Songs from the Violet Cafe

by Fiona Kidman

  Instead, she found herself shaking hands with the woman at the bar.

  ‘Annette Gerhardt,’ she said. ‘From Switzerland. I’m with the Red Cross.’

  Jessie saw, now that she was close to her, that the woman was stronger-looking than she had assumed at first glance. She had broad cheekbones and a high aquiline nose. Her voice was heavily accented, a shade imperious.

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘Yes. I’m planning to head north tomorrow. There’s a group of children in an orphanage at Battambang that’s been hit by guerrilla crossfire. Our convoy wants to get medical supplies there.’

  ‘I know about them,’ said Jessie. ‘I don’t think you’ll find many of them left.’

  ‘We’ve got enough supplies to set up a camp hospital for amputees.’

  ‘You won’t get through,’ Jessie said.

  ‘We’ve got protection from the Vietnamese. We are the Red Cross, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll mean much to the Khmers if they come across you. Is this your first time out here?’

  Dr Gerhardt hesitated. ‘I need a driver, that’s all. One of mine is down with malaria.’

  ‘You could have mine,’ Jessie said, ‘but you’ll have to wait another day. You need to start travelling at dawn but I’m not going to break curfew tonight to find him.’

  ‘What’s the catch? Why would you offer me your driver?’

  ‘Because I could come with you.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Annette Gerhardt. ‘Not that. This is tough work.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jessie. ‘I know about that. I spent two years in ambulance choppers in ’Nam. You might find me useful, I can use a tourniquet. And Kiem’s a good driver. He was a long-distance bus driver before all the killing started and he can interpret as well.’

  Annette tapped her fingers on the edge of the bar, before beckoning over a young man, thin and fair, with hollow blazing eyes. ‘My assistant, Donald; he’s an Australian. He carries mine-detection equipment. I need to talk to him before I make a decision.’

  Donald had elbowed his way through the crowd at the bar. The women journos looked like stick insects, poking their cigarettes in the air and using their hands for expression. The men were resigned almost, detached as if they were already in danger and knew there was no escape. Jessie supposed that, to newcomers, she looked the same as her colleagues, and really she was little different. Hungrier for a story of her own, perhaps. Some of them got lazy, dined out on other people’s work. Or there came a point when you had been under fire once too often, and you either did nothing or went over the top. She remembered a time like that in Da Nang. Instead of covering the defence of the air base, she had got carried away and made contact with a group of Viet Cong anxious to tell her their story. Suddenly, in the middle of it, she was fleeing into the jungle alongside them. That had been years before and, thinking herself lucky to be alive after she’d escaped, she had gone back to England and applied for a tutor’s job at Sussex, where she had taken her degree. When she found herself in front of the students on the first morning of her new job, she had looked at them without speaking for a long time, then walked out of the room. Her nostrils remembered the smell of explosives and the scent of frangipani in the jungle air, and she felt less afraid of the East than she did of the classroom.

  She saw, at a glance, that Donald was like her, scared but insatiably attracted to danger. It was written all over him. When they had been introduced, he said, ‘So you’re a Kiwi?’

  ‘I was born there,’ she said cautiously. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘What does he mean?’ Annette asked her.

  ‘It means I grew up in New Zealand.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have picked it.’

  Donald snorted. ‘Spot it a mile off.’

  ‘A good little country,’ Annette said approvingly. Condescending, Jessie thought; could she be getting thin-skinned? ‘Hard people. Perhaps we could wait another day. Your man will be coming in the morning for you?’

  ‘Kiem? I gave him the day off, I plan to touch some bases I have here, before I go north. I was planning to go up the river towards Kompong Chhnang on Thursday, if the worst came to the worst, and then across to Battambang.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Donald.

  ‘Everybody’s looking for Pol Pot of course.’ Trying to keep it light. ‘Not that I think he’s there — he’s somewhere up in the mountains towards the border. But there are better scents the further north you

  ‘Crazy Kiwi girl. You’d be better off with us,’ Annette said. ‘Can you find this man Kiem tomorrow?’

