by Tom Knox
‘Yes exactly.’
Her demeanour was strained, like she was forcing herself to use a matter-of-fact voice, even though her lips were trembling. ‘But how could this brain surgery, or whatever it was, how could that have such an effect?’
‘Well, I did a bit of research on primitive surgery when we got back from Chiang Rai, I read about holes in the head, like the trepanations we saw on the –’
‘Trepanations?’
‘It means drilled holes in the skull.’
‘OK. Hn. And?’
Jake stared through the grimy cab window. The forests out there were thicker now. Mahogany, rosewood, sugar-palm. The banyan of the Buddha. They were driving deep into the soul of the country, Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, the emotional heartland of the Khmer.
He gave his answer.
‘I’m obviously not any kind of expert, but it seems the frontal lobes of the brain are associated with self-control, commanding the baser emotions; so maybe if you cut out some of the frontal cortex, you excise the most evolved part of the brain, therefore, just possibly, it could make you amoral and criminal? Cruel. Predatory. Violent.’
‘A rapist.’
Jake was silent. Then he said: ‘Yes.’
Her hand reached for his across the torn vinyl of the taxi’s back seat. She said to him, with softness:
‘You lost your sister and I lost my grandmother . . . and God knows who else.’ Her kissing lips were a warming whisper on his cheek, momentary and elusive, then she sat back. ‘We are the same.’
Jake felt his heart melt like sorbet in the sun, yet he wondered if this was really true. Some of him resisted the equation. Were they the same? Were they definitely on the same side? Even as he was falling for her, some element inside him still didn’t trust her. He thought of the black toothed spider witch. Her muttering and curses, her kitsch pullover with the sequined turquoise heart. Kali, the Eater of Men.
Chemda said:
‘Could that be why they did it, the Khmer Rouge? These, ah, horrible experiments, to make some kind of behavioural change? Make people more violent and cruel? Like beasts?’
‘Maybe.’ Jake had already been thinking on these lines. ‘But why would anyone volunteer for this. Like your grandmother?’
Chemda exhaled.
‘That’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Why volunteer for that? It simply doesn’t make any sense. But we can ask my uncle, he might know.’
‘Your uncle?’
‘My father’s brother. Tek Sonisoy. He works in Siem Reap. He’s a scientist. Conservation. That’s where we’re going.’
‘But –’
She lifted a dark yet somehow pale hand, and put a finger vertical to his lips. She spoke:
‘He renounced my family years ago. The wealth and the power and the politics. Resents my grandfather, dislikes my mother, hates all that political stuff. He grew up in California with me, but then he went travelling, wholly rejected my family, ah, he backpacked. And then he fetched up in Cambodia. He was a real monk for a while, now he works discreetly at Angkor. We get on. He has helped me in the past, when I was researching the Plain of Jars. I trust him . . . implicitly. He can shelter us.’ She paused, and added, ‘I didn’t want to bother him before, with all this. He hates the . . . politics. But now we have no choice.’
‘But won’t your grandfather know where we are?’
‘He might guess, eventually. I wonder if my grandfather even knows that Sonisoy is in the country, he certainly won’t know his precise location in Siem. Why would he?’
Jake sat back. He wasn’t entirely reassured.
‘Chemda, we can’t stay there for long. A few hours. We need to find a way to get to Thailand.’
‘OK, but we can work it out in Siem. Ah, please. I need to . . . rest. Hn. Just one night.’
The churning anxieties were hardly soothed. But Jake also saw no other obvious escape route. And Siem Reap was well on the way to Thailand. And Thailand would be safe. Rich, developed, comparatively sensible Thailand.
Crossing the frontier would be very tricky but they’d done it before in Laos, and once they were in Thailand he could draw breath – and then give vent to his despairing anguish at the trail of violence they had left behind. And he understood why Chemda needed to rest. The ghastly image of the cratered man, the severed man, groping inside her thighs, trying to rape her.
The cut on his head still hurt, under the haphazard bandage Chemda had applied at the apartment. It was just a flesh wound – but Jesus it stung. Jake winced and sweated and gazed at the sunlight, serrated by the palm fronds.
