by Peter May
‘Hey, Elliot. We gotta do something for Mikey.’
Elliot turned back, the lighter now burning his fingers. Ny and her mother squatted on the floor beside the prone figure of Slattery and the kneeling shadow of McCue. Faces glowed palely in the light of the searing heat that grew from his hand. All turned towards him. Looking for answers. From him. His responsibility. Hadn’t it always been that way?
‘Better light a fire.’ He wondered for a moment where this strange voice had come from, metallic and soulless, echoing out of nowhere – before he realized it was his own.
McCue took less than half an hour, returning several times with armfuls of dry wood, to get a fire burning. Elliot laid out a sleeping mat, eased Slattery on to it, and covered him with another. The Aussie’s face was so pale it almost glowed, drained of blood and life. Elliot fingered the sticky warmth of the blood that oozed around the tourniquet on Slattery’s leg. He knew that if he took it off Slattery would bleed to death. If it stayed on much longer he would lose the leg.
The flames of McCue’s fire licked up around the small group, yellow light flickering across faces lost in fatigue and hopelessness.
‘Sleep,’ Elliot said. ‘I’ll take first watch.’
*
The shadows of lions couchant and many-headed serpents rose up around him. He walked slowly through the slabs of silvered light that fell between the tall stone columns guarding the hideously carved outer walls of the wat. People devoured by crocodiles, butchered by swordsmen. Elliot wondered if this barbarous culture had somehow proved a breeding ground for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge to come.
He glanced back along the length of the causeway, across the long grass and the still lakes, to the distant line of the outer walls and the jungle beyond. Not a sound, nor a movement, stirred the night air. It did not seem natural. McCue had pumped Slattery full of painkillers and the Aussie had fallen into a restless slumber. McCue himself had been asleep almost before his head touched the floor, curled up in a curiously foetal position close to the fire. A sleeping child. Elliot had left Ny wide-eyed and sleepless watching over her mother. ‘Don’t let the fire go out,’ he told her.
The scrape of a foot on stone brought his thoughts to an abrupt halt. He turned to find Ny staring up at him out of the gloom, dark eyes turning black. ‘You should be sleeping,’ he said curtly.
She shrugged. ‘No can sleep.’
He took in her slight, fragile frame, and for the first time realized just how small she really was. Like a child half her age. And yet there was a maturity and experience in her eyes that might have belonged to a woman of twice her years. In her gaze was a sense of knowing, as if she had known him all her life. As if she knew him all too well, as only he did. The idea discomfited him. He rested his M16 against the wall and squatted down on the top step, leaning back against a pillar and taking out a cigarette. He lit it and felt the smoke, dry and acrid, burn his mouth, and he sucked it deep inside him and felt the tightness across his chest relax.
‘Smoke?’ he asked, and held out a cigarette.
She shook her head. ‘When cadres smoke it smell bad. Bitter. Like . . .’ she searched for the word ‘. . . privilege.’
He smiled. ‘You’re too young to have thought that one up for yourself. You hear it from your mother?’
She tilted her jaw defiantly. ‘My mamma clever. She keep us stay alive.’
Elliot nodded seriously. ‘Sure.’ He drew again on the cigarette. ‘Weren’t you ever curious? For yourself?’
‘About what?’
‘Smoking.’
She met his look with the same directness, mirroring his seriousness, unaware that he was laughing at her. And at once he regretted his flippancy.
‘I remember see ladies smoke, Phnom Penh. It make them look like bad woman.’
‘Sounds like your mother talking again.’
‘You no laugh me, Mistah Elliot.’
He heard, with something like shock, her father’s voice in hers. The way she said his name. And he remembered she was somebody’s little girl who’d grown up without a father.
‘You no – curious?’ she asked, rolling the word around her tongue, savouring its newness.
‘About what?’
She looked at his blankness and wondered if it could be real. A little half smile. ‘You no curious.’
‘If you mean about what happened to you and your mother, to this whole godforsaken country, I’m not paid to be curious. Just to get you out.’
‘You only thinking and doing what you paid to.’
‘Yes,’ he said. And he remembered the heat and the white blinding brightness, and then the sightless dark, the smell of sweat and fear. And after, through the red mist, smoke clearing, eyes adjusting, the broken bleeding bodies. Children, like Ny, and younger. ‘It’s an old army trick I learned years ago. Otherwise you end up drunk somewhere, or shooting junk.’
She didn’t speak for a long time, sitting on the edge of the stone balustrade watching him. He let his head fall back against the pillar, the cigarette easing his tension. And as the tension eased, so he felt the first seductive waves of fatigue. His eyes were gritty and sore and he closed them for just a moment. And saw himself standing beneath the stark winter trees in the rain watching the stranger in black who was his daughter being led away by another stranger – a young man with red hair. He knew she’d seen him. But of course she had no idea who he was. A stranger at her mother’s funeral who was her father. She commented on him to the young man with red hair who flicked angry eyes in his direction before steering her away toward the line of cars.
‘Will your friend die?’
