Very little happened at the Villa Cresna. The hotel stood in Seminyak on the west coast of Bali. The hotel opposite, the Pila Concern, had a band that played on weekends in a rotunda decorated by coloured lights. In the evening the noise drifted across the lush gardens as Aurélie lay awake beneath the mosquito net. Some nights she heard gamelans. The only music in the Cresna was a Debussy CD that played in the dining room and after that the gentle vibrations of the pump in the swimming pool house. At ten o’clock the pump switched off and small bats flapped across the night sky and pale geckos skittered across the rocks. Then, finally, if she strained, she could hear the sea. Her distance from it was a necessity. The hotels on the ocean front were all five-stars with security cameras and passport checks, whereas the only barrier at the Villa Cresna was a stone fence and a wooden gate painted bright red. The owner and manager, Yudo, was an ex-polisi officer who moved her around the different villas in between other guests checking out and kept her name off the register as part of a monthly arrangement she renewed for cash.
Yudo said cremations were permitted in Bali only once every five years so the funeral in town that day would be a special event. The ceremony was for a royal, a cousin of the former king of the banjar, so all the villagers would come to see the burning liberate the man’s soul for reincarnation. The body was to be borne to the pyre on a ziggurat over seven meters high which villagers had spent weeks building in the square and decorating it with velvet and tinsel.
At midday as Aurélie made her way into town she saw the crowd of tourists and locals who had gathered to watch the procession. The funeral tower was carried through the streets by an army of bearers dressed in white. A drummer maintained the rhythm of the bearers’ step. A caller with a megaphone shouted a command the bearers raised the tower off the ground and staggered forward a few steps before dropping it again, gasping to catch their breath. And so the procession made their way along the street to the cemetery in uneven lurches, deliberately tilting the pyre so any bad spirits clinging to it would be tipped off on to the roadside.
The day before the funeral the Hanuman Road had been hosed down and officials had cut down the power lines crossing it and all traffic had been banned from the street. But after the polisi had retreated a lone driver had parked his white Fiat on the sidewalk. As the procession approached the vehicle the callers shouted for the bearers to weave right, tipping the pyre towards it. One of the bamboo poles punched through the front window of the car and lifted it off the ground, spraying glass across the sidewalk. A group of onlookers rushed forward and bounced the car out of the way. As they tipped it on to its side gasoline from the vehicle’s tank leaked on to the sidewalk.
Inside the Top Speed internet cafe was filled with the odour of petrol and the sound of drums and calls and the chanting but the spectacle of the funeral had emptied it of customers for at least an hour. Although the PCs were outdated and swimming with malware there was always a queue of hikers and backpackers and yogis and local businesspeople waiting to log on. Aurélie inspected all the different computers before she found one she trusted. The latest file attached by TropicalDandy to the email which was never sent was a screen cap from the Paris Metro CCTV. A line of people were waiting for the train. The still frame was the exact moment Zoe turned towards the camera. She had brushed her dark hair over one shoulder and was staring into the tunnel waiting for something or someone.
Outside the drums and shouts were fading. Aurélie logged off the machine twice to clear the cache. Outside the funeral procession had advanced along the sealed road to the point where it started to track through the fields. She could see flashes in the distance as the tinselled pyre tipped bad spirits into the uncut grass. The sidewalk outside the internet cafe reeked of petrol. The white was lying on its side in a halo of broken glass. She stepped around it and walked in the opposite direction to the crowd.
That night at dusk she put her broken iPod in her pocket and walked the ten minutes down the road from the hotel to Kuta Beach. The air had cooled as evening drew in and the tide had gone out far enough for her to cut a wide circle around the tourists and locals. A man in plastic sandals and a counterfeit Armani T-shirt was casting a line into the breakers. A bronzed older woman in a pink dress was walking three wiry miniature dogs. Aurélie walked until the curve of the coast ended at a bank of palms and square umbrellas. The sun was touching the horizon now. She closed her eyes to listen.
When she opened her eyes she saw a shirtless man in fisherman’s pants crossing the shallows towards her. The bag on his shoulder was stuffed with painted canvases. He offered her one, cradling it in both hands. The painting was of Kuta Beach at dusk, shrink-wrapped in clear plastic. He said forty Australian dollars and she said she didn’t want it and he said thirty-five and she said that was too much and they stood haggling in the shallows as the sunset turned golden in the sunset.
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