Two hours later, as the twilight finally relieved the countryside from the torment of the sun – like a good cop taking over from a bad cop – they arrived in Siem Reap.
Jake had been here, briefly, once before. A sweet little Indochinese town, not unlike Luang Prabang, full of hotels and spas and moonlit walks and klongs and nightmarkets, all dedicated to watering and sheltering the millions of tourists who flooded the sites further north: the clearings of Angkor Wat, where the great temples and palaces of Jayavarman and Suryvarman mouldered nobly in the rasping jungle.
But they were not here for sightseeing. They parked by the biggest nightmarket, already busy with stalls selling obese wooden buddhas and antique incense burners and pirated DVDs of Thai horror movies. Jake glanced at one image as they passed: it was a DVD called Demonic Beauty and the label showed the disembodied head of a woman with her spinal cord and lungs trailing from her severed head like a grisly bridal train of viscera. He turned away.
Sonisoy was waiting for them at a doorway. He looked like Chemda, in a male guise. Taller, handsome, older, with the shaved bald head of the monk he once was. He seemed intensely Khmer, he spoke flawless American-accented English.
Hands were shaken. Jake’s hands were shaking anyway. He smothered his nerves: he euthanized them. Sonisoy escorted them into a house just around the corner from the nightmarket, a house of wood and sweet smells of incense, and paper Chinese lanterns, and photos of the Temple of Ta Prohm on the wall.
He served them red Khmer tea as he listened to Chemda tell their story, in one gushing monologue. His face was sober and his head was shaved and his demeanour was monastic. He nodded.
Then he handed out some Khmer sweetmeats: Nom Krob Khnor, a translucent blob of gelatine with a yellow mung bean in the middle, like a sweetened little embyro in placenta. Jake wanted to be sick. He wanted to be at home in England. He could see the blank milky eyes of the smoke babies, the horrible pulsing scar of the janitor, he could see blood and death, the blank eyes of his sister and the disembodied smile of his mother and . . .
He snapped out of it. Turned the wheel of his mind. He had gone off road, for a moment, he had veered into the bush, where the minefields lurked, the UXO of the past.
The room was quiet. Chemda had finished her story. Sonisoy put down his cup of red tea and, with the nocturnal murmur of Siem Reap just audible beyond the shutters, he said:
‘Of course, I understand, I believe I have some more information that may piece it all together.’
‘What?’ said Chemda. ‘How?’
‘I think,’ Sonisoy sighed, ‘I believe, from what you told me, that I know who else was a victim of these experiments. Another member of the family. Close, Chemda. Very close.’
Chemda said nothing. She stared into the gloom, she stared at the scraped, shaven head of her uncle, now just a silhouette in the candled dark. She had a hand to her mouth; her eyes were shining in the candelight, moist with incipient tears.
‘My father? As well?’
‘Your father,’ he said. ‘My brother. Think about it, about the way he died.’
The room was morbid with silence. The plate of mung beans, wrapped in their translucent cocoons of jelly, glistened in the candlelight.
Chapter 21
The head was floating. Another floating woman’s head, with a funereal veil of black gauze, or was it hair? The head was disembodied by dark, and it wa
s sucking him, sucking his penis, Kali Kra, white toothed and drooling, fanged and desirous, with her two tongues black and blood-red, licking his erection, painfully, exquisitely, making him cry out.
He didn’t want the woman to stop, the witch, the spider witch, the apsara, to stop; surely it was Chemda who was blowing him, giving him pleasure, waking him with fellatio once again: and it was beautiful, Jake fought the beautiful feeling in his dreams, he was half awake now, yes he could see her, it was Chemda’s head above his groin in the darkness of the shuttered room above the krama shop in old Siem Reap.
‘Chemda, Chemda . . .’ He wanted real sex. Penetration. He grasped her head. He lifted her head from his erection, and she looked up at Jake, and her eyes flashed and smiled, and it was his mother, sucking him. His mother, smiling up.
