Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  One day, Harper’s boss Gregor came to the door of his office and leaned casually against the doorpost, arms folded. Harper had his head bent over his desk but the moment he became aware of a figure blocking the light, he knew who it was. Gregor never announced himself with a ‘good morning’ or a ‘hi’. He announced himself with silence.

  Harper’s head was down over a list of figures. He was muttering the figures out loud and twirling ticks and crosses on the list with a pencil, so he had a small but satisfying excuse to take a moment or two before he looked up. While he took advantage of that moment, Gregor waited. Gregor continued to wait when Harper lifted his head. Gregor met Harper’s gaze and waited long enough for their mutual stare to become odd, expectant.

  Gregor dropped his gaze, lifted it again, pushed his glasses further up his nose and sniffed – only then did he say to Harper, ‘Got a minute?’

  Harper sat back in his chair to indicate that he had. He did not put the pencil down.

  Gregor used his weight to lever himself upright from the doorframe, looked behind him at the open-plan office, quiet but for the discordant clacking of several typewriters at different distances from where he stood, and only at that point did he uncross his arms, take a step into Harper’s office and close the door behind him.

  ‘It’s raining,’ Gregor said, lifting an arm to indicate the view from Harper’s office window, which included the brown water of the canal and the blank brick wall of a warehouse building that dropped straight into the water. Harper liked the fact that there were no other windows looking into his office. The rain was invisible against the brick but when he looked at the brown canal he saw tiny pits on its surface, disappearing and reappearing in a pattern.

  ‘So, our Asia Department.’ It was a statement rather than a question so Harper remained silent.

  ‘Well,’ said Gregor with a sigh, as if Harper was being particularly truculent that afternoon. ‘We need someone on the ground. Jakarta, land of your birth, it was Jakarta, wasn’t it? Six months, a year maybe, maybe longer.’

  ‘Long time.’

  ‘He speaks! The enigmatic one speaks!’

  Harper did not return Gregor’s smile. ‘Have they asked for me?’

  ‘I’m asking for you.’

  He frowned, leaned forward, dropped his pencil on his desk. ‘Why me?’

  Gregor actually shrugged. ‘Look, it’s up to you. I know it’s a big deal, it would be your first big job and you’ll need Stage Three clearance, and some physicals. To be honest, seeing how new you are I’m not sure but you know the region.’ He sniffed and rubbed at the side of his nose with one extended finger. ‘It’s your background rather than experience.’

  ‘Joosten knows the region better than me. He’s been.’

  ‘This one isn’t for Joosten. This one needs the time to develop contacts on the ground and we need to send someone as soon as possible, now the guy in the black hat has pulled them out of the UN. You’ll be taking a crate on delivery so instead of an aeroplane through Karachi, you get to go on a cruise, pretty good I would think, lots of deckchair time to do your homework . . . and,’ this next point a concession to the obvious, ‘Joosten can’t pass for a local if he has to. Things are getting a little hot for us palefaces out there.’

  ‘Why not use the local operatives?’

  ‘Client doesn’t trust them, wants someone we’re sure of here, who we can move swiftly to another island as soon as job done, but it also has to be someone who can do the local thing, which, my friend, narrows it down to you. Pronto.’

  Gregor watches too many movies, Harper thought. ‘Why the hurry?’

  ‘I can’t tell you until you’ve said yes.’

  He’d been waiting for an overseas assignment ever since he joined the Institute. He had always been curious to visit the country where he spent his first three years, even though, especially though, he had no memory of those years and only his mother’s dubious stories to go on. True, it was something of a backwater, but that would give him more autonomy too.

  Gregor was waiting. His patience irritated Harper so much that he was on the verge of saying he wasn’t sure he was ready and didn’t want to be told any more details, just to be difficult, but then Gregor lifted both hands, splaying his fingers in an okay, hands up motion, as if Harper had opened a drawer of his desk and extracted a pistol. ‘Look, there will be bonuses involved. Quite a few of them, in fact. And an opportunity to move sideways, which is presumably what you’ve been waiting for. It’s what all you new young guys want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sideways in which direction?’

