Honourable Schoolboy (50 page)

They stepped round a little boy playing privately with stones in the dust. Jerry wondered whether he was gun-deaf. He glanced back. The Mercedes was still parked in the trees. Ahead; he could pick out men in low firing positions among the rubble, more men than he had realised. The noise rose suddenly. On the far bank, a couple of bombs exploded in the middle of the fire. The T28s were trying to spread the flames. A ricochet tore into the bank below them, Ringing up wet mud and dust. A peasant rode past them on his bicycle, serenely. He rode into the village, through it, and out again, slowly past the ruins and into the trees beyond. No one shot at him, no one challenged him. He could be theirs or ours, thought Jerry. He came into town last night, tossed a plastic into a cinema, and now he’s returning to his kind.

‘Jesus,’ cried the girl with a laugh, ‘why didn’t we think of bicycles?’

With a clutter of bricks falling, a volley of machine-gun bullets slapped all round them. Below them in the river bank, by the grace of God, ran a line of empty leopard spots, shallow firing positions dug into the mud. Jerry had picked them out already. Grabbing the girl, he threw her down. Keller was already flat. Lying beside her, Jerry discerned a deep lack of interest. Better a bullet or two here than getting what Frostie got. The bullets threw up screens of mud and whined off the road. They lay low, waiting for the firing to tire. The girl was looking excitedly across the river, smiling. She was blue-eyed and flaxen and Aryan. A mortar bomb landed behind them on the verge and for the second time Jerry shoved her flat. The blast swept over them and when it was past, feathers of earth drifted down like a propitiation. But she came up still smiling. When the Pentagon thinks of civilisation, thought Jerry, it thinks of you. In the fort the battle had suddenly thickened. The lorries had disappeared, a dense pall had gathered, the flash and din of mortars was incessant, light machine-gun fire challenged and answered itself with increasing swiftness. Keller’s pocked face appeared white as death over the edge of his leopard spot.

‘KR’s got them by the balls,’ he yelled. ‘Across the river, ahead, and now from the other flank. We should have taken the other lane!’

Christ, Jerry thought, as the rest of the memories came back to him, Keller and I once fought over a girl, too. He tried to remember who she was, and who had won.

They waited, the firing died. They walked back to the car and gained the fork in time to meet the retreating convoy. Dead and wounded were littered along the roadside, and women crouched among them, fanning the stunned faces with palm leaves. They got out of the car again. Refugees trundled buffaloes and handcarts and one another, while they screamed at their pigs and children. One old woman screamed at the girl’s camera, thinking the lens was a gun barrel. There were sounds Jerry couldn’t place, like the ringing of bicycle bells and wailing, and sounds he could, like the drenched sobs of the dying and the clump of approaching mortar fire. Keller was running beside a lorry, trying to find an English-speaking officer; Jerry loped beside him yelling the same questions in French.

‘Ah to hell,’ said Keller, suddenly bored. ‘Let’s go home.’ His English lordling’s voice: ‘The people and the noise,’ he explained. They returned to the Mercedes.

For a while they were stuck in the column, with the lorries cutting them into the side and the refugees politely tapping at the window asking for a ride. Once Jerry thought he saw Deathwish the Hun riding pillion on an army motorbike. At the next fork Keller ordered the driver to turn left.

‘More private,’ he said, and put his good hand back on the girl’s knee. But Jerry was thinking of Frost in the mortuary, and the whiteness of his screaming jaw.

‘My old mother always told me,’ Keller declared, in a folksy drawl. ‘Son, don’t never go back through the jungle the same way as you came. Hun?’

‘Yes?’

‘Hun, you just lost your cherry. My humble congratulations.’ The hand slipped a little higher.

From all round them came the sound of pouring water like so many burst pipes as a sudden torrent of rain fell. They passed a settlement full of chickens running in a flurry. A barber’s chair stood empty in the rain. Jerry turned to Keller.

‘This siege economy thing,’ he resumed, as they settled to one another again. ‘Market forces and so forth. You reckon that story will go?’

‘Could do,’ said Keller airily. ‘It’s been done a few times. But it travels.’

‘Who are the main operators?’

Keller named a few.

‘Indocharter?’

‘Indocharter’s one,’ said Keller.

Jerry took a long shot. ‘There’s a clown called Charlie Marshall flies for them, half Chinese. Somebody said he’d talk. Met him?’

‘Nope.’

