The Fogging

by Luke Horton

There was a pause.

  I wonder if we’d have an anxious, bad sleeper, Clara said. Surprisingly, Tom thought, without a trace of irony.

  Holding her gaze, he dragged in breath.

  I guess the whole thing is such a lottery, she continued … who they become, whose genetics they get … God, I hope we don’t produce another academic.

  Ha, he said.

  The water they’d ordered with their food five, ten minutes ago hadn’t arrived. He had sweat still stuck to his back from the walk. He was wearing a linen shirt — the kind that, when worn in, was perfectly suited to hotter weather, but before this point was scratchy. The shirt was before that point. And he knew it was wrong, it wasn’t their fault, it wasn’t about them, but he was irritated by the people at the restaurant. The pace of everything was so slow. The woman who had taken their order had disappeared, and there was no one to ask about the water.

  There was no one else dining in the restaurant, either, other than a large Australian man with a tiny Balinese woman, eating in silence under the coruscating lights. He had probably paid for her services, Tom thought. They had seen something like this being negotiated the day before at lunch, at another warung down the road. A late-middle-aged Australian man waiting with a vaguely officious-looking woman in a suit, and then another woman, dressed less urbanely than the first in a long skirt and a T-shirt, arrived, trailing a boy. The whole thing was openly discussed, with the man, crudely, it seemed to Tom, negotiating the terms of the agreement, and then patronising the boy — I’ll come and spend some time with you and your mother at your place? And you show me around? How does that sound? Sound like a good deal? — and the boy looking baffled.

  More scooters started up outside. They were teenagers, two per bike, with their helmet visors up, hooting and throwing back their heads. One of the scooters looped around the road dangerously as it gathered speed.

  He was painfully hungry now. He felt faint from fatigue. Words from the menu still in his hands swam a little, but they often did that. At the base of his scalp, in the cavities between the neck muscles along his hairline, his head itched. It stung under his fingernails as he scratched at it, but he couldn’t help himself. He desperately wanted to go back to the hotel and take a long shower.

  Where the fuck is everyone? he said.

  She’ll be back, Clara said, now preoccupied with her phone.

  He looked around the room as if he was in a busy restaurant trying to catch someone’s eye, but there was no one in the room, so it was pointless. He was willing someone to materialise and realise they’d left them out there too long.

  What happens when someone wants something quickly, though? Or now?

  Clara looked up. Her face had that pale look she got when she was unimpressed, her expression set a little more firmly, both eyebrows ever so slightly raised.

  You know, at first, of course, it seems so gracious and charming or whatever, they are so beautiful, and discreet, especially with everything they have to put up with, all these arseholes, and how hard they work, and what we are doing to their country and everything … but then … I don’t know. You don’t get that? Does everything have to be quite so painfully relaxed? All the time?

  He was still whispering, but his whispering had risen in volume a notch or two. There was music playing, gamelan, from the kitchen, but it was low, and no doubt the other couple in the restaurant could hear at least some of what he was saying.

  You’re being a shithead, Tom.

  Fine, I’m being a shithead.

  A racist one too, even.

  Racist, he scoffed. But the word bit. It punctured his outrage, and, just like that, it collapsed.

  Okay, fine, he said sarcastically, but without conviction.

  He looked down at his phone. He could feel her scrutinising him. Shame pressed against his face.

  It was true that he didn’t usually allow himself to get angry. The impulse was there, but he controlled it, swallowed it back down. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d had something that might be considered a proper fight. They bickered in passing and let it drop. Usually he didn’t have the energy. He needed things to be okay at least with them; if there wasn’t that, then what was there? But he’d felt it rising in him and had to let it out. Maybe he’d moved up into another gear, like an overtired toddler, become so tired and hungry he was furious. But it was over now. He’d done that, he’d let it out, and the usual shame had descended over him.

  And Clara knew he hadn’t really meant that about the people here, surely; he spent so much of his time saying how incredible they were, but of course he wasn’t going to bring it up again to backtrack on that. Still, it did seem now that she wasn’t looking at him or speaking to him.

  The food arrived soon after that. Tom felt himself become almost theatrically ingratiating, needlessly rearranging the condiments and glasses on the table for the waitress to fit their food on there, too. Then they ate in silence. He asked Clara how her food was, and she said good. He said the sate ayam was actually really good here, and she agreed, the food was good.

  They carried their silence back to the hotel. He liked to pretend, when this happened, that it was a comfortable silence they were sharing, and, although he was concealing stomach cramps, which were worsening, as if there was concrete being poured into his stomach and folded in with his blood, he pretended they were simply strolling home after a nice meal — contented, full, enjoying each other’s company without feeling the need to speak. He had to do this, because otherwise he became enraged.

  She was much better at silences than he was. She could go on forever. It was always he who had to cave. He would let the silence deepen for as long as he could, but ultimately he would back down and puncture it with some innocent-sounding question, ask if she’d seen something he was looking for — his phone, the bottle-opener — and she would respond to the question, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes readily enough, like nothing had happened, and, usually, this was enough for it to pass. Except when it wasn’t, and she resumed the silence and didn’t talk to him for days on end, which had happened a few times — the worst time when they were travelling, all those years ago.

