by Fiona Kidman
Jessie knew that Violet had left town years before with Felix Adam. She wanted to ask Hester about this, but she could see it might be one scandal too many. Jessie had written to Violet’s lawyers long ago in an effort to trace her. Her father’s money was not the only gift she had received. Soon after she arrived in England, a letter was forwarded to her. She supposed that Jock had sent it on because it had a lawyer’s address on the back. Perhaps he thought it was trouble following her. But the letter bore the news that Violet Trench wished to give her a thousand pounds, following the sale of the Violet Café. She was going away soon, and Jessie was not to try to reach her. The money was sent to Jessie, the lawyer’s letter said, with an expression of her profound regret about the events at the Violet Café, and the hope that Jessie would ‘do something useful with her life, and follow her aspirations’. It did not say what it was that Violet so deeply regretted. At first, Jessie had thought she wouldn’t reply, decided against claiming the money, and then changed her mind. She had aspired to very little up until then, except to please Violet and stay with John Wing Lee for the rest of her life.
‘I lost John,’ she said to Hester. ‘I know it wasn’t the same, but he was my boyfriend.’
‘Well, he survived,’ Hester said. ‘What are you complaining about?’
‘He did what?’
‘He got ashore that night. His brothers took him home and didn’t tell the police.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Oh,’ said Hester, smiling her strange bitter smile. ‘Married. So I heard, not that I did the wedding. I’d leave that one well alone, if I were you.’
As the door closed against the steaming Phnom Penh street, Lou Messenger said, ‘I thought you’d have given up on pretty Asian boys by now. They always did get you into trouble.’ He was older, grey-haired, with a flabby gut and a cigarette burning down to his fingers. A drink stood on the fly-spotted table in front of him, though it was still only ten o’clock in the morning. The room was heavy with the smell of cooking and opium, wafting through the door behind the bar.
‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ Jessie said to the man in the shadowy room.
‘I heard you were in town,’ he said. ‘Call it the resurrection.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Jessie said. ‘I’ve seen it all before. Some rats never do desert sinking ships. They keep hoping it’ll re-float.’
‘Not quite,’ said Lou. ‘Even I didn’t stay around when Pol Pot’s lot moved into the city.’
‘But somebody told you they were coming, I’ll bet.’
‘Funny you should mention that.’
‘So let me put it together. You ran a bar here until ’75 and now you’re back. Same bar?’
‘Nobody else had moved in.’
‘So who are your clients? There aren’t many foreigners around.’
‘I look just like the locals.’ He grinned, the old lazy smile that had enchanted the girls she had known, back at the Violet Café. As if reading her thoughts, his smile faded. ‘I wasn’t to know,’ he said.
‘That people would die? I don’t suppose you did. Evelyn could have killed herself that night.’
‘That’s a touch dramatic, isn’t it?’
‘But you don’t know. The weather saved you from knowing what she’d do.’
‘A freak accident. I sell food as well as booze. Have something.’
‘I ate at the club.’
‘No you didn’t. They tell me you looked a bowl of noodles in the face less than ten minutes ago and couldn’t handle them.’ As he spoke, he turned to a wok on the fire behind him and scooped out two bowls of fried rice.
Beside her bowl he placed a thick glass of beer. ‘To old times,’ he said, raising his glass, as he settled on the other side of the table. ‘Bon salut.’
‘I didn’t know you spoke French,’ she said, intending sarcasm.
‘You wouldn’t. I had a bigger past to bury than you’d ever guess.’ Although he had served himself food, he didn’t appear interested in eating it.
‘Don’t expect me to be sorry for you,’ Jessie said.
‘Oh, I don’t, believe me. I’ve had some good times here. I took myself up to the temples at Siem Reap, in the mid-sixties, worked a bar up there for a bit.’ He talked then about the massive temples at Angkor, and coming across a monk in saffron robes, cross-legged beside burning joss sticks in the gloom of the ancient stone walls, and of how the smoke from the incense had floated so far above him, straight up to a distant dot of blue sky, and the way he’d felt his spirits lifting with the possibility he might still be redeemed.
