The Half-Child

by Angela Savage

  ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he said. ‘Kob is a sick little boy.’

  ‘I don’t understand. He seemed fine on Sunday.’

  ‘We’re testing him for a few conditions, one of which can lie dormant then manifest suddenly with grave consequences.’

  Mayuree hugged herself. She knew what she had to do.

  ‘Thank you for letting me see my boy,’ she said. ‘Please, look after him.’

  She walked out the gate and down the soi to the main road, where she hailed a songthaew; the loose change in her bag would pay the fare. She checked her wallet. The cop had left it untouched. She had close to five hundred baht. Enough for what she needed.

  Pattaya Bay came into view as the songthaew turned on to the beach road. Mayuree would stay on until it turned inland again and reached Wat Chaimongkon on South Pattaya Road. There she would buy garlands of marigolds and jasmine, a bunch of lotus buds, and a platter of fruit to offer the monks. She would light nine incense sticks and leave them standing upright in the earth of a bronze pot, counting on the smoke to carry her petition to the Lord Buddha.

  ‘Make Kob well,’ she prayed. ‘Keep him safe.’

  She would ask nothing for herself.

  18

  ‘That was close,’ Somsri said.

  ‘Actually, I think it was a blessing the mother showed up like that,’ Frank said. ‘Now she knows her child is sick.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Somsri ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘Chaowalit did well.’

  ‘Yes, it was quick thinking on his part to call me. It bought us the time we needed. Speaking of timing, how long will the child stay under?’

  ‘A few hours yet. The dose I gave him should last long enough to get through the formalities.’

  ‘And the rise in body temperature?’

  ‘We put a lamp over the cot for a few minutes. Just long enough to heat him up a little.’

  ‘Simple but effective.’

  The doctor nodded.

  ‘And all the paperwork’s in order?’

  Somsri nodded again.

  ‘Good, good,’ Frank said. ‘I’m going to head over to the orphanage and make sure all the volunteers leave on time.

  You’ve teed up the meeting with your contact from the Board?’

  ‘Yes, though it will cost more to have him come outside business hours.’

  Frank held up one hand. ‘Not my jurisdiction,’ he said, still smarting from their recent phone conversation. ‘It’s up to you to handle that.’

  He took leave of the doctor and made his way out of the compound. He was content with proceedings, though he felt sullied by the mother’s performance. What did that shameless whore think she was doing, throwing herself at him like that? She almost knocked him off his feet. Frank tried to recall if she’d made contact with his skin. The possibility made him shudder.

  More than ever, Frank was convinced God had sent him to Pattaya to restore order to chaos. Some women with children were not fit to be mothers. Others fit to be mothers were denied children. It was Frank’s duty to right these wrongs.

  Jayne was not the maternal type. When her contemporaries married and started having children, one after the other, it seemed they’d all succumbed to an epidemic to which Jayne alone seemed immune. She fled the country and became an expatriate largely because her aspirations when it came to marriage, mortgages and children were so at odds with those of her family and peers. That they were also at odds with the vast majority of Thai people—who always asked how many children she had and looked crestfallen to learn she had none—was beside the point. As a foreigner, she was allowed to be different. What made her a misfit at home added to her exoticism in Thailand.

  Her time in the orphanage was doing little to change her mind. The toddlers were amusing, the way they walked like zombies and struggled to speak Thai and English—or German in little Gai/Rolfe’s case. But all you could do with a baby was put food in one end and clean up the shit that came out the other.

  ‘Everyone is special’, proclaimed the poster on the wall, the slogan emblazoned over a photograph of a penguin colony. ‘We are all God’s children’, advised another that featured an image of a warthog.

  They reminded Jayne to keep her uncharitable thoughts to herself and she read them over and over throughout the day when she felt herself at risk of slipping out of character.

  She read them again in the late afternoon as she and Dianne paced the playroom, each with an infant over one shoulder, waiting for them to burp. Jayne was carrying the baby with the mohawk, whose name was Ant. Dianne carried the tiny newborn Nok.

