Holiday in Cambodia (9 page)

‘It would be awful to lose a parent.’ Phila looked over at me.

‘I th … think …’ I began, my voice breaking and rippling outward. ‘Perhaps we should be a bit more respectful. Culturally sensitive. These people have actually lost someone.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Kathleen turned energetically to the old woman, their fingers still entwined like roots. ‘Can she tell us more about her granddaughter?’ The woman told Phila that her granddaughter Savoun had fallen in love with a married man when she was supposed to go with Thorn – she indicated a teenage boy who nodded at us gravely – and when the married man wouldn’t have her she turned to the lake. That’s how Phila translated it. That she turned to the lake for help. Now she was out there, two days under and with one more to go until her body rose up and they could meet her again.

‘Terrible,’ said Kathleen. ‘My husband had affairs. Tell her, Phil. Phil-a, sorry.’ Phila told the old woman, who thumped her chest emphatically.

‘Her husband did too.’

‘We’re practically sisters! Except you’re quite a bit older.’ Phila spoke to the woman.

‘She’s fifty-six.’

‘I’m fifty-five! Oh god, Kate, I thought she was eighty.’

‘People don’t have the same benefits as we do.’ I swallowed my wine. ‘On the global poverty index Cambodia may rate more highly than other developing nations, but –’

‘But at least you’ve got grandchildren. Tell her, Phil. Ask her how many she has.’ Phila asked her.

‘She
had
seven,’ said Phila. Kathleen shook her head and was quiet a moment. I looked out at where the lake would be. With the clouds covering the moon it was as though we were all underwater.

‘Now Phil, are you speaking Cambodian to this woman?’ Kathleen started up again.

‘Khmer? No, she’s ethnic minority. She speaks a very different language. Tampuen.’ I could see Kathleen mouthing the word in the candlelight then shaking her head and smiling. ‘I speak that language and two others,’ Phila continued. ‘English and Lao. And I’m learning French.’

‘You were good at languages, Kate. Katie speaks Japanese.’

‘I have a few basic sentences,’ I told Phila. ‘And I was in Phnom Penh two whole years before here and I still can’t speak Khmer.’

‘You need to marry a Cambodian man, and have some Cambodian children, then you’ll speak Khmer,’ said Phila but I couldn’t see his face. I could only hear Kathleen laughing with the old woman like it was Christmas.

A car shone its lonely beams over us. I rose on unsteady feet. It would be the park rangers and I would need to explain what we were doing with a family that we didn’t know at the lake. I hoped they would understand that I took complete responsibility. More relatives, young and old men who smelled like sweat and smoke, made their way down the stairs and past me onto the pier. The candles caught their bodies hauling small barrels filled, Phila told me as I sat down again, with rice wine. We all shuffled around. I could feel the heat from Phila’s arm, just centimetres from mine.

‘Oh goodie,’ said Kathleen and opened another bottle of red. ‘Now it’s a part –’ she glanced at me, ‘a wake.’

‘Do you like Cambodia?’ Phila asked her, holding out his glass for another drink. She refilled mine without asking.

‘Oh yeah! It’s like Jakarta.’

‘You’ve never been to Jakarta,’ I hissed.

‘No but Andrea has. Andrea loved it.’

‘Is Cambodia better than Jakarta?’ Phila persisted.

‘I’m sure it’s better than Jakarta. The people at the airport, the sellers at the market, you, you’re very convivial. That means friendly. Are you Muslim?’

‘Me? No, Buddhist.’

‘Buddhist! How lovely! Do you know how to do tea ceremony?’

‘Tea? You want tea?’

Kathleen screeched with laughter.

‘No, no I said tea
ceremony
… isn’t he
funny
?’

There was a gap in the clouds. The moon burst through it and struck the lake. In the places where the light didn’t fall, under the pier, under our armpits, in the hollows of our eyes, it was pitch. Around the mats, the family bellowed with sore laughter. I would have liked it if Kathleen had come to sit by me.

‘
I
dated a man once who would pick me up with his mother driving because he’d lost his licence for being drunk.’

