I had no reason to suspect that the cute little girl who was the waitress at the only so-called restaurant on North Beach was a conniving cheat, but, well, I had only been in Indonesia for less than a week and didn’t know much about how things were on the tourist island I went to. I’d had the idea that I could relax there for a few days, even a couple of weeks, before moving on. I’d read about the island in Lonely Planet’s Guide to Southeast Asia, which described the island’s North Beach as a place to lie in a hammock and now and then hear a coconut go, thump, onto the sand.
The dot-com company that I had been slaving away at for the past three years, ever since graduating with a degree in web design, had just gone bust, setting me free. For a week or more I put in time looking for another job, and then one day, when I was talking to my then-boyfriend in the Java or Not coffee shop, he made a joke about me having to move back in with my parents, which I didn’t think was at all funny, and added, “Or we could start our own company.”
He, too, had lost his job.
“Are you out of your mind?” I said.
“It’s an opportunity, now that we have time on our hands.”
“No, thanks.” I said to him, “I think I’ll travel, backpack through Southeast Asia. I missed out on that when I was a student.”
He pondered that for a while before saying, “Rebecca. You’re not thinking straight. There’s opportunity here.”
“I want some time alone,” I said.
“What?”
“All I’ve known my entire life are studying and working and I’m sick of all that. Just sick sick sick of it. Understand?”
“Sick of me, too?” He had a wry smile.
I grinned, and he got the message.
Two weeks later, my Garuda flight landed in Jakarta. I was there for three days battling the heat and traffic, all the time wondering if I had made the right decision to backpack through Southeast Asia, until I took a bus to this island, on the coast of Java, Indonesia’s main island. It was an all-day bus ride to get there. Then a few hours on a ferry out to the island. It was in the Indian Ocean and was popular with surfers, as I had read, who partied on South Beach, but North Beach was, like I said, described in the guidebook as being “serene and laid-back, for those more into lying in a hammock reading.” That was for me.
I did take along my iPad and caught up on some of the books I’d always wanted to read, classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jane Eyre, and Madam Bovary. I also did some drawings of the beach, along which were coconut palms and moored off the beach traditional colorful blue and yellow boats that had outriggers. I also drew a portrait of this cute girl I mentioned, the waitress, who when she came to my table to serve me my banana pancakes in the morning was eye-to-eye with me. She was eight. Her features were not those of a child, though. Her cheekbones were too pronounced, her nose too sharp, and her eyes too knowing. Her hair was short, pageboy style; it enhanced the captivating features of her face. Once, when there were two tourists sitting nearby, the one with the tattoo of some Chinese characters on the back of a wrist said, “Imagine what she’ll be like when she’s seventeen.” The other said, “I can’t stay on this island until then. There are others to be had where we are.” Then they laughed. I wanted to go over to them and pour my syrupy Indonesian coffee on their paedophile heads. Adi, at his table, stopped his card playing with his friends long enough to look their way with an expression of greed on his face, of how he was going to profit from Citi’s looks.
I had no choice but to have all my meals at the restaurant, considering it was the only one around, and the girl—her name was Citi—talked when there weren’t other tourists there. The restaurant, which had the name Adi’s Oasis, was owned and run by her father. He never did any work that I saw, only sat at one of the tables smoking cigarettes and talking with other men. Now and then they played cards, making wagers. Citi and her mother did all the work. Her mother was the cook, dishwasher, and recorder of what a tourist owed, because, you see, Adi also owned the bungalow I was staying in, which was set on a small jetty of black rocks. I would just pay my bill when I left. Adi’s wife—her name was Bulan—was at the restaurant from daybreak until all the drunks had left, which was often past midnight.
My bungalow was pretty much what I wanted. It had a porch, and on the porch there was a hammock, and from the hammock I could look out across the beautiful blue Indian Ocean, when I wasn’t reading or drawing, and let my mind wander until I had forgotten all about my previous life of studying and working and a boyfriend who was no longer funny but had become a burden.
The bungalow did have a bed and mosquito net and toilet and mandi—that is a bath—simply a plastic bucket of rainwater collected from the roof that served as a bath. I just scooped out water from the bucket and poured it on myself as I sat on this block of concrete. The place was lit by candles, but I had brought an LED flashlight. I paid seven dollars a day for that place. On my savings, I could’ve lived there for the next twenty years or more.
