Prose by Malina Douglas

Terracotta / Ricefields

Jakarta, a green and orange city, orange for the buses, hulking and rust-coloured, for the packaging and billboards catching your eyes, the colour of nasi goreng—spice-fried rice, the plate edged with krupuk, a pale-orange prawn cracker, the colour of noise—horns honking, roosters crowing, men calling out greetings, the bright orange sound of the words Salamat siang, good afternoon, the redder orange words Salamat soray, late afternoon, when the round, livid sun sinks into a hazy cloudmass before ever touching the horizon, the orange t of tidak, pronounced with the k thrown away—tida’ apa apa, they say, that cars crawl through traffic, the roads are lined with waste-clogged ditches, water grey-black and trickling, that barefoot children poke at the ditches with sticks, fishing out plastic bags like tired ghosts, that you can hardly walk down the street because the pavement is broken, chunks missing, and clogged with men, standing, chatting, starting conversations with you, smoking kretek, named for the crackling of cloves, sitting on plastic stools, eating, laughing, waiting, and you weave around them till you can flag down a taxi, because the metro hasn’t been built yet and the buses are a joke—orange flaking dinosaurs belching black smoke, passengers spilling out the guts of them, gripping the bare metal handrail, hanging out the door with one foot in the air, while you watch through the taxi window, AC drying your sweat, glide a few hundred metres to the mouth of the road, past the stables on the corner, where you stroked a row of muzzles till a horse nipped your shoulder, and onto the big road, straight into traffic—hours of starting, stopping lurching to get to the supermarket, swimming pool, anywhere, but you’re a kid so you accept it, tida’ apa apa, Bahasa for no worries, s’alright, mate, that how life is, and the city is also green—that street where you get in the taxi is lined with trees, huge and shady, dwarfing the shack-like shops, acacias, wide like umbrellas with tiny leaves that close up at night, green for the great dark green gates of your house, swinging open when you come home, to a long green lawn and a yard lined with tropical plants, jungle expeditions from the playhouse under the mango tree, through the border of green between yard and wall, crunching leaves, catching grasshoppers that leap off your fingers, past elephant ears, the leaves huge and heart-shaped, the bamboo in the corner with its thick, green-ringed stalks, red chains of heliconia that hang against dark leaves and banana trees, great blades filling with sun, to the little walled garden where you let your rooster, large, white and predatory, roam, past the bougainvillea climbing up a white wall, bright green leaves and magenta flowers, papery, along the front of the house and you dash through the garage, filled with the squawks of the cockatoo and the green of the parrot, who can mimic the sound of the car engine starting, down the side of the house, turning into the back garden, green for the lettuce and carrot tops you feed the guinea pigs, tiny paws raising to the wire of their cages, squeaking greetings, green for the lined oval leaves of the frangipani tree, with low forking branches you climb, inhaling the sweetness of pink-edged flowers, light green for the maidenhair ferns growing up the rock wall behind the pond, green for the thick bladed grass in the long L-shaped garden that lines the verandah, where your father sits, in a wide rattan armchair on Sunday mornings, reading the Jakarta Post, a bamboo dart gun beside him, now and then shooting at the fat, black rats that dart across the grass but he never gets one, visiting the kantor—his office, a large building several traffic jams away, the seventh floor balcony where a dove landed once because it’s lined with potted plants, green from a distance, the green of your school and its gardens of little mown hillocks, planted with dwarf palms and borders of shrubs, flowers tiny and purple and star-shaped coral, the green of banana-leaf parcels, unwrapping layers to find sticky rice, orange-brown with coconut sugar, terracotta pots on the backyard grass, where your dad buried a hose in the ground and turned the pots into a fountain, departing to green distances, the green of the tea plantations of Bogor, a little higher, a little cooler, relief from thick orange humidity, mornings threading through tea plants on the backs of docile ponies, the bright, jewel green of the ricefields glimpsed through a car window, barefoot farmers pacing slim earthen ridges, and in the city, the green of tropical plants jutting out of every crack in the concrete, alive, shooting sunwards after the rains, pounding the roof and flowing in torrents down thick, heavy chains that hang off the eves and line the white tile verandah, directing water into channels that run beneath the concrete, monsoon rains when you run to the wide front lawn and let it soak you, till the grass turns soggy, liquid orange earth wells up to cover your feet, and you dance in the oozing squelch.

