Little Brother Page 9

  Until he saw ‘Thank you, Muong Vithy’ under a crinkled message. He removed the message, found another place for it and reread his own notice. Then he realised that all his own notices were on noticeboards like this and they were all probably covered like this one. They would probably never be read.

  Vithy slouched to the door and stared at the long chain of parked buses without seeing them. Two loudspeakers shouted at each other. Mang must have reached the border now, but there was nothing he could do to reach him …

  Vithy slowly began to see the people near the buses.

  Beside the buses there was a far longer queue of quiet people with bundles at their feet or on their shoulders. They all looked tense and unhappy, almost frightened. A few soldiers, carrying guns on their shoulders, talked in small groups. It was as if the people were being forced to take this bus ride.

  One soldier noticed that Vithy was staring at him and raised his arm to wave.

  Vithy screamed and began to run.

  NIGHT OF THE SOLDIERS

  Betty saw Vithy running a long way off. With his head down and his feet dancing desperately to stay under his careering body, he didn’t know where he was going. Betty jumped from the Toyota and crouched, spread her hands, and caught him like a flung medicine ball.

  He squirmed in her arms, shouted and kicked at her.

  ‘Hey, hey.’ She pulled him to her, pressing him to her body, lifting him from the ground. ‘It’s me, it’s me …’

  Vithy stopped kicking, but he would not open his eyes. ‘The bus,’ he kept saying. ‘The bus, the bus …’

  ‘The buses at the front gate?’ Betty was puzzled. ‘They don’t do any harm.’

  Vithy jerked his head from side to side.

  Betty put Vithy on the ground and bent forward so her head was very close to his. ‘Is it the people? They are just going to a transit camp nearer Bangkok. They want to go. They are just nervous. They are going to countries all over the world. To France, America, Britain, Australia … What’s wrong?’

  But Vithy just kept shaking his head.

  Betty straightened and looked in the direction of the front gate as if something strange and terrible was about to thunder down the road. She bobbed her head at Frank, who slowly drove away. Then she turned back to Vithy.

  ‘Bus, Vithy? Just one bus that frightens you? Not a lot of buses?’

  Vithy lifted his eyes to Betty. He looked at her for a long time, then nodded.

  ‘I think we’d better talk now,’ Betty said.

  The war in Cambodia hadn’t really troubled the people at Sambor. One week there were Government soldiers, the next week there were Khmer Rouge and the fighting was somewhere downriver. But then the war came to an end.

  ‘One night the soldiers came,’ said Vithy simply.

  ‘And took your father,’ murmured Betty.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In a bus filled with teachers, doctors, engineers and monks.’

  Vithy stared at Betty.

  ‘We have heard it before. Many times. You are not alone.’

  Vithy looked away. That night was his, and his alone. That night even Mang was somewhere else.

  A motor cycle had roared out of the shadows, throwing strange shapes across the kitchen as its headlight swayed in the window and grew. And stopped.

  Dad had turned off the radio and was on his feet before the kicking at the door had started. He spoke to a soldier in a peaked cap outside the door, softly so the soldier had to stop shouting and nobody in the house could hear what he was saying. Then he turned back to the family and smiled, but his face was like a dead fish. He said, ‘They want me to help them with a little job. For a while. Be good. Be careful…’

  He touched Mum lightly on the cheek with his finger and walked away, towards a bus parked in the street, filled with silent watching faces.

  And then he was gone.

  Betty sighed and pressed her fingers over her eyelids. ‘That’s not the end, is it?’

  ‘They took Mang away.’

  ‘I thought you saw Mang only a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Yes. He came back.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mang returned and tried to find Dad. He couldn’t find him and the soldiers came again. They took our house and everything and marched maybe a hundred of us out of Sambor. We walked for a week. Sorei rode on Mang’s back for most of the time. Then we stopped by an old ferry and some of us went across the Mekong and the rest just stayed where they were. Sorei, Mum and me, we went on the ferry but they kept Mang on the river bank. We could see him most of the way across the Mekong.

