8

The next day was what Tom thought of later as the best day. Later. When everything was ruined and the holiday had taken on a significance to him that he could not have anticipated.

They had settled in. The bad flight was way behind him, the next flight was a whole week away, but, more than that, he was having a good time. He had warmed to Jeremy, he had warmed to Madeleine and Ollie. No longer was he just being well behaved, putting up with them for Clara’s sake. No longer was he feeling anxious around them, either. They had broken the ice. They were friends now.

It reminded him of what it used to be like, being on holiday with friends — something he had not done for a long time, but which was once such a regular feature in his life. Weekends away, whole weeks during summer camping by the beach. Looking back, these times seemed to have stopped suddenly, but that couldn’t be right. Surely the end was gradual — so gradual he didn’t really notice it. Why had it happened? He knew and he didn’t know.

In truth, being with Madeleine and Jeremy reminded him what it was like to have friends in his life in any way. This had stopped, too, somehow. He made calculations. At twenty-two he had maybe four, five good friends. At twenty-eight, fifteen, twenty. At thirty-five, one — or two, if you counted Clara.

He remembered how, very early on with Clara, sometime in those first years, he had become hung up on the idea of friendship. It embarrassed him now to think of it, and yet if he was honest, he still nursed many of the same doubts and questions he’d had then. What it means, how it is done. He obviously banged on about it a lot because one day Clara presented him with a book she had picked up from an op shop called A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You. She thought it was sweet, funny; she was only gently mocking him. But he had been humiliated by that present, and he was as embarrassed thinking about it now as he was then: that he was preoccupied with something that was so obvious there was a children’s book that explained it to you in the very title. Of course, he thought then — and still did think, privately — it wasn’t actually as simple as that. Simply liking you did not make someone your friend, not in any meaningful way. People could ‘like’ you and not see you one year to the next. In what way was that friendship?

At the time, when Clara had given him the book, they were part of a tight little group, people from university, mostly, and a few of Clara’s older friends from high school who had also moved to Melbourne from the Gold Coast; Tom had happily let his hometown friends go when he moved to the city. Perhaps because of this, because they were her friends first, he always felt slightly on the outer of this group. He was uptight, paranoid. Everyone else — it was girls mostly and a couple of guys, boyfriends of the girls — seemed to see each other more often than they did him, and he wasn’t sure quite how this happened. But he knew he wasn’t always easy to get along with, he could be argumentative, prickly, and he always suspected he was tolerated rather than liked. Back then, he was often like this, moody, unpredictable. He slept about as badly then as he did now. He had a reputation for saying things most people wouldn’t — and to people’s faces, too. Certain people called him ‘acid tongue’. But he couldn’t handle the injustice of people walking around oblivious, not knowing what everyone thought of them. So he told them. An early girlfriend had said if there was a song about Tom, it was The Smiths’ ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’.

When they first got together, he and Clara would argue all the time about the smallest things, and did it everywhere — in front of her parents, in front of his — but he’d put a stop to that. He was agreeable, now. Mild. Quieter.

He’d been trained in the art of argument by his parents — trained to take offence, rise to the occasion, take the bait. To be thin-skinned and sharp-tongued. And it wasn’t good for him. He’d agreed with his therapist about that. He could give, but he couldn’t take. Besides, if his parents were how you turned out if you kept up with all that, he wanted no part of it.

So he was pleasant, now, and polite. You could just do that, it turned out: swallow it back down, roll with the punches. It was an anti-anxiety strategy, too, of course. If he could just not care about things so much, they wouldn’t piss him off or stress him out or make him paranoid, so he was trying to let things go. It might all come out in other ways, of course, like in your legs on a plane or in your hands as you raise your cup to your lips, but he was working on that.

After the present of the book, he’d dropped the subject of friendship, kept his thoughts to himself, and, over time, the preoccupation waned. Besides, only a few years later, when they were no longer in contact with most of the people in the old group, it became a moot point, because they suddenly found their people. A big, messy, amorphous group, introduced to them mostly by Trish, who was a girl who could go out on a Friday night and have a whole new gang by the end of the weekend. And, for a couple of years, they were busy with art openings, gigs, parties, spontaneous all-nighters. There was drugs, lots of booze. It felt late — he was twenty-seven, she twenty-five — but they’d had a quiet, supposedly studious, but in truth lacklustre period after their trip overseas, some of which had been especially lonely for him, as she had spent time away from him, and they entered this new world with a hunger they recognised in each other, but did not discuss. He was happy for the distraction from the PhD, which he had just started, but was already loathing, and she was yet to start hers, so had the time.

