Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

He laughed. “I thought after seventy-two years, I might know what I hate and what I don’t.”

“You need to build up your strength for the digging.”

“What happened to all the prison inmates? They used to do all this. Dig ditches, unplug sewers.”

“Dr. Siri, I’m surprised at you. Sometimes I wonder if you really did fight for the revolution. There’s no longer any excuse for the uneducated and ignorant to be doing all our dirty work. We’re all perfectly capable of lifting a hoe and swinging an ax.”

“…and dissecting a cancerous liver,” he mumbled under the cover.

“All our ill-advised criminal types are undergoing re-education at the islands. You know that. Now. Are you getting up, or do I have to drag you out of there?”

He decided to punish her for her unsolicited familiarity.

“No. I’ll get up. But I have to warn you, I’m naked and I have a morning erection. It’s nothing sexual, you’ll understand. It’s a result of pressure on the….”

There was a slight click and the battering of loose boards on the veranda. He peeled down the sheet and looked triumphantly around the empty room.

When he went downstairs, he found two trucks loaded with drowsy silent neighbors, obviously overcome with delight. Area 29C was providing the labor for irrigation canal section 189. It would take the better part of the day, but a sticky rice, salt fish, and tamnin ivy lunch would be provided absolutely free.

He shook off Saloop’s lethargic charge and climbed onto the rear truck. He’d spotted Miss Vong on the front one, lecturing the young couple from the room opposite his. He nodded and joked with his neighbors as the convoy set off. They nodded and joked back. But none of these good moods could be described as sincere.

Despite having joined the Communist Party for entirely inappropriate reasons, Siri had been a paid-up member for forty-seven years. If the truth were to be told, he was a heathen of a communist. He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

After clawing his way through a French education system dense and overgrown with restrictions against the poor, he had finally proved that a country boy could make something of himself. He found a rare, benevolent French sponsor, who sent him to Paris. There he became a competent but not brilliant medical student. France wasn’t renowned for making life easier for those poor souls born outside its borders. It was every homme for himself.

But Siri was used to struggling. In his first two years at Ancienne, without distractions, he was in the top thirty percent of his class. His tutors agreed he had great promise, “for an Asian.” But like many a good man before him, he soon discovered that all the potential in the world was no match for a nice pair of breasts. He found himself in third-year pathology concentrating not on the huge blackboard crammed with its neat diagrams, but on the slow-breathing sweater of Boua. She was a red-faced Lao nursing student who sat by the window whatever the weather. He could generally tell from the sweater just how cold it was outside. In the summer, it became a slow-breathing blouse with more buttons undone than was absolutely necessary. He barely scraped through pathology and plummeted into the bottom twenty-percent bracket overall.

By the fourth year, he and Boua were engaged and sharing a room so small, the bed had been sawn short so the door could open. She was a healthy, well-curved girl from Laos’s ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang. Her family was blue-blooded Royalist from generations back. But while her parents knelt and bowed at the feet of the passing king and tossed orchid petals before him, she was in her room plotting his demise.

She had learned of the French Communist Party from her first lover, a skinny young tutor from Lyons. At the first opportunity, she set off for her Mecca. Whereas Siri had come to Paris to become a doctor, Boua was studying nursing as a pretext: she was actually in Paris to become the best communist she could be, in order to return to elevate the downtrodden masses in her homeland.

She made it clear to Siri that if he wanted her hand, he had to embrace the red flag also. He did want her hand, and the rest of her, and considered four evenings a week, the odd Sunday, and five francs a month, cheap at half the price. At first, the thought of attending meetings that espoused the fall of the great capitalist empire made him uneasy. He was quite fond of the music of capitalism and fully expected to dance to it as soon as the chance presented itself. He’d been poor all his life, a state he was hoping to recover from as a doctor. But guilt at having such thoughts eventually overtook him.

So it was that communism and Boua conspired to damage his hopes and dreams. By embracing his fiancee and her red flag, he was slowly tearing himself from the grasp of medicine. In order to pass his fifth year, he had to take several make-up exams. By the time he reached his practicum, he had two black stars on the front of his personal file. They indicated that the student therein had to be an exceptional intern if he didn’t want to be loaded on an early Airopostale flight and forfeit his sponsor’s fees.

Fortunately, Siri was a natural doctor. The patients adored him, and the staff at the Hotel Dieu Hospital thought so highly of him that the administration asked him to consider staying on in France and working there full-time. But his heart was with Boua, and when she returned to further The Cause in her homeland, he was at her side.

On Monday, Siri walked down to the Mekhong River and stood for a while. The rains had held on stubbornly that year, but he was sure they were now gone for another five months. It was a brisk November morning and the sun hadn’t yet found the strength to dry the grasses on the bank. He let the cool dew soak his feet and wondered how long the Party’s shiny vinyl shoes would survive the next rains.

He walked reluctantly along the embankment and kicked up scents from the Crow Shit blossoms that grew there. On the far bank, Thailand stared rudely back at him, its boats floating close to its waterfront. The river that was once a channel between two countries had become a barrier.

In front of Mahosot Hospital, he sat on a wobbly stool beside the road and ate stale foi noodles purchased from a cart. Nothing really tasted fresh any more. But with all the diseases he’d been exposed to over the years, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to his health. He could probably inject himself with salmonella and it would pass straight through him.

With no other excuses to delay his arrival at work, he walked between the shoebox buildings toward his office. The hospital had been put together without style or grace by the French and was basically a village of concrete bunkers. He hesitated in front of his own building before stepping inside. The sign over the door said MORGUE in French. The mat beneath it, his own personal touch, said WELCOME in English.

Only two of the rooms in the blockhouse had natural light. One of these was his office. He shared it with his staff of two, a staff that Judge Haeng rudely referred to as one and a half.

“Good morning, Comrades.” He walked into the gray cement room and went over to his desk.

Dtui looked up from her Thai fan magazine.

“Good health, doctor.” She was a solid young nurse with a well-washed but rather craggy face and a happy mouth. Her first reaction to everything was to smile, and goodness knows, she didn’t have a lot to smile about.