~
In daylight I could see that Lisa’s house stood surprisingly close to the lake. The lake, brown, rectangular, was crossed by a bamboo causeway. A row of anglers squatted along the causeway, protected from the sun and the rains by a roof of woven reeds. Across the water I could see a line of huts and houses through strokes of greenery. Behind the houses rose a steep hillside notched with staggered terraces, a sequined ascent in the morning light. Villagers waded through the padi, the little people seemingly on top of one another, their trousers rolled above their knees.
On the concrete slab by the doorway, facing the lake, sat Lisa, sharpening a stick with a Stanley knife. Blinking Clive crouched beside her, holding a wooden comb. Chocolate wrappers and empty biscuit packets glittered on the concrete.
‘We were wondering where you’d got to,’ said Lisa. ‘That’s Adi hammering up on the roof. We’re making a lock for the new door in the attic, and we need this stick. It’s good here, isn’t it?’
Large yellow and orange flowers bloomed beyond knickers and bras draped on a sagging string. Something was going on over the water. Children were racing pigeons up and down a path. The birds flew back and forth, in and out of bamboo cages.
‘They do that for hours,’ said Lisa. She sighed. ‘I’m so glad I found this house. The boys are helping me get everything set up. We’ve found another mattress and some pots and pans. And the music’s coming together too. I’m writing songs with Adi.’
The hammering on the roof, which had resumed soon after my arrival, paused again.
‘Everything’s been going right for me ever since I came to this place. Although I’ve had a few problems with the owner, but I’m being positive about that. It’s got a good energy here, hasn’t it? It’s healing. Can you feel it?’
I squatted on the concrete. The insects were much louder close to the ground. Flies crawled over Friday night’s fish entrails. I remembered Lisa’s words about these islands being a forgotten place inside: I felt myself remembering that place.
‘There is something magical about it,’ I said.
‘You can feel it too? I was wondering if you could feel it. Some places are healing – they offer a special kind of energy. When you’re really sick you learn about those places.’
Clive waddled around Lisa and began combing the other side of her head, dragging the comb with long, scooping motions. I noticed Lisa had no lashes or eyebrows. Adi hammered a steady powerful rhythm on the roof.
‘There’s magic in this house. I’ve been using magic to get back a guitar lead we had stolen. Last week I had to walk out of class and swallow two eggs, scatter earth over myself, and repeat an incantation while turning in circles. I did it in the bathroom at school! And as it turns out we’ve just found out who took the lead, haven’t we, Clive? I used this earth here.’ Lisa chattered on, her accent sometimes Californian, sometimes English, even in the one sentence. ‘Everyone here believes in spirits, in magic, right? It’s the critical mass of belief that makes the spirit world real. That’s why you can sense the spirit world all around you here. It’s very close to the surface. It’s like the lava in the volcanoes this entire island is made of. The lava is just under the surface, always bursting through. And that’s what the spirit world is like here too. I rarely feel the spirit world in the West. But that’s the West, isn’t it. Most of the spirits have left it, through neglect, I suppose. You pick up on spirits even more when you’re sick.’
‘Are you feeling better?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said you were sick the other night.’
‘I’m always sick. I thought I made that clear.’
‘Right.’
‘I haven’t been this sick since I was a girl on the boat. I told you I was born on a boat, didn’t I? About the waves that are still going around the world? That’s why I always have to live by the water, even if it’s only a little man-made lake like this one. I have this crazy dream that I’m going to see the wave I was born on, coming around again. Did I tell you? When I was in grade three my parents took me out of school and we sailed around the world. We sailed for years. Either we ate out of a tin or we ate fish. After a few months I couldn’t bear to eat another fish, and I still can’t eat out of tins. All that time I virtually lived off water and biscuits. I was starving, but my parents didn’t seem to notice. They kept sailing. They never wanted to put into port. I would watch the towns and villages slowly disappearing from view and the water deepening. I hate the feeling of water deepening under the boat. But I didn’t want to be always complaining and ruining it for them – you know, the big adventure they’d been planning all their lives, right? They were so consumed by their personal journey, their spiritual odyssey. So I ended up being hungry all the time. And it’s never left me, that hunger. I always feel a bit hungry. Not just for food.’
