When the World Was Steady (31 page)

The women’s voices rose and fell: for a while, Emmy listened for the few words she had just learned, but not hearing them, she gave up, relying instead on periodic English commentary from Jenny. The afternoon was hot and sleepy despite the vigorous activity. It wore on, and on, and on, uninterrupted but for late arrivals and pauses to sip tangerine juice or to admire finished handiwork.

Amid the placid hum, Emmy’s eyes settled on two little girls playing with tattered dolls in the corner of the yard, rocking them, walking them, throwing them in the air. The girls were clearly alive only to each other and to the engrossing fantasy world they
had created for their inanimate charges. Their entire bodies laughed with the pleasure of the stories they shared, and when one of their dolls apparently fell ill, they both grew solemn and all but wept. Watching them, Emmy felt that she and Virginia, too, ought to have had such a shared world. She marvelled at the completeness—however temporary—of the little girls’ union, and she wondered, wistfully, whether being born in this paradise island might have allowed her and her sister a similar freedom, a similar joy. But it was pure fantasy, this notion, just like the girls’ doll world, and it passed back into the rhythm of the women’s weaving fingers and the mounting towers of thanks to the gods.

Emmy did not have her watch, but she could tell from the lengthening shadows that it was well past three. The work showed no sign of slowing or of nearing completion: several new towers were just being begun. She worried about Max, about what Aimée had said. Unaware of its truth or falsehood, she didn’t want to disrupt the pre-ceremony rituals she had been invited to observe, but it was suddenly clear to her that Jenny was not going back to the house before the event and, therefore, that it was not intended that she, Emmy, go either. She wondered about making her own way back, but had only to think of the monkeys’ eyes and their grasping fingers to reject the idea.

Fretting spoiled the peaceful pleasure that the afternoon had been bringing her, the delight in the women’s deft hand-movements, in the economy of their bending bodies. Just the sight of Suchi, so exquisitely beautiful, had seemed a gift after the terrifying journey she and Jenny had endured. But as the afternoon wore on, Emmy’s gratitude shrivelled like the discarded leaves that gathered on the porch. She wanted to get back to the house.

‘Do you plan,’ she asked Jenny eventually, ‘to go straight to the temples?’

‘We will all go to one temple,’ Jenny explained. ‘Only to one. Others will go to other temples.’

‘Buddy?’

‘Maybe to ours, maybe to a different one.’

‘But you’ll go from here, without going back to the house?’

‘Of course.’ Jenny seemed surprised that there was any question.

‘But what about Max?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, if Aimée’s right and he
is
leaving on the plane for Sydney tonight, then shouldn’t we both get back to see him?’

‘I do not think he will go,’ said Jenny, imposing origami-like contortions on a banana leaf without looking at it.

‘I agree it seems unlikely, but if he does—surely you of all people would want to say goodbye?’

Jenny looked hard at Emmy, her fingers still twitching over the leaves, making boats of them, baskets. ‘If he does go, and I do not say goodbye, then I will see him very soon in Sydney. We can be together in Sydney.’

‘You really believe in it? You believe Buddy actually has the power to get your visa sorted out? You believe he’ll pay for your course in advance, make sure you have somewhere to live, all of it?’

‘He promises me.’

‘Look at Aimée. What did he promise Aimée?’

‘It’s different,’ Jenny said, taking a sudden interest in the folding of fronds. ‘She is—she was his girlfriend. I am a true friend. Suchi now is Buddy’s girlfriend.’ She smiled across the room at Suchi, whose gaze was elsewhere.

‘So you wouldn’t even want to say goodbye to Max?’

Jenny was silent.

‘Well I
have
to go back to the house before the ceremony,’ said Emmy, standing for emphasis. She had been kneeling for some time and her joints were unpleasantly stiff. ‘I can’t possibly go to a temple dressed like this.’ She gestured at her sundress,
beneath which the straps of her bathing-suit could be discerned. It was, frankly, inappropriate: even Jenny’s tactful once-over could not conceal the fact.

‘But I cannot go now.’

‘I could go alone.’

‘Through the forest? No. You are not good with the spirits.’

‘The other way, then?’

‘It is too difficult. One turning wrong and you would be halfway to Den Pasar. It is the little paths, the little villages. And you do not have the language.’

