The Half-Child (31 page)

I wonder if Dad will disown me.

Sunday 22 September 1996

Sumet and I had another argument about Australia last night. I thought given his parents' attitude to poor Mayuree and her baby, he'd have a bit more empathy. But he doesn't seem to believe it's that bad. Perhaps I
should
take him home to meet the family. Then he'd see for himself. But I really don't want to and anyway we can't afford the airfares.

I could ask Dad for the money I suppose, though I wouldn't put it past him to refuse to pay for Sumet's ticket, even if we married. And I wouldn't go without Sumet— no way!

Maybe I should blackmail Dad, offer to spare him the humiliation of having to introduce his ‘slope' son-in-law and ‘half-caste' grandchild to all his One Nation voting mates in exchange for paying us to stay in Thailand.

I'm tempted to cut all ties with my family, make a fresh start. It would upset Mum, but it might also give her an incentive to crawl out from under her rock. I reckon she'd visit us once the baby is born, even if meant lying to Dad about where she was going.

On the other hand, maybe it would force Dad to confront his prejudices to see his darling daughter happily married to a Thai man.

I wish I could trust him more.

And I wish Sumet would just accept that I'm happy to live in Thailand. I'm tired of arguing. We go round and round in circles about the same things, over and over again.

Speaking of circles, I've been getting a lot of headaches over the last week. Dizzy spells, too. Once or twice I stood up too quickly and almost passed out. Dr Apiradee says these are normal symptoms for the first trimester of pregnancy, and I should consider myself lucky I don't have morning sickness. But I feel so tired.

I wish I could tell someone else about the baby, but if word got out—and it would, the Thais are terrible gossips— I'd lose my job at the centre, and I need to keep working there for as long as possible. It's awful, but I make more from my volunteer allowance than Sumet used to earn as a teacher.

We need all the money we can get, especially if we're going to rent our own place. I mean, I'm keen to visit Sumet's family but I don't want to live with them.

Thurs 26 September 1996

After what seems like weeks of fighting, Sumet and I had a lovely time last night. Romantic dinner followed by a moonlight walk along Jomtien Beach, where we first kissed, first told each other ‘I love you'. I can't believe it was only three months ago!

If someone told me when I left Australia that within a few months I would fall in love with a beautiful Thai man and be having his baby, I wouldn't have believed it. But here I am, and I couldn't be happier.

Within five days of writing this, Maryanne was dead.

Jayne closed the diary and let it fall on to the table, imagining the ripples it sent through the floor of the floating restaurant.

She phoned Police Major General Wichit and briefed him on her find.

‘I can't fathom how something as significant as Maryanne's pregnancy could have been left out of the autopsy reports,' she said.

‘It wasn't. I have the Thai report here—' she heard the shuffling of papers ‘—and it's on page two: deceased was approximately eight weeks pregnant at the time of death, foetus normal.'

‘Well, it didn't rate a mention in the English version. A significant detail to get lost in translation, don't you think?'

Police Major General Wichit cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps my colleagues in Pattaya didn't deem it relevant to the autopsy findings in light of Doctor Somsri's testimony regarding Maryanne's mental health.'

‘Which we now know to be false. I'm guessing Somsri fabricated the depression to account for Maryanne's death— to keep Chaowalit out of it and protect his standover man.'

‘Highly likely,' Wichit said. ‘But at the time my colleagues had no reason to doubt the word of a doctor.'

‘Surely Maryanne's pregnancy had a bearing on their findings?'

‘Not so much as to change the verdict. The police had the corpse of a young girl, unmarried, pregnant and reportedly suffering from mental instability. In other words, a classic suicide.'

‘Then surely they would have mentioned the pregnancy to corroborate their case.'

‘Perhaps whoever finalised the translation dismissed that as a minor detail in order to spare the girl's family.'

‘Minor detail?' Jayne spluttered. ‘How could someone make that sort of judgment call? If I were Maryanne's parents I'd be outraged.'