‘In our village, we know if a boy wants to marry a girl because he comes out of her hut the next morning,’ said the old woman and they cackled together, rocking side to side while Phila grinned into his translation. Thorn, the boy who was supposed to marry the girl in the lake, said something and the old woman yelled at him. The rest of the family fell silent. ‘He says he spent the night in her granddaughter’s hut but the old women told him that’s a lie – except she said something stronger than that,’ added Phila. We all turned to stare out, scanning for detail in the surface of the silvery lake.

‘I need to pee,’ said Kathleen. ‘Come to the ladies’ with me, Katie?’ Kathleen reached out her hands to me and giggled.

Away from the candles it seemed colder. Kathleen looped an arm through mine and we picked our way slowly away from the voices. The gap in the clouds passed and we were dipped in darkness again.

‘Will this do?’ I could feel a tree ahead and the smooth earth of the path underfoot. I heard Kathleen unzip her trousers and rustle as she squatted.

‘Aren’t you peeing?’ she asked. I looked around in desperate search for detail, blue and red specks twirling over my eyeballs. I stepped sideways and unzipped my jeans. I could smell Kathleen.

‘Phew,’ she gasped. ‘That’s better. That Phil is quite a guy.’

‘You hardly know him.’

‘I know he can sing very nicely. And that he only has eight toes. Two were blown off, can you believe it?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Told me.’

‘Why?’

‘He was on a train that got hijacked by the Khmer Rouge of all things. In the ’90s! His brother died and Phil lost two of his toes and some teeth. He’s lucky he survived.’

‘Phila?
That
Phila?’ I whispered.

‘Oh yeah, Kate. There’s a lot of things you don’t know. That man needs a woman to –’

‘Oh, leave him alone,’ I said. Kathleen laughed.

‘Katie-Kate, whaddya mean?’

‘What I said.’ I wiggled my buttocks and felt the flesh move, then I stood and zipped. Kathleen laughed again.

‘Darl, are you jealous?’ I turned away but Kathleen shot out a hand and found me in the pitch. ‘Katie you must
know
–’

‘All I know is you’re flir … f-f- …’ I gulped. ‘There’s this poor girl out there floating around and all you can do is think about your v …v … genitals.’

‘You’re wrong, Katie. She’s not floating at all. She’s
coming up
.’ I gave her a push to get her off my arm and she stumbled and shrieked.

‘I stepped in the pee!’ she shouted after me, laughing. ‘My leg’s covered in pee! Kate? Katie? Come back. Help Mummy, Katie. Kate.’

Some of the family were asleep on the mats or in hammocks strung from the rails of the pier when Kathleen found her way back. She was breathless and the pants that brushed against my arm as she felt her way to the mat were damp. Phila saw her from the circle of men he was sitting with. They were talking in low voices around a couple of candles and pointing out to the lake.

‘It’s dangerous out there in the dark. You shouldn’t go walking at night, Kathleen,’ he told her. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘Oh thank you, Phil. I was thinking. About Tony actually. My boyfriend. Tony.’

‘I thought you were single.’ Phila’s voice was high with surprise.

‘Well, I meant single as in not married again.’

‘You haven’t spoken about Tony.’

‘That’s because when I start. He’s … what’s Tony like, Kate?’

‘Tony?’ I found my voice in the dark. ‘He’s … well, his full name is Antony. He mows – he’s a gardener.’

‘And he’d like a boat.’

‘Would he?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah he was always … he’s always saying he’d like a boat. Just to go out in, you know?’

‘I know he likes cricket. Boxing Day, remember?’

Kathleen laughed like she was far away.

‘He hardly talked to us at all. He’s a quiet sort of a guy, Phil.’

‘Like Kate,’ said Phila. Kathleen’s hand brushed mine.

‘Like Katie-Kate.’

It was an egg but what was an egg doing by the pond? Eggs belong at the market or in chickens or nests, or as a
balut
with a hot cooked chick inside the shell, not out like a rock by the water.

‘Yanie, come and look at the egg!’ And Yanie came as quickly as she could on her old legs and put an arm through her sister’s at the window. ‘It’s not a chicken egg,’ said Sida. She was wearing her hat for the garden. ‘We eat chicken eggs every day and it’s not a chicken egg. It’s too white. Almost glowing. Is it a duck’s egg? Speak up, Yanie, I can never hear you.’