‘Very Zen, Lou.’
‘You’ve gone troppo yourself, Jessie.’
‘Not likely. I’ve got a neat little flat in London near Victoria Station. I can go back any time I want.’
‘You’re kidding yourself. I recognise people like you. They get that dried up round the edges look. You want to keep out of the sun, Jessie.’
‘Did you go back to Thailand during the occupation here?’
‘There was a living there.’
‘And you weren’t a waiter, I’ll bet. This isn’t Casablanca, Lou.’
‘You’re eating my food, and drinking my booze, and you want to know where to find Kiem, so why don’t you just shut up.’ When she didn’t answer, he said; ‘Look, it’s not as bad as it looks. There are some things I don’t do.’
‘Like what?’
‘Children. Oh, don’t purse your lips, you know bloody well kids are being sold in this city. What can people do? There’s a ready market.’
‘Perhaps the kids are better off out of here. If they go to the right homes.’
‘Yeah, Jessie. That’s one way of looking at it. The trouble is it’s turning into a paedophiles’ picnic spot.’ He pulled his lower lip down and stroked a piece of tobacco from inside it, an old man’s fumbling gesture. But he wasn’t so old, still, she thought. Mid-fifties. ‘Actually, I do buy kids. Some nuns came back and opened an orphanage a few months back. I give them some kids now and then, gives them something to do.’
She studied him, trying to work out if he was telling the truth. The way he sat with his arms folded, as though he didn’t care whether she believed him, was convincing. A cold flatness had descended behind his eyes, so that he appeared indifferent to her. For an instant, she saw him standing by a blue lake, laughing, naked, his penis slightly erect, dark hair in his groin and on his chest. And yet she’d never known him, never had, never seen him care about anything or anyone, except the night when his wife Freda had come into the Violet Café, and the girl Belle had said that she loved him. ‘Isn’t that playing God? Perhaps they don’t want to be Christians.’
‘Ah crap, Jessie. What a load of bullshit they’ve taught you. Do you know what happens to little girls here? They get fattened up for the markets when they’re two, three years old so men can stick their dicks in them. You got a better moral solution?’
‘All right,’ Jessie said. ‘Okay. I don’t know why people do what they do. I write what I see. This was a beautiful city once, and now it’s a bloody hole and it needs all the help it can get. Will you let me do a story?’
‘No thanks. I don’t need anybody reading about me. I’ll get someone to take you to Kiem’s place when you’ve finished, and then you can forget you ever saw me. Is it a deal?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
‘I do. Have you been back?’
‘To New Zealand? Once. A few years ago now.’
‘Who did you see?’ He was engaged again, in spite of himself. A team of rats scurried across the floor towards a rice sack. His eyes travelled their wake. ‘I’ll bring the cats in when you’ve gone.’
‘I saw Hester. She does weddings, and is generally in hate with the world. And Belle. She’s selling home appliances these days.’
‘Oh yeah.’ As if he had to think who Belle was. ‘John, did you see John?’
‘I thought then he was dead. Like you.’
‘You
’re really out of touch. Speaking of abandoned children, you know he was Violet Trench’s son?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’ She pinched herself under the table. But straight away she knew she was being offered a missing piece. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I lent her my boat one day when John was a little kid. It was the middle of wartime, and this woman turned up at the lakefront. I’d never seen her before — a real good-looking woman. She was beside herself, wanting to take the kid across the lake to Hugo’s place. I used to go there a lot. Harry and Sam were mates of mine. Uppity of course, that was Violet, but she needed my boat.’
‘Did she tell you she was John’s mother?’
‘Not exactly. Well, who knows, perhaps the kid wasn’t hers, but if he wasn’t, why had she carted him halfway around the world? I heard later from Harry that she’d brought him from London. Anyway, she got the boat off me, and then she didn’t come back until late that night. It caused me a bit of trouble.’
‘And then she went away again?’
