When the World Was Steady Read online

  Max didn’t know whether to lock his door and pull the shutters and lie absolutely still, or whether to give in and go to the party, as his father wanted him to. Buddy had left an envelope on Max’s bed, which contained two substantial joints and a note which said, ‘These should do the trick. I’m counting on you. See you at 7.’

  In an attempt to make up his mind, he lit one of the joints and sat down cross-legged on the floor. He heard an unfamiliar tread on the stair—Aimée—and heard her pause outside his door. He inhaled and held the acrid smoke in his lungs until it trickled from his nostrils of its own accord. He shut his eyes and sat motionless, smoking, until he heard her steps continue down the corridor.

  The first guests arrived before Buddy had returned. Suchi and her parents, who had come on foot, walked up the path promptly at seven. Emmy heard them and peered from behind her door to see who it was, but she did not then rush upstairs. She left them instead to Jenny’s care. Jenny and at least a dozen helpers had come up the path while Emmy was dressing. They all wore sarongs of the most elaborate batiks, beneath lacy-bodiced blouses with fitted sleeves. Each woman had her hair sleekly knotted behind her head, and a flower at her ear. As they passed, Emmy heard the jangle of jewellery. These women were the hostesses—in the absence of the host—and they laid out platters and served drinks and settled their guests into comfortable chairs from which they could watch the last glimmerings in the evening sky and the night stars awakening.

  Others came after Suchi and her parents, until a steady murmur of conversation wafted down to Emmy’s room. But still she couldn’t hear the broad twang of Buddy’s accent. Someone—Emmy assumed it was Jenny—put on music, popular Indonesian singing with a steady beat. It struck Emmy somehow as an act of desperation. She decided that it was time to join the crowd. She dreaded, for Jenny and for Suchi, the appearance of Aimée without Buddy there: Aimée was a woman who would just know about Buddy’s connection to these two. She thought of what Max had told her about Buddy saying that Eastern and Western women, in such matters, did not mix, and she thought that Aimée was just that, a dangerous mix of Eastern and Western, clearly seeing both ways of being and yet belonging to neither. Emmy thought she should be there.

  Emmy wore the one good dress she had brought with her, made of white linen and cotton, with large blue cornflowers on it. It was sleeveless, revealing her ample but well-bronzed arms, and skilfully belted to minimize her hips and full bosom. She wore a long lapis necklace that brought out the blue of the flowers. Her hair swung neatly at her chin. She applied a little make-up and felt quite elegant, worthy of the most sophisticated Double Bay garden party.

  But as soon as she walked into the gathering, she felt all wrong. Too old, for one thing, and at a great remove. She had dressed for the wrong life.

  The room was filling up, and although there were guests of all ages, the women were all young, with the exception of Suchi’s mother and one other Balinese woman in late middle age. They were dressed in sarongs and blouses similar to those that Jenny and the other girls wore, only finer still, spun in silk, threaded with gold or silver. The younger guests, both Balinese and Western, were clad in an array of styles, but all of them casual. Or trendier. Or something. Emmy wished she had worn her batik shift, sewn by the Ubud tailor. But it was too late for that.

  The room was divided into knots of conversation, largely Westerners together and Balinese among themselves. Suchi’s parents sat on the sofa and spoke to no one, alternately smiling at the room at large, and looking nervous. The guests of honour—Kraut and Madé—did not appear to have arrived. Nor were Max or K’tut or Aimée in evidence. Nobody looked around when Emmy came in; nobody seemed to be waiting for Buddy to show up, or even expecting him.

  She was wondering whether a discreet retreat would be remarked upon, when Jenny, extricating herself from a conversation with a bloated Australian man in a Hawaiian print shirt, came up to greet her.

  ‘Emmy, come to meet some guests.’ Jenny took her arm. ‘A glass of punch?’

  The punch was made with fruit juices and rice liquor and it was strong and sweet.

  ‘Where’s Buddy?’

  ‘I expect him back any time. He is perhaps with the groom. They have always business. The party is going well, yes?’

  ‘Looks it. Aimée did come, you know.’

