Little Brother Read online

  While he was under the gently tumbling water Vithy felt he could run the hundred and fifty kilometres to the border that very night.

  *

  He woke in the house at dawn with gravel gashes throbbing on his shoulders and knees, a dull ache at the base of his spine, a weary pain in all his muscles and a hunger so acute he could bite wood. He brushed cockroaches off the sausages and managed to limit himself to eating a third of one. He did not know where or when he would find another meal. He found that one tap would give water, so he drank a lot before he began to build his bike.

  He started off well. He found a frame intact, with the front fork still attached and enough paint to keep the rust at bay. He found a paint tin with a few tools among the weeds and the snails. He found a complete set of pedals on a broken frame, but it took him two hours, a great deal of effort and a badly bruised finger to remove the pedal crank from the frame, and he lost two ball bearings when he unscrewed the cones. He decided then to collect everything he was going to need before he went on with the building of the bike.

  He quickly found two wheels of slightly different diameters and with only a few spokes missing. In two badly mangled frames he found two axles which would fit those wheels and wondered what the tourists had been doing on the bikes. He even found mudguards and screws. He found a chain so rigid with dust that he could carry it like a pole. He found a tyre and a tube that fitted the rear wheel perfectly, and several pumps, but the only other tube that could hold any air was too big for the front wheel. He selected a damaged tyre to go with the tube and reluctantly discarded the first wheel in favour of a wheel that swayed with a buckle and needed eight new spokes. He could not find a handlebar anywhere.

  Vithy ate the second third of the rice sausage in the house and relaxed, listening to the creaking of the big waterwheel as it patiently and uselessly scooped up water, lifted it high and poured it back into the canal. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine the splashing was the murmur of the Mekong outside his house.

  He suddenly remembered that there was one thing he had been able to do better than Mang: be a special friend to Sorei. She would find him under the fig tree, trailing her broken doll behind her, and ask him to fix it. Him, not Mang, because he was young enough to listen and old enough to help, while Mang was too big, too grown-up and he called her ‘kid’. So they sat in the shade of the fig tree and fixed the doll, discussed the mystery of her latest Judge Rabbit tale, laughed at elephant jokes and plotted darkly the fall of the snooty girl from Phnom Penh, who always pretended she was an important lady …

  Vithy sat up and wiped his arm across his eyes. He hurried from the house and walked about his gleaming junk yard, kicking metal shapes as he moved. He did not sleep for more than an hour.

  He was awakened very early next morning by a man and a woman shouting at each other as they walked down the street. Something about coming home to nothing. Vithy lay motionless on the floor until they had passed his house, then sat up, wide-eyed.

  As the youth had said, nobody owns anything any more – until the original owner comes back. If the owner of this house returned while he was still building the bike, what could he do? It wasn’t his, he didn’t have anything to buy the parts he was using. He would lose the bike and all the work he was doing would be wasted.

  And what was to stop the youth from coming back to claim the bike as his own?

  Vithy hurried to the pile of scrap that would be his bike and started work silently in the dark. He fished the rusty chain from a tin of dirty oil and found that he could move it almost easily now. He hung the chain over the tin to drip and began to assemble the rear wheel. By the time the sun had pushed its rim over the rooftop the rear wheel was ticking smoothly in its fork. Vithy sprawled in the shade of a tall clump of bamboo and finished his first rice sausage before he looked for enough spokes to straighten the front wheel.

  He wondered where Mang was now, and whether he’d seen Angkor on his way through Siem Reap. After all, it had been Dad’s dream city, Mum’s dancing stage and it was so close. But maybe not. Why stop and get the memories back? He’d have shot straight for the border, and he’d be waiting there now. He’d better be.

  Vithy returned to his bike and began to gather spokes. He broke two, inserted four in the wheel and tuned the rim almost like a piano. He snapped another spoke, kicked the wheel and worked for forty-five minutes to replace it. The wheel still wobbled but it did not touch the fork and that would have to do.

