Little Brother Page 10

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ That was before the fight. So long ago. Vithy kept on thinking how that fight might have ended. It frightened him very much.

  ‘Have you heard anything of your brother?’

  Vithy shook his head slowly. The speaker over his head spluttered. It seemed to be laughing at him.

  ‘How long have you been looking for him now?’

  ‘For a long time, I guess. Four months, maybe.’

  Vithy looked up as his voice wheezed tiredly over the loudspeaker. He had heard himself perhaps twenty times and he moved his lips to mime the old tape recording.

  ‘Muong Mang. Muong Mang of Sambor, can you hear me? This is Muong Vithy, your brother. I am at Hospital Two in Khao I Dang, waiting for you … Please, if anyone has heard of Muong Mang of Sambor, please tell me, I am Muong Vithy at Hospital Two …’

  ‘Four months?’ Betty interrupted the loudspeaker. ‘That’s a long time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ But he did know. He just wasn’t admitting it.

  ‘Well.’ Betty scratched her knee. ‘How long will you wait for him?’

  Vithy shrugged.

  ‘I finish here in three weeks.’ Betty spoke fast and looked away, as if talking to the loudspeaker.

  Vithy stared at Betty. ‘But you said that wasn’t going to be for a long while.’

  ‘That was a long while ago, Vithy. Other doctors want to come here to help. I must make room for them.’

  Vithy hunched his shoulders and gently shook his head. He had lost Betty as surely as if the Khmer Rouge soldier had succeeded with those scissors. And this time there was nothing he could do. He was alone again.

  ‘Sorry, Vithy,’ Betty said.

  But no more than two hours later Betty stormed into Ponary’s house, grabbed Vithy by the shoulders, sat him on a bed and said: ‘What the hell, kid. Want to come home with me?’

  Vithy could not understand the woman. ‘What?’ he asked stupidly.

  ‘Home. Australia. Sydney. House full of weeds.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘If you can’t find Mang of course.’

  ‘Go to Australia? It’s a terrible long way.’

  ‘There are a lot of Kampucheans – Cambodians – in Sydney. Do you want to come? If I can get you out?’

  ‘How will Mang find me?’

  Betty didn’t say anything for a while. ‘Tell you what we’ll do. Just forget about Mang. Just for a moment. Now, without Mang, would you rather stay here in Khao I Dang or come with me?’

  Vithy was being asked to think the unthinkable. Making any big plan without Mang was as silly as paddling a boat with a spoon. Planning to live, not across the border but half a world away, was paddling a boat with a spoon in a flood. But apart from Mang there was only Betty.

  ‘Australia,’ Vithy said, and felt cold.

  After a few days Betty came to the hospital and took down all Vithy’s family history, his education, medical details and muttered odd things about the Embassy. She went to the Embassy in Bangkok with all the forms filled in as Vithy made a new tape for the loudspeaker. He heard it transmitted over the speakers after a news bulletin about Nong Samet being the centre of a border battle.

  In the evening of the next day Betty and Frank caught Vithy outside Ponary’s house within minutes of each other, as if they had been racing each other. Betty arrived first in a squeal of rubber and a cloud of dust.

  ‘You, Muong Vithy, are the luckiest boy in the world today!’ Betty leapt from the commandeered Toyota.

  It had been a long hard day and Vithy didn’t feel any luckier than yesterday or any other day. ‘What?’

  Betty squatted unsteadily before him. ‘I’ve just come back from the Embassy, and they’re not really that bad when you get them to move. So I found out some pretty wonderful things …’

  And Frank’s old Land Rover rolled to a stop behind Betty’s Toyota. He got out and waved at Betty and Vithy, but Betty did not even see him.

  ‘Now you can go to Australia – just like that!’ Betty snapped her fingers. ‘Well, almost.’

  ‘Hi, kids,’ Frank said.

  ‘And you didn’t need me to sponsor you …’

  ‘So ignore me, already,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve only found Mang.’

  MANG?

  Betty and Vithy stared at Frank for a moment. Then Vithy began to smile.

  Betty frowned. ‘Are you sure, Frank?’

