One of the men stepped onto the bus, saw Pettit and Yates, and nodded almost imperceptibly. He motioned all the passengers to leave the bus.
‘Do not say a word,’ Pettit said. They left the bus.
The man with the helmet walked up to Yates with an automatic rifle drooping from the crook of his arm and asked him for his passport in syrupy French.
Yates caught the word ‘passeport’ and slowly began to fumble in his hip pocket. He could not stop his wrists from trembling.
‘Ah, it’s a lonely job, eh?’ Pettit said in French and thrust his passport into the man’s hand.
The man grunted and opened the passport.
An old woman began to scream angrily at the soldier who was carrying her caged rooster from the bus. She was ignored.
‘Haven’t seen you before. This would be better than on the plain, wouldn’t it?’
The man looked at Pettit for almost a minute. He glanced at the passport. ‘You have been here a long while.’ He was the only man in his patrol who spoke French and he was a little proud of it. ‘You like it in Laos, eh?’
‘Ah, the government gives me diarrhoea.’
The man smiled. ‘What is it like in the north?’
A young soldier pointed his rifle at Yates and clicked the hammer. Yates stared at him.
‘There is a lot of bombing on the plain.’
‘There is always a lot of bombing on the plain.’
Both men laughed. The young soldier motioned Yates away from Pettit and Yates looked back desperately at the laughing Frenchman.
‘But your people are all around Luang Prabang. They have it like a nut in a nutcracker.’ Pettit glanced at Yates.
‘Ah good. We will take LP.’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Why?’
‘You would have to destroy some of the pagodas to get the army base. You wouldn’t want that.’
The man thought a moment. ‘They hide behind the monks now. Women!’
Yates was being walked from the bus and the passengers to a narrow clearing. Pettit watched him go with his teeth on his lip.
‘I have seen Luang Prabang only once as a little boy. Is it still beautiful?’
‘It is like a proud old lady. It becomes more beautiful every day.’ Pettit had used that line many times before. ‘But, friend, what are you doing with my friend?’
The man frowned. ‘He is your friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘He is an American.’
‘He is harmless, like a butterfly. He is a hippie.’
‘A hippie?’ The man laughed. ‘A flower? But he has short hair.’
‘Some of them are even bald. They come in all shapes now. It would be silly to shoot a hippie. But you were just going to frighten him, weren’t you?’
The man took off his helmet and punched it lightly. He breathed in heavily then called the young soldier back with a touch of regret in his voice. He looked at Pettit in mild contempt and did not speak to him again.
Yates’s face had become a grinning mask.
Ten minutes later the bus started again.
Yates sprawled in his seat and stared happily at the ceiling. ‘That was close. That was really close,’ he said. ‘They nearly shot me, didn’t they, Pettit?’ He might have been talking about a film he had seen.
Pettit nodded. He was wiping a damp handkerchief across his face.
‘You stopped them, didn’t you, Pettit?’
Pettit folded his arms to stop them trembling.
‘I was never so scared in my life. God, that was really awesome. The young bloke who marched me off – he kept clicking his gun. He really wanted to kill me. Wow!’
Later in the afternoon Yates nudged Pettit from near-sleep. ‘Hey, Pettit, there’s a road running from Phnom Penh to Saigon, isn’t there?’
Pettit was wide awake. He stared at Yates.
‘I bet you could do it in four days. With a motorbike. You could buy a bike from one of the kids in Phnom Penh and sell it in Saigon. Bet you could.’
SNAP
In 1979 North Vietnamese troops were driving Khmer Rouge into the hills of Cambodia and thousands of starving, desperate people were fleeing to the Thai border. I was a freelance journalist and the book Little Brother was forming in my head.
The camp was a great brown stain in the forest, with a few splashes of bright blue. Low thatch huts jostled for room, leaning on scarred and stunted trees. Some had a patch of plastic sheeting to make the roof work. Tired, bored groups settled around a thousand pots of simmering rice in the light haze of the low fires. In the centre of the camp, a man was prancing like a monkey with his cameras.