  ‘She was abandoned at the hospital a couple of days ago, poor thing,’ Dianne told Jayne. ‘They say her mother was probably that teenage prostitute whose body was found on the weekend.’

  ‘I know the one you mean, I read about it in the local paper. Poor girl.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be okay,’ Dianne said. ‘In fact, she’s probably much better off. She’ll be cared for here for a while and then get adopted overseas into a well-off family.’

  I was talking about the mother, Jayne wanted to say, but the penguins and warthogs told her to bite her tongue. She patted Ant on the back a little faster than necessary.

  ‘It’s the thing I love about this work,’ Dianne continued, cradling Nok’s head in her hand. ‘It feels good to be part of an organisation devoted to improving children’s lives. New Life—the name says it all.’

  ‘Doesn’t it,’ Jayne said, adding self-consciously, ‘Praise the Lord.’

  She glanced at the warthog, wondering if she was laying it on a bit thick. He raised an eyebrow but Dianne beamed.

  ‘You know, you’re amazing Jayne. Everyone is talking about how you’ve taken on all the dirty work around here with no complaints. It takes a special person to do that.’

  Jayne flushed in spite of herself.

  ‘Frank must think very highly of you.’

  ‘I’ve hardly seen him.’

  ‘Ah, but as he’ll tell you himself, Frank has very good instincts when it comes to people.’

  Jayne felt something warm and wet hit her shoulder.

  ‘And he must think you’re really special to have trusted this work to you.’

  The warm, wet stuff started to trickle down Jayne’s back.

  ‘So what are your plans for this evening?’ Dianne said.

  ‘There’s this new place opened in town that serves fondue.

  A few of us thought we might try it out.’

  She was saved from answering by the appearance of Frank Harding.

  ‘Just dropped by to see how you’re all getting on,’ he said. ‘How’re you going, Jayne?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, backing away towards the bathroom.

  ‘Busy.’

  He chuckled as if she were joking. ‘Dianne keeping you on your toes is she?’ He smiled at the volunteer.

  ‘Actually, she’s pretty low-maintenance, whereas these babies…I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me. I need to get cleaned up.’

  Frank held up his hand. ‘It’s good to hear you’re settling in.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Loving it.’

  Baby spew was sliding down Jayne’s back, headed for the waistband of her jeans. How had Ant managed to vomit under her T-shirt?

  ‘You shouldn’t overdo it, especially in the first few weeks.’

  ‘Right,’ Jayne nodded.

  ‘Don’t feel obliged to stay late.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  There was an awkward moment when both of them waited for the other to speak.

  ‘Well then—’ Frank said.

  ‘I’ll be—’ Jayne said at the same time.

  ‘Go on,’ Frank said.

  ‘I really need to get cleaned up.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Yes, of course, don’t let me keep you.’

  It was too late to salvage her jeans. Ant had fallen asleep and Jayne handed her over to one of the Thai staff on her way to the bathroom. She moppe
d up the vomit as best she could. But the smell clung to her as she headed back to the hotel causing her fellow songthaew passengers to screw up their noses and give her a wide berth. They probably thought she’d been drinking.

  I should be so lucky, Jayne thought.

  Frank Harding had a nerve, counselling her not to work late. Jayne couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Fuck the penguins. Fuck the warthogs. And fuck the fondue. The minute she got cleaned up, she was heading out for a beer, a smoke and a game of pool—preferably all at the same time.

  19

  Chaowalit watched the nurse fasten the strings of the baby’s top.

  ‘It’s a boy, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she snapped.

  Chaowalit kept his expression neutral. ‘It might. What if I bump into someone who recognises the baby? I’ll need to be able to explain that I’m taking him or her to see a doctor on behalf of my employer—which is true, in a manner of speaking.’

  She grunted, reluctant to concede the point. ‘Yes, he’s a boy, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She swaddled the baby in a white muslin cloth and checked under his eyelids before handing him over. The baby had been drugged and didn’t stir as Chaowalit placed him inside a striped phakhama sling across his chest. He checked his reflection in the mirror on the back of the nursery door.

