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‘Well, I am leaving, Bill.’
‘Wait.’ When he smiled he showed off the top row of his perfect teeth. ‘You remember what we talked about last time we met…’
Margaret looked him in the eye then looked away. ‘Yes.’
‘And…?’
‘And what?’
‘Well,’ he paused. ‘We need to know what you…think.’
She did not answer. A steady stream of limousines drew up before them; the revving of the engines and the exhaust fumes made her feel sick, and the whistling of the doormen rang sharply in her ears and made her incipient headache grow worse. She wanted to go home.
He stood watching her, not saying anything. Margaret felt he was prepared to stay there all night, waiting for her to answer, but in the end he said, ‘I’m sorry. This is not a good place to speak. You sure you won’t come back inside for one more beer? No, you’re tired, of course. Look, come by and see me in my office. Soon.’ He handed her a folded-up newspaper. She saw the same smiling badminton player she had noticed earlier in the day, one half of his face disappearing into a crease. Bill leant over to kiss her on the cheek. ‘Come soon, Margaret.’
‘Taxi, madam?’ asked the doorman.
‘No thanks, I’ll walk for a while.’ She went down to the road and stood watching the swirling traffic before her, assailed by the pleading cries of the child beggars and the shrill calls of the boys and girls lined up on the other side of the road. It hurt Margaret to look at them, so she turned away, trying to pretend that the noise was something mechanical and inhuman. The city had never seemed so enormous, so overwhelming, so chaotic, and its enormous overwhelming chaos was growing worse every day. Not wishing to walk any longer, she hailed a taxi that stank of clove smoke; She unfolded the newspaper and looked at the front page. Bill’s handwriting – a surprisingly elegant cursive – read: Page 5: PS Great to see you again. B
She flicked through the pages. More protests in Europe against the imprisonment of Mandela. Sukarno condemns Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Abebe Bikila promises gold for Africa. Brezhnev to provide more aid for Indonesia. Drug use in Malaysia reaching epidemic proportions; Britain offers no help. Communists arrested in outlying islands. It all looked familiar to her – surely she had read it all this morning?
She looked again at page 5. Below the article on communist arrests was a small picture. In the dim light at the back of the taxi it was difficult to make out the already blurred photograph of twenty or so men in a police cell. But there was one face, paler than the others: a European.
4 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
In 1841 the Nan Sing, a Chinese vessel sailing under the Dutch flag, set sail from Canton bound for Batavia laden with a cargo of porcelain, silk and tea. Caught in unseasonally bad weather just south of Cape Varella, it began to move south-eastwards, drifting for many days until, lured by powerful currents, it crashed on the notorious reefs off the rocky shores of Nusa Perdo. Exercising his ancient right of looting shipwrecks, the Sultan immediately ordered his fleet of little boats to recover the precious flotsam from the wreck of the Nan Sing. Enraged by this transgression, the Dutch authorities in Batavia demanded the return of the cargo and ordered the Sultan to submit to Dutch rule. When this was predictably refused, several skirmishes took place, escalating into a stand-off that lasted two days. There followed a further fifty years of shipwrecks, looting and half-hearted attempts by the Dutch army to bring the island under its control. No great energy was expended in the subjugation of Perdo because the island had neither spices nor sandalwood. Covered in scrubby bushes and dominated by a dead volcano, this unobtrusive island virtually disappeared in the constellation of more attractive islands around it, until, late in the century, the discovery of Kayuputih trees and rumours of rich gold deposits brought the white man back to these shores, and this time they did not leave. The Sultan died by his own hand and the island came under Dutch rule.
No one really knows how the island got its curious name, which does not seem consistent with the rhythms of the (now virtually dead) local dialect. Writing about Muslim sects in the eastern archipelago in the pre-war Revue des Études Islamiques, a French scholar called Gaston Bosquet suggests that the name of this island is a bastardisation of ‘pieds d’or’, a reference to the fascination held by early Western visitors for the shoes of gold cloth worn by the princes of the royal household in the seventeenth century, and to the idea that these explorers might have been walking on fields of gold. Given the relative poverty of this island, however, such explanations seem highly implausible (rumours of gold reserves turned out to be a myth). No more likely – though a touch more romantic – is the idea that members of a Portuguese reconnaissance expedition in the early sixteenth century foundered on the rocky coastline of the island, as so many were to do in the centuries that followed. Marooned hundreds of miles from the shipping channels between Malacca and China, they called this place the Lost Island, Nusa Perdo – a name that continues today. This might also explain why, in town, there are three local merchants whose surnames are Texeira, De Souza and Menezes, even though they look thoroughly Indonesian.
