Kim is alone. He stands at the door to the bedroom and peers through the dim to Grandma’s body under the blanket. A little bird’s body. Her chest isn’t moving. He creeps forward and sits down by the mat to watch for it. He’s so light without his basket his body hardly needs breath at all. He gives his breath to her. All of it. But her chest doesn’t move. He says, ‘I’ll run as fast as you want, Grandma, I’ll run anywhere. I’ll run to Italy. Just tell me. You just have to tell me where to run.’
COMING UP
I’m pleased with the allied health project so far. I said as much to my counterpart Phila over the phone and he said in his quiet voice that he was pleased too. We agreed that the community consultation process, the fieldwork and the final outcomes equalled those modelled in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. We hung up and it rang again.
‘Yes, Phila?’ I said, but was Kathleen. She told me she needed a holiday, wanted to come over here. I knew she wouldn’t. When I got back from a meeting with the Ministry of Health there was an email. Kathleen had attached a picture she’d found of Yeak Loam Lake. It was taken from the west side, through a knotted tree, the sun slippery on the water, the pier stretched over it.
‘I want to see this, Katie-Kate,’ she’d written. I asked who she was bringing and she wrote back that she and Tony had ‘come asunder’.
I finished the pay-realignment explanation for the field staff and left it on Veasna’s desk to translate, then I called Phila.
‘I thought I should inform you that my mother might visit. Her name is Kathleen. She’s from Australia.’ I could hear him smile.
‘That’s a very special thing, Kate. Your mother.’ After we hung up I started making notes for a quarterly progress report. I assumed Phila went back to his cousin’s house in Phnom Penh, where he was based for a week offering his expertise on a new landmine project. Up here in Banlung he lives in single men’s housing. I’ve seen it from the road: a square horseshoe of blue rooms facing a concrete yard. Phila wears a white shirt in the mornings and a blue one after lunch. He smells very strongly of soap. When he smiles, it’s as though he’s practising. I could imagine someone like Kathleen’s Tony outside those flats on a broken plastic chair, smoking alone. But not Phila.
It was the cool season and some tourists had reached new heights of disrespect by going around wearing blankets they’d bought off the hotels. They cut holes right through the middle of them and wore them as ponchos. ‘Bring a jumper,’ I wrote to Kathleen.
Phila was scheduled to return from Phnom Penh with logistical supplies: office paper, a desktop computer and some new jerry cans. I asked if he could fit my mother too.
‘After you’ve picked her up from the airport and met the other safety requirements of travelling with her, please don’t trouble yourself,’ I wrote to him. ‘I’ve advised her not to bother you and to bring some audio books and headphones.’
Phila put her in the front seat next to him and by the time they were twelve hours up Highway Seven, Kathleen had him figured. Or that’s what she told me, anyway.
‘Just a country boy,’ she yelled over the top of the fruit sellers crouching over their produce in the domed market. She’d seen the building from the car and wanted to go in. The meat section was a fierce-smelling, open-air fly pit. I thought it would put her right off but she seemed to take to Cambodia the way she took to motorbikes in the ’70s and scrapbooking in the 2000s. She wanted to get right inside, where sequined formal dresses lined the dim halls. I hadn’t seen Kathleen in eleven months – since Christmas with Tony. She seemed shorter. Her cheeks were sunken, the lines over her upper lip more defined. Her dark button eyes shone feverishly.
‘Phila grew up in Phnom Penh. Or just outside it,’ I told her after she’d haggled over two tops, one fuchsia, one lemon meringue.
‘Yeah, but he’s a country boy at heart, Katie-Kate,’ she insisted. ‘What else would he be doing out here? He’s not married.’
Phila helped move our things over to the hotel in town, where I had rented a room for Kathleen and me.
‘Three singles out on the town!’ said Kathleen, and Phila, who has an asthmatic laugh, gasped like there was no air. I usually lived in a place around the corner from the market – a street of stilted houses that overshadowed squat wooden brothels – but my house had recently developed a bat problem. At first I had enjoyed the company of their path over the high roof at night, the chirp of their sonar scanning the walls. But lately they’d become territorial and would swoop me on the landing. The field staff at the office – village women and men – told me that if I gave them a week they’d sort it out. Phila said this meant the whole village would be eating bat that long weekend.
