Neptune's Tears (17 page)

He wasn’t even sure exactly why he loved her, except that when he was with her he felt like someone he’d always wanted to be. He didn’t feel the weight of his family’s
expectations for him, didn’t feel he was trying to find the right words to impress someone who would forever remain a mystery to him. There was no mystery with Zee. She was home to him, and
he knew they were meant to be together.

Only they couldn’t be. He’d lied to her, over and over again. Lied about who he was and why he was here, and he would never be able to tell her the truth. She who was so strong and
yet so vulnerable, who had used all of her spending money to buy him the eagle talisman, then been too shy to give it to him. He would never forgive himself for failing to protect her from the
cruel truths that engulfed them, truths she was not even aware of. He had no right to interfere with her life more than he already had.

Yet even this far away, she filled the space around him. The drifting scent of flowers and citrus reminded him of her. When the wind changed and brought the warm, humid sea air inland, he
thought of their day at Brighton and the way they’d kissed at the edge of the dark sea. The voices of American tourists that drifted to him as he worked were so like hers he would put down
what he was doing and listen, willing it to be her. And so, one day when he left the small, sweltering manuscript room he was working in to take a break and saw, down one of the long grassy alleys
between the miniature temples, a girl with auburn hair standing with her back to him, it made all the sense in the world that it would be her.

Zee had almost decided to go back to Jasmine’s and postpone seeing him until the next day. Her emotions were tangled and she still had jet lag. But suddenly she felt the
warmth of him and the call of his thoughts all around her, and turned to see him standing there.

‘Zee?’

She had rehearsed a hundred things to say, from love to anger. But now, face to face, she had no words at all. They stood staring until he reached for her, wrapping her in his arms and holding
her tight.

‘I know,’ he whispered. ‘I know.’

Later, she would never remember exactly what they said to each other, or what was said with words and what was said without. She remembered that once they touched each other, they did not let
go, and that in his embrace she felt, as she had so often before, the turmoil that held him tighter than she ever could.

At some point she must have asked him how he could have left her the way he did, without a note and without intending to come back, because she remembered him saying, ‘It was the only way
I could leave you at all, Zee. Staying would have been too dangerous, even with Mia helping us. It would have put you both in danger. So I thought if I left that way, you’d be angry enough to
forget me.’

They spent the rest of the afternoon together wandering among the temples. He showed her his favourite structures and sometimes told her the meanings of the relief carvings. Transcribing them
into words was part of the research he was doing, and he knew the stories well. According to legend, the many temples of Prambanan had been built in a single night by a prince to win the heart of a
beautiful young woman.

‘And did he?’ Zee asked.

David shook his head. ‘No. Even after he fulfilled her challenge, she still refused to marry him. So great was her cruel indifference that the gods turned her into a serpent.’

‘Seems fair,’ Zee said, and they tightened their arms around each other.

At the end of the afternoon, as he walked her to the buses at the visitor centre, he turned suddenly quiet. ‘What do we do now, Zee? Nothing has changed, you know, no matter how we feel
about each other. Omura still is going to make me return. I have another two weeks of work here, and my Earth time runs out in a few months. If I’m not on a ship back, they’ll come
looking for me. And they might find you. It’s too dangerous to keep seeing each other in London. I’m planning to request a rotation straight home from here.’

The enormity of their situation washed over Zee. If it was truly as hopeless as he said . . .

‘Shouldn’t we at least have this?’ she asked at last. ‘If this is all we have, shouldn’t we take it? It’s not like your chip will give you away if I come to
you here, not within a week. We can pretend we’re just two ordinary people. We can have more days like today. Isn’t that better than nothing at all?’

In the end, that’s just what they did. Through an effort of imagination and will, they managed to forget their circumstances to enjoy one perfect week. Some days Zee shopped for lunch in
town, then hopped on the bus to Pramabanan and surprised him with a picnic. On Jasmine’s day off, Zee toured the local arts and crafts market with her, buying presents for her family, Rani,
Mrs Hart, her adviser, and even Major Dawson.

