Fishing for Tigers (8 page)

‘Ouch.' He rubbed his arm, like a toddler.

‘Sorry.'

‘That's what you said to him.'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't get it. Dude was an abusive fuck.'

‘I know.'

‘That's okay with you?'

‘What I think of it is irrelevant.'

He let out a mocking snort. The sound and the fluttering fear in my throat reminded me of Glen and I walked faster as though I could sweat the memory out.

‘You late for something?'

‘No.'

‘Can you slow down then? I feel kind of sick.'

I slowed and risked a glance at him. He was breathing hard and his fringe stuck wetly to his forehead. ‘Let's sit.' I led him to a nearby stone bench shaded by a weeping willow. ‘Breathe,' I said.

As soon as we sat down a postcard boy approached. He looked to be eleven or twelve but might have been as old as Cal. He sat beside me, grinning. ‘Hello, hello. Where you from?'

‘America,' I told him. ‘But I live here now. Where are you from?'

‘You live in Hanoi! So cool. Me, I'm from Haiphong. My family very poor. I come here and sell postcard. See?' He thrust the open shoebox towards me.

‘Yes. But I don't need any postcards, sorry.'

‘What about your friend? He from here?'

‘No,' Cal said. ‘I'm from Australia. Do you know Australia?'

‘Sure, sure. G'day mate. Kangaroo. Yes?'

Cal smiled. ‘Yes.'

‘You buy postcard, please.'

‘No,' I said. ‘We don't want any.'

‘I do.' Cal stood and pulled out his wallet. ‘How much?'

The boy jumped up and began to lay cards out on the bench. ‘Very cheap.' He laid out Ha Long Bay and the Temple of Literature, girls in
áo dài
riding bikes, old ladies in
nón lás
squatting over baskets of vegetables, a motorbike carrying a buffalo. ‘I give you all these for five dollars US.'

I tutted. ‘He's Australian, not stupid. Cal, they're worth about 5000
dong
each. A dollar for the lot is too much.'

‘Oh, you tough lady!' The boy shook his head, grinning. ‘Okay, so, more cheap. Four dollar only.'

‘Okay,' Cal said, pulling notes from his wallet.

‘That's ridiculous.'

The boy smiled at me and danced on his toes. ‘No. Very good.' He scooped up the postcards and handed them to Cal, taking the five-dollar bill Cal offered. ‘Ah, I get you change or you like more postcard?'

‘Keep the change.' Cal shoved the postcards into the pocket of his baggy cargo pants.

‘Thank you, kangaroo. Here, free for tough lady. Make you nicer.' He handed me a picture of a bicycle laden with baskets of flowers, nodded smilingly at Cal and ran toward a grey-haired couple bent over a tourist map.

‘You were ripped off.'

‘No. I chose to overpay.'

‘Out of charity or because I said not to?'

He smiled a little then and plucked the postcard from my hand. ‘This is a good one.'

‘Keep it. Are you feeling better?'

Cal nodded. ‘Yeah.'

‘Are you sure? Because I could call your dad or—'

‘I'm okay. If you need to go, then go.'

‘Okay. If you're sure.' I stood and looked north towards the bridge.

‘Where you off to anyway?'

‘The bank. Very exciting.'

‘Can I come with you?'

‘To the bank? If you like.'

He stood and we began to walk. After a minute he said, ‘How come you told that guy you were American?'

‘I am.'

‘You've got an Aussie accent.'

‘Yes, I suppose I do. People rarely notice that here. It's enough to find someone who speaks the same language.'

‘So you are Australian?'

‘Originally, yes, but I haven't lived there for nearly twenty years.'

‘How old were you when you left?'

‘Old enough to have my accent set for life, it seems.'

‘Ten? Twelve?'

‘I was seventeen, Mr Nosey. Any other questions?'

‘Yeah. Why did you drag me away back there? I can look after myself, you know.'

We had pressed through the tourists milling around the bridge entrance, but the path was still busy with travellers, merchants, scam artists and locals going about their business. I stopped walking and nodded towards the lake wall. We leant against it, looking out over water the colour of overcooked peas.

‘You're not in Sydney, Cal. You can't interfere like that.'

‘Sydney or not, hitting women is wrong.'

‘It's not a question of that. It's about how things are handled. You need to trust the Vietnamese to deal with men like that one.'

‘But they weren't dealing with him! They were standing around watching like it was a footy match.'

‘No. They were witnessing. They were waiting until it was over, making sure he didn't seriously hurt her, making sure he knew he was being observed. They'll leave when it's over and they'll tell everyone they know. Maybe someone will tell the police, but more likely someone will tell that young man's mother or the father of the girl he was abusing, and he'll have to answer to them.'

‘Or maybe no one will do anything and he'll go home and belt her a little bit more.'

‘Maybe. But your intervention wouldn't change that. If anything it would make things worse for her. No man likes being shown up in front of his girl and you being a
makes it that much more humiliating.'

A breeze rushed past our backs and we sighed in unison. I smiled at him but he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the stone wall, picking at it with his fingernails. I noticed the display on his watch and said, ‘The bank closes in a minute.'

‘How far is it?'

‘Five minutes.'

‘We could run?'

‘Or we could skip right to the finding of a cool dark room and drinking beer part of the afternoon.'

‘Lead the way,' he said.

