by Mary Jaine
Nia hugged her father while she cried silently, and I turned away to give them their moment together, let them snuffle for a while. As they didn't need me, I thought I'd go and talk a little with mum, give dad and Nia some alone time.
Mum was just as teary, sitting me down so she could hug me round the neck and cry about the step forward we had taken.
"Look Mum," I started, to be instantly cried down again, so I had to let her snuffle herself out before I could get a word in edgewise.
"Mum, we're not getting married and moving to Timbuktu tomorrow!" I grinned, "This is just the beginning. Nia will need time to get used to her job, she may spend long periods away, so us getting engaged is really a placeholder, something we can come back to and finish when the time is right!"
Mum shook her head. "You wrong, little boy, Nguye't want get married soon as she can, she say she waited long enough to get you, she not waiting much longer, I think you talk to her soon, start making plans for wedding, she not in mood to start making plans for waiting!"
I gaped at her, Nia had never intimated she was in any rush, although maybe the ring had crystallised things for her.
Mum continued, picking her words carefully.
"Jamie, you my little boy, my sister give you to me to love you, and be my son, you the only part I have left of sister Laura, and I not want to see you or Nguye't be unhappy for anything. I know sister want to see her little boy happy too, if you unhappy, she very sad, and I will feel her tears and know she crying; I will not let her be unhappy where she resting, it will be a bad thing, she must wait for you in peace, not in sadness."
"Your mummy not gone, she just not here anymore, and she still talk to me inside, and I tell her about you, and I feel always that she proud that you such good boy, so in love with my daughter. Right now Nguye't want her Jamie to marry her as soon he can, I agree, it best for you, it best for her and it best for both of you, it will make you very happy! If you wait, it will make you unhappy, and soon all will be unhappy! Nguye't tell me her plan, it a good plan, it give you what you want, that is your next thing to do. Make my little girl happy, my lovely little boy!"
Mum sat down next to me, took my hand between hers, and looked into my eyes.
"When you very small, daddy and I take you to Beckenham Park, want to see you run around, play with squirrel, feed birds. You did not want to play, not want to do anything except come back when Nguye't old enough to play with you, you say can only play with her, she only want to play with you. Even then you know what she want, so now, you know that what she want is you, now. I look at you now, I see little boy then, to me they are still same boy. Follow your heart, but listen to hers as well, my little boy!"
I hugged her to me, overwhelmed with love for this tiny little lady who'd made me her son, loved me for all my life, and only wanted me to be happy. Her loyalty to my mother was humbling and instructive, she really was an object lesson in commitment, I could be no less to her daughter, my half-sister.
"Jamie, put me down, cannot breathe!" she giggled and choked, and I realised I was holding her off the floor, holding her in a bear-hug.
I gently put her down, and she playfully smacked me on my upper arm.
"You big boy, Jamie, but you make Nguye't cry, I find broom handle and we see who bigger!" She'd been joke-threatening me with the broom handle since forever, and we both started laughing.
"Now go get your father and sister, lunch ready, you will be hungry after long trip, yes?"
Something about the look in her eye told me I'd better be hungry. I peered inside one of the pots on the cooker, reached in to try and sneak something, and got a smack on the knuckle with a wooden spoon.
"Not touch clean food with dirty hands! You do that again, get ladle on back of head! Now go get family, and wash dirty hands!"
I haven't had a chance to update this since Saturday, things have been a little...hectic, shall we say. After Jamie gave me such a stunning Graduation present, he surprised me with a trip to Paris, and put a ring on my finger. I must show it to Julie and Shelagh, do a little gloating, well, a lot of gloating, the rock is enormous, or, as dad put it, bigger than a pimple on a pig's arse; he's such an old-fashioned romantic, how did mum resist him for as long as she did...
