Hunters in the Dark (6 page)

He came over the Downs in the tall grass and the flint walls of the old barn stood high on the crest almost with a view of the sea through a gap in the hills. There were large holes in the walls filled to bursting with stinging nettles and through these a small boy could step. Inside it was gloom and fragrance but he always hesitated because he was alone. Around the barn the grass quivered and rippled and there were momentary patterns upon its silvery surface. He reached out and ran his hand along the rough flints and he drifted through the cornflowers at the bottom of the walls. Why always here, under this same apex sun which made the shadows stand still only a millimeter from the forms that cast them? The terror of the cows standing in their isolate shadows too all over the hillsides, in gleaming rivers of half-dried mud. Look up at the sun and you wake at once, always the same.

He did so then and he saw the blueness of a morning sky, almost the same as the sky of England and childhood. It, and not his eyes, seemed to blink. Then, almost at the same moment, he heard water and sensed it close by. The lapping of lake waves, weak but ploddingly insistent. The horizon tilted, then righted itself: he was on a boat.

It must have been the boat that Simon had called for him. Though his head still hummed from the night before he got onto his elbow and forced his eyes to work again. He was on the deck of a small shabby fishing boat with a motor at its rear end and above him in a ramshackle cockpit a man stood at the wheel smoking a half-crushed cigar. He was naked but for a pair of shorts and dark blue tattoos ran all down his back.

Robert was lying on a mattress, like that of a sunbed, and the early-morning sun had burned his nose a little. Water, he thought. I need a bloody drink. He got up with difficulty and steadied himself and made his way forward to the cockpit. The man turned without surprise and motioned to a thermos lying in the shade. It was hot coffee with sugar and milk.

“Good morning,” Robert said as loudly as he could.

A godsend, the coffee.

The man grinned and made a playful salute with one hand. Robert unscrewed the thermos's cap and fell gratefully into the coffee. He sipped it cautiously at first then took larger mouthfuls.

Instantly, he revived. They were on a vast toffee-colored lake. Across it a saline wind swept, warm and menacing, and far off on the horizon he could see systems of nets laid low against the water. There was no land to be seen, they had left it far behind.

He sat half in the sun and gulped down the whole thermos. It was only gradually that he became aware that he was wearing clean clothes and that they were not his. He looked down and spread his hands over his warm lap. He was wearing off-white linens, freshly laundered. He felt in the pockets and there was a hundred-dollar bill. The shirt was a soft dark cream linen with heavy buttons. He got up and turned once as if looking at himself in a mirror. Incredible. Espadrilles too.

He called out to the pilot.

“Where is Simon?”

The man waved a silent hand but didn't turn again.

All right, Robert thought, he doesn't speak a word of English. That's to be expected, I suppose.

He took out the hundred-dollar bill and looked it over. Then he thought about his backpack. It was nowhere to be seen on the deck.

“So that's it,” he said aloud.

Exhilaration came upon him, and then a back-pedaling panic.

He leaned against the boat's side and let his senses clear and soon he saw low shimmers of green on the leftward horizon. It's a small country, he thought, and no one is more than four hundred miles from anyone else. For some reason he didn't yet care about the backpack and yet he knew instinctively that it was not on the boat and that there was no use looking for it. There was no point asking the pilot about it and there was no point asking him to take him back to the house by the river. He did not even know where the house was or where the jetty was or what the river was called. He would never be able to find it, and the pilot would never take him anyway even if he understood.

He lumbered to the rear of the boat and looked down into the toffee waters being churned by the motor. A five-mile swim in any direction. He shaded his eyes and saw that the shimmers of jungle on the horizon were in any case coming closer. But there was no way of calculating how long he had been on board this boat, or for how many hours they had been plowing through this featureless wasteland. It could have been for several hours. It could, for that matter, have been for half the night. There was no way of knowing. Nor was there any way of knowing if a gentlemanly favor had been done him, or the reverse—one barang gentleman to another.

Toward noon, to judge by the position of the sun (he had no watch, he discovered) the boat began to near land—the same low forest and waterlogged banks of reeds and flat grass—and soon he saw people walking along a road, bicycles flashing in the sun.

