Drowned Sprat and Other Stories

Best known for her well-loved and prize-winning novels, Stephanie Johnson also writes superb short stories, plays and poetry. Written over the last sixteen years, this collection of twenty-three stories shows the breadth of Stephanie's writing. It features her poignant insights as well as her sharp wit, with characters as diverse as a woman arranging a second wife for her husband, a criminal returning to the care of his mother, and a widow who hears an octopus call her name.

There are new and old favourites here; New Zealand stories and stories set overseas, reflecting back on our perspectives and lifestyle. There are fables and ghost stories; tales of young and old. This is a book to dip into and devour.

Suddenly she is surrounded by three hard-faced white girls and an older woman, all with cameras held to their eyes, a rush of them across Jalan Legian to join a crowd of ten or so others who, Sarah sees now, are all quietly pointing their cameras in the same direction. She turns to see where she is, where the family has got to on this flaming barbecue of a Bali afternoon in late September. They draw up behind her, her husband and three daughters, the youngest one reaching immediately to touch a bunch of bright fake flowers tied to the hoarding. The Sari Club.

Two women, both in crocheted bikini tops and squitty denim shorts, step closer and then from side to side, clicking, taking in a poem, a tribute, a sun-bleached toy kangaroo, a battered teddy, a row of portraits, the lists of names. Fluidly, one of them squats to snap a fallen wreath of pink and green plastic flowers, small enough to fit a child’s wrist. A butterfly emerges on the skin of
her shiny, tanned buttock above her shorts, framed by the pink elastic of her G-string. Her thin, rippling back is set with several black moles and above it her splintery hair is caught up with a plastic clasp on the top of her head. She is perhaps eighteen, not quite twenty, the same age Victor would have been had he lived. The girl is sun-blasted, her freckly face solemnly riveted into an expression of grief and important, patriotic trauma. Beside her, Jimmy is gaping slightly, not at the butterfly, but at the fence and the desolate square of dirt on the other side, as he draws his camera from his bag.

‘Don’t take photographs of it, Dad,’ instructs fifteen-year-old Lily bossily, one hand on her saronged hip, a scowl deepening under the beak of her cap. ‘That’s gross.’

‘Is this where the Bali bomb was?’ Annie squints up at her mother, the sun flaring on her spectacles.

‘That’s right.’ Why did seeing that girl bring Victor to mind? Sarah wonders. Apart from his projected age, he would have had nothing in common with her. He would have been darker. Much darker … but then he didn’t leave her with much to remember him by — just a fading picture now, of his little face wrapped in the hospital shawl. She hardly ever thinks of him. He lived his few hours years ago, before she even met Jimmy. Before sensible Jimmy saved her from her too-often-unsensible self.

‘Did all these people get killed?’ Annie waves in the direction of the pictures on the fence; Lily and Margot flank their father. Maybe, observes Sarah, even though Jimmy hasn’t lived in Australia for almost twenty years, he’s having a moment of solidarity with his countrywomen. But the ruin chills her heart and in some way irritates her, but she doesn’t have the energy to define why in this blistering heat, with Annie’s overactive imagination churning in the eight-year-old skull beside her, level
with her waist, shaded by a lurid orange crocheted brim. Sarah hooks an arm around her.

‘Let’s go,’ she says, drawing Annie away.

‘Why were those ladies wearing their bikinis in the street?’ asks Annie in the taxi van on the way back to Sanur.

‘Because they haven’t learnt anything since the —’ Sarah begins, but Jimmy cuts her off.

‘Because the beach isn’t far away. Kuta Beach.’ He has a warning tone in his voice. Not too much information, says the tone — you always tell them too much. The picture you give them is too bleak.

Margot leans a skinny brown arm across her mother to slam the van window shut against the fumes.

‘Skodie! Look at that poxy river,’ she says, pointing at a plastic-clogged shallow canal. Her face registers real shock, her eyes wide — brilliant blue set in the purest white. Alongside the waterway, factories and workshops mar the few remaining paddy-fields, a patchwork broken into ragged squares. There are drooping shanties, skinny dogs and an old man bent over his plants. Further on, acres of mangroves thrive in the mud, a delta opening out beyond them towards the sea. Then they are at the corner with its KFC, red and white polymer walls, a monstrous carnival house, the ever-encroaching sideshow of America.

When will the Americans come back in person, wonders Sarah, if they ever do? Doleful locals had told her and Jimmy that the Americans stopped coming to Bali after September 11, long before the Kuta bomb, their departed dollar lamented by the shopkeepers and hoteliers, but otherwise, seemingly, unmourned.

‘I’ve got a taste for chips,’ announces Annie, squinting at the
KFC sign. ‘I wish we could have some chips —’ but the taxi van is wheeling around the intersection and winding the narrow road into Sanur.