The Grog Hut was the closest pub with air-­conditioning and cold beer and for a millisecond I considered it, but the idea of introducing Cal to Julian and Mario was terrible. I got on with both of them well enough, but I get on with every­body well enough. That I can share a beer and a laugh with someone is no indication of their character. Julian and Mario, for example, were, like surprisingly many expats in Hanoi, unapologetically racist. Oh, they wouldn't use that word for themselves, but they believed that Vietnamese men were lazy, backward and corrupt and that Vietnamese women were gold-digging whores. I don't know what they thought of Vietnamese–Australian teenagers, but I had a pretty good idea as to what Cal would think of them, and given he was willing to confront an angry stranger in the middle of a street mob, there was a better than even chance he wouldn't hold back when confronted with a couple of loutish expats.

In fact, in Cal's agitated state any bar likely to be populated by tourists or expats or drunks was a bad idea. I decided on a quiet
bia ho'i
whose elderly proprietor I nodded hello to every morning on my way to work. It was on the other side of the church district and by the time we got there we were both dripping.

Seated on child-sized stools under the canvas shade, we fanned ourselves with coasters. A moment after Mrs Ly placed our beers on the rickety plastic table, a breeze swept through the lane, speckling them with ash.

‘Please tell me there's not a crematorium around here.'

‘It's only paper.' I used the edge of my coaster to scrape as much as I could from each of our glasses.

‘How do you know?'

‘It's the first of the lunar month. First and the fifteenth, people burn money for the dead. Printed votive paper, really, but the dead can apparently spend it just fine. You didn't notice all the piles of flaming notes as we walked here?'

Cal looked towards the street and shrugged. ‘I don't know. There's so much to notice. I don't register some things until later. I was in bed the other night, nearly asleep, and I realised that I'd seen a whole roasted dog in the market earlier. It's a weird feeling. Like your brain's taking photos without you knowing.'

‘Sensory overload.'

‘I guess. Have you tasted it?'

‘Dog meat? Sure.'

‘Really? Is it nice?'

‘Depends how it's prepared.'

He looked towards the counter. ‘Do they sell it here?'

‘No. Anyway, it's bad luck to eat it during the first part of the month.'

He drank his beer. ‘They have a lot of rules here. How do you keep them all straight?'

‘I don't much of the time, but my work helps.'

‘I've read that magazine of yours. Dad's got a heap of copies at his place. It's kind of—' He gave a demented smile. ‘You know.'

‘What?'

‘Propaganda,' he whispered.

‘Only in the sense it's positive towards Vietnam. It's not pretending to be anything else.'

‘So you believe the things you read in it?'

I emptied my glass. I felt thick and slow, as though it were my first week here. I knew I should order sugar-cane juice or coffee, but instead I raised my hand and signalled that we'd have more beer.

‘It's not a matter of belief,' I explained. ‘It's about information and a perspective on that information. You don't have to agree with the perspective or believe it's the only one for the information to be useful.'

‘Spoken like a true propaganda apologist.' He said it as though it was a compliment and I responded as if it was one. I felt my mouth softening, my rib-cage dropping.

‘I may be over-sensitive,' he said. ‘My grandpa drummed all this stuff into me about the communist north and ­people who dared to disagree with anything the regime said being whisked away in the middle of the night. And then Mum'd correct him, tell him it's not just the north, it's the whole country because the regime got rid of all the non-­communists wherever they lived, and how they hardly ever need to whisk people away in the dead of night, because they have talented propagandists and a government-controlled media to paint everything as rosy and the guilt-ridden, lily-livered western nations endorse and encourage this picture and so people think they're free when really they're living in the Matrix.' He drew breath.

‘What does your dad say about all that?'

‘I don't talk to him about Mum or Grandpa or argue their views or anything. Dad knows the general vibe there is one of negativity and he always tries to show me the positive, I guess, to counteract that. Or maybe he's not trying to do anything. Maybe he really does think this is paradise.'

‘And what do you think now you've had some time here? Forget politics. How do you like Vietnam?'

He shrugged one shoulder and began to rub at a cloudy patch on his glass. ‘It's good. Weird. Sensory overload, like you said. I haven't got my bearings yet, I guess. It's cool when Dad's not at work and he can take me around on his bike, but the rest of the time, I've just been wandering. Oh, and—' He held both hands in the air as though about to lead a cheer. ‘Yesterday, just after Dad left for work, I was mooching about the house and the doorbell rang. Guess who?'

‘I can't.'

Cal slammed his hands on to the tabletop. The glasses jumped and Mrs Ly frowned.

‘
,' Cal said, as though he'd been saying it all his life, and Mrs Ly beamed. ‘Oops,' he said to me and smoothed his palms over the tabletop. ‘Well, anyway, it was Collins.'

‘Henry's friend?'

‘Yeah. He had a day off and had been to the gym on some street I'd never heard of and he thought he remembered Dad saying we lived in this complex and – well, you get the idea. He asked me out for coffee.'

‘No!'

‘I swear. Stood there with his gym bag and wet hair and asked me out. I mean, I know I'm hot and all, but that's just . . . Anyway, I said I couldn't, that I had plans, and he said something about calling in again soon. I wish I'd just told him I'm not gay, but it seemed rude somehow. So now I have to make sure I'm out of the house whenever Dad's not home just in case Collins drops in again.'