20. Mr. Salt’s Wife
Mr Salt was nearly an hour late when he finally rolled up at the gates of the provincial bank to relieve Kheng of his evening shift. Kheng didn’t mind too much, but it was nearly 11pm. If, for the next week he had the chance of both sleeping in his bed but being home late enough to miss out on his wife gossiping with the loopy rattan seller from next door, then he wanted to get back home in time and make the most of it.
“Sorry I’m so late, Mr Kheng. Been at the hospital all day. Wife’s in there. Not well at all. Problem with her blood.”
“Not to worry, Mr Salt. There are always going to be family issues that come up and have to be put first. Sit yourself down on the chair and get your breath back a while.”
“Doctors want to keep her in. Maybe she has to stay for weeks. Doctors were talking about her kidneys. Said they would need to use expensive machines. We can’t afford expensive machines. She’s not working of course. Just me. I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ve got no money, other than what we live on. I can just about afford to keep her in overnight. We’ll struggle to pay for the next few days. I can’t pay for her to stay after that. Let alone pay for any expensive machines. It’s not good, Mr Kheng. Not good at all.”
“What about your family. Can they help?”
“We’ve got no relatives. Well, not with any money. None that we keep in touch with. None that stay in touch with us anyway. The boy’s a hopeless layabout. My girl’s still in high school. We started our family quite late you see. I was, well, ‘away’.”
Kheng nodded. He was intrigued why there was no extended family for Mr Salt to fall back on in his time of need. The extended family was an inevitable part of life, sometimes to your benefit, sometimes not, but they were always there. The story behind why Mr Salt had been ‘away’ for much of his middle-years also raised Kheng’s curiosity, but now probably wasn’t the time to dig into that one. It seemed the problem with his wife needed to be addressed first.
“I’ll help you get your hammock set up and you have a bit of a lie down and get your head straight. There’s always a way with these things if you put your mind to it. After all, you can’t stop her treatment if she needs it, so a solution will have to present itself.”
Mr Salt watched as Kheng put up the hammock, regretting that he’d arrived in too much of a fluster to remember to bring any coffee.
“There that should do.”
Kheng straighten his back, and picked up his rucksack.
“Oh, and here. Make your mark in the handover book to say that you’ve got the chair and the torch.”
Kheng passed over the notebook and watched as Salt scrawled his name next to where Kheng had written ‘torch’ and ‘chair’.
“What about getting a loan, Mr Salt? After all you are an employee at the bank now. Maybe they can do you a good rate?”
“Already asked Mr Tann. He wasn’t impressed. Sceptical that I was trying to get perks. It is my first month at the job. Said that I could get an advance of half a month’s salary. Got to come out of the next pay though – so doesn’t make a lot of difference. They won’t give much of a loan. They know how much they pay me. And how old I am. This isn’t something I can put off for a few weeks. She needs help now. She might die, Mr Kheng.”
Salt slumped back in the hammock and gazed at the stars as the leaves of the jackfruit tree rustled in the breeze and intermittently provided a brief view of the night sky. Despair had overtaken his ability to think straight about any of it.
Kheng tried to talk it through.
“Well there must be a way. Other people have to get treatment at the hospital. They can hardly turn your wife away now, not if she really needs help.”
“Well, if you come up with something, Mr Kheng, then let me know. I’m at my wits end. I can’t lose her you know. Not now. Not with so much time lost already.”
Kheng headed out into the night, carefully negotiating the wobbly planks over the pipe-filled trench as he did so. Fortunately the moon was starting to wax larger and so there was enough light to see where to tread. Poor Mr Salt was in a fix all right. Somehow families usually rallied and came up with a solution. It sounded like Mr Salt didn’t have the support. It was unusual not to have an extended family at times of need, even close neighbours from the village were often happy to help out at a time like this. If none of those avenues existed then he really might be in trouble. No money would mean no treatment. It was clear that Mr Salt’s wife needed help straight away.
21. Kheng’s Dream
Kheng woke up with a start. It had been a puzzling, almost disturbing dream. More so, because it was the exact same dream that had affected him so much earlier in the month. This was significant. Even Kheng with his sceptical approach to fortune telling could see that. Normally he could never recall what he had dreamt beyond that brief period of being half asleep and half wake. Almost immediately the clarity was lost to him like the evaporation of an early morning mist as the rising sun began to burn away the cool lingering remains of the night. All he would be left with was the knowledge of images that he could no longer recall.
Unusually, as with the last time this dream had happened to him, the images and clarity had very much stuck with him. It might have been because he was sleeping at home next to his wife instead of in his hammock at the bank. He liked his hammock and always got a good sleep. A night spent on a thin mattress on a wooden bed, and you might as well just sleep on the floor. He was always having to reposition himself to try and get his back comfortable. He never started the next day feeling refreshed like he did from the hammock. Maybe he’d remembered the dream because he’d not been quite as asleep as he normally was.
