The Rainy Season Page 7

  US military teams flew into Vietnam last week for the largest search yet for the remains of service personnel still classified as missing in action (MIA) from the Vietnam War. Most of those missing are known to be dead, and since the late 1980s efforts have focused on ‘discrepancy cases’, of which there are now 73.

  The eight teams, each of which includes anthropologists, medical experts and explosives technicians to deal with live munitions still found at some excavation sites, will visit areas in 19 provinces.

  Hanoi’s cooperation in the search for the 1643 MIAs in Vietnam was a key US demand for the lifting of the embargo, imposed by Washington on the entire country in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.

  I fold up the paper and stuff it in my bag; finish my beer.

  I look up at Allan. He is side-on to me, pouring whisky. He keeps his own bottle here, up on the shelf. I try to imagine him as a young man, in uniform, but I can’t. I can’t see it at all. And then, without thinking too much, I am standing up and walking towards him, like a moth to a flame. ‘May I join you?’

  He turns his head toward me slowly, deliberately. ‘They say it’s a free country but I think you’ll find that’s a lie.’

  I stay standing. ‘I just thought, you know, we see each other nearly every day …’

  He nods to the empty chair opposite his. I sit down.

  ‘So what are you still doing here?’ he grunts.

  ‘I’m thinking of staying for a while.’ Am I? ‘I might have a job,’ I add, as if it’s in the bag.

  ‘Let me guess, teaching English?’

  ‘How’d you know?’ I smile, but he doesn’t. ‘What about you? Have you been here long? In Saigon?’

  ‘Sweetheart, I’ve been here forever.’ He grins suddenly, unnervingly. ‘You’re a pretty girl,’ he says.

  I feel my face flush. There is something hateful in his eyes and I know I should stand up and walk away, but somehow I can’t. I want to ask him what it was like, the war, whether he met any diggers, whether he has children back home.

  ‘A drink?’ he offers.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, surprised.

  He calls to Chanh for a glass and pours me some whisky.

  ‘So what do you think of this MIA stuff?’ I say, as nonchalantly as I can.

  ‘I think it’s a farce,’ he says, mockingly. ‘Do you know how much money they spend on these little forays? There are three hundred thousand Vietnamese missing and do you think anyone’s out there looking for them?’

  Three hundred thousand? Fuck. I shake my head and gulp the whisky. It burns.

  ‘I’ve noticed you like a drink,’ he says.

  I flinch. ‘I’ve noticed you like a drink too.’

  He grins again; it is full of bitterness. ‘So let’s drink together, El-la, and then maybe I’ll let you come back to my room and suck my cock.’

  I shove my chair back and stand up. ‘I was trying to be friendly. What’s your problem?’

  He smirks. ‘Do I look like your damned friend?’ His blue eyes burn into me.

  I grab my bag and storm out onto the street, in a fury, but I’ve run out of puff before I reach the corner and I retreat to the hotel, to Room 513, where I turn on the fan and collapse in tears on the bed.

  I lie there for hours, unmoving, watching the late-afternoon sun move ever so slowly across my body in the abstract patterns of the iron window case. I figure out that if none of this had happened, right now I’d be riding home from work to see Tim. I reach out and pick up the cross-eyed lion from the bedside table, hold it to my breast and stroke its tangled woolly mane.

  Later, when night has set in, I eat a bowl of pho at the stand outside and then go alone to the Apocalypse Now Bar. It is dark and loud and welcoming. It is just the thing. I order vodka, straight, and chat to a Kiwi guy who has spent five years chasing the solar eclipse. He has a beard and green eyes; he looks like Jesus. He talks about his time in the Mexican jungle; I drink three vodkas; I start to feel okay.

  Some time after ten, Suze arrives, wearing a weird nineteenth-century chambermaid’s costume. She is a gorgeous apparition. She pulls up a bar stool and lights a joint; the Kiwi wanders off – he is high on life. We drink and smoke and talk, and talk, straight into it, as if we’ve known each other for years. It feels like Campbell’s Condensed Friendship, a product of this time and place. I hear all about her junkie ex-boyfriend in LA and the years he spent wearing her down. ‘You must be resilient,’ I say.

