Ten Journeys Read online

  We were very free children. We ran amok in the village, never listening to the adults when they told us to behave. But we pushed it too far when Lanh started in on Mr C. Mr C was a big Yank left over from the big war. Apparently he was something called AWOL, which we didn’t really understand. We thought it might have had something to do with that crazed look in his eyes, like his spirit had taken leave of his body and rendered him mad. After a few years, he’d started to look like an old man of the forest. All long red hairs everywhere; wild and matted.

  Mr C liked to smoke dope all day long in his tent on the outskirts of the village, where our land bordered on jungle. In fact, that was pretty much all he did. Smoking so much for so long did something terrible to his bowels though, and eventually he built his own pit so he didn’t have to keep running off to use the toilets in Romi’s Bar. His pit was awful and primitive. Most of the women in the village wouldn’t come near him after he dug it, but he didn’t seem in the least bit bothered by having this huge grave-thing in what was his garden.

  After a while, Lanh and I started creeping up on him while he was at his painful-sounding ablutions. We’d throw small stones at the back of his neck and at his exposed behind so he thought insects were attacking him. We’d make howling-monkey noises so he couldn’t concentrate properly. And then, we decided that it would be the funniest thing we’d ever done if we could manage to make Mr C fall in his own shit pit.

  We spent ages and ages coming up with a plan that would work, and then finally Lanh saw something on the television in Romi’s Bar, (he was always sneaking in there) he decided that we needed to make a trap. We would cover part of the pit with big palm leaves so that in the dark it looked just like it was normal undergrowth. Then we would wait in the bushes and watch as Mr C dived out of his house, ran to the pit and then, as soon as his full weight was on the leaves, he’d go crashing down into it. The plan was foolproof.

  That night, our trap laid, we crouched low in the tall grass so as not to be seen. (I think that even if we had been seen Mr C would have ignored us, but that was beside the point; this was our very own military operation.)

  After a long time, we heard his shaky wooden door being prised open. We watched him creep across the dark ground, almost bent double such was the sting in his bowels. He was walking with the aid of a stick, we now noted; he was so wasted.

  As he reached the edge of the pit, we were sure that he was about to drop through the leaves. I stifled a giggle, Lanh tried to hold back a whoop of joy. He stepped onto the leaves…This was it, the moment of truth…And then, as the big leaves started to give way under his weight, he gave out this terrible wounded sound, like the yelp of a tormented animal. One leg slipped through and down, as if here were on quick-sand. The other started to give way, but right at the last minute he managed to hook his stick onto the trunk of a nearby tree and hoist himself up and out of the hole.

  Then he turned to the long grass and started shouting in his own language. He was whipping the stick back and forth. He was a man possessed.

  Lanh gave out a terrible groan and then turned on his heels, but I couldn’t seem to get my legs to work properly. The ground was wet and it seemed to be eating up my little feet. And now Mr C was gaining on me, batting away long grass with his stick, growling like an animal.

  When he found me, he dragged me by the hair back to his pit, screaming questions in my face. I didn’t have the strength to fight him off. I could only let myself be dragged. I suppose that was the moment I learned how to submit myself, no matter how painful circumstances may be.

  We reached the stinking pit. He lifted me with his string arms and then launched me into its hungry mouth. I landed on soft ground but didn’t want to think about why it was soft. I looked up and saw many, many stars glittering around me, watching. I also saw the great shaggy ginger mass of Mr C, peering over the edge looking immensely pleased with himself. I shouted up to him, pleaded with him to help me out. But he simply smiled one of his funny gap-toothed smiles and then started to put each and every one of my blinking friends out of business. He dragged more palm leaves over the top of the pit. Palm leaves and now long struts of wood (which he’d been given free by the village so that he could make his house stand up properly). He was laughing maniacally as he buried me alive…

  I woke up in darkness in the back of the truck wondering how I’d managed to fall asleep again and then deciding that it was because my body was so weak. I was lapsing in and out of con- sciousness, in and out of past and present. Even now, Mr C’s pit felt as real and as shitty to me as the hard wood of the crate, which my tender foot was resting on. I could half-see his orange form dancing back and forth as he carried more flotsam and jetsam with which to cover me up. I screwed up my eyes and tried to imagine him away. It had all turned out OK. Why was I so scared by it now?

