On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  ‘Not a crime, Fraggle, but please make sure you only smoke where the boys do, down the back. Yeah?’

  She pointed to the young guy with his shirt off, sunnies pushed up into his hair. He’d introduced himself at the airport…Carl. He had his hand raised.

  ‘You got wi-fi?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you gonna sink shots like Joel does?’

  She knew it was a bait. ‘No, Carl, I’m not. That all right with you?’

  A faint ooh passed through the group and Carl revelled in his direct hit.

  After the talk the surfers stayed on the high deck over the stern, slouched on cushions and laughing loudly. Radja worked his way to and from the galley with trays of fish in lime juice. For their families, Radja’s and Sanusi’s employment with a surf charter company was a cause for unconcealed pride in their home villages. Their children would boast about it at school: their wives would thread it into conversation in the street.

  Fraggle had found the box of Beng Beng bars in the fridge and was somehow alternating the chocolate with mouthfuls of beer. He waved the box at the person next to him. It was the tall girl, Leah. She peered into the box, drew a long strand of brown hair behind her ear and smiled at him. ‘No thanks.’

  Isi retreated to the wheelhouse and leaned both elbows on the instrument display. She spooned out the rest of the avocado she’d started earlier, flicked the husk out the window into the sea. Congratulated herself on the malaria line, a momentary inspiration. She’d been worrying how she would explain Joel’s absence. He was legendary to them, a word-of-mouth phenomenon whose reputation grew over coffees among the marooned city surfers back home. How long you got for lunch? You wanna try that joint in Little Bourke Street? Hey, did you email the Indo guy?

  The fact that it was him, not her, that they spoke of in hushed tones was of no concern to Isi. They’d talked once or twice about marketing her directly to women looking for an all-female charter, and she liked the idea. But with the steady demand for Joel, who required no marketing, the idea never became a reality. The obvious risk, of course, was that when Joel wasn’t available the clients felt they’d been had. They needed a cover story, and malaria was a pretty good one: it conjured the great surf explorers like Troy and Cooney. A bag of rice and a motorcycle; a fateful mozzie one jungle night.

  Whereas in fact Joel was talking to bankers, because the business was bleeding money. Credit cards, fuel bills, people with their hands out for cash all over the place. The old Javanese man who’d sleep on the boat at the wharf in Benoa to ensure it wasn’t pilfered, even though it was his own cronies doing the pilfering. The capital partners required by Indonesian law—businessmen from Jakarta who appeared only on holidays, wearing the wrong batik and as foreign to the locals as Isi and Joel were. The ‘taxes’ paid in cash to a revolving cast of local officials; the casual handouts to make business happen quicker; the kid on the motorbike…the workshop…the food wholesaler.

  Indonesian banks were liberal with their credit, but the Australian end had had enough. Every extension or limit increase meant a trip to Perth and another twelve hundred dollars in flights.

  Isi went sometimes. She could dress the part and spout the commercial buzzwords. But when Joel did the trips he came back hungover and irritable, and sometimes empty-handed. She could trace his exhaustion through the online banking: casino, nightclubs, favourite pubs with his old schoolmates. Shouting the bar and making a big fella of himself. Yep, I run a charter business in Indo. It’s epic. You should come over.

  She glanced over the pictures of Joel on the cabin wall.

  Joel surfing, Joel drinking. Joel always, always grinning. There was the one someone took of them the night they got together—the night he pulled off his best feat of salesmanship. She was first year out with an engineering degree, determined to break into the boys club, and the resources boom was pulling all the available talent into its orbit: even a few women like her. She’d flown to Jakarta for an interview with an oil and gas joint venture, gone out drinking with the recruitment people and stumbled into this bullshit artist along the way. A week’s growth, red eyes and a crinkled smile, buying her drinks and asking why she wanted to analyse load tolerances in a dirty city. She’d looked at the ends of his brown collarbones, visible in the frayed neck of his T-shirt, and realised he probably spent almost as much time under the open sun as he claimed.

