Twilight in Kuta

by David Nesbit

  Twilight in Kuta

  Love and lies in Indonesia

  David Nesbit

  Monsoon Books

  Burrough on the Hill

  Published in 2018

  by Monsoon Books Ltd

  www.monsoonbooks.co.uk

  No.1 Duke of Windsor Suite, Burrough Court,

  Burrough on the Hill, Leics. LE14 2QS, UK

  ISBN (paperback): 9781912049288

  ISBN (ebook): 9781912049295

  Copyright©David Nesbit, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design by Cover Kitchen.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Neil's Story

  2. Sari’s Story

  3. Jack’s Story

  4. Tess’s Story

  5. The General’s Story

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Discover more books set in Indonesia

  Prologue

  Coffee Plus Café, Plaza Indonesia, Jakarta, 2006

  We click the moment we meet. Of course, we’ve already been chatting for weeks online but this is our first date. I spot her as soon as I enter the café in Jakarta’s Plaza Indonesia shopping mall. Her beaming smile ensures she will always stand out in a crowd.

  Having lived in Indonesia for fifteen years, I am used to the kindly disposition of Indonesian girls but something about this particular girl has piqued my interest online. She wants to delve deeper than the others. She wants to know why a foreigner has been living in her country for so long. She can sense I am holding back in my answers to her questions and she is determined to get to the bottom of it.

  She reaches across the table and takes my hands, right there in the café.

  ‘Come on. Tell me. I can see it in your eyes,’ she says kindly.

  I try to stall her. ‘Tell you what? What do you think you can see?’

  She isn’t to be deterred. ‘I don’t know exactly, but I can see something there. Some kind of pain. So, come on. What is it?’

  Over the years I often wondered at what point it all began. Was it the day I left Europe for a round-the-world trip? Or was it when I found her in bed with the local dukun or ‘medicine man’? Perhaps it was my fateful decision all those years ago to turn left rather than right upon entering the beach in Kuta, Bali? More pertinent and even more difficult to answer, what did ‘it’ even refer to?

  * * *

  It was on Kuta Beach, Bali, in July 1990 that the very seeds of my life in Indonesia were planted.

  People of a certain age and inclination will remember where they were and what they were doing at this time. No? Let me remind you. It was the height of the 1990 FIFA World Cup. Remember now? Italia ’90, Gazza’s tears, penalty shoot-outs, fat men singing opera.

  I spent the majority of this tournament watching England manager Bobby Robson and his boys stumble their way to the semi-finals while I was travelling around Southeast Asia and, come the big day — the day of the World Cup final itself — I was to be found traipsing down to the beach in Kuta, which was then, as it is now, a big draw for tourists visiting the Indonesian island of Bali.

  I had been on Bali for about a week and, apart from a couple of half-hearted day trips to slightly more salubrious locations, I had spent almost all that time either in cafés or on the aforementioned stretch of golden sand, spreading myself horizontally and taking in life on the beach. Hordes of visitors from Indonesia and overseas visit the three-mile-long stretch of sand on the southern tip of the island, making it an ideal place to doze away the hot afternoon hours whilst indulging in a spot of people-watching. And it was often me who was the object of interest. Countless Indonesians took it in turns to approach and wile away the time in conversation with me. Some wanted nothing more than to share a few words and have a photo taken with the strange looking bule, or white guy, while others would try to sell me something: clothes or souvenirs, occasionally girls.

  It was following one such conversation that I became aware of a gaggle of local girls walking along the beach. They were grouped closely together and were wearing normal street clothes: t-shirts and jeans, rather than swimming attire. Students on a school trip, I imagined. They meandered past me a few times, with a couple of them glancing in my direction and whispering to each other before giggling and pointing me out to others in the group, who then repeated the process.

  Amid plenty of pushing, nudging and elbowing, the group began to walk in my direction. I decided to continue to keep up my pretence of playing it cool until the gang was ten meters or so away. After all, I reasoned, it was better to make sure it was me they were actually coming over to.

  Anyway, approach me they did, and we enjoyed an amiable, if limited, chat for a few minutes. Once I had posed for the obligatory pictures, the group began to wander off up the beach in search of further examples of this strange bule tribe.

  All except her, that is. She stayed.

  She told me her name was Yossy and that she was twenty years old, two years younger than me, and that she was at university studying English literature. She was indeed, she explained, on a school break with her friends and the next day would be heading back to a city called Surabaya on the neighbouring island of Java.

  She was not especially sexy, but she had a certain something about her, physically. Although not a giant, I still towered over Yossy, who was tiny in comparison and couldn’t have been as tall as five foot. In addition, she probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds soaking wet and yet still she couldn’t exactly be described as petite.

  As she spoke, I was taken in by her manner. It was bewitching in a way I hadn’t encountered before. She had a way of speaking through her eyelashes whereby she would tilt her head slightly downwards while glancing up through her long lashes, as if gauging my response. She spoke softly in good, yet not perfect, English with a rising intonation, which made each sentence sound like a question, and weirdly I found myself feeling drawn in by this funny, articulate and friendly young lady.

