by Graham Joyce
‘Lisu people,’ Coconut said, naming the tribe.
I took my bottle from my pack and glugged on my water. Not because I was especially thirsty, but to disguise my anxiety. We pressed on, passing sloping terraces tilled for growing what I took to be maize in the red soil. Further down a brightly coloured weed garden grew on a slope, in which a hovering and luxurious mass of stately red, white and purple flowers flared in the golden light of late afternoon.
Drawing abreast of the exotic, showcase blooms I suddenly realised what I was looking at. Phil hunkered down and put his eye up close to one of the flowers. It was as if he wanted to squint back at Satan. ‘There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother,’ he said.
‘Poppy,’ said Coconut. ‘Opium poppy.’
20
The Lisu people inhabiting the village were not especially interested in us. I got the impression they’d seen plenty of gawping Westerners shuffling through on organised treks. The kids gathered to appraise us with huge, liquid eyes, but the adults got on with their domestic tasks as we slid off our backpacks outside a hut on the edge of the village. Coconut went in search of the headman. Mick drew a circle of kids around him when he started to hand out chewing gum and sweets. I must admit it hadn’t occurred to me to bring little gifts for the children.
For the Lisu women tribal costume was a colourful blue and red tunic worn over trousers, and some of the older women wore tasselled turbans. The men wore blue or green baggy trousers pegged at the ankles. I thought how healthy they all looked. Certainly the kids had good, shiny skin and strong white teeth. Their faces were more rounded than the somewhat heart-shaped faces of the Thais; later I learned that these people had migrated here from Tibet.
Coconut returned with the smiling headman. Despite our exhaustion we waid, and I remembered to offer him a cigarette. A deal was struck quickly and we were led to a pair of huts on stilts. Coconut was quick to point out that one hut was for us, and one was for them. The headman spoke to one of the assembled children, a boy of about seven. The lad trotted off, there was a brief squawk, and he returned holding a flapping chicken by its neck and legs. Bhun took a stainless steel dish from his backpack. Grabbing the flapping chicken he took out his long knife and beheaded the fowl, letting it bleed into the dish.
‘We cook for you now,’ Coconut said, rather unnecessarily.
‘Would you ask the headman,’ I said to Coconut, ‘if he knows of an English girl – a farang – living in one of the villages?’
Coconut frowned. ‘Look, they don’t speak Thai. I don’t Lisu. I can hut, I can chicken. That’s about all.’ He must have seen my face crash, because he added, ‘Sorry.’
Dusk was settling on the village as the headman and his boy left us to it. Our hut was made of bamboo, with a neatly swept rattan floor. A raised area of rattan was obviously for sleeping on, and a couple of moth-eaten blankets were folded in the corner. The rattan bed which looked so inviting was actually as hard as a gravestone. With the twilight came giant mosquitoes, and though you couldn’t see them they had a bite like a dog. We changed into long trousers and tried to cover up. Savoury smells of rice and ginger wafted from the guides’ hut.
‘Ugh!’ The cry came from Phil, struggling out of his trousers in the corner of the hut. He’d discovered two ticks on the back of his right leg. We went over to inspect. I must admit, I winced. They were knuckle-sized and bloated after a good day’s feed on Phil’s blood.
‘Let’s have ’em off,’ I said, reaching out to pinch one between thumb and forefinger.
Mick slapped my hand. ‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘You’ll leave its guts in Phil’s skin.’ He sucked his cigarette into a bright cone and held it to the tick until the parasite dropped off. Phil looked queasy. The cone had gone off the cigarette before he could burn the second, so he gave the cigarette to me. ‘Get a cone on that.’
I looked at the end of his ciggie. It still seemed to have half a tick stuck to it. I didn’t much fancy smoking tick, and I said so.
‘Just pull on the sod!’ Mick said. He didn’t fancy it either. We could simply have lit another, but we were concerned about conserving cigarettes.
‘You pull on it!’
‘He’s your bleedin’ son!’ Mick said.