But it was short-lived. As quickly as it bloomed, it withered. Certain key people moved overseas — instigators, party-throwers, the glue between groups within the group — a few had kids and moved to outer-ring suburbs. By then, Tom himself had to knuckle down and get on with his research, Clara was finishing her honours thesis, and no one seemed quite in sync anymore. And something that had been so effortless, the spontaneous nights out that moved from openings to restaurants to bars to lounge rooms, even backyards the next morning, something that took no arranging at all, no need for texts or Facebook invites, became something that took work, was difficult to line up, and was never as satisfying. It felt prematurely nostalgic, elegiac, vaguely sad. Very few of these people actively kept in touch, and soon they hardly saw anyone.

He was aware this wasn’t the full story, and others might tell it differently. And he knew that if he’d kept going to the shows, the art openings, he would’ve kept seeing those people; it was as simple as that. That the anxiety played a part in this was something he found hard to acknowledge. He had concealed it even from Clara, as far as he could, and he spent so much time covering for it that he had himself half-believing the lies too: that he was just busy; that he had too much work to do; that he was old now, needed to knuckle down; and, to Clara, that he didn’t even like those people anymore.

Clara did better. Some of her older friendships endured, and the small group that had formed around Emily — Paula, Celia, Thuy, Chris — remained her friends, and by extension his. It came more naturally to the women of the group, friendship, it seemed. To talk on the phone, meet for drinks, coffee. The gendering of it was depressingly predictable. Not once had a male friend suggested anything like this.

He still had Barry, of course. Barry he saw because they played tennis together, itself something they had taken up semi-ironically as the classic buddy thing to do, but which soon became the most significant and regular contact he had with anyone. Barry was a leftover from the big group. But Barry didn’t go to parties much anymore, either; he worked long hours on the weekend in a bike-repair shop. As the only job he’d ever really enjoyed, he was doing all he could to hold it down. He was on a health kick, too, not drinking, and he’d lost weight. But he was still depressed, most of the time. Before Barry stopped drinking, they’d sometimes had a beer or two afterwards. Very occasionally it became five.

Being with Madeleine and Jeremy brought some of the old times back. All those times he’d forgotten about, when they’d spent whole days, whole weekends, with people without a second thought, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It reminded him how much he liked it. How much he missed it. But he was rusty. Rusty as hell. He felt like he hadn’t spoken about himself to anyone in years — someone who wasn’t Clara or his mother or his therapist or Barry — not if he could help it, not in anything but the most cursory way. But Madeleine was insistent. That he not dodge the question — about his research, his teaching, what growing up the son of an architect and an artist in a small Victorian town was like. He found himself clearing his throat a lot. Telling them rambling stories that didn’t go anywhere, as if he had forgotten how to tell a story that made sense, that held shape — what it was about a story that kept people’s attention. Besides, his childhood seemed so quaint to him, like he was telling stories of some incredibly distant past.

One story he told was about his father’s architectural practice. How he’d semi-retired to the country when they were kids, but of course had started back up and designed people’s houses around the place, and how he would later, when he finally did retire, take them on tours, showing them his work, the few houses around the area that stuck out so obviously as architecturally designed. There were a lot of driving tours, as Tom’s mother got sicker, and got out less. They were, by and large, ugly houses, he told them. Ostentatious eighties builds. Busy proto-McMansions or too-big luxury beach houses with spectacular views. They’d be sparkling and bloated, with marble and stainless steel, ridiculously broad decks, and white curving roofs poorly mimicking the waves beneath them, like budget, mini Sydney Opera Houses. That was what led him to urban planning, probably, he said — although he wasn’t sure this was true at all. All that vanity. How do we kill that?

