Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  I was beside myself with the romance of it all. A shooting star rocketed across the sky and showered down the perfume of frangipani blossom in the garden trees.

  “You play beautifully,” I gasped. “Did you have lessons?”

  “Not really. Just a little, first with Rachmanninov, then from Arthur Schnabel. And now, Rudi …” he yawned and fluttered blond lashes. He had called me Rudi. “… it is late. I’m afraid all the boys have gone to bed. It doesn’t seem troubleworth disturbing them to make one up for you does it? Why not just share with me, like the Balinese do? Less fuss everywhere?”

  I awoke with the anxious sense of puzzlement that comes from sleeping in a strange house. I felt a stir of breeze on my naked skin. I had not cleaned my teeth or applied the medication betwen my toes. The river sounds of flowing water and the wind in unknown trees came first, then memory of the night before pulled sleep away like a lifted blanket. I rose on one elbow to see Walter exposed in the terrible vulnerability of dreaming, arranged in one of those implausible sprawled poses favoured by that old fraud Gaugin. From his parted lips came an odd musical sound, not snoring exactly, more like the purring of a great cat. As I watched, he supinated brusquely and stretched in an even more feline manner, batting some imagined vexation from his face with one hand. His fingers fell warm and unheeding against my skinny thigh. I examined the body with forensic detachment, took inventory, as Jacob Vorderman had taught me. It was a good, sound basic design without the narcissistic finish of the athlete, but made for use, compact, strong, bearing no marks of dissipation or old injury, indeed, resolutely boyish. The chest was hairless, muscular, very trim, the stomach flat. Tufts of blond in the armpits and crotch like ermine edging. The genitals I had explored earlier and established their good working order. The legs were hard and slim, tapering away into darkness. It would give years of maintenance-free service and wear well – like solid mahogany furniture with real brass fittings, as opposed to the splitting and cracking of cheap veneer. With time it would even acquire a fine patina of wear that would only enhance its beauty and exude a sense of comfort and solidity and so increase rather than decrease in desirability. It would, I decided, do me very nicely. With shock, I realised that I was in love. I drew up my knees to think about that, horribly aware of my own scrawny form.

  Normally, in such matters, I had found that there came a point of conscious choice. You approached the edge of – as it were – an emotional cliff, looked hesitatingly over the brink and made a choice of whether to jump or not. I had always been ruled by prudence and, even in the case of esculent Luigi, had turned back at the last moment from the dizzying view. But here, puzzlingly, I was to be offered no choice. I must have leapt for I had already fallen. So here it was then, that thing so much written and sung and, I supposed, painted about – love – and I sounded my own body and mind with fascination and trepidation. What I felt was a mixture of infinite joy and piercing sadness that curiously involved a mellow pain in my left side, so that I smiled even as tears coursed down my cheeks. Shakily, I climbed out of bed, careful not to wake the sleeping object of all my future affections and wrapped a towel hanging there around my thin waist as I groped for my glasses. The floors were reassuringly solid and cold underfoot, like reason. Somewhere out there, down there, was water.

  I eased my way through the door, snagging the towel on one of the particularly bristling figures of folklore it bore in carved relief and fingered and toed my cautious way down a precipitous cement staircase with no bannisters, to regain the living room. Even then, it seemed an absurd architectural metaphor. Wooden masks of heroes and demons, arranged like trophy heads, smirked and snarled from the walls to mark my descent from felicity. The last in the series was a stupid and angry Dutch face, with glasses and moustache surmounting many chins. There was, if my memory served me well, a carafe of water on the table. I moved slowly forward, then tripped and fell, crashed into the corner and sent glass and carafe tumbling to the floor with outstretched, fumbling hand. I crouched and listened, cursing under my breath. In a flash a face appeared at the door, the boy Resem, clutching a lamp.

  “Apa?” He rubbed his eyes and registered a strange very white white man, scuffling for a towel under the table. With the aplomb of a British butler he made it all right. “Oh. I think is monkey but only Tuan. If Tuan go back to his room I bring coffee.” Then I saw the wheels of his brain slowly turn as he tried to work out where exactly my room was and then his eyes traced my guilty route, in reverse, back up the stairs and he grinned. “Oh. I bring for Tuan Walter also.” Before I could say anything, he was gone. I knew the boys all slept in a great bed back there, entangled like pullovers in a draw – the Western bed a luxury that some Balinese adored and some disdained for a traditional, hard, woven mat, to them more comfortable. I heard whispering offstage followed by a belly laugh, more whispering and another laugh, the sort provoked by a Charlie Chaplin pratfall. They all knew then. I crept back, in shame, up the stairs.

  Walter was already up and dripping water from wet hair, unselfconsciously naked. As I entered, he turned, smiled, dragged his fingers through his hair and knotted a towel into a sarong. Ready to go.

