by Medina, KT
Tess met his gaze. ‘That’s terrible.’
‘Aye. It wasn’t pleasant. So that’s why I had the certificate made. To try to cheer the kid up. Also I feel a bit—’ He tailed off with a shrug.
Tess glanced across; there had been something in his tone. ‘A bit?’
‘You’re nosy, aren’t you?’
‘It comes with the female territory, I’m afraid.’
‘Aye, well. I feel a little responsible, I suppose.’
‘Responsible? Why?’
They had reached the common-room building. MacSween stopped, his hand on the door.
‘It was an MCT Land Cruiser that hit them.’
‘What?’ She paused as the information sank in. ‘You were – were you driving?’
‘No.’
‘Then who?’
He had begun tapping his fingertips against the doorframe, just gently. ‘Johnny was driving.’
‘Was it Johnny’s fault?’
‘No. It was . . . one of those things. Ret S’Mai’s dad had been drinking. Johnny had also had a few. It shouldn’t have happened and the consequences were fucked up for Ret S’Mai and his family, but no one was to blame. This is Cambodia. The Green Cross Code doesn’t apply out here. Drink-drive laws don’t apply out here, and we live with the fallout.’
The room they entered was light and airy and ran almost the entire length of the building. Tables and chairs crowded the near end; the wood floor at the far end was covered with blue mats, gym bars climbed the walls, and soft shapes and exercise balls of various sizes were scattered around. Double doors in the opposite wall were propped open and through them Tess could see the obstacle course she had noticed yesterday from the window of the hospital building.
Groups of Khmer mine victims were gathered around the tables, chatting and laughing. They quietened when they noticed her and MacSween.
‘Johm riab sua.’ He raised a hand. ‘Neuv ai naa, Ret S’Mai.’
One of the men pointed to the obstacle course. Outside, a young boy was helping a middle-aged woman with a thigh-length prosthetic climb the wooden obstacle-course stairs. Her expression was a blend of concentration and fear as she clung to the banister, hauling herself up each step more with her arms than her legs.
‘That’s Ret S’Mai,’ MacSween said in a low voice. ‘Dr Ung’s done me a favour and given him a job here helping mine victims with their physiotherapy. Cambodians believe that anyone who’s lost part of their body has also lost part of their mind, so it makes mine victims both an object of ridicule and unemployable. It’s incredibly tough for them to find jobs. And if they can’t work, and don’t have relatives who’ll support them, they starve.’
They waited while the woman completed her ascent and stopped to lean against the rail at the top, chest heaving. After Ret S’Mai had helped her down and to a chair, he trailed across the yard to join them. He was so tiny and slight that he could have passed for ten had he been a Westerner, but MacSween had told Tess that he was fifteen. His head was disproportionately large – but his features were tiny, nose a folded stub of skin, mouth a pucker. MacSween clapped him on the shoulder, almost tilting him off balance with the force of his hand.
‘Working hard, I see.’
‘Baat.’ He smiled shyly and tiny black eyes skipped from MacSween to Tess and back.
‘Ret S’Mai, this is Tess. She’s joined us for a time to help train more local mine clearers.’
Tess extended a hand – stopped short – silently cursing herself for her stupidity. But Ret S’Mai just grinned and raised a skinny arm. The fingers on the hand he had raised, his right, were missing completely, as if someone had ripped them out with a pair of pliers leaving him with nothing but four pale dents and a twisted thumb.
MacSween stepped forward, holding up the certificate to cover her embarrassment. ‘I’ve got a wee present for you, lad.’
Ret S’Mai was trembling as he leaned forward to study it, trailing his thumb over the gold embossed letters, over the blue and white of the MCT logo, pinching the frame between his thumb and the flat of his hand and tugging it from MacSween’s grasp.
‘How are things, kid?’ MacSween asked, when Ret S’Mai had finished studying the certificate.
‘I very busy. Many mine victims here.’ His big head bobbed. ‘Dr Ung tell me about Johnny accident. I sorry. Very sorry.’
‘Thank you, Ret S’Mai. It was a hell of a shock.’
‘He going to be OK. Dr Ung says.’
