‘Yeah, I have to admit, I haven’t exactly felt safe here over the last week.’
‘After Franz’s?’
‘Well, sure. But I was thinking more the blokes.’
‘Ah.’ She lifts her eyebrows. They’re expertly waxed.
Something shifts, there’s a softening. We’re warming to each other. Fraternising. The way women do when there are no blokes around.
So I tell her about this morning in the shower. It must happen all the time – at home as well as here – but I still feel rattled. Dirty in my skin.
She tilts her head to the side. ‘I’ve had guys wait for me a couple of times on the sand when I’ve been out surfing by myself. Most of the time they’re harmless. As soon as you speak a bit of Indo or better still, Lampung, it trashes whatever myths they have from whatever porn films they’ve watched. They realise you’re an actual person. You remind them by telling them they’ve got sisters and mothers. Most times they’ll ask you to come home and have dinner with their family!’
‘Yeah, I thought it was a bit like that.’ The office feels like the inside of a rice-cooker and I hope there’s not a sweat patch on the bum of my trousers.
The Kiwi isn’t perturbed. She looks cool and classy in her denim shorts and Parisian thongs. She chucks the pen at the wall.
‘Anyway, I got a few bits and pieces I gotta do around here. You coming over to Dennis’ in a couple of nights?’
‘I dunno. Yeah. Maybe. What’s happening?’
‘Just a barbecue. A bit of a chat about how we can cut a lower profile. And Matt’s gunna fill us in on where we’re at with Shane.’
‘Shane? What’s Matt got to do with Shane?’
‘Matt hasn’t said anything to you?’
I shake my head.
‘Maybe he’s worried you’ll warn Shane. Oh well. Come to Dennis’ and you’ll find out.’
What the hell? I sit for a moment in uncomfortable indecision – should I press her for details? I let it slide. ‘Can you tell me where you got your eyebrows waxed and your nails done? I got the worst wax the other day and my nails …’
The Kiwi promptly draws me a map. ‘The lady who runs it is from Surabaya – she’s an absolute character! But she’s closed Fridays and Sundays. Now, did you say you wanted to use the net?’
Marika gets up briskly and I follow her back out into the smoky cafe. All the computers are full. She looks around. Then walks over to two young guys in school uniforms. They’re glued to a game. Guns, blood, khaki-coloured animation.
‘Get off,’ she tells them in Indo.
I try to protest but she waves her fingertips at me.
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s not like they’re doing anything important.’
The boys shuffle sullenly toward the door.
28
Three hours later I step outside with the strain of a headache behind my eyes. It’s from the glare of the screen, the tidal movement of cigarette smoke between the booths, the multiple cups of black coffee. I picked up an email from Dad and another from my sister Lucy, the kind of travel email that’s sent in bulk. She’s the brains of the family, a law graduate with distinction who’s spent the last year drinking tequila with dark-eyed villains and drug runners in Mexico. We’ve both definitely got more of Dad in us than Mum, more wildness than caution.
Nothing from Mum, but that’s not unusual. As a kid I remember her constant worry, constant disapproval. As an adult, I recognise a natural pessimist. When I decided to go to Bali with Dad, Mum was beside herself. It’s probably only now I’ve begun to acknowledge how much I hurt her. She met Dad in Indo in the late ’70s and they fell in love. But it’s as if her memory of this country has been soured; she hasn’t been back since they split up when I was twelve. Now she’s living over East, doing the rich hippy thing at Byron Bay, a moderately successful interior designer.
Nothing from Josh either. Instead, I clicked through photos on the company website of a ‘team-building’ night they had recently in the city. Josh looked like he was ten schooners deep, flashing those fine, dark, private-school-boy eyes at the women around him, the first grey threads through his dark hair. Back at the bungalows I’ll charge up my phone, send him a message, arrange a time to talk.
