by Graham Joyce
I was still thinking about Phil’s strange remarks in the night. Meanwhile the jungle vegetation changed dramatically as we climbed or descended the sides of a ravine or as we came closer to a river. After passing between towering, spindly trees with fluffy balls of leaves only at the very top, we crossed a stretch of jungle that was smoking and smouldering. Orange flames licked at charred, blackened logs strewn over wide expanses of silver ash. The smoke was choking. I tied a handkerchief around my mouth. Coconut told us it was controlled fire, slash and burn, but I saw little evidence of its management. After that we descended sharply, and had to wade thigh-deep across a river. Downstream was an Hmong village, where we were to make a noon halt.
The Hmong looked very different to the Lisu. They wore black tunics and indigo skirts with embroidered aprons, and masses of silver jewellery: necklaces, amulets and the like. The women tied their hair on their heads in a bun, and within seconds of our arrival they were waving small wedges of opium under our noses. When they realised we weren’t interested, they wanted to sell us silver bracelets. I bought one to give to Charlie, if I ever found her.
Coconut and Bhun prepared lunch for us. It was while we were surrounded by chattering Hmong dope-and-silver dealers that Bhun touched my elbow and pointed to the river edge. ‘Farang,’ he said, and he nodded encouragingly.
I spun round. Sitting with her feet in the water’s edge was a young European woman. Alongside her was a Thai male, also with his feet in the water. He had an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
No, it wasn’t Charlie.
But I was astonished to see any European woman there. ‘Where are you going?’ I heard Phil shout over his shoulder as he battled to extricate himself from the attentions of Hmong women.
The lady at the water’s edge had long, brown hair, tied in a pony-tail. She wore a tattoo on her arms – some sort of Chinese or Thai symbol I supposed. I walked right up to her, and said, ‘Good afternoon.’
Both she and the armed Thai spun round to look at me. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she smiled broadly and said, in a warm Irish brogue, ‘Well, what about ye?’ Mary O’Connel, it turned out, was an aid worker, operating with an outfit I’d never heard of called Frontline Aid. She was helping with the refugee crisis, she said.
‘What refugees?’ I asked crassly ‘Are there any?’
‘Jesus, just a few miles over there, only about a hundred thousand of the poor fuckers, so there is.’
I didn’t know anything about this, and Mick, coming to join us, admitted that neither did he. It seemed there were masses of Kareni people – yet another hill tribe – being pushed out of Myanmar and into the more tolerant Thailand. I asked why, and her armed escort slipped away to join our two guides. ‘Because the Burmese are bastards,’ Mary told us. ‘Killing. Raping. Burning the villages. They want these mountains for themselves.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? To control the opium you fucking idjit!’ she said gaily.
Of course. The poppy. Misery everywhere.
Mary was in the Hmong village to pick up supplies which had been relayed there. She was waiting for elephants to transport both her and the supplies back to what she called Camp Three, but the mahout was late. ‘Are you boys having a nice holiday?’
I invited her to have some lunch with us – and not just to hear what an invitation like that sounds like in a Hmong village in the Thai jungle, but because I wanted to ply her with questions. She’d assumed we were holiday trekkers, and when I explained what we were doing, it seemed to resolve something for her.
‘You know, I thought it odd to see a trek coming through here. You used to get them all the time until the warjacks moved in. It’s been pretty unstable round here for a while. Lot of desperate people roaming around.’
‘That why your guide is tooled up?’ Mick asked her.
‘Wouldn’t be good to be around here on your own. Easy target and all that. It’s the bandits you’ve got to watch for. They say that if the villagers don’t rip you off, and the opium gangs suss you’re not from the government, and the KMT don’t think you’re Chinese, then all you’ve got to worry about is the bandits.’ She laughed pleasantly.
‘Where are you from?’ Phil asked.
‘Belfast. Home from home.’
I asked Mary if she’d heard of any farang girl living in the villages nearby. She hadn’t. She consulted her Thai guide. He didn’t answer directly, but had a long conversation with Coconut and Bhun in which they kept nodding in my direction. He knew no more than did Mary. Bhun and Coconut were giving her man a good listening to, and I didn’t like the way they kept looking at us. I felt an intuitive unease about whatever it was he was saying.
