Allan doesn’t look up as I pass. I take a seat at my table and order cha gio and a beer, to make the hangover go away. I pretend to myself that I am just sitting here waiting for my boyfriend to arrive; I drum my fingers impatiently on the table.
The little girl who sells cigarettes is sitting with Allan again, drawing while he reads. They look like a contented old couple and I wonder, with a jolt, if he could be her sugar daddy. And yet, despite his crude invitation to me, it is impossible to imagine him being intimate with anybody, least of all her, whom he treats with some tenderness.
Chanh stops to chat for a bit. He is going to start a business course at Saigon University and there is an English component. He wants to know if I will help him. I tell him I would love to, we could start right now if he likes, but he has to go off to serve other customers so I eat and drink, alone, gazing out at the street and its relentless busyness.
When I see Pham passing, I step out to buy a newspaper. I come back in, order another beer, light a cigarette and read the paper from cover to cover.
Big news is that a delegation of American companies, eager to invest post-embargo, will arrive next month to meet with government leaders and local businesses. On the opposite page, a report that in the past year more than seven thousand tourists have visited the site of the My Lai massacre. And then, an announcement that John Denver is to play Saigon on the anniversary of the city’s liberation. All these strange circles and links; time compressing and expanding in turn with barely a hint of irony.
The cigarette girl gets up and straps her tray back on, heads out into the evening. The café fills with the evening crowd. I pay Chanh and wander slowly back to the hotel.
Hien is cracking watermelon seeds and watching TV. ‘Miss Ella have a good day?’ She flashes me such an odd, vigorous smile that I’m certain the night guard has spread the word about my nocturnal guest.
‘It was fine, thanks.’ I don’t want to explain but I still can’t face my room, so I grab a handful of seeds and sit down on the brown couch. ‘How was your day?’
‘My day no good. I have headache.’
I frown. ‘Shouldn’t you be at home?’
‘Tonight I work late. Some guest arrive airport.’
We sit together companionably and watch TV. The drama unfolding on the screen looks like any American daytime soap – the same meaningful, sideways glances; frustration and longing. I ask Hien what is happening and she explains that two men are fighting over one woman. They both want to marry her but she is secretly in love with the tea-seller, who is beneath her.
The soapie is interrupted by an ad break. There is an ad for instant noodles and then, like some karmic joke, one for condoms. Two young men walk separately into a pharmacy, both giggling with embarrassment, and point to a packet labelled ‘Trust’.
Trust in what? I wonder, wearily. The intentions of the wearer? The quality of the rubber? The existence of true love?
Hien laughs uproariously. ‘Very new for Vietnam! Very funny!’ She gives me a probing look – at least I think she does. I snicker, then say goodnight and go up to my room.
As soon as I close the door the silence starts ringing in my ears. The room seems even emptier since the MD came and went. I tidy up, hang out some washing left damp in the basin, pour a teacup of vodka and light another cigarette. Then, for some reason, I get out the old itinerary.
I sit in the hard wooden armchair and study it, as if it might suddenly offer up something new. Was Tim already in love with her as he wrote this? Why couldn’t I see? I put my cup down heavily in the middle of the page. The bottom of the cup is wet and Days 9 to 12 start to dissolve.
I drag hard on my cigarette. Tim hated smoking, the way it made everything yellow – teeth, fingers, walls. I use the cigarette to burn a hole in the itinerary. Then another, and another. And now, look! There he is at the kitchen table, with his notes and his fennel fucking tea, but, look! He only has one leg! Oh no! Oh God! What’s happened to his head?!
I dream I am at the Smiling Café with Mum. She has come to take me home. I am trying to explain that I can’t go because I have to get to my afternoon class, when she pulls out a photo of my father, one I’ve never seen before. It’s in a cheap gold frame. It looks like Hugh in the photo but I know it is my father. Where did you get this? I ask her, urgently. I can’t believe she is behaving so casually. Then she tells me, smiling, that I am in the wrong place; I am never going to find him here.
Wednesday morning of my third week at Speak Easy I get my first pay packet.
