On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  Well, if she was going to roll over, she might as well do it properly. She looked at her watch: 3 p.m. She had time. A few minutes later she stood on the gunwale of the Java Ridge in a bikini with a five-ten van Straalen under her arm. This wasn’t an indulgence she allowed herself very often. She threw the board onto the dazzling surface of the sea and jumped after it into the body-temperature water; paddled the distance to the reef, swells rising and falling more sharply under her. Sea lice prickled now and then around her ankles. Her whole body was talking back to her, as every practical demand fell silent.

  As she reached the takeoff she found only Leah and Tim waiting at the top of the line, the rest of them in various stages of paddling back from rides. The heat of the day had reduced the surface of the ocean to an oily mirror scattered with strange flotsam: a slick of tiny dead fish, leaves, a half coconut. These little ghosts floated past her in streaks between wide stretches of flat water.

  And then the sea rose. The first wave of the set was small, forming wide of the reef, but it was only there to announce the larger swells behind. She started moving quickly out to sea, before Tim and Leah knew to react. As she rose over the first wave she could see the second, already darkening much further out. It was big enough and moving fast enough that she struggled to reach it and yet she had time to appreciate the exquisite curvature of the sloped ocean coming forward. The flat water in front of the wave tilted slightly down and into it as it drew the sea towards itself. It moved without violence, its tremendous weight and energy made sinuous by deep physics; a glass escarpment that was concave in two dimensions, trough to peak and end to end, a bowl reflecting the wide convex of the sea floor.

  Now it was lifting and the lip of the wave began to fizz. When it reached her, the pitch of the steepening wall would be perfect. She locked her eyes on the exact space she wanted to occupy, then turned and stroked into it. Tim and Leah were wide of her and still sprinting to avoid being run down. She’d be able to weave around them once she was up. It lifted her, tilted her downwards as she paddled, and she swept to her feet.

  Rushing under her, the water surface became a transparent lens, the coral heads clearly visible and rising as if to break the surface. She knew they were deeper than they looked: if she held her nerve she’d pass safely over them. Coloured stripes between the corals resolved themselves into reef fish, pulled helplessly around by the powerful suction of the wave. The board accelerated silently as she angled downwards into the bottom turn. She banked onto the inside rail and felt the fins grip tight into the foot of the wave. From here she could see only the great blue wall before her and the wide expanse of the sunlit ocean everywhere else, dotted with the upturned heads of the other surfers.

  She swung off the rail and speared the board up the face, unaware of herself and conscious only of the wave’s propulsive will. At the peak of her speed, as the board crested the lip, she stood hard on the tail and flicked it back down again, fanning the air with spray. The board slowed momentarily then began to accelerate again and she wove it gracefully down the line, looping the others as they lingered to watch her pass.

  The wave rocked and spilled several more times in front of her, curves upon curves. Movements in her hips and calves and feet, tiny contractions her conscious mind had abdicated to experience, took her through the end sections of the wave, faster and faster over coral that rose ever nearer to the surface. Until she kicked over the wave’s dying edge and let herself fall face first into the deeper water, where a circle of golden fish were delicately inspecting a coral head.

  Later in the afternoon they all slumped themselves over the front decks in hammocks, on yoga mats and towels, enjoying the faint breeze that picked up over the water. The boards had been returned to their racks by the crew, each with its legrope wound around its tail and buffered against the other boards by an interleaved board bag. Only her van Straalen wasn’t there—it lived under Joel’s side of the bed in the private cabin.

  Fraggle had clipped a camera to the drone and filmed the last of the surfing. Now he was using it to cut high circuits above the boat, filming the reclined bodies on the deck. ‘Lifestyle,’ he told Isi. ‘I’ll shoot you a copy of this stuff.’

  She was grateful that at least the gadget was being put to a practical use. Joel had outlaid fifteen hundred US on the damn thing, and so far had only perfected the art of taking a cold beer can from the Java Ridge out to a surfer in the lineup. It was a popular trick, but no more or less effective than the old way—putting Radja in the Zodiac and running the beer out by surface mail. Somehow the beer-delivery drone typified Joel’s approach: do it the flashy way rather than keep it simple and hang onto the money.

