by Graham Joyce
Later when Charlie woke, she spotted Rupert Bear looking down at her from the bamboo wall. She gasped. She took him down from the wall and hugged him. Then she went strangely quiet, and asked me why I’d brought him. She didn’t let go of Rupert for a long time.
I was glad. It meant she was holding on to the old days.
Some time later, when Rupert had finally tumbled free of her grasp, I picked him up and made to lodge him back in the bamboo wall. It was then that I made a significant discovery. Looking for somewhere better to locate Rupert I noticed a rough star-wheel of bamboo above Charlie’s sleeping head, at the point where the upright bamboo canes met the giant tobacco-leaf roof. A big dry leaf had been stuffed behind the bamboo there and I thought I could see some small object lodged behind.
‘What is it?’ Charlie said.
I had to get Mick to help me. We dragged a spindly, low table across the floor, and I climbed on it. A little unsteady, I reached up and pulled a folded piece of paper from behind the dry leathery leaf. I got down from the table and unfolded the paper. Mick moved in closer to take a look.
We were both shocked into silence. As we stood gazing at the paper, I heard Mick’s breathing go shallow. My hand holding the thing started to tremble, not with fear, but with renewed anger. Mick grabbed at the paper, trying to relieve me of it, but I wouldn’t let him take it.
In the middle of the sheet of paper had been glued a Polaroid snapshot of Charlie. In the snapshot she was wearing a swimsuit and was washing her hair in a river. She was bending over, smiling at the photographer who’d presumably caught her unawares. It was a happy and spontaneous photograph, taken in the fresh golden light of early morning.
Around the photograph, and on the backing paper, several winged demonic figures had been added with thick black lines of charcoal. The figures had bulging eyes and ferocious teeth. The cartoon style in which they had been sketched would have been ridiculous if it were not for the fact that all of these airborne figures had massive, erect penises extending from the paper and on to the photograph, so that the image of Charlie was being assaulted: between her legs, at her anus, at her mouth, at her ears and at her eyes.
I ground my teeth together in an action purely involuntary.
‘Can I see?’ said Charlie.
‘Let’s stop and think clearly about this,’ Mick said. But thinking clearly about it was the last thing either of us could do. At last I let him take it from me, and he held the thing at arm’s length, as if something vile and unholy might leap from the paper and crawl up his shoulders. His other hand massaged his own, leathery neck, slowly and ineffectively. Mick, the steady rock, was shaken. I could see him thinking how much more of this? ‘Let’s stop and get a grip,’ he said.
Charlie stepped up quickly behind him and snatched the thing from his hand. She nodded briefly, as if understanding. ‘Right,’ she said, very quietly. ‘Right.’
We immediately started looking for more of the same, as if we’d found a scorpion nestling in the bamboo. And we discovered two similar papers secreted in the walls. Different shots of Charlie glued to backing paper, but overdrawn with obscene figures.
‘But who would do this?’ Mick said. ‘Out of the villagers, who would do this?’
I knew what he meant. The uncovering of these dirty objects could make our situation much worse, depending on who was behind it. I started counting. High among the suspects had to be Khiem, village medicine man and sorcerer. But somehow I didn’t see his hand in this, and for once in my life I decided to trust my instincts. Either way, if I were to brandish the hideous articles in his face, I could study his reaction. ‘Khiem?’ I said.
‘No,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s Khao; the one with the beard. His father is a sorcerer in another village, where he left in disgrace. He would like to be a sorcerer here, for which reason Khiem is his enemy, I know that. These people live and breathe spirits. They don’t simply believe in them; they live and work and play side by side with spirits every moment of their lives. They entertain the spirits. They invite the spirits into their lives.’
‘Just as you have done, Charlie,’ said Phil drawing up behind her. ‘Just as we all have done.’
I decided to show Khiem because if Charlie was right and he was innocent, then I thought he would want to help me. There was another reason: I had to go out and look for any signs of the villagers regarding us differently. I figured if they knew what had happened, Jack would too.