  ‘We walked a few more days and stopped where a lot of people were chopping down trees to make a very big paddy. Mum and Sorei were taken to some huts and the men and the kids built huts for ourselves in another place. We didn’t get much food. We got so tired one kid fell off the roof of one of the huts because he fell asleep on the thatch. We would have laughed but we weren’t allowed to.

  ‘I saw Mum a few times when we were all working in the Big Paddy. Sorei was working with Mum and she looked all right. A bit tired and dirty and sad, but she was all right. But Mum looked terrible. I got near Sorei and she said Mum had been sharing rice with her. Then Sorei was out on her own and I never saw Mum again. They took Sorei away two weeks later. Someone said a soldier asked her if she had learned to read and she said yes and she could do sums too …’

  Betty was crumbling a clod of earth in her hands. ‘You –’ She coughed to clear her throat. ‘You didn’t see Sorei again?’

  ‘’Course not. She was dead. Stupid girl.’ Vithy was now completely calm, as if he was talking about a boring movie he had seen last week, except that his shoulders and arms were shivering slightly.

  ‘Okay.’ Betty steamrolled her words, keeping them flat and expressionless to match Vithy. ‘Just one more thing. How did Mang find you and lose you again?’

  Some of the strain left Vithy’s face. It was better now. ‘One day he just walked into the paddy with a few people and two soldiers. He just nodded at me in the beginning and he didn’t speak to me at all for three days. Later he said he was just being careful, that’s all. He said that was what you have to be all the time, careful and dumb. When I told him about Mum and Sorei he kept saying we had to go somewhere.

  ‘Then the new war started in the mountains and trucks kept coming to our Big Paddy for rice. But there hadn’t been enough rain for the Big Paddy and there wasn’t enough rice for the trucks and us. The war came closer and sometimes we could hear the shells and soldiers started to take people into the forest and come back by themselves.

  ‘One day the soldiers took us into the forest. But the soldiers were afraid of some shelling near us and we stopped in a small clearing. Suddenly Mang shouted to all the people, ‘Run!’, and we ran. We stayed together for a long distance with the soldiers chasing us but I got a sore foot and Mang led them away from me. He said he would come here.’

  Betty squeezed Vithy’s shoulder for a moment, then let her hand drop. ‘So you came here. Right across Kampuchea, through jungles, bandits and a war, on the chance that you can find him.’

  ‘He is all I have.’

  THE KILLER

  A few days later Vithy was shouting at Sen over the din of a loudspeaker on a pole when he stopped, listened and thought. He searched for Betty and found her watching some kids playing on the gravel slide. She looked deeply unhappy.

  ‘Something is wrong?’ he said, a little nervously.

  Betty put a smile on her face, but it looked wrong. ‘Oh, just thinking about your family and you, Vithy. And, I guess, me.’

  ‘You said it does no good to think about that now.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking of the days of the soldiers and the Big Paddy. I said that now you’ve brought that out and looked at it you should throw it away. There is nothing else you can do with it. You don’t forget but you don’t have to remember all the time either. Okay, I said that, but you don’t throw away good t
imes too.’

  Vithy kicked at a pebble.

  ‘I was thinking about your house at Sambor, with Mang and you revving old motorbikes, your mum and Sorei polishing the pots and your father chasing the ducks. It must have been wonderful.’

  Don’t think about Big Paddy but remember Sambor. Vithy stood before Betty with a frown and looked far beyond her. ‘It was noisy,’ he admitted.

  ‘I’ll bet. And there’s you telling tales to little Sorei under the fig tree …’

  And Vithy smiled. ‘She knew most of the stories. Sometimes she read her stories to me.’

  ‘It sounds very, very good. I’ll tell you something, Vithy. I’ve got a little house in the suburbs. It’s got a vegetable garden which hasn’t been touched for six months, no pets and definitely no ducks. The neighbours would scream blue murder. I just rattle round the house like a pea in a thimble. I envy you your house in Sambor.’

  ‘You have no family?’

