The Rainy Season Read online

  I take a couple of photos and as I’m putting away my camera, newspaper boy approaches. He shoves my arm playfully. ‘Hello, Madam. You buy newspaper from me!’

  ‘Of course.’

  I take the paper and he pockets the money then we stand together, watching the men building. ‘Please you give to me one cigarette,’ he says, after a while.

  ‘No!’ But then he scowls, narrowing his sparkly black eyes, and I relent and pass him the packet. He puts a cigarette behind each ear. ‘Will you smoke them?’ I ask.

  ‘No, Madam, smoking no good!’ He laughs, he is quick. ‘I give them my brother.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name Pham.’

  ‘I’m Ella.’

  ‘Yes, I know already. Miss Ella, from Uc.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He starts to wander away then calls back, ‘Madam, you Number One, next week you buy from me!’

  ‘Pham, I always buy from you,’ I say, rolling my eyes; forgetting, for just a second, that next week I’ll be gone.

  At sunset I go to the Smiling Café and order a coconut with double rum. I am wearing jeans and a new green T-shirt with a panda and Chinese characters I can’t read. I take out the itinerary and lay it flat on the table. I realise that this is the souvenir of my trip: all the places I didn’t get to, all the things that will never happen.

  ‘Miss Ella look sad,’ Chanh says, bringing my drink.

  ‘That’s just my broken heart.’ I sound like a B-grade cowgirl. I take a slug from the coconut and think, with a jolt, that I’m just a year older than Mum was when my father walked out on her. Is this me turning into her?

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ Chanh says. ‘My heart same-same like you – broken many time.’ He is sombre, for a few seconds, before he starts telling me about the handsome Australian he met at a disco last night. He describes the funny way this guy danced, with his elbows out, like a chicken. He does a demonstration and we both laugh until the boss shouts at him to get back to work.

  A guy at the next table has been watching us. He smiles at me. He’s good-looking in that blond, translucent kind of way. Eyes sky blue.

  I put the itinerary back into the guidebook and take another long drink. A few minutes later the blond guy approaches. He asks if I’d like to join him and his friends for dinner. His name is Jesper.

  I go and sit at their table. His two friends are equally polite and blue-eyed; they are all Danish. It turns out they only arrived this morning and they are excited about the traffic and the children selling postcards and the people, who seem so friendly. Suddenly I feel like I’ve been here forever.

  We share spring rolls, cha gio, and beef with lemongrass; I introduce them to coconut and rum. They ask where they can change money and I suggest the jeweller’s up the road, it gives a better rate than the bank. They want to know about bargaining and beggars and the embargo. I talk like I know what I’m talking about. I don’t mention I never even made it out of Saigon.

  Then Jesper’s friend says they’re thinking of going to the Apocalypse Now Bar. They’ve heard it’s very interesting. Would I like to come?

  I hesitate, and then say yes.

  Jesper and I share a cyclo, his friends ride in another. They shout things to each other in Danish as we glide along. I inhale deeply the now-familiar night air of petrol fumes and street sewage and strange foods, as if it were a delicious and strengthening tonic; I’m half-drunk and the billboards are flashing.

  We clamber out. Apocalypse Now is scrawled across red neon in the Coppola script. We walk into the packed, smoky, black cave and it is like entering a time capsule from the late ’60s. The Doors’ ‘Break on Through’ is playing so loudly the whole room is vibrating. I stare, wide-eyed, at the white graffiti on black paint – messages from made-up GIs with names like Jack-The Clap-Jenkins. Machine guns and hand grenades are mounted behind the bar, and above our heads, a painted chopper hovers upside down, its propellers the spinning blades of the ceiling fan. Red paint drips like blood down the walls. The whole effect is monstrous and crude and yet I feel, at once, completely at home; like I have landed at last. I imagine my father, twenty-one years old, walking into a place like this. What might he have been feeling? A rush of adrenaline? Rage? Sadness? Might he have been thinking of us? Of me?

