Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (12 page)

Before I left I had showed Ron’s photograph to Iron Butterfly just in case Psorng-Preng had been unfortunate enough to take up employment in one of the bars on the hill. The Mamasan barely glanced at it and simply gave me a blank look and shook her head. It was now nearly five p.m. and I’d had enough of the search for one day. I made my way back to the tiny, open-fronted store where I had arranged for Narith to pick me up. The little shop doubled up as a general store and pharmacy and I thought I would buy the ingredients for my tried and trusted Pattaya hangover kit (paracetamol, antacid tablets and electrolyte powders) because the one small shop on The Hill didn’t stock medication of any kind.

There was a very young beggar sitting in the dust by the doorway in front of the wall of the small store. He was around ten years old and had a marvellously good-looking face that would break female hearts in ten years time. Strangely, the hump on his back and his badly crippled leg only seemed to accentuate the young male beauty of his features even more.

Although the beggar had the ubiquitous plastic cup in front of him he didn’t appear to be trying too hard to fill it. He seemed far more interested in bouncing a little rubber ball up against the wall and catching it in one hand. He was totally immersed in his game and in his own world. As I walked past him into the store he tired of the ball game and began adding to the drawings he had scratched in the dust with a stick in front of him. The youngster was not merely doodling; he screwed up his almost pretty face in concentration and poked a pink tongue out of one corner of his mouth like any kid trying hard not to go over the lines in a colouring book back home.

When I had made my purchases I walked out of the store and put my change into the beggar’s cup. Still being a bit of a big kid at heart myself and having always fancied I am pretty good with children, I bent to pick up the rubber ball beside the boy, intending to have an impromptu game of catch with him. This was a big mistake. As yet, nobody had told me about the Cambodian kids’ determination and ferocity when taking care of what little they possessed. Later I learned that the Khmer children didn’t have much—but by Christ, they were going to fight for the very few things they had managed to accumulate. The young beggar thought I was after his toy and he went for me like a savage puppy.

The boy snatched at the ball furiously and our heads collided with a jarring thud. He then backed up against the wall with what was very likely the only toy he possessed clutched tightly against his chest. His black eyes were blazing venomously and his lips were pulled back in a snarl. Shocked, I backed off a few paces with my palms held up in front of me to show I had meant no harm.

The Cambodian store owner noticed the disturbance and came out of his doorway quickly. He began to yell at the poor kid. I calmed the man down and told him what had happened and how it had all been my fault. The boy was crying now and he watched us mistrustfully as we spoke, his large, liquid eyes wide with fright in his angelic brown face. I felt very bad at upsetting the kid. He plainly had enough difficulties in his life without some stupid
farang
poking his nose in and making problems for him. To try to rectify the situation—and to make myself feel better—I asked the store owner to tell the kid it was all a mistake and I hadn’t been after his ball at all.

“Tell the boy to come into your shop with me,” I said. “And I’ll buy him anything he wants.” Delighted at making yet another sale the owner of the store did as I asked and spoke rapidly to the young beggar in Khmer. I was astonished when as quickly as he had become angry, the little lad grabbed a wooden crutch that lay nearby and pulled himself to his feet. Then he looked up at me with a wide smile and slipped his small hand trustingly into mine and began pulling me into the shop with surprising strength.

The shelves all along one wall of the small store were lined with an assortment of biscuits, sweets, candies and cakes. There was also a large fridge near the door with a glass cover that contained an array of ice creams and lollipops. The boy began searching the shelves and I wondered what he would choose. Chocolate, perhaps—or one of those ice-cream cornets to cool down with at the end of a hot day. Imagine my surprise when the young beggar joined me where I was standing by the till holding nothing more edible than a large tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush and a bar of soap. When I paid for the items I bought a couple of ice creams anyway, and we both sat at the little stone table outside the store and enjoyed them whilst I waited for Narith to turn up as arranged. The owner of the store sat down with us and I asked him a few questions about the lad. He spoke to him for several minutes, then translated what the boy had said.

“My name is Rath, which although is a type of flower, also means ‘orphan’. I am eight years old. I have no brothers and sisters and I never knew my mother or father or any of my family at all. Ever since I can remember I have stayed with Papa Eng, the man many people in Sihanoukville call ‘The Father Of The Beggars’. Papa Eng has a large house on the outskirts of town and he allows any crippled or orphaned children to stay there so long as they work for him. At the moment there are around twenty of us living with him. He is kind to us and feeds us well and it is good to have friends who are the same as myself
—
and as long as we all work hard Papa Eng is very good to us.

