Fishing for Tigers (24 page)

My room was on the top floor, two flights up from where the elevator stopped, and was approximately one-quarter the size of Matthew's. The double bed took up almost all of the floor space; a bar fridge took up half the cupboard space. The bathroom was a toilet, sink and a hose with shower nozzle attached. The view was of the giant satanic buffalo head over the Crazy Buffalo bar. At least there was an air-conditioner. I switched it on and stripped off my clothes. I sat on the bed and waited for relief.

Matthew's nurse visited at one and I spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to understand the extent of ­Matthew's injuries and the progress and nature of his treatment. His drug regime alone was so complicated that it took four run-throughs before the nurse agreed that the list I'd made was correct. Matthew's Vietnamese – strained at the best of times – had deteriorated to my level, which is to say, useless. Finally, the nurse said the patient needed to sleep and promptly fed him a fistful of yellow pills. I still had no idea about Matthew's insurance arrangements, who to contact and what they would pay for. Finding a translator and attempting to have the surgeon come to the hotel to speak to us would have to wait until tomorrow.

It was after three when Cal and I went to grab some lunch. Sapped by the heat and hunger I let Cal drag me into a tourist bar across the road from our hotel. Our table faced the blindingly bright street, but the light within was so dim I had to hold the menu at the end of my nose to read it.

A girl of perhaps seventeen wearing a white tank top and denim cut-offs approached with an order pad. She dropped into the seat beside Cal and grabbed his arm. ‘Hey, I think maybe you are Vietnamese?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Australian.'

‘Ah, yes, your muscles are very big. Australians always very big. But your father is Vietnamese, yes?'

‘No.' Cal studied his menu. ‘My mother.'

The girl looked at me, frowning. ‘This not your mother?'

‘Jesus.' Cal put the menu down. ‘This is my friend. We're both Australian. Can we order some food, now?'

The girl removed her hand and straightened. ‘What would you like?'

‘Fish and chips. And a Tiger.'

‘And for you?' she said, not looking up.

I had given up on the menu. ‘I'll have the same.'

The girl took a deep breath. ‘For Tiger beer we have special offer. Buy four get two free. I bring six in bucket with ice. You want this?'

‘Yes.' Cal said. ‘Thanks.'

The waitress nodded and disappeared into the gloom. Cal tore a strip off the coaster in front of him.

‘I know the questions get tiresome, but she didn't deserve to be snapped at like that.'

He tore the strip in half, then half again. ‘It didn't bother you? Her thinking you were my mum?'

‘No.' It was half of the truth. The other half was that I was relieved.

‘Vietnamese people suck at guessing age. They're always asking, “How old you? How old?” I'm gonna start lying, tell them I'm thirty. They won't know the difference, I swear.'

The girl returned then with a sweating silver bucket. She placed it between Cal and me and pulled out two bottles, opening each with an expert flick of a rusty bottle opener.

‘Thanks,' Cal said, and she nodded curtly.

I drank some beer and shivered. I'd forgotten how good brain-punchingly cold beer could be. I downed the first ­bottle too quickly, told myself I'd go easier on the second. But I was also thinking how Matthew would be out of it until morning and I was with Cal in a city where no one knew me and if I couldn't be carefree and irresponsible now then I never would be.

‘Jesus. Look at these clowns.'

I followed Cal's gaze to the table closest to the street. Three blond-haired men, crouched on the cushioned cane stools, their knees sticking awkwardly up near their armpits. They were around my age, I guessed and not bad-looking, although fair men always looked overly flushed and greasy in this intense, wet heat. To the left and slightly behind each one stood a tiny Vietnamese woman. Each touched ‘her' man constantly, rubbing his shoulders, playing with his hair, offering to get more drinks. The men were bantering with each other as if the women weren't there.

A metre away, on the broken footpath, a cyclo driver looked on with an expression of utter contempt. One of the men stood and the driver rushed forward, beaming. ‘Cyclo, sir? Very cheap for you.'

‘Not unless you've got a dunny in there,' the man said to his friends, who howled in appreciation. The blond clomped into the bar and the driver retreated, his face blank.

‘It's like bloody Bangkok,' Cal said.

‘I didn't know you'd been to Bangkok?'

‘A few times. Since I was fifteen Mum let me fly there to meet Dad once a year. It saved him having to come all the way to Sydney so often.'

I'd been sure Matthew went to Australia twice a year, was certain he'd never mentioned Bangkok.

Our food arrived, the fish somehow dry and oily at the same time, the chips sodden. I watched the blond bloke slap the young waitress's arse as he returned to the table and felt a sharp pang of longing for Hanoi.

‘It's not all like this,' I told Cal. ‘It's just around here. Backpackers, you know.'

‘Those guys aren't backpackers. Fat forty-year-old grubs. Should be home with their kids. Probably told their wives they're on a fucking business trip.'

The eighties glam rock was loud enough that nobody beyond our table could hear, but Cal's face was pure hate. If one of the men turned and saw him, responded to Cal's glare with the clichéd bar challenge . . .

I handed Cal the last bottle from the bucket. ‘Drink faster so we can get out of this place.'

‘And go where?'

