When the World Was Steady (4 page)

When Friday came, Emmy was loath to leave. Her resolve to return to the mountain had evaporated, and the vigorous ascent of a peak draped in wet cloud seemed less and less appealing to her ever browner and softer body.

She cursed when Gdé woke her, pounding on the door of her cell, the same one as at the beginning of the week. The same experience, minus Frank. Minus the breakfast of
nasi goreng
, too, she discovered when she fumbled her way out into the pre-dawn. The innkeeper and his family were still asleep, waiting for the cock’s crow.

Gdé was, to Emmy’s mind, unnaturally lively. He wore shorts despite the chill, and danced a small jig there in the courtyard at the prospect of the climb.

‘Very good, very good, now you up. You waiting for me out front. I coming back.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I am going to make offerings. Offerings for a successful climb. It is a good day, I have checked before with the priests, this is why we are going on this day. I make offerings for seven people, we will be seven people. Before I make offerings but the day was not good, the climb is not successful.’

‘Not successful?’

He shrugged and opened his hands, which shone pale in the darkness. ‘Today is … auspicious day, yes? Today will be successful. I coming back.’

When he returned the beginnings of light were filtering through the swirling air. Emmy could see that Gdé carried two small banana-leaf dishes with rice cakes and flowers in them. She felt anxious. ‘Is something wrong? Couldn’t you make the offerings?’

He laughed. ‘Oh yes. Very good day for climbing today. These are for the mountain.’

‘The top?’

‘For the first temple. Halfway. For the second half of the climb.’

Emmy and Gdé then sat in silence, awaiting their companions, who didn’t come for the better part of an hour, during which time Emmy wished herself back in bed many times. The market, like the day, was growing around them, the noise and traffic picking up, half-naked children appearing in alleyways, everything in soft-focus like the opening of a film.

Before they arrived, Gdé seemed to know they were coming. There were loud cries in rapid Balinese, and then a horrendous sound of scraping, out of sight down the hill.

Gdé got up and motioned for Emmy to follow: less than fifty yards down the road towards Penelokan, in the middle of the market, they came on a bus—but a
real-sized
bus, or almost, certainly much bigger than the vans and trucks that Emmy had grown accustomed to. White, monstrous, growling, it had run aground on just such a van in an attempt to avoid a pile of cabbages on its other side. The van owner stood by, yelling, but the bus driver was unfazed.

When the tirade ceased for a moment, he put the bus in reverse and pulled the two vehicles, groaning, screeching, apart.
The van was scratched and dented, it was true; but already so decrepit that it was difficult to tell which scrapes were new and which dated from months or even years earlier. The bus driver did not stir from his seat, high above the van owner, who was still complaining. Gdé darted among the crowd to the door of the bus, as if from stone to stone across a stream. Emmy had slightly more trouble making her way behind him.

‘Eh, K’tut!’ he greeted the driver, who curled half his lip in the semblance of a smile.
‘Selamat pagi!’

‘G’day Gdé!’ boomed a voice from the depths of the bus, a thick Australian accent that prompted titters from within. He said the two words in exactly the same way.

‘Hello, Buddy.’

Hello Buddy? Emmy was surprised by the name. Buddy? Had she landed a sheep-shearer for a climbing companion? She tried to peer in the bus window and only then did she realize that the windows were hung with batik curtains and that those curtains were drawn.

Gdé waved his arm at Emmy, half smiling, half impatient, urging her on to the bus. She rounded the corner into the cave-like gloom, to a sight for which she was wholly unprepared. While some stiff benches remained in front, the entire back half of the bus had been stripped of seats, and in their place was installed an immense and many-cushioned bed.

Sprawled in the middle of it, propped up by cushions, was a small, barrel-chested man slightly older, Emmy thought, than she herself, although it was difficult to tell. He was dressed from head to toe in various clashing batiks, which all in turn jarred with the prints of the cushions and the bed itself.

On either side of him, more awkward and tentative, perched two young women not much older than Portia, one big-boned, with cropped, bleached hair, and the other with a long, smooth, hennaed tress and a heart-shaped face. Emmy sensed that the
women were related neither to each other nor to Buddy, which made her wonder how they came to be there. Then she noticed, slumped in the last row of seats, his back to the others, a boy of about seventeen or eighteen, a longer, thinner version of Buddy, with the same faintly bulbed nose and indulgent mouth.