  Jessie sighed. ‘I can try. You’ve seen what this town’s like. It’s a real maze — so many shacks have sprung up on the edges of town, and they all look pretty much alike.’

  ‘Do you trust Kiem?’ asked Donald.

  ‘He’ll want to come back to Phnom Penh, if that’s what you mean. He’s got family.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right,’ Annette said. ‘Risk their lives for a few dollars.’

  ‘Then they’ll do it for someone with fewer scruples than you,’ Jessie said shortly.

  Jessie rose soon after dawn, but not before the city was stirring. A man with a battered cyclo was at her elbow offering his services before she had had time to cross the street.

  ‘I’ll need you two, perhaps three hours. Very hot. Can you last that long?’

  The man’s hands trembled over the flare of a cigarette.

  ‘Take me to the markets, then we eat. All right? Food, to make you strong. Go all day, perhaps. Many dollars.’

  He held up his hands, five fingers.

  ‘Two, okay?’

  ‘Okay. We’ll find Kiem and I’ll give you three dollars. You know where I can find Kiem?’

  ‘Maybe.’ But she could see he was already formulating an idea of where he would take her. It would mean a long ride around the city, but she wouldn’t necessarily find what she was looking for. The drivers talked to each other while they looked and waited for fares outside the club. A search would have to be seen to be done. The way the cyclo driver was pedalling gave her hope.

  At the market, Jessie stopped the cyclo driver at a food stall and ordered noodles for them both. She squatted beside him on the pavement when the food came, picking it over and deciding it was a bad risk, thin and watery and probably floating with amoebae. If she was going to travel tomorrow, she could do without dysentery.

  ‘How far?’ she asked the man. ‘Where is Kiem?’

  ‘Perhaps far.’ Now that he had eaten, the cyclo driver was more evasive. Bad move, she thought, and yet that was the very thing she sought to avoid — easy power over him. She had wanted the frail man simply to be comfortable, but she saw it was unlikely that he had the strength to take her much further.

  ‘Which way? Tell me which way, and I’ll pay you two, maybe three dollars, and let you go home.’

  ‘Four, ma’am, four dollars.’

  ‘You tell me where to go, I’ll give you four.’ Because she could see he was too ill to take her any further. Holding the money where he could see it, but tightly.

  He drew a rough diagram in the dust beside them. She studied it, committing it to memory. ‘Sure?’

  When he nodded, she said softly, ‘You’d better be right. Nobody at the FCC will go with you any more if you’re making it up.’

  ‘I’m not making it up, ma’am. That is where Kiem goes to be with wife. Okay.’

  Jessie was knee-deep in dust before she had gone more than a hundred metres. People closed round her, imploring her to stop and feed them too. This was the year of famine in Cambodia. The year before there had been nobody left in the fields to plant rice. So many men had disappeared that women were banding together and calling themselves families, krom samaki or solidarity groups, gathering to plant rice. But then they went into the fields and their legs were blown off when they stepped on landmines. Aid had begun to trickle in from the outside world, as images appeared in news
papers and on television screens abroad, of starving and destitute Cambodians collapsing besides the roadsides or struggling across the borders. Perhaps things were better than a year ago, but when she looked round, Jessie wondered if, after all, she was on a futile mission. What was she really here for, to get a scoop, or to save the world? And she didn’t know if she could do either. Somewhere around the end of the sixties she had seen a movie called Medium Cool, about a news photographer covering the Chicago riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, who had got involved with his subject. It was one of those slightly grainy art-house movies that most people forgot but it stayed with her. The moral dimension. How far does one go? Jessie still asked herself this during long restless nights. Since she was a teenager, she had never slept easily. A young man, crouching beside the street, looked at her with beseeching eyes, his hand out, and her stomach lurched. He rubbed his stomach. ‘Hungry,’ he said. She slid him some riels, enough for a bowl of rice, knowing she would regret it. Within seconds, she was being mobbed, hands clutching her clothes, wrestling her to the ground.

