12

The day after the fogging incident was their trip to Lembongan. Organising themselves without speaking — making it to the right beach at the right time — was difficult, but they managed.

There were loose gatherings of passengers under palm trees on the beach, and moored in the shallow bay were several more or less identical catamarans — mercifully robust, modern-looking boats, with rows of powerful outboards. The scene was chaotic, and finding who was in charge was difficult. Tom checked with some people waiting, who didn’t know, and then with several of the many men in uniforms — patterned green shorts and white shirts — who were hovering under the shade of a weathered gazebo. But these men all seemed peripheral to the main business of tickets and destinations, and the information he received was contradictory. In the end, however, they got on the right boat and sat next to each other silently in a wooden booth as the boat bobbed about near the shore.

About halfway through the hour-long trip, the seas got rough, and there were looks, nervous laughter, and talk in the cabin, even some whoops. Tom and Clara, who did none of these things, fell wordlessly into each other’s shoulders a few times and pulled themselves back up. With nothing to hold on to that was designed for it, Tom tightened his grip on the edge of the table in front of him and the rim of its inlaid cup holder. But gradually it became clear that, although it would remain rough the rest of the way, the boat was well able to handle this kind of battering, and the mood in the cabin lifted. Two crew members came in and lay down on the free benches in the booth opposite them and closed their eyes, while occasionally they were sprayed with foam from the deck where the waves were bursting across the plunging stern.

A middle-aged couple across the aisle and one up from them began talking to the people sharing their booth. They were German, and the younger couple were American. The Americans, in full view of Tom and Clara, were bronzed, good-looking, laid-back, and, the whole time during the rough seas, unflappable in that smug way people who consider themselves seasoned travellers rather than tourists can be. The Germans were chatty, laughed easily, and they asked the young couple many questions, and told them in turn about their son and his girlfriend, who were clearly never far from their minds. The young Americans were receptive enough, the man more so than the woman — she looked sleepy, vague, so settled into her holiday that she was only half present — but he was a talker. He was always meeting people, you could tell, always dragging her into social situations she would rather not be dragged into, but ultimately she held up her end and giggled quietly along with the rest of them.

He was a ‘digital nomad’, the young American said, smirking, knowing he would have to explain the term for the Germans, and confident in advance of how impressive it would sound to them. He developed websites, he said. He could work anywhere in the world, as long as he had his laptop, and because of this he was staying on for another month while she was going home, back to the states. The girl prised her gaze from the sea and laughed good-naturedly at this with the Germans, who thought it was very amusing that the boy was staying on without her.

I have to go back for college, she said, and the Germans laughed again, although Tom wasn’t sure why they found this funny. Then once again they brought up their son, who had been to Bali with his girlfriend last year for three weeks.

The Germans then probed the young couple about different islands to visit and places to stay, and Tom stopped listening. People behind them were talking about the boat ride and different charter companies. Apparently, they were saying, not only were these trips often very choppy, sometimes they were much worse than this, with a lot of seasickness and vomiting, and just last week one of the boats capsized in rough seas, although no one was drowned. Last year, however, one of the boats somehow caught fire and people drowned then, on the longer trip up to the Gili Islands.

The coast of Lembongan appeared. First mansions and luxury hotels nestled in hillsides above dramatic cliffs, then streets of rudimentary concrete and thatched-roofed houses, and then a clot of hotels and bars and restaurants overlooking the water above bluestone and concrete sea walls.

Finally, they reached the beach, and, helped by the crew, they disembarked and waded through the waist-high water with their backpacks held above their heads. Once on shore, Tom and Clara began to speak to each other by necessity, because they had no plans. After everything, Clara didn’t seem angry. Whatever resentment she had harboured was no longer apparent, at least for the moment. Or perhaps whatever it was that was troubling her no longer expressed itself as anger towards him — if that was what she was feeling. It was so hard to know. She was a little quieter than usual, but in the way of someone who had been weakened by something, but was now recovering — a bout of the flu maybe, or Bali belly. She was amenable to his suggestions, and even smiled a little when he began talking about lunch.

