Chapter XX Cosima #2
She turned. His face was gleeful.
‘He’s done it,’ Martin said. ‘At last. He’s done it.’
Cosima had no joy. She experienced a shrinking, as if the horizon had contracted and there was no way of connecting to what else was happening around her.
She had thought she and Martin wanted the same thing – namely, to take her father and Jarvis down – but she realised now her feelings had been lying to her.
He was her dad, after all, and perhaps it was possible to love and hate the same person when they were part of you.
‘He’s saying he’s passed the files to the Metropolitan Police!’ Martin said, with a single clap of his hands. ‘Yes, very good, Harriet – press home the point that it’s a criminal matter. Ha! This is working out better than we ever could have imagined …’
He squeezed her shoulder. It was the first time Martin had ever touched her. She tried to be happy. She wanted to celebrate the execution of their joint plan, this moment of triumph. But when she searched for joy, she found nothing.
The following forty-eight hours passed like scenery through a rushing train window: brushstrokes of melding colour, painted at warp speed by unknown hands.
Her phone exploded. Her mother called and sent increasingly frantic texts.
Her father emailed several times, trying to explain himself, trying to say sorry.
She didn’t reply to any of them. She was too scared and too ashamed.
TikTok was awash with videos of her father and Jarvis walking into New Scotland Yard.
Not arrested, apparently, like some of the reporters stated, but interviewed under caution with a lawyer present.
Martin brought home the papers and her parents were splashed across all the front covers.
They’d used a recent picture of her father from the British Museum reception and reprinted the old photo of him and Jarvis as students, in white tie at a Pitt Club dinner in Cambridge.
Her mother was shown looking harassed at the wheel of their Range Rover, driving out of the Tipworth gates, hair in a loose ponytail, the flash of cameras reverberating off the glass of the car window.
At least she’d be happy she looked thin, Cosima thought.
Soon, Cosima was getting calls from journalists who had uncovered her connection with Oblivion Oil and when she didn’t answer, they somehow traced her to Martin’s cottage and turned up on the doorstep.
Martin had to keep the curtains closed to avoid the cameras.
He made her cups of tea and brought them to her bedroom.
‘They’ll lose interest soon enough,’ he said. ‘Trust me. I used to be one of them.’
‘You were an art critic.’
He looked offended.
‘True. But I saw how the newsroom operated. Give them nothing, starve the story of oxygen and they’ll leave. Besides, you’re off to Bali tomorrow – they won’t be able to find you there as easily.’
‘Are you sure they won’t be able to trace this back to us?’
‘Positive. Richard Take won’t want to say where the files came from and the police definitely won’t want to admit the source was one of their own undercover officers. We’re safe. You especially. I haven’t mentioned your name once.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, meek with gratitude. Funny, really, how much she trusted him.
Cosima was counting the hours until she could leave. She had booked a car to drive her all the way to Heathrow the next morning. She wasn’t going to risk public transport. Suddenly, saving the planet didn’t seem as pressing as saving herself.
‘I still don’t know how they worked out I was here,’ she said, peering through a gap in the curtains. There was a television camera van parked illegally on the opposite pavement.
‘I would imagine your mother told them.’
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, taking care 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 skin still 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.