She’d been living in Indonesia for just over three months when Petra walked back into her life, flanked by her brothers, wreathed in a halo of kretek smoke. Up until that moment, Diana had been able to lie to herself about why she’d picked the Jakarta posting.

She landed at Soekarno–Hatta at night, in the middle of the dry season. Came out of the plane into a wall of air that smelt heavy, of bodies and things shifting state. Followed the other passengers over dark red tiles, down a gently sloping ramp to immigration, where she chose a line at random and waited, gritty and spacey and high with the knowledge that she was finally there. She’d arrived.

The American couple in front of her were breathing loudly and saying: You know you’re in Asia when you smell that, don’t you? Don’t that smell like Asia, Pat? Don’t it just?

Dari mana, missus?

The official, strapped tightly into his brown uniform, leant over the pages of her passport: Where you from?

Walking out of arrivals and into a crowd of men muttering transport, transport, she tried to look as if she knew what she was doing, sorried and no-thank-youed through them, then was hustled towards a blue taxi by a man with fake leather shoes at least three sizes too big for him. His heels flapped as he ushered her into the cab.

At first they drove through a low, moving dimness, and Diana tried not to think about where the driver might be taking her. She repeated the hotel’s name, the street, over and over, but he only smiled, nodded. Crumbling walls to either side of the highway sprouted lean-tos and rubbish heaps. Then they were turning onto a main road, punctuated by repairs, abandoned tractors and diggers. She breathed, leant back in her seat. Men slept scattered on the ground among the work vehicles, t-shirts wound around their faces, or lay stretched out on the concrete between the orange warning cones as the traffic whipped by on either side.

They passed through a tollbooth. At the very edge of the highway motorbikes clustered around shacks selling food under bare fluorescent bulbs. The road rose up from the thick darkness on stilts, spinning her out over canals and shadowed streets, and she had a glimpse of the city lights rolling all the way to the horizon, a spread of sparks and streams and large areas of blackness strewn with the weak blink of generators. Jakarta.

Petra’s city.


Out there, somewhere, were Petra and her brothers, the brothers Diana had never met. Petra had talked about them constantly, though, Isaak and the half-brother Paul. Thin voices on Petra’s phone, names flashing across its screen; scrawling handwriting on an envelope still to be opened; the photograph on the fridge door that Diana had stared at so many times in Petra’s Melbourne apartment: the three of them as children in traditional Javanese dress, posing in front of a silver car on a fading afternoon. Isaak, maybe ten years old, maybe eleven, one hand resting with a posed casualness on the pommel of the pretend ceremonial sword stuck in the sash of his sarong. His other arm clamped around the youngest’s shoulders: chubby Paul, so white next to his half-siblings that his features had nearly disappeared over time.

Next to them in the photograph, a grown-up, an Indonesian woman. Staring down the barrel of the lens and into the future. Petra, young and fierce, holding on to the woman’s arm, keeping her in the frame.

Six years, since Diana had seen Petra Jordan.

She sat with the window of the taxi wound down. Each tollbooth brought them into higher buildings, stronger lights, more traffic, until they were part of a metal herd crawling through an illuminated world — Starbucks, BreadTalk, J-Lo, Dunkin’ Donuts, Carrefour, Zara, Hero.

They came to the centre of the tangle, where a line of cars was backed up a ramp. Men with shrilling, shrieking whistles clamped between their teeth were anchored across the mess, directing traffic inch by clamouring inch. Motorbikes pressed against bumper bars. On the back of the scooter next to Diana’s window a woman in a blue Muslim bonnet sat sidesaddle, reading a magazine. Two children were wedged in between her and the man steering, the toddler asleep with his mouth open as the whistles blew in his ear.

On that first night she woke in the half-light to a wail. Surrounded by unfamiliar things. Yes, a hotel. The sound went on and on, urgent, rising in pitch, distorting. Dropping to sudden silence. It broke out again, was picked up by a second voice, echoed, deeper and with more distortion, then a third, closer, higher, and within seconds there were hundreds of them. They howled across the night, a wordless song, grating and sweet. Painful. The bedside clock blinked at her. 4.38 a.m.

She lay, staring at the latticework of shadows on the ceiling, listening to her first call to prayer. In her mind a flood of men and women swirled up tiled stairs. She must have fallen asleep at some point, because she woke again to bright white walls and the sound of traffic, tiny, muted whistles, the mousy protest of brakes and horns.