In Kheng’s recurring dream the moon had appeared before him from behind the enormous tree. Just as before the full moon had shone with an incredible intensity and Kheng had known that it was made from liquid gold. Some of the molten gold had dripped down from the sky and landed on him, splashing on his skin. Kheng knew that it should have been white hot, but it didn’t hurt, it just made him warm. Then from nowhere a large wild boar had appeared in front of the moon and faced Kheng with a gleam in its eye. It snorted a bit before announcing with a very well spoken but urgent voice: “The buffalo is a triangle. It’s a triangle I’m telling you!” After that the pig vanished and Kheng’s Aunt Kaylin had appeared from behind the moon with a scowl across her lined and cruel face. Waving her bamboo stick, she ordered him to go to the market to buy her whisky, and there’d be trouble if he came home without any. It was at that point that Kheng woke up once again in a cold sweat.
It was frustrating. More than that, it was troubling. It felt like there was more to come, to bring all the threads together and make sense, but he was waking up before the important part. Like watching a movie when you’re about find out who the killer is but then the electricity goes off or the DVD is too scratched to get any further.
He really hoped that his Aunt Kaylin wasn’t speaking to him from the grave. She had been terrifying enough when she was alive, but the arrival on the scene of Aunt Kaylin in spectral form didn’t bear thinking about. It might just be that this new shift-work thing was putting his sleeping pattern out of kilter and making him restless. It could take a while to get back to normal sleep with that sort of thing going on. Besides, Mr Salt’s family problems had caused him to be even later in getting home. It had been midnight by the time he eventually got to bed.
Another option was that there could also be some kind of malicious spirit playing tricks with his mind. He’d spent a lot of time on patrol in the depths of the forests when he was in the army, pitching camp amongst the undergrowth, trekking for days through the jungles to scout the enemy. He could well have been inadvertently collecting up spirits as he made his way through the dense forest. They might have been clinging on like the spiny seeds from the grasses that attach themselves to clothing as you brush past. Spirits from the forest could be quite pesky once they’d got it into their head you needed to d
o something for them. Whole villages often had to move if the spirits decided it was time to play their impish games. Bad luck would manifest in the communities until the entire population was forced to pack up and arrive in the place that the spirits needed them to be.
If his dream was inspired by tree spirits then this would also explain why the wild boar was appearing to him and talking about buffaloes. Spirits were obsessive about buffaloes. Whenever there was bad luck in a village the starting point was always to sacrifice a buffalo to appease the mischievous phantoms of the forest.
Maybe it was the timing. Last time he’d had the dream was the night after Old Papa Han’s funeral. This time it was after learning that Mr Salt’s wife was suffering from an illness that could be life-threatening if she didn’t get the treatment soon. No, maybe the timing was not the key. They were not really the same thing. Perhaps it was just the anxiety, or the fact that his mind was wandering now that his daily routine had been disturbed.
He thought about waking his wife to tell her about the dream. They could see if she could think of any other reasons that he’d had the dream again. She and Mama Tae had actually made a bit of money on the lottery last time they’d punted on his numbers with the additional tree information. If he told her he’d had the dream again then she’d probably rush out and stake their life savings on it. Sharing his most recent recap of the vision might not be such a priority after all.
22. Sleepless
Mr Tann was also having a difficult night. The unexpected appointment of Mr Hua Lin as Branch Manager had been eating away at him for weeks. It was the injustice that really got to him. The lack of respect that had been shown to him by the managers at head office was a disgrace. That job was his by rights. He’d earned it after years of faithful service. No one had even discussed it with him. They just sent that young upshot down to his province who’d never even been a manager before. What did he know about running things in a place like Maklai. Mr Tann had served in the bank for most of his working life. How dare they treat him in this dismissive way?
Equally frustrating was the additional strain that being overlooked for manager had added to his marriage. Or more specifically, the additional strain his marriage was causing him. His wife had always been disappointed with him. Her sister had married into a family with a company that made a lot of money in the building trade. Her husband had been set up with the logistics side of the business and now owned a fleet of about ten lorries. The brother-in-law had been one of the first people in town to by a pick-up truck for the family. Whilst his sister was flouncing around in her big car and sending people running every time she careered down the street, Mr Tann’s wife had been relegated to walking each day to the market and back. She complained that it was so humiliating.
The one comfort that Mrs Tann had tried to cling on to all these years was that Old Papa Han had been on the eve of retirement for as long as anyone could remember. Once he’d gone, her husband would be provincial manager of the Khoyleng Bank in Maklai province. The money of course would never match that of her sister’s family. However, there would be prestige and the opportunity to network with the powerful in the same way that Papa Han had done. It was this long held hope that had enabled her to hold back her sour glares and cutting remarks. Now that the reality of her husband’s failure at the bank had hit, she had no incentive to stop herself from unleashing a whole marriage-worth of frustration and hatred towards the poor man. Mr Tann had begun to dread going home. In the past he had always locked up the bank at 4.30pm on the dot. These days he was getting later and later to reduce his contact time with the embittered old dragon. When he did return he was subjected to a barrage of comparisons between him and his brother-in-law. It was all about the money. How well the sister had done, and how poor Mr Tann was. How he was useless, couldn’t get a well-paid job, wasn’t respected by society, wasn’t respected by the bank. She’d have been better off marrying anyone but him. Dr Gaiek from the hospital, for example. He would have married her, she was sure of it. But no, she’d been foolish enough to marry Tann, and look at where that had got her. Nowhere.
