Island of Demons (45 page)

Walter had built the place in conformity to Balinese notions of space. So the kitchen and its fire lay to the south, this being the direction of the sun and corresponding god, the well was dug to the north and the realm of the sea god, the barn set up to the west, house shrines to the north-east and so on. It kept the servants and guests happy and drilled the importance of cardinal points into the McPhees themselves and soothed poor Made Kaler who was originally from the other side of the mountain and so totally disoriented at living ritually back to front in the south.

One of the disadvantages of Walter's position as architect-almost-on-site was that he was expected to sort out any problems that might arise, as in the present case where the well had run dry. So we found ourselves making the mid-afternoon walk, as so many times before, across the gem-like green of the ricefields towards the ridge on which their house stood with a certain high incumbence, enjoying the swish or reeds and grass against our bare legs – a memory from childhood – and steeped in the mellow clatter of wooden cowbells. “We make a beeline,” said Walter, “which is as the crow flies.” Arrived at the house, we were greeted with bowing regret. Tuan Colin had gone out in the car. Tuan Bayung – Gregory – had gone for a walk. It was not known when he would return. Both the
nyonyas
were taking a siesta. Perhaps we, ourselves, might care to rest downstairs, or lie down in one of the pavilions, and tea would be brought. We settled in the main living room with its great, carved beams, views out over the valley and minstrels' gallery running round all four sides. Plush cats had disposed themselves all over the furniture. The interior of the house virtually purred with them, for Jane had a weakness for cats and was nicknamed
Nyonya Meng
, “Mrs Pussy”, by the Balinese. For the local builders, no detailed plans, such as Walter abhorred, had proved necessary, just a rough sketch, a wave of the hand and a walk round the site. They made the whole thing work and limited their fussing to arcane numerology – the odd and even numbers of beams and such. Traditional bamboo and thatch were forgiving media that would expand to accommodate Western architectural obsessions yet augmented the organic feel of the finished building. There was not a nail in the place, everything tied together with rattan and pegs and the whole resting lightly on the earth, more a piece of knitting than a Promethean construction. When the mountain sent out one of its many earth tremors, brick and stone split and tumbled but bamboo and wood merely yawned and stretched. We tucked our bare feet up on the soft sofas (“Sofa so good” – Walter) and I admired the quality of Nyoman Lempad's carving as Walter instinctively charmed the houseboy, poured tea and settled back, staring up at the internal spiderwork of the roof struts, impressed by his own design.

“In Bali, every house is based on the body of its owner,” Walter mused, “combined in the correct proportions. So this one is saturated with the span of Colin's arms and hands and the length of his feet.” The thought made me feel as if I were clutched in a pudgy, sweaty-socked embrace – quite sick. We sat in silence for a while.

Then the peace was split by a cry from upstairs, piercing and primeval, almost a sob, a reprise of the Widow Traverso's scream. It was not a cry for help but rather a noise imbued with the despair that only comes of a terrible wisdom, like the last defeated sound you will ever make in this world. We both leapt to our feet and I was halfway to the front door when I realised that Walter was not with me but halfway up the stairs. Above each door, was a transom that allowed light from the bedrooms to fall down into the gallery. I watched, appalled, as Walter skirted along the polished passageway, took a chair from against the wall and climbed on it to peer boldly in through the fanlight. He nodded, smiled, returned the chair to its place and sidled down the stairs and past me to sit on the front step and light a cigarette.

“Walter. How could you be so shameless?”

He shrugged. “Better sorry than safe. Anthropologists spend their lives looking through other people's keyholes. They must occasionally expect us to look back.”

“Well … what did you see?” He looked up at me and smiled and said nothing. Just chuckled. “Walter. Who was it? What was going on?”

He rose and dusted off the backs of his legs with irritating langour. “I think I'll go and take a look at that well.” He sidled off round the corner and I heard his voice talking to one of the servants. I made to follow, paused, looked up at the transom. The cry rang out again. God help me, I had to know. I could have borne not knowing but to have Walter know and not tell was insufferable. Each step of the stairs creaked beneath my tread. At any moment, one of the boys would come and catch me red-handed and -faced. The chair stuck, then scraped on the floor, wobbled as I climbed up. Bamboo did not make good furniture. The door was hung to open outwards. If it opened now I would be pitched over the edge to a death only slightly better than the embarrassment of being caught. I put my face to the glass and looked in.