A one-legged man leant on his crutch and watched him curiously. He was standing before a large thatched hut with a group of veterans and a gold-toothed woman, but he was apart from the others. He shook his head very slowly as the man with the cameras dropped to his knees before a girl carrying sticks, then ran to get in front of a bullock cart and its arrogant owner. Finally the one-legged man called to him.
‘Oy!’
Brien glanced across at the large hut and saw the man waving a long stick at him. He ignored him while he shot a woman holding out a blackened melon in a sparse market, but the man called again. Brien measured the sinking sun and clicked his tongue in anger, but he walked towards the man and his hut.
The hut was probably the biggest building in the camp besides the blue plastic circus tent they used for a hospital. It had been built carefully of stripped saplings, straight twigs and the essential grass thatch. It even had a painted sign on one of the front poles. Café de La Bohème.
‘Français?’ The man had been waving an aluminium crutch, and he folded his arms over it. He had no right leg.
Brien dropped into a clumsy squat and took the man and the sign together. Nice shot. ‘Un peu.’ He shrugged.
‘Never worry,’ the man said. ‘I am very fortunate with the English.’ Deep brown eyes with an astonishing streak of grey in the right pupil. Somewhere between twenty-five and fifty years old.
‘Come and have tea with us,’ said the man, indicating the other men and the gold-toothed woman.
Soft focus for the woman? ‘Well … I’ve only got a moment …’ Brien stalked the woman and she looked a little frightened. Ideal.
‘She is La Bohème,’ the man said, and laughed.
‘Pleased to meet you.’ Brien nodded at the woman and stepped into the cafe.
No windows, just open walls and the shadow from the large roof. No floor, just beaten and immaculately swept earth floor. The cafe’s seats were untreated benches anchored in the earth, the tables were picnic tables, but covered in blue plastic pulled taut to eliminate wrinkles and fastened at the edges with old drawing pins. A painting of someone’s dim memory of Angkor Wat faced the tables, a crude altar piece.
‘You know that?’ The man was at his shoulder. His breath was heavy with garlic.
‘In Kampuchea.’ Brien was reaching for his flash.
‘No.’ The man shook his head, almost violently. ‘No, it is Cambodia. Cambodia before … everything.’ The man shrugged. ‘I am sorry. I am not polite. I am Phan Mang. You are a newspaper. Yes?’
‘Yes.’ Keep it simple. They understand a newspaper, maybe even a magazine. But they are not going to understand a freelance are they? Get the low sun on their faces.
‘You are late,’ Phan said, accepting a chipped Chinese teapot and two small glasses from La Bohème. ‘We thought newspapers had finished with us. Long ago you forget about us.’
‘Oh, no, I never forget.’ Brien took a seat opposite Phan.
Phan rolled his glass in his fingers. ‘You come here before?’
Brien fumbled awkwardly with his camera. ‘Ah, no. But I know about you —’
‘There is not much thrills here any more. No hungry babies now, no fights over rice, no more Thai black markets, we have no gold left for them. No Viet shells, they fight the bloody Khmer Rouge in the hills there, not h
ere. There is nothing for you now.’
‘There is always something.’ Brien could still remember his bushfire scoop. He had been too late then, the fire had roared past a town and had begun to die in a black forest, and the journalists and the fire-fighters had left for their phones, their homes and their pubs. Except five fire-fighters had saved a house and were too tired to leave and he had got them. It’s never too late. Brien panned the camera around the faces.
‘What newspaper?’
Brien looked up from the camera. ‘What?’
Phan flapped the air with his fingers. ‘I know Newsweek; Chicago Tribune; New York Post, the Guardian. What are you?’
Brien placed his camera on the table before him and studied Phan’s face. He somehow felt at bay. This was ridiculous. ‘Ah, all of them, and none of them. Whichever pays the best.’
Phan grinned. ‘Ah, yes, I know this. Many bosses, but little money. Which boss wants Nong Samet even now?’