  He was thinking a lot about that trip now — now they were overseas together again. It was as if, when they’d broken up for a while, and she was living mostly away from him, he’d boxed up those ten months and relegated them to some dusty corner of his memory where there was, he had convinced himself, nothing of interest to him. And he’d left them there ever since, untouched, even though they’d been back together for so long.

  Now, it seemed, he was interested. He kept remembering new things. It seemed like it had happened to different people. She was twenty then, and he was twenty-two. He had to remind himself of that. At the time, they had felt so jaded and old — certainly not like young people exploring the world, which, of course, they were.

  At the hotel they trudged past reception where the woman who had checked them in was on shift, sitting at a computer behind a tall bamboo counter. She smiled and called out goodnight, and Tom smiled back, waved, said, Lovely night, and turned to see Clara’s face still closed against them both.

  Back on the bed, and still not talking, Clara flipped through the channels again, finding nothing but Indonesian versions of the same game shows and reality TV they had at home.

  Tom drank a beer and read his book, but he couldn’t concentrate on the book and picked up his phone. He scrolled through Instagram. Then, using his best neutral tone, he said: Do you remember our other holiday pals?

  Clara didn’t respond straightaway, and, for a moment, he wondered if she was going to ignore him completely. This was an unspoken rule, that they respond to each other. Ignoring him completely would make it something else, something they might need to acknowledge.

  Who? she said, finally.

  In Thailand, he said, feeling a rush of gratitude and
trying not to show it in his voice.

  No?

  The Swedes. You know, the sweetest people on earth.

  Oh … yeah.

  She was looking up at the ceiling, now, and he followed her gaze. Beyond the mosquito net, there were ornate cornices that were glossy with varnish and many-tiered and so intricately carved it was hard to make out what they depicted. Flowers? Angels? Animals?

  I loved them, she said.

  They were very sweet, he said, relaxing completely now. Dumb, though. Or maybe just naïve. Like they’d lived a very sheltered life and this was their first time out of the village, or Stockholm or whatever. She got heatstroke, and we visited her in the hospital.

  Oh yeah. Clara clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and began exploring her teeth with it.

  He was so excited when he found us and brought us to visit her, he said. Like we were their oldest friends. Do you remember that? She was so happy. So grateful. It was very weird.

  It’s strange, she said, after a moment. I remember that, but nothing else about it. I mean, I don’t remember the hospital, at all … it’s like a dream … Just her very, very red, very, very happy face.

  And it was only, what, ten years ago?

  Twelve, I think. No, thirteen. Two thousand and six.

  He kept making bad jokes and getting all sheepish and embarrassed and blaming it on his English, he said.

  They were young. He was sweet.

  He was sweet. They were both were. Lovely. We just had absolutely nothing to say to each other, that’s all. He recommended books to me. Strindberg, I think. That was good.

  Clara changed the channel again. Have you read Strindberg?

  Not yet, no.

  He looked down at his book, and then back up. How about Marco, in Paris, remember him?

  Oh God, of course. I will never forget him.

  You know who he reminds me of, just a little?

  She looked at him. No, who?

  Non, Ollie, non! he said. His impression was terrible. He laughed.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she said.

  4

  France was around five months in. After Thailand, Laos, Krakow, Berlin, but before England, New York, Mexico. They spent about a month there, mostly working on organic farms. WWOOFing, it was called — Willing Workers On Organic Farms — and the idea was you exchanged labour for food, lodgings, skills. They stayed in three places, with three families, all English — where were all the French people, they wondered — and only one was anything like what they’d hoped it would be. The other two were disasters, although one of these disasters had little to do with the farm. And then once, between stints, they’d stayed with Marco in Paris. That was a disaster, too.

  Marco ran a squat on the outskirts of the city, far south of the thirteenth arrondissement. They were given his email by a friend, Tess, who gave it with trepidation.

  He is intense, she said, Full on, and she fixed them with a look that suggested a gravity her words could not quite convey. She tried again: He was in a bad place when I was there. But who knows, maybe he is doing better now.

  They took note of this and would use him only as backup, they decided, if they had time to kill between farms, which, in the end, they did have — a week in fact. He was receptive to their email, and they turned up one afternoon to find him alone in the courtyard of the squat, an old factory of some kind, sitting at a picnic table with a laptop, in front of a fireplace fashioned out of bricks and corrugated iron.

  The squat was nicely set up. The fireplace, the picnic tables, plants in pots scattered around, raised garden beds full of herbs and staked tomato plants heavy with fruit. A clean, light-filled kitchen with benches made out of recycled timber. People had put effort into it, and recently, but it was strangely quiet now, as if everyone might return at any moment and the place would spring back to life, but it never happened. There was only Marco.

  Marco was an unkempt, ruggedly handsome man, kind of timelessly aged, with piercing eyes and long black curls streaked with grey, which were permanently entangled in a scarf hanging loosely around his neck. He was charming, kinetic, and he welcomed Tom and Clara with a winning smile and immediately made plans.