At first I could see little but my own dismembered reflection. Light was leaking into the bedroom through drawn curtains from outside. The bed was sited facing north as prescribed by Balinese notions but the head of the figure sprawled on it had its back towards me. Never mind. It was blonde and unmistakable as it twisted from side to side in denial or some agony of surrender. And crouched between its legs was another dim figure engaged in an activity that looked vaguely doggish, with hands raised to Jane's breasts like a man randomly twiddling the knobs on his wireless set to improve reception. Suddenly the whole scene shifted into focus and the dog raised its head. Not Gregory. Not one of the boys. Certainly not McPhee. Margaret! Gruesomely naked but for necklace and dangly earrings, her mouth a great red smear hinting at God knew what vampiric perversities. No wait. That was not the blood of menses nor Rangda's due of afterbirth. That was lipstick and, unless further degradations had been attempted, it had been put on her mouth and only subsequently smeared in the heat of battle. It seemed for a moment that she looked directly at the transom and saw me, but the laws of physics surely prevented that, and she returned gurgling to her task as the dreadful cry rang out again from Jane and I teetered back on the trembling chair and fled from the house.

Outside, Walter was calmly talking to Greg, over by the wall of the well, like two old men discussing the season's crop of runner beans. Surely, by rights, Greg should have been up there with Margaret, taking pictures, tripod twirled to a rakish angle, stopwatch held up to the light, ears straining to pick up any revealing slip of the native tongue. I could hear Walter showing off, reciting some fancy Malay
pantun
, full of puns on the well as a joyful source of water and the eye as a sad one, Greg all nodding, dutiful interest. On seeing me, he switched to a more Freudian mode.

“You're not going in deep enough,” Walter was saying with surely calculated salaciousness, flashing glances at me. How much did Greg know? What was he prepared to put up with? “You're up here on the backbone of the ridge and, in the dry season you'll end up just scratching at a damp bottom. I reckon you need to go down another thirty meters but there's always the danger of bedrock that you'll not be able to penetrate, so you might want to think about moving down towards the river and drilling your shaft in a virgin patch.” He brightened, abandoning metaphor to a better idea. “Unless you use explosives. Dynamite should get you flowing again.” He could see it all in his mind, lighting the fuse, the hiss, the roar, the almighty bang. What fun. “Yes! Dynamite!” he nodded, “that's the thing.”

“Walter, they'd never let you get your hands on dynamite.”

“Black powder! Lee King sells firecrackers. He must have access to gunpowder. A Beryl – I mean barrel – of that should do it!”

Greg laughed and slapped Walter on the back. “Well, I was in the Officers' Training Corps and it sounds a little dodgy to me, old man, but I think we'll have to ask Jane. I don't know how long she'll be.”

“Oh, I should think about another ten minutes should be about right,” Walter said. We both frowned and looked questioningly at him. “Oh. I heard sounds of stirring, running water, you know.” Walter's knowledge of the female sexual climax proved accurate. And ten minutes later, there they were, hand in hand no less, the adulterous minxes, taking advantage of male innocence to flaunt their Sapphic urges. Margaret had shed the harlot jewellery and wiped her mouth of Delilah's paint and looked as cleareyed and scrubbed as though she were back from singing in the church choir. With shock, I remembered that her first fieldwork had been on something like the sexuality of adolescent Samoan girls in church schools. Oh dear! It struck me then that most anthropology is really autobiography. I could not bring myself to kiss her though Walter, with a total disregard for hygiene, unhesitatingly planted a great wet kiss of greeting on her lips.

