were bomb cases. The Hmong were using bomb cases to construct their barns: there was obviously so much unexploded ordnance around here, so many old bombs and shells and grenades providing so much metal, the swidden-farming Hmong were scavenging the stuff for buildings.
And now Jake looked closer he could see American hardware everywhere: rusty shell-cases used as flower pots. Metres of corrugated tank tracks utilized for fences. Huge bombs sliced in half and employed as water troughs for oxen.
‘Why don’t you tell me? Why are you taking this risk?’
It was Chemda, at last. She had spoken. Her brown eyes secured his gaze; her expression was demure, clever, and opaque.
‘’Cause I want the story,’ he said. ‘I want to get a decent story for once in my life.’
‘You want it that badly?’
‘That badly.’
‘And that’s it? Just that?’
Jake paused. Obviously Chemda sensed there was more: and she was right. But he couldn’t tell the truth. Could he?
Two little Hmong boys ran uncaringly in front of the car chasing a rooster – the car slowed just enough not to kill them, then speeded again. He thought of his sister, killed by a car. The guilt was a burn on his brain, an ugly scar, never properly healed. He thought of his mother, and his sister, and their deaths: and the absence of femininity in his life.
Living his life was like living in a jail, like being in the army. Everything was crudely masculine. It was all beers and jokes and danger and ambition and cynical laughter with Tyrone. Maybe he needed some real femininity in his life. Maybe he already craved the elegant, clever, refined, mesmeric femininity of this Khmer girl, to fill the hole in his life, the hole like a bomb crater left by a war.
He didn’t know what he wanted.
They were headed deeper into the rough. The broken shallow hills where the lethal golden ‘bombies’ slept, un exploded, beneath the pine trees: like fallen Christmas baubles of death.
‘All my life,’ Jake said, at last, ‘I’ve wanted danger and risk. The adventure. And yes, the story.’
She eyed him.
‘But why? What drives that?’
Her gaze was shrewd, even knowing. Jake now felt an enormous urge to confess: just get it out, cough it, purge the pain. Puke up the poison like when he was a teenager, drinking too much, drinking the pain away, with the room spinning: best to go and throw up.
‘My sister died when she was five. Run over.’
‘God. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say that. Everyone says that, it’s bollocks.’
‘OK. OK. And?’
‘My mum was more broken than any of us. She was Irish, Irish catholic. Devout. Before it happened. You know. Then Rebecca was killed and she just fell apart. Mum lost her faith. Stopped going to church. Then she stopped going anywhere. She . . .’ He found it hard to say; he said it. ‘She changed. When I was about nine years old, she abandoned us, me and my brother, and my dad. Overnight. She never even said goodbye. She just walked out one night.’
‘Jake. Ah. God. That’s awful.’
‘She died of cancer ten years later. We were only informed when the police came to tell us. They took us to the hospital. We never knew she was living alone, in a different city.’
Chemda’s face was framed by the placid green hills beyond, cratered by the war. Like Jake. Cratered by a war.
‘So that’s what drove me out. In the end. I fled the UK. Just wanted to go anywhere else. Take risks. I didn’t care. Did lots of drugs, nearly killed myself.’
‘So it was nihilistic behaviour?’
‘I suppose, yes. Drink and coke and drunken rock climbing and bad bad places. And, eventually, photography. I wanted to do a job that entailed risk, you know? When I was in danger I didn’t feel so sad, I just felt scared. And I had a job, an excuse, a purpose. It wasn’t just drugs. So I went to Africa, south Russia, looking for action, seeking the work.’
‘But you didn’t get the story?’
‘Not anything amazing. There are a lot of guys – and girls – out there doing what I do. Lunatic photographers. Most of them are better than me. At least I can write a bit so I can work on my own if I need to – but these guys are better photographers than me and –’ He looked at her, he looked beyond her, at a flat blue lake surrounded by bushes with blue flowers and teak houses pillared by bombs. ‘And some of these guys are even more fucked than me. They will do anything. They don’t care. Really. They are broken. Damaged. Flawed. Junkies of one sort or another. Sometimes just basic junkies, heroin addicts. At least I managed to stop the drugs. I did a deal with Fate. I said just let me keep the booze, something to kill the guilt and grief – I’ll quit everything else. So that’s how I have survived my family. Now I stay cheerful. Sort of. When I’m not being threatened by cops.’
There. It was done. He’d said it. He had confessed. He felt a kind of lightness, his spirit unburdened; like he was on a better and smaller world, where the gravity was less punishing.
‘And you?’ he said. ‘Chemda? Why are you taking this risk?’
She was quiet again. Pensive. He didn’t know whether to insist, so he stared ahead at the track, at the widening landscape.
All around them stretched the Plain: in the bright harsh sun, the scenery had an astringent beauty; flat whispering lakes, groves of silent bamboo, docile parades of brown cattle pursued by bored-looking boys with willow sticks; and in the distance, modest green hills.
Even from ten kilometres away Jake could see the hills were marked by the smallpox of bomb craters; regular in dentations of shaded circles. This region really had been bombed to fuck, as Tyrone put it, and now it was like a landscape that had survived death, a land in traction, floating on its memories of pain – but alive. Even the landscape was a survivor.
Chemda inhaled, and said: ‘As you know my grandmother was killed by the Khmer Rouge, probably somewhere . . . around here, in the Plain of Jars. Somehow she was killed. Maybe UXO.’ Chemda hesitated, and then added: ‘But I don’t know, just don’t know. And that, Jake, is the real cancer in Cambodia’s past. Not Knowing. Ah. I just know she is not here, no one is here, they all disappeared, got swallowed up. Dissolved. Maybe she wasn’t even blown up . . . maybe she just did her job and then they got back to Phnom Penh and Angkar, the Organization, the KR, they took her to Cheung Ek and smashed the back of her head with an iron bar. Because that’s how they killed, Jake, they didn’t even waste bullets – they just crushed heads with car axles and cudgels . . . two million heads. Babies or children they smashed to death against trees. Smashing babies against trees.’
Her voice was dry, faltering; for the first time it was breaking: her demure composure was gone. She shut her brown eyes and opened them and shook her head and she was quiet, and then she said: ‘How can you do that? How could anyone do that? They weren’t even doing it to the enemy? They were killing their own people. Smashing their own babies. So I want to know what happened to my grandmother and, ah, ah, all the rest of my family.
