by Tom Knox
Jake wiped the sweat from his eyes and assessed the situation. He knew they would have little trouble getting into Thailand. Their passports were in order: British and American citizens could enter Thailand freely, and get a visa any time.
But Jake and Chemda still had to cross the Khmer border first. Would his plan work?
The Cambodian officers inside their kiosk were making frantic phone calls. Two of the officers had guns drawn – the revolvers were laid significantly and blatantly on the counter before them. But the crowd, still ominously silent, moved closer, gathering around the kiosk. The sheer weight of numbers threatened to topple the little building; the sad little office, with its sad men inside, rattled and vibrated.
Victory came quick. The guards surrendered: behind their grimy panes of glass they did deep submissive bows, with their praying hands high above their heads: they were doing the high wai, the deep inferior samphae of total submission.
The fattest Cambodian border guard urgently beckoned Chemda and Jake to his little hatch, past the white barrier. His hands were shaking and sweat was dripping in long rivulets down his chubby, frightened face.
Wordless, he took their passports. He glanced at the crowd behind the barrier.
He stamped Chemda’s passport, he stamped Jake’s passport. With the same weak unspeaking demeanour he waved them on. His face said Just go, please. Go. Now.
But Jake lingered for a second, savouring the moment, this tiny refreshing moment of his victory, in all the recent tragedy of flight and defeat; Chemda walked over to Rittisak, who was smiling, at the front of the crowd, she hugged him.
Then she ran back and she took Jake’s hand and they walked the hundred metres of no-man’s-tarmac, to the bigger glassier office on the Thai frontier.
‘Sawadee kap!’ said the Thai border guard. He glanced down at their passports. His smile was brief, but subtly meaningful. ‘Thirty-day visas?’
‘Yes,’ said Jake, ‘thirty-day visas.’ He clutched Chemda’s hand. ‘Kappunkap.’
They caught a cab to Surin, an hour’s drive through the cane fields. Their mutual good mood, their sense of wide-eyed astonishment, at their own gruesomely belated good fortune, lasted until they got to the train station, whence they had decided to catch the night train to Bangkok. To Bangkok and Marcel Barnier and the next clue in this ineluctable and inescapable mystery. The mystery of Cambodia’s history that Chemda was determined to solve, that Jake was determined to record. He still had his precious camera with the precious photos.
Jake picked up a copy of the morning’s Bangkok Post from a newsagent stand in the station; he was surrounded by Thai workers reading manga. Half interested, half anxious, he flicked the pages as Chemda bought the tickets.
But he soon stopped flicking pages.
The Post had an article about him and Chemda. UN worker missing from Phnom Penh . . . granddaughter of Sovirom Sen, noted Chinese-Cambodian businessman . . . photo-journalist linked to the disappearance . . .
The article was very small, and tucked away, and neutral in tone: it didn’t accuse Jake of anything, but it did mention the reward for Chemda’s return, and the mere fact that the article was printed in the most important Thai English language newspaper brought the rest of Jake’s unease sweeping back. Who might try and claim that reward? And how?
The afternoon hours ticked until the night train’s depart ure. Jake drank bottled water and cans of cold Japanese coffee and sat nervously on a station bench, next to Chemda, both of them trying to be inconspicuous. He telephoned Tyrone.
Tyrone told him to shut the fuck up and stop being so ‘minty’ when Jake tried to say thankyou you saved my life. Tyrone listened to the epic story of their escape from Siem Reap and Tyrone swore and even chuckled and his good humour helped dispel the darkness, just a little.
Tyrone asked:
‘So you’re going to Bangkok?’
‘Yes.’
‘To find Barnier. You don’t give up, do you?’
‘Not after all this, Ty, no I don’t. You said I had a good story and I’m on it. I want it. And Chemda wants the truth. What happened to her family. But we need somewhere to stay, incredibly discreet. Near this guy’s apartment, Nana. You know Bangkok. Any ideas?’
‘Yes . . . The Sukhumvit Crown, soi 8, you can only find it if you go the wrong way down soi 6.’
‘Anything else? Any other advice?’
‘Stop walking across lakes filled with corpses.’
