by David Savill
But Marko isn’t listening. The woman at the photocopying machine is staring out of the window as the papers spit out. She is staring at him.
Poipet
It is past midnight. William is hopelessly late. Missy has already eaten. He finds her not in the restaurant, but in the bar, sitting down with her bare knees pointing towards a youthful-looking western man, who sits on the low sofa next to her.
‘They have bar snacks,’ Missy shouts over the music. ‘It’s not so bad here!’ She hands him a menu. He tries to read, but the letters keep getting up and marching around on the page.
‘So you’re the boss?’ The man who stands up and holds out his hand is English.
‘This is Henry,’ Missy says.
Henry’s shake is firm.
‘I manage the school where Missy works.’
‘Try this.’ Missy hands him a glass of something tall and purple. He sits down on the sofa opposite.
He can do this.
The drink has a bitter, gingery taste. ‘How do you find yourself in Cambodia?’ William asks.
‘I work at Angkor Wat.’
‘We were there today!’ William says.
‘Henry gets to stay out there overnight!’ Missy says.
William maintains his smile. ‘That must be wonderful. When all the visitors have gone.’
Missy reclaims her cocktail from the table. ‘Henry works in conservation.’
‘We help organise some of the restoration work.’ He holds up his hands as if in apology.
‘What a wonderful job,’ William says.
‘I’m very lucky.’
‘It must be incredibly difficult,’ William continues, ‘because it’s all made out of sandstone, isn’t it? Who do you work for? Is it the WMF?’
Henry smiles. The English man is glad to have met someone who knows at least a little about his work. William nods enthusiastically as Henry begins to explain how the World Monument Fund works with local sculptors, many of them retrained soldiers, some of them disabled veterans who carve on site making new Aspara figures for the broken reliefs.
‘I read somewhere there were two million visitors last year,’ William says, ‘all those footsteps, all those hands . . .’ And he remembers he is good at this, at making people feel they are being listened to. It is what makes him a good teacher; not the ability to talk at people, to deliver information, but the ability to listen, to ask the right question. It is coming back to him now. He can do this. It is one of the things Anya loved about him.
‘Now I feel guilty,’ Missy says. ‘I just washed off a ton of sandstone in the shower.’
‘It’s a catch-22,’ Henry confesses. ‘The tourism helps pay for the restoration.’
‘You were trained as a sculptor?’ William asks.
Missy grabs Henry’s wrist and presents his hand. ‘Look at these sculpting mitts!’ she says.
William claps his own hands together. ‘Your drink?’ He points at Henry’s empty glass. ‘Let me get you a drink.’
The bar is busy. The Thai man who stands next to William nods in courtesy and offers his place. The Cambodian woman who serves has a flat face, as polished as a porcelain plate. Looking at the artfully chalked board behind her, he has a sudden urge to order cocktails with rude names just so that he can say the words out loud (although he avoids the one inexplicably named Sexpoo). As she assembles the drinks, the girl’s movements appear to be choreographed with the music, and William understands for a second why men hire private dancers.
‘I love this track,’ he blurts when the girl serves him, but her serving smile and her serving eyes are impenetrable.
‘A game!’ William returns with the drinks. ‘Do you know that you can put the word “poo” into the name of any Bond film, and it works?’
‘Any Bond film?’ Henry asks.
‘Any Bond film.’
‘What,’ Missy says, ‘like, Moonpoo?’
‘I prefer Pooraker,’ William says.
Missy laughs.
‘I get it,’ Henry takes the straw out of his cocktail. ‘You only Poo Twice.’
‘Excellent work.’
‘Oh my God,’ Missy says, ‘it’s true, like – Thunderpoo.’
‘I love Thunderpoo!’
‘Thunderpoo is very good,’ William confirms. ‘But not as good as The Man with the Golden Poo.’
Missy snorts through her straw. William hides his smile by bringing his glass to his lips.
‘What about From Russia with Poo?’ Henry says.
