by Zoë Folbigg
Maya walks along the pavement, parallel to the monks, with less grace and more urgency as she scans the crowd.
What’s going on?
A yearning in her stomach draws her to the deep and pulsating noise, so she carries on along the pavement, towards the river, scanning scanning scanning the small pockets of Westerners, mostly taller than the Laos people, to see if James is one of them.
She can’t see his thoughtful face looking through a lens; she can’t see his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth while he rounds his shoulders and watches people watching people.
The noise grows louder and more thumping, like the beating of her heart, as Maya hurries her pace along the road to the tip of the small promontory, to the river’s edge where the Nam Khan and the Mekong converge.
As Maya stands on a precipice and looks up at the steep mossy karsts on the other side of the river, she sees the water swirl, a wind whips up her hair, her eardrums hurt from the raw sound, and a helicopter rises in front of her as if the river itself belched it into her face. Startlingly loud and black, like a giant scarab beetle flying right at her, Maya screams and ducks, shielding her face with her arms as her scream disappears into the rotors. The helicopter makes a turning circle in the air and hovers back over the river.
Is he in there? Is he dead?
Maya runs down a winding river-edge road, past French colonial guesthouses and rosewood verandas, past white pillars and pink bougainvillea and plum blossom, around the end of the promontory on a road that curls back towards the centre of the town. Her breath is short and her heart is racing. She has never run like this before.
I have to find the police station.
Maya uses every ounce of the little energy she has to run in her cumbersome cargo pants and walking shoes, her small jewelled bag slung across her body, as she sweeps into a side street and cuts through a tiny alleyway that she hopes will lead her back into the historical centre, because surely the police station would be in the centre of town?
At the end of the alley, Maya rejoins Luang Prabang’s main road. More bakeries. Bars that have battened down their hatches until opening time. Some fancier hip hotels. On a crossroads she sees a flash of orange, as the monks curve around a far corner, their oath to Buddha more powerful than the commotion in the sky.
Maya looks left, back towards the river, only a couple of hundred metres away, and sees the helicopter rising again. This time it hovers above a crowd; it looks like the helicopter is trying to tail or contain a crowd of people that seems to grow as it strides and surges towards Luang Prabang’s centre. Towards Maya.
What the hell?!
The helicopter looms, the wind thick and throaty under its blades. The group of people charging below it cling on to their hats and flatten their hair as they pace towards Maya, standing open-mouthed and astounded halfway down the road. Children look up and gasp. Bystanders break away from the alms-giving to see what the furore is all about in this lazy and lackadaisical town.
The crowd marches, continuing to swell under the surveillance of the helicopter’s roar. Lights flash and a siren starts to scream as the group gets closer, seemingly larger with every step of their approach, as townspeople, tourists and dogs all gather, to try to see what is at the heart of it, and join it as it grows.
Then Maya sees him. Through her puffy cried-out eyes. James is the eye of this storm, flanked now by what must be a hundred people, as he carries a pale woman in his arms, her head turned away as she leans into James’ chest. Maya sees dark blue shorts, she sees a rusty chain cutting into a bruised ankle. She doesn’t see the terror in the woman’s eyes, only the horror of James’. One is swollen shut. Both are cut, bruised and bloody, and his glasses have gone. James’ hair seems to have grown longer in an absent night. His arms expand with one last push.
‘James!’ Maya shouts through a gasp.
Maya!
He can’t speak.
She runs to him and puts her hand on his face, mindful of the woman in his arms, examining him as if he were not from this planet.
‘Oh my god, oh my god, what’s happened?’ Maya tries to hold back her cry but can’t, the sight is too horrific, but still she digs deep, so she can switch to survival mode.
The crowd slows under the groan of people joining it and shouting, but James says nothing. He can’t say anything. His mouth is cut and voiceless.
Maya searches James’ open eye for direction, to see what she needs to do, and she gives him a quick and reassuring nod.
