Aran shook his head again, more definitively. His eyes began to refocus. “They press-gang prisoners and homeless people into service to meet the volunteers quota imposed on Thailand, you moron. I was in lockup overnight for being caught with weed at a full-moon party. I’m a tourist.”
“Hmm.” Borthwick looked down at the small screen in his hand, “I see the Chinese gave you a medal for bravery during a fire fight with some Vietnamese troops.”
Aran rubbed his temple with two fingers. “I didn’t do anything to deserve it. I just killed… I think they were refugees.”
Borthwick raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you committed a war crime?”
“No… I…”
“Because that’s what shooting unarmed refugees amounts to.”
Aran put his hand down on the smooth black desk, his legs felt tired. His voice was soft. “You lecture me. You lecture me when Australia hasn’t accepted refugees for a decade.”
Borthwick pursed his lips. “I don’t understand your point. We do have the sovereign right to determine the circumstances in which people come to Australia. We don’t have the right to butcher innocent civilians.”
“I didn’t have a choice. I was following orders. If you don’t follow orders in the Chinese army-”
Borthwick interrupted, shaking his head. “That’s the Nuremberg defence Mr Sintawichai. You should know that historically,” he smiled a pained smile, “it was not a successful one.”
“You’re following orders, aren’t you?”
Borthwick paused. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He straightened, took a step closer. “What do you think is going to happen to me out there, arsehole? I’ll be put back in the war. I’ll be a dead man.”
Borthwick waved away the suggestion with the flick of his fingers, “Orders or not, the point is moot, Mr Sintawichai.” He drew in a deep breath, then smiled again. “Now, because of your links with Australia…”
“Links?” Aran felt himself going red, his good hand started to shake.
Borthwick held up one finger. “Because of your links with Australia, we have provided you with an explanation as to why you are no longer welcome in our country. We’ve given you first aid for your injuries. More than could be expected, really. But you’re not Australian any more, Mr Sintawichai, and this,” he pointed downwards, “is Australian land. It’s time you left.”
Aran did the only reasonable thing there was left to do. He kicked Borthwick in the balls. The man collapsed with a groan, eyes wide, holding himself. His palmscreen clattered on the clean white floor.
Aran stood over him. “Links? What are your links?” His voice was shaking, “You don’t even have an accent, motherfucker. What are your fucking links?”
Borthwick responded with a groan.
He’d started yelling again when the burly Australian entered the room. The big man shook his head, a sad smile on his face. “Sorry about this mate.”
The force rod came down.
Darkness fell.
§
They stood on the baking airfield, waiting to board.
“[Sergeant Sintawichai, what’s our destination?]”
Aran turned, looking down at the thin volunteer. “Da Nang.”
“[What’s there?]”
Aran looked off into the shimmering horizon. “Home.”
* * *
About TR Napper
TR Napper worked as an international aid worker for ten years. He lived for several years in both Mongolia and Lao PDR. He has also worked in Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, and Indonesia. He currently resides in Hanoi, Vietnam. Over the past five years he has had numerous articles published at The Guardian, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Drum, New Matilda, and others. TR Napper has also had fiction published at OMNI Reboot. You can find him online at: www.nappertime.com, and follow him on Twitter here: @_Ruijin_
Bright Student
Terence Toh
~ Malaysia ~
The boy with the scorpion tattoo threw back his head and laughed.
It put Yi Ling in mind of the cry of a raven.
“The one thing my shop doesn’t have!” he said. “And that’s what you want!”
This is getting surreal, Yi Ling thought. She caught sight of her reflection staring back from the glass jars on the shelves all around her: it was almost hilarious how nervous she looked.
“What exactly do you need ginseng for?” the boy asked.
Yi Ling hesitated before answering.
“It improves your memory, right? I’ve got a big exam coming up, and I need all the brainpower I can get.”
“Oh, is that so?” The boy smiled. “I have something far better for that.”
He looked right into her eyes: he was a cobra, staring down its prey. Yi Ling was shocked at how green his eyes were.
“Imagine having a brain as swift as quicksilver, a memory as powerful as a mammoth’s. Imagine if you could answer any question put forth to you, whether as trivial as a baby’s name or as complex as the dance of the stars in the sky,” he said. “I have something that can supercharge your brain. It’s an old recipe given to me by my ancestors. You’ll never have to worry about tests or any kind of academic challenge ever again. And all I ask in return is something simple.”
Yi Ling shivered.
“It’s not… my soul is it?”
The boy laughed again. “What would I want with a soul? Do I look like the devil or something? No, my dear. All I want is your shadow.” He smiled.
“Excuse me?” Yi Ling thought she had misheard.
