a little cigarette while waiting for his bowl of soup in the dark and arctic restaurant, and listens to the hum of the world’s cooling machinery, he admits that he is still curious. Communism has failed and capitalism has triumphed and John Stuart Mill’s hypothesis has been rendered otiose. But had Pol Pot known that? Stephen has come here to try to find out. He is still curious.
A fatal curiosity. He remembers invoking that phrase once while dining with his friend Liz Headleand in Bertorelli’s at the beginning of the year. Her memory of this conversation is vague and defective, and so is his, and so is mine, but it had nevertheless taken place, and it lingers on in both their recollections and in the limbo of my old Amstrad word processor like a formative shadow. They had talked of Pol Pot and Kampuchea and atrocity stories. Stephen had expressed his interest in his curiosity about a country which had tried to cut itself off from the forward march of what is called progress. It had refused all foreign aid. It had turned its back on electricity, electronics, mechanics, postal services, medicine. It had returned to People Power. Men yoked with oxen pulled the plough. Men and women with bare hands built dams and dykes as in the dawn of time. They had dosed one another with bitter leaves, and given one another transfusions of coconut juice.
A sort of original Green party, Stephen had suggested to Liz, with his dubious little smile.
‘Yes,’ Liz had said smartly, thinking she had indulged him far enough, ‘and they had slaughtered one another with their bare hands too. With sticks and spades. And what about your hero, the charming and charismatic Pol Pot? He was probably living on champagne and caviare, while the slaves toiled.’
‘Probably,’ Stephen had conceded. ‘Yes, probably. But we don’t know that, do we?’
‘I sort of think we do,’ Liz had insisted, frowning over her coffee, dunking her little Italian macaroon.
‘Anyway,’ Stephen had said with gay bravado, ‘perhaps I shall go and see.’
‘You’d better be careful,’ said Liz.
‘Why should I be careful?’ Stephen had more or less memorably said. ‘I have nothing to lose. There is nothing to keep me here.’
And, looking back, as he rolls his little cigarette, he reflects that this was probably the moment at which what had been fancy had hardened into purpose. Everything had unrolled from there. And now he sits here, nearer but not very much nearer his goal, waiting for his soup.
Be careful, Liz had said. But he has nothing to lose. Except his life, except his life, except his life.
Stephen Cox’s thoughts about human nature are deeply lonely. He is a lonely man, as you can at once perceive if you see him sitting there, his book propped up against his bottle of Singha beer, thinking visibly about the turpitude of man. Loneliness comes off him like a cloud of gnats. Yet he is a romantic figure, a mysterious and sympathetic figure, in his white suit. As he perhaps intends to be. He may be a rolling stone, but he does not look demented, dishevelled, dulled. An observer might well wonder (might well be intended to wonder) if the man in the white suit is not perhaps a person of distinction? And even as he sits there, he is approached by a young man much slung about with cameras and bags, who pauses at the corner of Stephen’s table and says, ‘Excuse me, but am I right in thinking you’re Stephen Cox, the novelist? I’m most awfully sorry to intrude, but I just thought I had to say hello, and to tell you how much I’ve liked your books.’
Stephen, being human, is delighted. Such words are balm to one outshone in the Orient by Pett Petrie and Gore Vidal. He smiles, admits that he is, he thinks, himself, invites his new friend to join him.
His new friend is blond, tall, handsome, open faced, brown, with unfashionably long hair held back by a sweat band. He wears shorts and trainers and a khaki shirt. He has a gold chain round his neck. He sits down with Stephen, and tells him that he is a photographer and that he has just got back from the border camps. He too is staying at the Troc. His name, he says, is Konstantin Vassiliou.
*
Well, that is what I call a coincidence. A whole day full of coincidences. It makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, I hadn’t heard from Stephen or of Stephen for years, and suddenly his name is everywhere. Suddenly Stephen is the buzz. The hot property. It won’t come to anything, of course, but never mind, there might be an option in it somewhere. The first thing that happened was a call at seven fourteen this morning from a chap who said he was Marlon Brando, and I said do you know what time it is, piss off, but it actually was Marlon Brando his very self, and he was interested in the rights for Stephen’s French novel. He went into this great spiel about how the bicentenary of the French Revolution was coming up and everybody would be making French Revolution films and didn’t I think Barricades would make a wonderful movie and who had the rights and where was Stephen and could I give him some contact numbers, and I said Stephen was abroad but as far as I knew the film rights were negotiable, and to get in touch with Derry & Michaelis, and then I suddenly realized what he was on about and said but you know Stephen’s novel isn’t about the French Revolution at all, it’s about the Paris Commune, and he said wasn’t that the same thing, and I said oh I suppose so, sort of. But frankly the man’s a fool. Of course it’s not the same thing. Wrong bloody anniversary. Anyway, I left him to chase it up himself. I’ll be interested to know if D. and M. claim to have had any recent dealings with Stephen.
Anyway, that early morning call stimulated me to ring Stephen’s accountants again, but I was a bit more devious this time, I said I was a Miss Price calling from Customs and Excise about an irregularity in Mr Cox’s returns, and they went away in a fluster and came back and said what was I talking about, he’d deregistered eighteen months ago. So I hung up, before they could retaliate with any tricky questions. But that was interesting, wasn’t it? Perhaps I could embark on a new career as a detective.
I don’t suppose it was exactly a coincidence that the man sitting opposite me on the tube on the way to Romley was reading The Road to the Killing Fields. After all, it was a best-seller, and a lot of people must have been reading it up and down the country, if sales and best-seller lists figures mean anything at all. (Which I’m told they don’t.) There were a lot of spin-offs from that movie. Well, that’s not quite fair, you could argue that the movie was a spin-off from some of the real-life stuff that’s begun to come out of Kampuchea recently. Art and life, life and art. I wonder if Stephen saw The Killing Fields? Maybe it hadn’t been released, when he left. Somebody rang me up the other day with an idea for a script about that Scottish fellow-traveller who got himself murdered in Phnom Penh in 1978. Malcolm Caldwell, was that his name? One of the last Westerners to see Pol Pot alive. I poured cold water on it, told him all that had been done, but in fact I don’t think it has, and the more I think about it the better it seems as an idea. Ah well, we all make mistakes. He’s probably sold it to Warner Brothers or David Puttnam by now.
This chap opposite me on the tube was an odd-looking guy. Not what you might call a reading man. Black leather, skull and crossbones on his T-shirt, earrings, punkish black hair. But his boots were the most scary. They had high heels and these weird silver metal square toes. Really kinky. I’ve never seen anything like them. Must have been custom-made. One couldn’t help thinking his interest in the Killing Fields was hardly wholesome. But then, whose is?
The tube is hell. I hate it. But how else do you get to Romley?
Why go to Romley at all, you might well ask, and the answer is that I was on an errand of mercy to see my friend Angus who’s filming The Lillo Story out there in a nice cheap warehouse. Well, mercy and business combined, to be honest, because I had a little proposition of my own to put to Angus. I’d hoped I’d get a nice lunch at the Caprice out of him, but he said no, he hadn’t time, come and have a bacon sandwich in Romley,