‘Miss Jenny, where can I buy a bicycle?’
She shows me on the map where to go. It looks a long way away. ‘Only forty dollars for Vietnamese bicycle,’ she warns me. ‘Chinese bicycle may be fifty dollar.’
Outside, I hail a xich lo. The driver looks over sixty and after he’s been pedalling slowly for ten minutes, I turn around to see sweat streaming down his face. He grins and I smile apologetically. It will be good to be independently mobile.
He asks all the usual questions as we glide along, about my age, job, country, marital status, and then, in exactly the same tone of voice, tells me he used to fight for the ARVN – Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. I tense. He says that now he has to ride a xich lo all day and work in a factory at night to support his family. Because he fought with the Americans his children can’t get good jobs, are not accepted into university. Life is impossible for them here but what is the alternative? His sister drowned at sea trying to escape.
I shake my head in sympathy but I don’t know what to say. It is too big for words and I am muzzled by my feelings of shame and complicity. I shake my head, grit my teeth and tut-tut at his fate as I make him sweat to carry me up an endless hill.
We arrive at a street lined with bicycle shops, dozens of them. I get out and pay the driver twice what he asks but as I’m about to walk away, he pulls a bunch of GI dogtags from his back pocket. ‘You buy souvenir,’ he demands with a fixed smile.
He puts a few of the tags into my hand; I feel obliged to look at them. They’re lightweight aluminium, each engraved with a name, date and personalised message – things like I miss you, Mary-Lou, I love you through and through and I left my soul on the paddy field. I know they’re fake, that they’re made and sold by the thousands, but even so they give me a chill, as if I’m peering through the innocuous into the unbearable, being pulled into that dark, bottomless hole.
I pick one that says Soldier by day, Lover by night, Drunkard by choice and stuff it into my pocket. Then I pay the driver and watch him pedal slowly away.
People start emerging from their shops to lure me in. I take a deep breath. The air is gummy with oil and rust.
‘Lady!’
‘You like Chinese bicycle?’
‘I sell you very cheap.’
‘My shop Number One!’
They get right in front of me – I have to keep stepping around them – and with all the other hawkers pushing steamed corn and pineapple-on-a-stick and cinnamon chewing gum, I feel like a ball in a psychedelic pinball game.
I go into the corner shop just because no one comes out. A man is squatting on the floor playing cards with a small boy. He nods but doesn’t get up. The cards they are playing with are long and narrow, like bookmarks. For a few minutes I stand and watch them, catching my breath. I wish I could just sit down and join them, sit and play quietly in the shade. The boy smiles up at me. I smile gratefully back.
‘Bao nhieu?’ I ask, standing alongside a ruby-red bicycle that sparkles like cheap nail polish.
‘Sixty dollar,’ the man says, nonchalantly.
‘Okay.’ I don’t know whether it’s Vietnamese or Chinese. Really, I don’t give a shit.
The man gets up and comes over. He adjusts the seat and the handlebars to my height, takes the money and goes back to his game.
When I wheel the bike out onto the street, it feels like everyone is watching. I climb on and push off, but before I’ve gone fifty feet, a mot
orbike pulls out from the footpath. I swerve too late and scrape its side.
I hear peals of laughter from behind. I look down: my left foot is bleeding and I’ve broken my sandal. I push off again and this time I make it to the next corner, narrowly missing a mangy yellow dog and a man crossing the road carrying a large plate of glass. As soon as I’m around the corner, out of view, I climb off. I can’t do it. I can’t ride my new bicycle home.
A xich lo driver has followed me; he had me picked. He laughs at me and motions for me to climb on. At least he is young and fit. He pedals me back to the hotel with the bike resting at my feet, broken sandal on my lap, blood dripping from my foot. I look at myself and start to laugh out loud, and then I am crying, and then laughing, and then crying again because the old xich lo driver with the dogtags has no way out, and because with all my obsessing about the war I have never thought that much about people like him, the ones we abandoned; they were never in the movies.