He reckoned that was far enough. ‘What do most of them use for machines?’

‘Whatever they can get. DC4s, you name it. One’s not enough. You need two at least, fly one, cannibalise the second for parts. Cheaper to ground a plane and strip it than bribe the customs to release the spares.’

‘What’s the profit?’

‘Unprintable.’

‘Much opium around?’

‘There’s a whole damn refinery out on the Bassac, for Christ’s sakes. Looks like something out of Prohibition times. I can arrange a tour, if that’s what you’re after.’

The girl Lorraine was at the window, staring at the rain.

‘I don’t see any kids, Max,’ she announced. ‘You said to look out for no kids, that’s all. Well I’ve been watching and they’ve disappeared.’ The driver stopped the car. ‘It’s raining and I read somewhere that when it rains Asian kids like to come out and play. So, you know, where’s the kids?’ she said. But Jerry wasn’t listening to what she’d read. Ducking and peering through the windscreen all at once, he saw what the driver saw, and it made his throat dry.

‘You’re the boss, sport,’ he said to Keller quietly. ‘Your car, your war and your girl.’

In the mirror, to his pain, Jerry watched Keller’s pumice-stone face torn between experience and incapacity.

‘Drive at them slowly,’ Jerry said, when he could wait no longer. ‘Lentement.’

‘That’s right,’ Keller said. ‘Do that.’

Fifty yards ahead of them, shrouded by the teeming fain, a grey lorry had pulled broadside across the track, blocking it. In the mirror, a second had pulled out behind them, blocking their retreat.

‘Better show our hands,’ said Keller in a hoarse rush. With his good one he wound down his window. The girl and Jerry did the same. Jerry wiped the windscreen clear of mist and put his hands on the console. The driver held the wheel at the top.

‘Don’t smile at them, don’t speak to them,’ Jerry ordered.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Keller. ‘Holy God.’

All over Asia, thought Jerry, pressmen had their favourite stories of what the Khmer Rouge did to you, and most of them were true. Even Frost at this moment would have been grateful for his relatively peaceful end. He knew newsmen who carried poison, even a concealed gun, to save themselves from just this moment. If you’re caught, the first night is the only night to get out, he remembered: before they take your shoes, and your health, and God knows what other parts of you. The first night is your only chance, said the folklore. He wondered whether he should repeat it for the girl but he didn’t want to hurt Keller’s feelings. They were ploughing forward in first gear, engine whining. The rain was flying all over the car, thundering on the roof, smacking the bonnet and darting through the open windows. If we bog down we’re finished, he thought. Still the lorry ahead had not moved and it was no more than fifteen yards away, a glistening monster in the downpour. In the dark of the lorry’s cab they saw thin faces watching them. At the last minute, it lurched backward into the foliage, leaving just enough room to pass. The Mercedes tilted. Jerry had to hold the door pillar to stop himself rolling on to the driver. The two offside wheels skidded and whined, the bonnet swung and all but lurched on to the fender of the lorry.

‘No licence plates,’ Keller breathed. ‘Holy Christ.’

‘Don’t hurry,’ Jerry warned the driver. ‘Toujours lentement. Don’t put on your lights.’ He was watching in the mirror.

‘And those were the black pyjamas?’ the girl said excitedly. ‘And you wouldn’t even let me take a picture?’

No one spoke.

‘What did they want? Who are they trying to ambush?’ she insisted.

‘Somebody else,’ said Jerry. ‘Not us.’

‘Some bum following us,’ said Keller. ‘Who cares?’

‘Shouldn’t we warn someone?’

‘There isn’t the apparatus,’ said Keller.

They heard shooting behind them but they kept going.

‘Fucking rain,’ Keller breathed, half to himself. ‘Why the hell do we get rain suddenly?’

It had all but stopped.

‘But Christ, Max,’ the girl protested, ‘if they’ve got us pinned out on the floor like this why don’t they just finish us off.’

Before Keller could reply, the driver did it for him in French, softly and politely, though only Jerry understood.

‘When they want to come, they will come,’ he said, smiling at her in the mirror. ‘In the bad weather. While the Americans are adding another five metres of concrete to their Embassy roof, and the soldiers are crouching in capes under their trees and the journalists are drinking whisky, and the generals are at the fumerie, the Khmer Rouge will come out of the jungle and cut our throats.’

‘What did he say?’ Keller demanded. ‘Translate that, Westerby.’

