Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw

sick; it was as if someone had doused Adam with cold water, and he was able to rise slowly to his feet. The other boys had backed off; Neng was straddling the bicycle and ringing its bell. ‘Come on,’ she said gaily to Adam, as if nothing had happened. She patted the horizontal bar in front of her. ‘You sit here, I’ll cycle. OK? Great. Off we go!’

      Along the coast road the wind was fresh and tinged with the softness of impending rain. The clouds strained the sunlight that fell on the waves, and this made the sea look calm in places but dark and mysterious in others. It was often like this on Perdo, where the slightest shift in the weather could change the very nature of the island. On those days when the sun was high and unflinching the possibility of rain would seem ridiculous, and on rainy days, when water soaked through everything, you might believe that even if the sun were to reappear, it would never be able to dry the moisture from the earth. But there were other days, too – days such as today, when you could feel both the dry dustiness and the heavy moisture that made up the very air on this island.

      Neng produced a banana from her pocket. It was blackened and squashed, the pulp beginning to ooze from its tip where it had been torn from its comb. ‘You look tired,’ she said, handing it to Adam. ‘Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.’

      It was very ripe and mushy and sweet. Adam ate it quickly and wiped the stickiness from his fingers on his shorts. Maybe it was the fresh breeze, maybe it was his imagination, but the trembling in his chest began to subside, his heartbeat calming. He blinked; there was dust in his eyes and he turned his head from the wind. His face was very close to Neng’s now, and he could see the tiny imperfections, the fragile creases of skin on the scar on her face. She was smiling, and stuck out her tongue at him, just as she had done on the day. It was beginning to rain: the first heavy drops of a shower, falling through the leaves above them.

      ‘Hey, it’s getting late,’ said Neng. ‘You look tired. I think you should just go home. We’re not far from where you live.’

      ‘But I want to go with you – you know, to help you collect your rice.’

      The bicycle slowed to a halt and Adam had to hop off it. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go on my own. Your father will be worried. Besides, you look really tired. I don’t want to get the blame – I’ve been blamed for enough things already!’ She handed him the bike and began to walk off into the distance, heading away from the coast into the hills. The rain was falling heavily now, an earnest downpour that would not ease up for at least an hour, maybe two. Adam felt a sudden panic at being left behind, and started to follow her. She turned round and said, ‘If you follow me I’ll kick your balls too.’

      He watched her splash through the puddles that were forming on the road; the rain fell like a thick curtain of mist, and within a few seconds she was out of sight.

      As he cycled home, Adam felt the rain running in thin rivulets down his face and neck until his entire body was wet. Occasionally a gust of wind would sweep raindrops into his eyes and he would have to slow down and blink hard just to see where he was going; his plimsolls were soaked through and his toes felt clammy and gritty. But the rain and wind were not cold, and he was no longer tired. Funny, he thought: at this moment, he didn’t even fear what tomorrow might bring.

      ‘Where have you been, son?’ Karl said, rushing to meet him with an enormous towel that he held between outstretched arms, the way the fishermen hold their nets before flinging them out to sea.

      ‘Nowhere,’ said Adam, letting Karl towel his hair vigorously. ‘I just took my time. It was…it was raining.’

      With his head wrapped in the darkness of the towel, Adam knew how unconvincing this sounded. For a moment, he considered telling Karl all that had happened. He was doing something wrong, he knew that. He knew he ought to share everything with Karl because Karl did the same for him; Karl had taken him in and shared his whole life with Adam, so why couldn’t Adam do this tiny thing for him? He also knew that if he was going to tell Karl he must do it immediately, otherwise the opportunity would be lost. Two, three, four, five seconds. The moment was gone.

      Adam did not feel bad at all. Now that the moment was over it did not seem as if he had done anything wrong. Karl lifted the towel from his head and draped it across his shoulders, letting it fall around him like a cape. He looked at Adam unblinkingly, waiting for an explanation, but Adam merely stared out at the murky sea.

      Karl said, ‘You should go and change out of those wet clothes.’

      The next day, Neng was waiting for him in the shade of some trees, not far from where the main road curved towards the town; the dirt track that led to school ran like a tangent away from the road, disappearing into the bushes beyond. ‘Let’s skip school, maybe go for a walk. It isn’t going to rain today,’ Neng anounced, squinting at the sun.

      They left the coast behind and began to cycle along the gravel tracks that led into the hills, and when the path became too steep they hid the bike behind some bushes and began to walk. The coarse earth crunched underfoot, the black volcanic sand sticking to Neng’s bare toes and covering them like tar. She talked endlessly, pointing things out to Adam: a flock of brilliant green parakeets fluttering like giant locusts in the distance; a boulder the shape of a hand with its fingers cut off; the coral reefs which, from up in the hills, resembled a map, a huge watery atlas.

      She told him about herself, too. Her father was in jail because he’d killed someone, she said cheerily. Well, not exactly killed him, but the man he’d had a fight with had died, purely by accident. All Neng’s father had done was hit him; OK, he hit him quite hard, even her mother said so, but still, he wasn’t the only one. There had been lots of men fighting, it was just a street brawl outside the rice merchant, you know, just by the clock tower. But her father was the only one who was still in jail. Just because he’s Madurese. It was so unfair. He didn’t even want to be on this island anyway.

      ‘Then why did you come here?’ Adam couldn’t remember where Madura was, but it sounded far away. He tried to remember his lessons at home with Karl, when Karl had shown him where all the big cities and islands of Indonesia were.

      She frowned, looking closely at him with squinted eyes as if she had spotted something nasty on his face. ‘God, you’re dumb. Transmigration. We were forced to, just like everyone else.’

      They had had nothing in Madura; it was an overcrowded island where there were a few cows and too many people who had no food and no work. They had been promised work, she said, in a place where there were few people and much land. The government was building a new pumice mine and there were lots of jobs, and maybe the workers would be given some land of their own. Her parents didn’t even know what pumice was. Don’t worry, the official had told them; we will give you rice to eat every month and your kids will go to school. But the mine was never built. There was no land for them, and often no rice. They’d been in Perdo for three years, but there was no work at all.

      ‘What about you?’ Neng asked. ‘Where did you come from?’

      Adam shrugged. He looked around, hoping to see those parakeets again, but there was nothing.

      ‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching out and touching him on the elbow. Her scar obscured her cheek and made her look as if she was only smiling with half her face. ‘I forgot you’re an orphan.’

      ‘That’s OK,’ he smiled. But he thought to himself: it was not OK. Why did he not know which part of Indonesia he was from? What dialect had his parents spoken? Even orphans had to come from somewhere. It was not that he had never dared ask Karl, but rather that it had never occurred to him to ask. He had known little of his past and cared even less, and he had liked it that way. So why was he now troubled by this lack of knowledge? Suddenly he felt guilty at having missed school without telling Karl.

      ‘Come on,’ Neng said, breaking into a run, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ Beyond the trees the grassland gave way to a rocky plain covered with cacti and scrubby bushes; in the distance the land rose towards the point of the dead volcano that dominated the island. Neng disappeared behind some rocks, and when Adam caught up he saw that she had crawled into a natural depression sheltered from the sun and