3

The next morning they emerged from the path and from between a pair of semi-effaced putti to find a woman trawling a boy of four or five through the blue-spangled water of the pool, which, the previous day, they’d had to themselves. The boy was giggling and saying, To the frogs, Mummy, to the frogs, as she struggled through the deep end. Tom and Clara settled into their banana lounges, the woman smiled up at them, and Tom watched Clara smile back a strange smile that seemed more a mirror of the other woman’s than her own.

It was only midmorning, but the heat was already intense. The sun bore down upon them with such ferocity that the pebble-encrusted concrete around the pool seemed to wither under its force. The reflected light was blinding. Tom found his sunglasses and put them on. A Balinese woman in a sarong with a maroon sash around her waist appeared with three juices on a tray and put them on a table. As she left, Clara ordered juices for them, too.

Soon a tall, skinny man in wet shorts appeared and dived into the water. He came up grinning broadly as the boy squealed to escape his grasp. That’s when Tom learnt that he was Australian, but she was French. She was saying, Non, non! as he came after her, too.

When the woman and the boy got out of the pool, they sat on the lounges nearest them. The woman, who looked as if she was about to lie down, instead gathered her long hair behind her ears, and, squinting, turned to Clara.

Is your room mouldy? she asked.

There was a beat as Clara, behind her book, registered being spoken to. She lowered the book. No, our room’s not mouldy, she said. Is your room mouldy?

The woman twisted her hair into one big plait, pulled it around her shoulder, and let it unfurl down her front. She then lay back in the lounge and pulled on her sunglasses. It was, she said. Two different rooms were … The third room, it was okay.

Oh, said Clara.

It was okay, but — she spoke quicker, turning her face to the sky and perhaps closing her eyes behind her sunglasses — it was annoying to move each time. And then I found them spraying disgusting toxic shit in our room, which I asked them not to, actually.

Really? Clara put her book down and pulled herself up the banana lounge. What stuff? Insect spray?

The waitress returned with their juices. Tall, brightly coloured drinks, full of ice. Tom sat up and apologetically removed things from his table — his cap, book, towel — for her to set them down.

Yes, the woman continued, her voice lowered as the waitress returned to the restaurant. This huge fucking can was on the dresser when we came back to our room. They use it in all the rooms, every day. I asked them not to use it in our room. I complained to the front desk. I don’t want Ollie to be sleeping in a room full of toxic fumes. Merde. He has a bad chest.

Tom looked over at Ollie. A vaguely pudgy, gentle-looking kid, he was not paying attention to the conversation. He had an iPad out, drawn very close to his face, presumably due to the sun.

I guess our room does smell of something, now you mention it, Clara said. I thought it was just, like, cleaning products … I haven’t seen them use it, though.

They do it when they clean the rooms, when you’re out, the woman said, growing angrier about it as she spoke. You wouldn’t know, unless they leave the fucking can in the room!

Wow, Clara said, and there was a pause in conversation as they considered the problem.

Clara had allergies, and other strange ailments and symptoms that had never been satisfactorily explained. A stubborn rash on her upper thighs. For weeks, every night she rubbed cream into the inflamed, pimply skin and he would walk into the room while she was doing it and pretend not to stare, her white legs pressed flat and wide against the bed, her unshaved pubic hair tightly curled. The thing above her lips, like an echo of her upper lip drawn on, a possible fungal infection that was a mystery to her doctor, and which meant they couldn’t kiss for a while. Also, iron deficiency, possible IBS.

Tom had nothing like this. He had an anxiety disorder, and he was perpetually exhausted from this and insomnia, but he could eat anything, rarely got sick, and, unlike her, was entirely complacent when it came to the chemical threats around them in the house: the black mould in the bathroom, the asbestos in the roof. For some reason these dangers gained no purchase on his anxieties. Perhaps because they were things that could be fixed, but the fixes were expensive or involved a lot of work, so it was easier to just pretend they weren’t there.