  Maybe it was because the smell was the same. When I’d been down there in his pit, I could smell the human waste, sure. But I’d also smelled something far, far worse. Only when Lanh came back, bringing with him all the men from Romi’s Bar did I discover what that smell was. When the men dragged me out, they also dragged out the bodies of at least three dead pigs and a couple of chickens. A dog too, maybe one of the pups from the mad dog at Romi’s last litter. Human waste mixed with the stench of dead, rotting flesh. The flesh of various presents that had been given to Mr C over the years by the villagers.

  On the long walk back home that night, Lanh was apoplectic. He wouldn’t listen to me as I begged him not to tell mother what had happened. He was more concerned about the behaviour of Mr C to even care what I had to say.

  “I agree with what the men say. He’s gone too far this time. All we wanted was for him to feel a part of the place, even if he didn’t grow up here. We told him, if going back to America was too much, then stay here. We tried to make him feel at home with us. Only, he’s thrown it back into our faces. Like shit.”

  I wondered who this ‘we’ was that Lanh was talking about and felt jealous. I suppose that even then, I could sense that he was drifting away from me. That the shit pit trick would be our final, grand hurrah as a duo. Already he was spending more and more time at the bar. Already he was listening attentively to whatever the Band of Brothers, shaping himself to be one of their gang. It was clear as the Qui River that they liked him because of his ‘street smarts’.

  As we traipsed down the alley behind the bar, I felt like I was a hindrance to him for the first time. As we passed the kennel, I gestured to a stick (one which would have been perfect for plaguing the mad dog with) but Lanh simply shook his head and looked sad. “Jojo wouldn’t like it,” he said. Since when had Lanh known the mad dog’s name? Since when had he stopped referring to it as Mad Dog? I was starting to lose my grip on us.

  “Oh Lanh!” I called.

  No response. Of course there was no response. I was all alone in the back of a lorry. Human traffic. And finally the tears I’d been saving up for the whole journey so far started to fall. A raging torrent, eating up whatever reserves of moisture I must have stored up in my body. They came like a river, draining me of everything that was still me. I’d become an animal, a stupid, desperate animal.

  “Don’t cry,” said a voice in the darkness.

  “Leave me alone! Get out of my head!” I cried. A cough, a splutter, retching sounds in my head.

  “Shut up! Shut up! Can’t you see I’m on the edge!”

  Silence again. Good. Silent like the grave.

  Suddenly I heard another sound from the darkness. It sounded like rustling. Like movement. My imagination ran away with me. I pictured a big animal in there with me. A tiger perhaps. A tiger who was feasting on the dead meat but would soon be hungry for the fresh stuff.

  “Who’s there?” I called numbly. A tiger wouldn’t answer me.

  A rasping, croaking sound was delivered by way of response.

  “Who’s there?” I called again, thinking this is it, my journey is complete. My life’s journey is about to
come to an end.

  A voice in the darkness: “It’s me: An.”

  An. Of course; Mr Peacefulness. An means peace. Mr Death. Ready to come sweeping over me, releasing me from this gawky body. “Take me now!” I whispered.

  “Pardon?” asked the voice in the darkness.

  “Take me away from this place, this body, this torment,”

  And then An gave what I thought was a laugh. “What are you talking about, Dung? Have you finally succumbed to madness? Pass me the water will you? I’m dying of thirst here!”

  Dying of thirst, Bumpkin. Think about it. You’ll get it in a minute…

  I did get it. I didn’t want to get it.

  “What are you wearing, An?” I asked, carefully.