‘I’m going to talk to Dr Ung now. See what he has to say.’ He reached out and ruffled Ret S’Mai’s hair. ‘Look after yourself, kiddo. Juab kh’nia.’
‘Lia suhn hao-y, Mr Bob,’ Ret S’Mai said. Then he turned to Tess. Tiny black eyes stared up at her; the stump of a blunt palm felt its way into her hand. ‘Come again. Please. I like you come.’ A grin parted his small mouth.
Tess shivered, despite herself. ‘Of course I will,’ she said, with a brief smile. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’
10
Running, which in her early twenties, before she met Luke, had been about burning off excess energy, had become Tess’s way of escaping, of letting her body and mind float free. Ducking out of the hospital gates, she stood on the quiet street for a moment, sucking in a couple of breaths, jiggling her arms and legs to get the blood flowing. The sky was that rare, perfect blue over a green English field. But it was fiercely hot: the dense heat peculiar to Asia that made every breath an effort, even when standing still.
Sweat ran into her eyes and darkened her T-shirt as she ran down the road, dodging the steady stream of bicycles and mopeds, whose drivers honked and shouted encouragement; a couple of women washing clothes in a plastic bucket, who raised their eyebrows at her; a gaggle of tiny children who danced in front of her waving and pulling faces, dodging out of the way, giggling, just as she reached them. A dog slunk out from behind a fence and kept pace with her for a few steps, but it must have been too hot and lethargic to put up a proper chase because when she looked back it was lying on the kerb, its tongue lolling.
She crossed straight over the intersection, following the curve of the river on the quieter, southern side, past white-painted two-storey houses and traditional bamboo huts leaning drunkenly on stilts over the water, all somnolent in the midday heat.
Though she tried to focus only on the sound of her soles hitting the cracked tarmac, her mind kept orbiting back to Luke, to Johnny.
Luke who couldn’t go to bed until every light had been switched off, every appliance unplugged, every lock checked and double-checked. Luke who couldn’t leave the bathroom until the towels were hung on the rail in perfect rectangles, the shampoos ranged from small to large on the shelf above the bath. Luke who had to load the dishwasher because Tess could never do it right. Luke, who was so controlled, so controlling – because he was making up for all the years of childhood during which, as the son of a drug-addicted single mother with a ruinous lifestyle, he had no control over anything, even his own body.
She slowed to a walk – shaking out her arms and legs as she went – turning right across the bridge over the Sanger, letting her eyes skim along the water. In the middle of the bridge she stopped and leaned against the concrete parapet, tilting forward so that she could see the muddy water below. From where she stood there were two towns. One hemming the banks of the river: alive, moving, a flood of cars, mopeds and bikes, people walking, running, shouting, jostling, lights, colour and noise. Its reflection, the silent, phantasmal twin.
Coincidences were for romantic comedies, not real life, and as such she was pretty sure that Luke’s death and Johnny’s injury were connected. But how had Johnny been targeted? How had the person who laid that mine made sure that Johnny, not somebody else, would step on it?
She looked back down at the water below her, and she pictured him walking towards Huan’s lane, his detector slung over his shoulder, visor propped over the top of his head, casual, too casual because he’d done it a thousand times. Because
he was arrogant and flippant. He’s a bit of a joker – goes with the posh-boy territory, I suppose.
The skull: It’s probably just a fucking rock.
Whatever she thought of her profession, she knew that at its most basic level it was a game. A game in which the mine clearer needed to be cleverer than the person they were playing against, the one who laid the mine. Whenever a mine clearer felt they were being led, they needed to ask why? Because what normally works is the simple things.
She remembered an incident the Royal Engineers had faced during her most recent tour of duty in Afghanistan last summer – the incident which had finally made up her mind to leave the army when her five-year service commission was up a year later. It had stayed with her for months afterwards.
Their Engineers’ company had been on a route-clearance operation in Helmand Province, a land with few roads, where routes were easy for the Taliban to predict and target with land mines and IEDs. One critical Engineers’ role was to check and clear these roads before other troops used them.