The others laughed along with his take-down of his father’s work, although they were somewhat distracted — by Ollie, by orders arriving, the general busyness of the boardwalk — and he had felt embarrassed for a moment for going overboard, for going so dark, laying it on a bit thick, and he decided he would not talk so much from now on. It wasn’t even true, what he had said. His father had designed as many nice houses as he had awful ones: the A-frame; the eco house now reclaimed by the national park; some early, uncompromising geometric houses after Roy Grounds in the seventies. The bad, later ones were a reflection of the tastes of his clients when he moved to the coast as much as his own. But his embarrassment faded quickly in the general atmosphere of good cheer, and later Jeremy picked up certain threads while they played frisbee, asking about his half-sisters, his mother, her art, and, more tactfully, later after a few drinks, her illness. What a person with emphysema could and couldn’t do.

But it wasn’t being able to talk about himself that he enjoyed particularly — he had no good answers to their questions, nothing interesting, or cogent, to say — it was that he was comfortable around them. And once all the preliminaries had been taken care of, once all the getting to know one another was out of the way, they could all sit around and talk about nothing. Or not talk that much at all. Eat; chat; watch the comings and goings along the boardwalk from their vantage in the cabanas; stare out at the water, grey and flat, but also glittering, reflecting the sun back into their faces; watch the prettily painted jukungs launch from the next beach over, the bigger catamarans heading off to the islands; and drift in and out of one another’s experience of it all. Madeleine continued to dominate conversation, but this meant that the rest didn’t need to worry about it so much. A dynamic had established itself. And even she had quieter spells. Being a constant source of distraction, Ollie helped. He required some sort of attention so much of the time. But Jeremy was easy to be around, too, and the longer Tom spent in his company the more he liked him, the more he was happy, not resentful, to be spending his days with him.

Jeremy was as easygoing as he was quiet. It helped set a certain tone. He was also discreet. Tom had the feeling he could say whatever he liked around him, didn’t have to be constantly on guard or worry about being funny or clever or whatever, because Jeremy himself didn’t. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that they were on holiday together. These were people he would never see again. It was freeing. After a tense first couple of days, when Tom did his best to avoid spending any time alone with Jeremy, he found he looked forward to seeing him each morning at breakfast. He was earnest, perhaps, mostly, but he had a sly wit that became more pronounced the longer you spent in his company. He didn’t try too hard, wasn’t a performer like Barry, which Tom decided was a good thing. His ego did not demand an audience, or competing wits to spar off, which was the default mode of most of Tom’s male friends. In fact, Jeremy made no demands. But he wasn’t entirely passive, either. He seemed to sense when more from him might be needed to make things run more smoothly, or to change a mood, but he did this without reluctance or any apparent sense of obligation. Tom wondered how much of this was the effect of being with someone like Madeleine. They seemed so perfectly matched: Jeremy happily leaving most of the social energy to her, but remaining present enough to pick up the slack when needed, as if he was as perfectly content being quiet as he was talking. Tom was slightly in awe of this quality, and then, increasingly, of Jeremy in general.

But most importantly, Jeremy was at ease with himself. Self-consciousness or anxiety in others repulsed Tom. As much as he tried to empathise, as much as he dreaded exactly this kind of judgement of his own anxiety, he found himself eye-rolling inside, thinking: just, like, pull yourself together. People who were comfortable with themselves didn’t look at you the same way, with the same sharpness. They weren’t constantly making appraisals. Their self-possession could be infuriating, but on balance it was better than the alternative, and anyway, this was unlikely to happen with Jeremy, who had not a whiff of smugness about him. His physical presence, which at times scanned as apologetic, and clumsy, made this impossible.

On the morning of the best day, they had breakfast together at the hotel, under the thatched roof of the open-air restaurant. Looking up at the roof from their table, they saw the dustier, though more richly golden underside of the woven panels, which extended in a steep pitch to a small opening at the top that showed a square of blue. From the underside of the roof and between exposed beams hung paintings, mostly large-scale works, in a wide range of styles — works reportedly donated to the hotel from the many artists who had stayed there over the years. Some of them looked like this might have been the case. There were several moody, airbrushed portraits of women with complex, variegated hairstyles wearing reflective visors that looked like they had probably been painted in the eighties. But some of them looked suspiciously like the kind of art you found everywhere in cafes and hotels in Bali: that odd mix of the grotesquely sensual and jokily surreal that often featured monkeys or gorillas engaged in human activities, like riding motorbikes or surfing or smoking joints or holding paintbrushes and pallets and wearing berets.

