Twilight in Kuta
Love and lies in Indonesia
David Nesbit
Monsoon Books Burrough on the Hill
Published in 2018
by Monsoon Books Ltd
No.1 Duke of Windsor Suite, Burrough Court,
Burrough on the Hill, Leics. LE14 2QS, UK
ISBN (paperback): 9781912049288
ISBN (ebook): 9781912049295
Copyright©David Nesbit, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover design by Cover Kitchen.
Contents
Prologue
1. Neil's Story
2. Sari’s Story
3. Jack’s Story
4. Tess’s Story
5. The General’s Story
Epilogue
About the Author
Discover more books set in Indonesia
Prologue
Coffee Plus Café, Plaza Indonesia, Jakarta, 2006
We click the moment we meet. Of course, we’ve already been chatting for weeks online but this is our first date. I spot her as soon as I enter the café in Jakarta’s Plaza Indonesia shopping mall. Her beaming smile ensures she will always stand out in a crowd.
Having lived in Indonesia for fifteen years, I am used to the kindly disposition of Indonesian girls but something about this particular girl has piqued my interest online. She wants to delve deeper than the others. She wants to know why a foreigner has been living in her country for so long. She can sense I am holding back in my answers to her questions and she is determined to get to the bottom of it.
She reaches across the table and takes my hands, right there in the café.
‘Come on. Tell me. I can see it in your eyes,’ she says kindly.
I try to stall her. ‘Tell you what? What do you think you can see?’
She isn’t to be deterred. ‘I don’t know exactly, but I can see something there. Some kind of pain. So, come on. What is it?’
Over the years I often wondered at what point it all began. Was it the day I left Europe for a round-the-world trip? Or was it when I found her in bed with the local dukun or ‘medicine man’? Perhaps it was my fateful decision all those years ago to turn left rather than right upon entering the beach in Kuta, Bali? More pertinent and even more difficult to answer, what did ‘it’ even refer to?
* * *
It was on Kuta Beach, Bali, in July 1990 that the very seeds of my life in Indonesia were planted.
People of a certain age and inclination will remember where they were and what they were doing at this time. No? Let me remind you. It was the height of the 1990 FIFA World Cup. Remember now? Italia ’90, Gazza’s tears, penalty shoot-outs, fat men singing opera.
I spent the majority of this tournament watching England manager Bobby Robson and his boys stumble their way to the semi-finals while I was travelling around Southeast Asia and, come the big day — the day of the World Cup final itself — I was to be found traipsing down to the beach in Kuta, which was then, as it is now, a big draw for tourists visiting the Indonesian island of Bali.
I had been on Bali for about a week and, apart from a couple of half-hearted day trips to slightly more salubrious locations, I had spent almost all that time either in cafés or on the aforementioned stretch of golden sand, spreading myself horizontally and taking in life on the beach. Hordes of visitors from Indonesia and overseas visit the three-mile-long stretch of sand on the southern tip of the island, making it an ideal place to doze away the hot afternoon hours whilst indulging in a spot of people-watching. And it was often me who was the object of interest. Countless Indonesians took it in turns to approach and wile away the time in conversation with me. Some wanted nothing more than to share a few words and have a photo taken with the strange looking bule, or white guy, while others would try to sell me something: clothes or souvenirs, occasionally girls.
It was following one such conversation that I became aware of a gaggle of local girls walking along the beach. They were grouped closely together and were wearing normal street clothes: t-shirts and jeans, rather than swimming attire. Students on a school trip, I imagined. They meandered past me a few times, with a couple of them glancing in my direction and whispering to each other before giggling and pointing me out to others in the group, who then repeated the process.
Amid plenty of pushing, nudging and elbowing, the group began to walk in my direction. I decided to continue to keep up my pretence of playing it cool until the gang was ten meters or so away. After all, I reasoned, it was better to make sure it was me they were actually coming over to.
Anyway, approach me they did, and we enjoyed an amiable, if limited, chat for a few minutes. Once I had posed for the obligatory pictures, the group began to wander off up the beach in search of further examples of this strange bule tribe.
All except her, that is. She stayed.
She told me her name was Yossy and that she was twenty years old, two years younger than me, and that she was at university studying English literature. She was indeed, she explained, on a school break with her friends and the next day would be heading back to a city called Surabaya on the neighbouring island of Java.
She was not especially sexy, but she had a certain something about her, physically. Although not a giant, I still towered over Yossy, who was tiny in comparison and couldn’t have been as tall as five foot. In addition, she probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds soaking wet and yet still she couldn’t exactly be
