The Darkest Little Room (19 page)

‘That is it. Take it or leave it.'

‘I leave it.'

I swore and put another two hundred on the bar.

‘Happy?'

‘Yes.'

I went back to the girl.

‘Let's go.'

But the sour-faced old woman at the desk of the hotel would not let us in, not even under bribery.

‘Mei you ji
… No whores.'

‘She is not a whore.'

‘Bu keyi. Mei you ji
… No whores.'

‘Ni gan jue mei yi ge piao liang de nu hai shi yi gi ji nu ma?
… Do you think every pretty young girl is a whore?'

‘No. I think every pretty young whore is a whore.'

‘She's my sister.'

‘Bu keyi.'
I spoke English. ‘She's my fucking sister, you old crow.'

‘Bu keyi.'

‘
Wo bu hui fu ni qian
… Do not think I am paying you for the room tonight!'

I slammed the door behind me.

I hailed a taxi and the driver grinned and stared at us in the rear-view mirror. I gazed out the window at the city crumbling in the dark, the few scattered and indecipherable lights on the horizon, a line of incandescence that marked a highway that went through the mountains. The girl gave an address and the driver took us to a hotel used by prostitutes.

The place was lit by dim red lanterns and the hotel did not give you the key but soap and a prophylactic and a girl with bad teeth and fake eyelashes at the desk smiled as if she was witness to an embarrassing and comic crime while a sick-looking old man stood behind her making sure she took the money correctly and did not steal any of it and I thought that of all the places I had ever been on earth that could be that gate to hell Thuy had warned me of this was the most fitting. The driver stood behind us, leering over my shoulder while I paid for the room. I felt like slapping him. He leant over my shoulder and showed me a picture on his mobile phone of a pretty topless girl in her late teens.

‘My cousin,' he said. ‘Tomorrow night, yes?'

I shoved him out of the way and took Phuong Trinh's hand.

I took off my shirt and pants and lay down in the awful cold room and covered myself with blankets and stared at that ugly green paint that covers the bottom third of the walls of half the hospitals and cheap dormitories in Asia. I lay down on my back. She put her hand on the side of my face.

‘You don't like me,' she said.

I checked my watch. The border would re-open in a few hours. I wondered if the hotel staff would inform management at the Mountain Bar of the time we checked out. But the girl had no papers, even for her own country. At this hour, I thought, the sentries would be asleep and it might be easy enough to cross the river out of sight of the bridge.

She put her hand on my thigh.

‘I know a place we can cross back to Vietnam,' I said, ‘out of sight of the border guards. Where are you from?'

‘Sa Pa.'

‘I can put you on a bus to Sa Pa in the morning?'

‘But there is nothing for me there.'

‘Weren't you kidnapped to here? You told me–'

‘We came through the mountains and crossed downstream of the river because we girls had no documents. But I came willingly. I had no choice.'

‘You have no one to care for you in Sa Pa?'

‘No. Yet if you would keep me …'

I wondered why the past had such a hold on me. Why I could only truly love once what I loved was gone. Why should I not, in this cold and dark hour, give up Thuy and live with the girl beside me and never speak of where I found her or any of this ever again? We could go away, live in some town in, say, Japan. Why not Japan? Or perhaps Spain. I could teach and she could speak her native language to our children. And I would be utterly at home feeling so utterly in transit, far away from anywhere and anything I knew.

‘But you do not like me,' she said.

She sighed and lay down and put her arm around me. But her fondness died away in the night when tiredness took hold. I fell into a kind of half-sleep and dreamt I was in an enormous city without a name.

The girl's mascara had smudged on the pillow and she looked sick when she left the next morning.

29

I walked down the main street to a tin shed cafe. A civil guard slung a rifle from his shoulder and sat down to read a newspaper. He eyed me across the tables. Shortly a plump girl came in to meet him. I reading a Vietnamese New Testament that someone had left at the whores' hotel. A girl came out of the kitchen and leant against the wall with a bunch of white flowers. She must have come in via the back alley. A man stood up from a table and walked past her and she followed him, extending a flower in her hand before he shooed her away. I called her over.

