Dark Horizons

by Dan Smith

  ‘You know they had the police up there one time? A year ago, maybe a little longer.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘And did you hear that some people came over from Australia looking for their son? Hadn’t heard from him for weeks. Last place he’d contacted them from was Lake Toba, so they came here to poke about. Police weren’t much help, so they started showing pictures around, coming down to the lake, asking if people had seen their kid. I recognised the picture and pointed them in the right direction. I’d seen him going up to that place they’ve got up there.’

  I couldn’t help looking back, but the hillside was obscured now; all I could see was Samosir.

  ‘Police had to follow up on it. As far as I know they had a look round but didn’t find anything. Got told the boy stayed a while and moved on. No one got busted, though, not for anything. No arrests at all, but there’s drugs up there, I know it. What the hell else are they doing up there? And I know your people sell on Samosir.’ He paused for a moment and watched me as if waiting for me to give something away. ‘I’ve seen them.’

  ‘I’m not selling anything,’ I said.

  ‘They must’ve paid someone off,’ he carried on. ‘Hell, you can buy just about anything here. Buy your way out of anything. Korupsi. It’s like there’s a price list. A hundred thousand for a dope bust, add a bit for LSD, more for heroin, couple of million for killing a man.’ He stopped again, watching my reaction. ‘You don’t pay, you’re in deep shit, especially with drugs. You know what they do with druggies in this country? They jail ’em and shoot ’em.’

  He turned back to the wheel and started the boat with the turn of a key. The motor was loud in my ear and I had to shout when I next spoke.

  ‘What was their name?’

  He looked over his shoulder and furrowed his brow. ‘Who?’

  ‘The people you said. Who came looking for their son.’

  Richard closed his eyes like he was thinking hard. ‘Sullivan, I think.’ He paused as if checking it again. ‘Yeah. Kid called himself Sully.’

  I turned my head and stared at the water, lifting my eyes to see the shore. I remembered how I had seen the lake for the first time, the excitement and the promise. That moment when the cloud had broken and the sun had shone through like it was blessing the water. Then I thought about drugs and pigs and Michael’s fists, and how I had hidden in the night, lying close to where we had buried Matt.

  There was no breeze and the air was warm, but I shivered for Sully’s unspoken death. For his shallow grave. And for his nameless shrine.

  35

  When we reached the eastern side of Samosir, Richard took us into shore where there was a gathering of dilapidated buildings close to the water. I climbed over the side of his boat, stretching to make it onto the concrete steps without falling into the water. I thanked him and he waved a hand as if to tell me it was no problem, like he’d done it for free, then he revved his engines and headed back into the lake. He turned the boat not in the direction of his home, but towards Parapat on the other side.

  I stood on the concrete jetty, holding on to a set of rusted metal, pool-style steps that dropped into the lake. Two women were washing clothes just along the shore, white islands of bubbles drifting out in the dark water, and they watched me as I headed up towards the guest house. Now, as for the rest of the boat trip, I was thinking about Sully, wondering exactly how he had died. And I thought about the people who’d come looking for their son. Kurt had sent them away with the belief that he was still alive out there somewhere, not buried beneath the forest floor. Sully, a member of the community populated by lonely, impressionable travellers. Losers and drop-outs who had no one to come looking for them. But Sully hadn’t been alone. Someone had come looking for him.

  The Pulau Samosir guest house was an innocuous place, just a small collection of four, maybe five waterfront cottages, arranged so that each had a window looking out onto the lake. There were a couple more set back. Like everything else, the cottages were shaped like traditional Batak homes, but they were smaller, only meant for one or two guests. They were old and in failing repair, but there were signs of renovation. Some of them had been repainted recently, making me think of the work I’d done with Michael.

  I wandered past the cottages and approached the main office, a saddle-roofed building with a wide veranda at the front where several tables were laid out. Each of them covered with a white paper tablecloth held down with clips. Knives, forks, spoons, glasses and coffee cups laid out on each one. There was a group of Europeans sitting at one table: three young men and two women.