She squinted up at me, her blouse open, her breasts slack. The skin was stippled about her raw neck. She went back to stripping the stick. Clive put aside the comb and began braiding her hair, letting loose a flurry of blinking.
Lisa asked if she talked too much, and went on without waiting for a reply, ‘I’ve had letters and phone calls from my friends telling me I have to leave this country, that it’s ruining my health. I may have said this to you already, have I? People can’t understand what I’m doing here, or why I like it. And they never will unless they come and see it for themselves. Then they’ll understand. You can’t describe this place, you can’t capture it. It’s not like home, it’s outside the home experience. It’s on a different plane. How can you describe the spirit world?’
‘You have to be under its spell to even see it.’
‘Right.’
Clive said suddenly in Bahasa, his delicate fingers pinching Lisa’s hair, ‘Lisa, may I ride your bike soon? Boleh?’
‘You’re allowed. Boleh. But Adi’s riding it tonight. So maybe tomorrow you can ride it.’
‘Could I ride it now? Sekarang?’
‘No. You may not. I said tomorrow. I made that clear.’
‘Can I ride it tonight? Malam ini?’
The hammering on the roof was waiting.
‘No. I said Adi could use it tonight. That would be unfair to Adi if I changed my mind and let you ride it. You must wait your turn. You’ll get a turn, but only if you are patient.’
The hammering resumed, slow and emphatic now.
‘Well, go on through,’ Lisa said to me. ‘Don’t mind my mess.’
The room was bare except for a rolled-up mattress. The window looking onto the lake took up most of the wall. The exterior door faced the upward slope. I placed my backpack in a corner and unrolled the mattress. A small crowd had begun watching through the window, and I regretted having so thoughtlessly carried my backpack into the room. I unzipped it, took out a sheet, and tacked it across the unmoving onlookers. An imam started a call to prayers from a tower, which sounded as if it was right above the house. A second started wailing over the lake, a third somewhere beyond that, and countless more followed across the city. The moment they stopped – all as one – I heard a knock at the door.
Danu stood in the sun. A smaller person stood behind her.
She had said she would show me the best places. Didn’t I remember? Her car was just up the hill. She had brought her friend Siri.
Soon we were walking away from the crowd that had moved about the house to gawk at Danu. I saw Adi on the roof, watching us climb the hill.
Danu’s car was air-conditioned, the windows tinted. Danu’s friend smiled at me, turned about in the front seat. Siri’s manner was deferential and tentative, and she appeared only able to speak in a whisper. One eye was lazy.
While we were snarled at an intersection, a policeman drew alongside on his motorbike, rapped on the driver’s window and waited, looking ahead in his creaseless khaki uniform, immaculate cream gloves, calf-sculpting boots, glossy dark glasses. Danu eased down the window, spoke a few words, handed him a crisp banknote. The policeman pocketed the note and waved us through a path magically opening in the traffic. We passed another policeman as we left the intersection … but no, it was a concrete mannequin of a policeman, whistle stuck in his lips, arm permanently extended.
Danu smiled in the rear-vision mirror. ‘That’s the problem with driving a new car. The police are always stopping you.’ Her face hanging in the mirror looked darker, older. ‘I suppose it’s a kind of tax.’
‘Applied by the department of police,’ giggled Siri.
At the next set of lights a boy came up to the driver’s window, played his ukulele listlessly for a few seconds, then thrust out his hand. His mouth was like a tennis ball, and his eyes angry. Danu again pressed down her window, passing him a crushed and grubby note. This intersection teemed with beggars. One dragged himself on a trolley between vehicles. Another vigorously swung along the ground on his palms.