After lunch Mary, Mick, Phil and I went to the water to bathe our tired feet. I learned a lot about the region from Mary, particularly about the opium crops. Opium, she told us, was a cure-all medicine for the hill tribes. It was not considered unrespectable for a person to use the opium as a comfort in old age, and many did. But the young tribespeople had been corrupted by the spectacle of Western trekkers trying a smoke for larks. It made the practice seem more desirable. The Western youths could always jet back to their lives at home, far away from the call of the poppy; but the young people here were left with the temptation in their backyard for every day of their lives. The path to addiction was very short.
The Thai authorities, under pressure from the West, had begun to burn the opium crops to deal with the heroin epidemic at source. The hill tribe addicts were therefore driven into the town where they were introduced to processed heroin rather than field opium. This in turn meant the use of shared syringes, which had spread infection among the ethnic people. The crop burning had caused a new AIDS epidemic.
‘A mess, here and at home,’ Phil said.
‘Well, yes,’ Mary answered. We all went quiet for a minute or two.
I got up and left the others chatting as I had a poke around the village. These people had nothing that would make anyone want to spend any length of time there, and I couldn’t imagine Charlie wanting to stay put. Sure, she might have hung around for a while to smoke some opium, but even so the life of a subsistence farmer is limited in its attractions. Maybe they slaughter a pig every other month to represent a big day in the calendar. What Oxford-educated city girl is going to be impressed by that?
I tried to take a picture of one of the huts, but a Hmong woman came out and angrily waved me away. I’d been warned that some of the hill tribes didn’t like it – that they thought you were stealing their essence – but the Lisu hadn’t seemed to mind having their souls trapped inside my Olympus Trip. Suitably chastened, I returned to the river and took a shot of Phil wading in the water and of Mick and Mary chatting at the river’s edge. They were talking and laughing. I was about to say something when the mahout arrived with his elephants at a trot.
There were three of the magnificent behemoth creatures. They thundered into the village, and stood with overwhelming presence, stinking and cooling like steam engines on a railway platform. We watched the cumbersome process of the loading of supplies. There was a high platform with a ladder for mounting the elephants. Mary climbed on by stepping from the platform on to the elephant’s head and thence into a wooden seat roped precariously along its back. We shouted lots of encouraging and jolly remarks but I wasn’t feeling jolly. The deeper we moved into the jungle and saw things like this, the lower was the lodging of my spirits.
‘I’ve seen everything now,’ Mick said, after we’d waved her away. I could tell he was sorry to see Mary go.
‘It wouldn’t have worked out,’ Phil said to him. ‘Your tattoos were different.’ It was meant to be funny. I threw a small stone in the river and it landed with a tiny plop.
It was shortly after Mary’s departure that Coconut dropped his bombshell.
‘But you never said anything about this before!’ I exploded, forgetting about that loss-of-face thing.
He wanted us to go downriver by bamboo raf
t. He said it would be half an hour to an hour, what with the water level being low, and then we would abandon the raft and cut inland, saving, he said, almost half a day’s trekking. This I had no problem with. It was what came after that I found unacceptable. Coconut told us we would overnight in another village, and that the following morning he and Bhun would turn back, and we would be left to make the last half-day’s journey alone.
I had a feeling they’d been spooked by something Mary’s guide had told them, and I flipped. ‘Alone! You must be crazy! How are we going to make it alone through this lot? How? Just how do you think we’re going to do that!’
I was shouting at Coconut. Bhun tried to calm me by placing his hand on my forearm. ‘You dadda,’ he said. ‘Me dadda. Me unstand you. You my fren. We no ’low go there.’
Wrenching my arm away I appealed to Coconut. ‘What’s he saying?’
‘Bhun feel very bad. I feel very bad. But we not allowed to go there. Too dangerous for us. Them guys think we from government, maybe Bangkok, or maybe we soldiers. For farang not so dangerous. We can’t take you.’
‘Why didn’t you say this earlier?’
