Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  For a moment, Harper was unsure what the man meant, then he snorted, ‘You mean the hut?’

  Johan gave a wry smile. ‘It’s a little rudimentary, having seen it this morning, I must agree.’

  Harper felt a sudden wash of nostalgia for the hut, a feeling that by not imposing his personality on it, he had made it his. Three days? How had time slipped? He felt as though he had been there forever – and he knew, in that moment, that a return to what was euphemistically referred to as real life was impossible: Jakarta, Amsterdam, Los Angeles – it didn’t matter. He had withdrawn from all these places, and from the transitional places that led from one to the other; planes, taxis, waiting lounges. He could no more imagine re-entering that world than he could growing wings and flying over the crater of Gunung Agung. If you come to a place to die, then what are you supposed to do if, somehow, you carry on living?

  Johan passed over a pen. As Harper signed the addendum to the confidentiality clause he said, ‘Three days will be no problem. As you probably saw, I don’t have many possessions.’

  Johan mistook his meaning. ‘I’m afraid that the papers and reports, well anything in fact, that you left in the Jakarta apartment belongs to the Institute.’

  Harper put the pen down on the confidentiality agreement then slid them both across the table. ‘Fine by me. Just out of interest . . .’ He nodded towards the agreement. ‘What would the Institute have done if I had refused to sign?’

  Johan shrugged, reached to pick up the agreement and smiled. ‘Well that’s the catch with signing, you never get to find out.’

  Harper leaned back in his chair as Johan slipped the signed agreement into the envelope. ‘Have you ever thought, Johan, that we work for the kind of organisation that has people killed?’

  He saw the look of shock on Johan’s face. ‘Surely, even in your department, you think through the consequences, now and then? We get involved with governments, we get involved with coups.’

  Johan glanced around, and then gave a hearty, vocal smile – less than a laugh but more than a facial expression. ‘I thought you meant us, for a minute there!’ He was embarrassed to have momentarily believed Harper to be suggesting something so absurd.

  Harper looked at him and let the question hang between them.

  ‘I’m a lawyer, you’re an economist. We provide advice, that’s what we do. People like us will always exist,’ Johan said, closing his briefcase. ‘If we didn’t exist, someone else like us would, and the someone else would probably be worse, you seem like a decent enough fellow to me. Agreed?’

  Harper looked to one side, at the view, and smiled.

  He took the risk of parking outside the school. It was a long wait until the lunchtime break. When Rita emerged, she was surrounded by students and set off down Jalan Hanoman without seeing him. He was momentarily affronted. Shouldn’t she have been looking? Then he was amused at himself; of course she wasn’t looking. Why should she? He remembered how she had strode away from the guesthouse on Jalan Bisma after their first night together without seeing him sitting in plain view in the cafe right opposite. Head in the clouds, he thought, with affection. Or maybe just . . . normal. Maybe she wasn’t looking because there was nothing to look for. Maybe the boys waiting by the cafe opposite the guesthouse that morning were just boys sitting on a tree trunk, the young men passing through town in a jeep just young men in a jeep. His heart sang, then. That could be him. If he was with her, he could be like her.

  The car was parked awkwardly, as close to the drainage ditch on the side of the road as he could risk without losing a wheel down it, but cars and mopeds had still been forced to pull out to get past him. He restarted the engine and followed at a distance, slowly. The street was full of students streaming from the low building. It was only when she turned onto the main street, still with a student either side, that he was able to overtake, pull in in front of a shop and toot the horn as she approached from behind. He watched her in the rear-view mirror and saw her head lift, the wide brim of her hat rising to reveal her face, her smile of surprise.

  She stopped and said goodbye to the students, then lifted one hand and splayed her fingers in a five minutes gesture. He nodded. She went into a shop just behind where he was parked, a mini-market, and emerged a few minutes later with a plastic bag. He leaned over to open the passenger door for her.

  As she got in the car she leaned across and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek. The smile she gave him was an ordinary smile because, of course, she did not know that when he dropped her off at the school that morning, he was thinking it might be the last time they saw each other. She had never known what was at stake.

