by Rea Tarvydas
“You’re a tall one, all right,” says Load Toad. He scoops her clothing off the floor and throws it at her. When she is dressed, he marches her onto the lift. As they descend to the brothel on the fifth floor, she scales the walls and braces her feet on the handrails. Squatting above, she flashes her bare crotch at Load Toad then dismounts with a bounce.
“Christ, you’re bendy,” says Load Toad with some admiration.
She curtsies and exits the lift ahead of him.
The brothel is surprisingly bright, businesslike, underneath fluorescent lights that cast no shadows. As Load Toad hands the girl over to the front desk clerk, a gaggle of businessmen tumble out of the lift and Load Toad recognizes a glassware dealer from a trade show he attended in Shanghai the year prior.
“Happy,” calls Load Toad. “What’re you doing here?”
“Celebrating a contract signing,” says Happy.
“Lucky bastard,” says Load Toad. Stalled contract negotiations. School fees. His old man. Load Toad’s forehead feels incredibly tight.
“You join us?” asks Happy, waving a pale hand at the reception desk clerk.
“No, no. You go ahead,” says Load Toad.
“Chinese people are free,” says Happy.
Load Toad doesn’t know what to say.
“Chinese people are free,” repeats Happy and adjusts his eyeglasses. “Free from Mao.”
Alone in his hotel room, Load Toad drinks several glasses of rum and thinks about a country of brothels full of men celebrating Mao’s death, thirty years after the fact.
Next door, The American arrives after midnight and turns on his television, louder than usual. Load Toad finds it impossible to sleep. At 2:00 AM Load Toad knocks on his door and asks him to turn it down. The American, wearing only his underpants, sways in the open doorway and says, “I’m celebrating four weeks at The Skyline.”
He invites Load Toad in for a drink.
I’m stuck in a variety show worse than the one with the fucking clowns. Load Toad declines. The half-empty bottle of rum in his room is shouting.
I’ll never last four weeks at The Line in the Sky, contract or no contract. Load Toad throws his belongings into his suitcase.
At night, Guangzhou is a haze of construction dust, a purple desert, through which skyscrapers emerge like robots. The taxi floats down empty streets. For some reason they’re caught in a snarl of traffic in the side streets around the TV Tower site. Why is every middle-of-the-night taxi ride like this?
Electrical lines swing from bamboo pole to bamboo pole, feeding the temporary residences that crowd the entrance. Old people squat around charcoal fires, drinking tea, guarding their sleeping grandchildren. Somebody, somewhere is playing the national anthem.
On the rubble heap, scavengers with miners’ headlamps clamber over the mound, search for scrap metal and wire, rush to extract what they can before the debris is trucked to the countryside and abandoned. There will always be someone squatting in the rubble of soviet bloc housing.
“Hurry, hurry,” says Load Toad.
The taxi driver nods in the gloom of the front seat.
The taxi inches forward.
Three dogs stand at the top of the rubble heap and shout like outraged citizens. Like when the police arrive and drag you into the secret night. The faces of your neighbours turn silently away, leaving a trio of dogs to protest.
Eventually the taxi rounds the corner behind the TV Tower and the reason for the traffic jam is revealed. A night market has sprung up. In a roadside stall, a young woman turns and the flight of her hair travels through Load Toad back to his wife, asleep in their bed in Hong Kong, one arm draped across her beautiful face. He wonders if he could cry.
That’s when a scavenger shoves through the plastic sheeting and offers to a grandmother a hand-made basket overflowing with scrap. She squats in the dust, untangles wires with fingers gnarled like ginger root. This is the memory that Load Toad will seek words for, when he watched an old woman pluck wire from a basket like a bird. He will repeat this story over and over, and search for meaning. In the end, he will wonder if he loves China.
The TV Tower watches over us all. Like a god, even though I don’t believe in gods that abandon people to scavenge for scrap currency.
At the train station, Load Toad hears the sliced steel of an express train. He rattles the padlocked gate until a security guard approaches.
