Songs from the Violet Cafe (24 page)

Belle looked at her curiously, unable to absorb Jessie’s long absence, and how little she knew of what had passed after she left the town where they met. ‘I never heard much about that,’ Belle said, after a pause.

‘Do you think he’s alive?’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ Belle said. ‘Tell me about your wars, Jessie.’

‘They never found a body.’ Hester’s mouth was pinched around a line of pins. She was making a wedding dress that had to be altered within forty-eight hours, because the bride was pregnant. Same old story — silly girl. Hester was sorry, but she really couldn’t stop working, though if Jessie wanted to put the kettle on, she could make them both a cup of tea. When she opened the door her expression was unfriendly. ‘You could have written,’ was the first thing she said. ‘About Owen.’

‘My mother had died.’

‘Everybody had died,’ Hester said, relenting and letting her in. The old house hadn’t changed since the last time Jessie was there. Only Ruth Hagley had gone.

‘She’s in a rest home,’ Hester said briskly, when Jessie enquired. ‘She’s far better off.’ Hester was in charge of the house now. She made wedding dresses, as a business. Weddings were the coming thing, and she was in on the ground floor. ‘Things have changed you know, Jessie. People plan weddings like proper
e-vents.
They used to be so home
-made
.’ It was odd the way people used emphasis, as if to convince themselves of the changes taking place. ‘They use wedding consultants like me.’

‘About the Messengers,’ Jessie said, when the tea was poured.

‘Well, you probably heard, Lou vanished after the accident. Freda and Evelyn are long gone. They went to California. I’ve heard that Evelyn did well. She’s an economist. One of my clients saw her in
Time
magazine — she’s working for Reagan now. Fancy him running for president.’

‘Good God, tax cuts for the rich and all that.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. I don’t have time for politics.’

‘But I do. I’m interested in the way economies justify deficits in order to fund wars. Perhaps Evelyn could tell me how it’s done.’

‘Jessie,’ said Hester firmly, ‘I don’t care if Mickey Mouse runs the world, Freda and Evelyn left town without saying goodbye, just like you did. Like most people for that matter. Besides, my client only
thought
it was Evelyn. Her name isn’t Messenger now.’

‘And Lou was never found?’

‘Not that I’ve heard of. Well, his car was all fixed up for him to kill himself, but it seems that he didn’t. But he never touched his bank accounts.’

‘You’d have thought they’d have waited to hear what happened to him.’

‘Why? Why would Freda stick around? People were pointing the finger at her too. I can tell you, Jessie, after that accident I pretty nearly went round the twist. Have you ever married? No, I thought not. Well, I’m a widow, remember? I had someone and I lost him when he was brand-new as husbands go. Thanks to Lou Messenger.’

‘Did they look for him?’

‘Of course they looked for him. The police were searching for
weeks. What stupid questions you ask.’ Hester’s face was flushed an angry red.

‘I’m sorry. I should go.’

‘Perhaps you should. I don’t know why you want to rake over old coals. You seem to have done all right for yourself, with all these trips of yours.’

‘It’s not exactly like that.’

‘Isn’t it? Well, I don’t know about that. You and Violet Trench, you weren’t people who stayed around.’

Jessie knew that Violet had left town years before with Felix Adam. She wanted to ask Hester about this, but she could see it might be one scandal too many. Jessie had written to Violet’s lawyers long ago in an effort to trace her. Her father’s money was not the only gift she had received. Soon after she arrived in England, a letter was forwarded to her. She supposed that Jock had sent it on because it had a lawyer’s address on the back. Perhaps he thought it was trouble following her. But the letter bore the news that Violet Trench wished to give her a thousand pounds, following the sale of the Violet Café. She was going away soon, and Jessie was not to try to reach her. The money was sent to Jessie, the lawyer’s letter said, with an expression of her profound regret about the events at the Violet Café, and the hope that Jessie would ‘do something useful with her life, and follow her aspirations’. It did not say what it was that Violet so deeply regretted. At first, Jessie had thought she wouldn’t reply, decided against claiming the money, and then changed her mind. She had aspired to very little up until then, except to please Violet and stay with John Wing Lee for the rest of her life.

‘I lost John,’ she said to Hester. ‘I know it wasn’t the same, but he was my boyfriend.’