These were the stories that Adam loved above all others – the unofficial history of Perdo; he clung to them dearly, afraid they would desert him. He knew exactly why he found them so comforting – they gave him a reason to be different: maybe he, too, had foreign blood in him. And this was why he did not look like the other children on the island, why they hated him.
He often wished that he had the coarse curly hair of the local boys, as well as their sturdy square faces that made them look, well, rudimentary, more suited to the sharp changes of weather on the island. Sometimes, if he stayed out in the sun for too long, the skin on his forearms and knees would begin to smart, as if rubbed with fine sand, and by the end of the day it would feel hot and taut, properly burnt by the sun, just like Karl’s – a foreigner’s skin. On those occasions he wished that he had the other children’s darker, thicker skin that turned to leather by the time they were teenagers, shielding them from the elements. He wished he did not have his straight hair and brittle jawline and fragile cheekbones; he wished he did not stand out quite so much.
For one bucolic year after he moved into his new home, he did not have to worry about other children – or, indeed, about anything else. Much later in his life he would remember that first year with a mixture of nostalgia and regret, and he would experience that odd sensation of sorrow and yearning said to be a trait peculiar to people of the south-east, even though he himself was not genetically native to the region. But the truth was that life during this time was simple, blissful and untroubled, in a way that can only happen when two people are desperate to achieve happiness.
Their days were idyllic and filled with all the things that fathers and sons dream of sharing. They made kites in the shape of birds that sometimes swept effortlessly into the sky but more often crash-landed after the briefest of flights, much to Adam’s and Karl’s amusement; they played takraw in the yard, Adam’s plump legs proving surprisingly adept at juggling the hard rattan ball, Karl less so because of his one weak leg; they hollowed out lengths of driftwood and collected lengkeng seeds to play congkak, a game which Karl explained had been brought to these islands by Arab sea traders many hundreds of years ago; they found an old biscuit tin amongst Karl’s things that contained chess pieces, and drew a chalk chessboard on the floor of the veranda that had to be re-sketched every time the rains swept in and washed it away.
It was a Spartan happiness, it is true. Sometimes, Karl often told him, it is better not to own things, especially precious things, because they will be lost or taken away; things cannot last beyond your lifetime. Karl did not spend any money on toys, for example, or anything he deemed to be ephemeral or trivial. Once or twice, Adam had paused in front of the glass cabinets at the Chinese store in town, admiring the brightly coloured motorcars and plastic water pistols. ‘No one here can afford these toys,’ Karl had said, gesturing in the vague direction of the villages on the coast, ‘and yet they’re quite happy. We don’t need these things either – we’re just like everyone else.’
And so they pursued simpler pleasures. Adam learnt to wade into the shallows and, when the sea was calm, he’d paddle out over the reefs with Karl. He would float along quite calmly for a while but then he would be panicked by the enormity of the ocean, the endlessness of its possibilities, and he would start to flail around, desperate to regain the sureness of the shore, until Karl came over and held his hand. His previous world now seemed empty and colourless, but in this world there were kaleidoscopic fish, purple sea urchins and pulsating starfish; and beyond the coral there was the promise of shipwrecks, their silent corpses filled with treasure from a lost time. Later, Karl would tell him about each of the wrecks: one of them had been shipping opium to China, another had been decommissioned from the British Navy; the biggest one contained hundreds of bottles of precious wine from Oporto and Madeira, still drinkable. In this way Adam learned the history of Perdo; about the Opium wars, Catholicism and the destructive power of religion, and the unjust conquering of Asia by Europe.
This is how Adam believed his new world would begin and end – in this place where he was safe from danger but connected to the possibilities of the world. It was then, however, that Karl began to talk about school.
‘Can’t I just stay at home and learn things from you, pak?’ cried Adam, trying to stem his growing unease. ‘What else do I need to learn?’
‘What you need to learn isn’t contained in textbooks. You need to learn how to live with other people your age – how to be like everyone else. You mustn’t become too privileged.’