Ny’s soft, stilted voice startled him. He opened his eyes and saw her still sitting on the balustrade. Birds fluttered around in his chest and stomach. He saw that his cigarette had burned down to the filter and gone out. ‘What?’
‘Your friend who is shot. He will die?’
The blunt, emotionless quality of her question was unnerving. She accepted death with the same ease she accepted life. But, then, hadn’t she known as much of one as the other? ‘I don’t know,’ he lied.
She seemed to accept this, nodding thoughtfully. Then, ‘My mamma mean what she say.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Elliot searched his pockets for another cigarette.
‘Will you take us Phnom Penh?’
He found one and looked at her irritably. ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘No answer without question.’
He lit his cigarette and got to his feet. He was getting tired of her fatalism. ‘Sometimes the last thing you want to hear is the answer, so you don’t ask the question.’ And he walked back into the temple to the glow of the dying embers of McCue’s fire. He heard Ny’s bare feet behind him. ‘I thought I told you not to let the fire go out.’
Without a word she padded towards the circle of light and picked up a log to poke among the ashes before piling on fresh wood. McCue sat up, instantly awake. His eyes shone like polished coals, fastening on Elliot as he stepped into the flickering light. ‘My watch?’
Elliot nodded. ‘Wake me at first light.’
*
The blood drained out of the dawn sky leaving it a blue so pale it was almost yellow. A mist lay across the water like gently undulating gauze slowly smoking into the morning haze as the sun rose to scorch the air. McCue and Elliot stood, silent statues, staring out across the causeway towards the jungle. With the light, they realized how vulnerable they had been through the night. The wat was surrounded on three sides by flat swampland, tall trees growing sparsely through the swollen waters of the Tonle Sap. They had limped up a blind alley without knowing it. Had the Khmer Rouge picked up their trail the night before, they would have been trapped. As it was, they were still in danger, and Elliot wanted them out of here fast.
‘Do we go north or south?’ McCue
asked without looking at him.
‘North.’
‘What about the old woman?’
‘She’ll have to be persuaded.’
‘That will not be possible.’ They turned, startled, to find Serey there, calm, almost serene, Ny standing a respectful distance behind her. ‘And I am not such an old woman. Even if I look it.’
‘Lady, I’m sorry for calling you old, but we got no choice but to head for Thailand.’
Serey remained implacable. ‘Perhaps you do not. I do. My daughter and I are going to Phnom Penh.’
‘Shit!’ McCue glanced at Elliot. ‘What’s there? There’s nothing there, is there? No hospital, no doctors, nothing. They emptied the goddamned place, didn’t they?’ He shook his head. ‘Mikey’d never make it.’
Elliot was impassive. ‘He’ll never make it to Thailand either.’
McCue regarded him with disbelief. ‘Shit, man, you’re not going along with this crap? Phnom Penh! That poor bastard ain’t got a chance! Be like putting a gun to his fucking head – never mind ours!’ He turned towards Serey. ‘You want that, do you, lady? You want the man’s blood on your hands? Maybe ours, too?’
‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ she said simply.
‘We’d better move,’ Elliot said.
McCue grabbed his arm, frustration boiling over. ‘Where to? Phnom Penh?’
Elliot’s silence was his confirmation.
‘Why, for fuck’s sake? Why are you doing this?’
‘Because we can’t make them go north with us, and they haven’t a hope if they go south on their own.’ He paused. ‘Then Slattery would have died for nothing.’
McCue ground his anger out through clenched teeth. ‘He ain’t dead yet.’
‘Only a matter of time,’ Elliot said, and he pulled free of McCue’s grip and walked into the cold grey gloom of the temple.
McCue shouted after him, ‘You’re a callous fucking bastard, Elliot, you know that!’
Slattery’s face was a mask. He raised himself on one elbow with difficulty and grimaced at Elliot. ‘Not like Billy boy to go shooting his mouth off. What’s the trouble, chief?’
‘No trouble,’ Elliot said. ‘Time to go.’
*
The constant but irregular bumping jarred his whole aching being, sending pain in random waves through a hazy consciousness that was clearly focused on only what hurt. And that clarity centred upon his leg, a leg that seemed to have swollen larger than anything in his forty years’ experience, enveloping everything, filling all of time and space. It left him feeling like some infinitely small being attached somehow to one of its vast curved surfaces. But even that infinite smallness was full of pain. His throat was swollen so that he could barely swallow and his head was filled with a fire that burned and raged.
He was only vaguely aware of Elliot and McCue taking turns to drag his crude bamboo litter through this eternal landscape. Overhead, light flitted erratically through the broken canopy, drifting in and out of focus. And from time to time a face would swim into his field of vision, disembodied concern, eyes that blinked to hide their hopelessness. He wanted to say, Stop! Enough! His lips moved, but there were no words.
Elliot looked into Slattery’s clouded eyes and knew he didn’t have long. He brushed flies from dried cracked lips that tried to move and he heard the breath that rattled in his throat. Then suddenly the dying man’s hand clutched Elliot’s wrist, every last ounce of his strength pressed into the grip. And his eyes opened wide, burning with a diamond-sharp blue-grey intensity. For a moment Elliot thought it was death that gave them their brief, bright life, before he saw, with a sudden shocking clarity, that it was not death itself, but an appeal for it. And he felt a sack of bile knot in his stomach.