  A dinner was proposed for later that evening, and he would take them to the markets and show them how to source free food. They would pay only for the fish, and he would teach them about Paris as they walked. Tom and Clara were tired after travelling — to get there from south of Lyon had taken three trains, and then it took a long time to find the place so far beyond the nearest station — but they could not refuse him, and they set off.

  On the way to the markets (the oldest markets in Paris, Marco said), which were a long way from the squat — a walk, a train back into the city, and then another walk away — Marco pointed out a street where barricades were erected during the commune, and later a cafe where André Breton and Philippe Soupault read pages from their experiments in automatic writing that would become the book The Magnetic Fields. He was impressed that Tom and Clara knew who Breton and Soupault were, too impressed, and embarrassingly pronounced them the most cultured guests they’d had in a long time.

  Usually, we have only stupid fucking students, he said, snorting snot back up his nose. People who only want to fuck and get wasted and who don’t care about anything like culture or art. There are so many morons everywhere, he said. Culture is everything. If you are cultured, you understand some real things about life, understand the value of work and struggle and resistance and love.

  Marco got worked up like this easily, of his own accord, his thoughts inevitably drifting back to the same grievances — it happened several times during their trip to the markets alone — and when he did, his speech, which was already quick and agitated, became more so, and the snorting worse. He made them nervous. Tom could tell Clara was nervous by her over-eager smile, her forced receptivity to Marco’s talk — it was so rare to see her strike a false note — and for Tom the nervousness was compounded by the dawning realisation that Marco had designs on Clara.

  At the markets, they bought fish, dumpster dived for vegetables, watched Marco extract free bottles of wine from an initially sceptical-looking merchant as he packed up his stall, and returned home, listening the whole way as he talked. Their good cheer was an effort to maintain, but they both sensed the importance of keeping him happy.

  Prompted by a discussion of certain recipes and his culinary skills in general — that, despite its reputation as a nation of food-lovers, most men didn’t cook in France, while he was a fantastic cook — Marco asked Tom how Aboriginal people separated domestic roles according to gender. Tom was studying history and must know these things, he said.

  Surprised by this, by the misunderstanding of his degree — he had readings on urban history with him as part of his degree in architecture and urban planning, not history — but also by the sudden swerve in the conversation, the way Marco demanded this knowledge from him, Tom laughed awkwardly. He explained that he had not studied Aboriginal history or culture in any depth — not since high school, at least — and admitted, guiltily, that he did not know much at all about gender roles in Aboriginal nations. Marco did not hide his disappointment, indeed he evinced shock — a shock that was ludicrous in its performativity, but which nevertheless had the desired effect — and Tom found himself bumbling through an incoherent explanation about the secrecy of certain aspects of Aboriginal culture, the idea of secret men’s business and secret women’s business, which westerners were not allowed to know and out of respect did not pry into, but the whole time he was speaking it felt like a cop-out — he knew it sounded like one — and it was accompanied by a sinking feeling that he had fallen into a trap. Regardless, he did feel ashamed. Even though he suspected the question had been disingenuous, designed only to humiliate him, he couldn’t help but think Marco was right, that he should know more about Aborigin
al culture, and that he was every bit the arsehole he sounded like in that moment.

  Clara saved him, distracted Marco by talking about something else, asking him questions to get him back on the tour-guide tack, and then, as they walked, she found his hand. He didn’t know why he still remembered that — maybe because she never did things like that. But she found his hand, and they walked hand in hand, while he smarted and sweated in the third arrondissement. Maybe, he thought now, it was only to signal to Marco that she was loyal to her boyfriend.

  The turn against Tom, then, was sudden and vicious, but not unforeseen. The impasse over his knowledge of Aboriginal gender roles was one warning sign. Another was the obviousness of Marco’s crush on Clara. He lavished attention on her and complimented her in a way that was transparently seductive, pouring his tour-guide facts and charming grins upon her with ever more intensity. It didn’t seem to trouble her much — when they went to bed the first night, Clara laughed about it, said she found Marco ridiculous — but it gave Tom a sense of impending doom.

  But it was the guitar that took the blame.

  The squat was once a music-filled place. This was evident in various ways. Adjacent to the courtyard was a long, single-storey building that faced the street. Once the factory office, it now served as an open-plan kitchen and dining area, and there was a small riser built into the far corner of the room. It had a single, limp mic stand on it and bits of gaffer stuck to the carpet. And there was Derek, one of the only other people they met during their three days there. A tall African man with dreadlocks down to his waist, Derek came to rehearse in the basement, which, when they followed him down there, turned out to have several rehearsal studios built into the space, all carpeted and soundproofed and fully wired. Derek was friendly, soft-spoken, and on good terms with Marco, although his responses to Marco’s efforts to engage him in conversation were muted, bordering on perfunctory. For his part, Marco was clearly pleased to be associated with this musician in the eyes of their guests, and he boasted about his friend’s talents and his success in the underground music scene.