Some talk at breakfast was about this, both the styles of art prevalent in Bali — they told Madeleine and Jeremy about the Kirschler museum — and the authenticity of these supposedly donated works of arts from the many esteemed artist guests of the hotel over the decades. They had to be discreet about it, as there were only a few other people at tables around them, and the waitresses — the few women they saw each day and whom they had now begun to recognise and talk with more freely — were constantly on the floor, serving and clearing up after the guests. They would hate for them to think they were mocking the hotel.

Madeleine was of course friendliest with these women. She knew a couple of their names now, Eka and Inten — or Indah maybe — and there was talk of a play date with one of their sons, who was of a similar age to Ollie. Tom admired this about Madeleine, how she made the most of the people around her, made herself a little community wherever she went. And he admired more generally how comfortable she and Jeremy were with the Balinese people, as far as they were encountering local people — almost exclusively in service to them. Clara was comfortable, too, with these interactions, in her understated way, but Tom found he couldn’t relax into it, these transactions that over days morphed into relationships; he felt he was either overdoing it the whole time, and getting things wrong, fussing too much, or trying to be cool about it and becoming paranoid that he was being rude.

Other topics came up. Brexit — what the French thought about it, and about the British in general — then Jeremy’s French, which Tom told them he admired. He had always regretted not learning another language.

Your French is so good, he said.

It’s okay, Jeremy demurred.

No, he is fluent, you are fluent, Jeremy, Madeleine said, holding on to Ollie’s arm while she popped the cap on the sunscreen.

Maybe.

Yes, you are. He is fluent, but not bilingual.

Fluent, but not bilingual, Tom repeated.

Yes, of course. He can speak it, he can hold conversations, but maybe he can’t write an essay in French, or give a lecture, maybe.

Okay, I hadn’t made that distinction, Tom said.

It is not maybe the dictionary definition of it, but yes, of course, he is fluent. You are fluent, Jeremy. But not bilingual.

Madeleine applied the sunscreen to Ollie’s arms, pushing up his sleeves while he chewed on a piece of pineapple and stared vacantly into the distance. The piece of pineapple appeared in his open mouth, worked its way towards the front, looked about to fall out, then fell back into one of his cheeks. Tom found all this very endearing, the way food quietened Ollie, the way it occupied him. How hypnotised he was by it. The absentness of children; the way they were permitted to just disappear.

It was a pleasant way to start the day. Tom was exhausted — he still wasn’t sleeping well — and he had his sunglasses on. They were effectively outdoors, so he did not feel self-conscious about that. He ate all of his eggs and toast and tea and several other things from the baskets of pastries and the plate of fruit that came with it, even if none of it was especially fresh or particularly high quality. It was serviceable, it was free, and he felt like indulging himself.

For most of the breakfast, when he wasn’t eating, mostly from the plate of fruit, Ollie agitated for another a game of frisbee on the beach, and finally they did that, while Madeleine and Clara stayed behind, moving with their books and phones and towels from the restaurant to the poolside lounges.

It was another sparkling day out on the beach, cloudless, the sun climbing fast, but not yet too sharp, the beach starting to fill up. The boardwalk was bustling: men walking together in traditional clothing — sarongs and small, square hats — brilliant and immaculate; hawkers carrying coconuts in tubs on their heads; schoolchildren on bicycles; tourists wandering by, looking dazed, sizing up the hotels and their beachside frontages as they passed.

The couple with the Balinese nanny were back out on the beach. The nanny had the child building sandcastles with a bucket, while the mother, in a nearby banana lounge, looked up occasionally from her book to comment on her progress. The father was behind them, flat on a timber platform in the shade, shirtless, looking at his phone. One of Ollie’s wilder throws landed on the sand in front of the man, and he did not flinch.

Not long into the game, the woman strained to find her husband in the shadows behind her.

