He thinks of it this way: with her spirit yet guiding him, and the name on the sign next to the buzzer the moral bottom line, John B guarantees the well-being of any girl who shows up at Safe Shelter, still more widely known as Mother Ginger. (Their policy? If a child asks to be admitted, she needs to be, at once.) There have been square-offs, loads of them, curses and threats and trucks with tinted glass staked out in front, knives brandished in the air, and pistols, hidden beneath shirts, flashed in warning. Once an actual shot was fired at his head by a B-kok hoodlum under the impression he owned one fourteen-year-old. He can handle all that, and does, thank you very much, even the bullet whizzing past. But beyond the shelter gate—the squalid district surrounding the village, the lawless province encasing the district—he can guarantee little and promise less. Inside, he is anvil-skulled, pigeon-chested John B, a cliché of the British underclass at its most feral. Don’t fuck with him, or his charges. Outside, he is nothing and nobody, and that, alas, is that.
Little new in any of these reflections, he grants, moody thoughts triggered by the supplicant at the buzzer late last night, and his failure to fall back asleep once the girl had been settled into a spare bed. Nonetheless, he is sharing them with the kitchen staff while he chops. Among those purported to be listening are his wife, Hom, formerly known as Springroll, though you try calling her by her Patpong nom de guerre, and Mrs. Chum, the Cambodian kitchen chief, whose English still isn’t always up to the task of either his accent or, as she—and others, true—like to complain, his sprays of argot, ripe as a pepper-bloody chopper. “If you’d only listen, Mrs. Chum!” he occasionally chides her, well aware of how many of the crew, Hom most prominently, have trouble with his speech, and don’t always attend to his every word. Of which there are plenty, words spoken by John B, some cohering into stories, others gathering into sermons, a few spiralling off into rants. The man is a storyteller and sermonizer equally. Why not, if you’ve a tale that isn’t just your own sad excuse for a life lived in squalor, but rather one for all, of all, us fallen creatures.
Over by the older girls’ dormitory, Sameth Chum is waiting on the new arrival, sketchpad, as ever, in hand. Everyone is waiting for her to emerge and explain her dramatic appearance at four in the morning. The cab driver from Chiang Mai, who must have thought long about taking a fare into the hills east of the city at that hour, idling until his passenger roused the night watchman, had said nothing. John B has figured out who she is now, and although he certainly remembers her lawyer mother from some years back—exactly the kind of confident, attractive Western woman who didn’t bother pretending around scum like him, and whom he, in turn, had once upon a time longed to smack, or even violate, out of low-self-esteem rage—he can’t claim distinct memories of the daughter who tagged along one trip. But Hom remembers her, as does Mrs. Chum. As for the cook’s son, Sameth/Sam, he apparently never forgot the girl. Now seventeen, and a potential cat in the henhouse, Sam is in fact gentle and thoughtful, a friend and part-time art teacher of those same hens. According to his mother, the stoic Khmer has been quietly pining for the Hong Kong refugee, awaiting her return all the while, and has done so with the improbable hope of the young, and their naive faith in happy endings. And now, improbably, naively, here she is! Her passport, which she surrendered on arrival, reveals that Xixi Sarah Kwok, born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, turns sixteen tomorrow. That fact doesn’t help clarify anything.
But then Xixi Sarah Kwok herself is curled bony knees to chin in a chair, sleep still shading her face, sipping tea and smiling. Fighting-a-blush Sam lurks nearby, watching but not yet sketching her, Mrs. Chum scrambles her eggs with rice for breakfast, and Hom, who only bothers to inform him later in the afternoon about the online Bangkok Post article, which solves a few mysteries without really explaining anything, fusses over the teen. Prettiness aside, is Xixi Kwok so special, or is her appearance on the very day that Christ likewise made his big splash being taken by these good ladies as augury? Women, he thinks—there is no talking to them about their babies, even those near grown-up, with their own independent impulses, equal parts light and dark, overlay and undergrowth, already formed.
Speaking of which, he is hard at it, the boilerplate sermon he feels obliged, and quite enjoys, delivering straight away, a little for its shock value, a lot more to allay natural worries about why his variety of cat, closer to a full-grown Bengal tiger, has been let loose among the shelter hens. As far as he can tell, nothing has proven too adult, or too threatening, for her tender ears. An interesting one, he decides, admiring her irrepressible dark eyes, and not your usual princess in the tower, her hair only lately let down. Or rather, given the evidence that she has very recently, and none too expertly, cut off most of her locks, she is the princess turned female monk, abandoning Daddy’s prison tower for the monastery.
