Honourable Schoolboy (49 page)

‘Okay. So hear this,’ said Keller.

‘Sure’ said Jerry.

Jerry had his notebook open and scribbled while Keller talked. The girl wore a short skirt and Jerry and the driver could see her thighs in the mirror. Keller had his good hand on her knee. Her name of all things was Lorraine and like Jerry she was formally taking a swing through the war zones for her group of mid-West dailies. Soon they were the only car. Soon even the cyclos stopped, leaving them peasants, and bicycles, and buffaloes, and the flowered bushes of the approaching countryside.

‘Heavy fighting on all the main highways,’ Keller intoned, at near dictation speed. ‘Rocket attacks at night, plastics during the day, Lon Nol still thinks he’s God and the US Embassy has hot flushes supporting him then trying to throw him out.’ He gave statistics, ordnance, casualties, the scale of US aid. He named generals known to be selling American arms to the Khmer Rouge, and generals who ran phantom armies in order to claim the troops’ pay, and generals who did both. ‘The usual snafu. Bad guys are too weak to take the towns, good guys are too crapped out to take the countryside and nobody wants to fight except the Coms. Students ready to set fire to the place soon as they’re no longer exempt from the war, food riots any day now, corruption like there was no tomorrow, no one can live on his salary, fortunes being made and the place bleeding to death. Palace is unreal and the Embassy is a nut-house, more spooks than straight guys and all pretending they’ve got a secret. Want more?’

‘How long do you give it?’

‘A week. Ten years.’

‘How about the airlines?’

‘Airlines is all we have. Mekong’s good as dead, so’s the roads. Airlines have the whole ballpark. We did a story on that. You see it? They ripped it to pieces. Jesus,’ he said to the girl. ‘Why do I have to give a re-run for the Poms?’

‘More,’ said Jerry, writing.

‘Six months ago this town had five registered airlines. Last three months we got thirty-four new licences issued and there’s like another dozen in the pipeline. Going rate is three million riels to the Minister personally and two million spread around his people. Less if you pay gold, less still if you pay abroad. We’re working route thirteen,’ he said to the girl. ‘Thought you’d like to take a look.

‘Great,’ said the girl, and pressed her knees together, entrapping Keller’s one good hand.

They passed a statue with its arm shot off and after that the road followed the river bend.

‘That’s if Westerby here can handle it,’ Keller added as an afterthought.

‘Oh, I think I’m in pretty good shape,’ said Jerry and the girl laughed, changing sides a moment.

‘KR got themselves a new position out on the far bank there, hun,’ Keller explained, talking to the girl in preference. Across the brown, fast water, Jerry saw a couple of T28s, poking around looking for something to bomb. There was a fire, quite a big one, and the smoke column rose straight into the sky like a virtuous offering.

‘Where do the overseas Chinese come in?’ Jerry asked. ‘In Hong Kong no one’s heard of this place.’

‘Chinese control eighty per cent of our commerce and that includes airlines. Old or new. Cambodian’s lazy, see, hun? Your Cambodian’s content to take his profit out of American aid. Your Chinese aren’t like that. Oh no, siree. Chinese like to work, Chinese like to turn their cash over. They fixed our money market, our transport monopoly, our rate of inflation, our siege economy. War’s getting to be a wholly-owned Hong Kong subsidiary. Hey Westerby, you still got that wife you told me about, the cute one with the eyes?’

‘Took the other road,’ Jerry said.

‘Too bad, she sounded real great. He had this great wife,’ said Keller.

‘How about you?’ asked Jerry.

Keller shook his head and smiled at the girl. ‘Care if I smoke, hun?’ he asked confidingly.

There was a gap in Keller’s welded claw which could have been drilled specially to hold a cigarette, and the rim of it was brown with nicotine. Keller put his good hand back on her thigh. The road turned to track and deep ruts appeared where the convoys had passed. They entered a short tunnel of trees and as they did so, a thunder of shellfire opened to their right, and the trees arched like trees in a typhoon.

‘Wow,’ the girl yelled. ‘Can we slow down a little?’ And she began hauling at the straps of her camera.

‘Be my guest. Medium artillery,’ said Keller. ‘Ours,’ he added as a joke. The girl lowered the window and shot off some film. The barrage continued, the trees danced, but the peasants in the paddy didn’t even lift their heads. When it died, the bells of the water-buffaloes went on ringing like an echo. They drove on. On the near river bank, two kids had an old bike and were swapping rides. In the water, a shoal of them were diving in and out of an inner tube, brown bodies glistening. The girl photographed them too.