Jamie brought back something from his sojourn in Vietnam that made my weekend, in a 'this is terrible but it's also fantastic' sort of way; details of the sordid dealings of that animal who stole my sister when she was 3-weeks old. It made terrible, horrifying reading, and it made me feel deeply unclean, but it gave us a definite lead on where to begin looking for Hu'e, and it finally let me know the true extent of the pain and loss that man has caused. I'm not sorry to say that I feel a great deal of schadenfreude, 'Shameful Joy', to know that he's probably being tortured or raped in a hell-hole prison right now; sometimes natural justice does get a chance to work, and he's probably lucky at that; if it were up to me, I'd tie the rope and kick away the chair...
I gave Polar Bear the low-down on how to bend the law sufficiently to allow us to get married, he wants to know why I'm not running for Parliament, and dad's worried I'll take up bank fraud as a hobby, but I just wanted my Polar Bear to be aware that the clock's ticking; mum gave him the speech, the verbal equivalent of choosing to cut the red wire or the blue wire, and it finally percolated through; he may be a whiz at determining deep well yields and thingies, but when it comes to the realities of human marital customs,and the intricacies involved in planning weddings and suchlike, like all men, he's a complete arse-head; he couldn't seem to see that putting a ring on a girl's finger and thinking it ends there is not a good or healthy thing to do, especially if said girl wears stiletto heels and is willing, purely in a spirit of scientific enquiry, to discover if it's possible to push one though a man's instep and nail his foot to the floor.
Sometimes poor Jamie is all too living proof that the average man's head is a large echoing space, with only three active neurons; one each for football, beer, and scratching, all enclosed by a thick bony case that's a good place to hang his ears, that sometimes looks like George Clooney, but more often like Mickey Rooney.
Anyway, we 're waiting with bated breath for a package from one more of his mysterious, nefarious, nay, downright shady contacts in one of the world's lesser-known waste spaces, he refused to discuss it with Jamie via email, so it's obviously relevant and important enough to send by bonded courier. Apparently the man is some sort of Frontier Sheriff-type, hand never too far from his gun, 1,000 yard stare, all that stuff, and I keep asking myself; how does an oil prospector from South London ever meet shady characters like that, is there some sort of secret society they belong to, The Ancient and Elucidated Order of The Wandering Idiots, or is there a real Star Wars-type cantina out there somewhere, where some murky Han Solo-ish character waits for people like Jamie to show up? Enquiring minds want to know...
You're waffling, girl, stop it.
The Polar Bear is trying to look all nonchalant, but I've been able to see through him since I was 3 years old, and he's definitely keyed-up and excited; I know he's trying to keep me from getting my hopes up, but he really should give me more credit than that; I know that whatever happens, we couldn't be any worse off than we are now; we're currently in a state of advanced ignorance about where Hu'e went after she was taken, and if this package has no new information, we're still ignorant of her whereabouts -- it's not additive, we won't suddenly become more ignorant, no matter what, it just means we start looking again, and find someone else to help us, and fretting about it and clicking and drumming fingers on tables and pacing and flicking TV channels aimlessly does no good to anyone, and really, really gets on my nerves. I just wish he'd go to the pub, find an old school friend and get smashed, blow-off some of that excess nervous energy, because he's driving me up the bloody wall!
++++
This week has been the slowest week on record, every day since we got back from Paris has been one of those days where suddenly! nothing happened, an
d it's been fantastic. This is my first real break from work/study in 6 years, and Nia's not due to start her new job until May 16th, so two whole weeks of Nia and lounging around. What shall we do, what shall we do?
I had a couple of suggestions for her, but she deep-sixed those, she said it was impractical, that walking bow-legged into her new job was bound to cause comment; she's not closed and barred the bedroom door or anything; nor is she averse to more than a little wild whoo-hoo; she just believes I should give her a sporting chance to get away now and again...she did suggest I give my dirty mind a good wash, and get a proper shave while I'm at it, designer stubble works on Brad Pitt, on me it just looks...scraggy, like a badly-mowed lawn.
Nia killed some time by going to Lambeth Town Hall and filing a Deed Poll, a legal instrument to legally change her name, to Nguye't Laura Vienh Lo, mum's maiden name, this being Part One of her nefarious plan to outwit the Registrar when we registered our overseas wedding. With a few little tweaks and refinements, it was the plan she'd outlined in Paris, tested it out on dad, and gone ahead with putting it in motion. Hopefully we'd get the paperwork through in a couple of days, then we could book flights to Hong Kong for the purposes of getting married, so we'd just have a couple of days away; we'd pay with jet-lag, but it would be worth it.
