Jalan Jalan

by Mike Stoner

  He walks back through the market nodding, laughing and saying ‘Pagi’ to everyone, his brown hair flopping from side to side as he moves his head.

  My actor hasn’t even left his changing room. Kim sees he doesn’t want to come out.

  It is still a beautiful day.

  We leave Parapat on a hand-painted boat. It is green, red and blue in fading, peeling shades with a canopy over the top deck. The chairs are like metal garden chairs, painted white and screwed to the floor. There are about twenty people on this deck and more below.

  I lean over the rusty handrail and watch as Parapat recedes behind us. The boat seems to glide over the clear blue-green water leaving hardly any foamy wake.

  ‘We’re on the largest volcanic lake in the world now, did you know that?’ Julie is at my side, sunglasses holding her hair back. She looks relaxed today; even her hands are still, almost: only her small finger taps on the rail.

  ‘I had heard something like that.’

  ‘It’s a hundred kilometres long and over four hundred and fifty feet deep.’

  Looking down into the water I get a slight feeling of vertigo. What’s at the bottom? What animals lurk down there? The child in me feels uncomfortable.

  ‘They think it was the biggest eruption in millions of years and sent the planet into some sort of nuclear winter.’

  ‘Maybe a volcanic winter?’

  ‘Don’t be a smart arse. Anyway, imagine if it went up now. We’d be fucked.’

  ‘We would,’ I agree.

  Singing, loud and sudden, has started on a high note behind us. Three boys no taller than my waist stand in a row and are singing in complete tuneful harmony. In cut-off shorts and grubby T-shirts they look like they’ve come off the street, as they probably have. Their sudden and perfect voices make the rest of the boat go silent for just a few seconds. Kim, Jussy and Marty sit and watch like the three wise monkeys on a break.

  When the boys finish their song they walk up and down with their hands out. Nearly everyone gives something.

  As we move further onto the lake the water becomes choppier and darker blue. The hills around are green and lush but have an edge of harshness to them, presumably caused by the violence of their birth. Parapat is now a dot back on the shoreline and the size of the lake is starting to impress me. I again get a slightly queasy uncomfortable feeling from being too far from a shoreline to swim to and too high over a gaping water-filled hole that goes deeper than I can fathom.

  ‘They’re really musical on the island.’

  I jump. I’d forgotten Julie was still next to me.

  ‘Sorry. Were you somewhere else?’ She tilts her head so that her eyes sneak into my vision.

  ‘At the bottom of the lake, probably.’ A shiver runs up my back.

  ‘Kim said he thought you wanted to be alone for a bit today. Needed space.’

  Kim is doing his take on an Indonesian dance for two older local ladies at the other end of the boat. Jussy and Marty are laughing at him and the ladies are clapping their hands for a beat for him. A cigarette is stuck in his mouth as he swirls around with his hands in the air.

  ‘He said that?’ I ask, lighting my own cigarette.

  ‘He can be quite perceptive at times. So if you want me to go away just say, but I personally believe company is sometimes the best thing for people who want to be alone.’

  ‘Jesus. The fresh air must be getting to everyone today. Making them all a little too wise and knowing,’ I say. ‘Sorry. That sounded wrong.’

  ‘I’ll leave you alone then. I guess he is wiser than me.’ Her lip twitches and she picks up her bag at her feet.

  ‘No, wait. Maybe you’re right. I’m a little too into myself lately. Let’s try your theory.’

  Julie smiles and puts the bag back down.

  ‘Don’t worry. I don’t want to shag you, you’re definitely not my type. Too skinny for me,’ she says, ‘I just want us all to have a good weekend.’

  I’m pleased with a hint of disappointment that she doesn’t fancy me. Is the disappointment because I like her a little, or is it because my pride is hurt? Or is it because Laura won’t be jealous and react? For fuck’s sake, there she is again.

  ‘Yes, let’s have a good weekend.’

  ‘And you got to try the mushrooms. They grow in water-buffalo shit, and blow your head off.’ She’s now hopping from foot to foot. There’s the Julie I know. ‘Tonight we’re having mushroom tea. It’s going to be mad.’

  ‘OK.’