‘Now you’re talking.’
‘Talking of poo,’ Henry says, ‘although actually, that’s not what I’m going to do, did either of you see the toilet on the way in?’
When Henry is gone, Missy relaxes, and spreads her arms across the back of the sofa. He notices for the first time she is wearing a New York Yankees T-shirt, and not her red vest.
‘Well, you turn out to be fun,’ she says.
‘You didn’t think I would be?’
Missy shrugs and smiles.
‘You managed to buy some new clothes?’
‘There’s a store in here. Sells a lot of baseball merchandise for some reason.’
‘I like it.’
‘Anyone in New Jersey ever saw me wearing a Yankees shirt I’d die. But the Mets clearly don’t merchandise in Cambodia.’
At a booth next to them, European men are toasting each other. At another table, a Thai man brings his chair around to sit next to his pregnant lover. The couple press their foreheads together, laying their hands on the table, one on top of the other.
‘Well, you look good,’ William tells Missy.
‘Why thank you.’
He turns the cold glass in his hands and pokes at the ice with his straw. He doesn’t need to be anywhere else. He doesn’t need to be with anyone else. He just needs this.
‘Truth is, I was starting to honk,’ Missy says. ‘In fact I think I still do, despite a shower – here—’ She shuffles onto the edge of the seat and presents him with the left armpit, ‘truthfully, does this smell strange to you?’
William leans over the table. It is the smell of body odour disguised by soap. ‘You smell perfectly normal.’
‘I think I smell weird.’
‘Missy tells me you rescued her?’ It is Henry. He has returned from the toilet and hovers until Missy shuffles up.
‘I told him about the visa,’ she tells William.
‘I rescued her from my own mistake.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ Missy says. ‘Make a mistake, I mean. Or we wouldn’t be having this adventure.’ Putting her hand on Henry’s knee, she says, ‘Hey – Henry’s a hero too. Henry volunteered to go down to the beaches, after the tsunami, to help with the clear up. Henry – tell William that story.’
Sarajevo
Vesna’s hair isn’t long any more. It is cut into a plum-red bob so neat it looks like a wig. From beneath this wig, someone, who occasionally resembles the girl Marko knew, is talking about the burgeoning travel industry in Bosnia, how the company she works for isn’t really a travel company, but a department of the government’s tourist board. Eco-tourism. Heritage tourism. And something to do with combatting the work of illegal logging companies.
They are in the café opposite her work. Over Vesna’s head in a slick suit and leather gloves, Justin Timberlake dances across a widescreen TV. The sound on the television has been turned down, and the stereo behind the bar plays a Dino Merlin track. Nothing about any of this seems to quite fit together. He doesn’t know what he expected by surprising Vesna, but perhaps he had imagined she would be more – surprised. Instead, Vesna greeted Marko like a man she hadn’t seen in a few months. Someone who had been on a long holiday, not a ghost of ten years. She hugged him, and held him at arm’s length like a relative who remarks how much a child has grown, her beaming greeting more for the benefit of her colleagues than any expression of true feeling. This is Marko! Marko from Stovnik! As if they had only just been talking about him.
In the café, Marko expects the stiff smile to loosen, but Vesna keeps it up.
‘I really hoped I would see you,’ she is saying. ‘But I couldn’t come and I lost your parents’ phone numbers and then we had all these things going on at work.’
She divides a tiramisu cake with a small fork. Marko pours another packet of sugar into his coffee. She is just like the others. Acting as if Kemal’s resurrection and death were nothing remarkable at all.
‘You still have a sweet tooth?’ she asks.
‘It’s good to be back in a country where they make proper Bosnian coffee.’
‘But you’re drinking latte,’ she says. ‘And in England they only drink tea, right?’
Marko asks her if she has been there.
