Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  “Shut up, Walter.”

  He shrugged. “Anyway, the point is I am finally free. I am the bee’s knees which is the cat’s whiskers.” He saw my face. “You can’t imagine how wonderful it feels.”

  “No,” I said in dry agreement. “I can’t.”

  “Moreover, while I was in Batavia, I went to see the lawyers. Plumpe’s money is out of crow.”

  “Crow? Oh you mean escrow.”

  “It is on its way, is what I mean. We must keep our thumbs crossed.”

  “Ma’af, Tuan,” Alit, having pattered in on velvet feet stood at the table’s edge, eyes agog, horrified by the sight of so much cash, the plenitude of it stifling his throat, cutting off speech. He coughed and spoke with difficulty, his troubled eyes fixed to the spot. “The woman from Bedulu has sent word for Tuan Rudi. There has been trouble. Sampih has stolen some money and now run away again. Since Tuan is now his father, he must please find him and sort out the affair as he promised.”

  Free? No. Good as I was at imagining things, I couldn’t imagine that.

  I was not greeted with open arms in Bedulu. It was immediately clear that most people thought I was McPhee, since all white men look the same and, it seemed, he had built up a number of local resentments of which I was now to be the beneficiary. They were polite, of course. Balinese are always polite but they have a sort of extra level of politeness that is a form of rudeness since it shunts you away and keeps you at a distance. Champlung, Sampih’s teacher, was in the fields so they sat me on a solitary chair ín the middle of the compound, like a garden ornament, until she might be brought. The men of the house avoided me, or rather the McPhee they thought I was. Chickens and children wandered in and out in the thickening rays of the morning sun. Everything was down at heel. They needed the money McPhee was paying.

  She was a small, neat woman of middle age with all the corporeal assurance that dancers have and she was torn between dislike of Sampih and anxiety that this would mean the end of an important source of cash for the house. Even Balinese who have land and livestock and might be accounted rich, are short of cash. She came and sat at my feet, meaning that I had to lean forward because she spoke so softly.

  “Tuan, he is a difficult child, cold and unloving. I tried to treat him as my own but he would not allow it.” I nodded. I had seen that for myself. “It was Nyoman Kaler’s fault. He came to my house with his pupil, Rindy and insisted Sampih should dance with him. I never should have allowed it. Rindy is older, more experienced. He is tall and slender. The dance has truly entered him. Sampih was shy before them both, stiff awkward. Even I would admit that. Nyoman sneered at him, made fun of him. He kept stopping him, standing behind him grabbing his arms, shouting out the beat, and forcing his body into the line that Nyoman likes, which is different from the Bedulu style. You know that he is an aristocrat, an insider? He called Sampih a peasant.”

  “Ah.”

  “He said he was ugly.”

  I thought about it. I found it hard to visualise Sampih’s face. Only the peevish expression remained. “Is he ugly?”

  She made a tight mouth as though at a particularly stupid pupil and her eyes flashed with contemptuous scorn. “He is dark which is the same as ugly. Nyoman laughed at the idea of anyone so dark performing as a solo dancer. Sampih was angry. His face was full of blood and he was cursing. He took the money I had made in the market and ran away.” She had a small business in the folding of leaves to make religious images for altars.

  “Has this happened before?”

  She shifted, uncomfortably. “It has happened before. Sometimes things go missing in the house and we know it is him. We said nothing because Tuan Colin would always say that it our fault and Sampih could make him do anything he wanted.”

  I could see that happening too. “Where does he go?”

  “He goes to the town. Then, when all the money is gone, he goes home.”

  A typical Balinese male, then. I wondered what he did with the money. Probably spent it on food and cigarettes. He was too young surely for drink, gambling and girls? But then, Sampih – I knew – was a precocious child. “What would you have me do? If I bring him back, will you take him?”

  I saw her swallow a silent groan. The burdens of teaching, we all knew them. “I have promised Tuan Colin, so I cannot let him down, but he is a terrible trouble” … I recognised this as a renegotiation of the contract. I made up the losses and increased the fees. Now I must find Sampih.