Gdé, like Emmy, had been looking the group over. ‘Mr Buddy,’ he said, with evident alarm, ‘You say five people plus me and Emmy—this is Miss Emmy—’ (that was all the introduction she was to get; Buddy barely nodded) ‘—but there are only four of you. K’tut climbing?’

‘Nope, Gdé. Just us. That a problem?’

It obviously was. Gdé turned and spewed a stream of near-hysterical Balinese at K’tut, who opened the bus door for him. ‘I coming back.’

He reappeared moments later pushing a small boy in front of him. ‘Wayan wants to climb too. OK, Buddy?’

‘Sure, OK.’ Engrossed in conversation with the platinum blonde, Buddy was as indifferent to Wayan as he had been to Emmy.

The young Wayan and Gdé sat together on the bench behind Emmy, and K’tut the driver proceeded to back the bus down the road until they could turn around.

Everyone focused on Buddy except the boy Emmy took to be his son, even if this meant craning or twisting uncomfortably. Not that Buddy said or did anything significant during the drive. He merely lolled, his thick body loose to the bumps and rolls of the road. He was explaining his import-export business to the blonde—artwork, batik, baby shoes, it seemed—in a fairly offhand way. Emmy tried again to guess at the relation between them: they spoke the words of strangers, and yet their manners with one another were so intimate.

Buddy’s son, arms crossed and knees up against the seat in front, was fiercely feigning sleep, the only concrete indication
that this woman was perhaps closer to Buddy than some would have liked.

The bus came to rest in a dirt clearing, a sort of car-park at the base of Abang, itself rising invisible above them. Here, as at all other odd and unexpected spots around the island, a thatched kiosk offered dusty bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta and 7UP to the rare passers-by.

It occurred to Emmy that she was in no way mentally prepared for this expedition: she had no idea what to expect. Someone, somewhere, had said three hours; she had neglected to ask whether it was three hours up and down, or three hours up. There was something about Buddy’s smug but solemn look that made her fear the latter.

‘I’ve been up here twice now, Junior,’ he was explaining to his son, in a voice that seemed to Emmy both strained and condescending. ‘This’ll be the third time. And believe me, it’s a rare Australian who’s been at all.’

The boy merely nodded. His thin, burnt arms swung a bit, and he toed bullishly at the dirt. He did not look his father in the eye.

The young Wayan had run ahead, following the gently sloping trail into the woods. Gdé was obviously eager to follow, waiting only for Buddy who, in turn, waited for his reluctant son. K’tut the driver stood at the edge of the clearing and spat melon seeds over the long drop towards the lake.

Nobody had spoken to Emmy since she had joined their party, a fact which both relieved and alarmed her. She did not particularly
want
to converse with these people, who seemed to her an unsavoury, not to say vulgar, crew. And she was alarmed for two reasons, the first being that one of them was bound to say something to her sometime, and anticipating that awkward moment was worse, possibly, than the moment itself would be; and the second that supposing—such rudeness hardly seemed possible,
but just supposing—that none of them did make any effort to chat, then the coming three or possibly even six hours would be fairly awful.

The first hour or so was pleasant, a brisk upward walk amid solid trees, along a path that occasionally afforded glimpses of the lake below. The sunlight fell dappled through the branches, not strong, and although she was a little warm, Emmy felt quite comfortable. She dawdled a way behind the others. Deep in conversation, the two young women walked together, not far ahead. They were English and their accents were shrill. Buddy soldiered on in front of them, pausing to point out fungi or flowers or the view. Beyond him, Gdé picked out the path—for although there was a distinct way to follow it was in some places obstructed by a fallen log or large rock—and Wayan and Junior had scrambled far ahead, out of sight.

Emmy picked leaves and put them in her pockets. She walked with her head back, watching the skipping rays of light falling towards her and the occasional waltz of branches in the windless air, when a bird alighted or a seed dropped; or with her head to the ground, examining the colours that sprouted among the roots and damp debris, the glinting sweet-wrappers and discarded bottles left by other climbers.

