupiah, the unrest it might lead to. I said things would stay stable, I said Soeharto would never resign. Badly wrong on both counts. Then the students were shot, and the riots.’

‘Terrible. .’

‘I guess at that point I went to the other extreme, after before, I mean, once it got going, I thought it was all going to kick off like it did before.’

‘In sixty-five, you mean?’ She shook her head, leaned it back a little against him. ‘The world is different now.’

He rested his chin on her shoulder. ‘They thought the world was different then.’

She drew on the kretek, exhaled. ‘Smoking this early is making me dizzy.’

‘And I got drunk and broke client confidentiality to a journalist.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m guessing that isn’t very cool.’

He sighed, lifted both hands and began to massage her shoulders. ‘Truth is, I’m old.’

‘You’re not old, Donkey.’

‘In my business, I’m old. And my boss will hate me now, my fuck-up will reflect badly on him. Makes his judgement look poor. If my intuition is shot to bits I’m no use to anyone.’

‘Intuition is nothing more than experience, surely, just guesswork, anyway?’

He shook his head. ‘If you’re an oil company who pays tens of thousands of dollars for a report, you expect a little more than that.’

She shrugged. ‘So, you’ve been sacked. Or you’re going to be. It happens.’ And he felt the small ache of loneliness he knew he would feel when he told her only a part of the truth.

She turned then, offered him the cigarette. ‘It’s making me dizzy. .’ she repeated, wobbling her head and rolling her eyes.

He took the cigarette, stepped back a little and smiled at her, drew on it, tossed it over the railing. They faced each other for a while, both smiling, and then the memory of his bad behaviour the night before returned to him and he reached out a hand, and, very gently, stroked her upper arm with the back of his fingers.

She lifted her chin a little then, gave him a cool look.

He exhaled.

‘It’s okay, you’re sorry, I know,’ she said softly, and stepped towards him at the same time as he moved against her, pressed his mouth to hers, lifted both hands and put them in her hair, holding her head still, his fingers entwined. Her mouth opened wide, their tongues mingled; smoke, sleep, familiarity. He pressed his groin to hers and ached with the desire to lift her knees, slip into the soft comfort of her right there on the veranda, with only the thin protection of a wooden railing stopping them from plunging, conjoined, into the lush thick valley below.

After a long while, he drew back, gave her a small smile of regret. Her gaze flicked to her right to make sure there was no sign of Kadek and she returned his smile. It was understood between them: their mutual need was enough.

He thought how short a time it was since they had first met, how few encounters they’d had, and he remembered how she had sat on the edge of the bed after their first night together at the guesthouse. He had looked at her then, had read her stillness — and concluded that there was something damaged about her, something that made mornings difficult. There was some knowledge in her life that she didn’t like to wake up to, he had felt quite sure of it.

He stared at her and, self-conscious beneath his gaze, she dropped her head, turned back to look at the valley.

How much could he trust his own judgement, any more? Perhaps he was wrong about her. Perhaps she had just been thinking of everything she had to do that day, whether she needed to go back to the family compound she stayed in and get changed before work. Perhaps she had just been thinking about the textbook she had promised to lend one of her students.

And all at once, looking out over the valley with his body leaning against Rita’s soft back, he was awash with hope, as clean as the dawn before him. If he was mistaken about Rita, then maybe he was mistaken about everything else. Maybe nobody was coming to kill him. Maybe there was no gathering of men in a glass-walled office, debating how to deal with the tricky problem he had become. Perhaps he could just say to her, ‘We’d better get dressed before Kadek comes,’ and Kadek could come and find them both on his balcony and he, Harper, would be nothing more than a man on extended leave from his job who had got lucky.

He thought of the rice fields beyond Jalan Bisma, where small plots of land were being divided up for villas. She could speak Balinese, she could negotiate for a lease. There was the matter of what they would use for a down payment as he’d signed the Amsterdam house over to Francisca and he doubted Rita had any resources behind her, but he had some savings in a dollar account. He wondered what the local bureaucracy was like, sometimes these things could take a while, but a bit of financing usually oiled the wheels and she would have good contacts with the local councils, they would be full of the parents of her students or perhaps some of her former students. She could walk to work from Jalan Bisma, even if they built a little way out of town. He could make shelves for her books: he bet she had a lot of books. He liked making shelves, had never done enough of it, in fact, he decided. In Amsterdam, their house had been too small for him to build anything, and too perfect, in a way. Francisca had made sure it was perfect.

He allowed these thoughts to dwell in his mind for a bit, to brew. Bali was peaceful. Soeharto had fallen, Habibie had taken over and the country was stabilising. Perhaps he had just been wrong about everything. Perhaps a life was possible here, with her. Now he had confided in her — to a certain extent — he had transformed so many difficult things; he had made them into stories. Stories could be put in boxes.

‘It’s so beautiful. .’ Rita said softly, her voice a murmur, as if she was thinking out loud. ‘Isn’t it? Don’t you think, you could look at this, the trees and everything, and for a bit forget everything? If I could wake up to this every morning, maybe mornings would not be so hard.’

There was something in her tone of voice. He was still. ‘Why are mornings so hard?’

She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she said, her voice low but even, ‘I have a son.’

He didn’t respond.

‘I don’t know why, mornings are worst. I wake up, and it’s just normal, but then I think of him, you know, that strange time when you are awake but not thinking? Only a few seconds, but it’s my only relief. Then I think, and I think about how I haven’t seen him since he was eight years old. He’s a teenager now. I think about him all the time. But for some reason, in the mornings, he’s in Belgium, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem so far when I’m busy, during the day, but in the morning, when I wake up and remember it, it’s so far it hurts. Every single morning.’

He rested his chin on her shoulder, leaned his head against hers.

She gave a little, false laugh. ‘Any idea what some people think about you if you admit you have a child you don’t live with, as a woman, I mean? I once made the mistake of telling a woman on an aeroplane and she spent the rest of the flight telling me how unnatural I was. We’d got talking during take-off. It was a seven-hour flight.’

She dropped her effortful facetiousness, then, and spoke plainly, with the tone of someone telling somebody else something they thought they ought to know, unembellished by anecdote. ‘I had some real problems, after he was born. Head problems, you know?’ She tapped the side of her head with one finger. ‘I was in hospital for a while. A lot of drugs. Then I was okay. Then when he was four I had some more problems. I didn’t get help when I should have done, you know. I was hospitalised again, eighteen months that time, nearer two years in fact. His father thought it was good I didn’t see him until I was better and then I didn’t get better for a long time and the longer it got, the easier it was to believe what his father said, that he was doing well without me, that it was disruptive for him, me coming and going. He’s got a stepmother now, Lucia. She’s Italian. I think about her cooking bacon for him because you know, he really liked bacon. But then I think, maybe she hates him, tells him his mother left him because he was no good. His father would back her up on that, that’s for sure. Maybe he cries at night when he’s alone, he won’t in front of his friends I suppose. Maybe he’s having a horrible life, and I’m not there.’

He was still holding her from behind. He rested his head against hers. He did not know how else to comfort her. He had no idea what it must be like, as a mother, to be separated from a child, but he knew enough to know that anything he said at that moment would sound crass. Touch was what she needed: closeness, him being close. At the same time, even as he comforted her, he could not help thinking a self-centred thought. You were right, there is something broken here. And if you were right about that, then maybe you were right about everything else.

‘Anyway,’ she said, a note of briskness entering her voice. ‘I just wanted you to know, when I was a little rude on that first morning, it wasn’t your fault. I had enjoyed our time together. If I hadn’t had to go to work, I wouldn’t have rushed off, but when I wouldn’t talk and didn’t even say goodbye properly, it wasn’t your fault. I was thinking about my son. Thinking how he gets up every morning and knows nothing about me except I live abroad. I don’t know if he even reads the letters I send. I have to send them to his father. I never get anything back. I tried calling last year, it got too much. He refused to come to the phone, he was angry I’d called, his father said.’ She shrugged, then turned round to face him. ‘You’ve never had children?’

He shook his head.

‘Well, it’s hard to describe but when you wake up and you are without your child, it’s like you’ve woken up and remembered that your arm or leg is missing. That’s what it’s like. So,’ she said, kissing him lightly on the mouth. ‘So we got each other’s sad stories after all. Serves you right, John Harper.’

They kissed then, but not as deeply as before: now, he was just kissing her.

After a while, he stepped back and said, ‘I want to take you back to bed but Kadek could show up any minute.’

She smiled her ironic smile. ‘You’re worried what the man who looks after you will think about you having had a woman for the night? They are used to the funny ways of foreigners, you know.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get dressed.’

She was light-hearted on the drive back to town, happy to have unburdened herself a little. Everyone has their own parcel of unhappiness, he thought, like the bundles people carry on their heads, each person has their own bundle in its own particular shape and size — but if you talk to someone, you give them your bundle to carry for a bit. It was only temporary, though, that feeling. He pitied her, as she chatted to him about being hungry and about how she couldn’t believe she had to work that day and she really shouldn’t have stayed the night, she hadn’t meant to. She was cheerful because of the temporary relief, because she had handed him her bundle for a short while. But, he knew — and if she thought about it for a moment, she would know too — the next morning, alone in her room in the family compound, she would wake feeling just the same as she always did.

He’d better not see her again. It wasn’t safe. If Kadek had come while they were at the hut together, she might have been linked with him, in the eyes of the organisation. What if they had come for him last night? He had endangered her already.

As they pulled up outside her compound, she said, her hand already reaching for the car door to open it, ‘You know, you haven’t told me the really bad thing in your life yet, don’t think I didn’t notice.’

He looked at her.

‘You really think I couldn’t tell when you were skipping bits?’ She gave a throaty laugh, her eyes shone with amusement. ‘Just because you are mister well travelled and live in big cities? You think I am some village schoolteacher? Well, you underestimate me.’ She leaned over and kissed him. ‘I’m going to ask later, you know.’

‘Go and get your things,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to the school gates.’

He watched her as she ran into the family compound — her solid figure graceful in its haste. An outside observer would think of her as a self-contained, competent sort of person, not beautiful but handsome in a Nordic kind of way, the kind of person you would want to look after you if you had a cold. How hard was that air of briskness won? How different it was, when she sat on the edge of her bed each morning, a few moments after waking up, awash with grief for her lost child and wondering how she would find the strength to rise, to face the coming day?