Here I am, thought Emmy, trapped between being a tourist and something else. Most annoying.

‘I have an idea.’ Jenny was genuinely excited. She turned and spoke to several of the others, who stopped their work and looked Emmy up and down. One woman laughed. Another stood, came over to Emmy, indicated that she should lift her arms, and reached around her bust, embracing her. The woman said something to Jenny. Something noncommittal. Jenny was insistent. The woman did not change her tone. Suchi called something from across the porch, where she sat, and several of the women burst into peals of laughter. But Jenny was stern.

‘We know what we will do,’ she said to Emmy. ‘So you will not have to go back to Buddy’s house. We will make you a Balinese woman, in the proper clothes. In a sarong. It is very easy.’

Emmy looked around the group and understood why they had tittered. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be a top to fit me.’

‘We’ll see,’ Jenny said. ‘I know that Suchi’s
Bibi
, her father’s sister, she is big like you. We will send K’tut.’ She called to one of the girls in the courtyard, who laughed, nodded and ran off down the path beside the house.

But this did not solve everything. Emmy turned to Jenny, but Jenny anticipated her question.

‘Max will not go,’ she said, as simple as fact. ‘I do not care what Aimée says, I know that Max will not go. He cannot go.’ Jenny spoke not with Buddy-will-fix-it certainty, but with the confidence of one in love, who knows that she too is loved. And Emmy was convinced.

‘You will be a Balinese lady,’ Jenny said. ‘Come.’

Max’s search for Jenny was fruitless. He walked miles before giving up. His inability to speak the language hampered him in the smaller villages, where only Balinese and not even Indonesian was spoken. The name ‘Jenny’ didn’t seem to mean anything to anyone, and only as he conceded defeat did it occur to Max that her real name might actually be something else—something less clearly English. He wondered whether she was a Wayan or a K’tut or something in between.

When, in the late afternoon, he eventually returned, sweating and exhausted, to the house, Max found K’tut waiting for him, in a very bad humour.

‘You are going tonight,’ K’tut said, as if this were a distasteful rather than a disappointing fact. He ran his hand through his hair as he spoke, revealing his high, veined forehead.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘I am here to take you to the airport.’

‘And my father?’

‘Gone.’ K’tut gestured limply, a cynic’s dismissive wave. ‘With the German. This afternoon.’

‘Shit.’

‘Today it is the day of our temple ceremonies.’ K’tut’s voice carried reproach, but Max did not hear it. ‘You may want to eat something before you pack your bags. Possibly I could cook.’ K’tut sounded doubtful.

‘No worries.’ It was after six. It was a blow that his father had
left, but Buddy’s behaviour was not out of character. Getting the last laugh, thought Max. Besides, neither was any good at farewells.

K’tut had removed himself to the bed and was watching an old kung-fu film with the volume turned down.

‘Bruce Lee?’

K’tut nodded.

‘Just two quick questions for you, mate?’

K’tut turned a weary eye.

‘One, where is everybody, aside from Buddy and Kraut? And two, do you have any idea where Jenny might be? Then I swear I’ll bugger off.’

‘Frank is at the hotel,’ said K’tut. ‘Aimée is with Ruby, to get chocolate cake at the
warung
. Your Australian woman, I do not know. But Jenny is probably at Suchi’s, preparing for the ceremonies.’

‘Where’s that, then?’

‘On the other side of the Monkey Forest. Far away. I do not think the spirits would want you to go there. Also, there is not time.’

Max thought for a moment and spoke again, even though K’tut had already turned back to the film. ‘We could go, if you would take me in the bus. We’d be really quick. It’s just that—you’ve got to understand—’ Max stopped because even preoccupied as he was he could see the curl of K’tut’s lip.

‘No,’ said K’tut, crossing his legs tidily beneath him. ‘It is not possible. It is too late.’ His eyes settled once and for all on the flickering movements of Bruce Lee.

Upstairs, on Max’s bed, he found an envelope from his father addressed to him in his familiar, hasty hand. Inside there was a note, a wad of Australian dollars and a fat joint.

Max stuffed the money into his pocket and walked out on to the terrace, holding the joint and a book of matches. He didn’t know whether to light it or not. Night was falling, and he stood watching the colours and shapes change: the outlines of objects took on a dark thread, which was then filled in, till there were only silhouettes against the sky. And then the night advanced further, as if a divine sewing project were embroidering the whole globe with black silk—deep, soft, impervious, alarmingly swift.

