The crowd of young people shrieked and laughed at each other. The two young men on Harper’s left, who had been following them closely, ran into a looted shop for shelter, where they discovered a pile of tea trays they snatched up and held above their heads, calling out to their friends — and in the minutes this took, Harper watched until he was sure the crowd was sufficiently distracted before pulling at the unwilling young man and saying, ‘Ayo!’ again but this time hissing rather than shouting.
Still, the young man did not understand he was being saved. Harper had to clench his upper arm in his fist with all his strength as he dragged him along until, finally, at the end of the street he was able to turn right and shove him up against a wall and hold him there for a minute, by the shoulders, looking into his face. ‘Go home. Don’t go back that way. Do you understand?’ he said in Indonesian, but the young man seemed too shocked to comprehend and the minute Harper took his hands away from his shoulders, he reeled from him, back the way they had come.
Harper called out as the young man turned the corner — he was damned if he was going to have gone to all that effort only for him to endanger them both by running back to the crowd — and the young man stopped, staring back down the main street, then finally understood, reeled round again and, half bent double and with no acknowledgement to Harper, staggered off down the side street.
It was pouring with rain now. Harper stood for a moment, the adrenaline of the incident draining from him. Already, a small muddy river was flowing down the drain on the other side of the street. He lifted his shirt, untucked from his trousers in the chaos, and wiped his face. People would be taking shelter in the looted shops now, all but the most determined rioters that was. It should be safe to find his way back to his apartment but it would be a good idea to avoid the main streets until he was well clear of the old quarter and could find a cab. He lifted his face to the heavens, closed his eyes and opened his mouth, letting the hard raindrops fall on his tongue and sting his face. They were right to send in Henrikson, he thought, I’m too old for this.
His apartment was on the fifth floor and the lift had broken down several months ago — the maintenance company couldn’t afford the replacement parts, which were German, so it had stayed broken. He climbed the stairs slowly and by the third floor, his legs had started to shake. He paused for a moment, thinking, how hopeless. Then he thought, no, it isn’t just stairs, you’ve climbed these stairs many times without difficulty. It isn’t just the heat or humidity either — it’s the draining of the adrenaline, come on, you know this one.
His hand shook as he put the key into his apartment door. He closed it behind him and leant against it. The maid had been while he was out and the apartment was tidy, swept. The pile of books and papers he had left on the small dining table was neatened, the pens next to it laid out in a row. His legs were still trembling. How odd. And then, he was shuddering from head to foot, so much it was shaking his lungs, and he began breathing in great gulps. He had saved a boy. Without any part of his body alerting him to what was about to happen, apart from the trembling that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, he sank down onto the polished wooden floor, crashing onto his knees. He had saved a boy. It was a fissure. It was enough.
He crawled across the floor, ruffling the thin rug, to the cabinet — dark polished wood — where he kept the whisky. As he extracted a tumbler it slipped from his grasp and then rolled in a semi-circle by his knee. He grabbed it and threw it to one side, meaning only to remove it from his immediate vicinity because he didn’t want it but it flew across the room and smashed against a wall. He unscrewed the bottle and threw the lid in the same direction, where it landed with a tinny clatter. He drank from the bottle, long and hard, and once he had started he did not stop. It was the closeness of everything. Here he was, and the floor was polished and clean because the maid had been in while he had been out in a city in which people were being beaten, killed, and there was a television and a sofa and a fridge with food in it, and all the normal business of a normal life, and a few minutes ago he had watched a boy come close to having his life snuffed out, beaten from him — and that could happen or nearly happen, and he, Harper, could then go home and put his key in his door and have a beer, or perhaps something to eat, just like all the other people who were doing things just like that, and minutes away, the world was ending for a boy, or for another boy like him, in the most horrible way. And it wasn’t long ago or in the middle of nowhere: it was now, in one of the modern cities of the world. And all at once, he realised that what he could not stand was the closeness of everything. Yes, that was it. There would always be horrors, perhaps. Perhaps there would never be a time in human history when they would not exist because it would take so long for Homo sapiens to develop to that stage that a meteor would have wiped them all out by then, like the dinosaurs, or a freak tidal wave would have washed them all away — darkness upon earth, cold and dark, before this sick soft race worked out how to live without huge numbers of it suffering cold and hunger and humiliation in order for the lucky few to live in something approaching peace and comfort. But the closeness of it: the fact that he could walk out of his clean, white apartment again right now if he wanted and a few streets away. . and it rippled out, everywhere, beyond Jakarta, beyond Java — on Borneo the Dayaks hated the Madurese and the Madurese hated them back and why stop with these islands? They were far from unique. The Middle East — let’s not even go there — and the Pakistanis had tested those missiles and had India in their sights. And then Poppa and Nina, and Nina saying, ‘Go back upstairs, Poppa’s just clearing something off the lawn.’ And why was there something on the lawn? Oh, because Poppa’s skin was black, that was why. And then they couldn’t even walk up a path up a mountain without people staring at them and why not, not for anything you’ve done or even want to do, just because of what you are. And his mother, his mother as a slim girl, running down the road, and his father, who he had never met, killed for not wearing an armband. He saw Francisca weeping and weeping in the hospitaclass="underline" the face of their drowned baby, perfect in repose, mouth a little open — there had never been anything more perfect. He saw Bud’s face, lifted upwards, dreamily, skyward, and heard his own voice shouting, ‘Bud!’ as loud as it was possible to shout, at the same moment Bud’s eyes opened.
He crawled around the polished floor: everyone, all over the world, knew these things happened and looked the other way and got the bus to work and collected children from school and at least those sickening soft ordinary sorts of people in Holland or England or America had the benefit of distance to blanket their ignorance. But him, and people like him. They knew how close it all was. They knew what burned flesh smelled like. He heard Komang’s children, screaming.
And then the creatures started climbing out of the walls. He rang the twenty-four-hour emergency hotline at the Institute in Amsterdam, the one that was reserved for operatives or clients in imminent danger, and told them that cannibals were eating his legs while he was still alive. Soeharto would never resign. He would send out the cannibals. And they would slice the flesh off him and men like him and they would cook it over fires while they watched and everyone should get out get out get out now. He screamed it down the phone. Then he hung up and fell asleep on the floor.