  I walked through the open door into the main building. This front area was small. A counter that served as a reception desk. An old bell fashioned from polished brass, the kind you hit on top to make it ting. A rotating rack with colour leaflets and pamphlets standing in one corner. A wooden unit to one side with guidebooks and tourist maps. To my left a swing-door led to a kitchen. Even now, this early in the morning, the air was scented with spiced cooking.

  By the counter, close to me, a small woman was sitting in a rattan chair. Her eyes were closed and her head was bowed as if she were sleeping. I cleared my throat to attract her attention and she immediately looked up and smiled, her old face cracking into a dry mud-bed of fissures. She had long hair, tied into a tight bun. She beckoned me in and moved behind the counter, lifting a section of it to let herself through. She was wearing a white tunic and a sarong. Her feet were bare.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked, but she shook her head and continued to smile. Her teeth were stained betel-nut red.

  ‘Room?’ I ventured.

  The woman nodded and took a sheaf of paper from a pile at one end of the counter. She turned it round and passed it to me. It was a faded, photocopied list of prices and I was relieved to see that each one had a translation next to it. No double or single rooms, nothing like that, just different rates for different lengths of stay.

  I pointed to the weekly tariff and held up a finger. ‘One week,’ I said. ‘One room.’

  She nodded and took out the necessary paperwork, which I completed and returned to her before she held out her hand and showed me that she knew at least some English. ‘Pay now,’ she said with a smile.

  I took some money from my pocket and counted it out for her. It amounted to no more than three pounds a night.

  She took the bills, folded them and crushed them in her fist while taking a key from under the counter with her other hand. Then she barked something in Indonesian that sounded like ‘Pa!’ and a skinny man, similar in age, came through the swing-door, bringing a fresh waft of cooking smells with him. The woman handed over the key and the man beckoned me to follow him.

  I trailed him back along the path and waited as he went to the door of the cottage nearest to the metal steps where I’d first stepped foot on Samosir. He turned the key and pushed open the door, showing me into the room. Once inside, he opened the shutters and showed me the bathroom with a smile before saying, ‘Selamat datang. Welcome,’ and leaving the room.

  Alone, I sat on the edge of the bed. It was a simple room, but comfortable. Clean. The sheets were fresh, and the floor was free of dirt. Swept and washed. There was a table beside the bed with a stack of four or five well-thumbed paperbacks, and a lamp that looked as if it might not work. I reached over and tried it, surprised that it came on with a single click. I smiled to myself and went to the bathroom, looking in at the clean facilities.

  A proper toilet, not just a hole in the ground. In the corner, a concrete tub, waist high, filled with water. I dipped my fingers in to test the temperature and found it to be stone cold. Resting on the edge of the tub was a stainless-steel bucket with a fixed handle. I didn’t suppose it would be much different from the cold waterfall I’d grown used to, but was pleased to see that there was also a shower in the room. I hadn’t realised, until now, how much I had missed hot showers, and the sight of two taps on the wall, one marked red and one marked blue, stirr
ed surprisingly strong feelings of comfort. I turned it on, testing the water, feeling it growing warm.

  Unable to wait, I stripped off, threw my clothes onto the floor and put the shower on full blast. While the water warmed further, I inspected my bruises in the mirror. I looked tired and drawn, my eyes bloodshot, the right one ringed black, blue and yellow. There was a day’s growth of stubble on my face, streaks of dirt from my night in the forest. There were bruises along my ribs, too, some on my back where Michael had kicked me.

  I turned away from myself and stepped under the hot torrent. The water and the free soap didn’t wash everything away, but it made me feel better. The cold shower of the waterfall was already just a memory.

  After that I climbed between the fresh sheets and slept. I didn’t wake until early the next afternoon.