“Stay to dinner,” urged Jane, looking relaxed and oddly beautiful in a simple linen dress. “We have turtle.” Not just turtle but
a
turtle, presented by McPhee's Kuta musicians cum fishermen. And there it was, poor thing, turned on its back, legs pedaling the air, helplessly awaiting the butcher's knife. “Satay for everyone. I'll tell the boys.” I had an unwanted vision of Margaret, red lipped, going down determinedly on the dank sea beast. I have never liked turtle meat, heavy and oily and with an attenuated taste of fish that speaks of involuntary contamination rather than true flavour, so I ate sparingly, mainly of rice and peanut sauce. Its flesh would not be wasted. The Balinese regard it as a great luxury and would spin it out amongst themselves in a web of exchange and social obligation. Beryl would be eating roots and berries back in Ubud, bringing Walter's book to term, like a dutiful wife.

It was one of those evenings like ruched satin that you can only have before age makes you constantly aware of the tinny ticking of life's clock. I recall it now in a thick wash of sepia tones. At this altitude, you looked down on the plains as from a high tower and the wind had a slight chill delicious in the tropics. Walter mixed a cunning new cocktail in an antique silver bowl and floated delicate purple and red bougainvillea blossoms on top, then decanted it into delicate little glasses.

“We shall call it ‘Breast Stroke' in honour of the turtle – and various other things.” I shot him a warning look. He always went too far.

“Why the tiny glasses? Looks like the product of an ant's orgasm.” Greg tasted warily. Then, “I think maybe ‘Walter's Dynamite',” he offered hoarsely. “
This
would certainly bore a hole through solid rock.” Walter slid behind McPhee's piano and improvised some gentle bespoke variations on Balinese themes, caressing the keys breaststrokelike, the music blowing out into the darkened ricefields. I turned towards Greg.

“How did the research go in Batuan?” I asked. When conversation fails, it is always easiest to get a man talking about his work.

“Absolutely non-stop, old man.” He blew air. “With Margaret as taskmaster, between work-sessions, one barely got time for a wank and a sandwich before being lashed to one's labour again.”

“Don't exaggerate, Greg. It was fascinating,” corrected Margaret, sweeping in and tapping ash from her cigarette. Did I imagine fishy breath? “Fulfilling. Painters make good specimens except for their notorious inability to put their art into words. Frustration breeds trancelike passivity and withdrawal from the world, a cultural validation of temperamental tendencies to dissociated states probably originally rooted in childhood toilet training.” So that was it. My lessons in perspective were simply grace notes to the organisation of bowel movements. Greg clamped his mouth shut and, himself, withdrew into trance, watching with owl eyes as he displaced his own attention to the anal cleaning of his pipe bowl.

“And what do you think of their paintings? Are they any good?”

She frowned. The concept was alien to her. “Okaaay. They are neither good nor bad, Rudi. They are merely a cultural symptom like the sustained emotional passivity of our last village, Bayung Gede.” Irritation flared. I had been to that village, too, knew the men she had been working with better than she did. I could see, in my mind, their thin, bony chests like those of skinned rabbits.

“And when you were in Bayung Gede, the simple fact they were malnourished, riddled with malaria, iodine-deficient and therefore prey to hypothyroid conditions – was that, too, a mere cultural symptom or part of the explanation for any passivity?”

She shook her head sadly. “No, no, no. You do not understand, Rudi. Nature has nothing to do with it – least of all in Bali. Have you never seen a Balinese man breastfeed his baby? Look, when I was in Manus, I collected over 35,000 pieces of children's art and discovered that they are totally free of the animism that characterises Western children's paintings. They have just not been
taught
that that is what children should be doing. The whole thing was beautifully put to a colleague of mine working in the American Southwest by an old Red Indian storyteller. He told her that, at the creation, the Great Spirit had handed each people a clay cup to dip into the waters and give form to their way of life. ‘But now,' he said, ‘our cup has been broken'. The Balinese cup is chipped and cracked and leaking badly but it is not yet broken. What we must do is capture its outlines before it is shattered by the impact of the outside world. It is always the case that nature provides the keyboard but culture plays the tune. QED.”

Over her shoulder, Walter played a – to me – very natural-sounding tune on a clearly cultural keyboard. Under the pretence of refilling my still-intact cup, I crossed the room to where Jane sat alone, staring out into darkness – dissociated some might say. I sat down beside her.