‘No need. We think this is the most attractive choice.’
Crush
Zac now has a confirmed crush on Nguyet. The tits and arse observations have given way to more circumspect musings on her warmth, humanity and obvious intelligence.
‘She’s exceptional. You were lucky to meet her,’ he tells me, regularly. He seems a changed man.
I find the crush rather touching, and while matchmaking the two would probably be unconscionable, I can’t deny him the opportunity to find out if there really is a spark there.
With this in mind I made sure to let Zac know that Nguyet was playing piano in the lobby of a five-star hotel tonight. Sure enough, he surprised even himself by suggesting a trip to see ‘some live music’. Natassia and I didn’t need much convincing. An evening of live piano in an air-conditioned foyer sounded like the height of luxury.
Nguyet, her posture on the piano stool, perfect, is playing a Chopin prelude. Her long hair is loose and brushed and she’s wearing make-up. I’ve never seen her look so beautiful. Moreover, she’s in a low-cut, backless black dress and I note with some surprise that Zac’s anatomical observations were perfectly correct. This serves to reinforce the disturbing suspicion I’ve had for most of my life, that men have a sixth sense – a kind of x-ray vision, that they’ve kept secret from the other sex since the dawn of clothing.
But my reflection in the gilded mirror to my right reveals a forehead crimped into a frown of despair. My role as go-between and moral support is looking untenable. Zac’s not playing his cards right, and I fear all may be lost.
The last few months of all-you-can-eat buffets have not been kind to his figure, and the humidity outside has taken its toll on his sweat-glands. He’s turned up in an out-sized bottle-green polo shirt. There are dark, almost black, patches under the arms, across the back and down the chest area. And now he’s ordered no less than two full meals for his supper. From where we’re seated, right near the stage, Nguyet has a full frontal view of Zac’s binge-eating disorder.
While Zac eats, Natassia and I quietly discuss her latest lover, Guillaume.
‘He’s passionate, but so stubborn,’ she tells me.
‘How much do you like him? Is it serious?’ I ask her.
‘I don’t think so. We fight often but he’s really good in bed,’ is the reply. I notice Zac has his eavesdropping stare on and that unnatural tilt to his head.
Guillaume wanted to see Natassia tonight but she wanted to come out with us and see Nguyet. Now he’s off somewhere sulking. I wonder whether his present condition might be related to the public dressing-down Zac and I watched her give him yesterday.
‘I told him he can meet us here if he wants to,’ she shrugs.
‘Nats,’ chomps Zac, thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever considered that you might be a ruthless man-eater?’ Natassia tuts angrily, glares at him, and slaps him on the upper arm.
But I picture Guillaume being told what to do by a woman, and shake my head in silent admiration for Natassia. A dangerous-looking mixture of African, Asian and European, this is a guy who got the genes for gangster rapper, Yakuza membership and spoilt Lord. I expect he has his good points, but I imagine that without seeing him naked, I won’t get to appreciate them. Whenever I see him, he’s sullen and non-communicative, and strangely at the mercy of an indifferent Natassia.
I’m starting to realise that Natassia doesn’t hold her lovers in high regard. She told me her father walked out on her mother when she was young. She’s been making cocksure men pay for it ever since. And it works like a charm. The harder she is, the harder they queue up for more. This phenomenon has come to the attention of other female expats, who sometimes come up and congratulate her as though she’s some kind of feminist folk-hero.
But now she drops a bombshell.
‘Hey. I’m going to leave Hanoi and go travelling again.’
‘When?’ Zac and I chorus in horror.
‘Soon, I think. Maybe in two months, or less,’ she says. After a moment’s silence she adds: ‘I don’t know when I’m coming back.’ The silence lengthens.
‘I’ve only got two friends in this country,’ says Zac bitterly. ‘And now one of them’s about to leave.’
I watch Nguyet playing for a few gloomy minutes before an amused-sounding ‘hi!’ from Zac breaks the mood. Looking round, I spot a familiar Vietnamese face sitting beside him. It’s a beautiful face with ruby red lips.
