And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism – just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.
But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.
A young suntanned barefoot ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt, and clicked his camera, once again.
The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behaviour. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.
Every cool and river-misty morning dozens of minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tyre inner-tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the riverflow, and then these western teens and twentysomethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beershacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.
By the time the innertubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.
Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously third world experience – when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twentysomething who came here. Laos was remote but not that remote: thousands had this ‘unique experience’ every week of every month.
But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed-up he’d have jumped in a tyre himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Han Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher Lager and crystal meth.
But he wasn’t a kid any more. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough faffing around; and anyway, these days, when he took drugs, especially something mindwarping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms – it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.
The light was nearly all gone.
The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hilltribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.
Ty was there. Tyrone J Gallagher. The American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.
‘Alright Jake?’ Ty smiled. ‘Got all your shots?’
‘Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Ty. ‘Sunset over the karst?’
Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.
Tyrone was leaning forward.
‘Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.’
‘Yes?’
‘Chemda is here.’
A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers – tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.
The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.
It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.
His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.
‘Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?’
‘Well it’s Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.’
Jake said nothing; Ty said:
‘So you remember her. Cute, right?’
Jake shrugged.
‘Well, I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Yeah . . . rrrright.’
‘No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.’
They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:
‘She’s at the hospital.’
The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.
‘She’s OK?’
‘Yeah yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s with some Cambodian professors.’
‘Here in Laos?’ Jake was mystified. ‘I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.’
‘She was, sure.’ Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.
Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.
‘Why