She emerged from the compound within minutes, dressed in clean clothing and wearing a hat — the sun was bright that day — beaming at him as she walked back to the car, a large wicker bag over her shoulder. She opened the car door and slid into her seat. He gunned the engine as they drove off, even though they went a few yards and then were stuck behind a delivery truck.

‘You’ll have to give me directions,’ he said.

‘Back to the main street then up Jalan Hanoman,’ she replied.

She got him to drive past the school and then pull up at the far end of the road, away from town, so her students wouldn’t see her getting out of a strange man’s car. He climbed out of his side as she was lifting her bag from the footwell and went round the car to open her door. As she climbed out, she gave him the same small smile she had given when he insisted on carrying her bag in the night market. How long ago that seemed. It was as if they had had a whole life together.

They kissed politely, on the cheek, as they were in public, and as he turned to go she said, ‘You know. .’ then petered out. He heard in her tone a desire to arrest his departure. How often that impulse came, he thought. Even when we want to leave or want someone else to go, that moment just before the separation, when you or the other person can’t help saying, pause a while. When he had been a young man, he had always thought that the one who asked for the pause was the one in a position of weakness. He had always made sure it wasn’t him. Now, though, he wondered. The folly and pride of youth: that was all those power games had been? Rita was asking for a moment more with him before he got back in the car and drove away. That didn’t make her weak or subservient; on the contrary.

He turned. ‘What?’ he asked, hearing the softness in his own voice and hoping she would hear it too, so that if this was the last time they saw each other, she would remember it and know that this had meant something to him.

‘You know, I know there’s lots more you haven’t told me, not just your little brother, lots. It’s up to you, I didn’t mean what I said then, I’m not going to press you, it’s up to you. I just wanted you to know I know.’

He looked at her. ‘I told you lots of things,’ he said.

‘I know you did,’ she replied.

There was a look in her eyes that might have been pain were it not for her smile, and then she broke his gaze for a second by glancing back into the car to check she hadn’t left anything and he took advantage of that second, that brief snapping of the thread of spider-silk that held them, to turn away.

He watched her in the rear-view mirror as he drove away, a large woman with an oversized wicker bag on her shoulder, walking slowly in the same direction as him but growing ever more distant, her floppy hat hiding most of her face.

Back at the hut, he found Kadek on the veranda shaking out a pillowcase. The bed sheets were hung over the rail. He wondered if he and Rita had left traces of her overnight stay but then remembered that Kadek changed the bed linen once a week anyway.

‘Morning, Mr Harper,’ Kadek said with a small bow and a broad smile. ‘It is a good morning, yes?’

‘Yes, Kadek,’ Harper replied, stopping at the top of the veranda steps and casting his gaze across the valley. There was no trace of haze in the sky today: it was a perfect blue, the valley full of light. It was the sort of day that people from all over the world paid thousands of dollars to come to Bali and experience. ‘A fine day.’

‘A fine day,’ Kadek repeated, as if he was experimenting with the word ‘fine’, trying it out for size in that particular context. Fine, as in beautiful; fine as in good; fine as in delicate, perhaps: certainly not ‘fine’ as in just about okay, oh alright, that’s fine: and not fine as in payment due, penalty. Ever since he had arrived at the hut, Harper had been waiting for his fine day.

Kadek moved to let Harper pass. Harper saw that beyond the billowing linen was a young woman in a sarong and sash kneeling on the wooden planks at the far end of the veranda. She was lighting the incense sticks protruding from the offering in front of her. Beside her on the wooden planks was a bamboo basket. She did not look up.

Kadek glanced at her and said, ‘The ghekko, Mr Harper.’

Of course. He had forgotten that, a few days ago, he had mentioned being woken by the ghekko every night, its relentless chant. Kadek would have arranged for the young woman to come and place offerings on the veranda, to appease the gods and demons. It was all about signs and portents: everything signified. If you believed that, he thought, then didn’t it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Whenever anything happened, good or bad, you could always look backwards for the sign.

He watched the woman bend over the offering, the care and attention with which she arranged the flowers. At first, he thought he was watching sceptically, but then the image came into his head of Rita in the rear-view mirror of the car that morning as he pulled away from her, her floppy hat, the way she had smiled when she had said, ‘I’m not going to press you,’ as if to undercut the sincerity of her own words: and from somewhere inside him came a sonorous, rattling sigh, the kind that comes involuntarily. He felt it in his ribcage and thought, now where did that come from? Kadek was folding the pillowcase, the young woman intent upon her duties — neither of them looked at him.

What should I say to this young woman arranging flowers on my porch? he thought then. There is nothing? No one cares? Your diligence is pointless? Go home and worry about all the other things there are to worry about because that’s all there is? No, the woman’s offering was valid, just not in the way she thought. He did not believe in the Invisibles: there were no ghosts or demons. He believed in men with machetes. But Kadek arranging for the woman to come, and the woman making the trek up here, was a way of them saying, we are concerned for you. He wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t come, after all, wouldn’t have remarked on it — what was he to them, a rich bule? They would be paid the same wage whether the offering was made or not. The offering was made because they believed they had a duty of care to the stranger in their land. The spirits were their spirits, just as the gods were their gods. And he thought of Rita saying, as she got into his car on the day they went to Sanur, ‘God bless the Balinese,’ and he thought, for all my travelling and my knowledge and my world-weariness, I am the fool, perhaps, yes.

Inside the hut, he ate the breakfast that Kadek had left for him, thought briefly that Rita hadn’t eaten before she went to work, then opened the drawer of his desk and found the half-written letter to Francisca. He placed the letter on his desk and smoothed it out.

At the back of his desk, there was a metal ashtray, a copper-coloured one with semi-circular indents all around its edge, as if there was any chance a dozen people might want to rest a cigarette on it at the same time. Using that ashtray on his own had always struck him as a little poignant. There were two cigarette stubs in the tray, both bent and broken, nestling amongst the fine grey ash, very faintly kretek-scented. He wished there was a blush of lipstick on one of them, even though Rita didn’t wear lipstick. They would have looked touching, nestled together, if there was. In fact, they were both his. He had risen from bed after she had gone to sleep the previous night, very late, and sat at the desk and smoked two in a row, thinking that to go out onto the veranda might disturb her: and for the pleasure of sitting on the chair at the desk and hearing her breathing in the darkness as he smoked. He had thought the smell of smoke might wake her, even though he was in the far corner of the hut, but it didn’t. She sleeps so well, so deeply, he had thought. She’s really good at it.

He patted his pockets, located his lighter. He leaned forward and drew the ashtray towards him, then carefully shredded the letter to Francisca. He held the lighter downwards and set light to the shreds. The paper was so fragile the small flame made it dissolve into powder and smoke: one second a blue butterfly’s wing with blackened edges and the finest glowing orange rim, then nothing.

Outside, on the sun-struck veranda, he could hear Kadek and the young woman talking softly to one another. The door was wide open but because they were at either end of the veranda, he couldn’t see them. He heard the low murmur of their voices cease.

Then he heard Kadek say in English, loudly and firmly, ‘If you will excuse me, sir, I will see if Mr Harper is available.’ There was something protective in his tone.

Harper looked up as Kadek’s silhouette, dark against the bright blue of the sky, filled the doorway and he said, with no inflection in his voice, ‘There is a gentleman here to see you, Mr Harper.’

Harper stepped over the doorframe and out onto the veranda. Kadek did not return to folding sheets but stood a few feet back, respectfully. The young woman had disappeared. The offering she had left was glowing on the far end of the veranda, the scent of incense drifting out over the valley.

A white man of around forty stood at the top of the wooden steps that led up to the veranda from the path. He was dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt and holding a black briefcase with steel clasps. There was something familiar about him.

Harper gave him a slow look.

He smiled at Harper but did not advance towards him or hold out his hand. ‘Goedemorgen,’ he said. ‘Hoe gaat het met je?’

Harper turned to Kadek and said, ‘Kadek, do you need to return the car or can I use it today?’

Kadek stood nearby. ‘That will be fine, Mr Harper.’

Harper looked at the stranger and then said in Dutch, ‘Goedemorgen, I don’t have any decent coffee, or anything in fact, out here. Did you get a taxi from the village?’

‘I’ve come straight from the airport,’ the stranger replied, mildly.

Harper thought, at least they’ve sent someone businesslike, polite. At least we won’t have the bluster and false bonhomie of Henrikson.

‘Well, if you’ve come straight from the airport then at least I can take you to a decent restaurant,’ Harper said. His Dutch sounded odd and guttural to him now, as if he was speaking through a mouthful of small stones. ‘I’ll come down to the lane and tell your driver where to go, then I’ll follow.’

He could have taken the man to the cafe on the main street or the guesthouse bar on Jalan Bisma but he wanted to keep him away from anywhere that he associated with Rita. She had mentioned a new restaurant she hadn’t tried yet, a smart one, on the other side of town over the bridge. He couldn’t remember what it was called but he described the location to the man’s driver, then followed in the car Kadek had borrowed for him.

At that hour of the morning, the restaurant was deserted. They walked straight through to where a huge stone balcony overlooked the valley on the edge of the town, a broader view than the one Harper had from his veranda; the valley split wider here. Birds flew in the bright light as the greenery plunged beneath them, the river hidden by a density of banana trees and palms. They sat down at a table with a pink tablecloth, already laid for lunchtime later in the day, and a young woman brought them menus. Harper didn’t look at his, just put it down on the table and said to the young woman in English, ‘Black coffee, please.’

‘I’ll have the same,’ the man said, also putting his menu down on the table and leaning back in his seat. The young woman picked both menus up and turned away.

‘Fabulous view,’ the man said. He had put on sunglasses in his car but removed them now, leaned forward in his seat again and extended his hand. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself properly. Johan.’

They shook hands across the table.

‘You don’t need to wait for the coffee,’ Harper said, glancing at the floor to the side of Johan’s chair and nodding towards the briefcase.

Johan pressed his lips together, moved his head to the side in a cheery little right you are gesture and pushed his chair back, grimacing at the scraping sound it made. He lifted the case onto his lap, flipped open the clasps with two loud hard clicks, then extracted a manila envelope.

