Troppo (15 page)

‘Mmm.' I swim over. Circle his waist with my legs. ‘So what did your parents do for work in the Pacific?'

‘They were missionaries.'

‘Really? So … what about you?'

‘What about me?'

‘You don't – I mean, are you religious?' He's got me worried. I'm not too fond of the whole missionary idea.

‘I'm not Christian. My brothers and sisters all still go to church but I was the black sheep in the family. I wouldn't say I'm
irreligious
. I'm really interested in the beliefs of the people here. Like about this place,' he presses me closer to him, ‘or the place you talked about near Cahyati's village, or dukuns.'

Since last night my head has been buzzing with questions for Matt about the dukun.

‘Why have you got it in for Shane? Why are you going to a dukun about him?'

Matt unlaces my legs. ‘It wasn't my idea. Bapak Joni talked to me about it – he's got personal reasons for disliking Shane, and on a purely professional level, I think he's keen to take out the competition. I'm just going along for the ride, you know, interested to learn a bit more about black magic, if it can work on a bule. This kind of stuff is vanishing as quick as satellite dishes are going up.'

I tread water, perplexed. Just going along for the ride? ‘But what if it does work? If Shane gets really crook and dies or something? Have you got it in for him that bad?'

‘I'm not trying to kill the bloke, if that's what you're implying. But I do think he's a waste of oxygen. Like I said last night, the dukun's spell is just to make him crook, to take him out of the equation for a while. If he goes, things will be a lot easier for the rest of us who are trying to live here. There have been rumours that some of the local blokes have something else planned for him, but I don't have a clue what.'

I feel a tremor of wariness. I am certain Matt's a hell-man, one of those characters who'll be talked about across the archipelago for years to come, and like all hell-men, he courts darkness.

‘So you said you wanted to go to the dukun?' There's a tilting, half-teasing, half-mad look in his eyes.

I did yesterday, in the warmth of Dennis and Meri's kitchen, mouth full of sticky rice, heart ready for adventure. But wouldn't that make me responsible, implicated, accessory to anything that happened to Shane?

‘Come on then,' he says and it's a dare. A challenge.

Moral reluctance battles curiosity. Curiosity wins. But only after I've promised myself to tell Shane.

So I step out of the pool with my back to him, conscious of the water streaming from me, conscious of my own lissom body from too many bad nasi campurs and gutter-grown prawns. I wonder what he sees when he looks at me? My skin's darker than it was in Perth. My eyes are dark. My hair's long, printed straight down my back like monsoonal rain. Pretty much as good as it gets. I turn to face him. He sweeps back his hair with a hand.

‘Ayo,' he says.

I heard a savage story about a dukun when I was a teenager. Dad had offered our house in Kuta to some family friends for a week during school holidays and we relocated to Balangan, a white-sand, blue-water cove. The road down to Balangan was still unmarked, a hazardous slide of loose gravel and slyly squealing pigs. We slept on the balcony of a guesthouse, on thin mattresses under mozzie nets. At night, Dad got on the piss and I let a Brazilian butterfly-kiss my thighs in swap for sips of buttery arak. Until I got caught. Dad was disgusted. Not because he found me necking a bloke ten years my senior but because I was with a Brazilian.

‘No Germans, no Brazilians,' he told me.

‘What about Japs?'

‘Yeah. Japs are alright.'

Dad's measure of a man's worth was how courteous he was in the surf and how well he surfed; in his experience, Germans or Brazos didn't make the grade.

Dad kept me closer after that. No sneaking to the other guesthouses to watch the backpackers practise fire poi. No drifting to the rock platform between Balangan and Dreamland in a white dress.

The night I heard the dukun story I was wrecked sideways in a hammock. The surf had been a solid four to six foot and on low tide I missed a take-off and got dragged over a jungle of reef.

It scissored up my bikini, my back.

The blokes at the guesthouse, Aussies mostly, made a fuss and painted me up with Mercurochrome. They complimented Dad on having such a gutsy daughter and I think he was secretly proud.