‘Where do we know him from?’ I whisper to Natassia, whose memory for people is almost infallible.
‘Your farewell dinner. Remember? I think his name was Binh. He’s Nguyet’s friend.’
Zac has overheard us again, and leans over to slip in an extra epithet. ‘The poof.’
I smile at Binh and he smiles fetchingly back. Another gorgeous Hanoi guy with no interest in me whatsoever. I experience a sudden wave of self-pity.
Nguyet is behind him, on a set break. She hugs me, kisses Natassia, then sits on the other side of Binh and greets Zac with great warmth. I watch closely. In the periphery of my vision I see Natassia’s eyebrows rise. Mine have probably lifted a little too. It’s a sign – as surprising as it is promising.
Zac is tongue-tied for a minute, but then launches into one of his long anecdotes in Vietnamese. The intonation, as always, is Australian. Natassia and I watch as Nguyet and Binh strain to follow what is, judging by all the accompanying hand and face movements, a lively tale involving police harassment of an elderly vendor.
I try to imagine how Zac’s Vietnamese must sound to locals and decide it would be something like hearing the electronic voice of Stephen Hawking with the word order changed radically and most of the vowels replaced by different ones, although consistently. Much later, when Natassia and I are exasperated with the effort of learning the impossible tones and phonemes of Vietnamese, I’ll realise that all Westerners are doomed to sound like this.
But as Zac pantomimes his way through his narrative I lean back in my chair and notice something curious. Nguyet and Binh are holding hands under the table.
The interview
There’s a cigarette-smoking, uniformed guard at the gate of the publishing compound. I fancy I catch a glimpse of a rifle in the guardhouse behind him. He seems amicable enough though, baring me a few lonely brown teeth as I pass. He’s guarding the premises of about ten publications and a printing press.
I walk the length of the sunny compound, past the canteen, outside which a large number of male workers in ink-stained blue overalls are smoking. At the far end I find a large neon signpost attached to the side of a featureless building. The signpost says: ‘National Economic Review.’
I’m here for an interview. Lee’s name seemed to open doors for me. At reception I find two very affable guys waiting for me. The first to introduce himself is Alistair, the cheery head of the foreign editorial team. He’s slightly chubby with long hair and John Lennon glasses. His face seems to default to a smiling position. The other is Charlie, his friend from the editorial team. Charlie, by contrast, looks dead serious; a sandy-haired giant whose attempts to smile seem blighted by a face resistant to muscle movement. But they’re both wholly British – polite and sardonic, with the reddened eyelids of committed beer drinkers.
On the way to Alistair’s office I’m taken through a room the size of an auditorium. I fancy the far side of the room is slightly blue from atmospheric perspective. There must be more than 60 people in the room, yet it’s quiet as a library. Rows of computers, occupied by rows of Vietnamese people, fade off into the distance. In one corner of the room I spot a small clutch of foreigners frowning into screens. It’s all highly intriguing.
But in Alistair’s chilled office the atmosphere becomes more relaxed. We sit around on big sofas and talk about Hanoi. Alistair smokes and Charlie twirls his hair abstractedly. These guys are both long-term expats with an interest in local affairs.
I ask again about my hours. When I called, earlier in the week, Alistair told me I was in line to rep
lace someone one day per week and as a casual. But now something’s changed.
‘Actually,’ Charlie starts, twirling his hair again. ‘There might be three full days a week because we’ve recently had to…er…’ he looks at Alistair.
‘Sack a guy,’ says Alistair brightly.
‘Oh.’ I say.
‘We don’t do that very often,’ he adds.
‘He’s been working here a long time, but he’s turned out to be … er … a bit of a … ’ Charlie twirls.
Alistair finishes for him. ‘A bit of a junkie.’
‘Oh,’ I say again. There’s a cog turning slowly in my head. As it picks up speed I ask: ‘Where’s this guy from?’
‘Sydney town, actually. Up your way.’
‘Oh,’ I say for the third time. The cog is whizzing round and round. I venture one more query: ‘… Don’t suppose you’d care to divulge his initials?’
