It is not the first time a tourist has died here, but it is the first time a tourist has died while with a guide. I wait with the others on the grassy lip that encircles the billabong while five men hoist your body up the rocky sides. 

Your rag doll remains flop as they spare all ceremony to get your body off the ledge​;​ its puncturing teeth hold you just above the now flat water. Your head hangs limply from your neck, bouncing with every jolt, every heave, every yank over the unforgiving cliff face.  

Before your face had the pallor of marbled beef, you wore the freshly sun-licked visage of one usually more accustomed to light rains and seasonal affective disorder. Your body was slim but athletic, your hair wavy and a little overgrown. I suspect that you’d be a neat looking man​,​ generally. But you were four months into your gap year, you said, doing the Southeast Asia trail of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, and I imagine haircuts were low on your list of priorities. 

I don’t help hoist you out of the billabong because I have to hold Amy upright, and that’s harder than you’d imagine for a woman no larger than a ten-year-old child. She’s keening, groaning like a wounded ox, and her body keeps crumpling in concertina.  

There is no ambulance on the island: you are taken to the hospital in the tray of a truck, a man either side to keep you from rolling around, even though it is too late.  

‘I will drive you’, I tell Amy.  

Guilleme, your name is. Was. 

# 

She wants to get drunk.  

I take her to Penida Colada, a bamboo beach bar where I’d planned to bring you both anyway. After the billabong. 

The sun hangs low on our arrival. 

‘Drink with me, Gede.’ 

We sit side by side on a roughly hewn bench overlooking the copper shimmer of the water’s skin. Her leg is touching mine, the heat of it snaking between the fibres of my cotton trousers.  

I’m not much of a drinker, the Bintang acidic in my throat, so I sip slowly, swirling the liquid in my mouth to take some of the fizz out, before swallowing. She swigs hers, eyes fixed on the horizon.  

‘I’d only known him a month’, she says.  

The other drinkers have given us a wide berth, and we are alone on the terrace, though inside the bar, the chatter continues. News travels quickly on this island.  

‘Met him in a hostel in Ho Chi Minh.’ 

I wonder briefly what my life might have looked like had I too been born in Europe or Australia: whether I would have shared a cigarette with her on a hostel rooftop in Hanoi or found myself beside her on a sleeper bus to Hoi An.  

# 

Angel’s Billabong.  

It makes angels of so many.  

They come, the tourists, because it is stunning. Nature’s most beautiful infinity pool, they call it. Perched on the west of Nusa Penida, it gazes across the Indian Ocean at its big commercial sister, Bali.  

They don their most photogenic swimwear, risk the clamber down rocks jagged as shark’s teeth to ease themselves into the aquamarine pool. This way, they direct their friends who are snapping the Instagram-ready images. Make sure you get the ocean in. Do I look fat? 

‘Please, don’t go down there.’ 

I said that to you just before you fixed me with a stare. Then, you turned to Amy.  

‘Take lots of pictures’, you instructed and threw your t-shirt on the grass.  

When the wave came, you leaped to your feet, but it picked you up and smashed you against the cove.  

‘Oh God!’ gasped Amy, dropping the phone. ‘Fuck!’ 

The pool swelled white and angry, hissing and spitting, sucking and rolling. It threw you against the cliff sides, batting you from side to side like an inconsequential fruit fly. It smashed your handsome features against the peaked limestone walls, pushed your sun-warmed head beneath the surface then left you on a rocky ledge.  

It departed as quickly as it came, swift, elegant: a clean assassin.  

You were dead before the intruding water leapt back over the lip into the roiling sea. 

I hope that first blow killed you straight away and that you didn’t flail in a breathless panic, thrashing for the surface. 

# 

The sheets are cold and wet: sweat-soaked and then cooled by the pedestal fan that spits out dust motes with every laboured rotation. My mouth feels dry and thick, and slimy strands of spittle collect at the corners of my lips. Hands squeeze my brain.  

She is sitting at the end of the bed, straight-backed, staring at something on the floor, dressed in a baggy t-shirt. Yours, I assume. It swamps her small, athletic body.  

I sit up straight, rub my eyes, hoping that the motion will make her turn around, to start talking to me. But apart from a few loose strands of hair trying to escape her ponytail, nothing moves. 

‘Amy’, I say. 

She shakes her head, quick, tight.  