But Adam already knew that he was not like everyone else. That was why he was here in the first place, living on this island that was not his real home, with a father who did not look at all like him.
Other children. The very sound of the words made him feel sick. For nearly a year he had had little contact with other children. He had seen them in town whenever he and Karl went for supplies, but he avoided their cold hard stares and clung to Karl’s side, never looking directly at them. He saw them crouching by the roadside, blinking the dust from their eyes as he swept by in the car. And further along the beach he sometimes saw them splashing in the shallows in the late afternoon when the sea was flat, the shadows of the trees reaching across the sand towards the water’s edge. Their faraway cries were shrill and threatening.
* * *
‘Don’t worry, you’re just like the other boys,’ Karl said as he took Adam to school that first day. He spoke in a calm voice, yet Adam knew that Karl himself was not convinced by what he was saying. ‘You’ll enjoy being with compatriots your age. If ever you feel scared, tell yourself, ‘I’m just like everyone else here.’’
The school was a one-room shack on the edge of town, a squat concrete block with a roof of corrugated iron. Adam loathed it from the beginning; its very appearance made him feel sick, and spots of colour appeared in his vision, as if he was going to faint. (I’m just like everyone else here.) There were about eighteen or twenty children crammed into the small classroom, all boys, save for one girl whose roughly cropped hair made her look like a boy. One side of her face was obscured by a birth-mark, a purple-red cloud that stretched from her temple to her jawbone. Adam had to stare closely before deciding that she was indeed a girl; she stuck out her tongue and threw a scrunched-up piece of paper at him. The other boys gathered round him and examined the contents of his new canvas satchel: an exercise book with buff-coloured covers, a pocket atlas and a new box of coloured pencils. His classmates tore the pages from his books and folded them into paper airplanes that they launched into the air with sharp spearing motions. Adam watched as bits of the atlas glided past him: the pink-and-green of the United States floated dreamily in circles until it stubbed its nose on the blackboard and fell abruptly to the ground; the whiteness of the Canadian tundra swept out of the window in an arc, into the dusty sunlight; and the silent mass of the Pacific Ocean that Adam loved so much, dotted with islands (Fiji? Tahiti?) lay on the cracked cement floor, waiting to be trampled upon.
At the end of that first day he did not have the strength to cycle the entire journey home; he pushed his bicycle along the final sandy stretch, too tired even to cry. When he reached the house he let his bicycle fall to the ground; he sat on the steps to the house watching the pedals spin lazily to a stop. There were sea-eagles hovering against the powder-blue sky, barely trembling in the wind. Karl sat with him and put his arm round his shoulders. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s a privilege, you know.’
‘What is?’
‘Education. You saw those kids at school? What kind of families do you think they come from?’
Horrible ones, Adam wanted to say. Filthy, mean, horrible ones.
‘Poor ones. Farmers or fishermen who can’t read or write, and yet everyone has had to pay to get into that school. They take a small packet of money or a carton of cigarettes to the education officer and beg him to put their child’s name on the school list, and if they don’t have cash they take a goat or some chickens or sacks of rice. There isn’t space for everyone, so the kids whose parents pay the most get in. I had to do the same – I paid the most because I’m, well, they look at me and their minds are made up.’
‘Because you’re foreign?’
‘Because I’m rich. Or at least that’s what they think.’
Adam watched as Karl lifted the bicycle and set it upright; its handlebar and pedals were covered thickly with sand that fell to the ground in clumps. ‘The point is,’ Karl continued, ‘none of those people can afford to send their children to school. They’d rather have their kids with them, working in the fields or out at sea with them. Then they have to pay for uniforms, shoes, books. Why? Because they want their children to read and write, to have nice jobs in offices and drive cars in Jakarta. They might not realise it, but they believe in the future of this country.’
The next day he sent Adam back to school again.
The teacher taught them simple grammar and rudimentary arithmetic. She made them practise the letters of the alphabet and introduced them to new words, writing them out on the blackboard in short sentences that no one but Adam could make sense of. It did not seem to matter to her that almost everyone in the class was asleep or staring red-eyed out of the window at the grassy plains pockmarked with blackened heaps of half-burnt rubbish, where skinny goats picked through the piles of waste, dragging plastic bags out of the cinders. CITIZEN. REPUBLIC. PRESIDENT. REVOLUTION. WESTERN IMPERIALISTS. I am a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia. The President of the Republic of Indonesia is President Sukarno. PresidentSukarno led the revolution against the Western Imperialists who destroyed…
‘It’s hot,’ someone whispered, ‘I have to go home.’ Adam turned around and saw the girl with the birth-mark slumped on her desk, twirling a dry strip of coconut leaf in her fingers. She brushed the leaf lazily against Adam’s back. Are your parents expecting you home too?’