  ‘I met him.’

  The smile became a grin.

  ‘Where?’ Betty seemed puzzled.

  ‘Nong Samet. 007. He heard Vithy’s message yesterday. Skinny Khmer, but big. Said he was Muong Mang from Sambor.’

  And the grin became a whoop. Vithy leapt to his feet and hugged them both. But then the grin faded from Frank’s face. ‘I guess he won’t be going to Australia after all. Sorry, Betty.’

  Betty waved him down. ‘It’s what’s right for the boy that counts. We’ll go and see this Mang tomorrow.’

  From a distance 007 did not seem to have changed at all since Vithy had last seen it, months ago. But the Café de la Bohème had been scorched and a few Khmers were patiently filling in a great hole, a crater, between the café and the hospital. On a distant rise the drab brown of the huts had been cut into by a wedge of black where a fire had raced from one hut to many of its neighbours.

  Vithy jumped from the Toyota and scanned the people around the hospital. But there was no sign of Mang. ‘What happened?’ he asked, trying to control his anxiety.

  ‘Another fight.’ Betty stepped out behind him. ‘Nasty one.’

  Vithy nodded. He could feel sympathy for these hundreds of people who could not escape from war, but he was here to finally find Mang, and that was the best thing in the world. To see him and touch him after all those months of doubt and wandering and waiting … He thought he might never let Mang out of his sight again.

  ‘Well, hello fellah.’ Frank was greeting someone on the other side of the vehicle.

  Vithy turned to look but the cabin blocked his view.

  ‘Hi, Mang,’ Frank said warmly.

  Vithy started to run around the Toyota.

  ‘You come to take me away, yes?’

  Vithy stopped.

  A tall Khmer in rags, young, thin, with a nervous voice and a light smile playing across his face.

  Not Mang.

  ‘Not yet,’ Frank was saying, his voice echoing in Vithy’s head. ‘But here’s someone to see you …’

  ‘You don’ understand. I got to go with you.’ The young man glanced at Vithy as he waved his hands at Frank. ‘I am Muong Mang from Sambor, I got to see Veethy in Khao I Dang …’ Then he looked back at Vithy. Vithy and the man stared at each other in silence until Vithy shook his head and ran blindly through the camp.

  Betty found Vithy two hours later, sitting on a hill outside the camp, facing Kampuchea.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘It was a rotten trick. He got frightened in the fighting here so he thought he would get into safe Khao I Dang by pretending to be somebody else. Never mind that we’d know in the first hour in Khao I Dang. I wanted to kick him right round the camp.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Vithy said.

  ‘You’re not angry at all, are you?’ Betty was puzzled.

  ‘What’s the good?’

  She winced. ‘Do you want to go back?’

  He shook his head. He had been looking at the distant blue trees of Cambodia, remembering Dad flying a fierce kite with Sorei giggling on his shoulder, Mum laughing and dancing the old legends with a lamp balanced on her head. And Mang, always remember Mang on a dragon of a boat, striding down the river in a cloud of flying spray with the other boats snapping at his tail. But the memory was all that remained.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,’ Betty was saying, apparently to herself. ‘But after that boy pretending he was Mang …’

  Vithy stood up and brushed his shorts. ‘Mang’s dead,’ h
e said.

  HOME

  For two days Vithy was left alone. Betty disappeared from Khao I Dang. Frank went to other border camps and Ponary, even Nurse Coldstream, watched him with worry in their eyes. He didn’t mind. He had brought his dying hope of ever finding Mang into the open, and he had killed it. Now he didn’t want to share his final grief with anyone.

  He could sit down in Khao I Dang and taste the earth that had rimmed his lips when he heard that single shot in the forest. And he could still hear the echo through the trees and the silence. That was real. The rest, the King’s encouragement, the tale of whistling in Siem Reap, even the discovery of Mang’s railway lines … they were no more than the wild dreams of a silly little boy. There was nothing left.

  Then Betty came back, and Vithy was jerked from his sorrow by an accelerating rush to leave Khao I Dang and Thailand. He was filling in and signing white forms, pink forms, yellow forms, green forms, without understanding what any of them meant. Betty took a sample of his blood, shone a torch into his eyes, pounded his chest and stabbed him with needles. Australia wasn’t worth this.