  Jenny nodded, while smiling across the room at Suchi’s parents. ‘Of course she did. We knew she would. She will come downstairs soon. She hates me.’

  ‘You? Why?’

  ‘She says I steal her clothes. She said. Last time. I cleaned them for her and she says it was stealing. Did K’tut not tell you this? She is from Thailand. People from Thailand are often very wicked. Come, meet this nice couple.’

  Jenny said all this while nodding and smiling at guests. Her expression was unchanged as she accosted a man and a woman who stood smoking. They were perhaps a decade younger than Emmy, both with long, lank hair tucked behind their ears. The man, Aaron, had a beaked nose and wore an expensive rumpled suit, with Birkenstocks poking out clumsily beneath it. The woman, Gaya, was tiny and draped in tinkling silver. Her batik halter mini-dress gaped to reveal small freckled breasts. No tan-line, Emmy noted.

  They gave her the once-over and didn’t seem too interested, but when Jenny introduced her as Buddy’s house-guest, their expressions changed. They were Americans.

  ‘Been with Buddy long, then?’ Gaya asked.

  ‘I’ve been here a couple of weeks. We met mountain climbing, and … I’m Max’s guest, really, I suppose. He invited me. Do you both live here?’

  ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else! Couldn’t go back. We’re trying to Westernize the kids enough so that they have a choice, but it’s tough.’ Aaron pointed out Raven and Azure, a scruffy little boy of eight or nine and a smaller, slightly more presentable girl. They were tussling in a corner over a hand-held computer game. They looked pretty Western to Emmy.

  Gaya explained that Raven attended a progressive boarding-school in California, but that Azure, at six, didn’t yet go to school. She helped them in the French restaurant they ran on Kuta Beach, handing sweets to customers along with their bills. Gaya seemed to think this was cute; Emmy thought of child labour laws.

  She could see that Gaya and Aaron couldn’t live anywhere else, and looking around the party she was aware that there were numerous exiles in a similar position, long-haired idealists, wrinkling and thickening, leftovers from the seventies.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it, but we’re quite a tight community. We look out for each other. We hang out together. You know. It’s hilarious, really, I mean, people come and can’t go. We just love it so much. And of course you can’t get a proper working visa, or own land or anything, so we’re all a bit on the sly. Helping each other out, like I said.’ Gaya laughed. ‘Buddy’s pretty new, but he’s a big helper. He’s really got this town under his thumb—he’s in with all the right people.’ She winked. ‘It must come in handy for you, no?’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’ Emmy looked around and saw all these white faces as a strong, taut vine, spreading and choking the island. A tight community indeed.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ said Aaron.

  Buddy was in the doorway, red-faced, grinning, his arm around a younger man with pointed ears who looked somehow familiar.

  ‘Come on everyone, listen here a minute. Let’s have a cheer for the man of the evening’—he pushed his companion forward and brought a Balinese woman from behind him—‘and his lovely new wife.’

  ‘Good on ya, Kraut!’ called the fat man in the Hawaiian shirt.

  ‘Gustav and Madé! Awright!’ Aaron boomed, raising his glass.

  The room filled with whistles and catcalls. ‘To the bride and groom!’ ‘Hooray!’ ‘Cheers, mate!’ ‘Madé, you’re fucking gorgeous!’

  ‘Isn’t she?’ whispered Gaya. Madé was tall and supple. She looked like an Indonesian cover girl, with her long, black hair framing her face and swooping down her
back, and her perfect, open features. She seemed pleased and embarrassed and she reached for Gustav’s hand.

  ‘Kiss!’ someone shouted. ‘Let’s have a kiss!’

  Gustav turned and planted a smacking embrace on Madé’s lips. She flushed. A flashbulb went off.

  ‘They’re not much for kissing, the Balinese,’ whispered Gaya. ‘Not big on PDA.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Public displays of affection. You know.’

  But Emmy wasn’t really listening. She was looking at Gustav, Kraut, the German. She had placed him: a sinister adviser on a bemo outside Kintamani. A Westerner who lived there. It was like a conspiracy, these people who kept reappearing. The tightening vine. And behind them, on the doorstep, she caught a glimpse of Frank, veined and leering.