‘How is Rani?’ Jasmine asked as Zee paid for the handmade sandals with peacock-blue crystals that would suit Rani’s narrow, high-arched feet to a T.

‘You know our Rani,’ Zee laughed. ‘Breaking hearts left and right, determined never to succumb herself.’

At sunset, David drove into town to spend the evening with Zee. Often they ate dinner with Jasmine and Raj, all four of them cooking, laughing and washing up in Jasmine’s tiny kitchen
sink. One evening, Raj urged them to hurry through the meal so they could take in a real Indonesian specialty – a neighbourhood badminton match.

David confessed he’d never seen badminton played at all. To Zee it was a lazy game played on summer holidays like the Fourth of July. Both of them were unprepared for the huge crowd that
had gathered in an empty lot between large apartment buildings. There were even vendors selling flavoured ices and sweets.

‘There must be three hundred people here,’ David said.

‘Just wait until the game
really
gets going,’ Raj promised. Two neighbourhoods with a longstanding rivalry were going up against each other. As the weaker seeds played each
other, more and more people continued to arrive. When Zee looked up, she could see people watching from apartment balconies and crowded windows. There were even people lining the roofs. It was
stifling in the crowd, but the heat seemed only to increase the tension and excitement. With each round, the contestants became better and better, playing a game nothing like the lazy,
lackadaisical version Zee knew. The shuttlecock flew back and forth with amazing speed. Players rarely missed making a return shot, giving their rackets so much power that the swoop of air through
racket strings and resounding
thwunk
of the shuttlecock could be heard throughout the crowd.

As the long summer evening grew dark, people brought old-fashioned electric lamps out to light the court, connected to outlets by extension cords that trailed out of apartment windows, a
reminder to Zee that not all countries enjoyed the modern advances, and a sign of how much Jasmine must love her country, to return to help it move forward.

By the time the top players faced off against each other, the crowd was charged with excitement. Every returned volley was cheered and every missed shot received a gasp of despair. It was past
one in the morning and the noise was deafening.

‘Aren’t they afraid the neighbours will complain?’ Zee asked.

‘There’s no one to complain,’ Jasmine laughed. ‘Everyone’s here.’

The final sets were the best, so fraught with tension Zee couldn’t look away, her eyes so focused on the flying shuttlecock she felt the image was permanently burned onto her retinas. And
though David had never seen the sport before, he caught on quickly and was as into it as the rest of them.

By the time the final winners received their rounds of applause, the crowd was limp with exhaustion. ‘I guess we’ll know who to watch for in the next Olympics,’ Zee
commented.

Raj shrugged. ‘These are just the neighbourhood best. Not even close to making the Olympic team.’

The next night, David arrived with a set of borrowed rackets and a canister of shuttlecocks, and he and Zee set off for a park to try their hand. They were both miserable at it, and counted it a
great success to keep the shuttlecock in the air for more than a minute at a time. Two of the shuttlecocks they lost in the shrubs, though Zee found one of them later and quietly tucked it in her
pocket to keep as a souvenir. For a split-second, she remembered that she was leaving in a few days, and a sadness close to panic rose within her. Then she returned to David, smiling as best she
could.

Walking back to Jasmine’s, David asked her if there was anything special she wanted to do on her last day.

‘Not really,’ Zee said. The very words
last day
sounded like a death sentence.

‘Good,’ David said, ‘because there’s somewhere special I want you to see. We’ll have to leave here about four in the morning to catch it, though. Are you up for
it?’

Zee nodded. ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

‘No way,’ David said. ‘It’s a surprise. But I’m renting a car, so I promise to get you to the airport in plenty of time for your flight.’

Zee packed the night before and, because she’d be gone by the time Jasmine left for the hospital, she placed the gift she’d bought her on the table. It was a beautifully embroidered
bed coverlet worked in Jasmine’s favourite colours of blues and greens. Vines ran along the borders, making a home for swallows that took flight across the coverlet’s centre. Slipping
away to buy it the day Jasmine took her to the art market hadn’t been easy, but Zee was sure she’d kept the purchase a secret, and smiled to think of Jasmine’s surprise.
She’d just finished tucking a note into the wrappings when she heard soft footsteps on the stairs, and opened the door before David could knock. As he started downstairs with her single piece
of luggage, she took a final look around the apartment.
Have a happy life, Jasmine. A happy, happy life.
Then she closed the door softly and hurried to follow her own fate.

