by David Savill
Behind Missy, the teller’s window is empty. It is not yet eight o’clock in the morning. They are the first people in the waiting room. William’s shirt is clinging to him. He is uncomfortable in yesterday’s underwear. In Thailand, he is accustomed to starting the day with a fresh shirt, and wonders if there is anywhere he can get a new one. He has got to this point without once thinking about the decisions he is making. The decision to get up, to brush his teeth, to shower, to eat. He just knew he had to get here. Now he only knows he wants to get back to the car.
‘So once I get the tourist visa here we can start fresh?’ she asks.
‘Correct.’
Missy is staring at something across the room, pressing her mobile phone to her nose. The wild silver hair is gone, replaced by the slight kink of a bob still damp from a morning shower. The panda eyes of nightclubbing have gone too. Stripped of the make-up, there is something childlike about Missy Ammanucci, sitting in a visa office smelling her phone like a child does a stuffed toy. The denim shorts and the vest add to this impression. There are bruises like thumbprints all up her shins and pink burns on her knees.
‘Skateboarding.’ Missy straightens her legs, feet together as if she is measuring one against the other. ‘I’m heavy into skating – these bruises are my epic bails. It’s so screwy that you can’t get a tourist visa in country.’ She sees the cigarette butt and flicks it away. ‘I was meant to meet a friend today.’ Missy thumbs around her phone.
Checking into the hotel had probably been the worst moment. Oceans of red carpet, everything gilded like a temple shrine, air filled with strings playing ‘Dear Prudence’. Missy had been chatting away about the pool and the sauna. William felt as if he had a balled sock in his throat. He knew he was on the edge, and didn’t want to go over it in front of Missy. Missy had come to his room. He had stood with a sheet wrapped around his waist. The mess of the bed, the minibar bottles. The dream about Anya’s call.
‘I hope you’re not missing anything in Bangkok,’ Missy says without looking up from her phone. ‘You been in Thailand long?’
William clears his throat. ‘Three years.’
‘Me? Two years.’
He looks hopefully at the woman who has appeared behind the glass of the counter. She is holding a folder, looking through papers, approaching the glass. They will get Missy’s visa and drive home. He will be with his television, and Anya’s laptop, and the view from the window, and she will speak to him again. He will slip back into his routine, into safety. After all, he took responsibility, didn’t he? It was what Anya was always telling him to do. He had answered Missy’s call, met her on the street. He drove through the night. He made it through the heat, and the passport control, and was still here. Still breathing. No harm had come to him or to anyone else. There was no reason to be afraid.
So why did he feel so afraid?
The woman behind the glass jags to the right and out of the room without a glance.
‘First time in Cambodia?’ Missy puts the phone back into the pocket of her shorts.
William nods.
‘I kept meaning to come,’ Missy says, ‘I really want to see Angkor. But then I never seem to get the vacation time. Or when I do, it’s monsoon season or whatever. It’s, like, always monsoon season. Right?’
He tries to remember what he should know about her. For some reason he thinks New Jersey. She is from the town with the name of an early Bruce Springsteen album. The tape he used to have. The one he would play in Anya’s car. Greetings From Asbury Park.
‘William?’
He looks at Missy. Her face is a question and he doesn’t know what she has asked.
‘I’ve just remembered I have something too,’ he says, ‘to cancel today. I don’t have a mobile – can I borrow your phone?’
Kletovo
It was the last house of the Lekić family. A one-storey farmhouse at the end of a gravel track in Kletovo. Marko sits in the old van. Engine ticking as it cools. He can’t believe his father garaged the thing. As if he knew his son would return. They all thought England was just an adventure in Marko’s life, not the future. His responsibilities lay in the Balkans. The only child. He would join his parents in Croatia, or better, come back to Bosnia and invest in the security company his father had set up at the end of the war. People need security like shit needs flies, his father always said. As long as people keep shitting it’s good business. Besides, why did Marko want to work doors in England when he could sit back and manage the men working doors in Bosnia?