Adam nodded. Close-up, he could see that the discoloured patch of skin on her face was not a birth-mark but a scar, an inky mass of tissue that looked almost smooth, like a pebble on the riverbank, crisscrossed by long-dead veins. She was a few years older than Adam but no taller; her fingernails were dirty and worn.
‘Actually, I only have a mother at the moment,’ she said.
‘At the moment?’
‘Yeh, my father’s in jail. Don’t know when he’ll be out. I’m an orphan! That’s what my mother says when she gets in a mood and starts crying. “I am a widow! I am nothing! My daughter is an orphan! O, my daughter is an orphan!”’
Adam giggled. She was much darker than he was, yet she did not seem entirely like the other kids; she spoke with a different accent too.
‘My name’s Neng. What’s yours?’ She tickled his neck with the leaf.
‘Adam.’
‘I have to go and collect this month’s rice from the district office later. Want to come with me? It’s not a long walk. Besides, you have a bicycle…’ Her smile showed off two gaps in her teeth.
‘Umm, I don’t know. My father will be worried if I don’t come home.’
‘Come on, it won’t take long.’ She reached out and brushed the leaf softly across his cheek, giggling as she did so. ‘I know a shortcut back to where you live.’
By the time they left school the sky had dulled slightly with patches of silver-blue cloud, and it was no longer oppressively hot; the sea breeze had picked up, signalling the possibility of the sudden sharp showers for which Perdo is famous. Adam and Neng had just reached the end of the track that led to the main road when they saw a group of boys from school waiting for them, squatting at the edge of the broken tarmac in the shade of a sea-almond sapling.
‘Hi, friend,’ one of them said, standing up. He had taken his shirt off and tied its arms around his forehead so that it fell down his back like the head-dresses of Arab sheikhs that Adam had seen in books. This boy was bigger than the others, and when he spoke his voice cracked, alternating between a child’s high-pitched squeak and a manly croak. ‘This is the little orphan who lives with that European man. You’re his servant, yeh?’
‘No,’ Adam said, ‘he’s my father.’
The older boy threw back his head and laughed. There was a circle of dried-up spittle around his lips. Behind him Adam noticed that one of the other boys was playing with a dead bird, stretching its red-and-black wings across the sand as if willing it to fly. ‘Yeh, yeh. You lick the shit from his toilet.’ He pushed his fingers into Adam’s collarbone with a rough jabbing motion, making Adam lose his balance; his bicycle fell from his grip and dropped to the ground. The other boys laughed. ‘What a weakling,’ the gang leader said.
Adam tried to pick himself up but found that his legs had turned to jelly; his face felt hot and he could not speak. Pressure filled his head, and he felt like vomiting. His ears filled with a great rushing noise, the kind you might hear if you are standing on the seashore before a violent storm, when the froth of the waves blanks out all other noise and makes you lose all notion of where you are. He lay on the ground, kicking feebly at the coppery leaves of the sea almond that lay scattered on the ground. The people standing over him seemed blurred, wobbling as though shaken by gusts of wind. He began to shiver.
I am just like everyone else I am just like please I am just
‘Anyway,’ he could hear the man-boy’s croaky voice, ‘whatever the white man is to you, he’s rich. He can buy you another bicycle. This one’s nice.’ Adam saw feet moving around him and heard the chain of his bicycle ticking. Someone tugged the strap of his satchel, which came away from his body as if it no longer wanted to belong to him.
‘Stop!’ Neng shouted. She put her hands under Adam’s armpits and hauled him into a sitting position. ‘This is not fair. Leave the bike or I’ll kick your balls.’
‘O-oh, look who’s talking,’ the croaky voice said. ‘What you going to do, help this weakling? Look how tiny he is! Look at those little fat legs. He’s not worth getting beaten up over. Right, boys?’ The voice was steadier now, threatening.
‘At least he can read and write. You’re nearly an adult and you still can’t read.’ Neng was trying to yank Adam into a standing position but Adam’s legs were still weak.