‘Ty. Please God. Ty!’
‘You should buy new sim cards for you and Chemda, now you are in Thailand . . . use True, no, DTAC, just give a few people the numbers. Use the phones sparingly.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Mai pen rai. Stay in touch. And remember, you are still in serious shit. People will come after you in Bangkok, they won’t do it openly, but they will try. Be very very very very careful.’
As instructed, Jake went straight to the nearest convenience store, at the front of the station, and bought new sims for himself and Chemda; they swapped numbers, he texted the number to Tyrone. He sat down on the bench again. Waiting. Passengers came and went, eating fishball noodles at the fishball noodle stalls. Amputee beggars lifted their stumpy arms, pincering plastic cups of loose change. Commuters yawned. Policemen patrolled. Their train was ready. They climbed on the carriage.
They had bought first class berths mainly because first class berths had a tiny shower. The shower was risibly small but Jake didn’t care: as the train rumbled out of town he stepped straight in and he rinsed away all the mud of the Butcher’s lake, and all the grease from Pol Pot’s house, and all the dust from Preah Kahn where Sonisoy was caught, he only wished he could sluice away the terrifying memory of kneeling there, in the dirt, by a shrine to the ghost of an atheist dictator, waiting for a man to casually smash his brain through his mouth with a rusty iron bar.
Crack.
Chemda was already fast asleep in the bottom bunk. She had held his hand as she fell asleep, but now the hand was limp and unconscious and he folded it on to her breast, and he climbed the bunkbed steps to slide between his own crisp clean white cotton sheets. The sensation was unfathomably blissful.
The train was rattling through the dark Isaan countryside. The comforting rattle of a train, ta-chakkating over the points, soon lullabyed Jake into sleep.
Most of his sleep was undisturbed. He woke just once when they pulled into a hick little station with moonlit palm trees, at about five a.m. Hushed voices muttered outside in the tropical stillness. Jake sweated in the airlocked compartment. Who was that? Outside? Someone quietly passed down the train corridor, seeking a berth, whispering. He waited, tensed with fear. But nothing happened. Chemda’s un conscious breathing was regular and low.
The train pulled out. At length he fell asleep again and this time he dreamed – he dreamed of someone hitting his head and his head being smashed off his body, and then somehow he was looking down at his own head fallen to the ground and the head rolled over and it was his mother’s head, smeared with violet lipstick. The eyes opened, the head smiled, an eye winked.
Jake woke with a jolt. Their compartment was bright with morning sun, and skyscrapers and motorways paraded past the uncurtained window. Chemda was awake and dressed.
‘We’re here, Bangkok.’
She leaned and kissed him.
His returning kisses were slurred, reluctant. The dream had been so vivid; why did he keep seeing this image, the disembodied head?
‘Chemda.’ He wanted to confess, to share, to divide his anguish. He’d had enough of lonely wondering. And he had been through so much with this girl, why not tell her?
He felt he was falling in love with her. He had no idea what falling in love meant or felt like but if it was something like this then he was happy to call it love, so yes he was falling in love with Chemda Tek. But love meant he had to be truthful. He wanted to be truthful.
‘Chem, I keep having these dreams. Sometimes day dreams. Nightmares,
just idiotic nightmares, but they are persistent, this image I see.’
He told her. About the head, the floating heads, his moth-er’s face.
As his story unfolded he watched her expression turn from curiosity to concern – to piercing anxiety.
‘The krasue.’ She said. ‘What you are seeing is, as far as I can tell, the krasue.’
She explained.
‘A krasue is a malign spirit, cannibalistic, ah, bloodsucking. It appears mainly at night. It manifests itself as a woman, usually young and beautiful, with . . .’ Chemda winced. ‘With her internal organs hanging down from the neck. Because she has no body. So she floats, with her spine and her organs trailing behind.’
‘OK.’ Jake swallowed a dry taste. ‘And what does she do? This demon?’