  Twenty minutes later and the boat is cruising close to Samosir Island’s shoreline. The sun is shining from a cloudless sky onto coconut trees and palms and lush green vegetation. Water, clear azure and mouth-watering to look at, laps the edge of the lake. Huts and houses poke out of the greenery and sit on the water’s edge. Most of the wooden buildings have pointed roofs at the front and rear and a dip in the middle like saddles. The wood surrounds are decorated with colour carvings.

  Women wash clothes at the water’s edge as children run and jump in the lake. The boat passes close as it comes alongside the jetty. We wave at the kids, some of them naked, others just in their underwear.

  ‘Horas,’ yells Julie.

  The kids yell back, ‘Horas.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s Batak for hello.’

  ‘Batak?’

  ‘Jeeesus. You’re coming here and you don’t even know about the place?’

  ‘It’s a big lake.’ Should I know more?

  ‘Yes, it’s a big lake and it sits in a volcanic crater and the people who live here are called Batak, you bloody English backpacker.’ She is almost annoyed, and seeing just a little of her wrath is making me shrink in my clothes. ‘Batak are the people. They used to eat ignoramuses like you.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘Yes shit. They were cannibals for ritualistic reasons up to a hundred fifty years ago.’

  ‘Wow.’ For want of a better word. But I want to fight back: ‘Shouldn’t that be ignorami?’ I ask.

  ‘No it shouldn’t, you fuckwit.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ I lean over the side of the boat and yell ‘Horas’ in an unusually loud voice. I must be getting in holiday mood. The kids shout it back and even some of the women bent over their washing and scrubbing on the ground look and wave. It’s like being in some Technicolor travel film. Scenes I’ve never really believed existed in places I never knew could be so vivid are burning themselves onto my mind. I know these moments will stay close to me from here on. Asia seems to have been painted with a keener brushstroke and in crisper shades than England.

  We bump up against the jetty.

  ‘Come on, let’s go, imbecile.’ She smacks the back of my head.

  We jump off the boat as a couple of teenage boys hold it steady with ropes. There is a queue of very chilled-looking people waiting to board as we walk up the path away from the lake.

  A day is passed sitting by the water, smoking grass, drinking beer. The sun is kind, not blaring, but gently dripping on us from between clouds that float across the mountains like a parade of passing zeppelins. The lake lies sleeping and calm beside us. Conversation is slow and gentle, happening between silences which fill the air around us like soft cushions. During these silences I find nothing much passes through my mind, except the slight effort of remembering where the last conversation has gone and for how long and has it in fact finished. I look around at the lake, the mountains that rise out of it, or do they fall into it, or does it creep up them? But look at the lake. So old. So wide. So deep.

  ‘I’m going for a swim. It’s a lake. It has to be swum.’ Marty is up and running to the edge and pulling his T-shirt over his head as he goes. He just throws it off before he runs onto a diving board set up from the low wall. He bounces once and is gone. Into those depths. Old, old depths. Bottomless depths.

  Kim takes a long drag on a joint.

  ‘Me too.’ He says through held breath. The joint goes in the ashtray, then another
body to the depths.

  ‘Come on, man,’ says Jussy.

  Before I have a chance to answer he is gone. Three of them, suspended over a dark abyss. What strange things look up at their legs treading water over the void?

  ‘You not going?’ Just Julie and I remain by the water’s edge.

  ‘Uh-uh. Too deep.’

  ‘Scared of water?’

  ‘No, just too deep. I’m scared of heights. If all the water fell out, those three would fall to their deaths.’

  ‘If the water fell out? Fuuuck. Where would it fall?’

  ‘Don’t know. But it’s too high to be swimming there.’

  Julie nods, blinks and mutters, ‘Yeah.’

  Silent cushions are placed over our ears again. Julie stares at the lake. The vast vast deep lake. I stare. We stare. We smoke weed. Silence. For a long time? A short time?

  ‘What the fuck did you say?’

  ‘What?’ I answer her.

  ‘You said something about the lake. What?’

  I reach in and scrape around my skull, pulling up fragments of used conversation. Lake. Water. Then other fragments that just float around my mind: Eka. Beautiful skin. Eka. Soft lips, her flesh. What did we do the other night? It was good. It was sexy. Her hair over my stomach.

