Kenje was in the doorway, telling him he had to call Jakarta, but outside the gym Devlin saw someone – a miner, judging by the overalls and boots – carrying a shotgun and heading for the jungle. Going off-site. Another monkey-hunting fucker. Without thinking he pushed past Kenje, ignored the metal steps, and jumped down, landing heavily in the dirt. The jarring in his temple enraged him. He set off into the jungle.
The D road was a roughly cleared track which ran parallel to the river. He unlocked the padlock on the gate, pulling it shut with such force that the steel clanged and a bird overhead – was it a heron? a magpie? – let loose its liquid notes so they rose like rainbow-coloured balloons in the misty air.
Even a few steps down the track, the shouts and smells of the mine were fading. He thought about what he was going to do to the miner if he found him hunting. Flouting authority. There would be no excuses, Devlin said to himself, and it was his father’s voice. Sympathy is a sign of weakness in my business.
The track stretched on. Already the jungle was growing back over the side, twigs and leaves drifting in, blurring the edges. Devlin didn’t know the names of the trees or the plants. To him the jungle was a mass of green. Vines, there were lots of vines, and some muddier green things which might not be vines. But those on the edge were vines, vines with green tips much brighter than the sections behind; they stretched out into the churned earth. They were growing as he watched but not enough to cover the prints of bare feet.
A hunched figure walked away from the corner of his eye: tallish, in the shapeless brown miner’s suit, dusted with red, mud maybe. Devlin left the track, aimed for what appeared to be sparser jungle, but immediately found himself caught on thorny bushes. He heaved back, felt another bush behind him and, reduced to a crouch, had to move forward with his hands outstretched, trying to push the branches away. The light grew dimmer, the branches closed overhead, he was almost on his knees. He saw splashes of colour, a centipede moving like a stilt-walker over the slender points of the brilliant red mould on a rotting log.
The tough cloth of his shirt caught and, after a particularly savage wrench, he thought he heard it tear. He was furious: at himself, at the miner, at the monkeys stupid enough to stray too close. He was swearing under his breath, the words billowing up, silencing the jungle. He put a foot on a log which collapsed in a cloud of dried splinters and sodden mould-eaten patches. He toppled to one side – for a sickening instant there was the black pressing down and he was lying on the path outside his father’s house, sweating alcohol, raising his head to look at the jimmied door, hearing the shouts inside, the breaking glass.
He lay on his back. The light was low, the ground damp and cool. The flat-nosed face of a small, white stone statue stared at him in lidless fury from under a bush. It was very quiet, an occasional creak from somewhere behind him; the wind must have been coming up through the trees. Through the fringed branches he saw a figure in white. Maybe the miner had taken off his suit, was so determined on a kill that he had climbed the trees. There was a rhythmic slapping, something rapping – softer than metal – against nearby bark.
Ants were crawling over Devlin’s leg, into the cuts. He forced himself up, took a fix on the position of the white man, and pushed through the bushes, trying to follow in the general direction. The figure disappeared, reappeared, it almost seemed to be swinging from the branches. A man gone ape. An ape man.
Then he saw the real thing: a procession of brown shapes on the upper branches. He saw the hairy red-brown bodies, the long arms, the smaller shapes embracing the shoulders of the larger. A family of orang-utans. The biggest male stopped, his black bubble eyes fixed and unblinking. His leathery red-grey breast-plate was twice Devlin’s width. Devlin lay very still. A call from up front and the male climbed on, flexing his long arms, peering over his shoulder as though to memorise the location, as though he would come back later.
Devlin couldn’t place the slapping sound. He forgot about following the hunter and walked towards the noise. He had a sense that the river was behind him, on his right. But when he turned and searched for the path, it was as though the jungle had already grown back.
He wasn’t worried. There would be a shift change in a few hours, the siren should be loud enough to hear. He still thought the mine owned the jungle. He didn’t like to think of lost explorers, deluded white men, failures.
He was so focused on the sound that was not the usual rustlings and creaks of the jungle that it was a shock to find himself in the latticed thicket.
All other sounds curled away from him. He was alone, finally.
He looked up and it was as though light was kindled in the gloom of the jungle.