  An spluttered a laugh again: “What is this, one of those sex lines? Pass me the water and I’ll…”

  “Tell me what you are wearing, you ghost!” I demanded.

  Still laughing, An responded: “Well, despite the fact that I have such an extensive wardrobe in here, with all the fashions from Tokyo freshly flown in for me, I’ve decided to plump for the checked shirt and beige combat shorts combo that I know the girls just love.”

  “Che…Checked shirt,” I stammered.

  “Come on, it ain’t that bad. It’s a fake Ben Sherman, for crying out loud!”

  “But you’re dead,” I gasped. “You’re the dead man! The dead man from the concrete place…”

  “I will be a dead man if you don’t give me some water. Come on, Dung. I thought we were both trying to keep each other’s spirits up? I thought we were going to keep each other sane so that when we finally reach our destination we won’t be gibbering lunatics like that guy from your village. That Yank. Mr C you call him.”

  Without knowing what I was doing, I reached into one of the two plastic bags. The bag, which I now discovered contained a half-full bottle of mineral water and a few slices of bread. Before I threw it over to my ghostly companion, I unscrewed the cap and let a modest dribble wet my lips. It felt like freedom.

  “Ah! Wonderful, life-affirming water,” chirped An, as I tossed him the water. And amazingly, for a figment of my imagination (which he surely was) he gulped. Evidently this imaginary friend had a throat and a stomach as well as a mouth. Either the mad visions were getting clearer or something else, something so completely strange even Lanh couldn’t have come up with it, was happening.

  An woke me with a finger on his lips. I couldn’t help but jump backwards and crack my head on the metal wall when I saw him, for his share of the water and a few slices of bread appeared to have done him the world of good. He was still wearing his shorts and checked shirt but his body seemed to have filled out in them. He was no longer so knock-kneed, no longer so sunken-chested. And he was breathing. Despite everything, I couldn’t get over the fact that he was breathing.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Hush! I heard us being loaded onto a boat, that’s why I’m waking you. All that clanging and shouting and yet you slept right through it. You could sleep for Vietnam, Dung, honestly!”

  I couldn’t help feeling my face flush. Over the past few days, we’d shared many intimacies. Hell, we’d crapped right in front of each other into those horrible plastic bags, chucking them out through a small gap in the roller-shutter as soon as we were done. And now he’d filled out, become, well, less dead, I had found myself starting to like An. I liked the way he was so funny all the time, like Lanh had been. I liked the way he could make the old tarpaulin cover of the back of the lorry, and the crates within it into some marvellous world that I could almost reach out and touch. He almost made the whole thing bearable.

  The only problem was that An quite clearly thought I was mad. And I could completely understand why he’d come to such a conclusion. First, I’d called him a dead man. That’s a pretty serious accusation to make about any man without them thinking you’re a bit of a, well mad-dog-barking-at-the-moon type. Then there was the day when I kept, mistakenly, calling him Lanh (which I got over only after he joked that I had ‘a thing’ for a dead man that resembled my brother, which was weird in anyone’s book) and then there was my constant sleeping. I’d sleep in the middle of conversations; just float off into the past, into the village or into some dream-time which must have been what the Westerners call a ‘parallel universe.’And when I wasn’t sleeping, I made enough noise to wake the dead (ha! Very funny, An).

  But the final straw that broke the donkey’s back was my proposition that we were not going the way he thought, and all common sense dictated, we would be going. At first, I tried to break it to him gently. “I think we’re heading back across France. We’ll then be loaded onto a ship and then taken back to where we belong.” And he’d said poppycock and some other choice words that he’d learned in his own Orientation 101. We’d agreed to disagree, but whenever the subject reared its ugly head, we started to argue. The fact that we were to all intents and purposes being loaded onto a ship was the first time I could actually point to some concrete evidence that we were on some karmic, reverse journey. Deep down, past all the jokes and the petty arguments, we both knew what it meant when we were loaded onto a ship.