I scan the floor for my clothes, locating them in a tangled embrace with hers. I daren’t move; she’s so still. Silence chokes the room, broken only by a gecko announcing his triumphant digestion of a mosquito.  

Amy sighs, the outbreath escaping on a shudder.  

‘His things’, she says. She waves a limp hand at a backpack in the corner, bent like an old man. It is one of those North Face ones that would cost me a month’s salary, and, judging by the items spilling out the top, the contents are probably worth everything I own.  

‘Amy, I…’  

She stands. ‘I’m going for a shower.’ She tugs the shirt down her legs as she crosses the floor to the bathroom. ‘To be clear, I’m showering you off my body. Not him. Maybe you could be gone by the time I get out.’  

# 

My mother doesn’t look at me when I return home.  

We live behind the warung that she runs with her sister, Widi: three adults in two small rooms, cooking, sleeping, simmering.  

She manages twelve minutes before words bubble out.  

‘Where were you last night, Gede?’ 

She does not stop chasing the mie goreng around the wok with her skimmer, does not draw her eyes from the effervescent oil smoking up the pan.  

‘There was an accident.’ 

‘I heard about the drowned boy.’ She adds a palmful of chilli flakes to the noodles. ‘But you should have been at home. I was worried.’ 

‘I stayed to help the girl’, I say. ‘Amy.’ Her name feels too thick for my mouth.  

‘Bodoh sekali!’ Mother slams the skimmer onto the bench. ‘These western girls aren’t like us. You should stay away.’ 

‘Aku minta maaf.’ I apologise, but I’m not really sure what for.  

She shakes her head but slides the noodles into a bowl and holds them out to me. An Indonesian mother can be madder than a snake, but she will not see her offspring go hungry. Today though, the gelatinous entrails make me think of the strands of liquid garnet trailing from your head.  

I turn away.  

# 

Your parents have arrived on the island.  

I get a message from Wayan at the hospital, who says they want to meet me there, where they are still holding your body.  

They are not what I expected: they don’t look very French. I cannot see your proud jaw or your heavy brow on either of them, nor can I see your open posture, your straight back.  

Both are curled. They make me think of thin bread drying in the sun, corners folding in on themselves, trying to disappear. Their clothes too are hastily thrown on, crumpled.  

Your mother’s face sags at the jowls, though she can’t be much more than fifty. She is a cracked ceramic that someone has hastily glued back together without care.  

She weeps and takes my hand. ‘You were there’, she whispers.  

I tried to tell him not to go, I want to say. But I don’t know if that will make it better or worse.  

If I could have shown you this broken face before, you would never have gone down there.  

‘I’m so sorry’, I tell them. ‘It happened very quickly.’ 

Your father nods tightly, puts a limp hand on my shoulder.  

I did not know that Amy would be there, that she would arrive with her own parents in tow. She enters the cafe in the hospital foyer like a hesitant child, looking at her parents to lead the way.  

She has grown smaller, dwarfed by your backpack which she grips to her chest, and her restless eyes cannot settle on your mother, your father. Or me.  

‘Amy’, says your mother and succumbs to a wracking, heaving bout of sobs. Amy drops the backpack and lets herself be embraced, disappearing into the creased linen of your mother’s blouse. The fathers shake hands stiffly, hers murmuring a pointless So sorry.  

Amy does not cry. Instead, her face is waxy, stiff, like a snuffed-out candle.  

Her parents gesture vaguely and wander away, wearing palpable relief as they leave the foetid air of grieving parents. And then the four of us are alone. We take seats around a sticky Formica table.  

The embassy man comes to collect your parents. Andre something, he said. They’ve flown him in from Jakarta, and he is too shiny for this place amongst the infirm and the bewildered, where the doctors are uniformed in the resignation of the understaffed and underresourced.  

They shake my hand, stroke Amy’s face, and your father struggles to swing your backpack onto his sagging shoulder.  

We watch them go. Amy empties a sugar sachet onto the table, scoring curls into it with a toothpick. Her parents haven’t returned yet. I clear my throat, push back my chair. She looks at me, toothpick suspended above the spilled crystals.  

‘I didn’t even know he had a sister’, she says. ‘He never mentioned her. Or if he did, I didn’t listen.’ She scratches out the curls, hard, snapping the toothpick. She looks at me then. ‘They’re calling me his girlfriend in the press. Like we were a proper couple. We weren’t. He kissed this other girl in Nha Trang, about a week after we met. It bothered me, but I said it was fine. And after here…’ she sighs. ‘He made it clear that he wanted to do the next bit on his own. Asked my plans first. I said “Gilis”; he went “Ah, Rinjani hike for me.” He knows I haven’t got walking boots. Knew.’  

