Black Water by Louise Doughty

Author:Louise Doughty [Louise Doughty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571278688
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

He took another betjak back and got it to drop him on the other side of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout. The traffic had picked up again and he walked alongside the slow procession of cars wheeling round the roundabout and past the ruined bulk of the British Embassy, now boarded up and deserted, the graffiti on the walls, CRUSH BRITISH IMPERIALISTS, scrawled and faded. He wondered how long it would be before that was scrubbed off and the embassy reopened, now the military were back in power.

In the lobby, two German businessmen were smoking and talking loudly – from their gestures he guessed they were arguing about whether or not it was safe to leave the hotel that evening.

As he walked down the corridor to his room, where, he knew, the air that was waiting for him would taste as though it had been breathed in and out again by a hundred previous occupants, he thought of Parno’s wife and wondered, briefly, if he should try ordering up a working girl, like so many of the journalists and businessmen did. In the bar downstairs, they bragged about which antibiotics they preferred. But then he thought of the glassy, stuffed-tiger look in those girls’ eyes, looks that were undisguised by their toothy smiles and chatter, and what was the point of having something that was handed to you on a plate? The whole point was the chase, wasn’t it? The act was fifteen minutes, tops. Prostitutes were for middle-aged men, fat men, men who couldn’t get a woman any other way. Surely it was demeaning to pay? He’d rather sort himself out: at least you didn’t have to worry about making stilted conversation with the handkerchief.

He could go down to the bar, perhaps, but at this time of the evening it would be rammed with journalists. They had become unbearable recently, full of self-congratulation: they were the right men in the right place at the right time, war heroes for just being in Jakarta even though they had spent the days of the coup stuck in the hotel like Harper and the worst hardship that had befallen them was the temporary failure of the air conditioning. Luckily for them, the hotel had its own generator and things had been fixed in a jiffy. Crisis over. Now it looked like the situation might stabilise here, they were all desperate to get to Vietnam, talked gleamingly of how dangerous it was, as if there weren’t enough danger in Jakarta still, as if the Indonesians being rounded up on the streets and loaded into trucks weren’t newsworthy in comparison with the next large political event elsewhere. He pitied their wives when they got back home. He would rather spend an evening with Parno than with the hacks, any day. For all his vanities and prejudices, Parno was at least a man living in his own country and making his decisions, good or bad, within that context. Parno would rise or fall by those decisions.

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