  ‘What the fuck did you say?’

  ‘What?’ I answer.

  ‘The lake. What the fuck did you say about the lake?’ She is sat forward, her elbows on her knees and eyes wide, fingers pulling a length of hair hanging down the side of her face straight, then curling it, then straight.

  ‘The lake? What?’ Her feet are tapping the ground.

  Scrape my skull again. Nails scratching down the bone. Dukun. No not the fucking dukun. Get out. I squash him against my skull with my thumb. Laura. I won’t squash you, and sorry I thought about Eka. It’s lust and forgetting, that’s all. And why not? Eh, why not?

  ‘The lake. Tell me or I’ll go fucking mad.’ Julie’s hair is wrapped taut around her index finger, the end has gone white.

  ‘The lake. Oh. It’s deep and high and it’s too high.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yeah.’ She slumps back in her plastic chair but her hair is still cutting off circulation to her finger. I pick up the remains of another joint and relight it. Need to forget the depths, deep dark depths. Watch the zeppelins instead. Yeah. Look at them floating around. Big white floating things.

  Below us the white, and here we cut through the blue. Darkness of space just above our heads, so close we can almost touch its infinity.

  Laura’s face is pressed up against the small plastic inner window. I sometimes worry what happens if the inner plastic cracks. Surely nothing, in which case why is it there? What if it does? Does the outside glass weaken? Does the pressure get too much, and phloomph, we’re sucked through a hole smaller than my waist? Images of disaster movies flash through my mind: planes twirling, spinning, people holding on to seats being ripped out of the plane’s floor while others are sucked out into the near stratosphere.

  ‘This is time travel, you know.’ She is almost whispering.

  ‘How do you work that one out?’ I lean towards her, partly to hear her answer and partly to get away from the arm that has crept across the armrest on my other side. Middle seats, bloody things. Who has the right to which rest? Instructions should be given along with the emergency evacuation pictures on the back of the seat in front. ‘Please use the rest to your left and consider the person sitting next to you.’ But then who gets the spare rest? Planes: hollow missiles loaded with questions.

  She turns and examines her hands for a moment: small hands with long elegant fingers. A shame about the bitten-down little fingernail. Would she be she without that little ravaged digit?

  ‘OK, we’re not going far so it’s not so noticeable, but we left England at two twenty. We arrive in Crete at about eight p.m. We only fly for about four hours, therefore we gain about two hours. We go forward in time by two hours. Time travel.’

  ‘Not that simple, Missy.’

  ‘Is.’

  ‘Isn’t.’ Superior male intelligence is making a proud appearance. ‘That’s all just down to time zones. Every time you cross one you—’

  ‘Don’t be a condescending Ice-Cream Boy. I do know what time zones are.’ She licks my face: a new habit that seems to happen every time one of us says ‘ice cream’. ‘If we didn’t have them it wouldn’t change the fact that night-time falls quicker than it does at the same moment in England.’

  ‘Ice cream.’ I hope another lick will change the subject.

  ‘Not this time, sicko.’ She sits more upright in her chair. ‘If you talk to someone in New Zealand, their time is twelve hours into the future, so they’re contacting someone in the past and you’re talking to the future. Time travel.’

  ‘Doesn’t work.’

  ‘Does.’

  ‘Doesn’t. If it was the future then I’d phone someone in NZ and say, “What’s the lottery numbers on today’s draw?” and they’d tell me, and I’d buy the ticket and then win twelve hours later. Then that’d be time travel.’ I lean back in satisfaction and put my arm on top of the woman’s arm from the other seat. She jumps, looks at me, tuts, and crosses her arms over her chubby tummy. I lean back towards Laura. She leans towards me, all sparkling green eyes overflowing with certainty in her belief. My confidence falters.

  ‘Right. I break into the cockpit, yell “Get this thing moving faster or the Ice-Cream Boy gets it.”’ A sudden lick, I wipe it off. ‘The captain puts his foot down—’

  ‘They don’t have pedals. It’s not a car.’