Marko hadn’t intended to get into the van but he had got into it. He hadn’t intended to drive the van but he had driven it. He hadn’t intended to do anything other than drive around the block, but he had left the block and found the road leading him out of Stovnik, over the hill, down into the next valley. He thought he might be heading for England, but then he noticed signs for Kletovo.
A breeze tickles the ears of wheat. In front of the farmhouse, the sail of a giant model windmill turns behind the painted blue fence of the garden and abruptly stops before starting in the other direction. The glove compartment of the van is locked with a twisted piece of old wire. Marko unwinds it, and the door falls open. His cigarettes. An ancient packet of Drina.
If Marko was ever tempted by his father, it had been last night. Barking in the hills. A football crashing a goal. The cries of children occupying the darkness of the playground. He had climbed out of Samir’s car into the memory of the cool night air, the yellow and orange lights of the apartment blocks printed against a black sky. One of the town’s dogs had stopped at his feet, sat down and looked at Marko as if his master had returned. On the sixth floor he had opened the door of number 67 as if he had closed it only that morning. The apartment was as clean as his mother had always kept it. Preserved like a museum of his childhood. The only change his bedroom. Every trace of the old room had been replaced. A single bed where the bunks had been. New cream carpet and magnolia walls. No trace of him. No trace of Kemal.
Next to the packet of Drina are some old tapes. Dino Merlin, Van Gogh, Bijelo Dugme in Concert. He is back where he was the moment he left. Kemal was dead, Vesna didn’t love him and the next twelve months held only the barracks for Marko. The barracks without a war. He used to tell himself he would have stayed if there was a prospect of fighting. But the truth? Marko would never be the soldier Kemal was. And he wanted nothing less than to be a soldier in the war that had taken Kemal from him.
The years burn in the dust of the van’s cigarette lighter. He barely recognises his own handwriting on the cassette sleeves. The dry tobacco of the Drina crackles through its cheap paper. Kemal’s house looks the way it always did. The scrappy garden before the green wooden door. The place Kemal’s father and mother had died.
It had been the winter Marko turned fifteen. The village of Kletovo fell and Kemal’s mother was taken by the Chetniks. Kemal came to live with the Novaks. Marko’s parents found a bunk bed in the apartment of a friend who would not be returning to the town, and put it into their son’s bedroom for the boys. Early in the first war, a stalemate of sorts had settled in the hills around Stovnik. The older boys in the apartment block became soldiers. Every two days, the army’s Volkswagen camper-vans picked up the boys and drove them out to their positions, as if sitting in a hole with a gun were really no different from sitting in an office or working at the salt-refining factory. Marko was too young to go. Kemal would leave in the middle of the night, quietly closing the apartment door on ears always awake. He was their soldier now. The soldier from apartment 67, floor 6, Slatina, Stovnik.
Marko throws the cigarette out of the driver’s window. The music wobbles, tape head creaking, a wavering voice and shimmering guitars. Unlistenable. Even before his body was vaporised in the shelling, Kemal was dead. One by one, Marko had seen the lights in the boys’ eyes snuffed out like candles. He thought Kemal had survived this living death. But what if he hadn’t?
A dirty starling appears on the blue fen
ce of Kemal’s front garden, hops along, then disappears like something in a magician’s trick. Why did no one but Marko want to know? Not Samir who had spent three years of his life fighting alongside Kemal, not Marko’s father, not Marko’s mother, the woman who had practically adopted Kemal and given him a home after Kletovo fell!
‘Any number of reasons,’ his father had said over the phone.
‘Meaning?’
‘Any number of reasons why a soldier in that war would not want to be found in Bosnia, or anywhere else.’
When they came here, they would put their shoes in the old iron trough on the porch. The trough is still there, but filled with someone else’s shoes now; a pair of black clogs and a small pair of pink Nikes that might belong to a woman, or an older child.
‘Yes?’ It is an old woman’s voice answering his knock. ‘I’m not expecting visitors.’