  But one day Betty said: ‘You’re off the day after tomorrow. Get ready.’

  Vithy said goodbye to Sen and Ponary and Ko – who was racing doctors and journalists and winning – and many others. He shook hands with Frank for the last time as Betty ushered him towards the waiting buses.

  ‘Sorry about that Mang stunt, son,’ Frank said. ‘It stank.’

  ‘Not your fault.’ Vithy shrugged and tried to smile.

  ‘Am I doing the right thing, Frank?’ Betty asked suddenly.

  Frank smiled awkwardly. ‘You’ll know soon enough. Good luck, Vithy.’

  Vithy turned, swallowed his old terror and joined the queue for the buses.

  The bus took him to another camp and for three days he thought Betty had changed her mind about him. Then Betty arrived with documents, more papers to sign and he was told he was free. He left the last camp with Betty in the late afternoon and went to Bangkok.

  In the one day he saw Bangkok he was astounded by the size of the city and a little frightened by the din. The temples were like Phnom Penh, but bigger. The river was about the same, but dirtier with huge freighters anchored in the middle. In the streets more cars, buses, trucks and motor bikes than in all old Cambodia coughed and blared at each other, with small boys trying to clean windscreens. And there were great buildings blocking out the sky. Vithy had seen pictures of New York and other cities but he hadn’t really believed a city could be this big. That evening Vithy and Betty took off for Australia.

  As the plane roared down the streaked concrete and slid into the air Betty squeezed Vithy’s hand. ‘Still thinking of Mang?’

  Vithy was trembling as houses became roofs, then tiny boxes. He didn’t hear her.

  ‘You know, this is not the end. He might still be alive …’

  Vithy turned to her and stared into her eyes. ‘No,’ he said slowly and deliberately. ‘No more.’

  Betty sat back in her seat in silence. She looked hunted.

  Vithy’s first five minutes of flight frightened him, but he kept quiet and in the next two hours his fear became fascination. He watched the city become paddy, bright water, jungle then a great plain of nothing else but water. He remembered an old man in Sambor who talked of spirits, phis, in the trees and the hills, and talked about the edge of the world. He didn’t believe it then, and he tried not to believe it now, but he could not stop himself from nervously looking for a mighty waterfall. But the sun set and the plane began to circle the glittering lights of Singapore. He fell asleep.

  When he woke the plane was flying again, but there were no jungles, no seas, no cities. There was nothing but a great red desert, stretching from horizon to horizon with low ranges rippling like a child’s finger painting.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked, dreading the answer.

  ‘Australia. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vithy said. He thought, no trees, nothing. How can I live here?

  But after a short while grey clouds slid under the plane, leaving it alone in the sky.

  ‘What is going to happen to me, Betty?’ Vithy asked.

  ‘I haven’t told you enough, have I? For a start you’ll be going back to school – and you’ll be meeting people.’

  ‘School?’ Suddenly Australia was not all that strange and terrible. He knew and could understand what school was all about, from before the wars. ‘Am I going to stay with you?’

  For a moment Betty seemed to hesitate, but she smiled. ‘Don’t you worry. It’s all fixed up.’

  That wasn’t enough. ‘Are you going to be my mother?’

  Betty turned to Vithy in surprise and saw the lonely fear in his eyes. She took his hand. ‘Vithy, I am anything you want me to be for as long as you want.’

  Red lights flicked on the plane asking passengers to extinguish cigarettes and fasten their seat belts. The captain began to talk about Sydney and the plane dipped into the grey clouds.

  A dirty fog for half a minute, with drops of water racing across the windows. Then the city. Lakes, estuaries, rivers of flat bronze water, buildings fenced by lush trees and bordered by water. Buildings from the mountains’ edge to the white curl of the ocean. Buildings rising in a great hump from the ground, still rising in shining parapets and a golden tower reaching for a hazy sun.

  ‘It can’t be that big,’ Vithy said quietly.

  The plane descended until the wheels squealed shortly and Vithy was in Australia.

