by Alan Carter
Howell sees it too. It is serious — a deep burn taking up half his abdomen raised up and angry red and orange, in the shape of the rising sun badge of the ADF, complete with sun rays coming out of the crown where the burning flesh of the Old Man must’ve had little folds where he fell. Neither of the GPL4 officers recognise the shape.
Just get the shirt on him, urges Howell.
I think he’s dead.
He’s not dead. Get on with it.
But the Old Man is too heavy. She gets the sleeves over each wrist.
You pull him forward.
Howell half climbs in and gets the Old Man around the shoulders and pulls him forward. The cut over his eye looks deep. Stockbow slides the shirt up his arms and down over his front. Howell eases the torso back down and the Old Man’s head hits the hot metal floor with a clunk. She quickly gets the buttons done back up and gets out. Howell is on the doors immediately, shooting the bolts and locking them. She stands by the road panting and sweating heavily. Howell’s shirt is so wet from sweat that he looks like someone has poured a bucket of water over him. Stockbow gathers herself, and they head for the cabin.
Hurry up. He might die.
He won’t die.
He might already be dead. I couldn’t feel no pulse.
Howell starts the engine. It coughs and splutters. He slams it into gear and they head for the hospital. All around them are massive red slag heaps baking in the sun, as though the town of Baalboorlie is ringed with the shallow graves of giants.
(From Sweet One, a novel, 2014.)
JULIENNE VAN LOON
HE LOST HER TWICE
This sort of heat was too much for somebody his age. It was only nine in the morning, and already so ruthlessly bright. Back home in Thailand, the rainy season had only just finished and the moist air felt close and warm. This dry Australian air was different. He felt exposed by it.
Rattuwat turned back towards the bushland path they’d left half an hour before. At least there was some shade in that direction. It was unwise, actually, to have ever left the vehicle. But the child had convinced him that they were already very close to the prison and so he had begun walking for her sake. She was a child, after all, and she deserved to be able to see her father, especially after everything that had happened. Ah, Rattuwat, he thought to himself, you have been a fool to believe an eight year old’s view of the world.
And now what? What could he do? The child had no respect. The child was impatient and rude. She did not understand that an old man like himself could not walk this sort of distance, especially in such heat. He took another step towards the shade of the trees, but paused to glance back over his shoulder at the girl. She was now just two twigs for legs sticking out beneath a faded red dress. She was a small girl in a big landscape. And was it wise, he wondered, to leave this girl on her own, to turn away from her out here in a place like this? What if she were your own daughter, he thought, and he remembered Sua at a similar age, so many years ago, the way she would skip in circles around him in the family’s electrical appliances shop in Ubon Ratchathani, her skirt flapping, her grin wide. Rattuwat touched his hand at his chest again. The burning pain was back. He stood motionless in the bare paddock. The sun beat down and he was overcome with grief. The little red dress walked on. ‘She not know where to go,’ he said, though nobody could hear him.
That little baby girl of his — the one who was dead now — he still remembered precisely how small she was when she was born, the length of her no greater than his own forearm. She came nearly two weeks later than predicted, and she did so back-to-front, causing her mother a long and painful labour. When Rattuwat held his daughter for the first time he pulled aside the soft white muslin wrap and retrieved her hand. She wrapped her fingers around one of his as he looked closely into her red and angry face. Rattuwat had come to parenting at a mature age, already into his fifties, but when he looked at that baby’s face he felt a sense of awe that he had never felt before. It seemed the girl knew already something of what life was about. And while she had put up what resistance she could during the labour, it was the only tantrum she ever had. Rattuwat gave her the nickname Juum, meaning splash, because she had arrived so dramatically, but thereafter settled quickly into peacefulness. Within weeks she was sleeping and feeding in a predictable pattern that came to foreshadow her placid and good-natured approach to everyday life. She rarely cried.
