Deception

by Tory Hayward

  ‘Is my father here?’ I asked apprehensively. But a glance at his face made me realise he would not be revealing anything.

  I stopped at the entrance of the temple automatically and slipped off my shoes. Smith made a grunt of approval, as if he’d expected me to stamp in there with no respect for local traditions.

  It was cool inside the temple. I hesitated. There were eight passages in front of me, which would lead to eight separate Buddhas. By tradition I should go and worship at the one that matched the day of my birth. Each day of the week had its own Buddha and Wednesday had two for some reason, I couldn’t remember why. I was born on a Thursday, ruled over by the planet Jupiter in the Buddhist tradition.

  I glanced at Smith again, hoping for direction, and realised from the smirk on his face that this was a test. He was waiting to see what I’d do.

  I took a breath and focused. Thursday meant west. The Thursday Buddha would be on the western side of the temple. I stepped confidently forward, past a huge statue of Buddha that sat near the passage entry, and ducked under a low archway.

  In a smaller chamber sat a golden Buddha. Seated in a cross-legged position, his hands rested on the tops of his knees, palms open and upwards. The meditating Buddha.

  I felt a wash of relief. This was the right one. Thursday was the meditating Buddha.

  Picking up a cup, I scooped up water from the reservoir in front of the statue and poured it over its head. I could see Smith nodding in approval, and noticed his two accomplices had moved to block the entrance to the chamber. They were keeping other people out.

  I swallowed and steadied my nerve.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out the canister with the jewels. Pressing my thumb into the depression at the bottom, I listened for the telltale suck of the seal being released. I had reset the opening device back in Sydney.

  Then, with hands that shook slightly, I opened the lid and set the jewels carefully before the statue.

  ‘I brought them back,’ I said. I wasn’t sure to whom. To Smith, or maybe Buddha himself. I pressed my palms together and bowed over them.

  ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me. We never should’ve had them.’

  There was a moment of complete calm and silence.

  A grating sound made me glance sideways and gasp. A door, almost invisible against the wooden murals that lined the chamber, slid open. Before I’d even stood upright, Smith had grabbed my arm and shoved me through the dark opening.

  ‘No.’ I turned instinctively to try and get back to the jewels and the light. But the door slid shut behind me, heavy and soundproofed.

  ‘Smith.’ I hammered on the door. But it was like hammering on the trunk of a hundred-year-old tree. Solid and immovable.

  The blackness was absolute, I blinked, and blinked again, straining to see any hint of light, but there was nothing. I pressed my palms against the door, using it as a frame of reference to keep myself from falling over. The total sensory deprivation was making me dizzy. All I could hear was my own breathing and it was speeding up as I fought panic and began to lose my usual calm control.

  I tipped my head back. ‘Jack,’ I screamed. ‘Jack.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I pressed hard back against the door and dragged in air. Closed my eyes, and consciously slowed my breathing. Being trapped in the dark was one of my worst nightmares.

  Lib always said she liked the dark. But not me. It made me feel vulnerable, exposed, as if things were going on just in front of me but I couldn’t see them, couldn’t protect myself against them. The dark felt suffocating to me, and even at my age I slept best when the room was lit with a soft glow.

  My heart slowed as I grabbed onto some composure. I slid down the door until I landed on the floor and put a hand out, feeling stone and dirt beneath my fingers.

  Wood door.

  Stone paving.

  I held my breath and listened. Nothing. Not a whisper of sound. So I turned my head, took another slow breath, and pressed my ear against the wood of the door. I could hear faint scratching. It was probably a rat, eating away at the wood. Or termites.

  I swallowed and shuddered. Either was a horrible thought.

  Then I sighed, and almost laughed. My phone. It had a flashlight app on it, and even without the app, it lit up like a Christmas tree as soon as you touched the screen.

  Feeling like a first class idiot, I scrabbled in my bag and pulled it out. I’d turned it off for the flight out of Sydney and hadn’t planned on turning back on. There was no global roaming in Myanmar. The local infrastructure simply didn’t support it, and the internal mobile phone network barely worked.