She laughs then. ‘I’m tied to him forever now, aren’t I? They want to keep in touch, his parents. Fuck!’ 

I ask, ‘Are you mad at me?’ 

She frowns. ‘We shouldn’t have slept together, if that’s what you mean.’ 

‘Am I in trouble?’ 

‘You mean, did you take advantage of a drunk grieving woman? Yes, you probably did.’ 

I tried to leave, I think. And I was pretty shaken too. You begged me to stay, and then we were both crying, and then we were kissing, and then you gathered me into your yielding flesh, and we cried some more, and then we held one another until sleep sucked the images away.  

‘I don’t want to talk about it’, she says. ‘I want to get this shit over with and go home and forget any of this happened.’ 

# 

I find the band down the side of the back seat, the day after I meet your parents.  

It’s a ratty little thing: red cotton with frayed tendrils spurting from a tight knot. I recognise it from the bunch you were wearing around your wrist.  

‘They from tubing?’ asked a Scandinavian at the dock when I picked you and Amy up from the boat.  

You grinned, nodded, as he held up his own wrist, heavy with the same bands.  

The language of backpackers.  

You chatted for a few minutes, promising to meet up for a drink the next night.  

I wonder if he knows that you’re dead. Wonder if he waited for you in Fullmoon bar, eventually getting bored, making friends with a new group.  

I slide the band around my wrist and examine it. Is there a reality where a barman tied twine around my wrist while his colleague poured a shot of bitter Thai whisky down my neck? 

I slip it off and into my pocket. I will give it to someone, I think. Your parents; Amy.  

But at home, I slide it inside my pillowcase.  

# 

There’s a memorial thing tonight, before your parents fly back to Rouen with your tattered body. Before they have to figure out how to fill the you-shaped holes that will yawn at them from every room; before they have to decide what to do with your wardrobe full of clothes, your car, your place at university; before they embark on learning how to forget you just enough to be able to go on.   

Before all that, they must remember, here in this place where you sucked in your last frantic breath.  

My mother doesn’t want me to go. ‘Gila kau!’ she says. You’re crazy!  

It doesn’t help that I’m standing in the doorway which gives her palpitations at the best of times. ‘Pergilah dari sini’, she yells. Get out of here.  

I’m dressed as smartly as I can: clean jeans, long-sleeved, pinstripe shirt, the leather brogues that belonged to my father. In the small, fat-speckled mirror, I look quite presentable. For a moment, I wonder what you might have worn to an occasion like this if it had been Amy and not you who’d died.  

And under the sleeve of my shirt, encircling my wrist, is your thin band. 

I drive to Pura Paluang alone, car crunching on the stony roads. I’m not alone on the road though: several other cars snake up the hill with me, one of them carrying your parents.  

It is light when we arrive, but the sun hangs heavy as a pregnant belly, and the stout copper stripe on the horizon bleeds into purple. Here, the sky likes to put on a show for visitors, though I’m doubtful any of them will pay it much heed.  

Your mother hugs me as I walk through the gate. She’s grey as the stone deities glaring at the assembled, eyes wild, hair uncombed. Your father’s back is rounded into a question mark.  

Amy stands between her parents, arms interlocked. They all wear the required sarongs handed out on entry, inexpertly tied like beach attire. I want to tie them properly but resist. A scattering of locals intersperses the westerners, conspicuous in their kebaya and batik. The Scandinavian from the port is there, his wrist still shackled by the bands, and I feel yours on my wrist like a searing tether.  

There’s a blessing first, in Balinese, and the air is thick with incense as we ask the gods to protect your soul. Here, we believe that the soul is an eternal thing that will return often in different guises. But yours is trapped there in your body, caged behind your ribs and matted hair for a while longer until your parents let it free in your homeland.  

Amy steps onto the small platform haloed by the setting sun. Soft, white cloud wisps stroke the sky, and Venus glints quietly on the horizon. 

‘Guilleme was a wonderful man’, she says, voice wooden, face blank. ‘We had only known each other a short time, but together we had many adventures.’ There follows a list of your travels together, presented as dully as a shopping list.  