Since it was a holiday, Phila offered to drive Kathleen and me around. I would have declined straight away but Kathleen had expressed an interest in renting a motorbike and I didn’t want to relive my childhood. I approached Phila’s desk on Friday morning, after he’d finished with a long call to Phnom Penh about the landmines project. He was staring straight ahead with his hands folded on the desk. There was a mist of sweat at his temples.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Phila.’ He glanced up at me with surprise then gestured to a seat. ‘I’d like to talk to you about the weekend, but I’m aware that it’s an inappropriate subject during work hours, so it can wait until lunch.’
‘Please.’ He smiled and sat back in his chair. Phila had a piece of wood or bone where his front tooth must once have been. I’d never asked him about it.
‘Please don’t drive us if you’re busy. I’d appreciate your honesty. Kathleen and I can happily find other ways, or we’re content to read at the hotel, too.’ I frowned at the heat in my face.
‘I’m looking forward to spending my holiday with you, Kate. And your lovely mother,’ he said.
It was warm and we spent the whole of Saturday morning on the east side of the lake. Kathleen wore her yellow T-shirt over her bathers and only asked a few times if she could take it off. In the distance we could see a big family sitting on the pier, but they weren’t swimming. For lunch we bought smoky grilled fish cooked over barrel fires and Kathleen and I lay on our towels reading while Phila stared out over the water.
Kathleen was reading a biography of Patsy Cline and I had Heart of Darkness on my lap. I couldn’t get past the first lines of chapter three. I was thinking about my old supervisor at university, who had advised me about work–life balance. ‘You seem like a young woman who would prefer work to life and I don’t blame you,’ she had told me. She had met Kathleen and was duly unimpressed by her, which drew a huge amount of respect from me. ‘Just remember that other people need life.’
In the late afternoon we walked slowly back around the lake, along the packed-earth path under the arch of trees.
‘Katie, look at the way that tree is shaped up there. It’s like a woman’s face looking down at us, isn’t it?’ said Kathleen. In six months I hadn’t noticed that and told her so. She looked pleased. But when I got to the car, I realised I was alone. In the distance, Phila and Kathleen were talking with the Tampuen family who were sitting out on the pier.
I made my way back down the stairs that had been carved into the hillside. Phila lifted his chin towards me in acknowledgement. His collar jutted at an angle and there was a space about the size of a cheek between his collarbone and shoulder. He turned back and rapidly translated whatever Kathleen was saying to an old woman wrapped in a sarong.
‘Ask them what her name was,’ Kathleen said.
‘Kathleen?’
‘Oh Kate, Katie, good, you’ll know what to do. They’ve,’ she leaned towards me and whispered, ‘they’ve lost a girl.’ I could see her blue floral bikini through her wet T-shirt.
‘Well, they’ll find her.’ I handed her my towel.
‘No, Katie, she’s gone … to a better place.’
‘In the lake? We w
ere swimming in the lake.’ I glanced at Phila. He nodded and looked away. ‘Phila, would you mind translating f … for me?’
‘Of course he doesn’t mind. I’ve –’
‘Please can you tell them that they have our deepest sympathy and that we sincerely apologise ff … for …’ I focused on my words, ‘for being here. During this time.’ Phila said it and the old woman nodded sharply and turned away. I did too. Kathleen jogged beside me up the stairs.
‘We’ll need dry clothes and blankets. I mean, how cold could it get out here? It wouldn’t be like camping up the Murray. We used to go camping up the Murray River when Kate was a girl,’ she called to Phila.
‘Sorry, Kathleen, I missed the point of this story?’ I said. I could see that she was turning her own handle, winding up.
‘Cutlery, glasses, I was quite the organiser. That’s where you get it from. Insect repellent! Have to have insect repellent. No buts.’ She mock-glared.
