The Big O is a lovely kid. His compact frame decked out in stripy surf shorts, boxfresh T-shirt, mirrored aviators and oodles of sunscreen, he can work a look as well as his English idiom.

An idiom inherited, like his dreams of Miami Beach, from the time the US Navy came to town. A formative experience for The Big O, the highlight of his 23 years on the planet.

Formative, also, it appears, for much of the population of what is, fundamentally, a small, conservative and largely Muslim island.

“Damn, my friend,” he says, time and again. “Those Americans were crazy! No bullshit, motherfucker. They were great guys, my friend. Great guys!”

There were thirty of them, as The Big O tells it. US Navy. They came to the island to rebuild the clinic.

It was, I would guess, the kinds of “hearts and minds” PR initiative that the US army, in its wisdom, sends to Islamic countries to persuade them that, despite Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza, the Great Satan means so very, very well.

“Every night,” The Big O reminisces fondly. “Every night, my friend. They are like, ‘Get me beer. Get me women. Get me beer and a woman, my friend.’”

A well-brought-up young man from an observant family, the Big O is, nonetheless, not short on initiative. He is asked to procure. Therefore he procures…

Beer is easy to find, in Christian Tobelo on the mainland. Women, too. So his first attempt at pimping brings him to one of three “nightclubs” in Tobelo.

A depressing place it is, too, Golden. Decked out in the local “nightclub” standards of bad neon spraycan art and faux-leather settees. The roll of clingfilm sitting besides the two bottles of Guinness Export Strength in the cabinet behind the bar speaks its purpose all too clearly.

More so, in many ways, than the girls freighted in from Sulawesi, in their oddly demure 60s minidresses and platform mules, to service the “nightclub”‘s all-male clientele.

“They took the whole place, my friend,” says The Big O. “The boss, he says, ‘I don’t want no goddam Indonesians in that place. Get the Indonesians out, my friend.’ They put the women in a line. They pick one, they ask me to find the price, they pay the money down. They’re asking me, ‘My friend, you want a girl, my friend?’ One of them? He fucks her in the toilet. Asks me if I want to watch.”

Even by the standards of East Indonesian pissoirs, Golden’s is especially unappealing. One does the deed on the tiled floor, then sluices it down the shower-style drainage grill using the heart-shaped scoop floating in the slimy water in the tiled mandi.

With a good aim and the right equipment, you could take out four or five cockroaches in one, erm, arc….

Anywise. The US Navy, in its wisdom, preferring its chaps not to rely on clingfilm, has equipped the boys with rubbers.

Before they depart, the Sarge lines them up, military style, to give them instructions. In my mental picture, he is chomping the nub of a fat cigar.

You will be back by 05:00 hours. Got me?

05:00 hours, sah!

It’s a good night for the girls, one would imagine.

At north of fifty dollars per hour for the full monty, in a town where a single greenback buys a simple meal with change, the girls pass most of their time offering company over sugared tea or fizzy pop to gents in their best shirt-sleeves for the rather more affordable rate of seven or so bucks.

Even with the nightclub’s hefty cut, a night with the US Navy is going to buy a lot of school for the babies these women have, most likely, left back home with mum.

However, it is the second phase of The Big O’s procurement career that really opens both my eyes and his.

Because the girls the Americans brought to the uninhabited island? They were nurses. Local girls. Working in the clinic the Americans were rebuilding.

The Big O was shocked. “They were prostituting themselves,” he explains to me, eyes wide. “Dancing close with the Americans. Drinking beer. And fucking them… Some of them, they did it in the hotel.”

Now, the hotelier in question, the Haji, is an amiable chap of, round about, 60ish. He’s kind and worldly enough to wholeheartedly accept a ladyboy son and a daughter with two kids and a bad marriage. Realist enough not to evict such lucrative clients. Nonetheless, he is devout enough to have made his pilgrimage to Mecca and sport the traditional cap.

Even as The Big O tells it, the Navy’s illegal beer, imported sound systems, shouting, drunkenness and vigorous, public sexual activity went down as well as the proverbial cup of cold sick.

Particularly, perhaps, since these girls were local girls. And nurses, too!

Ye olde double standard is very much alive here. And female virginity is a cherished asset, sold as a package (in theory at least) with the bride price.

“Why would the girls do that?” Cam and I ask The Big O repeatedly. “They have to live on the island, right? Why did they do that?”

The Big O shrugs. It beats him too…

Until an illuminating exchange.

My status, as a solo woman with child in tow, has caused The Big O (among others) some confusion. After Z and I have been hanging with him and Cam four days (no doubt causing our own confusion over Western morals, despite the separate bedrooms), he plucks up the courage to raise the issue.