  The surfers had found the rhythm that settled over every trip: they’d helped themselves to beer from the fridges and were laughing and heckling, reliving the afternoon. Isi was listening to Carl and Tim, sparring like they were at one of their deckchaired family Christmases. What caught her attention, as she pretended to fiddle with a hand-held radio, was their pushing towards an unspoken line.

  Carl didn’t mind, he was busy telling Tim. He didn’t mind. What he minded was Tim bringing her. Isi figured this could only be a reference to Leah. She was just about out of earshot, though the boat wasn’t a big place. Tim had sold the trip to Carl as a boys’ trip, his birthday present to himself. ‘You’re my one cousin,’ Carl was arguing. ‘I don’t have a brother. Couldn’t you have left her at home for ten fucking days?’

  ‘She’s not causing you any trouble.’

  ‘She’s so bloody picky. Have you watched her eat? Won’t eat the chocolate. Won’t eat Indo food. Swear I haven’t seen a drink in her hand once this trip. I mean, she lives on salads! A bird like that…salad chicks do not deliver.’

  Isi marvelled at Tim’s self-control. He was screwing his face up but his voice remained calm. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, my friend.’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t. She’s probably into like, activated charcoal enemas or something.’

  ‘Freak.’ Tim was trying to suppress a smile.

  ‘Me? Mate, it’s you I’m worried about. Friends like that, who needs enemas?’

  Tim lost the battle and started snorting with laughter. But Carl wasn’t done. ‘Seriously, how’s she gonna have an authentic Indo experience if she won’t eat the food?’

  ‘Well how are you gonna do it if you won’t engage with the Indonesians?’ Tim stopped and thought for a moment. ‘Things change, Carl. You’ve got your footy and your work, and I’ve gone off into—’ He made a vague detouring motion with his hand.

  ‘Into what? Chasing causes? What you do, right, it’s like the latest fad you’ve found at uni turns into something that everyone around you has to take up.’

  Jumped from the girlfriend to the big issues pretty quick, thought Isi.

  ‘And that’s fine,’ Carl was saying, ‘but I’m not gonna go fucken weeping for people I’m never going to meet. Bad shit happens everywhere. Nothing I can do in my lifetime is going to change that. I’m not going round thinking I’m such a big deal I can change the world.’

  Isi could imagine the two of them retreating year by year into their own versions of conscience: Carl and his family (which by extension included Tim); Tim and the world.

  Carl had his index finger extended off the beer can now, pointed at Tim for emphasis. A good-looking prick, she thought. Still a prick. ‘What about you emailing all your fucking admirers with your—your press photos from getting arrested in the city at your rallies and shit. I delete ’em, you know. I don’t even wait for the fucking things to finish loading.’ Tim laughed again, despite himself.

  ‘Remember your crush on the Dalai Lama? Then what you called land rights, so we’d go “land rights” and then you’d correct us and go “nah, it’s called native title.”’

  ‘I get it, Carl.’

  ‘Nah, mate, you know there’s more. Bloody boat people…gay marriage, sweatshops and Nike and battery chickens, and
what the fuck have chickens got to do with Nike, Tim? Coal seam gas…what else is there? Naomi Klein: what is she, like Calvin’s missus? Assange and Snowden…oh, and that poor bloody tranny Manning. It’s fucking exhausting mate.’

  ‘Assange is alt-right these days. And yeah, they all matter, even if you deliberately mix them up.’

  ‘They matter to you, Timmy.’ He took a big slurp from his beer. ‘You make the mistake of thinking they matter to everyone, like it’s compulsory.’

  ‘Hey, at least I never fell for that Kony 2012 shit.’ They both fell silent, then Tim chuckled. ‘Fuck, your memory is prodigious. I can’t believe you can list all that. You wasted your brain being a landscaper.’

