by Luke Horton
But most importantly, Jeremy was at ease with himself. Self-consciousness or anxiety in others repulsed Tom. As much as he tried to empathise, as much as he dreaded exactly this kind of judgement of his own anxiety, he found himself eye-rolling inside, thinking: just, like, pull yourself together. People who were comfortable with themselves didn’t look at you the same way, with the same sharpness. They weren’t constantly making appraisals. Their self-possession could be infuriating, but on balance it was better than the alternative, and anyway, this was unlikely to happen with Jeremy, who had not a whiff of smugness about him. His physical presence, which at times scanned as apologetic, and clumsy, made this impossible.
On the morning of the best day, they had breakfast together at the hotel, under the thatched roof of the open-air restaurant. Looking up at the roof from their table, they saw the dustier, though more richly golden underside of the woven panels, which extended in a steep pitch to a small opening at the top that showed a square of blue. From the underside of the roof and between exposed beams hung paintings, mostly large-scale works, in a wide range of styles — works reportedly donated to the hotel from the many artists who had stayed there over the years. Some of them looked like this might have been the case. There were several moody, airbrushed portraits of women with complex, variegated hairstyles wearing reflective visors that looked like they had probably been painted in the eighties. But some of them looked suspiciously like the kind of art you found everywhere in cafes and hotels in Bali: that odd mix of the grotesquely sensual and jokily surreal that often featured monkeys or gorillas engaged in human activities, like riding motorbikes or surfing or smoking joints or holding paintbrushes and pallets and wearing berets.
Some talk at breakfast was about this, both the styles of art prevalent in Bali — they told Madeleine and Jeremy about the Kirschler museum — and the authenticity of these supposedly donated works of arts from the many esteemed artist guests of the hotel over the decades. They had to be discreet about it, as there were only a few other people at tables around them, and the waitresses — the few women they saw each day and whom they had now begun to recognise and talk with more freely — were constantly on the floor, serving and clearing up after the guests. They would hate for them to think they were mocking the hotel.
Madeleine was of course friendliest with these women. She knew a couple of their names now, Eka and Inten — or Indah maybe — and there was talk of a play date with one of their sons, who was of a similar age to Ollie. Tom admired this about Madeleine, how she made the most of the people around her, made herself a little community wherever she went. And he admired more generally how comfortable she and Jeremy were with the Balinese people, as far as they were encountering local people — almost exclusively in service to them. Clara was comfortable, too, with these interactions, in her understated way, but Tom found he couldn’t relax into it, these transactions that over days morphed into relationships; he felt he was either overdoing it the whole time, and getting things wrong, fussing too much, or trying to be cool about it and becoming paranoid that he was being rude.
Other topics came up. Brexit — what the French thought about it, and about the British in general — then Jeremy’s French, which Tom told them he admired. He had always regretted not learning another language.
Your French is so good, he said.
It’s okay, Jeremy demurred.
No, he is fluent, you are fluent, Jeremy, Madeleine said, holding on to Ollie’s arm while she popped the cap on the sunscreen.
Maybe.
Yes, you are. He is fluent, but not bilingual.
Fluent, but not bilingual, Tom repeated.
Yes, of course. He can speak it, he can hold conversations, but maybe he can’t write an essay in French, or give a lecture, maybe.
Okay, I hadn’t made that distinction, Tom said.
It is not maybe the dictionary definition of it, but yes, of course, he is fluent. You are fluent, Jeremy. But not bilingual.
Madeleine applied the sunscreen to Ollie’s arms, pushing up his sleeves while he chewed on a piece of pineapple and stared vacantly into the distance. The piece of pineapple appeared in his open mouth, worked its way towards the front, looked about to fall out, then fell back into one of his cheeks. Tom found all this very endearing, the way food quietened Ollie, the way it occupied him. How hypnotised he was by it. The absentness of children; the way they were permitted to just disappear.