‘OUT OF THE WAY! LET THEM THROUGH!’
Maya can see that James’ cracked mouth is too sore – he is too shocked – to speak, so she does it for him as she waves her arms to clear the path ahead. Swimming on land, treading water, under a helicopter that seems to be trying to push them under.
‘Hospital! Police! Where are the police station and the hospital?’ Maya bellows to the crowd around them. An excited boy with a shaved head takes pride in leading the pack, beckoning Maya with a small and hurried pace, leading the way in his little sandals.
Maya looks up at the helicopter above them, urging it to take flight, shaking her head angrily at the pilot, before looking back to the woman in James’ arms.
‘GIVE HER SPACE!’ Maya shouts.
No one can hear under the thunderous roar, but everyone gets the gist of what she’s saying. Ahead of them, people join the little boy in guiding the way, each wanting a role in the commotion; a story to tell their families over fish soup or laap tonight. The wind and the noise of the helicopter make it hard to hear all the different directions and instructions being shouted, so Maya takes her lead from the boy, his small round head bobbing in front of them as he runs as fast as he can.
‘This way!’ Maya says, as she follows the boy.
As they hurry, as James struggles to keep up, Maya steals glances at his face, to assess his injuries, to dare to take a look at his swollen eye and cut, cracked lips; to peer into his tired, swollen arms.
To see what the face of Manon Junot looks like in real life.
67
The little boy brings the charge to a halt at a modern-looking pagoda on the corner of two streets. Its walls are made of breeze block, its triangular roof of orange terracotta tiles. An orderly rolls a bed trolley down a ramp onto the street, and a woman in a white coat and a North American accent dashes down the steps.
‘You speak English?’ she asks without hesitation.
‘Yes, we’re British. I don’t know what’s happened!’ Maya despairs. ‘He can’t speak easily.’
‘Dr Wong,’ says the woman. ‘This is the Chinese hospital. We’ll take them from here. GET RID OF THAT THING!’ She waves up at the helicopter, which obediently rises and turns sharply, heading back to the river.
The orderly approaches, proffering the bed, and James slumps Manon Junot onto it with both care and clumsiness, just at the point he was about to drop her. He leans onto Maya and breathes heavily, in relief. She holds him tight and he winces. His arms tired from rowing, from fighting, from carrying. His beautiful face bloody and cracked.
‘It’s OK, baby, it’s OK,’ Maya says, bringing James in, putting her forehead to his, stroking his hair. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK…’
‘Papers please,’ says a man in a sand-beige shirt. His matching trousers have a crease running from his hips to his shiny boots. Mirrored aviator shades conceal most of his face, but Maya can tell it’s a face of authority. Another man in beige uniform appears on the other side of James, offering to hold him up even though he is much smaller. The little boy continues to jump up and down in excitement, but the man in the mirrored aviators gestures to swat him away like a fly.
‘It’s Manon Junot!’ Maya tells the policeman. ‘Someone tell the French ambassador! My boyfriend has found Manon Junot.’
‘Papers please,’ says the first man again, this time more sternly. He lifts and replaces his peaked military cap while he waits for compliance.
‘English! English!’ s
houts the little boy, who gets a clip around the ear.
James slumps between Maya and the second officer.
‘Passport…’ James whispers breathlessly to Maya, finally daring to open his mouth. ‘My passport should be in my back pocket, from the flight the other day, but I don’t know…’
Maya fumbles around James’ body. His camera bag has gone. There is no digital SLR dangling proudly around his neck. She feels in the back pocket of his faded black jeans and finds a wet passport. She slides it out and opens it, careful not to tear damp pages while the first police officer snatches it out of her hands.
‘Hey!’ Maya protests. She gives the man a hard stare, but he doesn’t notice, as he thumbs through soggy pages until he finds the one with the photograph on it.
‘James Alexander Miller, come with me please,’ says the officer.
‘What? He needs medical help! You’re not taking him away!’