  My phone flickered into life, and I lifted it to scan the room. I yelped in fright when the first thing it lit up was a looming golden statue of Buddha, which seemed to be staring right at me from beneath half-closed lids.

  I pushed myself up off the ground slowly, my legs aching and prickling as the adrenaline ebbed out of my system.

  The room was small, only about four square metres. With two stone walls and two heavy wood slab walls. It obviously used to be one of the shrines in the temple, but was unused now, chairs and a fold-up table were stacked against one wall. They weren’t dusty and must have been used recently. The air felt fresh and clean as well, when I would’ve expected it to be musty and stale. I shone the phone around the side of the Buddha saw that the huge statue half covered a metal grate in the floor. The draft from it lifted wisps of hair and made them tickle my cheeks.

  I pushed at the Buddha, to try to get to the grate. But he didn’t move.

  Leaving my phone on, I put it carefully to one side and then went and picked up one of the chairs, intending to try and lever the Buddha off the grate. But there was a scraping sound from the wood door, and instead I tossed the chair aside and dived for my phone. Getting to it just as the door slid open.

  I stuck it in my pocket.

  A figure was shoved in to the room and the door slammed shut behind him.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Well, hello there, Merry darling.’ His voice came out of the blackness, calm and almost cheerful. I turned my phone on and shone it at him.

  He raised an arm, blinking in the glare.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I peered at him, he seemed okay. Maybe thinner, and in need of a haircut. But still the handsome silver fox. Dressed in a khaki shirt and dark canvas pants. His usual adventuring attire.

  ‘I’m much better for seeing you, my dear,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Dad.’

  He pulled me into a bear hug. He smelled fresh, and a knot of tension just below my heart eased a little; he wasn’t sick or abused.

  ‘They’ve treated you well?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded in the light beam. ‘I’ve been at the most beautiful place, a few hours drive from here. Surrounded by thick jungle and remote as I’ve ever been. But aside from house arrest, they treated me well. Incredible library. Never bored.’

  ‘Do you know who did it?’

  ‘I don’t know his name. But he is English, and well educated, wealthy too.’

  I nodded. ‘He picked me up from the airport. Said to call him Smith.’

  ‘I take it you came without the jewels.’ The condemnation in his voice made me grit my teeth. ‘Though why, after they’ve looked after me so well, I’m shut in an oubliette beneath a Buddhist temple is beyond me.’

  ‘An oubliette. Is that what you think this is?’ I felt sick. He was referring to a type of dungeon or prison where the prisoners could not get out, and were often bricked in and forgotten about.

  ‘No, of course not. An oubliette only has a door in the roof. You know that.’

  ‘Are you actually joking?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If I am, you don’t think it’s very funny. So perhaps I’m not.’

  ‘You were wrong about the jewels. I brought them. Of course I did.’ Typical that he’d think I’d turned up without them. I always missed him when he was gone, but as soon as I saw him aga
in I’d remember his gift for irritating me.

  ‘But they took them off you, and put you in here?’

  I thought of the moment when I’d offered them to Buddha with an apology and decided it best not to mention it. He wouldn’t understand, and he’d only say something annoying about me being overemotional about things.

  Me. Overemotional.

  Clearly he’d never met me before.

  ‘Yes. That’s what happened.’

  ‘Doesn’t look good then,’ said Dad, with grim resignation. ‘Do you think we’ll end up eating one another? Or will we die of thirst before we get to that point? I drank my own pee once—’

  ‘Shut up,’ I shrieked before he could get any further. I’d actually heard the tale several times before, and knew it only usually led to a discussion about the perils of drinking your own urine and kidney failure. I really didn’t want to hear it just at that moment.

  ‘Just trying to lighten the situation.’

  ‘Well don’t, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he agreed.

  There was silence for a moment, and then he said, ‘I hear that the buttocks are the most edible part.’

