Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  BORNEO, 2004

  Devlin woke to lapping water and a drumming and clicking in his ears. The sky had the soft blue blackness of pre-dawn, the stars already withdrawing. The frogs’ castanets were deafening in the last calls of the night.

  Something tapped his finger. He thought it was Kenje trying to wake him after a lapse. Lapse. What a quaint word. He swatted, his knuckles grazed cold serrated skin. The ridged ground rocked beneath him; the smudged and shaking world was dissected by bars.

  His hands went down to grip the ground and he felt bamboo poles, smooth but for the occasional knot, spaced six inches apart. If he sat still, the rocking settled.

  He probed carefully: poles above him, thick rope lashing them together. A bamboo cage then, big enough to sit in but not to stand. He ticked off what he was left with: work boots, watch, shirt, shorts. What day was it? Was it the day after Friday? It was too dark to read the watch face. He peered, rubbed at the glass. A useless instrument for twenty years of service.

  Hello, he shouted. Hello. Some of the cries and clicks paused but most of the frogs clapped on. I’m just an engineer, he shouted. You’ve got the wrong man. He waited. The frogs snapped on. What day was it?

  Devlin dreamed it was Friday afternoon. He was in his office. He was laying out his pens – the red one inside the two black ones – his laptop, the satellite phone, the diary turned to next Monday’s page, the clean trousers, the blue tie, the socks, the boots, the two ironed shirts, two pairs of underpants, the four packets of dried biscuits, the dozen litres of bottled water. The towels. The buckets.

  He must have fallen asleep again. When he woke, the frogs had stopped, silenced by the usual inexplicable shower. The light was soaking in cautiously. He was curled on his side, his clothes damp but not cold, the occasional gritty flick of water hitting him.

  He saw that the cage was lashed to chunky wooden poles driven into the bed of a river. The river? He was assuming he was still within distance of the mine site. He peered down. A long ridge of gun-metal grey humps moved slowly beneath him. He sat up too sharply and the cage dipped to one side, swayed back, dipped again – it felt even lower – swayed, dipped, swayed, trembled to a stop. Foam swirled below a knot on the nearest pole.

  Hello? he shouted. Is anyone there?

  He looked at his watch. It was five in the morning of the twenty-fifth.

  The cage was almost exactly in the middle of the river, thirty feet each way to the nearest bank. The trees and scrub went right to the edge; the gnarled roots of the mangroves poking like irritable fingers at the muddy water. A kingfisher hooted its familiar jokes in the treetops and he saw small hunched figures moving along the upper branches. Ironic – the mine site was the only place where the monkeys weren’t hunted for food. He’d enforced the ban – it would help when Jakarta produced a fake environmental impact study in another grab for bribes. The miners had snickered and rolled their eyes when they thought he wasn’t looking. The next day there were two monkey heads nailed up in the gym. The men took the ban seriously once he sacked four of them.

  He wondered now if the cage was payback for the ban. But he thought not. He had inspired plenty of other reasons for revenge.

  He peered down. The water seemed to be swirling less vigorously around the knot. He didn’t know how many crocodiles were in this section of the river. Until recently he had only left the mine site to take the chopper to Belipatan for the plane flight to Jakarta. When he had to see Mitch.

  He stared up at the criss-crossed blue. There was a grinding pain behind his temple and when he felt the back of his head he found a lump; dried blood flecked his fingers.

  He tried to remember. He saw the office: the old fan clicking overhead, stirring the diesel fumes which drifted in from the generator. He heard the raucous shouts from the gym: a four-hour work-out session in progress, lines of speed on the window sill, the bets getting bigger and more dangerous as the weights were piled on.

  Behind him: the wind-up radio with a Singapore pop singer cracking the high notes. Devlin could remember saying to Kenje, ‘There’s nothing like a love song for a good laugh.’ He saw sunlight falling through the window onto the files arranged in precisely spaced rows, Kenje’s thin brown arms as he put the mail in the trays on the desk. He saw his own neat writing on the labels on the trays – every letter the same width and height – Site, Jakarta, Canberra, Washington. He looked around the room, searching for the cardboard box. He couldn’t see it. So it was not Friday afternoon.