‘Well,’ he said, as he took a sheaf of papers out of the envelope, ‘obviously, the main thing we need to address in the light of recent events is the confidentiality clause in your contract of employment. I’m sure you don’t need reminding but I’ve brought a copy along just in case. There’s the confidentiality, ah, issue. . and of course the non-competition clause. And this piece of paper here. .’ he laid another sheet on top, ‘is just an additional clause. It specifies new media, world-wide web, and so on.’ He gave a small laugh. ‘Of course none of all that existed when your contract of employment was drawn up!’

The young woman returned with their coffees. Harper withdrew a packet of kreteks from his pocket and held it out to Johan but Johan shook his head and said, ‘Ah, no, thanks, I don’t smoke.’

I bet you don’t, Harper thought. He did not look down at the bit of paper. He looked at Johan. After a moment or two, he turned his head to one side to exhale away from Johan, then took a sip of coffee. Johan lifted his cup at the same time.

Harper let the silence between them continue for long enough to force Johan to speak.

‘Look. .’ Johan began and Harper interrupted immediately, ‘Just tell me what the deal is.’

‘If you sign, and stay away, we mean completely away, from the business, including but not exclusively our competitors in the field, then we are calling it redundancy. With all the benefits that accrue, including this.’ The briefcase was still on his lap. The envelope he extracted this time was long and white and unsealed. He handed it over and gestured to Harper that he should look inside. Harper pushed a finger in to widen it and saw that there was a cheque, a more generous one than the Institute was obliged to offer, under the circumstances.

Harper put the white envelope down on the table. ‘Do you have a pen?’

Johan gave a terse, grateful smile. Harper wondered if this young man had expected more trouble. If so, he had been inadequately briefed.

‘Oh, the Institute does have one more request,’ Johan added as he lifted the lid of the briefcase for the third time. ‘We would like you to vacate the company accommodation facilities within three days. Is that reasonable?’

For a moment, Harper was unsure what the man meant, then he snorted, ‘You mean the hut?’

Johan gave a wry smile. ‘It’s a little rudimentary, having seen it this morning, I must agree.’

Harper felt a sudden wash of nostalgia for the hut, a feeling that by not imposing his personality on it, he had made it his. Three days? How had time slipped? He felt as though he had been there forever — and he knew, in that moment, that a return to what was euphemistically referred to as real life was impossible: Jakarta, Amsterdam, Los Angeles — it didn’t matter. He had withdrawn from all these places, and from the transitional places that led from one to the other; planes, taxis, waiting lounges. He could no more imagine re-entering that world than he could growing wings and flying over the crater of Gunung Agung. If you come to a place to die, then what are you supposed to do if, somehow, you carry on living?

Johan passed over a pen. As Harper signed the addendum to the confidentiality clause he said, ‘Three days will be no problem. As you probably saw, I don’t have many possessions.’

Johan mistook his meaning. ‘I’m afraid that the papers and reports, well anything in fact, that you left in the Jakarta apartment belongs to the Institute.’

Harper put the pen down on the confidentiality agreement then slid them both across the table. ‘Fine by me. Just out of interest. .’ He nodded towards the agreement. ‘What would the Institute have done if I had refused to sign?’

Johan shrugged, reached to pick up the agreement and smiled. ‘Well that’s the catch with signing, you never get to find out.’

Harper leaned back in his chair as Johan slipped the signed agreement into the envelope. ‘Have you ever thought, Johan, that we work for the kind of organisation that has people killed?’

He saw the look of shock on Johan’s face. ‘Surely, even in your department, you think through the consequences, now and then? We get involved with governments, we get involved with coups.’

Johan glanced around, and then gave a hearty, vocal smile — less than a laugh but more than a facial expression. ‘I thought you meant us, for a minute there!’ He was embarrassed to have momentarily believed Harper to be suggesting something so absurd.

Harper looked at him and let the question hang between them.

‘I’m a lawyer, you’re an economist. We provide advice, that’s what we do. People like us will always exist,’ Johan said, closing his briefcase. ‘If we didn’t exist, someone else like us would, and the someone else would probably be worse, you seem like a decent enough fellow to me. Agreed?’

Harper looked to one side, at the view, and smiled.

He took the risk of parking outside the school. It was a long wait until the lunchtime break. When Rita emerged, she was surrounded by students and set off down Jalan Hanoman without seeing him. He was momentarily affronted. Shouldn’t she have been looking? Then he was amused at himself; of course she wasn’t looking. Why should she? He remembered how she had strode away from the guesthouse on Jalan Bisma after their first night together without seeing him sitting in plain view in the cafe right opposite. Head in the clouds, he thought, with affection. Or maybe just. . normal. Maybe she wasn’t looking because there was nothing to look for. Maybe the boys waiting by the cafe opposite the guesthouse that morning were just boys sitting on a tree trunk, the young men passing through town in a jeep just young men in a jeep. His heart sang, then. That could be him. If he was with her, he could be like her.

The car was parked awkwardly, as close to the drainage ditch on the side of the road as he could risk without losing a wheel down it, but cars and mopeds had still been forced to pull out to get past him. He restarted the engine and followed at a distance, slowly. The street was full of students streaming from the low building. It was only when she turned onto the main street, still with a student either side, that he was able to overtake, pull in in front of a shop and toot the horn as she approached from behind. He watched her in the rear-view mirror and saw her head lift, the wide brim of her hat rising to reveal her face, her smile of surprise.

She stopped and said goodbye to the students, then lifted one hand and splayed her fingers in a five minutes gesture. He nodded. She went into a shop just behind where he was parked, a mini-market, and emerged a few minutes later with a plastic bag. He leaned over to open the passenger door for her.

As she got in the car she leaned across and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek. The smile she gave him was an ordinary smile because, of course, she did not know that when he dropped her off at the school that morning, he was thinking it might be the last time they saw each other. She had never known what was at stake.

‘To what do I owe this honour?’ she asked.

‘I’ve something to show you,’ he said, pushing his hand into his pocket. ‘Remember how I told you I was being fired?’ He pulled out the long white envelope, which he had folded neatly, concertinaed, and put into his trouser pocket. He rested it on the dashboard and smoothed it out. Then he extracted the cheque and held it up in front of his chest, as if it was a certificate he had just won at a sports day.

She looked at the cheque, then up at his face. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a cheque,’ he said.

She lifted her eyebrows and said drily, ‘I can see it’s a cheque but I can’t see how big it is, I don’t have my reading glasses on. Is it enough for you? I mean, are you a free man?’

‘Enough for me to do a deal with the landowner who owns the fields beyond Jalan Bisma, and enough for me to stay in one of those guesthouse rooms in the meantime, if that’s easier that is, while I decide which plot of land to lease, on the edge of the rice field, on the way to the Monkey Forest, although I guess it would be a good idea if we asked around about other plots as well. You know this town a lot better than I do. And you’ll have to do the negotiating with the builders, Ibu Rita. You’re the one who speaks Balinese.’

When she spoke, her voice was uninflected. ‘Aren’t you scared of the Invisibles?’

‘It’s the land of Dewi Sri, remember.’

She said nothing, just stared, and he stared right back: and this was the best thing of all, staring at her, watching the progress of her thoughts play out on her face. He saw, first of all, her slow understanding of his seriousness; then he saw how she questioned that understanding, wondering if she had got it right. When she decided she had, a small amount of joy came into her features, a flattered look, manifest in a slight widening of her gaze, a minute lifting of her eyebrows. Then, briefly, a shadow of doubt, not at her understanding but at her own desires: the hint of a frown as the eyebrows lowered. He saw her think to herself that there were many things he had not told her and many she had not told him, two whole lives lived that needed explaining. The cloud of these omissions misted her pleasure for a moment: her gaze lost focus. Then, finally, a kind of light, a kind of recklessness in her smile: if she was younger she would not contemplate this; if he was younger, he would not have asked. Their separate tragedies had brought them both to this: a point where they had nothing much to lose by taking a chance on someone as damaged as they were.

All he was doing was watching her face. Its motions were minute. He had no way of knowing if he had interpreted the panorama of her thoughts correctly — but still, in that moment, it felt enough.

They went to the guesthouse on Jalan Bisma together and Rita asked to speak to the owner. The three of them sat around one of the small round tables in the bar while Rita and the owner chatted in Balinese and she negotiated a long-term rental for one of the rooms — a corner room on the first floor: Balinese people didn’t like sleeping upstairs, she told him, so the first-floor rooms were slightly cheaper. They went to see the room together but while Rita checked it out, opening the wardrobe, turning on the taps in the bathroom, tightening them efficiently, Harper just stood smiling at the bed, wondering if he could persuade her to stay with him there that night. Johan would be back in Denpasar by now, at the airport. Perhaps he would take a domestic flight to Jakarta to report back to Henrikson, or, more likely, go straight back to Amsterdam via Singapore. Job done.

The young man who had shown them the room handed Rita the key and left, closing the door behind him, and Harper advanced upon her. She backed towards the bed, smiling, mock-reluctant. ‘I should make you wait another three days,’ she said, ‘wait until you’ve moved out of your old place, you know, finished with all that.’

‘Should you?’ he said, placing one hand on her chest and shoving her, neatly and gently, back onto the bed, and she grabbed the pillow and placed it over her face and he had to pull the pillow away and clear her hair from her face in order to be able to kiss her. He took her wrists and went to pin her arms above her head but she shoved him off, pushed him onto his back, rolled on top. ‘Who has the upper hand now, John Harper?’ she said.

‘You,’ he conceded, and yielded to her kiss.

In the early evening, they went out to eat and even though she refused to spend the night with him, he could not bring himself to return to the hut — he slept at the guesthouse alone. In the morning, she came by for breakfast.

The fine sun continued and they sat at a corner table in the restaurant upstairs: a view of the street rather than a valley, but fresh juice and eggs. This is going to be my life now, he thought, watching Rita as she scans a menu. Here we are, opposite each other at a table, and our primary task, our main responsibility, is to decide what sort of juice we feel like, how we want our eggs.

Rita checked her watch — she had work that morning but there was plenty of time. After she had gone, he would go back up to the hut for his last two nights. Now, he would be able to enjoy that small and finite solitude, now all that paranoia was behind him.