We’d almost reached the top. I was panting a little. A stream of water dripped down my back from my hair. I got a clear image of the girl turning in the secret currents of the lake.
‘What for?’ I asked Kathleen.
‘To bring back here,’ she said, and laughed. ‘It’ll be just like camping.’
I smiled.
‘We’re not coming back. We’re going to the hotel and I would like to take you to the resort for dinner. It’s very interesting – a refurbished French Colonial –’
Kathleen flapped my words away with her hands. ‘We can see that tomorrow. Tonight we’re staying with this poor family until their daughter comes up.’
‘We’re not.’ I started walking again. ‘I think you’ll really enjoy this place. Their curried fish amok is …’ Kathleen stopped on the stairs. Phila smiled anxiously from behind her shoulder, holding her towel and book.
‘I’m not going,’ said Kathleen. Her hands were clasped piously over the towel around her waist and her brown leather bag was tucked under her arm. ‘I’m not going.’
‘You just want us to leave you here?’ Kathleen shrugged and looked off into the thick snags of jungle. The sun moved behind a ridge of clouds and a shadow fell over her face. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ I said. I would have told her that her morbid fascination with dead bodies was a form of atrocity tourism but Phila was there. ‘Alright, hop in the car and we’ll see.’
She shook her head and turned to Phila with a smile. ‘Phil,’ she said, rummaging around in her bag and bringing out a damp wad of US notes, ‘if I gave you a list do you think you could get us a couple of –?’
‘He’s the Regional Coordinator for Health Projects!’ I was speaking quite loudly.
‘Of course, of course I can,’ Phila told Kathleen.
‘When your father was dying, people came to sit with me,’ Kathleen said.
‘He wasn’t dying, he just came off his bike. He was drunk.’
We were carrying the last of the supplies down from the car. Phila had spent two and a quarter hours gathering Kathleen’s requests and bringing them back while I waited with her at the darkening lake. Pale clouds iced the sky, leaving no stars or moon. I’d followed him to the car park on his way out and said that I hoped this wouldn’t impact on our, what I considered to be good, working relationship, and that he wouldn’t think this indicative of Australia’s attitudes towards Cambodian people. He’d smiled and said that we should talk more simply when we were on holiday. I’d said I was just sorry, sorry about Kathleen.
‘How would you know if he was drunk or not? You were off at Natasha’s,’ Kathleen told me.
‘I believe I was five.’
‘Well, people, adults, came to sit with me and I came to understand the importance of it. I learnt from that, see.’ We set down a striped bag holding pillows and blankets and a box that rattled like cutlery and turned to watch Phila come down the stairs with the food. ‘Phil’s nice, isn’t he?’
‘His name is Phil-a; “-a”.’
‘Phil-a. Sounds like a girl’s name. I almost dated a Phil once.’ She turned to me but I was studying the weave of the plastic mat that the family had placed on the pier. It was a peacock with his train of eyes spread in courtship, fading with the day. Kathleen found a spot over his right foot and plonked onto it, cross-legged. ‘He’s as lonely as you, that man,’ she reflected and wriggled her hips to settle. ‘Wants a woman in his life.’ I shook my head at her. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What?’
‘A large part of my time over the last month has been spent researching and preparing to go to a Tampuen village.’ I glanced down at the old woman who sat watching the lake.
‘Sounds like you’re ready to go, then. Do you think we should cover that … what is it, chicken? It’s out in the weather.’
‘I’m saying you can’t just walk in and be with people. Especially at a time like this. There are special rituals, practices. It’s disrespectful.’
‘Sit down would you, darl? You’re making this lady nervous.’ The old woman’s neck was craned back to take in my height. I crouched but couldn’t manage a flat-footed squat so I fanned my legs out to the side like the younger women.
Night fell as though it was sucked into the water and held there. The family lit candle stumps and Phila came to join us. Kathleen patted the mat beside her.
‘I was just telling Katie that people came to sit with me when her father was dying.’