‘Would you like to buy a flower, sir?'

‘How much are they?' I fished through my pockets for change and pulled out my photograph of Thuy along with the notes.

‘Have you seen this girl?'

She palmed the photograph.

‘No.'

Rain began falling.

I paid for a daisy and the girl walked out onto the street.

I checked my phone.

The trail was cold. I looked to the northern mountains fading into the impossible eastern night and knew I must return to Saigon.

I went to the transit and tried to arrange papers, for I had none for China, but anyway it was Sunday and what few buses there were had been stopped by flooded roads.

A middle-aged lieutenant general from the Vietnamese Border Defense pulled up in a civilian car. He said he was going all the way to Saigon overnight and for a fee he would take me.

Rain fell hard and there was ice under the windscreen wipers. The landscape turned white. We crossed the border from China into Vietnam. I thought there would be trouble, seeing as my papers would not have stood up to scrutiny. But the general made sure there was none.

How very easy, I thought as I fell asleep on my arm on the window. And I laughed thinking of how difficult it had been for me to cross days ago. How difficult it would have been with the girl last night.

Out of the grey came headlights and the dark shapes of soldiers and police in trench coats moving against a spotlight.

The lieutenant general wound down his window. A private leant into the car.

‘Cầu đóng
… The bridge is down.'

‘Cầu nào?
… What bridge?'

‘Ngoc Minh.'

‘Thề nào?
… How?'

‘Nước lớn
… Flood. You must go back.'

‘Back to where?'

‘Bac Ha,' he said.

‘We have not come from there.'

‘Bac Ha is the nearest city you can reach.'

‘Are there other roads?' I asked.

‘Not in this weather,' said the private.

Another car's headlights appeared out of the mist behind us and the private made a gesture with his hand to turn around.

We had no choice but to drive back.

30

The lieutenant general found a hostel in town and retired. I did not fancy a night at the hostel with him and the other military men he had met up with. We agreed we would meet back here at six in the morning if the rain cleared. If the weather was good overnight and remained good in the morning we could take back roads and resume the highway after the bridge.

I checked into a mock-Swiss chateaux hotel and went next door to a concrete cafe to drink. The cafe was sterile but well heated by a stove. Wind blew down the narrow road from the direction of an empty church and blew rain against the window and banked rubbish against the wall of the hotel. A pair of Hmong women in pink hemp skirts and tartan scarves pushed up the road against the wind carrying kindling tied to their backs and I put my arm on the windowsill and my hand against the glass to feel the cold outside. A man came into the cafe and ate a bowl of beef noodle soup and sipped the bitter tea that sat lukewarm in jugs on the tables and then left.

The proprietor was a middle-aged woman who had perhaps once been pretty but whose heavily made-up face was now a garish mask. She came in and out of the room, taking my glass once in a while and needlessly pouring from the cans I bought. Three young soldiers with green Border Defense epaulets sat down. The woman's juvenile daughter came in to wait at the tables. A dull electric light came on and properly revealed the place's state of neglect. There was only me and the three soldiers and the little girl who came and poured my beer. She had dirty hair and a flat nose. Strange that a girl so young should be pouring drinks, though I supposed it did her no great harm. Still it did not feel right sitting watching a little girl pour beer for tourists and soldiers and I told her I would pour my own. She nodded and left.

Then it was very late. I lit a cigarette and stared hopelessly out the window down the empty Bac Ha street watching the town's ugly buildings overcome by the dark and the girl had returned and put her hand on my arm. I stared at the small, greasy fingers barely able to grip the width of my wrist. I looked into her eyes that held my gaze through a minute of silence.

I pulled my arm away.

She furrowed her brow with apparent confusion. She seemed offended.

She spoke English. ‘Would you like something?'