It was a pleasant way to start the day. Tom was exhausted — he still wasn’t sleeping well — and he had his sunglasses on. They were effectively outdoors, so he did not feel self-conscious about that. He ate all of his eggs and toast and tea and several other things from the baskets of pastries and the plate of fruit that came with it, even if none of it was especially fresh or particularly high quality. It was serviceable, it was free, and he felt like indulging himself.
For most of the breakfast, when he wasn’t eating, mostly from the plate of fruit, Ollie agitated for another a game of frisbee on the beach, and finally they did that, while Madeleine and Clara stayed behind, moving with their books and phones and towels from the restaurant to the poolside lounges.
It was another sparkling day out on the beach, cloudless, the sun climbing fast, but not yet too sharp, the beach starting to fill up. The boardwalk was bustling: men walking together in traditional clothing — sarongs and small, square hats — brilliant and immaculate; hawkers carrying coconuts in tubs on their heads; schoolchildren on bicycles; tourists wandering by, looking dazed, sizing up the hotels and their beachside frontages as they passed.
The couple with the Balinese nanny were back out on the beach. The nanny had the child building sandcastles with a bucket, while the mother, in a nearby banana lounge, looked up occasionally from her book to comment on her progress. The father was behind them, flat on a timber platform in the shade, shirtless, looking at his phone. One of Ollie’s wilder throws landed on the sand in front of the man, and he did not flinch.
Not long into the game, the woman strained to find her husband in the shadows behind her.
Come over here, love, she called, gesturing to the lounge beside her.
He did not respond.
Come over here, she said again.
She turned back, and, again facing the sea and her daughter, she called back to her husband flatly, loudly, all the sing-songiness gone from her voice, and her Australian accent more pronounced each time, Get off the Insta, love, get off the Insta. She said it several times more, less and less good-naturedly, but it had no effect on her husband. He did not move or reply until maybe fifteen, twenty minutes later, when Tom and Jeremy and Ollie had finished their game and were leaving the beach. Then, in one slow, graceful motion, he rolled off the platform onto his feet and trudged sleepily over to his family.
It became a running joke.
They got back to Madeleine and Clara, and Ollie nuzzled into his mother’s armpit and rubbed his head all over her breasts, while she held her phone away and above his head to continue reading. Tom settled into the banana lounge between her and Clara, who was reading her book, and Jeremy took the next one after Madeleine.
Tom got out his phone and checked his messages. Mostly things from the university, nothing important. He opened Facebook for a moment, but closed it again immediately, opened Instagram instead, and, looking around him, wondered if he should post a pic. Now didn’t seem the time. Madeleine was holding Ollie at arm’s length, while he bounced against her arm, pressing up to her and whining softly.
Because you’re a big boy, that’s why, she was saying.
I’m not a big boy, he moaned.
You’re not?
I don’t feel like a big boy.
You don’t?
He grinned and spoke louder: I feel like a teenager, Maman! He clasped his mother’s hand delightedly at the thought.
Madeleine laughed and looked
over at Jeremy, who raised his eyebrows back.
Jeremy had been following various sports on his phone, on silent. He’d walk over to Tom occasionally and show him things, replays, turn up the sound for a second. Or he’d send Tom links to clips, and Tom would turn it up and the sound of commentators shrieking players’ names over and over would disrupt the women talking. But they had all begun sending each other things, after their morning chats. Madeleine’s were all job openings at European universities. Jeremy’s were news articles, mostly, things they would read in the afternoon and talk about at dinner or the next morning: George Pell, the never-ending #MeToo revelations, US politics, the Mueller Report, potential Democratic candidates. Madeleine and Jeremy were invested in US politics. They listened to podcasts on the subject and had strong opinions, knew all the leading Democrats’ names, backstories, chances.
