When the World Was Steady (28 page)

‘What are
you
doing here?’

‘I can ask the same of you,’ he said. Then: ‘I guess you know where you’re not wanted.’

‘These accusations are ridiculous, you know as well as I do. I won’t be bullied by a girl young enough to be my daughter, just because her ex-boyfriend—old enough to be her father—has dumped her. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in my world. People live by a code, where I come from. They act like civilized human beings. You know where you stand.’

‘It’s not the locals around here who live without a code, dearie. What kind of code have you been living by, exactly, since you landed here?’

‘Speak for yourself.’ Emmy looked Frank up and down: his dissipated, flabby, forgotten self, the marks of laxity all over him. ‘Why the devil is that child so poisonous, anyhow?’

‘Buddy worked—works—well, does business with her father. That’s how they met. It’s complicated. Buddy doesn’t usually keep girls around when he’s done with them. She knows that.’ Frank licked his lips but he seemed genuinely moved by his story. It transpired that as well as the issue of Ruby, there was the question of Aimée’s father. He had not been pleased by the liaison—his daughter had been, as she herself had said, little more than a child—but had bowed to it because of Aimée’s stubbornness. Now that the affair was to all intents and purposes over, Aimée was too proud to let on to her father that she had not instigated the rupture, but with her silence she set certain conditions. Because if she
did
tell her father the truth—that she, and her beautiful daughter, had been more or less dumped—then he would stop doing business with Buddy. ‘And that,’ mused Frank, ‘would leave Casanova well up shit creek.

‘Not to mention,’ he continued, ‘that he might just break every bone in Buddy’s body. Y’know? Or Buddy might mysteriously fall off the top of Abang.’

‘But what does he
do
, this man?’ Emmy again recalled the conversation at the party.

‘He’s a businessman, that’s all,’ said Frank. ‘But you never
know. Buddy always says, East and West, like oil and water. Oil and water.’

After suffering the doctor’s treatment for a week, Max was inclined to agree with K’tut. ‘A charlatan,’ he told Emmy. He was done with his injections, and the mark on his neck seemed to be healing fine. But still the doctor made him come to his sweaty green surgery in central Den Pasar, where he loaded Max down with large, vile-smelling tablets and wads of herbs to be brewed into tea. And Max had continued to feel sick ever since the monkey bit him.

Max thought it was the various teas that upset him so badly, but the doctor insisted they were to calm his insides. And it was true that on the one day Max hadn’t taken them he had suffered just the same. His father dismissed it as a bout of Bali belly. But Max worried that whatever it was might be fatal. The monkey might have had AIDS, for example. Or it might have had a strain of rabies the vaccine couldn’t protect against, and the existence of which they were hiding from him. Or it might have passed on any number of unidentified viruses or bacteria. Some nights he woke up, bang, certain that his heart had stopped or was just about to: certain that even before life had begun, it was over. He didn’t tell anyone about his terrors: not the doctor (before whom he feigned a sullen, superior indifference); not Emmy (who, he worried, would get all gooey and maternal and would treat him like a complete infant); and certainly not Jenny, whom he might have told under other circumstances but whom he had been avoiding since the night of the party. He would have been avoiding his father, too, except it was clear that Buddy wouldn’t have noticed: business was keeping him so busy that he was hardly even around. A big day, business-wise, was coming up. A couple of trips. And a planned junket to Komodo to see the dragons. Max didn’t much
want to go.

Seeing as Buddy had given K’tut the bus and the day off, and K’tut had driven to Candi Dasa to look at some property his cousin wanted him to buy, Max had hitched a ride into Den Pasar with the van from the hotel next door. But it meant that after his appointment he had to take a
bemo
back up to Ubud.

It was noon, and the
bemo
was crowded and unpleasant. The breeze that blew in from the road seemed hotter even than the air inside the covered lorry. The driver took a perverse delight in bouncing over potholes and in veering madly from side to side to avoid stray dogs or wandering humans. All the drivers were known for this tendency but this one was the worst Max had encountered and, frightened, Max found he was sweating terribly. Then Max could hear his heart pounding: it was louder than the squealing suspension, louder than the spitting of gravel and the diesel-chug of the
bemo
engine. Louder even than the fare-collector’s yelling. All Max could hear was his heart. And he suddenly thought: ‘I must get off this bus. I am going to be sick.’