‘In Akha village we try to find you a guide. Akha man. Tomorrow take you where you want to go.’
‘Looks like we’re being relayed on,’ Phil said, while Mick nervously fingered his amulet.
‘It’s not as simple as that, Phil. What if we do find Charlie? We’ll need these two to bring us out again.’
‘From the look of things,’ Phil retorted, ‘I don’t see as we have much choice.’
An extremely old Hmong woman, hearing the commotion, came out of a nearby hut. She looked about two hundred years old as she waved a wedge of opium under my nose. She wouldn’t go away. I wanted to punch her in the face.
‘Sorry,’ Bhun said, stroking my arm again. ‘Sorry.’
22
No prevailing upon Coconut and Bhun could to get them to change their minds. They were both family men – something that hadn’t occurred to me before that moment – and they were not going to take the risk. Neither was in any sense a timid man, but they were not prepared to cross into the territory into which we needed to go. It was bandit country, a zone of lawlessness, and though Coconut tried to reassure me that the uncertainty for us was far less than the hazard to them, all their anxieties immediately transmitted to me. I asked the other two if we should turn back.
‘You’re fuckin’ joking,’ is all Mick said. ‘We go on.’
‘They make a journey. It gets darker,’ Phil said with a thin smile. ‘Swords, lions, dragons, darkness.’ I remember shaking my head: he might as well have spoken in the Hmong language. At least I could understand Mick.
This trick of Phil’s – of speaking in riddles – was getting to me. It riled me beyond reason.
The bamboo raft was one of many floating near the Hmong village. Bhun whittled some bamboo and expertly lashed a tripod together, from which he suspended our backpacks. We had to take off our shoes and tie them to the tripod, as the raft itself glided just under the surface of the water. Coconut steered from the front with a long, sturdy bamboo pole, and Bhun from the back. Though Mick, Phil and I were also entrusted with poles, we were pretty ineffective. At least the poles made us look a little more manly than we felt in the company of these all-action boys. The water journey passed quickly. I had a lot of things on my mind.
‘How’s your leg?’ I asked Phil, genuinely concerned.
‘Oh,’ he said lightly, ‘it’s not those two ticks that are the problem.’
I stroked my pole through the water and thought about what he’d said. Then it occurred to me he was talking about me and Mick. I turned and stared at him. ‘What exactly did you mean by that?’
‘You’re the one who knows everything,’ he said. ‘Figure it out.’
I took an aggressive step towards him and the raft wobbled. ‘Keep your mind on the job,’ Mick shouted.
The pea-green river ran swiftly. There were sections of white water where we had to glide the raft between smooth boulders. Bhun trained his eyes on the water, thwacking it occasionally with his pole. ‘Snake,’ he said.
We reached a spot where a herd of water buffalo wallowed. Here we abandoned the raft, laced up our shoes and continued our trek, but not before I had to pluck a leech off my thigh. Most of the walking was accomplished in a dismal silence, and I took my eyes off the extraordinary lush landscape. I looked back at Mick. He was suffering. His feet were badly blistered, he was sweating profusely, he was scratching his mosquito bites, and he had the shits. I wondered what sort of man would put himself through this for no obvious reason. If he’d thought this was going to be a jaunt with a bit of sex tourism thrown in, he was experiencing a severe re-education.
Meanwhile Phil, also caked in sweat, seemed to be retreating deeper and deeper into an inner world. His comments got briefer and more obscure. His remark about the other ticks suggested he regarded Mick and I as the burden he had to carry on this enterprise, and not the other way round. He was the still centre of his own private world. What’s more he seemed to regard this as a perilous spiritual journey, when the dangers were material and very real.
I began to feel a deep sense of despondency, and I felt guilty for allowing the pair of them to come with me. It was starting to go wrong, and now I saw little prospect of finding Charlie. We were in the remote jungle on the word of a thieving, drug-smuggling girl convict, entering territory that scared even these hardened guides. I began to be haunted by terrible visions of myself dying in some forgotten and dreadful place, far from home, far from everything I loved.