  Jesper orders a round of tequila slammers and we sit on rickety stools sucking lime and salt. A large, grey-haired westerner balances a young Vietnamese woman on his lap like a doll. I wonder if he is a Vietnam vet. I try not to stare at him. Jesper shouts questions into my ear: What is my career in Australia? Where else have I travelled in Asia? The questions seem pointless but I shout back answers and he lets me know that he’s studying economics and hopes one day to work for the United Nations.

  At the end of the bar there’s a pool table and a dance floor. I notice a woman standing next to the pool table, wearing the most full-on clothes – a red halter top, tiny Uncle Sam shorts and glittering red platform shoes. She’s got blonde cropped hair and is deep in conversation with a Vietnamese guy with a ponytail.

  Jesper follows my gaze then shouts. ‘Do you play this game?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I do not play well either. Shall we play together?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We play against the ponytail guy and the blonde. She’s American and her voice, as we clarify house rules, is low and husky. She has beautiful big eyes, like choppy green seas.

  They beat us and we go back to the bar. A few minutes later, she pulls up beside me and orders a whisky. ‘Honey, I’m having a bad fucking day,’ she says out of the side of her mouth.

  ‘Really? I’m having a bad year,’ I confess. She knocks her glass against mine.

  ‘See that guy?’ she points to her pool partner. ‘He’s just let me know we can’t see each other any more because his wife saw us together last week. Man, he never mentioned he was fucking married.’

  I offer her a cigarette. She takes it and I light it for her. ‘I need some air,’ she mutters.

  I tell Jesper I’ll be back and, on an impulse, follow her outside. I sit down beside her in the gutter. Her platforms glitter in the dark.

  ‘How long have you been seeing him?’

  ‘Three months. I can’t believe my fucking luck.’ I think she is going to cry but then she laughs. ‘Ah, to hell with it, right? Surely even I can do better than this.’

  I laugh too. ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘I’m Suze.’ She puts out her hand and I shake it; it’s small and strong.

  ‘Ella.’

  She rolls a joint, nimbly, barely looking at her fingers. I ask her how long she’s been in Vietnam and she says she’s been here six months and works as a journalist at the Saigon Times. She came to get away from shit back home in LA – a bad relationship, debt; came to start over. She says she’s never chosen men wisely. We laugh some more.

  We pass the joint back and forth; I feel myself slowly melting into the night, all the edges softening. I should be disorientated, sitting stoned in a Saigon gutter with a kooky American chick, but I feel at this moment, given everything, that right here is the best place in the world to be. I tell Suze about Tim, and about Lisa. I try to remember the exact wording of his fax because it suddenly seems hilarious. It’s been a great five years, Ella, and I wish you the very best – with everything. Like the message on a card when someone is leaving for a new job. We laugh and laugh; it comes spluttering out of me.

  After a while we wander back inside. Suze introduces me to her one-eyed housemate, Dave, a sub-editor at the paper. His good eye is brown but the glass one is aquamarine. He tells me, with a straight face, that it helps him keep perspective. We drink more, smoke another joint. I haven’t felt this good in a long time; I don’t even mind the way Suze calls me ‘honey’. At some point, Jesper comes over and tries to join the conversation but he has become boring beyond belief, and after a while he goes back to his friends.

  ‘Mrs Robinson’ comes on; I
remember this music from my childhood; blood drips down the black walls. My father is missing but I am here – in Vietnam. We dance. We drink and smoke and laugh and dance and I am happy and numb.

  Just before dawn we go and have pho, me, Suze and Dave, slowly sobering as the sun rises. A huddle of cyclo drivers are standing by their vehicles, chatting and laughing. A woman walks past in the half-light with two baskets of green mangoes swinging from a yoke balanced across her shoulders.

  ‘I love it here,’ I say, lighting my last Boy Boy Boy. ‘I don’t want to go back.’

  I know it’s a lie. All I want is to go back, to the life I had, but I know I can’t and that there is nothing before me but a gaping abyss. Here, at least, I can take refuge in the chaos, in the disfigured beauty of the city.