He motioned to the conductor, who, in turn, leaned off the running-board and shrieked to the four winds and the driver to pull over, and the driver obliged by slamming on the brakes. Max got off, picking his way over old men and mothers and children and, still clutching the damp packet of herbs from the doctor’s office, he watched the
bemo
bounce into the distance.

Teetering in the ditch by the side of the road, he tried to retch but couldn’t be sick. He sank to the ground, bent in the ditch, put his head between his knees and shut his eyes.

‘Just concentrate on your breathing,’ advised his reasonable self. In, out. In, out. Slower: in, and … out. He pressed his fingers to his temples. His T-shirt was clammy with sweat and prickled by grasses. He hunched like that for a while and started to feel better. A little. But there was no doubt in one significant part of him that this was the beginning of the end. He looked
around him, and his eyes didn’t seem to work properly. Transparent swirly things drifted across his vision. The road was unbearably bright.

He might, he thought, just die on this island. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that: he pictured his mother, forced to fly out to join Buddy, whom she hated, for the funeral.

Considering her distress made him feel marginally stronger. He couldn’t really hear his heart any more, but he still found its beating tiring, and his ribcage ached. And then he thought about Jenny. The thought gave him a quick palpitation, satisfying in its way. When he thought about Jenny, it occurred to him that the only reasonable thing to do was to confront her. To tell her, perhaps, about the true, final nature of his illness, and to insist that she make a choice—to share his last weeks, or, possibly, days. His reasonable self argued that he might not actually be at death’s door, and even half-allowed the possibility that she could, in any event, choose against him. But the voice of his un-silenceable, as yet unvanquished heart prevailed. He would speak to her, now, as soon as he could get home to Ubud.

Feeling herself battered by insults, Emmy lay on her bed to consider future movements. Soon, she conceded, she would have to make a decision about the Sparkes, and then, no matter what it was, she would have to look again at Pod, at Pietro, at that utterly alien world of hers, now as unfamiliar as Ubud had been. She was letting herself slide: if she wasn’t explaining things to herself then she was simply escaping. And while that might long ago have been her intention in coming to the island, things had changed. Escape was not what she had climbed the mountain for. Contemplating the opacity of truth (why
couldn’t
it be as distinct as the disc of the sun, rising and setting opposite?), Emmy fell asleep.

When she awoke it was late afternoon, and she was cold,
curled on her bed in a bathing-suit and towel. Her hair was matted and eccentric, and her head thick with dense and distant dreams. She had dreamt, she was aware, of her mother and sister, an exhausting, busy dream of the world in which she would only ever be a child. Her exhaustion was born from the effort of trying to make Virginia like her: she had done something wrong, and her sister had sent her away. Their mother, a stern vision in an apron, had taken Emmy’s part, but this alliance had only made Virginia shun her the more. In the dream, Emmy knew she had wept, great racking sobs of shame and sorrow, but upon waking, her cheeks were dry.

After lying for a few chilly minutes, she realized that if she remained in her room, waking would only feel like more ghastly sleeping, so she decided to get dressed and go for a walk.

She didn’t bother to look upstairs for any companion for her stroll. Still smarting, she knew where she wasn’t wanted, and until one of her true hosts came forward to claim her, she would keep out of the way.

She decided to follow the web of paths through the paddies on the west side of the road, to a village she and Max had stumbled upon in the early days of their acquaintance. There, at this hour, everyone would be gathering beneath the central pavilion to watch their communal television, and as the sun set, their one street light, a long, lonely fluorescent bulb, would cast its mauve light on one small patch of ground. She could return in time to witness one of her favourite quotidian moments: the duck-herder crossing the paddies in his mollusc hat with a stick on his shoulder and a half-dozen jabbering fowl marching smartly in his wake. Watching that ritual would cheer her, Emmy reasoned, even if the rest of her outing failed to.