Mr Tann was coming to the end of his tether. Something was going to have to change soon or he would lose it. As he lay awake in the early hours he started to consider whether he could pay someone to help his wife have an ‘accident’. No, that wouldn’t work. As Mrs Tann regularly pointed out, they didn’t have much money. Arranging a hit on someone was said to be quite costly. If he had the kind of money needed to pay for a hit man then his wife wouldn’t be torturing him like this in the first place.
Whilst he was going through his insomniac late night scheming, the second choice that occurred to him was to help Mr Hua Lin have an ‘accident’. On review, for the time being that plan came up against some very similar constraints to the ones that had led him to rule out doing away with his wife.
Hua Lin was the enemy, of course. He had taken Tann’s rightful job away from him. Job theft aside, of late there were other elements of the new manager’s activities that had become even more annoying to Mr Tann. The joy of having Papa Han about the place was that the old man was so un-intrusive. He had just sat in his office all day, quietly going over the books of accounting, and rarely interfering with anything that Mr Tann did. This Hua Lin meanwhile had virtually turned the whole place upside down in his determination to shake things up. In spite of this, Hua Lin was no Mr Perfect himself. Lately he had been coming to work at least twice a week with bleary red eyes and his breath stinking of cheap booze. It was no way for a manager of a respected provincial bank to conduct themselves in working hours. If he wanted to change everything at the bank then maybe he should change his own questionable ways as well.
Mr Tann rolled over in bed and stared at the stars beyond the open shutters of his window. He wished he was able to sleep properly. All this scheming just made him feel more awake. Most nights in recent times he just lay awake worrying about things, and that made it all the more difficult to concentrate at work the next day. It was what people called a vicious circle. It was so difficult to concentrate at the bank if you were tired. That was how mistakes were made. If he started making mistakes then he was liable to not only miss out on promotion but lose his current job as well.
As Mr Tann contemplated this rather worrying outcome, a devilish thought crossed his mind. He knew what the consequences would be of him making a mistake at work, however, what were the consequences of Mr Hua Lin making mistakes? Mr Tann was quite sure that he was not the only one to have noticed the alcohol fumes as the new manager passed through the bank. The prim and proper Mrs Yea-bo had rolled her eyes for the benefit of Mr Tann on several occasions from behind her cashier’s window as Hua Lin had wafted past. Right now there was easy access at the bank to poorly secured piles of cash. A slightly intoxicated provincial manager would be an easy target to blame if it was found that any of this cash was missing. Particularly as it was the manager’s idea to have more cash than the safe could properly hold. Mr Tann could sneak some money for himself, and with any luck get Mr Hua Lin blamed and sacked.
Mr Tann smiled a rare and wry grin. Mr Tann had been at the bank for years and nothing had ever gone missing. No one would look to blame him, but the new manager had been around for only a few weeks and would quickly come under scrutiny. This time Mr Tann would know to make a prompt proactive communication with the bosses in Khoyleng. Show them that in a crisis he was the man to turn to. They’d soon see that they could easily do without the young upstart from the city. What they needed was a mature and responsible man that was respected by the community. The bank would be run just as well if not better with Mr Tann at the helm.
Mr Tann began to doze off with a look of contentment on his face. It was the first real sleep he’d had in weeks.
23. Early
Kheng arrived at his afternoon shift a little earlier than expected. He’d had an unsettled morning, thinking through the implications of his recurring dream, and he wanted to get on with doing so
mething to take his mind off things. It had occurred to him that the dream might be a visitation by disgruntled tree spirits that were upset with him. Often in these cases the only solution was to move house. They might even have to move to a new province. Perhaps the tree at the start of the dream was literally a mischievous tree spirit, doing a kind of opening speech as a formality to start off the rest of the dream. He really hoped that wasn’t the case. He was far too old to pick up his life and start afresh.
Meebor was sitting on the chair by the gate, taking the batteries out of the torch and then putting them back in, but in a different order.
“Afternoon, Mr Kheng. That Mrs Khamgenn has been in again this morning. That’s three times in the last week that I’ve seen her. They must be raking it in at that hardware store of theirs. You know, the one that’s on the corner opposite the market. I noticed there was a whole load of new water-pump engines out the front of their shop the other day. They must be doing some good trade to have that kind of stock in. Oh well, not much use knowing that now that I’ve gone straight is there? It’s probably a good tip for someone thinking of giving the place the once-over though.”
“What if she’s putting money in, not taking it out?”
“Wealth is wealth, Mr Kheng. They don’t keep it in the bank for long. People still think of savings as their assets. They don’t trust the paper that goes inside the bank and turns into numbers on a computer. They’ll be buying jewellery, some property, or a new TV or something. It can all be turned back to money quite easily if they decide they need to.”
The Feiquon Heist Page 9