  She asked me what I thought of her country, and rather than reply in the glib non-committal manner I had employed with most others who’d asked me that, I actually told her what I really thought.

  ‘It seems nice, but I don’t really understand the people,’ I said.

  ‘How so?’ she enquired.

  I told her that although everybody seemed to be forever smiling, it was hard to know if they were being genuine or if they just wanted something from me.

  She smiled and said: ‘Most of them probably do want something, you know.’

  Yossy then explained how her country was still very poor and a lot of people just lived day-to-day if not quite hand-to-mouth.

  ‘We see someone and we make friends easily, then we move on easily too,’ she explained. ‘We are friendly but we don’t let anyone too close to us, and when we meet new people, especially bule, we kind of see if there is any benefit or advantage we can get from them.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ I countered. Yossy looked up through her eyelashes at me and continued.

  ‘No, not really. We don’t try and rob or steal or cheat, we just believe that people come into our lives for a purpose. There is a reason for everything that happens.’

  Whilst I was not exactly convinced of her philosophy, I found it to be an interesting one; the concept that we go through life taking what we can from each person and the
n moving on to the next one as if we are nothing more than glorified worker bees perhaps sounds a bit cynical, but probably does contain more than a grain of truth.

  We were so engrossed in our conversation we almost missed the world-famous Kuta Beach sunset. It really is a sight to behold with a glorious array of colours producing both a hue and shifting shadows that transports you into Beatles’ Yellow Submarine animation. In fact, Yossy told me the whole purpose of her group’s afternoon excursion to the beach was to experience the sunset and instead she had ‘wasted her time’ talking to me.

  Charming, I thought.

  Then I saw her grinning through her eyelashes again, and I realized she’d been having me on.

  ‘Ha, I think you are a mysterious boy,’ she mocked.

  ‘Mysterious? In what way?’ I queried.

  ‘Ah, I dunno, kok. Just mysterious. Come on, we have to go back to our hotel now. You can walk back with us if you like.’

  As twilight fell on Kuta Beach, Yossy and I rejoined her friends, who were hovering at the entrance to the beach waiting for us, and who subjected Yossy to some good-natured teasing. Yossy affected to be faux-angry at something one of her friends said to her and pretended to storm off for a minute or two before coming back to the group.

  We stopped at the small place she and her friends were staying at. I remarked that it didn’t look much like a hotel to me and she explained it was a kost, or boarding house. As her friends finished saying their goodbyes to me and drifted inside, Yossy and I continued to chat outside.

  I knew the time for us to part was fast approaching, and I actually found myself starting to develop a bit of a lump in the throat. I had found this small, friendly girl very beguiling and I didn’t want to say goodbye just yet. We stood there and kind of looked at each other and although it would have sounded crazy had either one of us said it out loud, I think we both knew that this was the start of something and not the end.

  As I walked back to my own hotel a few minutes later, all thoughts of watching the FIFA World Cup final had evaporated. I dug my fingers into my pocket and wrapped them round the piece of paper on which Yossy had written her name and address. This was all I could think about now.

  * * *

  Jakarta, 2006

  Back in the café my new date listens to me, never interrupting, never judging, just listening. I unburden myself and for the first time in many years I begin to feel liberated: I begin to believe I am alive again. I speak honestly and openly and without embarrassment. When, after two hours, I finally come to the end of the story of my life in Indonesia, she leans over to me.

  ‘Until now? That’s how things are at present?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Pretty much. But I don’t care anymore.’

  She takes my hands again and looks directly into my eyes. Her stare penetrates deep into my soul and she waits for an age before saying, ‘Yes, you do. You do care, but don’t worry.’

  ‘Why not?’ I say, almost in a whisper, my voice choking and tears not far away.

  She holds my hands, eyes and heart all at the same time.

  ‘Because I will save you.’

  And I believe her.

  My name is Neil and this is my story.

  1

  Neil's Story

  Surabaya, 1995

  Those were the happiest days of my life, and, what’s more, I knew it at the time.

  Usually people look back on certain periods in their life and think, yep, those were the best days of my life. Not me. I was aware that I was living them right there and then.

  The year was 1995 and I was living in Surabaya, on the island of Java in Indonesia. Yossy and I had been married for a couple of years and I was madly, swimmingly, incredibly and, no doubt very annoyingly, happy.

  Oh sure, I could have had more. We all could, right? We could all have more money or more friends or more fun or more something.

  But more happiness, more contentment, more feeling of being alive?

  Nope, not I. I was living the dream. I had it all.

  I was on top of the world.

  Yossy and I had started corresponding a few months after I returned to England in 1990. The letters started off friendly enough but rather inconsequentially, rather inconsistent too, in the beginning, maybe once every couple of months. (No email or Internet then, remember.)

