Black Water

by Louise Doughty

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

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

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

  So why were these two watching the guesthouse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘They say you were terribly tortured.’

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

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

  ‘It’s called Indonesia now.’

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

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

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

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

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