Tom was hugely grateful, and he became cheerful, gratingly so — even to himself. They ate at a warung on the main strip by the beach — the food was good, he drank two Bintang in his wet shorts, and she one — and then they meandered. They spotted a temple in the distance and made their way towards it, walked around its perimeter, admiring its faded majesty, and then walked the length of the main strip, looking at shops and restaurants.

It seemed hotter on Lembongan. Although you could see the sea at any given moment — its astonishing blue sparkling so invitingly at the end of every side street, a rectangle of turquoise in the neat earthen spaces between buildings and the street — the heat felt sharper. There was a lack of trees and shade, and no breeze. Maybe that was it.

They picked up a tourist sheet. One of the best things to do, it suggested — and TripAdvisor agreed — was to visit the mangroves in the north of the island and go snorkelling or swimming and lounge in the many bars with beach frontage along the north coast. They decided to walk. But after twenty minutes down dusty, exposed streets, they changed their minds and looked for somewhere to hire a scooter, only to find they were now too far from town.

They had hired a scooter in northern Thailand. Thailand was the first stop of that ten-month trip. Going there first was a mistake, they both saw immediately. They should have put this — the most holiday-ish part of the trip — at the end, not the beginning. They got the whole trip wrong, really. The itinerary, the places they went to. They had had certain ideas. Notions to avoid the same routes that everyone took, the same locations that everyone visited. Avoid the clichés. Culture over comfort.

Clara wanted to go to Krakow because her family was from the countryside around there. He remembered telling someone that in Thailand, that they were going to Poland next, and the guy had said, Oh yeah, great, Holland is lovely. And how perplexed he’d been that they’d go to Poland when Tom had corrected him. But they’d loved Krakow. It was one of the best places they went to, and one of their happiest times. Maybe because it was the first stop in Europe. They loved the intact old city, the pierogi ruskie, the cheap beer. He wasn’t sure he had one proper concrete memory from Krakow, though. Except for the time they’d lost some money on the street and retraced their steps all the way back to their hostel. And how he’d bought an SLR there, agonised over the purchase for several days, only for it to break a few weeks later when they were in Berlin. But the pictures of Krakow were saved, and they were okay. They looked like De Chirico paintings.

But he remembered the scooter in Thailand clearly. Tom had never driven a scooter before, but he wasn’t nervous about it. It was easy, and they decided to drive to the next village a few kilometres away and return it the next day. But they took a wrong turn somewhere and found themselves in the countryside, with no one around and very little traffic. The road led them up a mountain, and they struggled up the steep incline, skidding on the rough surface. They ran out of petrol eventually and hitched a ride into town, putting the bike in the back of a ute, in exchange for beer and cash. When they got in that night to one of the only homestays in the village, a newly built, all-timber place on stilts, Clara complimented his driving.

Why did he remember that? Something so inconsequential? But he had driven well. It was difficult going, and the scooter was not designed for it, and it was hairy, with the two of them on this small bike that might skid out from under them at any moment, and he had had to meet the challenge, to get them over that mountain, and he had done it — until they ran out of petrol. He’d felt good about his driving, and there she was, saying it, too, acknowledging it — awkwardly but seriously. Walking along the road now, jungle opening up either side of them, he felt ashamed that, of all things, this was the kind of thing he retained. And not only that, but that these were the kinds of thing he had in store to help him feel better about himself.

A tuktuk saved them. It came trundling along the dirt road, with two people spilling out the back, yelling to them to jump in. They were British — in Bali for a fortnight, too — and they were sunburnt, grinning, and holding enormous-looking steins of beer. In a pause in the conversation, once introductions were made and basic holiday facts were exchanged and the small talk petered out, the woman looked down at her stein, which she was no longer drinking from, and said, I don’t know whose idea it was to get these. The man, large and sweaty and cheerful, with his legs spread wide, looked at her and said, It was your idea, love. And, still looking at each other, they threw their heads back and laughed.