‘You still speak French, Westerby? Me and Westerby did a thing together in the Congo a while back,’ he explained to the girl.

‘I heard,’ she said knowingly.

‘Poms get education, hun,’ Keller explained. Jerry hadn’t remembered him so talkative. ‘They get raised. That right, Westerby? Specially lords, right? Westerby’s some kind of lord.’

‘That’s us, sport. Scholars to a man. Not like your hayseeds.’

‘Well you speak to the driver, right? We got instructions for him, you do the saying. He hasn’t had time to learn English yet. Go left.’

‘A gauche,’ said Jerry.

The driver was a boy, but he already had the guide’s boredom.

In the mirror, Jerry noticed that Keller’s burnt hand was shaking as he drew on the cigarette. He wondered if it always did. They passed through a couple of villages. It was very quiet. He thought of Lizzie and the claw marks on her chin. He longed to do something plain with her, like taking a walk over English fields. Craw said she was a suburban drag-up. It touched him that she had a fantasy about horses.

‘Westerby.’

‘Yes, sport?’

‘That thing you have with your fingers. Drumming them. Mind not doing that? Bugs me. It’s repressive somehow.’ He turned to the girl. ‘They been pounding this place for years, hun,’ he said expansively. ‘Years.’ He blew out a gust of cigarette smoke.

‘About the airline thing,’ Jerry suggested, pencil ready to write again. ‘What’s the arithmetic?’

‘Most of the companies take drywing leases out of Vientiane. That includes maintenance, pilot, depreciation but not fuel. Maybe you knew that. Best is own your own plane. That way you have the two things. You milk the siege and you get your ass out when the end comes. Watch for the kids, hun,’ he told the girl, as he drew again on his cigarette. ‘Whi1e there’s kids around there won’t be trouble. When the kid’s disappear it’s bad news. Means they’ve hidden them. Always watch for kids.’

The girl Lorraine was fiddling with her camera again. They had reached a rudimentary checkpoint. A couple of sentries peered in as they passed but the driver didn’t even slow down. They approached a fork and the driver stopped.

‘The river,’ Keller ordered. ‘Tell him to stay on the river bank.’

Jerry told him. The boy seemed surprised: seemed even about to object, then changed his mind.

‘Kids in the villages,’ Keller was saying, ‘kids at the front. No difference. Either way, kids are a weathervane. Khmer soldiers take their families with them to war as a matter of course. If the father dies, there’ll be nothing for the family anyway, so they might as well come along with the military where there’s food. Another thing, hun, another thing is, the widows must be right on hand to claim evidence of the father’s death, right? That’s a human interest thing for you, right, Westerby? If they don’t claim, the commanding officer will deny it and steal the man’s pay for himself. Be my guest,’ he said, as she wrote. ‘But don’t think anyone will print it. This war’s over. Right, Westerby?’

‘Finito,’ Jerry agreed.

She would be funny, he decided. If Lizzie were here, she would definitely see a funny side and laugh at it. Somewhere among all her imitations, he reckoned, there was a lost original, and he definitely intended to find it. The driver drew up beside an old woman and asked her something in Khmer, but she put her face in her hands and turned her head away.

‘Why’d she do that for God’s sakes?’ the girl cried angrily. ‘We didn’t want anything bad. Jesus!’

‘Shy,’ said Keller, in a flattening voice.

Behind them, the artillery barrage fired another salvo and it was like a door slamming, barring the way back. They passed a wat and entered a market square made of wooden houses. Saffron-clad monks stared at them, but the girls tending the stalls ignored them and the babies went on playing with the bantams.

‘So what was the checkpoint for?’ the girl asked, as she photographed. ‘Are we somewhere dangerous now?’

‘Getting there, hun, getting there. Now shut up.’

Ahead of them, Jerry could hear the sound of automatic fire, M16’s and AK47s mixed. A jeep raced at them out of the trees; and at the last second veered, banging and tripping over the ruts. At the same moment the sunshine went out. Till now they had accepted it as their right, a liquid, vivid light washed clean by the rainstorms. This was March and the dry season; this was Cambodia, where war, like cricket, was played in decent weather. But now black clouds collected, the trees closed round them like winter and the wooden houses pulled into the dark.