  ‘Or idiotic,’ she responds.

  I tell her I’m thinking of getting a job in Saigon and staying a while, and saying it makes me feel I have strength and purpose. We keep drinking and things look better, and better.

  I make my way through the crowd to the reeking pit of a toilet and hold onto the walls as I squat. When I come out, I try to dance to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ but it’s too slow or I’m too stoned. My pink nails luminesce under the strobe lights.

  Back at the bar, Suze and I laugh – about the Kiwi and his pilgrimage; about her mother sending a fruitcake from the States for her birthday. I tell her about my conversation with Allan and we laugh at that too. But then, all too soon, she is standing up, yawning, saying she has an article to finish in the morning. She offers to drop me at my hotel. I reluctantly finish my drink and follow her outside.

  We get on her old, bright orange Russian Minsk. The engine sounds like a jet plane. She goes fast and it feels like we’re flying, wind in our faces; I don’t want it to end. And then we are back at the Hotel Van Mai, the guard frowning as he drags back the security screen, and I’m so lonely again I could die.

  ‘I think I’ve worked out who Tim’s new girlfriend is,’ I say to Suze. ‘I think I met her once at a departmental function.’

  ‘Hey, honey,’ she squeezes my arm. ‘Does it even matter? Your Timothy is the loser here.’

  I nod, but I don’t for a second believe her. I am the loser: I managed to lose everything. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I say. ‘It was a good night. I’m so glad I met you.’

  ‘Call me next week.’ She reaches down into her lace bodice and pulls out a business card and hands it to me, chuckling. ‘Only in Vietnam could I be handing out my fucking card. Only in Vietnam.’

  Rob had long thick hair that he wore loose and a dense brown beard that collected crumbs and droplets of milk and wine. He was an emergency teacher at Mum’s school and he was interested in her art – intricate, abstract tapestries and needlework. When she was sober she made beautiful things.

  The first time she brought him home she made a show of preparing dinner. I would have been eleven or maybe twelve. I remember standing in the kitchen watching him watch her douse sausages in white vinegar, then flour, to fry; the fatty, sour smell of them.

  I could tell he was a nice man. Often he’d arrive with a block of halva or some small thing he thought might interest me, a seed pod or an X-ray of someone’s leg. They were always drinking, always topping up from the cask on the kitchen bench, but it never seemed so bad. I had worked out by then that there was something curious about my mother’s passion for riesling, the special trembly attention she paid her first glass of the night. It was like realising she had a lame leg or a funny accent. But when Rob was there, a warm, occupied feeling seemed to move through the house. Sometimes he’d wink at me, and I think I believed we had some kind of understanding. Together, we could take care of things.

  I have a clear image of the two of them, swaying in the middle of the living room in a soggy embrace. Mum so drunk she’d crossed over into that childlike state, where simple things become complicated and puzzling; and him, holding her up.

  Within a year, though, he had gone, and life went back to her and me.

  I grew too big to hide in the cupboard. I got a cardboard hanger for my bedroom door, ‘Do Not Disturb’; sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I’d retreat to my room when she was drinking, and I worked hard to make it nice and homey in there. I burned sandalwood incense supplied by Mum’s friend Janet,
and my bed was always neatly made with its patchwork quilt and my cotton lion. I put a poster of a waterfall on my wall, it was soothing, and sometimes I’d take in a grown-up cup of milky tea. I always had the radio tuned to 3XY and the chirpy voices helped, too, to shut off the world outside my room.

  Sometimes I would sit alone in there, mentally barricaded in, and write stories about my father. The settings and time would vary but in these stories he would always be returning, and he would be sorry, so unspeakably sorry for leaving us. There would be an embrace that would mend everything; this was essential – the smell of him, the texture, the warmth. I’d keep these handwritten stories under my mattress and read them in bed at night and they’d flood me with a sad, snug feeling. After a couple of weeks I would tear up the latest version and start again.

  I knew it was strange to do this; I knew no one could ever find out. But I never stopped missing him, never stopped longing for him; to me, he was love – he was the heart of everything. He was the one whose arms had made me safe.

