You don’t want to go there.
I awoke with a start, Kadek’s words coming back to me as the fog of sleep lifted. It took half a second to piece together where I was: in my room, under the creaking air conditioning. I had arrived back from the Blue Turtle, showered and lain down to close my eyes. Now it was gone ten.
I cleaned my teeth and recalled showing Kadek the word on the piece of paper.
Bacang.
The young man had recoiled from it.
Bad place, he had said. A bacang was a glutinous rice dumpling filled with meat, he’d explained. Street food. This Bacang, though, was actually located behind a series of stalls selling the buns, noodles and meatballs. It was not a place a nice Ibu like Miss Wylde should go, he’d insisted. And I’d insisted back that I had to be there at eleven.
We’d arranged that he would wait for me outside after he had dropped me off, and I made sure to have him on speed dial. If he got a call from me, he should come in and get me.
But what was Bacang, exactly? I had asked. But he either didn’t know for sure or wouldn’t tell me.
I dressed in a pair of black cotton trousers, flat shoes and a dark-grey T-shirt. I looked in my case and my Ready To Go bag, but there was little I could use for self-protection.
I might not need it. Aja was no threat. But what if it was a set-up by Dieter? What if he had sent her as bait? Although, what would Dieter gain from messing with me? No, I was being paranoid. I was also, I realised, ravenously hungry. I had neglected to eat.
While I waited for Kadek, I went down and ordered a bowl of nasi goreng from the warung next to my hotel. It arrived in an enormous cone, with the egg on top just erupting, sending a stream of yellow lava flowing down the rice slopes. It came with a bowl of pickled vegetables on the side.
I wolfed most of it down in a few minutes and felt my confidence and excitement return as my stomach filled, and the sugar from the temulawak ginger soda hit my blood stream.
Aja knew where Matt and Jess had gone. OK, knowing him, they might have moved on, but it was the first giant step to overtaking them.
The race was on.
I glanced over my shoulder. A cluster of young men, mostly in mirrored sunglasses, were crouched under the dadap trees, sheathed in smoke from their spiced cigarettes. One of them raised a hand.
Driver? it asked.
The men were all drivers of Kijangs, the all-purpose four-door workhorses of Bali tourism, which were parked outside most hotels. I smiled, shook my head and went back to the last few morsels of my meal.
The honk of Kadek’s horn made me jump. I took a final mouthful of soda, debated going back up to clean my teeth again, decided against it and got into the front next to Kadek. He had changed into yet another crisp white shirt and his black hair was oiled and combed.
‘Fifteen, maybe twenty minute to place you want,’ he said. It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to say the name.
‘Let’s go.’
‘Sure?’
‘Let’s go,’ I said forcefully.
‘OK, Ibu.’
We set off, navigating between overloaded mopeds carrying extended families with a skill that would shame one of those army motorcycle display teams my father loved, and a series of semi-skeletal dogs with various death wishes. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. A red-faced Westerner with a glistening forehead and damp, lank hair. I helped myself to one of Kadek’s wet wipes and dragged it over my skin, grimacing as I examined the greasy patch on the tissue.
Paradise certainly came with a lot of pollution.
‘What do you do on your days off?’ I asked Kadek once we were properly under way.
‘Me?’ he asked.
‘Well, not the car. I don’t care what the car does.’
He shrugged. ‘I hang out with friends. Play video games. I go to a mixed martial arts gym.’ He looked a little sheepish. ‘Sometimes. Go to cinema.’
‘Favourite films?’
‘Guardians of the Galaxy. The Fast and the Furious.’ A giggle. ‘I like Baby Driver. You see it? I wish I could drive like that. But Bali too crowded.’ As if to make the point, he swerved to avoid a clutch of chickens that were actually crossing the road to get to the other side.
A simple soul, then. And maybe not the best source of information on the subject I was about to broach.
We passed a parade of carvings, gathered at the roadside like a ragtag version of the Terracotta Army.
This was the Foreign Legion equivalent.
There were gods, dragons, birds and, oddly, a fullsized Batman, complete with cape. Within half a mile, they had gone, replaced by shacks selling gaudy bangles, beads and necklaces.
‘What is in the baskets?’ I asked.
‘Which baskets?’
‘At the side of the road. There, look. And there’s a pile on that motorcycle.’ I pointed to a precarious stack of wicker baskets on the back of a moped.
He didn’t have to look. ‘Cockerels. For the cock fights. They are next to road to get used to people. Noise. For when they fight. I don’t like,’ he added hastily. ‘Too much gambling. Too much gangsters.’
I wasn’t sure I believed him. He would know most Westerners are squeamish about such things. But it gave me an opening. ‘Tell me about drugs on Bali, Kadek,’ I said.
His voice quivered with shock. ‘You want drugs? Ibu, that’s not—’
I stopped him before his opinion of me crashed and burned altogether. ‘No, I don’t want drugs. A man I know may have sold them. At least, I think he might have. Isn’t there the death penalty here for drugs?’
‘Mainly for smugglers,’ he said warily. ‘Mules, you know?’
‘I know.’
‘Especially if police not getting a cut.’
‘The police are in on it?’