  Within four days she’d moved into his crappy apartment, armed only with a bag and a credit card. She didn’t go home for another year.

  ‘Imagine it,’ he’d said that night, his hand on her forearm, selling her the dream. ‘All the waves you could ever want. Money, freedom…I’ll be your backup guy. Just run the boat while you look after the clients.’

  She burst into laughter at that. The audacity of him.

  ‘Look around you.’ He swept his arm around the room full of bellowing expats. ‘Worker ants. They’re nothings. You could have the ocean for the rest of your days.’

  Don’t look away, said the eyes, green and pale and burning with something. Don’t laugh and brush me off. This is the truth.

  And he was right of course, in a way. Life on the water—the image they fed to the wailing baby of social media—was magnificent.

  But the life they really led was one of photogenic poverty. Rented lodgings in Kuta, a mattress on the floor and the same blackouts and internet failures as everyone else who lived back-of-house to the tourism. The traffic, the litter and snarling mopeds, the smell of broken sewers.

  So, the begging trips.

  But this time, as Joel walked away from the van at Denpasar airport, Isi saw him in sharp focus. He was a drifter. He could live on nothing much, burn the lot and start again. His instinctive response to any kind of hardship was to move on—she’d seen him do it already. That easy version of friendship he practised…all his clients were ‘brother’ until the financial hooks were set, then they were ‘mate’. Shortly afterwards they were forgotten entirely, and none of it was worth a pinch of shit in the hard times.

  His vast knowledge of the islands, his mind-map of the reefs—they were real. They would always be in demand. He didn’t need to grind out the sheer hard work it took to build a business. Someone would pick him up to skipper their boat and he’d do it until he’d stashed enough money to start again. Open another business, screw another partner. There was enough ocean out there that he could indefinitely avoid the people he burned. Her included.

  In a drawer to the left of the navigational instruments she’d stored the clients’ passports, as she was required to do until she’d entered them in the government register. This was a good time to start on them, before the demands of the surfing took over.

  Neil and Luke Finley.

  The surgeon and his son. The resemblance in their photographs, as in life, was remarkable. Joel had warned her about the father, who’d travelled with him before. The Vaucluse vowels, the aloofness. Polite, but only as an expression of his superiority. He drank very little, listened more than he talked. Snob, said Joel, but there was something to be said for having a doctor along. Injuries happened. Usually minor, but not always.

  She looked down from the wheelhouse windows at them, side by side in the hammocks on the foredeck. They’d both shaved their heads down to a number-one. Both wore the same brand of boardies, coathanger-new with the stitching still sharply white. And they were fit. Stringy, mung-bean fit. The lamps lit their ribs. Like brothers separated by a generation, the young bloke’s body was an exact replica of the old man’s, right down to the bony knobs over his shoulder joints. Neil had a light silver fuzz over his flat pectorals: the youngster was hairless. Six weeks out from his seventeenth birthday.

  She carefully entered their details in the ledger and took up another passport.

  Timothy Wills.

  A trip to India at eighteen and a border crossing into Nepal. A couple of Indo entries. Twenty-six now. In his emails booking the group, he’d been eager to establish their e
nvironmental cred—I hope you don’t mind me asking: do you use sustainable anchoring practices? The whole group were copied into the queries, though the tone of their replies suggested only Tim was concerned. He’d been on the boat before. Harmless, was Joel’s assessment. And you won’t see him on the big days. She took another passport from the pile.

  Carl Simic.

  She leafed through the pages. Nothing. His first overseas trip.

  Right now he was stretched out on a yoga mat, sipping at the rum he’d been poured. Short but strong, tanned on his forearms and neck. As he reached for his ankles she could see a Southern Cross tattooed on his shoulderblade. But she’d also seen the brands of his board and his gear, bought online from overseas. Not so patriotic with his consumer dollar, then.

  Joel had said Tim and Carl were cousins. In the exchange of emails about ethical anchoring, Carl had responded—probably forgetting the whole thread was going to Isi’s email—Right behind your environmental push cuz—will make sure I only shit in your board bag.