  I remember how he’d squat down to catch me in those big arms: running, running, fast as I can, down the long cream corridor with the spiderwebby high corners and then bang!, knocking hard into him, knocking him down; rolling together on the splintery floorboards; his rough, sandpaper cheeks and the incredible softness of his black hair, his tickling staccato fingertips; his deep laughter intermingling with my tiny squeals. He called me his little Ellyphant. He cooked me porridge and boiled eggs. He caught me at the bottom of the slide. He tucked me up at night.

  How much of this do I really remember and how much have I made up? It’s twenty years since he left. At best, what I have now are memories of memories of memories. I can picture him, so clearly, swinging a cricket bat and yet it was Nan who told me he was a great batsman – and made a mean pepper steak – and when I asked Mum once she said he hadn’t played cricket since Vietnam.

  I remember Mum and him fighting. I have a hazy snapshot image where I am looking up at them from way down below and I remember his voice as louder and angrier but that I was more afraid of her, of how she might hurt him. I seem to remember him weeping.

  But then I lose him. He disappears. He leaves me alone, again and again, in that shell of a house with my broken mother.

  EIGHT

  ‘Miss Ella! Wake up!’ Hien is calling through the closed door. ‘Miss Jenny down stair, wait for you!’

  ‘What?!’ I shout back, head screeching. ‘You didn’t tell me she was coming!’

  I look at my watch; it’s a quarter past seven in the morning. Jesus! I was at the Apocalypse again last night, the second time this week. I didn’t get home until three.

  In ten minutes I have showered, taken painkillers, dressed in my least crumpled clothes and brushed my teeth. I can still taste last night’s vodka and cigarettes. I grab my sunglasses and day pack and head down the five flights of stairs.

  ‘Ah, Miss Ella,’ Hien says, all syrupy now, as I enter the foyer, ‘please to meet my friend, Miss Jenny.’

  Miss Jenny is perched very upright on the couch. She is wearing a baby-blue trouser suit and her head is crowned with a genuine beehive, huge and shimmering. She turns to me and her smile takes up her entire face, leaving her eyes in squints. ‘I am very pleased to meet you,’ she annunciates perfectly, standing to take my hand. She is tiny.

  ‘Yes, you too,’ I say, already in awe of her.

  ‘Now I will take you to my school.’

  ‘Now? Oh.’

  I frown at Hien and then follow Miss Jenny out to her scooter. ‘Do not worry,’ she says, ‘it is only a short distance.’

  She proceeds to drive like a maniac, cutting corners, screeching, burning rubber. I cling on, feeling like I’m going to vomit, telling myself this will all be over soon, for better or worse.

  After about ten minutes we pull up outside a neat grey building whose sign boasts Speak Easy English Language School. Inside, the foyer is cool and bare, with a single desk where a young Vietnamese girl sits reading. We are introduced: she is the secretary, Oanh. I follow Miss Jenny down a long corridor with rooms off to either side. We pass some classes in progress and go into an empty room. Miss Jenny gestures for me to sit down at one of the desks while she stands by the blackboard.

  She explains she is the director of the school and that Speak Easy is the very best English language school in Ho Chi Minh City. On top of the ten qualified local teachers she employs, she always has at least three native-speakers to take classes in conversational English. One of her teachers returned to the States just before Christmas so she has a vacancy. She will pay me US$75 per week to take five classes of two hours each. This is good money in Vietnam, she assures me. I can start with the advanced group because they are easiest. And she will arrange a six-month work visa. I am to start next week.

  I am nodding throughout this but then I say, ‘Miss Jenny, I’m not a teacher. I work in a bookshop.’

  ‘Bookshop is good,’ she says, nodding sagely. She opens a drawer in the desk and takes out a red book. ‘Here. This is the book you will use. It is not difficult. You will talk to your students and give them exercise. Your first class is next Monday at ten o’clock. Okay?’

  Here is my opportunity to back out – I’m not sure I can do this, or even that I want to – but Miss Jenny is persuasive and I need money and there is something so easy, almost seductive, about just saying yes, being carried along. It’s not like there’s anything else on my horizon.