  ‘I know, it’s a turn of phrase. Anyway, he makes the thing go faster, double-speed, treble-speed, more. And before you say anything, you male idiot, I know planes don’t go that fast, but if they could.’

  ‘OK. Get on with it.’ I’m looking at her throat. A vein jumps every second or so with such force on her pale skin that for some reason my trousers stir.

  ‘We get up to twenty-five thousand miles an hour, which puts us back in London an hour later than we left.’

  ‘Not time travel.’ My head is moving into the neck. She pushes it back.

  ‘So I yell at the captain, “Faster, or I’m going to make Ice-Cream Boy tell you about his life.”’ A slow lick from under my ear up to my eyebrow, followed by a kiss to the temple. I don’t wipe this off, but I adjust my sitting so my trousers aren’t so uncomfortable.

  Laura raises her dark eyebrow at me and smiles.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she says.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I reply, ‘I love it when you talk quantum bullshit.’

  ‘OK. So I’ll continue. Fifty thousand miles an hour, we get back when we left. Seventy-five and we get back and see our plane on the runway.’

  ‘Doesn’t work.’

  ‘Does.’

  ‘Doesn’t. It means you get back in about twenty minutes.’

  ‘Does it? OK. Give you that. So faster and faster until you get back in a second, then faster and faster and at some point the time difference becomes a negative.’

  ‘Doesn’t work.’ Confidence has not found a comfortable seat in my argument.

  ‘And,’ she adjusts in her seat as she realises a new revelation, ‘the plane has passed over all the time zones with people going to bed and getting up and working at different times in each one, ahead of us and behind us, yet we arrive back before we left. Work that out. It just strengthens the belief that time as a human concept does not exist. It is not linear.’

  ‘Have I got a week of this mental torture during this holiday?’

  ‘All sorts of torture.’

  ‘Good.’ I kiss her neck. She kisses my cheek. We kiss lips. The woman next to me tuts.

  ‘Time, my dear boy, not as a concept but as a dimension or an object, is always there, like the sky and the mountains and the sea.’ Laura is holding the back of my neck and whispering against my ear. ‘All laid out across an endless plain where it isn’t known as time. You just have to tr
avel a bit to see it all, and know where to be to soak it all up. All those moments of now that have ever been and will ever be. They’re all there.’

  The next few moments aren’t successive, they all become one. Time is certainly not counted while kissing and holding and two-people-asone happens. When skin melds into skin and thoughts soak into the other’s. It has no length, it has no count, the convention ceases to exist while people become more than people and slip out of the universe, closer to space than to ground, nearer to infinity and timelessness than clocks and numbers. How can time travel be an impossibility when linear time doesn’t exist, and all that does exist is me and her and emotion? Love at forty thousand feet: as good and mind-blowing as sex at zero feet.

  GOING WITH IT

  ‘I was used as a medium once.’ Joanne sips from her beer and nods. She is a teacher at another school in Medan, at Toba to relax for the weekend with her husband John. Julie knows her so we’ve joined tables in this gently lit and wall-less restaurant. Crickets are rubbing their wings in the undergrowth. The large full moon throws a line of shimmering white across the lake’s surface beyond their noise. The hills the darkest of blue under the mass of stars that decorate the sky.

  ‘Here’s a good story,’ says John, small and scrawny and henpecked beside the tall and hippy and overbearing Joanne.

  A good story. Right. Can’t wait. My head pulses behind one eye, the result of grass and beer in the sun followed by a late-afternoon nap. I hope the coolness of the evening that envelops this little place by the lake will help to ease it.

  ‘Go on, tell it.’ Julie’s eyes are nearly out of her head and her hands are strangling the neck of her beer bottle.

  Jussy is leaning back in his seat, staring out into the darkness. Marty is leaning in, his head close to Julie’s. Kim is still smoking grass and looking around the restaurant with bemused red eyes.

  ‘Well, I went to a spiritualist meeting in Brisbane to keep a friend company and watched this woman with wild hair prance around this stage trying to find people to use her crap on. It really was a load of crap and she was a fraud, but my mate soaked it up. But this woman sitting on my other side’—she points to a spot to her left—‘kept looking at me in the darkness, and every time I looked at her she didn’t even look away.’