  ‘You don’t look all that happy behind a desk.’

  Did anyone look happy behind a desk?

  The following week, Gregor summoned him to his office and introduced him to a middle-aged American who called himself Johnson. Johnson had dull, pitted skin on his cheeks, the remnant of some childhood disease, and a very bald, very shiny head – it was adulthood that had done that bit. He kept running a hand over his shiny head while he spoke, as if he liked to keep it polished that way.

  After things were agreed, Harper shook hands with both men and Johnson said, ‘Gregor here speaks very highly of you. I must admit I was a little concerned you were inexperienced, on paper, I mean, but now I’ve met you I can see why he does.’

  Now you’ve seen my skin, Harper thought.

  Gregor intervened. ‘I told him you got the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in your year. And you scored ninety-eight per cent on our induction programme. There’s a few physicals but that won’t take long.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper replied.

  Later that day, Gregor said, ‘I also told him you spoke all the languages out there. You can get up to speed, can’t you, once you’re on the ground? It’s not going to take you that long to pass.’ He wondered if the Malay he had learned as a child might help with his Indonesian, whether it was buried there somewhere. He was quick at languages, he’d get conversational faster than most, but the sort of fluency Gregor was talking about took years – and Javanese was another thing altogether. Javanese was fiendish. Gregor’s optimism about Harper’s language skills was based on no more than his own colossal ignorance. He pulled a face to indicate it wasn’t that simple and Gregor said, ‘Oh c’mon, you half-castes have a real facility for languages, you’re gifted at it, you guys, you’ll be fluent within weeks, accent and everything.’

  Harper felt the drip, drip, drip of all the remarks they made around the office, about how good his sun tan was, how much he must like spicy food. Such remarks were always phrased as compliments. He had been permanently resident in Holland since the age of twelve but people often remarked on the flawlessness of his Dutch.

  *

  His pain threshold was fairly high but he had a secret weakness: a great and pressing fear of any situation where breathing might be difficult. It wasn’t the same as claustrophobia: lifts and cars were fine. If the situation demanded it, he could have happily spent hours hiding in a wardrobe as long as there were holes in it – but suffocating, drowning, these were the fates he dreaded. It was the totality of them, he sometimes thought. Pain belonged to the location where the pain was situated – a broken arm was a broken arm, however agonising. Even a stomach ache or backache, those most internal of pains, could be ring-fenced from the rest of your body, your consciousness, if only you were strong enough: but being unable to breathe, for whatever reason, was a state that possessed the whole of you.

  So when the hood came down over his head, he panicked, sucking in a great breath that pulled the rough fabric into his mouth. The two men holding either arm threw him to the ground and he landed on his back with a thump that made his head snap backwards and expelled what little breath there was left in his lungs out into the hood – he sucked in again, more violently this time. As he rolled to one side, he forced himself to do an inventory: whiplash, perhaps, some bruising to his back no doubt. No broken coccyx at least – he would have felt that immediately. He
tucked his chin down and braced himself, expecting one or both of the men to kick him now he was on the floor: with his hands tied behind his back he couldn’t roll into a ball – his head was very vulnerable. But it wasn’t that that was worrying him most, it was his breathing. He had a moment to observe his own efficiency in noting this.

  Instead of laying into him, the men left the room. At least, he thought they had left – there were the sounds of their feet scuffing on the dirt floor, the slam of the door.

  He lay very still but his own breath was ragged against the cloth and too harsh for him to listen to the room. He was still hyperventilating and each time he did, he sucked the hood back into his mouth, shortening the breath and making him hyperventilate more. It came to him that if he did not control his breathing, then without the men doing anything more, the end would be suffocation. That was what happened. You shortened your own breath millilitre by millilitre, a bit like someone with a rope around their neck struggling so much they pulled the noose tight. Would they use the water trick? He had heard stories of people choking on their own vomit when they did that.