“Your shadow.”
“But why?”
“We have our uses for it,” the boy said. “Bottle it maybe, weave it into a cloak, or pickle it and serve it with rice and sambal. You’ll be amazed what you can do with a shadow.”
Sensing her hesitation, the boy spoke again.
“It’s not like you really need it, right? What good has your shadow ever done for you? Seriously, when was the last time you even noticed it was there?”
Yi Ling had to admit that he had a point.
§
Five hours ago, everything had been normal.
A double period of Tort law lectures. Ugh. Yi Ling hated those. Two hours of Mr Ong droning on and on, his flat monotone turning the most sordid cases of harm and human injury into agonising exercises in staying awake.
She had gotten last week’s Negligence assignment back. A bright red ‘D-’ was scrawled at the top of her paper, together with ‘Poorly written,’ and ‘Out of topic’ scrawled in her lecturer’s messy handwriting underneath.
Yi Ling had wanted to cry. Five nights she had spent on this essay. All those long hours poring over textbooks and course materials, all wasted!
The results put her in a funk, and she had little mood for the day’s lecture, which was on Vicarious Liability.
She should have copied off Kenny’s paper, Yi Ling reflected sadly. It would have been the easiest thing to do. Kenny, the class swot, who lived and breathed the law, a man whose idea of fun was an evening in the library with a statute book and a mug of coffee. He also didn’t go out much: one little smile, and he would have bent over backwards to help her score.
But no, she had to listen to Amira. Sweet, sanctimonious, Saint Amira of Petaling Jaya, always doing the honourable thing. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” she had lectured Yi Ling. “If you don’t use your own effort, you might as well not try at all!” How they were best friends, Yi Ling sometimes couldn’t understand.
It was easy for Amira to say, Yi Ling reflected bitterly. Amira was blessed with a quick brain and a marvellous memory. She also sported an impressive co-curricular résumé that would give any university recruiter a hard-on: the girl was a state debater and swimmer, for goodness sake. She would have no problem finding a scholarship.
Yi Ling, on the other hand, was getting seriously worried. That assignment had contributed 30% of her grade. She did some mental calculations: with
her marks, she would need at least a B+ on the final paper to be accepted into a good university.
Fail that, and she could kiss her current lifestyle goodbye. Farewell to the bustling metropolis of Subang Jaya, with its clubs and bars, and hello again to the coffee shops and paddy fields of Alor Setar, her hometown. Her parents would put her in some God-forsaken university in the middle of nowhere with an oppressive dress code and dreary lecturers.
And she would rather kill herself than let that happen.
There has to be another way, she thought.
Yi Ling closed her eyes, and imagined sleeping with her lecturer.
It wouldn’t be that bad, would it? Mr Ong, all 220 pounds of him, with his food-flecked beard and sweaty palms. She imagined lying beneath his colossal weight, pretending to climax as he huffed and puffed from the physical exertion: the man perspired walking from one end of the classroom to the other, for God’s sake!
And that’s if they even got to there. Mr Ong had probably never been laid in his life: would he even know what to do? Yi Ling wondered if her lecturer would be able to find his penis beneath all his rolls of fat. Or who knew, perhaps it had shrivelled up and dropped off, after decades of disuse. Grown a pair of wings and flown away, maybe.
The thought made her giggle.
Her laughter broke the silence: in the front of the classroom, Mr Ong stopped speaking. He glared at her momentarily before going back to his lecture.
Oh damn, that’s not a good start, Yi Ling smiled.
She suddenly felt disgusted with herself. Three years ago, Yi Ling knew she would never even have contemplated anything like this.
But that had been before the days of the law degree. Before the days of the endless lectures, the ultra-competitive coursemates, the never-ending assignments and the death of her social life. Law school was the ultimate vampire. It drained everything from you: your finances, your time, your dignity, and peace of mind.
She needed to study harder, she told herself. Exams were in a week, and painstaking analysis of past year papers over the last seven years showed that examiners seemed to have a hard-on for questions on vicarious liability. Why, her seniors told her that in 2005, there had been two questions on the topic for Paper 3, which had thrown the entire class into disarray: most of them had expected occupier’s liability and the rule of Rylands v Fletcher.
Law exams were tricky bastards.
Yi Ling was thankful when the lecture ended. She made sure to make an impression on Mr Ong on her way out: a flirty smile, laughter at his jokes, ‘accidentally’ brushing against his tremendous girth as she left the room.
Every little bit counts, she told herself.
§
Her housemate did not even look up at her as Yi Ling entered their apartment.
“Hey girl,” Kumar said, his eyes not moving from his laptop.