‘Are you kidding?’ She pulls a face. ‘I’d love to go to England. When are you going to invite me? The only time I get to travel is with work. Which isn’t so bad. Italy, Turkey, mainly our neighbours. But I still love Italy.’ She stops and looks at her fingernails. ‘Am I complaining? I shouldn’t be complaining. I have a great job.’
‘Where else have you been to?’
‘Hmm?’
‘With your job?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – not so many places. It’s only if there’s some marketing work. I try to get myself those gigs.’
‘Just Europe?’
She presses down on the sponge with her fork. ‘Yes, just Europe. But who gives a shit, right? Wow. Marko.’
When she shakes her head, the straightened bob doesn’t appear to move.
‘I like my job.’
‘What do you do?’
He tells her about the security company. About working as a doorman. How he began to employ his own doormen. He is about to tell her about the philosophy classes he started this year, but has lost interest in himself already.
‘And you married an English girl?’
‘No! What makes you think I would do that?’
‘Why not? How old are you now, Marko? Twenty-eight? What are you doing? Come on. You won’t be beautiful for ever. And neither will they.’
‘Twenty-seven, I still have a month. And I’ll marry a younger woman.’
‘Of course you will.’ Vesna rests her fork on the plate. In the silence between them, Marko realises one thing hasn’t changed. He will play whatever game Vesna wants to play. She has always had this power over him.
‘You remember the Hotel Stovnik?’ he asks.
She nods, but not out of interest. She is looking through the window as though she has lost her smile on the street somewhere.
‘Lorens,’ Marko says, ‘and what was the guy’s name, Joachim?’
She finds her little plastic smile again. ‘Sometimes I think, why didn’t I do what Marko did? They offered me the same deal. Come and study for six months, try to claim asylum if that’s what you want.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Maybe I love my country,’ she bites, and excusing herself for the bathroom, leaves Marko to watch her walk across the tiled floor of the empty café in her heels.
Poipet
‘We were just helping to move the debris from a few of the villages—’
‘But tell Will that thing you told me about.’
‘The dugong?’
‘Show him!’
Henry digs in his pocket and pulls out his phone. ‘We were in a village down on Koh Lanta, you know? They had these apartments, badly built – that were flattened. But the funny thing was, generally the bathrooms, if they had good bathrooms, had stayed intact. And swimming pools too. Anything plumbed in, or rooted in the ground I suppose.’ He thumbs through his pictures. ‘So we were working on this place all morning, shifting great piles of glass and brick, and suddenly we find there’s a swimming pool under it.’ He hands William the phone.
‘Does everyone have a camera in their phone now?’ William jokes.
‘It looks like a manatee,’ Missy says.
William is looking at a picture of something lying in a swimming pool.
‘It’s a dugong,’ Henry says. ‘From the same family.’
‘And it was still alive!’ Missy says.
William watches Missy’s hand drift over to Henry’s knee. Henry starts to explain how there had been enough water in the pool to keep the animal hydrated.
‘So they lifted it back down to the sea!’ Missy says.
‘You have no idea how fucking heavy a dugong is – it took, like, twenty of us.’
The dugong sits in a pool of green water, anvil of its trunk flat on the floor, flippers useless. If anything, it looks mildly pissed off.
When William hands back the phone, Henry sighs. ‘You really had to be there just to get the madness of it.’
‘I was.’ William is grinning, he doesn’t know why.
Only when there is no response does William realise what he has said. Missy looks confused. Henry’s mouth has opened, but no words have come out. It seems they expect him to keep talking. ‘The tsunami. At Kao Lak.’ William adds the facts. ‘On Boxing Day. In the first wave.’ He feels as though his grinning face no longer belongs to him.
‘Dude.’ Missy slumps back in the sofa.
‘In it?’ Henry leans forward.
‘I got washed into the mangroves.’ He is not sure what they want to hear. It has left him: the man he was a second before, the man sure he was in the right place. Whatever lightness entered William on the way back from Bangkok, whatever sense of wonder for the world, it has stepped out of him, and is walking away, leaving only the noise of the room swelling in his ears.
