by Luke Horton
They checked in and were shown to their bungalow, which they loved everything about, including the hidden extra room with two antique daybeds that was enclosed in glass and encircled by dense green foliage, and which you got to through a low, shuttered door that initially they’d thought was a window or a cupboard. Then they followed the sound of the sea to the beach.
It was very late, now. No one else was around, and everything was closed up for the night. On the sand, greyish in the moonlight, maroon banana-lounge cushions lay stacked up in piles. They sat in one of the cabanas — something they’d looked forward to especially — and enjoyed a cool breeze coming off the water. The water was low and still and pale. From somewhere nearby came the hollow clatter of wind chimes. A couple of dogs drifted over, looked up at them, and moved on.
2
The first morning, while Tom slept, Clara went for a walk, which she told him about when she got back.
She’d gone out to the boardwalk and headed north, past markets, a turtle rescue, and fish stalls on the beach. She could see, ahead of her, the long curve of the coast: several white lengths of beach extending north, one big hotel looming over the rest of the low-rise coastline, and, off in the hazy distance, the thankfully inactive-looking volcano. She took short breaks from the heat in air-conditioned shops and 7-Eleven-type stores, which were blindingly white under fluorescent strip lighting, and whose aisles were full of strangely flavoured snack food — Chicken Wing Pizza crisps, Pepsi-flavoured Cheetos — a selection of which she brought back with her to the room. One of the shops was full of beautiful but overpriced antique woodwork — lots of monkeys, phallic lingams, and long flat faces missing ears or noses.
Not keeping track of time, she turned back only when she got tired and hungry, but on the way home had stopped in at a museum dedicated to a German painter who had lived in Sanur in the twenties and married a famous Balinese dancer. The painter, Kirschler, who had returned to Germany in his final days, established the museum of his work before he left. The paintings were mostly portraits of the dancer against idyllic, expressionistically rendered Balinese scenes.
She was topless in nearly every one, Clara told Tom, as she handed him the brochure.
Still in bed, Tom read the brochure and made jokes about its poor grammar and confusing design, while Clara changed into her swimsuit. The way the biography of the artist made a point of noting, in parenthesis, that at this time women in Bali mostly went topless: was this a sly nod to the reader about the painter’s attraction to the woman — that she had great tits? Or just an awkward way of explaining why she was topless in most of the paintings?
Clara was laughing. I think it’s a romantic story, she said.
Is it?
Or …
What?
Really gross and creepy.
It’s so hard to know.
After breakfast, they lounged by the pool and read their books and dropped their bodies into the water for cooling. Squatting on the edge of the pool were two large bronze frogs. Through their upturned mouths, through nozzles that sat on their lower lips like lolling tongues, water arched up in the air and cascaded into the pool. It made a pretty pitter-patter that lulled them, in the heat, into a pleasant stupor.
Along the other edge of the pool, both in the early morning and late afternoon, there was shade from the overhang of the restaurant pavilion’s roof — this they had seen in the photographs, too — and under the water, running along a curved platform, there were stone stools with seats the shape of waterlilies, so you could sit in the water and drink cocktails in the shade. Later they would do this, they said. Now, it was time for the beach.
From spindly-trunked trees a canopy of leaves and tangled branches shaded the restaurant tables and the boardwalk, and reached across the boardwalk to meet the roofs of the cabanas, so Tom and Clara could walk through the grounds from the pool to the beach without catching any sun. Inside each cabana were two bamboo couches and an armchair around a glass-topped coffee table — except the cabana at the end, which had a dining table. They had blinds that could be dropped down each side, or three sides, for privacy, while keeping the side that faced the sea open, which was how they were set when they reached them.
The beach itself wasn’t much to speak of. With white, raked sand and flat water stretching shallowly to a reef, it was pretty, if unspectacular. The water was well suited only to sitting or floating around in, which was okay by Tom and Clara — that was all they required of it.
From the shade of the cabana they looked out at the sunbathers on the beach and the few people crouching in the water near the shore. Every so often, further out, people motored by on jetskis, usually in pairs. Tom wondered if, with another sort of partner, Clara might have been convinced to do something like that — if, with someone else, she might be the kind of person who would hire jetskis while on holiday in Bali and spend the afternoon carving arcs through the surface of the placid water.
They ordered juice. Then, when an elderly couple relinquished their banana lounges, they took their towels and books and drinks and set up in front of the water.
With freckles and skin cancer in the family, Clara had a strict no-sun policy, and she set to work spreading the umbrella above them. Tom picked up the menu and leafed through it, although he had done this several times already. After dealing with the umbrella, Clara sat down, put on her wide-brimmed canvas hat, and began applying sunscreen to her legs, squeezing out onto her knees high piles of the thick paste and methodically, in circular motions, rubbing it from her knees down to her ankles.
