Tom and Hattie

We had scrambled down to the waterfall's cup with panic twisted tightly around our chests, steam peppering at the sunlight. Hattie was face down and pushing against rock, the sound of a thousand erratic hoofbeats, the basin spitting, boiling, unfinished with her death and then yielding as we peeled her from its custody. Her hair was pasted to her face as if nature had respectfully shrouded her with clay, the sombre folding of eyelids. We tried for an hour to push the blood and air back around inside her body, bagpipe lungs, dog-tired arms, but she had left. I gave my phone number to officials, ignoring their tutting about the idiocy of Instagram bloggers risking their lives for extreme content. It was too late, too soon, too sad.

I trudge aimlessly along the dirt road until I reached the main stretch of bars and shops, all familiar, yet suddenly unfamiliar. My mouth feels tingly from being on her mouth, on the wretched clumsy coldness of her death. I sit down at my local, taking a moment to compose myself, wondering if it’s too early to order a bintang. Sam, the Aussie bar owner nods at me and calls me over. “Tom!” he grins. I walk over in string puppet flight, my body isn’t my own today.

“Hattie left this here this morning, mind dropping it off to her?” He hands me a blood-red sarong wrapped around what seems to be a book. “What’s this?” I ask.

“You know, that bloody book she writes in every morning. Always the first one here, scratching away, you know Hattie.”

Everyone thinks I know Hattie, but I don’t, not really. I don’t deserve that title. I nod at Sam and take it. I don’t order breakfast, or a beer. I walk, my feet dragging me along paths just because they’ve been there before.

The silence surrounding my villa is unnerving. I try not to look at the villa next door where she should be, a deathly dream I can’t process yet. Back in my room I undress my unexpected inheritance, and try not to think about the ethics of reading her journal. I’m surprised that there isn’t the black moleskin I expect to find in its fold - instead there are just pages as if cut from the middle. The pages are only ten centimetres across the top, fifteen down and about an inch thick, and chock full of drawings, graphs, lists and scribbled paragraphs.

An intimate journal that had been meticulously mangled.

I feel suddenly annoyed. I had wanted to read her words, to bargain a way into her inner life, to find some kind of connective channel - to absolve my guilt, or to perhaps convict it. Yet, with all the sides missing, the beginnings and the ends, the skins of her feelings and experiences, I don’t know if it would just be an endless jumble of unended phrases and empty candy wrappers. Before I have the chance to process my moral dilemma and my frustration, on absentmindedly flicking through I catch my name on a page about halfway in, bold and underlined twice. TOM. Stark, as if unwanted on its surface, intrusive.

Fuck! I can’t do this. I put the pages back together like sacred tarot cards, one on top of the other, and lay back on the bed avoiding its scrutinising energy. I pull my shorts off, let them slap wet onto the concrete floor, and lay there naked.

The first time I saw Hattie was in a resort in India. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but she was beautiful. It was more that she had an inner thing you could feel across the room. We sat on concrete stools at the swim-up bar, pink clouds had looped around us and reflected onto the pool. We were both big travellers and in India solo, blogging, and so naturally the conversation flowed.

I was dazzled by her ease, her lack of fuss over her own kinesics and speech. She was full-throttle class and dark humour and surreal dreams wrapped into one, a lolly that melts and then explodes sherbet in your mouth when you’re least expecting it. There was this chemical lean into her that I couldn’t control.

We stayed in the pool drinking tequila until our fingertips were ridged with chlorine bloat, our cheeks sore from laughing. The moon was a waning crescent that night, just like the tattoo at the base of Hattie’s neck. At the time I had felt it like a prophecy.

I had a friend who managed a sailing yacht business, and he’d agreed to let me hire a 14 foot Catamaran in the off season for less than half the usual price if I agreed to create content using my drone and video equipment. It had been a dream of Hattie’s for years to sail, and so I asked her if she’d work with me on it. We figured we could rent out rooms to influencers and make a buck. Hattie wanted to gift any money we made to a local balinese animal shelter that she had once volunteered for, which I thought was a great idea. We planned an eight week expedition, leaving in five months time. It was a decent amount of cash upfront - a whooping 40k - but we’d make it all back and either way we both knew it was a trip of a lifetime. Hattie told me she needed some time to save up her share, which was cool with me. We spent another week in India adventuring, and then I left on a tourism board sponsored trip to the Philippines with plans to meet up in another country in a month.

I’m not sure why in Hattie's absence my heart tilted on an axis to form this kind of off-skew feeling. I resented our mental closeness, and felt a strange kind of goose bump guilt when I’d sleep with other women. The shame intrusively stuffing up in my chest was an unfamiliar reflex.