  ‘Get in here,’ said a man’s voice roughly. ‘For Christ’s sake, hurry up.’

  She pulled herself free, throwing herself through a shop entrance. The words ‘Lou’s Lot’ were painted in rough letters above the door. A man stood in the shadows, not moving to help her.

  ‘You better shut the door, Jessie.’ A familiar voice.

  It was in a bar, too, that Jessie had last seen Belle Hunter.

  She’d been under fire on and off for seven years and the editor on her desk said it was time she stopped; she really would go crazy if she didn’t get some rest. ‘Look at you,’ he said, when he took her out to lunch in London. She had grabbed a fork like a weapon when a waiter dropped a plate.

  ‘Nerves,’ she said, apologising. One day not long before, outside Saigon under a white hot sky, a bomb had flipped the journo beside her into the air, landing him head down, flattened like a squashed pumpkin among a platoon of soldiers who had suffered similar fates. The ground was strewn with shattered helmets and the detritus of human remains. She had escaped with shrapnel wounds in her left calf muscle.

  ‘Go home for a bit. I don’t want you walking out on us again.’ Because after the failed attempt at teaching she had gone back again and again, to Vientiane, Saigon again, Hanoi. Now she was due to go to Phnom Penh, the hill of Penh.

  ‘This is home. I live here. Well, sort of.’

  ‘Never think of New Zealand?’

  ‘Oh shit, yes, of course. But I try not to.’

  ‘Sometimes you talk like a New Zealander,’ he said, and laughed.

  Going back to New Zealand felt more alarming than shellfire in Vietnam, but she did it anyway.

  At first Jessie hadn’t known Belle, sitting on a high stool in the house bar of the hotel where she had stopped for the night. She remembered her as a pink and white girl with lashes so fair you would think she didn’t have any and that skinned look from having her hair pulled back. But this Belle had a lemony yellow tint in her shoulder-length hair, dark fringed eyes and fingernails so long they curved. When Jessie saw her from the far side of the room, she was resting an elbow against the bar as she sipped a gin and tonic, silver bracelets tinkling when she raised her arm. The tip of her tongue flickered along her top lip. Flirting with the barman. She wore a tight shiny red suit with the skirt riding high on her thighs. With a little snort of recognition, she called out: ‘Jessie San-dle.’

  The barman looked disappointed when he saw Jessie, turned away.

  ‘I don’t believe it’s you,’ Jessie said. The hotel was an hour south of the town. Jessie, tired from driving, hadn’t wanted to complete the journey there, not just yet. Several times during the course of her trip she had paused, pulling up to look across the desert at the mountains, as if in doing so she might recapture that first time she travelled north. As she stood by the road, watching, she thought she saw herself riding by in a bus. And as the memory returned of the night she had travelled back in the cab of a logging truck, through fog and darkness, away from the town, she shivered and moved on.

  ‘Belle Hunter.’

  ‘Clever old you. How did you know I’d gone back to my maiden name?’

  ‘I didn’t. So you got married then?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Not to Wallace?’

  ‘For a while.’

  A warning sounded in Jessie’s head, reminding her that she was not a reporter now. ‘That was brave of you,’ she said, for want of anything better.

  ‘Brave of him, I suppose. Poor Wallace. He’d have done anything for me.’ The door wasn’t completely shut.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Oh well, you know, a couple of kids, pigeon pair, Shantelle and Wally Junior, but he gets called Junior. I’ve got some pics. Would you like to see them?’

  ‘Love to,’ Jessie said, peering in the dim light at a gawky pair of adolescents. The older of the two was a girl looking much like her mother, a darker version of the Belle of old, not the woman sitting before her, swinging her legs. There was a boldness in her smile. The boy was thickset, with a gap between his front teeth.