  “Breakfast,” he said with energy. “Downstairs. Take your time, Bonnetchen. Then I’ll show you Bali.” He ruffled my own hair in manly affection and pounded off down the stairs, intercepting Resem on the way. Greetings, giggles. I sighed like a shopgirl – he had called me Bonnetchen – as he rampaged through the house like a force of nature, stirring it into life, evoking happy shouts, screams of laughter and the rattle of pans. As if at his command, the sun rose in magnificence above the trees to reveal the valley slathered in a fog of whipped cream. A dragonfly as big as my hand perched on the windowsill and pumped up its red filigree wings in preparation for another day. This was how I wanted life to be.

  An hour later we were fed and watered, the car had been brought round and a picnic hamper prepared. It was an odd-looking car, long snout, long boot and a little island in the middle for two passengers, rather like a motorboat intended for some inland regatta..

  “My Willy’s Overland Whippet,” he announced proudly. “You pay $500 for one of these things straight from the works in Indianapolis, Indiana.” Perhaps so. But I doubted that this one was a Whippet exactly as known to the citizens of Indianapolis, Indiana. While the main body was still black, as intended by the manufacturer, the mudguards had undergone radical piecemeal revision, each being a different shade of blue and of different shape. The perceptive observer would have noticed the same shades of blue in decorative use at various points about the house.

  “Did you pay $500 for it?”

  “No, of course not. People give me things,” he explained vaguely. “This was Baron von Plessen’s auto. We made a film together. You have not seen it?” He sulked. “It was a work of some artistic merit. One day I will tell you the story.”

  I walked round the vehicle suspiciously. Was it safe? “What happened to the mudguards?”

  “In Balinese circumstances mudguards are not necessary. Generally, I only use it in the dry weather. The roof got lost in an accident involving a pig. It took me a little time to adjust to autos. When he gave it to me the Baron asked whether I could drive and I replied with complete honesty that I had no idea as I had never tried.”

  “Oh my God.”

  He laughed so that I was unsure whether he was joking. “It’s all right, Bonnetchen. I am much better now. Nowadays I hardly ever kill anyone when we go out somewhere and I have learnt not to try to avoid the pigs but to run them down and offer compensation which is really much safer.” At this point, the two domesticated monkeys came scampering round the side of the house and tried to insert themselves into the car, something they were normally permitted. They were detected and vigorously repelled and snarled at me as at the “other woman” who had ousted them from grace. Then the three boys came, lugging the heavy picnic hamper between them and looking sad-eyed at their abandonment. Walter sighed and opene
d the curved boot. Inside was a dickie or rumble or mother-in-law seat in scuffed leather.

  “Alright,” he said wearily. “The monkeys stay. You can come. But there is only room for two, You must toss to decide who stays to look after the house. Er … have you got a coin, Bonnetchen?”

  He tossed, they called, the loser, chubby little Oleg, got to keep my coin and whistled happily as he performed artful throws and catches with it up his back and over his head. The winners, Resem and Badog, tucked up their sarongs, leaped lithely in and gripped the back of the front seat like postillions, eyes wide with excitement. Universal smiles. I would learn that Walter always left everyone happy, wanting more. And he always managed to use someone else’s coin yet leave them humbly grateful to be allowed to supply it.

  We set off at a spanking pace. He had lied about the improvement in his driving. The key to his technique seemed to be that he must be, at all times, accelerating hard unless actually executing an emergency stop. The Whippet was a sporty roadster that incorporated several features considered advanced at that time, such as a pressurised lubrication system and brakes on all four wheels. They only exacerbated Walter’s exuberant style that was in direct contrast to that of slow-revving Bagus. Its most important component was the horn that had grown hoarse from overuse. The boys, of course, loved it, secure in the immortality of youth and never having experienced anything faster than a horse. Every wild swerve and improvident bump elicited fresh squeals of delight. At one point we became airborne over a hump in the road and they begged Walter – please, please Tuan Walter – to reverse and do it again, which I forbade, becoming ever after grumpy Tuan Rudi, the spoilsport. Bridges were a particular source of exhilaration to them. On Bali, because all the rivers flow between north and south in deep valleys, so do most of the main roads. Going from east to west or west to east was always very difficult since so many rivers had to be bridged and only “we” Dutch had thought the investment worthwhile. Still, as an economy measure, bridges had been frugally constructed wide enough for one-way traffic only so that to approach them at full speed, klaxoning wildy, as Walter did, was to bet one’s life at 50–50 odds. Fortunately, in those days, there was little motorised traffic outside the towns. People did not seem to have the pathological urge to move from place to place that grips us now. Mostly it was men carrying protesting pigs slung on poles and women, bare breasts haughtily aswing, living lessons in deportment, bearing great pyramidal towers of fruit to the temples, or, their essence having been extracted by the hungry gods, carrying them home again to the pigs.

  “Think,” urged Walter, “how life would be simpler if all Balinese gods did regular home visits.”

  We must have been speaking English that day as I remember several eclecticisms of his that were new to me at the time. The semantic field of automobiles was always particularly challenging to one who favoured speed over precision. Indeed, “speed”, or “Geschwindigkeit”, he called “quickety” and the speedometer became thereby the “quickety clock”. This freed up the word “speeds” to be used for “gears” and the “tyres”, as I recall, were always referred to as “gummytyres”. We bounced along on high leaf springs, the land becoming flatter, the fields larger. The ocean blazed deep blue on our left. Whenever we slowed the heat beat down on us flatly. A small town, more a large village, gathered itself about us.