How ridiculous his fears seemed now. In his head, he listed all the things he realised were nonsense: the young men in the jeep as he sat drinking coffee and eating a cinnamon bun: they were just young men in a jeep, passing through town, off-duty soldiers or police cadets, perhaps. So what? The boys he thought were following him from the breakfast shack — why, exactly? Because they were sitting on a tree trunk near where he had chosen to sit down? Because they rose when he did? There had been no gathering of men in a brick-walled office or, if there had, their discussions had revolved around the appropriate size of his pay-off, how to avoid any public embarrassment for the company. And Joosten, poor Joosten — maybe it was the stuff he smoked that made him paranoid. Wrong place at the wrong time. Could happen to anybody.

The world is different now. Rita was right. He had allowed the things that had happened to him to colour his perspective far too much, sad but true. He would go back to the hut, enjoy his last couple of days there, and after that, his new life could begin.

‘Will it take you long to pack?’ Rita asked, and he spluttered into his coffee.

After they had eaten, she took out a map of the town and showed him how it was actually a series of adjoining villages and districts. She pointed at the areas on the edges that were being developed, talked him through the labyrinthine processes of leasing land locally; where they would have to register. At one point, while they were still scanning the map, heads bent towards each other, she lifted hers and looked at him and said, ‘John. .’ thoughtfully. ‘You know, I know you will think this is strange of me, but it’s an odd name for you. It is a blank name, isn’t it? There is a form of John in every language, isn’t there? John for English, Jan or Hans in German, and Dutch, would it be Jan? Or Johan, is it Johan?’

In all the time he had been John Harper, hardly anyone had called him John. He was Harper at work. Francisca had known him as Nicolaas. He shrugged. ‘Call me something else if you like. Anything you like. Just don’t expect me to call you fluffy bunny or something in return.’ It would be appropriate, after all, to shed John Harper now.

‘Mmm,’ she said, ignoring the bunny comment, ‘I will have to give that some thought. What did your grandparents call you, the grandparents in California?’

‘Nicolaas,’ he said, ‘or Nic, sometimes, that was mostly Nina. My grandfather, I don’t know, most of the time he called me son.’ And it came to him then, Poppa’s deep tones, the ease with which he spoke the word, the same slow comfortableness with which he had called Nina baby or hon. Son. For a while, he had been a son. He thought then of Abang — call me Abang, he had said, big brother, as soon as Harper had arrived on the island, after taking just one look at him. Adik, he had called him in return: little brother. Abang had only called him that a handful of times, but it was enough: someone who cared enough to choose the right word for you, like Rita’s students calling her Ibu. How important it was, to be named. Once, on the streets of Amsterdam, he had seen an elderly Indian man bending painfully to pick up a paper bag that he had dropped, and the youth of the Netherlands rushing past, none of them pausing, and he wasn’t in a hurry that day himself so (uncharacteristically, he would concede) he had stopped and said, ‘Uncle, please,’ and bent and picked up the bag and handed it to the old man, who had given him a keen look and said, simply and without emotion, ‘There should be more people like you in the world.’ It was the only time anyone had ever said anything like that to him, and just because he had named the old man uncle.

Rita was looking at him. ‘You had a father, for a while, there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are right.’

She gave him a wide-eyed look then and made a small whooping sound. ‘A miracle! Miracles will never cease!’

He pointed his spoon at her. ‘Don’t make a habit of it.’ She rolled her eyes and he added, ‘And it’s wonders.’

‘Wonders?’

‘Wonders that will never cease, not miracles.’

‘Okay, I will settle for wonders.’

He would have liked to turn it around then, to talk of her. He would have liked to say, and what about you? What are you looking for? Your lost son? But he knew that would make the light go from her eyes — and it wasn’t the right time. She had to be at work soon and he had to go back to the hut.

But along with the fantasy house that they would build together in the rice fields, he pictured, then, a fantasy letter arriving from Belgium. He pictured Rita holding it with trembling hands, looking at him, as if for permission to open it, and him sitting her at the small table on their veranda and placing a supportive hand on her shoulder before leaving her to open it in private — she would know that he was just indoors, whenever she was ready. And after some time, she would come inside, her eyes brimful of tears, and hold the letter out to him and say, ‘My son, he wants to come and visit.’ And then there would be some months of wrangling with the father, during which he, Harper, would lose his cool once in a while and threaten to go over to Belgium and kick that idiot her ex-husband down the stairs, and Rita would cry at night or go silent — but eventually, it would all lead to this: one day, when the house was complete and the guest room furnished, they would be standing together at Denpasar airport, waiting for the boy to arrive. And he, Harper, would see him first amongst the many youths emerging from Arrivals, because Rita was looking for her child but he was looking for Rita. The son would be a strapping youth, well built, with Rita’s soft features but dark hair. He would come over and he and Rita would embrace awkwardly, neither of them too emotional, not yet, and then he would turn and face Harper and shake his hand firmly and their eyes would meet in a moment of masculine recognition that, strange as this meeting might be for all of them, the one who would need protecting here would be Rita.

She hadn’t told him her son’s name yet: Viktor, perhaps, or Maxim? He would get the name eventually: she would tell him when she was ready to trust him with it. What does a man do when he is too old to look for father figures? Perhaps he finds a son.

Rita jumped up from the table. ‘I have to go.’ Her distracted, dreamy air was back, and he knew that, when they lived together, it would annoy him, that when her mind turned to her job, her responsibilities to her students, he would not be the focus of her attention any more. She would always switch off, just like that, say ‘I have to go,’ unexpectedly — he realised that he would have to quell his desire to become demanding at that stage. He would have to accept that she was still open to the world in a way that he was not. I’d better busy myself with building projects, he thought, otherwise I’ll start to annoy her.

She bent her head and gave him a brief kiss on the lips. ‘Next time I see you,’ she said, ‘two days’ time, I’ll have thought of a name to call you, then. Maybe I’ll make something up.’ She was gone.

He drove the car back to the top of the lane and left it there and walked up to the hut. Kadek might have been and gone already that morning, but if he was still there, maybe he would ask about buying the car. He wondered whether Kadek had been briefed about his departure yet or whether he would have to tell him himself. He would leave a handsome tip, in hard dollars. He hoped that Kadek would be sorry to see him go.

The doors to the hut were closed but the small silver padlock had not been attached to the metal loop that locked them shut: it was sitting on the table on the veranda, next to his washing bowl. That was unusual — Kadek was normally very thorough about locking up. Still, maybe things were different now, maybe Kadek knew he would be minding an empty building for a while, until the next incumbent that the Institute needed to squirrel away for a bit. Perhaps Kadek thought Harper wasn’t returning at all after his meeting with the lawyer. He would be used to the arbitrary comings and goings of Institute staff by now.

Harper stood on the veranda, facing the door. Then he reached out, took hold of the iron circle that lifted the latch, twisted it slowly. The latch lifted with a squeak and a scrape. He pushed the door back.

Inside, the hut was clean and tidy. Kadek had remade the bed and smoothed it immaculately. The mosquito net was tied in a neat waterfall of cotton around each post, the white sheets tucked in tight. He had emptied the ashtray of the burnt shreds of Francisca’s letter. The chair in front of the desk was inserted in its proper position neatly, not at the lazy diagonal that Harper always left it at. The hut could not have been more organised, more empty.

He stepped over the threshold. There was no breakfast waiting for him on the desk — that meant that Kadek had not been that morning, that the hut had been left tidy and emptied and unlocked all night while he had been at the guesthouse. He walked into the hut, leaving the door behind him pushed wide open, to admit the light. He went over to the shutters and opened them, pushing them back against the outside wall, and then all was filled with daylight inside, albeit still silent. He stood for a moment in the centre of the room.

Packing his few things wouldn’t take long. Perhaps Kadek would come later.

He went down to the river for a walk.

He came back and made himself some powdered coffee.

He grew hungry, and found the remainder of a packet of biscuits that he had left in a cupboard, a dry remnant of one of his few trips to the mini-market in town.

He sat on the veranda for a bit, watching the view, then went back inside and, suddenly tired in the full heat of the day, lay down and took a nap on the immaculate bed. When he woke, he climbed off the bed, still a little sleepy, looked at the creased sheets and felt a sense of trespass — he never normally slept during the day. He tugged at the edges of the sheets and then neatened them with the flat of his hand, so that Kadek would not have to do it when he showed up later, and as he straightened, it came to him what was familiar about Johan. He stood for a moment in the middle of the room, then turned to the corner cupboard, where he kept the whisky and the cigarettes.

There was no trace of moon. He had to navigate by holding his hands out in front of him, feeling the tree trunks and then grasping them and hauling himself slowly round. Once he was through the trees, he stood at the edge of the rice field, in the pitch dark, the men with machetes only metres behind him, and watched as the red tail light of the motorcycle disappeared down the rise. That was all he saw, in the blackness, that one, small, round red light, his chance of escape, dropping down the track, disappearing as if into the earth — and then there was nothing but night, and he was alone in the rice field and the men were hunting him and they would have heard the sound of the motor for certain and be heading his way. Wayan had done more than leave him alone in the dark: he had drawn the men towards him.

He stepped carefully away from the trees, towards the rise, lifting his feet slowly so as not to make splashing sounds in the mud and water, although his breath sounded so loud in his own chest, he could scarcely believe it was not giving him away. The men were nearby, he knew it, perhaps standing still and listening for any sign of him, but every now and then, there was a shout or a scream from the burning house on the other side of the field. The men’s companions were still killing Komang’s family. The noises would distract the men, perhaps, and if he stayed motionless, invisible, they might return to the main task in hand.

He should have let Wayan use a light, even if it had risked him being discovered: to leave the man alone in the dark in a water field — how stupid of him, he only had himself to blame.

It was then he saw a movement, a shadow to his left, no more than the shift of something lighter in the dark, pale clothing perhaps, against the black wall of the treeline. The breath froze in his throat. In daytime, shadows were dark: in this pitch black, they were light. If Wayan had seen this ghost-shape moving around in the dark, of course he would have cracked.

The ghost flickered, whimpered, clutched his arm, thin fingers digging into his flesh. He grabbed at a bony shoulder and at that point a cloud above them must have shifted a little; there was a small amount of moonlight. He pulled the ghost towards him. It was Komang’s wife. He looked down into her face, which was a rictus of fear. She must have been the fleeing shadow he had seen when he had watched the men murder Komang — she had been hoping to draw the men away from her home, her children. If so, she must know by now it was a strategy that had failed. He wondered how long she had been hiding in the trees, too terrified to return to her house, too terrified to run, perhaps hoping that one or two of the other household members had been able to flee in the chaos. And then she had realised that the tall figure she could just about see emerging from the trees was Harper, the stranger who had come to the house earlier that day, the man who her husband said was a friend.