“A predator I was, make no mistake,” John B says, forearm muscles slithering with each imprint of blade on wood, “roaming the alleys of Patpong seeking low-cost snatch. Girls were so starved—for food, literally, or cash for yaba—that by midnight, with no other johns in sight, they’d do me for the price of a meal or a hit. I knew it, and used it, and being forever high on skag, glorious raw opium harvested from these very hills, fancied myself a ladies’ man, can you believe it, rather than a lower-than-low-life farang, a stinking, diseased junkie, so lost to my true self I wouldn’t have recognized skin-headed, tattooed John Barlow in a photograph. It was only after I fell further, sank deeper, into my self-induced misery, my woeful, delusional ego, that I, me, the exploiter, the right prick, got taken in by the very ladies I’d been using and abusing. Most notably that one there,” he adds, gesturing towards Hom, “one of a dozen Khmer girls, from the same village up near the Laotian border, sharing a single room in the metropolis. They’d been the fairly lucky ones too, sold by their parents to B-kok pimps with the expectation of them firing their wages home for fridges and microwaves for the relations. That’s what set off the selling of tribe females, I shit you not—electrification in the remote areas, and the hunger for appliances! Imagine what new levels of slavery everyone wanting an Xbox or iPhone must be triggering. And working the streets in Patpong at sixteen was better than being chained together in a sweatshop or, the honest-to-God nightmare, imprisoned in a makeshift cathouse on some construction site, which is the fate of too many Burmese girls, who are docile and can’t speak the language. Springroll, as I knew her then—sorry, pet—Springroll, and Lychee, and Cat, and all these other street birds, although they were the victims and I the victimizer, for no good reason except that they are good souls, good folk, and are not docile, not on your life, they took me in, cooked me meals, and helped me kick. Me, sharing a room with a dozen juicy girls, some of them with their own bad yaba habits and two, at least, HIV positive. I slept with a few, I did, couldn’t help it—you Thai ladies are such bits of fluff—but that wasn’t the—”
“John B …,” Hom says.
“That wasn’t the point, as I was about to say. We became friends, and I started to see what a disgrace I was, and while I basically deserved to be castrated, my todger on a stick and my head on a pike, my only redemption was to stop hurting and start helping instead. Which I did, in Patpong itself at the start, me and Hom and a few of the other girls opening a secret safe house for those who wanted free of their debts to the pimps and clubs, and then, after we were found out—some little Doris, hooked on skag as well, grassed on us—driven from the area by gangs menacing knives and handguns, with myself earning, proud as stripes on an officer, this scar across my cheek from defending all the Lychees and Cats that I could. And so here I am, here a handful of us are, the survivors of that bloody eviction, and so help me, Ms. Xixi, any child who makes it to that gate out there and who stays inside this compound comes under my watch, and no harm comes to her, and only good things slowly, steadily happen. Except over my dead, rotting corpse, that is.”
The girl, pupils swimming in unshed tears, ponders his dead, rotting corpse. �
��Wow,” she finally says. Another clarification not pending.
“Everyone getting hungry,” Hom says. “You should change.”
But John B, unsettled by her stillness, her expression as serene and sloe-eyed as any Sam Chum sketch of a character from anime, resolves to depart from script and get down to what is really wrong. This rarer, plaintive John B sermon is generally triggered by the finality of an Asian nightfall, too many cans of Singha Beer, and involuntary excavations of his life pre–Mother Ginger, all the way back to Hackney, why not, and a mom who died of sadness and fags, and an old man who offed himself with the drink, basically, and other such yadayadayada. But today the preaching—honestly, it’s closer to pleading, praying, a kind of pre-emptive benediction—feels worthy of daylight, and sobriety, and an audience of those good ladies, plus Sam.
“No divisions, no borders, but one,” he says. “Either you’re a force of light or dark, the overlay or undergrowth. Fuck off with the supposed divides between us—rich and poor, white and non-white, first and third. They’re bullshit, and a waste of everyone’s precious time on this earth. The only divide that matters is between those who get it and those who don’t. Let me tell you straight. We only think we’re individuals whose feelings and thoughts are our very own personality turds. We only think we’re free, and that the universe has a unique plan for us, because we’re the exception. Whereas the truth is the opposite. No me, no you, no exceptions, no solo destinies. Just an us, a huge collective whole, seven billion car wrecks of perpetual yearnings and needs, seven billion collapsing buildings of unappeasable, incoherent desires. Unless, unless,” he says, certain now that a wave of the chopper has sprinkled pepper juice into his eyes, and so is triggering the tears that the teenager across from him should be weeping, “we face up to the lovely, freeing fact that we are all one organism, one experience, with nothing but our illusions and delusions keeping us separate, alone, and miserable of character and, for the most part, behaviour.”
“You drink much Singha already, John?” Hom says.
“You know that I haven’t,” he answers. “And thus ends the sermon for today. Except for this …” Turning to the girl, the chopper on the table, he opens his arms and smiles, aware that many find even his crooked-toothed grin alarming, the predator feint preceding the pitiless kill. “‘Our task,’” John B quotes, “‘must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.’ Einstein, Albert,” he adds. “Frizzy-haired bloke.”
Smiling back at him, Xixi Kwok cocks her head.
“E equals MC squared?” he says, to no effect.
“Your Santa suit,” his wife says. “The children are waiting.”
