The Fogging

by Luke Horton

  That night Tom and Clara watched the film about the tsunami. They found it in the hotel’s DVD library. It was a pirated copy, recorded on camcorder, the camera occasionally bobbing about, and it was greenish around the edges, which removed them a little from the action, but at the same time made it more dreamlike, nightmarish. The big scene was quite close to the start, the tsunami sweeping over the coastline and into hotel grounds much like theirs. It was a challenge for the filmmakers, because it seemed to move so slowly, and, in some ways, it was unspectacular. Just a mass of swelling water. Also, because it was so big, the scale of everything got strangely corrected in your head, as if you wouldn’t allow yourself to see it for what it really was, so you kept thinking they were tiny, miniature — those buildings, those trees, all that outdoor furniture.

  Then the camera plunged under the surface of the water, and it all sped up, things whipping by, and the violence became clear. The sound effects helped, and you saw Naomi Watts being struck by various things churning around her in the water. Although the film became less engrossing after this scene, as it followed the aftermath of the tsunami, it was a gripping enough story, based on true events. Tom knew Clara enjoyed this kind of movie. He did, too, up to a point, but he didn’t want to be scared like she did. He had never liked horror movies. She seemed to want everything to be more intense in movies. Bigger, scarier. He was just glad he could laugh at it and pretend to be unaffected by the emotional family reunion at the end.

  Afterwards, they turned off the light, and he put his hand on her thigh as they got comfortable in the bed. He thought she might be asleep, but then he felt her pick up his hand and clasp it in hers. After a few minutes, she put his hand back down on the bed between them and fell asleep.

  6

  The next morning, Tom arrived at the cabanas to find Clara comforting Madeleine. She was sitting beside her on the couch, rubbing her back, looking up at him warningly, and saying, She’s smart, Mads, she’ll know to get out before it gets really bad. He couldn’t think who they could be talking about.

  It was Madeleine’s sister in Sydney. Madeleine and Jeremy had visited her before their trip to Bali, which was really just a short holiday tacked on to the end of their visit to Sydney because — like Clara and Tom — they’d never really taken a holiday like this before. They spent all their summers at a family holiday house in Paros. Madeleine had only been to Southeast Asia once before, when she was young and the family visited Thailand — whereas her sister, Cece, had been to Bali many times and told them they had to go while they were so close.

  All this Tom had learnt that first morning they’d met them all by the pool, but now it turned out that Cece had an abusive partner. He had held her by the wrists, slapped her, thrown coffee at her, and once refused to let her out of the car. Yesterday, Madeleine said, Cece had written her a cryptic email suggesting something new had happened, that she was close to leaving him, but didn’t know how to do it — their daughter was only three, and she didn’t have any kind of support network in Australia — but this morning she was back-pedalling on the whole thing, saying yesterday was one of her fasting days and she always gets emotional when she doesn’t eat.

  It’s so strange, Madeleine said. Everything seemed okay when we were there. Yes, he’s an asshole, alright … but for the most part he was on his best behaviour, because of his history, I suppose, and because we threatened not to visit at all because we didn’t want to spend time with a man who hit my sister.

  Clara, looking at Tom, said it reminded her of what had happened with her friend Trish, and she told Madeleine the story of how, several years ago, Trish had held on in an abusive relationship for way too long, and partly because of children, too. She told her about the time in the mountains when Trish sprained her ankle while pregnant, and Simon did nothing to help her, and what happened in Rome — also while she was pregnant — and how he made her walk everywhere and wouldn’t let her catch a taxi. Simon wasn’t physically abusive, it was emotional, psychological, Clara said. It was all about control. Cece, like Trish, it sounded like, was being gaslighted by this guy.

  What is this actually? asked Madeleine.

  When someone manipulates you into thinking you’re going crazy, that everything is your fault, Clara said. That’s what it was like for Trish. She couldn’t do anything right, he criticised everything she did — how much money she spent at the supermarket, not just the brand of butter she bought but what size packet, the way she cut up her vegetables — every trivial thing. It was her fault that he was so awful to her all the time. If only she did things the right way, everything would be fine.

  Oh God. How awful to have a man like that in your life, Madeleine said. We feel crazy and stupid enough already, no? She was laughing weakly, her face still pale with concern.

  But it was like what you said about Cece, Tom said, trying to join in. Whenever we were around, everything seemed okay, you know. We never had any idea what was going on. They seemed fine.

  They did not seem fine, Clara said. I had an idea! You just … hope she’ll get out, or it won’t get any worse. I don’t know.

  Exactly, said Madeleine.

