Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales

Author:Garry Kilworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781848631489
Publisher: PS Publishing Ltd
Published: 2011-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

WAYANG KULIT

I was fascinated by a wayang kulit hanging in Gwyneth Jones’ house in 1986 and so jumped at the chance to see a shadow-puppet show in Bali three years later. This is an attempt at a monochromes story.

1.

She closed the door gently and was gone, and her leaving made little difference to the ambience of the room.

I lay on the rough-hewn bed, with its carved end posts, for another hour, just staring at the ceiling. Then I got up and went out onto the balcony. It was five-thirty in the evening and the sun was setting on the Balinese rice terraces. A beautiful, light-green landscape surrounded the hut, the tiers dropping away to the front and rising above behind. The hut seemed to be floating like some forgotten gazebo in an emperor’s garden. Beyond the fields, in the far distance, was Gunung Agung, one of the many dominating active volcanoes.

The duck herders were calling in their flocks on the rice terraces. The herders carried bamboo staves, twice the height of a man, which slimmed out to whip thin at the top and were arched, weighted by coloured rags. They stuck these in the ground and their ducks gathered around them. When they finally left, the ducks following, the tall crooks made the herders appear stately, like princes in the midst of a gabbling rabble.

I sat in the rickety bamboo chair and drank some cold tea.

It was the forest at the back of the town that had frightened her. The mosquitoes, even the cockroaches and snakes didn’t bother her as much as they did me, but the forest had troubled her. We had been out walking and I insisted we follow a path through the undergrowth. She would have none of it, saying she didn’t like the shafts of light, lancing the lacework canopy. They worried her, especially when there was a breeze, stirring the branches, causing the patterns on the ground to change.

What are you afraid of? I had asked her.

Of getting lost, she replied.

But there’s a path through to the other side, I said.

Not that kind of lost, she had answered—lost forever.

This answer was incomprehensible to me and I gave way to my temper, shouting at her, calling her an idiot. It was, I saw now, inexcusable of me, but the damage had been done. I was not forgiven. Later she told me she was leaving.

We had been thrown together in a vernacular hut in the middle of rice fields and I guess it had put a strain on the relationship. Maybe it wasn’t the forest? Maybe it was us—or just me? Maybe she’d discovered, after seven days together, seven nights together, she just didn’t like me? Or that our cultures were too different? Hell, I didn’t know.

Anyway, I sure as heck wasn’t going to stay on Bali now and thought I might go to the coast tomorrow, to find a ferry.

I went indoors again and had an all-over wash in the mandi at the back. A kind

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