  It would be really stupid to suffocate himself when they weren’t even trying to kill him. He lay trying to steady his lungs, interrogating the pain in his shoulders where his arms were pulled back. He found that if he rolled his shoulders back in tiny movements, like a minute version of a limbering-up exercise, it eased the pain.

  He managed to slow his breathing a little, but only a little. Each time he inhaled, he still sucked the cloth into his mouth, like a tiny billowing sail, shortening the breath that followed. When he exhaled, he blew the cloth back out with more force than was wise, filling the interior of the hood with his own CO2. I must stop this.

  The door opened again, slammed back against the wall. The light in the room changed – he could tell through the hood. Sounds were muffled but he felt sure that several men had entered the room. A pair of hands scrabbled against his neck and the drawstring around the bottom of the hood. For a moment he thought, if they aren’t careful, they’ll asphyxiate me instead of getting me free. The string pulled against his windpipe, released, and the hood was yanked away. As his eyes adjusted he caught the blurred form of a figure in front of him and then another two against a wall, more distant, to one side, but before he had time to configure what he was seeing a hand grabbed a handful of his hair and shook his head from side to side and Joosten’s round face was in his and his voice was booming in his ears, ‘Wakey wakey Nic old man, you’ve passed!’

  ‘Fuck you, Joosten,’ Harper gasped, his breath still painfully laboured in his chest, ‘fuck you.’

  The two trainers, leaning back against the wall of the cell with their arms folded, burst into appreciative laughter; Joosten clapped him on the shoulder; and for a moment or two, as the breath that heaved in his throat still felt as heavy as sand and his chest pressed painfully inwards, it occurred to Harper that when he got out in the field, it would not, after all, be one big game.

  There was a pleasing symmetry to his arriving in Jakarta by ship. He had left on a long sea journey at the age of three from this very port, perhaps even this very jetty, and here he was, returning the same way, nearly two decades later. Last time he had stood on this spot he was an undersized boy, head shaved to keep the lice at bay. Now, he was a man. He had done his national service; he had – as Gregor had pointed out to Johnson – received the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in his group; he was fit and trained.

  He imagined his younger self, big-eyed and malnourished, a refugee child clinging to his mother’s skirts, looking up at his grown self in awe. I’m back, he thought, as he stood on the dock long after the other passengers had disembarked, waiting for the crate he was accompanying to be unloaded, looking around at the vast sheds and the gangs of shirtless men, a foreman yelling at them in a high-pitched voice. The jetty he was standing on was for deep-sea ships, the passenger liners, and his boat was the only arrival in port at present, but stretching far in the distance, to his right, was the long strip of docking bays for the smaller freight boats, old wooden things, hardly seaworthy they looked, with peeling paintwork on their high bows. These were the boats that would sail to and from Sumatra, Borneo, the smaller islands perhaps, carrying everything from cement powder to coconut husks for animal feed, coffee, spices. He could get on one of those freight vessels and be almost anywhere, nowhere as far as anyone else was concerned. What a fine thought. The further you travelled, the more you faded from view, until nobody knew where you were or if you even existed. Were it not for the seriousness of his mission, he would be tempted to stroll down to one of those boats now, deserting his crate and his tin trunk full of research, shedding everything Dutch or American about himself, bribe the captain with cash, stow away – and disappear.

  The port was undergoing expansion; skeletons of new sheds were ranged in different stages of construction and beneath the mechanical chunter of boat engines and the shouts of men was the grind and spin of machinery at work: a cumulative noise that made the port seem like a living thing, a monster needing to be fed. A row of open trucks loaded with sandbags and coils of rope lined the edge of the concrete jetty to his left – parked perilously close to the water, he thought. As he watched, a man standing on top of the bags raised a hand in which there was the steel question mark of a hook. He jabbed the hook into one of the bags then pulled, slitting the bag open. Sand ran out in a torrent, down the side of the truck and into a wheelbarrow held by another man waiting below. Indonesia: always a work in progress – he had followed the recent history of the land of his birth enough to know that. But now what? Where was that progress heading now the great Bung Karno was drifting ever closer to Peking?