Their neighbourhood in Ubon Ratchathani marvelled for years about the time when Sua was three years old, and she was trampled by an angry buffalo, leaving her with fierce bruising and a broken wrist. Afterwards, she simply picked herself up from the ground and wiped the dirt from her hands. ‘Pôr,’ she said, looking up at her father, ‘I hurt me.’ There were no tears.
Rattuwat and Thawin had kept every letter, every postcard their adult daughter had sent to them from Australia. The collection was piled into a small cardboard box in their single room in the modern-style multistorey building they had moved into after the children had left. And though he was now struggling to find any truth at all in the quaint domestic narrative his daughter had wanted him and her mother to believe, he still felt nervous to think of that little bundle of papers, so far away. He was itching to read them all over again, to look for clues between the lines. His daughter’s handwriting was neat and careful, the paper lightweight and pale blue, the kind reserved for airmail. It was all they had left of her now.
Perhaps, for all his doting, he had not been the most careful of fathers.
In 1997, they were still living above the family whitegoods business in Ubon Ratchathani. If not for the financial crisis of the late nineties, they might still be there now, his brother, their two wives, the children and grandchildren. It was a dream Rattuwat indulged in occasionally. In fact, he knew that if had he not left the bulk of the financial decisions to his brother in the first place, they might have got through even that period. Proi was a risk-taker. That was always clear. But the scale of his risk-taking went unnoticed for too many years. When the stock market floundered in the capital, Rattuwat made the trip to Bangkok to try to ensure supply of their stock from a trader whose father had once been a close friend of their own father. When he got there, he discovered the truth: the entire value of the business had been fully mortgaged for some years, and the stocks Proi had gambled on were worthless. Their company was 1.3 million baht in debt. But that was not the worst of it. Within days of Rattuwat’s discovery, Proi was dead.
When Rattuwat got home to Ubon, already burdened with the news of his brother’s suicide, he witnessed a more confounding sense of loss on the face of his own wife.
‘Juum has disappeared,’ she told him.
‘What do you mean? How could she have disappeared?’
‘Two days ago. She helped me prepare the first meal, she never came to the second.’
‘How could she disappear between the house and the school? There is only a few blocks to walk. Everybody knows her there. Where did you look?’
‘I have looked. Everybody has looked. She is nowhere.’
For Rattuwat and his wife, those three years between 1997 and 2000 were the longest years of their married life. Bankrupt and heartbroken, they moved back to Warin Chamrap, the village in which Rattuwat’s parents were born, and lived with his peasant cousins, fourteen family members in a one-room house. Daily life was reduced to a dull and exhausting pattern of physical labour in the fields. Rattuwat and Thawin withdrew from each other and from their sons, Arthit and Lek, each carrying out their daily work with a solemnity that was new to their once lighthearted family. Juum’s name was barely spoken between them: they struggled just to carry on, to save face. Rattuwat went more regularly to the nearby forest monastery to speak to the head monk, who gave him the same simple advice about the eight winds, the eight conditions and the value of non-attachment he had been giving him all his life. In the third year, at the Bun Bang Fai festival, Rattuwat and Thawin got drunk together and broke their silence about their
daughter. They talked for a long time about everything that had happened, and they decided to release a bird for Juum; it was a traditional gesture, aimed at setting her spirit free. Even if it would not bring Sua back, perhaps it would help to cure their unhappiness, or to lighten the impact of their poverty. They arranged it with the bird handler, and Rattuwat felt a weight shift from his shoulders as soon as the white bird fled its cage. A glance across at Thawin and he knew that she felt the same.
The following afternoon, a teenager in blue jeans, carrying a small handbag, stepped off the songthaew from Ubon. It was Sua.
The girl who stepped back into Rattuwat’s family that May was different to the one they’d known three years earlier. Her body had become the body of a young woman, and she was beautiful, despite the awful Western-style clothes. But it was her face that struck them as so different. Her expression revealed immediately to Rattuwat that she had seen too much. She held her head up high all the way along the dirt lane to her paternal grandmother’s house, but when she knelt in front of her parents on the old grass mat upstairs, she burst into tears.