‘Disappeared, but the kid was left there. Then she comes back and opens the café. She knew I knew.’ He drained the glass he had refilled twice since she arrived. ‘You ever hear from my daughter?’
‘I heard she was in America,’ Jessie replied.
‘Yeah, maybe. Her mother was as mad as a snake, you know.’
‘Perhaps she was driven crazy.’
‘You’ll bake if you stick around much longer,’ he said, inviting her to leave. ‘It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum out there. I’ll get someone to show you the way.’
‘Lou,’ Jessie said, standing up, ‘how did you get out of the forest?’
His expression went blank again. ‘I walked,’ he said.
‘It was too far.’
‘I got to Auckland and shipped out.’
‘You never touched your money. Hester told me.’
‘There was never enough to bother about.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Jessie? Things can happen to people who ask too many questions round here. Do you know how many bo dai have gone missing in this country in the last ten years? Yeah, I can see that you do. Remember a man called Caldwell? You don’t even have to go missing. Someone comes to your room at night and opens the door. Room service, they say, and you open up, just a crack, but it’s enough. Or perhaps you don’t even do that — but they have a key, and the next thing you’re lying in a pool of your own brains.’
In the heat, Jessie shivered. Dead war correspondents. ‘Malcolm Caldwell. Yes I do. He was an apologist for Pol Pot.’
‘A Marxist. He thought the Anka would protect him. But they didn’t.’
‘You know who shot him?’
Lou picked up a cat that looked as much like a rat as the animals it was being sent to hunt. ‘I don’t exist. Don’t look for me again.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. Sarcastic, but it was her best defence, and besides he would have her taken to Kiem. ‘Thanks for everything, Lou. Especially the diversion that got me lost.’
But it was nearly the end of the day before she found Kiem, on the road that led to the killing fields of Cheung Ek. Her krama, the scarf that served as headgear, was wet with sweat, her clothes matted with red clay and dust. She was almost ready to give up, because if dark fell, she would be as good as dead, and just moving in the direction of the killing fields made her skin crawl. She had been there once, a place of total desolation. Recently exhumed skulls, some still wearing their blindfolds, and torn clothes poked through the earth. She had been surrounded by total silence. No birds sang near there. People didn’t speak in that monstrous place. As she neared Cheung Ek, she found herself increasingly afraid. Now that she had been in the East all these years, she sensed some Buddhist force at work in her. It was said that the spirits of those who were not buried in the place that they came from would wander alone and restless, seeking help. But she had nothing to give them.
She was riding on the back of a motor-bike, saddle-sore and exhausted when the driver came across Kiem.
He was asleep in a hammock, beneath a thatched roof, fanned by a young wife who was close to giving birth. Suddenly, Jessie didn’t want Kiem to go on this expedition.
Not that she could explain this to him, because once he saw her he became excited. Yes, he did want to come north with her. He wouldn’t be put off This way he would take care of his wife and babies. They negotiated a price, Jessie starting low, in the hope of putting him off. His face fell, and she offered him what the job was worth.
Back at the FCC, there was a change of plan. Reports had been coming in of guerrilla activity and such heavy retaliatory fire by the Vietnamese that the road to Battambang was virtually impassable. The Red Cross group’s second target was a group of amputees in the Kompong Chhnang area, and now they had switched to that as a first option. If the road was good the jeeps could get through in perhaps half a day, but much of it had been sucked away in the last monsoons, so that it could take days, skirting the washouts. During the day, in Jessie’s absence, the group had been exploring the possibility of taking a boat along the river, but it was crawling with pirates, and the banks were full of snipers. Annette Gerhardt had decided to take her convoy by road to Kompong Chhnang.
‘Is Kiem up to it?’ she asked Jessie when she appeared, showered and changed, and settled opposite her.
‘He’ll go where I want him to.’
‘Is there a but?’ asked Annette, noting her hesitation.
‘He has a wife and children, and another one due soon. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t take him.’
