by Graham Joyce
I got a bit of petrol on my rag and I gave all the visible working parts a thorough clean before I replaced the cover plate. I knew if I had the right tools to strip it down completely I could have got that baby to sing. I was going to have to present Jack with an inventory of things to bring me along with that roll of cable.
When I stepped outside there was a fracas going on next to Nabao’s hut. Jack’s bearded henchman was being roundly scolded by Nabao – I could deduce that much. A few villagers looked on silently. The bearded henchman had a fluorescent tube in his hand, which I quickly realised he’d taken from Nabao’s hut. My length of cable lay discarded like a dead snake in the dust. Nabao must have said something impressive, because the bearded man stepped over to her and threatened her with a backhand slap. She knew this was no idle threat, for she skittered away, retreating into her hut.
Jack turned up, demanding to know what was going on. The bearded man barked a few words and carried away the strip-light. Jack stepped over to me. ‘Why did you give this woman the light?’
‘It was already hers. I just connected the cable.’
‘Don’t interfere with things here. You don’t—’
‘I wasn’t interfering—’
‘Don’t talk while I’m talking! Understand me? You don’t talk while I’m talking, or I’ll take your damned head off!’ His anger was absurdly disproportionate to my offence, and his eyes were like splinters of dirty ice. I nodded. ‘You fix the generator again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fix it good this time?’
‘Yes.’
‘That generator fucks up again, you’re in big trouble, you hear me? Big trouble.’
‘I need some tools. I haven’t got anything to work with.’
‘Fuck that. Work with your hands. And if you want to wire a hut, you wire my hut. Do it now.’
I pointed at the short length of cable running to Nabao’s hut. ‘That’s all I have, apart from what goes to the radio. It won’t reach your hut.’
Two deep, vertical creases appeared in Jack’s brow. He stepped over to me. He was a head shorter than me, and I could feel his breath on my neck. ‘Look, I’ve got lots of damned shit to deal with right now. Keep away from old ladies and keep that fucking generator going.’ He spun on his heels, leaving me standing under the sullen gaze of the villagers. I saw Nabao peeping at me from inside her hut. Crestfallen, she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I made my way back to our hut. Inside, Mick, Phil and Charlie wanted to know what the shouting was about. Before I’d finished telling them, I saw Jack’s bullying henchman – the bearded one – heading towards us. ‘Here comes trouble,’ I said.
From the threshold he jabbed a finger in my direction. ‘Jack want you NOW!’ he shrieked. ‘You come quick NOW!’ Then he turned his back and marched away.
Outside a nearby hut two villagers were slaughtering a pig. They seemed to be making an unnecessarily drawn-out job of it. The high-pitched squeals of the pig were distressing and unnerving, occasionally striking a human note.
I drew a deep breath, and followed.
29
Jack was seated before a low-burning fire outside one of the huts, gnawing a chicken bone. His back was illuminated by a strip-and-battery light, so his face was in shadow. One of his other henchmen was cleaning a dismantled bolt-action rifle, and the bearded one who’d summoned me there – old laughing boy – slumped down heavily beside Jack to resume an identical activity.
Jack pointed to the earth across the fire. ‘Sit.’
I did as I was told.
‘So, you’re going to wire up this place for me eh, Danny?’
‘I will if you get me the gear.’
He tossed his chicken bone on the fire and wiped the grease from his hand on his shorts. ‘You want a cigarette? Here.’ He flung a packet of Marlboros at me. ‘Look, Danny, I’ve got no fight with you, eh? I’ve got other stuff on my mind right now. Big stuff. Just don’t make a nuisance of yourself. Your daughter has been in my way for some time. I only let you in here because I thought you might take her from under my feet.’
‘That’s what I’d hoped.’
While the second of Jack’s sidekicks was absorbed in oiling the bolt action of his rifle, I noticed that the bearded one only pretended to be doing the same. He was a bad actor. He was watching me closely. I had a question buzzing around in my brain. I wanted to know what had happened to Ben, Charlie’s trekking companion.
