5.49 p.m.
Raf takes a swig of beer. ‘So what happened?’ he says. He has that feeling of mild inadequacy he gets whenever he listens to anyone who’s had a truly eventful or difficult life.
‘I was wrong! That afternoon, my mom came back. My brother was about a minute from making a commando assault on the Lacebark building, but she came back. She said we were going to America. Everything was arranged. And that was the last night I ever spent in Gandayaw. The next day, a jeep took me and my mother to an airfield near this town called Kyaukme, then we got a flight to Bangkok International, then another flight to LAX. All the paperwork was already waiting for us.’
‘What about your brother?’
‘He wouldn’t come. He said we couldn’t “abandon Gandayaw to the white men and the Tatmadaw”. Like the three of us were the last line of defence.’
‘So you left him?’
‘My mom pleaded. But he just went off into the forest with his friends. He said he wouldn’t show himself in town again until we were gone. It must have torn my mom to pieces, but we were on somebody else’s schedule and there wasn’t a lot she could do. She knew how stubborn Zaya was. She used to tell me he’d follow us one day.’
Raf doesn’t want to interrupt the story but he can’t stop himself from informing Cherish that this chicken curry might be the best curry he’s ever eaten.
‘You don’t have to tell me.’
It’s fragrant like getting knocked down in the street by one of those trolleys from the flower market would be fragrant, and the hot capsaicin buzz feels as if it’s seeping directly through his soft palate into his medulla oblongata, about a hundred times as good as ethylbuphedrone. ‘I wish I knew how to make one like this.’
‘Me too.’
‘Did you ever find out who that guy was?’ Raf says. ‘Your father?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think of him as my father. He’s just a genomic precursor.’
‘Right, sorry.’
‘He must have come to Gandayaw in 1990. Some Lacebark exec who got tanked up on Johnnie Walker one night and raped my mom. And I guess Zaya must have been there too. In the room, or watching through a doorway. He would’ve been six years old. That’s why she sent Zaya away when she saw the guy in the car. She must have thought there was a chance Zaya might recognise the guy too, and if he did, he’d go apeshit and get himself killed. She was probably right about that.’ Cherish purses her lips. ‘I always used to find it weird, what that prick did. Like, if you can rape someone on a business trip, how can you also care enough to pay for a new life for your little rape kid? But now I think it was a self-esteem thing. Status. He was thinking, “I know I’m not the type of guy who has a kid growing up in this shitty town full of hookers and guns and speed. So I’d better throw some money on the ground to make sure.” Or maybe he did feel genuinely guilty, too. Who knows? We never saw him again.’
Raf scoops up the last of the stir-fried beans. ‘Was it weird, moving to America?’
‘Was it weird? Eating macaroni cheese in the cafeteria at a middle school in Echo Park after spending my entire life up to that point in a mining town in southern Burma?’
‘Sorry. Stupid question.’
Every time she smiles she puts his heart in her mouth like a wonton. ‘Yeah, kind of, but then again it was definitely no weirder for me than it was for, like, the Liberian boy sitting next to me. So it’s not like I won that contest.’
‘Where’s your brother now? Still in Gandayaw?’
‘No. But my mom’s still in Los Angeles.’ She pushes away her plate, casting into shadow the little golden flowerbed she’s cultivated beside it by picking the foil absently from the neck of her beer bottle. Her phone beeps from her pocket and she takes it out to read a text message. ‘Hey, I just need to talk to the chef for a minute,’ she says. Raf eats the last of her rice. When she comes back from the kitchen, she’s putting something in her purse but he doesn’t see what. She also has the bill. ‘They’re going to wrap up a couple slices of mango cake for us,’ she says as she sits down. ‘Do you have plans tonight?’
Yes: Isaac has a new Xbox game. ‘No.’
‘Well, shall we get some more booze and go back to your apartment? I’m not drinking any more of that god-awful vodka you had.’