“I’ll broil in it, as usual,” he replies, moving to the sink to wash his hands. Rare for him to feel sheepish about anything he has pronounced, especially stuff so bedrock and heartfelt. Again, it is the girl herself, he suspects, and it isn’t only because, yes, a decade ago in the streets of Patpong he’d have done her, if she’d been selling herself cheap enough, and thought little on the human disaster implicit in the exchange. No doubt John B will be cremated and poured into an urn before he expels his shame, and good for him for keeping the current alive, an ethical hundred volts applied to his daily conduct as bone-rattling, and head-clearing, as the sound of a church bell to the person yanking the cord below. But the sheepishness derives more from her specifically, those eyes and that face, a comic book heroine meets a Valley Girl, an unexpected pop Christmas gift to the shelter.
“The moon was full last night,” she suddenly says, apropos, as far as he can tell, of nothing.
“Was it?”
“The taxi driver said he found Mother Ginger only because it was so bright out. This building was lit up, like God was fully watching.”
John B waits.
“Making sure I got here safely,” Xixi Kwok says.
“Is that why you’ve come? To be safe?”
“And less sad,” she answers, chewing her lip. “I was sad in Bangkok.”
He has an idea. “Santa has an elf to pass out the gifts. A happy elf, naturally, like you are now. Will you lend a hand, Xixi Kwok?”
“Cool,” she says.
Sameth, still squatting against the post and still not sketching, throws him such a whimpering look that he has to keep himself from patting the boy on the head. What was it the poet said—the heart, it is an organ of fire. Aye.
“You too, my bold lad,” John B says.
Next morning, another hosanna of a hill country day—the new arrival has brought the weather with her, the mini Mother Gingers are convinced, reason enough to bake her a cake and prepare a feast, two birthdays in a row—John B, having received glowing reports of Xixi’s second night as resident, her brushing the younger girls’ hair and reading them books at bedtime, and then up with first light to help Mrs. Chum in the kitchen, help Saweet in the garden, help set the table for breakfast; with all this to mull over, and the flurry of emails and stern phone calls that he and Hom have been dealing with since shortly after her miraculous conception, he yet again finds himself choosing his words carefully, crafting some of them in advance, before this skin ‘n’ bones teen in the Hello Kitty shirt and shorts. He joins her in the courtyard behind the main building, on the bench near the spirit shrine, with Sam, naturally, not far off, ready and willing, he thinks, to garland his puppy love in gold leaf and prayer beads.
“We’ve been contacted by your mom,” John B says.
“Gloria?”
“Isn’t her name Leah?”
“I want Gloria. She’s my Excelsis-Major.”
He nods. “She must be the amah I’ve been hearing so much about. Your mother wants you to know that she tried reaching Gloria when you went missing. No luck so far,” he says. He has been warned to tread cautiously.
“She’s busy with Miguel. He’s in trouble. Her other boy, Jesus, is the best player on his soccer team.”
“Leah hopes to get here within thirty-six hours.”
“Not my dad?
“No mention of him.”
A few seconds pass before she speaks again. “Mom turns fifty on January nineteenth. My sister says she’s going through menopause.”
“Don’t I know about that!”
“Are you going through menopause, John B?”
On catching the flash in her eyes, he grins. “She’s flying over from Blighty, of all places, and will be bringing your medicine. Are you … managing without it?” he asks, unsure of his footing.
“I had one yesterday and one today.”
“Episodes?” John B says, having learned the polite term from the mother. Her directness is unexpected, and keeps him off-balance.
“Seizures,” Xixi replies. “Petit-mal epilepsy.”
“Poor doll.”
“I think I had the first seizure while you were chopping peppers. Did I miss much?”
“Now hold on a second …”
“Hom says I didn’t. She says she wishes she could blank out during your sermons.”
“You told the missus?”
“And Sam.”
He needs to sit, but first asks permission to join her on the bench. Everything about John B—the anvil head and scar, the East End accent and diction, and certainly the tattoos distressing both forearms and biceps, as well as across the chest and back—usually gives a serious first fright to newcomers, especially the young birds. Yet this wee girl is right away slagging him with the affection she might show a feckless uncle? Who is Xixi Sarah Kwok?
“I want him to sketch me while I’m having one,” she says.
“Why so?”
“Because it’s me too. Anyway, can’t I stay here for a while longer? Maybe Mom can wait a few weeks. She’s a very busy person, and has to help men get the goddamn job done.”
“She’s pining for you, Xixi. And you don’t belong at Mother Ginger. At least, not as a resident.”
Amazingly,
that remark threatens to release the pent-up worry—or is it simply emotion?—in her eyes.
“Lucky you are not to be homeless, and busted up,” he says. “It’s in your gaze. You’re still whole, still intact.”
“But I’m see-through.”
“You are?”
“Mos def.”
He gives the comment serious consideration. “All of us are, I suppose, after a point. But you’ll still never be like those poor girls.”
“It’s because I haven’t had it done to me,” she says.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know. But it makes a huge difference. There’s a girl named Mary … or who could be named Mary … in Hong Kong …” Twice she reaches for strands of hair that are no longer there. Another kind of memory, he suspects, stubbornly occupies the forefront of her thoughts.
“Then you understand,” he says.
Planet Lolita Page 18