‘You just want the bike for yourself, that right?’ The man-boy took a step towards Neng; he looked nearly twice as big as she was.
‘Just leave him alone.’
The boy raised his hand and hesitated a second before slapping Neng hard. ‘You’re just a dirty foreigner too,’ he said. ‘Look at you, a dirty monster.’ Neng stood blinking at him, as if she had not been struck.
‘Careful, Yon,’ a smaller boy said in a quiet voice. ‘She’s Madurese. You know what they’re like.’
‘I don’t care,’ the boy croaked. ‘These bloody foreigners, they come here and all they do is cause trouble, taking our land. They’re going to chase us off our own island soon, there’ll be nothing left for us. There’ll be more of them than us! That’s what my dad says. He’s fed up with them. Need to teach them a lesson from time to time, he says.’
‘Yon, c’mon, let’s take the bike and go. Don’t get mixed up with the Madurese. They’re big-time trouble.’
‘But this one’s only a girl. My dad says all Madurese women are prostitutes anyway. The sooner we teach her who’s boss around here, the better.’
Adam had managed to get up to a half-kneeling position, one leg still trailing on the ground, when he saw Neng raise her knee, swiftly, in one firm, neat motion; it thudded into the boy’s crotch with a loud squashy noise and he crumpled silently to the ground. He put his hand between his legs to protect himself but it was no use. Neng stood over him and continued to kick him in that same spot, sometimes hopping up and down to stamp on his crotch as if putting out a cigarette. His cries cut through the ringing in Adam’s ears and made him feel less sick; it was as if someone had doused Adam with cold water, and he was able to rise slowly to his feet. The other boys had backed off; Neng was straddling the bicycle and ringing its bell. ‘Come on,’ she said gaily to Adam, as if nothing had happened. She patted the horizontal bar in front of her. ‘You sit here, I’ll cycle. OK? Great. Off we go!’
Along the coast road the wind was fresh and tinged with the softness of impending rain. The clouds strained the sunlight that fell on the waves, and this made the sea look calm in places but dark and mysterious in others. It was often like this on Perdo, where the slightest shift in the weather could change the very nature of the island. On those days when the sun was high and unflinching the possibility of rain would seem ridiculous, and on rainy days, when water soaked through everything, you might believe that even if the sun were to reappear, it would never be able to dry the moisture from the earth. But there were other days, too – days such as today, when you could feel both the dry dustiness and the heavy moisture that made up the very air on this island.
Neng produced a banana from her pocket. It was blackened and squashed, the pulp beginning to ooze from its tip where it had been torn from its comb. ‘You look tired,’ she said, handing it to Adam. ‘Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.’
It was very ripe and mushy and sweet. Adam ate it quickly and wiped the stickiness from his fingers on his shorts. Maybe it was the fresh breeze, maybe it was his imagination, but the trembling in his chest began to subside, his heartbeat calming. He blinked; there was dust in his eyes and he turned his head from the wind. His face was very close to Neng’s now, and he could see the tiny imperfections, the fragile creases of skin on the scar on her face. She was smiling, and stuck out her tongue at him, just as she had done on the day. It was beginning to rain: the first heavy drops of a shower, falling through the leaves above them.
‘Hey, it’s getting late,’ said Neng. ‘You look tired. I think you should just go home. We’re not far from where you live.’
‘But I want to go with you – you know, to help you collect your rice.’
The bicycle slowed to a halt and Adam had to hop off it. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go on my own. Your father will be worried. Besides, you look really tired. I don’t want to get the blame – I’ve been blamed for enough things already!’ She handed him the bike and began to walk off into the distance, heading away from the coast into the hills. The rain was falling heavily now, an earnest downpour that would not ease up for at least an hour, maybe two. Adam felt a sudden panic at being left behind, and started to follow her. She turned round and said, ‘If you follow me I’ll kick your balls too.’
He watched her splash through the puddles that were forming on the road; the rain fell like a thick curtain of mist, and within a few seconds she was out of sight.
As he cycled home, Adam felt the rain running in thin rivulets down his face and neck until his entire body was wet. Occasionally a gust of wind would sweep raindrops into his eyes and he would have to slow down and blink hard just to see where he was going; his plimsolls were soaked through and his toes felt clammy and gritty. But the rain and wind were not cold, and he was no longer tired. Funny, he thought: at this moment, he didn’t even fear what tomorrow might bring.