  The crowd moved forward to enfold and congratulate. Or the Western crowd did: Emmy noticed that the Balinese, like herself, lingered on the edges, restrained. She spotted K’tut standing beside the Ubud Police Chief, by the door to the veranda, and she made her way over to him.

  ‘You’re not going to kiss the bride?’ she said. He didn’t answer.

  After a moment, he replied: ‘This party is for Kraut. She celebrates with her own people.’

  Emmy looked at him, his serious, thin face. It was the first indication that not everyone approved of this match.

  ‘Do you think it’s a mistake?’

  His gaze flickered back to the doorway. ‘There is no attention for the elders,’ he said. And it was true that an older Balinese couple, presumably Madé’s parents, hovered by the entrance, unattended. They were not smiling.

  K’tut spoke to the Police Chief in Balinese, and the two of them left Emmy’s side for the company of this pair, with much nodding and courtesy and, Emmy could see, an exaggerated politesse on K’tut’s part that he would never waste on Westerners.

  When the loud toasts were over, the party went on, and Emmy stood for a time on the sidelines, watching, sipping her punch. She watched Buddy’s American ex shake her peroxide curls at the neck of the Chief of Police; she watched Frank clap Aaron on the back and then spill his drink on the other man’s expensive linen suit; she observed the knot of Ubud youths pouring straight arak into their punch glasses from a jug behind the television. Her eyes followed Jenny through the crowd, and she winced as she saw hands, Australian, American, men’s hands, clap Jenny on the shoulder, catch Jenny for a hug, rest on Jenny’s small behind, and Jenny smiled all the while because amused endurance was her only ticket to Sydney and accounting school. She watched Madé’s parents join Suchi’s on the sofa, where all four sat looking bewildered and addressing each other only occasionally; and she saw Suchi, looking frail and even pregnant, clinging with both arms to one of Buddy’s while he laughed and drank amid a group of men and paid her presence no heed whatsoever.

  Someone offered Emmy more punch and she took it, drinking less cautiously now, accustomed to the burning in the back of her throat. She tried to imagine the pasts that had brought these people to this place, and found she couldn’t at all. She wasn’t capable of knowing the lives of the Balinese around her, and as for the others, who could say what choices or mistakes or desires had made them leave everything for this delicious, empty life ‘on the sly’, as Gaya put it? She could not even read them through her code of luck: they had made their own, it was true, but she didn’t know whether it was good or bad. There was something amoral in the atmosphere, an absence of absolutes.

  Wearied, she took another glass of punch and wandered on to the netted veranda. It was quieter there, and she could hear nature hissing and singing and croaking beneath the voices. She sat and sipped and ignored a young Balinese couple who, at the other end of the balcony, whispered and fumbled at each other.

  They rejoined the party when dance music started—Jenny’s doing again, Emmy thought—and then she was alone on the darkened fringe of the festivities. Until, that is, Buddy emerged at the far door, in conversation. With Kraut, Emmy realized, and with Frank. They spoke quickly and earnestly, and although the arak was making everything swim a little, Emmy listened.

  ‘… about it tonight?’ the German was saying. ‘Here?’

  ‘Just the basics. The dates.’ Buddy said.

  ‘Next month, I don’t know more.’

  ‘I’ve got to kick around here another month?’ Frank whined.

  ‘You can go to Bangkok sooner if you like. We can contact you there. As long as you don’t get yourself arrested on drunk and disorderly, like last time. Aimée can bring you the cash later. She doesn’t need to know. Kraut, just tell me, you’re sure of the quality?’

  Drugs, Emmy thought. You’re paranoid, she thought.

  ‘You’ve seen the Polaroids yourself. A lot of temple carvings this time. And one—’

  ‘OK, fine. Are you sure they’ve got to go across by Chiang Mai? I would’ve thought—’

  Kraut broke in: ‘It’s still the safest. Better pay off the scouts in—’

  There was a sudden clatter and a mop of black curls pressed up against Buddy’s knee. He whooped and slung the small cloud of pink frills into the air above his head. ‘Hey beautiful! How’s my baby? How’s my Ruby?’

