When the World Was Steady

The Emperor’s Children
The Hunters
The Last Life

T
HE GRASS AND
the damp soil oozed up between Melody Simpson’s toes as she picked her way to the bottom of the garden to watch her children sleeping. It was a summer night, but brisk, and she clutched her dressing-gown around her as she went, patting at her hair although it was past midnight and there was nobody to see.

The clear quiet sang, almost, in Melody Simpson’s ears: it was the first summer after the war, the first summer of a new life, when—battered and bruised though He might be—God was in His Heaven and all was right with the world. Melody Simpson did not believe in God, of course, except as a figure of speech. Only at moments like this she was tempted. Before she remembered the rest.

Virginia and Emmy had built themselves a tent from two large sticks and an old sheet weighed down at the corners by bricks from the wasteground up the road where the end-of-terrace house had been bombed out. The tent had been Emmy’s idea, but at five she was too lazy or too young to execute it, and only when Virginia, a responsible if timorous nine-year-old, had taken on the project had it become real.

Melody Simpson had to squat to peer in at them. Awake, the girls were always squabbling, their natures at once as fluid as air
and as fixed as concrete and, above all, eternally opposed to one another. But asleep in their singlets and knickers, beneath a tartan blanket, their small, pale arms overlapping, they seemed to share their dreams and to be content.

Melody Simpson could not have described the emotion she felt in this small hour of this free summer morning. She would not remember it, or not specifically. There may have been birds singing, and the breeze may have been full of the honeysuckle that grew along the wall, but Melody Simpson did not notice. What she felt was a longing, in her limbs and her belly and in her spirit, for her daughters’ futures, for every joy or triumph that swirled in their dormant imaginations as well as in her own. Was this love? Or greed? Or selfishness? Or pain? Or the anticipation of certain disappointment? Had she believed in God, she might have deemed it a moment of prayer. But she didn’t, and didn’t. And being the sort of person who thought such reflection a tedious waste of time, she tugged a little at their blanket, by way of maternal rearrangement, and then tiptoed back across the lawn and up to her own solitary bed.

B
ALI IS NOT
a big island: it is fifty miles wide at its widest, and at most ninety miles long. But it is big enough to get lost on. Kuta Beach, the tourist resort on the island’s south coast, must only be a couple of miles in diameter, but one can get lost there, too, amid crazy alleyways of bars and brothels and pirate tape shops, or along the crowded hillocks of sand patrolled by hawkers and deal-makers and old women offering massages. The Balinese, remarkably adaptable, have simply severed Kuta Beach from the island, like amputating a limb—in their minds, of course. To go to Kuta Beach is, for a Balinese, to leave Bali. It is so simple.

The real Bali, then, is to be found higher up or further out, along narrow, winding roads or in emerald rice paddies or over on the destitute, lava-scarred eastern plain where the tourists never go. In all these places that are ‘really’ Bali, the watchful, angry mountain Agung dominates. There are other, smaller mountains—Abang for the devout, Batur for tourists. But Agung is the mountain of the gods, fierce, unpredictable givers and takers of life. Everything depends on Agung, and everyone is situated by it.

Not to know where you are, not to know where the mountain is: in Balinese there is a word for this,
palang
. To be
palang
is to be paralysed: not to be able to work or to dance or to sleep.
Orientation and order are everything. Everyone has a place.

Emmy Simpson Richmond, at forty-seven years of age, was
palang
. She stopped at the stall in the bend of the road and pointed at a bottle of 7UP. She would have preferred a slice of green mango with salt, or a rambutan, but there was none of the latter and the mango was being sampled by three large black flies. Before Emmy could stop her, the woman stallholder dunked a greasy glass in the drum of water at her side to rinse the dust, and poured the soda into it. The woman was smiling, it would have been rude not to accept, but Emmy wasn’t pleased: her stomach had been holding out so well, despite everyone’s warnings, and it seemed a shame to risk it for a drink she didn’t really even want.

