They are Trying to Break Your Heart

by David Savill

  ‘Kemal never gave a fuck about imams or mosques.’

  ‘I know.’

  The car turns off the high road onto an old street, heading down between the lean-to houses built out of old shepherds’ huts. Samir slips it into neutral, and the sound of the engine is replaced by the familiar popping of tyres over cobbles. They drop down to the centre of the old town, the low red roofs of the buildings in the Turkish quarter, where his cousin now runs a bed and breakfast. This was a place too dangerous to visit during the war. Although Marko had come here with Vesna.

  Vesna was the last person Marko had seen before he left the country; Vesna standing on the banks of the Sava as the ferry, low with cars and cattle and people, drifted into the current. He knew he would not be coming back. This place had taken away his childhood and given him the opportunity to start again. He wonders now whether Kemal had known it too. Whether Kemal had stood on the ferry over the Sava. Whether Kemal had been drifting with the river current on the day Marko, Samir, Vesna and his father buried an empty coffin.

  ‘Kemal would laugh,’ he tells Samir, ‘at the idea of me and an imam washing his body. He’d prefer a woman.’

  It is an anger he is not supposed to feel. The anger he had used to kill the dog on Parker’s Piece. Be angry with something else, not with the animal. Kemal had taught him to do this. To kill without feeling as the plastic bag tied around the greyhound’s head became a thrashing balloon of spit. Without feeling, and with mercy. That was the trick. He was doing the dog a favour. He was doing the best he could.

  ‘Is Vesna coming?’ Marko asks.

  ‘The invitations went out,’ Samir says. ‘But we never heard from her.’

  The tip of Marko’s finger has turned purple. He lets the lace of Samir’s trainer loose. It is oddly light, this false leg, the shin a hollow rod of plastic. Not the shape of a real limb, but something approximating a Caucasian skin colour. Samir pulls the car up against a kerb, switches the engine off and takes the leg from him.

  ‘It’s just around here,’ he says.

  A tourist shop, postcard spinners and buckets of those giant sponge hands people wave at football matches, with ‘Sarajevo’ printed along the pointing finger.

  ‘Baščaršija Bed and Breakfast’. The name of Samir’s place is etched in English on the glass. So they are the ones running things now.

  Bangkok

  William closes the driver’s door and seals them from the nightclub din.

  ‘Pad Kee Mao – they didn’t have Rad Na.’ He offers Missy the tray of steaming noodles but she has fallen asleep, head against the passenger window and hands closed between thighs of denim shorts. Her hair is loose from its pins, a backcombed mess of curls over the glass. William thinks it may be dyed – no, sprayed! This strange American woman has sprayed her hair silver with the kind of stuff kids use on Halloween.

  ‘I charge for looking.’ Missy opens one eye.

  ‘Pad Kee Mao,’ he holds the tray out again. ‘You asked for something to eat.’

  She shifts with the over-meticulous care of a drunk and looks around the car as though she expects someone else to be there.

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ – so I did call you.’

  ‘You called me from the police station,’ William says. ‘Remember?’

  ‘They are going to deport me.’

  ‘They are not going to deport you.’ William rests the tray of noodles in the well of the handbrake, checks the rear-view mirror, tells her not to panic and knows he is really telling himself.

  He hears the passenger door close. Missy is already out on the road, trapped by a tide of cars. She looks left, looks right and, with one hand on the car to steady herself, stumbles around the bonnet, extending her arm for a taxi, stupid hair wobbling like a head of candyfloss.

  Well, fuck her then.

  He is startled as water slaps across the window of the car. A man trips onto the pavement with something bright pink that turns out to be a plastic gun. The New Year’s nonsense is starting already. The girl he is chasing runs clean out of her flip-flops, black soles of her feet flapping a few steps until she is cut off by a second jet of water. As the girl bends down to pick up her flip-flops, another man appears and drops a balloon of water over her head.