Tom read the odd thing, tried to keep up, to learn about the new contenders. Clara was interested while they talked about it, but not enough to read the articles. She had never been particularly concerned with politics, or even current affairs. She was caught up in her research, her reading — right now, on finding ways to link the writing of Elizabeth Grosz to her research on public art on highways — even if she was determined she wasn’t working while away. She wasn’t on social media much, either, only using Instagram, and that was mainly to stay in touch with friends she no longer saw much of. She rarely posted, herself. She was one of the few people Tom knew who seemed genuinely uninterested in sharing any of her life via social media. What she was interested in was people and their lives, whoever happened to be around her. She prompted long stories from Madeleine about her family and sisters and her work, what life was like in Paris, or Léon — where Clara and Tom had stopped through once, on the way to a farm — and when she spoke of her own interests, it was about the lives of the people around them in Bali, or the way these lives were organised. Like the tsunami evacuation system and the signs she saw around the place.
One day, she said to Madeleine, I want to follow them and see where they go.
You should. Or maybe we could all go, said Madeleine. You should do some research here too, next time.
Maybe I will, she said. I found a PDF of a map. An evacuation plan.
You could do some interviews, Madeleine said.
Yeah, but who with? Clara asked them.
No one knew.
When Tom checked his phone again, he saw that Jeremy had sent him an article on ‘Bernie Bros’ — how the term was offensive to the diversity of his supporters — and Madeleine had sent him a job ad from Goldsmiths, but Tom didn’t open either of these. He was scrolling through Instagram: brutalist architecture; art on the walls of the Guggenheim, more at MOMA; a couple of urban planning accounts showing plazas and aerial views of urban centres, scrolling too fast to see where they were; a photo of Trish’s dogs, two greyhounds, lying on blankets either end of a couch, looking equally contrite (this had seventy-seven likes, including one from Clara and one from Emily); some old friends, two couples, with their kids around the outdoor sculptures in the gardens at Heide; another old friend against a whitewashed wall in Crete; a couple of memes, only one of which made any sense to him; a New Yorker cartoon; a selfie of a girl he had never met in person, who was ten years younger than him at least, in a bikini on a beach somewhere; Barry’s latest shot from the bike shop, a selfie with an old party friend, Ira, looking thinner and greyer, but most surprisingly wearing spandex riding gear, Barry’s thumbs-up in the foreground, clearly having taken the photo without Ira knowing; a sponsored post about R U OK? Day coming up (Fuck you, Tom thought); and one from Clara yesterday he didn’t know she’d posted, of a corner of the hotel gardens. It was a perfectly symmetrical shot that framed a bright-green pergola, with a bench and table inside it that were painted powdery pink. Rampant bougainvillea cascaded down either side, and intersecting white pebble paths ran around the perimeter. It had forty-seven likes.
A shadow fell over him. It was Jeremy. He leaned in, serious-faced, and whispered, Get off the Insta, love, get off the Insta, and Tom found himself giggling uncontrollably.
After lunch they went to see the fabrics. Jeremy had the number of a driver who had offered to take them to a batik factory. He and Madeleine were thinking of taking something back to France with them, sarongs maybe, as presents for Madeleine’s family.
It was a picturesque drive through the countryside, valleys full of terraced rice paddies, choked pockets of jungle, food markets full of people eating, groups of men working in bare feet among concrete foundations and timber frames, and others alone, resting on their haunches on the side of the road, smoking and watching the shuttle as it passed.
The factory itself was underwhelming. It was set up for tourists — the rugs and sarongs and throws bright and busy, not the beautiful faded pastels of the fabrics they saw people using as hangings and tablecloths everywhere around them on the streets. They were also expensive, and Tom and Clara quickly lost interest and wandered out to watch a couple of women working at a loom under a corrugated-iron roof in the dirt. Tom wondered what they were being paid and if they were just for show, if any of their work actually made it into the warehouse behind them. He felt stupid standing there watching them and also complicit in their exploitation, and he wanted to leave.
The weather had changed. It was suddenly dark, and he peered out from under the roof as the first big drops hit the ground. The others appeared — Madeleine had found kids’ clothes in one section of the huge warehouse and had bought Ollie some board shorts. And then the sky opened up.
They huddled under a tattered awning outside the factory, waiting to be collected. The rain dragged the branches down on trees, thundered against tin, painted the tile roofs a glossy terracotta. Tom felt sleepy, lulled by the intensity of the rain. Everything had succumbed, everything seemed glad for it, was having its thirst quenched.
