Troppo (8 page)

‘That's great,' he says, but he sounds distracted.

‘So what have you been up to?'

‘Actually, I've just hired ten new staff under the age of thirty. They come on board at the start of the week.'

‘That's wonderful.' Bankrolled by his parents, Josh started a graphic design business as a seventeen year old that has grown to become the biggest in Perth. When we first met, I was unbelievably attracted to his mind, to his creativity, to the way he
bounced ideas off me, nightly. And to the sex. What they say is true – sex with older men can be very, very satisfying.

‘I got the new contract with that mining company EXO,' he continues. ‘We've been hired to do all their rebranding. It's probably good timing that you're away now, I'm going to be flat out over the next few months.'

‘Awesome!'

‘Yeah, we're all heading off early for drinks.'

I don't answer.

‘Penny, are you there?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You've gone all weird on me. Is something wrong?'

‘Nah, it's just … I wish I could be there with you.'

I'm jealous. Unreasonably. Of that receptionist. Of the new, and probably hot, young staff.

‘Well you could be, if you wanted.'

There's a three-second pause.

He continues, ‘So have you decided? Do you reckon you'll stay away six months?'

‘I …' Another six seconds untick. There's no way I'll land something like what Shane's offering back in Perth. Not without a degree, hotel school, more experience.

There's smothered voices at the other end.

‘Ah, Josh? Are you still there?'

More voices, then he's back on the line.

‘Sorry Pen, I've gotta go. Give us a call when you know what you're doing. And can you please,
please
sort yourself out with a mobile phone?'

I pay the wartel owner. Slump in the doorway and look out over the street. The night before I left, when Josh finally came to bed, cheeks now dry, he held me to him. It was as if he sensed the distance in my heart and was trying to will me back, through skin.

‘What will you miss about me?' I asked, mouth muffled against his chest.

He was quiet a long while, then said, close to my ear, ‘I'll miss the way you're interested in everything, the way you ask questions of anyone without worrying what they think. I'll miss the way you think about some things much more deeply than you let on, but then how with other things, things that are common sense to most people, you're completely oblivious to.'

‘And what won't you miss?' I asked, turning, so my back was to him.

His arms locked around my chest. My lips touched one of his slender fingers. He didn't answer.

Twenty minutes later I'm flat on my back with my pants around my ankles. The bed looks like a hospital stretcher from WW2. The girls haven't bothered to put down a clean towel and it's glossy with filth. As soon as they roll out a dirty, bubbling wax pot on pram wheels, I sense trouble.

I should leave. But beauty salons are great places for gossip.

‘Hello Missus! Where you from? Are you married? How long you in Batu Batur?'

I answer as best I can, feeling a blistering lick of wax across my pelvis.

‘Mister Shane? You're going to be working for Mister Shane?' one of them asks incredulously.

A bandage rips. The girls quickly press their fingers against my skin to ease the pain.

‘You're not scared?' asks the first girl, switching to Indonesian.

‘Should I be?' At the moment, I think I'm more scared about getting third-degree burns.

‘It's just a rumour,' says the second girl.

‘Oh ya?' challenges the first.

‘What's just a rumour?' I ask.

‘About Shane chopping the fingers off one of his maids. I know the truth.'

Another slap of wax.

‘My cousin knows Yuliana. She told me Yuliana worked in
Saudi Arabia as a maid for two years. That's where it happened. Her boss cut off her fingers because he thought she'd been stealing. It happens all the time.'

She whips off the bandage.

No soothing fingers this time.

‘So why are people saying Shane did it?'

‘Ya, people don't like Shane. They'll say anything to get rid of him.'

I hobble out forty minutes later after declining the offer of a ‘crackwax', nearly hairless, with burns boxing in my vagina. Relieved as I am by this counter-rumour, there's no way I'll be going back to find out more.

At the bungalows Cahyati passes me a folded square of paper.

It reads:
Seeya at 6
.

‘Matt?'

Cahyati nods.

