‘No, they don’t always dress like this. It’s the Hmong New Year. The most important three days, when people meet their future husbands.’
‘So…’ ‘They are fiercely traditional. Animist… but – wait – is that – over there?’
She was pointing, and trying not to point. Jake scanned the scene: the parasols and the pick ups, the Chinese potnoodle trucks and the silver jangling coins on summery dresses.
A small figure was discreetly waving at them, down the road, half hidden between two large jeeps:
‘It’s Tou.’
Jake marvelled. This was Tou? He was barely more than a boy. And this was the crucial figure? Their all-important guide? This was the chief suspect in the homicide of Samnang? It was indeed a ludicrous concept: this boy looked more street urchin than murdering villain.
Tou’s smile was broken; his shirt was grubby and worn; his face was young and brave and eager and frightened.
Glancing either way, Tou slipped into the shadows, then seconds later he reappeared, directly behind them, speaking quick, anxious, and fairly articulate English:
‘Come, please, quick, Chemda – Come!!’
His nervous glance flickered over Jake.
‘It’s OK,’ said Chemda. ‘It’s OK. He’s a friend, he’s with me. What is it? Are you alright? I know the police are -’
‘Chemda I have seen what they were looking for.’
‘What?’
Tou gave his anxious reply. ‘The stripe Hmong! One of them come to me yesterday, old Hmong man. And he told me – he told me stories of the Khmer Rouge came here, in the 1970s. And others. That’s what I tell Doctor Samnang last night. That’s what I try to tell you on the phone. Then Samnang he got sad, crying, and I ran away -’
‘What? What stories?’
‘Chemda. I show you. We must to be quick, but…’ He lifted a finger, invoking their silence, and their discretion. ‘I can show you.’
‘What do you mean? Show me what??’
‘I can show you what the Khmer Rouge found. Many many years ago. On the Plain of Jars.’
Chapter 6
‘Chemda, why are you taking this risk? Why not just give up? And go home?’
She didn’t answer. Jake wondered whether to try again. They were speeding south, jeeping into the heart of the Plain, with Tou and the old Hmong man, Yeng. They were taking a terrible risk, disobeying the cops, quitting Ponsavanh, going to see what Tou had discovered.
Yeng had swiftly agreed to help them, as he had already helped Tou: he apparently hated the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge, all the communists; he was a wiry determined old guy, maybe an ex fighter, Jake suspected – certainly he was toughly contemptuous of everyone and everything. Yet likeable.
Jake had been told Yeng was Hmong Bai, Striped Hmong, one of the most rebellious and warlike of Hmong tribes. Jake could see his motivation.
But why would Chemda be so audacious, so foolhardly? The cops in Ponsavanh were truly menacing; rustic and clumsy, but definitely menacing. If he and Chemda got caught doing this, with the prime suspect for the murder – Tou – they would of course be immediately deported, if not arrested and imprisoned. And very probably they would be beaten. Badly.
Yet Chemda’s dark and serene Khmer face was impassive; only the tiniest tic of nerves showed in the corner of her eyes. Nothing else.
Frustrated, Jake looked out of the window, wary and nervy.
The old jeep was rumbling along lanes which were little better than cattle-tracks. Wooden houses of Hmong villagers lined the way, large wooden rice barns stood beside the laurel trees and the elephant grass. Some of the barns had strange metal struts supporting their thatched or iron roofs, fat pillars of steel curving to a point.
With a jolt – a physical jolt as the ancient American jeep vaulted a crack in the sunbaked muddy track – Jake realized the pillars in the rice barns were bomb cases. The Hmong were using bomb cases to construct their barns: there was obviously so much unexploded ordnance around here, so many old bombs and shells and grenades providing so much metal, the swidden-farming Hmong were scavenging the stuff for buildings.
And now Jake looked closer he could see American hardware everywhere: rusty shell-cases used as flower pots. Metres of corrugated tank tracks utilized for fences. Huge bombs sliced in half and employed as water troughs for oxen.
‘Why don’t you tell me? Why are you taking this risk?’
It was Chemda, at last. She had spoken. Her brown eyes secured his gaze; her expression was demure, clever, and opaque.
‘’Cause I want the story,’ he said. ‘I want to get a decent story for once in my life.’
‘You want it that badly?’
‘That badly.’
‘And that’s it? Just that?’
Jake paused. Obviously Chemda sensed there was more: and she was right. But he couldn’t tell the truth. Could he?
Two little Hmong boys ran uncaringly in front of the car chasing a rooster – the car slowed just enough not to kill them, then speeded again. He thought of his sister, killed by a car. The guilt was a burn on his brain, an ugly scar, never properly healed. He thought of his mother, and his sister, and their deaths: and the absence of femininity in his life.
Living his life was like living in a jail, like being in the army. Everything was crudely masculine. It was all beers and jokes and danger and ambition and cynical laughter with Tyrone. Maybe he needed some real femininity in his life. Maybe he already craved the elegant, clever, refined, mesmeric femininity of this Khmer girl, to fill the hole in his life, the hole like a bomb crater left by a war.
He didn’t know what he wanted.
They were headed deeper into the rough. The broken shallow hills where the lethal golden ‘bombies’ slept, un exploded, beneath the pine trees: like fallen Christmas baubles of death.
‘All my life,’ Jake said, at last, ‘I’ve wanted danger and risk. The adventure. And yes, the story.’
She eyed him.
‘But why? What drives that?’
Her gaze was shrewd, even knowing. Jake now felt an enormous urge to confess: just get it out, cough it, purge the pain. Puke up the poison like when he was a teenager, drinking too much, drinking the pain away, with the room spinning: best to go and throw up.
‘My sister died when she was five. Run over.’
‘God. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say that. Everyone says that, it’s bollocks.’
‘OK. OK. And?’
‘My mum was more broken than any of us. She was Irish, Irish catholic. Devout. Before it happened. You know. Then Rebecca was killed and she just fell apart. Mum lost her faith. Stopped going to church. Then she stopped going anywhere. She…’ He found it hard to say; he said it. ‘She changed. When I was about nine years old, she abandoned us, me and my brother, and my dad. Overnight. She never even said goodbye. She just walked out one night.’
‘Jake. Ah. God. That’s awful.’
‘She died of cancer ten years later. We were only informed when the police came to tell us. They took us to the hospital. We never knew she was living alone, in a different city.’
Chemda’s face was framed by the placid green hills beyond, cratered by the war. Like Jake. Cratered by a war.
‘So that’s what drove me out. In the end. I fled the UK. Just wanted to go anywhere else. Take risks. I didn’t care. Did lots of drugs, nearly killed myself.’
‘So it was nihilistic behaviour?’
‘I suppose, yes. Drink and coke and drunken rock climbing and bad bad places. And, eventually, photography. I wanted to do a job that entailed risk, you know? When I was in danger I didn’t feel so sad, I just felt scared. And I had a job, an excuse, a purpose. It wasn’t just drugs. So I went to Africa, south Russia, looking for action, seeking the work.’