Sarajevo
Her manicured fingernails are painted a bright canary yellow and stand to attention on the coffee glass.
‘How many years have you been in England?’ she asks.
‘Nine, nearly ten years.’
‘Do you think things have changed? Around here? From what you’ve seen?’
‘It’s been two days.’
‘Still.’
Even though it is noon, they are the only customers in the café. The barman is using a napkin to work his way through the cutlery lined up along the bar.
‘Widescreen TVs in bars,’ Marko tells Vesna. ‘There’s an Audi TT parked right there. And you can walk down Mustafa without getting shot at.’
Vesna raises an eyebrow. Since she came back from the toilet, there is something different about her. She has reapplied her eyeliner, freshened her face. Her cheeks have some blood in them.
‘Some people miss the war.’ A cigarette appears between her fingers. Marko digs in his pocket before realising he doesn’t carry a lighter any more.
She lights it herself. ‘People our age miss the war because at least during the war they had a job to do. There are children – fifteen, sixteen – who don’t remember it, and think it might have been some kind of adventure. Either that, or they do remember, and they want to leave the country.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t,’ Vesna says. ‘I don’t think. I still don’t watch the news.’ She straightens up and tucks one curtain of the bob behind an ear.
‘But you heard about Kemal?’
‘People told me. My neighbour showed me the newspaper.’
She looks out of the window. A refuse truck is backing onto the pavement, orange lights spinning. A man in green overalls wheels the dumpster and, with another man, positions it against the piston arms of the truck.
‘You don’t want to come to the funeral?’
‘Isn’t it enough to bury a man once?’
‘I have to do this thing. This ghusl ceremony. Muslim bullshit. He’d have hated it.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because there was no one else.’
She places her hand over her mouth, and for a moment he thinks this is finally it. Finally they are going to say something real to each other. But she just pulls on her nose and says, ‘I really should be getting back to work.’
‘You didn’t know he was still aliv
e?’
‘What kind of a question is that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe you’d been to Thailand.’
‘We buried him together, Marko. We thought he was dead.’
She reaches across with these words, tapping them on the tabletop with her finger.
Marko wants to cup her hand in his.
‘It’s supposed to wash away his sins.’ Marko tries to change the subject. ‘This ceremony.’
‘I know what ghusl is.’
‘Why did he run away?’
‘Why did you run away?’
The channels change on the television above Vesna’s head. The screen flicks through an Italian shopping channel, a South American soap opera, a Turkish game show, a Serbian news channel. It rests on Eurosport and a German football match.
‘Did I know he was still alive,’ Vesna tuts.
‘You might have done. What do I know? I haven’t been here.’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘You haven’t been here. You know why I don’t watch the television? Why I don’t read the newspapers? Because every time you look at anything, there it is. Having the old arguments. Digging up old graves. They don’t let anyone stay dead around here.’
He takes a cigarette from her packet. Dunhill. A luxury brand in the war. She had always wanted Dunhills. ‘You aren’t offended? He was your boyfriend!’
‘Total amnesia,’ Vesna says. She is not answering him. She is still talking about herself. He reaches for her lighter.
‘That’s my policy. Keep moving forward. I thought you’d appreciate that. I thought: Marko’s made it. Made a life for himself. I want you to have a life for yourself. OK? I’m envious.’
He cones the burning end of the cigarette on the edge of a glass ashtray with a photograph of Tito’s face printed on it. Tito in his prime; the solid, square head beneath a Partisan beret; the brow furrowed in a victorious V. The same Tito who cut the ribbon on the opening of new schools. Tito looking straight through the camera and into his eyes with a stare that, as a boy, had always reminded Marko he could try harder.
‘I really need a swim.’
‘Is that your old van, Marko?’ Vesna is looking out of the window again, across the road where he had ramped the van up a kerb.
‘Did Kemal,’ Marko begins but doesn’t know how to finish.