Their company had barely left the base, were nowhere near their target, so were driving fast, on a tarmacked road which was in constant use and considered safe as houses. She could see it now: the road, a thin black strip cutting through the pale landscape, on one side a desert plain, endless and featureless, on the other a rocky overhang. Through the grimy glass of the windscreen, she watched the Land Rover in front, its desert camouflage colours pale against the black tarmac, the soldiers inside young – most not yet out of their teens – and full of bravado. Beyond the Land Rover, she saw a landslide blocking the road. She thought it was trying to tell her something, but in the speed, heat and dust of the moment she couldn’t think what. She saw the soldiers laughing, saw the flash of brake lights as the Land Rover reached the landslide and slowed, saw it turn off the tarmac and put two wheels on the sandy verge. The sound of the anti-tank mine exploding drowned out the sound of her screaming at them to stop.
The skull.
Planted by someone who knew that a cautious Khmer mine clearer, jumpy as hell, his mind full of myth, would call in his boss when he saw it, particularly if it wasn’t in his lane. That he wouldn’t want to deal with it himself. Planted by someone who knew that the boss had a weakness, knew exactly how to exploit it. Planted by someone who knew that the boss, in the White Crocodile minefield that day, was Johnny.
11
As she left the outskirts of Battambang, lightning snapped across the sky, illuminating gathering storm clouds with flashes of neon white. A crack of thunder sounded, barrels rolling down stairs. Another, closer. The countryside was a depthless sea green under this brooding ceiling. The long grass in the paddy fields rippled and bowed and the palm trees were beginning to sway, their broad leaves heaving and dipping in the wind. A branch blew across the potholed road in front of the Land Cruiser. Tess braked, the wheels screeched, and for one heart-stopping second she thought she might lose traction and skid off the road into the waterlogged ditch beside it. But the huge tyres held and she accelerated away again, her heartbeat slowing as the wheels ate up the tarmac. She passed a family of peasants wheeling a wooden handcart piled high with cut bamboo, glancing up at the sky with harried expressions. She beeped her horn and caught sight of the family in her rear-view mirror, the children dancing and waving, the parents herding them along, faces unchanged in reflection.
The storm broke and a curtain of rain swept across the fields, flattening the long grass in its wake, engulfing the Land Cruiser. She slowed and flicked the wipers to maximum. They fought against the downpour, sloshing water from the windscreen, clearing visibility, losing it again. She was still driving too fast, but she had to get to Koh Kroneg before dark. Going into a minefield after sunset would be madness.
This was madness anyway, she knew. But she had to get another look at the clearance lane where Johnny was hurt.
Forcing her attention back to the road, Tess drove on, squinting through the windscreen, trying to pick out landmarks. At first she could find nothing familiar, but then, just as she began to feel uneasy, a village she recognised swung into view. Twin palms swaying in the wind, rickety huts clustered tightly around a corral of animals. One hut on the edge of the cluster, its walls blackened and burnt-out. The track was a kilometre or so further on. She slowed again and wound down her window. Rain lashed into the car, freezing cold down her cheek, but at least she could see. A track wound off to her left – not the one. Another – too narrow. Then, a few hundred metres further on, she saw a third, just wide enough to take a 4 x 4, bearing heavy tyre marks flooded with rainwater.
Changing down, she eased her foot off the accelerator, minimising the revs. The Land Cruiser leapt off the road and sank into the mud, bucking and slithering like a rodeo bull, but its wheels kept turning, pulling her forward. Tangled bushes on either side dragged against the windows; the mud sucked at the tyres. A hundred metres further and the front wheels bit deep into a rut and span uselessly.
‘Fuck.’ She couldn’t get trapped out here alone, in the dark. And what the hell would MacSween say when he discovered one of his clearers and one of his Land Cruisers were missing? Reducing the revs, she reversed a fraction, jammed the vehicle into second gear and crawled forward. ‘Come on, damn you.’ The tyres slipped and grabbed, lost their traction again, and the Land Cruiser slumped back down into the rut with a metallic groan. Pushing back panic, she tried again, easing her foot gently on to the accelerator, just giving enough revs to get the wheels moving without turning them so fast that they lost grip and span. ‘Please, please, come on.’ Finally, the Land Cruiser bit into the muddy bank of the rut and hauled her upwards. She exhaled in a burst of pent-up tension.