When I was very small Papa Eng used to have one of the older children carry me around and we would beg money from the tourists who first started to come to Sihanoukville around ten years ago. All I had to do was look sad and that wasn’t very hard to do. The big boys and girls would carry me around the beaches, the market and the bus station
—
anywhere the farang tourists might be found. Sometimes I was very sick because I was only a baby and it was very hard work to be out in the sun all day. But we couldn’t go home until we had reached the target Papa Eng had set us, and that usually took all day long.

I don’t know what happened to my leg
—
it has been this way ever since I can remember. Sometimes I dream it is fine and straight but when I wake in the morning it is still crooked and useless. I have been a beggar all my life and I don’t mind the work at all
—
after all, what else could I possibly do? But I do wish I could run, jump and kick a football with the normal children sometimes when I see them playing in the streets and schoolyards.

When I grew older and too heavy to carry around Papa Eng started to send me out begging on my own. I like this much better because now I am an experienced beggar I know the places where I can soon earn the amount that Papa Eng has set me without any trouble at all, usually within a few hours. There is no reason for me to continue begging after I reach my target because I give everything to Papa Eng at the end of the day, anyway. Of course, no child would ever dream of keeping money from Papa Eng. He would know at once by the look on your face and that would be the end. So now when I have reached my target I find a shady spot to get out of the sun and the rest of the day is my own.

I have never been to school and I cannot read or write. I suppose it is my destiny to be a beggar forever; like so many of the older men and women you see begging around Cambodia who were hurt in the war or by the mines that were never cleared. This worries me a great deal, because I will be on my own then and as every beggar knows the older you become, the less appealing you are
—
and the less money the farangs will give you.

If my life could change by magic and I could be anything at all in this world I would choose to be just like David Beckham. I would love to score a goal in an important football match in a huge stadium filled with people shouting and cheering me. Then, I would run back to my friends very fast with my arms in the air and all the other players would hug me and slap my back. I would pull my football shirt over my head to show my strong chest and tummy and dive and slide across the wet grass, laughing like I was crazy, just like I’ve seen on TV!”

Presently, Narith pulled up on his motorcycle and I got up to leave. Rath regarded me solemly, still licking his ice and making it last. He extended his small hand out to me, which still contained his rubber ball. I took the ball gently from him and we threw it to each other for five minutes before I left. When I finally climbed onto Narith’s pillion I noticed the pictures the young beggar had scratched in the dust in front of the shop again and I took a closer look. Rath had drawn the crude outline of a pair of goalposts surrounded by a team of stick men playing football. Perhaps not quite a Lowry but the drawings in the dirt certainly did bring a tightness to my throat, just the same.

When Narith found out how I had lost my way he asked me if I would like him to take me to ‘The Strip’, but I’d had enough of the downtown area for one day and I told him I would try again another time. So, after bidding my new young friend goodbye, I climbed onto the back of Nariths’s motodop and we rattled on up Ekereach Street and back to Victory Hill. As we drove off, I craned my neck around to look behind me and the figure sitting in the dust waved a small hand at me until he became no more than a blur in the distance.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Despite that first meeting with The Professor when he had attempted to scare me back to Pattaya, I was beginning to like him. For his part, the intense naturalist seemed to have decided that, in spite of my tattoos and admittedly rough appearance—and the fact I chose to live in that hell-hole of a city called Pattaya—perhaps I wasn’t such a bad bloke after all. This was mainly due to the fact that I have always loved all animals and wildlife and I was genuinely interested in The Professor’s daily expeditions to the muddy streams, puddles and ditches he would visit every day and I would always be fascinated to see how he had got on. The Professor was obviously touched by my curiosity about his work and we would spend hours together poring over his large collection of natural history books trying to identify the latest water snail or aquatic insect he had captured. He was also very fond of baffling me with the scientific names of various creatures and he told me that Stumpy was really a Common House Gecko or “
Hemidactylus Frenatus
,” but although I had to admit my diminutive friend’s correct moniker was undeniably impressive, the little reptile would always be Stumpy the lizard to me. The Professor had installed a truly magnificent aquarium in the television room complete with a gravel bed and a pump that looked powerful enough to run an oil rig—in preparation for the day when he would return from one of his safaris with something really exciting to record. To date, sadly it was uninhabited.

I have never been one to poke my nose into anyone’s business and I never felt the need to ask the intense Anglo-Indian naturalist where he had been born or educated. I did guess it was not in the Western world though, because despite his obvious intelligence and his admirable conscientiousness in the pursuit of his research, his speech was littered with fantastic faux pas and misquotations—particularly when he was excited—which made conversation with him even more of a pleasure.When I had been on The Hill for a week The Professor loosened up enough to tell me how he wasn’t interested in women anymore. He said he had been concentrating on his naturalism since his long-time girlfriend had disappeared with a muscular Australian surfer with flowing dreadlocks they had met in Hua Hin. Apparently, the amorous pair had done a runner whilst The Professor had been busy crouching in a flooded bog in the nearby Khao Sam Roi Yot national park in an attempt to spot the elusive purple swamp hen.