With nightfall came violent rumbles. The surf was doubling, trebling. I was glad I wouldn't be able to go out the next day. The men's voices, scarred and rough, were almost crushed by the sound of the water. They were talking about Nias. One of the older men said he'd been in Nias in the '60s. With another bloke and a French girl. The three were camping out near a wave. After they'd been there a few days an old man approached and told them to leave.

‘Does someone own this land? We're happy to pay,' offered the Aussie bloke.

‘I don't want your money, I want you to leave.'

There was a splinter-sharp madness. A betel-tinged absence. He shuffled off.

In the surf they learnt he was the town's dukun.

They'd heard about dukuns. They weren't scared. But that night in the tent they discussed whether there'd be repercussions if they stayed.

‘Nah fuck it, we'll be right.'

The next day the two men scored Lagundris. A flawless, almond-eye barrel. They surfed until they were ravenous, until their skin glowed with the wattage of Jakartan brothels. When they got in, the French girl was out, off somewhere, probably walking. That evening she still hadn't come back. All her stuff was there: passport, money, clothes. But no girl.

They never found her.

We follow the track further up into the mountains. The air here seems so pure compared to the air in Indonesia's cities. When you step from air-conditioning onto a pumping artery of Jakarta or Denpasar or Balikpapan it crushes you; the air's bronchial, it's infection, it's smoke and soap and shit. But here, these soaring, scarred trees keep it clean; have swallowed penicillin, the radio, and Sukarno in their rings.

After another half an hour, we reach a village and Matt pulls up in the shade. Within moments we're surrounded by a bunch of women pinching and crowing. ‘Who's this? Where's she from? Is this your wife?'

Matt laughs and shakes his head.

They turn to me, talking over the top of each other in Indonesian, frank and nosy.

‘Matt's a good person,' they say. ‘He's put two of the children in this village through primary school and he's always bringing gifts. How long have you known him? Are you going to marry him? Do you have any children?' Their hands go to my belly. ‘How long have you been in Indonesia? What hair!' They lift it out, let it run through their fingers.

We break away from the women and follow a track further into the jungle. The dukun's shack is a squat wooden structure with smoke leaking through the roof. Around it, a yard is pegged out neatly in bamboo. A couple of bare-bummed kids chase
the chooks. Shell-shaped leaves spiral to rest. The dukun is nothing like I imagined, no mask or bones through his ears. He looks like an ordinary village bloke, crouching on the doorstep of his shack, mobile phone jammed between shoulder and ear, fingers racing the skin off a rambutan. He doesn't stop talking when we arrive, so Matt and I drift to a bamboo bench and wait.

‘Is he the closest dukun to Batu Batur?'

‘Nah, there's a couple of others in town. But Bapak Joni told me they're frauds. Their ilmu isn't very strong and the local people will only go to them if they need help to find something they've lost, or maybe if they get sick.'

My eyes are fixed on the scrimshaw patterns of ants and earth.

‘Apparently his father was really powerful. People would come to him from as far away as Bandar Lampung. They say he could turn himself into a tiger, disappear. Bapak Joni reckons there's not many of them who can do that now. He told me a story about one dukun who was locked up during Dutch colonial times. Apparently this dukun could project his body so that he appeared in two places at once – both in the village and the jail. The Dutch were so spooked they let him go.'

‘So has this guy's knowledge been passed down from his father?'

‘Yeah, as far as I understand it's generally in the family. Usually it gets passed on to the first son but this guy is the second son. When his dad started teaching his older brother, the kid got really crook. This shit's dangerous, Penny. You've gotta be strong. You're trafficking energy from fuck knows where and if you're not strong enough …'

A shadow eclipses the patterns of the ants.

‘Penny, Bapak Dudi.' Matt stands.

The dukun holds my fingers for a moment longer than polite.

Matt and the dukun speak to each other in Bahasa Lampung.
The dukun seems pissed off we're here unannounced. But when Matt pulls out a wad of fifties his eyes light up like bee stings and he quickly ushers us inside and clears space for us to sit. A ray of wet shimmering light strikes the dukun's cheekbone. In it swirls mosquito wings and dust motes. The dukun moves around the shack gathering things and I try not to breathe. The air is bitter with pond-grown vegetables.