Come over here, love, she called, gesturing to the lounge beside her.

He did not respond.

Come over here, she said again.

She turned back, and, again facing the sea and her daughter, she called back to her husband flatly, loudly, all the sing-songiness gone from her voice, and her Australian accent more pronounced each time, Get off the Insta, love, get off the Insta. She said it several times more, less and less good-naturedly, but it had no effect on her husband. He did not move or reply until maybe fifteen, twenty minutes later, when Tom and Jeremy and Ollie had finished their game and were leaving the beach. Then, in one slow, graceful motion, he rolled off the platform onto his feet and trudged sleepily over to his family.

It became a running joke.

They got back to Madeleine and Clara, and Ollie nuzzled into his mother’s armpit and rubbed his head all over her breasts, while she held her phone away and above his head to continue reading. Tom settled into the banana lounge between her and Clara, who was reading her book, and Jeremy took the next one after Madeleine.

Tom got out his phone and checked his messages. Mostly things from the university, nothing important. He opened Facebook for a moment, but closed it again immediately, opened Instagram instead, and, looking around him, wondered if he should post a pic. Now didn’t seem the time. Madeleine was holding Ollie at arm’s length, while he bounced against her arm, pressing up to her and whining softly.

Because you’re a big boy, that’s why, she was saying.

I’m not a big boy, he moaned.

You’re not?

I don’t feel like a big boy.

You don’t?

He grinned and spoke louder: I feel like a teenager, Maman! He clasped his mother’s hand delightedly at the thought.

Madeleine laughed and looked over at Jeremy, who raised his eyebrows back.

Jeremy had been following various sports on his phone, on silent. He’d walk over to Tom occasionally and show him things, replays, turn up the sound for a second. Or he’d send Tom links to clips, and Tom would turn it up and the sound of commentators shrieking players’ names over and over would disrupt the women talking. But they had all begun sending each other things, after their morning chats. Madeleine’s were all job openings at European universities. Jeremy’s were news articles, mostly, things they would read in the afternoon and talk about at dinner or the next morning: George Pell, the never-ending #MeToo revelations, US politics, the Mueller Report, potential Democratic candidates. Madeleine and Jeremy were invested in US politics. They listened to podcasts on the subject and had strong opinions, knew all the leading Democrats’ names, backstories, chances.

Tom read the odd thing, tried to keep up, to learn about the new contenders. Clara was interested while they talked about it, but not enough to read the articles. She had never been particularly concerned with politics, or even current affairs. She was caught up in her research, her reading — right now, on finding ways to link the writing of Elizabeth Grosz to her research on public art on highways — even if she was determined she wasn’t working while away. She wasn’t on social media much, either, only using Instagram, and that was mainly to stay in touch with friends she no longer saw much of. She rarely posted, herself. She was one of the few people Tom knew who seemed genuinely uninterested in sharing any of her life via social media. What she was interested in was people and their lives, whoever happened to be around her. She prompted long stories from Madeleine about her family and sisters and her work, what life was like in Paris, or Léon — where Clara and Tom had stopped through once, on the way to a farm — and when she spoke of her own interests, it was about the lives of the people around them in Bali, or the way these lives were organised. Like the tsunami evacuation system and the signs she saw around the place.

One day, she said to Madeleine, I want to follow them and see where they go.

You should. Or maybe we could all go, said Madeleine. You should do some research here too, next time.

Maybe I will, she said. I found a PDF of a map. An evacuation plan.

You could do some interviews, Madeleine said.

Yeah, but who with? Clara asked them.

No one knew.

