Troppo

by Dickie, Madelaine

  There’s a moment of waiting, when all is excruciatingly still, except for the low purr of a gecko preparing to sound. Ge-cko! Its voice pops. Ge-cko! And before its third call, two shadows move up behind Shane. The first holds a noosed fishing rope. The second holds a machete. With a swift measured throw, the first man looses the rope and it lands around Shane’s neck. He gives the rope a jerk but Shane holds his ground. His monstrous arms fly out behind, in anger, in panic, in madness.

  Ge-cko!

  But Shane doesn’t stand a chance. There’s movement now, fast and wordless. These are men who know each other, who work together day in and day out on fishing boats, who no doubt face death in the black roll of the dry season swells. One of the men crushes his foot into Shane’s balls. Another helps the man with the noose pull Shane to his back. A third leans down, certain and deadly, and lifts Shane’s chin with the tip of his machete. He regards Shane dispassionately, as if he’s about to fillet a fish.

  I should stop watching. Should slide back from the edge of the platform. If Shane or any of the men look up, they’ll see me. But I can’t move. Not even a finger. It’s like the dreams you have of being chased, and you can’t run, the dreams of being buried, and you can’t breathe. Fear has me locked to the wood, locked to the edge of the platform, locked to fate.

  Shane looks up.

  His face deforms with something malicious and coherent. His lips are starting to form words: he’ll give me away to poach a few extra moments of life for himself.

  As I recoil, he shouts hoarsely, ‘Di atas! Ada perempuan di atas!’

  Up there. There’s a woman up there.

  My heart thrashes. I slide to the furthest corner of the platform, try to narrow myself into shadow, bite hard on the heel of my palm to stop from crying out, from crying. Maybe they won’t believe Shane. Maybe no-one will come to check. There’s nowhere for me to go. The ladder’s the only way up and down. To my right, a palm tree curves its neck within leaping distance but if I miss it, I’ll break my legs.

  There’s a wooden groan and the platform shifts ever so slightly. There’s someone on the ladder. The rungs creak. One, two, three … Three heartbeats to a rung.

  Suddenly, something small and furred cartwheels across the platform.

  It’s a monkey, wearing a red jacket.

  A monkey, wearing the chilling half-moon mask of a doll’s face.

  Moments later, a young man’s head appears. He has a set of those handsome cheekbones that distinguish the people here; those dark, stainless steel eyes. He must have been the one at the markets the other day, the one who followed me home after Dennis’. I wonder if he was also the one who saw me naked in the shower. I can’t breathe. He’s weighing me up. His eyes crawl from my sleep-tousled hair, to my breasts, to my pelvis, then back to my breasts. At last he meets my eyes. I plead with him through a look. Then whisper, ‘Jangan.’ Don’t. He hesitates, undecided.

  Below, the men are getting impatient, the fire is inching closer, they can feel it on their skin. It moves with languor, slowed by the moisture in the air, the sopping gutters, the vaporous palm fronds.

  ‘Ada?’ they call. ‘Ada perempuan di sana? Ayo, cepat!’

  He looks behind and below him.

  For a moment the fire flashes against his cheekbone.

  He looks back at me.

  ‘Ada,’ he says. There is. And he grabs my ankle.

  I try to writhe away but he lifts his machete and nicks it against my leg. A quick bite of peroxide-white pain. A warning. I stop writhing. Scramble to my feet. Follow him down, not crying, not yet, but almost. The posters in the hallway are crimping and blackening. The men are arguing. Should they cut him up, cut off his balls, sever his head? Or should they leave him here, leave him to burn? The young man lets go of my wrist and steps forward to give Shane a passionate kick to the jaw.

  ‘Cut off his head,’ he says.

  Blood appears at the corner of Shane’s mouth.

  The young man turns to me. ‘Cut off both their heads.’

  I start crying.

  The young man slaps my face.

  I barely feel it.

  I’m thinking of Shane’s head rolling yellow off the balcony; Shane’s skin, spitting and bubbling like a white pig’s.