Not that Clara was alarmist about these things, and ultimately she took them in hand — convincing the landlord to re-enamel the bathroom tiles, and repainting the ceiling herself. She was sensitive to smells; she was always catching whiffs of things he couldn’t detect at all, or not for ages after her, like the time a house a few doors down were polishing their floors, or when the tip caught on fire a few suburbs over. All her senses were stronger than his. She tasted burnt garlic in her food, heard all the mumbled things on television he didn’t catch, could read signs on the highway hundreds of metres before him. He had always meant to get his eyes checked, but he couldn’t be sure if it wasn’t just exhaustion that made things swim right in front of them or lines blur in the distance, unless of course he was short-sighted as well as long. He couldn’t afford lenses, so he put off even finding out.

The man — who had been floating on his back while the women talked, kicking off the sides of the pool with his long legs — joined them finally and stood over his family, drying himself and casting a shadow that fell over the legs of his son and over Tom’s feet, too.

The two women were talking about mould now, about its effects on the lungs of children, but in a pause in the conversation he interjected apologetically and introduced himself, and introductions were made all round. They were Jeremy, Madeleine, and Ollie. Jeremy made to shake hands with Tom, but, as he came towards him and leaned down, he got his foot stuck on Ollie’s banana lounge and dragged it with him a little, sending the iPad onto the tiles.

Papa! cried Ollie.

Idiot, Madeleine said, not quite under her breath.

Jeremy scooped up the iPad. It seemed okay. He handed it back to the boy. Crisis averted, he said, grinning at Tom.

Back in their room, Tom laughed about the rude Frenchwoman and her bumbling husband, but Clara was not amused.

I like them, Clara said.

Yeah, yeah … they’re fine.

He was naked at the bathroom mirror, working on his hair, which had become impossibly frizzed and uncontainable. He was wetting it and patting it down with his hands, which worked — while the hair was wet. Clara was on the bed, flipping through the channels on an old TV that sat on a bamboo cabinet in the corner of the room. He gave up on his hair, stepped back into his wet shorts, and pulled them on.

I guess we’re going to see them everywhere now, he said.

And they did. On the way to the markets, outside warungs they’d chosen for lunch, out on the beach. It was Tom’s intention to keep them at arm’s length, at the level of the passing nod, and he assumed Clara would want the same, but she was being warmer than that. She seemed glad to be making friends, and by the end of the third day she had a loose arrangement to meet Madeleine at the cabanas for breakfast.

Not sleeping well in the poorly air-conditioned room, Tom came out the next two mornings to find them all eating breakfast — banana pancakes, nasi goreng, eggs, pastries, large platters of fruit.

Madeleine held court, talking about her research (she was a cultural historian specialising in women’s history); flat prices in Paris as compared to Sydney, where her sister lived (which were shocking to her), and as compared to Melbourne (which were slightly less so); and about Ollie (the complications of her pregnancy, his chest problems), in muted tones, or in code (third-degree T-E-A-R, postnatal D-E-P) if he was around.

Jeremy didn’t speak much, and he moved around the place quietly, too. He was always ducking his head, as if to dodge door frames only he could see, and, although he was mostly nimble, if he moved too fast he became clumsy, comical. But he beamed readily, at Madeleine, at Ollie, at Clara and Tom, too, and engaged happily with everyone he came across — hawkers, the women selling massages on the beach — while also following Madeleine’s orders and keeping Ollie entertained with board games, frisbee on the beach, or by drifting around with him in the shallow water. When he came back, he sat next to Madeleine, and she arranged him so she could lay her legs over his lap. Then he would stroke her legs as she talked. At one point, Tom saw him absent-mindedly raise one of her feet to his lips and kiss the joints of her toes. They were painted fluorescent orange.

For Tom, it was all too much. He wanted slow mornings. He wanted to stay so long in one spot they got hungry again and ordered the next meal there, too. He wanted to read his book. He did not want to make small talk. When he tried, he said stupid things, or distracted, awkward things, and received looks from Clara for them. She made excuses for him — said he was always preoccupied. And this was true, but he wasn’t relaxed about it. He couldn’t relax, and relaxing was the whole point. All he wanted was for two weeks what they’d never really had before: a proper holiday. And they’d picked Sanur because it was quiet; people called it ‘Snore’. Of course, he could see where they’d gone wrong there, now — because of this reputation it was popular among young families.