  There was a small puncture in the tube for the front wheel, but he found a hard, topless tube of rubber glue. There was a small pocket of glue that had not yet set. He cut a patch of rubber from one hanging tube, repaired the puncture and waited for the glue to set. He looked again for a set of handlebars, but all he could find was half a handlebar and another folded in upon itself. He tried to straighten the folded handlebar, realised that it would break and hurled it away.

  He walked across to the canal, toppled into the water and drank for a long time. He thought how good it would be just to float away, past the broken wheels and into the inland sea of the Tonle Sap. But he had no time.

  He returned to his inner tube and pumped it up enough to listen for escaping air. The tube was silent so he deflated it, fingered it into place between the rim and the tyre and used two flat spanners as levers to fit the tyre. He pumped up the tyre, fitted the front wheel and turned the bike the right way up. For a few minutes he sat on the saddle and felt the bike move under him. If only he had handlebars …

  And then he stared at the clump of bamboo over his head. A forest of handlebars. He went to the bamboo with the blunt and broken blade he had used to cut out the rubber patch, selected a pole taller than the house and began to cut.

  The sun was setting now, and Vithy ached all over his body. He just wanted to eat some of the remaining rice and sleep. But he was so close now and that boy could come to claim the bike in the morning. Vithy worked on in the fading light for two more hours. Finally he stood back with his dead arms hanging before him like the arms of a big monkey, and he could not straighten his back.

  But the bike was ready. A chipped yellow frame, half a silver front mudguard, no rear mudguard, a black front wheel, a rear wheel that was red with rust, no brakes at all and a sawn-off piece of bamboo rammed into the eye of the steering column and held there by a piece of grey rag and three pieces of wood hammered into place. Not a beautiful bicycle at all, but it was his.

  Vithy went into the house for the last time, and slung the rice sausages across his shoulders. He came outside, picked his shirt from a rusty pole and sat on the bike while he buttoned it. He listened to the slow creaking and splashing of the big wheel then pushed unsteadily on the pedals.

  And the ugly collection of bolts, rubber and old metal changed. Within ten metres the bike had steadied on the road and a sudden breeze was whispering behind Vithy’s ears. The tyres hissed softly on the bitumen, the spokes whirred through the heavy air and the chain slid silkily beside Vithy’s leg.

  Vithy sat proudly on his creation and felt that it could fly.

  DREAM CITY

  Vithy would have ridden smoothly out of Siem Reap and slept by the road to the border but for the sign. He skirted a few soldiers round a low fire, turned for the road east, and saw the old discoloured tourist sign by the canal pointing towards Angkor. He stopped.

  He did not want to see the old ruins. Dad had talked about them off and on for as long as he could remember and Vithy could picture the huge temples of Angkor Wat and the Bayon, the beautiful stone Apsara girls and the walls of elephants without seeing them. Angkor would be just like the house in the forest, with sad memories at every step. No, he didn’t want to see Angkor.

  But Dad and Mum had always promised to take the whole family to the place where they had met. They had hung gold and black rubbings from the walls in every room of the house and they talked as if they had built the ancient city themselves. Vithy was so close, they would not have liked him
to miss the city and he was now leaving Cambodia, perhaps for ever. He would have to go. Vithy rode into the dark for about ten minutes, reached an open space with a moat around a dark building and went to sleep under a tree.

  He was snapped awake by water exploding on his face. He sat up in confusion and fingered water from his eyes as heavy rain swept over him. After two seconds of the slanting, stinging rain he was as wet as if he had fallen in the canal. He shrugged, opened his mouth, sat in the mud and tried to remember where he was. The rain eased a little, a grey curtain lifting from the trees, and there was some great walled city swimming in the jungle, as if it would disappear in the next wave of rain. Just like that.

  Vithy stood up in the mud and peered across a moat that was broad enough to be a small lake. A causeway of worn stone slabs crossed the moat and passed a long mottled wall to reach a grim city of massive stairways, gateways as tall as trees, galleries of so many columns they looked like a picket fence, and towers like great lotus buds scraping the low cloud. But it wasn’t a city, just one building of a city that had been a ruin for more than five hundred years.