Just beyond the third village, Tess turned off the track and cut the engine. She sat for a moment, squinting out through the steamed-up windscreen. The landscape was already familiar. Koh Kroneg, shrouded in a mist of warm rain. She looked towards the village. Deserted. The animals were huddled together beneath the huts, ears flattened against the weather, huge eyes watching the metal intruder warily.
Hauling herself into the back seat, she slid the flak jacket over her head, squirming to fix the fastenings in the constricted space, then grabbed her detector and battery pack. The rain was still tapping on the side of the Land Cruiser, but lighter now, easing off. Nervous, limbs tingling, she swung the door open and eased herself to the ground.
There was a movement at the front of the Land Cruiser – one of the animals? Her detector held in front of her like a club, she made her way around the vehicle. A tiny girl – five or six – was standing by the bonnet. She had a soft oval face the colour of chocolate milk and huge, solemn dark eyes. A torn purple T-shirt, much too big, flopped off one shoulder; its hem sagged around her ankles. Where had she come from? She hadn’t been there as Tess was pulling in.
‘Johm riab sua,’ Tess said gently, squatting down.
‘Johm riab sua.’ Her voice was only just louder than the whisper of rain. Her head dipped and a curtain of matted hair fell across her face. Both feet were bare, caked in mud, one balanced on top of the other in an agony of shyness. One skinny arm trailed across the Land Cruiser’s bonnet; her tiny fingers rested on the MCT logo.
‘Whiecocodi,’ she said suddenly, still looking at her feet.
Tess leaned forward. ‘Sweetheart, tell me again. What did you say?’
‘Whie Crocodil.’ Her tiny index finger began to pick at the logo. ‘Laan ch’nual. Pel yohp.’ Her other hand was missing, the arm finishing in a messy brown scar just below the elbow, the skin of her upper arm stretched and ridged like overstressed elastic.
‘I don’t understand,’ Tess said, gently.
The little girl was trembling. She was so thin; so exposed. ‘Laan ch’nual. Pel yohp,’ she repeated and this time her gaze slid towards the minefield. ‘Whie Crocodil laan ch’nual.’
Tess glanced over her shoulder, following the child’s gaze, and saw the red-and-white mine tape fencing the mined
land. She turned back to face the girl, suddenly horribly conscious of the time.
‘It’s OK. I know about the White Crocodile, but I’ll be safe because I’m a mine clearer.’ She pointed to her flak jacket. She had to get moving. ‘Sweetheart, go back to the village. You must go back home. Now.’
Tess laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder and tried to turn her, but the child resisted with surprising strength. Her mouth formed a firm line and she looked up, meeting Tess’s eyes fully now for the first time.
‘Whie Crocodil laan ch’nual. Night-night! Laan ch’nual. Pel yohp. Pel yohp.’
Then she pushed Tess’s hand away gently, turned around and walked back towards the village, soon lost in the twilight.
*
Tess crossed the sodden grass to the field through the drizzle. Suddenly disconcerted, she stopped. The lone tree – Johnny’s tree – with its knot of branches and thick, dark foliage, looked different; the contours of the mined land rose and fell with a rhythm that felt totally unfamiliar; the clearance lanes weren’t placed in a pattern that matched her memory. And – the sign had gone.
She looked back over her shoulder to the solid, safe shape of the Land Cruiser, and the village beyond it. The sun was low now, dipping below fast-moving grey clouds, skimming the roofs of the wooden huts, orange deepening to red. A pall of smoke rose from one hut, candlelight flickered in the window of another, and a distant peal of laughter rang out. She was infused with a sense of weightlessness – of how easy it would be to turn back.
Ducking under the warning tape, she inched up to the start of Huan’s lane.
It was the same. The same tree, the same curves and undulations that she had seen yesterday morning. The same soft ground: grass, mud, puddles reflecting a fiery sky, the imprint of running boots. She gripped the metal detector.