Troppo (2 page)

It takes a couple of hours for the blokes to fix the bus. I sit hunched on the side of the road with a bleeding cheek and a heaving gut, throw bags of vomit into the valley and watch them explode on the rocks below. By the time we reach Batu Batur around midnight, I'm too weak to lift my rucksack onto my back. A man on the bus helps me, then points me in the direction of a losmen.

It's hot out on the street. A motorbike sails past, lifting a wing of mud. Across the road a young boy pisses on his toes. I start walking, still dazed with sleep and sick. A wartel. I need to find a wartel to phone Josh. I haven't been in touch since a perfunctory call on my first day in Bali – and the day after, I lost my phone. No doubt he's left messages. No doubt he's worried sick.

Some people lift a hand and yell the ubiquitous and genderless greeting, ‘Hello Mister!' Most just stare. Up ahead, the empty racks of a market are wound with plastic and rotting fruit. I quicken my pace when I spot a wartel on the other side.

‘Can I call Australia?'

The bloke out the front nods, stubs out his kretek with a toe and leads me inside to the phone box. The walls of the box are on worrying wooden diagonals and the bench inside is chequered with kretek burns and spots of old blood.

‘Sebentar,' he says, as he connects the line. Then he gives me another curt nod, ‘Sudah.'

A receptionist answers – young and bright and happy. ‘I'm sorry. He's just stepped out of the office for lunch. Would you like to leave a message?'

‘Can you tell him Penny called?'

‘Sure. Penny who?

‘He knows who I am.'

‘Okay … So would you like to leave a number?'

‘No. No number.'

I hang up and go and sit on the doorstep of the wartel. The owner lights a kretek for me and passes it down; it leaves a sweet, clove taste on my lips. Opposite the wartel an old woman is crouched under the shade of a bit of plastic. She swings at a bare-bummed child with her cane. Beyond her there's a row of shops packed with curious clutters of detail: curling cigarette ads, faded fertility bottles, teabags of shampoo, grey gallons of Aqua. Outside the shops is a line of becak riders, folded up in their bicycle taxis. Their dust-coloured legs are cricked and ricked, their hands shade their faces from the sun. Behind the market, behind the suspended, midday town, towers a mountain range.

It's eerie, empty, beguiling.

Ibu Ayu and Bapak Joni run five clean bungalows that leave last night's windowless jigsaw of a losmen for dead. The bungalows are on stilts, leaning among stands of frangipani and enclosed by walls of concrete and broken glass. From each balcony there's a view of the heaving reef-ripped ocean.

‘There's only one other guest. He's a surfer. French.' Ibu screws up her nose. ‘But no problem, you need motorbike? Board hire? Beer? No problem for this, Missus Penny, we happy you to be our guest!'

Ibu Ayu wears a navy jilbab – a headscarf – and the bell curve of a baby swells under her shirt. When she turns to speak to her husband her voice lifts in light, fluty tones, and she touches his hand. It's rare to see gestures of affection between Indonesian couples in public. Bapak Joni takes her fingers and smiles. He has a mouthful of butter-coloured teeth and his t-shirt strains over a rice-big stomach.

By the time I'm finally settling in to my bungalow it's late afternoon. Squalls of salt and spray lift from the ocean and sweep through the palms and window shutters. Despite still feeling sick, I'm happy to be high up, to feel the afternoon moving, gusting around me. And I like the bungalow: its crooked balcony, the white mosquito net that spills over the bed, the geckos in the thatch.

In the top of my rucksack is a pile of clothes still beer-sour from Bali. I'll wash them tomorrow with a bar of soap and a nailbrush. I pull out my medicine bag. Josh would be aghast if he knew it stocked only a single, poisonous bottle. Betadine Cina is legendary among hardcore Indo travellers and surfers, a dark brown liquid that smells like rust and stings like fuck and heals reef cuts, motorbike burns and even sea-ulcers in a matter of days. Next I pull out my high heels, my hair straightener and finally, a few volumes of poetry.

Once everything is in its place, I feel better. To inhabit a temporary space like this, you have to make an imprint, have to neutralise the energy of all the other travellers who've slept there before you. Although it's only been an hour, there's more of me here than in a year of living with Josh. The interior of his apartment in Scarborough was nearly bare, the furniture spare, the paint job neutral. But it smelled good, like finely ground coffee, citrus, Calvin Klein.