  He’d swapped his navy security guard’s uniform for a pale yellow polo shirt, green slacks and black plastic sandals.

  To anyone passing in the street, he looked like an honest worker—a tailor, perhaps—making his way home at the end of a long day, carrying his baby son. The casual clothes softened the harder lines of his face, making the furrow on his brow seem less intense, the lines around his mouth less pronounced. Experience had prematurely aged Chaowalit, but in the guise of a parent, he looked younger.

  He straightened his shoulders and with a nod from the nurse, set out for the orphanage wing. He took a long detour, making the most of what it felt like, albeit briefly, to be tamada, to blend in with the crowd.

  He sauntered along a soi transformed at night into a strip of makeshift cafés. Small blue plastic stools clustered around low tables against the outer wall of an office block.

  Vendors with cooking carts dished out local specialties: rice noodles with fish balls and tom yam po taek, ‘broken fish trap soup’. The smells of fish, galangal, lemongrass and basil made Chaowalit’s stomach rumble beneath the weight of the baby. With no time for a meal, he satisfied his hunger with a spicy sausage on a stick, before continuing on his way.

  A car whizzed past, sounding its horn to clear the way.

  Chaowalit felt the baby stir. He pulled back the edge of the sling to check on him. A fleeting observer could have mistaken the gesture for affection, but Chaowalit was concerned only that the sedative didn’t wear off.

  The baby stayed asleep. Chaowalit resumed his walk.

  He wished they could meet in twenty years’ time. He’d like to call in the debt this baby owed him for the service he’d performed. But by then this baby would be a farang, wouldn’t even speak Thai.

  Son of a whore.

  It was one of the worst insults that could be thrown at a person. How much worse, then, when the insult were true?

  ‘You can’t escape it, you little bastard,’ he whispered to the baby whose name he didn’t know. ‘You can try to hide, but shame sticks like shit. They’ll smell it on you wherever you go, even inside the temple. Not that you’d wanna live the life of a monk, eh? Fuck that for a joke.’

  He leered at the sleeping baby, imagined him taking it all in, hanging on every word.

  ‘There’s only one way out, little brother,’ he said. ‘You gotta leave behind everything you have—your name, your family, your friends—and start again. You gotta find a place where you have no past, only a future. You gotta seize whatever opportunities come your way with both hands because no one else is going to help you. It’s every man for himself.’

  Chaowalit knew what he was talking about. His father was a nameless john who fucked his mother for money. His mother was dead to him long before the disease that killed her. He’d lived among aunts and cousins in his maternal grandmother’s home where he was treated as an unpaid servant, until the day he decided they could all go to hell.

  Chaowalit looked up at the billboards over the intersection. A pale man with Chinese features punched the air with his mobile phone. A woman with white skin, Asian eyes, a European nose and ringlets in her hair seemed ecstatic about the tea she was drinking. It was fashionable now to be look kreung, a mix of Asian and farang, provided the mix resulted in whiter skin. But Chaowalit’s was the wrong mix. His features were big and blunt, not small and refined. His hair was the wrong tint, neither glossy black nor chestnut. More like rat-brown. And his skin was scarred and black as an Isarn farmer, making him a second-class citizen in the eyes of many Thai people.

  Without Chaowalit to help him, the baby in his arms would have been destined to suffer the same ignominy.

  ‘You may never know it,’ he whispered to the sleeping boy, ‘but I’m the best friend you’ll ever have.’

  20

  As a student at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education, Jayne spent a month’s teaching placement in a boys’ prison, euphemistically called a Youth Training Centre. Classes were voluntary, few boys attended and those who did objected to lessons, agreeing only to play games or use the computers. Jayne spent most of her time, as the inmates did, trying to find ways of overcoming boredom. To this end, she took the boys up on their offer to teach her to play pool, unaware of an unwritten and uniquely Australian rule that a player who fails to sink a single ball is required to ‘drop their dacks’ and run a lap around the table. Only when she was one shot away from losing did the boys enlighten her, the beefier ones moving to block the exit in case she thought they were joking. The frisson of risk lifted her game and while she didn’t win, she kept her pants on.