The traffic thinned the further we climbed into the hills; soon we were in tea plantations, hill after hill crossed by neat rows of the compact tea bushes, the rows dark green on bright green, running in and out of the mist.
‘It’s like being in the clouds, isn’t it,’ said Danu, looking askance in the mirror. ‘But the tea industry almost collapsed because of the tigers. Yes, the cats were eating the workers. Eating hundreds of them every year. I’m not exaggerating.’ She watched me in the mirror, while Siri continued smiling at me. ‘This island used to be full of big cats. Now it’s full of people and their rubbish. I think there are over ninety million people living on this island alone. No one really knows how many. The officials lie about the number. They don’t want to admit how many people are here.’
‘There are too many people,’ explained Siri. ‘That’s why we like leaving the city. There are four million people in that bowl back there.’ She wore either a worried expression or a wondering smile, sometimes both at once. Her eyes reserved some mischief. So many people here had small deformities – squints, birthmarks, limps, growths, rashes, hare lips.
We stopped at a cutting by the roadside. The tea fields were deserted, silent, without even an occasional bird call (I don’t recall seeing a bird in Bandung). The road wound on over the hills, in and out of the clouds. Siri laid out a tartan rug on the grassy margin between the verge and the uncertain edge of mist, opened a picnic basket, and filled three cups with milky tea from a thermos.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see,’ said Danu.
‘It’s a lake, a bit further up in the hills,’ Siri whispered. ‘Usually it’s crowded. But we don’t think it will be today. It’s good to get away from people, isn’t it?’
‘No one’s here to sell us anything,’ I said. That already felt strange.
And it was cool here, miraculously cool. Why wasn’t everyone living up here?
‘Do you have a girlfriend in Australia, Joe?’ asked Siri.
‘I did. She left me just before I came here.’
‘Oh, I see, you’re fleeing a broken heart,’ said Siri tenderly, unwrapping a little crustless segment of sandwich. ‘Women in Australia are strong, aren’t they?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They do as they please,’ said Danu. ‘They live with men, don’t they, before they marry?’
‘Some do. It depends on the person.’
Danu and Siri nodded slowly, intent on every word.
‘You know it would be extremely rare for a woman to do that in this country,’ said Danu.
‘And yet it’s so close,’ I said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Geographically.’
‘Only geographically.’
‘Do you think Indonesian women are pretty?’ pursued Siri, sensing some opening.
‘They’re gorgeous.’
Siri squealed and clutched Danu. This kind of simpering was de rigueur among the women here – apart from Danu, who never did it.
‘Would you marry one?’ asked Siri, fascinated by her own daring.
‘You’d have beautiful children,’ said Danu. ‘Everyone says Eurasians are the best-looking. But it would mean converting to Islam.’ She smiled.
She pulled up the sleeves of her light cashmere cardigan, and for the first time I noticed scars carelessly crossing her wrists.
‘Are you Protestant or Catholic?’ asked Siri, pianissimo. I was often asked this. It seemed that Protestantism and Catholicism were considered two distinct religions in this country.
‘I’m neither.’
‘But you go to church?’ pressed Siri.
‘No.’
Danu and Siri considered this, talking together in Javanese, a language I could not understand.
‘You don’t have to have a religion in Australia, do you?’
‘No.’
‘It’s against the law not to believe in a god here. You have to have a religion here.’
‘Do I need one now?’
Siri looked confused.
‘We’ll give you until the next time we meet,’ said Danu.
‘And you don’t have poor people in your country, do you?’ wondered Siri.
‘We certainly do, Siri.’
‘But not like people are poor here,’ said Danu, ‘hopelessly poor, with absolutely nothing, tens of millions of them, virtually starving.’
‘No, not many like that, I suppose. I don’t really know how to compare.’