McCue was on point. He came quickly back through the trees. They had been circling south-east around the top end of the Tonle Sap, avoiding the small towns of Roluos and Kompong Kleang, trying to reach the shores of the great lake. The one thing Elliot and McCue had agreed on was that the only way they were likely to reach Phnom Penh was by boat. It would be the fastest, most direct route, south-west across the Tonle Sap, eventually feeding into the wide, slow-moving, southbound waters of the Mekong, a great river highway that led past the city and on down through Vietnam, before finally debouching, through the nine dragons’ mouths of the Mekong Delta into the South China Sea. McCue crouched breathless beside Elliot.
‘We’re about quarter of a mile from a small fishing village on the lake shore. Half a dozen huts on stilts. It’s partially flooded and looks deserted.’
Serey and Ny squatted silently in the grass, gnawing on small hard biscuits that Elliot had taken from his pack. The heat was devastating, stealing away all their energy, sapping their strength and will to move. The air chirred with the sounds of countless insects, while high above strange birds cawed and screamed in the canopy. Elliot wiped the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve and nodded. ‘Okay.’ He inclined his head towards the two women. ‘We’ll give them five.’
McCue looked at Slattery. ‘How is he?’
‘Do you need to ask?’
A moment of contempt flickered in the American’s eyes, but he said nothing. He stood up and turned away, only to stop as the incongruous sound of voices in idle chatter reached them through the trees. Three Khmer Rouge soldiers walked into the clearing. Stunned by the sight of the two women, they stopped abruptly as McCue and Elliot snatched weapons, the clatter of gun metal on webbing, to cover them. Taken completely off guard, they reacted too late. One swung his AK-47 from his shoulder and fell in a burst of fire from McCue’s automatic. The other two stood in frozen horror, staring in near-disbelief at the Western faces.
‘Mrs Ang, tell them to put their weapons on the ground, very slowly,’ Elliot said. Serey was scared but hiding it. She and Ny were both on their feet, Ny breathless with fear, holding her mother’s arm. Serey glanced at Elliot then uttered a few halting words to the Khmers. They hesitated, just boys with frightened faces. And then the snap of a safety catch from behind forced Elliot into a half-turn. A fourth Khmer was standing over Slattery with a pistol pointed at his head. The soldier’s face was distorted by fear as he shouted a cryptic command.
‘He says if you do not throw down your weapons your friend will die,’ Serey said.
‘Fucking ironic, isn’t it.’ Elliot half-smiled. ‘Keep those bastards covered, McCue.’ And he dropped his M16 and drew out his service pistol.
McCue shifted uneasily. ‘What the fuck are you doing!’ Elliot raised the pistol, levelling it at the soldier’s head. ‘Elliot!’ McCue shouted. And with the fear there was now confusion in the Khmer’s face.
The air hummed with the silence that had fallen after the first shots. Elliot’s eyes met the Khmer’s, and the Khmer could not understand the gratitude he read in this alien face. Then Elliot’s eyes dropped to where Slattery lay on the stretcher. And in a single swift movement he lowered his revolver and shot Slattery through the temple. A small fountain of blood looped briefly through a patch of sunlight. The sense of disbelief was paralysing, the Khmer standing pointing his gun impotently at a corpse. His mouth gaped as he stared at the body then looked up to see Elliot as he raised his pistol to shoot him in the face. A bloodcurdling scream filled the air as McCue squeezed the trigger of his M16, venting his anger and confusion on the other two soldiers, bodies torn apart by two dozen bullets as they fell broken to the ground. Then he spun round, cracking the butt of the rifle across the side of Elliot’s head, knocking him over. Specks of spittle frothed at the corners of his mouth. He pointed the weapon at Elliot’s chest and screamed, ‘You bastard! You fucking bastard! I’m going to fucking kill you!’
Elliot shook his head to clear it, and felt blood running sticky down one side of his face. He stared back into McCue’s fury for several long moments, then he pushed the hot, smoking barrel aside and got back to his feet.
‘We’d better get out of here.’ He wiped the blood from his face and picked up his M16.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The freshly watered grass was cool and crisp under her feet. She felt vulnerable barefoot, wrapped only in a flimsy silk dressing gown, but was comforted by the hand of the girl in the yellow dress who held her lightly just above the elbow, guiding her from the dark interior and into the glare of the garden. The air was velvety warm, cooled by the fine spray that filled the air and carried the scent of winter blossoms across the lawn. A gardener, dressed all in black, played a hose liberally over flower beds across a haze of green, while in the centre of the lawn a sprinkler sent millions of tiny droplets flickering through the morning sunlight, making perfect little rainbows.
Under the shade of a large tree Tuk sat at a white, circular table eating breakfast, a morning paper folded beside his plate. He looked up and smiled across at her and stood as she approached.
‘Good morning, my dear. And how are you feeling today?’