He woke with a myoclonic jerk, rigid with horror. Properly awake this time. It was just a dream, a lucid dream. He shuddered and looked around. The day had barely dawned: ladders of pale and unfading blue showed the slatted shutters of Sonisoy’s apartment.
Where was Chemda?
Jake swept a hand across the empty bed.
‘Chemda . . .’ he could sense the fragments of the dream fleeing him. Yet he kept seeing the image, of his mother, a head, disembodied, blood dripping from somewhere, the image of Kali, the Mother of Dissolution.
‘Hello.’
Chemda had walked into the room. She was dressed, and frowning.
‘Chemda. Are you OK?’
She shrugged.
‘Couldn’t really sleep. Ah. Not after hearing that about my father. We talked, me and Sonisoy.’ Her hands were hovering on her hips, impatient or wary – like a Western sharpshooter approaching a gunfight. ‘He wants us to see something in Angkor Wat, to tell us something.’
‘And?’
‘We’re gonna meet downstairs in ten minutes. Pack everything.’
Obedient, he threw a towel over his shoulder and walked for the shower. He really needed a shower.
Chemda loitered by the door, watching him, she looked at his nakedness as he walked. And lust flashed for a second in that gaze, he saw it: fleshly hunger. Kali, the devourer, with her seven black tongues.
She waved a dark hand at the bathroom.
‘Please, Jake, we need to be quick –’
‘I thought you said we’d be safe here. For a night.’
‘I did – I thought we would – until I heard that about my father. Now I wonder: is my whole family cursed, do they want us all dead? I don’t know. But this means everything is worse than we imagined –’
‘So. Let’s get to Thailand!’
‘But first I want to hear Sonisoy’s story. Then we go to Thailand.’
‘But what about Sonisoy?’
‘He’d have turned us in by now, if he was with them. I told you. I trust him more than anyone. Apart from you.’
Her eyes fixed on his. She continued:
‘Quick, ah, please, be quick. Sonisoy will take us to Angkor. Ten minutes.’
The shower took him two minutes: towel, clothes, socks, boots. Then he loitered in the bedroom packing his pitiful bag: two pairs of jeans and tee shirts bought from Siem Reap nightmarket, passport, cards, little camera, and a mobile phone. Jake stared at the phone, and took it out of the bag.
He dialled a number. Right now he needed a friendly voice, a western voice, an English speaking voice, a white voice. He felt so lost and isolated.
‘Yyyyyo?’
It was Tyrone at his groggiest. Just waking up, probably just assessing his hangover.
‘Ty. It’s Jake.’
Immediately, his friend sharpened.
‘Jake, for fuck’s sake where are you? The whole of PP is looking for you, you and Chemda.’
As concisely as possible Jake explained the situation – the grandfather, the firebomb, the janitor, the escape to Siem Reap. Tyrone cussed, urgently, a couple of times. Then Jake told his friend about Chemda’s father. Also lobotomized.
‘Fuck.’ Tyrone said. ‘How did she take that?’
Jake paused. He walked to the window and looked down at the unbusy streets of Siem Reap. He could see a street cleaner with a wicker hat and a municipal jerkin, brushing indolently – and a waiting tuk-tuk close to the front door.
‘Apparently it happened a few years after her family fled to California. She was young, nine or ten. All she remembers is that her dad was very depressed a lot of the time, drank too much. Silent. Taciturn.’
‘Sure, but a lot of Khmers were, like, traumatized by the genocides . . .’
‘And that’s what she presumed but last night she told me she dimly recalls a scar, on his head, under his hair. And very deep deep depressions.’
‘So he killed himself?’
‘No. He walked under a bus, very drunk, Chemda says. An accident. At least that’s what she was told at the time, by her mother. Madame Tek. But of course now she wonders if it wasn’t a total accident. There was some volition there, an act of self destruction, or at least nihilism. A brain damaged man in terminal despair.’
‘Jesus,’ said Tyrone. ‘No wonder grandfather Sen hates the Khmer Rouge so much, they did frontal lobotomies on half his family. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. And now you’re going to Angkor on some Indiana Jones malarkey, nice timing –’
‘Sonisoy insists he has important evidence. We’re going to see it.’
