essence of being a mother? Panic first, love second. Those were the rules. And anyway, it was different for Tim. She sighed as she gingerly stepped onto the metal stairs outside the plane and gripped the railing firmly.
*
‘Where you go, lady?’
She glanced at the taxi driver as she clambered into a blue cab, which looked like it had seen better days. She searched for a seatbelt in the back seat, but there didn’t seem to be any as the driver sped, erratically, off to the right. ‘Jesus!’
Maddie searched in her bag for the name of Ed’s hotel. When she’d told him the name, he turned around quickly.
‘Not for lady like you,’ he said curtly.
What on earth did he mean? I need to find Ed, she thought, winding the window down and enjoying the breeze on her face. She breathed in a heady smell of something flowery followed by something quite sour; she screwed her nose up at the unpleasant smell.
After what seemed like quite a short distance, they were in a crowded, noisy road. Motorbikes sped past them, sounding like they were about to break down any minute, a high-pitched whiny noise, the smell of diesel in the air; there were neon-lit bars, pumping out music and spilling out tourists onto the pavement. A motorbike whizzed next to the taxi. There was a woman riding side-saddle at the back, her legs dangling dangerously, grinning like a lunatic. At 3 a.m. in Little Rowland even the ‘twenty-four-hour’ garage was shut.
The taxi took a turn to the left, down a dark street, then abruptly took a smaller lane to the right and stopped. ‘Here hostel is,’ the taxi driver said to her, then he turned around. ‘Seventy thousand rupiah.’
There was a sign in pink neon above the door: ‘The Luna Bali Hostel’. The ‘l’ was un-lit. She walked towards the dimly lit entrance and suddenly felt overwhelmed. Taking a deep breath, she strode into the bright foyer at 3 a.m. in the middle of Kuta Beach, in Bali, in her Marks and Spencer casualwear and wondered what on earth she was doing.
An older Asian woman, possibly in her sixties, was at a grubby wooden desk. She looked up at Maddie and scratched her grey hair as Maddie approached.
‘Yes?’ Gold hooped earrings dangled in her ears.
‘My son is staying here. Do you know him?’ She swiped to a photo on her phone.
Paint was peeling in the top corner of the wall. A moth fluttered about by the light in the middle of the ceiling.
The woman looked up, then said, ‘Room 3, but he no there. Hospital. Hurt; he surfing. He go yesterday. You pay room?’
Maddie frowned. ‘Which hospital?’
‘You pay for room.’
A gold tooth gleamed where her incisor should have been. Maddie handed over the money and the woman stuffed it in a drawer. ‘You come. I show you room.’
Maddie followed the woman as she shuffled through a small archway along the corridor leading to gardens at the back of the hostel. The path was lit with tiny lanterns enclosing tea lights on each side and she could smell both the cloying scent of the trees and the slightly dubious smells of what was possibly a nearby toilet.
Her phoned pinged. Tim. She quickly texted him back. She could really do with him right now.
The woman opened the door and then turned to Maddie. ‘You need torch for here. No light after twelve, power no good.’ Then she turned on her heels. Maddie stood in the doorway in the dim light and felt almost nauseous with fatigue. Ed needed her.
She groped a bit forward in the dark and could just make out what looked like an unmade bed. The light from the candles on the pathway coming through the open door was enough to give her a sense of shapes, but no more. She reached into her bag, took out her phone again and swiped up for the torch. Just as she did that, a figure emerged from the bed, sat bolt upright and said in a very strong Australian accent, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
11
‘Bloody hell, woman! I nearly had a heart attack!’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Maddie replied, taking a huge slug of whisky from the glass offered to her. Only then did she stop shaking.
Johnny, as he turned out to be, was Ed’s boss from the surf school who had messaged them from Ed’s phone. He was ‘crashing’ in Ed’s room for a bit as it was nearer the hospital. They had