When the World Was Steady Read online

  After a moment he said, ‘You don’t quite look the type. A bit old, aren’t you?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ The Sydney society tone again.

  ‘Well, for this whole thing.’ He gestured limply at the air. ‘Batur?’

  ‘No, Abang. I could say the same of you.’

  ‘He’s a guide, you know,’ he said, jerking his head towards the back of the building, presumably in the direction of the woman’s husband. ‘But he won’t take you up Abang. It’s not worth their while for one person.’

  The woman came in with a tray of steaming food: dinner for the Indonesian family. Both Emmy and the man—whose name, it transpired, was Frank—waited until she had left to speak again—a futile silence, seeing as she spoke little English.

  ‘Have you been here long?’ Emmy asked.

  ‘In Kintamani? On the island?’

  ‘Either. Both.’

  ‘Here, I arrived today and will leave tomorrow. I go around the islands every year—Bali, sometimes Java, sometimes Lombok, Sumatra. Other bits of the region too—Thailand, you know. Always Bali. The Last Paradise.’ He winked. Lewdly, Emmy thought. ‘Such friendly people. The only Hindus, you know, in Indonesia. Makes them more hospitable.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘And I love the little children. Such beautiful little girls.’

  Emmy wasn’t sure what he meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it. When she remembered his eager game with the owner’s daughter, which had drawn her in the door of the losmen, Emmy felt certain that this winking, grinning, flaccid apparition was a seasoned child molester. Worse than that, he was the only Western gauge the losmen owners had besides herself. Which meant the smiling woman, the earnest Indonesian family, they would all think she was cast from the same mould. He was still smiling.

  ‘Are you from England?’ she asked. She herself rarely felt English any more; she could perhaps wedge a gap between them here.

  ‘Used to be,’ Frank said. ‘My daughter’s gone back. But I’ve been out in Australia for years, couldn’t live in Britain again, not now.’

  This was worse: this was her life. It was only a matter of time till Portia set off for London. She decided not to ask more.

  She got up and went to the street door to observe the night. A few distant lamps winked in the darkness, and somewhere dogs howled at the moonless sky. The air was cold; there was a breeze, not soft and salted as by the sea, but bitter and somehow dangerous. There was no patter of feet along the road; no hushed singsong of voices in the dark; no wafting strains of gamelan music.

  Supper consisted of a plate of fried rice filled with lethal chili peppers, and beer. She and Frank ate in semi-silence, he slurping greedily and reddening, eventually sweating, from the chilis. Emmy picked fastidiously at her plate, careful to avoid the vermilion flecks; but there were so many that the process was lengthy, and the rice soon cooled to a glutinous and unappetizing mass. She offered it to Frank, who downed it with swigs of beer that splashed a little and dribbled down his chin.

  ‘You should speak to him.’

  Emmy looked puzzled.

  ‘Oka. The guide. The owner.’

  ‘You said he wouldn’t take me.’

  ‘He probably won’t.’

  ‘Besides, I have a name. I’ll ask the woman where I can find him.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Rivalry. Ask outside, in the morning. In the market. But if Oka would take you,’ he said, leaning forward confidentially, ‘you could go tomorrow at dawn, and be out of here by noon. You could come with me to Singaraja. It’s not too friendly, as villages go, this one.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Frank shrugged. ‘There are rumours. People—Western people—get robbed here, or cheated. There was even a murder once, although it was never proved. A death under mysterious circumstances, shall we say.’ He sat back in his chair and belched, waiting for Emmy to take the bait. She decided not to. After a moment he said, ‘What would you say to a bit of fun?’

  Again, she did not know what this meant. It flashed through her mind that he might be propositioning her. ‘No thank you,’ she said.

  ‘A game of cards?’ He pulled a worn pack from his jacket pocket. ‘A quick one?’

  ‘No thank you. I’ve had a long day.’

  ‘As you like.’ He looked disappointed. As she left he was dealing himself a hand of patience.