  ‘To what do I owe this honour?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve something to show you,’ he said, pushing his hand into his pocket. ‘Remember how I told you I was being fired?’ He pulled out the long white envelope, which he had folded neatly, concertinaed, and put into his trouser pocket. He rested it on the dashboard and smoothed it out. Then he extracted the cheque and held it up in front of his chest, as if it was a certificate he had just won at a sports day.

  She looked at the cheque, then up at his face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a cheque,’ he said.

  She lifted her eyebrows and said drily, ‘I can see it’s a cheque but I can’t see how big it is, I don’t have my reading glasses on. Is it enough for you? I mean, are you a free man?’

  ‘Enough for me to do a deal with the landowner who owns the fields beyond Jalan Bisma, and enough for me to stay in one of those guesthouse rooms in the meantime, if that’s easier that is, while I decide which plot of land to lease, on the edge of the rice field, on the way to the Monkey Forest, although I guess it would be a good idea if we asked around about other plots as well. You know this town a lot better than I do. And you’ll have to do the negotiating with the builders, Ibu Rita. You’re the one who speaks Balinese.’

  When she spoke, her voice was uninflected. ‘Aren’t you scared of the Invisibles?’

  ‘It’s the land of Dewi Sri, remember.’

  She said nothing, just stared, and he stared right back: and this was the best thing of all, staring at her, watching the progress of her thoughts play out on her face. He saw, first of all, her slow understanding of his seriousness; then he saw how she questioned that understanding, wondering if she had got it right. When she decided she had, a small amount of joy came into her features, a flattered look, manifest in a slight widening of her gaze, a minute lifting of her eyebrows. Then, briefly, a shadow of doubt, not at her understanding but at her own desires: the hint of a frown as the eyebrows lowered. He saw her think to herself that there were many things he had not told her and many she had not told him, two whole lives lived that needed explaining. The cloud of these omissions misted her pleasure for a moment: her gaze lost focus. Then, finally, a kind of light, a kind of recklessness in her smile: if she was younger she would not contemplate this; if he was younger, he would not have asked. Their separate tragedies had brought them both to this: a point where they had nothing much to lose by taking a chance on someone as damaged as they were.

  All he was doing was watching her face. Its motions were minute. He had no way of knowing if he had interpreted the panorama of her thoughts correctly – but still, in that moment, it felt enough.

  They went to the guesthouse on Jalan Bisma together and Rita asked to speak to the owner. The three of them sat around one of the small round tables in the bar while Rita and the owner chatted in Balinese and she negotiated a long-term rental for one of the rooms – a corner room on the first floor: Balinese people didn’t like sleeping upstairs, she told him, so the first-floor rooms were slightly cheaper. They went to see the room together but while Rita checked it out, opening the wardrobe, turning on the taps in the bathroom, tightening them efficiently, Harper just stood smiling at the bed, wondering if he could persuade her to stay with him there that night. Johan would be back in Denpasar by now, at the airport. Perhaps he would take a
domestic flight to Jakarta to report back to Henrikson, or, more likely, go straight back to Amsterdam via Singapore. Job done.

  The young man who had shown them the room handed Rita the key and left, closing the door behind him, and Harper advanced upon her. She backed towards the bed, smiling, mock-reluctant. ‘I should make you wait another three days,’ she said, ‘wait until you’ve moved out of your old place, you know, finished with all that.’

  ‘Should you?’ he said, placing one hand on her chest and shoving her, neatly and gently, back onto the bed, and she grabbed the pillow and placed it over her face and he had to pull the pillow away and clear her hair from her face in order to be able to kiss her. He took her wrists and went to pin her arms above her head but she shoved him off, pushed him onto his back, rolled on top. ‘Who has the upper hand now, John Harper?’ she said.

  ‘You,’ he conceded, and yielded to her kiss.

  In the early evening, they went out to eat and even though she refused to spend the night with him, he could not bring himself to return to the hut – he slept at the guesthouse alone. In the morning, she came by for breakfast.