‘Yeah, what was all that?’ said the girl. ‘It sounded really great. Like a proposition or something.’

‘Didn’t quite get it actually, sport. Sort of out-gunned me.’

They all broke out laughing, too loud, the driver as well.

And all through it, Jerry realised, he had thought of nobody but Lizzie. Not to the exclusion of danger - quite the contrary. Like the new glorious sunshine which now engulfed them, she was the prize of his survival.

At the Phnom, the same sun was beating gaily on the poolside. There had been no rain in the town, but a bad rocket near the girls’ school had killed eight or nine children. The Southern stringer had that moment returned from counting them.

‘So how did Maxie make out at the bang-bangs?’ he asked Jerry as they met in the hall. ‘Seems to me like his nerve is creaking at the joints a little these days.’

‘Take your grinning little face out of my sight,’ Jerry advised. ‘Otherwise actually I’ll smack it.’ Still grinning, the Southerner departed.

‘We could meet tomorrow,’ the girl said to Jerry. ‘Tomorrow’s free all day.’

Behind her, Keller was making his way slowly up the stairs, a hunched figure in a one-sleeved shirt, pulling himself by the banister rail.

‘We could even meet tonight if you wanted,’ Lorraine said.

For a while, Jerry sat alone in his room writing postcards for Cat. Then he set course for Max’s bureau. He had a few more questions about Charlie Marshall. Besides, he had a notion old Max would appreciate his company. His duty done, he took a cyclo and rode up to Charlie Marshall’s house again, but though he pummelled on the door and yelled, all he could see was the same bare brown legs motionless at the bottom of the stairs, this time by candlelight. But the page torn from his notebook had disappeared. He returned to the town and, still with an hour to kill, settled at a pavement café, in one of a hundred empty chairs, and drank a long Pernod, remembering how once the girls of the town had ticked past him here on their little wicker carriages, whispering clichés of love in sing-song French. Tonight, the darkness trembled to nothing more lovely than the occasional thud of gunfire, while the town huddled, waiting for the blow.

Yet it was not the shelling but the silence that held the greatest fear. Like the jungle itself this silence, not gunfire, was the natural element of the approaching enemy.

When a diplomat wants to talk, the first thing he thinks of is food, and in diplomatic circles one dined early because of the curfew. Not that diplomats were subject to such rigours, but it is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example - to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know. The Counsellor’s house was in a flat, leafy enclave bordering Lon Nol’s palace. In the driveway, as Jerry arrived, an official limousine was emptying its occupants, watched over by a jeep stiff with militia. It’s either royalty or religion, Jerry thought as he got out; but it was nothing more than an American diplomat and his wife arriving for a meal.

‘Ah. You must be Mr Westerby,’ said his hostess.

She was tall and Harrods and amused by the idea of a journalist, as she was amused by anyone who was not a diplomat, and of counsellor rank at that. ‘John has been dying to meet you,’ she declared brightly, and Jerry supposed she was putting him at his ease. He followed the trail upstairs. His host stood at the top, a wiry man with a moustache and a stoop and a boyishness which Jerry more usually associated with the clergy.

‘Oh well done! Smashing. You’re the cricketer. Well done. Mutual friends, right? We’re not allowed to use the balcony tonight, I’m afraid,’ he said with a naughty glance toward the American corner. ‘Good men are too scarce, apparently. Got to stay under cover. Seen where you are?’ He stabbed a commanding finger at a leather-framed placement chart showing the seating arrangement. ‘Come and meet some people. Just a minute.’ He drew him slightly aside, but only slightly. ‘It all goes through me, right? I’ve made that absolutely clear. Don’t let them get you into a corner, right? Quite a little squall running, if you follow me. Local thing. Not your problem.’

The senior American appeared at first sight small, being dark and tidy, but when he stood to shake Jerry’s hand, he was nearly Jerry’s height. He wore a tartan jacket of raw silk and in his other hand he held a walkie-talkie radio in a black plastic case. His brown eyes were intelligent but over-respectful, and as they shook hands, a voice inside Jerry said ‘Cousin’.

‘Glad to know you, Mr Westerby. I understand you’re from Hong Kong. Your Governor there is a very good friend of mine. Beckie, this is Mr Westerby, a friend of the Governor of Hong Kong, and a good friend of John, our host.’

He indicated a large woman bridled in dull, handbeaten silver from the market. Her bright clothes flowed in an Asian medley.