  As a child, Emmy had known exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Born with the echo of bombs in her ears, she had felt special from the start. Her sister Virginia had been old enough to spend the war doubled over in fear, but as the two of them crouched with their mother in the shelters, tiny Emmy would continue to hum or mumble to herself, oblivious, not missing a note when all around her gasped and shuddered.

  She herself had no memory of this. And she had no memory at all of her father, a sacrifice to the enemy early in the war, a pilot shot down before Emmy’s singsong took on any tune. What was for Virginia a tragic first loss was not even a hiccup to her younger sister. It wasn’t until much later, when she felt for some reason that she should, that Emmy began to miss her father.

  Her first and eternal belief was in the creation of one’s own luck. More than that, there was for Emmy a distinct morality to luck, an interrelation between good and bad luck and virtue and vice. Throughout her life, Emmy always took it very hard if things went badly for her.

  When, at twenty, she announced to her mother and sister that she was leaving their modest home in south London in order to marry a dashing Australian named William and head for the Antipodes, they were not surprised. Emmy was in the brief flush of her beauty, between the sloppy plump child she had been and the handsome but formidable matron that she fast became. As Mrs Simpson pointed out, what better place for her to make her own luck than in the newest of the new worlds? And who could stop her?

  Virginia was perhaps even a little glad. From the day of her birth, Emmy had never ceased to terrorize her older sister, or at least that was how Virginia saw it, and she attributed her pinched, shy nature to that unplanned birth amid the whistling bombs: all her dread born at once. That Virginia would probably have been the same without Emmy was not something she recognized on that damp spring morning in 1960 when Emmy said she was leaving.

  Emmy felt her sister saw the world upside down. Virginia believed that things just happened to one, and Emmy saw this not merely as a mistake but as evil. Her final advice to Virginia was to pray. As they weren’t then religious believers of any sort, Virginia, surprised, asked to whom Emmy would have her do so.

  ‘To yourself, silly,’ Emmy said. ‘That you’ll have the gumption to live.’

  Emmy and William had sailed to Australia, to William’s home in Sydney, and there Emmy had discovered her luck to be greater, even, than she had imagined. She had married into a family of aspiring publishers, whose empire was small but flourishing, based on a solid ground of working sheep-stations.

  Emmy would always tell Portia of her joy when, early in her marriage, she and William had made a tour of those outback stations. She had been greeted at homestead after homestead by women with their sleeves rolled up and dust in the creases of their skin, women with their arms outstretched, all of them weeping, weeping at the sight of Emmy, because they lived alone among men and she was water in the desert, balm on an aching wound. She heard about their cramps and labours and miscarriages, she heard their recipes for biscuits and the lists of supplies they couldn’t get hold of. She heard about their worries for their children—those who had them—and their problems with their men. She took down titles of books that they longed for, hesitant requests for feminine luxuries. Some hadn’t spoken this way for years, one for almost a decade. And as she left each woman to climb into the buzzing shell of the plane, Emmy would throw her arms around her and weep with that woman, these tough Australian labouring mothers and bright-eyed, primly English Emmy.

  During this trip, Emmy felt more blessed and good than she had
imagined possible: her luck was at a pinnacle, she was needed and envied and loved. She clung to the memory always, and disregarded the fact that, back in Sydney and hurled into a whirlwind of social and wifely obligation, she had somehow neglected the lists of books, of luxuries, then lost them, then forgotten them altogether. When she did recall this, with a quickly stifled pang of shame, she would remind herself that she had been young.

  But that was just the first forgetting, and it seemed, somehow, when much later all the perfect luck had soured, that it had been only the first step in a mammoth self-deception. Thinking that her life was in her hands, Emmy had ordered her days with lunches and receptions and had eventually borne a child. She had launched a career writing about restaurants and society, gleeful impetuous pieces about places that delighted her, published in the papers and magazines of her husband’s family.