‘I think I can compare,’ said Danu. ‘You’ve got social security. So no one starves. There’s no social security here. Here you or your family makes money, or you starve.’
‘There’s a different kind of poverty at home.’
‘Don’t say spiritual.’
I laughed.
Danu shook her head. ‘All you Westerners say the same thing. I should have been born in Australia, and you should have been born here.’
‘Let me say this, Danu. Look at the Westerners here. Do they seem admirable to you? Would you really want to be like them?’
‘Yes, why not? They have everything that matters as far as I’m concerned. I don’t mean wealth. I have wealth. I mean freedom. In your country women come and go as they please. I cannot. They go out with whoever they please, they talk to whoever they please. That’s what I have been told.’
‘We’re not as free as you think.’
Danu appeared angry at this, and her head snaked a little. ‘But I’ve been told, by Australians, that women and men are equal in your country.’
Danu had some kind of episode as we were packing up. She turned pale, started trembling, and could not rise from the grass. She talked rapidly to Siri, again in Javanese, and lay limp as a marionette on the ground. Siri ran to the car, returning with a little zippered pack. She took out a syringe and injected Danu.
Within minutes Danu was up and mobile again. She drove down to the lake evenly, if slowly, circling down through always-thickening layers of mist. Nothing, it seemed, had happened.
We walked the red shoreline between water and cloud. Mist disguised the lake’s extent. Treetops vanished upwards in radiating lines. Here and there a monkey or some rainforest bird called. I had the feeling of knowing this place vicariously, of having pictured it in my mind, of having heard it described.
‘Hardly anyone’s about,’ said Danu, ‘that’s good.’
A few rowboats nestled in an inlet, a man snoozing in one of the hulls. Soon he was scrambling about looking for oars and oarlocks. Siri held up her phone to take a photo, but Danu waved it aside. After a confused pause, Siri obeyed.
‘You row, Joe,’ said Danu, as we climbed into the boat.
‘Isn’t Siri coming?’
‘No, she’s not. She’s too scared. She can’t swim.’
For some reason I hesitated. But I got in.
The man pushed us out. I put in one oar, then the other, and began rowing from shore, finding a rhythm, yet still uneasy. Siri grew wispy, before the mist swallowed her. The shore disappeared too, the water steadily contracting to a circle about the boat. The sun was confusingly low and watery, surrounded by diluted lemon rings. Then I could see nothing but Danu in front of me, and hear only the dipping oars.
Danu appeared excited, and gazed intently at the water. She had wrapped the tartan blanket about her, into a dark pyramid pearly with water drops. Highlights dabbed the tip of her nose, her bottom lip. I suppose most men would have been happy to be stuck in a boat with a Danu, but I wasn’t enjoying our little row. I was oppressed by the feeling of shabbiness that afflicted me whenever I was around her. And I was trapped in my physicality, trapped by knobbly elbows and knobbly knees, by a nose that seemed to grow larger every day in this place, by skin so pale it showed every blemish. I felt inadequate in other ways, too. Danu had constructed some kind of ideal Western man for herself, and how could I ever match him? I had the sensation of being on stage – now – but not knowing my lines. I was an imposter, without knowing how or why.
‘Siri’s the only person I could call a friend,’ Danu was saying from under her beaded pyramid, ‘I’m not close to anyone else, and I’m not close to anyone in my family. Except my brother. The rest of them mean little to me. I know they’ve given me my education, a place to live, a car – so much more than most people in this country could even dream of. I know that. But they have never had anything to do with me. I’ve always lived in a different city to the rest of my family. I was sent to boarding school here in Bandung, while my parents lived four hours away in Jakarta. I had my own house here even as a child, because it was too far to travel back to Jakarta every weekend. It was as if my parents didn’t want to know me. I think they are cold people.’
I sculled on, the strokes barely audible. A dark shape appeared in the mist. It became an island, unveiled as we slid close by.
‘Whoah!’ I cried. ‘We could have hit that.’