‘Well, he survived,’ Hester said. ‘What are you complaining about?’

‘He did what?’

‘He got ashore that night. His brothers took him home and didn’t tell the police.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Oh,’ said Hester, smiling her strange bitter smile. ‘Married. So I heard, not that I did the wedding. I’d leave that one well alone, if I were you.’

As the door closed against the steaming Phnom Penh street, Lou Messenger said, ‘I thought you’d have given up on pretty Asian boys by now. They always did get you into trouble.’ He was older, grey-haired, with a flabby gut and a cigarette burning down to his fingers. A drink stood on the fly-spotted table in front of him, though it was still only ten o’clock in the morning. The room was heavy with the smell of cooking and opium, wafting through the door behind the bar.

‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ Jessie said to the man in the shadowy room.

‘I heard you were in town,’ he said. ‘Call it the resurrection.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Jessie said. ‘I’ve seen it all before. Some rats never do desert sinking ships. They keep hoping it’ll re-float.’

‘Not quite,’ said Lou. ‘Even I didn’t stay around when Pol Pot’s lot moved into the city.’

‘But somebody told you they were coming, I’ll bet.’

‘Funny you should mention that.’

‘So let me put it together. You ran a bar here until ’75 and now you’re back. Same bar?’

‘Nobody else had moved in.’

‘So who are your clients? There aren’t many foreigners around.’

‘I look just like the locals.’ He grinned, the old lazy smile that had enchanted the girls she had known, back at the Violet Café. As if reading her thoughts, his smile faded. ‘I wasn’t to know,’ he said.

‘That people would die? I don’t suppose you did. Evelyn could have killed herself that night.’

‘That’s a touch dramatic, isn’t it?’

‘But you don’t know. The weather saved you from knowing what she’d do.’

‘A freak accident. I sell food as well as booze. Have something.’

‘I ate at the club.’

‘No you didn’t. They tell me you looked a bowl of noodles in the
face less than ten minutes ago and couldn’t handle them.’ As he spoke, he turned to a wok on the fire behind him and scooped out two bowls of fried rice.

Beside her bowl he placed a thick glass of beer. ‘To old times,’ he said, raising his glass, as he settled on the other side of the table. ‘
Bon
salut.’

‘I didn’t know you spoke French,’ she said, intending sarcasm.

‘You wouldn’t. I had a bigger past to bury than you’d ever guess.’ Although he had served himself food, he didn’t appear interested in eating it.

‘Don’t expect me to be sorry for you,’ Jessie said.

‘Oh, I don’t, believe me. I’ve had some good times here. I took myself up to the temples at Siem Reap, in the mid-sixties, worked a bar up there for a bit.’ He talked then about the massive temples at Angkor, and coming across a monk in saffron robes, cross-legged beside burning joss sticks in the gloom of the ancient stone walls, and of how the smoke from the incense had floated so far above him, straight up to a distant dot of blue sky, and the way he’d felt his spirits lifting with the possibility he might still be redeemed.

‘Very Zen, Lou.’

‘You’ve gone troppo yourself, Jessie.’

‘Not likely. I’ve got a neat little flat in London near Victoria Station. I can go back any time I want.’

‘You’re kidding yourself. I recognise people like you. They get that dried up round the edges look. You want to keep out of the sun, Jessie.’

‘Did you go back to Thailand during the occupation here?’

‘There was a living there.’

‘And you weren’t a waiter, I’ll bet. This isn’t
Casablanca,
Lou.’

‘You’re eating my food, and drinking my booze, and you want to know where to find Kiem, so why don’t you just shut up.’ When she didn’t answer, he said; ‘Look, it’s not as bad as it looks. There are some things I don’t do.’

‘Like what?’

‘Children. Oh, don’t purse your lips, you know bloody well kids
are being sold in this city. What can people do? There’s a ready market.’

‘Perhaps the kids are better off out of here. If they go to the right homes.’

‘Yeah, Jessie. That’s one way of looking at it. The trouble is it’s turning into a paedophiles’ picnic spot.’ He pulled his lower lip down and stroked a piece of tobacco from inside it, an old man’s fumbling gesture. But he wasn’t so old, still, she thought. Mid-fifties. ‘Actually, I do buy kids. Some nuns came back and opened an orphanage a few months back. I give them some kids now and then, gives them something to do.’