I crash on the bed. The fan turns slack yellow circles in the air. Josh is probably at home cooking dinner. He's an epic cook, turning out contemporary gourmet dishes that put my slapdash stir-fries to shame. If I were home we'd be eating together, then doing the dishes and settling in to watch the ABC's
Foreign Correspondent
. Josh loves the quiet rituals of domesticity. Sometimes it's too much. I end up out midweek, loose and wild at a work party or with the girls at a bar, throwing my eyes and talking to strangers, unable to bear the thought of another unvaried evening. He says it's fine, says I should go out with the girls and do some more solo travel, says he understands how important it is to do this at my age. He's fourteen years older than me. Says he'll wait.

On Ibu's recommendation I head to town for a feed at the night market. I'm feeling a little better and reckon I can stomach something light. It's early evening and the market is being set up. Light bulbs flicker above warming vats of oil, and kaki lima are wheeled into place. From the outside, kaki lima look like wooden trolleys, but when unfolded, all sorts of compartments jump open, revealing gas bottles, pipes, drawers full of chilli, noodles, rice. Portable restaurants. ‘Portable genius,' Josh said after his first thirty-cent meal at a kaki lima in Denpasar. He admired the Indos' inventiveness, though scowled over the unhygienic food prep. ‘That woman just used her fingers. Jesus, Penny, do you really think you should eat that?' This sort of caution gave me the shits. As did his refusal to eat anywhere other than the tourist restaurants in the last two weeks of our trip.

After I've done a lap of the market, I perch on a wooden stool in front of a kaki lima selling bakso.

‘Lima minut lagi,' the man says. Five more minutes.

The night air is sticky as cut mango.

A local bloke with a sparse but ambitious moustache comes and sits next to me.

‘Hello Mister! Where you from?' he asks, resting the side of his foot on his knee and lighting a kretek.

‘Australia.'

‘You can speak Indonesian?'

‘I can.' As a fifteen year old I lived with Dad in Bali for almost a year. Talk about going off the rails. But one good thing to come of it was a near-fluent grasp of the language.

The bakso seller looks up from his pot. ‘Sudah pintar,' he affirms.

So we chat and I become animated, eager to move my tongue around the language again. When the man asks if I'm married and how many children I have, I invent three husbands and eight children. The bloke looks utterly bewildered. He shakes my hand without meeting my eyes, says, ‘Good to meet you Mister,' and walks off.

That's when I notice him. He's leaning against the kaki lima stand, lifting my bowl of bakso, passing it down to me. ‘Eight kids, eh?'

I grin and raise a spoonful to my lips.

‘You mind if I join ya?' He pulls up a stool. ‘I'm Matt.'

My lips are tingling with chilli. ‘Penelope.'

‘Nice to meet ya, Penny.'

By this time it's dark. The air is smoky with frying fish scales. Matt's cheek and jaw are kerosene-lit. Not quite handsome.

‘You live here?' I ask, after a slow mouthful.

‘Yeah, on and off. At the moment on.'

He's in his late twenties or early thirties. Older than me, younger than Josh. He speaks with a slow, sun-damaged drawl – one Aussie expats often affect in the tropics.

‘What about yourself? You here for long?'

Work kicks off in a few weeks and then six months, a year? I told Josh I didn't know how long I'd be away.

Well what does that mean? he'd demanded. What does that mean for us?

I dunno, I said. I dunno. You tell me.

Matt's looking at me expectantly.

‘Ahh … maybe like, maybe for a while.'

‘Oh yeah.' He nods, like it's a perfectly coherent answer. ‘So where are you staying?'

‘Just at those bungalows on the beach.'

‘Ibu Ayu's, eh? She's lovely. But steer clear of Shane's Sumatran Oasis if you can. It's the other main tourist accom here, bit out of town.'

There's a tapping in my blood. I wasn't convinced by the ladyboy's story in Bandar Lampung about the girl's fingers; I know how ladyboys can be inclined to melodrama. ‘Oh yeah? Why's that?'

A couple of men crouch nearby in red, grease-stained singlets. Their hands hang between their knees, their heads are cocked.

‘To put it bluntly, the bloke who runs it is a real crazy fucker. Because of him, Batu Batur's in a pretty tense state. The expatriates are barely tolerated as is, let alone blow-ins like yourself.'