‘What do the Khmer Rouge dress like?’ the girl asked in a quieter voice. ‘Do they have uniforms?’

‘Feathers and a G-string,’ Keller roared. ‘Some are even bottomless. ‘ As he laughed, Jerry heard the taut strain in his voice, and glimpsed the trembling claw as he drew on his cigarette. ‘Hell, hun, they dress like farmers for Christ’s sake. They just have these black pyjamas.’

‘Is it always so empty?’

‘Varies,’ said Keller.

‘And Ho Chi-minh sandals,’ Jerry put in distractedly.

A pair of green water birds lifted across the track. The sound of firing was no louder.

‘Didn’t you have a daughter or something? What happened there?’ Keller said.

‘She’s fine. Great.’

‘Called what?’

‘Catherine,’ said Jerry.

‘Sounds like we’re going away from it,’ Lorraine said, disappointed. They passed an old corpse with no arms. The flies had sewed on the face-wounds in a black lava.

‘Do they always do that?’ the girl asked, curious.

‘Do what, hun?’

‘Take off the boots?’

‘Sometimes they take the boots off, sometimes they’re the wrong damn size,’ said Keller, in another queer snap of anger. ‘Some cows got horns, some cows don’t, and some cows is horses. Now shut up will you? Where you from?’

‘Santa Barbara,’ said the girl. Abruptly the trees ended. They turned a bend and were in the open again,. with the brown river right beside them. Unbidden, the driver stopped, then gently backed into the trees.

‘Where’s he going?’ the girl asked. ‘Who told him to do that?’

‘I think he’s worried about his tyres, sport,’ said Jerry, making a joke of it.

‘At thirty bucks a day?’ said Keller, also as a joke.

They had found a little battle. Ahead of them, dominating the river bend, stood a smashed village on high waste ground without a living tree near it. The ruined walls were white and the torn edges yellow. With so little vegetation the place looked like the remnants of a Foreign Legion fort and perhaps it was just that. Inside the walls brown lorries clustered, like lorries at a building site. They heard a few shots, a light rattle. It could have been huntsmen shooting at the evening flight. Tracer flashed, a trio of mortar bombs struck, the ground shook, the car vibrated, and the driver quietly unwound his window while Jerry did the same. But the girl had opened her door and was getting out, one classic leg after the other. Rummaging in a black airbag, she produced a telefoto lens, screwed it into her camera and studied the enlarged image.

‘That’s all there is?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘Shouldn’t we see the enemy as well? I don’t see anything but our guys and a lot of dirty smoke.’

‘Oh they’re out the other side there, hun,’ Keller began. ‘Can’t we see?’ There was a small silence while the two men conferred without speaking.

‘Look,’ said Keller. ‘This was just a tour, okay, hun? The detail of the thing gets very varied. Okay?’

‘I just think it would be great to see the enemy. I want confrontation, Max. I really do. I like it.’

They started walking.

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven’t done your job unless you’ve scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go; for machismo; and because in order to belong you must share. In the old days, perhaps, Jerry had gone for more select reasons. In order to know himself: the Hemingway game. In order to raise his threshold of fear. Because in battle, as in love, desire escalates. When you have been machine-gunned, single rounds seem trivial. When you’ve been shelled to pieces, the machine-gunning’s child’s play, if only because the impact of plain shot leaves your brain in place, where the clump of a shell blows it through your ears. And there is a peace: he remembered that too. At bad times in his life - money, children, women all adrift - there had been a sense of peace that came from realising that staying alive was his only responsibility. But this time - he thought this time it’s the most damn fool reason of all, and that’s because I’m looking for a drugged-out pilot who knows a man who used to have Lizzie Worthington for his mistress. They were walking slowly because the girl in her short skirt had difficulty picking her way over the slippery ruts.

‘Great chick,’ Keller murmured.

‘Made for it,’ Jerry agreed dutifully.

With embarrassment Jerry remembered how in the Congo they used to be confidants, confessing their loves and weaknesses. To steady herself on the rutted ground, the girl was swinging her arms about.

Don’t point, thought Jerry, for Christ’s sake don’t point. That’s how photographers get theirs.

‘Keep walking, hun,’ Keller said shrilly. ‘Don’t think of anything. Walk. Want to go back, Westerby?’