Perhaps Jack saw a shadow come over my face because he asked me, ‘Have I treated your daughter badly in this time?’
‘No.’
‘No. I’ve got a daughter of my own. Nearly the same age. I’m not a bad man, Danny.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, you think I’m a bad man.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t fucking argue with me!’ he yelled. His anger rocked on a hair switch. ‘If I tell you that you think I’m a bad man, then that’s what you think! You know what I’m called in your newspapers? Drugs warlord – that’s a good one. Warfucking-lord.’ He said something in Thai, and his two lieutenants laughed. ‘Fucking warlord, living like this. If I’m a warlord where’s my fucking Mercedes-Benz, Danny? Where’s my fucking Mercedes-Benz? Eh?’
‘I don’t see one.’
‘No. You don’t see no Mercedes-fucking-Benz. What car do you drive, Danny?’
‘An old Vauxhall Cavalier. The cigarette lighter is broken and a spring pokes through the driver’s seat.’
He nodded sagely, squinting in appreciation of these details. Then his anger appeared to pass and a smile came over his face. ‘Actually I’ve got three Mercedes, parked in a garage, over in Fang.’ He laughed loudly, and repeated in Thai. The other two joined in the cackling. The first henchman held up three fingers for me to confirm the boast. ‘Yeah, I’m just a slant-eyed farmer with three Mercs.’ He stopped laughing suddenly. The switch from mirthful joker to volatile interrogator was terrifying. ‘You a good father, Danny?’
‘I try to be.’
‘Me too. I try to be. Try very hard. I’m just a farmer, doing the best by my children. My daughter is in Chiang Mai, in school. The best school. I’m going to send her to university in your country. How about that? I’m sending her where I was going before I got brought back from Charterhouse. She’s going to Oxford University.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Don’t send her to Oxford.’
He stiffened. Both of the henchmen sensed something, and suddenly looked uncomfortable. He squinted at me. ‘Why not Oxford? Why do you say that?’
I paused for a long time, before launching into it. I mean, I was able to clue him in about Oxford, full bib and tucker. Now Jack was looking at me as though I was a man who held some cards. The bearded one obviously couldn’t fully understand me, because he kept looking up to study Jack’s face while I was talking, whereas the other one morosely oiled his gun. Something in the fire flared briefly.
I told Jack how Charlie and I had a terrific relationship before she went to Oxford. I let him know she was a sweet and loving girl. I tipped him off about drugs and body-piercing and tattooing and whoring and general timewasting, which is the general lot at Oxford University, particularly among the professors. I really laid it on with a trowel. ‘I speak as a father,’ I said passionately. ‘The kind of father who would come through the jungle to win my daughter back, if I had to.’
He was simultaneously annoyed and wrong-footed. He stroked his chin. ‘Maybe things have changed since I was in England.’
‘Probably.’ I was able to tell him about Thomas De Quincey and a few other deadbeats – making them sound present-day – and about how Oxford University has always been a hell-hole and a jumping-off point for layabouts and people of low instinct. The way I told it by the time I’d finished you’d think it harsh for a serial killer to serve twelve months at Oxford University.
He reached round behind him and produced another bottle of whisky, splashing a measure each into two rice bowls, one o
f which he brought round to me. There was none, I noticed, for his men. He squatted next to me, but before handing me the bowl he looked hard in my eyes. ‘Are you shitting me?’
I looked at him without blinking. ‘My Charlie graduated at Oxford, that’s the truth. Look at her now, laid up there, drugged to the gills, unable to leave the hut. I sent them a virgin and that’s what came back.’
He nodded glumly. ‘What about Cambridge?’
I was able to put him right there, too. When I told him about the Cambridge University paedophiles he slammed down his rice bowl. I told him if he didn’t believe me he could check the record of our man in Chiang Mai. ‘Bloody fucking bastards!’ he said. ‘Land of hope and glory. Your country has gone down, dear boy! Down down down.’
‘That’s right.’
He poured more whisky and snarled, ‘So where the damned hell am I supposed to send my daughter for a decent education?’