  ‘You mean husband and kids? No, too much trouble. But I am not looking forward to going back to that empty house.’

  Vithy caught his breath. ‘Are you leaving?’

  Betty leaned forward and rumbled Vithy’s hair. ‘Not for a while, kid. I guess we’ve both got the same trouble. Just call us Lonely.’ She gave his head a playful cuff. ‘Anyway, what did you want?’

  Vithy stood in the dust for half a minute until he was able to remember why he had wanted Betty this afternoon. ‘Oh, yes. Loudspeakers. Are they in all the border camps?’

  ‘Well, most of them. Why? Oh, Mang.’

  ‘Can I send a message?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Vithy heard his message over the loudspeakers the following day. Everyone in the hospital and Ponary’s house heard it and talked about it for hours afterwards. Vithy knew his name and Mang’s name were being broadcast all over the border all that week and he just had to listen for the answer.

  It never came.

  For weeks Vithy’s message was sent regularly through the loudspeakers in the camps, but it was like listening down a deep well to the echoes of your voice. Vithy’s world was only Ponary’s house and the friendly little hospital and he was beginning to believe that was all it had ever been or would be.

  But one day the hospital changed.

  The youth was carried into the hospital late in the afternoon. He was unconscious, but two patients near his mat shuffled away and refused to be moved back. He had been shot in the shoulder.

  Vithy stood at the foot of the youth’s mat, looking at a face with black fat lips, heavy bones and wide-set eyes framed by a shock of tangled hair, and realised with a slight shock that the youth was not that much older than he was.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t he?’ Betty pressed Vithy on the shoulder. ‘He comes from Nong Samet.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘No one knows. He wouldn’t speak to us at all at the camp.’

  ‘Is he a soldier?’

  Betty nodded. ‘I think he might be a bad one. He was shot by his friends.’

  That did not make sense. ‘Friends?’

  Betty put her hand on Vithy’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Vithy, but we have to look after him. He’s Khmer Rouge.’

  Vithy couldn’t eat that night. When he slept he was being chased through the forest by a soldier with a peaked cap on a motor cycle. Ahead of him Dad and Mang were watching him from a parked bus, but he could not touch them. The bus was drifting sideways, always just beyond his reach …

  When he woke up Vithy did not want to go back to the hospital. He wanted to stay with Sen and build houses or just play ball. He felt a little sick in his stomach, and he knew that if he went to the hospital today it would be one of the worst days of his life.

  But he went because Betty was expecting him, and that was that.

  The Khmer Rouge soldier was awake when Vithy entered the hospital, and he stared about him with carefully constructed contempt. Nurse Coldstream tried to help him with his morning rice but he shoved her back, grabbed the bowl and ate from it as if it were a mug.

  ‘You don’t do that to me, boy!’ Nurse Coldstream shouted at the youth, but he looked up at her with ice in his eyes. Nurse Coldstream backed away, found something to do a long way away and stayed away.

  ‘Come on, Vithy,’ Betty said. ‘Before we have real trouble.’

  Vithy followed the doctor to the youth’s mat and squatted a little further away from him than with any other patient. The youth looked at Vithy with half-closed eyes and Vithy remembered the shooting the night before he had reached the border, the desperate rush of people through the undergrowth and the screaming. Was this soldier there that night? He looked as though he would kill people as easily as snapping a twig.

  ‘Ask him what his name is,’ Betty said.

  Vithy moistened his lips. ‘I am Vithy. This is Dr Harris. What is your name?’

  The youth’s eyes flitted to Dr Harris and back again. He said nothing.

  ‘We are trying to help you. What is your name?’ Vithy rubbed his hands as he spoke. They had become moist.

  The youth watched Vithy as if he was about to fall asleep. He began to smile at some private joke.

  Betty clicked her tongue. ‘Tell the boy he’s got a bullet through his shoulder and if we don’t help him his arm will drop off.’

  Vithy translated. The youth’s face did not change but he was looking at Betty now and the smile seemed to be frozen.

  ‘What’s the name?’

  The youth opened his mouth, but closed it again with enough force for Vithy to hear the teeth click.