  ‘Don’t go,’ Dave drawls. ‘Stay awhile.’

  ‘Could I just do that?’

  ‘Why not, honey?’ Suze says. ‘This is Vietnam – anything’s possible.’

  Easy Vietnamese

  SEVEN

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  I snap awake to a thumping on the door in the dead of night; I spring out from under the net, feel on the wall for the light switch. It doesn’t come on – the power must be out. Shit!

  ‘Open door! We are police! Open door!’

  I pull on clothes in the faint moonlight, legs loose with fear.

  Two policemen in olive green uniforms are standing in the corridor with torches – and big glossy guns. One is shining a light onto my passport. The large gold watch on his wrist shows it’s twenty past two in the morning.

  ‘How long you stay Vietnam?’ the younger one barks without introduction.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I stammer. ‘Maybe four more weeks.’

  ‘Where you go now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘After Ho Chi Minh City, where you go now?’

  ‘Back to Australia.’

  ‘Why you come Vietnam?’

  ‘Is there something wrong with my visa?’

  The older man shakes his head impatiently and the younger one repeats: ‘Why you come Vietnam?’

  ‘For a holiday. I came … to see Vietnam.’

  There is a pause and then the older man nods, once, and that’s it: it’s over. They stride off down the corridor.

  I close the door and bolt it. There is banging at the next door and then muffled voices. I wonder if they are looking for prostitutes or drugs. I lie back down but my heart is hammering so I get up and use my lighter to find the half-full bottle of vodka. I pour some into a little chipped teacup and take it out to the balcony.

  The night air is thick as treacle. I try to breathe it in deeply. I remind myself that this is peacetime and I am in no danger. I shakily light a cigarette. So I am a smoker again, I think, after years of good health. Just like that. Great! I sip the vodka; it makes me grimace. My heart starts to slow.

  As the fear subsides, I think about the policeman’s questions, my feeble answers. I feel like I’ve been caught malingering. It’s been two weeks since I extended my visa and cancelled my ticket home but apart from meeting Hugh for coffee I haven’t done anything, been anywhere. Each day is the same: I eat noodle soup and drink beer and walk, in ever-widening circles. I have no idea where I’ll go next, no plan whatsoever, and my meagre savings are fast running out.

  A man on the street below is sweeping by the light of a kerosene lamp. Back and forward, calm and slow, like a metronome. I sit in the dark, watching him, until he reaches the corner, where he stops and pulls something from his shirt pocket. For one loaded second I imagine he’s pulling out a gun, a grenade, I wait for the explosion, but then there is a flicker as he leans down to poke a stick of burning incense into the freshly swept gutter.

  ‘Why did the police come last night? Did something happen?’

  Hien is painting her nails Barbie pink. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Were they looking for someone?’

  ‘Just check. No problem.’

  ‘Do they come often? In the middle of the night?’

  ‘Just some time. No problem!’ she says, exasperated.

  ‘Well, it was scary.’ I slump down on the couch opposite the desk. She looks at me blankly. ‘I mean, I was frightened.’

  She doesn’t respond but after a while she offers to paint my nails and, though it’s a terrible colour, I lean forward and give her my hands.

  When she has them, she asks, without looking up, ‘Why you come Vietnam with nobody?’

  I laugh. ‘You sound like the police.’

  ‘Where your boyfriend? Your friend?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ I tell her. And not many friends, I suddenly think. Apart from Jess, and the girls at the bookshop, Tim has been all I wanted, all I thought I needed.

  ‘Why you no have boyfriend?’ Hien prods.

  ‘I did … we broke up, just before I came here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He fell in love with someone else.’

  She stops painting and leans back, a look of melodramatic incredulity on her face. ‘No!’ she says. ‘Em dep lam! Very beautiful! Your boyfriend no good!’

  I laugh, a little too much. I wipe away the tears that come. I cry so easily now, just like my mother. ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Of course! I have one son, one daughter.’

  ‘How old are they? What are their names?’

