Black Water

by Louise Doughty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

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

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

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

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

  Her smile was a yes.

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

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

  ‘Is there?’ His surprise was genuine.

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

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

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

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

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

  Her look invited him to continue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I have money.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He didn’t reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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