This question stumped me. The only place I really knew about in any detail was Oxford, since that’s where Charlie went; and Durham, and I didn’t think much of what that had done for Phil’s dress sense. I racked my brains to think of somewhere. One of the sparks I’d met while doing some on-site contracting had a son studying at Nottingham, so out of ignorance I suggested that as a very fine place.
‘Nottingham, you say?’
‘Well, unlike Oxford and Cambridge they don’t drug your children and fuck ’em up the arse, so far as I can tell.’
‘Damn!’ Jack said. He sat back and savoured his whisky. ‘Nottingham. Nottingham.’ He was trying out the word, savouring it on his lips. Then he sat up again. ‘Hey! Isn’t that the place of Robin Hood? That’s me. I’m the Robin Hood of Northern Thailand!’
‘So we are still in Thailand, then?’
‘Some would say so.’
The smile on his face caught the light from the fire. The notion pleased him greatly: Jack did indeed see himself as a Thai Robin Hood. I learned a lot from him that night. He dismissed his two henchmen, even though the bearded one, whose name was Khao, made a weak protest before leaving us alone.
After draping himself in the Lincoln green of Robin Hood’s men, Jack was in a talkative mood, and I made sure I gave him a damn good listening to. Jack claimed that his uncle was Khun Sa, an infamous opium warlord of the seventies and eighties, and that he himself had trained under Khun Sa’s Muang Thai Army. Though the MTA had surrendered in 1996, Jack claimed that about seven thousand MTA were still active along the border area. I have no way of verifying any of this, and I didn’t think it wise to ask questions about what numbers of men were under Jack’s control.
He was determined, he told me, to give the local farmers good pay for their crops – a lesson in loyalty he’d learned from Khun Sa. Sixty dollars per kilo for the raw opium. He wanted to bring more in the way of power – electrification and the appurtenances of civilisation – to the villages but transport was a huge problem wedded to the fact that he had to move his poppy-growing location season by season.
It was when I asked him about the Calpol in the generator hut that I got an insight into who or what I was dealing with. The hill tribe with whom we were staying were particularly susceptible to opium. They had little medicine to speak of, and poor herb craft. Consequently their babies and children developed the opium habit from an early age. Jack had cut some deal which involved a large consignment of Calpol from Europe. It had been his plan to distribute it to the hill tribes. When he told me that, I realised he was a dreamer and a megalomaniac of the kind it was impossible to totally dislike.
Then he learned that he’d been palmed off with a recalled batch in which the ingredients of the Calpol were separating, resulting in dangerously unreliable doses for children. He was left with the consignment. This he shrugged off as one of the small setbacks associated with his business, and it didn’t matter, he said, because the man who had betrayed him wouldn’t do so again.
Here was a man who would go to extraordinary lengths to import infant medicine into the jungle but who wouldn’t think twice about killing a treacherous supplier.
What with his failure over the Calpol, his faulty generator and his lack of cable, I didn’t like to point out that his programme for civilising the jungle was so far modest at best. But I asked if I might take a bottle of Calpol for Mick. For some reason he thought this was hilarious, and invited me to take as much of the stuff as I wanted.
He also disclosed that he converted most of his opium to morphine before taking it away. ‘I must say,’ I offered in an unguarded moment, ‘it’s not how I imagined a drugs factory.’
‘Oh? How did you envisage us?’
I thought about it. ‘A laboratory. I thought you’d need a laboratory.’
‘You’re not educated, Danny. You know that? You think we’re slant-eye little savages – yes you do, don’t fucking argue with me – but you’re the one who is ignorant.’ He stood up, grabbed a pot and half filled it with water from a plastic container. Then he went inside his hut and came out with a mass of brown substance in his hands. I’d no idea what a quantity of opium like that would have weighed, or of its street value. He dumped it in the pan, and settled the pan on the fire without a word.
We talked some more. He treated me to his opinions about the hypocrisy of the West. He said that if he worked for the tobacco or the alcohol industry he’d be responsible for vastly more deaths than opium or heroin had ever caused, and he would be called an executive instead of a warlord.