After the Umbrella

I never imagined how much time could distort them.

We used to meet at a park beneath a pair of glassy towers. Our oasis. There was Blane in his red shirt and loose baggy trousers, punctuating our talk with bursts of enthusiasm. Chase flipping off the trees, curls like sand flying. Elfin features and a grin I will never forget.

We sat on a stone ledge passing wine in soda cups as the city flowed past us. Only Chase refused to drink. He jumped out at pedestrians and danced on the pavement. Brown hair splayed as Blane shuffled, grinning.

Before Blane became an impassive husk, walking the same streets we frolicked once, numbed. Before Chase was thrown in prison. Before our friends reviled him.

I remember.

Standing in the plaza when Chase popped up, in a jester’s cap of yellow and purple plush. When he vanished into the crowd and I found him by his hat, bright and bobbing. Sitting on the scaffolding of a construction site, legs swinging.

Days unfurled in a sun-daze till I left, and the world we knew vanished.

*

When I came back, I crashed on the sofa at Chase’s place.

Five years had passed. Chase had filled out. His shoulders were stouter, jaw squarer. His voice had deepened and his hair was clipped short.

He poured out two glasses of whiskey.

“But you don’t drink,” I teased him. He always was the young one, the pure spirit among us.

“Maybe I’m not the you that you knew.”

He laughed with me and I glimpsed his old, elfin self in his mirth. Though he was still impish, his games had turned serious. When I asked why he went to prison, he said it had something to with an umbrella, and using it to hit someone.

Our friends said other things. That Chase had psychotic episodes. That I should stay away from him.

I came back to his house to find a rose on my pillow. As we drew on the walls with chalk, I wondered. Chase blasted music till familiar beats drew me backwards down the sunlit path of memory. We reminisced on urban escapades, dancing till our feet ached and sitting out the back of our usual club, because he was too young to get in.

At a gathering under peppermint gums, a barrel-chested man walked towards me. It was Blane. He was taller, his shoulders broader, sharp chin engulfed by a layer of flesh.

The way he spoke had changed more. Dry, ironic and unimpressed. He wore his weight like a barrier, to keep out a world that had hardened against him. No longer was he the first to dance and the last to leave the party. He watched from the sidelines as bright figures spun, his expression unmoved.

“See that man smoking a ciggy?”

“Yeah.”

“Observe his hand.”

I saw hunched shoulders and dusty black clothes, hand clenching the roll-up, a space where the end of his thumb should have been.

“What… happened?”

“Chase had an episode.”

*

Chase is smiling and my eyes can see sweetness but not the psychosis.

“Mint chocolate or mango?” he asks again.

I choose mango and he brings out two bowls of ice cream. A yellow as soft as the fluff on a hamster’s belly. I take a bite and taste Blane’s words, playing over in my mind.

“Why don’t we catch up with Blane sometime?”

Chase’s look hardens. “He won’t speak to me.”

What?But he was your best friend. I don’t say the words but they ring in the air between us.

“It wasn’t really me, but everyone saw me. I gave up trying to convince them.” He shrugs. “So I got used to it. That’s how life is, after the umbrella.”

“How long has it been?”

“A year, seven months and three days A.U.” He forces a hollow laugh.

Of all he lost, I do not speak. We dig through our treasures of memories, shifting them like gems to the light. And we create new ones, gliding by skateboard on smooth streets after dark. Sharing a flask as the sun plunges into the sea. He’s calm as the distant ocean, and I can’t see the trouble beneath. As I swing my legs off the edge of the jetty, I keep my course on the person he was, unwilling to believe in the person they say he’s become.

Years pile up, distorting the people I knew. I lose track of Chase, and wonder if I would still recognise him. Clear as a moth trapped under glass, the memories remain. When I close my eyes, I see Chase in his jester’s cap, grinning.

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