Figurehead (32 page)
The driver waded out, handed Kiry a banana and then turned away and dived head first into the water. Kiry peeled the banana, but it was brown and soft. He hurled it at a stick that floated by but missed.
The driver lit a cigarette. Kiry looked back at him, appalled: ‘Put that out. You can’t smoke in the ocean.’
He stayed floating in the water for hours. Finally, his government minder appeared on the shore. He took off his shoes, rolled up his pants and waded out to Kiry.
‘I’ve decided to go out for dinner,’ Kiry said.
‘It’s very difficult. Please reconsider. Too many people want to look at you. And there are still a few journalists hanging around.’
‘I am going. Only me. You can come if you insist, so long as you get your own table. But I am going.’
Accompanied by the government official and three bodyguards, Kiry went to a restaurant on the hill above Victory Beach. Ieng Sary had recommended it for the sunset as well as the food, but by the time Kiry arrived the view beyond the balcony was black. Still he chose an outside table, away from the red-faced tourists who were watching
Rambo III
, the sound turned up high. His minders took a table near the television and ordered beer.
Kiry sniffed the air, enjoying the mix of salt air and the smoke from the mosquito coil burning in an empty Pepsi bottle at his feet. He ordered a gin and tonic and was delighted when it came with two triangles of lime, one drowning in the drink and the other on a small plate to squeeze over the ice.
His food came quickly. Kiry surmised that the restaurant owner hoped he wouldn’t stay too long. He wondered, while he poked at the soft white flesh of the fish and waited for a glass of sauvignon blanc, what his family was eating. Cheeseburgers again, probably.
A couple of well-to-do Cambodians sitting a few tables away glanced at Kiry and then took a longer look. They drew their heads together and whispered. Their faces turned sour. They ate in a rush. Kiry smiled at them as they left and thought to himself, So you’re the middle class.
He paid for his meal with a five-dollar greenback. The owner took the note and held it close to the candle on the table, checking for stains or creases or rips and making sure it wasn’t counterfeit. The procedure amused Kiry. ‘It’s American money,’ he told the owner. ‘It’s full of imperfections.’
As Kiry stood to leave he accidentally kicked the Pepsi bottle at his feet. The last curl of the mosquito coil, the stub still glowing, lodged in a crack. The bottle spun across the decking to a nearby table, where a Western couple in their thirties – tourists not expatriates, Kiry could tell by their beach clothes and their flushed looks – sat perusing the menu.
‘Please excuse me,’ Kiry said.
‘No worries, mate,’ the man said in an Australian twang, saluting him with a glistening bottle of Angkor Draught. ‘It was an accident.’
After illness delivered Ted Whittlemore to the Concertina Rest Home, Lea converted the granny flat at the back of her parents’ house into a darkroom and studio. She felt guilty about it; it was as though she were giving Ted’s eulogy while he was still propped up in bed, still breathing (sort of), still swearing to himself, still ogling those nursing assistants. But Ted had told Lea he was never going back home: ‘I’m stuck here, girl, and no pointless nobility on your part can change that. Take the bloody flat and do something useful with it.’
After Ted died, it was there that Lea began going through Ted’s papers. But she found it almost impossible to do. Every time she sat down at the tiny pine table in the kitchenette, she felt as if she was spying on him. Finally, she forced herself to skim through Ted’s Ho Chi Minh biography. She smiled as she remembered Ted ranting against the world’s publishers: ‘It’s mass censorship, pure and simple. Nobody wants me to get my Ho book into print. It’s a conspiracy funded at the highest levels.’ But the frayed and stained pages Lea sampled seemed to her to be a mix of hero worship and banal detail: who cares, she wondered, how strong Ho Chi Minh liked his tea? Her first act as Edward Whittlemore’s literary executor was to dump
Ho Chi Minh: A New and True Biography
, all 1009 pages of it, into a sink full of developing solution.