Almost of a height, Lily and Margot lead the way into the hotel lobby, where they swim through conditioned air colder than the water of the pool will be. In their rooms they change, find their books and hurry through the compound down towards the pool by the beach restaurant. It’s late afternoon and all the deck chairs and umbrellas are taken, except for one by the children’s pool. A small Japanese boy stands under the gushing mouth of a concrete frog, watching Jimmy rub sun block into Sarah’s back.

‘Makes you realise,’ says Jimmy, pushing down the straps of her togs, ‘just how bad it was. Seeing that wall. We didn’t get the full brunt of it at home.’

‘Mmm.’ Sarah doesn’t want to think about it. She concentrates all her being into the skin directly under his moving hands.

‘Did we?’

‘Immm.’ Sarah leans a little into the pressure of his fingers.

‘Do you think,’ says Jimmy, and she feels his warm lips, the prickle of his two-day beard, pressing into the back of her neck, ‘do you think the kids’d notice if we disappeared for a while?’

Annie sits on the edge of the bigger pool, dangling her legs, her glasses still on, focusing into the depths. Margot and Lily are doing underwater handstands, competing to see who can stay down the longest. There are a few adults and other children: a fat, loud, sandy-headed Australian boy; a pale English rose with her grandparents lovingly towing her around; three micro-thonged, golden-skinned German teenagers.

‘It’s too hot,’ says Sarah, just as Jimmy goes on: ‘The girls’ll look after Annie.’

‘How can they? They’re upside down.’

With a sigh, Jimmy registers her rebuff and returns to his own chair.

With the slap of a slipper being thrown to the floor, the tree behind them drops one of its long, flat leaves. Annie slides into the pool, leaving her glasses folded on the edge where someone is bound to stand on them. Lily comes to the surface, gasping, and Margot ceases counting out the seconds — ‘One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi’ — even though their mother has tried to teach them Paremata, which has the same number of syllables and none of the allure.

As Sarah makes her way to rescue the specs a dispute erupts between the girls over Margot’s time-keeping. Lily stands chest-deep, shouting, one young breast escaped from its triangle of cloth.

‘Lily,’ says Sarah gently, and when her daughter looks up, drops her gaze. Lily understands immediately and ties her bikini tighter with emphatic movements before heaving herself out of the water and striding over to take her mother’s chair. The glasses in hand, Sarah watches Lily’s mouth move — she’s too far away to hear — and eventually Jimmy lies his book on his chest and closes his eyes. He could be sleeping, but Lily appears to believe he’s listening and talks on.

Sarah drops down, sitting on the warm wet concrete where Annie had been, and soaks her feet in the water. A quartet of large women wallow beside her, telling one another of their various bargains: the already-in-transit-to-Sydney sets of hand-hewn garden furniture beaten down to below cost; cushion covers and curtains run up for nix. They move on to food — what they’ve eaten today and how bad or good it was. Sarah tunes out, borne away from her eavesdropping on a sudden wave of anger.
Greedy pigs, she wants to say to them. Look around you. Look at the poverty — spend your big fucking dollars.

The women are probably regular visitors, tourists who can hold up both hands in response to the constant question, ‘You come here how many times?’ When she and Jimmy are asked that question they can only shake their heads. ‘Never before. First time.’ It’s not true, of course — not for Sarah. She was here once before, in 1983. She should hold up one finger.

‘You like it?’ is usually the next question and they reply, or the girls do, ‘Yes, very much. Very nice.’

‘Thes es just beuddiful,’ sighs the woman closest, and lies back on the surface of the water, offering herself to the sun, her stomach a flowered island of beach-ball proportions.

For the next half hour, while Annie demonstrates her duck-diving prowess and Margot brings her mother floating frangipani blossoms that have fallen in the pool, Sarah castigates herself for not luxuriating, not giving in to the indulgences of a resort holiday. This is the real rest, the tonic, the reconstitution of the harried soul, the convalescence of the tired body. But sometimes, waking in the cool early dawn to the whirring of the fan, Sarah has thought she was in a hospital. There was the same knowledge that all your bodily needs would be taken care of, a mild infantilising. You bought yourself a moment’s return to the nursery.

Carrying their towels, Jimmy is walking towards her.

‘Come on,’ he ruffles her hair. ‘Lil says she’ll watch them.’

He hasn’t given up hope, then. And looking up at his wicked, inviting smile, Sarah feels that old warm rush for him, the gift of it.