‘It’s an
Ap
egg.’

‘Are you sure? How do you know that an Ap even has eggs? They eat babies, they don’t hatch them.’

‘I saw two ducks in the pond yesterday and they wouldn’t touch it.’

‘Well if the ducks won’t touch it then neither should we. I’m going outside and then I’m going to make lunch and then I’ll go and get Susan from Australia on the bus and you’re not to worry about a thing.’

But could you just leave an Ap egg? They’d put chicken blood out in a jar by the front gate so that spirits like the Ap
would be distracted. Yanie wondered now if it was the right sort of blood.

All the things in the house were Sida’s: the nice wooden furniture and the kitchen things and the bed mats and linen and the computer and the pond with the brilliant orange fish glowing below the dusty surface laced with morning glory and now an egg by the water. Sida told Yanie that it was her house too, that everything was hers just the same, but Yanie knew that Sida’s husband had built the house twenty years before and now that he was dead it was Sida’s. Yanie was in the bedroom, making up the bed for Susan from Australia. Through the open window, she could see the neighbour sitting in a deck chair, peeling lychees and shouting through the fruit trees to Sida.

‘Really?’ Sida yelled back across the yard.

‘It’s true, my friend heard it on the news and my cousin saw it with her own eyes,’ shouted the neighbour. The TV in the neighbour’s house was loud as a wedding, tuned to a film clip of a woman crying in a satin gown. A man was trying his hardest to cheer her up but Yanie suspected he’d done something wrong.

‘What did she say? Your cousin?’

‘That a vampire Ap is attacking people. Old women and babies.’

‘No!’

‘Really. Just over in Kampong Cham.’

‘I’m going there today to pick up our great niece.’

‘You better be careful. It’s in their spit. My cousin’s daughter Sopea drank from the same glass as the Ap and now she works in a bad bar.’

‘And your cousin? Did she drink from the glass?’

Yanie watched the neighbour peel the fruit with the tough nubs of her fingers until it sat like an eyeball in a little skull of shell. Then she raised the cone to her face to slurp the lychee through her lips and suck the flesh off, spitting the slimy black pip to the ground.

‘Maybe my cousin in Kampong Cham
did
drink,’ agreed the neighbour.

‘And what happens when you drink? Do they always go to work in bars?’ asked Sida. The neighbour laughed as though she was hacking at grass with a blade.

‘You turn into an Ap for a while, with a big beautiful face and all your intestines hanging out. Then,’ her chair squeaked threateningly as she leaned forward, ‘you die.’

‘We’ve got a strange egg in our garden …’ yelled Yanie from the window. On the TV, the man touched the woman’s bare shoulder and she turned and smiled with real tears in her eyes. The neighbour didn’t like to look at Yanie because of her scar but she’d heard.

‘I’d watch that egg if I were you,’ she said.

It rained all through the late morning and the pond was nearly full. What happens when it reaches the house?

‘Now, you’re not to worry about that either,’ Sida said. ‘It’s all in the drainage.’ And she went under the house to make the soup. Yanie watched the glowing egg until the rain stopped and the sun sparked off the drops of water that decorated the shell. She watched until Sida called up the stairs that it was too much watching.

‘Maybe the blood we leave out is the wrong blood. Maybe we shouldn’t be using chicken’s blood,’ Yanie panted, coming down the stairs. The soup was churning in the pot. You could get lost in it.

‘Dearest one.’ Sida set down her book and stood to give the lunch a good stir. It sent up a rush of steam that made their eyes water. Sida was older than Yanie but they looked almost the same. Sida had more white hairs at the nape of her long neck, Yanie’s right ankle was more swollen than the left, Sida’s right breast was a little larger. And of course, Yanie had the scar. ‘You sure the Ap is that smart?’ Sida scooped deep into the pot and ladled some soup into a bowl for Yanie.

‘Oh I’m sure, I’m sure.’ Yanie ate a forkful of rice, then sucked some soup into her mouth and swallowed. ‘She took the baby right out of that pig farmer, Bonavy’s, stomach, didn’t she?’

‘Bonavy shouldn’t have been wandering around at night with other men. Serves her right.’