  Carl didn’t answer him, chose to look out over the sea. He’s hit a nerve, thought Isi. But there was an underlying affection between these two: maybe Carl loved the way Tim had no idea how he came across. Maybe he loved the fact that he was passionate. The night before the Java Ridge had sailed, when they were all laid out in the dormitory at Legian, he’d been talking shit right up to the point that a honking great snore cut off his sentence and he was out like a light. Carl had worn him out with his obstinacy.

  The clouds she’d seen earlier were now stacked up on the horizon, an ominous gloom forming under them. Sanusi was watching them too, cross-legged in singlet and boardshorts, absorbed in thought.

  ‘Weather coming in?’ she asked him in Bahasa.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, waving his bandaged paw at the clouds. ‘Nasty up north, huh?’ Then he smiled. ‘We get swell though.’

  Neil Finley had seen them talking, seen them both watching the dark horizon. ‘Is that trouble?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Not for us in the lagoon. You wouldn’t want to be out in it though.’

  He reached behind him into the icebox and produced two Bintangs, handed her one and prised open the other.

  ‘I’ve set up a camp on the island,’ she said. ‘You think everyone will be okay sleeping on land if it gets ugly?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they’ll be right.’

  ‘Sometimes, when it gets gusty, the boat swings a bit on the anchor chain. It’s probably a better night’s sleep on land.’

  He nodded, took a swig. ‘You can surf.’

  His tone was so perfectly neutral that she had no idea how to take it. If he meant to be condescending she didn’t care anyway.

  ‘Yes. I can.’

  Once night fell, they sat around the long table in the main cabin, eating big white chunks of reef fish in a salad that Radja had made from Isi’s greens. The crew reclined in the shadows away from the clients, eating with their hands, chatting softly in Bahasa.

  Isi watched Neil Finley’s precise use of his cutlery. ‘What kind of surgery do you do?’

  He stopped chewing and touched his lips neatly with the knuckle that held his fork. ‘Plastics.’

  ‘Must be very interesting work.’

  His smile was thin and dismissive. She looked at his son beside him. The boy’s face bore the remains of the day’s zinc—applied in exactly the same pattern as his father.

  ‘And you, Luke? What do you do?’

  Again, that look with its trace of superiority. ‘I’m doing year twelve at Scots.’

  ‘You going to be a surgeon too?’ she asked, unsure if this was awkward territory.

  ‘Yes.’ A tiny smirk. ‘That’s the plan.’

  They were both drinking water, ploughing through the salad. Father and son. Whose plan, little man?

  Leah sat between Carl and Tim, who were arguing about climate change. Smiling painfully as she attempted to steer the topic away from their differences. She was eating fish without the marinade. The photographer, Fraggle, sat alone at the far end of the table, unnoticed by the others. Isi wondered about him. He’d paid full fare for the trip, but his gear looked professional. Joel reckoned the guy was trying to build up a folio to get magazine work. He was scrolling and tapping at a computer, turning the screen around now and then to show the others his shots from the afternoon. Each was greeted with a chorus of hooting, then conversation would re-form around Fraggle as though he wasn’t there, and he would return to his work.

  When they’d finished, Isi ferried the guests two by two over to the beach in the Zodiac. When she climbed in she found Sanusi’s smokes and lighter resting on top of the plastic fuel tank. She’d told him before that this wasn’t a good look, but Joel would’ve laughed it off enough times that Sanusi was now habituated to ignore her warnings. Someone else waiting for her to finish her shift so life could go back to normal.

  These were urban surfers, and this beach was a puzzle. Nothing demarcated it from the jungle behind. Not an erosion barrier, not a fence or a warning sign. There was water, then there was sand, then the jungle crept forward as far as it dared. Nobody would ever build a walkway here. The foliage obeyed no one.

  So they wandered across the sand, away from the spill of the shoreward ripples into the heavy grasses and back to the sand again, unsure of where to put their belongings. It was like watching a dog make circles in its bed.