  “Sanur,” explained Walter as we picked our way down a small track to the beach. “This is the best spot for a swim because the reef here keeps the surf and big waves out.”

  The sand was the purest gold, shaded above the high tide mark by coconut palms and swept by a stiff breeze. In the misty distance, the volcano, Gunung Agung, swirled in cloud. Outrigger canoes were drawn up, white, blue and red, their eye-decorated prows carved with the long snout of some great sea monster and, further up, some simple fishermen’s huts. We had no idea then, of course, that this place would be our nemesis. The boys sprang out, looked at each other, shyly tucked their sarongs between their legs and up into the waist fastening, creating immediate swimming trunks, and rushed off whooping into the sea, diving and splashing. Walter looked around to ensure there were no women to shock and stripped boldly to the buff, token modesty being maintained by no more than a cupped left hand.

  “Come on, Bonnetchen!”

  He pounded down the beach, waded, dived and was soon sporting with the boys amidst screams of laughter. Some men came out from under an awning and held their hands over their eyes. I picked out the word “Walter” over the noise of the surf. Then, they too, were running laughing into the sea, slapping him on the back, hugging him. Soon fights had been arranged, one perched on the shoulders of his friend, jousting his opponent into the water with shoves and feints, Walter always on the winning side to cheers and shouts. Since I had no bathing dress, I rolled up the legs of my flannels and waded up to my ankles in the warm water of the shallows then sat on the sand and watched them at play. After ten minutes or so, they began to drift back to the shore, panting, tousled, bodies shimmering with golden flakes of mica. The younger men were sent off and came back with cigarettes, hand-rolled from a pinch of tobacco and a dry nipa palm leaf, and coconuts to be sliced open with long machetes. We sat, drank, sucked in the smoke that smelled of autumn bonfires and Walter was, as always, the centre of it all. A little boy waddled up, a single lock of hair left on his shaven head, and kissed his hand, was seized and dandled, ecstatic, on his knee. Walter fired off fluent Balinese, from its effect, clearly jokes, endearments and words of sincere affection. A man came up, pluming more bonfire smoke, gripping something wrapped in an old piece of red rag. Walter unwrapped, examined. It was two old plates. He held them out for me to look at.

  “Chinese. Mid-eighteenth century. They turned up in the sand, uncovered after a big storm. See the way the pattern has been rubbed off one. You know about that historic wreck, the Sri Kumala, a quarter of a century back? It was cast up here and the wreck was looted by the locals, thus breaking an old treaty the southern rulers had signed with the Dutch and long forgotten. It was the excuse the Dutch had been waiting for to invade and all the massacres that followed. These are supposed to be from there but are far too old. Could be important. But actually the cloth they’re wrapped in is more so, a genuine Indian patola – very rare – evidence of ancient Hindu links. Sanur’s an odd place. Odd things happen here what with all the sorcery and Brahmanas.” He turned and, from his gestures and faces, it was clear he was haggling gently, transforming it into a comic turn. He rolled his eyes, flapped his arms, gasped and clutched his head. They exhaled a chorused chuckle. Handshakes, hugs, smiles. The deal was done.

  “But Walter,” I objected, reasonably, “you don’t have any money.”

  “Oh. That’s all right.” He looked astonished. “They’ll trust me.” He shrugged his clothes back on and we climbed back in the car, the plates rewrapped and stowed in the rear. The boys were some way off, carefully brushing the sand off their feet, one with the other. “Resem! Badog!” he called, like a man summoning a stubborn hound. He glowed with happiness. Then, he turned his big blue eyes on me and spoke very quietly.

  “There are many ways, Bonnetchen, to divide up the peoples of this world but, for me, the big divide is between those who are gigglers and those who are not. Balinese are emphatically gigglers. Resem and Badog are gigglers. I am a giggler. You are not. It is perhaps my life mission to turn you into a giggler.” In the dickie, the boys were peeling off their sarongs, wringing them out and spreading them to dry on the hot metalwork, mischievously laughing at the sensation of driving naked, though unobserved, through the middle of the village.

  “Look at them, Bonnetchen.” He nodded in the rear view mirror, in Walterese his “backlookglass”. “Two beautiful, healthy young animals. Children of nature. Not an unkind or ungenerous impulse in them.”

  I looked. I saw two boys in their mid-teens, for whom life was a series of happy new experiences and joyful prospects, hair thick and wet, eyes wide with joy, teeth
shining, skin flawless, leaning like brothers – but not like my dour brothers – with their elbows trustingly on each other’s shoulders, knowing the world to be a fine place. They pulsed with life, two young lotus plants twirling up towards the sunlight of their full growth. If this had not been the first day of my new life with Walter, I should have been depressed by it, a sort of anti-memento mori from some painting, showing everything that I lacked in spontaneity, physical beauty and capacity for joy. Walter was suddenly fierce.