It took years to find out the truth about what had happened. If Rattuwat had been given access to the facts in 1997 he could probably have saved Sua from those years. He could have tracked her down, somehow, bargained her back. But the cruelty was this: of all the rumours that reached his family’s ears during that time in the old village, none of them steered anywhere near the truth. The day before he died, Rattuwat’s brother had traded his niece to people traffickers to settle a personal debt. As it turned out, everybody in their old district knew, but nobody had the courage to mention it directly to Rattuwat and his wife.
They lost her again in 2005, not long after Rattuwat found himself sitting across from the big Australian man — Steve — at the makeshift tables beside their local noodle seller in Bangkok. Steve was not well dressed. His singlet, with great armholes, showed half his torso, and his baggy shorts, a faded khaki green, had a large ink stain on the left pocket. He wore flip-flops. Was this any way to dress to meet your potential father-in-law?
‘She is a good daughter,’ he said to the Australian. ‘Lôok saao dee.’
‘Don’t worry, mate,’ said Steve. ‘I look after girl.’ He grinned broadly and nodded, pointing to himself and then at Sua. ‘I look after girl.’
Rattuwat looked away, embarrassed.
This was not what he and Thawin had in mind for their only daughter. The family had been living in Bangkok almost a full year, and Sua had a good job at the cosmetics counter at the big retailer MBK. She was happy there. Nobody here knew anything about the stolen years. The twins, too, were happy in their new roles with the local motorcy gang, ferrying the local commuters up and down the soi, every day a game of strategy and chance, a kind of sport. But now, here was the Australian man, eager to split the five of them up.
Rattuwat watched sweat forming on Steve Manning’s brow and thought it unlikely that any good would come of the marriage. Most of the men in their neighbourhood would consider it a blessing to have a daughter good-looking enough to draw the attentions of a rich farang, to have one of the family put down roots in a Western country like Australia, but Rattuwat watched the Australian carefully across the table and could see no reason to rejoice.
And yet it was what she wanted, the girl. It was all she talked about. Rattuwat could not bring himself to disappoint her.
When the day came to leave for the airport, Thawin could not bear to go to wave them off. She did not even want to witness Sua packing her clothes into the small black suitcase-on-wheels which the Australian had given her. She sat on their shared bed watching the television.
Rattuwat and the boys rode with Sua and the Australian to Don Muang Airport in the metered taxi. While they waited in the traffic on the Vibhavadi Road, Rattuwat took off one of several amulets that hung around his neck and held it forth in both hands, nodding at his daughter.
‘This was my grandmother’s,’ he said.
Sua took the amulet in both hands while her brothers looked on. It was a tiny buddha carved in tiger tooth, mounted inside a small silver and glass case. It was the most valuable thing their family now owned.
‘For protection.’
‘Pôr, this is yours,’ she said, ‘you need it for yourself.’
‘Take it. You don’t know what can happen in a foreign country. You are still young, Juum. You need plenty of luck.’
Rattuwat looked his daughter in the eye. He found himself unable to interpret her expression. Was she sad or happy? Was she sure about what she was doing? This was to be the last time he would ever see her alive, and a part of him sensed it, even then.
‘You are a good daughter,’ he said to her. ‘A good daughter.’
After Sua left, Rattuwat sometimes allowed himself to imagine that her marriage to the farang would mean a move to Australia for himself and Thawin; that they might live out their old age in their son-in-law’s first-world house, Sua tending to them in their frailty, they, in turn, lending their wisdom to the grandchildren. His Isaan friends, living in Bangkok, encouraged this fantasy, indeed they believed it the chief reason for seeking out such a marriage for any eligible daughter. It was perhaps this foolish but persistent daydream that had allowed him and his wife to loosen up on the supervision of their sons, to fail to pay the right sort of attention when the boys became distant and moody. Rattuwat could not put his finger on the precise day or week or month he lost his boys to the slum gang. If he had been aware of it, he might have moved more swiftly to prevent the situation. If he had been aware of it, he would never have let them go.