  36

  Feeling like a different person, I lay naked on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The sun slid through the slatted shutters and fell across me in golden bars. I tried to put the past days behind me. Focus on what I was going to do. I hadn’t decided how long I’d wait for Domino, or if I even wanted to wait for her at all now, but I was glad of the change of scenery and made up my mind to make the most of my time here. And the first thing I needed to do was find something to wear.

  I counted out a few notes into my pocket, glanced around the room that contained nothing of my own, and closed the door behind me. With my fresh mindset, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of freedom. I was going back to the world with new eyes. Things were different away from the trees and the clearings and the swept dirt. Here everything was open and colourful. It was warmer, too, as if the sun had finally agreed to burn through the cloud and shine on me. There was life and there was sound and there was openness by the lake – something that had been missing on the hillside.

  I wandered back towards reception with a confidence that had eluded me. There was a bounce in my walk as I followed the stepping stones – no hidden paths and secrets here. I took in everything around me, soaked up everything I saw, watched people going about their business, saw the other tourists and travellers experiencing the island. I wondered why I’d ever considered staying cocooned on the hillside with Kurt and his people, and realised that this was exactly the reason Kurt didn’t want people to leave the community too soon. Because, like me, they’d see that it was not the life they wanted. Up there, people were not themselves. Up there, people thought they were free, but they weren’t. Instead, they were a primitive, shadowy version of themselves. That was no paradise. It was another world; something darker.

  I took a seat at one of the tables and waited no longer than a few minutes before someone spotted me and came out to take my order. I’d missed more than one meal, and my stomach was complaining. I was going to eat something other than fish.

  Using only my index finger and my smile, I ordered chicken curry, rice and a Bintang beer from the menu. And when the food came it was good, hot, tasty and free of grit. The beer was cold and the clean glass sweated in the warmth of the early afternoon. It was perfect.

  When I’d finished eating, I leaned right back in my chair, put my hands across my stomach and closed my eyes. This was the best I’d felt in a long time. It was as if all my worries had melted away under the warm shower and now I had buried what was left of them beneath a good night’s sleep, a meal and some warm sunshine. I even stopped thinking about what I’d left behind, and began thinking about what lay ahead.

  I walked away from the lake, following the small map on the back of the price list the woman in the losmen had given me. A road, not much more than a track, led further inland, but I didn’t have to walk far before I came across what I was looking for. A warung, a stall no larger than a bus shelter, with an array of goods hanging from it, covering almost every inch of its surface. T-shirts, shorts, caps, flip-flops, sandals, swimming trunks, sarongs, sweets, cigarettes, drink cans, everything. And beside it, tied through their front wheels with a length of chain, a row of bicycles and mopeds.

  I bought some new clothes, basic toiletries, a small backpack, a cheap watch, and hired a moped for what was left of the day, setting off along the main road that snaked around the island.

  ‘Pigi mana? ’ said the stall owner as he finished showing me how to use the moped. ‘Pigi mana? Where you go?’

  I shrugged and swung my leg over. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t know? Tidak tau? ’ He gave me a thumbs up. ‘Good place to go.’

  Keeping track of the time on my new watch was a revelation to me. By putting plastic and metal on my wrist, I was once again in control of my time. Time that had never changed. It hadn’t quickened, slowed, stopped or disappeared, but I had lost track of it, and felt secure in my regained mastery of it. I was recapturing control of my own life. I was making my own decisions and doing the things I wanted to do. I wasn’t following anybody.

  It struck me that I had been swept along by so many emotions and intentions. I had been controlled by the community, sapped of my ability to be myself, and by not refusing to go along with its strange rules and rituals, I had been carried into extraordinary circumstances. Kurt had told me that the community was a place to be free, but he was wrong. Out here I was free. Out here I made my own choices. And, blessed with that feeling of great relief, as if a shroud had been lifted from my mind, I thought I had seen the last of Kurt and his people.