  By now, everyone had noticed the towers of cloud soaking up the night’s first stars. Lit occasionally by spears of lightning, they’d grown much taller and more menacing, occupying at least a third of the northern sky. The air hadn’t changed: it was still and heavy, as it had been all day. Isi was unconcerned. The storm would probably miss them, but even if it scored a direct hit, the boat was safe in the lagoon and they were safe on the island. Carl’s selfish dash for the water that afternoon had ended up being the best move for all of them. As she landed the last boatload, a distant rumble echoed over the ocean. The reef had been roaring under the impact of ever-larger swells, but this was different: a vast, alien booming.

  This was thunder, and it was coming their way.

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  North of Pulau Dana

  The ocean was no less gigantic by moonlight, a great expanse of restless land. Hills and gullies and cliffs and dunes, cut from some gleaming substance that shifted and fought itself.

  Roya watched it with her chin resting on the smooth wooden rail, trying to understand what she was seeing. This changing mood: she had nothing to compare it to. She wondered if the sea had its own mind and had become angry over something.

  She was hungry now—they’d started the voyage with bananas, canned fish, rice and bread and water. But the bananas and the fish were eaten rapidly and the bread went mouldy. People were becoming sick.

  Her mother had slumped under the rail with an arm extended so that it wrapped around Roya’s waist, leaving her enough room to twist her body and watch the sea, the growing chaos that was making the men nervous too. There were so many of them, men of unfamiliar kinds laughing and playing fis kut during the afternoon when the ocean was flat.

  Their faces tensed when the engine trouble started around sunset. They’d crammed themselves into a hatchway that led into the dark belly of the boat. Those who could argue in a common language were doing it now. Others looked sullen; they spat and glowered. However it was that the sea was supposed to behave, none of them had expected this.

  She listened for familiar words. Some of them were Urdu but still made no sense, because they were the words of men; words about the engine, curse words. It was possible to know a language and still get lost in its corridors.

  This much she understood: the bolts that held the engine in place had broken, and the beating heart of the boat had gradually worked its way off its mounts, shifting its great weight into the well of the hull, still connected to the shaft that drove the propeller. The men disagreed about exactly what this meant, but it seemed the engine could no longer drive the boat without everything overheating and jamming up. Some of them were furious, bent on violence. Some were panic-stricken, some beyond caring. She thought about which to avoid and which to trust, how best to protect her mother and the sister she hadn’t met.

  Her mother still slept. This was good, Roya decided. She didn’t
want her to worry. She studied the timber under the rail, the little corner formed where the upright held the timber of the rail in place. A collection of old fishing muck had formed there; scales and snipped pieces of fishing line, a mealy-looking pile of something rotted. The timber there had fresh marks in it. It had been gnawed. Roya knew what did that.

  The men down below made metal sounds with their tools, yelling curses at the men above. A mother held a small boy over the side, her arms locked through his armpits, while he emptied his bowels into the ocean. In Herat, catching a boy in this position would have been excruciating, both for the boy and for the observer. Now it was beyond embarrassment: it was something to pity. The boy’s face, looking back towards Roya, was racked with shame then caught by spasms as his body ejected the filth. A man sat slumped on the opposite side of the deck, vomiting helplessly between his feet, thin and watery; pale solids stopping on the timber boards as the fluid streamed away.

  The deck was heaving now, not only rising and falling over the oncoming waves, but twisting from side to side so that the timbers groaned. Meagre belongings slid away from people and they crawled to retrieve them. Hours earlier, an orange had rolled from one woman to another and an argument broke out when the second woman claimed it as her own. Others handed back the wandering items in good humour; even with a smile.

  Two teenage boys were hunched over the big plastic tub scooping water into their mouths with a cup. The water had started running low because everyone used it to wash when they prayed, in addition to the quantities they were drinking. The boys scooped greedily, spilling the water on their feet in their rush and scrapping to take turns with the cup. Neither of them noticed the figure approaching them from behind, but Roya did.