~
I was wanted on the phone, I was told the moment I returned to the losmen.
‘Joe? It’s me, Siri. Danu’s not well. She’s very upset. Something’s happened.’
‘What?’
‘She wants to see you. Can she see you now?’
‘Yes.’
‘This afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’ll come by any minute now.’
‘Okay. But Siri –’
‘She’ll tell you all about it. You’ll make her feel better. She wants you to wait in the lobby of the losmen.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, Joe. You must help her. Can you see her?’
Through the barred glass a black car was double-parking in the street.
‘Goodbye, Siri.’
The proprietor and several of his helpers watched me going back out.
‘Don’t you want to get in?’ said Danu, smiling, oblivious to the cacophony reaching a crescendo behind her.
I looked about, peeped in the car: what about Bobo?
‘I’m not kidnapping you.’
Danu seemed her usual self. Perhaps she was a little distracted, or just busy handling the peak-hour traffic, beggars on the road, and a convoy of military trucks strung through the town square. I was struck by how the interior of the car had little or no resemblance to the heat and squalor of the street. I began suffering a queasiness I had felt before in that car.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I wanted you to come and buy some azaleas with me.’
‘You want me to buy azaleas with you?’
‘Yes! I want to show you my favourite nursery. It’s one of my favourite places. The nursery’s in the hills. It’s a special nursery, entirely for azaleas. Well, it specialises in azaleas. It’s calming. There are lots of plants and no people.’
‘You still have the car.’
‘I told my family a few piggies.’
‘Porkies?’
‘That’s it.’
We came to the nursery. A small white house stood alone by the road. Behind it, potted plants ran off in lines under green mesh. A young woman appeared from a shed as we stepped from the car. She peered up at Danu as if dazzled, and gestured to the plants, smiling.
We wandered under the netting. Danu observed some plants minutely. Something had altered in her since our visit to the caves. She was further away, much further away. I sensed I had already served some practical purpose: What? I wondered.
We had been down the pink, the purple, the white rows. Now we entered the red.
‘What do you think of this one?’ asked Danu, feeling the leaves of a flowering plant. ‘It would look good by a pond, my pond, don’t you think?’
I looked at Danu’s hand on the plant, then at Danu. The light under the meshing was green, submarine. Wavering shadows dappled her. I wanted to take the cotton of her shirt between my thumb and fingers. And her shoes made a soft chocking sound on the paved path, expensive, low-soled Italian shoes, their leather darkened from the oozing plastic piping snaking at our feet.
‘I want to fill my garden with azaleas. But sometimes I think I won’t be here much longer, so why plant a garden? That’s the thing about gardens and pets – people say they tie you down.’
I halted as Danu halted, then followed as she moved on.
‘Look, this plant is putting out too many blooms. It’s dying. Do you ever think about dying, Joe? I’ve tried to kill myself twice. Do you think there’s any reason not to kill yourself?’ Danu began inspecting the undersides of petals for mites and spiders. ‘People always say, “What about the ones you leave behind?” But my family would only see my death as a missed opportunity. Yesterday they took away my telephone. Can you see why I hate them? Next they will take the car, and then I really will be a prisoner in my own house.’
We began walking down a row of tiered ferns.
‘Time’s running out for me. I’ve got days left. I’m afraid my fiancé won’t arrive in time. You see, if he doesn’t come any day now, it’s over for me. I’ve nowhere to go, no – what’s the word? No alternatives. In Australia it would be different, wouldn’t it? I would never be in this – this –’
‘Predicament.’
‘– situation.’
We turned from the ferns to the camellias. Danu picked a dead leaf, inspecting the remains of once fleshy foliage.
‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that if you really love one person you should be with that person, whatever the cost. Your society believes that.’
‘Does it?’
‘It does. It’s in the old legends, the fairytales, the songs. I’ve studied it. So why was I born in a place like this, where I’m not allowed to follow my heart? This man I’m meant to marry is rich, his family is powerful, and everybody thinks he’s good-looking and charming and so on. In fact, he is all those things. But I don’t care, he leaves me cold. What are my options? If I don’t marry him I’ll be disowned and destitute.’