But she realized as she set out that the sun was lower than she had thought; she would not see the ducks march upon her return. It would be too late. She even contemplated going back
to her room: when night fell in Ubud, the earth disappeared and everything was given over to the realm of the spirits, a dark world of shifting shapes and unknown quantities. That was what the local people believed: it was why they made and tended their roadside shrines; it was why Gdé had so carefully prepared the ascent of Abang down to the last member of their group. And in this place that was not hers, where other people’s truths held sway, the generally aspiritual Emmy was inclined to believe it too. She hesitated about going alone into the dusk—but resolved not to be hindered by superstition, not to be banned from the island’s pathways as she had been effectively banned, by Aimée, from the Sparke sitting-room.

As she picked her way along the muddy barriers between the paddies, she heard the duck-herder calling to his ducks. Already the paddies themselves were black and possibly bottomless pools, their thousands of green shoots invisible in the failing light. If night had fallen fully, it would be all but impossible, she acknowledged, to negotiate a dry return. The paths between the paddies were slippery and narrow, and the mud slimed up around the edges of her sandals. But her mind was made up. As if from another planet, she heard the buzz of a motorbike on the road behind her, and the sound of voices. The light was blue, and deepening fast.

Emmy made it across the rice paddies and was into the stretch of forest that hid the village from open land when she decided she would have to turn back. She imagined she could see the light of the fluorescent bulb ahead, made to flicker by the movement on the public television screen, but she couldn’t be sure. The distance and the dusk and the trees played tricks. It was dark—almost night now—and she was, she told herself, getting cold. She didn’t want to miss supper. There was no point in going on. It was hard not to feel as though Aimée had triumphed: no Buddy, no ducks, and even her walk aborted. No more life here than at home, was the
truth of it. ‘I am a damn fool,’ she said aloud to the trees, and she felt they rustled in assent. But it didn’t make her feel any better.

The walk back was a nightmare. Emmy kept thinking this sentence as she walked: imagining talking about her walk, with Max, with Buddy, with Jenny perhaps. It did not make the slipping and stumbling any less unpleasant, nor did it warm the icy ooze of the paddies into which she occasionally fell, but it did take her out of the moment to a time when this would only be a faintly hilarious memory. And as the night closed in—and the moon had not yet risen—considering the experience in the past tense made it a lot less frightening.

Until, that is, Emmy heard something, or someone, alive. She was within earshot of the road, but the sounds were much closer than that. They were animal sounds—a rooting and snuffling, perhaps of a wayward pig, or of one of those craven, gaunt dogs, foraging for toads and lizards in the water. Emmy didn’t want to think that it might be one of the island’s famed spirits—that didn’t, she hastened to add, exist—but she couldn’t help but consider it. She stopped her slurping steps to listen better, and the sounds continued but did not move. Whatever it was, it was ahead of her on the path, snivelling, and she didn’t much want to run into it.

‘Hello! Hello? Who goes there?’ Emmy called, to shoo away the dogs and pigs and spirits.

The noise stopped, as if the creature had tensed itself, was hiding.

‘Is somebody there?’

The silence held. And held. And then broke.

‘Aw, for Chrissakes, Emmy, leave us alone? Jesus, what’re you doing following a guy around like that? Bloody hell!’

Spirits sometimes spoke in the voices of friends and relatives. Emmy started to move forward, swinging her arms back and forth crossways in front of her like a mine detector. No pig, this.
‘Is that Max? Max, is that you? Max? What
are
you doing here?’

‘None of your fucking business. Jesus.’ His breathing was ragged. She felt from his voice that he wasn’t far away, only a few steps now.

‘I didn’t follow you. I’m coming back from a walk. What’s happened? Have you been crying?’

‘I’m fine. I feel just fine. Leave us alone, Emmy?’

She was almost upon him. He was beneath her, or at least, his voice was at the level of her thighs, which meant that he was actually sitting in the mud.

‘I’m glad it’s you—I heard the noises and I thought … but it was just you crying.’ She squatted down beside him, caught the luminous glow of his watch face. ‘The moon will be up soon,’ she said. She did not have to see Max to know he was upset. ‘And you’ll be caught here. It’s like a searchlight when it comes. Will you help me get back to the house? I’m having some trouble, in the dark.’