Constance. Rosie Thomas

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       ONE

      Nights on the island were rarely silent.

      The guttural scraping and grunting and booming that was the frog chorus could rise into a din sufficient to drown out all the other wildlife before fading away into a single disconsolate bleat. The many dogs who ranged the village streets barked incessantly, and in the small hours the roosters started up a brassy call and answer that lasted well into daylight. But towards dawn the world suddenly fell silent.

      On this day the sky lightened from pitch black to a vast grey touched at the eastern rim with green, against which the coconut palms on the crown of the ridge stood out like paper silhouettes. In the waiting hush the light strengthened and the horizon flushed with pink and orange.

      In a beautiful place, another lovely day was breaking.

      Wayan Tupereme yawned at the door of his house and then shoved his feet into the brown plastic sandals that he had left neatly paired on the step. He made a brief circuit of his garden, nipping off a flower here and there and cupping the blooms in his left hand. By the time he was back at his door again, it was daylight. A little later he trod quietly down the dusty path beside the swathe of leathery leaves and twined stems that separated his garden from the Englishwoman’s, and strolled up to the next-door house. Even though the sun was rising there was no visible sign of life. He stooped to place something on the lower step of the deep veranda that ran all the way round the little single-storey house. It was a tiny basket woven from palm fronds and containing some squares of coarse leaf on which were laid an orange flower like a miniature sun, a scatter of scarlet petals, and a few grains of rice. Wayan touched his hands to his forehead, then stood up straight again and made his way back to his own house. He was getting old, and he walked slowly.

      Ten minutes later, Connie’s alarm clock went off. She wasn’t used to waking to its shrill beep, and her arm thrashed as she tried to find the button to silence it. She extricated herself from the tangle of thin sheet and blinked at the time. It was six thirty. The car would be here to pick her up in half an hour but she lay still for a moment, letting the familiar outlines of the room and its furnishings reassemble themselves in the dim light. She had been dreaming, a thick coil of a dream that still clung to her although she couldn’t remember what it had been about.

      ‘Come on. Get going,’ she advised herself, once the chair and cupboard and the horizontal slits of pale light marking the shutter louvres were properly distinguished. She felt apprehensive, although not unpleasantly so, but there wasn’t time to dwell on any of that. The car was coming. There was a seven-thirty call.

      The bedroom doors opened onto the veranda at the back of the house. As she did every morning, Connie opened them to let the light flood in, and stepped out into the air. It was still cool, with a faint breeze stirring the leaves of the banana palms. There was no pool, she had deliberately chosen not to have one, although the other Europeans who lived in the area all did. There was only the liquid music of water trickling down the rocks a little way off, and the view itself. It took her by surprise and then engrossed her, even after six years.

      The house clung to the upper rim of a steep valley. From beneath her feet the ground fell away into the gorge and rose again on the opposite side, densely clothed in a tangle of trees, feathery leaves against broad blades against sharp spikes, a lush billow of textured greenery. The crowns of the highest coconut palms spread against the sky, three-dimensional in the brightening light. At the bottom of the cleft lay the river, a wide silver sweep with the morning mist rising from it. The cocks were still crowing, and as the warmth of the sun filtered through the leaves the first cricket started up its dry rasp. From the road on the other side of the house came the distant buzz of motorbikes as people headed for work.

      Connie smiled at her view, thinking how lucky she was to have all this. She rocked on her bare feet, spreading her toes to connect with the warm, varnished boards. On an ordinary day she would have made tea and sat out here, gazing at the green wave until it was time to do something else. But today was not ordinary. The outside world had arrived.

      She had laid out the shooting script the night before, her tape-recorder and her laptop and the sheets of music, even her clothes. All she had to do was shower and dress, make a last check and pack her bag.

      At 7 a.m., still with a persistent flutter beneath her ribcage, Connie carried her bag out of the house. The offering placed by Wayan lay in front of the house temple, a little shrine sited at the appropriate corner of the veranda. She nodded her head to acknowledge it and then stepped past. The car was already waiting for her, pulled off the road into the grass and bare-earth space where the way to her house joined up with the path to Wayan’s. It was a big silver-grey Toyota 4x4, with tinted windows and enough room to seat seven people.

      The driver leapt out as she emerged, and hurried to open the rear door for her.

      ‘Selamat pagi, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Good morning. All set now?’

      Connie knew him quite well. His name was Kadek Daging and he was Wayan’s relative by marriage. Usually he worked in his small general store up in the main street of the village and was famous as a source of local gossip, but today he would have left one of his several sons in charge of the shop in order to undertake this important driving assignment for ‘the movie company’, as he put it. Actually it was less a movie than a trio of expensive thirty-second commercials for an online bank that were being shot on the island. But Connie didn’t want to diminish his sense of importance by making the distinction.

      She would have shaken his hand, or even lightly touched his shoulder, but she took her cue from him and put the palms of her hands together to make a polite bow.

      ‘Good morning, Kadek. Thank you for coming.’

      To preserve the formality of the occasion she climbed into the back of the car, even though she would have preferred to sit up front. Kadek jumped smartly into the driver’s seat and eased the Toyota out into the stream of scooters and motorcycles. One young man on a motorbike tried to race them, his blue shirt ballooning and his black hair raked back in the wind, but Kadek hooted and they sailed majestically past him.

      Once they were established as the kings of the village traffic he asked over his shoulder, ‘Ma’am, would you care for a cold drink? A cool towel?’

      Normally he would address her as ‘Ibu’, as he called all the other European women customers and neighbours, or ‘Ibu Con’ when he remembered, although Connie tried to persuade him to make it just ‘Con’. Today, however, they were in a different СКАЧАТЬ