I wave down a becak. The seat probably fits four Indonesian bums to my one. The man is perched on the bicycle behind me. He kicks off the curb. ‘Ibu Ayu’s bungalows,’ I tell him. We creak along the left-hand side of the road, skirting puddles and goats with jangling brass necklaces. I keep looking at the sky, expecting it’ll start raining. The becak rider doesn’t look to the sky, or to the sea, or to the pensive, gloom-fringed mountains. He stares straight ahead, expression bleached of dream or whim. Only his legs move, with effort. When we finally arrive at the bungalows I give him an extra twenty thousand rupiah. For a moment, there’s a greedy gleam in his pupils. Then it dims, as if he’s already spent the money, as if his wife has already demanded he hand it over. He turns a slow, speechless semicircle and pedals back to town.
Ibu Ayu is on the dining deck peeling a snake fruit. The skin of the fruit lies in puzzle pieces between her forearms. ‘Penny!’ she calls out. ‘Kenapa kamu nggak mau sarapan?’ Why didn’t you want breakfast?
I join Ibu on the deck and accept a piece. The salak is dry and tart, a little like an apple, a little like an unripe pear. While I’m crunching, I explain what happened in the shower. She’s horrified.
‘Maaf sekali Penny, aduh! Where’s Joni?’
‘Don’t – no, don’t call Bapak! It’s okay. There’s no-one around now.’
I resist an urge to look over the guesthouse wall to the tree line.
‘It’s not your fault. Penny always dress, ahh, how you say?’
‘Sensibly?’
‘Exactly. In long shirt, long skirt, like Indonesian lady, ya? But the problem is, sometimes the girl coming here, for example, I had girls six month ago from France. French girl Rip Curl team, you know? All surfing, making film.’
A look between consternation and wonder settles on her face.
‘These girls go away surfing in the morning, then in the afternoon they come back and surfing again, just here, out front.’ She waves a contemptuous hand toward the water. ‘But then – and this is the problem – after they surfing, they sunbake! In bikini! Just here on the beach! Wah!’
She pushes the salak peels into a spiky square.
‘So I say, “Now listen you girl. No sunbaking here. No good. All these men watching you!” And you know what those girl say to me? They stick their chest out like this and they say: “So what? Let them look!”’
I laugh at Ibu’s animation.
A hot spool of thunder unravels.
‘But that’s not all. Now I have friends at the market who won’t take their children to the beach to swim. They don’t want them to see lady in bikini.’
While I’m thinking of how to answer her, a door swings open on the main building, Cahyati’s foot eases a bag into the doorway. Cahyati’s getting the sack. Maybe it’s because she took me to the soccer game.
‘Ada apa, Bu? Cahyati ke mana?’
‘Cahyati mau pulang kampung. Just for one, maybe two night.’
I swallow with relief. ‘Why’s she heading home?’
‘Her mother sick.’
‘Sakit?’ Sick?
‘Always sakit,’ she mutters. ‘Cahyati finish school at fourteen, so she could look after her mother. She was very smart and Joni and I help pay for a good madrasah, best madrasah in the area! Then mother sick – finish.’
Matt said the madrasah around Batu Batur were some of the most radical in the country.
‘Why did you send her to a madrasah, not a normal SMP or SMA?’
‘Ya, if you want focus on Islamic education, you send your children to madrasah. Or better still, to pesantren, like an Islamic boarding school. Madrasah, pesantren, all over Indonesia. Some tourist tell me in Australia you have Christian school, no? Same here. We have Islamic school.’
Cahyati steps from the main door of the building and picks up her bag. I think we have the idea at the same time but Ibu speaks first. ‘How about you go with her? When you start work at Shane’s you won’t get time to visit the mountains. Cahyati’s village is very traditional, very beautiful.’
An excitement, a lightening of my heart is swiftly undercut by the thought I’d rather stay here in case Matt comes by. Then I curse myself for being so ungracious. If Cahyati is happy to take me to her village for a night or two, then I’m happy to go.
‘Cahyati!’ bawls Ibu.
Cahyati makes her way to the dining deck. The two women converse quickly in Bahasa Lampung and I can see from her eager nods she’s keen to have me.
‘Okay,’ Ibu turns away from Cahyati. ‘She say she leave on the four o’clock bus from the market. You get some things now and you go together. Bapak Joni take you to the market on the motorbike.’
I run back to my bungalow to grab my toothbrush and a couple of changes of undies.