When she is done, your father takes her place, squeezing her shoulder in relay as he presents his son to these strangers.  

I learn nothing new in the anecdotes your father tells: a fall from a tree you’d been told not to climb, a bizarre tale of you stealing bread which I suppose we are meant to find endearing, a few triumphant athletic wins. In all of these tales, I see your flinty eyes staring me down when I warned you how dangerous the billabong is. And for a moment, I’m furious at your parents. Why didn’t you stop this wilful arrogance?  

‘Sounds like an awesome guy’, says the Scandinavian to me. ‘Wish I could have got to know him.’ 

Amy finds me afterwards. ‘Gede, can you take me to the billabong?’ 

She is framed by a navy-blue sky, flecked with pinpricks of light. Tendrils of her hair catch on the breeze, and, below, a petulant surf licks at the boots of the cliff.  

‘It is dark’, I tell her, looking away. ‘And I thought you hated me.’ 

‘I’m sorry. I was angry. Upset.’ She lays her fingertips on my arm. ‘Please.’ 

Her parents are talking to yours, nodding, squeezing hands, and people mill about trying not to appreciate the view too much out of respect for the dead boy.  

‘I don’t know.’ 

Amy leans on the wall that keeps the temple from careening into the Indian Ocean.  

‘I leave tomorrow. I’d like to say a proper goodbye.’ 

I don’t ask whether it is me, you or the island she wants to bid selamat tinggal to.  

On the surface of the quiet water, a waxing gibbous moon ripples and refracts. There is little light from the stars now though, so the torch I keep in my car beams from the lip of the cliff. Below the billabong, waves smash against the steep limestone, foamy droplets rearing over the parapet of the pool from time to time.  

Amy’s legs dangle over the edge; I keep mine crossed.  

‘Is it awful to say that I had started to dislike him?’ She throws a clump of grass that she has torn from the ledge into the pool. ‘Disliked him, but I still wanted him, you know?’ 

A bat swoops close to the edge of the cliff, pulls up at the last second, skitters off into the night.  

‘Like, he was a bit mean sometimes, you know? And that girl, the one he kissed in Nha Trang, he was going to meet up with her in Bali when I was there, except she missed her flight.’  

‘I thought his parents might want to send me to jail.’ 

‘What?’ she frowns. ‘Why?’ 

‘Because I was your guide. I was meant to look after him.’ 

Amy snorts. ‘No. Who thinks like that? We can look after ourselves. Besides, Gee never listened to anyone. If you knew him for more than a day, you’d have known that.’ 

I did, I think. But it doesn’t stop the weight from pressing hard into my shoulders.  

Amy leans into me, the skin on her arm still carrying a mote of the day’s heat. ‘Hold me, Gede.’ 

I get to my feet, pick up the torch. ‘No.’ I start walking across the stones to the car, not caring that I’ve left her in the semi-dark of the night. ‘But I’ll drive you back.’ 

# 

It is still light when I reach the billabong, though most of the tourists are leaving. Now, their guides will take them to Amok to watch the sunset, and tonight’s promises to be a good one.  

I hang my legs over the side of the cliff, the way Amy did the last time I saw her. I wonder if she has travelled to Rouen for your funeral or has done as she said she would: gone home to Townsville to ‘forget this shit’. We won’t be keeping in touch. 

The water in the billabong lies sheet-flat, not a wrinkle in its tourmaline waters, not the kiss of a breeze to disturb it.  

Why couldn’t you have been like this? I ask the pool.  

I run my finger under your band and around my wrist. I decided that Amy didn’t deserve to have it, since she disliked you so much in the end. Besides, your parents already gave her a few things that you probably wouldn’t have wanted her to have. Maybe you would have rather given them to the Nha Trang girl, whoever or wherever she is.  

My eyes fall closed. I breathe in, deep as the ocean, exhaling with a sigh. I am still, stiller than the water, stiller than the inert slopes of the cliff: body, mind, still.  

And then I feel you. The moment, I know, when you have been released from your body. My shoulders fall, and I blink softly, viewing the site of your death through a soft lens.  

I slide the band from my arm, ball it up, throw it over the lip. It pauses in the air then flutters, landing on the surface, as innocuous as a loose thread torn from a shirt.  

For a while, it will float, quietly, before the ocean crashes down, dragging it out to the open sea then letting it drift, drift.  

2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist: Issue 1