‘I was just passing—’ Marko realises for the first time that he is calling at the house of a man who lived there ten years ago. A dead man. ‘My name’s Marko, I’m—’
‘Who?’
‘Marko Novak.’
‘What do you want?’
A cricket twitches at his feet, translucent and new. ‘Did you know Kemal Lekić?’
‘Who?’
‘Kemal Lekić.’ Marko picks up his foot and flicks the cricket from the toe of his trainer.
‘No, I don’t know anyone called Kemal,’ the voice coughs. ‘You’re at the wrong place.’
He tells the woman not to worry. The grass in the front garden of the farmhouse used to grow taller than Marko, now a path is beaten through it. Harvestmen scare into the undergrowth as he walks along the fence at the side of the house. He wants to see the back garden. Before Milošević, before the Chetniks dragged Kemal’s mother away, this is where their childhood had happened.
‘Can I help you?’
He startles.
It is a woman’s face, hovering on the other side of the fence, hidden in the hood of a pink tracksuit. A small, sharp chin. He thinks about telling her he is looking for his childhood. I’ve lost my childhood, have you seen it anywhere?
‘My name’s Marko,’ he begins.
The woman pulls her hood back.
‘I know who you are,’ she says.
Poipet
The skiff’s engine had cut out, and they drifted over the coral, the danger of the ocean beneath them, the illusion of movement as a breeze played over its green surface. Anya in her bathing suit – the body which should have been so familiar it was invisible – had become exciting again. She was flirting with him. And yet at the same time she seemed distracted. He wanted to talk to her – to really talk to her. He wanted to tell her about the dead end relationships he had been in, about his disappointment with himself, with the school, about things he didn’t even realise he was feeling until he had seen her again. How he had thought a clean break was the only way to do it. How even when they made the mutual agreement to split up, he had secretly felt it was more her decision than his. How he had always thought it was her work getting in the way, but that now he realised, it had been his own lack of ambition. Instead, they were making small talk, like two people on a date. She stood up and shuffled down the skiff to try the outboard motor, and although at this moment Anya spoke, he cannot hear her. He cannot hear her through the noise of the Cambodian street.
He has come outside to make the call, but he is standing in front of a man in a kiosk and can’t think why. The man in the kiosk is looking at him with expectation, palms up, smile inviting him to choose something. William looks into the frosted glass door. Scarlet bottles of Chinese lager, emerald bottles of Cambodian lager. Frozen bags of grey shellfish.
On the beach, Anya had been with a man. She had introduced him. William had seen the man somewhere before. He is sure of it.
‘What do you want?’ the man in the street kiosk asks.
‘Sorry,’ William says. ‘I don’t know.’
Anthony answers on the third ring. He is not pleased when William tells him he won’t make the tennis match.
‘I was just walking out the door!’
‘I know, but something has come up.’
‘God help me, William, I know this is tough. I mean – I know it has been tough. But there comes a point, and maybe this is it, where your friends – an intervention or something. I think we need to stage an intervention. And I say that with absolute respect and out of friendship, dude. Tough love.’
‘I understand.’
‘Not to mention the fact that there are now going to be three of us on a tennis court. Come on, William. I’ve half a mind to really come round there and drag you out.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Don’t I? How long has it been since we saw you? Or since you went anywhere?’
William opens his mouth to speak, but Anthony hasn’t finished.
‘And I mean apart from the school. Again, William, dude – this is only out of friendship.’
‘Anthony, I’m in Cambodia.’
‘Oh – oh, well, that’s different – good. I think.’
‘I was trying to tell you.’
‘William – are you OK? What are you doing in Cambodia?’
‘It was a last minute thing. But I think – this is good for me.’
‘William. Are you alone?’
There is something so parental in Anthony’s tone, William’s response is as quick as a child’s, ‘I’m not actually – I’m with someone.’
‘Good. I mean, good that you’re with someone – I mean and getting out – even if you have buggered up our match.’