She studied him, trying to work out if he was telling the truth. The way he sat with his arms folded, as though he didn’t care whether she believed him, was convincing. A cold flatness had descended behind his eyes, so that he appeared indifferent to her. For an instant, she saw him standing by a blue lake, laughing, naked, his penis slightly erect, dark hair in his groin and on his chest. And yet she’d never known him, never had, never seen him care about anything or anyone, except the night when his wife Freda had come into the Violet Café, and the girl Belle had said that she loved him. ‘Isn’t that playing God? Perhaps they don’t want to be Christians.’

‘Ah crap, Jessie. What a load of bullshit they’ve taught you. Do you know what happens to little girls here? They get fattened up for the markets when they’re two, three years old so men can stick their dicks in them. You got a better moral solution?’

‘All right,’ Jessie said. ‘Okay. I don’t know why people do what they do. I write what I see. This was a beautiful city once, and now it’s a bloody hole and it needs all the help it can get. Will you let me do a story?’

‘No thanks. I don’t need anybody reading about me. I’ll get someone to take you to Kiem’s place when you’ve finished, and then you can forget you ever saw me. Is it a deal?’

‘If that’s what you want.’

‘I do. Have you been back?’

‘To New Zealand? Once. A few years ago now.’

‘Who did you see?’ He was engaged again, in spite of himself. A team of rats scurried across the floor towards a rice sack. His eyes travelled their wake. ‘I’ll bring the cats in when you’ve gone.’

‘I saw Hester. She does weddings, and is generally in hate with the world. And Belle. She’s selling home appliances these days.’

‘Oh yeah.’ As if he had to think who Belle was. ‘John, did you see John?’

‘I thought then he was dead. Like you.’

‘You’re really out of touch. Speaking of abandoned children, you know he was Violet Trench’s son?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ She pinched herself under the table. But straight away she knew she was being offered a missing piece. ‘How did you find out?’

‘I lent her my boat one day when John was a little kid. It was the middle of wartime, and this woman turned up at the lakefront. I’d never seen her before — a real good-looking woman. She was beside herself, wanting to take the kid across the lake to Hugo’s place. I used to go there a lot. Harry and Sam were mates of mine. Uppity of course, that was Violet, but she needed my boat.’

‘Did she tell you she was John’s mother?’

‘Not exactly. Well, who knows, perhaps the kid wasn’t hers, but if he wasn’t, why had she carted him halfway around the world? I heard later from Harry that she’d brought him from London. Anyway, she got the boat off me, and then she didn’t come back until late that night. It caused me a bit of trouble.’

‘And then she went away again?’

‘Disappeared, but the kid was left there. Then she comes back and opens the café. She knew I knew.’ He drained the glass he had refilled twice since she arrived. ‘You ever hear from my daughter?’

‘I heard she was in America,’ Jessie replied.

‘Yeah, maybe. Her mother was as mad as a snake, you know.’

‘Perhaps she was driven crazy.’

‘You’ll bake if you stick around much longer,’ he said, inviting her to leave. ‘It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum out there. I’ll get someone to show you the way.’

‘Lou,’ Jessie said, standing up, ‘how did you get out of the forest?’

His expression went blank again. ‘I walked,’ he said.

‘It was too far.’

‘I got to Auckland and shipped out.’

‘You never touched your money. Hester told me.’

‘There was never enough to bother about.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Jessie? Things can happen to people who ask too many questions round here. Do you know how many
bo
dai
have gone missing in this country in the last ten years? Yeah, I can see that you do. Remember a man called Caldwell? You don’t even have to go missing. Someone comes to your room at night and opens the door. Room service, they say, and you open up, just a crack, but it’s enough. Or perhaps you don’t even do that — but they have a key, and the next thing you’re lying in a pool of your own brains.’

In the heat, Jessie shivered. Dead war correspondents. ‘Malcolm Caldwell. Yes I do. He was an apologist for Pol Pot.’

‘A Marxist. He thought the Anka would protect him. But they didn’t.’

‘You know who shot him?’

Lou picked up a cat that looked as much like a rat as the animals it was being sent to hunt. ‘I don’t exist. Don’t look for me again.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. Sarcastic, but it was her best defence, and besides he would have her taken to Kiem. ‘Thanks for everything, Lou. Especially the diversion that got me lost.’