  I set out in the early morning cool to walk from Ubud to Sayan. It is just a few miles across the fields and today was one of those days when Bali is a place of magic. The air was honeyed, infused with the rich scent of frangipani, and swarmed with happy, benevolent creatures as in a Hollywood cartoon. Pigeons with little flutes under their wings circled me with music and everything was dappled with the sunlight reflected by quivering water. Green, fresh growth cascaded down the slopes and haughty, long-legged birds stalked among the rice, spearing frogs and other splashing things. Comely Balinese tended their fields, bent not in hard labour but coaxing forth fruitfulness with love and raised a hand in smiling greeting as I passed. At Sayan, the McPhees’ house stood sturdy and trim on the brow of the hill. Beyond the wall, inside the yard, one of their boys was sweeping the steps with a hand brush and scattering water to lay the dust that might have offended the absent owners had they been there. A good boy, clearly.

  “Have you seen Sampih?” I called across. He paused, scanned the horizon and pointed down the ridge to the river where a little blot of intense green and blue could be seen, like one of the dragonflies that haunted the spot. A fancy Pekalongan cloth, copying exuberant Chinese designs and far too expensive for most of the locals. I took the same yellowing track that the household took down the hill towards the river where he and McPhee allegedly met. It would have been impossible for me to approach him unnoticed – already his head was up like a startled deer – so I made as much noise as possible and came on as slowly as I could.

  “What the fuck do you want?” The charming child was smoking.

  “Good morning to you too,” I sembahed extravagantly and sat down. He did not, after all, own the rock. “I hope your parents are both well.”

  He looked at me with loathing. “My father is drunk and has been beating my mother. When I came back, I found her in the field with her head laid open. One day I will have to kill that bastard.”

  That rather took the ironic wind out of my sails. Nevertheless, I took a deep breath and forged on in my prepared speech. “Sampih,” I said gravely. “You know that Tuan McPhee has asked me, during his absence, to help you in any way that I can.”

  He sneered up at me. “He made me promises. He said he would look after me. I told him if he betrayed me I would kill him and pursue his soul screaming through every level of hell.” His voice was thick with blood. “Now he is gone.”

  I allowed myself brief distraction. Did Balinese hell have levels, then? I must ask Walter. It seemed young Sampih already had a whole list of people to kill. That, Nyoman Kaler, would say, is what happens when you teach peasants to dance.

  “The woman in Bedulu has agreed to take you back if you wish to go. It is entirely up to you. I too have made promises that must be kept but I have no means and no inclination to make you return if you have decided otherwise. I shall simply write to Tuan McPhee and tell him that this is the case.” I spoke evenly, without heat. I had no wish to detonate his explosive mood.

  “That stuck-up pig Kaler insulted me. One day I will have to …”

  “Kill the bastard. Quite so.” I could see the way this worked with McPhee, the stoking of rage until it flipped over into lust. I remained irritatingly cool. It would not be long – I foresaw – before I was added to the homicidal list. “In the meanwhile, only know that the path has been cleared for your return. Compensation has been disbursed for wrongs done and monies lost. Hurt feelings have been assuaged. If it proves necessary, a priestly offering for reconciliation can be duly
made. I will keep my promise and pay all on Tuan McPhee’s behalf. Only consider that the best way to make Nyoman Kaler eat his words is to outperform his pupil and so shame him before everyone. That would quite destroy him.” He liked that. He liked that a lot. A week later, I heard that he had returned to his studies and was working around the clock, or rather without a clock. So much for the selflessness of art.

  ***

  They were less co-varrubiously intertwined than before. It was no longer necessary for Rosa and Miguel to huddle on the same settee holding hands. They could even sit on separate chairs across the room from each other. After several years of marriage, this was surely not to be taken as a mark of a relationship in trouble but more likely to be a mere case of familiarity building content. More building was going on outside in a sort of athletic cabaret. A team of dusty workers were heaving thatch onto the roof of Barbara’s new house, leaping up and down the bamboo scaffolding like pole-vaulters. Further off, another team, glistening with water was attacking the solid rock at the edge of the river, in an act of gigantic dentistry, with long metal picks, gouging out the new swimming pool. We sat and watched and sucked at our teeth in sympathetic pain.

  “It is the duty of the gentleman,” I remarked, as I thought, pointedly “to provide employment for the artisan.”