  I always felt so conflicted, Clara said, stroking Madeleine’s back. Sometimes people just want to be heard, of course, they don’t want advice. They don’t want to be told what to do. And of course people need to make their own mistakes and everything. She readjusted herself on the seat, smoothing down her dress with her free hand. And, Christ, who is to judge other people’s relationships anyway? Who’s to say what is a good or bad relationship? Or a good or a bad man? Clara looked at Tom, innocently enough, he thought, as if to include him in the conversation. It’s such a low bar, she continued, and yet, it was my responsibility, my role, as her friend, to tell her to get out, wasn’t it? I could never quite get it right, the response to her and her problems, she was never happy with what I said. If I was simply sympathetic, she could tell I was holding back opinions, and if I gave opinions, she would argue with me about them, and even though she has left him now, and freely admits I was right and everything, we’re not really the friends we used to be … I don’t know, it’s so hard.

  Tom had no idea this was the case with Trish. He thought they still talked all the time.

  Skilfully, Clara brought Madeleine around, and, soon, as Tom picked at the plate of pastries that sat in front of him on the table, talk moved on from Cece and her custody issues in Australia and returned to a subject they’d touched on before, child care and how it compared in the two countries. Madeleine felt Cece would be better off in France as a single mother, especially with her nearby, even though Madeleine’s experience with the French child-care system had been mixed.

  The pastries were much better in Luang Prabang, Tom was thinking. Much better than the soft croissants and stale scrolls that came with breakfast here every morning, and which sometimes tasted of rancid oil or butter or had an ant or two crawling on them, but which of course he still ate. He couldn’t remember much else about Laos. They went there second. After Thailand and before Europe. The pastries, the baguettes, the colonial terraces lining the streets, how sick they had got there from eating street food. But Madeleine’s accent, the force of her opinions, the way she said non so definitively when she disagreed with someone, had reminded him of something else that had happened to them there.

  They’d hired bikes for the day, to see the streets lined with French patisseries and coffee shops and then to follow the curve of the Mekong, which was wide and slow there, as it skirted the city, with marinas full of beautiful painted boats. After eating baguettes and cheese at a patisserie — it was such a novelty after a month in Thailand, a country without ‘real’ bread — they were navigating their way through the streets to the river when they accidentally rode through the gates of a private residence or a hotel or a compound of some kind. It had looked just like any other street at first, with low, shuttered, whitewashed building
s either side of a paved road, but there were the gates they had passed through, and then a hulking figure — who, from a distance, seemed like a frail old man, waving to them perhaps — appeared from one of the buildings and steamed up the drive towards them, shouting. They put on their brakes, but the man didn’t slow down, and, when he arrived, he tried to pick up Tom’s bike while he was still getting off it and turn it around.

  The man was old and had an enormous paunch, but the rest of him was wiry and strong. Tom tried to restore civility, to engage the man in conversation, to explain that they were lost, and then to at least insist on his own dignity — to insist on turning the bike himself and walking back up the drive at his own pace — but the man would not allow it, was so incensed that he dragged Tom’s bike all the way back through the gates with Tom still half on it. The force of the man’s anger, the way he could not be reasoned with, was so unstoppable, stuck with him. He wanted to do something to him — even now. Like he did to Marco. Get him back, somehow. For his violence, his self-righteousness, his misdirected rage. For the way he had humiliated him.

  Jeremy and Ollie came back under the shade of the cabana. Madeleine was talking about cross-disciplinary work now. How she was working with an illustrator on a cultural history project on French abortion laws and the trickiness of these collaborative relationships. How someone always seemed to need to be in charge, to take the lead, how it had become clear that she was the leader of the project and the illustrator just wanted to be told what to draw or else do the whole thing himself, which was disappointing to her.

  Ollie, with a slick of watermelon across his cheeks, his beach hat pulled hard over his forehead, wanted her attention.

  I hear that you want to speak, Oliver, mon cherie, she said, in a practised tone. I acknowledge your desire to speak next, but we are talking, please, and she finished her thought. Then she gave her attention to Ollie.

  What do you want?

  Maman. Les tortues, Maman, he said, tugging ineffectually at the strings of his hat.

  She turned to the others and sighed. Should we all go? We can see the turtles on the way down to Mick’s place, no?

  She was referring to a famous resort further down the boardwalk that, sometime in the early 1990s, was the location for Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall’s wedding. Clara had seen an article about it somewhere. The guest list had included Bowie, Sting, Chrissie Hynde, all sorts of people, some of whom were rumoured to have bought properties in the area or to still visit the resort. The place was so exclusive that there was no listing for it on any of the apps.

  They decided on the resort, then the turtles, and they set off south along the boardwalk, running the gauntlet of the masseuses sitting under the trees on deckchairs and crates. Clearly, these women were not allowed to enter the grounds of the hotels or approach people on their beachfronts, so they had to yell across to people as they came out onto the beach. As a result, they were uproariously loud all day long, laughing among themselves and shouting at each other and over to potential customers in a way quite unlike anyone else around.

  Tom had flown relatively under the radar of the masseuses, but Jeremy, of course, was well known to them. As they left the hotel grounds, a couple of women followed, and Jeremy laughed and bantered with them happily as they asked countless leading questions designed to circle back around to massages and other services and goods they could provide. They could arrange anything, of course — boat rides, jetskis, trips to the textile factories — and Jeremy answered their questions diligently but ironically, enjoying the entrapment from which he had then to extricate himself. They laughed, too, showing that they knew that he knew but it didn’t matter — knowing, perhaps rightly, that all this could still land them custom, in honour of the effort they put into the game. But there was a limit to their efforts, and eventually they dropped away, securing the promise of another chat tomorrow.