“21:23. Last train. 21:23,” says the guard and points at the solitude of a train platform with his baton. A train sits there, under a spotlight, neither moving forward or backward. Eventually, the security guard provides Load Toad with a printed schedule for the train to Lo Wu and tells him to come back in the morning.
The same taxi driver lifts Load Toad’s suitcase into the trunk of the same taxi.
When Load Toad returns to the same room at The Skyline Business Hotel, the Night Porter silently delivers a tray with tea and a fresh fruit basket. Hot jasmine tea and heavily-waxed cherry tomatoes tooth-picked into a pyramid.
THE DIRTY DUCK
ON THE SECOND evening, the electricity goes out. Bill grabs a flashlight from a basket at the front desk and leaves. Past an elephant statue with hibiscus tucked in its folded hands, down the stone staircase and onto the terraced grounds of the Hotel Kebun Indah, he walks in search of something to eat.
The hotel is set back from the road and Bill follows an uneven pathway. A moon emerges, low on the horizon. The flashlight weakens as he walks alongside fields filled with rice sheaves, ready for harvest. Stone walls mark the boundaries. When the beam fades to nothing, he makes do with the green glow of his cellphone. It’s difficult but, once his eyes adjust to the darkness, it’s quite light. The soft skin of night is scratched with stars.
His cellphone buzzes.
“Bill? It’s Mum. How’re you going?”
“Great. Middle of the rice fields. What can I do for you?”
“Oh. I just called. How’re you going?”
“Mum, you already asked me that. What’s wrong?”
After a moment or two, she launches into a worry. “They used staples. They should’ve used stitches. What if it bursts?”
“What’ve you been doing? Bicycling into town? You’re four weeks post-op, Mum. Take it easy.” Bill fits his fingers into the mossy grooves of the stone wall. He changed Mum’s dressing. An incision held together by a curved line of metal clips, stick insects.
“Looks good,” he said. But when he plucked gauze squares from the dressing tray with plastic tweezers, he noticed his hands trembled slightly and couldn’t make them stop.
“It’s not infected, is it?” She hugged her nightgown closer to her body, peered over the accordion folds of peach-coloured fabric.
“It’s clean,” he said and applied adhesive strips for reinforcement. The midline incision was indicative of Wertheim’s Procedure, a radical hysterectomy.
“I just shifted the patio furniture.”
Mum. He wrenched his knee moving that teak furniture when he was in Melbourne last month, helping her. A strange trip. Dressing changes and patio furniture.
“No heavy lifting for another month,” he says. Tries to keep impatience out of his voice and fails.
“How am I supposed to get things done?”
“You’re just supposed to get better, Mum. That’s all you’re supposed to do.”
“You’re coming home next month for Dave’s graduation, right?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Did I tell you? Maggie wants the whole family to get together for dinner to celebrate. Barbeque by the pool. You should see her new condo, Bill. Deluxe.” Bill doesn’t respond. Support payments are high and he resents money spent in ways he doesn’t approve; Maggie shouldn’t have sold the house.
“C’mon, Bill. It’s one night. For Dave. You only graduate uni once, right?”
Bill reluctantly agrees. His relationship with Maggie is difficult. After nine years, he is surprised by her bitterness. The jibes about escap
ing to Asia. Christ, he married her, didn’t he? He did the best he could. Dave’s the one good thing that came out of their marriage.
Before Bill hangs up, he reminds Mum to call him immediately with her biopsy results, reassures her that otherwise, he’ll telephone as soon as he arrives back in Hong Kong.
There’s a rustling in the foliage. Bill startles, loses his balance on the uneven pathway and halts. Then there’s jingling. What? A ring-nosed water buffalo sticks its face between the coconut palms and potted plants.
“Christ, are you trying to kill me?”
Pointy ears twitching, the water buffalo slowly swings its delicate head in his direction, as if to say no. They stare at one another for a moment, then the animal lowers its head to pull on shoots of elephant grass.