“May I ask you something, mother?” he says, using a translation of the respectful form of address to an older woman, ibu, that rings oddly in my 30-something ears.

“Sure,” I say. We’ve been in Maluku for pushing four weeks and, when asked about the whereabouts of my swami I have replied (broadly truthfully) that Z and I will be meeting him in Australia in November. However, this clearly hasn’t washed with The Big O.

“Mother. Are you alone with Z?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“I’m sorry to hear that, mother,” he says, his face and tone expressing exactly the amount of flummoxed sorrow I expressed when Cam told me that his mother had died when he was fifteen.

“Oh, it’s OK,” I say, slightly flustered.

Cam jumps in. “It’s not unusual in the West,” he says. “Many people don’t marry. We also have divorce.”

“So, you, mother,” The Big O continues. “You had sex before you were married?”

“Err, yes,” I say, before recovering sufficiently to deliver a Paddington Bear hard stare: “Haven’t you?”

“Well, yes,” says The Big O. “But it’s difficult. We have to choose very carefully. And we keep it secret.”

Cam, Z and I have talked before with The Big O about the general absence of religious belief in the West – here everyone has a religion, with the debatable exception of the animists – and the decline of marriage in an increasingly secular society. But it’s really too alien to sink in.

“And you get pregnant?” The Big O follows up. “But you do not go to prison?”

“Erm, no,” I say, scraping my jaw off the floor. “No prison, no.”

Now, I knew that single parenthood was rare. And I’ve accepted, here as in other more traditional places we’ve traveled in, the role I’m cast in of married woman with a husband elsewhere. But… prison?

I cast a wary eye across to Z, who’s drawing.

“No,” I say. “Like we said, many people have children before they marry. Many don’t marry. In Z’s class in school, maybe 5 out of 25 or 30 children had only a mother at home… So you can go to prison in North Maluku for getting pregnant?”

“Yes,” he says. “If a woman gets pregnant, she has to tell the police who did it to her. The man has to marry her and take responsibility. If he won’t, he goes to prison. And if she won’t tell the police, she goes to prison. You don’t have that in England?”

“Err, no,” I say. “Our birth rate… ”

Cam interjects. “The prisons would be full…”

Then a penny drops with me.

“So these nurses,” I say. “The nurses who were fucking the American sailors. You think they thought that if they got pregnant, American law would be the same?”

The Big O thinks a bit. “Mother, I guess that must be why. My friend, I guess that must be why.”

Cam and I take a pause for breath. “Those poor girls,” I say. “Reckoning a night with a soldier equals the big ticket to the West…”

“Jesus,” he says. “There’s only one type of clinic they’ll be needing on this island…”

Later, we are on the idyllic, uninhabited island where the soldiers went to celebrate American Independance[sic] with sixteen cases of beer, big speakers, hip-hop, rap and the nurses from the clinic.

Idyllic place. White sand. Dazzling. Cam is cooking. I am sous-cheffing. Z is building a secondary campfire in which to blow stuff up.

“Those Americans,” The Big O exclaims. “Damn, my friend! They were fucking those nurses right here on the sand!”

“Blimey,” I say. “All of them, right here?”

“Yeah!” he says, and launches into another funny story. “One of them, she didn’t want to do it. She jumped off a boat into the sea, right here, because she didn’t want to do it…”

In the firelight, Cam’s and my faces mirror each other in utter horror.

“Of course,” Cam says. “Of course that’s how it was.”

“But she did it anyway, in the end, right?” I say, through gritted teeth.

“Yeah,” says The Big O. “Some of them didn’t want to. But they did it in the end.”

Now it’s my turn to drop the sociocultural bombshell. I am extremely cross. Not with The Big O.

Not even, entirely, with the soldiers. I can’t imagine that basic training in any military covers consent, though IMHO if you’re dishing out condoms to young, under-educated men selected for muscle and aggression you ought to throw in a bit of basic sex ed too.

I’m simply very, very angry for that poor girl, leaping into these sparkling waters in the darkness off an island from which there was absolutely no escape. And for whatever, and with whoever, happened to her next…

“In the West,” I choke out, turning the tables on The Big O. “A man can go to prison for that. It’s very serious. If a man has sex with a woman who doesn’t want to, he can go to prison for six years or more.”

“In theory,” begins Cam. “In practice…”

“Well, yeah,” I say, cutting him off.

“It’s called rape,” says my spawn, who’s been absorbing more than I thought. “It’s very serious.”

The Big O’s face collapses. He’s a good guy. And he knew, I think, in his heart that some of what was happening was wrong.

But he had a great time with these guys. He dreams of Miami Beach, of the good life in the West. They are friends of his. Real friends. And for them, well, it’s a laugh, innit?

“In America, too?” The Big O asks, hoping for a get out.