I took the cigarette and pulled on it, exhaling quickly without drawing the smoke into my lungs. I held the glowing end to the tick. The damned thing didn’t seem to want to drop. I had to do it again before the horrible insect would let go of Phil’s leg. Throughout this Phil watched me closely. I had some antiseptic lotion in my bag. I rubbed it gently into his leg.
After the business with the ticks we sat outside, our heads leaning together, our limbs aching. Mick sighed and I said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, Mick. I could murder one, too.’
No sooner were these words out of my mouth than did a small Lisu boy appear, baggy pants pegged at the ankle like an apprentice genie, clutching three bottles of Singha beer, your wish is my command. We almost sent him back again when the kid told us how much he wanted, but Mick laughed and paid up, feinting a kick to his arse.
The beer was warm, but it was nectar. It bubbled deliciously on the tongue. It flooded the gullet and scraped back a sheath of dust from the swollen throat, chasing out the taste of bamboo and replacing it with the savour of hops. It restored balance, equilibrium. It was like being rubbed down with silk, and, since Phil had declined a beer, I was ready to fight Mick for the third bottle.
Mick looked at me, looked at the spare brew, and he laughed. In our exhaustion a kind of nervous hysteria was making us telepathic. Bhun came out of his hut with a steaming bowl of chicken fried rice, and stopped when he saw the pair of us giggling like morons.
There was a table outside our hut, rough-hewn out of teak, and Bhun and Coconut laid out the evening meal. In addition to the chicken fried rice there was a soup, two kinds of curry dishes and a plate of vegetables with ginger and noodles. There were also three tiny condiment dishes, containing ferocious spices. Jungle fare. In about half an hour of mess cooking these boys had rustled up what would not have been out of place in a high street restaurant. Even the service was polite, formal. All that was missing was the after-dinner chocolate mint and a cab home. We invited Bhun and Coconut to join us at the table, but neither would be prevailed upon to do so.
Phil held us up by muttering a brief grace, throughout which Mick practised jiggling his eyebrows.
Just as it was getting almost too dark to see, the headman’s boy arrived, struggling with a hefty plastic block and some wiry contraption. Immediately seeing what it was, I leapt to my feet. Bhun urged me to get on with my dinner, but a Boy Scout enthusiasm made me want to be useful around camp. The heavy object was a car battery; there was a length of cable with crocodile clips at either end; and a small fluorescent strip light. I had it rigged in half a minute, dangling the light from an overhead cross-beam. No electricity in the village, but with the car battery we had glorious illumination.
‘And there was light,’ said Phil.
‘Happy now?’ Mick said, wolfing his chicken fried rice.
Yes, I was happy. I returned to the table and tucked into my green curry and noodles with a new-found relish. I guess it was the first time since arriving in Thailand that I’d actually felt in control of events, even if it was just for a moment. Power source, bit of cable, and a phosphor-coated electrical discharge device (lamp, to you). And I was going ha ha ha. Bringing light to the jungle.
When we finished our meal, another lad brought bananas and papayas. The six-year-old beer vendor returned, too, hawking Singhas at vastly inflated prices, and we bought his entire stock. Mick calculated we were paying, almost to the penny, the same price we would pay in the Clipper for a pint of Old Muckster’s Jubilee Ale. It seemed fair, but I don’t know what it did to the village economy that night.
Phil sipped his mineral water. ‘You’d be completely lost without your jug of beer, wouldn’t you?’ This was his way of making a huge phil
osophical point, and the only answer he got from either of us was a deeply satisfied belch from Mick, so loud that it startled some live thing lurking under the stilts of the hut.
As we sat drinking and smoking, more beautiful children with deliquescing black eyes appeared silently from out of the dark, drawn into the circumference of illumination cast by our car-battery light. Behind them their mothers, hovering at the edge of the table. Clearly we had become the evening’s entertainment. One of the braver women tried to peddle us embroidered friendship bracelets and other trinkets. Mick bought one for each of us. He put his on: he was looking more like a fucking hippy every day. Phil strapped his on, too, but I resisted. They looked like the kind of things Charlie’s boyfriends used to wear. But one of the boys insisted on tying it to my wrist.