  Through my tears, I watch Shane, watch something snap – not Shane’s sanity, that probably went years ago – but something else, perhaps the twin strangleholds of malaria and magic. For a big man on his back, he moves quick. He rams out his left leg and his foot connects with one of the men’s shins. There’s a sickening crunch and the fisherman falls backwards with a howl. Then Shane’s on his feet, going hand over hand down the rope that’s noosed his neck, hauling his captor toward him. His captor drops the rope and backs away, machete lifted uncertainly. Shane loosens the rope from his neck and starts swinging it, like a whip. It cracks across his captor’s machete wrist; it cracks across his captor’s crotch. The man nosedives, letting go of the machete and Shane pounces on it – burying the machete into the back of the man’s thigh with a sound like ruptured watermelon – and then jumps up again, grinning madly.

  The other four have forgotten me and they’re warily, hatefully, shifting their weight from foot to foot. Shane’s facing them, legs apart and steady, a fishing rope in one hand, a machete in the other. Smoke turns through the air, gin and oranges, alternately clear and opaque. In minutes, it will be impossible to see anything. This is my chance. This might be my only chance. I squeeze my eyes shut for a split second. Then I spin and launch myself over the balcony rail.

  65

  Two of the bikes in the car park are in flames. My bike’s okay – for the moment. I swing my leg over the hot vinyl and with a shaking hand force the key in the ignition.

  It won’t start.

  ‘You motherfucker. Not now. Come on. Come on.’

  The ignition switch isn’t enough to get it going. The jungle around the side of the resort bends and breaks. They’re coming. They’re coming and I’m sitting here, bathed in the light of the fire. I kick the engine to life. It starts with a roar. I throw her into first, into second, into third; I’m out of there, racing into the tonic sting of night, no lights, no helmet, only fear.

  The road is empty.

  By the time I’m two thirds of the way to Ibu Ayu’s, I still haven’t passed a single truck, a single belching bus. I keep looking in my side mirror, expecting to see headlights behind me, but there’s nothing. Perhaps they didn’t follow me after all. Perhaps they went back to get Shane instead. I’ll be at Ibu Ayu’s in ten, in a car with a driver in fifteen, Bandar Lampung by late morning, Jakarta by evening. I’m gunna make it.

  I swing a corner, almost skid out on a rash of loose gravel, steady the bike.

  Now the last stretch of rice paddies before town. It’s one of the worst parts of the road, with crater-like potholes that shift and slip every time it rains, making it impossible to memorise a clear track.

  A single motorbike headlight appears in my side mirror. There’s someone behind me. Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s someone out for a late-night drive.

  The throttle won’t twist any further. I can’t seem to hold the bike steady, my hands are shaking too hard. I come unstuck on a pothole, feel myself vaulting over the handlebars, feel my lips and chin grazing rock and dried mud. Something kisses my hair. A fraction of a second later, two of the men from Shane’s pass on a Honda Tiger. The young man with his monkey is holding a machete. He says something to his friend and the brake lights on the bike flash red. They’re circling back for me.

  I shut my eyes.

  I have no more fight left.

  Let it come down.

  Nothing comes down. There’s a truck rumbling toward me and the young men see it and flee. Back to Shane’s. Back to finish him off. I touch my head.

  My fingers lift a wet flap of scalp and hair.

  66

  At Ibu Ayu’s I almost break down the wooden gate with my fists. It’s locked.


  ‘Bu! BU!’

  There’s a guard on the other side snoring warmly on his baton. I bang harder. ‘PAK! PAK!’

  ‘Apa?’ a sleepy mumble.

  My leg stings. My head stings. My heart tries to punch out my throat.

  I have to get out of Batu Batur tonight. I have to get out of Batu Batur right now. They know where I am. They’ll be back any minute for more.

  ‘Come on, Pak!’ I scream, throwing another closed fist at the gate.

  ‘Ya, ya …’

  He opens up. Did Ibu Ayu know something would happen tonight? Last time I came back late there was no guard, nor was the gate locked. She’s walking toward me now, eyes full of sleep.

  ‘Kok ribut sekali?’ she complains. ‘Ah, Penny! What is it?’ She’s moving too slowly, everything is moving too slowly. I don’t have time to explain. I point to my bleeding head. I point to my bleeding leg.

  ‘Bu, I need to go. I need a driver. I need to leave Batu Batur right now. Sekarang, ya? Bandar Lampung, ya? Like, right now!’