She put the rest of Ted’s papers in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe in his old bedroom. She made a decent fist of forgetting they were there until the day a couple of boxes arrived in the mail from Ted’s Vietnamese friend, Hieu. The boxes contained masses of drafts and notes: stray thoughts that Ted probably should have thrown out but which Lea now felt obliged to catalogue and archive. But there were also letters – it seemed to Lea that half the world wrote to Ted to tell him he was an asshole and the other half wanted to be his best friend – and bundles of photographs: jungles, cities, battle scenes and portraits of strangers, some dressed in rags and sitting in the dirt, some nursing horrific wounds, some weighed down by jewellery and superior looks. And there were snapshots of Ted with an array of politicians and celebrities, the cumulative effect of which was to show the growing prominence over the years of Ted’s balloon-shaped head.
Within a week of the boxes arriving from Vietnam, Lea retrieved the rest of Ted’s papers from the wardrobe. There she found
The
Confessions of Edward Whittlemore
. She had been certain that Ted had abandoned his memoirs, but here was a stack of pages, unnumbered, some typed, some handwritten, a muddle of events and people and opinions and grumpiness. The order was so illogical that Lea wondered if Ted had dropped the manuscript and retrieved the pages at random, or if, day by day, he’d simply recorded whatever stray memories popped into his head.
She found Ted’s letter to Nhem Kiry inside an unmarked envelope lying between two pages of the memoirs. It was undated, but Lea suspected from the way the neat, small script intermittently gave way to a ragged scrawl that Ted had been in pain when he wrote it.
Dear Nhem Kiry,
I’m old and sick. I cannot begin to tell you how bored I am. I’ve got so
much time to sit around and think, a curse I hope befalls you too. I don’t
mean that in a nasty way – although Christ knows you deserve every bit of
nastiness that comes your way. I just mean that after you’ve lived the sort of
life you’ve lived, you might appreciate having a good long hard think about
things before you die.
I’ve been reflecting on my life, and it’s annoying the shit out of me that I
cannot stop thinking about you. Sometimes I find myself imagining I am
you. I try to think like you think, rationalise like you rationalise. It drives
me crazy: I wish I could banish you from my head forever.
I believed in you. Did you know that? I believed that you had some sort
of key to unlocking the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Not just
in Cambodia. I thought you might offer up some model for how to merge
radicalism with compassion and decency. That’s why I was always trying to
get you to loosen up and have some fun: because I wanted us to be friends.
Allies.
I had faith in you, and a person like me is not supposed to have faith.
You let me down. You let a lot of other people down too: all those peasants
who believed that you were their champion. Where was your unbending
moral code when the people were dying by the millions? Did you have your
eyes closed? Were you keeping yourself too busy to notice? Or were you up to
your elbows in the murders yourself? And, in the end, what’s the difference?
And don’t tell me you were protecting your country’s sovereignty. Were
there any more mass graves after Vietnam invaded? You know there weren’t.
And Bun Sody. You let Bun Sody down. He was a beautiful man. It’s
not too late – it’ll never be too late – to tell me his fate. Maybe he just got
sick. If you write and tell me in all honesty that he caught malaria and
died, or that he had a heart attack or stepped on a landmine or got attacked
by a feral pig, then I will believe you. It would comfort me to know that he
died of natural causes or because of some ludicrous accident. I know these
things happen. But if he got his throat slit or a bullet between the eyes, can’t
you just tell me? What does the truth matter now?
You let Sihanouk down. I know he was a clown but you never made
proper use of him. And you never gave him credit for trying. And he did try.
I wish I could see inside your head. I imagine it must be as well ordered
as a library in there, every idea, every fact, filed in alphabetical order and
written in duplicate in Khmer and French. There’s an index, no doubt, for
ease of searching. There are summaries and footnotes.