“It was like a dagger in the knife,” The Professor sighed ambigously, shaking his head sadly, before bending back down to continue the undeniably much less heartbreaking pursuit of examining a giant dung beetle under his colossal magnifying glass.

When I told The Professor about my quest for Psorng-Preng he shook his head dismissively.

“If I was to put my hand on my head, I don’t think you stand much chance,” he said, sagely. “It will be like looking for a camel in a haystack.”

The Professor used to disappear every day on his pride and joy, a battered old motorcycle he had been conned into buying by one of the motodop boys who had realized the machine was on its last legs and that he needed to offload it on some sucker before it gave out completely. The Professor had scraped off most of the rust and lovingly repainted the bike and it now retained a reasonable appearance although the engine still sounded like someone had emptied a bag of nails into the cylinder head.

Before setting out every day The Professor would hang a gigantic pair of binoculars around his neck. He would load up a rucksack—the size of which the veterans of Desert Storm would have been proud of—full of the required books and guides for the day’s expedition. He would hang his catching nets and specimen buckets on an ingenious Heath Robinson-style rack he had made and disappear off up the track in a cloud of dust and a rattle of dodgy engine components. Despite his meticulous preparation and diligence The Professor usually returned from his forays with nothing more exciting than bad sunburn, muddy legs and the occasional dead insect which he would examine for hours with the aid of his monstrous magnifying glass.

One day however, it seemed that the intrepid naturalist had finally struck gold. I was taking advantage of The Professor’s absence to watch an old Mr. Bean re-run in the television room. This would normally have been impossible as the TV was constantly tuned to the National Geographic channel whenever my room-mate was present. Suddenly, the side door burst open and a mud-spattered Professor burst into the communal room—he used to call it the communist room—in a state of delight which bordered on panic. He emptied the contents of the small plastic bucket he was carrying proudly into the palacial aquarium and rushed for a gigantic book on fish he had in his room.

“I think I might have discovered a previously unrecorded Cambodian specimen!” He yelled at me excitedly, and began frantically flicking through the pages of his guide with shaking hands.

Previously unrecorded specimens or not, the two little fishes that had unwittingly swum into The Professor’s net were undeniably beautiful and they darted around their new luxury home happily. The fishes were both around an inch long and had golden spots and bright, waving fins that glowed black and orange in the soft light from the fluorescent tube The Professor had fixed up above the tank. We both stared into the clear water at the tiny fish and the delighted naturalist babbled on unintelligibly about Galaxy Rasboras and “
Celestichthys Marginatus
” in a loud, excited voice. Drawn by the commotion, Srey Leak’s two pretty daughters Chantavy and Chavy turned up to see what all the fuss was about. The two sisters also seemed to be impressed by the delightful little fish and we all gazed into the clear water. The teenaged girls pointed their slim brown fingers at the aquarium and jabbered away happily in Khmer to each other.

Presently Chavy, the younger of the two girls, ran off into the yard and came back with half a dozen tiny coloured shells which she dropped into the fish tank. The Professor was instantly furious.

“No! No! No!” He yelled angrily at the surprised girl. “You will dirty the water!” He wagged a big finger at her admonishingly. “Leave it alone!” he instructed her sternly. “It is
my
aquarium, and it is
not
a toy!”

The two young girls looked at each other. They never said a word, but after twenty-five years in Asia it was obvious to me they had formed a silent pact. I shuddered to myself. Trouble was on the way. The sisters got up from where they were kneeling and silently slid out of the side door together. The Professor pulled up a chair, the National Geographic channel forgotten for once, and he stared into his aquarium with rapt concentration.

The next morning I was woken at an untimely hour by The Professor clattering about outside as he prepared his nets and buckets. It was barely light and Stumpy the lizard had risen early and appeared from his hiding place. He was happily sunning himself in the warm spot on the wall where the early morning rays slipped their first fingers of light in through the small window. Stumpy was apparently a morning person but I’m not and I groaned. No doubt encouraged by his success, my ardent zoologist of a neighbour had decided to rise at this inhuman hour and attempt to repeat the sensation of the previous day. I was still hungover from the previous nights revelry and I turned over and swore when I heard his beloved bike clattering away from the Crazy Monkey sounding like an antique printing press. I pulled the bedsheet over my head and tried to ignore the beer-induced throbbing in my skull in an attempt to get back to the land of nod.

Just as I was about to drift off again, I heard low voices and giggling in the television room outside. It was Chantavy and Chavy—and they were obviously up to no good. I climbed out of bed very quietly and opened the door a fraction and peered out of the crack. The two young sisters were in the process of putting something into The Professor’s aquarium and they were laughing together as they did so.