‘That’s Passion Island,’ said Danu, ignoring my alarm. ‘There’s an old story about that island. It has just one tree growing on it, a magnolia. See? No, it’s gone now, it’s lost in the mist. They say that tree has been there for hundreds of years. But it shows no signs of ageing. In fact, it’s still a young tree. The story goes that two young lovers are buried under it. That’s why it never grows old. Did you see it had flowers? It always has flowers.’
I put down the oars, realising at last the futility of rowing. Fish mouthed the surface, sank back under. The mist opened up once, and a cloud came skating down from the hills, drizzle dimpling the water: Danu’s blanket shone, then darkened. Hilltops appeared briefly between the lower and upper cloud, a pair of ivory ducks flew against the mist.
‘My parents’ marriage was arranged,’ said Danu. ‘It was loveless. It was dutiful. I was born out of duty. My parents say romantic love is a decadent lie of the West. But I know it exists. And the story knows,’ she said, looking back at where the island might have been, but where shoreline now stretched. Parkland, running away under frosted trees. A shape in the mist evolved, a brandy tiger with shoulder blades revolving as it padded forward. Then it drifted apart.
‘I don’t like my new maid. They sacked the old one because I got along with her too well.’
‘Who sacked her?’
‘My family, of course. They control me. Or try to. I fight and fight not to be a puppet. I’m not a doll or a puppet to be manipulated.’
Now a furry green hull was wavering below the surface, timbers trailing weed. That was real. ‘Look, Danu, there’s a boat under the water.’
‘Oh, the lake is full of wrecks. Lots of people drown in this lake. They say drowning is the dreamy way to die. I’ve nearly drowned a few times. I keep going into the water when I shouldn’t. I can’t swim either.’
Siri appeared at the water’s edge, holding up her phone. I took up the oars again.
When Danu had gone to collect the deposit from the boatman, Siri limped close to me, whispering, ‘You know Danu’s sick? She’s not a well person. And she’s lovesick too. She’s in love. She’s having trouble with her family at the moment, big trouble. They want her to marry a man she doesn’t even like. A man she doesn’t want to marry.’
‘Really?’
‘She’s determined not to. But it’s all meant to happen – do you understand? Don’t tell her I told you any of this.’
Danu was haggling with the boatman. I walked toward them.
‘She was supposed to marry him a year ago,’ Siri continued, following closely, ‘but she managed to trick her family, saying she was too sick. The time before that, she slashed her wrists. That bought her a bit of time. But the truth is she’s in love with someone else.’
‘Siri, please stop.’ Some kind of vacuum was opening up and I was being drawn into it.
Siri did not seem to hear, or comprehend, and kept coming. ‘She says she’ll die before she marries the man her family wants her to marry, no matter how much they punish her. And they do punish her! They read her letters, spy on her, they threaten to take away her allowance so that she can no longer study. I hope you never meet her brother. But he follows her. Her family took no notice of her all her life until it was time for her to marry. Poor Danu. She appears to have everything, but she’s trapped. Sometimes Danu has talked of fleeing. But a woman can’t leave the country without her father’s permission, or her husband’s. That’s the law.’
‘Can’t anyone help?’
‘Oh no, she’s not asking for help.’
I had been unaware of time passing; the day was nearly gone by the time we returned to the car. From the back seat I watched the mist turning blue in the growing dark. A livid sun plunged between black volcanic peaks. I was shaky, febrile, hungry.
Danu drew to the side of the road.
‘Where are we now?’
‘We always stop here to eat before going back down, Joe.’
A lone hut perched on the side of the mountain, by the road. Inside, a humpbacked woman roasted corn on a brazier. The corn was three-quarter sized – like the people, the cats, the houses, the fences, the hedges, the buses, the cars of this place. Everything here was three-quarter sized. Two-third sized, even. Sometimes I thought I was in a dream, in which everything had shrunk.
