‘Ampun-ampun!’ he shouted, and for another moment or two, they did not hear him and continued — one landed an excruciating blow in the middle of his back that made him snap back, reversing the arc of his body in one swift movement.
Then they stopped and were shouting at each other, speaking with such speed he couldn’t understand what they were saying, and when he opened his eyes he saw that one of them, the tall one, had his arm across the chest of the one next to him, holding him back — they were having a ferocious argument of some sort. Harper rolled gingerly onto his knees but he knew that if he tried to rise, they would beat him to the ground. He tried to think of a whole sentence, brothers I am with you, I am your cousin, but his mouth wasn’t working. He lifted a hand and touched his chin, which was swollen and covered in dirt. He spat and there were strings of blood amidst the spittle.
Then they were gone. They had run off down the alley, back the way they had come. As he watched them go, he saw one of them stop by the moped and lift it from where it lay on its side, the engine still grumbling. It was the smallest youth — thirteen or fourteen years of age, perhaps. He sat on the moped and tried to kick it into life and was shouting at the others to come back and help. Harper hauled himself to his feet and loped off in the other direction, the holdall bumping against his back. He didn’t look back.
The main street was still busy with fleeing people but nobody stopped him as he walked against the tide, head down. When he glanced up, he was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. He glimpsed a huge pall of smoke rising from a few streets away. Any building with Communist associations was being set on fire, and sometimes just any building. There was the stink of burnt rubber from somewhere: then as he was looking at the smoke, a herd of young men similar to the ones who had attacked him ran down the street — they were slightly older than the others; students, he guessed, dressed in trousers with white shirts, waving objects in the air, sticks and batons, and shouting gleefully to each other, shoving each other. Driving behind them was an army jeep with six soldiers in the back, waving and smiling. It was a hunting party and their prey was PKI. Such a group became more than the sum of its parts. They wouldn’t care about any list.
Harper moved closer to the wall but kept walking, looking at the ground. He could smell paraffin. Buildings set alight almost always meant people set alight too.
The moped didn’t matter. He could find some other way of getting out to Parno’s. He had the holdall, covered in dirt and battered, but intact, and with the leather case still inside it, that was all that mattered. His bruises would heal. And he didn’t think his back was broken — but every time he moved his left leg, arrows of pain shot up his side, torn ligaments perhaps? With each stab of pain, a wave of nausea and dizziness gripped him.
He needed to get off the streets. A man who looked as though he had barely escaped with his life from a beating was offering himself up to the next lot who wanted to finish the job.
He turned a corner: a side street, a small mosque on the corner, an administrative building next to it, at the end of it another corner, and at once he was in a quieter district, on the edge of a kampong but still adjacent to the main roads. Safe for a moment, he paused at the end of a street that was, when life was normal, a small, local market. It was closed and unnaturally deserted. The stalls were boarded with whatever might have been to hand: some with properly constructed wooden shutters or doors. Other families had made makeshift attempts to protect what little they had by nailing broken boards and bamboo poles in criss-cross patterns across the front. Yet others, who could not protect the open area of their stalls, had simply stripped every object from the shelves. In the back rooms, plastic buckets and wooden carvings and boxes of fruit would be piled high and, amongst them, he guessed, families cowering, waiting for things to become calm again. The stink of burnt rubber and paraffin drifted over this area too. Amidst the chaos, though, lives still had to be led, children calmed and fed. Somewhere further along the market street, someone was cooking: beneath the stench he could smell coconut oil and dried fish, smoke and spices.
Without warning, rain dropped from the sky, falling in a sudden solid waterfall. He tipped his head back and opened his mouth to catch the water, letting the hard fat drops wash the dirt and blood from his face. He would have liked to stay there until he was soaked but couldn’t risk the rain seeping through the tough canvas of his holdall and into the leather case.
At the end of the market street was a ragged shack, sloping and derelict. Through the empty porch area, there was a broken door that wasn’t even boarded — it opened easily, half on its hinges. Behind the door was a small square room of the sort a large family would sleep in, head to toe; a dirt floor, an empty wooden crate and a single broken plastic sandal in one corner — recently abandoned, he guessed. Given how overcrowded the kampong were, it was unusual to find anything empty. He wondered why the family had fled.
At the other side of the room was a narrow open doorway for ventilation, with no covering. He went and looked out. The room backed onto a canal, not one of the grand ones built for the smarter areas of town or even the river that delineated Parno’s area from the kampong but a small, shallow one, little better than a drainage ditch. To the left, it stretched back along the length of the market street: to the right, it bent away, the view blocked by other shacks. He wondered how many men, women and children had slept here unprotected from the mosquitoes, the bad odours from the still water, the diseases it harboured.
As he stepped back, he felt his knees start to shake. It was kicking in. It had been an elementary part of training, both when he did his national service and at the Institute. One of the most dangerous parts of danger comes when you think you are safe again: that is the point where the adrenaline will drain away and you will feel hungry, thirsty and completely exhausted. He had thought he was just finding somewhere to shelter from the rain, but he realised he had crawled like a wounded animal into a hole.
He pulled the holdall over his head, dropped to his knees. He was beginning to shiver. He opened the holdall and found the few balls of klepon, wrapped in paper, that he had taken from the hotel restaurant that morning. They were already collapsing and had leaked through the paper. He unwrapped them as best he could and crammed two of them into his mouth, the sweet stickiness of them dissolving into glue. He pulled out a cotton jacket and put it on: it was clean but could be sacrificed. There was the thin towel he had taken from his room, too small for his purposes but better than nothing. He put the towel down on the dirt floor and lay stretched out, tucking the holdall underneath his head as a pillow, closing his eyes.
When he stirred again, it was dusk. Everything hurt. He moved his left leg, carefully, but it was so stiff he felt he might break a bone trying to shift it. His arms both ached — why his arms? He couldn’t even remember being struck there. When he arched his back, he could almost feel the vertebrae cracking. His head throbbed. The thought that he had to raise himself and complete his mission made him want to throw up. It was still raining. Darkness would fall soon. There was no chance he could make it to Parno’s now. He would have to shelter until dawn broke. The delay wouldn’t cause alarm at Parno’s end; with the streets in chaos, it was touch and go whether the General himself would have been there today, or at all. He might have got to Parno’s only to find he had to wait there for a week.