‘The door to my house is always open to you,’ he had often promised his children. And it was true: the door was open. But the children chose to walk through it less and less.
When he took the urgent phonecall from the Australian — the second Australian, Dave — and registered the news of his daughter’s death, Rattuwat walked away from his post at Park Plaza Sukhumvit and went immediately in search of the twins at the headquarters of the outlaw motorcy gang buried deep in the slums of Kloeng Toey. It was a risk even to walk those narrow dirt streets in that neighbourhood, and he was threatened by several gatekeepers, and by a volley of dogs, but he needed the boys to know, and further, for them to be with him when he broke the news to their mother. When Arthit and Lek finally appeared in the doorway of a makeshift hovel, Rattuwat could see from the look in their eyes that they were no longer completely human. The boys were twin ghosts. There was barely the slightest recognition at the name of their sister; the word death meant even less to them. They refused to come home.
From his position beneath the ancient Australian tree, surveying the dry, salt-pocked farming land, Rattuwat tasted only regret. He should have done more to fight for his children, all of them. He supposed he had trusted them to find their own way, make their own mistakes. He had never sought to control them in the manner of his own father. Now he wondered whether that approach was a poor excuse for laziness. In his mind, he heard again the distant voice of Vithi, son of the politician for whom Rattuwat had worked as a driver in Bangkok during his youth.
‘You people from Isaan, you are put to work like dogs,’ Vithi said to Rattuwat once, catching his eye in the rear-view mirror as he sat on the softly upholstered leather seat of his father’s luxury car. ‘Listen comrade, you see the slums here in Bangkok, they are full of farming people. Our people, Thai people, are starving right here in the capital, while the ruling class get fat on English teacake, looking ridiculous in those cheap Western suits.’
Rattuwat didn’t always know how to respond to Vithi. He did not want to cause any trouble. Most of the time he said nothing.
‘You see? You see how you are?’ the university student would chide him. ‘How can you improve your people’s lot when you are so passive? This is the problem with our country. Somebody shits in our cooking pot, right in the middle of our house, and all we can do is kneel down and wai to them in gratitude.�
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Once, Rattuwat quoted the Buddha to him: ‘Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal.’
Vithi scoffed. ‘It is so convenient isn’t it? Have you ever thought about that? The Dharma tells us not to get angry, no matter what the ruling dictators choose to do to us. In this fashion, we are docile. We are too easy to manipulate. No, we are fools.’
Remembering this now, Rattuwat shook his head. Poor Vithi. He was the first real communist Rattuwat had ever met. And he was long dead now: shot dead by Field Marshal Sarit’s men in 1963. Four decades had passed and the young man’s voice still followed his one-time chauffeur around.
Actually, right now, Rattuwat was almost as destitute as he had been in the fifties, in the days before he took the job driving for Vithi’s father. Two days ago, he had changed his last two thousand baht at the airport in Bangkok. It amounted to fifty Australian dollars. Half of this he had spent yesterday at the little supermarket near his son-in-law’s house. He had bought flowers for the makeshift altar to his daughter that he had set up in the main room of the cottage, and then he had bought food for himself and the little girl. Now, he had a little less than twenty Australian dollars in his pocket. If he could not find his way back to the car, to the girl, to the little house in the paddock in which his daughter had spent her last years, he might even die here himself.
For the first time since the dim days of the nineteen seventies — six years he spent in a prison camp by the Mekong River — Rattuwat felt almost completely bereft of hope. He longed for the company of his wife, the touch of her nose against his. He looked up at the sun and envied its relentless strength. I have failed each and every one of my children, he thought. And then he gazed across the dry paddock and noticed a farm tractor, edging the perimeter. So, there was life here, after all. He stood, as carefully as he could, and waved his arms in the direction of the farmer.
‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello!’
But he might as well have been made from glass. The tractor turned the corner of the paddock and receded into the distance.