One morning when I was having my usual banana pancake breakfast, Citi, standing beside me, said, “Why not you go South Beach?”
I had thought about it, just to break up my routine, and out of curiosity. At night I could hear music coming from South Beach, rap and hip hop and reggae, none of which I object to, but why was it that so many backpackers sought out these party places rather than enjoying the peacefulness of a tropical beach, the sound of palm fronds thumping together, waves lapping on a beach, and geckos sounding off from the corners of bungalows? They seek to escape one culture only to create another that is even more demanding of what is acceptable behavior, that is smoking dope, dropping mushrooms, and fucking each other.
“You know trail?” Citi asked.
A trail led from North Beach to South Beach, zigzagging up a ridge through a jungle and back down to the beach again. All I could think of when looking at that jungle was—mosquitoes. I’ll be eaten alive. From time to time some backpackers had come over to North Beach from South Beach and complained about them.
“Use lots of repellents,” a girl told me, “and wear a shirt with sleeves and long pants. Then you’ll be okay, not scarred by bites as I am.”
“Thanks,” I told her.
Citi put her little hands on her hips and jutted them out in a sexual kind of way. Adi, at the table where he always was, just looked at the two of us and grinned, the worthless man. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out how Citi’s father was going to profit from her when she was older.
“I take you,” Citi said.
“Mosquitoes,” I said.
“You put repellent.”
Citi was always wearing the same ragged yellow sarong and grimy blue T-shirt. “What about you?” I asked. “You can’t go dressed like that.”
“I can!” she protested.
Adi had kept his eyes on us. I knew now he’d put her up to pestering me about going to South Beach to get some money out of me
“One dollar only,” Citi said. “I guide you.”
I had seen that coming. But what was a dollar to me? Not much. “I’ll get ready,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later we met behind a bungalow, from which the trailhead began, and made our way up the ridge, zigzagging back and forth. Mosquitoes now and then buzzed in my ears, and I swatted them away, but Citi paid no attention to them. She plodded along in her bare feet.
When we reached the summit of the ridge line we rested, sitting on some rocks there. I had taken a day-pack along and had a bottle of water in it and some bananas and biscuits. I shared some water with Citi and offered her a banana. She took it. We ate bananas and water.
From the rocks, I had a spectacular view of most of the island, the white beaches, the traditional fishing boats skipping across the waves, and the boundless ocean. That view alone made the hike and mosquito swatting worthwhile. I took a photo and promised myself to make a painting of the scene one day. I hadn’t brought my paints. Too much trouble. Just pencils and a sketchbook.
We continued on down the trail, which flattened out, not as many zigzags there. It looped around enormous banyan trees that had root systems like a series of walls, and hardwoods that had canopies of branches high above us that were so thick they allowed for only a few shafts of sunlight to get through. The shafts of light were like beacons from the heavens, and I don’t mean that in a religious way, just as a poetic way of describing what it was like in that jungle
Twenty or thirty minutes later we came out onto a beach. Along it were colorful boats with those outriggers moored just beyond the surf and under the palms the same made-of-bamboo bungalows that I was staying in, but these were packed in side-by-side so that if a person were in a hammock on the port they could reach out and touch the wall of the bungalow next to them. The way they were wedged in together reminded me of a Jakarta slum I’d seen.
Citi and I came to a woman who had a basket of bananas and pineapples balanced on her head walking along the beach. The woman said to me,
“You buy, please? My children.” Her face was as withered as a prune. I bought a banana.
Citi talked to her for a minute or so, and the woman eyed me and smiled. I didn’t like that. And I would find out when I headed back to North Beach what they’d talked about.
Citi and I continued on along the beach. We passed some tourist girls who were lying on the beach topless and others frolicking in the surf with their boyfriends and a few with Indonesian men, gigolos, I assumed, because I’d heard that they were available. Then there were the massage ladies plying the sand, balancing baskets that contained bottles of oils on their heads and, under the palms, men who were selling coconut water. They all called to me, “You want?” We continued on and came to a restaurant that advertised, what else, pizza, and Citi said, “I want to eat.” Children.
We stepped up onto the open-air deck of the restaurant and sat at a rickety plank table and a waitress came out of the kitchen who was maybe in her thirties and very pregnant and took our order, pizza and returned to the kitchen.