29
Two hours later we’re hurtling knees-to-chin toward the mountains. I nurse a basket of dried sardines for an old, half-blind man and Cahyati’s thongs rest on a chook’s cage. When Cahyati starts to doze, I reach into my bag for my water bottle. It’s filled with gin. After the incident that morning and mindful of the bus trip ahead, I’m craving a few hours of drunken dreamy indifference. I’m careful not to drink too much. If anyone notices, I’ll probably be hauled off the bus and stoned. And I don’t want to end up busting for a wee. We might go for hours and hours without a stop.
I turn my face toward the fading afternoon. There’s the usual smell of burning rubbish and a hint of something else, sweet as cedar and aromatic as sandalwood. The first lamps bloom orange in the rice fields and kaki lima smoke by the roadside. Across the aisle the old man whose sardines I’m nursing beams and winks his one good eye. He points at my water bottle and winks again. I pass the bottle over. He takes a swig, smacks his lips in delight, then hands it back. I ask him something in Indonesian. He answers in Lampung. We laugh, realising we have no common language, content to trade sips and grins.
Just as we begin the climb into the mountains, there are two young women walking along the side of the road. They balance woven baskets on their heads and wear sarongs that brush their ankles. They walk with a grace rare in young women at home – nothing like the drunken, high-heeled hobble of beautiful girls in Perth. Upon seeing the girls, the bus driver and conductor let out hisses of approval. Then, instead of showing their appreciation through horn or shout, the driver wrenches the steering wheel and veers toward them. The girl closest to the road trips in fright and spills her basket of custard apples. The other keeps her balance and shakes her fist at the bus. Both the driver and conductor dissolve into childish giggles.
Disgusted, I pull my eyes from the road and dig out my phone. What should I write to Josh? ‘Hey Josh, here’s my new number …’, ‘Hey Josh, everything’s going well …’ Then I hold the phone and just sit, remembering the first night we met. I was living in a share house in Freo, hot off a four-month trip bartending on Namotu in Fiji. One of Dad’s mates has shares in the resort and he’d lined me up with a job. I had a good suntan and was fit from two surfs a day, but after four months on a tiny island, I was ready for a change. I planned to come back to WA, spend six months working, then fly over to Indo for the next drift. I snapped up a job at a bar in Freo and two weeks after I started, Josh walked through the door. I noticed him straight away. His dark hair cut to the jaw. The width of his shoulders. When one of the other girls moved to serve him I nudged her out of the way.
‘What can I get you tonight?’
‘A Coopers.’
He took his beer to a corner. He was alone. All night, his eyes tracked me. At last, with the candles running low on their wicks, we started talking. Not only was he handsome, but he was really smart, and really sad. He’d just separated from his wife. A week later we met for coffee. Eight months later, I’d quit my job at the bar in Freo, moved out of the share house to Scarborough, and we’d booked a two-week holiday to Bali together. I thought I was in love.
I look back down at my phone, punch in, ‘Hey Josh, would love to chat soon. Msg me a time that suits.’ I hit ‘send’. Less than a minute later, the signal drops out completely.
The road steepens and we slow. Dusk crushes into the valleys, catches under the leaves. I’m grateful – the memory of the head-on on the way to Batu Batur is still vivid, and on trips like this, it’s better not to look, better to travel in the dark. We pass the turn-off to Franz and Adalie’s and from there the road is unfamiliar. I must drift off because the next thing I remember is Cahyati shaking me awake saying, ‘Sudah nyampai.’
We’re let off at the edge of the road. Columns of black jungle press in on either side and there’s the manic shrieking of insects. ‘We walk now,’ she says to me. ‘It’s about half an hour.’
‘Okay, yuk!’ Let’s go!
A breeze shifts the canopy, shivers down cupfuls of cold rain.
30
Cahyati’s mum doesn’t look sick; she nurses one child and dandles another on her knee while offering an endless stream of observation and anecdote. Every now and then she slaps at the running legs of the two other children, telling them to settle down, that it’s time for bed.
‘Nakal!’ she says with feeling.
Her house is simple but spotless; the wooden floor has been swept clean and there are no roaches or rats nibbling at the edge of the light.
