“I am an outcast, but last night I went to Gamartha street. I told someone I believed a living Garuda was present at the debate, and did not favour Gusti Ketut. I thought it might make a difference.”
She stared, a frozen moment.
“But now the Koperasi mean to raid our inn, looking for big game. I swear Gamartha did not betray you. I must have been followed.”
Not necessarily.
“It’s odd,” she said, “to tell tales like that and then come and apologise for it. But thank you anyway.” Her voice was gentle as ever. Her eyes were black, so I could see no iris. She’d already forgotten me, dismissed me: she was calculating her next move, her chances of escape. I would have liked to die.
Then there was a commotion in the street behind us. A line of chairs stopped. The ladies descended, veiled and bearing their silver chains, surrounded by high caste boys in green and mauve Gamarthan livery. The boys had a flower ball woven of frangipani petals, they were tossing it from hand to hand to sweeten the air. The robes and liveries drew level with us, across the street. As they did so, a boy let the toy slip and it tumbled into the roadway. The Gamarthan ladies did not raise a single eye, or a single veil, but they all stooped together, as if reaching for it. Like a field of grain under the wind they went down, they bowed, fluidly, until their graceful bare hands touched the ground.
One of the boys ran out and picked up the flowers. Gamartha’s delegation rose, walked on, and turned into Jagdana’s gate. Garuda, silently acknowledged by her loyal enemies, stood on the dirty cobbles blinking like a cat surprised by sunlight.
It was not twelve hours since I had spoken to my cousin. I understood that I, and my contacts, had probably been watched all the time. My mouth was suddenly dry: Gamartha never forgets. Derveet turned back to me with a crooked smile.
“My apologies,” she said, “to Endang, and Gamartha. You must have been followed. Things are not so bad, after all. Never quite so bad as they might be.”
That was the end. Annet took her friend’s arm and drew her into the gateway. The chairboys had stopped arguing. They stood together with Snake and Buffalo, like a shield, and stared at me until I walked away. I did not see Derveet again. I left the inn that same hour, and then Canditinggi. I heard afterwards that the “big police action” achieved nothing except to put the so-called fifth vote into disarray. A day or two later an unidentifiable delegation guard-boy was found dead, with the colours torn from his livery. “Been followed” was after all an euphemism, a Peninsulan courtesy. Our Rulers’ servants are everywhere, even in the ranks of proud Gamartha. What happened in the closed courtyards I do not know. When the announcement eventually came, Ida Bagus SadIa had been elected prince.
But Derveet was wrong. Things are bad. Things are so bad, these days, that it is hard to see how worse can be possible. Shortly after the Accession, the disappointed family of the infant Bangau invited their former daughter for a visit, with her son the prince-elect. During this visit, it seems the elder boys of the family entered Sadia’s room in the middle of the night. They gagged him, tied him to a bedpost, and castrated and excised him, cauterizing the wounds with a hot iron so they should not be guilty of murdering a guest. He was seventeen years old. He recovered, but he killed himself, as soon as he was able to use a knife. In punishment for this crime, the Bangau lost the last of their independent territory to the plantations. The displaced population was moved into camps, in the usual way. The Bangau have vanished, like the Garudas and so many others; and Gusti Ketut Siamang is our prince. There is no sign as yet of any improvement in Timur’s status. I believe the Peninsula is doomed. I believe we have all gone mad, and nothing can save us. I have no more dreams of the “different road,” of the tree growing slowly, slowly. It is no use. The forest is on fire, and as far as I can see, that precious new growth burns just like any other wood.
As for Derveet, she is gone. I think the fate of Ida Bagus Sadia, the good young man, broke her at last, destroyed her patience and her strength. I heard a few months after the Bangau tragedy that Buffalo boy was dead, killed in a Koperasi raid on illegal hill-crop farming. Derveet may have been killed there, too. Or she may still live, an ogre among the rest. There is a story of a new bandit leader, very clever, very savage, who is terrorising the Koperasi down south. I don’t know. Perhaps it hardly matters. But when I hear of that leader dead, as I surely will one day soon, I will mourn the last of the Garudas, the end of our hope.