‘Come with me please, we need to talk to you.’
‘Get the French ambassador, get the British ambassador, and get my boyfriend some medical help!’ Maya demands, standing nose-to-nose with the man, seeing her lioness face in the reflection of his glasses. ‘Please,’ she adds, quietly.
‘This man isn’t going anywhere until we’ve looked at him,’ Dr Wong steps in, putting a protective arm around Maya and James. ‘Nurse!’
The doctor speaks to the police officer in Lao and he in turn replies, before looking to Maya and James and slipping into broken English.
‘Very well,’ he nods. ‘But then we take him to the station, we have lots of questions.’
‘Of course,’ nods Dr Wong, ushering James and Maya in through the white and weathered glass doors of the clinic. ‘Asshole,’ she mutters under her breath.
Maya turns around and sees the little boy who led them there looking up at her. His dirty yellow T-shirt has a blue cartoon elephant on it. His trousers are too short for him.
‘Thank you,’ she says. Stuffing all the kip she has in her purse into his shaky little hand.
He smiles, and runs home in his sandals, to tell his parents tales they won’t believe.
On the other side of the hospital doors, a man rushes to a halt with a wheelchair. James turns around and slumps in it, while both he and Maya wonder where Manon Junot has been taken.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Dr Wong, as if reading their minds. Her pristine white coat and competent, made-up face give her a reassuring gravitas. ‘The woman you brought in is being seen to urgently – my colleagues are first-class.’
Maya opens her mouth, to explain to Dr Wong who the woman is. ‘She’s—’
‘I know who she is,’ she says, putting a reassuring hand on Maya’s arm. ‘I have a friend who works out of the French embassy in Vientiane. I’ll put in a call to make sure they know, but I’m sure the police will. Let’s just get them seen to first, yes?’
‘Yes,’ nods Maya. ‘Thank you. I’m just thinking of her family.’
Dr Wong starts shouting orders for saline and drugs and other things Maya doesn’t understand and James is too tired to take in.
Outside the clinic, a formation of police officers jog in perfect unison towards the river and the monks file back into the temple, to return to their morning prayers.
68
Maya perches on the edge of the copper roll-top bath and softly wipes James’ skin, olive brown and bruised, with a sponge that looks like soft honeycomb.
‘Ow!’
‘Sorry, baby, I’m trying to avoid the cuts, but some do still need cleaning. There’s dirt and mud. I’m not sure they looked you over well enough.’
‘They stitched my eye; they would have said if anything else needed it.’
James speaks gingerly, almost through his teeth, so as not to tear the cracks at the edge of his mouth.
‘But this looks nasty, there’s still dirt in some of the cuts!’
Maya gives a sigh, unhappy with Dr Wong’s ‘first-class’ team. Her brow is sweaty and her cheeks are pink. She took off James’ jumper and her thick cargo trousers, thanks to the steam she worked up cleaning him in the bathroom, so she leans over the bath in her lace-trimmed marl vest and knickers. Worried and exasperated, and trying to remember to be relieved. But she’s tired too.
‘I’ll be fine. I can’t face going out there right now.’
He looks up at Maya, one eye purple and red and swollen shut, while old-fashioned needle-and-thread stitches hold his straight dark brow together. Maya tries not to show the horror she’s feeling as she looks at him; her love, back from a traumatic and violent night he hasn’t yet told her about.
Maya rests the fuzzy, honeycomb sponge on top of the copper taps, dries her hands on a white waffle towel that’s hanging on the radiator and walks over to the window.
‘Uff!’ she says, opening the latch to let in some air. She gently unpeels a slat, cautious so no one sees her in her underwear, peeping out to see more people gathering outside than when she last looked. A white news truck with red letters on it pulls up. Maya knows there will only be more arriving as time goes on. She shuts the slat with a slam.
At least they don’t know he’s right here.