  Vithy remembered Cambodia and his family as he passed through customs. He had lost his country and, far worse, his family. That was a sadness that would never leave him, but perhaps he could be happy here.

  ‘I am going to be a doctor,’ Vithy told Betty as they passed through customs.

  ‘Ah-huh,’ Betty said, looking around her. She seemed to be biting her lip.

  ‘I will work hard, Betty. Thank you for bringing me.’

  Betty smiled. ‘I didn’t bring you, really. I just helped. You would have got here on your own, given a little time. I tried to tell you.’

  Vithy shook his head.

  ‘Oh yes. The Immigration people bend over backwards to help people with relatives here …’

  Betty raised her head to meet the eyes of a youth standing clear of the customs barrier. She hesitated and watched Vithy.

  Vithy stopped.

  The youth before him was a stranger. He was gaunt, with lines on his face and a pale wash under the brown of his skin. He stood with a slight hunch, as if he had not yet the strength to stand up straight. An ugly scar above his ear marked the wound made by a bullet very near Nong Samet, 007, four months ago. He had been a nameless and unconscious body, very close to death, when he was taken from Nong Samet to Khao I Dang. He was no more than a number when a specialist on extended leave decided that it was just possible to save his life and took him carefully to Bangkok. He was a number scrawled on a yellow card when he was flown to a team of neuro-surgeons in Sydney for a ten hour operation. He stopped being a number when he woke after sleeping for three months and told a tired doctor his name. He was still very weak.

  A stranger. But somehow not quite …

  The young man began to cock his face for an old lop-sided grin, but Vithy suddenly saw through the lines and the weariness. He would recognise this stranger in a monkey mask. He gave a whoop and a yell and flapped his arms in the air, and leapt at the man.

  The stranger crouched, and caught Vithy, and pressed him to his shoulder.

  He said: ‘Hello, little brother.’

  AFTERWORD

  I was writing tourist books on Cambodia and Laos in 1969. Both countries had a touch of the pixies – a feeling of everything being unreal. Laos was having a civil war and I was captured there by some of the communist guerrillas (Pathet Lao), but I was laughed at and let go.

  In Cambodia, then a rich, slumbering country, I went hunting with French plantation managers in Khmer Rouge
territory and shot dead two coconuts. I travelled up the Mekong in a primitive riverboat run by a fourteen-year-old boy smoking a hand-made cigar and he became my King. I spent a week in Angkor, so my Vithy went there. I returned to Australia shortly before the tragedy began to unfold in Cambodia.

  Many years later, I was writing an adult novel, The Mask Maker, set in Laos, and returned to Cambodia to research it. That second journey in 1980 launched Little Brother.

  For a start, Little Brother is about seventy per cent true. I met Vithy – actually Vuthy – in the camp hospital at Khao I Dang, Thailand, a day after he fought the Khmer Rouge soldier, and he then told me how he had escaped from Cambodia. The background is largely my invention. I spent a great deal of time in Phnom Penh and read in newspapers what the war and the terror had done to the country since I had last been there. I went to the refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodia border. Thirty minutes after my visit to the border refugee camp of Nong Samet a battle was fought there.

  I collected a swag of stories from people and managed to write a draft of an adult novel. It was the most depressing thing I have ever done. Everything decent had gone from that place.

  The Khmer Rouge were training kids to kill kids; training kids to tell tales on their parents. I tried to understand Pol Pot. He was in power, but lived in fear of the people he controlled. He only survived because he was backed by the Chinese government. I decided I couldn’t tackle this, and started writing Adrift instead, and while I was working on the third draft, I suddenly realised that I could tell the Cambodian story through the eyes of one of those kids. Vuthy had told me his story. All I had to do was make a few alterations, and I had my story.

  Allan Baillie, Sydney, 2004

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Allan Baillie in Cambodia, 1985, playing a Cambodian flute

  Allan Baillie is one of Australia’s most important writers for children.

  On leaving school, Allan worked as a journalist and travelled extensively. Many of his books draw upon this background and give his readers invaluable insights into world politics, with a particular focus on Asia.