I wheel the sparkly bike past Hien and park it where the night guy puts his, alongside the pond. Hien gives me a puffy, coconut-flavoured doughnut and a bandaid for my foot. She informs me I have bought a Chinese bicycle. She hands me a note that she says was delivered by ‘woman look very funny’ and, for just an instant, I think Mum has come – like in the dream – to take me home. A middle-aged woman with a new fondness for plaits, and paint on her hands. But the note is from Suze.
Hey Baby Doll,
Tomorrow night, 8, River Bar, then on to our place.
It’s Dave’s birthday and there is cheese and salami from Germany – and nice boys.
Suze
I hobble up to my room and, before I do anything else, pull down my pack from the top of the wardrobe and stuff the dogtag into the inside zip pocket. Out of sight, out of mind.
TEN
I get to the River Bar at ten to eight. I’m wearing my new red dress from the silk shop up the road and I have my hair tied back. I can’t see Suze so I sit up at the bar and order a beer. The Rolling Stones are playing and the barman with the handlebar moustache is singing along, word for word. Every now and then he looks up and smiles, winks, as if I were his adoring audience. I smile appreciatively back.
‘Hello.’ Kirsten comes up beside me. ‘Elsa, isn’t it?’
‘Ella. Hi.’
‘Suze said you might be coming. We’re over there.’ She points to a table in the far corner, obscured by a cluster of palms.
‘Thanks.’
While Kirsten orders, I make my way over to the table.
‘Hey, honey.’ Suze gets up and pulls a chair in beside hers. She’s wearing what looks like a wetsuit above a red and black gypsy skirt. She looks gorgeous.
I wish Dave a happy birthday and give him a voucher written in Vietnamese for ten double chocolate sundaes at Free Time. He winks with his good eye then introduces everyone at the table in his languid way. I already know Martin and Kirsten, but not the Australian tour leader, who goes by the title White Water John, or Klaus, who flew in yesterday with the luxury cold cuts, or the stunning guy beside him with the big brown eyes, thick lips and slightly hooked nose, like some sculpture of a man – Dave’s chess partner, Ariel.
‘I’ve just been telling everyone,’ Martin explains to me, ‘that I might not be around much longer. Last week two thousand of our coats had the wrong fucking lining sewn in – factory’s fault – and it could conceivably cost me the business.’ Even swearing he reminds me of Humpty Dumpty, pink-cheeked and merry, shaped like an egg.
‘Come on, Marty, it’s going to be fine,’ Kirsten says. ‘You’re a drama queen.’
‘How much can this matter, this lining? Surely you cannot even see,’ says Klaus in a staccato German accent.
While they are talking, Suze leans over to me and says, ‘So, I’ve been dying to know, what happened with the MD?’
I consider lying but instead I screw up my face and only as she laughs does it start to be funny. She lights us cigarettes and when I look up, my eyes meet Ariel’s. We both look away.
‘You think you’re stressed,’ Kirsten is saying to Martin. ‘I heard last night that two wives out at An Phu were evacuated last week for nervous tension.’
‘Well, no great surprises there,’ Suze says. ‘Holed up in a great white mansion with nothing to do but shave your legs and drink martinis. The BP insurance policies won’t even let them ride bicycles. They have to satisfy themselves with managing the maid and Thursday morning Ladies Circle at the Floating Hotel.’
‘Doesn’t sound bad,’ Dave muses.
‘Let’s see you stay in three nights running,’ Suze says.
‘I have just read a piece in Le Monde that found Vietnam to be the most stressful country in the world for expats.’
It’s the first time Ariel has spoken; his voice is deep and sexy. I want him to keep talking but then Kirsten says, ‘What about you, Ella? Are you finding Saigon stressful?’
I shrug. ‘Last night the Smiling Café ran out of rum. The waiter had to go off on his bicycle in the dark to find more. That was worrying.’
As soon as I’ve said it I realise it sounds weird and desperate but Suze and Dave laugh, and Martin says, ‘There isn’t an expat in this city who isn’t an alcoholic.’
‘Bullshit,’ says Kirsten. ‘We’re just heavy drinkers.’