Close above the table hung a kerosene lantern. No cars passed, no voices intruded from the night. The air was almost cold, and lights spluttered on the slopes below.
‘Everything’s changing in Bandung,’ said Danu. ‘When I was a kid it used to rain for five months solid during the wet season. Now you get three months if you’re lucky, and it’s on and off.’
‘Once people heated the water to have a bath.’
‘That’s right. Now they never need to. At least you can breathe up here in the hills, and there’s still space. That’s what I think I’d like most about Australia, it’s not so crowded, is it? I’ve always loved your country, Joe, ever since I was a girl. It seemed so free, and not so far away, just over the water. Yet different. Completely different. Sometimes I try to imagine what spring must feel like, or autumn. We only have the wet and the dry here, no real seasons. What’s autumn like? I think I can imagine it.’ Danu leaned closer in the gaslight. The peasant woman served the hot, garnished little cobs. The brazier hissed. Siri too was leaning forward from the shadows, her eye roaming freely over me. The lamp swung, its yellow beam crossing the women’s faces. Danu’s face was opening, and I saw how closed it had been before.
‘There’s actually a reason why so few Indonesians have gone to Australia in the past, Joe. They’ve been told to fear the space between our countries. There’s a legend of a sea goddess who lives in the ocean between our lands. Ordinary people believed it; they still do. That’s why so few Indonesians sailed that way. They thought the goddess would eat them.’
‘You see, people have never been encouraged to leave, have they!’ exclaimed Siri.
‘I got around that story when I was a child by dreaming I flew to Australia – flying with my own wings. I would always fly low, and see the goddess beneath the surface of the water, and watch her black eye following me. But she couldn’t get me.’
Danu was flexing her arm.
‘Are you warm enough?’ whispered Siri. ‘I could get the blanket.’
‘I’m a little bit stiff, that’s all. Now I know there is no goddess, Joe. Yet still I can’t cross the water.’
The peasant woman served another batch of corn. This garnish was delicious. I had never tasted anything like it. I forced myself to eat slowly, and no more than my share. I already felt a new clarity, as if my brewing fever had evaporated. The peasant woman arranged a last line of corn on the brazier, before hobbling off to sweep the earth floor with a large handbroom shaped like a fan. She avoided our eyes.
‘She’s half-Japanese, from the war,’ muttered Siri, looking sidelong. Then, looping her arm inside Danu’s, she returned to her favourite theme. ‘You said you thought the women here were pretty, Joe. Does that mean you would go out with an Indonesian woman?’
‘Probably not.’
Siri’s mouth fell open. ‘Why not?’
‘The culture’s too different. It would be too hard.’
Danu and Siri frowned, shook their heads.
‘No, no, no. You make things too complicated,’ said Siri.
‘What differences are you talking about?’ asked Danu, unsmiling. ‘Westerners marry Indonesians all the time. I know one couple who ran away together, because her family didn’t like him. They ran away to England. I know her. She writes to me from Durham. A mixed marriage can work, I’m sure it can.’
I watched the left side of her face grow slack. Then without warning her face closed, and she came forward out of the shadows. ‘Do you know why I can’t go to Australia, Joe? It’s because my parents won’t let me. They’re frightened I’ll never come back. A daughter has to have her father’s consent to leave this country. And my father won’t give it.’
Siri put her hand over Danu’s hand, reassuring – or perhaps restraining.
‘Danu!’
Blood was streaming from Danu’s nose, twin streams over her lips onto the corn. I saw the bleed before either woman was aware of it.
The peasant woman stopped sweeping and began staring. Siri rushed as fast as she could to the car, scurrying back with the little hypodermic kit.
‘Don’t worry, Joe, don’t worry,’ said Danu, watching Siri hurriedly unpack another syringe. ‘It’s nothing. It happens sometimes. It’s nothing.’
‘Nothing,’ echoed Siri, who began ministering to her friend.