Kadek gave a little bark of a laugh. ‘Always. Except maybe where army in control. Army specialises in cannabis. Police, they control ecstasy and ketamine. The people at Bacang, they sell yaa baa and putauw. Very bad. Don’t eat or drink anything inside please, Ibu.’
I knew what yaa baa was, a catch-all term for various strains of methamphetamine, most of it made in Myanmar or the Thai jungles and shipped across Asia. It was consumed like Red Bull is in Europe – something to give taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, bar workers, farmers and students a lift. But, unlike Red Bull, it was highly addictive and unpredictable. ‘What’s putauw?’
Kadek laughed again, but this time it was an empty, mirthless sound. ‘Something that was once heroin. Street grade.’ He looked across at me and repeated: ‘Very bad. Why you want to go?’
‘I was told to meet someone there.’
He grunted at that and we rode on in silence into an area that was dense with bars, clubs, restaurants and a night market. There were people twirling flaming batons on one corner – which looked like a public-safety menace to me, what with all the bamboo around – a few hollow-cheeked, mostly dreadlocked buskers who looked more like scarecrows than musicians and clumps of drunken Western travellers swaying along what passed for a pavement.
Eventually, we pulled into what appeared to be a parking lot, one end of which was colonised by a dozen food stalls, the air dense with their smoke. I was glad I had eaten. Even in the car, the food smelled delicious. Before I got out, I said: ‘You’ll be here?’
‘Just over there, Ibu. You be careful.’
‘I will.’
The stalls were arranged in a shallow semi-circle, with a single break in the middle. I stood still for a moment, eyes stinging from the smoke, and watched several furtive figures slip through the gap, as if it were a portal to another world.
As I walked across to enter whatever lay behind the car park, I noticed a familiar face – or, at least, a familiar arse – at one of the stalls, scoffing a giant bowl of gado-gado.
The cop from the Blue Turtle.
I strode across the pockmarked asphalt as if I belonged there, and straight through between the two lines of stalls, ignoring a half-hearted soft sell from one of the vendors.
I hesitated to let my eyes adjust.
Above me was a stretched tarpaulin, which cut out some of the light from the food stalls’ gas and battery lamps. Ahead was a bamboo fence with a single wide door in its centre. It swung open and a tall Westerner, shirt undone to his navel, came by, studiously avoiding eye contact, his cheeks burning with shame or excitement, it was difficult to tell. The door clacked back into place.
Once my night vision had improved a little, I stepped through the opening. The smell that hit me was the olfactory equivalent of sweet, sour and nauseous.
Incense, of course, food, sewers and the musk of too many bodies in close proximity.
A path, squelchy underfoot, led between shanty shacks made of wood and corrugated iron, every one draped with a crown of electrical cables. Each doorway had a different-coloured lantern hanging from it. Women, mostly, sat around on chairs and stools, smoking, uninterested in me. Or anything. The majority were mere carcasses, the meat on them burned away by whatever life they lived and chemicals they took.
I continued to walk down, following the row of torches that marked the route between the shacks. I passed a hut full of hollow-eyed young boys, another of what I would later discover were called benchongs; transvestites or transgenders or whatever the current nomenclature was. One of them smiled at me from under a bright red wig and raised a beer bottle. My return smile might have been somewhat strained. I could see why Kadek didn’t like this place.
It began to rain, warm but heavy-ish. Some of the prostitutes shifted back under shelter. There came a sound like the shake of a million tiny tambourines, and from under the huts came an army of cockroaches, which took to the air and flew at me.
I began to bat them away and heard a few barks of laughter. As they hit my skin, I felt the burn of regurgitated nasi goreng.
‘Ibu, Ibu, this way.’
I peered through the shifting screen of insect bodies and saw, some metres ahead, the silhouette of Aja. I stepped forward, but as soon as I moved she spun around and trotted off.
As I followed, the cockroaches thinned. Then, someone turned off the rain tap. As one, the cloud of clacking insects fell to the ground, as if their flying batteries had run out, and they scuttled off back under the shanties.
After the last of the flaming torches, the shacks gave way to a small wooded area, the trees spiralled with fairy lights to mark the new path. Unseen birds chirped from above, with the constant, inevitable rhythm of tree frogs underneath.
It was like going from a Grimms’ fairy tale to an Enid Blyton world.
Following the strings of electric lights took me through the woods to a clearing, where an ancient, twisted banyan tree held pride of place. Next to it was a shrine, illuminated by candles and the glowing fireflies of incense sticks, with a statue of Ganesh, the elephant god, sitting on top. A young woman was on her knees before it, pressing rice offerings into a bowl. At the far end of the space, behind the tree, were the lights of another ‘village’, but these houses looked more substantial, less international refugee camp.
Aja was standing directly in front of me, hands on hips.
‘Hi,’ I said, my insides knotting at the thought of what she was about to tell me.
‘Hello, Sam Wylde.’
It took a second for me to realise that her lips hadn’t moved and that this was not an act of ventriloquism, but another person.
She stepped aside. There was a man sitting at a table in the shadow of the banyan tree. There was the flare of a match as he lit a cigarette, and in the brief light I saw a face I recognised and my stomach unravelled itself, ready to vomit up its contents.
I knew him.
Thought he was dead. Hoped he was dead.
In that moment, all the optimism in me drained away, like petrol poured on sand.
It was Bojan.