‘Same question over and over. Twenty-one, ninety-one, what’s the matter? You thinking about the wrong things. Do some work. Find a wife.’

‘What’re you bugging my mother about?’ Ketut asked, reaching across the table to steal a jackfruit. She slapped him away.

‘How old is this table? How old is Wayan?’ she said, and resumed her chopping with fresh energy. ‘Go fishing.’

Ketut laughed and flicked me with the t-shirt he’d slung across his shoulder. ‘Why would she need to know that? She’s been around for one childhood, one marriage, four kids and a million dinners. Right, ma?’ Ketut kissed his mother on the cheek. ‘Let’s go, Charlie.’

We walked down the path to where Ketut had left his motorbike, dense low-lying shrubs brushing against our legs. The day was quiet but for the gurgle of chickens and the swoosh of brooms on stone.

‘So how old are you?’ I asked Ketut, sitting behind him on the bike.

‘Twenty-nine or thirty. Ma says the war ended when I was a baby, but her handle on current affairs is slippery.’ He turned on the rattly engine. ‘I’m healthy and strong, that’s what matters. I’m going to have babies with Made, raise a family and drive tourists around. When my teeth fall out I’ll go fishing all day.’

We puttered along the skinny road, dodging potholes. The wind pushed back my hair. I remembered that feeling from when I was a kid, in the family car with Abby, coming home from a dinner party we’d been dragged to by Mum and Dad. We’d fallen asleep on the couch under crocheted rugs that smelled like cat to the sound of adults whooping it up, singing to Frank Sinatra records. At the end of the night my dad carried me to the car and placed me on the cold leather bench seat. The man of the house – Mr Wilson, maybe? – carried Abby out, placing her so that each of us had our head near opposite car doors, our legs parallel. As Dad drove, windows open, I’d made a pillow of my hands, watched the back of my parents’ heads and shoulders, listened to them talk in low voices. Mum laughed and put her hand on my Dad’s cheek, and he leaned in to her touch. I’d kneeled, and put my head into the rushing wind. The feeling had been bliss – the freedom of movement, the thrill of being awake so late at night – until hot ash from Mum’s cigarette had hit me on the chin and I’d yelled.

Ketut and I rode through Pedungan and Sidakarya towards Sanur, heading to the house of Ketut’s friend Nyoman. We cut through rice paddies, past a cow tethered to a tree, then stopped near a stone wall.

‘You want to see old, wait till you meet Nyoman’s mother. Older than the island.’ He lifted the bull’s-head doorknocker and let it fall. We waited. Ketut knocked on the door again. ‘I don’t think Nyoman’s home.’