  William turns on the windscreen wiper. Missy has reached the corner of the block. She stands by a road crossing, yanking her ridiculous silver hair into a small ponytail and dangling one foot over the road.

  Technically, this was all his fault. Missy’s visa had expired. The visa William was supposed to arrange. She had been taken to a police station with backpackers who didn’t have the correct paperwork.

  His hands open the car door. His feet walk him over the pavement. His shoulder leads him through the crowds. It is two a.m., a hot April storm has passed and the street smells rise from asphalt slick with neon colours. Missy is bending over a tuk-tuk driver.

  ‘Missy, I think it’s best—’

  ‘I just need to get to the border.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind getting in the car first, we can talk—’

  She shakes him off and heads back down the pavement. William wants to call her name but can’t bring himself to shout in public. Instead, he half runs, half walks, until he catches her at the crossing which holds the night-market crowds beneath the Skytrain tracks.

  She is looking at her feet. When she lifts her head it is with a deep breath, as if surfacing from the sea. ‘I’ve had a little bit to drink – what with New Year.’

  ‘That’s fine. You’re absolutely fine.’

  ‘I was expecting the school to sort out my work visa. I don’t know if that was personally your fault, but it was a screw-up.’

  When he gets her to the car, she climbs into the back seat.

  ‘I’m going to take a nap,’ she says. ‘And when I wake up, I’m going to hope it isn’t in the backseat of my boss’s car where I crashed out drunk after being arrested.’

  She has closed her eyes. Beneath the vest her chest rises and falls. He clears his throat. Perhaps she had just decided the best way out of what she has just done is to hide.

  What is he supposed to do with this tray of noodles?

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ he asks.

  But she appears to be completely out.

  As William pulls away from the kerb, he realises, he doesn’t even know where she lives. At the junction of Pitsanulok and Luang the lights stop them. On the wide corner of Bamrung Muang, a woman places an incense stick into a Buddhist shrine next to a stall selling bongs, hula hoops and water guns. Golden Buddhas, posters of South Korean pop stars in their underwear, dildos lined up in order of size and giant cactuses laid out on a Turkish carpet by the pavement chairs of an all-night Starbucks.

  Where is Anya? Why isn’t she talking to him? Only the failed passwords.

  Hula Hoops, Four Winds, Underground.

  Rama Road falls behind them; the Paragon Mall, the Bank of Thailand, the Metropole. He could take her home but he had cancelled his cleaner months ago – the sink in his kitchen is full of unwashed dishes, the fridge is empty, the bins are full of takeout boxes. The road rises on to the flyover where advertising hoardings loom and fall. The New Kia Cee’d, Louis Vuitton, and a sign that simply says: ‘Thailand thanks the Rotary Club for helping eradicate cholera’. Beneath the tyres, the concrete sections of the flyover thump: Stratton, Stratton, Stratton.

  He has done the border run before. Three years ago now; six hours to Aranyaphratet in Thailand, two in Poipet. He has heard the bureaucracy is worse these days. It takes twenty-four hours, maybe more, to turn a new entry-visa around. But what choice do they have? When the flyover dips down into a single lane between the shacks of the suburbs, William pulls over, rests his head on the steering wheel and breathes in and out to a rhythm dictated by the ticking of the car’s indicator.

  ‘What?’ Anya would grin at William when she was driving, ‘What are you looking at?’

  He was looking at Anya. A
nya who had passed her driving test first time. Anya who would give him lifts to their shifts at a restaurant. He had already failed the driving test twice. To sit next to Anya as she drove her mother’s car was everything. The car changed the world they were in. They let the windows down, William lit her cigarette from his own, and they filled themselves like sails with the air rushing in. The dual carriageway that stretched out into the green belt wasn’t just leaving the town, it was leaving everything they had been. It was all over. Not just the houses, and their parents, shrinking in the rear-view mirror, but the school with its teachers, the parks with its bullies, the girls who had broken his heart. All those battles were over and William had won. He had won! His arm trailed out of the window, palm batting the thick summer air.