Phila craned past her to look at me. ‘You didn’t tell me that your father had died.’
‘That’s because he hasn’t.’
‘Tell them, Phil, tell them that my husband was dying and people came to sit with me, just like this.’ Phila told the family that people had sat with my mother. The old woman with bloody betel teeth spoke.
‘Her husband died too,’ Phila said. The old woman shifted to make a space. ‘She wants you to sit next to her.’ Kathleen beamed, as though she’d been picked for a game show, and tiptoed her way over the peacock to settle by the old woman. I saw them holding hands. There was a gap on the mat between Phila and me.
‘Phil?’ called Kathleen.
‘Yes, Kathleen?’
‘Did you bring the …?’ she laughed.
‘Oh! Oh yes.’ Phila reached to a bag behind him and opened the zipper. I heard the clunk of wine bottles.
‘Phil and I understand one another.’
‘It’s Phil-a.’
‘Phil-a, Phil-a, pour me a drink-ah!’ Kathleen laughed and offered one to the old woman. ‘Give Katie one too, it might help her mood.’ The wine slopped into the plastic cups Phila had brought. ‘She wasn’t a grumpy child at all until her dad … then she started to stutter. She was a shocker. I had to take on extra shifts to iron that one out at speech therapy.’
‘It would be awful to lose a parent.’ Phila looked over at me.
‘I th … think …’ I began, my voice breaking and rippling outward. ‘Perhaps we should be a bit more respectful. Culturally sensitive. These people have actually lost someone.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Kathleen turned energetically to the old woman, their fingers still entwined like roots. ‘Can she tell us more about her granddaughter?’ The woman told Phila that her granddaughter Savoun had fallen in love with a married man when she was supposed to go with Thorn – she indicated a teenage boy who nodded at us gravely – and when the married man wouldn’t have her she turned to the lake. That’s how Phila translated it. That she turned to the lake for help. Now she was out there, two days under and with one more to go until her body rose up and they could meet her again.
‘Terrible,’ said Kathleen. ‘My husband had affairs. Tell her, Phil. Phil-a, sorry.’ Phila told the old woman, who thumped her chest emphatically.
‘Her husband did too.’
‘We’re practically sisters! Except you’re quite a bit older.’ Ph
ila spoke to the woman.
‘She’s fifty-six.’
‘I’m fifty-five! Oh god, Kate, I thought she was eighty.’
‘People don’t have the same benefits as we do.’ I swallowed my wine. ‘On the global poverty index Cambodia may rate more highly than other developing nations, but –’
‘But at least you’ve got grandchildren. Tell her, Phil. Ask her how many she has.’ Phila asked her.
‘She had seven,’ said Phila. Kathleen shook her head and was quiet a moment. I looked out at where the lake would be. With the clouds covering the moon it was as though we were all underwater.
‘Now Phil, are you speaking Cambodian to this woman?’ Kathleen started up again.
‘Khmer? No, she’s ethnic minority. She speaks a very different language. Tampuen.’ I could see Kathleen mouthing the word in the candlelight then shaking her head and smiling. ‘I speak that language and two others,’ Phila continued. ‘English and Lao. And I’m learning French.’
‘You were good at languages, Kate. Katie speaks Japanese.’
‘I have a few basic sentences,’ I told Phila. ‘And I was in Phnom Penh two whole years before here and I still can’t speak Khmer.’
‘You need to marry a Cambodian man, and have some Cambodian children, then you’ll speak Khmer,’ said Phila but I couldn’t see his face. I could only hear Kathleen laughing with the old woman like it was Christmas.
A car shone its lonely beams over us. I rose on unsteady feet. It would be the park rangers and I would need to explain what we were doing with a family that we didn’t know at the lake. I hoped they would understand that I took complete responsibility. More relatives, young and old men who smelled like sweat and smoke, made their way down the stairs and past me onto the pier. The candles caught their bodies hauling small barrels filled, Phila told me as I sat down again, with rice wine. We all shuffled around. I could feel the heat from Phila’s arm, just centimetres from mine.
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