“In America, too,” I say. “Remember when we were talking about sexual freedom? What comes with having the right to say ‘yes’ is having the right to say ‘no’. They go together.”

“But those guys, they are my friends,” he says, helplessly.

“Well,” I say, thinking that, what with the beer and all, probably neither the girls nor their, erm, seducers, had any kind of label for what was going down. “I’m not entirely sure that they knew what they were doing was wrong, either. They would have thought, you see, that the girls were coming out there for what they were coming for: to drink beer and have sex. But some of the girls, I guess, weren’t thinking of that at all. They had no idea.”

“Some of them would have been,” says Cam. “The ones who’d already done it, back at the hotel. But they weren’t all back at the hotel, right?”

The Big O nods. He’s shaken. And he understands the concept, alright, which is, of course, enshrined in Indonesian law. (I’d like to know how many women have the strength and courage to get a case to court. And how many of them win… )

More oddly, The Big O felt what was wrong in his soul, as well. Because it was in the pre-dawn dark after whatever happened happened, high as a kite on the unfamiliar beer, that he saw the island’s ancestral Moro spirit, a woman, rise dripping from the luminescent water, and felt her hostile presence, too.

“I don’t want to talk about this any more,” he says. “Those guys, they are my friends.”

For Z’s sake, as well as The Big O’s, we don’t.

Anywise. After The Big O’s friends had finished rebuilding the clinic, the Sarge had the brothel on the mainland cleared of “Indonesians” (meaning the male variety, naturally) once again, for a celebration evening.

There was drinking. Speeches. Celebrations.

Of the fine things they had achieved, here on the island.

Of, all in all, a successful exercise in hearts and minds.

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“Chinese wedding?! No!!!” Asun exclaims. “Chinese wedding, one day, you have one table, cost 350 ringgit.”

Mimi chimes in. “And you need many tables. Big family. I have ten brothers and sisters, so…”

“We had a Kayan wedding,” says Asun. “With a Kayan wedding, all you need to do is buy a pig, and everyone from the longhouse eats. One pig! Three hundred ringgit…”

“Was it a Christian wedding?” I ask.

“Oh yes, Christian,” they reply, in harmony.

The Evangelical Church of Borneo is very active upriver. It has been since the Methodists moved in, soon after the head-hunting stopped.

Asun’s longhouse community of 900-odd folk has its own pastor, regular services, plus Bible Study on Sunday evenings, occasions for which the men of the community change out of their uniform of football shorts, tattoos and rubber sandals and into shirts and smart black trousers, and little girls wear a hybrid of Sunday best and party frocks.

The pastor will tell me that everyone in the community is Christian, a fact only belied by the traditional tombs across the curve of the Balui River, to which the bodies of couples who follow the old beliefs are ceremoniously ferried on their journey to join the spirits.

When they married, Asun was sixteen and Mimi the ripe old age of 25. At 29 she’s expecting their first child. “I am so old,” she says. “So old to be having a baby…”

I tell her that in England women in their 40s have children. “45, 46, maybe even as late as 49.”

She looks at me bewildered. At 45, Asun’s mother is definitely in grandmother territory, on the wrong side of that weird precipice over which indigenous people seem to fall, tripping effortlessly from youth to old age, smooth, plump skin to chasms of wrinkles, a sort of Eurydice stumble but with old age, not mortality, when you look back.

Of course, I am closer to her age than to her son’s. And he is closer to Z’s age than to mine…

They live together, in what Asun terms a room but is more of an apartment, in the main longhouse of Asun’s kampung.

In structure, though the materials have changed, the Kayan longhouse remains very much what it was when the nineteenth-century colonial anthropologists Hose & McDougall wrote the splendidly-titled The Pagan Tribes of Borneo.

A long building, raised on stilts to first floor height, with a wide, communal verandah out front and ill-nourished, unwelcome hunting dogs below. Off one side of the verandah, doors lead to each family’s room. By the balcony are platforms used for sleeping, resting, sitting, beadwork, repairing tools…

… And smoking…

Everyone but the pastor smokes like chimneys. Pregnant, with babies on their back, ancient enough to have long, looping earlobes and tattoos covering their calves and forearms — even the man who, popular belief says, is one hundred years old — they’re constantly twirling short, fat conical cheroots (in lieu of Rizlas, a twirl keeps the ungummed banana leaf paper sealed).

The local tobacco, farmed smallscale on precipitous hillsides and sold, if you don’t grow your own, at a dollar for about 250 grammes, has a hay taste, reminiscent of American Spirit, and a harshness on the draw that makes me think of cigars.

There’s a general belief that it is better for you than Western tobacco. And, of course, it keeps the bugs off.