On the way here they stopped off at the block with the Myth FM transmitter so Raf could take Rose back up to the roof. As much as he wants to climb into a dryer with this girl and never get out, there’s also part of him that doesn’t even want to leave the restaurant, because he knows that wherever he goes next he can’t conceivably feel as much well-being as he does now. There’s no clock on the wall and no other customers, and time in here only moves as fast as the Maneki Neko cats can waft it forward with their plastic paws, so why stir? But he still nods and takes out his wallet to find his share of the bill.
‘What are you whistling? I think I know that tune.’
‘GABBA GABBA hey!’ he sings softly. ‘GABBA GABBA hey!’
Day 6
6.24 a.m.
The next morning she’s gone.
The realisation is pre-empted by his hangover, which as usual waits a few seconds after he wakes up before it pounces, as if it wants to savour the expression on his face. He mews in agony at Cherish, at the assumption of her presence, already looking forward to a tactical discussion of their mutual enemy and a fried breakfast that might bring as much joy as yesterday’s curry. But when he reaches out, his hand finds nothing but rucked duvet. He takes off his eyemask to look around the room, and then he takes out his earplugs to call for her. Last night, after they had sex for the third time that day, he said, ‘You’ll still be here in the morning, right?’
‘Yes, and I will still respect you.’
‘No, I mean — you have to be careful. The vans.’ By this point Raf and Isaac have asked all their mutual friends about Theo, but no one seems to know anything more.
‘I’ll still be here.’ So he lay there with his arms around her, trying to tune his breathing with hers, but couldn’t get the frequency, and after a while she said, ‘Are you waiting for me to fall asleep?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
With his ex-girlfriend, Raf didn’t like to install his eyemask and earplugs while she was still awake because it felt like the first step towards a marital schedule of fortnightly sex, but she did like to fall asleep on his chest, so he used to have to wait until she dozed off and then ease out from under her so he could barricade his head. (Isaac once reported going home with a girl who wore not only an eyemask and earplugs but also a retainer and an anti-congestant nasal strip, which made her look as if for some reason she were morbidly afraid of leaking cerebrospinal fluid.)
When Raf didn’t answer, Cherish explained, ‘We can hug for as long as you want, but I can’t sleep if I can feel someone else’s heartbeat. Plus spooning just doesn’t work, ergonomically. Everyone knows it but no one wants to admit it.’ Around this girl there were black iron railings and a neat buffer of grass. That evening, sharing a bottle of whisky at the kitchen table, she had asked him about his own parents, who moved out to Essex a few years ago, and taught him a drinking game where you had to bounce a ten-pence piece into a shot glass. In bed afterwards she was rougher and more impatient than before, and he had an enjoyable feeling of being used, but when she came it was in complete silence, like a fuse blown in a cheap speaker.
A minute ago, Raf was dreaming about those empty soundproofed warehouses, rising and multiplying until their steel roofs blocked the sun from every street. Now he rolls over to sniff the other pillow, to prove Cherish wasn’t a dream too, but it’s blank to him. At least the sheets do have that tired and porous quality of sheets that have been repeatedly fucked in. He wonders what Rose would be able to smell here. How would a Staffie go through a bad break-up? Reminders of your lover breathing out from every object. You’d have to move house and burn all your bedding. Which is not that different from the plan Raf recently made. The only physical object he still has of his ex-girlfriend’s is a hexagon-print scarf he once bought her as a present. He could tell straight away that she didn’t like it, and sure enough she didn’t bother to take it with her when she was collecting the things she’d left here. But apart from the scarf, there’s all the rest of London, too. Isaac keeps telling him that it’s no use trying to flee the reliquary of a dead relationship. ‘Statistically,’ he once said when they were drunk, ‘every pint of beer you ever drink for the rest of your life will contain at least a few of the same molecules of H2O that she sweated out the first time that Brazilian cunt gave her an orgasm. So you might as well learn to live with it.’