The pilot turned to him and said something, the name of a place perhaps, Prek Pnov, and he stood up and walked to the bow, which would touch land. There were long shelving banks of dirty wet grass and reeds, and above them a scrim of slum shacks made of tin. There were a few children with mechanical toy birds and fishing rods standing at the tip of a line of planks that led up from the water's edge into the shanty. It was not quite the city but over the slum and the river soared a modern bridge which suggested its presence. The thick dust of the country roads hung above Prek Pnov, the dust which dries in an hour and then rises to envelop the head, and through it he could see the gold tints of a ramshackle wat covered with wooden scaffolding and high sad trees caked with cement powder.

When the boat came to, Robert stepped onto the planks and looked down at the mysterious pilot, who seemed unconcerned. This was not a stop that any commercial boat would use; it must have been a secretive place that Simon used to get ashore while going about his equally secretive business.

“Where's Simon?” Robert asked again, but now more clearly and forcefully. “Where's my bag?”

The pilot smiled with a vast charm.

He had already unmoored the boat again and the craft was moving away from the path of planks as suddenly as it had arrived. As it did so the children closed in on Robert and began to pester him.
One dolla, one dolla.

“Oh, OK then,” Robert called after the pilot, “you dump me here and then you just leave like that? Just like that? What am I supposed to do now?”

The pilot waved cheerfully. Nothing to be said or expressed, just the fact and the consequences that sprang from it.

“Come back,” Robert shouted after him, waving too, but not in the same friendly way. “Come back right now!”

He knew already that no such thing could happen. The men in the cluster of longtails below him stared and slowly their ironic smiles gained traction in Robert's mind and he desisted. “Damn and fuck it,” he muttered and brushed past the children and began to climb the precarious gangplank through slopes of colorless plastic trash. The planks snaked through shacks on stilts, up into the shadow and heat of a single alley that wound its way through the slum.

He was just at a loss, and aboard the boat he had not been able to think anything through. He moved as an automaton until he was clear of the river and he thought wildly, in great leaps: go back up the river by car and find the house again or press on and see what happened. But there was no sense in going back, he knew there was nothing behind him and, far more importantly, he didn't want to go back. Secretly, he was thrilled. From now on he could tell himself that he was a victim of circumstance.

He laughed and the people out on the alley sitting around with their lunch saw it and laughed along immediately. It was the Khmer way. Their surprise was not melodramatic. It came out in that subdued collective laughing. He was in an alley filled with little shops and two-story houses where the balconies were crowded with makeshift altars of bowls of fruit and decorative piles of beer cans. Great round earthenware urns stood outside the doors. As he turned and decided to walk to the right, his head narrowly missed a line of tiny fish impaled on a wooden pin that dangled from an awning rod. The children burst into laughter. He ducked and laughed along and moved awkwardly toward the cheap gold
chedi
of the temple which he could see over the roofs.

The wat looked like a half-abandoned construction site. But there were gold guardian lions erect and snarling in the sun and
chedi
which had been restored. The
naga
heads on the stairs had been repainted gold and green and there were smaller lions posted on the roofs. He walked in, seeing nobody and now no longer followed by the children, passing venerable trees whose shade covered a ground of rubble and grass.

He came out onto the road, and he could sense at once that it was the main route into the city. In fact it was the Battambang highway. Chaotic traffic pressed through it, a medley of motorbikes in swarms. The sun beat down on tangled cables and pink bricks and forlorn flag posts.

He walked along the dust bordering the tarmac until he came to a small shop with a curious sign for a thing called “Alexand” brandy with a black head of a Greek warrior. He stepped into its shade and felt the sweat and burn on his skin. He cashed in the hundred-dollar bill for an Angkor beer. As he stood by the road, tuk-tuks and motodops began to stop. In his nice linens he appeared a profitable target but he soon beat the motodops down to five dollars for the run into town. Since he had no baggage they assumed he lived there. No, he said, I'll go to a hotel, you know one? The motodops were not as wise to the hotels as the tuk-tuks but they knew a few flophouses.