‘We’re going to Angkor,’ William carries on lying, ‘I just – double booked.’
‘Double booked? Yes. OK. Well, I’m sure we’ll find someone.’
William apologises.
‘Not to worry. Angkor’s incredible, dude. You’ll enjoy it.’
William hangs up and holds the phone to his nose. What did she smell? The heated metal and something else, something that is Missy. The phone is one of those fancy things with a picture for a screensaver, a young man, handsome and dark haired, something of the Mediterranean about him. The man is leaning into the picture, and winking with a confidence that seems to William obscene. The phone has all sorts of options:
Internet.
Phone Book.
Call Log.
Camera.
Gallery.
He has never seen a phone with a camera. When he enters the gallery there are pictures Missy has taken of herself. Missy in a nightclub, her hair the way it was last night, the same red vest and ragged denim shorts. She is looking up at the camera as she holds another woman’s head to her shoulder and they pout. A picture of a dun street dog sitting next to a corner shrine of Buddha; a picture of Missy at the night market shovelling a chocolate penis-shaped ice-lolly into her mouth; Missy centre of field, standing with military strictness next to a statue of a Thai soldier, and flanked on either side by two more stone soldiers. The same picture, but now she is joined by two men in skateboard shorts who imitate the statue’s pose. One of the men is the winking man, and in the next picture, the winking man is waving from a river taxi in front of the Royal Palace in Bangkok. There is a picture of Missy in an apartment somewhere, looking not quite right. Like an older woman using make-up to disguise her age, arms twisted in a traditional Thai dance, and body wrapped in the silk of a lime-green pra-yuk. The winking man has his arm around her waist.
There seem to be hundreds of pictures, and every now and again, the winking man pops up; younger now, a different haircut, Missy with her hair longer but tied back, standing on top of a skateboard ramp in board shorts and a T-shirt, dropping down the ramp on a board, moving out of the frame, ponytail trailing.
William looks up to find he is almost back at the Visa Office. He stops. He doesn’t know how to get out of the picture gallery on the phone.
‘Hey.’ It is Missy.
He gives her the phone and says, ‘
I don’t know if I pressed the right thing to hang up. It’s a pretty smart phone you have there.’ He feels as if he has been rooting through her things.
But Missy doesn’t even glance at the thing before she puts it in her pocket. ‘This sucks,’ she says, looking back across the street at the Visa Office, ‘but they’re telling me it might not be ready until quote, “the end of the day”.’
She runs her hands over her bob, as if feeling for the missing ponytail. Beneath the shadow of her left armpit is a black mole, shiny like a leech.
‘How far is it to Angkor Wat?’ William asks.
Kletovo
The young woman is called Sabina. She shows Marko how the steep garden has been transformed from his clearest childhood memory into terraces of vegetable plots, the beds neatly braced with planks of MDF and twisted branches of birch.
‘This is impressive – you did this?’
‘It was done before we came. Kemal did it for us. But we’ve planted it up.’
Steps are cut into the slope. Sabina stops to bend down and pick up a snail from a radish leaf. Marko scrapes at the earth with the toe of his trainer. They had buried a time capsule here, before the war: a plastic Coke bottle, Italian football cards, his Expo ’86 badge, some old communist party belt buckles, those Sarajevo Winter Games badges made out of felt and some empty PEZ dispensers.
Sabina throws the snail over the stream and into the trees.
‘Kemal was a good man,’ she says. ‘In the camp he looked after my mother.’ She smiles at the memory. ‘Dime bars. I don’t know where they came from but he must have found them somewhere because he brought Dime bars into the camp. I mean – boxes of them. If you asked me to eat a Dime bar now I think I’d be sick. But then – we hadn’t eaten in nearly three days.’
Sabina’s family had left her village and taken to the forest. Marko knew about Telovici; it was one of those villages on the wrong side of the river Drina. But it is the first time he has heard anyone except Samir mention the camp.