  67

  On the road to Bandar Lampung I drift in and out of sleep. The pain in my head, despite popping four Panadol, still comes in surges. Outside the car, hypnotically beautiful strings of lights pool amber in the windowpanes of warungs and wartels. In every village, an immaculate white-tiled mosque resists the weary shadows of night and dust. I’m frightened by the flash of headlights against the back windscreen. I’m frightened they’re following us. My stomach knots, my hands knot, my heart knots.

  And we drive on.

  Sometime near dawn we reach the outskirts of Bandar Lampung. And sometime near dawn I hear a small voice. I nearly jump off the back seat.

  Behind me there’s a headscarfed head.

  ‘Penny?’

  ‘Cahyati! What the – ?!’

  ‘Maaf ya, Penny.’ I’m sorry. ‘But I thought I’d come with you to Lampung. I thought maybe you could buy me a ticket to Bali?’

  She’s so hopeful, so excited.

  ‘Sure,’ I manage to say at last. ‘But I need to see a doctor first.’ My hair has glued to the cut and when I touch it, my fingers trace a damp lump.

  Definitely a doctor first.

  68

  Six hasty stitches hold together the skin of my head after a trip to Bandar Lampung’s biggest hospital. We catch the afternoon flight to Jakarta, and now I’m alone, in a bar on Jalan Jaksa. The temperature soars on dusk and stalls – everything is tensed to rain. I should be back in the room with Cahyati, trying to sleep, but despite the stitches and drugs, anxiety feels like it’s about to rip open my chest. It’s a crazy, desperate feeling, one I usually associate with betrayal, breakups or endings, though I know it’s much bigger than Josh, or Matt, or even the last forty-eight hours; it’s as if the whole month is about to burst from me and it either needs a target or to exhaust itself. The room Cahyati and I are sharing is no place to think of Shane on a darkly obsessive loop, it’s no place to thrash, dry-throated with insomnia. Although it costs more than a night at Ibu Ayu’s bungalows, it comes without towels, without sheets, without toilet paper, and toe prints crawl the walls. Cahyati was unfazed by the squalor and after our early dinner went straight back there to sleep, exhausted after a night bunched up in the back of the car.

  The bar was a bad choice. It’s filled with men who sit alone on stools. Their hands rest on the bar, starched with arthritis. I try to catch the eyes of the man closest but my loneliness, my desperation, is a repellent. He ignores me. A scrum of street kids trip past, with grasping fingers and too-big thongs. The coloured lights out the front dim and strain.

  After a while, three young bules come in and sit up on stools at the table next to me. The guy is from Sweden, the girls are Australian. They’ve obviously just met because their conversation rings with the usual banal travel questions: how long have you been here? Where have you been? Where are you going? What do you do back home?

  The Swedish bloke’s on a six-month surfari, no doubt armed with a hair straightener and a formidable wardrobe. One of the girls is flying to Sulawesi on some youth development scholarship, and this is her first time out of the country. The other Aussie girl teaches Indonesian in Sydney. She’s heading to Yogyakarta to kick off a ten-day refresher course at a language school. Although I’m bored with them already, I keep listening in, half-wishing they’ll ask me to join them – just for the company. Anything would be better than the panic-reel in my head.

  But they don’t.

  And really, what would I have in common with a pretty-boy Swede, an Indonesian teacher who’s struggling to order her drink in the language she’s supposed to teach, and a chick who looks just shy of thirty and has never left Australia? There’s a terrible, yawning distance and the real trauma of last night (it was only last night!) churns somewhere beyond conscious thought, like there’s judgement happening in a place within myself that’s deep, mute, impossible to reach.

  The sky opens, sending rain sluicing from the eaves.

  I head back to the room, stumbling around puddles of oil, grease and Saturday night piss. I ease through the door quietly and peel off my wet clothes. Then I find a dry singlet and undies and lie on the skin-dusted mattress. There’s a light on outside in the hall. It’s bright enough to see fungi blooms on the ceiling and old spoors of kretek ash on the windowsill.

  That’s when I start to cry.

  I wonder if they beheaded Shane, wonder what happened to the mean and hopelessly loyal Kristi, wonder what Matt will think when he finds out. I wonder if Franz and Adalie will unpack their boxes, whether the children will return to Dennis’ class at school and what awaits Cahyati on the hard streets of Kuta. And I wonder again and again: what would’ve happened if I hadn’t got away?