The sky had just begun to lighten when they arrived, though sunrise itself was still half an hour away. The visitor centre wasn’t open yet, but there was a light on
inside. David went around to the back and returned minutes later with two passes and a parking sticker. ‘I worked here a few days before Prambanan,’ he explained as he tethered the car
securely. Like all cars on Java, it was an older model, one of the first pneumatics that had come along, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be stolen. He held his hand out to Zee.
‘Let’s go.’

She still couldn’t see anything but dark jungle falling away on all sides. ‘Where are we?’

‘This is Borobudur,’ he explained, ‘the largest Buddhist temple on Java. It was built about the same time Prambanan was, over a millennium ago. Both temples were partially
destroyed by an earthquake and this whole area was abandoned. When explorers stumbled on them in the seventeenth century, no one knew they’d ever existed.’

Zee thought of the portrait sculptures on the walls of Prambanan, dancing in silence as the jungle grew towards them, their faces and the names of those who’d imagined them forgotten. Was
that what life was? You lived, you danced, you were forgotten? No, she thought with sudden insight. Others found you. Explorers came along and found you. People like David retrieved your story.
Nothing you ever did was truly lost.

‘Can you see it?’ David was asking.

Zee squinted at what seemed a gathering of shadows in the distance. As they walked closer, she saw that it was a large building, built in tiers of dark stone. The tiers were cracked and uneven.
Whole sections seemed to tilt. Compared to Pramabanan with its grassy paths and tiny temples, Borobudur seemed unfriendly, almost menacing.

‘What’s inside?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. This is solid stone.’

The grounds weren’t open yet and so they were the only people on the path that led to the vast, eerie structure. The only sound was the occasional screech of a monkey. She wondered why
he’d brought her here but said nothing.

As if reading her thoughts, David paused when they came near the foot of the monument. ‘Do you see them now?’

At first she didn’t, but then suddenly, despite the dim murkiness, she did. Looking out at them from every tier, from corners and alcoves and parapets, were Buddhas, hundreds of them.
Their serenity transformed everything around them.

‘Ready to climb, then?’ he asked. ‘You mean we can go up to them?’

‘Sure, all the way to the top. Follow me.’

On her own, Zee could have spent hours on each tier, examining the statues and taking in the patterns carved into the stones. She noticed that while all of the Buddhas were seated in a lotus
position, their hands were in many different poses. Some held their hands palm to palm in prayer, some touched the earth, some held objects, some rested one hand on a knee and raised the other to
visitors in peace. She wanted to slow down and examine the variations, but David was a man with a mission, and kept urging her upward.

‘Perfect,’ he said when they reached the large, square top.

The first thing Zee saw were structures shaped like old-fashioned hand-bells, the kind town criers rang, only they were made of stone and brick and much taller than a human. Through their many
small, diamond-shaped openings, Zee saw that each contained a Buddha, and more Buddhas sat in low stone circles looking out towards the horizon.

‘We’re just in time,’ David said. He led her quickly to the east-facing wall and Zee gasped at the view. Far below them lay the dense jungle, deep green with a canopy of fog
drifting just above it. The green reflected up through the fog to give everything a soft green glow, even the pale stone Buddha who kept watch with them. If Zee didn’t know better she would
have sworn the statue was carved of the palest milky jade. As she watched, the sun broke above the horizon. In an instant, its rays transformed the Buddha to shimmering gold. The effect lasted no
more than a minute, but Zee would never forget its magic.

‘Oh,’ she said, reaching for David’s hand. ‘This is my favourite Buddha of all.’

‘Mine too, and there’s no one I’d want to share him with but you.’ He drew her close to his side and they stood as the golden light fell over them. ‘Here.’ He
reached into his pocket and pulled out a square of folded tissue paper. ‘I’m sorry there’s no box. They’re not big on gift wrap here.’