The insult stings. ‘I'm
not
a blow-in! I've got a job here!' But his attention has been caught by a bloke riding up to us on the coughing skeleton of a motorbike.

‘Permisi, Mister Matthew!'

The black heat from the exhaust scorches my shins. They're hairy. They need a shave. Hopefully it's too dark to notice.

‘Mister Matthew! Ayo pulang.'

‘Now?'

‘Sekarang, yuk!'

Matt stands up. ‘Righto, Penny. I'll catchya later.'

He drops me a wink and swings his leg over the bike.

‘Seeya.' I give him a casual smile and go back to my bakso.

But I'm still thinking about him later that night, as the rain slips cool down the thatch.

Ibu Ayu sets my breakfast on the dining deck. It seems the Frenchman prefers to eat alone. Or maybe he's already gone for a wave. I wrap my fingers around a glass of basalt-coloured coffee and we gossip. Our talk whirls from women's business to the business of the bungalows, from the surly Frenchman to traditional Lampung weavings. I want to find some weavings for Dad – he collects Indonesian kain ikat and kain songket. Ibu Ayu says she knows some women who might show me their work and that she'll ask them at the morning market.

‘Did you grow up in Batu Batur?' I ask.

‘Ya, of course!' she tells me proudly. ‘I spend three year at university in Bandar Lampung, studying tourism and English. Then I meet Joni and we come back here to start business.'

‘Were there already tourists visiting Batu Batur back then?'

Ibu furrows her brow. Her skin is flawless: it probably won't wrinkle until she's well into her sixties.

‘Ya, not so many.'

A quiet grows between us. The garden is jammed with wild, edible, wet colours. Nothing here is for decoration, everything has utility, from the row of pandanus palms along the back wall to the mango and papaya trees. We sit comfortably. My Indonesian friends aren't scared of silence. As the seconds unfold, I think again of my future boss and wonder what Ibu Ayu thinks about him. The best way to approach difficult topics
here is always slowly, and so I work toward the question by asking how many other surf resorts there are in the area, and if the owners are locals or bules like myself and then finally, if she's heard of anyone called Shane.

When Ibu Ayu hears the name Shane she reacts explosively, nearly knocking over my coffee glass with her closed fist. ‘Mister Shane, he no good! He already long-time live here. But Ibu think not much longer.'

‘What, why? What's he done?'

‘He say to local people: no more fishing off beach because beach is for tourist! He say to them: no more using channel for boats, because channel for surfers! No good. Local people, they no like Mister Shane. And they no like the tourist so much either.' She slaps off a mosquito, leaving a smudge of blood. Then, realising what she's said, she adds quickly, ‘But you can speak Indonesian and you staying here with me, so I thinking you safe, no problem.'

‘Does he have a wife?

Ibu looks at me almost pityingly. ‘What woman would put up with Mister Shane? He did have wife, Chinese wife, but she try kill herself. So he send her back to China. Now, sometimes he pay Javanese girl, girl from Medan, or Lampung, okay. They stay little while, then they take the money, and go, go, faraway, quick!'

A few chooks wander the garden. They inspect, peck, and flick at the earth, gurgling in their throats.

Ibu lowers her voice. ‘Maybe five month ago, people say he cut the fingers off a girl for stealing.'

‘What girl? Was she okay?'

Ibu adjusts her headscarf. ‘This girl, no-one know her. She from somewhere else, some other village, maybe from Java. She orang lain, kan?'

Orang lain. Not from here. An outsider. A blow-in.

‘It happen, then she run away. No-one see her since.'

I'm desperate for the story not to be true but it seems unlikely, given the matching story of the girl in the brothel. ‘That's awful, Bu. Has Shane been here long?'

‘Nearly ten year. He have surf camp here. Before that, he live in Aceh. Ten year too long, Penny. He no good for this town, no good for the tourist. He crazy man, orang gila! But how come you hear of Mister Shane? You want to go surfing there? Maybe stay at his surf resort?'

Should I tell Ibu Ayu? I might learn more by staying quiet. But she'll find out anyway so it's probably better she hears it from me. I'd hate for her to think me dishonest, think I'm the same as him or any other dodgy expats who may have washed up here. There's certainly no shortage of foreign con artists, speculators and drunks in Bali, and Batu Batur probably isn't that different. So I tell her outright, ‘Actually, I've got a job working at Shane's.'