  ‘Dad,’ I howled.

  He chuckled. ‘I’ve missed you. It was lonely in my jungle hideaway. I’m not used to having time on my own. Gave me time to think.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been going nuts with worry. Just nuts.’ My voice wobbled.

  My phone’s light jiggled as I reached out and pulled open the folding wooden chair I’d been planning on using to prise Buddha from the wall. It’d been a dumb idea anyway, the statue had to weigh eight tonnes.

  ‘Sit, Dad.’ I went and grabbed another chair from the stack and put it out for myself. ‘I’m going to turn off my phone. This app chews through the battery. We might need it later.’

  I waited a moment to see if he’d disagree, then sat and turned the phone off. The darkness enveloped us, as impenetrable as before.

  ‘Does anyone know you’re here?’ he said in a tone that strongly suggested he doubted I’d been that organised.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, stung. ‘Well, no. Sort of.’ I thought of Jack and wondered again how he’d find me.

  ‘Care to clarify?’ said Dad, heavy on the sarcasm.

  He had no right to be sarcastic, or to judge me or make me feel that I hadn’t done my absolute best.

  ‘Would you care to clarify a story I heard?’ I retaliated. ‘About you stealing the jewels.’

  Dad said nothing. I didn’t hear him shift or move. In the absolute blackness it seemed like time didn’t shift or move either, like someone had hit the pause button.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe we should be figuring a way out of here?’ He tried to put me off. ‘Not discussing unsavoury subjects.’

  ‘There is no way out of here,’ I said coldly. ‘And before I die of thirst or cannibalism, I’d very much like to know how, exactly, I came to be in this situation.’

  ‘Merry.’ He half laughed and hesitated, as if seeking the right things to say. ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about it actually, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I made a mistake.’

  ‘You think?’ Now my sarcasm rang off the walls.

  ‘I had an opportunity to get the jewels back. For Buddhism, for the Indonesian government—’ His voice dropped a note and quivered with reverence. ‘For the Dalai Lama.’

  ‘Oh please,’ I said. ‘If you were getting them back for Buddhism, then why on earth did you bury them at the beach? Why not announce you had them, with a load of hype, the minute you set foot in Australia?’

  ‘What, and have the government take all the credit?’ He sounded outraged. Horrified at the idea.

  I snorted. I well knew Dad’s dislike of any form of authority, or doing anything any way but his own way.

  ‘But buried at the beach? Really?’

  ‘They were onto me. They were waiting to grab me and the jewels when I arrived back at home, in Mosman. So I hightailed it to the beach house. But they had a helicopter. They knew where I was going. I got away, to the bushland behind the house, but if I hid them there you’d never find them. So I went back to the beach at night and buried them. I knew you could use a metal detector and find them again relatively easily. It made sense at the time.’

  ‘I’m sure it did,’ I said coolly. ‘But they caught you. Didn’t they torture you or something, to get the location of jewels?’ I thought of Jack’s friend, Dan, and what he’d been put through by Wuu Sing Chow.

  ‘They’re Buddhists,’ said my father, a note of scandal in his voice. ‘Buddhists don’t torture people. They discuss things and reason with you. Over and over again.’

  ‘How did they get hold of you anyway?’ I frowned in the darkness. His story seemed a little strange and nonsensical, like he was avoiding telling me something important.

  He cleared his throat and sighed. ‘I ran out of petrol. I was stuck at the beach house with no way to get away.’ He sounded sheepish. ‘They took me to a place, up in Queensland somewhere, judging from the heat. We went in a small plane. Then one day I ate something, it made me feel terribly tired and next thing I knew I woke up in the jungle in Myanmar.’

  ‘Oh.’ I understood suddenly. ‘I get it. So that’s why you were digging holes on beaches. You had no petrol, you couldn’t escape, so you buried the jewels. It was our English friend who was after you. Not Wuu Sing Chow, who you stole the jewels from?’

