THE LOLA BOYS ABROAD !

Java had been a blast. A visceral assault on the senses that had inspired Paul to erupt with a molten flow of verbose lava most of which he deemed unpublishable.

It was far too volcanic.

He’d reached into his core and discovered more than enough explosive material to fuel a tectonic trilogy. But he wasn’t ready to vent quite yet and was keeping dormant.

For now.

He knew there would be a few quaking souls out there who would be unable to escape the fierce heat of his literary flow once he let rip. Yet now was not the moment. He was already under an ash cloud of his own making after kicking the booze.

Or rather, attempting to.

He couldn’t trust his emotions at present and many an innocent bystander could get caught in his emotional eruption. He thought it better to keep a lid on it. He didn’t want to cause any unnecessary aftershocks. So instead he wrote of his outward adventures and kept most of his molten interior to himself.

But it seemed the planet on which he was attempting to exist had other ideas.

At just before four in the morning, in a surburban part of eastern Bali where the boys had holed up for a bit, Andrew suddenly woke Paul. Before he could explain Paul knew what was happening. The bed was shaking and there were urgent shouts and the sound of barking dogs coming from outside the compound.

‘It’s an earthquake!’ Andrew said, his voice as tremulous as the ground, laced with excitement and a touch of fear.

‘I know that’, Paul replied. He’d felt the earth move in the bedroom before but it had never been quite as active. As his feet hit the floor he realised it wasn’t just the bed that was moving. He stumbled for a brief moment, found his balance and yelled to his partner,

‘Get outside now!’

Paul was always rather good in a crisis. Had he been on the Titanic he’d probably have remained as icily calm as the guilty berg. Ironically, it was everyday life which provided him with real drama. He was never adverse to to a touch of proper adversity.

He and Andrew rushed out onto their small terrace and into the garden of the guesthouse they called home. There were joined by a local guy from the cabana opposite who obviously knew the drill.

‘It’s a big one’, he assured them.

Paul wasn’t sure if he and Andrew should be impressed or terrified. Instead, the three of them just stood uneasily staring at one another hoping for the world to stop moving.

They waited as the ground beneath them re-arranged itself whilst issuing forth the strangest of sounds. Like an irate giant with indigestion. Or an angry ogre re-adjusting his underwear to get comfortable. It seemed an age before he did. The very air seemed to blur as if in motion.

It was magnificent.

Majestic.

And bloody frightening.

Paul learnt later that the locals had all taken to the Main Street, babies and toddlers in tow, they were all too aware of the real danger. Paul and Andrew had rather ignorantly gone back to bed only to be woken again before dawn by another powerful aftershock. They didn’t rest properly after that.

In the morning Paul learnt that the family, in whose property the boys were staying, had resisted the urge to hit the sack again and had remained on clear ground in relative safety. He thought at least they could have warned their unrelated guests who were slumbering ignorantly beneath their traditional Balinese tiled roofs.

The Lola Boys bringing the house down on this occasion would not have been fun.

He also noticed that the clear patch of ground they had used for shelter in the darkness was directly underneath a fecund coconut palm. He and Andrew had been incredibly fortunate they hadn’t been turned into smoothies in time for breakfast.

They had woken with a sense of excitement. Probably happy to still be alive. Adrenalin was a powerful drug. Although not as powerful as the earth’s crust if it decided to make toast of one.

Later that day they moved across town to different digs. This time they were not staying at ground level so Paul hoped the malevolent magma monster was now at rest. There was no garden to which they could run for cover. Only a balcony to jump from.

However, their new Balinese hosts seemed to take the geological event in their stride, even if they did look a tad nervous when discussing it. Paul decided to follow their calm example. There was ultimately nothing they could do if the great leviathan decided to re-awake. They were in his grip whatever.

In the torpid afternoon he and Andrew lay on the bed and slept like uprooted logs.

Exhausted.

It had, after all, been a seismic night!