When the World Was Steady (15 page)

When, at last, the bus arrived, there were only muted greetings for Aimée, although K’tut swung Ruby into the air and hugged her warmly.

‘They love children, these people,’ said Aimée, as if K’tut couldn’t hear.

‘You’d better get this show on the road, or we’ll miss Buddy’s precious party,’ yelled Max from the rear of the bus. ‘It’s gonna be a beaut.’

When they arrived back in Ubud, it was dusk. The path to the house was lit with firesticks, and the main room had fallen into prepared quiet. There were no shoes at the door, and nobody emerged to greet the returned travellers. Those who had worked so hard all day had retreated to ready themselves, to bathe and scent their skin and to smoothe the creases in their most elegant clothes.

K’tut carried a sleeping Ruby and the luggage to the spare bedroom, upstairs. Aimée settled into a wicker armchair on the netted veranda and lit a long, drooping cigarette, and Max, stepping haltingly, as if in pain, climbed to lie a while on his bed. Emmy was about to go down to her room when Aimée spoke, without turning her head.

‘I see Horace is not here either. I thought he might take some interest in his daughter.’

‘He can’t be far. Last minute details, I expect.’

‘Or a woman, perhaps?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Business, rather.’ Emmy felt defensive on his behalf.

‘Ah, yes. There will doubtless be a lot of business this evening. How forgetful of me.’ So saying, Aimée stubbed out her cigarette on the pristine floor, ignoring the ashtray in front of her. As if she knew about Jenny and were making a point.

Max felt terrible. He felt worse than when the monkey bit him. The doctor hadn’t inspired confidence—even K’tut thought him a very bad man. And the shots made him feel like someone had unpacked his insides on a table and stuffed them in again any old way.

It was hard to tell how much of this pain was in his head. When the doctor stuck the needle into him, Max had tried to think of good things, but Sydney and its range of good and bad were too distant for him to focus on; and when he thought of the best thing he thought, despite himself, of the taste of Jenny’s mouth. He thought of having sex, which he hadn’t ever done (although he pretended to all his friends and even to his father that he had), and which he imagined would be the best thing, superior to anything else. And when he thought of sex—just as the doctor jabbed at the soft flesh of his stomach—it was Jenny’s face he saw, and the texture of her skin he felt beneath his fingertips. It was since then that he had felt terrible.

Max didn’t know whether to lock his door and pull the shutters and lie absolutely still, or whether to give in and go to the party, as his father wanted him to. Buddy had left an envelope on Max’s bed, which contained two substantial joints and a note
which said, ‘These should do the trick. I’m counting on you. See you at 7.’

In an attempt to make up his mind, he lit one of the joints and sat down cross-legged on the floor. He heard an unfamiliar tread on the stair—Aimée—and heard her pause outside his door. He inhaled and held the acrid smoke in his lungs until it trickled from his nostrils of its own accord. He shut his eyes and sat motionless, smoking, until he heard her steps continue down the corridor.

The first guests arrived before Buddy had returned. Suchi and her parents, who had come on foot, walked up the path promptly at seven. Emmy heard them and peered from behind her door to see who it was, but she did not then rush upstairs. She left them instead to Jenny’s care. Jenny and at least a dozen helpers had come up the path while Emmy was dressing. They all wore sarongs of the most elaborate batiks, beneath lacy-bodiced blouses with fitted sleeves. Each woman had her hair sleekly knotted behind her head, and a flower at her ear. As they passed, Emmy heard the jangle of jewellery. These women were the hostesses—in the absence of the host—and they laid out platters and served drinks and settled their guests into comfortable chairs from which they could watch the last glimmerings in the evening sky and the night stars awakening.

Others came after Suchi and her parents, until a steady murmur of conversation wafted down to Emmy’s room. But still she couldn’t hear the broad twang of Buddy’s accent. Someone—Emmy assumed it was Jenny—put on music, popular Indonesian singing with a steady beat. It struck Emmy somehow as an act of desperation. She decided that it was time to join the crowd. She dreaded, for Jenny and for Suchi, the appearance of Aimée without Buddy there: Aimée was a woman who would just
know
about Buddy’s connection to these two. She thought of what Max had
told her about Buddy saying that Eastern and Western women, in such matters, did not mix, and she thought that Aimée was just that, a dangerous mix of Eastern and Western, clearly seeing both ways of being and yet belonging to neither. Emmy thought she should be there.