I waited, impatiently, I'll admit, for my package from Thawip in Thailand, he said it would be interesting, and he gave me the name of a bloke in the HKPF, the Hong Kong Police, which intrigued me; it's a bit of a leap from Luang Prabang in Laos to Hong Kong, maybe if this bloke had something to tell me it would be worth going out to see him; I had an appointment with Aboitiz Geotech-Orient in Tagbilaran City, in the Philippine Visayas, in late May, looking at offshore gas extraction possibilities in the Camotes Sea, maybe I could reschedule and hop over to Hong Kong to kill two birds with one stone, it's only a little over an hour from Manila to Hong Kong. I decided to see if this package merited meddling with my schedule.
I did know one thing though; if I went out to Hong Kong, no way Nia was coming with me; I didn't like the idea of her getting it into her head to do a bit of sleuthing while she was out there, the authorities take a dim view of that sort of free-enterprise, that's what the HKPF and the PAP (People's Armed Police) are for, and they don't appreciate amateur interference; they have an unfortunate habit of speaking English right up to the point where you need to explain yourself then they suddenly stop understanding English and start writing out your confession in fluent Mandarin...
Nia, of course, will definitely refuse to see it that way. Amongst her many adorable traits is a doggedness that sometimes flares up into outright rebellion, hopefully she'd stay quiet and do the think-work, let me do the leg-work, maybe we'd meet somewhere in the middle. I decided to pop into the office later, see if I could switch things around, once this package got here and Nia had a chance to digest what, if anything, it actually meant.
Saturday morning passed into Saturday afternoon, and just as I was thinking that it wouldn't arrive until Monday, the doorbell chimed. When I opened the door, a man in a courier uniform stood there holding a bulky sealed package. I signed for it and tore the packet open. Inside was a thick wad of photocopied pages and photographs of various sinister-looking men, all holding number plaques, obviously mug-shots, maps, and copies of UN and American Drug Enforcement Agency reports and commentaries. All in all, there must have been 300-plus pages, more information than I had hoped for, now all we had to do was make sense of it all, and then maybe we'd get our next move.
Nia was delighted, she immediately latched onto the police reports, sorting them by date, oldest first, some of them dating back to 1980, and tying them up with the stack of mug-shots. After a while, one of the piles of reports began to refer increasingly to one man, a harmless-looking middle-aged man named Han Wu, sometimes labelled 'Jimmy', with an increasing number of references to something called 14K, and other references to something or someone called 'Kuomintang', which sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.
This Jimmy character seemed to spend a lot of time being questioned in Chiang Mai, and had been granted numerous visa's to Laos, flying to Vientiane almost every month. He also seemed to take an extraordinary amount of holidays to Canada, flying to Toronto three or four times a year on a multiple holiday visa, and there was a DEA report linking him to something called 'The KMT'. He was linked with several of the others in the pile of mug-shots, with reports that tallied as to dates when they had all been in Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang, Singapore and Hong Kong at the same time, and many of them seemed to enjoy travelling to Canada almost as much as 'Jimmy'. These were just snippets Nia passed over to me as she read through and collated one report after another. I decided that the UN reports would make an interesting read. I was not wrong.
I was appalled to read that the annual trade in babies and children from South East Asia and China was estimated at $10 billion, a figure that paled into insignificance when the global figure was given as a comparison; $130 billion, a staggering sum, hundreds of thousands of children stolen, extorted or removed by corrupt officials and sold to middle-men, and taken all over the world, with large numbers of children being taken to Canada for adoption across the border, and there was that '14K' again. Children from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, they all seemed to funnel through a group of societies with strange, exotic names; Shui Fong, Sun Yee On, Wo Shing Wo, Wo Hop To, 14K again, and KMT in the Golden Triangle. Uh-Oh.