  ‘Be like me,’ she would tell Portia as her daughter grew older. ‘Be sure your life is your own, your happiness in your control.’

  And then, a year and a half ago, things started happening to her, pulling the pins out of her life, revealing … what? That she had been blind and a fool all along. William, whom she had barely considered a factor, more a presence, a part of herself that was at times irritating but was, above all, a part of herself, left her. He left her for her friend Dora, the wife of his friend Andrew. At Emmy’s outcry over the selfishness of two divorces (not one but two families ruined!) William replied, calmly, almost generously, as if explaining to an uncomprehending child, that he was merely taking control of his own life.

  Six months ago, Portia had informed Emmy that she was dropping out of university to study sculpture at art college. She had, at the same time, changed her Christian name to ‘Pod’, so that she truly was no longer the daughter whom Emmy had nurtured and created. And this mysterious Pod, who still hung clothes and ate food and slept in Emmy’s house, had recently brought home Pietro, a fellow sculptor, the son of an Italian labourer from the far western suburbs of the city, from the rows of little bungalows that stretched for ugly multicoloured miles and looked, not very much but oh-so-slightly, like the drab terraced houses of south London that Emmy had so triumphantly abandoned many years before.

  Emmy was forced to concede that things did just happen. But still, she insisted to herself and to her one dear, remaining friend Janet, that if things did indeed just happen, it was only because you let them.

  She took on the full weight of responsibility for the changes in her life. She felt that perhaps the very adaptability she had considered a virtue had brought about her downfall. Shedding selves like skins, she had also shed their emotions—or rather, her own. This mutability had led to a loss of herself and, Emmy had to conclude, to a loss of her luck. And it had been so easy—until she was called upon to play ‘divorcee’. Divorcee wasn’t in her repertoire. It was not, to her mind, a lucky opportunity. Not an opportunity at all.

  She found the burden of her failure so great that she was suddenly, and for the first time in her almost fifty years, incapable of making any decisions at all, of taking any action. What if she were deceiving herself? Playing into the hands of the enemy? She had been so blind, William and Dora’s affair had gone on for years. She couldn’t see their old friends, she was a laughing-stock. She remembered that she was English, he Australian, their friends somehow thereby his. As for her work, she could not write for his magazines, it was too great a blow to her pride; she could not write for the opposition, it would be too public a betrayal.

  She spent an entire month leaving her small house in Double Bay only to go to the supermarket or to walk Aristotle, an Afghan hound and the sole remainder of her pulverized existence, along the thin strip of beach at the end of their street. The alien Pod did not count, a fairy changeling dropped in her darling Portia’s place. Emmy grew broader than she had ever been: unable to decide what to eat, she ate everything, hoping something, some potion ingested, would restore her life to her.

  She did not decide, really, to go to Bali; she chose Bali only when Janet had decided that Emmy had to go somewhere. Janet had got on the phone to Qantas, had decided on the date, had given Emmy’s credit card number and had then turned, in the by now cockroach-infested kitchen, to ask Emmy where she wanted to go. She had to say something, or Janet would, she threatened, pack her off to London, to her mother and sister, whom Emmy hadn’t seen for six years and found dreary in the extreme. At that moment, her head in her hands at the kitchen table, Emmy had said, for some reason, Bali. Perhaps not for any reason, but rather because, on the table beneath her eye, one of her ex-husband’s magazines was open at an article entitled ‘Bali: The Last Paradise’. What, after all, had she left to lose?

  That afternoon, in a moment of exuberance, Pod’s Pietro had backed her car—yes, her, Emmy’s car—into and over the unsuspecting Aristotle. He too, last and most cherished, was gone. Emmy had no life left to be lucky in. It was time for something.

  If only she didn’t catch herself adapting again, moulding herself. In this tiny cell of a room, there was not much to mould to, and, Emmy assumed, it would be the same on the mountainside. The real island, which she sought, would bring out her real self. It would provide answers and a new beginning. Looking around her she felt certain, suddenly, of her changing fortune, of her soon-emerging soul. As William and her daughter and her sister all proved, the arbiters of luck and opportunity were not things but people: flesh and blood. And in their absence, she might be free.