By the time she’s taken Annie’s glasses over to Lily and followed the path back to their room, Jimmy is already lying back
waiting for her. She goes to him quickly and takes him in her arms and the pleasure they have in each other surprises her again, as it often does — it’s like a secret, something deeply unfashionable and for most people undesirable, to have the same lover for most of your life. Perfect — or at least enough for each other — graceful, swift, skilled: the irritations and distance of the afternoon dispel with every caress. They feel all of their good luck.

Why can’t it be like this all the time? Sarah wonders, snuggling into him afterwards, a slick of sweat between their two skins. Why do we have to lose our way here? Years ago, when the girls were tiny, she’d realised it was like this: sex was a room they could go to if they wanted — go through the door and find the other waiting on the other side. She’d thought then that there would always be the glitter and joy and celebration of that warm room, their grateful returns to it after jags of aridity, or resentment, or ill-health.

‘How long will it last?’ she asks him.

‘What?’ Jimmy is nearly asleep, one arm thrown above his head onto the pillows, its pale underside gleaming in the late afternoon light.

‘This.’

‘Oh,’ says Jimmy. ‘Do you want first shower?’

‘It won’t last forever, you know,’ she says. ‘It stops. I think it must all come to an end. When there’s no chance of any more children, even when you don’t want any more, when there’s no need for it.’

‘For godsake.’ He’s getting out of bed, wrapping his damp towel around his waist. ‘Why can’t you just enjoy things?’

‘But I did — I —’

‘Accept what we’ve got —’

‘But I did enjoy it. I —’

‘I’m not talking about sex,’ he says, suddenly furious. ‘I mean generally. It’s all right just to enjoy life, you know, to be happy, instead of waiting for the next calamity. It’s a bad habit you’ve got, bad conditioning. You’ve always had it, since I met you. We’ve worked hard for all this.’

‘Maybe it isn’t a calamity, by then, by the time it stops,’ Sarah murmurs, but Jimmy has closed the bathroom door after him.

Before dinner they gather the family together and go for a walk along the concrete pathway that leads along Sanur Beach, past hotels and gardens, palm trees, strings of stalls and warungs. Annie walks ahead on lolly lookout, Margot and Lily dawdle behind, Margot whistling through her teeth in a way she knows sets Lily’s nerves on edge. By the time they reach the beach market they’re surrounded by stall-holders, mostly smiling women, plucking at their sleeves — ‘You come in my shop? You come see?’ — pointing, cajoling.

‘No, not now,’ says Jimmy, ‘Jalan jalan,’ and after a while, rudely, ‘Nyeri to!’ One by one they drop away, all except one woman carrying a baby who stays silently by Sarah’s side. It’s not until they pass out the other side of the market, the massive edifice of the Grand Bali Beach Hotel looming up before them, that Sarah even realises she’s there.

‘You good mother,’ the woman says urgently. ‘One-two-three,’ she counts Sarah’s daughters. ‘You want to buy my baby?’

Sarah stops walking and looks for the first time directly at the woman. She’s not young — perhaps in her late thirties or early forties — thin, with bad teeth. But the baby is healthy, with cotton-thread bracelets around his plump wrists, his round tummy and shoulders glistening with oil. He is around ten months old.

‘You want to buy my baby? You only got girls — this a boy —’ the woman begins again, closer.

‘No!’ Sarah finds herself laughing, just once, in disbelief. ‘You don’t mean that. You can’t want me to …’

Up ahead, Jimmy is pointing out the glass-bottom boat chugging through the lagoon, a tall prahu skimming on blue outriggers behind it, a painted eye on the prow. The baby smiles at Sarah, waves his fists.

‘I can’t,’ she tells the woman, and wonders if it is in fact her baby. Is she the grandmother? ‘Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take him into my country. I wouldn’t be allowed to.’

The woman is staring at her and Sarah sees that the tired eyes are filling with tears.

‘Sorry,’ Sarah says quietly. ‘He’s a lovely baby.’ And she pats the woman’s narrow shoulder before hurrying on.

It’s not until the next day that she tells Jimmy about it, while they walk through the monkey forest in Ubud.

‘Did you give her anything?’ he asks. Monkeys cluster around a man feeding them with what looks like sweet potato; two young females fight for a chunk of it near Lily’s feet. She steps backwards, cautious.

‘What?’

‘Money.’

‘She wasn’t begging.’

‘Of course she was.’

A tubby boy is teasing an adult male with a banana. Suddenly the monkey takes a flying leap and lands on the boy’s shoulders, leaning over his head and grabbing with a sinewy arm at the fruit. As the boy spins, hooting and shrieking with panic, Sarah recognises him: the sandy-haired boy from the hotel pool. Around
them the Balinese erupt into laughter. The boy’s father, his forearms blue with tattoos, calls out, ‘Give him the bloody banana, Dwayne, give him the bloody thing.’