*
At the Police Office Xiengthong Group – a modest white building with brown shutters and not much in the way of security – James was taken away, fingerprinted, swabbed and interviewed. Maya sat nervously on one of the plastic chairs in the waiting area, smiling occasionally at the woman in a beige shirt and trousers sitting behind the desk; anxious that James might be being accused of something; wondering if he had a voice, if he could even speak – if he could even see – or if he needed her to help him. Thinking of how to contact the Foreign Office or speak to the British Ambassador in Vientiane.
What do people do in these situations?
‘It’s all taken care of,’ nodded the officer at the desk, with small teeth and a pretty face. ‘Phone calls being placed.’
Maya wasn’t allowed to be in the room to hear James’ statement, but her panic was abated by the noisy hauling in of a local man with wet, wavy hair to his shoulders and a moustache, flanked by officers with machine guns. He too had a bloody and bruised face.
James hadn’t been flanked by officers with machine guns. This was heartening.
Even more heartening was when the most stern of the police officers walked James back into the waiting area with the plastic chairs and pressed his passport into his hand and patted him on the back.
Maya stood up and flung her arms around James, to another wince.
‘We’ll speak again when the ambassador arrives,’ said a translator with large gold-rimmed glasses. ‘But for now you go back to your hotel and get some rest, Mr Miller.’ She gave him a sympathetic nod.
*
‘It’s getting busier out there,’ Maya says as she pads back to the bathroom. ‘Shall I see if someone from the hospital can come here? I don’t think they cleaned you up as well as they should.’
‘It’s fine, they were focusing on getting samples and stuff first. Cleaning later.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘It’s fine, really, they did enough.’
James sounds more irritated than anything but looks up at Maya in the doorway and tries to calm himself.
‘I’m hungry more importantly.’
Maya smiles, her shoulders relaxing a little. ‘I’ll go out and see if I can get some food, maybe some antiseptic cream. There isn’t any in our first-aid kit. I mean, what kind of first-aid kit doesn’t have—’
‘No. Don’t go yet,’ James says through his teeth.
Maya stops and sits down on the closed lid of the toilet. She looks at James as he moves his hair to the side, as he did that first day Maya saw him walking down the platform at Hazelworth station. When she was a stranger to him and she could only dream of being away with him; comfortable enough to bathe with him; the person who would make him right again. If she can, that is.
Maya nods. ‘It can wait. I might have
a cereal bar squirrelled away somewhere… I’ll look in a bit.’
She gives him a reassuring smile and turns to reposition his passport, hanging next to her on the radiator, trying to dry out the pages that got so wet she doesn’t know how. She takes the sponge from the taps and plunges it into the bath again and holds it gently to James’ forehead.
You’re back.
Water trickles from the large holes of the sponge, down James’ face, his straight nose swollen and bloodied at the bridge.
I was so worried.
‘What happened?’ Maya whispers.
‘I don’t know where to start.’
‘Start with last night. You left me. Here, in the bath.’
James looks mournful, and sinks back, low into the hot water.
‘Why did you go? Why did you want to be away from me?’
‘I didn’t…’
Maya turns on the tap, to top up the bath with hot water, busying herself while James has a moment to think.
‘I had a job offer, when I went to Skype Brooke. A pretty fucking amazing job offer too.’
Maya smiles acceptingly.
‘I needed to think about it, I…’
She spares him. ‘I know, I know about the job offer.’
‘You do?’
‘I checked your email when you didn’t come back to the hotel. I was so worried…’
James’ puzzled face looks as though the whole debacle with the job offer, his dilemma about whether to accept it or not, was all a lifetime ago, as he struggles to remember the minutiae of what happened before It happened last night.
‘I was too worried to tell you. I didn’t want to cause problems, to rock the boat. So I went for a walk, to take some pictures, mull it over.’
Did he see me and Jon?
Maya takes a deep breath and exhales towards the ceiling, steeling herself for what’s to come.
‘So I went back to the internet cafe, I emailed Kaye-French and I turned it down.’