‘But you're not a parent, Jayne, and it might interest you to know that in similar circumstances the authorities in your country issue two death certificates: one does not specify cause of death so can be used for administrative purposes without causing families distress.'

Wichit was pulling rank on her in more ways than one.

‘I believe my colleagues acted with the best of intentions based on the available evidence.' he added. ‘Of course, if Maryanne's parents wish to lodge a formal complaint—'

‘They don't know about it yet. I haven't had time to tell them. And…'

‘And?'

‘I haven't figured out what to say.'

‘Hmm.'

She could picture him nodding.

‘I'm worried what Maryanne's father might do to Sumet.

I want to keep him out of it.'

‘So perhaps you can empathise with whoever edited the English version of the autopsy report after all?'

That it was a question not a statement gave him away.

She knew it was Wichit himself who'd made that judgment call, and that he was thinking of his own daughter when he did it.

‘My client has a right to know his daughter didn't commit suicide.'

‘Of course.'

There was another moment's silence.

‘If Chaowalit makes a sworn statement that he witnessed Maryanne fall, we can get a revised verdict of accidental death without the diary and without bringing Sumet into it,' Wichit said. ‘We can let sleeping dogs lie, yes?'

This idiom translated into Thai sounded stranger than most because Thais only ever associated dogs with people as an insult. Jayne smiled in spite of herself.

‘I need to think about it,' she said.

39

W
ith more than an hour before she was due to meet Mayuree at the bus depot, Jayne summoned a waiter and asked for a beer, a packet of cigarettes and a plate of
pad thai
, in that order.

She sipped the beer, smoked a cigarette and leafed through the diary. The simplest course of action was to hand it to Maryanne's father. He'd employed Jayne to prove his daughter hadn't committed suicide, and the diary would make him feel vindicated.

But that's not all it would do to him: the truths it contained might do serious damage. Then again, if Jim Delbeck were the racist prick the diary suggested, why should Jayne care? On one level, it would be satisfying to drop those bombshells on Maryanne's behalf.

The arrival of the fried noodles provided a distraction, but she only managed to pick at the food. She pushed aside the plate and lit another cigarette. A motorised long-tail boat raced along the river, ferrying a group of tourists towards the bridge. Water lapped at the raft in its wake and the restaurant rocked.

Jayne remembered Rajiv's notes and fished them out of her bag. He had customised a guide to Kanchanaburi for her, photocopying items of interest from travel guides, history books, newspapers and magazines. Jayne failed to understand why he kept trying to please her when she treated him so badly. At the same time, she felt guilty he wasn't there with her. Kanchanaburi was his kind of place.

To punish herself, she read every page of his notes. She learned that Kanchanaburi province, known as Thailand's Wild West, boasted some of the country's highest waterfalls and largest sanctuaries, where elephants and even tigers roamed in the wild. Signs of human habitation dated back ten thousand years, and in the thirteenth century Kanchanaburi had been an outpost of the mighty Angkor empire. While the Thais visited for the spectacular scenery and floating discos, the major attraction for Western tourists was the province's World War II history. Under the command of the Japanese Imperial Army, some 16,000 Australian, British, Dutch and American prisoners of war had died building the Death Railway from Thailand to Burma. Their stories were commemorated with museums and monuments from Kanchanaburi Town to as far away as Hellfire Pass in the province's northwest, their remains interred at two Allied War Cemeteries.

More than 70,000 Asian labourers also died building the Death Railway, press-ganged from colonial Malaya, Burma, Thailand and what is now Indonesia. There were no monuments to them, only a mass grave allegedly covered by an orchard of limes and banana trees.

Jayne put down the notes. Did she have the right to punish Jim Delbeck for being racist when even here Asians were treated as second-class citizens? And what about Maryanne? Though she lamented her father's racism, she wasn't above prejudice herself. No one ever was. And it was inconclusive from her journal entries whether she intended her relationship with Sumet to drive a wedge between her and her father, or to test his love.