The pilot or what remained of him hung in his webbing, surrounded by the billowing folds of his cream parachute. He was a suit filled with air or earth or water or fire: hands or the remnants of hands inside thick gloves, a head covered in goggles and the hood of his jump-suit. When he knew he was going to crash, he must have pulled it up, as meagre protection. Now, he turned slowly as though someone recently passed by and pushed him – Devlin had an image of the monkeys patting him, as a totem – and there was enough movement to suggest breathing.
When Devlin drew closer, he saw the flare of ivory, light on bone.
The pilot hung from an oddly shaped tree, caught the way the branches had tried to catch Devlin. The tree had become a giant cross, overgrown with creepers and patched with moss; shredded brown bark plugging the hole torn along the metal trunk. A World War II bi-plane crashed in the jungle, its pilot – maybe his neck broken – unable to escape the ties that bound him. The canopy was a vaulted roof around him.
A scream; the birds scattered. The site siren tunnelled straight through the jungle at him. Devlin looked at the pilot hanging in his pale cloud in his jungle cathedral: sacrificed on the altar of his job. Unable to escape his work.
‘You and your lame duck causes,’ said Mitch. Devlin heard ice cubes rattling over the static on the line, imagined the whirr of Mitch’s tape recorder, the breathing of some Kopassus thug listening in.
‘I’m not a kind man,’ said Devlin. He pushed the open envelope away from him. ‘This isn’t kindness. The locals won’t stand for you wiping out villages.’
‘Natives,’ said Mitch. ‘Headhunters. Primitives.’
‘That’s bullshit. My foreman is a Dyak.’
‘Yeah, and Jakarta is pissed about that.’
‘So I can’t promote the best man for the job,’ said Devlin. ‘Doesn’t that kind of blow my cover?’
‘You can’t promote locals without Jakarta approval. You know that.’
Devlin reached forward, put his hand over the wooden fish, covering its eye.
‘We’re surprised,’ said Mitch, ‘you’re taking such an interest. After the inquest, we thought you’d want a bit of quiet.’
‘As Jakarta’s lapdog,’ said Devlin.
‘All you have to do is unlock the D gate on the twenty-fifth.
That’s it.’
‘So the Kopassus jeeps can get in closer to do their dirty work.’
‘The army wants to go in, clean out some villages, the mine is en route. Do the math.’
‘I’ll be an accessory to genocide.’
‘It’s Asian business, not ours. No-one’s asking you to shoot anyone. You unlock the gate, you’re doing nothing. Kick back, have another Scotch.’
Devlin opened his hand. The fin had imprinted red lines on his palm. Like scales.
‘Don’t go crazy on me now,’ said Mitch. ‘I sorted your mess.’
‘I didn’t ask you to.’
‘You still owe me.’ A pause, more rattling, a spurt of static not quite disguising a sigh in the distance. ‘And you need to stop wandering around the jungle.’
‘Rainforest.’
‘Whatever.’
‘The miners have been hunting monkeys. It’ll make us look bad.’
‘Who gives a fuck? Jakarta’s grabbing the land anyway.’
‘If I open the gate.’
‘Don’t even think about not doing it. You get caught, you’ll be shot or dumped in one of their little river cages. Either way, we’ll deny we ever knew you. Hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Watch your back.’ He slammed down the phone.
Watch your back, Devlin thought. Always such a stupid phrase. And impossible.
He took to going out at sunset. At first he went to contemplate cutting down the dead pilot. He took crampons and a small axe and got halfway up the tree supporting the plane’s tail. But the metal above him quivered, the black web vibrated and slipped. As he retreated, he caught the gleam of silver a stone’s throw away. He searched, thinking it might be debris from the plane, or more of the small stone statues and the shrunken faces of gouged bone and tufted hair wedged onto sticks which lay, precisely placed, in this part of the jungle.
That was when he found the rock pool.
The water was clear to the bottom, not veined like the muddy grey river with the chemicals dumped in from the sites up north. He plunged his hand through a coolness which coated him, entered his bones, put out whatever smouldered there. He took off his boots and socks and shirt and waded in. He floated on his back for hours gazing up to where the light fell in ribbons through the canopy.
He thought, It is a cathedral for the unreligious.
The jungle folded around him like roses. Night fell within seconds, into a blackness alive with rustles and clicks and long moaning cries building around him, and the moon leaving traces of silver in the rock pool that lay a few paces from the dead airman, the water matching the gleam of the liquid eyes of the creatures hidden in their secret places, watching him.