I sit next to her on the top step leading up to the dining deck and follow her gaze. She's watching the Frenchman. He's set up a couple of speakers on his balcony and is positioned on a sarong in an ambitious, physics-defying yoga posture. His legs are around his neck. And he has an audience. On the other side of the fence several men straddle motorbikes. One of the men has perched a toddler between the handlebars. The toddler is wailing in alarm – the Frenchman's probably the first bule it's seen. The men chat and pass around a cigarette and no-one shows any signs of moving.

I haven't spoken to Emile since that afternoon on his balcony when he told me he had just come from snapping photos in Côte d'Ivoire. I wonder if his reticence, his inwardness, is because of something he saw.

‘Have you been here for long?' I ask Cahyati in Indonesian.

‘Maybe a month. My family are still in the village.'

‘Do you like it?'

‘Yeah …' she says unconvincingly. Then after a moment she asks, ‘Have you ever been to Bali?'

‘I used to live there.'

Above us a rat disturbs the rafters, looses a faint rain of dust and dead insects.

She lifts her face, but her shoulders remain hunched over. ‘Is there much work there? Like cleaning work, restaurant work?'

‘Sure. I mean usually it gets busy around May through until August. It's pretty quiet at the moment, especially after the bombings in Jakarta. But Christmas isn't too far away, and so a fair few tourists will start to come through after that. Why, are you thinking you might head over?'

‘Maybe. Maybe if I can save enough money for the bus.'

That would be one hell of a bus trip. ‘Kasihtahu aja, ya, kalau mau bantuan,' I say flippantly. Let me know if I can help out.

If she's serious, it's unlikely her family will let her go. But then again, there's a surprising mix of young people in Kuta. It's one of the things that makes the place so exciting, the fact that there's this constant influx of young people from all over the archipelago: all full of dreams, all living in shared accommodation, all falling in love, falling out of love, getting drunk, learning English, sending home money to their families. Each group tends to stick together – the guys and girls from Lombok hang out, the crew from Flores share accommodation, the soccer games on Kuta Beach at dusk are determined by island – the Sumatrans will be playing one game, but in the next game down, it'll be boys from Sulawesi.

‘How old are you?' I ask curiously.

‘Seventeen.'

‘Are you still at school?'

‘No, I left when I was fourteen.'

‘Ahh. So do you have a boyfriend?'

She gives me a cheeky, spirited smile and her face transforms. ‘Nggak!' she lies.

‘Masak! Pacarmu masih di kampung, ya?' Yeah, right! He's
still in the village, isn't he?

She just smiles again. I learn that Ibu won't let her go into town unaccompanied and that she has no friends here. She's not keen to come surfing with Matt and me in the morning – she can't swim and surfing isn't something she wants to try. She does like soccer though; maybe, if I liked, we could go and watch the game tomorrow evening at dusk?

‘I'd love that!' I tell her.

She squeezes my hand in excitement.

‘But Ibu will be cool with it, with you taking the afternoon off?'

She drops my hand. ‘Probably,' she says.

I wake with the call to prayer and lie still, listening to the timbersigh of the bungalow, the black roar of surf over the reef. The waves here are nothing like the freezing, shark-chopped slabs in Albany. Indo's a warm-water playground of perfectly sculpted reefs that trap and jack perfectly groomed waves. Even so, I hope Matt won't coax me out if it's too big. It's been a long time and I don't want to have to do the paddle of shame back in.

I swing my legs out of bed and find the light switch.

Half an hour later I'm hunched behind Matt on his motorbike, clutching a board under each arm and holding on to him with my knees and thighs. It's cold; my cheeks and fingers and eyes smart. Matt's wearing a hoody, jeans and beanie. Before we left, he said, ‘You might wanna get a jumper, eh.' I laughed and replied, ‘Nah, I'll be right.' Stupid, stupid! I press my forehead against his back, imagining my hands wrapped around a glass of black coffee instead of cold fibreglass.

It happens every trip, an acute pang of First World guilt. We're flying along narrow roads, passing women and men whose bodies are halved over new rice, passing old women buckled under bundles of sticks and yet here
we
are, off to surf, off to play and play and play, for
months
if we want, while these farmers work their guts out, for our coffee, for our rice.

By the time we get there the sun's just coming up. We're south of Batu Batur, over the river and around to the southern end of
the next bay. I climb off, arms aching, careful not to bump the boards together. Matt parks the bike under a palm. He warned me not to bring anything of value, not to bring anything.