Clara didn’t like herself in a swimsuit. She thought she had a big arse and flabby arms, and her fear of the sun meant she was anaemic-looking all year round. So she wore a towel around her waist much of the time, and often a rashie over the top of her one-piece, and she spent no longer in public than absolutely necessary. From behind his sunglasses, Tom watched her arrange herself on the banana lounge, tucking the towel under her bum and pulling it up over her breasts. She then pressed her hair behind her ears and focused on her book.
When they’d first met, it occurred to Tom, Clara had had hair much as it was now: shoulder-length and brown — her natural colour — most of the time gathered into a ponytail, with some of it inevitably escaping the ponytail and reaching the nape of her neck. Or perhaps it was blonde when they first met. Or black. In those first years, it changed colour a lot. It seemed forever in the process of being grown out, her natural brown meeting the peroxide halfway down. It was green, too, briefly. And pink, very early on. She’d had a shaved head, a pixie cut, and for a while a more boyish kind of cut, with curls falling around her ears. Then a bob, which he had never liked — it was too severe, it looked like a wig — and, for years, long hair with bangs. But now it was back to how it was all that time ago, except with a premature grey streak he thought he sometimes saw, under certain lights.
People found Clara attractive, he knew this. She was rarely the most beautiful woman in the room, in the classical sense. Her face was round, fleshy — those big cheeks — and her nose was a little bulbous, so from certain angles her nostrils could appear large, slightly flared. She could look vaguely piggish. But at other times none of this was apparent at all, apart from the cheeks, which were irrepressible, and, Tom thought, very cute. Her attractiveness crept up on you, surprised you, or it had him; even after some time, he hadn’t seen it consciously, he just knew he wanted to be around her, until one night he realised what had been there all along — desire. Some saw it much quicker than he had, admittedly. But she was mutable. She could look as sexless as anything, and then do something small, look at you a certain way, or do something as simple as get up from the table, and all of a sudden the jeans she was wearing were not shapeless at all, but hugged the curve of her hips, or her inner thigh, suggesting the possibility of sex in a way that all the short skirts in the world could not. She looked better dressed down than up, us
ually — she, they both, didn’t really do dressed up — but she could be transformed by clothes, a shapeliness appearing suddenly where there had been none.
She had become more attractive as she got older, too, he thought. He hadn’t known her then, maybe he had seen a photo or two, but he felt sure that at eighteen she was nothing on her twenty-five-year-old self, which again was nothing on her thirty-three-year-old self. It was hard to say exactly why. Her features had become more defined as she had aged, more distinctly her own, and this suited her — perhaps that was it. The crow’s-feet around her eyes. The laugh lines. All of this seemed to reflect her character, so that she embodied it more fully and seemed more authentically herself now her features had matured. The maturity of her looks seemed to affect her demeanour, too, which had grown more self-assured over the years. People warmed to her quickly. He always noticed this, because it was in a way that they never did to him.
Not being classically beautiful had been a good thing for Clara, Tom decided — in contrast to say, Emily, Clara’s best friend, who was very beautiful and must in some ways be forever and exhaustingly conscious of her beauty. It might have had nothing to do with it, but Tom wondered if, had Clara been more conventionally beautiful, she would have turned out the same — if she would have been as relaxed, even nonchalant, about her appearance, as comfortable in her own skin as she was. She was not without her neuroses, of course, but when she wasn’t in the sun on a beach, for instance — her least comfortable place — she could be impressively unselfconscious. She was almost, at least to him, preternaturally comfortable in most situations, and untroubled by the way she might appear to others by sitting like that or standing that way or by wearing those clothes or by what her hair was doing. He would look over at her in a crowded room, on some special occasion, and she would be alone against a wall, looking vacant, her mouth agape. She burped loudly — a teenage party trick she had never grown out of — and he had seen her pick her nose in public, unrepentantly.
There were several other people on the beach, on lounges either side of them and on a wooden platform on the sand, and one group of people — two women and two men — on towels directly in front of them, close to the shore. One of the women in this group was stunning. Tall, olive-skinned, dazzling white-teeth smile. She had long black hair that shone in the sunlight and breasts that bobbed up and down every time she laughed, which was often. She was glamorous — like something out of an Antonioni film — and here, in this hotel, with its Mediterranean theme, he imagined for a minute that they were on the Amalfi coast somewhere. Then the group left, and Tom turned his attention elsewhere: a statuesque, grey-haired woman by herself, smiling lazily with her eyes closed to the sun; a young family with a Balinese nanny, the parents ignoring their toddler as she played in the sand behind them with the nanny hovering above; and a couple of very tanned women a few lounges over who looked like they’d had work done. Lips too fat, cheeks too taut. This made Tom think of porn, and he fantasised for a moment about what he might do with a woman like that — a woman that he didn’t love.
They didn’t go to the fish stall for lunch like they thought they might, but to a warung a little way down the road from the hotel. Of all the warungs, it had the best ratings on the apps. There was no air conditioning at Little Monkey — it was one small room opening out to the street — but the beer was cold, and the food was good. The monkey theme ran throughout, with toy monkeys and plastic bananas hanging from rafters, motorised waving monkeys on the counter, and a ceramic monkey with a large erection behind the bar. All the staff were smiling young men, and Indonesian hip-hop played through two small speakers on the bar. The other diners were all tourists: Europeans; Brits; a grizzled, red-faced man eating by himself who Tom guessed was Australian.