BLUE CLAY BLUES
Somewhere on the outskirts of town, the air suddenly smelled of rain. The change was so concrete and so ravishing that Johnny stopped the car. He got out, leaving Bella strapped in the back seat. She was asleep, thank God. The road punched straight on, rigid to the flat horizon. The metalled surface was in poor repair. It seemed to have been spread from the crown with a grudging hand, smearing out into brown dirt and gravel long before it reached the original borderline. There were trees at the fences of dusty and weedgrown yards: clapboard houses stood haphazardly amid broken furniture and rusted consumer durables. The town went on like this, never thickening into a centre, as far as the eye could see. The rain was coming up from the south, a purple wall joining sky and earth. It smelled wonderful, truly magical. There were a few rumbles of thunder knocking around the cloudy sky. He hoped for lightning.
It took longer than he’d thought. He reached in and picked up his phone from the seat, called Izzy again. He’d been calling her all day, leaving messages on the board. These repeated phone calls from an irate spouse would be the talk of the floor; Izzy’s workplace was that kind of petty. He knew she’d hate it, she would be made miserable by the piddling notoriety. He was partly disgusted at himself, but not disgusted enough to stop.
The arrangement was that Johnny looked after Bella, and when he was on a trip she went into day care. It was a good arrangement, except when all the emergency routines failed at once. It had broken down seriously yesterday. He had had to leave town with the baby. He had been trying to contact Izzy ever since, but they kept missing each other, with almost mythological symmetry. Every time he ran his messages, his wife jabbered at him in gradations of bewildered panic. Every time he called her, her number was busy.
Now she was at work, where they didn’t allow personal phones on the floor, and he was twenty-four hours out in the boondocks with a two year old in tow. She couldn’t be too badly worried though: he was keeping her well informed.
He stood and watched the advancing wall, brooding sourly on the amount of work he put into their relationship. He had practically invented everything, all the little rituals of bonding. He wondered, did Izzy feel that she was doing the same: building their life together, brick by sodding brick. Maybe she did. It’s called marriage. It works, more or less.
The breakdown truck careened to a halt, followed by three motorbikes. Three men got out of the cab. The bikers remained mounted. Johnny still had the phone in his hand. He took a step, casually, and let it drop onto the driver’s seat.
“What’s the problem, kid?”
The speaker was tall and basically skinny, but with bull shoulders and heavy arms from some kind of specific training, or maybe manual labour. He was inappropriately dressed: a suit jacket over bib overalls, no shirt. The rest were the same—not exactly ragged, but it was clear they’d left certain standards far behind. They were all of them technically white, a couple dusky; a shade further off the WASP ideal than himself. Every one of them was armed.
Johnny immediately realised that these people would find an aesthetic impulse hard to understand. It would be as well not to brand himself a city slicker, to whom rainfall is a spectacle.
“Some kind of breakdown?”
“I guess so,” said Johnny. “Engine died, no reason why. I was about to look under the hood.”
“Whaddya use for fuel?” A biker, nursing his mighty steed between his knees, seemed amiably curious.
“Uh—just about anything.”
“Well, all we got is just abo
ut plain gas.” The bikers laughed, contemptuous of city slicker modernity.
Ouch. That was a warning. Don’t pretend to be too like them. They’ll always smell you out.
“Let’s take a look.”
The man in the suit jacket bent over Johnny’s engine. He took his time, considering there was absolutely nothing wrong. Johnny’s assistance didn’t seem to be required, which was good because he didn’t feel like turning his back, and particularly not like bending over in a peculiarly vulnerable invitation. The other two men from the truck came close. They looked into the back of the car and saw Bella—whose existence had, for the past few minutes, vanished from Johnny’s consciousness. Something, some lax, living system inside him—blood or lymph or nerves—went bone-tight from the crown of his head to his heels.
“That your kid?”
“Yes, she’s my kid.”
“Can you prove you’re the father?”