When Tom checked his phone again, he saw that Jeremy had sent him an article on ‘Bernie Bros’ — how the term was offensive to the diversity of his supporters — and Madeleine had sent him a job ad from Goldsmiths, but Tom didn’t open either of these. He was scrolling through Instagram: brutalist architecture; art on the walls of the Guggenheim, more at MOMA; a couple of urban planning accounts showing plazas and aerial views of urban centres, scrolling too fast to see where they were; a photo of Trish’s dogs, two greyhounds, lying on blankets either end of a couch, looking equally contrite (this had seventy-seven likes, including one from Clara and one from Emily); some old friends, two couples, with their kids around the outdoor sculptures in the gardens at Heide; another old friend against a whitewashed wall in Crete; a couple of memes, only one of which made any sense to him; a New Yorker cartoon; a selfie of a girl he had never met in person, who was ten years younger than him at least, in a bikini on a beach somewhere; Barry’s latest shot from the bike shop, a selfie with an old party friend, Ira, looking thinner and greyer, but most surprisingly wearing spandex riding gear, Barry’s thumbs-up in the foreground, clearly having taken the photo without Ira knowing; a sponsored post about R U OK? Day coming up (Fuck you, Tom thought); and one from Clara yesterday he didn’t know she’d posted, of a corner of the hotel gardens. It was a perfectly symmetrical shot that framed a bright-green pergola, with a bench and table inside it that were painted powdery pink. Rampant bougainvillea cascaded down either side, and intersecting white pebble paths ran around the perimeter. It had forty-seven likes.

A shadow fell over him. It was Jeremy. He leaned in, serious-faced, and whispered, Get off the Insta, love, get off the Insta, and Tom found himself giggling uncontrollably.

After lunch they went to see the fabrics. Jeremy had the number of a driver who had offered to take them to a batik factory. He and Madeleine were thinking of taking something back to France with them, sarongs maybe, as presents for Madeleine’s family.

It was a picturesque drive through the countryside, valleys full of terraced rice paddies, choked pockets of jungle, food markets full of people eating, groups of men working in bare feet among concrete foundations and timber frames, and others alone, resting on their haunches on the side of the road, smoking and watching the shuttle as it passed.

The factory itself was underwhelming. It was set up for tourists — the rugs and sarongs and throws bright and busy, not the beautiful faded pastels of the fabrics they saw people using as hangings and tablecloths everywhere around them on the streets. They were also expensive, and Tom and Clara quickly lost interest and wandered out to watch a couple of women working at a loom under a corrugated-iron roof in the dirt. Tom wondered what they were being paid and if they were just for show, if any of their work actually made it into the warehouse behind them. He felt stupid standing there watching them and also complicit in their exploitation, and he wanted to leave.

The weather had changed. It was suddenly dark, and he peered out from under the roof as the first big drops hit the ground. The others appeared — Madeleine had found kids’ clothes in one section of the huge warehouse and had bought Ollie some board shorts. And then the sky opened up.

They huddled under a tattered awning outside the factory, waiting to be collected. The rain dragged the branches down on trees, thundered against tin, painted the tile roofs a glossy terracotta. Tom felt sleepy, lulled by the intensity of the rain. Everything had succumbed, everything seemed glad for it, was having its thirst quenched.

A wind had picked up. The fabric across the awning had come away from the frame in places and was flying up into air. It was letting in water towards the back, and the water flowed across the pavement and over Jeremy’s thongs. It’s leaking, he said, his head not far from the sagging green cloth. He manoeuvred himself and Ollie out of the water’s path and closer to Madeleine, putting his arms around her waist.

No one said anything for a moment; they had been made mute by the rain. By its suddenness, the heaviness of it, as much as anything.

That’s how you know it’s a roof, Clara said, finally.

Tom guffawed.

Jeremy and Madeleine looked at them.

What? Madeleine said.

Clara looked embarrassed. Frank Lloyd Wright, she said.

What about him? Madeleine said.

That’s what he said, Clara said. When a client told him the roof was leaking. That’s how you know it’s a roof. All his roofs leaked. When another client complained that he was being dripped on at his desk, Wright told him to move his chair.

Jeremy and Madeleine laughed, and Ollie did, too, exaggeratedly. He was clawing at Madeleine, trying to climb up her body.

Of course, Rossi said that a building wasn’t finished until it collapsed into the ground, Tom said. Jeremy nodded at him slowly.

Back in Sanur everything was sodden, but the rain had passed and the sun was back out. Clara and Madeleine went to their rooms, and Tom went with Ollie and Jeremy to the markets. Jeremy had caved and agreed to buy Ollie a boogie board. They’re so cheap, we’ll just give it to someone before we leave if we can’t take it with us, Jeremy said. Ollie chose one that was blue and white, with red stripes down one side and a picture of a man on a surfboard, emerging from a wave’s barrel. ‘Shred’ was written down the length of the board in a kind of retro computer font. On the way back, Ollie began to mope and lag behind. It had been a long day. Jeremy said he would put him on his shoulders, except that he was carrying the boogie board and all their stuff — bags, water bottles.