Emmy wore the one good dress she had brought with her, made of white linen and cotton, with large blue cornflowers on it. It was sleeveless, revealing her ample but well-bronzed arms, and skilfully belted to minimize her hips and full bosom. She wore a long lapis necklace that brought out the blue of the flowers. Her hair swung neatly at her chin. She applied a little make-up and felt quite elegant, worthy of the most sophisticated Double Bay garden party.

But as soon as she walked into the gathering, she felt all wrong. Too old, for one thing, and at a great remove. She had dressed for the wrong life.

The room was filling up, and although there were guests of all ages, the women were all young, with the exception of Suchi’s mother and one other Balinese woman in late middle age. They were dressed in sarongs and blouses similar to those that Jenny and the other girls wore, only finer still, spun in silk, threaded with gold or silver. The younger guests, both Balinese and Western, were clad in an array of styles, but all of them casual. Or trendier. Or something. Emmy wished she had worn her batik shift, sewn by the Ubud tailor. But it was too late for that.

The room was divided into knots of conversation, largely Westerners together and Balinese among themselves. Suchi’s parents sat on the sofa and spoke to no one, alternately smiling at the room at large, and looking nervous. The guests of honour—Kraut and Madé—did not appear to have arrived. Nor were Max or K’tut or Aimée in evidence. Nobody looked around when Emmy came in; nobody seemed to be waiting for Buddy to show up, or even expecting him.

She was wondering whether a discreet retreat would be remarked upon, when Jenny, extricating herself from a conversation with a bloated Australian man in a Hawaiian print shirt, came up to greet her.

‘Emmy, come to meet some guests.’ Jenny took her arm. ‘A glass of punch?’

The punch was made with fruit juices and rice liquor and it was strong and sweet.

‘Where’s Buddy?’

‘I expect him back any time. He is perhaps with the groom. They have always business. The party is going well, yes?’

‘Looks it. Aimée did come, you know.’

Jenny nodded, while smiling across the room at Suchi’s parents. ‘Of course she did. We knew she would. She will come downstairs soon. She hates me.’

‘You? Why?’

‘She says I steal her clothes. She said. Last time. I cleaned them for her and she says it was stealing. Did K’tut not tell you this? She is from Thailand. People from Thailand are often very wicked. Come, meet this nice couple.’

Jenny said all this while nodding and smiling at guests. Her expression was unchanged as she accosted a man and a woman who stood smoking. They were perhaps a decade younger than Emmy, both with long, lank hair tucked behind their ears. The man, Aaron, had a beaked nose and wore an expensive rumpled suit, with Birkenstocks poking out clumsily beneath it. The woman, Gaya, was tiny and draped in tinkling silver. Her batik halter mini-dress gaped to reveal small freckled breasts. No tan-line, Emmy noted.

They gave her the once-over and didn’t seem too interested, but when Jenny introduced her as Buddy’s house-guest, their expressions changed. They were Americans.

‘Been with Buddy long, then?’ Gaya asked.

‘I’ve been here a couple of weeks. We met mountain climbing, and … I’m Max’s guest, really, I suppose. He invited me. Do you both live here?’

‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else! Couldn’t go back. We’re trying to Westernize the kids enough so that they have a choice, but it’s tough.’ Aaron pointed out Raven and Azure, a scruffy little boy of eight or nine and a smaller, slightly more presentable girl. They were tussling in a corner over a hand-held computer game. They looked pretty Western to Emmy.

Gaya explained that Raven attended a progressive boarding-school in California, but that Azure, at six, didn’t yet go to school. She helped them in the French restaurant they ran on Kuta Beach, handing sweets to customers along with their bills. Gaya seemed to think this was cute; Emmy thought of child labour laws.

She could see that Gaya and Aaron couldn’t live anywhere else, and looking around the party she was aware that there were numerous exiles in a similar position, long-haired idealists, wrinkling and thickening, leftovers from the seventies.

‘You wouldn’t think it, but we’re quite a tight community. We look out for each other. We hang out together. You know. It’s hilarious, really, I mean, people come and can’t go. We just love it so much. And of course you can’t get a proper working visa, or own land or anything, so we’re all a bit on the sly. Helping each other out, like I said.’ Gaya laughed. ‘Buddy’s pretty new, but he’s a
big
helper. He’s really got this town under his thumb—he’s in with all the right people.’ She winked. ‘It must come in handy for you, no?’

‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’ Emmy looked around and saw all these white faces as a strong, taut vine, spreading and choking the island. A tight community indeed.

‘Speak of the devil,’ said Aaron.

Buddy was in the doorway, red-faced, grinning, his arm around a younger man with pointed ears who looked somehow
familiar.

‘Come on everyone, listen here a minute. Let’s have a cheer for the man of the evening’—he pushed his companion forward and brought a Balinese woman from behind him—‘and his lovely new wife.’

‘Good on ya, Kraut!’ called the fat man in the Hawaiian shirt.

‘Gustav and Madé! Awright!’ Aaron boomed, raising his glass.

The room filled with whistles and catcalls. ‘To the bride and groom!’ ‘Hooray!’ ‘Cheers, mate!’ ‘Madé, you’re fucking gorgeous!’

‘Isn’t she?’ whispered Gaya. Madé was tall and supple. She looked like an Indonesian cover girl, with her long, black hair framing her face and swooping down her back, and her perfect, open features. She seemed pleased and embarrassed and she reached for Gustav’s hand.

‘Kiss!’ someone shouted. ‘Let’s have a kiss!’

Gustav turned and planted a smacking embrace on Madé’s lips. She flushed. A flashbulb went off.

‘They’re not much for kissing, the Balinese,’ whispered Gaya. ‘Not big on PDA.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Public displays of affection. You know.’

But Emmy wasn’t really listening. She was looking at Gustav, Kraut, the German. She had placed him: a sinister adviser on a
bemo
outside Kintamani. A Westerner who lived there. It was like a conspiracy, these people who kept reappearing. The tightening vine. And behind them, on the doorstep, she caught a glimpse of Frank, veined and leering.

The crowd moved forward to enfold and congratulate. Or the Western crowd did: Emmy noticed that the Balinese, like herself, lingered on the edges, restrained. She spotted K’tut standing beside the Ubud Police Chief, by the door to the veranda, and she made her way over to him.

‘You’re not going to kiss the bride?’ she said. He didn’t answer.

After a moment, he replied: ‘This party is for Kraut. She celebrates with her own people.’

Emmy looked at him, his serious, thin face. It was the first indication that not everyone approved of this match.

‘Do you think it’s a mistake?’

His gaze flickered back to the doorway. ‘There is no attention for the elders,’ he said. And it was true that an older Balinese couple, presumably Madé’s parents, hovered by the entrance, unattended. They were not smiling.

K’tut spoke to the Police Chief in Balinese, and the two of them left Emmy’s side for the company of this pair, with much nodding and courtesy and, Emmy could see, an exaggerated
politesse
on K’tut’s part that he would never waste on Westerners.

When the loud toasts were over, the party went on, and Emmy stood for a time on the sidelines, watching, sipping her punch. She watched Buddy’s American ex shake her peroxide curls at the neck of the Chief of Police; she watched Frank clap Aaron on the back and then spill his drink on the other man’s expensive linen suit; she observed the knot of Ubud youths pouring straight
arak
into their punch glasses from a jug behind the television. Her eyes followed Jenny through the crowd, and she winced as she saw hands, Australian, American, men’s hands, clap Jenny on the shoulder, catch Jenny for a hug, rest on Jenny’s small behind, and Jenny smiled all the while because amused endurance was her only ticket to Sydney and accounting school. She watched Madé’s parents join Suchi’s on the sofa, where all four sat looking bewildered and addressing each other only occasionally; and she saw Suchi, looking frail and even pregnant, clinging with both arms to one of Buddy’s while he laughed and drank amid a group of men and paid her presence no heed whatsoever.

Someone offered Emmy more punch and she took it, drinking
less cautiously now, accustomed to the burning in the back of her throat. She tried to imagine the pasts that had brought these people to this place, and found she couldn’t at all. She wasn’t capable of knowing the lives of the Balinese around her, and as for the others, who could say what choices or mistakes or desires had made them leave everything for this delicious, empty life ‘on the sly’, as Gaya put it? She could not even read them through her code of luck: they had made their own, it was true, but she didn’t know whether it was good or bad. There was something amoral in the atmosphere, an absence of absolutes.

Wearied, she took another glass of punch and wandered on to the netted veranda. It was quieter there, and she could hear nature hissing and singing and croaking beneath the voices. She sat and sipped and ignored a young Balinese couple who, at the other end of the balcony, whispered and fumbled at each other.