– Yes. A massacre. Their government claimed it was only a few. The international human rights organisations accepted that in the end. President Karimov was supported by the West, until he turned the Americans off their bases out there. Bush needs his allies in Central Asia.
Noah was impressed, but not surprised that his mother knew so much. Jeanette always read everything that came her way, storing up news and comment, fiction and history like bulwarks against her deafness. She had been an early adopter of the internet as a source of yet more information, and her email connections and correspondences were more numerous than his own.
– Your Roxana’s brother was one of the rebels?
‘I think so. She’s not “mine”. Not yet, anyway, although I’m working on it. Her parents are both dead, she told me. Her brother was all she had. How sad is that, to lose your only sibling? The person you grew up with. It must mean Roxana hasn’t got any reference left to the little girl she was.’
Jeanette waited.
– Go on?
Noah faltered. ‘I wasn’t trying to say anything else, Mum. Not consciously. It must be in my mind, though. You and Connie.’
– Yes. I know. Me and Connie.
Here we are again, he thought. Six months.
He faced her. It meant she could lip-read more easily.
‘Dad and I were thinking, Connie would want to know that you’re ill.’
– You and Dad?
‘Well, yes.’
– Please. Don’t.
‘I’m sorry. It was only a brief mention.’
Jeanette looked towards Bill. Some instinct had made him lower his newspaper and he was watching them over the top of it. She moved close to Noah’s side again and they resumed their slow walk. Jeanette’s face was suffused with sadness.
– She is my sister.
‘Yes.’
– I should decide what to tell her. And when. Shouldn’t I?
‘Of course, Mum, if that’s what you want.’
Bill strolled across the grass towards them.
‘What are you two talking about?’
Noah hesitated. Auntie Connie was rarely mentioned in the family. Or never, now he thought about it.
–
Uzbekistan
, Jeanette indicated.
‘Really?’
– Noah has a new girlfriend who comes from there.
‘She’s not my girlfriend yet. I’ve only met her twice.’
Bill smiled easily at him. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing about her. If and when. Now, does anyone want a cup of tea?’
Noah washed up the lunch dishes and Bill made tea. They sat out in the sun until it sank behind the trees and the garden receded into shadow. The pale roses began to glimmer against the depths of green. Noah said that he thought he would head back to town. In his mind was the thought and the hope that maybe Roxana wouldn’t have gone off to her club quite this early.
He kissed the top of his mother’s head and noted the pink channels of scalp visible through her hair.
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mum.’ Talk was by email.
Bill walked him to the front door and leaned on the open door of Noah’s rusted Golf.
‘You haven’t told me about the girl.’
‘Nothing to tell. Let me know if anything happens here, Dad.’
Bill stood back. ‘We’re all right.’ He waved until Noah pulled out of sight.
Jeanette went upstairs to her study and turned on the computer.
Back at the flat, Noah found nothing but darkness and silence. Roxana had correctly double-locked the flat door and the street door. He looked into his bedroom, and saw that she had smoothed the duvet and plumped up the pillow after her sleep.
He drifted back into the living room and stretched himself out on the sofa. He thought he would wait up for her, to make sure that she came back safely.
Suitcases and boxes of film equipment almost filled the hotel lobby. Taxis and 4x4s were waiting to sweep them away, Angela and Rayner and Simon Sheringham, the complaining actress, the creative duo who were hiding their hangovers behind dark glasses, and all the rest of the cast and crew.
‘Thanks for coming to see us off,’ Angela murmured to Connie in the hubbub of departure. ‘Think about what I said, won’t you? I mean, it’s beautiful here, but it’s not
home
, is it?’
‘Yes,’ Connie said, ambiguously.
Miraculously, the mounds of luggage fitted into the vehicles and people variously scrambled for places in the cars that looked as if they would have the best air-conditioning. Only two minutes ago it had seemed as if the point of departure would never arrive, and now everyone except Connie had piled into a seat.
