War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  Phuong followed him inside; cedar paneling on the walls, French windows the length of another wall, a view over the cove. The oak floors were covered with oriental rugs and there was a coal fire burning in the stone fireplace.

  She stared, her mouth open. She looked so tiny; the leather jacket he had put around her shoulders in the terminal hung almost to her knees, a pair of sparrow-thin shins protruding. She had cheap rubber sandals on her feet.

  Her left hand was still balled into a tiny fist.

  He took the flight bag off her shoulder. It was very light. He looked inside. Her lifetime’s possessions amounted to a tin spoon, an in-flight magazine and the tom half of a file card stamped by the United States Immigration Service. There was also a dossier form provided by UNHCR that was supposed to contain her family history, but most of the names and dates were recorded as ‘unknown’.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  She shook her head. ‘I am very tired.’

  ‘I’ll show you your room.’

  * * *

  When Phuong woke the next morning Webb was sitting out on the deck with a cup of steaming black coffee. His breath left wispy clouds on the damp air. Gulls and jays wheeled over the water and disappeared, screeching, through the mist.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Uncle, how are you?’

  He smiled. ‘I am very well, thank you, Phuong. Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  He had a bowl in front of him, Phuong noticed, and in the bowl was some gooey brown slop and some milk. ‘Do you want breakfast?’ he asked her.

  She was starving. ‘No, thank you, I have just eaten,’ she said, remembering a phrase from her lessons at Puerto Princesa.

  ‘What have you just eaten?’

  ‘I am sorry. My English is not so good. I mean I do not have hunger.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he coached her.

  ‘Yes, sorry, I am not hungry.’ She had forgotten so much of her English. She remembered a time when it was all she spoke at home, before the communists came.

  ‘This must be very hard for you,’ he said. He put down his coffee cup. ‘Phuong, you must try and think of me as your family now. I know that won’t be easy, and it won’t happen today or next week. But eventually perhaps. This is your home now, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand, Uncle,’ she said, but she thought: You can never be my parent. I will never show you my heart. Perhaps you are a nice person, but one day you will leave me or you will get hurt. I don’t want any more parents, I just want to live here in America and have an easy life, like my mother said.

  She looked around, at the garden, at the big house, the water. It seemed unreal. Last night, before she fell asleep, she had thought: When I wake up in the morning someone will come, someone in a uniform, and they will say: Sorry, this is all a mistake, you must come back to Saigon now. You are a criminal and you must go to a Zone.

  ‘You’re quite safe here,’ he said.

  She lowered her face, appalled that her thoughts could be so transparent.

  ‘Did you sleep in those clothes?’

  Well, of course, she thought. How else should one sleep?

  He stood up. ‘Come with me.’

  She followed him back inside. He went into her bedroom. She stood to one side, waiting until he had finished his inspection. Everything was as it had been the night before. She had been careful not to touch anything. He must not think she was a thief, or a bad person.

  ‘You didn’t sleep in the bed,’ he said.

  He picked up the clothes laid out at the foot of the bed. ‘I left a nightgown for you. These are for you too. A T-shirt and jeans and some underwear. I had to guess your size.’

  ‘This clothes belong to me now?’

  ‘Yes, they’re yours. You can’t wear these old things any more. Take them off and give them to me. I’ll throw them away.’

  ‘Take them off . .. now?’

  ‘Well, no, not now. Later.’ He went into the bathroom that led from the guest bedroom and turned on the shower. ‘Look, this tap makes the water hotter, this one makes it colder. Okay?’

  Phuong stared at the steam rising from the shower cubicle. Another miracle.

  ‘Here’s some soap.’

  He unwrapped the soap and gave it to her. It smelled sweet. Perfumed soap! A luxury beyond imagining. Surely this was only how very rich people lived.

  ‘I’ll wait outside. Okay?’

  She searched her memory for the right phrase from her English book on Puerto Princesa. ‘Thank you very much, kind sir.’

  He grinned at her, as if she had made a joke. ‘Oh, that’s quite all right, good lady,’ he said, and went out.

  * * *

  They got in his mandarin-red Jeep Wagoneer and drove into town. There was a flagpole in the centre of the lawned traffic circle at the end of Main Street and Old Glory snapped in a brisk morning breeze. They drove over the bridge and headed north on Scrub Pine Road.

  Phuong stared out of the window, amazed by the beautiful houses and shiny new cars. But the people were so ugly. Everyone was so fat! A man ran up the hill, his face red as betel-nut juice, his belly shaking like jelly under his T-shirt. The women were worse. You could see their bottoms wobbling in their tight jeans.

  Webb parked the jeep on a bluff overlooking the cove. The wind raised white caps on the water. Below them a ketch, its hull painted sky blue, cut through the bay towards the narrows.

  Webb sat for a long time in fidgeting silence. Phuong sensed there was something very difficult that he needed to say to her, and she waited for the blow to fall. Perhaps he had changed his mind about her and wanted to send her back to U-5. She remembered how he had asked her, on that first meeting, about her parents not being Vietnamese. He must have guessed her secret.