The two lovely Cambodian girls looked a picture as they stood over the tank with their heads very close together. Their satiny hair hung around their smiling faces and shone in the early morning sunlight that filtered in through the window. Two tight kramas were stretched enticingly over a quadruplet of firm buttocks as they bent to their task. The girls only stayed half a minute, then they scampered out of the side door in a fit of giggles. I was still half asleep and thought nothing more about it and returned back to bed, intending to catch another couple of hours sleep.

In fact, I didn’t wake up again until the sound of loud male shouting woke me up around noon.

“Look what your daughters have done!” The Professor was yelling at Srey-Leak, with a dangerous note of hysteria in his voice. “It’s murder that’s what it is—a bloody murder!”

It sounded like the poor guy was almost in tears and I hastily pulled a towel around my waist and went out into the television room to see if I could help. The Professor was wobbling his head and waving his arms around agitatedly and kept poking his finger at his aquarium. Srey-Leak was standing demurely in front of him, allowing him to let off what was definitely a very full head of steam.

“They were previously unrecorded specimens!” The Professor was wailing. “I will never find anything like them again!”

The poor bloke was actually crying now.

I looked into the aquarium to see what all the fuss was about. The Professor’s pretty little fish were both gone and in their place were two six inch Snakehead Fish—a predatory species I had often caught on lures and livebaits that the Thai people call ‘The Freshwater Shark.’ It appeared the two teenaged girls had had taken the rapacious little carnivores from one of the big earthenware pots in the yard where their father kept a variety of fish and released them into the Professor’s aquarium, where they had eaten his previously unrecorded specimens.

Srey-Leak smiled at The Professor kindly and spoke to him in a calming voice, feigning an ignorance I did not believe she possesed.

“The girls were only trying to help,” she said soothingly, patting him kindly on the shoulder. “They know how much you like fish—and you never seem to catch very many.”

With that, the owner of the Crazy Monkey guesthouse walked serenely out of the side door in order to see to a party of biking, hiking, rucksack toting backpackers who had just arrived in town. As she walked away, The Professor stood there fuming apoplectically and opening and closing his mouth in exactly the same manner his previously unrecorded specimens had done before their demise. I retreated back into my room hastily.

The Professor really was dreadfully upset and later that day he was even talking about leaving the Crazy Monkey and finding a new place to stay. To cheer him up, I asked him to come and have a couple of beers with me that evening on The Hill, but he was still under the impression that the area was unsafe and populated by ‘cut-throat rascals,’ as he put it, and he declined my offer. Maybe it was just as well he had. When I made my way up to the dusty crossroads, just as I was about to turn into the bar-strip, I gave Narith and his motodop cronies—who were gathered there as usual—a cheery wave.

Narith’s’ bike was up on its stand and he was reclining backwards on the seat and using the handlebars as a pillow. When he saw me coming up the track he leapt off his machine and strode towards me, his face twisted with rage.

“Why you speak bad to me last night?!” Narith shouted at me angrily, and he stopped a yard in front of where I stood. The furious motodop driver took up an aggressive stance in the middle of the road, his muscular legs spread wide and his hands on his slim hips. He looked at me hard.

Shit. I thought things had been going too well. This was much more like the Cambodia I had imagined in my nightmares back in Pattaya. I cast my mind back to the previous evening. Admittedly, I had been slightly the worse for wear, but I couldn’t believe I had been either drunk or daft enough to upset the toughest motodop driver on The Hill. Narith growled at me like an angry dog and took another step towards me. I debated kicking him in the balls and doing a runner, but with all his henchmen at hand, I knew I wasn’t going to get very far. And anyway, where exactly was I going to run to? With the town consisting of three dirt roads and the hill up to the beach, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

The adrenalin kicked in and I prepared for the worst. I can honestly say I wasn’t scared—I was merely terrified. I knew I was no match for the fierce young motodop driver and I wondered if I might at least manage to get one good whack in before he battered me into the dirt road. I stared back into his blazing eyes, trying hard not to show I was almost about to shit my pants.

Narith moved in for the kill and I tensed.

Then suddenly, the motodop driver’s face broke into a huge, good-natured grin and he began laughing in delight. All his pals at the crossroads joined in and I looked at them in amazement, thoroughly confused. Narith threw his arms around me and gave me an amicable hug which almost cracked several ribs, then stepped back and shook my hand vigorously.

“I sorry! I sorry!” he apologised, gasping for breath in his merriment. “I only joking with you! You my friend!”

Feeling slightly sick, I attempted a weak grin and Narith gave me a matey clap on the back as I walked by, trying very hard to control my shaking legs.

The motodop boys were all still laughing like a pack of hyenas as I walked past them into the bar-strip.