This bloodcurdling question did not require an answer. As Johnny mumbled “Why yes, certainly…,” the speaker, a squat youth in baggy cut-offs worn over a stained but gaudy one-piece that surely belonged in another tribal culture altogether, turned away. The guy in the suit jacket slammed the hood down, saying: “Yep. That certainly is a catastrophic breakdown.”
At the same moment Johnny understood that the truck, which he’d taken to be a mere accidental prop, was here on purpose. A chill and horror of excitement ran through him. He was afraid he was shivering visibly, but in fact he’d have had some excuse, because just then the rain arrived. It fell over the whole scene like a roll of silk tossed down, as purple as it had looked on the horizon: scented and cold and shocking.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Johnny.”
“What d’you do?”
“Uh—I’m an engineer.”
“Looking for work? We could find you some. You need a wife to go with that kid. We got women too.”
This banter didn’t mean anything. Johnny had discovered that everywhere you go in the boondocks, people will invite you to stay. It seemed a point of etiquette to regard any chance comer as a potential addition to the community. It wasn’t something to worry about, no more than the equal number of brief aquaintances who invited you to take them home, see their kids through college, advance the capital for them to set up in business. Banter covered the positioning of the truck, the chaining up of Johnny’s car, all under the hammering of the purple rain. Johnny, expressing decent but not effusive gratitude, got into the back with Bella, who woke as the car was being winched onto the flatbed. She didn’t speak or wail, but stared all around her mightily. He could tell she’d been dreaming.
“It’s okay, Bel. The car broke down. These people are giving us a ride into town.”
“Daddy, why are you wet?”
“It’s raining.”
Bella stared with eyes like saucers, and dawning appreciation of this new means of transport, this audience, this adventure. The bikers peered in at her. “Who’s that?” she demanded. “What’s his name?” It was the stocky young one. She could never be brought to believe that there were people in the world whose names her parents did not know. “Archibald,” said Johnny at random. He spent the rest of the trip naming the other men in the same mode, and explaining over and over that the car was suddenly sick and needed a car-doctor: over and over again, while he made desperate mental tape of their route, and reviewed worst case scenarios; and still found a little space in which to want to kill Izzy, just beat her to shit. He knew she wasn’t to blame but she was the other half of his mind, and the fight-or-flight rush had to have some outlet.
The drive ended at a wired compound, shrouded by tall dark hedges. Inside, there was a wide yard and flat-topped buildings that looked somehow like a school. The rain made the wall of leaves glow blue-black, and glistened on piles of automotive rubbish. Dogs rushed to the gates as the bikers dragged them open, snarling and yelping away from kicks. Bella was scared. Johnny got down with the toddler fastened on his chest like a baby monkey, his pack on his back and jacket bulging. He surrendered his keys with a good grace.
“Papers?”
Out here, you had to carry physical documentation. It was a bitch because most of them couldn’t read, and just got mad at you while they were trying to decipher your life’s history. He handed over his folder, hoping the boss—at least—was literate.
He wished he had the nerve to leave some of his stuff in the car. It would have looked better, he knew. He staggered under his untrusting assumptions, and they led him off to a hall with a scuffed floor of light timber, and rows of plastic chairs. The room smelt of kids. He decided that this was the school, in so far as such things still existed. A school, and a breakdown yard: original combination for some gifted entrepreneur.
“We’ll take a look, Johnny, just you wait here.”
One of the bikers—Samuel—watched them through the fireproof glass of the hall doors. Bella was unusually silent—most unusually, because he knew she was riveted with excitement. He looked around, and found that she was sitting, legs jutting over the edge of the scummy plastic seat, with one hand ruminatively delving under her skirt. Her expression was of dignified, speculative pleasure.
Johnny managed to smother hysterical giggles.
“Get your hand out of your pants, Bel. People don’t like to see that. It doesn’t look good.”
This condemnation—always in a tone of mild and absolute Certainty—was the worst her Daddy ever issued. Bella understood that concern for the comfort of others and respect for their beliefs was to be her ultimate morality. She removed her hand with a sigh.