One of Cahyati’s little sisters brings us bowls of watery jackfruit curry. Then she slips clear of her mum’s hand and races outside. She must have told her friends there’s a bule staying at her house because as we eat, tiny foreheads lift above the windowsills and fingers curl around the doorframe. By the end of the night half the village has gathered around the house.
Cahyati makes me a bed on a cane mat in the room she shares with her sisters. She gives me a hairy blanket but as soon as it rests on my skin I start to itch. Bedbugs, for sure. If I throw the blanket out the window it’ll probably lift up and scuttle away. I push it aside, grateful, nonetheless, for how accommodating Cahyati’s family has been. Sometimes in people’s homes and villages, you get sly suggestions to take husbands or children back to Australia; addresses copied carefully into the back of guidebooks and diaries, each letter shaped with the fiercest hope. Cahyati’s mum didn’t mention a thing – even the presence of a bule didn’t seem to perturb her; she just looked happy to see her eldest daughter. Cahyati’s dad, who came in later, smiled at me, then went and quietly smoked a kretek by the open door.
31
Cahyati and I wash in the river. There’s a pool for women and, upriver, a pool for men. The women’s pool is dammed with valley rocks and enclosed by lianas and ferns. I copy Cahyati, keeping a sarong tied above my boobs and washing my body inch by inch from my wrists to the cracks between my toes. No tinea yet.
Despite the cold, I scrub my skin raw with a nailbrush. My Indonesian friends are fastidious about washing. ‘Sudah mandi?’ I’m often asked. Have you had a wash? It’s such a personal question; you’d never ask anyone this at home! Even though no harm is meant it always makes me prickly and indignant. What do you reckon? Of course I have!
‘Mandi lagi!’ they tell me, shaking fingers. Wash again!
By the time we’ve washed, done the laundry and helped Cahyati’s mum prepare lunch and dinner, it’s past midday. The dead hours close around us and we relocate to the balcony. There’s no wind to displace the humidity; it’s trapped under the clouds, trapped between the wooden walls of the homes.
Cahyati is completely different here at home with her nan and her mum and her siblings. There’s a lightness about her. If you passed her on the street in Batu Batur, you probably wouldn’t think she was a knockout. But here, with her teeth flashing, skin glossy and her jilbab slung over the back of a chair – she has a gorgeous, almost Papuan afro of hair – yo
u’d definitely look twice. How dependent beauty can be on one’s mood. I think some women are at their most beautiful when pensive or sulking. Not so for Cahyati. I’d cast her as a victim, as someone to be pitied, stooped under the weight of Ibu Ayu’s derision, when in fact she is strong and glowing and beautiful in her own space, in her own way.
How awful we women can be to each other.
I sit with my back against the wall, legs stretched out. Cahyati is sprawled on her belly. It’s too hot to move. Across the road, there’s a tiny shop. It sells things like instant coffee and kerupuks. Two women sit side by side in rattan chairs. The older woman is a nenek, a grandmother, probably in her late sixties. She has three teeth in a face that’s both sweet and spicy – no shadows of melancholy or malice are cast in her wrinkles. The nenek cackles and chain-smokes and insults her customers, always smiling. The other woman looks to be her daughter, or daughter-in-law. She’s probably in her late thirties and also has a kind of cheeky defiance in her gesture and appearance that seems to run counter to culture and religion. She’s a handsome woman with hair to her waist, lipsticked lips and a sleeveless dress. The two women share a cigarette. It doesn’t smell of the soft blaze of cloves, but is cigar-like, wrapped in dark brown paper. I wonder why neither of them covers their hair and why the younger woman has bare arms.
After a while, when the trickle of customers has stopped, the nenek stretches herself out on the floorboards and starts snoring. I don’t know any elderly people at home who could do that! Here, the old people aren’t shut away. They continue to be part of the community, they sit out the front of the shops, sweep leaves, collect wood, play with grandkids; in Batu Batur, old men ride straight-backed on classical bicycles, gripping bamboo fishing rods. Even the older people with Alzheimer’s still have a place and are looked out for by the rest of the community. Everyone has a place.
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