He felt he could walk blindfolded through this green land. He could sleepwalk through it, as though in a dream. He learned how to move with the forest: by touching, by travelling on the sound of his weight on the fine twigs and fallen bark. He learned how to sit still, to breathe deeply for the first time in years. He slept better, ate better. ‘Not so much drunken white bastard now,’ said Kenje approvingly as he stacked the Friday afternoon boxes in the storeroom.
One sunset, as Devlin watched a baby fern slowly uncurl to the fading heat of the day, he became convinced that the rainforest could erase memories. And excavate them.
At night, staring up at the pilot sleeping above him, Devlin closed his eyes and smelled wattle. He saw swaying silhouettes against dark blue sky and heard the frogs’ claps and bellows. Ahead of him was the creek bank with its myriad tiny white lights ringed by blue haloes. He was back in one of the few pleasant memories of his childhood.
The air was cold on the creek bed. The tiny lights were steady.
Glow worms, said his mother, lighting another cigarette.
They’re like – he stopped, remembering the talk his father had given him, his big-knuckled hand gripping Devlin’s arm. Occasionally he would dig in on a key phrase like,
Get it out of your head
.
Go on, said his mother. She coughed a little. She was already coughing then. She blew on the lit end of her cigarette, making it smoulder.
She said, There’s no-one else here.
They’re like . . . tiny people.
Go on, she said. She touched his cheek briefly. He let himself stretch out and stroke the soft moss. His hand sank into the warmth of the earth.
He said, Tiny people living in tiny homes between the roots of the gum trees.
Exactly, said his mother.
Don’t turn into another old white bastard with shaking hands, Mitch had said on his next call. Don’t get jungle madness. You’re a good organiser, no-one better at keeping lists. Do your job and the slate gets wiped clean. Retirement, relocation – not a dishonourable discharge. Everyone’s impressed by how you’ve juggled all three sides. You leave the gate open, who’s to know? Jakarta wants this, the army wants it, Canberra, Washington. No-one minds if you have a few drinks but just remember: the back of Borneo is ours. Not the locals’.
That day he almost missed the village. He had wandered farther in than he realised, following what looked like a track. When it meandered into a vine patch, he stepped off to stare at the family of monkeys in the branches above. The rain came down, suddenly, fiercely, large splots of water making the ferns shake. The old grey-chested male glared at him, too stubborn to move.
The rain stopped. Devlin leaned against the damp bark, breathed the warm mouldy smell. He liked the heat. Already Mitch was talking about the next job – ‘No ambiguities, nothing to trouble your conscience over: a looter, an art thief. You should read what he did to his son.’ Trust you, thought Devlin, to pick up on that theme. Trust you to find the wound. Devlin saw Mitch as a little boy, poking at an ant’s nest with a stick. Mitch had taken his silence for hesitation and said, ‘And perks, dude. There’s a wack-job daughter, an easy fuck for sure.’
Devlin rubbed his head irritably against the bark and felt a knot. He peered up: vines were twisted into ladders against the tall trunk. Then he saw the huts: bark and wood and palm leaves blending into the landscape. The land had been partly cleared but working around the trees, not against them.
He slowed his breathing, the way he did at night when he moved through the forest. A twig cracked on his left and he saw the silhouette of a man, haloed by the sunlight, next to a tree. He saw other faces merging with the brown jungle shadows. He thought he saw Kenje, dappled with light and bruises, retreating into the dimness. He saw a baby asleep on a flat rock under a fern, a dog watching him in a square of light, its muzzle held by a thin little girl with bottomless eyes. He saw a stream of smoke idling up through the branches. He thought for a moment. He said, ‘I’ll never tell,’ and kneeled on the steaming earth.
The cage rocked again but there were no crocodiles beneath him; they were all on the bank. Instead, there was a rush of water, tinged with green and malevolent yellow. He smelled rotten eggs. Some site flushing out their sewage and tailings, up river? Dumping their acidic water. The crocs were lucky to be out of it.
He stared at the bank. The crocodiles had been ripping and tearing. Now each backed away, bloodied flesh in their teeth. A crumpled heap of bones and pink fur lay stamped into the mud. The pungent smell of hot blood drifted across the water, overpowering the chemicals. The forest was silent. Devlin saw eyes watching him from between the roots at the water’s edge. He blinked, the water shifted and the eyes vanished.