‘And then?’
‘We will escape. Thailand.’
Tyrone drew breath.
‘That ain’t gonna be easy
–’ ‘Of course, I know – how can we do it? Any ideas?’
A pause. Then an answer.
‘When you’re finished in Angkor – head for Anlong Veng. Most remote border crossing. Chong Sa. I got friends there, from when I did my Ta Mok story. Might be able to help you. But just get there, as stealthily and as quickly as you can. Anyone repeat anyone could be a danger. Anyone at all.’
‘Anyone? Surely we are a little safer, this far out of Phnom Penh –’
Tyrone whistled impatiently.
‘Thurby, you’re not getting me. You don’t understand what’s fucking happening here in PP. It’s mayhem. The police are hunting for you, it’s all over the FCC, everywhere. Grandfather Sen has an advert in the Post this morning, asking for help in locating his granddaughter. And the article is worse, it has quotes from the Phnom Penh police, claiming you have kidnapped Chemda Tek. There’s even a fucking price on your head. You’re actually wanted. Like in a Western.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m sorry Jake. It’s true. Why don’t you just go? Fuck the evidence. You need to get out now, Jake. Just go.’
‘But Chemda wants to see –’
‘Leave Chemda behind. Go now. You’re better off without her. Fucking safer.’
The idea was sensible, the idea was ludicrous.
‘I can’t leave her, Ty. You know that . . .’
He groaned.
‘But they’re after your ass! With guns. This is not a rehearsal. The chief of police says it, literally: any means necessary may be used to rescue Chemda Tek from the kidnapper, i.e. they can take you dead or alive as far as the authorities are concerned.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘And knowing this is Cambodia, what that really means is –’
‘I can’t leave her.’
Tyrone sighed.
‘I know you can’t. I know.’
Chapter 22
Julia pressed herself into a corner, a kind of vestibule between the office and the main doors of the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme. Perhaps the killer would walk straight past, not see her, walk on.
Then she could run for it. If the killer walked straight down the lobby into the study room or the main archives she would have a few seconds to flee, without even being spotted.
The door swung open.
The killer stood there, looking left and right. Julia was hidden behind some coats and a stack of boxes, crushing herself backwards against the wall.
She could feel her heart beating in her lungs and her spine: that’s how hard she was pressed to the brickwork.
Again, the killer glanced left, and then right. The face of the young murderer was pale to the point of unearthliness. There was something wrong with it, something strange.
Now the killer was staring directly into the gloom of the vestibule. Squinting. Surely she had seen Julia. Surely this was it.
But then the woman walked on into the hallway, and she tapped on the glass. She wanted to speak to the curator. The grouchy old Frenchman.
Julia quelled her despair. This was another vortex of anxiety. Assuredly, the French curator would say, ‘Oh there is someone here looking for you, she is in the building, she was here a minute ago,’ and then – then the killer would turn and narrow those dark eyes and she would see Julia and the knives would come out or worse.
The curator appeared to be asleep, or disappeared. There was no response to the woman’s persistent tapping.
Tap, tock, tap.
‘Bonjour? Hello? Anyone there?’
No reply. The small lithe woman had a soft deep voice. Maybe an American or Canadian accent. Yet the face was not European. Maybe it was Asian. Oriental. Yet bewilderingly pale.
The murderer leaned close to the glass, cupping a hand to her eyes to see better, to see through. Where was the curator?
Tap, tock, tap.
‘Bonjour?’
Julia assessed her chances. She could just run now, run right past, out of the main door; it might take seconds for the murderer to realize what had happened; to turn and see the door swinging, see Julia sprinting away. Would the killer even come running after? Would she take the risk? Attack Julia in bright daylight?
It was the best option. Do it now. Before the curator returned and pointed down the way and the woman turned.
Sweat trickling. Sweaty and immobile. She was sticky and hot and terrified and immobile but she had to do it, she was about to do it, to run, when she heard a voice, the curator, heard him sliding back the glass partition.