  William had won Anya.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Looking at Anya. At her eyes behind oversized sunglasses, her smile wide beneath them, arms stretched to the steering wheel and a tie-dye skirt falling between her legs. She was the kind of girl who knew who she was going to vote for in her first general election, and actually knew why. She worked to pay her half of the insurance on the car, she knew what settings to use on a washing machine, she could cook curries and moussaka, and ate olives when she drank red wine.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Looking at Anya, who treated the car like she did the cutlery and plates at the restaurant. She threw it around without fear of breaking it, jamming it into small spaces on the high street, heavy on the clutch, ruthless with the gears (in Anya’s view, bumpers were for bumping). But William never for a moment felt anything less than safe. As with the rest of her life – the three dogs she walked, the two jobs she did, the political parties she had already joined – Anya seemed to be in control, to know what needed to be done.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Looking at Anya. Anya as she sits on the veranda beneath the palms. She smiles. She is wearing sunglasses again, but not over-sized. She is trying the Durian fruit he bought for their breakfast and the silence which follows contains their earliest memories. Sixteen years later, and William still feels like he has won.

  ‘I love that we can hear the sea,’ she says. And they can. They can hear the ocean sigh as it gives itself up on the shore.

  Christmas Day, 2004

  Kao Lak

  Anya sat up in the bed. The book fell from her chest. She had fallen asleep with the dominatrix, a nineteenth-century Austrian princess cast out from her family to live a life of exile in North Africa, where she commanded a harem.

  She opened the blinds. Through the heavy fingers of a palm there was a view of the walkway suspended over the mangroves. Three more bungalows in the trees. It could have been too early or too late for people to be up. She had passed the night in a jet-lag dream, waking to read again her notes on Kemal Lekić, and struck by a sudden doubt over whether she should be here at all. Not just because of William, but because of this business she had already fucked up once. Wasn’t it a vanity? The real question was, what would Ljuba Crvenović want? The woman whose apartment in Belgrade had been spotless, baklava freshly made for her English guest. Ljuba had heard the English didn’t drink coffee, and had been out to buy tea. Her children were at school. Her husband was at work. No mother of three could have always kept a place this tidy. When Anya used the bathroom, she found the end of the blue toilet paper folded into a neat arrowhead.

  Finally, after years of petitioning, after years of campaigning for the eviction of the tenants occupying their old house, the Crvenović family had won their right to return to their village. It was one of those front-line places, awkwardly split between post-Dayton Bosnia and the newly created Republika Srpska. Ljuba and her husband were Bosnian Serbs, but they had not participated in fighting on the Serbian side, and in theory, their return should not have caused any difficulties in the community.

  During the conversation, Anya had detected some stalling between Ljuba and the translator. But when it came, Ljuba’s breakdown was sudden. Her village was only a twenty-minute drive from Stovnik. How could she go back? How could she go back, when men from the brigade were living in the town? The man she accused of her rape was dead. But the other soldiers knew. The other soldiers had witnessed what happened. And what of her friends? Her friends were still missing, and no one was investigating that.

  Anya had told Ljuba she would be visiting Stovnik to report on the efforts of the local police to evict wartime tenants. What if she checked in to see whether there had been any developments in the missing person’s case? Would that help?

  In the bungalow, Anya’s mobile wouldn’t come to life. The heat drained her as she rifled through the suitcase for the charger and plug adaptors. What would happen if she just left the mobile turned off? The idea was startling. Her colleagues wouldn’t believe it. But with the care of someone laying flowers on a grave, she put the dead phone back in the drawer, and then in the shower, let the cold water beat against her face, a light battering for all of yesterday’s foolishness. There was no reason why it might not get better. They had twelve days together.

  God. Twelve days.

  She stood in a towel and cut off the price tags from a red one-piece bought on impulse at Heathrow. What if she knocked on William’s door and woke him with a blow job?

  But Will’s bedroom door was closed. She put her ear to the warm wood, her hand on the cool porcelain doorknob, when something stopped her.