Another boy tried to lift up my shirt. Coconut, who sat a little apart from all of this with Bhun, but who watched everything with a critical eye, said, ‘They wan see you hairy man.’
Because the Thais, and the Lisu and the other hill tribes presumably, had little body hair, the children were fascinated by the appearance of these three ape-men. Both Mick and Phil being pretty hirsute, they rolled up their shirts to give them a squint at the tobacco crop. The children giggled and leapt backwards, as if it was a monstrous sight. The women too clapped their hands and cackled and spoke rapidly to one another.
I dandled one little boy on my knee, making primate noises and slapping the top of my head with the palm of my hand. More hilarity.
‘Here they eat monkey,’ Coconut said.
I thought about my green curry. It had left a taste in my mouth that even the beer wasn’t washing away. I tried not to think about it, and did some more monkey business for the kids. An elderly woman, with a cataract or some other degeneration of her left eye, pointed at the empty beer bottles and spoke to Bhun. Our guides had a debate. ‘I not know what she say, exactly,’ Coconut said, ‘but she wan know this what beer do to you.’
Mick and I laughed, but the fixed expressions of the Lisu women indicated that they considered it a serious question. They thought perhaps we were drunk.
‘They don’t drink beer?’
‘The women? Never.’
The woman with the cataract then leaned across the table, proffering a waxy cube of black substance, a piece the size of my thumbnail. So this was it.
‘This’d be the stuff,’ Mick said, accepting and inspecting it.
The guides watched us with great interest. I felt angry. I didn’t even want to touch it. ‘Give it back to her,’ I told Mick.
‘I’m just looking.’
‘Give it back to her.’
‘Keep your hair on! I want to know what it looks like.’
Phil, watching this dispute closely, put in, ‘It’s not in the stuff, Father. It’s in the desire for the stuff.’
I waved my hands, palms outwards, at the woman. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Very bad.’ She glanced over at the guides and I saw Coconut shake his head, very slightly.
Then two of the younger women, each with a liquorice-eyed baby slung on a hip, offered us a massage apiece, in return for the price of one of the kid’s beers. That sounded like a prize way to close the evening, so Mick and I assented. The two women passed on their babies to their own mothers, one of whom was the opium dealer, and we went inside the hut.
They placed candles around the hut, creating a peaceful orange ambience. The only thing to spoil the mood was the cluster of mothers, grandmothers and children at the door, who seemed to regard the massage as a spectator sport. We shouted for Coconut to get rid of them. After a few words from him they drifted away. Only Phil remained, gloomily watching the proceedings. ‘Tell me something Coconut,’ I said as I lay face down on the rattan. ‘Do you smoke the opium?’
‘Never.’
‘And Bhun?’
‘Also never. I agree you. Bad thing. I glad you not buy opium.’ Then he waved a hand at Phil saying, ‘You make sure your friends keep they pants on. If they fuck, then you must pay lot of money to they husband.’
Phil wrung his hands nervously, and Mick vented an unnecessarily deep sigh of pleasure.
21
We were up and on our way early the next morning with no farewells to the villagers. There was a military air to the expedition in the way Coconut marshalled us along. I’d had a dreadful night, and so had the others. Mosquitoes like flying piranhas had savaged lumps out of us and the quaint rattan pallet was as comfortable as a bed of Welsh slate. It got shockingly cold in the night, too, and the two thin blankets we each had over our sleeping bags were inadequate. We spent half the night talking rather than sleeping.
Or arguing rather than talking. It started when I saw Mick swallowing a pink pill while performing his ablutions. At the hotel we’d taken it in turns to use the bathroom, so I hadn’t noticed Mick’s nightly rituals. Here the washing facilities comprised two drums of water outside the hut: one for washing your body, and one for sluicing your arse.
‘What’s that about, then?’
Mick washed down the pink pill with a swig of beer. ‘Malaria.’
I hadn’t thought about malaria. My doctor had consulted a list which declared Chiang Mai malaria-free. At that time I had no idea we might be venturing into the jungle.
‘You telling me you haven’t been taking malaria tablets?’ Mick said.