I left for the poppy fields with the ugly spirit papers folded inside my money pouch. Mick and Phil stayed behind with Charlie. Meanwhile the village radio shrieked out high-pitched Thai pop tunes. What had previously been an acoustic irritant was now a torment to the nerves.
Khiem, as was his usual habit, was working the poppies a little way off from the rest of the villagers. He was incising. Seeing me striding towards him he straightened his back.
‘Khiem,’ I said on reaching him. He didn’t even blink, regarding me steadily. I opened a packet of cigarettes and offered one. He accepted, all the while eyeing me suspiciously. He saw that my hands were shaking. I lit him, and together we puffed away at our cigarettes without taking our eyes off each other. Then I squatted down between the tall poppies and gestured that he might do the same, which he did.
I must have been stupid to think I could outguess a man like Khiem. These people were masters of deportment and control. My Western face must have been bubbling with the signatures and tokens of murder.
But I unzipped my money pouch and rolled out the papers, studying his reaction carefully. His body went rigid and the veins stood out on his bald head like insulated cable. He let out a deep moan, and then began clicking his tongue rapidly. He let his hands fall to the earth. It was obvious to me that he’d never seen the things before; but on the other hand he seemed to know something of their significance.
He asked me some questions, which I couldn’t fathom. I made a steeple of my fingers to try to indicate that I’d found the papers in the hut. He jabbed a finger in that direction and I nodded. He understood. I noticed he was very careful not to touch the papers with his hands, as if they might contaminate him. He indicated that I should put them back in my pouch. Then he gathered up his tool-kit and motioned that we should return to the village.
Khiem evidently wanted to inspect the hut for himself, though he wouldn’t cross the threshold from the outside just as Charlie refused to cross it from within. Khiem peered inside. I pointed out the three spots in which we’d found the obscenities and he crouched at the door, as if listening hard for something. Without warning, he skipped away like a startled hare. I was about to ask the others what they made of it, but Mick was pointing over my shoulder.
We had other things to think about. Jack was back in the village and he’d arrived with five new men, all armed to the teeth and each fantastically decked with poppy flowers. One of the bandits was wearing a headband interwoven with red and white petals. Khao appeared to greet this group. There was a brief conversation, after which Jack turned and made his way over, looking none too pleased. My heart tightened like a fist in my chest as Khao and the new men dispersed amongst the village huts.
Jack called me aside. He was carrying what looked like a bullwhip; or maybe it was an elephant whip. His face was set like a ceramic mask. ‘Something happened yesterday.’
My intestines squeezed. I felt he knew. I don’t know why; I just felt he knew. I quickly chose to admit to everything that had happened during daylight hours. ‘You’re a father, Jack. You know that a father has to defend his daughter against brutal men. We threw the man from our hut.’
He looked wrongfooted. ‘That’s not how I heard things.’
‘Whatever you heard, Jack, that’s exactly how it was. I don’t lie to you.’
‘You don’t lie to me, eh?’
‘No.’ My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My guts squeezed again.
He stared hard at me for a long time. ‘You know I decided to check on that. I took the
trouble to have your story checked while I was away. The British Consul in Chiang Mai.’ Brazier-Armstrong. I had no idea what he might have found out. ‘Seems you were telling me the truth about this Cambridge man.’
I didn’t blink. ‘And I’m telling you the truth about what happened here.’
Jack walked up and put his face very close to mine. I could smell what he’d had for lunch. I was sweating in the afternoon heat, but I fought the temptation to wipe my brow. ‘Have you seen him?’
‘Who?’
He glared over my shoulder at the hut. I’d seen past the construction of his question, and he knew it. ‘The man you had a problem with.’
‘No.’ The simple lie clunked in my mouth. Jack looked into my eyes. One of the village dogs chose that moment to dive under our hut, scuffling about under there. I tried hard to think whether we might have left anything for the dog to bring out, a shoe, a belt, a headband, a knife.
‘He’s missing.’
