‘Are you going to have time to stop over in Pak Lai on your way upriver?’ Daeng asked.
‘No. They want me there at the weekend. But if you’re still around on Monday I’ll abandon ship and celebrate the end of the world with you.’
‘How sweet of you,’ Daeng laughed.
‘I’d rather hoped I might meet your witch on board,’ said Civilai.
‘Not a good sailor, evidently,’ said Siri. ‘The Ministry of Agriculture flew her up in a helicopter yesterday.’
‘She didn’t have her broomstick?’
Madame Daeng looked baffled.
‘Just the two of us, older brother,’ said Siri. ‘Just the two of us.’
Mr Geung joined them on the upper deck clutching a whole cleavage of coconuts.
‘More,’ he said and sat on the deck with his sharp machete lobotomizing them one by one. Ugly chewed on a half shell that was his alone. Siri had entrusted the dog to the care of Mr Bhiku David Tickoo, the father of Crazy Rajid and the head cook at the Happy Dine Indian restaurant. Crazy Rajid spent his mute days wandering the streets of Vientiane or bathing naked in the river but many nights he would sleep behind the restaurant. Siri’d had a little business to discuss with him the night before their departure and he took the opportunity to chain the dog to the restaurant’s back fence. After a plate of beef curry, Ugly seemed perfectly content to spend a few days there. When Siri and Daeng arrived at the ferry that morning, Ugly had been there waiting for them, tail wagging, a big smile on his deformed face. How he knew about the ferry trip nobody could say.
‘And what news of your handsome paramour, Madame Daeng?’ Civilai asked.
‘I’m starting to wish I hadn’t told you about him,’ said Daeng. ‘Nobody else knows.’
‘You had no choice,’ said Civilai. ‘I am a man of influence. I can open doors. My minions at the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Interior are hunting out his arrival documents as we speak. Any chance he’s just here to shake hands with old foe? Love across the Atlantic? World peace?’
‘We can hope,’ said Siri. ‘Goodness knows the French spread so much goodwill and happiness while they were here.’
‘Nuts?’ said Geung.
As our working men had been disposed of horribly and publicly to end the rebellion, our village soon started to break up. My mother and sister and I travelled to Pakse in the south where Ma and me found laundry work. I was eleven. My sister, Gulap, was sixteen but she couldn’t help us. She was a victim of what I later learned was called cerebral palsy. At the time they called her a spastic. She could neither speak nor walk but she was easily the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She smiled continuously. An irresistible smile. I was a daisy to Gulap’s rose. I talked to her all the time. I told her stories. I know she understood me.
Our laundry was behind a large auberge. We did the wash for the guest house and took in laundry from the resident foreigners around the town. It was there that I learned to read and write and cook. I was a curious girl and I was always pestering people to teach me something I didn’t know. I was tired of being an ignoramus. Gulap would spend her days smiling at the world from a chair beneath the Buddha tree in the back yard. I always believed there was a magic word you could say to her and the mistake that distorted my sister would be rectified. I began by learning my own language and tried every word on her. When that didn’t work I decided it had to be a foreign magic word. I started to collect French from the guests in the auberge. Every day I’d gather half a dozen new words, run back to our room and attempt to free my sister from her demon.
And that was how I met Claude. He was a doctor from Paris. He was kind and patient and so unlike the other French men. I hardly noticed how unpleasant he looked: fat and ginger-haired, his teeth stained grey from wine and cigarettes. None of that mattered because Claude offered to save Gulap. The doctor travelled with a Vietnamese, a shifty man with a paunch and hair greased flat to his skull. They would come to stay at our auberge every twenty days or so. They’d stay two nights. The Vietnamese spoke Lao. He told me that Claude would treat my sister free of charge because he liked me. When I told this to my mother she was so happy she cried all over the newly ironed pillow cases. We dreamed of the day that Gulap would be able to talk to us. Tell us how she felt.
Dr Claude kept his word. He treated her twice. When his work at the hospital was over, he and the Vietnamese carried Gulap to our room and for half an hour or so they did whatever it took to remove the evil spirit from my sister’s soul. They didn’t let me see, of course. It was dangerous for somebody unqualified to be present, they told me. I even believed I was seeing an improvement in my sister. She was trying so hard to speak. She became so excited the second time she saw Dr Claude arrive. She clapped her curled hands and …
‘I can’t do this. All it does is remind me of how stupid I was.’
‘You were thirteen.’
‘Surely common sense comes long before that.’
‘Some people never get it. Write!’
… and seemed so excited.
Dr Claude and the Vietnamese hadn’t come for two months. I was anxious that they might not return. I asked at the auberge when the doctor was due back. The owner told me she knew nothing of a doctor. ‘Dr Claude and the tall Vietnamese,’ I said. ‘Claude?’ she laughed. ‘Claude is no more a doctor than I am a cabaret singer. Those two deal in bathroom attachments. They’re travelling salesmen, young Daeng.’
My sister, Gulap, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, died giving birth. My mother had considered terminating the pregnancy but they wouldn’t let us in the hospital. Only the village shaman with potions you wouldn’t give a rabid dog, and midwives with rusty knives were available for people like us. So my mother put her trust in nature. And nature let her down. With medicine and the hands of a surgeon, Gulap might have survived. But she was in the hands of fate and it took my sister and her baby from us.
*
The Voyage of Harmony reached Pak Lai exactly eleven hours after leaving Vientiane. It didn’t feel that long. Siri had always marvelled at the timelessness of river travel. For hours they hadn’t seen anything the early French explorers wouldn’t have experienced a hundred years before. All right, perhaps they wouldn’t have seen so many 333 Beer bottles floating nearer the towns or Che Guevara T-shirts on fishermen. No odd TOA paint cans lined up for shooting practice. But, basically, the cruise could have been before history. Before the ridiculousness of war. Before the greed of generals and the land lust of politicians. This river had defied it all and survived. Still her willowed banks bowed to the passing pirogues. Still the grey terns surfed the cool current above the water.
The pilot switched off his engine some hundred metres before the modest bamboo dock and waited for it to lure the boat home against the gentle current. There was barely a creak as the ferry kissed the old tyres that hung from the posts. Siri and Daeng had never been to Sanyaburi. It was a province that had often found itself changing nationality in the political lotteries. Civilai argued that the place was a victim of its spelling. On French and American maps there were no fewer than seventeen attempts at its transcription. More worryingly, there were three different versions on Lao maps. He argued that if it were easier to spell, a country might be more inclined to hang on to it. It was currently one of two Lao provinces with real estate on the west bank of the Mekhong, but that could change at any time. The players still sat around the board.
Siri, Daeng and Mr Geung were met at the dock by a smiling man in a grey safari suit and plastic flip-flops. He had a shaved head that rose gently to a cone like the sharp end of a coconut. Two twiggy men in football shorts and once-white singlets stood behind him. He had a booming voice.