On account of becoming a flaccid mess of a man and not liking it, I basically ghosted her in a whim to get my manhood back. I put the sailing idea to rest for the time being. I surfed Cape Town, snowboarded Japan and New Zealand, hiked the Bayasho Wayfarer solo, partied in Israel at the half-burn, and did Ayahuasca in Ecuador.

Eight months later a friend hooked me up to stay at a boutique villa in Canggu, Bali. My heart nearly fell out of my chest when I saw her, my new next door neighbour, glaring at me from over the small separating wall. Hattie was frosty at first, and then one night we got stuck into her favourite Indonesian drink, Arak, got wasted, and all seemed to be forgiven. Maybe she just didn’t care much about the ghosting.

It’s hard to imagine what you might mean to other people.

We fell back into the rhythm of our travel fling for two glorious months, and then just last week we revisited the sailing idea. I contacted my buddy and he said the offer still stood, but the time had to be now, as the season was soon to be back in full swing and there were hoards of rich folk lining up for hires. Hattie was so keen, her share of the investment ready to go. I could feel the responsibility of her affection, and so I gave her vague answers with timing, wondering if maybe I should just ditch her and do the trip with my mates instead.

The sound of my phone vibrating interrupts my undulating mental recline into Hattie. I answer. The police tell me they’ve transported her body to the mortuary and are waiting instructions from her parents. I try not to think about how much she wouldn’t want strangers touching her. They ask for the villa address, to ‘collect her things for the family’, although I suspect really it’s to loot her possessions, and I instantly think of the moleskin - the missing piece of my puzzle. I give them the address, jump up, slide on some dry shorts, and head next door. I had expected a frantic fuck-around in the villa, but the prize was tucked neatly under her pillow, a twin half begging to be reunited. I pack a backpack with both of Hattie’s sarong-wrapped possessions and some clothes, and get out of there. I ride my scooter to Uluwatu. My pack feels strange on my skin, as if it’s emitting some kind of taunting radiation into my bare back.

When I get to Uluwatu I buy some of Hattie’s favourite incense, some groceries, and then ask around at a few backpacker-like resorts for a private villa. On the third try I’m taken to a simple cliff top room overlooking Bingin beach. There’s no private bathroom, but the views are worth the compromise. I put my backpack down on the far right desk, take out my two puzzle pieces, and place them on the bed. I feel like the occasion deserves some kind of ceremony. I light the sandalwood incense and move around the room, a sudden grief lumped in my chest. I pour a little Arak with some honey and lime, one for Hattie and one for me. I cheers the air and sip, and then unwrap the scarf, hoping to God it’s the moleskin I’m expecting.

It is. Perfectly black and smooth, overlapped with black elastic.

I open the cover, my heart thumping so hard I can feel it in my gullet. It’s chock full of hundred dollar bills, sitting calmly in the blank space. I count 20k - it's the cash for the sailing trip, fuck! I wrap the cash in the sarong, and then slowly start to tape each page to its twin and read, from start to finish. It’s mainly detailing her adventures, however, there’s a common theme of sailing trip plans, as well as a chart of her savings. I figure she must have only recently taken the cash out, and her journal was sacrificed as a safe hiding place.

There’s only one line about me dating back to around the time I ghosted her.

TOM. What a fuckwit. You think you connect with someone and then you realise that you sure as shit can’t trust anyone. What a dick.

She’s right, I’m a dick, but it’s the guilt of depriving Hattie of her dream that is almost too much to bear. The heaving at my chest, the chunks of heartbreak all bound in my gut fall out then. I cry, and then throw up, and then sleep for twelve hours straight.

I ride back to Canggu after a week or so, and give Hattie’s 20k to the local animal shelter. They’re overwhelmed with gratitude and tears when I tell them who it came from. Somehow I end up leaving with a happy little mix breed dog called Sunny. I hire the sailboat, and Sunny and I set sail following Hattie’s thorough plan. On her parents' request, I ceremoniously spread a little of Hattie’s ashes in each location, and every time the moon is a waning crescent, Sunny and I sit under the stars and I drink Arak, straight.

Just before Hattie had climbed to the top of that waterfall, she had turned to me, wild hair swaying, that smile all up in her eyes. She said, “You know Tom, for a man that’s not scared of anything, you’re sure as shit scared of me, aren’t you?” We both knew what she meant. I had laughed, even if the truth of her words pinched hard. I was scared of her, scared of love, scared what it would mean to tell a woman something I actually meant.

You know, I didn’t think I needed to change and now that I’ve realised that I sure as shit do, it’s too late, because I can’t imagine giving my heart to anyone that isn’t Hattie.