This had gone far enough. ‘Look, I’m not worried about that now. We’ll see what I get first. I’ve got to see the camp before the light fades.’ Brien moved to the edge of his seat.
Phan rammed his crutch into the earth and swung clear of the table. ‘I will show you.’
Brien half stood and stopped. He didn’t want this smart little man around any more. ‘I don’t want to tire you …’
Phan laughed and reached the door in a long single hop.
‘Come. You don’t worry about me. Nobody worries about Phan.’
Brien reluctantly nodded his farewell to the cafe and followed Phan across the camp, passing a group of men repairing bicycles under a tree with less than a handful of tools and some shouting men who were throwing themselves around playing volleyball. Men; rarely ever a youth. He clicked his cameras and caught Phan looping through the trees; an old hawk flying – just – on one wing.
‘Wouldn’t it be better with two crutches?’ Brien said.
Phan waved his free hand. ‘Then I lose this. I cannot carry things. But with two I make a lot of baht.’
They passed a girl of about seven. She was staggering along the path under a yoke of kerosene tins filled with water. Brien turned and squatted. ‘How?’
‘Sometimes it is from the doctors – you are very late here, now, the doctors have gone from here. They leave before you come. Maybe you better come tomorrow.’
‘The sun is still up. How do you make money from the doctors?’
‘Ah, mostly it is from the newspapers at Khao I Dang. The doctors, they get to know me and they say, “Aihah, it is Phan Mang again, we must sit on our purse.” But the newspapers, they are new, they fall into my trap.’
Brien snapped the girl brushing her hair back from her face as she walked into the camera. ‘Yes?’
‘Ah, when we see the newspapers we have races outside the hospitals, the crutches and the chairs. Slow races, you understand? And they take pictures and then we make bets that I can race a newspaper. The newspaper thinks it is a big joke so he begins to run at half speed and then it is too late to catch me.’
‘It would make a good pic,’ Brien said warily.
‘I don’t do it now. It is not dignity.’ He tripped a running boy with the crutch and grinned.
‘Why aren’t you still at Khao I Dang?’
‘What do I want with Khao I Dang?’
‘You wanted to come here? Really?’
‘You also wanted to come here.’
Brien stopped for a moment, surprised and a little off balance. ‘That’s different. I’ve got a job to do.’
‘I’ve got a job to do here.’
‘Khao I Dang is ten times better than this place. It’s almost a town. You can live comfortably there, in houses instead of huts, eat good food and they’d get you a new leg.’
‘Khao I Dang is a prison. Full of Cambodians who want to go to America, France, even Australia, anywhere but back to Cambodia. They can’t do anything there but build bamboo huts and wait. They don’t need me there, they need me here.’
Brien slowly lowered his camera.
‘In Khao I Dang I am just one of the beggars waiting for a bag of rice and a tin leg. Here I am a soldier, a king.’
Huts chest-high and nuzzling each other. A long way from the hospital now, but some still with a piece of blue plastic, a bit of rice matting to sleep on, a little pot of rice, a pile of sticks, a tin of water. A string running from the hut to a tree or to another hut, carrying tired clothes out to dry. Women laughing and holding up babies for the camera.
Phan saluted an old man limping towards him with a load of sticks on his back, and the old man whooped with laughter.
Brien frowned. ‘You were a soldier before …?’
‘Before?’ Phan laughed suddenly. ‘I was not even army cook.’ He stopped by a low hut containing two young boys and a quiet woman. ‘This is my family now. Saro. Khim. Moung.’
Saro bowed her head and with a smile allowed her hand to be taken, while the two boys stared at Brien and giggled.
‘May I take a shot of your family?’ It was the first time he’d asked.
‘Oh, yes.’ Phan lowered himself on his crutch and swept his family about him. ‘But, not my family. Saro is a widow, I am a widow, it is a camp of widows. You have a wife?’
Brien rewound the film. ‘I had.’ See, it doesn’t hurt any more. Much.
‘Ah. How did she die?’
Always the questions. ‘We were divorced.’