‘C’est la guerre. Oh, I know what you mean. What would our mothers say if they could see where we were?’ Annette had shed her elegant clothes in favour of fatigues. She looked exhausted, as if she too had been out in the heat during the day.
‘I don’t know,’ Jessie said. She had downed two bourbons in quick succession. ‘My mother died when I was eighteen.’
‘That’s hard. Mine is still alive, an old woman, but strong in her mind and spirit, and her body not in such bad shape either. I’m lucky. What happened to your mother?’
‘Cancer. I wasn’t with her when she died. I should have been but I couldn’t bear to tear myself away from a boy I was in love with at the time. A young Chinese man.’ Jessie felt the drink, the heat, and the unexpected sight of Lou Messenger, risen from the dead, making her loquacious. She tried to remind herself that she was a self-contained woman who didn’t need to tell garrulous stories to strangers. But why she should think of herself as different? This woman and she were going to face life and death together, and then, if they survived, they would go their separate ways. There had been a telephone message from Bangkok to say that Paul Greaves couldn’t get a flight into Phnom Penh and he’d have to keep going to Sydney. ‘You remind me of someone,’ Jessie said. ‘A strong woman I knew around about that time when my mother and so many people died.’
‘So many people? This sounds like a complicated story.’
‘Yes, that’s true. I was with a group of people, the Chinese boy was among them. Well, he had one Chinese parent — after today, I’m confused. I knew his father too, or I thought I did, and it turns out neither of them was Chinese.’
‘This is the one you were in love with?’
‘Oh yes, very much in love. I thought John would marry me. I was such a plain girl and he was beautiful. I can’t tell you … he had a heat about him. But, I don’t know.’ She had stopped to read the specials. The fish was always fresh. Today it was baked with tomatoes, olives, capers and anchovies, and a touch of French basil. Violet would have approved. Where did they get all this stuff from, while outside, beyond in the dark, there lay nothing but misery and starvation? She found herself settling for Peking duck, wrapped in Mandarin pancakes. A gesture to the past.
‘He was in love with someone else?’
‘I suppose so, though I didn’t see it at the time. This woman I’m
telling you about was called Violet, and it seems that she was his mother, though I didn’t know that either. I’ve only found out today, and it’s been something of a shock. Anyway, a group of us girls worked in her café. Violet was very self-centred, she named it after herself, and she liked to be in control. She thought she knew what was best for all of us. She wanted me to marry John, but all her plans backfired when several people who worked for her went out on a lake and drowned. The place fell apart after that. I wasn’t with them, because I was on my way back to my mother, but I was too late, you see. She had already died. I’d waited too long.’
‘So you lost your mother and your lover on the one night?’ Annette said. ‘That’s a very tragic story.’
‘I did lose my lover, if you could call him that, although he didn’t drown. I found out years later.’
‘The mother didn’t tell you?’
‘I think she decided that it had all been a mistake. But then, perhaps she felt herself surrounded by mistakes.’
‘I don’t think I’m like this woman you’re talking about,’ Annette remarked. ‘I like to be sure I’m not making mistakes. I have other people’s lives in my hands.’
‘Well, I hope you’re right. So did Violet, but she let go at the crucial moment. I left my country hurriedly, after all these disasters. I don’t know where all the people went after that night. As it happens, I met one of them today. He runs a bar down by the markets, one of those seedy little shacks with bad food on the side, and a sack of can sa behind the counter, and God knows what else out the back. His name’s Lou Messenger.’
‘Messenger? I’ve heard of him.’
‘Well, I’ve been out here a long time, and I hadn’t.’
‘He goes by different names. He’s a bad man. Have nothing to do with him. He traffics in children.’
‘There are often two sides to a story,’ Jessie said evenly.
‘Not with men like that.’ Annette was stabbing the air with her lean brown fingers, making her point. ‘I tell you, if you’re a friend of his, I don’t want you near this mission.’
‘Look, I ran across him in the markets. I hadn’t seen him for nearly twenty years. He told me he never wanted to see me again.’