I explained what my doctor had said. ‘Moron!’ Mick exclaimed. ‘You’re supposed to be an intelligent person.’
‘You should have anticipated this,’ Phil said helpfully. He, of course, had his own supply.
‘I didn’t realise what was in store for us.’
‘Didn’t realise? You might have made provision! Do you want someone to wipe your arse for you as well?’ At which point he glanced down at water bowl number two.
‘Well, I didn’t.’
These little midges could bite a cow to death, and you’ve got nothing to say about it?’
‘All right. Just drop the subject, will you?’
Mick shook his head. He picked up his bottle of doxycycline and tapped a pill into his giant, pink hand. ‘Here.’
‘That’s no use.’ I knew you needed to take these things before you travel, and then for some weeks after.
‘Take it. We’ll divide up what we’ve got. Right, Phil?’
Phil gritted his teeth. ‘I wish you’d had more forethought, Father. Though I suppose that’s what we’ll have to do.’
‘Then you two won’t have enough.’
‘Take it,’ Mick growled.
‘Then all three of us will be at risk. Where’s the sense in that?’
Mick raised his fist at me. ‘Take the fucker or I swear I’ll chin you.’
‘Shut up, you big fucking stupid dumpling.’
Mick moved surprisingly fast for such a big man. He grabbed my face and forced the pill into my mouth, holding his hand over my jaw. Phil danced out of my way as we struggled. ‘Is it gone?’
‘Fnnnghhhh ohffff!’
‘I said is it gone?’
‘Neff! Ifff fone.’
‘Is it gone?’
‘I said it’s gone! Get off me, you tub of lard!’
He’d almost dislocated my jaw in the process. I walked away, my blood up; and then I saw Bhun watching us silently from the other hut. Our eyes met, and he nodded minimally. I turned back to our hut. After all, I wasn’t going anywhere.
Sometime in the night, after we’d forgotten about the nonsense with the pills, we were all three awake, with Mick and I smoking cigarettes. The candles had burned out and we sat in darkness. All I could see were the two coal-ends of the lighted ciggies. At least the smoke seemed to discourage the mosquitoes.
Mick had been sitting on a question for a while. I heard him exhale in the blackness before he said, ‘Now then, Phil. Have you got over your little paddy?’
He was referring to Phil’s outburst in the Chiang Mai bar. ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Phil.
‘Believe in that, do you? Brimston
e. Hellfire. Believe in it? Eh?’
No one could see another’s face in the dark. If they could have, this conversation would not have proceeded past first base.
‘Yes.’
‘So you think,’ Mick said, ‘that Danny and me are on the side of Satan, sort of thing?’
‘No. I don’t give you that much credit. You don’t get out of it as easy as that. It’s not about choosing sides.’
Pause. Drag on cigarette. ‘What’s it about, then?’ Coal-end fattening like a luminous red maggot in the dark ‘Tell me. I’m interested.’
‘No you’re not. You’re just trying to mock.’
‘Not at all. I’m trying to learn. I mean those girls in the Chiang Mai bars. Damned, are they?’
Long pause from Phil. ‘We wrestle, and not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world: we wrestle against spiritual wickedness in high places.’
Long pause from Mick. ‘Gosh,’ he said. ‘Don’t you get tired? What with all this wrestling?’
After a while I said to Phil, ‘What about Charlie? Where does she figure in your scheme? Did Satan lure her with opium?’
‘No.’
‘What did, then?’
‘Jealousy.’
This baffled me. ‘What was she jealous of?’
‘Not her jealousy. Yours.’
‘Eh?’
‘Think about it. Now if you don’t mind I’m going to sleep.’
I would have gone to sleep too, if I could. But that remark of Phil’s: it sat there, hunkered in the darkness like another member of the party, looking back at me.
That was in the chill of night. Now the jungle had heated up quickly and we were slowly ascending the steep side of a ravine. We were shivering the nights and sweating the days. The blisters on my feet were rubbing again, I had a thumping headache from lack of sleep, and my mosquito bites itched like crazy. We trekked on in silence. I looked back to see Mick, brow furrowed, fingering his amulet.