“A fucking water buffalo.” Bill checks his pulse. It’s running a bit high. Then there’s his elevated blood pressure and intermittent chest pain to worry about, his doctor talking medication and serious lifestyle changes.
He stumbles onto pavement. The road is dark. The only light comes from passing cars and he pauses when a motorcycle brushes past. There’s a pretty girl on the back and she’s gripping the driver with her thighs, leaning back with her hands on the seat. Her skin is ochre against her T-shirt, blue-white in the sweeping headlights of oncoming traffic. When he closes his eyes, the shape of the girl flashes on the inside of his eyelids like a contrast x-ray. When was the last time he held a girl in his arms?
Bell’s Beach. A crowd of surfers sat around a bonfire each weekend and drank beer. That’s where Bill met Maggie, on the beach, and they hit it off right away. Weeks passed in a blur of sex and surf. Their hurried sex, in the back of his car and on the beach, was fun. It was safer for him to think about it as fooling around but when he used the term at the bonfire one night, she grew angry and quit talking. Then she disappeared down the beach with his mate and he heard them laughing together. Propped against his surfboard, he stared at the night sky and waited for the blush of daybreak.
On Sunday afternoon, they sullenly drove back to Melbourne. Not far off the M1, a bush fire burned. The margin of the fire, a ragged line, scorched the grassland. The blue sky was clear of clouds and black smoke lifted from the ground in a raking rush.
Bill pulled over and parked, dug a camera out of his knapsack. He took several photos before he noticed Maggie standing next to him.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Documenting the end of this stupid fucking weekend.”
“I didn’t sleep with him.”
“Why’d you go off with him, then?”
“You hurt my feelings, Bill. We aren’t just fooling around. It’s more than that, isn’t it?”
“Christ, Maggie. I don’t know what we’re doing. Having fun?”
They stared helplessly at the fire. A helicopter, flying low and fast, dumped a water bomb, and the flames roared back. Sirens blared in the distance. When the wind picked up, a line of fire broke away, advancing across the grassland in a series of thrusts and parries. Its speed was astonishing; trees exploded on contact with flames. A kangaroo raced, erratic, frightened, across the road. When a series of police cars and fire trucks arrived, the uniformed men started setting up a roadblock.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Maggie. Together, they ran back to the car and drove away before traffic came to a complete standstill, the road clogged with firewatchers streaming out from the city. The Saints played on the radio, a song about being stranded far from home.
Maggie sat close, her small hand rested lightly on his thigh. He kept his eyes on the road, not daring to acknowledge her touch, afraid of interrupting the intimacy. It took a while to reach her parents’ and, by the time they pulled into their drive, the confusion of the weekend dissipated.
And they continued having fun for a little while longer. Until she told him about the pregnancy and he knew that he had paddled out too far, that he was in dangerous waters. Untethered from his surfboard. Under pressure from his mum, he did what was expected. Dave was born five months after the wedding.
Without warning, he’s ankle deep in a flooded rice field and strangely he isn’t worried about how he arrived here, nor the possibility of water and mosquito-borne illness. Instead, he removes his sandals and squishes his toes in the muck, enjoying the sensation until tough roots press too deeply into his soles.
Splashing. What? Bill uses his cellphone light and peers into the dark. A man wearing a black-and-white sarong stomps up and silently points at the ornate, wooden headdress he wears. The top of the headdress is a tall, triangular-shaped crown with a line of five little heads sticking out either side. The man removes it and offers it to Bill.
“You want me to wear it?”
The man nods, his smooth, young face glows green.
Bill takes the headdress and carefully places it on his own head. It’s heavy and cuts into his neck. The man roars fiercely in his face. Bill strikes a diabolical pose with his elbows and knees bent, and roars back. The crown wobbles. The man is laughing, shoulders heaving. Then he turns and stomps into the shadows of the rice field. At one point, he stops to wave.
“Don’t you want it back?” Bill shouts and points.
The man disappears behind a stone shed that tilts at an angle, a trick of moonlight slanting through the trees. There’s a gust of wind and silver-tipped plants whip against one another, each edge separate and distinct. Bill reaches out and touches. Sharp, smooth.