He was holding her by the shoulder but she was also holding him, seizing his arm in a bony grip. They stood clutching at each other. For a moment or two they were both just clinging and breathing and he saw, mirrored in her petrified gaze, his own fear. He lifted a finger to his mouth, then, to indicate she should be silent, although his own breath was coming louder than hers.

He heard a scuffle in the undergrowth, turned, saw the glow of a flaming torch — and with no warning, the men were upon them. The ones holding the torch were further away than the ones who had come close in the dark, who had emerged from the trees behind Komang’s wife. They must have been the party hunting her, not the one hunting him: the one hunting him was the more distant group. He felt a moment of fury that she had not only frightened Wayan away but led them to him. If she had stayed hidden in the trees, he would not have been discovered. He could have dropped down into an irrigation ditch while they were upon her.

These thoughts were swift — at once, several of the men grabbed her and she screamed and babbled in fear and they shouted back and the men with the torches came running, their feet splashing in the water.

They were surrounded then — between fifteen and twenty men, he estimated. It was hard to tell in the dark, with the shifting shadows thrown by the torches: each figure lit by orange had a shadow figure in black: in the dark, the men were doubled.

He knew he had one chance. He drew himself up to his full height and said loudly and firmly in Indonesian, ‘I found her. She was hiding in the trees.’

The men on the edge of the group were talking excitedly but the two closest to Harper looked at him. One raised a paraffin lantern: Harper could see the oval of his face, questioning. ‘I found her,’ he repeated. ‘She was trying to flee that way. There was a man waiting for her on a motorbike but he left.’

Komang’s wife was still talking very fast, whimpering and crying with a rise and fall, a rise into a small scream, a fall into a plea, the desperate sound of someone pleading for her life, her children — and one of the men, very small, very young-looking in the orange light, stepped forward and raised both his arms together, elbows bent, then struck her on the side of her head with an object Harper couldn’t see. She gave a single, sharp cry and fell to the ground. The young man looked at Harper then, to see how he would react. Harper kept his face still.

The boy looked around and the other young men clapped him on the shoulder. Then the group turned back in on itself, began talking excitedly.

The older man with the oval face was still standing next to Harper. Harper folded his arms, said, ‘What are they saying?’

The older man lifted his chin — his paraffin lantern swung to and fro, illuminating first one side of his face and one group of men, then the other side of his face and another. Komang’s wife was just visible on the ground, a small heap, silent now, but alive, her breath heaving inside her, the curve of her back rising and falling. ‘First we will put her face then her honour to the fire,’ the man said, nodding towards the flaming torch held by a man on the other side of the group.

Harper stepped forward. Komang’s wife was still bent in a heap. As he reached her, his feet sank in the mud and the irrigation water rose halfway up his calves. He grabbed the hair on the back of her head — it was loose and fell over his wrist — and she had only time for one final, inarticulate cry before he pushed her face down into the muddy water, put his other hand on the back of her head, and steeled every muscle in his arms to hold her there.

He was a young man. He was strong. His arms were like iron. And yet, the strength of a woman desperate to live — she got one arm up and began clawing at his forearms. Her legs kicked out behind her, splashing in the water. She even managed to raise her back a little. Who would have thought such a small woman had that strength? One of the men had lifted a paraffin lantern high to illuminate the scene. Die quickly, Harper thought, for God’s sake, die quickly, or they will stop me killing you. And yet, incredibly, she managed to shift her head a little and he had to use both hands to push her down again. And then one of the men dropped down to sit on her legs to stop them kicking out, and he knew that they would not stop him from killing her. Their own scheme was forgotten.

Strands of her hair clung across his wrist, the rest floating around her head; the ditch was illuminated black and orange; bubbles were rising through it. He began to count backwards from a hundred, softly, under his breath — he knew his lips were moving although there was no more than a whisper coming from them, one hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight. . Her whole body shook and the hand, small and bony, continued to scrape at his arm. . eighty-four, eighty-three, eighty-two. . she dug her fingers into his arm. . seventy-two, seventy-one, seventy. . His counting was slow — more than a second per number, he thought: a slow count back from a hundred would be around three minutes. It took longer than that to drown but she was small and had already been face down for a minute or two before he started counting. She would surely lose consciousness soon. Sixty-eight, sixty-seven, sixty-six. . He did not look up at the men who had gathered round him, watching. They had fallen silent. He concentrated all his effort on keeping the woman’s head beneath the water. Fifty-six, fifty-five, fifty-four. . he realised he was counting back in numerals but thinking in tens. Forty-two, forty-one, forty. . The counting became everything. His arms were like rock now. It was the numbers in his head, the soft movements of his lips — that was what he concentrated on. Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one. . Time had no meaning any more. Only the numbers had meaning. Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six. . He was so nearly there. He just wanted to be there. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen. . The men around still said nothing, just stood, and the night insects were blaring and there was a crackle from one of the flaming torches but he could sense they were all motionless even though he didn’t look up. And finally. . Three, two, ONE!

Even after he had finished counting, he did not release her. He did not dare. If the job was not finished, she would be burnt to death, and he too, possibly. He stayed where he was, his breath heaving in his chest, waiting.

And then he realised that the small fingers digging into his arm had eased, some seconds ago, perhaps. The hand lost its grip, fell limp into the water with a tiny splash. He stayed motionless for a minute longer, to see if there were any more bubbles, then released her, took his hands away, but stayed kneeling. The woman lay still. The men around him remained motionless too, looking down.

Eventually, he looked around the group, got to his feet, unsteadily. He glanced at the older man who had been standing next to him and saw that the look on his face was one of shock. The man had seen not mercy in his actions but efficiency. The men’s desire to torture her was born in heat, and all men understood that actions done in heat were excusable because they were men and that was what men did — but his ruthlessness in drowning Komang’s wife seemed evil to them. Even though they would have taken her and done far worse to her than he had just done, they were, momentarily at least, afraid of him.

The men had stepped back but then the young one holding the torch moved forward, lifted Komang’s wife up by her shirt. Her body was limp, her arms hanging down, water dripping from the ends of her fingers, her face hidden by the fall of her hair.

A murmur came from the men. One of them called something out and two of them laughed. Their moment of shocked silence was over. Denied the opportunity to torture her, they would now decide what to do with the body — a poor substitute for the person but one that would do. She would probably be hanging from a tree in the centre of the village in the morning. They would dismember her, perhaps, as they had her husband, her children. If he stayed with them, joined in, he would be safe: they would not question his allegiance now.

The excitement in the men’s faces: the wide eyes, gritted teeth — you did not need to drink arak all day, like Benni’s men, to have such an expression on your face. He had seen that same excitement on the faces of boys at school in Los Angeles or Amsterdam, on the young men of the Institute during training exercises. He began stepping backwards, into the dark. His feet sounded loud and splashy in the water to him but the men were intent on their conversation. He was halfway back across the field, moving slowly and carefully away from the men and the trees, when he heard a shout. The tone was unmistakeably hostile to his absence. He dropped down then, into the muddy water, took a deep breath, and pushed his own face into the mud.

Dawn is a promise. That is the mystery of it. It is as if you emerge from the swamp of night cell by cell yet in an instant. You are lying in an irrigation ditch, lying stretched flat in order to submerge yourself as much as possible, with only half your face turned upwards so that you can breathe, keeping your breath as shallow as possible while staying alive, knowing that each second of being alive may be your last because the men with flares and lanterns and machetes are only a few metres away and discovery is possible at any moment.

The birds announce it: the outlier birds, cheep, cheep, such a tiny, hopeful sound. The first hint of grey appears at the edges of the sky and, after a bit of tuning up, the whole chorus breaks out, the birds’ triumphant orchestra, the musical holler of it, because however black the night has been they are still there and they cry out. The sky is grey and lightening by the minute, and you turn in the ditch, stiff and frozen to the core. You are still afraid but now it is light enough to see across the rice field, growing greener by the minute in the dawn light, that the men with machetes have gone — and you are still alive.

*

It took him four months to get to Los Angeles. Wayan may have abandoned him, but he had at least dropped his bag where the moped had been parked. Harper found it as soon as he rose from the irrigation ditch at dawn, snatched it up then headed off at a trotting run, away from the village. There was some money in a secret pocket on the inside of the bag, and his documents: the notes in his money belt had spent a night being soaked in mud and were unusable even after he rinsed them in fresh water and dried them on a rock. That was a week later, when he allowed himself to stop in the same place for more than a few hours.

He made it to the coast eventually, at one point hiding out on Lovina Beach in Singaraja, in the cabin of a very alcoholic and somewhat demented old Dutchman whose brain was pickled enough to think Harper was his house servant. After three weeks there, he stole the old man’s moped — it hadn’t been ridden in years — got it working and travelled along the coast until he met with a group of hippie dropouts who had been camping for a year, smoking dope and sleeping with each other. He told them his name was Leaf and he was on the run from the CIA, which was possibly, by that time, partly true. The group was only camping for another fortnight and then planning on taking the long route back to San Francisco on freight ships crossing the Pacific. Eventually, he hit Humboldt Bay, where he could access his Bank of America account for enough cash for a flight to Los Angeles.

He managed to call Nina from a payphone before he got on the flight. When she answered the phone, for a moment or two, he could not speak. She said, ‘Hello. .? Hello. .? Who is this. .?’ Then there was a pause. ‘Hello. .?’ He could tell by the tone of that last hello that she was about to hang up so forced himself to say, to spit out almost, ‘Nina, it’s me.’ There was a shocked silence on the other end of the line.

At Los Angeles airport, he joined a line with three businessmen ahead of him and the occasional cab cruising to the kerb every five minutes or so. Eventually, it was his turn and he got into a battered vehicle driven by a fat white guy in a stained T-shirt who grunted when Harper gave him the address. There was something about the way the cab driver glanced in the rear-view mirror as he got in the back that he didn’t like. While on the move, he had let his hair grow and adopted a soft, scrubby beard: he looked like the kind of young man other men hated. As they cruised down the slipway, he took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up, without offering one to the driver, who responded by fumbling for his own cigarettes on the dashboard. They both smoked their different brands in silence all the way.