Because her eyes were down, and because nobody thought to alert her, straggling behind as she was, Emmy came abruptly to the base of what she would later, with a clear conscience, call the cliff. Within a matter of feet, the path turned into a wall of mud. At the same time Emmy became aware that no sunlight filtered down to them any more. More than there being cloud between them and the sky, there was cloud between them and the earth below. At the gaps in the vegetation, Emmy looked down and saw only more nothing.

She squinted up at the mud. The two young women were clawing their way halfway to an apparent ledge, created by a
tree-trunk, where the rest of the group waited. Emmy realized she would have to say something.

‘Hey there, Gdé!’ she called. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

Gdé’s voice wafted down to her. Not, Emmy thought, the way a stone would fall. She was almost certain she heard Buddy say, ‘Shit.’

‘It’s a river bed, Emmy. Muddy. But is plenty of places to hang on. Grab hand hold and foot hold and go slow. We waiting. And don’t look down!’

The redhead turned towards Emmy long enough to say, ‘It’s not so bad really.’ She had a grey mud smear on her cheek.

To Emmy, the slope might as well have been glass. She looked down at her feet, tiny in their white tennis shoes and impossibly far beneath her. She tried to imagine them holding her up on the vague mossy outcroppings she could discern above, and she felt her knees twitch. ‘I can’t stay
here
,’ she said aloud.

‘You saying something? Hold on, Emmy.’ Gdé slid down from stone to stone with his arms flung out like a child playing at aeroplanes. In moments he was reaching out his strong hand, the same hand that had loomed so pale and fragile in the morning darkness, now so much more capable than her own.

‘Put your foot here,’ he pointed. He held her by the wrist. No longer smiling, he grunted as he bore her full weight on the first leg-up.

‘Thank you.’ Emmy heaved, and reached her arm up again. But he, too quick, had sprung to higher ground and squatted against the mountainside, beckoning, almost taunting. The voices of the others broke the air far above.

‘Come on, Emmy, you can do it,’ he pleaded. He had made offerings, after all, for seven. Buddy might be impatient, but for Gdé Emmy was essential to the success of the climb. And Emmy, looking at Gdé’s anxious face—not taunting at all, when she focused clearly—had some small sense of his urgency.

She grabbed at a root that snapped under her weight, but not before it gashed her palm, a smooth line from forefinger to thumb along which red beads began to blossom. Tetanus, Emmy thought. But everyone was waiting, Gdé with them now, and as if for her he had taken his flute from his pack and coaxed an eerie, melancholy tune from it. The spirits were urging her on. Emmy slapped her bleeding hand around a stone embedded in the dirt, closed her eyes against the fears that assailed her—of heights, of slipping, of many-legged crawlies and poisonous insects—and hauled herself to a second foothold.

In this way, eyes shut for the most part, she scrabbled and slithered up the mud face, brushing her hair from her forehead with black fingers and thereby painting her skin a dull grey. It felt like innumerable unending heavings, unbearable. Emmy thought of the first land animals tearing themselves out of the water, up, along the shore. Everything was dripping: the sky, the sickly, caressing foliage, her own skin.

When she grasped the trunk she couldn’t believe she had arrived. She couldn’t believe she had made the climb, as she turned for the first time to the near vertical drop.

‘Bravo, Emmy!’ The blonde clapped her on the shoulder. Emmy sat on the log, dangling her feet, half-expecting the trunk to dislodge and barrel back the way she had come.

‘It is not so hard, yes?’ Gdé was encouraging. Buddy strained at the bit. His son sat down next to Emmy.

‘You ’right?’

‘I’m OK. Thanks.’ She looked at him carefully for the first time. Somehow he had escaped the grey bath. His small nose gave him a calculating air that his pouty lips belied. He was freckled, skinny, gawky; but would, in time, be handsome and more distinguished than his father.

‘You’re white as a ghost. D’you want some water?’ He offered her a plastic bottle, wiping the rim for her on his T-shirt. Emmy
was just putting it to her lips when she heard Buddy behind her, not speaking to her, but so she would hear: ‘Mobilize the troops! Can’t sit here on our arses all morning, we’ll never make it that way.’

The cold water had a strange effect on Emmy. She felt it on her teeth and in her throat and all the way down to her stomach. It made her forehead hot, then cold, and she grew suddenly dizzy. A sweat, cold and profuse, erupted over her temples, under her arms, down her back.