  Kenje was placing an envelope in front of him. The Embassy’s crest crouched over the brown paper like a scorpion.

  ‘This needs now,’ said Kenje. ‘Not this afternoon.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘I only read Monday mail.’

  The reference to the weekends silenced them both.

  ‘You such a lazy bastard,’ said Kenje quickly. ‘Another lazy whitey sitting around doing nothing.’ He hesitated and took a small orange-painted wooden fish from his pocket. He placed it on Devlin’s desk. ‘Come to here,’ said Kenje, fast. ‘Take our land.’

  ‘Blame Jakarta,’ said Devlin. ‘They do the leases.’ The coloured wooden fish gazed up at him. It had thick wavering black lines drawn on its body, thinner lines on the fins.

  ‘Is this a piranha?’ said Devlin.

  ‘Right,’ said Kenje. ‘A whitey bastard eating piranha.’

  Devlin picked up the fish. There were yellow triangles stamped in odd spots, to represent scales. Love Borneo was written along the belly in uneven capitals. The wood felt cool and smooth to his touch.

  ‘No wonder they don’t want Dyaks as foremen,’ said Devlin. ‘You’ll have my head on a stick soon.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Kenje. ‘Where all whiteys should be.’ He took the fish from Devlin, tore off sticky tape from the dispenser and taped the fish to the edge of the desk.

  ‘So you can see it,’ said Kenje. ‘On Saturday.’

  The cage began to rock. Foamy water slapped around the wooden poles. A ridge of grey humps passed beneath him, and another, and another. The hooded eyes rolled back at him. But the humps swam on and he saw why: a small monkey, a baby, its fine russet hair lifting in the early light, had come down from the trees. It was sitting at the water’s edge, drinking. As the crocodiles closed in, a chorus of shrieks broke out from the canopy. The monkey froze, its hand raised halfway to its mouth. The crocodiles sank from view. The monkey turned to look behind it. The brown-grey water lifted and the crocodiles came out, fast, one from the right, one from the left, one directly in front. Working as a team.

  In his first month on site, he had done little but sort papers and eat the greasy chow. He slept in his office. After the inquest that was all he wanted to do. If he couldn’t break his Friday afternoon ritual, he would do nothing but work in between.

  He processed the pay, collated the findings in the new tunnel and mopped up the bad bookkeeping of the previous manager, a Jakarta drunkard – another one, thought Devlin. The manager had propositioned a Dyak girl and fled from the site at news that two hundred of her relatives, armed with machetes, were coming down from the mountains.

  ‘They get really worked up about things like that,’ said the company representative who was showing him around. The rep was British with spindly white legs and a big belly rolling over his shorts. His half-undone zipper was being pushed lower by the weight above it. Whenever he talked to any of the Dyaks on site, he raised his voice and spoke very slowly, as though they were deaf.

  Now he said, thumping his fist on Kenje’s slender shoulder, ‘When the mine started, the locals all thought the lights were the lights of heaven.’

  Devlin glanced at Kenje, who stared into the distance, unblinking. ‘Really?’ said Devlin. ‘Well, they wouldn’t think that now, would they?’

  The Brit laughed as though it was a compliment, but after he had gone, Devlin said to Kenje, ‘I bet the locals didn’t dream up that lights of heaven bullshit.’

  ‘
No, boss,’ said Kenje, staring at his feet.

  ‘Should I tell him his fly’s undone?’ said Devlin.

  Kenje raised his head and smiled. ‘No, boss.’

  Two months into the job Devlin sat, head shaking, hands shaking, the usual Monday morning tremors rocking his stomach. He had washed out his mouth but the memory of vomit was acid on his tongue.

  He stared through the window of the prefab office, across the tamped-down dirt, past the other boxy buildings. There was no greenery here, the mine was a cleared circle of dirt and pebbles, like the blast radius of a rocket. It stepped away from the jungle, its tiers of scraped earth and dead dirt descending into the dark holes which, all day and all night, regurgitated men and trucks.

  There were no trees or flowers or pot plants on the site but somehow, on this Monday, he was back twenty years, gawking out the window of the squad room as the sergeant demonstrated weapon dismantling.