It was a choice, according to them, between the Sakura and the Paris. Both had girls. The Sakura was cheaper but the Paris had a nice location on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard and a restaurant on the ground floor. It was a difference of about five dollars. He chose the Paris.

They drove in through the heat of the day. The rain, the driver said, would not come in until the late afternoon that day. The suburbs, meanwhile, lay in a sullen calm and he went over in his mind the dozens of theories he had established as to what had happened. The most likely, to his taste, was that Simon had helped him on his way and would send on his things as soon as he sent word where he was staying. There must have been a reason why he had held on to the backpack, a reason that was not injurious, but, as it happened, no such reason came easily to mind.

On the outskirts of central Phnom Penh the light dimmed and clouds began to mass and they crawled through a river of traffic toward a thing called the Japanese Friendship Bridge. It was two o'clock. He could see already that it was a small, low-lying city with the great river pouring through it. They went past Chinese factories and loading bays, the metal boxes covered with Chinese characters, an office for Bruntys cider, mounds of rose bricks, the shapes of metal silos and the gleam of the pale green-tinted river below. They passed under the bridge, the tarmac shattered as if by mortars. The afternoon hysteria of car horns and the cafés along the streets filling up with anxious men in white shirts. A city with pools of slow life from another age. The trees along the roads then, the echoes of provincial France, a disappeared France of green shutters and dark yellow walls. The long pale gray walls of the French embassy topped with rings of barbed wire and a riverine boulevard swirling with dust and violent wind.

The river curved slowly, dividing the city they were on from a farther shore where half-constructed buildings rose up out of a slightly silver haze. New hotels, towers of dreary metal. They turned inland at a street market of some kind and passed alongside a baked city park, the frangipanis creamy in the sun. The driver glanced at his fare in the vibrating mirror. He looked like a young man about town, a rake down for the weekend. In fact, he looked vaguely familiar. But why did he have no money, so little that he had to stay at the miserable and ill-reputed Paris Hotel? But maybe he wanted a hotel with girls for the weekend. That must be it. But then, where had he seen his face before? Or something about the way he dressed. Most barangs dressed like beggars. This one dressed as if to hide the fact that he was a beggar. If he waited outside the Paris Hotel for a few days he might get another ride out of him. He might need something illegal like a passport.

Robert was not thinking about such things at all. He was watching the rotary swirls of girls on motorbikes, the back riders sidesaddle and helmetless. People massed on the pavements under the shade of mango trees. The great heat slowing down even facial muscles. He was not as dismayed as he had expected to be. The city was, one could see, young and upbeat and fierce, and yet its traffic had a slow, almost choreographed motion to it. They sped leftward into a large boulevard, wide and French—Norodom—and he could see old European villas and mansions set behind walls topped with broken glass and a dark monument at its distant end like a gloomy relic of Angkor. A quiet motor seemed to organize the city. The bikes whizzing in both directions simultaneously never quite collided. The tuk-tuks snaking their way through this chaos never quite came to grief. Almost, but not.

The driver had gotten lost and he circled back up to another boulevard—Monivong—and turned right into it until they came to Kampuchea Krom at a right angle to it. It had a somber, commercial feel. After the second junction, they came to the Paris. The hotel's name was written over a curved entrance in English, Chinese and Khmer, and around its pale orange columns lounged a handful of cynical-looking drivers. There was a KTV with red Chinese lanterns across the street and a shop with a sign that read
Sony, Make Believe.

He had no bags, he was free and light as he came into the colorless and empty lobby with “international” clocks on the wall and the cool glance of two young receptionists.

They barely looked up, in any case.

The lobby had white leather sofas and a coppery bas-relief of Angkor Wat and a soft-drinks fridge with the word
Vinamilk.
Sashed boudoir curtains made it feel like something other than a hotel.

“Passport,” one of them said impassively.

And suddenly he remembered his passport. Which is to say that he no longer had it.

“It's at my other hotel,” he said quickly, not missing a beat.

“What hotel?”

“The Sakura. I can get it later.”