Jayne checked her watch and signalled for the bill. A light breeze sent her notes drifting to the floor. She gathered them up, put them into her bag and reached for the diary. The front cover had blown open, revealing Maryanne's name and contact details. Jayne stared at it for a moment, picked up her phone and called Rajiv.

From the moment Uncle returned to the bookshop, he'd been on a mission to subvert Rajiv's carefully computerised system and restore his own eclectic regime. It started with small acts of resistance—moving the keyboard aside to make room for his receipt pad, pens and carbon paper, ‘forgetting' to return books to the shelves so they amassed in piles on the front desk—and soon developed into a full-scale rebellion. Rajiv arrived one morning to find towering stacks of books where a shelving unit had been and the computer disconnected at the wall. He turned the computer back on but his efforts to enter data were frustrated by tacky keys. Something had been spilled on the keyboard. Sabotage.

After an hour spent trying to consolidate records without use of the letter ‘s', Rajiv was ready to tear his hair out when Jayne called. Mumbling something about a new keyboard to his uncle, he excused himself for the rest of the afternoon. Uncle smiled and squeezed his shoulder as if he couldn't be happier.

Jayne gave Rajiv a précis of the contents of Maryanne's diary, including Maryanne's email address. She asked him to access it, gave him a list of possible passwords and said she would call again once she got back to Bangkok. There was no small talk, no reference to their previous conversation.

She told him nothing about Kanchanaburi and he knew better than to ask.

He took it as a good sign that she called; he was useful to her, maybe indispensable. It brought him closer to realising his ambition of becoming her partner in the detective business—a partnership he needed to secure sooner rather than later, given the return of Uncle.

He had to tread lightly. Jayne was fiercely independent and the notion that his skills were important to the business had to come from her. He needed to earn her respect without making her resent him.

At the same time, Rajiv needed to stand up for himself.

He'd put up with being treated badly in light of the traumatic events in Pattaya. But he couldn't let her walk all over him.

Trouble was, Rajiv felt himself falling in love with Jayne.

The full force of his feelings struck him when he saw her unconscious in the hospital. He wanted to win her over, but as his actions on that fateful night in Pattaya had shown, Rajiv wasn't romantic hero material. Not for him the lead role in
The Ramayana
, the Thai version of which,
The Ramakien
, he was currently reading to see how it differed from the Indian epic poem. He was no warrior-hero like Rama or his brother Lakshman. What Rajiv had to offer was brains not brawn. He was more like the monkey king Hanuman, whose cunning and resourcefulness were central to the heroes' success. He took heart from Hanuman's prominent role in
The Ramakien
, and hoped Jayne, like the Thais, appreciated the merits of cleverness and trickery.

He could have gone to an internet café nearby on Khao San Road, but the one on Silom was cleaner and faster. That it was close to Jayne's apartment was an added advantage in case he found anything of significance that needed to be printed out and taken to her later that evening.

It was still early enough to get a seat on the ferry. He handed ten baht to the conductor as she shuffled along the aisle, rattling the coins in her metal cylinder. Rajiv scanned the books in his bag: a history of the Death Railway, an Australian crime novel called
Kickback
that he'd picked up for Jayne, a bootlegged copy of a hacker's manual, and an English translation of
The Ramakien
that he fished out and resumed reading.

40

I
t took them two hours to get from Kanchanaburi to Bangkok's Southern Bus Terminal, and another hour in cross-town traffic to reach the hotel where the Kings were staying. Jayne would have deferred the confrontation until the following morning, but Mayuree couldn't wait to be reunited with her son. The closer they got, the more agitated the Thai woman became, compulsively checking her reflection, sniffing a menthol inhaler and dabbing at her eyes with tissues. Jayne worried that Mayuree would lose all self-control once she saw Kob, but decided that might not be a bad thing. An emotional outburst might be just what it took to move Alicia King.

Still, she wanted to spare Leroy and Alicia—not to mention Kob—the trauma of a surprise attack and asked Mayuree to wait in the lobby while she paged them.