She looked at him, surprised.
‘What? Why would she do that? The last thing she’d want is for us to get even more attention.’
He shrugged, his expression unreadable.
‘Maybe she wanted less attention on her?’ he said.
The thought of this sat heavily between them.
‘Do you think they’ll send him to jail?’ she asked.
‘Ben or Jarvis?’
‘Dad.’
‘Difficult to say,’ he replied. ‘Friends in high places and all of that. But …’ he turned away from her and began to make his way downstairs, ‘I think it’s more probable than not.’
Cosima had been trying to keep the enormity of what she had done at a distance, pressing away the truth of it with the palms of her hands like she used to when she had imagined monsters coming into her room as a child. But now the weight of it was inescapable. She slid onto the floor and sat there, back against the wall. She held the mug of cooling tea and listened to the chatter and laughter of the journalists outside until the light faded and she crept into bed and tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep.
Some months later and Cosima is walking down the Canggu main street after her morning vinyasa flow. It was with a new Australian instructor called Byron, a muscled, long-haired surfer type who spoke in hush-voiced monologues about the spiritual enlightenment of learning ‘how to breathe’. He made them all hold a chaturanga for the count of twenty, which seemed unnecessary – and, she reflected as she gritted her teeth and watched sweat from her forehead drip onto the towel, actually unhelpful for learning the art of breathing. Cosima, who knew yoga wasn’t meant to be competitive, forced herself to hold for seventeen before giving in and dropping to the mat.
Usually, she values the time just after class where her chest feels lighter and her head clearer. Today, Byron has left her rattled. The scribbled canvas of her mind is cross-hatched with anxiety. A moped screeches past her, the back of it laden with a wooden crate containing four squawking hens. Morning heat sticks to her skin. She passes the stalls selling rip-off Birkenstock sandals and phone chargers, takingcare not to step into any of the delicate palm-frond baskets filled with bright flower petals and burning incense sticks. Ni Ketut, the woman who showed Cosima around on her first day volunteering at the Clean Bali Beach ecological charity, told her these little baskets were called ‘canang sari’. It was bad luck to step over one while the incense stick still burned because ‘they are offerings to the gods’.
‘Which gods?’ Cosima asked.
Ni Ketut wrinkled her nose.
‘Good and bad gods. The good because we want to please them, the bad because we don’t want them to work against us.’
‘Makes sense,’ Cosima said.
Good and bad gods. So which one was her father? She isn’t sure any more. Her old certainties are beginning to crumble, replaced by ambiguity and the seedlings of guilt. She knows why she did what she did but feels increasingly distant from that former version of herself. The past weeks have stretched into small eternities, as though she is flying high above, watching the earth several thousand feet below through double-layered Plexiglas. The earlier version of Cosima was so blinded by her own passions that she wanted to bring her father down. This newer version is starting to forgive him.
He has emailed her every single day since she left. She hasn’t replied. Not even when he told her that he and Serena had donated a sizeable sum to an environmental charity in her name.
‘We do understand, Cozzie,’ he wrote. ‘I’m sorry it has taken us so long.’
In spite of herself, she was moved by the gesture. Maybe they were trying to buy her back, but it was better than not trying at all.
Cosima walks down the dirt road towards the beach. She listens to music on her AirPods to drown out the sounds of stray dogs and traffic. She loves Canggu but it’s not a relaxing place. A relentless thrum surges through every drainage ditch and building site, every café and smoothie bar, every luxury villa and ancient temple. She stops off at her favourite coffee shop where the clientele is a mixture of social media influencers on their laptops and jet-lagged tourists, their skinstill bearing the pallor of home. Spherical rattan lampshades hang from the ceiling and drinks are served in hollowed-out coconut shells. The barista recognises her and prepares her flat white without Cosima having to ask. It’s one of the notable paradoxes of Bali that while there is almost no functioning infrastructure, there is always excellent coffee in artisanal ceramic cups decorated with hearts piped into brown-white foam.
Cosima takes her coffee to go. She’s leading a week-long clean-up and when she gets to the allotted meeting point outside the Kamikaze Bar, the three gap-year student volunteers are already there. Despite being younger than the others, Cosima was made the group leader within two weeks of her arrival.
‘You know a lot,’ Ni Ketut had said. And it was true that Cosima was able to recite all the necessary facts and figures. She’d researched it on the flight over, in the way she used to prepare for Oblivion Oil meetings, so by the time she got off the plane, she knew that Indonesia produced 6.8 million tonnes of plastic waste a year and was the second most marine-polluting country in the world. Clean Bali Beach collected rubbish from the seashore, then transported it to a waste centre where it was separated into different types of plastic and then into recyclable or non-recyclable goods. The aim was to have the least possible amount of waste left over for landfill.
The straightforwardness of it appealed to Cosima. They picked, separated, cleaned. She didn’t have to talk. She could spend whole days and weeks trawling the sand, retrieving crumpled plastic bottles and crisp packets, and she found it almost meditative: the repetitive action; the feeling of being engaged in something mindless yet meaningful; the sense that she was simultaneously making progress while knowing the task would never be completed. However often they tackled a stretch of beach, the following week it would need to be cleared again.
‘Hi guys,’ Cosima says to the gap-year students, two German boys called Heinrich and Rudy and one Welsh girl whose name she can’t remember.
‘OK, so we’re going to head towards that end,’ Cosima signals eastwards, towards the posh beach club and, beyond it, the old temple, ‘and make our way back to here. I’ve got everything we need.’
She downs the rest of her coffee, placing the cup on the sand, and unzips her backpack, taking out the fabric rubbish sacks printed with the Clean Bali Beach logo (two hands meeting across a wave). She hands them out, along with a face mask and a pair of gloves for each volunteer.
‘Sorry to sound like your mum,’ she says, ‘but have you remembered to put sunscreen on?’
The three of them nod.
‘Cool. Let’s do this.’