Tom drank two steins of Bintang with lunch — they were so cheap — and they went to his head. He felt good. Heavy, exhausted, but buzzed. Clara seemed in good spirits also, enjoying her nasi lemak and taking everything in — the street life of the tourist strip and the world of the young men at Little Monkey. Tom was thinking how good they were together, how happily they spent their time — not speaking much, not needing to. How comfortable and easy it was, when it was good.
Clara was interested in the tsunami evacuation signs that were dotted about. They had come across one on a path in the hotel, and another out on the beach. After she had finished eating, she pointed to one across the road. A small, rectangular, orange sign on a stake driven into the ground, pointing the way to go and showing a figure in white running up an incline away from a wave curling at their feet. She wanted to follow them one day while they were there, see where they led.
Maybe I could come back here and do some research, she said. Become an expert on Indonesian planning and get funding each year to come back to Bali. She chuckled, then looked less sure. I wonder if people do that — base their research on places they’d just quite like to go?
Ha, he said, feeling mostly that talking was harshing the vibe.
At the counter, he became confused with the currency, how many zeroes he needed on the end of the number — three or four or five. Clara came to his rescue, which was good, because he felt light-headed. He loved the paper money, though. The illusion in the profusion of notes, their multiplying zeroes, of such wealth. But no, that was wrong. They were rich. Here, now, the illusion, which the wad of notes so loudly dispelled, was their poverty.
They had sex twice that day; it was a long time since they’d done that. The first time was after they got back from the beach. They were on the bed, naked, lying on towels, and Clara, with her face turned away, looking at something on her phone, reached over and took him in her hand. The second time was after lunch, when he followed her, a little drunk, into the shower.
Afterwards, while she went out, with her hair still wet, to scout for nearby beachside places for dinner, he lay on the bed with a book on his chest, his phone in his hand but screen-down on the sheet, and his eyes closed.
He was thinking about their early days again. Something about them being overseas together again after so long, doing something new, seeing Clara out in the world, was triggering all of these memories. And he had such a bad memory — the anxiety. Alcohol too, probably. Although he didn’t drink anything like he used to. Of his childhood, he thought he remembered, all in all, about five things, and most of these he suspected he’d only imagined himself into from photographs or stories told to him by his parents.
He couldn’t remember what he was doing the day he and Clara had first met, either, but he remembered where it was — in Fitzroy, on the corner of Johnston and Brunswick streets — because he was rarely in that part of the city, precisely for the reason that he might run into people he knew. She’d been with Trish. Trish, ever loud and eccentric, wearing a tiara and a fake-fur leopard-print coat, and leaning on a cane, her leg in a cast after a bicycle accident she’d had while riding home drunk from a party one night. Trish was a friend of friends, whose exactly he couldn’t remember — the Miller Street house maybe. She was dominating the conversation like always, and she only introduced Clara to him passingly.
In his recollection, Clara stood in the shadow of her friend, literally hovering on the periphery of the conversation, like a child might while waiting for a parent to finish their conversation and keep going down the street. What words had they exchanged? Barely any. She seemed sullen and pale. Bored. And he was slightly annoyed by her presence — wasn’t enjoying having his awkward conversation with Trish overheard by a stranger — but Trish carried the whole thing by talking nonstop, inviting him to a party, and then telling him about the accident and waving her cane about, almost hitting a man in the face with it as he walked by.
When they spoke about this first meeting, Clara remembered it differently. She remembered Tom as the aloof one. Thought maybe he was a snob. Nevertheless, she had known they would become friends eventually, she said. Not just from that meeting, but from the f
ew other times they ran into each other around then. They were just the same sort of people, she said. He didn’t know what she meant by this exactly, but he’d agreed, because somehow he had felt the same thing. Even though at the time he was suspicious of anyone who was close to Trish — she was so much, how could you bear to spend any kind of time with her? — there had been something there, it was true.
He hadn’t gone to the party, of course, and after one or two brief run-ins, he didn’t see either of them for months, until he took a room in their house. He hadn’t wanted to, initially, but the room was cheaper than most, and he badly needed a place. There, his wariness about Trish evaporated. She was a lot, but she was kind, and he was impressed by her. The way she made her life into a series of fascinating encounters and hilarious anecdotes by sheer force of will. Plus, she smoothed over every awkward social moment, so you could essentially hide in plain sight with her. So many times out she had become his shield. He knew the chances of coming under any real scrutiny while Trish was around was slim. He thought Clara liked this about her, too. But Trish also pulled Clara out of herself. She was more fun around Trish, more open, more liable to reveal things. To drink more, stay out later. She once said Trish was her joie de vivre, as if she wouldn’t have any without her. She quickly added that he was too, of course.