  Tom was glad to have avoided it, but he couldn’t help admiring Jeremy’s easy banter with the women, and their ease with him — how happily everyone played their roles and then transcended them, transcended a situation that could only ever have made him profoundly uncomfortable.

  For hundreds of metres down the boardwalk they passed one resort after another. With Ollie they made a game of comparing each new resort to their own and giving them ratings overall. Very few were as ramshackle and beautiful as theirs; most were newer and more expensive-looking, but ugly. Even so, most of them had one or another enviable feature, mostly to do with pools: more pools, prettier pools, larger pools, pools that extended further out to the boardwalk and the beach and were lined on either side with well-stocked bars.

  Then they found it. Like all places of great exclusivity, there was little to see. No signage, no pools. But neither was it walled off; just a low, whitewashed stone wall that opened discreetly at one point onto a narrow white-pebble path and green lawns. Everything else was hidden behind a stand of trees — black-trunked, Japanese-looking deciduous trees that stood starkly against the plush lawns extending deep beyond them. They stood and stared at it a moment, and then Jeremy broke the silence by saying it looked like the kind of lawn that was made to be passed out on, and Clara and Madeleine laughed.

  One villa could be seen through the trees, after all, Tom noticed, off to the side: a simple, squarish double-storey dwelling, also Japanese-looking, with a bottom floor open to the elements. This seemed to fit the bill. Serviced, secluded, with perhaps its own pool on the far side, cut into the lawn. Tom could see Rod Stewart dropping in for drinks at a place like that, Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese turning up in shorts, ready for a game of doubles. Models walking around it naked.

  The place had an uncanny quality, a feeling that was accentuated by how little there was to actually see. How tantalising those lawns were — lawns that gave away nothing, but which stretched endlessly beyond the screen of trees to some imagined paradise. Was it the thrill that maybe they’d catch sight of someone famous? Or was knowing these people had once been there enough? The invisibility of the super wealthy. Exclusivity and privilege present, detectable only in the expanse of perfectly maintained, under-utilised space. The green lawn so green, so soft, so eerily empty.

  On the way back, they went to see the turtles at the rescue — poor, apparently injured creatures of varying size and colour, including a couple of huge specimens, which were stuck crawling over each other in tubs on the beach, but were nevertheless saved, presumably, from painful deaths in the ocean, asphyxiated by bin liners or tangled in sixpack beer holders.

  Ollie had a lot of questions that none of them could answer satisfactorily, and there was no one in particular that seemed the right person to ask. Instead, Jeremy pulled out the frisbee, and Tom and he and Ollie played on the beach near the turtles while Clara and Madeleine went off to the market.

  It was another cloudless, hot, humid day in a seemingly endless run of such days, and, after a few minutes of playing, Tom was sweating profusely. They began ducking under the shade of palms and mangroves between turns. The sweating put him on alert, but it felt good to be sweating from exertion. To have an excuse. None of them was particularly good at frisbee, although Jeremy could send a frisbee incredibly long distances beyond the reach of Tom’s arms. Ollie was a good sport and threw himself into the game. He was easily impressed by the pseudo-trick throws Tom and Jeremy came up with — behind the back or between the legs was about the extent of it, although they managed passable forehands occasionally, too — and he ran at full pelt after the frisbee no matter how far away it was, sitting on the sand or in the water, the fabric of his rashie stretching tight around his middle.

  Near the trees, the sand was raked into piles, and, imperfectly hidden beneath the sand, Tom could see rubbish — plastic bottles, cardboard, napkins, glass — which he took as proof of what he had heard, that they simply raked the rubbish under the sand every morning.

  As they played, Tom and Jeremy talked a
bout Jeremy’s work. He was a boom mic operator for a TV company. He had done it in London first, after film school in Sydney. It was always easy to find work doing that, he said — his height helped — and he could do his own film work on the side, but he’d more or less given up on that now. He had worked with a few big names, Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, although he didn’t really meet her, and he had no notable gossip. Juliette Binoche was nice, he said. Treated everyone on set the same.

  Then they talked to Ollie about Bali and the turtles and the boogie board he wanted to buy at the markets and whether or not it would be any good or a cheaply made knock-off.

  Jeremy took Ollie’s hand as they walked back to the hotel the long way, via the street, and he talked to Tom about parenting. He talked about the hard first months — first years, he grinned — how it never really gets easier, the goal posts keep shifting, but that you kind of settle into it, and enjoy it more, maybe, the more confident you become doing it, the less often you think they might die from some stupid mistake you’ll make.

  He laughed and then grew more serious. I think, he said quietly — although not quietly enough that Ollie could not hear it, Tom thought — I had postnatal depression myself after he was born, for a while there.