‘I s’pose so,’ Alistair shrugs. ‘B.C. – Why?’
‘Brandon Costella,’ I say slowly.
It was only a matter of time really. In my last contact with Brandon he’d turned up unexpectedly at my place in Sydney with pinwheels for pupils, toting his new pocket-sized Vietnamese wife, Hai. She was, in every observable way, indistinguishable from a 12-year-old. Only carbon dating could have upheld Brandon’s assertion that she was twenty-five. She spoke no English, and in her shoes only came up to my chest.
I’d only met Brandon briefly before he moved to Hanoi in the late nineties. He was a friend of a friend - the friend who’d suggested Hanoi to me when I was looking for a destination. When Brandon returned to Sydney for a visit, soon after my decision to make the same move, he wasn’t quite the guy I vaguely remembered. He’d become a junkie and had made some enemies in Hanoi.
In hindsight, I realise I judged rather too harshly his and his wife’s inability to converse properly, which resulted from the lack of a common language, given the fact that I would soon be gazing longingly at illiterate Vietnamese men. In my living room they sat intertwined on the rug.
‘So!’ he’d begun, looking at me sideways. ‘What’s this I hear about you planning to move to Hanoi, and not telling us?’
‘Ahhh!’ I’d replied in a dull panic.
‘I know everyone in that town,’ he’d said. ‘I can help you get totally set up.’
‘Cool!’ I’d offered weakly, remembering stories I’d heard of all the enemies he’d made in Hanoi.
He left me with a piece of paper with a number on it. He said he’d be there by the time I arrived. I’d rung the number once. A voice told me first in Vietnamese then in English that the line had been disconnected.
Now the trail was hot again. And I was taking his job.
‘How’s he taken being sacked?’ I ask.
‘Rather well. It’s funny. We sacked him a fortnight ago, but he’s been turning up anyway for short visits.’
‘He walks though the office, says ‘hallo’ to everyone … ’ adds Charlie.
‘ … then retires to the toilets with a glass of water and a spoon,’ finishes Alistair.
‘How does he afford to keep buying the shit?’ I ask, amazed.
‘Well,’ says Charlie, twirling furiously. ‘He’s borrowed money off all the Vietnamese reporters here.’
‘And the sad thing,’ adds Alistair, still sanguine, ‘is that they earn in a month what the foreign subs get in a day here.’
‘How’s his wife coping with all this?’
‘Wife – and baby now,’ Charlie reminds me. ‘Yeah. It’s a bit grim. Apparently they’ve been living on sweet potato, donated by the neighbours. He hasn’t been paying the bills either so the electricity’s been cut. They’re living in this shithole on the road out of town, and now it’s a dark shithole.’
The guys seem vaguely amused, in a wry sort of way, by all this, but I feel only anger that Brandon’s dragged a local girl into this mess by marrying and impregnating her. None-the-less, I’m aware that for some reason, none of this seems as damning here, in Hanoi, as it would have back in Sydney. I begin to see how expats exist in a state of grace. Bad behaviour is ignored or celebrated. Brandon has become just another zany character to discuss at the Bia Hoi. It strikes me, suddenly, how liberatingly disconnected we all are here. The dramas and melodramas of Western life have stayed over in the West. In our community, at least, nobody’s old enough to die of cancer, nobody’s looking after their ailing mother, or arguing with their father. We’re living in an elite society devoid of parents, old people and sick people; a society where people appear, young, healthy, fully-formed, and completely free of background information.
‘Well,’ I say, sitting up and looking at Alistair. ‘Would you like me to work a trial-half-day or anything?’
‘Oh, no.’ He goes ‘hmmmm’ for a few seconds, then says: ‘I don’t suppose you could start this week?’
I’m hired! I have only one more question. I’m figuring if this is a communist country, then the government probably owns the press.
‘Who owns this paper?’
‘You mean which ministry? The Ministry of Planning and Investment.’
‘Are they scary?’