  ‘Will you tell me about your mother?’ he said.

  She was right. He knew she had lied. But she would lose too much face to change her story now. ‘She was very beautiful lady,’ she recited, ‘very kind. From a very rich family ...’

  ‘No, tell me the truth, Phuong. Please.’

  Phuong smiled in the oriental manner, the proper response to a question too difficult or too embarrassing to answer. ‘I do not understand, Uncle.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  His hands were tensed around the steering wheel. She had done something wrong, she had made him angry.

  ‘Please, you are going to send me back to U-5?’

  ‘No, of course not. No one’s going to send you back. This is your home now. I’m your family. But I must know the truth about you.’

  Phuong lowered her head. ‘My father was an American,’ she mumbled.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘He was very bad. My mother was very unhappy. He went back to America and never come back for her.’

  ‘He was a soldier?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Please. Try to remember.’

  ‘He worked for the government, I think.’ She stared into her lap, hoping this interrogation would soon be over. Why had he shamed her this way?

  ‘Do you remember when the communists came?’

  What was the correct answer to such a question? What was it he wanted to hear? If she told him everything she knew, it might be wrong, and he would send her back to U-5 anyway.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

  His fingers drummed on the wheel.

  ‘To hell with it,’ he said, finally. ‘Are you hungry?’

  She nodded.

  He looked at his watch. ‘You’ve been in America nearly eighteen hours and you still haven’t had a hamburger. We’d better fix that.’

  He started the engine and they drove back into town.

  Chapter 49

  She had never been inside a McDonald’s before so Webb ordered for her; a Big Mac and a large fries. She unwrapped the hamburger with elaborate care, as if she were defusing a bomb.

  She took one
mouthful, made a face and put it back in its box. The fries grew cold on the tray. Instead of eating she contented herself with drinking her Coke and most of his as well.

  ‘You have to eat something,’ he said.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  Time to bite the bullet, he supposed. ‘All right, let’s see if you can take some of my home cooking,’ he said.

  * * *

  While Webb was in the kitchen, Phuong wandered out to the yard. He watched her from the window. Seagulls had gathered on the lawn, near the bulkhead rocks at the foot of the garden. One stood separate from the others, its head turned into the breeze. Phuong moved very slowly across the grass until she was just a few yards away, crouched directly behind it.

  What the hell is she doing? Webb wondered.

  She inched imperceptibly closer to the bird. Webb felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  God Almighty.

  She moved so quickly that he did not realize what she had done until it was over. He heard the panicked screeching of the other gulls. Phuong was rolling on the lawn. When she stood up she had the gull in both hands. There were flecks of blood on her hands where it had bitten her. It was still alive.

  He ran out on to the deck. ‘No. Let it go. Let it go!’

  She stared up at him, bewildered. Then she did as he said and the injured bird fluttered to the ground. It flapped helplessly on the grass and he thought she had broken its wings but after a while it took off, squawking in outrage.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I was hungry, Uncle.’

  My God, what sort of creature have I allowed into my house? She’s practically feral. ‘If you’re hungry I’ll cook you lunch inside.’

  He put his arm around her and led her back to the house.

  Good God. At least now he knew how she had survived for so long without food on McAdam Reef.

  * * *

  She ate two bowlfuls of pho without comment. Afterwards she stood at the window watching the grey clouds gather over the cove. He wondered what she was thinking. Finally she turned around and he braced himself for what might come next.

  ‘I think it is going to rain, is it not?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it looks like it could rain.’

  Another long silence. ‘You . .. very rich?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  He knew she did not believe him. A house like this, a big car; it would take a while for her to understand that in America these were things that many people accepted as their birthright.

  ‘You are a businessman, isn’t it?’

  ‘I write books.’

  She frowned. This was something beyond her comprehension.

  ‘I’ll show you. Come on.’

  A wrought-iron spiral staircase led to a loft area that he had added to the original cottage a year before. At the top of the landing there were two doors; one led to his bedroom, another to his study.

  Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves, the third was hung with perhaps two dozen framed photographs. A dormer window overlooked the cove. There was a PC, a printer, and a phone fax, crowded on to a desktop jumbled with notes, manuscript drafts and post-it notes.

  Phuong looked around, perplexed.

  ‘I used to be a journalist, bao chi. These days I write books.’

  He took a hardback book from one of the bookshelves and showed it to her. On the front cover was a photograph of a helicopter lifting from the roof of the United States Embassy in Saigon in 1975. The title was embossed in red and gold: Goodnight, Saigon. Hugh Webb.

  She turned the book over in her hands. There was a black and white photograph of Webb on the dust cover.

  He pointed to the muddle of papers on his desk. ‘My next book. Voices from America. It’s about Vietnamese living here in the US. The bui doi. People like you.’

  ‘You write this book about me, please?’

  ‘No, not just about you. About ... many Vietnamese.’

  She looked at the photographs on the wall. Most were from his Vietnam days; one of him sitting on an APC at Chu Lai; another crouched in the door of a Huey; another with Cochrane and Crosby and Ryan in a Saigon street.