  They were bickering down there: Carl wanted a rum and Coke, Tim was starting in on a lecture about sugar. Coke’s just toxic sludge, Tim said. Cleaner than the water here, Carl shot back. Over ten days at sea the heat and fatigue and close-quarters living normally brought out the worst in people who couldn’t reflect on their own behaviour. One or two mishaps—an infected cut or a broken board—and these two would be at each other’s throats.

  She hurried through the passports for Fraggle (Alan James Veal—no wonder he’d cooked up an alias) and Tim’s girlfriend Leah Hogan. Fraggle had been everywhere: Morocco, Spain, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile. The perpetual wandering of a journeyman photographer. As for Leah, she’d had a gap year in the UK at eighteen and passed through Denpasar on the way back. It didn’t tell Isi much.

  Below her, Radja was talking to Carl. Trying to joke around, the body language said, while the Australian eyed him suspiciously. She wondered if Radja was incapable of reading the hostility. Or maybe he saw it clearly and was setting out to dismantle it.

  DAWN, SATURDAY

  Sumba Strait, north of Sumba

  There was a feeling of anticipation on the Takalar as they passed through a sea gap between mountainous islands. The lights of a distant city warmed the night sky. Labuan Bajo, the captain said to someone. A rumour swept the boat: the crowds of small islands were behind them: ahead was the great open expanse of the Indian Ocean and beyond that, Australia.

  But as the long night hours passed and they chugged eastwards into the Savu Sea, the festive mood subsided and something more irritable took its place. Roya withdrew from the sound of the fractious passengers, curled herself instead into the familiar folds of her mother’s chador. She rested her fingers over her mother’s forearm and allowed sleep to take her.

  She and Anwar had hidden themselves in the storage space by the well, looking out over the courtyard. Her father had shooed them away when the butcher arrived, herded them out with the other animals, while ensuring one sheep remained. It was this, the act of selecting, that spelled the animal’s doom. The dhabihah must not take place in front of the other sheep, any more than in front of the children. They were dumb beasts and nothing more, but she knew them. It felt like a betrayal to be watching this happen, yet it was too terrible and forbidden to pass up.

  The butcher sharpened his knife, talking calmly to her father while he did so. He had his back to the sheep, which was now tethered to a peg, and the animal seemed unaware of the sliding blade, even though the sound, the steel on steel, carried to where Roya and her brother were hidden, breathing softly. At a word from the butcher, her father took the sheep in his arms, kneeled beside it and ran his fingers gently, gently over its neck. Roya had done this many times but not this way: not looking for the courses of its blood under that warm fur.

  He took a tin cup and placed it under the animal’s snout, keeping two fingers on its neck as it drank, marking a place. He lowered the cup and withdrew; the butcher moved in deftly, and pushed the knife into the spot that the fingers had indicated. When it had gone in all the way, he drew it around the sheep’s throat as it kicked and thrashed, holding it firmly by one of the soft ears.

  Roya tightened her grip on her brother and held her breath.

  The butcher’s words drifted towards them, Bismillah Allahu Akbar, as he completed the circling of the knife. He lifted the animal’s head back and the blood came gushing forth onto the sand. A final kick raised dust that settled on the blood’s bright pool, then it shuddered and its legs collapsed. Her father had his arms around the animal now and he caught its fall and eased it onto its side, taking the utmost care of it—as the laws required him to do.

  She shuddered as she woke. Dawn, and the sky was choked with a high gloom. Smoke from forest fires, the captain said. It made a halo around the rising sun, mixed with the diesel fumes that wafted over the deck and made people cough. The gas stove burned noisily in the kitchen doorway: some of the women were preparing tea. It had been Roya’s routine, every dawn. Collect the pile of sticks at the door, left by her brother the previous night. Light the stoves in the kitchen and the bathroom, blow on the struggling flame until it took. Set the water to boil, fill the washbasins, cook the bread. Chase the endless grit that settled over every surface of the house. It had felt unremarkable, faintly tedious until the Taliban took it all away. Now it felt like lost comfort.