‘Oh?’
‘He went missing after Little John there humiliated him.’
‘I see. He must be afraid that you will punish him for what he did to my daughter.’
Jack pulled his face back from mine. ‘He will have to return and then we’ll get to the bottom of what happened.’
‘I don’t know why you keep such men, Jack.’ I knew I was chancing it, but I was appealing to his Robin Hood aspect.
Jack snorted. ‘He’s my nephew. He’s a complete fool, but he’s only here on sufferance, and I’m obliged to protect him.’
‘I understand,’ I said, though I didn’t. The salt from my sweat prickled my eyes. The dog came out from under the hut with what appeared to be a smudge of dried or clotted blood on its nose.
Jack bent down to pat the dog. ‘He found a rat under there.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A rat.’
Jack turned sharply to look at me again. The air around me seemed to ping with imminent fracture. ‘I’ve got my own troubles right now. I don’t need trouble from you. Keep Little John on a leash or I won’t be responsible.’ I looked at the hut, from where Mick was watching us. Just as I was about to reply the radio stopped dead. Jack let out a Thai expletive.
‘I’ll go and fix it at once,’ I said.
Jack stormed away, and as he did so he cracked his whip on the dry earth. I knew his anger was not entirely about us. Something much more serious was going on in his private kingdom, and we were merely caught up in events.
I hurried over to the generator, relieved beyond measure to be clear of the interrogation of Jack’s eyes. He didn’t know. He suspected, but he didn’t know.
As for the generator, it seemed bad luck to have imported such a temperamental machine into the jungle, when ninety-nine in a hundred of these motors would tick along happily for years. I lifted off the cover plate to check where I’d been before. It was when I ran my fingers along the plug lead that I realised the problem was not mechanical after all.
The insulation around the lead had peeled away and the circuit was shorting out. There was no way I could have missed this the day before. Somebody had been in there and had deliberately stripped it with a knife. I thought back to the previous faults and saw how they had each been ‘assisted’: the missing cap, the leafy gunk, the stripped wire. All disguised sabotage.
I chopped out the exposed bit of cable and simply shortened the lead. The generator started up again and ticked over nicely. I kept the bit of vandalised cable and put it in my pocket. As I emerged from the hut Nabao was standing in the shadows of her doorway. She stroked her chin very slowly with her hand, and then repeated the gesture before dissolving into the darkness of her hut.
A signal.
When I got back to our hut, Khiem was busy outside it. He had three clay pots, each of which was smoking with some kind of jungle incense. He wanted Mick, Phil and I to take the three pots inside. He directed us to position the smoking jars under the places where we’d found the photographs.
‘Jack doesn’t know,’ I whispered to Mick as we carried the pots inside. ‘And that fucker with the beard: he’s sabotaging the generator.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Nabao told me.’
‘We’ve got to get out of this place before that body gets turned up,’ Mick said, fingering the spot where his amulet would have been and wafting incense from under his nose.
‘We’ve arrived in hell,’ said Phil. ‘Have you noticed how red the earth is here? How red it is. It’s not easy to get out of hell. No, not easy at all. Did any of you know that?’
33
Jack’s face was impassive as he surveyed the obscenities, but his eyes dripped venom. The defaced photographs were spread out on the table, cluttering a jungle map he’d been studying when Khiem led me into his hut.
After he’d finished lighting incense and candles around the hut Khiem had persuaded me to take the matter to Jack. The old man had accomplished strange rituals, walking backwards around the hut and placing near the door a ‘spirit-house’, a miniature version of a village hut in which he placed tiny bamboo figures of birds and fish and animals. Then he’d persuaded me what to do by the simple expedient of gently taking my hand and whispering Jack’s name over and over.
At first I resisted. For obvious reasons I wanted as little contact with Jack as possible. But then it seemed that by pushing my problems under his nose I might appear less likely to be involved in his nephew’s disappearance.