  The naming of parts was the lesson that day. He saw himself, the fleshy young recruit, so in love with history and military manoeuvres, his carefully painted Napoleonic tin soldiers banished – but not forgotten – to the garage of his father’s house. The house he now couldn’t bear to return to.

  The sergeant was droning on; he had a blocked nose and breathed heavily through his mouth at the end of every sentence.

  Outside, practically touching the glass, was an apple tree. Its blossoms were white tipped with pink spilling into red; a bee was hovering languorously over the pollen, its wings a blur as it plunged and the blossoms shuddered and the pink deepened. Devlin could almost smell the perfume trembling through the room. He almost asked, Can anyone smell that? Can I go outside to smell that? But the sergeant snapped at him and he stopped looking.

  Kenje was in the doorway, telling him he had to call Jakarta, but outside the gym Devlin saw someone – a miner, judging by the overalls and boots – carrying a shotgun and heading for the jungle. Going off-site. Another monkey-hunting fucker. Without thinking he pushed past Kenje, ignored the metal steps, and jumped down, landing heavily in the dirt. The jarring in his temple enraged him. He set off into the jungle.

  The D road was a roughly cleared track which ran parallel to the river. He unlocked the padlock on the gate, pulling it shut with such force that the steel clanged and a bird overhead – was it a heron? a magpie? – let loose its liquid notes so they rose like rainbow-coloured balloons in the misty air.

  Even a few steps down the track, the shouts and smells of the mine were fading. He thought about what he was going to do to the miner if he found him hunting. Flouting authority. There would be no excuses, Devlin said to himself, and it was his father’s voice. Sympathy is a sign of weakness in my business.

  The track stretched on. Already the jungle was growing back over the side, twigs and leaves drifting in, blurring the edges. Devlin didn’t know the names of the trees or the plants. To him the jungle was a mass of green. Vines, there were lots of vines, and some muddier green things which might not be vines. But those on the edge were vines, vines with green tips much brighter than the sections behind; they stretched out into the churned earth. They were growing as he watched but not enough to cover the prints of bare feet.

  A hunched figure walked away from the corner of his eye: tallish, in the shapeless brown miner’s suit, dusted with red, mud maybe. Devlin left the track, aimed for what appeared to be sparser jungle, but immediately found himself caught on thorny bushes. He heaved back, felt another bush behind him and, reduced to a crouch, had to move forward with his hands outstretched, trying to push the branches away. The light grew dimmer, the branches closed overhead, he was almost on his knees. He saw splashes of colour, a centipede moving like a stilt-walker over the slender points of the brilliant red mould on a rotting log.

  The tough cloth of his shirt caught and, after a particularly savage wrench, he thought he heard it tear. He was furious: at himself, at the miner, at the monkeys stupid enough to stray too close. He was swearing under his breath, the words billowing up, silencing the jungle. He put a foot on a log which collapsed in a cloud of dried splinters and sodden mould-eaten patches. He toppled to one side – for a sickening instant there was the black pressing down and he was lying on the path outside his father’s house, sweating alcohol, raising his head to look at the jimmied door, hearing the shouts inside, the breaking glass.

  He lay on his back. The light was low, the ground damp and cool. The flat-nosed face of a small, white stone statue stared at him in lidless fury from under a bush. It was very quiet, an occasional creak from somewhere behind him; the wind must have been coming up through the trees. Through the fringed branches he saw a figure in white. Maybe the miner had taken off his suit, was so determined on a kill that he had climbed the trees. There was a rhythmic slapping, something rapping – softer than metal – against nearby bark.

  Ants were crawling over Devlin’s leg, into the cuts. He forced himself up, took a fix on the position of the white man, and pushed through the bushes, trying to follow in the general direction. The figure disappeared, reappeared, it almost seemed to be swinging from the branches. A man gone ape. An ape man.

  Then he saw the real thing: a procession of brown shapes on the upper branches. He saw the hairy red-brown bodies, the long arms, the smaller shapes embracing the shoulders of the larger. A family of orang-utans. The biggest male stopped, his black bubble eyes fixed and unblinking. His leathery red-grey breast-plate was twice Devlin’s width. Devlin lay very still. A call from up front and the male climbed on, flexing his long arms, peering over his shoulder as though to memorise the location, as though he would come back later.

