Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

“Nothing much. Your Vietnamese mate’s gone back to Hanoi.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Probably. But we had no idea what it was.”

“Did he leave anything for me?”

“His report and a letter or something.”

“Good.”

“Given there’s a lot of secret stuff I don’t know about, I hid ’em.”

“Good girl. Where are they?”

“In the hospital library. Under ‘V’. You know nobody ever goes up there.”

He decided to leave the Vietnamese report where it was. He was certain somebody would like to get their hands on it. He spent a few minutes breaking the law back in his office, then set off on Dtui’s bicycle toward Dongmieng.

The temple at Sri Bounheuan was just as well cared for as Hay Sok behind his house, but the atmosphere there was more frenetic. The Departments of Culture and Education had set up a pilot literacy project. All the monks, regardless of educational backgrounds, had been recruited to teach.

The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist. He’d given up his status and wealth as a protest against capitalism, and had striven to break down class barriers. As a reflection of these socio-politico-economic roots, monks were being yoked to blackboards up and down the country.

The number of liberated Lao citizens attending school had risen 75 percent since the Pathet Lao takeover. Lao radio never let anyone forget that. It didn’t mention what they did in the schools they attended, or the near-absence of qualified teachers. And it didn’t say that the burden of this new education system fell broadly on the shoulders of the monkhood.

They’d built rows of banana-leaf classrooms and filled them with logs split down the center for benches. The students ranged from five-year-old orphans to sixty-five-year-old grandmothers. They didn’t have any books or pencils, and the blackboards were the backs of old Royalist billboards. They may not have been learning a lot, but they all seemed to be having a good time.

The abbot was up a crooked bamboo ladder painting a stupa. His robe was tied up between his legs like an orange diaper. He was turning the dirty grey tope into a light blue birthday cake.

“Shouldn’t that be white?” Siri asked.

For some reason, the only paint to be had for the previous few months had been swimming-pool blue, a color that was slowly becoming synonymous with the new regime. The airport already blended nicely with the sky. Civilai argued it was the committee’s long-term plan to paint everything Wattay blue so astronauts would be able to recognize Laos from space.

“I don’t care if it’s black, as long as we can keep the elements off it for another year.” The abbot hooked the paint can over a cement elephant’s trunk and came down. He looked over the top edge of his glasses at his visitor. “I seem to remember you.”

“So you should, Abbot. We were in Pakse together about two hundred years ago.”

“Well, I’ll be…Siri, isn’t it?” Siri smiled and started to make an obeisance, but the old abbot grabbed his hand and pumped away at it. “You don’t look any different.”

“Really? You mean I was a wrinkled old codger with a stoop, even then?”

“Neither of us was really sure what we were then. You had to decide whether to follow your pretty wife to Vietnam, if I recall. I had a choice between riding a pushbike for the national team in the Asia Games, or following the love of my life to Australia.”

“Which one did you go for, in the end?”

“Neither. Look at me. I was so confused, I went on a retreat at Wat Sokpaluang and they never let me leave.”

They laughed.

“How on earth did you find me?”

“Oh, I heard a while ago you were here. One of the other teachers from the youth camp told me.”

“And how’s that pretty wife, Siri?”

“I’m afraid she died a few years back.”

“Ah. I’m not surprised. It can be tough for a woman in the jungle.”

“It’s even tougher if someone throws a grenade at you.”

“You aren’t wrong. Still, no shame in being brought down in battle.”

“She wasn’t in battle. She was in bed. She was sleeping. I was off on some campaign. It seems someone tossed a grenade into her tent. We never found out who.”

Siri was surprised at how easy it was to talk about. He’d kept this story inside himself for eleven years; now here he was blurting it out to a monk he hardly knew. The Catholics had it right. It was very therapeutic to share a burden with a man of the cloth. Except the Catholics probably handled it more delicately than the Lao.

“I bet it was meant for you.”

They walked to a bench and shared memories from their year at the youth camp. But Siri had to get to the point.

“A few days ago, they brought you a girl who’d slashed her wrists.”

“Yes, they did. How did you know that?”

“I’m currently the state coroner.”

“My! Congratulations.”

“And I’m afraid I need to dig her up again.”

“Oh, but you can’t.”

Siri pulled a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket that he’d written, stamped, and signed on Judge Haeng’s behalf. “I have here a warrant signed by….”

“No. I don’t mean I doubt your right to do it. What I mean is you can’t dig her up, because we haven’t buried her yet.”

“It’s been four days.”

“I know. Normally we’d have her in the ground right away. But this was a bit difficult.”

“How?”

“She has a sister.”

“She has?”

“They came down from the north together. She refused to let her sister be buried here. She’s trying to get the money together to take her body back to the family in Sam Neua.”

“Where is she?”

“The sister?”

“Both of them.”

“The body is in an old kiln we have here. We used to make pots. It’s dry and quite airtight. With all the kids here I couldn’t have her lying around.”

“I understand. What about the sister?”

“She’s living with a fellow who fixes bicycles, just down from the Thai Embassy.”

Siri wheeled Dtui’s bicycle under the straw canopy of the repair shop. It seemed to be deserted. He coughed and heard a rustling from out back. A taut-bodied young man wearing nothing but soccer shorts came out through a gap in the wall.

“Hello, boss. What’s wrong?”

“Can you fix the brakes? They only work when you’re going uphill.”

“No trouble.” He flipped the heavy bike over onto its handlebars as if it were made of balsa wood.

“Is there somewhere I can take a pee?”

“Sure, boss. There’s a latrine out back, if you don’t mind the flies.”

Siri walked through the gap, where he found a tall, slim girl in a phasin, shelling tamarind. There was a five-month swelling beneath the cloth of her skirt. He didn’t bother with the latrine. He knelt down beside her; she didn’t seem to care very much. Her mind was elsewhere.

“Hello. I’m Dr. Siri. I just came from Sri Bounheuan temple.” Her eyes grew wide and in some way afraid. “That’s your sister there?” She nodded slowly.

“I’m a coroner. Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah.”

“I need your permission to look at your sister’s body.”

She emptied the seeds from one more tamarind pod before she responded. “Can you tell? If you look at her, can you tell if she killed herself?”

“I think I can. But I need to operate on her.”

“You mean cut her open?”

“Yes. Is that all right?” She didn’t seem to like the thought of her sister’s body being defiled. “If it becomes my case, I can arrange for the body to be shipped back to Sam Neua.”

“Free?”

“We’ll pay.”

“She won’t be a mess, will she?”