‘You guys should smoke more ganja,’ White Water John says, grinning. He looks stoned.
‘I think we smoke enough,’ Dave drawls.
‘You really drink the local rum?’ Kirsten says to me, screwing up her face. ‘Yueech!’
I nod. ‘The vodka is good too.’
Suze and Dave’s apartment is the second floor of a house in District 3. The front door opens directly onto a living room where three two-seater couches are arranged in a U around a big coffee table. There’s a TV and stereo system, a ceiling-high bookshelf, a naïve painting on the wall of a girl jumping off the moon.
‘At ease,’ Dave says, and we all slip off our shoes and settle in. Suze puts on Tom Waits and switches on a standing lamp with a tatty, fringed, red silk shade, like something from a bordello. Dave brings out a platter of cheeses and salami, banh mi, lychees, a few bottles of wine. I realise it is the first social gathering I’ve been to without Tim in five years and for a moment I am disorientated and don’t know where to stand or how to be.
I sit beside Suze on a cushion on the floor. I love this apartment. It feels like a home. Suze explains that the landlord works at the paper but only foreigners in the highest tax bracket are officially permitted to live in houses so Suze and Dave are down as ‘friends of the family’. An extra monthly payment is made to the police – this is the way it usually works.
We drink some wine and flick through Suze’s photo album and I get to see her drug-fucked ex-boyfriend and her lovely, cake-baking Mom. We giggle. Ariel is sitting on a couch beside White Water John. I feel acutely aware of him. He seems quiet, serious, but has a really beautiful, big smile. I try not to keep looking at him but once I glance up to find him watching me intently. It gives me a hot, giddy feeling.
The phone rings and Suze gets up to answer it. While I’m leaning forward to get some bread and cheese, I gather up the courage to ask Ariel what he does in Saigon. He says he’s just finished his national service.
‘How does that work?’
‘In France, you have the option to work for a French company overseas or to join the military. I have been working for a bank.’ He smiles. ‘It was boring, but I love this country. I would like to stay here for some time, to take photographs. But I will need to find some job.’
‘Are you a photographer?’
He shrugs. ‘This is, how you say, my ambition.’
I nod slowly and smile, and then we are smiling at one another, but Klaus says something to him and when he turns to answer I retreat to my cushion.
Suze comes back. It was Hoang on the phone, the pool shark with the wife. She tells me they made up last night.
‘Really? What ha
ppened?’
‘What can I say, honey? He called and took me out. We drank rice wine from Sa Pa, gazed into each other’s eyes. He told me he hasn’t had sex with his wife in three years. Fuck, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
‘Are you in love with him?’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. What’s that? Maybe.’
‘You’re a masochist,’ says Dave, passing her a joint.
She groans and drops her head onto my shoulder.
I notice that everyone is slowly getting louder. I catch fragments of conversations: Dave is talking to Klaus about his father, who sent a birthday card for the first time since Dave came out of the closet seven years ago; Martin and Kirsten are still discussing the ruined coats; White Water John and Ariel are talking animatedly about soccer.
We finish the nice wine and move on to a US$3 Bulgarian red that White Water John brought. Dave starts rolling another joint and I get up to change the music. When I turn back, I notice Ariel pulling on his shoes. My heart sinks. I don’t want him to go! He looks up at me and our eyes lock, fiercely and without a doubt. I feel the hairs stand up along my arms. He smiles. I smile. Then he is standing up, announcing that he has a friend arriving tonight from Paris, saying goodbye, closing the door behind him.
When he’s gone, it feels like the night is over. I follow Suze into the kitchen where we wash a few dishes. ‘Ariel seems nice.’
‘Pretty hot, huh? Dave thought you’d like him.’
‘So they play chess together?’
‘Every week, they have a set time. They meet on the roof of the Rex.’
‘How come I haven’t seen him before?’
‘He doesn’t really dig the expat scene. He has his own thing happening – hangs out with this crew of local artists and a few Phaps.’
‘Phaps?’
The Rainy Season Page 9