  ‘Mai is seven. Long is ten.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘His name Chau.’ She lifts up my fingers and blows on the nails. ‘My friend Miss Jenny need English teacher. She pay you very well.’

  ‘Hien, I don’t know how long I’ll be here. And anyway, I’m not a teacher.’

  She snorts. ‘No problem. You native speaker.’

  I walk, and try to look like I am going somewhere.

  At the sinh to stand, the old man blends a mixed juice without my asking. We smile at one another as he makes a show of choosing the reddest strawberries, the ripest papaya. Further on, I pass a trolley draped with withered, dried squids. A woman is grilling one over hot coals. So this is where the ocean smell comes from: it reeks like a beach full of sun-baked seaweed. She offers me the smoky hot squid; I shake my head and keep walking.

  I pause to watch a policeman who is standing on a corner blowing his whistle seemingly at random, great, piercing exclamation marks. Straight-backed schoolgirls cycle past wearing snow-white ao dais, men in suits on Honda Dreams.

  I pass an old woman sitting cross-legged on the footpath, an upturned conical hat at her feet. I drop some dong into the hat without stopping but I can’t help but see she has no eyes, no nose and no hands. It makes me think of the black and white anti-war magazine Jess and I used to look at when her parents weren’t home. In the magazine was a picture of a Vietnamese woman with both legs blown off, lying on the dusty ground, breastfeeding her burnt baby. Next to the picture it explained that she died later that night. It gave me nightmares, that picture, I’d wake rigid with fear, but I kept going back to it, looking just one more time.

  I walk along Le Loi and down Ham Nghi, crossing roads without hesitation. I’ve worked out that the trick is to walk straight into the mayhem and not stop until you reach the other side; never pausing or changing pace; never looking back. Maybe, I reflect, this could be a good approach to life.

  I come upon a huddle of old men squatting in a circle on the pavement. They’re playing some kind of checkers. They don’t look up as I skirt around them but I know they are aware of me because they all stop talking. One coughs and spits a glob of phlegm into the gutter. I recoil. I keep walking.

  I end up at the Saigon River. I buy a banh mi and some Laughing Cow cheese and sit down on a bench. The paper wrapped around the roll turns out to be a fax from a multinational to a local company. The first bolded lines read: CONFIDENTIAL – This message may contain legally privileged information and the contents are not to be disclosed to anyone other than the addressee. Unauthorised reci
pients must preserve this confidentiality and should advise the sender IMMEDIATELY of any error in transmission. I can’t decipher the smudgy figures below but it makes me smile. I will send it to Jess, with the T-shirt. I eat and watch banana boats glide through the refuse that floats on the oil-slick water.

  After lunch I go to an ice-cream parlour called Free Time on Le Thanh Ton. The irony of the name doesn’t escape me – it’s my third visit this week. The parlour is always empty so I can sit for an hour, or more, and not feel so obviously alone. The boy who serves me never speaks: no bargaining or negotiating terms; the price written up on a board. The ice-cream is milky and sweet and is served with a glass of iced water to wash it down. It still leaves a coating on the tongue.

  Mid-afternoon, I walk slowly back towards Pham Ngu Lao, to the Smiling Café and my table by the fan. Allan is sitting right in the middle of the room; I have noticed that even when the café is empty he chooses a different table each day. It seems perverse.

  Chanh brings me a cold 333 and I flick through the paper. It’s bursting with news of foreign investment, joint ventures, diplomatic visits; infrastructure development, building proposals, economic forecasts. Renovation. Reconstruction. Renewal.

  Last week Princess Anne came to visit, the first British royal ever to set foot in Vietnam. A photo shows her with dark glasses and her trademark coiffure, flanked by smiling Vietnamese officials. There’s been a first round of talks between Vietnam and the United States since the lifting of the embargo, and Citibank has applied to set up in Ho Chi Minh City. A half-page advertisement for an American shipping company sports the tasteful copy: ‘Good Morning Vietnam! It’s nice to be back again.’

  Then I come to another piece on the MIAs. A new search is underway.