The two Khmer girls looked at each other doubtfully.

But it was a barang, a barang was not really a risk, and they didn't really care either way. Cash is cash.

One of them looked up at the clocks for some reason. The red letters below them spelled out the names of cities they would never see: Sydney, New York and of course Paris. The time in Paris would never be of any use to anyone staying at the Paris.

“All right,” one of them said, “you can bring it later.”

“I will, yes.”

“But then you got to pay up front now.”

“All right—two nights please.”

It was thankfully cheap.

“No bags?”

“I'll get them later.”

He paid the cash and one of the girls took him up to the fifth floor. As they passed by the lift he saw the photocopies of passport pages of wanted criminals taped to the wall next to it. Heng, Sarquen, Cambodian: eyes like pumice. Men on the run like himself, their images of little interest to guests of the Paris who probably had enough secrets of their own. The girl glanced at him. Her attitude quickly relaxed even though the lift was broken. The futility of the building's internal heat seemed to make her more amiable. It was the way here, the surface coolness quickly broke down.

“Holiday?”

“Business.”

“Ah,” and her face fell a little.

The Paris was a claustrophobic place, with half-lit corridors, a mama-san on every floor, and girls from the massage parlor sat around doing their day's makeup and coiffure. They looked up for a moment as he passed and the brushes and eyeliners came to a moment's standstill. So it was a single man's place and they kept track of the resident denizens. The room itself was the usual cheap affair in the tropics but there was a working fridge and air-conditioning and a TV with a Japanese channel. The wooden ceiling was so polished that it looked like a floor.
No gambling in the HOTEL room
on the back of the door.

The receptionist gave him the key and left him there. He locked the door behind him and went to the window and looked down into Kampuchea Krom. Tired and stoic trees withered up in the last hour of sun before the rain hit the city. The traffic went by in a curious silence. Behind a blue grille on a rooftop a woman sat combing out her wet hair. He sat on the bed in a state of vast emptiness and relief and took off the clothes that were not his and looked at the back of the collar and the inside of the linen trousers. Were they not Simon's clothes, pretty obviously? They did not quite fit and Simon had been wearing the same kind of thing. The labels were of a tailor in Phnom Penh, a place called Vong. They were Simon's clothes all right, they even smelled of a stranger. The gesture was strange and murky and he could not think it through even now. There was the money, and this was merely a better way of getting rid of him than killing him.

He lay back on the stiff bed and smiled at the thought of Simon and his slender girl trying to kill him. Obviously this was better. And they would not have had the nerve to kill him. No normal person ever had the nerve. And yet it was also possible that Simon had given him a backhanded gift in the light of their conversation the previous night. He had read Robert quite cannily, and he had surely sensed that the Englishman would not protest too much. He would not come back looking for his things, not even for his passport. It was an incredible game, sending him off naked into the world like that, but he had intuited that Robert would survive and make the best of it. People lost their passports all the time, it was never the end of the world. He would not, Simon had guessed, even go to the British embassy in a hurry and make a declaration, and if he did they would just give him a new one. It was difficult to see what difference it would make. But alternatively, he could go find himself a false one. They were easy to procure from the city's army of forgers. And in fact he was thinking about it already. He was thinking how he would step, lightly, into someone else's life.

But what life had Simon led here? Exhausted, he lay naked on the bed and turned on the TV set and watched a program about outer space that was all in Khmer. He could tell that it was about some tiny distant blue planet which had just been discovered a few months earlier, a place where it rained shards of glass all day long and where the nights lasted barely thirty minutes. He dozed. The sounds of the hotel drifted down into his consciousness. The girls shuffling in nighties and hot pants from floor to floor, the Khmer pop music, the men coughing on their way out and flinging the spit in the back of their throats. The daily thunder rolled in with a generous laziness and the trees shimmered with lightning, spreading a subtle panic through the street below. He was easily refreshed. When he was up, he felt confident again and he shaved with the hotel's plastic razor and put his expensive clothes back on after a cold shower. The air-conditioner barely kept the grit-filled heat at bay but he no longer felt hot. He thought he would go out and find an Internet café and maybe something to eat as well. It was going to rain then, but rain never hurt a man.