But beyond that, beyond Madeleine and Jeremy and Ollie, who weren’t awful, he had to admit (and sometimes it worked out well for him — with Madeleine and Clara talking for hours and Jeremy asking little of him, he was left relatively alone and could slip off and lie in the shade somewhere and try to nap), it was still too much: too much noise, too much accommodation of other people. Too much everything. He needed time. He needed peace. He was exhausted. More exhausted than he felt at home. The humidity wasn’t helping. He seemed to shed his body weight in sweat every few hours. It was triggering, too, the heat. He couldn’t decide half the time if he was starting to panic or was just overheated.

Plus, he was still coming to terms with the flight. The turbulence. How he’d simply … disintegrated. It had been a while, and he had been half-hoping — pretending, at least — that that was over.

So he continued to be disparaging about them, while Clara defended them both.

I think he’s funny, she said.

They were at dinner — a tiny, one-room warung on the corner of a busy intersection that was open on two sides to the street. On one side it overlooked the main tourist strip, forever congested with honking pick-ups and snaking scooters, and on the other opened onto a dark side street that led down to the beach. This was a popular parking spot, with scooters and motorbikes starting up continuously and thundering past.

Under hard lights, Tom and Clara sat at a small plastic table on gleaming pink tiles. It was their fifth day now, and Clara had taken to wearing the same thing each day — not shorts after all, and not the floral dress she had tried on at home, but a big loose-fitting cotton thing with pockets. It was a pale, faintly marled grey that turned darker in patches with her swimsuit underneath, and she wore it with sandals and a floppy red canvas hat that, by squashing her hair down, had the strange effect of making her face and ears appear bigger beneath it. There was something carefree about the outfit that told Tom she was enjoying herself. That she was happy. He would have liked to have been gratified by this, but something about it annoyed him. He was in a bad mood, it was true — the exhaustion, their new friends — but there was something about her attitude, her happiness here, that felt like a rebuke, even a rejection of him. It had nothing to do with him, her happiness — how could it, if she was enjoying herself so much and he wasn’t? It was all about Madeleine and Jeremy and Ollie, and he felt dumped for more interesting people while also pathetic for being so transparently jealous.

… and, actually, they have a good relationship, she was saying. Madeleine loves him, you can tell. She’s kind of play-acting, being grumpy like that all the time. She’s actually one of the happiest people I’ve met in a long time, I think.

Sure, okay, I don’t really care about the state of their relationship, Tom said. He was running his fingers along his eyebrows, collecting and inspecting sweat.

No, but you’re always making comments about how she comes to a place like this and complains, or is ordering Jeremy around —

She is kind of bossy, is all I said. And when she’s not being bossy, she’s draped all over him and complaining about the mould in their room or the water pressure or whatever … in this incredible pl—

Mould is bad for kids, she’s just concerned about her little boy … who is very adorable, you have to admit that, at least?

He’s cute, he said, looking down at the menu.

They’ve had a difficult time, though, too, Clara said, more carefully.

Really, how’s that?

She was telling me about how hard it was with Ollie … when he was young. That he never slept.

I thought there was something in him I recognised.

Madeleine said he woke up all through the night, and ended up in the bed with her all the time. So they co-slept … but it was long settles every night, and still lots of waking up … with Jeremy sleeping on the couch for, like, years. She said they had become enmeshed, or something.

Enmeshed?

Yeah, enmeshed. Something her psychologist said. I’m not sure what that means, she didn’t really explain. But she said she ended up spending a lot of time away from Jeremy, with Ollie at her mother’s in Léon, weeks and weeks away, even though everything was okay between them, and he was a good father and everything … She said that was the only way she could stay sane, that her mother calmed her down … and things slowly got better, Ollie started sleeping through the night, but it took years.

Sounds tough.

Yeah. But they got through it … And now he sleeps like an angel.

Seems so.

There was a pause.

I wonder if we’d have an anxious, bad sleeper, Clara said. Surprisingly, Tom thought, without a trace of irony.