“My nobble went fat. It went by itself.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s the adrenalin rush. Ignore it, kid.”
Samuel—stringy and pale, ropy muscled arms and a ponytail—came to fetch them. They were led into a cavern of a mechanic’s workshop. The foreign and menacing smell of heavy oil filled the air. Johnny’s car stood open-mouthed on black, greasy concrete, surrounded by a slew of tools and power leads. It looked as if the poor beast had been through a rough grilling. Johnny hoped it had managed to hold out.
The mechanic inspected them. Johnny had rarely met a black man outside the city. Tribal divisions were so stern it would have been pointless to send a white boy off the white squares, under no matter what inalienable flag of truce. But this man’s colour was only the least of the signals he sent out. Johnny gathered that he was looking at the local God, the big chief.
God was very dark, perhaps fortyish (but Johnny was always making mistakes about age out here), with sleepy narrow eyes and a whisper of moustache above his humorous mouth. Johnny liked him on sight, and was no less very scared, indeed. He slid Bel to the ground, but kept a tight grip. The wrist, not the hand. One learns these tricks of technique.
The mechanic wiped his hands on dirty rag.
“You ain’t armed, boy.”
A man without a gun on his hip was so peculiar he was downright threatening. Johnny didn’t mean to threaten anybody.
“I’m a journalist.”
“Ah-ha. Thought you said you were an engineer.”
God speaks grammatical English, when he chooses.
“Engineer-journalist. I’m an eejay.”
God’s courtiers displayed a hearteningly normal reaction. Samuel giggled, nudged Ernesto in the ribs; Gustave hooted.
“Hey, eejay. You wanna mend my tv?” Archibald grinned.
Florimond in the suit jacket cuffed him and shrugged at the visitor, assuming an air of grave man-to-man sophistication.
“Okay. So what story are you hunting, newshound?”
Unlike the others, God was not impressed by the eejay tag. But Johnny was still recovering from Bella’s masterstroke: from finding himself sitting in a gangster’s waiting room with a two year old who was calmly taking the opportunity to get in touch with her emotions….Smothered hilarity maybe gave him an aura so inappropriate as to shift the balance. As the man spoke, the casual p
romise of death that hung around him became less palpable. Johnny’s territorial blunder might be excused.
The courtiers grew quiet. Bella squirmed and tugged, displaying her usual pathological failure to read adult atmosphere, which at this moment made Johnny long to break her arm.
“It’s kind of private.”
“Let the kid go, boy. She won’t hurt anything.”
Bella bounced free. “I won’t hurt anything,” she parroted smugly. She was gone, beyond arm’s reach. Gustave was lifting her up to peer inside the poor, tortured car. Johnny felt sweat breaking out delicately all over his body.
“Look. This is not necessarily the truth, but…I’m after the source of a kind of legend. You had a nuclear accident hereabouts, two years ago?”
The reading in God’s eyes flickered upwards again. Johnny had better not dwell on this subject—nuclear poison, two-headed babies, that kind of insulting stuff.
“We had an incident.”
“Okay, I’m looking for…this will sound crazy, unless you know something already, but I’m looking for a diamond mine.”
“Diamonds.”
“It’s like this. When you get a melt—er, an incident of that kind, a massive amount of heat and pressure is generated. The safer the plant, the less of it gets dissipated outward. It has to go somewhere, it goes down. You’ve got coal-bearing strata around here, not all of it even mapped. Under pressure, that old fossil fuel can be transformed into another kind of pure carbon. What I’m looking for is a deposit of blue clay, a blue clay that’s new to this area. From the blue clay, you get the diamonds.”
Johnny needed all his professional skill to measure God’s reaction. He couldn’t use it. His attention was painfully focused on Bel: her position in the stinking cavern, who was touching her, was she being led near a door. It didn’t matter. God was stone-faced, neither twitchy nor incredulous.
“I don’t know if this is exactly a news lead, “ Johnny went on, straight-faced. “It’s my own long shot. I haven’t decided yet if my employer would have an interest.”
Grazing The Long Acre Page 6