Unless, of course, he said, turning to Tom, Tom could carry all this so I can put you on my shoulders?

Or, Tom said, surprising himself, I put Ollie on my shoulders, and you carry all the boring stuff?

Ollie giggled, and they stopped at a railing, Tom crouched down, and then lifted him into the air. He was surprisingly heavy, but they didn’t have far to go. Tom held the boy’s shins close to his sides and staggered forward into a light run. Ducked and weaved around trees and awnings and people on bicycles coming down the street, as Ollie cackled and clenched his knees around Tom’s head and yelled back down what he could see in the distance.

They spotted Clara and Madeleine at one of the restaurant tables with drinks in front of them when they got back, facing out to the sea, which was metallic now in the dusk. Way out beyond Lembongan, which was a fine line of grey in the distance, the storm front was moving away.

The women watched them approach in silence. Tom could tell Clara was surprised to see Ollie on his shoulders, but she was grinning, as if she couldn’t help herself.

Getting in shape, he said, lowering Ollie on to the ground.

He had a sweat stain all down the front of his T-shirt, and his fringe had stuck to his forehead, but it didn’t give him pause. Clara reached out to him as he aired his T-shirt and rubbed his wet back with her palm. This time, he didn’t flinch.

After showers they regrouped for a drink by the pool, then headed out again to a BBQ chicken place Clara had seen was rated highly on the apps. They took a taxi. They had tried nearly everywhere within walking distance now — everywhere that had a rating of four stars or more. But Ali’s Golden Chicken was the perfect choice, because it was the kind of food Ollie would gladly eat.

It was six-thirty when they arrived, and the sky above them had turned lilac. They had beers and Cokes and waters and ordered nearly everything off the menu. It was a tiny place, with a rotisserie in the kitchen and one on the street, and room for only one table inside and a few others in the courtyard under trees, which is where they sat. The menus and the walls and the uniforms of the staff were all in the same gold and red. They devoured the food — plates piled high with fried chicken wings and drumsticks, sides of mash and chips and corn on the cob and mac-and-cheese and jugs of gravy — and they washed it down with more Bintang and more Coke.

Ollie was giddy with joy, giggling and growling like a monster as he ripped into the skin of his chicken. He talked nonstop. Told them stories of everything he had seen during the day, some of which they had all seen, and some of which they had not. How much was imagined was hard to tell. Boys his age zooming past on motorbikes, a girl surfing the waves while they played frisbee, whom neither Tom nor Jeremy had seen. Clara encouraged him, wanting more details, which he never tired of furnishing. By the time the girl got on her motorbike, put on silver goggles, and drove off in a cloud of smoke with her surfboard under one arm, they were clapping.

After Ollie was asleep, Madeleine and Jeremy crept back out for another drink. It was the first time they had done this, but everyone was caught up in the mood, and they were nearing the end of their time together. In two days they would part ways — Madeleine, Ollie, and Jeremy to the Gili Islands, Tom and Clara on to Ubud.

At tables on the sand, under the warm glow of the bamboo lamps and candles on white tablecloths, they ordered beers — although in the end Clara declined, said she was too tired, alcohol would put her to sleep, and ordered a soda water — and they toasted to themselves, to having a successful holiday, having any sort of holiday. They joked about coming back next year, coming back every year.

And we’ll be introduced to your little bébé, Madeleine said. A boy, too, I think it will be, and they’ll become the best of friends, and we’ll see each other every July, and they can play together while we sit by the pool and drink. Yes? Or you both get jobs in Paris, or Europe somewhere, and we see you there instead, take research trips to Greek islands?

Tom and Clara laughed along, deflected the kids thing by making self-deprecating comments about how they’d never get jobs in European universities, they hadn’t published enough, but they agreed to it — Oh fine, they said, we’ll do it — although Tom noticed that Clara would not meet his eye.