He was tall, dark and scrawny, and had not shaved for days. Her housemate was seated on the sofa, a huge stack of files piled up by him. Thick textbooks formed a small tower on the table nearby, next to a steaming mug.
The television was on: a news channel on mute.
“Yo, Kumar,” Yi Ling slumped next to him. “How’s the project going?”
“Awful,” he muttered. “Can’t figure out this bloody diagram.”
Oh. Well that meant she couldn’t borrow his laptop then. Hers was in a shop in Digital Mall, having crashed two days ago.
Yi Ling glanced at Kumar’s work.
…the fundamental thermodynamic relation is generally expressed as an infinitesimal change in internal energy in terms of infinitesimal changes in entropy…
She shuddered.
Kumar was in second year engineering. Being a Humanities student, Yi Ling didn’t know what he actually studied, but knew he had a workload just as heavy as hers, believe it or not.
“I’ve been up all night trying to understand this,” Kumar sighed. “Entropic theory. What the hell, man.”
“Maybe you need a break,” Yi Ling said. “Seriously, dude, your eye-bags are nasty.”
“My pills are finished already,” Kumar said. “I need to go to the clinic later.”
Kumar had been taking sleeping pills since he was nineteen. It had all started during his A-Levels: his financially-strapped family had put a lot of stress on him to get a scholarship, and he had developed insomnia in the process.
After weeks of restless nights, Kumar had gone to the doctor, who first prescribed him pills called Lexotan. Kumar had tried them for a month, only to grow resistant: images of him flunking everything had been more powerful than the pill’s sedative powers.
Now he was on Ativan, a stronger drug that Kumar said worked wonders. Yeah, he probably hadn’t had a natural night’s sleep in years. But that was the price you had to pay for academic excellence.
It was better that than end up like her ex-secondary school classmate Fiona. An image swam into Yi Ling’s head: a sallow-faced, wiry-haired girl, with a scar on her face.
Fiona had been extremely driven. She had few friends, constantly barricading herself in the library with her textbooks, studying for up to 16 hours a day, as the rumours said.
For her School Certificate exam, she had scored 10 As… and a D.
The day after the results were announced, Fiona leapt off the top floor of a condominium. There had been an article in the paper.
Yi Ling shuddered at the memory. She would never get to that stage, she reassured herself. No matter how bad things got.
But she really needed a break: Yi Ling had not been anywhere other than classes or home for the past week now and every cell in her body cried out for deliverance.
Retail therapy. I need it now more than ever.
She left Kumar, and went to her room to change. After that, she picked up her phone, and called Amira.
§
Petaling Street. Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. A hustling, bustling street, packed with traders of every conceivable shape and size, all peddling wares ranging from bootleg Hollywood blockbusters to imitation Italian handbags.
Amira and Yi Ling chatted as they walked beneath the prominent green arch that marked the street’s entrance, and headed towards a row of stalls selling accessories.
Red lanterns marked with Chinese characters hung on strings from lamp posts. A grey-bearded man peddled wooden handicrafts from his wheelchair, while two Bangladeshi-looking fellows walked around with novelty pens and torchlights.
A Chinese man with spiked hair shouted at them in Cantonese from his pirated DVD stall: “Ham tai, ham tai! Veli cheap!”
Beside him, an elderly Malay woman stretched her hand over the clothes she was selling. Genuine Kalvin Cleins underwear.
In the air, the delicious smell of roasted peanuts mingled with the foul stench of an exposed drain.
There were many tourists, many of them haggling with vendors or taking photographs: an Australian man was smiling as he snapped a selfie with a pretty young handbag seller.
“Ooh, check that out!” Amira giggled as they passed a stall selling brooches. She wore a black t-shirt and jeans, matched with a blue headscarf. “A genuine Mockingjay pin!”
“How much?” she asked the elderly woman keeping shop.
“Forty ringgit,” the woman replied in Malay.
“What?” Amira was shocked. “That’s ridiculous!“
There was a small argument: Yi Ling watched in amusement as the woman haggled with her friend, eventually bringing down the price to 25 ringgit.
“And that’s the way you do it,” Amira said proudly as they both walked away.
“Whatever lah,” Yi Ling smiled.
It was while they were walking past a row of Chinese food stalls that Yi Ling noticed something strange in an alleyway nearby.
There was a boy. He was pale, with brown wavy hair, and dressed in a black shirt and jeans. There was a large tattoo of a scorpion on his well-developed left biceps.
He smiled at Yi Ling.
And suddenly, he vanished.
Yi Ling blinked in amazement.
“Did you see that?” she asked Amira.
“See what?”
“That boy.”
Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction Page 11