The water in the opium pot came to the boil. He picked up a bulging paper sack, split it open and poured white powder into the pot. ‘Ordinary lime fertiliser,’ he said. He went on to talk a lot about the conspiracy of the tobacco industry’s vigorous efforts to addict people to a known carcinogenic drug, and the collusion of all governments.
Still talking, he drained the contents of the first pot on to a flannel cloth. The solution was a pile of grey mush, and he tossed this into a second pan, setting that back on the fire. And did I know the statistics for death or injury caused through alcohol? he asked me. From violence, illness, reckless motoring? The figures for social problems?
Next he took a plastic container, and poured a liquid into the pan. ‘Ordinary concentrated ammonia,’ he said. He pointed out that it had suited the economies of the West to export opium to the orient in the past, to fix the balance of payments. He asked me if I knew what was meant by karma.
After draining off this latest solution on to another flannel cloth, he showed me the results: a small quantity of chunky grey particles. ‘Morphine,’ he said. ‘Ninety per cent less in weight than the opium you saw me start with. Better for smuggling. Stronger high. You wanted to see my laboratory. That was it. That’s a jungle laboratory. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut and you might learn something around here.’
Demonstration over, he brought up again the idea of my wiring the village for light. Then he said, ‘I’m going away tomorrow. I’m leaving my man Khao in charge. Don’t fuck with him. Do what he says.’ I looked up and saw the glowing end of a cigarette from the hut. Khao hadn’t taken his eyes off me since he’d been sent inside.
We talked a little more, about being a father. I asked Jack if he knew about Charlie’s unwillingness to leave her hut.
‘You’ve got a big problem there.’
‘What can I do?’
He stood up and brushed the dust from the seat of his cut-off shorts. I guess he’d had enough conversation. ‘You know Khiem?’
‘The soil-taster?’
‘Yes, him. She’s got bad spirits in her head. Khiem is the only one who can help you.’
I left Jack, and when I returned to our hut Charlie was asleep again. Mick was up and looking better. I recounted some of my conversation with Jack. He’d told me to tell them that Mick was Little John and Phil was Friar Tuck. I don’t know who I was in this scenario.
‘How is she?’ I asked, indicating Charlie.
‘She just flakes out,’ Phil said.<
br />
‘Out like a light,’ Mick added.
I felt very tired. ‘I don’t know where the fuck I’ve brought you two blokes.’
Mick must have caught the note of despair in my voice because he reached for the whisky bottle. ‘Let’s have a drop of the demon alcohol,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel much improved.’
‘No he won’t,’ said Phil.
‘Yes he will,’ said Mick. ‘The one spirit keeps the other spirits away.’
30
It was good to have Mick up and about the following morning. He said he still felt frail, but he wanted to stretch his legs so I agreed to show him the villagers harvesting opium in the fields. After he’d had a coldwater shave we men sat outside the hut, discussing the Charlie problem and breakfasting on jackfruit and papaya left by Nabao. I suggested we might have to dope Charlie so deeply that we would be two days out of the village before she recovered. Phil reminded me that Charlie had said the villagers tried something similar; she’d told him that her panic on waking was so great that she’d immediately retreated into a coma lasting three days.
‘You don’t have to hit every problem with a sledgehammer,’ said Phil, diligently carving segments of papaya.
His precision, his parsimony with the fruit, made me want to give him a fat lip. It was still early morning and already I was dribbling with sweat, and at that moment I hated the boy. I wanted to kick him. ‘Is that what I do?’
He popped a perfect cube of papaya into his mouth, nodded and chewed. ‘When someone has fallen into the Slough, what they need is a helpful arm, not a boot up the rear.’
The Slough? What was he talking about? My mind went winging back over twenty years and I flashed on a picture book I used to read to Phil at bedtime. A sweet little boy in oversize pyjamas, he would cling tight to my arm as I read to him, as if we shared a turbulent physical journey through the picture-book landscape. The book was a children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress. I’d chosen it for the illustrations. The Slough of Despond. Vanity Fair. Doubting Castle.