By their actions I suspected that Jack’s cohort was busy with jungle business, converting raw opium into morphine for transportation. It was Charlie who had told me that the secondary translation of morphine into heroin was a much more sophisticated operation, requiring serious scientific equipment at labs across the border in Myanmar or Laos, or even near Chiang Mai. I figured Jack was getting ready to transport a major haul and that I’d disturbed him in the planning of his route.
He was transfixed by the ugly spirit photographs.
‘There’s another thing I have to tell you,’ I said, anxious to break his unnerving silence. I laid before him the example of stripped wiring I’d brought from the generator. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the generator engine. One of your men is sabotaging it.’
Jack turned his head away from me and stared fiercely at the bamboo wall. Nothing was said, but I felt afraid. His lean body was utterly rigid, but he leaked an odour like iron and smoke.
‘Three times I fixed it and each time the engine had been tampered with. At first I thought—’
He cut me short. ‘Return to your hut. Stay there. Go.’
My hands trembling, I did as I was told. Khiem remained behind.
Mick sat outside the hut, playing with a couple of children. He’d had them hunting for his amulet without success, and now he was teaching them how to play fivestones. This time there was no golden light. I could see black lines of care striping his brow. I knew he would have calculated the danger to himself, and the real possibility that Phil might sacrifice him to spare the rest of us.
After all, there was no love lost between them. It was without doubt that in Phil’s eyes Mick had committed the ultimate unforgivable act. Unforgivable before man and God. If the body was uncovered then Phil might conclude that Mick could be made to pay the penalty. The finger would be pointed. I knew Mick would have figured this out already.
A dozen candles flickered on the porch, and the pungent smell of incense from inside thickened the air. Mick scrambled to his feet, wanting to know what had happened. I told him all there was to tell and then I went inside to see Charlie. In the shadows of the hut a dozen more star-like candles burned. After a brief, pig-like snort, Charlie snoozed on. Phil squatted at the foot of the bed, reading, by the dim light, from his pocket Bible. I squatted with him, and I soon found myself stroking Charlie’s foot just as before. I sat watching her as I did when she was an infant, looking for that cherubic beauty in her night-time flight across clouds seeded with gold and velvet dark. Now I had no idea what
resinous nightmares she crossed in her sleep. But I sat and watched all the same.
‘Didn’t I love you enough, Phil? You and Charlie? Is that why things worked out like this? Or did I love you too much? I’m not a psychiatrist. Not a shrink.’
Phil shook his head. ‘Will you say a prayer with me?’
‘I will not. I’ve told you before: she’s on her pipe, you are on yours.’
‘Then,’ he said, ‘will you say a prayer for me?’
I gazed at him with an uncomprehending expression.
‘You know what Mercy said, Dad? Mercy said: “I was a-dreaming that I sat all alone in a solitary place and was bemoaning the hardness of my heart.’” With that he got up and took himself outside, leaving me with Charlie.
The sigh which issued from me at that point was very nearly a howl. My son and I were reduced to trading in obscure quotations, and it was a game in which I was always going to lose. I felt Phil had confined himself to a cage, on some unreachable summit, just as Charlie had done.
‘I’m your dad,’ I whispered to Charlie, still stroking her foot, ‘come to get you. But I can’t get to you, can I? I can’t go where you are. Either of you. I don’t know the way in, Charlie, but if I did, you know I would come after you. You know I would. I’d go barefoot over hot coals for you.’
When my jaws ached from this one-way talk I went and sat outside with Mick, discussing our chances. I asked him where Phil was, but he didn’t know. I was hopeful that, after what I’d revealed to Jack, the opium bandit might decide to help us. We were silent for a while, and then Mick started talking about the new and exotic fruits he’d discovered since he’d been here; fruit he’d never seen before, and how he was going to import some for his market stall. Maybe he was faking it to lift our desperate spirits, but he seemed to have no doubt we would get out of this. He was going to be the first in Leicester market to import star-shaped fruit. Actually, I’d seen star-shaped fruit on Leicester market, but he was still talking like this when the attack came from nowhere.