‘I have beer.'

‘Something else.'

‘No.'

She took a bundle of postcards from her pocket. The postcards had windows cut into them and in the windows were glued cloth pictures of North Vietnamese landscapes.

‘You speak English?' I said.

‘Yes.'

‘Did you learn at school?'

‘No. From tourist and soldier. I speak Chinese, too.'

‘I remember.'

She smiled dimly and nodded.

‘You are very clever. How much are the postcards?'

She showed me an icon card of Saint Joseph.

‘Twenty thousand dong for three. I made them myself,' she lied, for I had seen the cards in other towns.

‘I only want one.'

‘You must have someone to send them to.'

‘Of course. I must.'

I put the notes into the girl's hand. She walked away. The three soldiers called her over to their table and she went and showed them her postcards. She stood with her hand on a soldier's thigh. After a few minutes the soldiers shooed her away. She returned to the proprietor.

I heard her call the woman ‘mama'.

I felt awful and it seemed the more I drank, the more sober I became.

The girl walked outside and gave a note to a beggar that the tourists and soldiers had been walking past for hours. The next time the girl came to my table to collect a can I invited her to sit with me. Her name, she said, was Kin.

‘That is an unusual name.'

‘Yes.'

‘Where is it from?'

‘Sa Pa.'

I looked out the window. The rain had eased to a mist.

‘I want to walk,' I said.

I stood up and left the girl and walked to the bridge. I lit a cigarette from a pack Minh Quy had left in my bag and leant over the railings and watched water rush beneath my feet. When I returned I looked in and the child was sleeping by the cafe stove on a fox skin. The woman tapped her awake with the toe of her shoe. There was another child there too now. The other girl sat staring into the embers of the stove.

‘Your friend?' I said to Kin.

‘Yes,' she smiled.

‘If you need anything, just come down to my door and ask,' said the woman.
‘Bất cứ điều gì
… Anything.'

I nodded and went to the hotel and the woman followed me.

A man came in shaking rain off his coat and stamping his boots. He seemed to be familiar to everyone. He greeted the concierge and the woman of the cafe with a brief nod. I slipped behind a wall when I saw it was my former driver.

The window in my room looked onto the street. I stood at the window before I lay down for the night and saw a police car pull up in front of the hotel. A policeman got out of the driver's side and left the motor running. He went into the cafe and stayed only a few minutes and then walked out with our former driver before getting back into the police car and driving to a house one hundred yards south on the other side of the road.

I fell onto a coarse grey pillow and slept badly.

31

I had forgotten to set my alarm and the lieutenant general had been gone two hours when I woke. I took a breakfast of beef noodle soup at the cafe next to the hotel. The girl Kin was not there. The woman was.

I found Kin in the afternoon. She was leaning against the railings of the bridge. I almost walked over her in the dimming copper light and rain mist.

‘Hello.' She strained to smile.

She was not in school uniform, but the children do not always wear uniforms. Her face was red, her eyes swollen. She looked sick. She sat with a rat-like dog, wrapped up in layers of cheap flannel and felt.

‘Kin, I heard you call the woman at the cafe “mama” last night. Is she your mother?'

‘Yes.'

She stared off into the distance as she spoke.

‘How long have you been there at the house with your mother?'

She furrowed her brow.

‘About two weeks.'

‘Two weeks with your mother?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where is your old mother?' I said, realising that for her the word signified nothing permanent; she used it in the same way a man would refer to
his
coffee.

‘Somewhere else. But I cannot misbehave with this mother or they will send me back to the border.'

I asked if she was going home to the cafe tonight. She said she was.

‘We will go together.'

I sat by the window and ordered whisky.

Kin sat on a plastic chair watching cartoons on a television with poor reception.

The woman came to my table.

‘Đêm qua cô hỏi tôi nếu tôi muốn bất cừ điều gì
… Last night, you asked me if there was anything else I wanted. I want it now.'