71
The days fall into a pattern. I sleep late. Drink coffee. And after 2pm, I wander the noodle-narrow lanes through Legian until I find a bar I like. For the last few afternoons and evenings I’ve been drinking and smoking kreteks at a place that’s quiet and advertises cheap arak. The staff leave me alone to watch the Indonesian news on TV and it doesn’t fill up with bules until later at night. I haven’t got in touch with any of my old school friends or started looking for another job. My head’s healing and my frayed nerves are under control; at least enough for me not to jump.
I’ve been drifting, drinking, breaking.
I half expect to run into Josh and Jessica. Knowing Josh, they probably stayed in one of those flash resorts down at Nusa Dua. Or maybe they are back in Perth by now, finding a rhythm with each other: taking long runs together on the weekends, downing post-coital piccolo lattes. I keep thinking I should be relieved. After that night with Matt I decided it was off. Decided my heart had cooled. But I don’t feel relieved, just betrayed. Not so much by Josh, but by his perception of me: no plans, never fully present, a drifter. Maybe he’s right, but still, I can’t help but feel like there must be another way to live, a way where those paradoxical moments of profound sadness and rapture hit you daily. There’s something intoxicating about living in extreme places, among extreme people. You never, for a moment, forget that you are alive.
72
Cahyati texts to say she’s landed a job at a bar in Legian and asks me to drop in. I’ve passed the bar a hundred times in the last week but never stepped inside. The pool tables, dance floor and the listless Javanese beauties at the bar suggest the place is a pick-up joint, not somewhere a single white Aussie girl would be particularly welcome.
From the moment I walk in, the girls ignore me and the owner eyeballs me.
I almost don’t recognise Cahyati. She’s abandoned the headscarf and crafted her hair into a perfect black afro. Her skin is glossy with coconut oil and she sways a little uncertainly in indigo heels. Compared to the other girls here, with their tattoos and cigarettes, all suspiring the smoky smell of sex, Cahyati has a complete, naïve grace, a complete lack of pretension or cunning.
I feel like throwing up. Does she have any idea of what’s really expected of her here? This is my fault. I bought her a ticket to Bali. Of course this would happen.
‘So what do you have to do?’ I ask.
‘Talk to bule, get them drinks. It’s pretty easy really! So much better than everyday cooking, everyday laundry, everyday yelled at by Ibu Ayu. Sometimes they touch me, here, here, but the girls say it’s all part of the job. It doesn’t mean anything.’
I almost choke. ‘Well, make sure you send me a text if I can help at all. A place to stay, money for food, a ticket home in case you don’t like it …’
She waves away my offers. ‘I like it,’ she says. ‘So Penny, how long you stay in Bali?’
‘I dunno.’ When I shift the darkness in my head. When my money runs out. When I get a better offer.
We exchange a few more awkward words until the Australian owner, hairy hands flat on the bar, glares me out.
73
Emile emails. The Frenchman. He tells me he’s in Banda Aceh shooting the aftermath of the tsunami. Staying at the Sultan. He tells me they need translators, like, right now, that I should stop drinking gin and tonics at Shane’s and come and do some real work. I haven’t heard from Emile since Ibu Ayu’s, and given the chaos and conditions in Banda Aceh I’m amazed he even managed to get an email off to me, more amazed that he chose to get in touch.
My first thought is no way. Working in post war zones, post natural disaster zones, leads to madness, sadness, suicide. I haven’t forgotten the Frenchman’s anguished eyes. He knew as well as I that a two-week yoga course in Ubud wouldn’t assuage his grief, wouldn’t wipe the memories. Not so soon, anyway.
Aceh is all everyone’s been talking about.
They’re saying a peace agreement will be reached between the government and GAM. They’re saying the tsunami has been a blessing, because it’s meant the end of the war. Side by side, soldiers and GAM guerrilla fighters dig graves. Most of the dead are women. Is this what it takes, to soften indoctrination in the hearts of radicals, to remember our shared humanity? Should a tsunami hit Batu Batur, would Shane be out there with his neighbours, clearing the debris, lifting bodies out of the mud?
I think of Shane’s tattoo, a throwback to the early independence slogans lobbed at the Dutch and strangely prophetic. Merdeka atau Mati. Freedom or Death. I think about my options.
Remember I’m living, by choice, on a faultline.
Realise for these people, for so many people, there is no choice.
I write to Emile and tell him I’m on my way.
74
It’s my last night in Kuta. Cahyati’s offered to give me a lift to the airport in the morning. I’m working my way steadily through a jug of arak laced with honey and lime. A television screen reels a mute, anxious blue. The boys sitting across the road selling sunglasses yell, ‘Transport!’ every time a hot Scandinavian chick in tiny shorts walks past. European expatriates, their faces tanned tense, look put out by having to come this far south of Seminyak. Australian girls with braids and Bintang singlets shuffle slow sunburnt legs. There’s the constant buzz of motorbikes and the bright patter of business.