  As the sky began to glow in front of them, Roya found her mother awake, standing heavily on the boards of the deck to stretch herself. High above Roya, her mother’s reaching hands wavered slightly with the movements of the boat. The light was weak over the quiet sea. They were out of sight of the other passengers, many of whom were still below decks. There was a timber floor down there for people who wanted to escape the weather, covered with old carpet and cushions. Roya had been in there but she didn’t like it: the lighting was dim and the older people jealously guarded their share of the floor space, snarling at any child who came near. The tiny kitchen area was even less welcoming: a chaotic huddle of women heaving sacks and crashing into each other as the unseen movements of the ocean confounded them.

  Roya had discovered a gap where a trickle of seawater ran onto the deck from each passing wave. She took her plastic sandals off and examined her feet, letting the water run over them. There were stripes of dirt where the sandal straps had been, and she carefully rubbed her wet hands over them until the marks were gone. Then she wet the sandals and rubbed at them until they were clean again, revealing the tiny sparkles in the plastic. She left the sandals to dry and watched Shafiqa unfurl herself in the gathering sunlight.

  ‘Mama, can you tell me the little verse about the egg?’

  Her mother looked down at her thoughtfully. ‘The egg? Hmm. Was it Rumi?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Shafiqa sat down and drew Roya into the folds of her chador. ‘See if I can remember,’ she muttered. Roya thrilled to the tracing of her mother’s fingertips across her forehead and into her hair—

  Like the ground turning green in a spring wind

  Like birdsong beginning inside the egg

  Like this universe coming into existence,

  the lover wakes and whirls in a dancing joy,

  then kneels down in praise.

  ‘What do you think it’s about?’ asked Shafiqa when she’d finished. Roya was reluctant to answer in case her mother stopped stroking her hair. But she said, ‘It feels like he’s talking about the morning.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I think,’ said Shafiqa. ‘Or maybe it’s about starting again.’

  ‘I spoke to a boy and he said we have to go in camps when we arrive.’

  ‘Camps?’

  ‘He said they’re like jails, and no one knows when they will be let out.’

  Shafiqa’s fingers ceased their linear strokes and began to trace circles. ‘I don’t think so. But even if there is something like that, we will be together. It can’t be worse than what happened at home.’
/>   ‘I want to see the beach,’ said Roya.

  ‘The beach?’ Shafiqa’s tone was gently scornful. ‘We’ll see.’

  As the passengers awoke they each took a bowl of rice and passed a cup of water between them. There were awkward attempts to defecate over the side, out of view. During the night Roya had heard some of the adults getting up and moving about for this purpose so they wouldn’t be seen. It made her worry that they would topple over and never be seen again. There was a lookout posted overnight, a short, silent Iraqi man. But he was only looking forward, not behind.

  The sea was getting up now as the expanse around them grew larger, the land more distant. People sitting together were knocking against each other and the tiny, constant adjustments needed for balance made them tired. Many of them weren’t sleeping at night either—the heat, their private torments. They would move about the deck, settle and writhe and grumble and re-settle.

  The old Pashtun man with his hennaed beard was seated against the stern of the boat, his sons immovably flanking him. Like watchful dogs, Roya thought. From eavesdropping, she had learnt that the old man was called Irfan Shah and that the family came from Khost. She wondered how they had wound up on this boat: surely Sunnis should have enjoyed the favour of the Taliban? Something must have gone wrong for them.

  There were boys climbing on the roof. The captain was telling them off. The navy will see you, you idiots.

  The man to Irfan Shah’s left was trying to eat rice and he had no hands. Roya couldn’t tell his ethnicity because his face was so shattered, scars expanding like a sunburst away from where his nose used to be. The little dark tunnels and pocks in his skin, Roya knew, were the paths of shrapnel. He scooped at the bowl with his two stumps, pushing his face into it and groaning in despair as the bowl flipped over and landed in his lap. He tried now to push the sticky grains with the shorter stump onto the side of the longer stump—his left—to lift a few morsels to his torn mouth. Roya wondered how he had fed himself until now.