There was also mention of a Japanese group, Kokuryukai, but what they were supposed to be I couldn't guess, the DEA reports mentioned them in passing, but that was all. So now I had a whole bunch of groups with odd names, and people who lived in Hong Kong but seemed to have lavish lifestyles in Singapore, liked holidaying in Canada, and spent a lot of time making short trips to Laos; were these people the Snake-Heads who bought baby Hu'e and sold her on?
My head was hurting now, and I could see Nia was starting to flag; information overload was setting in. I made an executive decision.
"Come on you, time enough for this later, I want to play!" I said as I grabbed her hand and took the sheaf of reports out of it. She looked rebellious for a moment, then grinned.
"I thought you'd never get round to it, Polar Bear, I was resigned to spending Saturday night reading police reports, I see I was mistaken; so now you got my attention, entertain me, you big beefy oilfield roughneck you!" she laughed throatily, instantly elevating my testosterone levels and making my libido tango around somewhere south of my navel...
Nia is a beautiful girl, and when she bats those big, blue, exotic almond eyes of hers at me I go all funny; well parts of me do; other parts develop a mind of their own, and the most insistent one was Jamie jr, who was currently making a determined effort to unfurl, climb out of my jeans and smack her on the forehead.
"I see you came fully loaded, Mr Oilman, planning on doing any probing with that there rig of yours?" she cooed at me, eyes dancing as I pulled her to her feet. She slid her arms around my neck and pulled herself close to me, kissing me softly, purposefully, very, very sexily, all the while rubbing herself firmly against the bulge in my jeans.
My hands drifted down to hold and clutch her perfect, taut little bottom, her cheeks like two firm peaches. I pulled her against myself, thrusting my groin into her, feeling her breathing hitch and slow down as she ground more purposefully against me. Nia has a way of grinding against me that makes all rational thought boogie right out of the room, and I was having a real problem focussing on my own seduction moves.
I slid my hands inside her leggings, savouring the feel of her warm silky skin, the taut springiness of her perfect little bum, and the warm dampness as I slid my hands further under to lightly caress her tight slit.
Nia jumped slightly, her lips curving against mine as she smiled, and I began sliding her leggings down, while she began fumbling with my jeans, trying to pop the button while I groped and squeezed her delectable little bottom and rubbed her slit more seriously, eventually
sliding a finger into her.
She sighed at that, her hand on my zipper more urgent now. We broke apart so I could tug down my zipper, Nia pushing my jeans down so I could kick them away while I was hurriedly tugging down her leggings.
She pulled her top off to reveal her lovely little bubbies, coral-pink nipples already erect and solid, just waiting for me to bite and suck, and my best friend was seriously trying to uncoil and come to full mast, and Nia didn't help matters by grabbing hold of it through my shorts and grinning "Ooo, is this all for me, Jamie? How sweet!"
I lost no time in slipping off my shorts, and helping Nia take off her panties (she didn't need any help, but I do like sliding them off her, oh yes!), then leading her into the bedroom, Jamie Jr pointing the way.
Once we got into the bedroom, she kissed me seriously, her arms locked around my neck as she propelled me backwards, until the backs of my knees hit the bed and I went over backwards, with Nia landing on me in a lovely giggling confusion of arms and lips and pink jiggly bits. Her hand came down to fondle me as I licked and nibbled the first thing I could reach, one of her delectable pink nipples, Nia immediately squeezing me as I gently bit and sucked on the solid little point, firm and hard as the eraser on the end of a pencil. Her hand began to pump as she squeezed my cock, the feeling of her hand on me absolutely out of this world.
She leaned up and slid to the floor on her knees, kneeling between my legs as I sat on the edge of the bed, her hand still working at my cock.
"Stand up, Polar Bear, I have something for you!" she smiled slyly, making my cock twitch in anticipation.
As I stood up, Nia licked up and down the length of my cock, before kissing down my length to my scrotum, licking and breathing on me, before slowly sucking one of my balls into her mouth and gently rolling it with her lips, nearly making me blow my load there and then. She relinquished it and slowly sucked in the other one, doing the same, and I was reduced to counting backwards from one million to prevent all hell breaking loose...