‘Wherever you like. Another pub. A proper restaurant. There's probably a nice, shady park somewhere around here. There are museums, shops. What do you feel like doing?'

He drank, glared. ‘It's too hot to do anything.'

‘So we'll go somewhere with air-con.'

‘I want to go back to Hanoi.'

‘Okay. There's a computer in the hotel lobby. We'll go online, book you a ticket. You can be out of here tomorrow.'

He turned his glare on me. ‘You want me to go?'

I sighed, gestured to the waitress for the bill. ‘If that's what you want.'

He didn't speak to me until we were back at the hotel. I headed for the computer and he grabbed my upper arm. ‘Don't.'

We went up to my room and turned the air-con on full. Icy air blasted our bodies while we soaked the sheets with our sweat.

In the hours while Matthew slept, I wanted air-conditioned pubs or my hotel room, but Cal was restless, agitated. He said he wanted to ‘experience Saigon' but then complained about how ugly and westernised it was. He wanted to explore the city streets, but moaned constantly about the humidity. We couldn't take
because ‘Shit, Mischa, did you see what happened to my dad?' and cabs were out because they meant sitting still on congested roads while motos swarmed around you. My suggestion of a cyclo was met with a tirade about how watching ‘fat lazy tourists being pedalled around by some tiny, impoverished Asian dude' made him sick. So we walked around the city, dripping and thirsty and constantly accosted by street vendors most of whom Cal insisted on buying something from. Cal's anger and unreasonableness rose with his body temperature and the weight of tourist tat in my handbag.

The War Remnants museum was his idea. ‘At least it'll be air-conditioned,' he said, but it wasn't. In the front gallery, the only concession to the stifling heat was a wall-mounted fan in each corner. We stood in front of the closest one until our shirts were dry and then began the viewing shuffle along the wall.

‘Jesus,' Cal said, in front of the first photo. A Vietnamese boy's melted face hung at the end of a charred sticky mess suspended in a smiling US soldier's hand. The boy's dead eye stared at a bodiless leg in the grass. To my right, a woman gasped and raised her camera.

We moved on. An American armoured car dragging the bodies of two Vietnamese men through the dust. Two GIs pouring water over the swaddled face of a Viet Cong soldier. A helmeted American holding a gun to the head of a screaming man in black pyjamas. A dozen or so women and babies dead in a roadside ditch. There were more; I didn't look at them. I followed Cal's straight back, watched the sinews strain as he tilted his head.

We reached the end of the wall and I stood with my back to the fan. ‘This is hard going,' I said to Cal's blank face. He ignored me, made a show of closely reading the information panel for the first photo on the next wall.

This section was dedicated to victims of Agent Orange. It started with a shot of chemical tanks being loaded onto a truck, then there was one of a plane dumping white spray over thick green foliage. And then, an old man's face on a toddler-sized body, a young girl with a tumour the size of a head growing from her groin, a child, lying like a dead insect, his five twisted limbs pointing to the sky.

‘This baby was born in 1969.' Cal touched the typewritten sign under a woman nursing a swollen-headed baby with no eyes. ‘Same year as my mum.'

‘God. Your mum isn't from the countryside though, is she? I mean, she wouldn't have been affected.'

‘I don't know. She was born around here. I guess she never got dioxin dumped on her. I don't know. She spent some time further south, sleeping in the jungle before they could get a boat.'

I stood behind Cal, waiting for him to move on. A drop of sweat trickled from the base of his skull into the top of his t-shirt. ‘Must make you feel so lucky. So grateful to her for going through all that, getting out when she did.'

‘She was six, she had no choice. My grandparents were the ones who decided.'

‘Grateful to them, then. That they made that choice and got your mum out safely.'

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, as it turned out Mum went and had a defective kid anyway. Sydney or Saigon, babies get born wrong and die. Shit happens everywhere.'

He stepped across to the next photo: conjoined twin babies with one leg between them. I walked to the next ­corner and faced the fan. The warm air stung my eyes, dried my face. I watched the blades spin until Cal barked my name into my ear.

‘You look like an idiot,' he said and stomped to the third wall of the gallery.

I stayed where I was. My eyes began to weep and so I closed them. Somewhere nearby, a British woman kept saying ‘Bloody hell' and a couple spoke continuously in rapid French. There was a child's voice, too, speaking in a language I couldn't identify. I didn't take particular note until she began to bawl. I think the idea that this was no place for a child flitted through my head a moment before Cal started yelling, but maybe I'm misremembering, crediting myself with his sensitivity when all I was really thinking was that it was no place for me.

‘Get her out of here! Jesus! Why would you bring a kid in here?'

I took a running step towards him, but my sandal slipped off and my ankle folded in on itself. I stumbled, my face hot, and retrieved my shoe. People who had been chatting through photos of torture and mutation went silent at the sight of Cal rearing up over a woman who knelt in front of the wailing child and a man trying to tug both of them away. A security guard peeled off the front wall and sauntered towards them. I spent seconds trying to put my shoe on, but I was sweating and breathless and afraid of overbalancing. I gave up and hobbled half-shod across the room, arriving at the same moment as the guard.