After lunch, Sida squinted at the computer and watched her emails come in and go out again. Sida had married after the regime, Yanie hadn’t. Sida had married a short businessman who had sometimes taken her on trips where she Met People.

‘It goes on and on, doesn’t it, Yanie?’ And Yanie had to agree, there didn’t seem to be an end to it, any of it. The soup went on boiling and the Aps kept on visiting and Sida came and went and the egg kept on sitting by the pond, not a chicken egg and not a duck egg but an egg to watch.

‘But some things stop.’

‘That’s true,’ Sida said, clicking at her computer.

‘Like war.’

‘Now, you’re not to think about –’

‘And thoughts.’

‘You can think about whatever you want but don’t
worry
about it.’ Sida told Yanie not to worry about anything – she would be back with Susan from Australia on the late afternoon bus.

The bus shook along the road like it was dying and Yanie heard it slow and pause while Sida clambered on. It was a wonder. Someone like Sida. It was a wonder she could just go off to town and bring Susan from Australia back to a house where there was an egg to watch in the yard. Yanie bounced on the spot. It was terrible to need to go to the toilet when you were busy and everything was so mixed up.

‘Not to worry,’ said Yanie, ‘not to worry,’ and she found a shirt that would do and took it out to the backyard. Stuffed with grass it was inelegant, like a policeman, but that was appropriate. She fiddled the buttons into place and put a long bamboo stake down the neck and through the waist. Her fingers hatched like eggs. Her legs were warm but the back of her dress was cold and wet.

‘What are you doing out there, Yanie?’ The neighbour peered at her the way she did, her eyes like black gems or snake’s eyes or pits, pips – the black middle of something you can’t get.

‘Making a
Ting Mong
.’ The neighbour picked her way through the papaya poles and stood a little distance from where Yanie was drawing a face on the back of a pink plastic dinner plate. ‘For the Ap,’ Yanie added.

‘Oh, well. Good. I thought …’ The neighbour’s two dogs came tearing around the side of the house and pounced on Yanie. One licked her face where the scar was while the other stuck its nose under the back of her skirt. She laughed and pushed them away. The neighbour pulled some dead leaves off the trees and scrunched them like paper in her hands while she watched Yanie tie a bit of plastic bag around the Ting Mong’s waist for a belt. ‘Sensible to make a Ting Mong when the Ap won’t eat poison or anything.’

‘Do you have a gun?’ Yanie asked.

‘What do you want with a gun?’

‘The Ap won’t be scared otherwise. It’s no Ting Mong
without a gun.’
The neighbour went back to her house, where the woman on TV was still crying. Yanie drew a line from the corner of the Ting Mong’s mouth to where its ear would be. There weren’t any pants so it would be a woman Ting Mong. Yanie’s damp skirt stuck to her legs. She pulled it off and filled it with grass. She eyed the egg. It was still. She drove the stake into the ground. The Ting Mong and Yanie looked down at the egg.

‘Yanie! You know your sister wouldn’t want you to be naked!’ The neighbour stomped over to her washing line and dragged off a sarong for Yanie to wrap around her waist. The she handed Yanie an old shotgun. Yanie tied it to the Ting Mong with another plastic bag and the neighbour grunted her approval. She said she’d get her son to make one when he was next home.

‘Kaliyanei, this is our grand-niece, Susan,’ said Sida. She didn’t say ‘from Australia’. ‘Susan speaks very good Khmer.’ Sida said this loudly and slowly. Yanie looked at Susan from Australia. Her face was beautiful – huge compared with her pale frame – she was wearing a new-looking cardigan but her eyes looked like they’d been gouged out and replaced with stones.

‘Have you seen the egg?’ Yanie asked, and pointed to the window. Susan from Australia went over and looked. When she smiled her teeth were yellow and there was a black gap where a canine had been. ‘Are you sick?’

‘Yanie!’ said Sida and Yanie and Susan from Australia jumped. ‘Sorry, Susan. Don’t mind your Grand-Aunt Yanie. Have you eaten?’ Susan from Australia shook her head. Yanie understood – she wouldn’t eat poison or anything.

Yanie stood in the doorway while Susan from Australia unpacked her things into the cupboard. She had taken off her cardigan and it looked like she had no body at all under the T-shirt. As she lifted clothes from her suitcase, Yanie saw the bites down the inside of her arm.