At last the dukun settles. Marks a circle on the floor of his hut with rice. Inside the circle he places squares of paper patterned with Arabic prayers, tiny hooked bones, wire, rusty nails, chipped mirror and flinders of glass. He gestures for Matt to pass him something. It's hair. Hair the yellow of nicotine-brushed teeth. It looks like Shane's. How the hell had Matt managed to get hold of Shane's hair? The dukun's lips move but I can't understand the words. My legs ache and I uncross them. Despite crouching, Matt still doesn't seem uncomfortable. His eyes are closed, his face motionless.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the temperature changes, like the first stirrings of fever. It gets warmer and warmer. At first I think it's because there are three of us crammed into a small space, that it's the poor ventilation, but the heat builds steadily electric until even the dukun is sweating, until I feel a crushing pressure in my head like a tropical hangover no amount of Nurofen will numb.

Then blackness.

Then I'm mumbling goodnight to Matt at Ibu Ayu's, fatigued beyond belief. I don't remember what else happened in the shack. I don't remember the ride home. Think, I say to myself, twisting hot on the bed,
think
! It must be in there somewhere.

But I can't think, can't remember a thing.

I wake up nauseous under the beak-like click of the fan, check my phone. There's still no message from Josh. So I call him. I figure it's better this way, better to be spontaneous and heartfelt than to think and overthink what I should say.

He doesn't answer.

So I text: U ok? We need to talk.

Should I sign off with a kiss? Maybe not …

Head whirring, I fall back onto the pillow. What on earth happened yesterday? Did Matt black out as well? He mustn't have, if he managed to ride me home. Maybe I passed out from the heat. Maybe I'm getting crook, my guts aren't a hundred percent this morning. But I've never passed out like that before, never had hours blanked out in my memory – except after heavy drinking. I'll drop in on Matt tomorrow, on the way to Shane's, will try to catch him before he heads up to Lampung for work, ask him what he remembers. I'm pretty sure he's off tomorrow. At Dennis' he said he had to go back in a couple of days.

The light in the bungalow shifts from a sun-kissed wood colour to glazed ceramic greens. Outside, a bouquet of fresh rain. Shane's tomorrow. I'm ready to start work, ready for rhythm and routine and a challenge. I wonder what he'll get me doing, if I'll be on the books as well as running the staff. That Kristi is gunna be a tough one to manage, saucy and haughty. Then the blokes who made me pay for parking – there'll be no more of
that
from tomorrow. And he's sure to have cleaning and kitchen staff, gardeners. I don't think I'm out of my depth: the budgets don't scare me, the management aspect doesn't scare me, Shane doesn't scare me, the stalking thing is uncomfortable but should ease off once I get set up with a bike. The only thing that has got me really worried is this talk about Shane being targeted, by Matt and maybe by other blokes, or young religious fanatics. Can I risk it? Is a good wage and five grand enough? Should I head to the Kiwi's and spend a day trawling for jobs, find something else, maybe in Java? I'm not going back to Perth. Not yet. Risk always makes things sharper, throws into contrast the highs and lows, gives clarity. As a surfer, I know this, I've lived this. Living in Perth, like a sleepwalker, I've missed this.

Shane's tomorrow.

That evening, I wait with a drink on the balcony while Ibu cooks for the Frenchman and me. It's the first time I've seen him in days. He turns the beer-curled pages of an old
Tracks
magazine. A mozzie coil poisons the cuts on our ankles.

‘How much longer you here for, Emile?'

‘How much?'

‘When do you leave?'

Ibu Ayu shuffles out slowly with our cutlery.

‘Ah. Tomorrow I think. I get the bus to mountains and then Padang.'

‘You leaving already? Where you go?' Ibu Ayu asks.

‘Padang. Then fly to Jakarta, Bali.'

‘Oh yeah. What have you got planned in Bali?' I take a swing on my beer.

‘Surfing, of course. But also yoga. There is one very famous yogi in Ubud next week. I go to him.'

‘Have you got any more work lined up in the new year, any more photo stories?'

He looks at me. He's so self-contained, gives so little away. Plenty of travellers who've been on the road alone for months or years can't shut up about their experiences. The Frenchman is the exact opposite. He drops his criminally dark eyes. Turns another page.