‘Want me to exit at Crenshaw?’ the driver growled when they were on the Santa Monica Freeway, and Harper didn’t know what he meant so he just nodded. This stretch of the freeway was new, had cut the Heights in two by the look of it.

When they pulled up outside Poppa and Nina’s house, Harper saw the driver stare into the mirror again as he extracted a roll of bills from the side pocket of his holdall. He made a point of glancing at the notes rather than counting them out, then pushed a crumpled heap of them into the driver’s outstretched hand, enjoying the brief look of confusion on his face as he worked out that this particular hippy dropout wasn’t short of dough.

Harper stood on the pavement while the driver pulled away. After the sound of the engine and the smell of the cab’s exhaust fumes had dissipated, he took a minute or two to breathe: the quiet, sloping street, the houses in an ascending row with their wooden facades painted in different pastel colours, the huge old cactus that was still in the front garden. The sunlight seemed so delicate here, in comparison with where he had come from. Standing on the empty street with the elegant droop of the vine that still twisted round the porch support and his bag at his feet, he realised he had wanted this homecoming so badly that he could not bring himself to mount the steps and knock on the door — the pleasure of this moment was so intense. What could be better than the seconds before you set eyes on someone you know will be overjoyed to see you?

He could have stood there for some time — but a shape passed the window and all at once, Nina flung the screen door wide.

In the kitchen, Nina said, ‘I’ll make tea, shall we take it out into the garden?’ but he replied, ‘Let’s sit at the table,’ because it reminded him of his first evening in the house and how he and Poppa had sat at the kitchen table drinking milkshakes and he had gazed longingly through the window at the garden and Jimmy the dog. Jimmy had died many years ago but there was still the iron stake dug into the grass at the bottom of the slope.

It was six years since his last visit: he had come for two weeks just before he began his military service in Holland. Nina’s brown hair was stranded with white, she was stouter round the stomach and there was a certain stiffness in her movements. She fetched down the tea set he had brought from Amsterdam on that trip, the blue and white, standing on a chair to lift it down, refusing his help, holding it under the rattling tap for a few minutes to clean it of dust. When the kettle had come to the boil on the stovetop, she warmed the pot and the cups, set it on to boil again.

They were enjoying each other’s presence so much that they talked of unimportant things until she wiped her hands on her light blue apron, joined him at the table and said, ‘He will be so pleased to see you. I can’t wait to see the look on his face.’

‘How is he?’

Nina tried to prevent her smile from becoming effortful. She lifted the teapot. ‘It’s not good, Nic,’ she said. ‘A year, maybe, maybe less. Sometimes. .’ She did not finish the sentence but Harper guessed she had been about to say, sometimes I wish it would be a lot less. The news that Poppa’s condition was terminal had come just before Harper had left Holland for Jakarta. It had not stopped Harper taking the job.

It would be less than a year, as it turned out. Poppa would succumb to his illness five months later, and two years after that, while Harper was working as a labourer on a farm in the north-east of Holland, near the German border, Nina would be knocked down and killed by a Dodge pick-up that was speeding round the corner of Firestone Boulevard: and with Nina’s death, his last link with America, those five years he had spent in California as part of a family, with grandparents and a little brother, would be gone. He would never return.

‘Is the doctor good? Should I speak with him while I’m here? Do you have enough money?’

Nina smiled then. ‘You were always trying to send us money.’

‘What else am I going to spend it on?’

‘Well you know what your Poppa would say, booze and women, son, booze and women.’ This was a joke: Poppa had always been such an upright citizen.

‘I like a bit of whisky, I guess. Drank a bit too much of it over there.’ It was risky, mentioning his life in Europe. He wouldn’t do it in front of his grandfather as it would be sure to prompt a question, but Nina was used to not-knowing things. She had not-known about Michael for year after year, not-known how Harper was getting on in Holland — never really known exactly how it had happened, losing Bud.

‘And women?’

He shook his head slowly, grinning at her, already copying his grandfather’s grin. ‘Tryin’ to marry me off?’ He heard how his accent had aligned with hers. There had never been any Dutch in his English, not after those years here, but in Europe and Indonesia his English accent was completely blank — and here he was, in Nina’s kitchen, drinking fine hot tea, already regaining his West Coast edge.

‘You’re a good-looking young man, mid-twenties, perfect age some would say.’

‘I’m not sure marriage is for me.’

‘Marriage is for everybody.’ She had waited many years for it to be legal for her and Poppa to wed, just because she was Latina, him black.

‘There’s not a lot of women would want a husband does as much travelling as I do.’ This, too, would be dangerous territory in front of Poppa.

He saw her glance at his forearms then. He was dressed in a loose T-shirt — the scratches had mostly faded during his time on the run but there were still some very fine white tracks on his brown forearm, unnoticeable but to anyone who really looked. If he had thought about it, he would have worn a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe he had wanted her to notice, wanted her to say, are you okay? What happened over there?

Nina raised her teacup to her lips, put it down.

He read the question in her face. ‘I always meant to come back, but, you know, military service, and then this job, you know, and travel. I’m not saying never. I have to go back and straighten things out with work, then maybe, I don’t know.’

Nina smiled delicately, to take the sting out of her reproach. ‘We always kind of hoped for another child around the place one day, if you got married one day I mean. We always hoped you would come back here for good once you were old enough so’s Anika didn’t have any say in the matter.’ Quickly, she added, ‘But we knew in our heart of hearts, once we lost you to Europe. .’ She shook her head. ‘It’s funny, you know, how when kids grow up, you can look back and see what they’ve grown into. You always wanted to go places. You once set off up the road when you’d only been living with us a month, taking a look around. Poppa and I came to the front of the house and just watched you head off along the pavement, up the hill. You didn’t look back once. We were so amused, we just watched you, until you disappeared over the brow of the hill, that is, then Poppa got worried about you getting lost and came chasing after you. Don’t know why, you were old enough to find your way back, it was just ’cos you were new to us. We worried about you as if you were an infant but you were six, after all.’

There was a long silence. Then Harper saw that a tear was making its way slowly down Nina’s cheek, leaving a shining trail.

‘Come on. .’ he whispered.

She fumbled with one hand for the handkerchief stuffed up the other sleeve, then whispered to herself, ‘I’ll never forgive her. I know that’s wrong of me. But to take you away from us, when we’d already lost Bud. We were the only family you knew.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘We had to put you on a boat with a tag around your neck, send you off like a parcel, across that big ocean, all on your own, just a boy, to somewhere you couldn’t even remember. Wasn’t it enough, what we’d been through? Everything we had been through?’

‘Well, she didn’t quite see it that way, I guess.’ His mother — the mother who had demanded him back, after what happened to Bud, only to make it clear that having a son living with her again was a mighty inconvenience when it came to her complicated love life.

‘Don’t go upsetting yourself because I’ve showed up.’

She lifted her head then, gave her face a final wipe, right and left, beamed at him resolutely. ‘You showing up is always the best thing in the world, make no mistake about that.’

She looked up at the ceiling, then back at him. It was time.

The first thing he noticed as they mounted the stairs was the smell: a strong smell of antiseptic, something faintly rotten underneath. Then, as they paused on the landing, both of them listening to see if he was awake, the harsh rasp of Poppa’s breathing, the effort in it, the sound of a man exhausted to be alive. The door was ajar; Nina pushed at it gently. Poppa was in the middle of the bed and on the other side of the room was a small cot that Nina must have been sleeping in at night. An oxygen cylinder stood upright on an iron support by the bed, the mask and tube hanging from the post of the bedstead. They still had the same flowered wallpaper, dusty roses, was how he had always thought of that pattern, faded now in the light through the net curtains.

They stopped just inside the door. Poppa looked asleep, his mouth open, his face tilted to the ceiling — even in repose, his brows were knitted in pain. Harper stared at him; the concave hollows of his cheeks, the white stubble on his chin.

He looked at his grandfather then and thought, you spent your whole life doing good, saving people, and now I need you to save me. I have done something that puts me beyond reach of forgiveness, and if you do not tell me how to find my way back into the world, I will never be able to do it.

A cough shook the old man then, and the sound of it was so deep and hollow: it came from the depths of his chest cavity in the same way that earthquake tremors come from the depths of the earth. It was hard to believe that such a cough could not shake his bones apart. From the knitting on his face, it was clear it was causing him great pain. They stepped forward into the room. Nina laid a hand on Poppa’s arm and leaned down to him as he opened his eyes, saying with quiet joy, ‘Look, Michael, look who is here to see you.’ And Poppa looked past Nina and saw Harper, and his mouth opened in a huge if effortful grin and their gazes met, and Nina looked from one to the other, smiling with pleasure at the sight of them together.

They raised Poppa up a little in the bed and adjusted the cushions behind him to make him as comfortable as they could, then Nina left the room on the pretext of making more tea but they both knew it was to give them some time alone together. She would be downstairs while they talked, moving around her kitchen, maybe humming a little.

He drew up a wooden chair from the corner of the room and sat on it. Poppa had closed his eyes, briefly, pausing from the effort of being hoisted upright, but he opened them again, grimaced, and said, ‘Well, son, look how tall and strong you are now. That’s the good thing about not seeing you that often, you really get to appreciate the changes.’ He coughed. ‘Not too sure about that beard.’

‘I’ll shave while I’m here. How are you?’ Harper said, a straight and simple question, to indicate that Poppa could speak the truth to him even if he was putting on a brave face when Nina was in the room.

Poppa grimaced again. ‘Not so good, son, not so good at all.’

They talked then about the doctors who came and went, a nurse that Poppa had disliked who had to be dismissed, how helpful the neighbours had been. ‘Take a look at all the good wishes downstairs.’ He didn’t know whether Nina had told Poppa about the money he had sent from Holland — Poppa was such a proud man, it was possible Nina had kept quiet. Poppa told him he had been relieved when the doctor had said there was no point in further surgery. He wasn’t scared of dying, he said, but he was scared of mutilation. He had seen some terrible things done to people during some of his spells in hospital. It was a great relief to be allowed to die at home. There was a new drug on the market but it made him real sick.