As we waited for the pizza I watched a girl who was there with her Indonesian boyfriend—or was he a gigolo?—and wished I weren’t so controlled by my morality, fear of getting an STD or being robbed, and, most of all, that he would, soon after we’d had sex, be a bore that I couldn’t get rid of. He’d be like a stray dog I’d made the mistake of handing a bone to. Even so, I couldn’t help but want what she was experiencing. Now and then she’d giggle at something he would say and reach out and run a red fingernail down his brown chest and smile. He rolled a cigarette and put it in her lips and lit it and she drew on it and tilted her head back and let the stream of smoke out.
She was quite beautiful, the way movie stars of the forties were. Her complexion, unlike the girls on the beach who were roasting like chickens, was pale. Her hair was strawberry blonde. It twirled down onto her alabaster shoulders in deep, scalloped curls. I wished that I had hair like that. And lips like hers. Pouty and full. She had a nobleness about her as if she were from European, aristocratic stock. On her right shoulder, she had a tattoo of a seahorse. Her lover was a lucky guy.
The pizza came and Citi and I ate it after we had we talked and I came to realize that she could neither read nor write when I asked her to translate something on a sign nailed to a palm. She was, well, a cute girl whose cuteness was of value to her father, a sad thing. Yes, I knew where she would end up, because, as we were there in that restaurant Indonesian girls walked past either with a tourist or in search of one. Some were wearing skimpy shorts and T-shirts and others sarongs. They paid me no mind. But an Indonesian boy who was maybe fifteen did and was brave enough to come up to the restaurant and sit at our table and ask,
“You be alone?”
“No,” I said.
“Where is your boyfriend?”
“None of your business,” I said.
“Can you buy me a Coca-Cola?”
I turned to Citi. “Let’s go,” I said to her.
We left the restaurant and went back along the beach to the trailhead, where there was an old man with one leg who had a big dog with him that had mud clotted to its fur. He had propped himself up with a crutch made from a tree branch and was leaning against the trunk of a palm.
“You be careful,” he said as we were passing him.
“I have a guide,” I said and nodded to Citi.
He grinned and for good reason.
“Monkeys there,” he said.
I had no idea what he was getting at.
Citi and I headed up the trail. And then we came to the Monkeys. Maybe twenty of them were at the base of a banyan tree, all of them eating bananas. The alpha male looked at me and bared his canine teeth, which was dissuasive enough for me to decide not to continue on. Then I recalled the woman who sold bananas and Citi talking to her secretively. I looked at Citi, and she grinned. This was a conspiracy theory that had legs, two scrawny ones under a sarong. Citi had the wry smile of a man who thinks he’s laid a good line on you, one good enough to get you in his bed. She said,
“Monkeys afraid dog.”
We went back down the trail, where the old man with the muddy dog was waiting for us, still leaning up against that palm. I looked at his dog. It was a rather pathetic animal, panting away, and had a muzzle that sprouted gray hairs. Its teeth, some broken off, were as brown as a coconut husk. I doubted that this dog would strike fear into any monkey.
“I tell to you monkeys,” the man said.
Citi said, “Monkeys afraid dog.”
“This dog?”
“Twenty dollars,” the man said.
“What?”
“I go with you and my dog. No monkeys.”
I wanted to tell him he was out of his mind, asking for twenty dollars, my budget for a few days, but knew that even if I did he wouldn’t understand. I turned, and Citi and I headed back up the trail, and this time the old man and the dog, panting away, followed us.
We came to the monkeys, who had remained where I’d seen them. But once they saw that dog they scattered and went up the banyan tree.
“You see,” the man said. “Twenty dollars. I take you to your bungalow.”
I wasn’t going to give in just yet. Citi and I kept on going up the trail, but the alpha male, who’d been over my head, hiding in among the leaves of the banyan, leapt out from his lair and landed right in front of me, baring those canine teeth. I stayed calm. I had read in the guidebook to not turn and run from monkeys in a panic. They’d come after you, especially if you had a backpack, the guidebook warned. I backed up, coming to the old man, who put a palm on my back.
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
I looked at the dog, back up the trail at the monkeys. “Ten,” I said.
“Twenty-five,” he said.
The alpha male started to come toward me, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that I might end up dying from rabies if it bit me.
“Twenty-five,” I said.
Citi said, “Pizza very good.”
