Island of Demons by Nigel Barley Page B

if she went back to the wild – her choice – but I brought her so far from Nusa Penida and she’d be all one her own in Bali, you see. Oh sorry,” he extended a dusty hand. “My name’s Walter. Walter Spies.”
    I shook the hand. Then the penny dropped. “Oh my god, it’s you. Walter Piss – Walter Spies. I should have guessed. I’m Rudolf Bonnet. Isn’t Ketut a human name, fourth-born child and all that?”
    â€œYes, naturally,” he ran his fingers through his hair, a characteristic gesture. “It’s a sort of joke. Cockatoo is kakak tua , ‘old elder sister or brother’ so that leads to eldest child so … er … well … it’s a sort of joke,” he ended lamely. “As for Piss, that’s as close as Balinese can get to Spies. I’ve had to get used to it.”
    There is a problem with all this linguistic badinage. What language were we speaking? I, surely, was speaking Dutch, maybe Malay, because it is impossible to be rude in a language you speak really badly. But Walter’s Dutch was abysmal. Like many Germans, he found it too close to Plattdeutsch to take it seriously as a language in its own right. His pronunciation was appalling and the vocabulary he just made up for himself out of Germanic roots. Yet he understood it perfectly, as I did German. Stupidly, it took us a while before we realised that there was absolutely no need for us to speak the same language while holding a conversation. He could speak German, I Dutch, and it worked perfectly well. Of course, with others we would sometimes speak English or Malay or Balinese. So we would flit in and out of languages, sometimes from sentence to sentence, sometimes from word to word, using whichever came first to the mind. So I’ve no idea what all this was in. Anyway, I don’t really remember the words. I was staring at the mouth. There was the suggestion of a blond moustache as of one who did not take more than boyish pains over his appearance and barely washed behind his ears before running out to play in the sun every morning. The lips had a full, infinitely mobile quality that denied any possibility of meanness and fell easily into a smile. The teeth were unaffectedly white and even and doubtless overjoyed to be in that mouth. They embraced you in a laugh of such childlike innocence that you forgot to listen to what they were saying. As I think I said before, he was the most magical person I had ever …
    A sudden flash of white and a squawk and a large bird was crabwalking up his shoulder and nuzzling his ear. Walter chuckled delightedly.
    â€œMay I introduce Ketut.” We began strolling back towards the front of the house. He had a leisurely, elegant walk despite the sandals. He paused and inclined his ear to the bird and made a solemn face. “A little bird tells me that the guardian has gone off to his sister in Sanur and will be gone for at least a week. There is neither dinner nor fresh bedding to be had. You had better come and stay with me across the road.” Walter, it seemed, in addition to everything else, spoke bird talk, a paraclete of parakeets. He nodded at snoring Bagus, mouth vulnerably open, oozing drool. “Is that your young man?”
    â€œThat’s Bagus.”
    He smiled. “Hmm. Only comparatively.” He did the bird-whispering act again. “Ketut says he’d better come too. Naturally. Oh, I hear you’re a painter. Me too – in a small way of business.”

5
    I pushed the homemade mango marmalade back across the table and smeared the dollop from my plate onto the fresh-baked bread.
    â€œThe boys made it themselves, entirely without help,” Walter twinkled, “the very best oat cuisine .” There was no butter. Times were hard at Walter’s.
    â€œI simply cannot,” I repeated with tears starting to my eyes, “stay here another day.” It was one of those traumatic