We walked to the back of the building to see if we could find anyone out there. A string of scrawny dogs trailed us. Roosters scuttled out of our way. We heard no sounds from behind the wall.

‘We’ll wait around the front. He’ll come,’ Ketut said.

We sat on the long, wide stone steps, dips worn into them from years of feet padding to and from the carved wooden door. I rubbed my hands up and down my legs to get rid of the mud, now dry, sprayed on my shins by the bike, noticing how dark my skin had become, and how the bleached and brown leg hairs together formed a salt-and-pepper field on my shins.

‘The main thing,’ I said, ‘is that if your age doesn’t matter, if people don’t know how old they are, then everyone quits telling you to grow up.’

Ketut cocked his head at me. ‘That’s exactly what Ma was telling you to do.’

‘Nah, man. She was messing with me. At home my sister and father actually tell me to grow up, as if rushing to old age is somehow life’s goal. I don’t feel that here.’

‘So you don’t want to grow up?’

‘Sure I do. But in my own time, or Bali time. I’ll be a boring old man when I’m ready. Until then, I’m going to be young and free, ride bikes and surf. And not feel guilty about that.’

Ketut laughed. ‘Never seen you feel guilty about anything.’

I gazed across paddies spiked with palm trees, the green of the rice crops and blue of the sky insanely bright. ‘My mother was thirty-two when she died.’

Ketut faced me, his arm up to block the sun. ‘Sorry to hear that, man. That’s young no matter where you are.’

We saw a bike in the distance. The driver had one hand on the handlebar and one on the side of a large bundle of fruit he balanced on his head.

‘Nyoman,’ Ketut shouted. We stood up and waved.

‘Maybe you want to stay the same person you were when your mother died,’ Ketut said. ‘But she probably wouldn’t want that.’

I told him I’d think about that, knowing I wouldn’t.

Nyoman stopped in front of us, dropped his bundle to the ground, and rested his bike against a tree. Nyoman and Ketut hugged one another as if it had been years, though I’d seen them together a few weeks before, in Wayan’s kitchen. Then he hugged me, too. We walked up the stairs, Nyoman promising durian and glasses of arak.

‘I gather you messed up with the chickens.’ Mark plops himself into the chair beside me. I open my eyes. ‘Ed’s not happy.’

‘You know Ed?’

‘First I’ve ever heard of him.’ He smiles, hands me a cold can of beer. ‘Think you’re going to get an earful when you go inside though.’

‘I’m growing grass on me.’ Sarah, naked and wet, has bits of cut lawn splattered across her torso, arms and legs.