  As it turned out, the flute-playing guide, whose name was Gdé, was taking an expedition up Abang in five days’ time. It was very rare, he insisted, that he should go at all; he was the only one, he assured her, who would take tourists; he suggested very strongly that she wait. He was a round-faced man with a goatee, and he had the disconcerting habit of laughing whenever he spoke. The people he was to take were Australians, he giggled. They were ‘especial friends’; they were, he implied, inhabitants of the island rather than tourists. Would they mind if Emmy joined their party? Oh no, Gdé laughed again: they were very hospitable people.

  Which left her with four days: it was Tuesday morning and they would be gathering for the climb before dawn on Saturday. Emmy didn’t want to stay in Kintamani for that time. Fifteen minutes walking with Frank among the pyramids of citrus fruits and mounds of cheap clothes and chickens in baskets that constituted the morning market, and Emmy had seen enough. Even the early morning mist that should have rendered the scene magical could not change her grim impressions of the evening before. Besides, for breakfast there had been nasi goreng again, the same fried rice with chilis, and if she stayed on in the village, Emmy was certain she would starve.

  Already someone in the market had pointed at Frank—who must have slept in his clothes; he looked more bedraggled than ever—and said in English, ‘You husban’?’ When she said no, the youth grinned, stuck out his tongue and said, ‘Yes, you husban’! You husban’!’ So when Frank suggested that they ride to Singaraja in the same bemo, Emmy figured she might as well accept.

  Frank was headed north to a resort called Lavina Beach, where, he whispered in her ear, they had flush toilets in the losmen. Emmy did not commit herself to going there, although she could tell that Frank thought she had.

  This bemo was a newer model, an enclosed van that had once been carpeted floor to ceiling in ochre shag that was now peeling away in strips. The vinyl on the seats had cracked and popped, allowing obscene sproutings of greyed foam. Frank sat beside Emmy in the row behind the driver, and two Balinese men managed to squeeze in next to him. The combined girth of Emmy and Frank would, under normal circumstances, have been considered to fill the space, but the pock-marked driver was unwilling to let go of a single potential fare.

  They sat in the van for almost an hour before it was full, an hour during which the morning mist cleared and the sun grew strong, so that even with the windows down, or those that would open, the bemo became a pungent stew of spices and grease and hot vinyl and, above all, t
he sour smell of unwashed flesh.

  Sitting so close to Frank, the fat of their buttocks closer than touching, almost mingling, Emmy felt it was indeed high time he made it to a world of flush toilets and showers. He had removed his linen jacket for the freedom of his lightweight shirt, which was missing a button, allowing aggressive stray chest hairs to poke through. It was dyed a deep, varying yellow in the circles of his armpits, where days, perhaps months, of perspiration had gathered.

  Through this hour, Emmy and Frank didn’t really converse. They behaved like a long-married couple, each in a reverie, sometimes noticing something outside the van and pointing it out to the other, with a tap or a nod.

  When the bemo set off, they were launched into even greater intimacy. The road was narrow, steep and winding, but the driver wasn’t about to slow his pace for such minor impediments. Emmy found herself in Frank’s lap, then he in hers. She was so miserable that she almost missed the sudden and spectacular transformation from arid mountain landscape to the swollen fertility of terraced paddies, deep green boxes flooded with muddy water, in which men, women, buffaloes and ducks waded in the distance.

  To be back in this safe world—what she had known and expected of the island—was a source of relief to Emmy. With that relief came the realization (although she had known it all along) that she wanted no more of Frank’s company. He, like the village of Kintamani, depressed and repelled her.

  At the bus station in Singaraja, he reached and took her hand as they got out of the bemo.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she hissed, reclaiming it. Her ‘viper-tongue’ tone, Portia would have said: Emmy at her most forbidding.