  I rode through one or two small villages, stopping to look around in each one, and passed many shrines along the road. The first few reminded me of what I was leaving behind me, the night I’d spent hidden in the forest, but once I’d seen so many, I hardly noticed them any more.

  At about four o clock I stopped by a village stall to buy a bag of rambutans, which I ate by the roadside, peeling the hairy red skins and savouring the sweet white flesh. Further down, on the other side of the road, there was a dilapidated longhouse with a rusted roof. In front of it, colourful fabrics were held up on poles, a makeshift sun shelter, and there was a group of people beneath it, the women with their hair tied back, all wearing ulos, traditional Batak cloth, woven with fresh and vibrant colour. Even the men, in shirts and trousers, were wearing ulos over their shoulders. I could see blackened pots over wood fires, a line of children watching from a stone wall beneath a small grove of trees. I could hear singing from inside the longhouse, the sound of instruments, drumming, the beat fast and alien to my ears. It was a colourful and joyous spectacle and only when I saw the coffin being carried from the longhouse did I understand that this was a funeral. I watched for a while longer as they carried it around the house, and my thoughts turned to the funerals in my recent past. I thought about what I had seen in the forest and I thought about Domino and I thought about Helena, feeling a tinge of guilt that I had left her behind. I watched the mourners circling the house with the coffin and I wondered what I could have done for her. What I could still do. But I told myself that Helena would be fine. That she was safe. Then I stood, turned the moped round and headed back the way I’d come, thinking that tomorrow I would venture further.

  Back in my room, I stripped off, throwing my borrowed shorts and T-shirt into the dented brass bin in the far corner of the room. I showered again, shaved and dressed in my new clothes. The batik-print shirt still smelled of the ink that had been used to produce the vivid pattern, and the flip-flops smelled of rubber, and I liked it. Everything I wore smelled unused. Fresh. Mine. I was a new person and the next part of my trip had truly begun.

  With the sun almost gone from the sky, I left my cottage and took the path to reception. There were a few electric lights on already, not much more than bare bulbs hanging from wires in the ceiling. The group of Europeans I’d seen when I arrived was there again, sitting at the same table, a collection of dishes laid out in front of them.

  They glanced at me as I went to the table I’d used at lunchtime and I was about to sit down when I changed my mind. I wouldn’t sit in the same place. I’d choose a different table. And I would d
o that each day and night I was here. There would be no pattern, no habits. This was a stop on a longer journey. I would be here and then I would be gone.

  The old woman with the bun and the smile came to my table almost as soon as I was on the chair, her sarong whispering around her bare ankles. She placed a menu in front of me and managed a short English phrase. ‘Good evening,’ she said.

  ‘Selamat malam,’ I returned, and we smiled at each other, being able to do little more. I ordered a beer and looked over the menu, settling on something I’d never heard of.

  At the back of the covered veranda, against the outside wall of reception, two dark-skinned men were sitting on a worn rattan bench, deep in conversation. Behind them, on the wall, two guitars. I’d only just started eating when one of them took down an instrument, strumming a few notes, twisting the tuners, then starting to play.

  By now, there were people – Europeans or Americans, I guessed – at one or two of the other tables and most of them stopped talking, looking up at the guitarist. When he started to sing, the sound he produced was loud and smooth and deep. The second man, the older of the two, joined in from time to time, making movements with his hands as if telling a story, and occasionally he made loud clicking noises deep in his throat. Then he took the second guitar from the wall and turned it round, using the wooden back as a makeshift drum.

  I watched and listened as I finished my meal, disappointed when they stopped. They accepted applause before settling themselves back on the bench as if nothing had happened.

  I overheard the people on the table next to me discussing the singing and I turned to look at them, catching someone’s eye. A small guy, in his twenties, short blond hair and ruddy cheeks.

  ‘Hey, man, you on your own?’ he said. They were the people I’d seen when I arrived.