‘Are you sick?’ she asked. Susan looked startled. She peered past Yanie. ‘Sida’s in the garden picking things for our dinner.
Are
you sick?’

‘For two years.’

Yanie nodded. That was when Bonavy the pig farmer’s baby got taken. They must have Aps in Australia too.

‘Are you scared of the Ting Mong?’ Yanie asked. She picked up Susan from Australia’s thin hand and led her over to the window. In the yard the Ting Mong’s plate face glowed in the late afternoon light. Susan from Australia’s hand was strangely warm.

‘Is that a gun?’ Susan from Australia asked. Yanie nodded. ‘That’s scary. What’s it for?’

‘It’s to scare …’ Yanie and Sida were supposed to make their grand-niece well and give her an understanding of the old country, the email had said. Not to scare her. ‘… the birds.’

‘Oh, it’s a scarecrow!’ Susan from Australia used the English word and smiled. It looked like her face might break.

Yanie hadn’t shared a bed with Sida since just after the regime, when Sida had found her under their childhood home, face healing badly, muttering, but alive. Sida could sleep though anything but all night through the wall Yanie heard Susan from Australia crying. When Susan went to the toilet in the morning, Yanie went into her room and felt her drenched sheets. Susan helped to get breakfast ready but hardly ate anything. The neighbour flew up the driveway on her motorbike and peered at them from under her house.

‘Come and meet our grand-niece Susan,’ called Sida. ‘From Australia.’ The neighbour dismounted and smiled at Susan, who pressed her hands together at her forehead in greeting. But she pressed them too high, as though the neighbour was the King.

‘Do you like Cambodia? How did you get here?’ the neighbour asked. Susan from Australia couldn’t think of the words.

‘I came through the air,’ she answered and glanced at her grand-aunts, embarrassed. The neighbour raised her eyebrows at Yanie.
I’d watch that egg if I were you
. When the neighbour had gone home, Susan insisted on cleaning the dishes she’d hardly eaten from. She washed each glass carefully.

‘It’s nice to have a young person in the house, isn’t it, Yanie?’

‘I’m not going to let anything happen to her,’ said Yanie so fiercely that Sida laughed.

The neighbour drove up again in the afternoon, followed by a boy with an elderly man perched on the back of his motorbike. Susan from Australia was showing her grand-aunts pictures from Sydney: a low white house behind narrow leathery trees, Susan from Australia hugging a hairy dog, a concert stadium blooming from a harbour – her hands shook as she picked up each one. When the neighbour and the old man came up the stairs, Sida stood and went to get some food. The man’s bald head shone with grey stubble and his threadbare clothes fell from his body in an almost holy way. He shuffled towards Susan from Australia and reached with a gnarled finger to touch her cheek. Susan from Australia flinched as the man pulled the skin down and looked into her stone eyes. He did the same to her lips and saw the gaps between her teeth. He muttered to the neighbour who stepped forward gingerly and pushed the thin T-shirt to the girl’s stomach. They all saw the ribs gnawed of flesh. Her intestines bulging against the fabric.

‘Is he a … a doctor?’ asked Susan from Australia. The man opened his whole mouth in a silent toothless laugh and began a long singing prayer. Susan from Australia glanced at her grand-aunt. Yanie stared back. The girl closed her eyes and stayed still but for her left knee, which wouldn’t stop jiggling. When the man had finished he waited patiently for Sida to bring him a bag of food. Then the man and the neighbour edged back down the stairs and Yanie went to stand by the window.

‘Well?’ she heard the neighbour say once they were out by the pond.

‘She’s not dead. But she’s not alive either,’ answered the old man.

That night while Sida slept, Susan from Australia sobbed through the wall. What was in her was trying to come out. Duck’s wings beating at her soul. Out in the yard the moonlight caught the Ting Mong’s face. The skirt was itchy with grass. The gun heavy and cold. Susan was crying into her pillow and didn’t hear the door open. She saw the Ting Mong standing over her with the gun and the sound died in her throat.

‘You have to promise not to eat any babies,’ said the Ting Mong. Susan from Australia coughed.

‘Not to …?’

‘Eat babies. Or spit on people. Okay? And you can’t die, either.’