In fact, I have to restrain Z from berating a bewildered mother who is passing her cheroot to her six-year-old daughter. “No, no, no!” he says. “She can’t smoke. She’s too young to smoke! Smoking is very, very bad.”

It doesn’t help that he is slightly taller than her, so not just metaphorically but literally talking down to her. While she may not understand English, she clearly understands the tone.

“Z,” I say. “Leave her alone. I know children shouldn’t smoke. But we need to stay within the cultural norms, and a child telling off an adult is completely inappropriate.”

Granny puts it rather better. “We are staying with these people, in their community. We need to allow them to live the way they live. And you can’t tell her how to live.”

In fact, Asun would rather be a city slicker. Mimi’s family are from Sibu, an industrial and logging city a hundred and fifty miles downriver, a veritable megalopolis whose population runs into the (very) low six figures.

Asun wears an Arsenal shirt, expensive-looking Aviators and leather shoes which, he explains, cost several hundred ringgit. His hair is tinted orange, the furthest, I understand, that local bleach will go.

“I like to live in kampung,” Mimi says. “The city is too much for me. Whenever he says, we go live in the city, I say, ‘No way.'”

At the moment, of course, they live in the family room, strictly more of an apartment, in the main longhouse.

Two largish rooms set on either side of a store room and a kitchen-cum-bathroom area that is not for the faint-hearted, it’s home to Asun and Mimi, his sister and one of his two brothers, his parents, and a six-year-old niece, the daughter of the other brother, who lives in Sibu.

She’s a sweet little girl. But in the UK she’d no doubt have some label or other to describe her condition. Which, while it would enable her to “access services”, would also leave her stigmatised and victimised. Here, well, “She doesn’t like school.”

Now, Asun makes decent money for these parts. When, I ask, will they move out of the family home and into what Virginia Woolf would probably not have called A Room of Their Own?

It’s a process that clearly happens. One of Asun’s aunties lives next door. And there’s what looks like a half-built longhouse part-way across the way (the previous one burnt down after someone left a pot on the stove: one of many reasons that the Malaysian government is trying to coax folk out of new-style longhouses and into clapboard bungalows or the traditionally styled longhouses they build down West for the tourist trade).

“Well,” says Asun, looking a little on the spot. “I can live in the new longhouse. But first I need to buy” — he gestures at the ceiling — “Zinc? Is that the word? And things for the floor…”

It appears neither he nor Mimi are in any particular hurry to leave.

In the family home everyone sleeps on thin, floral print mattresses which are unfolded, futon style, every evening, leaving clear passage to the doors and the bathroom. The form is to sleep clothed, in sarongs for the women and football shorts, for the men.

I wonder how on earth Mimi and Asun manage to have sex but I lack the courage to ask.

In the evening, we sit with them and watch Z’s choice of movie on their TV, one of few in the longhouse, and so a magnet for Kayans from 5 to, well, so old they have no birth certificate, whether watching from the room or the verandah.

Sir’s choice?

Mr and Mrs Smith.

“This Angelina Jolie,” says Mimi, as the pirate copy flickers across the screen and the generator chugs in the background. “I want her body.”

“Me too,” I say.

“She was modelling before?” asks Asun. (He would like to go to Thailand one day but is worried he will never come back, because of the women he has seen in movies.)

“Just a little,” I say, delving through my mental repertoire of Heat magazine as an elderly lady, her forearms solid blue with tattoos and her earlobes like elongated doughnuts, squints at an elaborate piece of beadwork. “She is the daughter of a very famous, well, quite famous, American actor, Jon Voight, and a French model. I think she modelled for a little bit, but then she was an actress.”

“But she was modelling?” asks Asun, who has models on the brain.

“I heard she likes children very much,” says Mimi.

“Yes,” I say. “She has three children and has adopted three more. Six, I think.”

Six children, of course, is not a noteworthy total hereabouts. “Is she married?”

“Yes,” I say. “To the guy in this film. Brad Pitt. This is the film where they met.”

We are through the preliminaries, and the lavish New Jersey mansion in which Mr and Mrs Smith’s marriage loses its spark appears on screen. “The rooms are so big,” exclaims Asun. “Are all rooms so big in America?”

“No,” I say. “This is a very expensive house. One million dollars US, or maybe more.”

“I would like to go to America,” Asun says. For this cheeky chappie, just out of his teens, who once killed a 20-metre python which he found digesting a piglet, and divvied all forty kilos of it around the longhouse at ten ringgit a kilo (the piglet, sadly, was past redemption, having started to smell), the Hollywood dream is very much alive.

“It’s not all like that,” I say. “This is a very, very expensive house. It is a film house, a movie house. Most people do not live like this.”

I am not sure he believes me. I don’t think he wants to. Because in America, I guess, the streets are really paved with gold…

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