But I don’t want the facts. I want to know what you think about when
you’re tucked up in bed. Have you nutted out how the Khmer Rouge managed
to kill all those people? Do you weigh up incompetence and malicious
intent and xenophobia and megalomania and rotten animal instincts? Do
you wonder which of those best describes you? Or are you just a garden variety
psychopath? I wonder all of those things, and then I ask myself if communism
is doomed to always be bloody. I answer ‘no,’ but that is never the end
of the conversation: soon enough I find myself asking that same question
again.
Do you ask yourself that question? Do you ask yourself anything?
Remember how I saved you and Sody back in ’67? You thanked me once
– remember? Well, nothing comes for free. It’s time to pay up. Write me a letter.
Tell me what’s going on behind that urbane mask you wear. Give me an
explanation, an insight. Give me something. Anything.
Figurehead
is not – and is not intended to be – historically accurate. Although inspired by recent Cambodian history, it is a work of imagination set in a familiar but imaginary world. The events and the political machinations were massively more complex and intricate than – and often just plain different from – the absurdist version of them I offer here.
In the characters of Ted Whittlemore and Nhem Kiry, some readers might recognise elements of two people: the Australian journalist/propagandist/agent of influence (depending on your viewpoint) Wilfred Burchett and the Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan. But neither Ted nor Kiry should be equated with the historical figure who inspired him, whether in relation to his public life or, of course, his private life and inner world. They are new, fictional men; the bond between them is likewise fictional. Nevertheless, I have co-opted many episodes from Khieu Samphan’s and Wilfred Burchett’s histories and made liberal use of their writings and public utterances.
Similarly, other secondary characters – including those who retain their own names, such as Pol Pot, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Henry Kissinger and others – are fictional creations even though they are often inspired and informed by actual people and by the historical record.
While I make no claim to historical fidelity, I nevertheless acknowledge my use of a collection of primary and secondary sources. I have made extensive use of such sources, sometimes directly and sometimes as the basis for my own interpretations and inventions. They include newspaper articles, opinion pieces, documentaries, motion pictures, photographs, memoirs, biographies, general histories, academic studies, novels, speeches and other documents.
I wrote an earlier version of
Figurehead
as the major component of a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. There, I was fortunate to be supervised by the legendary Tom Shapcott and mentored by J.M. Coetzee. I’m grateful to both of them, and to all the academic and professional staff associated with the Creative Writing program and the Discipline of English. I also want to record my gratitude to my peers in the PhD program for their camaraderie and expertise: Anne Bartlett, Tony Bugeja, Jan Harrow, Sabina Hopfer, Christopher Lappas, Heather Taylor Johnson, Ray Tyndale and Malcolm Walker.
Thanks to my agents at Cameron Creswell, Sophie Hamley and (formerly) Siobhan Hannan, for their support and persistence. At Black Inc, Chris Feik and Denise O’Dea have offered empathetic, clear-headed and plain-speaking editorial advice. And a big thanks to the entire Black Inc team: thanks for having me! Thanks to Deborah Bogle at the
Advertiser
, Cath Kenneally at Radio Adelaide and the Wordfire team for giving me opportunities to try out earlier versions of
Figurehead
.
I can’t begin to name all the friends, acquaintances, colleagues and strangers who have helped in various ways to bring
Figurehead
to fruition, but a few of these people are: Phally Hing; L.K.; Catherine Crease; Brian Pike; Jim Schoff and Dee Jones; the rest of the Thursday crew: Russell Bartlett, Mark Caldicott, Guy Carney, Katherine Doube and Niki Vois; Nick Jose; Mick and Sue Treloar; Annabel Kain and Glenn Smith; Carli Pfitzner; Nigel Palmer; Cath Palmer; Lenore Coltheart.
To Mum, Dad and Morag, Lisa and Harry, Matt, Kathy, Kaitlin and Maddie, Ros and John, Emma and Rami, Naomi and Kieran, and to my grandparents – and all the rest of the clan – my gratitude and love.
Special and heartfelt thanks to Thomas Berg and Zoë Gill.
