‘Now that’s what I call gratitude.’ Elliot hawked a gob of phlegm up from his throat and spat it into the bushes.
‘Why would you need my gratitude?’ Serey asked. ‘Is my husband’s money not enough?’
Elliot glanced at the boy who was watching him intently. The boy averted his eyes towards his sister and there was a brief exchange between them. Then he turned again to his mother, uttered a few short words, and strode past Elliot into the house, the Kalashnikov rattling at his side.
‘What did he say?’
Ny opened her mouth to speak, but Serey cut in. ‘He said he is doing it anyway and that I cannot stop him.’
Elliot shrugged. ‘I guess you can’t.’
Serey stopped digging for the first time, and she turned on him a stare leaden with hatred. Steam rose around her from the sodden earth, the rain of yesterday evaporating with the heat of the sun. With the slightest shake of her head she turned back to her digging. Elliot inclined his head to meet Ny’s gaze. It wasn’t hatred in her eyes. It was sadness. Or something more. Pity perhaps. He looked away. Hate was easier.
A single harsh word from her mother recalled Ny to the task of digging. They had made a hole nearly half a metre deep. Elliot trod through soft earth towards them.
‘What are you digging for? Gold?’
‘As good as,’ Serey said. And he heard the sound of her fingernails scratching on metal. He crouched down to watch as both pairs of hands intensified their digging, scrabbling hard to uncover a rusty metal box about a foot square and six or eight inches deep. Serey muttered something in her native tongue as they lifted it out and dragged it on to the mound of earth they had dug out. Burrowing insects scuttled away from the sudden light. She fumbled with the clasp, but it was rusted solid.
Elliot took out his knife. ‘Here, let me.’ After several attempts he broke the clasp and prised back the lid. Inside lay a heavy-duty black plastic bag gathered and tied securely at the neck. Serey held her hand out for Elliot’s knife. He handed it to her and watched as she slit open the bag to reveal its hidden treasure: gold and silver jewellery; necklaces and bracelets, earrings, brooches; diamonds, rubies, emeralds glinting in the slanting sunlight. Thousands of dollars’ worth. Elliot stared in amazement.
Serey kept her eyes lowered. ‘We were once very wealthy, Mistah Elliot. When one had no need to worry about food, one spent one’s money on the luxuries of life, the beautiful things, the expensive things. One would have needed ten thousand bowls of rice to buy a single diamond. But you can’t eat diamonds. Now, perhaps, my diamonds will buy a few bowls of rice.’
From the bottom of the bag she drew out a bundle of notes. US dollars, maybe five thousand in hundred-dollar bills. She tossed them to Elliot. He caught the bundle and looked up, surprised. ‘What’s this for?’
She looked at him steadily. ‘I do not wish to be in my husband’s debt. Or yours.’
Elliot felt the cold touch of the golden handshake, the dismissal of the hired help.
Serey delved again into the bag and lifted out a thin, tattered book embossed with the colonial crest of pre-revolutionary Cambodia. ‘What is it, Mamma?’
Ny took it from her and flicked it open. A photograph of a pretty young woman, barely recognizable as the woman kneeling beside her, stared out from its faded pages, a curious half-smile recalling happier days in another life. Serey was still looking at Elliot, defiance in her eyes.
‘It is my passport,’ she said, then turned to Ny. ‘And yours and Hau’s. It is not worth much now. But it is who we were, and who we will be again.’
Elliot rose slowly and walked back to the house. Serey took the passport from Ny and slipped it back into the bag. As she got unsteadily to her feet Ny said to her, ‘Mamma...’ And she turned to look as Ny picked up the wad of notes from where Elliot had left it lying in the dirt.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Lisa awoke feeling doubt: about who she was, about who she had always thought herself to be. She had come in search of her father and found herself instead. But a self who was still a stranger, full of contradictions, of responses she did not know herself well enough to predict. She was, at the same time, excited and frightened by this new self. The book of her life had quite suddenly opened up an unexpected chapter, leading her off on an eccentric spiral of delicious uncertainty.
The door opened and she saw that it was Grace, and was suddenly self-conscious, as if the older woman might have read her mind.
But Grace seemed not to notice. Her eyes were blank, a hunted look in the lines around them. Her movements were quick and nervous. Lisa smiled uneasily in an attempt to disperse her sudden sense of foreboding. ‘I was just going to get dressed.’
‘Get packed. You must leave quickly.’ Grace’s tone was cold and impersonal. Yet more confusion filled Lisa’s mind.
‘Why? Where are we going?’
‘I am going nowhere. You are going home.’
‘Home?’
‘I have booked your flight. But first you will need to sort out passport details at your embassy. Move.’
And she hurried out leaving Lisa feeling foolish and deflated. Gone were the revelations of the new Lisa, the unsuspected Lisa who had emerged so recently from the cocoon of her past. Suddenly she was the Lisa she’d always been. Young and naive and frightened. She glanced about her in the bedroom’s half-light, sunlight flickering around the edges of the shutters. Everything seemed alien now. All the intimacy between her and Grace dismissed by those few harshly spoken words. Get packed! You’re going home! The eyes that didn’t want to meet hers. Now, another piece of the old Lisa re-emerged. The stubborn Lisa. The petulant child who wanted to stamp her foot and scream, Won’t! Won’t do it! She started to dress hurriedly.
Grace wandered through the cool semi-darkness of the dining room, drumming her fingers along the length of the table. Through the French window, the sun spun soft patterns of light among the green tropical foliage, bright and optimistic, a visual echo of the chattering birdsong, the creak of the cicadas. A normal day, a never-ending cycle. Always the same. And yet, for her, nothing would ever be the same again. It seemed unfair, and unreal, that for her there should be such turmoil and change in the midst of such normalcy. It set her apart, somehow, from the world. She felt disembodied, a ghost haunting the familiar life she had known, but unable to touch it or be touched by it.
Nor could she understand why. Why she should risk everything, even her life, for this girl. Was it guilt? The thought almost brought a smile to her face. Conscience was for those who drew lines of moral distinction. She had never done that, would not know where those lines should be drawn. As Lisa’s naivety blinded her to her innocence, so Grace’s cynicism had never allowed her a sense of guilt. Of course, deep inside she knew the answer, but she shied away from letting it crystallize in her thoughts. That would be too painful.
She caught herself reflected in the glass of the French windows and saw an old face looking back at her, one she barely recognized. And yet it was an accurate reflection of the way she felt. She shivered, sensing cold sweat on her palms. Tears pricked her eyes and she wanted to weep. The layers of self-protection she had wrapped around herself across the years had somehow been stripped away, leaving her exposed and vulnerable. She heard the crunch of tyres on gravel as her chauffeur brought the car to the front of the house, and turned as she heard a footfall in the doorway behind her. Lisa stood framed against the hall, her face set and flushed with defiance.
‘I came to find my father,’ she said. ‘I am not leaving until I do.’ For a moment there was no sound, except for the squawking of birds in the garden. Lisa’s defiance faltered in the face of the naked hostility which hid the tears in Grace’s eyes.