  He had bought a packet of kreteks on board ship and he paused to light one now, ceremoniously – he had made himself wait until he was standing on Javanese soil. It wasn’t much to mark his return but it was small and private, which suited him just fine: the only other person who would appreciate the significance of this arrival was his mother and she didn’t know where he was, only that he had left Amsterdam ‘on another one of your stupid trips’, as she called them. Lately, she had taken to accusing him of not being abroad at all, just avoiding her. ‘When are you going to find a nice girl and settle down? What’s wrong with you? I’d been married twice by your age.’ That wasn’t strictly accurate but then Anika rarely was.

  He flicked the match away, inhaled deeply on the cigarette, blew out, then flapped his hand at the young man who had darted forward from the crowd in the hope of picking up his tin trunk or one of the cases that sat on top of it. ‘Tidak, tidak . . .’ he said, then added, ‘Terima kasih, tak usah . . .’ He passed his tongue over his lips – the sweet taste of cloves; the kretek was a honeyed hint of delirium, temporary and addictive. The ground beneath his feet felt pliant after three weeks at sea.

  He was being met by a driver – the local office had organised it. The ship had docked early but it would take some time for him to locate his crate once the ship had been emptied. The driver would be late. There was no hurry. Above him, to the right, some of the crates from the cargo hold were already swinging on ropes, the men waiting below, the foreman shouting.

  The Institute’s operations were in their infancy here: there was no physical office, just two local staff who both operated from their homes and they were out of town in Central Java, assessing the situation there. There would be no briefing for a while and even afterwards, he would be running his own operation, more or less, under Johnson’s instruction. The local staff were there to help with his language skills and advise on customs and etiquette, they weren’t trained men. There would be a chance to orientate himself, walk around, get used to the humidity, practise his Indonesian in shops and restaurants in districts of the city away from the ones where he would be working – and to buy more kreteks. Gregor may have been over-optimistic about his language skills but soon he would be smoking just like a local.

  His instructions were to go wi
th the driver to an area north of Glodok. The driver would know where to go, which street to wait in. Afterwards, he would be taken to a guesthouse in the Menteng district – but first he had to hand over the crate to the Americans. As they drove, a light rain began to fall, misting row after row of low-rise buildings, the warehouses giving way to long strips of open-fronted shops. Harper glanced at the driver from time to time, a silent man with a small, triangular face. More than just a driver, he guessed. He tried a little of his Indonesian on him but the man spoke so quickly and briefly in reply that he couldn’t catch what he was saying.

  The main roads were broad in Old Jakarta but behind them were multiple smaller roads and alleyways – although he’d been told to take a walk through the kampong if he wanted to understand the meaning of the word narrow. Most of Jakarta was kampong, Joosten had said, vast shanty towns of slums, divided and subdivided, with streets so small, so densely lined with open shacks that you walked through people’s living rooms as you strolled along. At the height of the dry monsoon, in August, a load of them would burn down. Then they sprang up again. And later, when the weather broke and the wet monsoon rolled in, they would be flooded. Fire and water: the alternate hazards of Jakarta.

  They parked in a road behind Kota railway station. There, they waited in silence. Harper offered the driver a kretek and he took one with a terse nod. Eventually, another car pulled up behind and a white man around Harper’s age got out with two Indonesian men. Harper saw them emerge in the rear-view mirror and opened his door. By the time he had climbed out, the white man was standing there, extending a hand. ‘I’m Michael, welcome to Jakarta.’ He had an American accent and a short crowbar leaning at a diagonal out of his jacket pocket.