  What the fuck was she doing?

  ‘It was in the pool,’ a man with a heavy German accent told the receptionist.

  By its laces, the receptionist held up a dripping pair of trainers, looking uncertain of what to do with them. A second boy darted beneath the desk and surfaced with a bin-liner.

  Anya waited and studied the leaflets in a carousel. Boat trips to islands, dawn parties on special beaches, tattoo artists, massage treatments and restaurants. Elephant rides.

  Elephant rides. She picked the leaflet out. An elephant on a beach. The red tabard with golden brocades over its back and the name of the place. Heaven Resort, Kao Lak. There were no more pictures inside the brochure, only this paragraph in a number of different languages.

  Thailand famous for its wild Elephant.

  Beach rides at dawn and dusk.

  Ride this wild and magnificent animal.

  Hire only from boathouse.

  Over four years ago she had written the name of this resort in her notes. But the picture of the elephant was something she had not seen since then.

  Anya showed the receptionist the leaflet. ‘Do you know where I can book an elephant ride?’

  The receptionist said something and Anya had to ask him to repeat it. The elephants could be hired at the boathouse, down at the south end of the beach, not far, he said. She found herself walking through a restaurant, white tablecloths reflecting the sunlight, the percussion of cutlery, and staff threading through the room like ghosts in their grey pyjama suits. Outside, a pool area, hot flagstones and the resort falling away in tiers to the sea. It was Anya’s first glimpse of the Indian Ocean and it blinded her. The sun on this side of the world seemed heavier, closer to the earth somehow.

  William sank a penknife into a giant watermelon. ‘Happy Christmas!’

  He had been to the local market, and from parcels of brown paper, dished out Thai specialities as if they were Christmas presents. Sticky rice in baking paper; a heavy orange fruit about the size and shape of a large aubergine. As he cut the fruit open with a penknife, he tried to teach her the name. The fruit split into two pieces of yellowish flesh folded over with a startling resemblance to labia.

  ‘And this rice,’ he said, splitting it with a fork, ‘funnily enough, sort of tastes spermy. But I think it’s fish.’

  She preferred the juice (his favourite apparently), a mixture of guava, lime and banana. He arranged everything in a line for her to try and although it didn’t feel like breakfast time, she found herself hungry for it all. Somehow, she
had forgotten Will could be fun.

  ‘He lives in a room next to the school entrance,’ Will was talking about the school caretaker, ‘with a kettle and a cupboard of Pot Noodles – or the equivalent of – and a blow-up doll.’

  Through the trees, on the veranda of another bungalow, a large, pale European man busily erected a picnic table for a family of what seemed like an impossible amount of children. Anya closed her eyes and let her head fall back. The light through the palms. She was a child trailing a stick along the iron bars of a fence.

  ‘Doesn’t attempt to hide it. Doesn’t even see anything wrong with it. I caught him washing the doll down in the school shower.’

  The noises cut through Will’s chatter; cutlery against a plate; the sound of children’s voices. Anya was falling and had to force herself to sit up and open her eyes. She hadn’t been down to the boat-hire place, not yet. Even if Kemal Lekić was alive and had at some point been here, visited by his girlfriend, it didn’t mean he was still here. And if he was – well, what was she going to do? In the pocket of her shorts she felt for the reassuring shape of her mobile phone. Returning from the reception she had plugged it in, and it was now fully charged.

  ‘Christmas presents!’ Will said. He produced another brown paper parcel from the bag.

  ‘Oh, I forgot!’ she said.

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘No – I mean, it’s in my bag. I’ll have to fetch it.’

  ‘Never mind that now, look – you might not want to give me anything after this. I only just remembered myself and it’s all they had at the shop.’

  Anya opened the parcel. ‘Wow.’ She examined the box. ‘This is – a Franklin Roosevelt action figure!’

  ‘Also available – Copernicus, Mozart, Schopenhauer and Einstein – all from the same stall that brings you vaginal fruit.’