  ‘Wuu didn’t have a clue.’ There was a note of satisfaction in his voice. ‘Hey, that rhymes. Wuu. Clue.’

  ‘Did you know someone was there, trying to negotiate to get the jewels?’

  ‘From Wuu?’ He sounded surprised. ‘No. I had a tip-off that he had them, and a contact who got them for me. They didn’t want Wuu to have them and I promised to get them to their rightful home.’

  ‘There was a young man there negotiating for the jewels. Wuu did not treat him well when you took them.’

  ‘Dear God,’ murmured Dad, horror in his voice. ‘I would never have … Not ever, if I thought … Is he alive?’

  ‘Barely,’ I said.

  ‘Oh well then.’ A note of cheerfulness returned to his voice. ‘I’ll send him something, a gift, to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t to know though, was I? How was I to know?’

  ‘Because, Dad, actions tend to have consequences and stealing things from despots is always going to end badly for someone.’

  But not me, I could almost hear him thinking. My shallow, irreverent father. Just like everything he did. No consideration for anyone else. Always pleasing himself and thinking of no one else.

  ‘Is taking something that doesn’t belong to someone even stealing?’ he asked. ‘Anyway, they were given to me. It’s not like I broke in and took them.’

  ‘Give it a rest.’ I felt my very small store of patience beginning to wane. ‘Must you screw up the lives of everyone you get anywhere near? How many people do you need to ruin before you start to think about the consequences, about anyone else?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I really am. And I’m sorry you’ve been dragged here, and I’m sorry about this whole mess.’

  ‘You could actually try to sound like you mean it.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you came to get me if you are so angry.’

  I jumped to my feet, so violently the chair toppled over. ‘Because you’re my father. Because I couldn’t just wash my hands of you and leave you to some unknown fate. Trust me, I thought about it.’

  I hadn’t considered it, not for a moment, but he didn’t know that.

  ‘I’m so touched you came all this way to fetch me.’ There was a hint of mockery in his voice.

  I scrabbled for my phone, fury at what I’d been through in the last weeks mixed with age-old hurts and resentment in a volatile mix. I wanted to see his face. Pressing the button, it lit up.

  ‘Are you? Are you touched?’ I shone the light into his face.

  Dad just stared at me, no g
uilt or remorse in his face. Almost a hint of amusement. As if he thought my reaction was hilarious.

  Grey fog settled over me, as if I’d stepped outside myself, and I could see me struggling to hold it all together, to keep the words inside. They didn’t want to stay within. Now, after all these years, I didn’t care if they came out.

  ‘Nothing to say for yourself? Well, that’s a surprise. You never have. Not one word. Not one hint of remorse. Not caring about anything. Not since the day Mum died.’

  Dad’s expression became set and grim, he shook his head slightly.

  ‘Oh Merry. Oh darling.’

  It wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. I stood and waited for him to say more.

  ‘Is that what you think, that I didn’t care about your mother’s death?’

  ‘You spent your time looking for one artefact after the other. You barely hesitated. It was as if the whole thing was a huge inconvenience.’

  He held up a hand. ‘I died that day. The day your mother died. It was the end of me as well.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Mum was drunk when she crashed. She was always drunk, and it was because you neglected her. She loved you, and you didn’t love her. Not at all. She was just a trophy wife and once you had her you just cast her aside to gather dust, like everything else you get your hands on—’

  ‘You were thirteen when she died. That’s a very adult perspective. Who told you this?’

  ‘Everyone,’ I cried. ‘All the people you dumped me on because you couldn’t be bothered dealing with me yourself.’

  I’d expected him to be angry. I’d expected him to be at least defensive or guilty. But instead he just looked tired. The colour drained from his face, and with it the energy he always exuded seemed to dim.

  ‘I haven’t been a very good father, have I?’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’ I felt instantly guilty. It was true, he hadn’t. But I still loved him. Despite everything I didn’t want to hurt him.

  ‘Sit, Merry.’ He point towards the pile of chair on the floor.