‘The krasue preys on pregnant women. It uses,’ she sighed, ‘she uses an extended tongue to catch the fetus, by, ah, probing inside, up the vulva and inside the womb to devour the foetus. This causes diseases during pregnancy. Or so many Southeast Asians believe.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Jake.’ She held his hand tighter. ‘I know you don’t believe this stuff, and it sounds like a cartoon, but this really is an iconic demon, all across my part of the world. The legend comes from ancient Hindu India but it is deeply rooted in Cambodia, and Cambodian voodoo, the Filipinos have their own version the Manananngal, the Balinese have the Leyak. Some call her the arp.’
‘What about Angkor? I saw something like this in Angkor. A sculpture on the wall.’
‘In Angkor they are called kinarees. Female spirits. But it is basically another krasue. They are everywhere. This icon is everywhere. There are legends and prayers about krasue, spells and stories. Hn. Even horror films.’
He stared at her. She looked at him. The train stopped, they had arrived. They had to disembark. Chemda said:
‘The thing I don’t understand is – this is my culture. Not yours. This is not your culture. So why are you dreaming of an Asian demon?’
Chapter 30
It took six or seven frantic jabs from the cattle prod for Boris to be dislodged, to be forced off Julia, and then to be slowly and cruelly tormented back into his cage. For a moment Julia lay numbed and flat on the wet and slimy concrete; but then she seized herself, and sat up. She was bruised but unharmed, terrified but unviolated, the orangutan had got no further than her thighs. But the ape had ravished her sense of herself: she could never forget this.
She stood brushing dirt from her long skirt and her top. Brushing and brushing. Yearning to shower. To wash the hot musky disgusting smell of the primate’s fur from herself. From her clothes. No, she would burn the clothes.
The Director was actually and luridly weeping as he gazed her way – weeping like a child, sobbing like a doll designed to cry.
‘What can I say – I am so sorry Miss Kerrigan.’ His sense of disgrace was obvious, he even lost conrol of his previously immaculate English: ‘Miss, sorry, mne ochen zhal, etogo nikogda ne sluchalos ranshe! I sorry. Vy dolzhny byt gormonal nye. Opyat ya proshu proshcheniya –’
‘Whatever,’ said Julia. ‘You stupid man. You . . .’
The curses dwindled to nothing. What was the point? Julia had seen and done enough. The orangutan was hunched once more in his cage, his long arms curved over his sad but guiltless face.
Guiltess. Guiltless. Guilt and conscience?
She had to focus on this. And she had to get out now. Julia had everything she needed from the Sukhumi Institute for Primate Pathology.
Making her way to the gate, not even talking to the red-eyed Director, she forced her mind to concentrate on the puzzle. Better that than relive what had just occurred. And Julia anyway sensed, as she passed through the laboratory gates, that she was now much nearer to a solution, being pulled nearer, even: it was almost as if the truth was a black hole, exerting some vast magnetic field, and she was spiralling around and in.
But the final descent needed clarity, she had to steer.
And before she could think straight she wanted a shower. And maybe another shower.
Scanning up and down the bleak Sukhumi streets, their off-season palms dripping in the autumn drizzle, she searched for a hopeful sign. Something neon, saying Hotel.
For once, she lucked out. There. The Hotel Ritsa. Its light was flickering in the drizzle half a kilometre down the hill, beside the rain-shiny tramlines, towards the Black Sea coast.
Julia almost ran down – dragging her reluctant bag – and checked straight in. The reception was dusty and run-down. The elevator was probably dangerous. The sheets in the bedroom were nylon. The shower-rose belched eccentric spurts of lukewarm water. It felt mildly paradisical. She showered twice and drank her bottle of duty free Georgian wine – using the bathroom tooth mug – and then she slept, in the nirvana of scratchy nylon, for many hours, and then she woke, and went down to a hotel breakfast of processed pink ham slices with pickled eggs.
Refreshed and revived, and trying not to remember the way, the precise way the ape had leapt from the cage, she got to work: putting the pieces together. The cave art. The trepa-nations. Guilt and conscience. The guiltless animality of the orangutan.
It took her many hours, it took her several days. But she was getting closer. To break the monotony and refresh her mind, during these days, she took breaks to make phone calls on her mobile, which miraculously worked; and to send emails from a small dingy cafe which served Abkhazian tea with saucers of gooseberry jam.