  He twirled her and she chuckled, and Aimée stepped outside to join them. She wore a luminous white chiffon dress and seemed to move in a pool of quiet. A pool, Emmy thought, of hostile quiet. In the moment of her coming, Frank and Kraut managed to make themselves scarce.

  ‘Aimée, gorgeous!’—Buddy’s cheer struck Emmy as forced—‘How’s the mother of my daughter, eh?’ With Ruby still clasped against one hip, Buddy threw an arm around Aimée’s neck and slurped at it.

  ‘Busy as usual?’

  ‘C’mon Aimée, show us a little affection?’

  He was twice her age, easily. It was unseemly. Emmy longed to leave but feared that she would be noticed if she did so, caught eavesdropping. Her head spun a little more, and her throat tickled furiously from the dregs of the punch. If she was going to cough anyway, Emmy figured, she might as well go back inside.

  Many people, particularly the Balinese, had left. Suchi, for example, had apparently gone and taken her parents with her. The powerful arak had taken effect, and those remaining were speaking or dancing intently, above all intimately, like members of the tight community they were. Emmy saw Frank and saw him see her, and she cast around for any group to join to avoid him. A child molester and a drug runner, she thought. It boggled the mind.

  Max and Jenny leaned by the front door. Emmy was on the verge of approaching them when she saw that their fingers were interlaced, their feet shuffling into mutually satisfying crevices, their murmurings barely audible. She stood next to them, they next to the door, so she passed beside them and went out.

  It was, perhaps, best. Elsewhere, Emmy had always held to her policy of leaving the party before there was no party left. This was part of her code, but she felt, nonetheless, that in this place, at this time, her code led only to anticlimax. There must have been something she had missed? She stood on the doorstep and struggled with an itch of anticipation that she hadn’t felt so strongly since adolescence: there were truths and adventures in the room behind her. Perhaps there was even evil.

  But Emmy’s adult self was destined to triumph. She followed this tingling flurry with the thought that, among other things, the room contained Frank. Responsible Emmy reached for the railing and started down the steps.

  ‘Emmy?’ It was an unfamiliar voice. Or rather, a voice unfamiliar in the pronunciation of her name. ‘Are you off already? Let me walk you to your room?’

  Buddy joined her on the grass. Emmy said nothing, but her heart jolted into complicated palpitations. He had seen her, she supposed, seeing him.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you,’ he went on. ‘All night. If only to tell you how great you look. Best-looking woman at the party.’

  ‘Really, Buddy—’

  ‘I’m not trying to chat you up. Believe me, if I wanted to do that, I’ve
had plenty of time. It’s just—in the run of things, we’ve hardly spoken. And I don’t want you to think I’m an ungracious bastard.’

  ‘Not at all. Not at all.’

  They had started walking, and strolled over to the low stone barrier beyond the pool site, to the point where the land dropped sharply and the view, in the daytime, was best. Now it was merely an array of amorphous dark forms that seemed to Emmy to swell and contract with her irregular breathing.

  ‘I suppose I really wanted to say thank you, especially for being such a friend to Max. A surrogate mum, almost.’

  Emmy frowned.

  ‘I mean, in the nicest possible way. Him and me, getting acquainted, it’s been a bit of a rough ride. And I know I don’t set the easiest example for a kid.’

  ‘I think this is a wonderful experience for Max. I really do.’

  ‘No need to lie. But he’s a good bloke.’ Buddy took her arm. ‘You would’ve thought we’d have met before,’ he said. His voice sounded peculiar. ‘Australia isn’t so big. Maybe when Max goes home, you’ll look after him?’

  ‘He has a mother, doesn’t he?’

  ‘She’s not your class. Don’t think I don’t know it.’

  This struck Emmy simultaneously as vulgar and strangely exciting, and she wasn’t at all surprised when his thick face suddenly blocked her view of the night, and his lips landed somewhere between her cheek and her mouth. She didn’t resist, but he didn’t pursue the embrace. Rather, he took her arm again and walked her back towards her door. There, with the discretion and grace befitting, Emmy thought, a far more sophisticated host than he, he bade her a swift goodnight and departed.