A random left turn. Another road. He pats his head and face, feeling for the crown. Shifts it to a more comfortable position. Sandals in hand, Bill walks, the rough road beneath his feet. The road is unmarked. It doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, it will turn onto another road and when it does it will cross a river that is slow and quiet and hidden; and, on the other side, a string of roadside restaurants and bars.
In the distance the sky is glowing. He rounds a corner, and then another. There it is. The Dirty Duck. It’s shining against the night sky, light streaming through the open walls, burning in the dark. Two stories high, it looms over the rice fields that surround it. It is so bright it seems to lean back, like the sky is holding it up. A hostess beckons. Bill steps across the threshold.
The restaurant is full and the hostess settles him into a seat at the bar.
“What would the king like to drink?” asks the bartender. His hair is combed carefully to one side and he moves discreetly.
Scanning the drink menu, Bill focuses on the house special noted as “The Best Martini in Ubud”. He orders a double and, when it arrives, asks, “Is there vodka in it?”
“Yes.”
“Is a vodka martini, strictly speaking, a martini?”
The bartender nods.
“Having read Frank Moorhouse’s book on the subject, I would have to respectfully disagree. This is a vodkatini. Cheers.” Icy cold slides down his throat.
“You have many responsibilities as king.”
“God, no. I don’t have any responsibilities. I’m here for a medical conference.”
A little later the bartender says, “You like to read. Me, also. My name is Made. Now we are more friends.”
Bill introduces himself.
In between drink orders, Bill and Made discuss Nordic mysteries. “The Laughing Policeman is my favourite,” says Bill and orders a double vodkatini. It occurs to him that he isn’t feeling any effects from the liquor.
A girl with blonde dreadlocks settles into a stool down the bar and talks quietly with Made. When she catches Bill’s eye she says, “I’ll have what the king’s having,” and points at his drink.
“It’s a vodkatini,” says Bill. He leans forward and loud-whispers, “Be forewarned.”
“No worries, no worries.” She slips her bead-laden hair over her shoulder. The ends clatter together like seashells and, for some reason, Bill wonders if she surfs.
“The best martini in Ubud. Says so on the drinks menu.”
“How is it?”
&
nbsp; “It’s a fucking fine drink. But I wouldn’t call it a martini.”
The girl asks Made how business is and he shrugs and says, “You finish work, Carolyn?”
She nods and says, “God, I need a drink.” When she winds her ankles around the legs of her stool, her flip-flops drop to the tiled floor. Her feet are tanned, striped white skin where straps used to be. Her toes are calloused and dirty.
“Rough day?” asks Bill.
“Endless cakes.” She moves her hand in the air like she’s knocking aside a stack of tins. Her hands are thin like her face but beneath her suntan she is pale.
Made explains she’s a baker at Café Wayan and describes her chocolate cake in detail, a favourite with locals and visitors alike. He ends by saying, “American style. Very good to you.”
“Backpackers love it,” says Carolyn and shrugs. “Reminds them of home, I guess.”
“You should be careful with flour dust. Clogs your lungs. You don’t want to end up with an occupational illness.”
“You’re a doctor?” Her eyes widen for a moment. They’re brown with gold flecks around her pupils. Brown eyes remind him of Maggie.
“Radiologist, although I’ve let my licence lapse. I sell radiology equipment.” Bill hands his name card down the bar. “You ever need an x-ray, give me a call and I’ll point you in the direction of a hospital with the latest technology.”
“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.” Carolyn stands and slides the paper rectangle into the back pocket of her cut-offs. Her shorts hang off slim hips and there’s a small tattoo above where her kite-shaped uterus is located, folded slightly forward.
Mum waved goodbye, standing, crooked, in the front doorway of her house, holding a pillow to her abdomen. She tried not to grimace. And it occurs to him that Mum could die, that it would fall to him to clear up her unfinished business.
“Did you decide how to advertise the taxi?” Carolyn asks Made.
“Yes. I use Twitter,” says Made.