Most of her calls were to Ontario, or to Alex, and full of lies. I’m fine don’t worry about me. She knew they would only tell her to come home; there was no way she was coming home, not when she was this close to The Truth.
Nearly all of her emails were to this man: Marcel Barnier. He, apparently, was the link. The next link. He was maybe the only man who could tell her if she was actually correct.
He didn’t reply. Not once.
Julia wasn’t surprised. She sat and sipped her gooseberry flavoured tea, and she surmised that Barnier was avoiding the world. All these western scientists and intellectuals, these Marxists who once visited Cambodia, must surely by now have realized what was happening to them: that they were all dying. Even the most isolated and friendless would have seen at least one or two news reports, especially of the spectacular later killings in France.
So if Julia wanted someone to confirm her theory, Marcel Barnier was the only one, because he was the only one left – yet he wasn’t replying. Perhaps, therefore, she should just go there? And see him? It had worked before. Yes, perhaps she would go there, when she had broken open the intellectual puzzle.
And on the third day she did it, she cracked it: she had her theory. Standing back from her laptop, which she was using in the hotel lobby, as the cleaners made their daily yet farcically half-hearted attempts to clean her room of forty years of Soviet grime, Julia almost gloated. It was just three pages of thoughts. But it worked. It made sense.
It was surely the answer.
Julia had done it, at last. Made that amazing discovery; restored an extraordinary thesis to the world. The fifteen-year-old girl still inside her, the girl who almost wept at the terrible Hands of Gargas, was exultant, and gloating, and happy, despite it all, because of it all.
‘Spassibo.’ She accepted the bill from the lobby waiter for her canned and sweetened orange juice. Then she got up, walked across the tram-clanging boulevard to the internet cafe, and she booked the next flight from Adler to Moscow, and then Moscow to Bangkok. She had just enough cash left in her savings for a few more flights and cheap hotels. She was going to use this money to see Barnier, whether he wanted to see her or not. This was her life, her moment, after this nothing seemed to matter, if she ran out of cash, who cared. Not her, not anymore.
A valium let her sleep on the plane to Moscow, a xanax let her sleep on the plane from Moscow to Bangkok. She needed energy for this confrontation: she was spiralling into the black hole of the truth, where destruction and oblivion l
urked, where the killer herself might be headed – but the risk felt almost good, she was unmoored now, floating on the tidal bore, surfing her success to the mouth of the river. Gloriously free.
Maybe the gravity in all this was her own pride, dragging her to danger. But she was proud. As the Thai Air plane landed at Bangkok she woke from a dream of herself receiving a prize: for a great discovery. The man giving her the prize was her father. Then Rouvier. Then Alex. Her mother was apparently locked out of the Nordic hall. The walls of the hall were covered with paintings of huge cats.
‘Sawadeekap! Thai Air would like to thank you . . .’
She stirred herself: stashing her new clothes in the hold-all, grabbing her laptop, filing out the plane and exiting customs. The heat outside the airport was welcome, a wet cocoon of humidity. After the chilly stale dankness of Sukhumi, this rich tropical Siamese closeness was better.
A cab? She got a taxi from Suvarnabhumi airport into the city.
Julia stared across the elevated motorway at the myriad skyscrapers as they sped into town: Bangkok, it seemed, was another lusty and furious Asian megalopolis, with wild skyscrapers and huge elevated freeways and vast adverts for Japanese cars and English language schools and South Korean TVs.
And Bangkok also had the answer to everything. Perhaps.
‘You say soi sick?’ The cabbie was talking. ‘Soi sick, Sukhumvit? Near Sukhumvit?’
‘Yes. I think so. Soi, er yes, soi six.’
She mumbled to a stop. What if the address on the card wasn’t correct?’
She had no choice.
‘Sorry sorry lady I pay money.’
The cabdriver was handing over cash at a tollbooth, but when the tollgate opened they merely inched ahead: they’d hit the real urban traffic, the cholesterol of sudden Asian prosper ity. The cab stopped again and started again, slowed and stopped. The endless traffic massed, and moved, and slowed, like an organic process, like peristalsis in the cervical canal.