As Ko snips the zip tie off his wrists with a small pair of pliers, Raf looks around. He’s in the living room of a two- or three-bedroom flat, part of an old converted house rather than a council estate. Just now, when he heard those two heavy bolts sliding back, he was reminded of the Myth FM studio, and he sees now that the comparison was pretty apt: this is another of those small pressurised containers you sometimes find in London that are put to such a brutally demanding and urgent and contradictory selection of uses that every organic or inorganic body within them, and perhaps also the local fabric of space itself, will before long find itself scoured and mulched into a sort of ragged black kimchi. There are bin bags taped over the windows and cardboard boxes stacked in the corner next to a folding futon. Up on the wall there’s a map of London, a faded poster of a huge pyramidal temple somewhere in the jungle, and a one-page advertorial torn from a magazine announcing Lacebark’s new annual human rights grant. The table by the doorway through to the rest of the flat has been converted into a sort of workstation whose purpose is clear to Raf because he’s seen others like it, with latex gloves, spoons, tinfoil, small resealable plastic bags, a few tubs of lactose, a vacuum brush, and a set of microgram digital scales.
‘What is this?’ says Raf. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ If he’d been thinking more clearly when he was in the van, maybe it would have occurred to him sooner that the van’s engine wasn’t silent.
‘We had to get you away from the restaurant before Lacebark worked out what we were doing,’ says Cherish. ‘But we also had to make sure you didn’t see the route here. Ko’s English isn’t that good and there wasn’t going to be time for him to coax you into putting the hood on. So he did what he had to.’
The guy in the wheelchair murmurs something in Burmese. He’s so deathly in appearance that Raf is almost too squeamish to look straight at him — cheekbones and eye sockets way too big for the rest of his face, glossy lesions swarming around his mouth, skin greyish and almost translucent in places like undercooked prawns — and yet there’s something in his gaze and in the set of his shoulders that gives the impression of real strength.
‘Also, it won’t have done you any harm to see what it would be like if Lacebark really got to you,’ adds Cherish, apparently translating. ‘It’s happened to a lot of our friends. We all need to learn to be grateful for our good luck so far. Incidentally, don’t go back to the restaurant for a while after this, OK? Lacebark aren’t going to believe you like mohinga that much.’
Raf starts rubbing his wrists where they’re sore from the plastic cuff but then he remembers how often he’s seen the gesture in films and feels so self-conscious about it he has to stop. ‘I thought you were working for them.’
‘Yeah. That’s my day job.’ She gestures at the sofa. ‘Sit down. There’s a lot to tell you.’ She’s wearing a black rayon zip-up shift dress with no tights, and the dress shows nothing off, it’s tersely functional, but this is still the first time he’s seen her in anything girlier than jeans and a T-shirt, and the contrast would be enough to staple his gaze to her hemlines if he weren’t so unnerved by what’s happening.
‘Who is this?’ he says.
‘Raf, I want you to meet my brother Zaya.’ The guy in the wheelchair nods at Raf. ‘By the way, he can understand us fine. His English is good. But he’s really sick at the moment. Even though he’s barely taking any pain meds, he has to work really hard just to keep his mind clear. It’s too tiring for him to speak English. So I’m going to translate for him.’ She says something in Burmese. And then, through Cherish, Zaya starts telling the story of the day the two of them met for the first time in eight years.
Living in the hotel during the monsoon, Zaya explains, was like being half blind and half deaf: the site was surrounded by jungle, a warm mist blurred the air, and the rain drowned out nearly every sound, so that nothing broke through into the swaddled pinhole of your awareness until it was close enough to toss a pebble at your feet. He didn’t mind this too much, because it liberated you from the delusion of vigilance — in December, as you tried to fall asleep, you still listened for every hornbill squawk, convinced that somehow you would be able to pick out the one that warned of an attack from the jungle, but in June, you just learned to accept that there might be a noose of fifty soldiers tightening around your base and you wouldn’t know it until the first shot was fired.
However, today, it also meant he didn’t hear the truck until it was almost at the top of the slope. He hurried out from the lobby to the verandah and watched as the old grey Toyota shuddered to a halt like a mule forced home with too much on its back. Mae Sot, where Kham had gone to pick up Cherish, was only about forty miles east, across the border into Thailand, but if you were trying to avoid checkpoints the drive through the muddy hills took five or six hours that left you numb and boneless and shaky. From this distance he couldn’t make out through the streaming windscreen whether there was anyone in the passenger seat, and he knew it was still possible that Cherish had refused to come here with Kham, or that something else had happened to pull her out of their reach in the three days since they’d got word of her arrival in Mae Sot. But then the passenger-side door opened, and the girl who got down was his half-sister. She saw him and her eyes widened.
He tried to take in her height, her beauty, her tourist clothes. As his heart swelled in his chest, he forced himself to recall that almost half this girl’s life was unknown to him, that she was an American of untested loyalties, that for all he knew she had Lacebark money in her bank account and a GPS tracker in one of her body cavities. But then their arms were tight around each other and for a while none of that was in his mind. He waited until the motor of her sobs had slowed before he said, ‘Come in out of the rain,’ and led her by the arm back to the shelter of the verandah, the bank of the vertical river. Behind them, Kham was fixing a tarpaulin over the van.
After she put her rucksack down she stood there wiping her face and wringing out the hem of her vest. ‘Where are we? What the hell is this place?’
At first, you might have taken it for the overgrown ruins of an old British governor’s mansion. But if the building lacked an east wing or a rear elevation, it wasn’t because they’d been shelled by the Japanese, it was because they’d never been built. Back in the eighties, Zaya explained, an Indonesian company had come to this site to begin construction on a colonial-style hotel. They had plenty of investment from the Burmese government, who also planned to build a road here from Kawkareik; on the other side of the slope there was a gorgeous natural waterfall, and the aim had presumably been to tempt a few travellers across from northern Thailand during the dry season. But the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism didn’t put up the rest of the stake it had promised, and the Indonesians pulled out.
This was such a reliable pattern whenever the Burmese government had any dealings with a foreign business that it began to resemble a kind of bureaucratic derangement, this uncontrollable compulsion towards starting projects and then reneging halfway through so that all the money that had already been spent was squandered. Today, even the few completed rooms were often so wretched with moss and rats’ nests and leaky ceilings that sleeping there felt only a little bit milder than sleeping out in the jungle, and Zaya and his seven comrades didn’t really live in the hotel so much as they lived in a camp that happened to use the hotel for scaffolding. At the back of this monument to waste and stupidity there was still a stagnant midden full of all the plastic debris that the builders hadn’t bothered to take away with them when they left, and under a half-completed stairwell Zaya had found a stash of Thai porn magazines, fused by twenty years of monsoon damp into a greenish loaf of nipples.