  After a little while, a soft voice comes from across the room.

  ‘Jangan sedih, Penny.’ Don’t be sad. And then in hesitant English, ‘No worry, ya?’

  That makes me cry even harder.

  69

  Cahyati spends the plane trip with her face pressed against the plexiglass, marvelling at the sprawl of Jakarta, at the volcanoes, the smoky drapes of Mount Bromo. Two friends meet her at the airport in Denpasar – they’re girls from a village near Batu Batur. They’ll probably whisk her off to a kos (a sort of shared house) where the three of them will stay in the one room, on the one mattress. I give her my number and promise to catch her through the week. I also slip her an extra hundred dollars and she looks dumbfounded.

  As she glides off on the bike, sandwiched between the other girls, I find myself admiring her guts. It’s a big deal for a young Sumatran girl. Does her mum know about it? And what will Ibu Ayu think when she finds out? The girls pass through the tollgate then turn left, down toward the tapering lanes of Tuban.

  I pick a driver at the back of a pack of touts, the underdog, the one who hasn’t raised his voice or seized my arm shouting, ‘Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss! Kuta! Ubud! Lovina! Yes!’ He takes my bags and we cut across the car park, climb into a white minivan. I’m starving. The taxi left Jalan Jaksa for the airport at four thirty this morning and we elbowed our way onto the six o’clock flight. The sweet, plastic-wrapped bun on the flight wasn’t enough – I’m hungry for rice.

  ‘Maaf ya, Pak. Boleh makan dulu?’ I ask the driver.

  ‘Where do you want to eat?’

  ‘A good warung or rumah makan. Is there somewhere you’d recommend?’

  The driver’s eyelids droop for a moment then he nods.

  We get talking, the usual questions. He’s from Yogyakarta, which I’d guessed by his oval eyes and round face. He has a wife and four children here in Bali. His wife is Balinese but he moved here from Java as a twenty year old. After fifteen years of nonstop work he now almost owns outright the vehicle we’re sitting in. He says the last few years have been hard though. Since the Bali bombing, Kuta’s been too quiet, there aren’t many tourists, it’s nothing like it was before. People have lost their jobs, businesses have shut down, there are more children beg
ging, there are people going hungry. Two of his friends died the night of the bombing. I murmur my sympathy.

  Then he asks me where I’m from.

  ‘Selandia Baru,’ I lie, just to see how he’ll respond.

  ‘New Zealand, ya? That’s good, I thought maybe you were Australian.’

  ‘You don’t like Australians?’

  He gestures out the window. We’re threading through one of Kuta’s main arteries, under a riot of billboards advertising surf brands and fast food; we’re passing windows full of tank-grown crustaceans, windows opening onto aquariums of Bintang bottles; we’re passing hole-in-the-wall shops selling Up the bum no babies singlets.

  ‘Australians own all of this,’ he says. ‘Australians think they own Bali!’

  Ten minutes later, we’re at a backstreet warung hovering over the best window spread of food I’ve seen in a month. It looks even better than the nasi campur at Pak Wu’s. There’re four types of fish, a lime green sambal, smoky chicken, chicken necks, a yellow chicken curry; there’re beans and chilli, tempes and chilli, potatoes and chilli; there’s diced eggplant and fried strings of water spinach.

  ‘Please,’ I gesture to the food. ‘It’s my shout.’

  We sit together and eat with our fingers in silence.

  When the driver finishes, he washes his hands and dries them carefully on a pink serviette. ‘Did you know, Miss,’ he says, ‘in all the years I’ve been driving tourists around Bali, today was the first time a tourist asked me to sit down and share a meal.’

  70

  A week later, on Boxing Day, the warungs of Kuta are filled with hysterical buzz. Televisions are switched to news. A tsunami has swallowed Banda Aceh. Thousands are dead. The only things left standing, in stark exclamation, are the coconut trees and mosques. Some of the tourists head straight up the Bukit Peninsula, the hill closest to Kuta with its natural barrier of cliffs. Others jump on bikes and rip up to Ubud, the tourist town tucked among rice paddies and jungle where the Frenchman went to do yoga. I stay glued to the television with the staff at the losmen.