  We were at sea for long enough for An to admit that he was wrong, and believe me, it takes a long time for a man to admit to that. Needless to say, as soon as he admitted that he was wrong, our spirits seemed to lighten. Because we were together, the terrible cramps that we suffered, the back spasms, the muscle-wasting, were all made just that little bit easier to bear.

  Alone, as I had been when I first entered the lorry, I had suffered these things and they were ten times the anguish they were now in our strange backwards-together journey. Remarkably, we were starting to become rosy-cheek happy, free from lice, and apparently getting cleaner by the day. It was a sort of, backwards miracle.

  Of course, we suffered from bouts of boredom from which we thought we would never emerge. We had our crab-biting moments of fear and we had our pregnant desires for chocolate, for Coca Cola, for television, for the touch of the long grasses, for the sounds of the wind, or simply the sound of silence. We had our moments of sea-sickness too, but I think we both came to realise that the body is a remarkable instrument. Capable of coping with whatever shit pit you subject it to, at least for a while. It was almost as though we were reaping our karmic rewards for our suffering at the same time as we were suffering it. Neither of us really knew what was occurring, and it was probably best that we kept it that way. You don’t mess with karma. Not if you know what’s good for you.

  Certainly, I knew what was good for me. I knew that An was good for me. His real voice was gradually exorcising all of those ghost-voices in my head. Making me whole again. He held me in his ever-stronger arms, squeezing the poison out of me, bringing me back to life.

  We made plans, and what further indication do you want that things were getting better than the making of plans? A caged tiger does not make plans. A swatted fly does not make plans. A person buried alive cannot make plans. Suddenly, as well as the smudged past and present, there was a new world opening up to us: the future.

  “It doesn’t matter where we go,” I said, rather bashfully. “As long as I’m with you. I feel like I belong with you.”

  “You think I’m the reincarnation of your darling brother or somesuch weird shit,” he said, but not cruelly. “Sometimes I think your Madame Dugard was right about you being a country bumpkin with your country bumpkinish ways.”

  “Don’t bring her into this,” I said, tickling at the hair on his stomach, barely even remembering when there had once been patches of damp mould on his dead body there.

  He kissed the top of my head, poured some water into my mouth for me and then whispered into my ear: “Oh Jenni Wen, you are a curious case!”

  His straggly whiskers tickled my ears and I couldn’t help but laugh. I was a curious case. Here I was with all my back-to-front dreams of fighting cockerels and spitting dog men. Here I was telling my stories of how we
’d tormented poor Mr C and how we plagued that mad dog out back of Romi’s Bar. Here I was with all of my stories of home and the past and nothing, no stories at all about where we were supposed to be going. I didn’t care where we were going, I really didn’t. I just had one condition: that he didn’t succumb to temptation as Lanh had.

  Lanh left me because he wanted to be with the men, to be a man, and not spend all his time with his stupid sister. At the time, just after my close encounter with the dead animals and his shit pit, the realisation was crushing. Going off to be with the men was what my father did, or so my mother was always telling us, and yet Lanh hadn’t taken in a single word that she said. As soon as people in the bar started saying things like ‘fighting for freedom’ and ‘taking back what is rightfully ours’, they were the only words he had time for.

  He joined the Band of Brothers to fight a guerrilla war against traffickers like the FFF. He’d never have forgiven me for later handing over my money and allowing myself to be treated like a piece of meat by them. But he’d already been gone three years by that time. He’d already said all he meant to say about how much or how little he cared for mother and me. Mother said he was dead to her. I didn’t agree, but I still felt betrayed. And when the rumoured attacks by the militia started to become more than rumours, when we actually knew some of the victims, we were too alone, too unprotected. The men from the FFF picked the most opportune moment to come a-calling with all their glossy brochures promising a new life with more riches than you could shake Mr. C’s wonky walking-stick at; I was ripe for the picking.