Holding her gaze, he dragged in breath.

I guess the whole thing is such a lottery, she continued … who they become, whose genetics they get … God, I hope we don’t produce another academic.

Ha, he said.

The water they’d ordered with their food five, ten minutes ago hadn’t arrived. He had sweat still stuck to his back from the walk. He was wearing a linen shirt — the kind that, when worn in, was perfectly suited to hotter weather, but before this point was scratchy. The shirt was before that point. And he knew it was wrong, it wasn’t their fault, it wasn’t about them, but he was irritated by the people at the restaurant. The pace of everything was so slow. The woman who had taken their order had disappeared, and there was no one to ask about the water.

There was no one else dining in the restaurant, either, other than a large Australian man with a tiny Balinese woman, eating in silence under the coruscating lights. He had probably paid for her services, Tom thought. They had seen something like this being negotiated the day before at lunch, at another warung down the road. A late-middle-aged Australian man waiting with a vaguely officious-looking woman in a suit, and then another woman, dressed less urbanely than the first in a long skirt and a T-shirt, arrived, trailing a boy. The whole thing was openly discussed, with the man, crudely, it seemed to Tom, negotiating the terms of the agreement, and then patronising the boy — I’ll come and spend some time with you and your mother at your place? And you show me around? How does that sound? Sound like a good deal? — and the boy looking baffled.

More scooters started up outside. They were teenagers, two per bike, with their helmet visors up, hooting and throwing back their heads. One of the scooters looped around the road dangerously as it gathered speed.

He was painfully hungry now. He felt faint from fatigue. Words from the menu still in his hands swam a little, but they often did that. At the base of his scalp, in the cavities between the neck muscles along his hairline, his head itched. It stung under his fingernails as he scratched at it, but he couldn’t help himself. He desperately wanted to go back to the hotel and take a long shower.

Where the fuck is everyone? he said.

She’ll be back, Clara said, now preoccupied with her phone.

He looked around the room as if he was in a busy restaurant trying to catch someone’s eye, but there was no one in the room, so it was pointless. He was willing someone to materialise and realise they’d left them out there too long.

What happens when someone wants something quickly, though? Or now?

Clara looked up. Her face had that pale look she got when she was unimpressed, her expression set a little more firmly, both eyebrows ever so slightly raised.

You know, at first, of course, it seems so gracious and charming or whatever, they are so beautiful, and discreet, especially with everything they have to put up with, all these arseholes, and how hard they work, and what we are doing to their country and everything … but then … I don’t know. You don’t get that? Does everything have to be quite so painfully relaxed? All the time?

He was still whispering, but his whispering had risen in volume a notch or two. There was music playing, gamelan, from the kitchen, but it was low, and no doubt the other couple in the restaurant could hear at least some of what he was saying.

You’re being a shithead, Tom.

Fine, I’m being a shithead.

A racist one too, even.

Racist, he scoffed. But the word bit. It punctured his outrage, and, just like that, it collapsed.

Okay, fine, he said sarcastically, but without conviction.

He looked down at his phone. He could feel her scrutinising him. Shame pressed against his face.

It was true that he didn’t usually allow himself to get angry. The impulse was there, but he controlled it, swallowed it back down. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d had something that might be considered a proper fight. They bickered in passing and let it drop. Usually he didn’t have the energy. He needed things to be okay at least with them; if there wasn’t that, then what was there? But he’d felt it rising in him and had to let it out. Maybe he’d moved up into another gear, like an overtired toddler, become so tired and hungry he was furious. But it was over now. He’d done that, he’d let it out, and the usual shame had descended over him.

And Clara knew he hadn’t really meant that about the people here, surely; he spent so much of his time saying how incredible they were, but of course he wasn’t going to bring it up again to backtrack on that. Still, it did seem now that she wasn’t looking at him or speaking to him.

The food arrived soon after that. Tom felt himself become almost theatrically ingratiating, needlessly rearranging the condiments and glasses on the table for the waitress to fit their food on there, too. Then they ate in silence. He asked Clara how her food was, and she said good. He said the sate ayam was actually really good here, and she agreed, the food was good.