  Devlin couldn’t place the slapping sound. He forgot about following the hunter and walked towards the noise. He had a sense that the river was behind him, on his right. But when he turned and searched for the path, it was as though the jungle had already grown back.

  He wasn’t worried. There would be a shift change in a few hours, the siren should be loud enough to hear. He still thought the mine owned the jungle. He didn’t like to think of lost explorers, deluded white men, failures.

  He was so focused on the sound that was not the usual rustlings and creaks of the jungle that it was a shock to find himself in the latticed thicket.

  All other sounds curled away from him. He was alone, finally.

  He looked up and it was as though light was kindled in the gloom of the jungle.

  The pilot or what remained of him hung in his webbing, surrounded by the billowing folds of his cream parachute. He was a suit filled with air or earth or water or fire: hands or the remnants of hands inside thick gloves, a head covered in goggles and the hood of his jump-suit. When he knew he was going to crash, he must have pulled it up, as meagre protection. Now, he turned slowly as though someone recently passed by and pushed him – Devlin had an image of the monkeys patting him, as a totem – and there was enough movement to suggest breathing.

  When Devlin drew closer, he saw the flare of ivory, light on bone.

  The pilot hung from an oddly shaped tree, caught the way the branches had tried to catch Devlin. The tree had become a giant cross, overgrown with creepers and patched with moss; shredded brown bark plugging the hole torn along the metal trunk. A World War II bi-plane crashed in the jungle, its pilot – maybe his neck broken – unable to escape the ties that bound him. The canopy was a vaulted roof around him.

  A scream; the birds scattered. The site siren tunnelled straight through the jungle at him. Devlin looked at the pilot hanging in his pale cloud in his jungle cathedral: sacrificed on the altar of his job. Unable to escape his work.

  ‘You and your lame duck causes,’ said Mitch. Devlin heard ice cubes rattling over the static on the line, imagined the whirr of Mitch’s tape recorder, the breathing of some Kopassus thug listening in.

  ‘I’m not a kind man,’ said Devlin. He pushed the open envelope away from him. ‘This isn’t kindness. The locals won’t stand for you wiping out villages.’

&nb
sp; ‘Natives,’ said Mitch. ‘Headhunters. Primitives.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. My foreman is a Dyak.’

  ‘Yeah, and Jakarta is pissed about that.’

  ‘So I can’t promote the best man for the job,’ said Devlin. ‘Doesn’t that kind of blow my cover?’

  ‘You can’t promote locals without Jakarta approval. You know that.’

  Devlin reached forward, put his hand over the wooden fish, covering its eye.

  ‘We’re surprised,’ said Mitch, ‘you’re taking such an interest. After the inquest, we thought you’d want a bit of quiet.’

  ‘As Jakarta’s lapdog,’ said Devlin.

  ‘All you have to do is unlock the D gate on the twenty-fifth. That’s it.’

  ‘So the Kopassus jeeps can get in closer to do their dirty work.’

  ‘The army wants to go in, clean out some villages, the mine is en route. Do the math.’

  ‘I’ll be an accessory to genocide.’

  ‘It’s Asian business, not ours. No-one’s asking you to shoot anyone. You unlock the gate, you’re doing nothing. Kick back, have another Scotch.’

  Devlin opened his hand. The fin had imprinted red lines on his palm. Like scales.

  ‘Don’t go crazy on me now,’ said Mitch. ‘I sorted your mess.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

  ‘You still owe me.’ A pause, more rattling, a spurt of static not quite disguising a sigh in the distance. ‘And you need to stop wandering around the jungle.’

  ‘Rainforest.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘The miners have been hunting monkeys. It’ll make us look bad.’

  ‘Who gives a fuck? Jakarta’s grabbing the land anyway.’

  ‘If I open the gate.’

  ‘Don’t even think about not doing it. You get caught, you’ll be shot or dumped in one of their little river cages. Either way, we’ll deny we ever knew you. Hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Watch your back.’ He slammed down the phone.