‘Ah, yes. I know.’ Phan watched Saro argue softly with Moung. ‘You have children?’
‘No.’ And that is just about enough.
‘They are trouble …’ Phan scratched in the ground with a stick. ‘It is a funny thing, this war, you know that?’
‘Hilarious.’ And you’ve got to move.
‘Before, Saro does not know me, never speak to me, you understand? She is Royal Classic Dancer, I am itchy bug cyclo rider. I learn a little English when I take newspaper from Royale Hotel to the bars, to the war, where they want to go. Then I am nothing. Maybe I will be nothing again if we ever go back. But now Saro has my baby. See? It is very funny.’
Brien nodded and hoisted the camera bag on his shoulder and started to leave. ‘I want a few quick shots as the sun sets …’
‘But maybe if I go back I can drive a bus. Eh, you got a pretty good job. You get all over the world.’
‘Ah, you get around …’
‘Seeing presidents and movie stars, eh?’
‘Everyone. Taking photos of men on the way to the moon, admirals …’ And Brien petered out. For a moment he just stood there in silence and stared at Phan.
Jesus, what are you trying to do, start a fan club? Why don’t you start again and tell him what a marvellous wedding photo man you’ve become?
Brien jerked his eyes from Phan to Saro, and to the gentle swelling of her stomach. ‘The doctors? You said they have left?’
‘Until tomorrow. You should leave also.’
‘What happens if there is someone – sick – tonight?’
‘We have some Cambodian nurses in the hospital.’
‘Why have the doctors left?’
‘They have been ordered to leave the border at four o’clock all the time. We have a little trouble.’
Brien lifted his head. ‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Khmer Rouge.’
And Brien was not as hot and tired as he had thought he was. ‘Here?’
‘For a long time. The army lets them stay and they stay to steal our food. We watch them, but what can we do?’
‘Where are they? I’ve got to see them.’
Phan pointed. ‘Come back tomorrow. They are safe in the day, but very dangerous at night. They want to control the camp.’
Brien felt something twitch along his spine. He wanted to go back to his car by the hospital and drive away, but this was what he had come for. ‘I’ll only be seeing them for a few minutes.’
‘I cannot come with you.’
‘That�
��s all right. Are they armed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ Brien took a step away from the hut, then half turned, remembering an old question he had forgotten. ‘What happened to the leg?’
Phan shrugged. ‘They use iron bars. Take care.’
Brien waved and walked quickly through the thinning camp. The shadows were now long ghosts among the trees. He had wasted too much time, but he could sense a photo story bare minutes away. He hadn’t felt this kind of excitement since the bushfire.
He had to remember that. The one time he had been on top of the world. When a bright kid with an ancient Pentax had staggered from the smouldering black scrub, shirt ripped open, burns throbbing where a falling branch had hit, sweat dripping into the eyes … But five exhausted, streaked-black men were leaning against a scorched little weatherboard house with smoking stubble all around them, and they were sharing a water bottle and one had his thumb in the air because they had whipped the fire.
Brien strode towards the edge of the camp, and Cambodia and the killers. He felt the old adrenalin pumping for the first time in a long, long time.
Then, he’d dropped to his knees and with shaking hands framed the house, the stubble, the men, and he’d known that it was a beauty, a classic, and it was his. There was nothing like it. Front page, huge by-line, nationwide spread, even a showing in Fleet Street. Then money, marriage, models, clicking away for Myer and the Trak brigade. Until he’d forgotten why he’d picked up a camera in the first place.
A single report. Like a bursting paper bag.
Brien stopped in the path.
A shot? Don’t be silly. But that’s what you had come for. Something like that. You did it before, you can do it again.
Another report. Louder, to the right.
You did it before. You can do it again. Brien looked down at the Nikon quivering in his hands and forced himself to move towards the reports.
Suddenly a woman dragging a panting little girl behind her brushed past him at a run. Some families sitting outside their huts watched in silence, then one family got up and followed her.
Brien began to pass empty huts, the fires still burning, the pots still bubbling on them.
A Taste of Cockroach Page 8