  ‘I miss them,’ Belle said, after an awkward silence. ‘They went with Wallace after we split. We lasted five years, which I guess is a miracle. If you believe in miracles, which after a while I stopped doing.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d already stopped when I met you,’ Jessie said, surprised at knowing this, because she had hardly thought of Belle Hunter in years, just the consequences of what she’d done. Suddenly it seemed obvious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Belle slowly, putting the photographs back in her wallet, with an air of embarrassment. ‘Well, I did think I’d found a miracle once, but you know some things are too good to be true.’

  ‘Lou?’

  ‘Never mind. What are you up to anyway? Did you settle down?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m a war correspondent. I just travel around.’

  ‘Like me,’ exclaimed Belle. ‘That’s what I do. I’m in home appliances. I’m giving a demo here tomorrow — would you like to come?’

  ‘I think I’ll be gone by then, I’m heading north. But thanks anyway.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Belle looked resigned, as if she had expected Jessie to turn her down. ‘Let me buy you a drink anyway.’

  ‘Did they ever find Lou? I heard he went missing?’

  Belle looked at her curiously, unable to absorb Jessie’s long absence, and how little she knew of what had passed after she left the town where they met. ‘I never heard much about that,’ Belle said, after a pause.

  ‘Do you think he’s alive?’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ Belle said. ‘Tell me about your wars, Jessie.’

  ‘They never found a body.’ Hester’s mouth was pinched around a line of pins. She was making a wedding dress that had to be altered within forty-eight hours, because the bride was pregnant. Same old story — silly girl. Hester was sorry, but she really couldn’t stop working, though if Jessie wanted to put the kettle on, she could make them both a cup of tea. When she opened the door her expression was unfriendly. ‘You could have written,’ was the first thing she said. ‘About Owen.’

  ‘My mother had died.’

  ‘Everybody had died,’ Hester said, relenting and letting her in. The old house hadn’t changed since the last time Jessie was there. Only Ruth Hagley had gone.

  ‘She’s in a rest home,’ Hester said briskly, when Jessie enquired. ‘She’s far better off.’ Hester was in charge of the house now. She made wedding dresses, as a business. Weddings were the coming thing, and she was in on the ground floor. ‘Things have changed you know, Jessie. People plan weddings like proper e-vents. They used to be so home-made.’ It was odd the way people used emphasis, as if to convince themselves of the changes taking place. ‘They use wedding consultants like me.’

  ‘About the Messengers,’ Jessie said, when the tea was poured.

 
‘Well, you probably heard, Lou vanished after the accident. Freda and Evelyn are long gone. They went to California. I’ve heard that Evelyn did well. She’s an economist. One of my clients saw her in Time magazine — she’s working for Reagan now. Fancy him running for president.’

  ‘Good God, tax cuts for the rich and all that.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that. I don’t have time for politics.’

  ‘But I do. I’m interested in the way economies justify deficits in order to fund wars. Perhaps Evelyn could tell me how it’s done.’

  ‘Jessie,’ said Hester firmly, ‘I don’t care if Mickey Mouse runs the world, Freda and Evelyn left town without saying goodbye, just like you did. Like most people for that matter. Besides, my client only thought it was Evelyn. Her name isn’t Messenger now.’

  ‘And Lou was never found?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard of. Well, his car was all fixed up for him to kill himself, but it seems that he didn’t. But he never touched his bank accounts.’

  ‘You’d have thought they’d have waited to hear what happened to him.’

  ‘Why? Why would Freda stick around? People were pointing the finger at her too. I can tell you, Jessie, after that accident I pretty nearly went round the twist. Have you ever married? No, I thought not. Well, I’m a widow, remember? I had someone and I lost him when he was brand-new as husbands go. Thanks to Lou Messenger.’

  ‘Did they look for him?’

  ‘Of course they looked for him. The police were searching for weeks. What stupid questions you ask.’ Hester’s face was flushed an angry red.

  ‘I’m sorry. I should go.’

  ‘Perhaps you should. I don’t know why you want to rake over old coals. You seem to have done all right for yourself, with all these trips of yours.’

  ‘It’s not exactly like that.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Well, I don’t know about that. You and Violet Trench, you weren’t people who stayed around.’