  The game proved addictive and over the years she’d honed her skills. She could hold her own against off-duty bar girls at the Woodstock Bar in Bangkok’s seedy Nana Plaza and even won on occasion, at her best when she’d drunk just enough alcohol to boost her confidence without diminishing her skills. If she drank too much, which she usually did, her bravado would increase and her skills decrease at the same rate. If she was ever forced to teach maths again, she could use this phenomenon to demonstrate an inverse mathematical relationship, it was that precise.

  Jayne decided on the open-sided beachfront bars of Central Pattaya as the place she was mostly likely to get a game of pool without going deaf. She walked along the footpath sussing out the options, when a howling electric guitar called to her from amidst the pedestrian slow rock and R&B. Jimi Hendrix. He beckoned from a bar called B-52, a bamboo shack draped in camouflage webbing with upside-down helicopters painted on the ceiling, chopper blades formed by the ceiling fans. The walls were decorated with American flags and movie posters. Good Morning Vietnam . Platoon.Born on the Fourth of July. Full Metal Jacket. A third of the floor space was taken up by an L-shaped bar, bamboo-panelled to match the walls, the short side fronting on to the street, the other lined with barstools with a sea view. The remaining space housed a few tables and chairs clustered around a pool table. The men behind the bar wore camouflage pants and tight black T-shirts, the female staff high-cut khaki shorts and black bikini tops with dog tags around their necks, homage to a war that was over before any of them were born. A chalked-up list offered the eponymous B-52 cocktail and others called ‘Tet Offensive’, ‘Napalm’ and ‘Agent Orange’.

  It was tacky and tasteless and about as far from the New Life Children’s Centre as Jayne could imagine. She took a seat at one of the tables where a Heineken Bier ashtray and a Tiger Beer coaster competed for her custom. When a waitress appeared she thumbed her nose at both and order a Singha. She sipped it slowly and sussed out the competition.

  Four men whose crew cuts and banter gave
them away as US Marines were playing pool. Two black guys sat at one table, a white guy at another, his redheaded companion leaning over the pool table to take a shot. Jayne picked up that they’d recently spent six months in Da Nang searching for the remains of Americans still listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War.

  They were finishing their fourth game and Jayne her third beer, when she stepped forward and placed a ten baht coin on the table. This was enough to make the redhead miscue and sink the black.

  A waitress stepped forward, pocketed the coin and racked up the balls. Jayne dusted her hands with talc, selected a cue and chalked the tip.

  ‘Which one of you is going to sit out?’ she asked the winners.

  They frowned at her unexpected accent and she had to repeat herself before the taller of the two raised his hand.

  As Jayne leaned forward to break, both men moved into her peripheral vision either side of the table, a ploy designed to put her off.

  ‘Game on,’ she murmured to herself, as she smashed the cue ball into the triangular configuration and listened for the plop of a ball falling into a pocket. She heard it twice. A quick count told her she’d sunk one of each.

  Jayne surveyed what remained and chose her target, sinking one small ball and then another. She misjudged the next shot but the white ball bounced off the side cushion on to another of her balls and sent it on a trajectory towards the corner. Her opponent gasped when it dropped into the pocket. Jayne feigned nonchalance. Although she missed the next shot, her opponent never recovered his composure and she won the game.

  Her next challenger was one of the white guys, who brushed past her with a ‘’Scuse me, m’am’ to take his first shot, which also proved to be his last.

  The Goddess of Pool was indeed smiling on her.

  The tall black marine was the next to take her on.

  ‘Mitch here ain’t as good as me, m’am,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘I’m Tommy.’

  He shook her hand. His high forehead and prominent cheekbones framed wide innocent eyes, but the dimples either side of his generous lips hinted at mischief. He was—to use the Australian idiom—built like a brick shit-house. His biceps, triceps and other muscle groups Jayne couldn’t name strained at the sleeves of his white T-shirt.