‘Where have you been, son?’ Karl said, rushing to meet him with an enormous towel that he held between outstretched arms, the way the fishermen hold their nets before flinging them out to sea.
‘Nowhere,’ said Adam, letting Karl towel his hair vigorously. ‘I just took my time. It was…it was raining.’
With his head wrapped in the darkness of the towel, Adam knew how unconvincing this sounded. For a moment, he considered telling Karl all that had happened. He was doing something wrong, he knew that. He knew he ought to share everything with Karl because Karl did the same for him; Karl had taken him in and shared his whole life with Adam, so why couldn’t Adam do this tiny thing for him? He also knew that if he was going to tell Karl he must do it immediately, otherwise the opportunity would be lost. Two, three, four, five seconds. The moment was gone.
Adam did not feel bad at all. Now that the moment was over it did not seem as if he had done anything wrong. Karl lifted the towel from his head and draped it across his shoulders, letting it fall around him like a cape. He looked at Adam unblinkingly, waiting for an explanation, but Adam merely stared out at the murky sea.
Karl said, ‘You should go and change out of those wet clothes.’
The next day, Neng was waiting for him in the shade of some trees, not far from where the main road curved towards the town; the dirt track that led to school ran like a tangent away from the road, disappearing into the bushes beyond. ‘Let’s skip school, maybe go for a walk. It isn’t going to rain today,’ Neng anounced, squinting at the sun.
They left the coast behind and began to cycle along the gravel tracks that led into the hills, and when the path became too steep they hid the bike behind some bushes and began to walk. The coarse earth crunched underfoot, the black volcanic sand sticking to Neng’s bare toes and covering them like tar. She talked endlessly, pointing things out to Adam: a flock of brilliant green parakeets fluttering like giant locusts in the distance; a boulder the shape of a hand with its fingers cut off; the coral reefs which, from up in the hills, resembled a map, a huge watery atlas.
She told him about herself, too. Her father was in jail because he’d killed someone, she said cheerily. Well, not exactly killed him, but the man he’d had a fight with had died, purely by accident. All Neng’s father had done was hit him; OK, he hit him quite hard, even her mother said so, but still, he wasn’t the only one. There had been lots of men fighting, it was just a street brawl outside the rice merchant, you know, just by the clock tower. But her father was the only one who was still in jail. Just because he’s Madurese. It was so unfair. He didn’t even want to be on this island anyway.
‘Then why did you come here?’ Adam couldn’t remember where Madura was, but it sounded far away. He tried to remember his lessons at home with Karl, when Karl had shown him where all the big cities and islands of Indonesia were.
She frowned, looking closely at him with squinted eyes as if she had spotted something nasty on his face. ‘God, you’re dumb. Transmigration. We were forced to, just like everyone else.’
They had had nothing in Madura; it was an overcrowded island where there were a few cows and too many people who had no food and no work. They had been promised work, she said, in a place where there were few people and much land. The government was building a new pumice mine and there were lots of jobs, and maybe the workers would be given some land of their own. Her parents didn’t even know what pumice was. Don’t worry, the official had told them; we will give you rice to eat every month and your kids will go to school. But the mine was never built. There was no land for them, and often no rice. They’d been in Perdo for three years, but there was no work at all.
‘What about you?’ Neng asked. ‘Where did you come from?’
Adam shrugged. He looked around, hoping to see those parakeets again, but there was nothing.
‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching out and touching him on the elbow. Her scar obscured her cheek and made her look as if she was only smiling with half her face. ‘I forgot you’re an orphan.’
‘That’s OK,’ he smiled. But he thought to himself: it was not OK. Why did he not know which part of Indonesia he was from? What dialect had his parents spoken? Even orphans had to come from somewhere. It was not that he had never dared ask Karl, but rather that it had never occurred to him to ask. He had known little of his past and cared even less, and he had liked it that way. So why was he now troubled by this lack of knowledge? Suddenly he felt guilty at having missed school without telling Karl.
‘Come on,’ Neng said, breaking into a run, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ Beyond the trees the grassland gave way to a rocky plain covered with cacti and scrubby bushes; in the distance the land rose towards the point of the dead volcano that dominated the island. Neng disappeared behind some rocks, and when Adam caught up he saw that she had crawled into a natural depression sheltered from the sun and the rain, a scooped-out hollow so perfectly formed that it seemed man-made.