  The fine sun continued and they sat at a corner table in the restaurant upstairs: a view of the street rather than a valley, but fresh juice and eggs. This is going to be my life now, he thought, watching Rita as she scans a menu. Here we are, opposite each other at a table, and our primary task, our main responsibility, is to decide what sort of juice we feel like, how we want our eggs.

  Rita checked her watch – she had work that morning but there was plenty of time. After she had gone, he would go back up to the hut for his last two nights. Now, he would be able to enjoy that small and finite solitude, now all that paranoia was behind him.

  How ridiculous his fears seemed now. In his head, he listed all the things he realised were nonsense: the young men in the jeep as he sat drinking coffee and eating a cinnamon bun: they were just young men in a jeep, passing through town, off-duty soldiers or police cadets, perhaps. So what? The boys he thought were following him from the breakfast shack – why, exactly? Because they were sitting on a tree trunk near where he had chosen to sit down? Because they rose when he did? There had been no gathering of men in a brick-walled office or, if there had, their discussions had revolved around the appropriate size of his pay-off, how to avoid any public embarrassment for the company. And Joosten, poor Joosten – maybe it was the stuff he smoked that made him paranoid. Wrong place at the wrong time. Could happen to anybody.

  The world is different now. Rita was right. He had allowed the things that had happened to him to colour his perspective far too much, sad but true. He would go back to the hut, enjoy his last couple of days there, and after that, his new life could begin.

  ‘Will it take you long to pack?’ Rita asked, and he spluttered into his coffee.

  After they had eaten, she took out a map of the town and showed him how it was actually a series of adjoining villages and districts. She pointed at the areas on the edges that were being developed, talked him through the labyrinthine processes of leasing land locally; where they would have to register. At one point, while they were still scanning the map, heads bent towards each other, she lifted hers and looked at him and said, ‘John . . .’ thoughtfully. ‘You know, I know you will think this is strange of me, but it’s an odd name for you. It is a blank name, isn’t it? There is a form of John in every language, isn’t there? John for English, Jan or Hans in German, and Dutch, would it be Jan? Or Johan, is it Johan?’

  In all the time he had been John Harper, hardly anyone had called him John. He was Harper at work. Francisca had known him as Nicolaas. He shrugged. ‘Call me something else if you like. Anything you like. Just don’t expect me to call you fluffy bunny or something in return.’ It would be appropriate, after all, to shed John Harper now.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, ignoring the bunny comment, ‘I will have to give that some thought. What did your grandparents call you, the grandparents in California?’

  ‘Nicolaas,’ he said, ‘or Nic, sometimes, that was mostly Nina. My grandfather, I don’t know, most of the time he called me son.’ And it came to him then, Poppa’s deep tones, the ease with which he spoke the word, the same slow comfortableness with which he had called Nina baby or hon. Son. For a while, he had been a son. He thought then of Abang – call me Abang, he had said, big brother, as soon as Harper had arrived on the island, after taking just one look at him. Adik, he had called him in return: little brother. Abang had only called him that a handful of times, but it was enough: someone who cared enough to choose the right word for you, like Rita’s students calling her Ibu. How important it was, to be named. Once, on the streets of Amsterdam, he had seen an elderly Indian man bending painfully to pick up a paper bag that he had dropped, and the youth of the Netherlands rushing past, none of them pausing, and he wasn’t in a hurry that day himself so (uncharacteristically, he would concede) he had stopped and said, ‘Uncle, please,’ and bent and picked up the bag and handed it to the old man, who had given him a keen look and said, simply and without emotion, ‘There should be more people like you in the world.’ It was the only time anyone had ever said anything like that to him, and just because he had named the old man uncle.

  Rita was looking at him. ‘You had a father, for a while, there, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are right.’

  She gave him a wide-eyed look then and made a small whooping sound. ‘A miracle! Miracles will never cease!’

  He pointed his spoon at her. ‘Don’t make a habit of it.’ She rolled her eyes and he added, ‘And it’s wonders.’