Thick and sweet and fizzy, the 7UP sucked any moisture she had left in her mouth as it went down. She turned her back on the woman and the stall as she drank, looking instead at the great drop on the far side of the road and the view beyond. She was halfway between Penelokan and Kintamani, or so she thought, having decided to walk the eight kilometres rather than pay the cost of a hotel room to ride in a
bemo
bus. The drivers had laughed at her and, it was true, she now worried that she wouldn’t get to Kintamani until after dark. Already the sun was falling low in the sky.

She was looking at two mountains, Batur and Abang, different worlds on either side of a lake. The lake had glistened, earlier, but now emanated darkness, as though with the passage of the sun the spirits rose from its depths to skim across the surface.

Batur, directly in front of Emmy, was how she imagined Hell to be: a barren, blackened cone of lava, rising in relentless symmetry from the lake’s west shore. Nothing grew on its slopes, except the curving tracks where tourists passed daily to
the summit. Emmy hadn’t been there and would not go, but she could imagine the soft black sand and hard black rock against which the climbers had to struggle, without a single shrub for shade.

To the east of the lake rose Abang, or what one could see of it. All afternoon, although the sky had been otherwise unblemished, a hazy cloud mass had shrouded the holier of the two mountains. Abang was said to be lush with vegetation, a tropical rainforest even, and in the wet season inundated with spilling rivers that prevented climbers from reaching the ancient temple at the top. Now, however, in the drier months of June and July, Balinese and some Javanese students made pilgrimages to the temple, to make offerings and to pray.

Emmy was determined to make the climb. Very few tourists did, although Emmy wasn’t sure why not. No doubt the Balinese were more reluctant to take tourists there than to Batur: the Balinese, Emmy had discovered, had a strong sense of the sacred.

A Frenchman in her
losmen
in Candi Dasa, a man alone like herself, and with the same forlorn air of one suddenly deserted by life, had given her the name of a flute-playing guide in Kintamani who would, the man promised, take her wherever she wanted to go. Which is how Emmy found herself at this bend in the road an untold number of kilometres from Kintamani, with the tropical night, deeper and blacker than other nights, preparing to fall.

Using two words of her guidebook Indonesian, she turned back to the woman at the stall and asked her how far it was to the village: the woman raised a hand: five fingers. When Emmy had asked the girl selling postcards over an hour before, she, too, had raised a hand. Emmy felt a fool for the money she hadn’t wanted to spend, and also, suddenly, for the caprice that had brought her to this pass in the first place. She thanked the woman and set off up the empty road.

There was no traffic at all, except for a pair of gaunt and
hungry-looking dogs with patchy fur, headed in the opposite direction with an apparent sense of purpose. Emmy heard the
bemo
coming up behind her before she saw it, the rattling blue carcass of a truck, with wooden benches on its bed and a makeshift roof, a wall-eyed ticket collector dangling precariously from the back running-board. Emmy flagged it down.

The benches were full, and a mother took her son on her lap so that Emmy could sit down.

‘Teri makasi,’
said Emmy. ‘Thank you.’

‘English?’ a man opposite asked. He was Western, in his late thirties, clean-cut, obviously not English himself.

‘Yes and no. Used to be. I’ve lived in Australia so many years now …’ she trailed off, smiled.

‘I see.’ He smiled back. His teeth were very pointy, and this, combined with the close cropping of his hair and the unusual breadth of his skull, gave him a devilish air. ‘I am German, myself.’

Emmy nodded. She didn’t know what to say to that.

‘You’re going to Kintamani.’ He said it as a statement. ‘To climb Batur.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Abang, actually. I hope.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘That is adventurous of you. Have you a guide?’

‘The name of one.’

‘I’ve been living a month in Kintamani,’ the man said, ‘and not one expedition has gone up Abang. Batur, daily. Abang, no.’

‘I know. That’s why I want to. That’s not the only reason, of course, but …’