They carried their silence back to the hotel. He liked to pretend, when this happened, that it was a comfortable silence they were sharing, and, although he was concealing stomach cramps, which were worsening, as if there was concrete being poured into his stomach and folded in with his blood, he pretended they were simply strolling home after a nice meal — contented, full, enjoying each other’s company without feeling the need to speak. He had to do this, because otherwise he became enraged.

She was much better at silences than he was. She could go on forever. It was always he who had to cave. He would let the silence deepen for as long as he could, but ultimately he would back down and puncture it with some innocent-sounding question, ask if she’d seen something he was looking for — his phone, the bottle-opener — and she would respond to the question, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes readily enough, like nothing had happened, and, usually, this was enough for it to pass. Except when it wasn’t, and she resumed the silence and didn’t talk to him for days on end, which had happened a few times — the worst time when they were travelling, all those years ago.

He was thinking a lot about that trip now — now they were overseas together again. It was as if, when they’d broken up for a while, and she was living mostly away from him, he’d boxed up those ten months and relegated them to some dusty corner of his memory where there was, he had convinced himself, nothing of interest to him. And he’d left them there ever since, untouched, even though they’d been back together for so long.

Now, it seemed, he was interested. He kept remembering new things. It seemed like it had happened to different people. She was twenty then, and he was twenty-two. He had to remind himself of that. At the time, they had felt so jaded and old — certainly not like young people exploring the world, which, of course, they were.

At the hotel they trudged past reception where the woman who had checked them in was on shift, sitting at a computer behind a tall bamboo counter. She smiled and called out goodnight, and Tom smiled back, waved, said, Lovely night, and turned to see Clara’s face still closed against them both.

Back on the bed, and still not talking, Clara flipped through the channels again, finding nothing but Indonesian versions of the same game shows and reality TV they had at home.

Tom drank a beer and read his book, but he couldn’t concentrate on the book and picked up his phone. He scrolled through Instagram. Then, using his best neutral tone, he said: Do you remember our other holiday pals?

Clara didn’t respond straightaway, and, for a moment, he wondered if she was going to ignore him completely. This was an unspoken rule, that they respond to each other. Ignoring him completely would make it something else, something they might need to acknowledge.

Who? she said, finally.

In Thailand, he said, feeling a rush of gratitude and trying not to show it in his voice.

No?

The Swedes. You know, the sweetest people on earth.

Oh … yeah.

She was looking up at the ceiling, now, and he followed her gaze. Beyond the mosquito net, there were ornate cornices that were glossy with varnish and many-tiered and so intricately carved it was hard to make out what they depicted. Flowers? Angels? Animals?

I loved them, she said.

They were very sweet, he said, relaxing completely now. Dumb, though. Or maybe just naïve. Like they’d lived a very sheltered life and this was their first time out of the village, or Stockholm or whatever. She got heatstroke, and we visited her in the hospital.

Oh yeah. Clara clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and began exploring her teeth with it.

He was so excited when he found us and brought us to visit her, he said. Like we were their oldest friends. Do you remember that? She was so happy. So grateful. It was very weird.

It’s strange, she said, after a moment. I remember that, but nothing else about it. I mean, I don’t remember the hospital, at all … it’s like a dream … Just her very, very red, very, very happy face.

And it was only, what, ten years ago?

Twelve, I think. No, thirteen. Two thousand and six.

He kept making bad jokes and getting all sheepish and embarrassed and blaming it on his English, he said.

They were young. He was sweet.

He was sweet. They were both were. Lovely. We just had absolutely nothing to say to each other, that’s all. He recommended books to me. Strindberg, I think. That was good.

Clara changed the channel again. Have you read Strindberg?

Not yet, no.

He looked down at his book, and then back up. How about Marco, in Paris, remember him?

Oh God, of course. I will never forget him.

You know who he reminds me of, just a little?

She looked at him. No, who?

Non, Ollie, non! he said. His impression was terrible. He laughed.

Don’t be ridiculous, she said.