  ‘Wonders?’

  ‘Wonders that will never cease, not miracles.’

  ‘Okay, I will settle for wonders.’

  He would have liked to turn it around then, to talk of her. He would have liked to say, and what about you? What are you looking for? Your lost son? But he knew that would make the light go from her eyes – and it wasn’t the right time. She had to be at work soon and he had to go back to the hut.

  But along with the fantasy house that they would build together in the rice fields, he pictured, then, a fantasy letter arriving from Belgium. He pictured Rita holding it with trembling hands, looking at him, as if for permission to open it, and him sitting her at the small table on their veranda and placing a supportive hand on her shoulder before leaving her to open it in private – she would know that he was just indoors, whenever she was ready. And after some time, she would come inside, her eyes brimful of tears, and hold the letter out to him and say, ‘My son, he wants to come and visit.’ And then there would be some months of wrangling with the father, during which he, Harper, would lose his cool once in a while and threaten to go over to Belgium and kick that idiot her ex-husband down the stairs, and Rita would cry at night or go silent – but eventually, it would all lead to this: one day, when the house was complete and the guest room furnished, they would be standing together at Denpasar airport, waiting for the boy to arrive. And he, Harper, would see him first amongst the many youths emerging from Arrivals, because Rita was looking for her child but he was looking for Rita. The son would be a strapping youth, well built, with Rita’s soft features but dark hair. He would come over and he and Rita would embrace awkwardly, neither of them too emotional, not yet, and then he would turn and face Harper and shake his hand firmly and their eyes would meet in a moment of masculine recognition that, strange as this meeting might be for all of them, the one who would need protecting here would be Rita.

  She hadn’t told him her son’s name yet: Viktor, perhaps, or Maxim? He would get the name eventually: she would tell him when she was ready to trust him with it. What does a man do when he is too old to look for father figures? Perhaps he finds a son.

  Rita jumped up from the table. ‘I have to go.’ Her distracted, dreamy air was back, and he knew that, when they lived together, it would annoy him, that when her mind turned to her job, her responsibilities to her students, he would not be
the focus of her attention any more. She would always switch off, just like that, say ‘I have to go,’ unexpectedly – he realised that he would have to quell his desire to become demanding at that stage. He would have to accept that she was still open to the world in a way that he was not. I’d better busy myself with building projects, he thought, otherwise I’ll start to annoy her.

  She bent her head and gave him a brief kiss on the lips. ‘Next time I see you,’ she said, ‘two days’ time, I’ll have thought of a name to call you, then. Maybe I’ll make something up.’ She was gone.

  He drove the car back to the top of the lane and left it there and walked up to the hut. Kadek might have been and gone already that morning, but if he was still there, maybe he would ask about buying the car. He wondered whether Kadek had been briefed about his departure yet or whether he would have to tell him himself. He would leave a handsome tip, in hard dollars. He hoped that Kadek would be sorry to see him go.

  The doors to the hut were closed but the small silver padlock had not been attached to the metal loop that locked them shut: it was sitting on the table on the veranda, next to his washing bowl. That was unusual – Kadek was normally very thorough about locking up. Still, maybe things were different now, maybe Kadek knew he would be minding an empty building for a while, until the next incumbent that the Institute needed to squirrel away for a bit. Perhaps Kadek thought Harper wasn’t returning at all after his meeting with the lawyer. He would be used to the arbitrary comings and goings of Institute staff by now.

  Harper stood on the veranda, facing the door. Then he reached out, took hold of the iron circle that lifted the latch, twisted it slowly. The latch lifted with a squeak and a scrape. He pushed the door back.

  Inside, the hut was clean and tidy. Kadek had remade the bed and smoothed it immaculately. The mosquito net was tied in a neat waterfall of cotton around each post, the white sheets tucked in tight. He had emptied the ashtray of the burnt shreds of Francisca’s letter. The chair in front of the desk was inserted in its proper position neatly, not at the lazy diagonal that Harper always left it at. The hut could not have been more organised, more empty.