  As time went by, slowly the letters seemed to have more meaning for both of us. I started to reply to ones from her a bit quicker and I started to look out for hers. Photos were exchanged, and the letters became more personal, less ‘how are you and what are you doing?’ and more intimate. We shared problems, ideas, hopes and feelings.

  We became closer. We became friends.

  Finally, in 1992, two years after my first visit to Bali, two years after the World Cup, I decided to make a second tip to Indonesia, this time specifically to visit Yossy in Surabaya.

  Our three weeks spent in east Java together were blissful, full of long walks and talks, romantic star-gazing and declarations of undying love and commitment, and we made the decision to permanently seal the deal, as it were, in a further twelve months or so.

  When I returned to England I expected to encounter at least some resistance from friends and family when I told them what I was planning. I thought someone would call me crazy and try and talk me out of giving up my life in England and moving to the other side of the world, seemingly at a whim, yet nobody did. I like to tell myself it was because everyone could see the determination in my eyes and that they knew my mind was made up. However, a small part of me fears they were probably just glad to see the back of me.

  The months apart dragged on and were the most miserable of my life. We kept in touch by snail mail, of course, and by twice-monthly phone calls, but those were dark and desperate times all right. I missed Yossy so much and although I knew it was only a matter of months until we would be together again, that winter was bleak, to say the least.

  I became a bit of a hermit, and although I didn’t totally cut myself off from my friends and family, I found myself spending more and more time on my own. This was partly because I didn’t much feel like going out, but mostly because I was trying to save money.

  One thing I did do during those cold and dark months, though, was to make a serious commitment to learn Indonesian.

  Although a variety of teachers at secondary school had spent five years trying to beat into me the vocabulary necessary to be able to ask for directions to the supermarket in French, I had never been particularly gifted at learning languages. In the typically arrogant British manner, I had always assumed if any of these funny-foreigner-types wanted to speak to me, well, they’d just have to learn English, wouldn’t they? Now however, I broke the habit of a lifetime and spent many a long and lonely night with my head stuck in Linguaphone correspondence learning coursebooks.

  To my surprise, I actually didn’t find it too difficult to learn the basics. Compared to English, Indonesian is a reasonably straightforward language. Verbs do not change their form to signify the different tenses as they do in English, and there is also considerably less vocabulary in general. The whole language seems structured on the principle that ‘less is more’ and that people can work out from context the timeframe of events without having to change everything around all the time.

  For example, the word for ‘eat’ in Indonesian is makan, and this one word is used in pretty much all contexts. Whereas in English we might say: I eat, ate, have eaten, will eat, had eaten, am eating, will be eating, was eating, had been eating and so on and so forth, in Indonesian ‘Saya makan’ (I eat) covers it all.

  Anyway, time rolled on, albeit slower and more miserably than I ever thought possible, and eventually the time came for me to depart the UK for Indonesia. If I thought the weeks and months apart from Yossy had been upsetting, they weren’t a patch on my final weeks in England. Talk about mixed feelings! I had so many goodbyes and farewell parties to get through I thought I was going to explode: work
colleagues, friends, neighbours, Saturday football club teammates, Sunday football club teammates, more friends, and finally, most heartbreakingly, my family.

  Saying goodbye to my mum, brother and sister at Heathrow Airport and not knowing when, or even if, I would see them again nearly finished me off. All of us hugged each other. Trying to be brave and not be the one to break down was just so unbearably sad.

  All I could do was hang onto my mum and whisper how much I loved her.

  ‘I am so sorry to leave you, Mum,’ I said, choking back the tears. ‘But I have to go, Mum, I have to. I just can’t live without Yossy. I’m so very, very sorry.’

  My mum just held me. She couldn’t speak. When, after an age, she finally did, she said, ‘I know, son. I know. Just make sure you always love her right.’

  As we broke apart the last words she said to me were, ‘Son, be happy always. I love you.’

  So, by 1995, I was happy. Just as I promised my mum I would do, I loved Yossy right, and we were enjoying life together. I loved life in Indonesia and I seemed to settle really quickly. Of course, things were different and I had to get used to a different culture and ways of doing things, but I seemed to fit right in with no problems, and whenever something did crop up that threatened to vex me a little, I had Yoss there by my side to support me.

  Surabaya is a coastal city on the east side of Java. It is the second biggest city in Indonesia after the capital, Jakarta, and has a population of approximately four million in its provinces. Unlike Jakarta, there is still a heavy reminder of the Dutch colonial period in certain parts of the city and many town houses in the Jembatan Merah area of the city built by the Dutch masters date back to the mid nineteenth century.

  Jembatan Merah translates as Red Bridge and it is named so in order to commemorate those who fell in the 1945 Battle of Surabaya. The British army really did a number on the indigenous population of Surabaya over a period of three days and bombed them to the edge of oblivion. This was in retaliation for the murder of Brigadier Mallaby, who had been in Surabaya at the time allegedly trying to broker a peace agreement between the locals and the Dutch army.