  “To Mother Guggenheim!” said Miguel, raising his glass in a toast. “My grant-giver who had the wisdom to see that work and fun can be the same thing.” We were drinking cooled white wine. A new opulence was in the air as if we were outgrowing our student days. Rosa was still a beautiful woman but her curves had rounded and her flesh was taking on a subtly different texture like breast of chicken when overcooked. Miguel’s bum had grown monstrous but he was somehow more at ease with it. Earlier, Walter had been disappointed when, at the taking of photographs, he had remained insouciantly standing instead of diving for the furniture. He was even making remarks at my own lack of steatopygic development.

  “To be honest,” Walter confessed regally. “We did not hope to see you both again. So many people come and say they love us, pay us a few cents and promise to return but never do. We, in Bali, are like sailors’ sweethearts.”

  It had been a special, self-indulgent lunch of welcome, one of Walter’s zoological rambles, enriched with McPhee’s sauces – garlicked sea-snails, bumblebees, dragonflies, flying fox and sea cucumbers, followed by rich durian and fried acacia flowers – the last sensationally flambéd in brem so that the workers had stopped and gathered round, wide-eyed, to watch this wonder of Dutchmen eating fire. I didn’t greatly like all this, the blue fire of brem being much too like that shooting from the heads of known witches but, in Bali, it is impossible to sit and eat while others fast, so fish and rice had been served to the labourers in an act of semi-biblical socialism that soothed us all.

  “It makes me want to get started.” Miguel sucked air through his teeth with appetite and inhaled the industry all around us like frost on a cold day. “On the book. The definitive work on Bali. I have to get it all down on paper. I have it all planned, chapter headings, fieldwork locations. I already have half the pictures from the first trip. I shall get up at dawn. I have a thousand questions for you Walter. Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier if we just sat down and wrote it together? We could work non-stop. In three months it would be done. We owe it to the world.”

  Walter blanched like morning glory dunked in hot water. “I have someone who will be much more useful to you than I, a secretary. One moment.” He shouted into the kitchen and in, from noontime shadows, stepped Made Tantra, Nyoman Kaler’s nephew, McPhee’s enthusiastic friend, smiling and sembahing. Still a dandy with a flower tucked behind his ear, but goodness, what a fine young man he had blossomed into over the last few years! Walter marketed him like a used car huckster.

  “Fluent Malay, even a little English, reads and writes in all languages including Balinese. Comes with the highest possible recommendation from Colin and provides entrées to the very best musical families. Honest, hardworking, charming and – as you see- very easy on the eye.”

  Made Tantra, no fool, had immediately homed in on Rosa as the key to advancement and was batting his long – very long – eyelashes at her with instant, panting puppy love.

  “Puppy love. Several weeks before, I had come to the house – I nearly said ‘came home’ – to find a puppy tied by the front door. It was adorable. Huge eyes, feet and ears and, of course, I bent down and patted it and it leapt up and licked my face, ready to give its love for a mere kind word or a tidbit. At last Walter was getting a sensible pet, a welcome change from snakes and birds and lizards and those confounded hooligan monkeys. But when I asked about it he replied.

  “Oh, it’s not mine. It’s the priest’s. He’s round the back preparing an offering for displaced demons so we can break the soil for the new house.” Only later did I discover that the offering was the puppy as Walter well knew. The experience was, to me, strangely upsetting. I had formed a relationship with the little creature and felt myself to have betrayed it. For an emotional, artistic man, Walter was strangely unsentimental in such situations. I realised suddenly that, if I were ever to suffer a long, lingering disease, he would plausibly turn up at my house, pull out a great, long gun and shoot me out of sheer dispassionate kindness – unless, of course, Sampih had already done it out of rage.

  “Will he,” I asked casually, nodding at desperately bobbing, incredibly handsome Made Tantra, “be living here?” There was a shout from outside, Walter’s name. He rose from the table, screwing up his napkin – napkins! – and went to the verandah. The foreman was looking up, stroking his moustache and making helpless gestures in the face of – God help us – a white, ceramic toilet such as you might find in central Haarlem or Harlem.