‘They're pretty desperate here. I've even had sunscreen stolen. Fuck knows why, they don't even use sunscreen!'

‘Can't you lock stuff in the bike?'

‘Yeah, but the seats are easy to lift. Year and a half ago some American blokes had their bikes stolen from this spot.'

We have turned down a grass track and ridden for ages. There are no people around, only a few cows with rusty, squared-off bells. It'd be a bitch to have to walk back to the main road.

‘Yeah, it's not like in Aus where you chuck your key under the wheel of your car. It takes a bit more planning. But it's worth it.'

We walk clear of the palms. The ocean is the powder blue of mid-winter daydreams. About a hundred metres out, a right-hand wave peels flawless and glassy into a wide channel. The inside section is sucking up and barrelling, but further over on the shoulder there's a second, more mellow take-off point, where the wave slows, but doesn't stall – perfect for me! It peels almost all the way to the shore. There's no-one on it. I startle Matt with a whoop and a clap and sprint back to the boards. It's been pretty much two years since Fiji, two years since I've been out for a proper wave. Giddy, champagne-light bubbles rise in my chest, that promise of adrenaline.

‘Wow, Pen, careful!' Matt's grinning, shaking his head at my excitement.

I admire his board, a green twin-fin fish with hand-sketched designs across the deck. Then I look again, now dubious, at the board I picked for myself. It was the best of a bad bunch of rentals from Ibu Ayu's, a mini-mal with a rounded nose and tail. Looking at the sunken fibreglass around the nose and fins, I find myself hoping it will float. Only one way to find out. I strip
down to my bikini, scrunch my t-shirt and shorts under a bush, scribble on some wax and zinc and run to the edge of the ocean.

I remember another time, years ago, going for a surf with a guy I had a crush on. Stupidly, I fastened my leg-rope where we'd left our towels, way up on the sand. Then I ran down the sloping bank to the surf, leg-rope bouncing against my calf. Just as my toes were about to touch the water, I tripped on my leg-rope and flew face-first onto the sand bar. I grazed the end off my nose.

The bloke never asked me to go for a wave again.

This morning I'm more careful. I strap my leggy above my right ankle, wade out until the water rings my waist, then balance on the board and begin to paddle. Slow, steady strokes. My arms remembering. Matt soon catches up and we paddle out together. We move away from the channel and circle in behind the break. Coral opens out beneath us, dusty with salt and still-dark – though every now and then fish flicker past, violet, teal, lemon.

The sun splits knife-thin above the volcanoes.

Matt doesn't spend any time teabagging: he turns and paddles hard into the first set wave, swooping down the face. White fans of spray open and fall from the back of the wave. I'm not so game. I let the other four set waves go, wondering where my take-off point should be and how far the coral is below the soles of my feet. Matt catches another couple then paddles over.

‘What's goin' on? You alright?'

‘Yep.' A wave darkens to my right, a smaller one. I swing my board around and start to paddle. The wave picks the board up but as I try to jump, my feet scramble and the wave sucks and chucks me over the falls. I come up, coughing and embarrassed. Damn, Penny, come on. You used to be heaps better than this. You never would have missed such an easy take-off! I grit my teeth, paddle back toward the channel, then let it drift me
behind the break again. I'm determined not to stuff up the next wave, determined that by the end of the session I'll be taking off on the inside and surfing with at least a fraction of the grace I used to have.

A couple more stuff-ups, a couple of shin-grazes on the coral, then it starts coming back. I've always enjoyed riding longer boards and by the end of the session I'm matching Matt wave for wave. I remember that graceful, swooping pattern: how to drop into an arcing bottom turn, angle the board toward the lip of the wave, then swing again when reaching the top, throwing spray from the tail. I remember how, when a wave fattens out, to move my hips, just slightly, to give me more speed; how to dance my feet to make the most of every glassy section, how to crouch low and drag my fingertips through the fish-flashing wall when the wave sucks over. I also remember how paddle-fitness is half of surfing and realise I'm seriously out of shape. No more kretek cigarettes or deep-fried bananas.