  Betty sighed. ‘I’m not going to play soldiers with you, boy. I want to change your bandage and have a look at that wound. If you co-operate, fine. If you don’t, you get dropped at the border today. Now, do I get a look at that arm? Just nod your stupid head.’

  Vithy took some of the anger out of Betty’s words in the translation. But the youth stared at him with a cold anger, blaming him, not Betty, for the words he was saying.

  Vithy imagined a peaked cap on the youth’s hard face, and it fitted. He wanted to get up from the mat and run into the warm sun outside.

  ‘Well?’ said Betty. Vithy did not translate.

  The youth very slowly nodded his head.

  Betty motioned the youth to rise and helped him to his feet. She led him to a bench in an open space, sat him down and approached him with a pair of scissors. He widened his eyes before the long, gleaming blades, and tensed with a shudder as she began to snip carefully at his bandage.

  ‘Now this will hurt a little …’ Betty said softly. But Vithy forgot he was Betty’s mouth. Her words were not translated.

  Betty put the scissors behind her and gently tugged at the discoloured dressing under the youth’s bandage.

  The youth opened his eyes and shouted in anger.

  Vithy remembered what he had been supposed to do and took a quick step forward.

  Betty stopped tugging at the dressing but she was still looking at the wound, not at the face of the youth. ‘It’s all right …’ she said.

  But it was all too late. With the stinging pain in his shoulder and the big woman still pulling at the bandage, the youth began to fight to escape. He twisted away from Betty, chopped at her hand and grasped her wrist.

  ‘Hey!’ she gasped.

  He twisted her arm behind her back. She cried out in pain as he forced her to bend forward.

  Vithy opened his mouth and he was back in the forest, running with Mang. And falling, with soldiers thrashing through the undergrowth around him.

  Betty had sunk to one knee, with her hand pushed so far up her back she could touch her neck. She was trying to say something but she could do nothing but gasp and wheeze. She looked at Vithy and he felt utterly helpless.

  The youth leant sideways and picked up the scissors, closing the long blades and gripping them like a knife.

  The youth was suddenly wearing the peaked cap and was pushing Dad towards the bus …

&nbs
p; Someone was shouting, shouting the length of the hospital, so loudly the building echoed. Betty and the youth and the bench swayed toward Vithy, gliding under him and the youth was looking up at him in alarm.

  Vithy had the scissors in his hand and he twisted them from the youth’s grip. The youth bucked desperately under Vithy, releasing Betty and reaching for his face. They rolled about the hospital floor, colliding with recoiling patients, the bench, a tray of medicines and a hard wooden pillar.

  The noise in the hospital became a spreading storm. For an instant Vithy was on top of the youth and in control, then the youth punched him in the face with his good arm. Vithy reeled back, the youth had him down on the floor and by the throat. Vithy tossed, turned and punched wildly up at the youth. The youth let go and sagged back with his hand on his shoulder. Vithy pushed him down for the last time, straddled him, pinning both arms to the ground. He was surprised to see that he still held the scissors.

  For a moment Muong Vithy balanced the scissors in his hand, and that youth had become all the soldiers who had destroyed his life and his family. The youth was the officer with the bus, the man who asked Sorei if she could read, the men who had shot at Mang in the forest. And he held a weapon in his hand …

  But the youth was looking up at him.

  He wasn’t a soldier any more. He was just a hurt boy, so frightened there were tears in his eyes.

  Vithy slowly lowered the scissors and felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s okay now,’ Betty said. ‘It’s all over.’

  THE LUCKIEST BOY

  Vithy walked out into the morning sun and sat down on a bench. He felt very cold and he couldn’t stop shivering for more than half an hour. When Betty joined him she was wearing a sling.

  ‘Thanks,’ Betty said.

  Vithy tried to smile but failed. ‘You are hurt?’

  ‘Nothing broken. I just have to give it some rest for a few days.’ She sat down beside him and for the first time seemed to be searching for words. ‘I have been meaning to speak to you …’