  “Time for a little cultural contribution,” adjudged Walter and soon we were all looking down on him and Miguel, out there astride the thing, miming, blowing raspberry lip-farts, holding their noses with the workers falling about screaming in laughter, then Miguel sticking out and waggling his prodigious rump as Walter, head averted in stage horror, elaborately wiped it with his handkerchief.

  Rosa came up beside me and smiled in a tender, almost motherly, way. “He’s really needed this,” she said. “We’ve not had a moment’s peace since we were here and he got the idea of the book. You can’t imagine how good it is to see him back doing some serious work again at last.”

  It was a time of incredible busyness. I brought my wood- and stone-carving chicks to see the new house, to design elements of it and execute them, so that it grew daily in beauty. Miguel took to instructing the Pita Maha painters in the techniques of caricature and, naturally, they devoted their new skills, gigglingly, not to the guying of his arse but to that of my face and forgot everything I had painfully taught them about naturalism. It was fortunate that Rosa’s Malay was still elementary as she lectured my aristocratic chicks for hours on the advantages of workers’ control of factories but perhaps it mattered little since few had any Malay, themselves, and none had any idea at all what a factory was. Miguel’s book researches drove Walter to rediscover his slumbering interests in archaeology and ethnography, thrusting him out into mountain and forest. In the hills, he explored an unknown lake, ink-black and brooding, had a great raft built and lived upon it in a tent for weeks, painting delicate miniatures of water-creatures plucked from its depths, until his interest flagged. Visitors came in battalions, notably a Mrs Corrigan and entourage, the sort of eccentric millionairess Walter adored. Despite her millions, she had no fixed abode but wandered the planet dishing out handfuls of fresh, young dollars from her luggage to anyone, or any cause, she approved of. She approved greatly of Walter and his struggling museum and bestowed largesse upon both, so that he was able to rage around the island, the Whippet stupefied with expensive gasoline, buying up anything that took his fancy – gold, silver, ancient carvings and scattering them between the new house and the burgeoning museum collection, for the two were r
eally one. One of her companions was the French Duc de la Rochefoucald, whose ancestor so eloquently preached the universality of self-interest and who had invited Charlie to visit his chateau, obliging him to foxhunt. Since Charlie had never mounted a horse in his life, he had recounted the event to us with hilarious exaggeration, acting out his panic, the bolting horse, the loss of his hat, his empathy with the departing fox. The Duc, we were gratified to hear from his own account, had noticed nothing of all that. Then, English lords, haughty and disdainful, expensively shod and baggaged but with scarecrow holes in their frayed shirts and socks, publicly displayed with amusement and poking fingers by the boys on the washing lines. Then two pipe-puffing, sheep-jawed, botany professors from Sydney and an elongated expert on snails, with matted hair. Walter treasured such contacts with the world of higher learning, loved the arcane, musty smell of academe and briefly, during their excursions, affected a briar himself. His all time favourite had been a Dutch zoologist whose expertise lay in excreta, working his way slowly towards a general classification of the ways in which the anus functioned as a pelletisation device and the shape of animal droppings was conditioned by height of release, consistency and weight, as demonstrated by graphs. Then, the Neuhaus brothers, Hans and Rolf. I distrusted them from the first. There was always something – well – fishy about them.

  Their introduction to Walter was, bizarrely, the world’s largest private collection of painted and varnished plaster sea creatures, cast from life. This they had compiled themselves during their stay in Java, engaged in “the import-export business”. Walter had always had a little boy’s enthusiasm for collections and coins, cigarette cards, train numbers were to him a prefiguring of museums in general, yet there was something unhealthy in the wonder with which he regarded these, to me, appalling objects. “They’re so solid,” he would say pathetically, turning them in his hands – he the painter in two dimensions. “They’re so real” – he the artist of imagined worlds. The brothers were both big and fair, blue-eyed and hairy-chested, with a haze of permanent beer sweat about them. They looked like twins and were always and everywhere together, though I gathered they were not actual twins. In Bali, twins are bad news, rendering the whole area in which they are born unclean. Their parents are driven away, their house burned. It was the reaction provoked by the Neuhaus brothers – they made the Balinese’ hair stand on end – that would lead Jane to write a major anthropological paper on the theme. Their sexuality was – I was almost sure – turned in on themselves. That, too, was appropriate to Balinese twinship.