‘Here, look,’ Neng said, showing him a stash of objects. She picked up a small comb made from pink plastic and ran it through her spiky hair. ‘I found it on the road, just lying there waiting for me to pick it up.’
‘But that’s stealing,’ Adam said, repeating what Karl had once told him.
‘Don’t be stupid. If something is thrown away, it means its owner doesn’t want it any more – in that case anyone has a right to take it. Idiot.’ She showed him other things she had found: a small motorbike made of tin, rusting where the paint had worn off; a cracked mirror; a book with a frayed paper cover showing a large sea-fish about to be attacked by a diver wielding a knife (there were some words in German, too, but Adam was not able to read them); and a doll with blue eyes and dark curly lashes. Its painted blond hair looked like a scar on its head, an imperfection. Neng picked it up and cuddled it as if it were a real baby, holding its head to her cheek and swaying from side to side; she sat down with her legs crossed and looked out of the miniature cave. They could see over the low trees to the tawny flatlands and the sea in the distance. ‘No one can see me in here,’ she said. ‘It’s my secret place.’ She leant over and kissed him on his cheek and he could smell the musty unwashed odour of her clothes and skin. He blushed, and withdrew slightly; her lips felt funny – dry and hot; he wasn’t sure he liked it. She giggled and continued to cuddle her doll.
From then on, they skipped school every day, cycling as far as they could or taking long walks into the interior. In the coves of the south coast they stood atop the steep fern-covered cliffs and saw the shipwrecks poking out of the surf; in a rainstorm in the hilly forests they were chased by wild goats; in a dried-up riverbed they found the giant stones for which Perdo is famous, those ancient boulders inscribed with fragments of scrolling words in a foreign language which Adam copied in a notebook and later found out were Spanish (and also nonsensical: ‘dream’ and ‘madman’). They met a team of scientists who were taking rock samples not far from where Adam lived; they wanted to build a mine, but they did not say what kind. One of them, an American, gave Neng and Adam three dollars each and an old T-shirt that said BERKELEY. Neng said Adam should have the T-shirt. She didn’t want it; she was happy enough as it was, not because of the money, but because her father would finally, FINALLY! have a job in this mine. That was what she kept repeating to Adam as they cycled home. She turned around and made funny faces at him, the bike zigzagging along the road. Above them, a flock of birds winged their way slowly southwards, small black flapping triangles against the blue-white sky. Maybe they were migrating to cooler climates, Adam said, to Australia, and Neng replied that he couldn’t possibly know such a thing. He did not know what kind of birds they were; and he did not know, either, that this would be the last thing he would say to Neng.
The next day she was not waiting for him at the bend in the road, and when he got to school she was not there. He asked around and everyone said, Oh yeah, that Madurese girl, her parents went back to Java or somewhere else, dunno, happens all the time with migrants, they weren’t born here so why should they stay?
Adam continued at school; his days were not the same without Neng. His nights, which had for some time been calm and heavy with sleep, became unreliable once more. The sensation of emptiness that punctuated his slumber returned, more frequently and powerfully than before. In his sleep he felt suspended in a void, and he would wake with a start, his legs jerking madly. When he awoke in the dark, he felt as if he had dreamt about his brother, but no image of Johan ever stayed with him, and he realised that his sleep had been as dreamless as ever. He had merely imagined dreaming of Johan – a dream of a dream. He thought he had banished fear from his life, but it was clear that he had not. He would go to the window and stare out at the inky blackness, at the shapes of the trees silhouetted against the night sky, and it would calm him a little to know that he was not in his Old Life with its unknown terrors but in his New Life with its known terrors, which were far less terrible.
One morning he awoke to find a large box on his bedroom floor, wrapped in colourful paper printed with a pattern of butterflies and bow ties. There were creases on the paper as if it had been left folded for a very long time.
‘Happy birthday,’ Karl said, appearing in this doorway. Adam suddenly realised he did not know when his birthday was. At the orphanage there had been no celebrations – at least none that he could remember. ‘I didn’t know when your birthday was so I decided that, from now on, we shall celebrate it on the anniversary of your arrival in this house.’ Adam had not realised that he had spent an entire year there; it seemed only minutes since he’d arrived.