She stood back and waved. Angela blew her a kiss and Rayner Ingram lifted one hand before adjusting his Ray-Bans. People shouted goodbye to her and then hastily wound up their windows to keep out the flies and the gusts of hot, steamy air. The convoy of cars rolled forwards and Connie
saw Ed looking at her through the rear window of the last 4x4. He touched two fingers to his temple in an ironic salute.
Connie stood still as silence descended. There was no clamour of mobile phones, no crackle of walkie-talkies, and no one was shouting. There was only birdsong, and the faint scrape of rough-edged leaves spreading in the sun’s glare.
She drew in a long breath and then exhaled.
The week had been like a runaway train ride. She had been right to be apprehensive. She had been very thoroughly shaken out of her equilibrium.
Maybe she should have gone back to Ed’s room last night.
She muttered to herself, ‘How many more chances d’you think you’re going to get?’
Then she saw that the doorman was glancing curiously at her. She gave the man what she hoped was a composed smile, and set off down the hotel drive towards the village street.
Connie didn’t have a car. As with her choice not to have a pool, her European neighbours (Kim and Neil who were in property and rentals, the French couple who owned a gallery in the main street, Werner Baum the sculptor, and all the others) regarded this as wilfully eccentric. But Connie liked walking, she had a bicycle for errands, and on the island she was never in a hurry. If she needed to go further afield there were the public bemos, small buses that ran fixed routes all over the island, and taxis were cheap.
The main street was quiet this morning. She passed a couple of dogs lolling in the shade, and a young woman sitting on her step with two smooth, plump toddlers playing at her feet. In front of the Café des Artistes a group of tourists in shorts and Birkenstocks were consulting a map and talking about a visit to the monkey forest.
‘They bite,’ one of the girls warned the others. ‘And then you get rabies.’
‘Noooo? They look so cute.’
Connie crossed the road and took her favourite route through the village’s central market. She loved the blazing colour and exuberance of the enclosed square. Two-storey buildings with open fronts were hung from ground to roof with dresses and T-shirts,
ikat
weavings and multicoloured sarongs, and the paved space in the centre was jammed with blue and red parasols. In the shade the stallholders were selling racks of beads and earrings, woven baskets in all shapes and sizes, plastic toys and cheap CDs. It was too early for the tourist crowds to be out in any force and the vendors were quietly gossiping with their neighbours. Connie was heading for the flower stall in the far corner. The blooms made a wall of brilliance beneath a sun-bleached awning.
Recognising Connie, the broad-hipped woman who owned the stall sprang up and began yanking stems of orchids and tuberoses out of buckets and pressing them into her hands. Business wasn’t good for any of these traders. Tourists had almost disappeared after the Kuta bombing, and they were still not coming to the island in the same numbers. Connie went through the ritual of praising the flowers for their freshness and the elegance of their blooms and at the same time firmly putting them back in their places.
She saw what she wanted at the back of the stall. They were scarlet cannas, blisteringly bright, offset by ribbed bronze leaves. When she had chosen an armful and told the stallholder what she wanted them for, the woman wrapped them in a swathe of white tissue brought out from a special hiding place, and finished off the bouquet with a stiff crepe-paper bow. Connie counted out
rupiah
notes, worn as soft and floppy as thin cloth.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She ducked out of the market, waving to two or three of the shoppers, and walked on towards Kadek Daging’s general
store. He was back in his usual place after his week of driving for the movie people. As soon as he saw her coming he bustled out from between his sacks of rice and drums of oil.
‘
Selamat siang, Ibu
,’ he beamed. ‘Glamour all finished for you and me. Back to ordinary life.’
‘
Selamat siang
, Kadek. I don’t know about glamour. We had a busy week, though, didn’t we?’
Kadek glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘I did not see her myself, but she was here, wasn’t she? Working in the film?’
‘Who?’
He checked again to make sure that there was no one eavesdropping from behind a tower of detergent packets and then whispered,
‘Penelope Cruz.’
Connie considered this. ‘I’m not sure. In a bank commercial? I certainly didn’t see her.’
Kadek stood back with a satisfied nod. ‘Yes. I knew that she was. I heard it from the mother of one of the young girls. Very beautiful. Not as beautiful perhaps as Angelina Jolie, but still. I expect you didn’t get the chance to work with her?’