  Vithy mounted his bike and rode slowly across the causeway to Angkor Wat. Until this moment he had felt that Angkor was a fairy tale, a myth like the snake-god that had changed into a prince. Oh, Angkor Wat was on the flag of Cambodia in the good times, you could see photos of the ancient city every day and there was no such thing as a book on Cambodia without Angkor, but it was all so unreal.

  And Dad hadn’t helped. A hundred years ago, Dad said, a French explorer pushed through a dense jungle and found a great city that everyone had forgotten about. A city built a thousand years ago with towers of gold, a vast treasury filled with tributes from Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Burma. A city of great walls, canals, reservoirs, and buildings with towers made of the mighty faces of kings. And the kings rode to battle on elephants with a thousand soldiers around them … Who could believe such a city existed?

  Vithy stopped before a flat stone area in front of the building, and realised with a low thrill that this must be where Mum had danced. He could even see the battling elephants on the wall she had talked about. She would glide out of the shadows, glittering in her green and gold costume, and tell ancient tales with her hands and her eyebrows. The other girls would follow her and they all would be the legendary dancing girls of Angkor, the Apsara. The spotlights would play over the high towers, the elephants on the wall, the long row of columns, and the tourists would applaud. Among the tourists would be Dad. Almost every time Mum danced, he said.

  Vithy left his bike long enough to see two stone Apsara prancing at each other on a wall, but he felt that anything could happen to the bike while he was away from it. He returned to the bike and rode back across the causeway and deeper into the city of Angkor. He passed through a mighty elephant gate guarded by stone giants pulling on a naga, a seven-headed serpent like the monsters on the hill at Phnom Penh.

  After the French explorer found the ruined city of Angkor, archaeologists cut back the jungle and carefully began to rebuild the city. Khmers carried immense carved stones clear of a ruin, archaeologists worked out where they had been before they fell and the Khmers lifted them back. And Dad was there, making chalk marks on the stones, helping out until the Phnom Penh university opened and taught him how to be a doctor.

  Vithy stopped before a tumbled mountain of rocks, blinked, and was staring at tower upon tower of four-faced stone heads. The heads were bigger than Vithy’s entire body and some of them made him look like a gnat. This was the Bayon, and Dad and Mum would creep into its halls at night to make rubbings from the carvings on the walls for the house they were going to have.

  And just a few metres beyond the Bayon was Dad’s workplace. He had spoken of a parade of stone elephants being built from the rubble of centuries and this was it. Mum would come in the late morning and sit on the Elephant Terrace to watch Dad and ten other Khmers lifting a block to complete a trumpeting elephant on the wall. Then Dad and Mum would sit on the roots of a banyan tree and eat a rice sausage and drink burnt sugar water. It must have been a very good place with laughter and people everywhere recreating a city as grand as Rome …

  Vithy leaned forward on his bike and smiled as he imagined the bustle around Dad and Mum just a few years ago, and the thunder of a thousand years before as the elephants of the Khmers cleared the jungle for Angkor. But Vithy started to listen and the smile slowly withered on his face.

  Angkor now was as quiet and desolate as Phnom Penh had been when he walked into it; as haunted and as dead.

  He turned his bike from the Elephant Terrace and rode out of the city.

  THIEF!

  The road from Siem Reap was deserted at first. Vithy could see people working in paddies a long way from the road and he could not tell if there were soldiers with the people. There was nobody close to the road. He got used to it, but he did not like it at all. After an hour he saw something on the road, so far ahead it was no more than a speck floating above the road. The speck grew to a family, or two families, as he approached and everyone was tired. A thin man stopped Vithy by putting his hands on the handlebars.

  ‘You come from Siem Reap?’ the man said.

  Vithy nodded. He was nervous.

  ‘Are they still fighting?’

  Vithy blinked.

  ‘The soldiers,’ a woman carrying a baby was almost shouting in his ear, ‘are they still there?’