  He held his breath.

  ‘You?’ she asked him, pointing to one of the photographs.

  ‘I looked a bit different then. No grey hair.’

  ‘Soldier?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, no, bao chi.' He pointed out the photograph Ryan had taken of him, out on patrol somewhere in the Delta, a camera slung around his neck.

  ''Bao chi,’ she repeated.

  He watched her as she studied the rest of the photographs. He waited for some sign of recognition on her face.

  Nothing.

  It’s not her, he thought. If it was her she would have recognized Ryan straight away. Or would she? She was just five years old when Saigon fell, and Ryan was hardly ever there.

  Anyway, it could not possibly be her. On the UNHCR form her mother’s name was given as Ngai, Ngai Dieu-Quynh. Ryan had introduced them once, but he could not remember Odile’s surname, had never learned her real name, her Vietnamese name, the one she would have reverted to when the communists took over.

  Phuong examined each of the photographs carefully. He dropped his gaze to her fist, still tightly closed. ‘Have a good look around. Take as long as you like.’

  He left her alone in the room and went downstairs.

  He went into the kitchen to make coffee. When he looked up again, she was standing on the stairs watching him. ‘You like coffee?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘There’s Coke in the refrigerator. Help yourself whenever you want.’

  The previous evening, using a Vietnamese dictionary, he had made a number of handwritten signs and had tacked them around the house: above the house phone he wrote ‘telephone’ on a piece of cardboard, and then the Vietnamese equivalent, dien thoai, underneath. He did the same on the oven, the refrigerator, the table, the doors, walls, chairs and so on around the room.

  Phuong went to the refrigerator, peered intently at the sign. ‘Refrigerator,’ she repeated slowly. She went to the oven. ‘Oven.’ She leaned over the range. ‘Hot pl —’

  She let out a shrill scream and jumped back.

  She clutched at her left hand, gasping in pain. He pulled her towards the sink, turned on the cold tap and put her hand under the running water. There was a pink burn along all the knuckles of her left hand.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘it’s okay, it’s not a bad burn. It’s okay, Phuong.’

  She started crying. He put the plug in the sink, kept her injured hand in the water, put his other arm around her shoulders. ‘That’s why they call it a hot plate, I guess. You’re okay.’

  Something caught his eye. Whatever Phuong had been holding in her fist had dropped to the floor. It was a small gold crucifix. He looked at her hand. She had been gripping the crucifix so tightly for so long that it had formed a bruised imprint in the flesh of her palm.

  She pulled away and retrieved her treasure from the floor.

  ‘No one’s going to take it away from you, Phuong. Let’s just fix this burn. No one’s going to steal it.’ But it was clear she did not believe him. ‘Was it your mother’s?’ he said.

  She nodded.

  ‘She was a good Catholic, wasn’t she?’

  She sank to her haunches, cradling her injured hand in her lap.

  He knelt down on the floor beside her and rocked her in his arms. Enough questions. Just let it be, Spider, he heard a voice say in his head. None of us will ever know for sure.

  Chapter 50

  The next morning he drove to the shops to get milk and bread. When he got back he found her in the kitchen, reading the signs he had put up for her, committing each object to memory. He put the grocery bags on the counter top. ‘How’s your hand?’

  She held it out for his inspection. Two of the knuckles had blistered.

  ‘You’ll live.’ He walked over to the range. ‘W
hat’s this?’

  ‘Hot plate,’ she said.

  He grinned. ‘Right.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a small box. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  Her face registered only suspicion.

  He opened the box. Inside, lying on a bed of red velvet, was a gold chain. ‘Twenty-two carat,’ he said. When she still did not respond, he undid the clasp and laid it on the counter top. ‘It’s a cross chain,’ he said. ‘Like your mother would have worn. You put the cross over the link here, and thread it down. Then you wear it around your neck. It saves wear and tear on your hands.’

  She did not move.

  ‘Phuong, trust me. No one is going to try to take your mother’s cross away from you? It’s a gift. Take it.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Uncle.’

  ‘Yes you do. You understand.’

  She slowly opened her fist. She fixed the chain through the eye at the top of the cross. Their eyes met.

  ‘You want me to put it on for you?’

  She nodded.

  He fastened the clasp behind her neck. She ran to her bedroom. He followed her; she stood in front of the dressing table staring at herself in the mirror, at the cross nestled in the hollow of her throat.

  ‘Thank you very much, kind sir,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right, good lady,’ he said, and went back to the kitchen to finish unpacking the groceries.

  Seventh Regiment Armoury

  ‘A gold cross doesn’t prove anything,’ Wendy Doyle said.

  ‘No,’ Webb agreed, ‘it doesn’t.’

  ‘Did you ever think of telling Ryan about her?’ Crosby asked him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He would have known the right questions to ask.’

  ‘I knew the right questions to ask.’

  ‘Where was Ryan anyway?’

  ‘He was in Washington. Lee here decided he’d look good in front of the camera instead of behind it.’