  ‘That sounds great.’

  She takes me back to the hotel, shakes my hand, and zooms off. I walk into the foyer, dazed. ‘Hien, I have a job, I’m getting a six-month visa, and your friend Miss Jenny is a crazy driver.’

  She smiles. Each time it is a surprising sight, and nice. ‘Now you stay Vietnam long time, I talk manager, you pay your room every month, make cheaper.’

  ‘That’d be great. Thank you, Hien. And thank you for calling Miss Jenny, although you could have warned me she was coming.’

  I go outside and buy two bowls of pho and bring them back into the foyer where Hien and I sit and eat together at opposite sides of the desk. Sweat drips down my face and I have to pause halfway to lie back on the couch. My hangover has returned with full force.

  Hien clicks her tongue. ‘Too much drink beer no good.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ I close my eyes and breathe deeply, trying to push away images of Mum in a dead sleep, in her dark, smelly room; shaking her hard so she could drive me to school; the sound of her bowels erupting volcanically over the toilet; the tatty blue silk dressing gown she wore in the mornings, with the embroidered cherry blossom; the daily hangover that could only be cured with another drink. My medicine, she would tell me, when I was still too young to understand. I worried when she said this: was she going to die and leave me too? I feared for her safety, our safety. I did my best to be sensible and good. But now she’s across the ocean and I’m all alone and there’s nothing and no one to be good for.

  When she’s finished her soup, Hien takes our bowls out to the street. A few minutes later she returns with a plastic bag full of dark green liquid. She tells me it is rau ma and that it will cleanse my liver. I snort. It tastes like freshly mown grass.

  The next morning, I throw the Lonely Planet onto the top of the wardrobe with my empty pack and abandoned conical hat. I hand wash all the dirty clothes that have accumulated in little mounds on the floor, hanging them out on the balcony to dry. I go downstairs to call Hugh and we arrange to meet for lunch, then I walk to the local market at the end of Pham Ngu Lao and stock up on toilet paper, bananas, peanut brittle, incense, mosquito coils, Beautiful Egg Shampoo. I buy a pack of little red candles for the blackouts and a net cover to keep the cockroaches off my food. On the way back to the hotel, I run into Pham and he sells me a proper map of the city. Maybe this is my chance to start afresh, I think, hopefully.

  When I get to the crab restaurant at noon, Hugh is already seated. He stands up to greet me, his sorrow formin
g a perfect smile. I give him a gift of tamarind sweets I picked up at the market.

  We get started on the soup while I tell him about my new job. I describe the school and Miss Jenny, her beehive and her lunatic driving. It is nice to make him laugh.

  ‘So this is great news,’ he says, raising his glass in a toast.

  ‘I think so,’ I say, uncertainly. We clink.

  Over spring rolls, I describe the nocturnal visit from the police.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it used to be,’ he says. ‘A few years ago every foreigner in Vietnam was under constant surveillance. Now they’ve opened the doors they can’t maintain that level of control, but you can still assume that all your mail will be read and that your phone is bugged.’

  ‘Far out. I had no idea it was that bad.’

  ‘There’s a story that does the rounds about two Finns talking business over the phone only to be interrupted by a stern voice ordering them to speak English.’

  I shake my head. ‘That’s freaky.’

  He shrugs. ‘You get used to it. It’s much harder of course for the Vietnamese, especially the southerners. In every street there’s someone on the payroll. It could be your neighbour, a xich lo driver, the local tea-seller. Unless you’re well connected you can’t ever let down your guard. Someone might be listening.’

  I stare around me but everything looks the same.

  He smiles at my wide eyes. ‘Don’t worry. I doubt they’ll consider you a threat to the state.’

  He talks for a while about the various problems with his new line of raw silk tunics. He describes the endless red tape involved at each stage of production. It is nice to chat about these simple things. It is like taking a short holiday from the angst.

  ‘I’m glad you’re staying for a while,’ he says, thoughtfully, as we’re leaving. ‘I enjoy our conversations.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  We smile sort of shyly at one another and I notice that he doesn’t jingle his keys or look away.