I swirl the arak around my mouth.
Dusk slowly disinfects the sun’s bite. Everyone will be on the beach for sunset and they’ll get a cracker – it rained all morning and now has cleared to a breezy blue.
As darkness falls, the bar fills with Aussies. I’ve lost a sense of time, have brushed off a couple of long-toothed Pommies hunting for a root and am deep in thought about Batu Batur. Suddenly, through the white noise of drunk Aussies, I hear the word ‘Shane’. At first I think I’ve imagined it, think the sound has manifested itself from the dreamy depths of my thought. Then I hear his name again, cutting hard through the glassy distance of arak, and it takes a few moments to switch in, a few more moments to realise the guy isn’t talking about one of his mates. A bloke behind me is talking about Sumatran Shane. Shane Shane. I twist around.
At first I think it’s the same group of guys who were at the resort. Then I look closer and realise it isn’t Johnno, Andy and Rob. Different faces, same Australian surf froth. One of the guys says he heard something about a fire. Something about Shane being taken to hospital by his housekeeper for severe burns. He says that when they got him there, after treating him for the burns, the doctors found something really unusual. Only one of the doctors had ever seen a case like it and that had been fifty years ago, when he was first training.
He’d never seen anything like it since.
‘Well for fuck’s sake Scotty, don’t keep us hanging.’
‘You’re not gunna believe this, but they found all this shit in his gut. Bits of hair and mirror and broken glass. They’ve pumped it out, they say he’ll live, but …’
I swivel back to face the street. It’s started to drizzle. Had it worked, the spell? Or was it just another bit of Indo rumour?
I put my glass down. I don’t know if I’m glad Shane’s alive. Don’t know if he deserves to have survived. Do know there’s a measure of relief creeping into my heart. If Shane is alive then his attackers are either dead or waiting for him. If he’s alive then they are not coming for me.
It must be after midnight, because here’s the dog man, limping down the lane. He has a bamboo pole over his shoulders, a steel food pot of curried dog on either side. He taps a spoon against a bowl and cries, ‘Anjing, anjing, anjing.’
I slip out of my seat and follow him.
Acknowledgements
I’ve punished hundreds of people over the past eight years on various aspects of Troppo. A special thank you to Tom, who has shared every disappointment and delight on this long journey. Thank you to Bruce McDowall, for Dovlatov, Bukowski, Blood Meridian and Beckett, and for his reassurance th
at at twenty-nine, while I won’t become ‘Miss Cable Beach’, I am ‘holding the line’. Thank you to Alan Wearne, for introducing me to the gorgeous prose of Antonio Lobo Antunes and for sending crazily eclectic reading lists every few months. Alan also put me in touch with the esteemed poet Geoffrey Lehmann, who kindly allowed me to quote sections of an early version of his wonderful, powerful poem ‘New Guinea Episode’. I am lucky also to have a bunch of brutal critics, starting with Felix Prael. Many years ago, Felix patiently read and edited dozens of my short stories and poems and always gave unflinching criticism. More recently, thank you to my mum, dad, my sister Charlotte, Josh, Elisa, Gilly, Tilly, Luke, Marco, Anna, Jess, Jemma, Shady, Jacqueline, Ibu Santi, Pak Waway, Pak Nana, Marie and Bill for their input on early drafts of Troppo. Georgia Richter from Fremantle Press has been a pleasure to work with on the final drafts, and has helped transform this rough gem of a manuscript into a proper novel. Finally, I would like to thank Ibu Yeti and Pak Omay, for allowing Tom and me to rent their beautiful home in Batu Karas, a small fishing village in West Java. They welcomed us wholeheartedly into their community during the drafting of Troppo.
A note on language usage in this novel: in Bahasa Indonesia, words do not take an ‘s’ to form a plural. Westerners (bule) do not always adhere to this practice. A glossary of Indonesian words and phrases used in Troppo accompanies the teaching and book club notes for this book, and can be downloaded from fremantlepress.com.au.
Madelaine Dickie
Madelaine Dickie has worked as a rollerblading and skateboarding instructor, a radio producer and a disability-support officer. Most recently, she’s managed the media and communications for an Aboriginal organisation in the Kimberley, Western Australia. Work means travel – travel means surfing! Madelaine’s scored empty point breaks in Mozambique, got crook with malaria in Indonesia, crashed a rental car racing to the surf in Spain, and has been bewitched by welwitschia in Namibia. It’s always easier to write when you’re on the road. In 2011, Madelaine received a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award to move to West Java, Indonesia, and complete her first novel, Troppo. In 2014, Troppo won the City of Fremantle T.A.G. Hungerford Award.
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