‘It’s a long time since a man has carried my bag.’ She had been flustered by his gesture: she was commenting on it to diminish its power. ‘As you Americans say, it’s cute.’
‘I’m Dutch.’ They had reached a narrow gap in the crowds. He gestured for her to go through it first.
‘Dutch when it suits and American when it suits, perhaps?’
‘That’s right,’ he replied, as he drew level with her again, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, you haven’t been treated right.’
She spoke from the corner of her mouth as they walked side by side. ‘Stop trying to make me fall in love with you.’
‘No.’
They slipped into it so easily; it was so fluent and meaningless. This was what he liked about her. You could say anything to her and it wasn’t freighted with significance. The gestures were important but the words meant nothing.
‘I’m sorry about the other morning,’ she said, as they paused by a stall selling fritters. ‘About rushing off, I mean. It was a little rude of me.’ A little rude: he liked that in her too, her precision.
‘Yes it was.’ Now, perhaps, would be a good moment to find out what was wrong with her, what was damaged inside. Once you knew that about a person, they were yours for the taking.
‘I did wonder, at that time, what. .?’ he started, but she spoke over him.
‘What did you do after you left?’ she said.
‘Went for a walk,’ he replied. Maybe she hadn’t seen him waiting in the cafe opposite the guesthouse after all.
‘I had to get home and get changed, I was already late. And I felt a little guilty, I guess.’
‘For being late or for having sex with me?’
She gave a half-smile. ‘Well, that’s not what I’m here for, is it?’
‘I don’t think you should feel guilty for giving yourself a night off.’ He did not add: that’s what I was doing, after all.
She looked away, at the market, then gave a sigh so heavy he presumed she was about to make her excuses and leave but instead she said, ‘A drink?’
‘How about we go back to Jalan Bisma?’
‘You are a bad man, John Harper.’
‘Yes I am.’
The morning after their second night together, they had exactly the kind of breakfast he had fantasised about before. The guesthouse didn’t do black rice pudding — it was a Sunday speciality only — but the tangerine juice was sharp and sweet, the coffee hot.
‘The sambal is great here, really spicy,’ Rita said, as they studied the menu.
When the young woman came with their dishes, she put the eggs and toast in front of Rita and the nasi goreng in front of Harper. They waited until she had turned away before exchanging plates with small smiles of collusion.
They took the same route that he had the other day, walking up Jalan Bisma out of town until the guesthouses and little warung fell away and the road became a track through the rice fields.
On his previous walk, the boys had fallen behind, then disappeared, and he had wondered if he was mistaken about being followed — but even so, he glanced behind them. This time, there was no sign of anything suspicious, no one on their trail. The tall wooden constructions in the middle of the field looked just like water towers. The sheen of light brown water in which the rice plants stood was nothing more than irrigation. In Rita’s presence, he realised, everything was no more than it seemed. If she were in the hut with him at night, the men would not come, rain or no rain. They would not even exist.
They passed beyond the edge of the town and along the stretch of dirt road that led up to the Forest via a winding rocky path. The edges of the rice fields were dotted with construction sites, the town stretching itself to accommodate its growing number of visitors. They passed a site where the bones of a building, a small hotel or guesthouse, were in place; the concrete pillars and the horizontal beams: a bare-chested man knelt on the ground chopping fiercely at a pile of wet cement on a board. Bamboo ladders lay in rows across one of the horizontals and several men were halfway up the ladders in a row, hauling another beam upwards between them by ropes slung over the top. At the bottom of the ladders and directly underneath the bones of the building, a large concrete base had already been filled and hardened. A pack of three dogs were lounging on it, all exactly the same shape, a cardboard-cutout mongrel shape: small, skinny, with disproportionately large ears. One of the dogs was dark brown, another a sandy colour, the other dirty white. They lay on their sides in the sun as motionless as if they were dead. Harper thought how sinister that sort of dog always seemed to him, all the same shape but different colours, as if they had been made, not born, cut from paper with scissors then magicked into life like the skeletons that jerked around the animated films of his childhood.
‘So many rice fields disappearing under concrete,’ Rita said. ‘Until recently, Jalan Bisma was a dirt track leading out of town.’
He thought, well, when a farmer probably gets the same for selling his land as he would for three decades of threshing, can you blame him?
Rita stopped and looked at the site, the fields beyond. ‘You know, I have wondered. .’
Something about her tone arrested him. ‘What?’
‘Oh, you know, about buying a lease, a piece of land. It would feel big, though, a big thing to do.’
‘Why? You could always sell it on, couldn’t you, if it was a mistake?’
She frowned. ‘It would mean I was saying goodbye, to other things, other options, going back, and so on. I would be saying something, to myself I mean. Alone.’
He wasn’t sure what she meant: saying something only to herself? Or buying a lease, alone? But the bit about saying goodbye to other options, that bit he could understand.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Eight years. Long enough, to decide I mean. If I was going to move on, I would have done by now. Building, you know, it’s saying something, no? Building something. Frightening.’
Of all the things in the world there were to be frightened of, buying land leases or building property did not strike him as particularly scary: but no sooner had he dismissed her remark than he paused for a moment. I have never built anything, he thought. How strange, at my age, to realise that only now. ‘Aren’t you scared of the Invisibles?’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘These fields are the land of Dewi Sri, don’t forget.’ She paused. ‘If this is your first time on Bali, how do you know about the Invisibles?’
‘Look,’ he said, pointing. ‘What kind of bird is that?’
She lifted a hand to shade her eyes.
While she scanned the trees on the other side of the rice field for the non-existent bird, he watched the man on his knees mixing the concrete and thought how he could buy a lease here too. With the political situation so unstable, it would be dirt cheap. Local labour would be next to nothing. You could throw up a small villa in no time. He wondered what colours Rita liked. He wasn’t into all that fancy folk art but he didn’t feel that she was either: she was too practical. In a couple of seconds, as they stood looking out over the field, he pictured their whole lives from now on. A small villa, together. Peace. Coffee on the veranda each morning as dawn broke over the fields. The view would be less dramatic than the one over the valley but, in its own way, just as beautiful.
The sun shone through the edges of her hair where it lifted slightly. He had the idea — which he knew to be stupid — that she had just had the same fantasy.