He went down by the stairs, landing by landing. In the street the rain came down in terrible sheets, the drivers outside cowering at the edge of the lobby. There was a soft surprise in their faces.

He found a motodop and told the driver to take him to an Internet café. They set off through the downpour and he let go of any remaining apprehension about staying dry. They drove down Kampuchea Krom until they crossed Monivong, and then they had reached a street called Pasteur, passing clubs with names like Shanghai and Flamingoes and bars stirring into nocturnal life with a laziness that gave them a natural and inevitable force.

In the thunderous rain the neon had a frosted, childish quality. They passed the Sorya Mall, a ground-floor open space filled with bars and sofas, and at the end there was Street 136 and the Internet café where the driver let him off. He dashed inside, soaked through, and sat at a terminal by the window for half a dollar.

He had wanted to just check his e-mails but now he was not sure if he should. To open his account would perhaps expose his whereabouts to someone who might be looking for it. He didn't know who would be looking for it as yet, but eventually—surely—his on-off girlfriend, Yula, would be anxious and maybe his parents as well. Incredibly, he hadn't thought of them. It might be a decisive thing, to use his Gmail password now. Decisive, that is, down the line. He therefore hesitated before signing in.

His hand hovered over the keyboard and gradually it relaxed and retreated. It had to be thought over, and now he was not sure that he wanted to go back to anything. He only worried about his mother, even though there were other things to worry about, a thousand loose ends left in a chaos of abandoned responsibility.

He often thought, in this respect, how un-English he really was, because breaking away from home was not proving to be as difficult as he might have once anticipated. On the contrary. It was proving easy and harmless, at least to himself. Because his own motive was becoming clearer to him, he assumed that it would become clearer to everyone in his life as well. It was not the case, and he realized that. But he hoped it would be soon. If he could walk out of the door and not come back, others would eventually understand why. There was no point, then, explaining himself to a chorus of puzzled resentment. If they couldn't understand, nothing could make them understand. Most people appreciated where they were born and grew up. They grumbled, but they liked it, could not live without it. He was not like that, he now understood. There was nothing about his birthplace or his life there that he enjoyed or would defend to the death. There was nothing he enjoyed in that way of life. It was claustrophobic and petty, and the police watched everything you did and thought. It was a way of life that justified itself as being the pinnacle of freedom, but it had not come up with an alternative reason for existing once the freedom had been sucked out of it. There wasn't even sex or sun. There was health care, so that although life was expensive at least death was free. A society premised on free death.

It was then that he opened the Gmail account and quickly went through his messages. Surprisingly, almost no one apart from his parents had sent him anything. It was as he had suspected. He felt a bitter contempt for himself for even hoping that it might have been otherwise. The two messages from his parents, moreover, were simple enough.

Bobby, we know you are on the road and it's awfully hard to send message sometimes, but
still
we are here, you know, not six feet under. You might pop us a message once in a while just to let us know that you aren't either!

The second seemed a little more anxious.

Bobby, are you all right? We don't know how we feel about you being in the land of Pol Pot. I mean, really. Awful things happen there, we've heard. We hope you are being careful at least. Send word, all right?

And impulsively he did.

Everything OK. Don't worry. Having a marvelous time in the land of Pol Pot. Would I be a monster if I decided to stay here a year and not come back to that awful job? Would you be furious if I did that? I met a girl. You know the story. But everything's dandy! It couldn't be better.

Bobby

It was fake, but it was not entirely so. The gist was true.

He imagined his father turning to his mother with a sly wink.

“So, he's got a girl out there. I told you so.”

It was then that he decided to “go invisible.” He felt that he could cut off contact with them for a while without arousing their fears. How long that would turn out to be he couldn't imagine. It might be weeks, or even months. He knew how they thought—once they had received word from him that he was thriving in foreign parts they would tend to let it go for a while. He would send them a curt word later on, when he knew what he was going to do. He didn't know himself at that moment, and so there was little point trying to explain it to them.