As he stood, Max realized he was listening for the tinkling laugh that would mean Jenny was next door, in Buddy’s room: unattainable, but near at least. Instead he heard the distant sounds of the procession, remote drumming rhythms from all sides, approaching different temples from different directions, all the beats faintly out of kilter with each other and out of touch with the singing cicadas. The music of the night did not delight or enchant Max: it flattened and saddened him, confirming as it did that he would not see Jenny again, that she was out in the darkness that could not include him, proceeding into another world and away from him. Not knowing what else to do, Max slumped in the balcony’s wicker chair and lit the joint.

He was still sitting there when K’tut came to pick him up. They were forced to throw Max’s belongings together with uncomfortable haste, and K’tut—furious in any event at having to miss the ceremony—could barely restrain himself from slapping his young charge’s face.

By dusk, when the offerings were finally ready, and the procession
from Suchi’s house to the temple was set to begin, Emmy no longer felt like herself. Like an offering of another kind, she had been dressed and preened and oiled and poked into a shape and personage she could not see (there were no mirrors in Suchi’s house).

Her boundaries and movements had been altered, as had the weight of her eyelids and the shape of her head. She stood among the younger Balinese women like a mascot. They still giggled to look at her, but Suchi’s
Bibi
and her mother, women of Emmy’s own generation, greeted her with solemnity and grace before taking their places in the procession.

Around her middle, Emmy wore a crisp blue sarong with swirls of green and golden yellow, tucked and draped into a long, straight skirt that fell to just above her ankles.
Bibi
’s blouse was of fine, cream-coloured lace with a low-cut neck and long, fitted sleeves, and many buttons down the front. Emmy’s arms and bust matched
Bibi
’s admirably, and the blouse was slightly constricting but not too snug. Beyond the waist, however, where the blouse could have fallen full to the hips, there was no buttoning it across Emmy’s breadth, and the two sides fell away unattached, revealing a tiny triangle of midriff above the sarong. In spite of this gap, Jenny had deemed the top suitable—had even waxed enthusiastic about it—so Emmy had to believe she looked presentable.

Jenny had not stopped there: she had perfumed and oiled Emmy’s hair, combing it repeatedly until it slicked back against her skull, around her ears, in heavy, oleaginous ridges. She had painted and powdered her face, kohled her eyes around the rims and corners, coaxing them into an almond shape, and had rouged Emmy’s freckled brown cheeks. She had perfected the line of Emmy’s lips and had coloured them in scarlet. And she had slipped a frangipani behind the older woman’s ear.

Only Emmy’s feet, still in the flip-flops she had put on that morning, reminded Emmy of herself. The rest was new, another
woman’s creation, to which she had attended only passively. Emmy’s nose was tickled by the various odours that emanated from this self of hers: the sweet smell of the perfumed grease, the vegetable scent of the frangipani, the pungent wafting of
Bibi
’s sweat from the armpits of the blouse, held like a memory in the lace since its last wearing. Emmy, too, was perspiring, unaccustomed to layers and films against almost every inch of her skin.

She wondered what she looked like, and looked at Jenny, beside her, to get some idea. Jenny’s eyes and mouth were painted, her hair back from her face, in thick coils at her neck. Her pink silk top accentuated the strength of her arms and the delicacy of her waist, and her sarong fell in folds to the ground. As they set out in the dying light, Jenny carried on her head one of the great, intricate towers that the women had constructed in the shade of the porch. It wavered above, luminous and fragrant, surrounded by other such monuments, gliding through the sky as the people below shuffled in near silence towards their destination.

The walk was long, and after a while Emmy grew claustrophobic in the crowd. She could only take very small steps in her sarong, and she worried—irrationally, given the pace—that she might trip and then be trampled. It was getting dark. She stepped a little to the side, craning her neck to try to see to the front of their train, but the procession from Suchi’s house had joined others and had swollen to a human river that seethed and surged peaceably along, winding this way and that without pause or question, and eventually, every so often, stopping still for short periods. Far ahead in the distance, Emmy could now hear drums and cymbals, and the discordant music of the
gamelan
.