‘Ahhh, they’re not too bad. They’ve got a couple of censors in this office,’ Alistair waves a finger towards the glass door leading into the enclosed vastness beyond. ‘But I wouldn’t worry about them too much.’ I squint at the bent heads, wondering who among them are the colluders. ‘They tend to put red lines through anything they don’t like,’ he adds, ‘but mostly, the reporters self-censor their work.’
This last piece of information has cast a thrilling pall of exoticism over my new job. I’ll be working for a communist government that plants stooges in my office.
Alistair and Charlie decide a lunchtime beer is in order and invite me to the local bia hoi. They nod at the guard as we wander out of the publishing compound and walk about 50 metres to a crowded outdoor stall. We sit on the low plastic stools and three large watery beers arrive immediately, along with some unshelled peanuts. The guys wave at a couple of red-faced Vietnamese at other tables and they smile back. Regulars. A large proportion of Vietnamese flush red after a couple of drinks – it’s a terrible giveaway. The staff are very friendly too. There’s a lot of smiling going on. The pavement beneath us is carpeted with peanut shells, cigarette butts and bits of meat. There’s a strong smell of meat in the air, and sitting there, beside the busy road I spot a rat tearing along the gutter. But I smile. I feel more connected, more acclimatised than ever. These things hardly bother me any more.
The indoor part of the establishment is little more than a hole in the wall. Possibly a kitchen hidden away, a cash register on a pile of wooden crates, and at the very front, almost on the street, a glass display counter with various dishes on the glass shelves inside, representing the menu. Every now and then there’s a wagging motion in my peripheral vision from something sitting on the top. It happens when somebody walking past knocks the counter.
The wagging thing eventually catches my eye and I see it’s the wagging tail of a dog. I react very slowly. Where I come from happy dogs wag their tails. This is not a happy dog. It’s not even a dog. It’s half a dog. It’s been skinned and barbecued to a golden brown colour then expertly bisected so that only its back half is on display. From where we sit we have a cross-section of its abdomen. Packed inside its ribcage, the offal is strangely grey. Its intestines have been partially removed and artistically arranged on the plate in front. I stare at it for a long time.
Until this moment I’ve been nonchalant about dogmeat. I’ve worked out that Hanoians love it and as a vegetarian I’ve refused to pass judgement on dog-eaters any more than on pig-eaters, a group which includes most of my friends. Even now I remain the calm observer. I say nothing and let the conversation roll on. But later in the day, the image returns to me and it comes tinged with the memory of Natassia’s culture shock. It’s undeniable – the tail-wagging doggie has left a distinctly unsavoury taste in my
mouth. Suddenly I don’t feel quite so connected and acclimatised. Was this how Natassia was feeling?
'A moving horrible'
I glance to my immediate left, where my new colleague, a softly-spoken Aussie in his late fifties called Bill, is tapping away, cigarette between pursed lips. His face is composed. I try to catch a glimpse of what he’s editing but without being obvious, I can’t.
I look back to the text on my own screen in rising despair. ‘For auto, motorcycle or even train, their most scared object is bicycle.’
‘Most scared object?’ I mouth the words to myself.
‘Many bicycle drivers have been a moving horrible for all other drivers, throwing like a javelin from the dark alleys or the sitting down until some money paid from the bicycle drivers carelessly true or false … ’
‘A moving horrible?’ my lips work soundlessly.
Above my computer screen looms the young but unkempt face of Bobby, who works facing me. His face is a little scrunched up in concentration and I can see a column of smoke rising from a point beside him. He hasn’t made any overtures of assistance. Beside him is an unfriendly woman whose name I haven’t learnt yet. Nobody’s talking. I want to talk to Charlie but he’s cloistered away in some little room off the vast one we work in. I try to focus my mind – to home in on the meaning, but the harder I try, the more I panic and the less I comprehend. I light a cigarette and try again.
‘The number in this street was really huge and the chasing stage was also operated much more interesting, due to many of the violated people was students. And student still is student, they have got money and were also the most firm object to be fined.’
Somebody seems to be getting chased. There are some bicyclists involved. I glance at Bill again.
‘I’m sorry Bill,’ I grimace.
‘Got some gobbledegook there have you?’ he smiles.
Single White Female in Hanoi Page 20