A wind had picked up. The fabric across the awning had come away from the frame in places and was flying up into air. It was letting in water towards the back, and the water flowed across the pavement and over Jeremy’s thongs. It’s leaking, he said, his head not far from the sagging green cloth. He manoeuvred himself and Ollie out of the water’s path and closer to Madeleine, putting his arms around her waist.
No one said anything for a moment; they had been made mute by the rain. By its suddenness, the heaviness of it, as much as anything.
That’s how you know it’s a roof, Clara said, finally.
Tom guffawed.
Jeremy and Madeleine looked at them.
What? Madeleine said.
Clara looked embarrassed. Frank Lloyd Wright, she said.
What about him? Madeleine said.
That’s what he said, Clara said. When a client told him the roof was leaking. That’s how you know it’s a roof. All his roofs leaked. When another client complained that he was being dripped on at his desk, Wright told him to move his chair.
Jeremy and Madeleine laughed, and Ollie did, too, exaggeratedly. He was clawing at Madeleine, trying to climb up her body.
Of course, Rossi said that a building wasn’t finished until it collapsed into the ground, Tom said. Jeremy nodded at him slowly.
Back in Sanur everything was sodden, but the rain had passed and the sun was back out. Clara and Madeleine went to their rooms, and Tom went with Ollie and Jeremy to the markets. Jeremy had caved and agreed to buy Ollie a boogie board. They’re so cheap, we’ll just give it to someone before we leave if we can’t take it with us, Jeremy said. Ollie chose one that was blue and white, with red stripes down one side and a picture of a man on a surfboard, emerging from a wave’s barrel. ‘Shred’ was written down the length of the board in a kind of retro computer font. On the way back, Ollie began to mope and lag behind. It had been a long day. Jeremy said he would put him on his shoulders, except that he was carrying the boogie board and all their stuff — bags, w
ater bottles.
Unless, of course, he said, turning to Tom, Tom could carry all this so I can put you on my shoulders?
Or, Tom said, surprising himself, I put Ollie on my shoulders, and you carry all the boring stuff?
Ollie giggled, and they stopped at a railing, Tom crouched down, and then lifted him into the air. He was surprisingly heavy, but they didn’t have far to go. Tom held the boy’s shins close to his sides and staggered forward into a light run. Ducked and weaved around trees and awnings and people on bicycles coming down the street, as Ollie cackled and clenched his knees around Tom’s head and yelled back down what he could see in the distance.
They spotted Clara and Madeleine at one of the restaurant tables with drinks in front of them when they got back, facing out to the sea, which was metallic now in the dusk. Way out beyond Lembongan, which was a fine line of grey in the distance, the storm front was moving away.
The women watched them approach in silence. Tom could tell Clara was surprised to see Ollie on his shoulders, but she was grinning, as if she couldn’t help herself.
Getting in shape, he said, lowering Ollie on to the ground.
He had a sweat stain all down the front of his T-shirt, and his fringe had stuck to his forehead, but it didn’t give him pause. Clara reached out to him as he aired his T-shirt and rubbed his wet back with her palm. This time, he didn’t flinch.
After showers they regrouped for a drink by the pool, then headed out again to a BBQ chicken place Clara had seen was rated highly on the apps. They took a taxi. They had tried nearly everywhere within walking distance now — everywhere that had a rating of four stars or more. But Ali’s Golden Chicken was the perfect choice, because it was the kind of food Ollie would gladly eat.
It was six-thirty when they arrived, and the sky above them had turned lilac. They had beers and Cokes and waters and ordered nearly everything off the menu. It was a tiny place, with a rotisserie in the kitchen and one on the street, and room for only one table inside and a few others in the courtyard under trees, which is where they sat. The menus and the walls and the uniforms of the staff were all in the same gold and red. They devoured the food — plates piled high with fried chicken wings and drumsticks, sides of mash and chips and corn on the cob and mac-and-cheese and jugs of gravy — and they washed it down with more Bintang and more Coke.