I felt the buds of a young camellia. ‘What about Passion Island, Danu?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s here too. Passion, romantic love – it’s here too.’
Danu darkened. Her head made a snaky movement, the only thing that could be called ugly in her. The snake had come out to certain music.
‘It’s not romance I want. It’s love. Someone who sees me for who I am, for what I am.’
I looked up at the netting. Leaves and seed pods lay in drooping pockets. Hanging baskets of pansies and violets riffled with breezes undetected by my skin. A fountain dribbled into a pond. It was a secluded corner of the nursery.
‘I’m always talking about myself, aren’t I, Joe? I’m self-obsessed. Selfish, my family calls me. I never do my duty.’
I wanted to say, Danu, if you need to escape from this place, marry me. My surprise that I should want to say this kept my mouth shut.
‘I’m going to buy this azalea, I think. You’ve been staring at it awhile, and it is pretty.’
These words seemed to conjure one of the nursery workers, who stepped with a smile from behind a row of plants. Danu made the slightest dismissive gesture with one hand – so slight I did not immediately recognise it. The girl backed away.
‘Did I tell you, Joe, about the time this slimy Westerner proposed to me?’
‘Really?’ I shivered.
‘Yes. He said, “If you marry me, you can come and live in a country where everyone is free and rich.”’
‘That’s slimy?’
‘Yes, I met him about a year ago. He was so sleazy. I said, “Are you in love with me?” He said he wasn’t talking about a real marriage, that he only meant a marriage to help me get out of the country. He was tempting me. Somehow he’d found out my … predicament.’
I stood stripping petals.
‘He barely knew me. “You don’t love me,” I said, and I told him I’d been in love for six years, that I had been waiting, true to one person, for six years. I’d fought my family – and many of my friends – and all alone – for that love, for that long. That is love.’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He said he didn’t mean we’d marry in the proper sense, only legally marry. We’d fly to England, get married in a registrar’s office, and then separate. Then I could stay on in the UK. I said no. He was proposing a marriage of convenience. It would make him – and me – no better than my family.’
‘Who was this?’
‘I’ll only marry for love, Joe. That’s what I’ve sacrificed the last six years for. To marry for love. Not convenience. I’m not going to change that now, not for anything. I understood he was trying to help me,’ continued Danu in a softened voice, while taking up a flowerpot, ‘but I could never do what he suggested. Never.’
‘Even to gain your freedom?’
‘Even to gain my life. Which of these ones should I buy, Joe – this one with the big flowers? Or the one with the small flowers? Come on, help me.’
Another nursery girl appeared from a row of plants, smiling, her pockmarked flesh tinted lime. The imam started up his call, and Danu dropped the plant she had taken up. She plucked a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it to her face, the white cloth rapidly reddening. The nursery girl began cleaning up the mess, and we walked on. Nothing was happening.
The day was dark by the time we were idling outside the gang, a little alleyway, that ran down the side of my losmen. We were saying goodbye when the car lunged forward. I registered a seemingly disassociated crash.
‘That’s only Bobo,’ said Danu, opening her door.
At last! I got to meet Bobo.
‘You stay here, Joe. I’ll talk to him.’
In the mirror a pot-bellied man dressed in white advanced through feeble streetlight toward Danu. I got out of the car. Bobo was shorter than his sister, and his rotundity was oddly disarming.
‘Why are you with him? Kenapa?’ Bobo shrilled, waving his short arms. ‘Kenapa?’
‘Bobo –’
‘Pergi ke mana? Where did you go?’
Danu answered in Javanese. But Bobo replied in Bahasa. ‘Tell me!’
Down the alley some windows were being shut, others thrust open.
‘I want to know where you went! What are you doing driving about with him? Why is he back?’
I walked toward them. Bobo did not look at me.
‘Nothing has happened between Danu and me, Bobo.’
‘Isn’t an Indonesian good enough for you?’ screamed Bobo. He made a sign with one hand.
Danu walked into the darkness and began retching. Bobo returned to his car, reversing in a series of short screeches down the narrow gang.
Danu reappeared, slid into the car without a look or a word, slammed the door, and sped away in the opposite direction.