  The man turned on the woman. ‘You shut up.’

  ‘Oh, yes, they are.’ Vithy saw the woman’s face fall. ‘But they’re not fighting any more.’

  ‘Ah. Then the Khmer Rouge …?’

  ‘They’re gone.’

  The man let go Vithy’s bike. ‘These soldiers. Did they bother you?’

  ‘No.’

  The man gnawed his lip as he turned to the others. ‘It’s still soldiers. It might be trouble.’

  ‘We have to find out, ei?’ said the woman and marched past Vithy’s bike. The others followed and the man shrugged and went after them.

  Vithy rode into rolling hills and past a few other people walking towards Siem Reap. They all had that tired, hunted look about them and they all asked the same questions. Around midday he rode into a small deserted village, where a house was on fire.

  He dismounted in the middle of the main street and walked slowly towards the fire. The house had been burning for a long while now; it had staggered forward and collapsed in a black pile of broken wreckage, filling the street with dark stinging smoke and spitting at the drizzle. Vithy called out softly a few times, then he smelt meat cooking. He followed his nose, almost running beside his bike, until he reached a slab of bullock meat being barbecued over a low fire, with nobody in sight.

  ‘Hello?’ Vithy stood three metres from the most delicious meal he had ever seen or smelt and called for its owner. Nobody answered and after three attempts he dropped his bike in the mud and tore at the meat, burning his fingers. The meat was very tough but it tasted so rich and heavy that Vithy just stood before the barbecue with his eyes closed, swaying.

  Then he started thinking.

  Who would kill a bullock, a village’s tractor and truck, just for a few meals? Why did they leave part of it cooking? Were they being chased? Who was chasing them? Would they come back? When? Who had burned down the house? Why? Who …?

  Vithy tore off another double handful of meat, shoved it into the banana leaf sausage with his last few grains of rice and rode from the village very fast. After that village he did not want to be seen by anyone. He spent the afternoon hiding in a quarry and rode only at night. He heaved his bike up the endless hills slowly, carefully and always listening for the sound of people. Any people at all.

  But toward the end of Vithy’s second night of riding he strained up his last tortuous mountain. Then he stopped pedalling and sped down a chain of slopes and humps, skidding round tight bends with black drops at his front wheel, the wind plucking at his shirt and streaming it behin
d him. Once he shouted in fright as he almost hit a log on the road, but the gnawing fear of the deserted village was behind him now. He was going too fast even for the Khmer Rouge …

  So he stayed on the road as the sky began to lighten and stopped in a silent town with a signpost. He had reached Sisophon. To his left was Battambang and another way back to Phnom Penh. But to his right was the Thai town of Aranyaprathet. The border was less than forty-one kilometres away.

  Vithy looked at the rim of the rising sun. Ride on a little bit, he told himself, sleep the day and tomorrow you reach the border.

  He rode through Sisophon humming, and out to the flat derelict paddy country with a rusty railway running by the road. He could see some blue hills far ahead and wondered if they were really Thailand.

  He looked again at the disused railway track and with a sudden prickling behind his ears realised what he was looking at. The railway had once carried great trains from Phnom Penh to Bangkok until the wars had stopped them and pitted the tracks with rust. But they were still railway tracks, railway lines. Follow these lines, the only railway to cross the Cambodian border, and Mang would be waiting.

  Vithy shouted in triumph and sped his bike down the road to the blue hills of Thailand. He would keep on riding today, reach the border tonight, find Mang tonight. Do everything today. It’s possible. Anything’s possible.

  Suddenly a dark shape rose from the grass beside the road and rushed to Vithy’s bike. Vithy gasped in surprise, turned the bike away and jumped on a pedal, but the bike was seized and shaken in anger.

  Vithy was staring at a gaunt woman with hard, glittering eyes and a knife in her hand.

  ‘Get off!” The woman thrust the knife a thumbnail’s width from his throat. ‘Get off. Get off!’

  Vithy jerked his hands from the bamboo handlebars as he recoiled from the knife and the woman’s eyes.