After a while, Poppa reached out a hand, and Harper bent forward in his chair and took it, and then he leaned further forward still and rested his head on the stiff white sheets and Poppa stroked the back of his head and Harper wept a little. ‘I’m sorry,’ he snuffled after a while, his head still down, ashamed of crying and struggling against breaking down entirely.

‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for. .’ Poppa said, his voice low and rattly. ‘You’d be surprised, you know, son, just how many people come here to visit and end up crying on those bedcovers. When you have an illness and people know you won’t live through it, well, it’s strange, it’s like you can offer them absolution.’ He gave a chuckle then. ‘Don’t know why. All that training to be a lawyer, now it turns out I’m a priest. An awful lot of them cry. Say, did Nina tell you about the riots we’ve had here?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s been bad.’

Harper was still and silent then, turned a little, let Poppa stroke his head. He could tell Poppa what he had done, that he had killed a woman, drowned her with his bare hands in an irrigation ditch. What would Poppa think of him then? The son he had raised when he had no reason to other than he was a good person? All those other people who came — he could just imagine the string of visitors Poppa must be getting after all the people he had worked for, over the years. He had expected to find the house full when he came; Nina must have got rid of them for his visit. Didn’t he, Harper, deserve and need absolution more than any of them? All those people who had used and needed Poppa over the years, when Poppa should have belonged to him, to them: and they were still using him, coming to his deathbed wanting something. He realised that in the five years he had lived with this family, he had always wanted more of Poppa, always resented how much he had cared for other people, his standing in the community. He was a big man in every sense of the word but there had never been enough of him to go around.

Poor Poppa, always expected to have the answer, to be wise — but even as he thought this, and felt guilty for it, Harper could not prevent himself from craving it. Say the right thing, he pleaded, in his head.

Surely Poppa had intuited that all was not right with him? Surely now, he would ask Harper what was wrong, and fix it.

‘What was it all for, Nicolaas?’ Poppa said.

‘What do you mean?’ Harper asked, lifting his head.

‘All that work. Young folk, smashing things, just wanting to be heard I guess.’

Harper looked at his grandfather, then rubbed the back of his hand across his face and drew breath. Poppa was dying. It wasn’t about him.

‘All that work,’ Poppa repeated with a sigh. Nina had warned him of this downstairs, that Poppa had started to question his life, as any man in his position was entitled to do. She said he didn’t even raise a smile about the Voting Rights Act.

He couldn’t bear the thought that Poppa might be hard on himself: plenty of men had cause for that, not him. ‘C’mon Poppa. . You worked so hard.’

‘Maybe if I’d worked a little less hard, I’d have taken better care of my own family.’

Was that really what Poppa thought? Here this man lay, a man who had worked so tirelessly for what he believed was right, and yet that very passion and tirelessness meant he could only see all the things that were still wrong. Harper thought of all the people he had met who were self-serving: the people in his line of work, who cared nothing for how their actions affected others as long as they earned a good living in an exciting way; the clean evil of the men with machetes and sickles for whom politics was no more than an excuse; himself — yes, himself. How many of those people would lie on their deathbeds excoriating themselves for what they had done or failed to do? The most evil would be the least self-questioning of all. And yet here, on this bed in this room smelling of antiseptic, lay a man who had worked all his life to do the right thing: a man who had done so much that he couldn’t forgive himself for not doing enough.

Harper rested his hand on top of Poppa’s where it lay on the bed sheet, lightly, because he didn’t know if his skin would be sensitive — it felt as though it should be. It was hot and papery, the veins standing out in ropes. To see this man on his deathbed: it catapulted him backward and forward at once.

Poppa had his eyes closed now and for a few moments, Harper wondered if he had fallen asleep, then the hand beneath his moved, turned and grasped at Harper’s with surprising strength, although he did not open his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was suddenly clear.

‘When I die, Nicolaas, you’re going to be the only one who saw what happened. I’m so sorry, son, so sorry to leave you with that.’

It was the only time Poppa had ever mentioned what happened to Bud, their joint complicity that day, their failure to save him.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Harper said then.

‘Sure, ask away.’

‘When Anika asked for me back, why didn’t you try and stop her? Why didn’t you fight it?’

Poppa looked at him then and the expression on his face was, if anything, amused rather than hurt. ‘Is that what you think, son? We didn’t fight? Oh, we fought. I was used to fighting.’ He coughed again. ‘Your mother wanted you back because of what happened to Bud. It happened when I was looking after you, too. It was my fault. You think there was a court in the land that would stop a child being sent back to his mother after that?’ More coughing. ‘We didn’t tell you any of that because we didn’t want you to go back to your mother hating her. We wanted to give you a chance.’

He thought, then, of the occasional card or letter he had sent to Nina and Poppa from Holland, during his teenage years. I am well. It has been raining here all week. My favourite lesson at school is Geography. The maps are very interesting. Staying in touch had never been his strong point.

Poppa had his eyes closed. Gradually, his breathing steadied, became slow and regular. On the branches of a tree outside the window, a bird was singing, out of sight.

*

Downstairs, Nina was wiping at the stovetop, more furiously than was strictly necessary. Harper saw how neat and clean the kitchen was — much tidier than he remembered it. He imagined Nina scrubbing the whole house, all of the time, in her impotent fury at Poppa’s suffering.

‘I’m afraid we have some folks coming round for supper later,’ she said. ‘Neighbours who moved in a couple of years ago, they’re nice people. I told them our grandson was coming and hoped they’d take the hint but they said they’re dying to meet you.’

‘You shouldn’t be cooking supper for anyone,’ Harper said, ‘you have enough to do.’

‘Oh, they bring their own supper. You know how people are round here. Remember all that food they brought round after we lost Bud? I had to bring the dog in the house for the first time in his life and feed it to him in secret.’

They shared a smile.

‘Your room is just the same. Want to take a look?’

‘Maybe later. I want to know what I can do for you and Poppa while I’m here.’

She straightened up from where she had been wiping, shook the cloth over the sink, folded it once and laid it over the side. ‘Like mending things? We have people lining up to do that.’

‘Why can’t he realise what a good man he was?’

‘Because he was, I guess, too good to realise it. Neighbours won’t stay long. How about you?’

‘I could eat something.’

‘Wasn’t talking about tonight.’

He went over to her then, put his arms around her and held her against him, her small stout frame against his tall wiry one. He felt the jolting of her body against him as she wept a little. He guessed that nobody had held her for a while.

Later, he would go up to his room and, before the neighbours came, he would shave off his beard and then sit on the back porch while Nina trimmed his hair with a pair of sharpened kitchen scissors and he would think about what he was going to say to Gregor at the Institute, how he was going to explain going off the radar for four months, and Nina would say, ‘Sit still and look straight ahead now, Nic, or I’m going to take a slice off your ear.’

Dusk gathered, as if the valley was filling with smoke; deepening towards dark. He was sitting on the veranda, drinking whisky. For most of the afternoon, he had still expected Kadek, bringing something for dinner that he would place inside the hut, on the desk, coming back outside to the veranda and saying, with his customary politeness, ‘Mr Harper, would you like me to light the lamps?’

Dusk gathered and grew. Kadek did not come with food. He did not come to light the lamps. Harper sat on the veranda for a while, drinking and smoking, then went back inside the hut and turned on the unreliable bedside lamp while he found the matches, lit the paraffin lamps himself, turned off the bedside lamp. He closed the shutters and pulled the door to behind him as he returned to the veranda, hanging one of the lamps from a hook on the inside of the roof. No sign of Kadek and it was too late for him to come now. So, Harper thought, tonight, then? It occurred to him to wonder, again, how implicated Kadek was. He had always wondered if, when Kadek said each morning, ‘I hope you passed a peaceful night?’ there was an element of derision in the question. But if Kadek was part of it, then he would not be risking warning Harper by failing to turn up for his duties. He would be here, as exquisitely polite as ever, keen to make sure that Harper was unaware. No, he thought, if it was tonight, then Kadek had been approached in the town earlier that day by a young man or woman he didn’t know, who came up to him and said merely this: ‘Don’t go to the bule’s house tonight.’ And after a momentary glance at the young man or woman’s face, Kadek would have gone home. Or perhaps Johan’s arrival was all the sign that Kadek needed. The Angel of Death didn’t come roaring into town in red and black with a pitchfork in his hand, after all, not in the world that Harper worked in. He came smiling, in casual slacks and an open-necked shirt, reaching out his hand. He came carrying a briefcase. Or he turned up one evening, as the light was turning golden on the green fields, and one of the children came running into the house to tell you that there was a stranger standing outside in the yard.

If I was running the Institute, and I wanted a man to be unsuspecting, Harper thought as he sipped his whisky, I would give the man a large cheque, to lull him into a false sense of security and to provide a paper trail of my good intentions in the event of any investigation. I would hire local youths through a chain of command — each link knowing no more than the link either side of him — so that, ultimately, the act would be untraceable to me. That’s what the men in suits did. The men in suits, on both sides of the equation, always kept their own hands clean. And he knew then that Abang had sent him up country to visit Komang that day not in order to warn him to escape with his family, but to give his murderers the signal that the time had come. He had not been sent to save Komang. He had been sent to kill him.

And when Johan stood on Harper’s veranda yesterday, that was what was familiar about him. Harper had seen his own reflection.

The world is different now, Rita had said to him. They thought the world was different then.

There’s a form of John in every language, isn’t there? There certainly is.

His head was thick with whisky by the time he went back inside the hut. He pulled off his shirt and trousers and slung them over the back of the chair, flung back the sheets. There was no point in running. If he was right, they would find him; if he was wrong, then he would be sacrificing the possibility of happiness with Rita for nothing. There was only one way to find out if he was being paranoid or not. Two more nights in the hut: if they didn’t come in that time, then he had been wrong about everything. It was that simple: two nights.

As he settled down, bunching up the pillow beneath his head with one arm, he thought, I wonder if, however ready you are, when the moment actually comes, you cannot help but fight. Even Poppa, he thought, ravaged with cancer, in pain: at the end, he fought, I’m sure he did. It would have been difficult for Nina to watch that fight, with its single possible outcome. He could just imagine the old man, skinny but large-boned in his bed, coughing ferociously, determined to hang on to those last scraps of life, the breath heaving inside him. And Bud. There must have been a split second when Bud realised what was happening to him — not while he was floating in the water, or even when he began to turn, but somewhere between hearing Harper scream his name and plummeting into the cascade of the fall. What would the mind of a five-year-old compute in that moment: would he have understood, or would the panic have been so raw, so unformed, that it was simply fear in its most concentrated form? Komang’s wife: she would have understood. She fought, long beyond the point that Harper would have thought her capable of fighting. Perhaps every human being fought, in his or her final moments — fought inside their head, even if they were immobile, no matter what the tortures of remaining alive.