Jealous? Phil had called me jealous. Was he talking about Sheila, and the affair? Or did he mean Charlie? Was he accusing me of being jealous of Charlie; or of him; or of both of them? I thrashed at some overhanging bamboo and pushed the notion aside.
It was madness, this entire trek. Preposterous. I lashed at the bamboo again, and my teeth started chattering, as if I was chilled. Sunlight dappled the rubbery leaves as a shape formed at the periphery of my vision, a shape which I took to be a bird or an animal. It was no more than a shadow, a silhouette even, but then the thing swooped down from the jungle canopy and started to close around me. It was like a heavy, damp cloak settling on my shoulders and pressing a great weight down on my lungs. I felt a rancid breath on my neck. There was corruption in the air, and a sound like a veil tearing. I tried to lash the thing away, and when my hand passed through it a moment of hideous panic followed. It was the loneliest thing I had ever experienced in my life.
‘Stop! Stop!’ I was hyperventilating. The others came to a halt. ‘Something jumped on me. Out of the trees.’
‘Nothing on you now, pal,’ Mick said.
‘We’ve got to turn back. At once.’
I started babbling nonsense until Mick put his big paw on my shoulder. ‘Take a deep breath,’ he said. ‘Hold it in.’
‘I can’t do this.’
‘Yes, we can. Take a breather, old pal.’
I did what he told me. Phil shuffled uncomfortably and the guides looked on.
‘Is it all right?’ I asked Mick at length.
‘It’s all right.’ He had one hand on each of my shoulders and he was looking deep into my eyes.
‘Is it?’
‘It’s all right. Take a sip of water. It’s just one foot in front of the other, Danny. One foot in front of the other.’
I’d completely lost it. I felt unstitched. Nothing physical had come at me from the trees. I was jumping at shadows, shivering at an encounter my mind had constructed out of jungle light and shade. I don’t know what the guides made of my outburst, but I was very close to flight; I mean literally running, fleeing, back the way we’d come. It was the oddest thing. I had this fantastic idea that I’d come upon some malignant spirit, some other-worldly force at the exact centre of my panic.
I felt, too, that it had singled me out for attention.
But then perhaps not. When I had recovered eno
ugh to dismiss the thing as a figment, it was made worse by Phil laughing – slightly hysterically – and saying, ‘Yes, I had my own encounter with him earlier this morning! Ha ha! Ha!’
I stared at my son, laughing at me in the jungle. Then Coconut said, ‘On. We go on.’
After that I managed to get my breath back and to resume the march, and it didn’t happen again.
When we reached the Akha village, I realised that I’d seen some of this tribe before, in Chiang Mai, touting bracelets and beads to the tourists. They were different again to the Hmong and the Lisu, almost a pygmy race, and some of the women were so tiny I mistook them for children. Once again they saw an opportunity to milk us for a few bhat, pressing on us the usual rubbishy gewgaws. Their aggression in this was alarming, and as they got up close I saw that quite a few of the old women had their teeth sharpened to points, and that their lips were stained purple.
‘Phil! Hey Phil!’ Mick said. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘That depends,’ Phil said, trying to fend off the attentions of one tiny, dagger-mouthed matron, her lips puckered like the leather drawstring on a miser’s purse, ‘on what you are thinking.’
‘What I’m thinking is: you wouldn’t want those jaws round your wedding tackle, would you Phil?’
The next morning, as Coconut and Bhun prepared to pull out, I made one last effort to retain their services, but not even an offer to triple their payment would induce them to go a step further. Shortly after our arrival in the Akha village they introduced us to a young Akha man – a teenager possibly – who had agreed to take us on from there. Our spirits had been lifted when the Thai-speaking young man claimed, through Coconut, to know of a farang woman living in a village at the distance of half a day’s trek. Coconut said it corresponded with the place Claire Merchant had indicated on the map.
The boy, who spoke no English, had also babbled a great deal which Coconut had either not understood or chose not to tell us. When questioned, he hadn’t actually seen the farang woman himself, but he’d heard of her. He said she was a ‘guest’ of the village. When I asked Coconut what that meant, he said he didn’t know.