‘No,’ Connie agreed. ‘I didn’t, unfortunately.’
‘Never mind,’ he consoled her. ‘Films are being made all the time, here in Bali. Perhaps next time. Those are very good flowers. Are they a gift, wrapped like that?’
‘I’m taking them to Dewi. Wayan Tupereme told me last night that she has a son.’
‘Yes, the birth was yesterday. I hear the baby is very small. You will be needing some first-quality rice.’
‘That’s exactly why I’m here, Kadek.’
They spent five minutes debating a suitable choice, and then Connie made her way onwards with the two-kilo package under her other arm. The quickest way to Dewi’s
husband’s family house, on the far side of the village where the paddy fields opened up, was to cut through the monkey forest. She walked briskly to where the street petered out in a clutch of little shops and open stalls.
The same group of tourists was now at the margin of the forest enclosure, negotiating with a small boy over the price of bunches of finger-sized bananas to feed to the monkeys.
It was cool and shady under the canopy of tall trees and the dirt tracks were easier on the feet than the uneven paving of the village streets. Connie often walked here, enjoying the quiet and the scent of damp leaves and trodden dust. She slowed her pace to a stroll, but she always kept an eye on the monkeys who sat in the branches or knuckle-walked at the edges of the paths. From behind her came a thin scream of alarm and then a chorus of shouts. She smiled; without even turning to look she knew that a troop of monkeys had executed a classic distraction manoeuvre followed by a pincer attack, and had successfully snatched the bunch of bananas from the grasp of the most monkey-friendly of the tourists.
In the middle of the forest was a temple complex. It was a mossy group of red-brick structures, open to the sky, the stone facings fleeced with lichen. A few people were on their way to or from prayer, women with baskets of fruit balanced on padded headpieces and men in the obligatory sarongs and bright sashes. Those who were returning had flowers behind their ears and grains of rice pressed to their cheeks, and their hair was beaded with moisture from splashing with
tirta
, holy water.
Monkeys prowled along the temple walls and sat in rows on the steps, picking fleas from one another’s backs. Several of them bit into the hijacked bananas. They were macaques with black-faced babies clinging to their fur. Connie noticed with sudden dismay that instead of a monkey baby, one male had a tiny, bedraggled ginger kitten. He detached the little
creature from his chest and flipped it over the back of his hand like a set of worry beads. Then he tossed it in the dust at his feet, yawning as he poked at it with his prehensile fingers. The kitten gave out almost soundless mews of distress when the macaque upended it and delicately scratched its pale-pink belly with black hooked fingernails. But when the monkey withdrew its hand the kitten righted itself and crawled back towards its tormentor, searching for protection.
The temples had colonies of wild cats as well as monkeys. Connie stared around her, wanting to rescue the little creature and restore it to its proper mother. But if she tried to swoop in and snatch it away the monkeys would certainly attack her. The tourists were right about that; they did bite. The monkey picked up the kitten again, perhaps in response to its mewing, and tucked it against his chest. It glared at Connie and the kitten hung on like the other babies, blinking its pale gummed-up eyes at the world.
Connie walked on. Trying to get the little scene out of her mind, she told herself that without its mother’s milk the kitten wouldn’t have to suffer for very much longer. The back of her neck and her shirt where the packet of rice pressed against it were clammy with sweat.
The path out of the forest crossed a small gorge by way of a plank suspension bridge, the metalwork crusted with decades-worth of wood-pigeon droppings. The planks creaked and swayed under her feet and she broke into a laden dash for the safety of the opposite side, stepping onto solid ground again and then laughing at her moment of panic.
Out here was the real village. Tourists never penetrated this far from the centre and there were no coffee shops or galleries. A sprawl of smallholdings and palm-thatch houses were separated by rank ditches clogged with refuse. Connie
ducked under the silver filaments of a spider’s web and noted the impressive size of the tortoiseshell-mottled spider gently swaying at the centre. She stepped over another ditch and made her way up to Pema’s family house. Today it was distinguished from the others by
penjors
, tall bamboo poles with curled bark and flags to denote a special occasion.