He lay awake, his eyes wide open in the dark, thinking all these thoughts and in the next minute thinking that he must not let paranoia take a grip of him again, not ever. He was completely certain he would never be able to sleep. That was the last thing he thought, three clear monosyllables. I won’t sleep.

He dreamt of Rita. She was standing far away from him, on a road, looking out over a field. Then the field was a cliff, then she fell, and he woke with a start. The hut was dark and silent and he fell asleep again, immediately, dreamt of her again. This time, he dreamt she was being cut at by people he couldn’t see, the way they had the corpulent I Gede Puger, the fat man famous for corruption. They had sliced the fat from his body, it was said, before they shot him in the head. He was standing on a bridge. Then she was beside him. They were cutting her but she didn’t mind. He woke in panic, flailing, and realised dawn had already come and Kadek was on the veranda.

As he opened the doors, Kadek bowed good morning. ‘I am sorry I did not come yesterday Mr Harper but my wife was sick.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, Kadek, please pass on my good wishes.’

He could see, as he looked out over the valley, that it had not rained in the night: a dry night then, not a night to hide your tracks, not a night when the thunder of rain on the roof of the hut would have hidden any sounds on the veranda.

He splashed his face with the water Kadek had brought, lit a cigarette, sat on the veranda and listened to Kadek inside the hut tidying up, making the bed, smoothing the bed sheets with a swift motion of his hand so that they made a sound like the slowly flapping wing of some great bird, an albatross perhaps. So, that was why they hadn’t come. They were waiting for rain. He wondered how much they would be paid. How much was he worth?

He wondered how Kadek lived: well, he hoped, if he was employed by a Western company, in a large compound with his extended family. He imagined Kadek’s wife as young and pretty, two or three children, perhaps. Such lives were good lives as long as nothing went wrong — that was what he often thought when he passed through the villages; the slow pace of life, the communal living, the family ties. As long as there was enough food, and no one fell sick. . he stared out at Gunung Agung, the holy mountain, floating above the trees. . as long as the volcano didn’t erupt or a tidal wave sweep away your fishing boat or pestilence destroy the rice harvest. . as long as there wasn’t a war or a devaluation of the rupiah or a coup. Rita and others like her could romanticise such lives, such islands, all they liked, but the people who lived here walked a tightrope every day of their lives.

After a few minutes, Kadek stepped over the threshold onto the veranda and, without speaking, placed a china cup of coffee next to his elbow. Kadek had intuited by his silence that it had not been a good night, he thought. Wearily, he relived his dream, sipping at the hot black coffee. He wondered if it really had been as long a dream as it had felt at the time, or if he had only remembered it as long. He had heard somewhere, back in Holland, that dreams occur in the second we rise from unconsciousness, in a flash — and that even if we think we have been dreaming for hours, it is only what we remember in a flash, time compressed. This thought had always fascinated him. Perhaps it was true of conscious memory too: decades could be remembered compressed into a moment, after all.

However horrible and odd the dream, it was at least a comfort that he had dreamt of Rita. He thought he would be pleased to dream of her in whatever form she might take: and surely that was something, whatever happened. How short a time he had known her and yet how large she loomed in his mind. Those who haunt us are not the most beautiful or most dear, he thought, far from it, merely those who arrive at a time in our lives when we are ready to be haunted.

Kadek came back out onto the veranda and said something. He was aware of Kadek’s voice sounding in his ear, a small burst of noise to his left, but he did not register the words. Then Kadek said again, ‘Mr Harper. .’

‘Yes?’ Harper did not turn his head.

‘Your breakfast. It is on the table but I could bring it to you?’

Harper turned his head, at last, and said, ‘Oh, thank you, leave it, thank you.’

Kadek bowed.

He sat on the veranda for a while, then rose, slowly, wearily, from his seat, went and leaned his elbows on the rail, looking out over the valley. If he fulfilled his fantasy of the villa in the rice fields, building those bookshelves for Rita, how long would it be before he started sleeping badly again, crying out or disturbing her as he rose from the bed in the middle of the night? She would say, what is it? He would tell her, eventually, and so hand some of his memories to her. It would be like presenting her with a severed head wrapped in a bed sheet. Better to stay away than do that to her. He must strike a bargain with himself, and make it firm — once he left here, if he left here, he would put it behind him. Could he do that? Wasn’t that the problem, always, not making a choice — but knowing whether you had a choice or not?

He became aware of Kadek standing next to him. The man had materialised soundlessly at his elbow. What was it now?

Kadek looked at him and said, ‘It is all done now, Mr Harper.’

As they stood facing each other, it was as if all pretences had fallen away, and Kadek was saying, you know the place you have come to now, all is finished.

Then Kadek said, ‘Will you be requiring a meal later today or perhaps you will eat in the town?’

‘You don’t need to come later, thank you.’

‘Tomorrow morning, or will you be leaving before breakfast?’

Of course, Kadek had been informed of his departure. Perhaps Johan had gone to see him after his coffee with Harper in the smart restaurant, or perhaps there had been a phone call from whoever employed Kadek directly, probably an operative or an office in Denpasar.

‘No, no, thank you, I won’t require anything else. .’ Harper said. He hadn’t realised this was the last time he would see him. He had assumed Kadek would be there on his final morning.

‘And what of your transport requirements, Mr Harper?’

Again, this was something Harper had not considered. It didn’t seem appropriate to enquire about buying the little battered car now. Kadek was clearly done with him.

‘I will take the car into town in the morning, then leave it parked outside the Museum. I’ll leave the keys at the entrance desk.’

Kadek bowed a little, said, ‘It has been a pleasure to work for you, Mr Harper.’ He straightened, gave a smile then, the smile of an equal, bidding goodbye.

Their goodbye was so peremptory, he could not think of a gesture. ‘Thank you, thank you, yes, it’s been a pleasure for me too.’

And then, as if the thought had only just come to him, Kadek added, ‘Would you like me to fold and pack your clothes?’

‘No thank you, I can do that myself, later today.’ He had what, six shirts, three pairs of trousers, some T-shirts, his old boots, two pairs of shoes? He had a nice watch. He had an expensive leather bag with a zip that Francisca had bought him that was intended for toiletries. He used it for pens and pencils and disposable cigarette lighters and kept some of his cash folded and tucked into the lining where he had unpicked a seam. He had his notebook. He would tear out the pages, one by one, and burn them in the ashtray. That would take an hour or so.

And then, before he could think to extend his hand, thank Kadek again or mention a tip, Kadek had gone, leaving him alone on the veranda. Ostensibly, Harper had dismissed him, but Harper knew that it was he who had been dismissed.

As Harper settled down in his bed that night, his final night in the hut, he left the bedside lamp on for a while and watched the shadows of the insects dance against the thick mosquito net like his own wayang show. He understood that the whole of his life had been built upon the lie of logic. It was logic that relieved you of choice. If I don’t do this job, someone else will. If my company doesn’t invest in this mad and murderous regime, another will. If I don’t kill this woman, then the men around me will and more slowly. All true: but there would always be one bad thing that was simply too bad to be justified in this way. If he had not drowned Komang’s wife in the rice field then she would have been tortured to death over a period of several hours. But he had not drowned her to save her from being tortured. He had drowned her to show the men he was on their side. He had done it to save his own skin.

He lay, watching the insects dance. He thought of the pictures he had carried around in his head for so many years: Bud, disappearing over the fall; Komang’s wife, the way her wet hair lay across his wrist as he pressed her face down; the moon over Jakarta that night, the yellow moon as he crouched by a canal and clutched a death list to his chest. And now, this moment now, watching the insects flick and flutter. What was any life but such moments, strung together, like beads on a necklace? Rita didn’t wear any jewellery, just small gold stud earrings and a watch with a leather strap. An image came of her sitting in the bar on the night they met, her easy laugh, and the way that when she did it, she lifted a hand to place her fingers, briefly, against the bare flush of her throat. Moments like that: it was all a string of moments.

He lay there, calmly: such insights, lying there, such clarity, waiting for the moment when he would lean over, lift the net just enough to reach out and turn off the lamp, lie back in the dark, and eventually, despite it all, give way to sleep.

In the morning, he would rise, dress, go out onto the veranda — maybe even go for one last walk down to the river. He would extract some dollars from inside the lining of the toiletries bag and place them in the envelope from which he had taken the Institute’s cheque. He would seal the envelope, write Kadek’s name on it and leave it on the desk. After that, it would simply be a question of lifting his holdall over the threshold of the doorframe, descending the steps, taking the case down the path to the car. He had arranged with Rita that he would check into the guesthouse some time in the afternoon and she had said she would get there as soon as possible after work, so that they could have cocktails together to celebrate their plans. In a mirror image of their first meeting, he saw himself sitting at the table in the corner. He saw himself waiting for her, smoking, a little impatient, and how she would glance straight at that corner as she stepped into the bar. She would look at him and smile. Lying there in bed, he smiled back at her.

He woke a few hours later but not violently, merely with a sigh at the derisive note of victory in the ghekko’s cry. Eh-ur!. . the pause, then the continuing. So the goodwill of Kadek and the young woman who made the offering had proved fruitless. The ghekko had still come. He realised that although he had heard it almost every night, he had never seen it.

He lay awake in the dark, quite still, breathing gently and listening to the skittering of the creature’s feet on the sloping wooden roof above his bed. It was nothing. It was only a ghekko. In the morning, it would be gone. In the morning, he would rise. Slowly, gently, he drifted back to sleep, a long fall into unconsciousness as unhurried as a man with a large parachute descending from a great height or a huge leaf detached from a tree on a still day: and as he drifted down, the sounds on the roof began to form a more regular pattern, pit-pit, pause, pit-pit-pit. It was just the ghekko, that was all, or some other creature, or his imagination — or maybe, yes, at last. It was the beginning of rain.