Troppo

First published 2016 by

FREMANTLE PRESS

25 Quarry Street, Fremantle WA 6160

(PO Box 158, North Fremantle WA 6159)

www.fremantlepress.com.au

Copyright © Madelaine Dickie, 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act
, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Editor Georgia Richter

Cover design Nada Backovic

Cover photograph Sarah Lee,
www.hisarahlee.com
. Stand-up-paddle athlete Donica Shouse duck-dives a hand-shaped alaia surfboard under a wave. This alaia was modelled after the ancient surfboards the Hawaiians surfed on in the pre-20th century.

Printed by Everbest Printing Company, China

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Dickie, Madelaine, author.

Troppo / Madelaine Dickie

ISBN: 9781925163858(epub)

Two thousand four A.D.

Surfing
—
Indonesia
—
Fiction

Xenophobia
—
Fiction

Islam
—
Fiction

Sumatera Barat (Indonesia)
—
Fiction

Dewey Number: A823.4

Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Some of us willingly live on fault lines.

John Kinsella

‘Unwell' … ‘Unwell' … the diary entries say.
No fuss, no talk of fever, just ‘unwell'.
Then at the end no hint of even this.

Geoffrey Lehmann, ‘New Guinea Episode'

For Tom

The first story I hear about my new boss is in a brothel in Bandar Lampung. I don't realise it's a brothel at first. From the outside it looks like a typical Indonesian beauty salon: pink curtains tacked up in a prayer arch over lace, a gritty ‘Salon Kecantikan' sign out the front and a becoming ladyboy at the door, with toilet paper moulded into boobs.

‘Hello Missus!' the ladyboy sings, thrusting sideways a sequined hip. ‘Bisa saya bantu?' Can I help you?

‘Bisa!' The ladyboy leads me to a room furnished with hairdressing chairs and cracked mirrors. There's a girl at one of the mirrors smoothing out a yellow dress that falls just below her undies. She wears cream gloves and stunningly high heels. In a beauty salon in Perth you wouldn't think twice about her outfit. But here in East Sumatra, most women have been covered from head to toe.

She smiles, warily. ‘Do you do manicures?' The ladyboy and the girl look at each other; the girl holds her hands behind her back.

‘Sorry,' the ladyboy wags his finger from side to side, ‘no have manicure.'

‘Cream bath?'

‘No have.'

‘Waxing?'

‘No have.'

‘Facial?'

‘No have.'

‘How about a haircut?'

‘A haircut?' The girl sounds incredulous.

The ladyboy pouts and picks up a pair of scissors. ‘Haircut have!'

Last time I had a cut at a hole-in-the-wall salon my hair looked like the dirty blond wool around the arse of a sheep. ‘Well, Pen,' said Josh, ‘they made a mess of that.' But Josh isn't here and the bus south to Batu Batur doesn't leave until tomorrow morning. I'd rather spend the afternoon in a beauty salon than nursing my hangover over cups of sweet, weak coffee. ‘Alright. Haircut.'

The ladyboy taps his lips with the tips of his pale fingers and murmurs, ‘I make you beautiful.'

The girl rolls her eyes and arranges herself on one of the frayed seats.

‘So where you from, Missus?' asks the ladyboy. ‘Already long-time in Indonesia? You already marry? How many children you have?'

A window drops a sud-coloured square of light onto the floor. Outside, two smog-stunned palms shade a courtyard. Doors are arranged around the courtyard in a similar style to a losmen – a motel – only none of the doors are numbered.

The girl stares through the window.

The ladyboy lifts and looses flaps of my hair.

‘Well?'

‘Australian. No husband, no children.'

‘No children, Missus! Hopefully soon, ya?'

A rattle of hot rain hits the window and the ladyboy glances up. Then he goes back to my hair. ‘So where you been in Indonesia?'

‘Bali, then a night in Jakarta, now here.'

The ladyboy's eyes blaze. ‘Bali! There's many-many party in Bali, ya? Party-party every night!'

I planned on avoiding the Kuta vortex this time, or at least planned on just flirting at the edges of it. Instead, fifty Bintangs and a police chase later …

‘Yeah, Bali definitely can be wild.'

‘So kenapa kamu disini?' Why you in Lampung? For holiday?

‘No, for work. I've got a job.'

‘A job? You teach English?'

‘I'm going to be managing a surf resort. I don't start for a couple of weeks but I thought I'd come down early, check out the town, have a bit of a break.'

‘A resort here in Bandar Lampung?'

‘No, Batu Batur.'

At the mention of Batu Batur the girl's head jerks around and her nostrils flare.

The ladyboy casts her a sly look. ‘Yuliana used to work in a resort in Batu Batur. Yuliana used to work for Mister Shane. But big problem, ya. She run away here.'

I feel uneasy – Shane's the name of the guy I'll be working for. ‘What happened?'

The ladyboy lays down his scissors. The girl bursts out in an angry, rattling dialect. He answers: placating, convincing. Then they fall quiet. The girl tilts her head, just slightly. The ladyboy continues, but softly, ‘Mister Shane's Australian, same like you. Yuliana work for him. She work for Mister Shane three year.'

Yuliana is perfectly still. Out in the courtyard one of the doors opens. A man stumbles towards the rear door of the salon, holding a towel over his head.

The ladyboy flicks his tongue over his lipstick and drops his voice to a murmur, ‘One night Mister Shane get very, very
drunk. They have a big fight, yelling, yelling. Mister Shane think Yuliana stole money from his guests. So he take a knife. Mister Shane take one big knife –'

The man kicks open the door, throws the towel at the girl, then sees me. He stops, his mouth drops. Then he shakes himself.

‘Hello Missus!' he says. ‘Where you from?'

Fifteen minutes later I pay for the haircut over a counter at the front of the shop. It's better than the last one I had in Indo – just a trim of dead ends with no length lost. Through the open door, steam lifts from the road. There's the smell of roasting satay sticks, of motorbike exhaust and slow-moving sewage. I look back to the ladyboy and lay down an extra fifty thousand rupiah.

‘So what did Mister Shane do with the knife?'

The ladyboy's smile flattens. He gestures to Yuliana. Yuliana hesitates, looks at the money, then steps forward and peels back a glove.

She's got no fingers.

On the bus south to Batu Batur I vomit for eight hours straight into sandwich-sized plastic bags.

Halfway into the trip, I shit myself.

‘Oh fuck. Tell the driver to stop.'

‘Sebentar, sebentar.' The conductor up the back waves his hand, palm-down, and lights another kretek cigarette.

He obviously hasn't smelt it yet, but by the time we finally stop at a roadside restaurant, his head is out the window and the seats around me are empty. The restaurant toilets reek of old, pissed-on porcelain. Jumping off the bus here with my gear isn't an option – there are no rooms and no village nearby, only the hazy midday stretch of rice fields and pandanus palms.

If Josh were with me, he'd hold back my hair while I threw up. Then again, if Josh were with me, we wouldn't be travelling by local bus. Despite the explosive bout of Bali belly, I'm glad to be alone.

The bus rattles to life. When you hear the bus start up, it's a sign to get back on. Before long, we're climbing through a chain of viridescent mountains. The sky is pale, moist, the colour of smoked lemon peels. We reach a straight stretch of road and the driver accelerates. The bus goes faster. And faster. And faster. The windows chatter. The women clutch baskets and children on their laps. To our left, there's a long drop into a valley and to our right, a crumbling cliff. Up ahead: a blind
corner. The bus groans. We're hurtling toward the corner. My throat tightens. I curl my fingers around the seat in front of me. We swing hard and hit a truck.