Colin Cotterill: Anarchy and the Old Dogs

Auntie Bpoo wasn’t one of those transvestites who fooled the eye from a distance. Even on the darkest of nights she wouldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a middle-aged man in women’s clothing. In daylight, viewed from the opposite corner of Samsenthai Road, she was a luminous beacon-and definitely a buoy. Her broad shoulders held up the spaghetti straps of a shocking pink halter. Her white stomach hung over the elastic waistband of her leopard-skin leotards like a floe of ice oozing from the freezer of a cheap refrigerator. The rouge on her cheeks and the purple around her eyes were redder and more purple than even the most flamboyant bird of paradise. But her hair, black and cut military short, set off a cream hibiscus blossom tucked behind her ear.

Siri stood in front of the closed-down coffee stand opposite and pretended to be maneuvering a misplaced paving stone back into its spot with his foot. But only the black stupa hunched in its island of overgrown grass took any notice of him. Even through the film of dust that hung over the city’s main street like a hazy hangover, Auntie Bpoo was an overstatement. Siri turned and headed back to his motorcycle. What was he thinking? What on earth had crawled into his head? He should have gone straight home like he’d planned.

But no. Here he was contemplating something quite foolish. Perhaps he’d just wanted to see for himself what could possess an otherwise rational nurse to fall for an obvious confidence trick. And who was feeding this roadside duchess? She didn’t accept payment but she obviously wasn’t starving to death. It was his inner detective that turned Siri around once more and sent him across Vientiane’s busiest street. On normal days he would have just launched himself into the road, but, given the day’s events, he decided to stop at the curb and look both ways before crossing.

A minute later he was sitting cross-legged on a banana-leaf mat beneath the long evening shadow of the Aeroflot sign. He watched Auntie Bpoo shuffle cards, just shuffle and shuffle, until he was sure the noses of the kings and queens had been scoured completely from their faces. She hadn’t looked up at him, not even when he arrived. She hadn’t so much as acknowledged his presence. When she spoke at last she began with a poem. At least Siri assumed that’s what it was. He’d heard bad poetry before, but Auntie Bpoo’s had a depth all her own.

“First a sheep (she began)

Cheap start. Turns into four

Then a boar

A lion, chimpanzees

Perfect clones

Our own anomalies

A hundred me

We, thee

All the same.”

Siri wondered whether to comment. Was he supposed to ask what it all meant? Applaud? But, before he could speak, the clownish face of the transvestite looked up at him and smiled-an ugly betel-nut gash.

“Dr. Siri,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Siri felt oddly disconcerted that she should know who he was. They’d never met. Perhaps Dtui…? He coughed to jog the surprise from his voice.

“I’m actually here to tell you-,” he began.

“That you think my predictions are a pile of poppycock,” she said.

Siri was impressed. Those were the exact words he’d chosen to complete his hijacked sentence. It was either a grand trick or an amazing coincidence.

“Well done. Perhaps you could tell me what I had for dinner yesterday evening,” Siri suggested.

“No. I couldn’t,” Auntie Bpoo growled, and returned her gaze to the cards. “If you want a cabaret, go to Bangkok.”

“But I thought that’s exactly what you were-an elaborate parlor trick,” Siri managed, although he was lacking his usual bravado.

When she looked up at him again, her eyes were the dull silver gray of ball bearings. They seemed to bore into him. “Before the second equinox, Dr. Siri Paiboun, you will have betrayed your country.”

“I will what? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You came to me. I didn’t pursue you.”

“I just came to-”

“And hang on to your lucky charm, Doctor. The Phibob are lurking. They’re waiting for their opportunity.”

“Who… who told you about them?”

Siri felt a cold shudder rise from the pavement and climb his spine. This fortune-teller had access to facts she couldn’t possibly have overheard. Dangerous knowledge. The spirits of the forest had hounded Siri to a ledge overhanging the valley of death. They’d hunted down the spirit of the thousand-year-old shaman, Yeh Ming, who’d chosen Siri as his host. But in order to destroy the one, they had to eliminate the other. Siri was in constant fear of them. He reached for his chest where the charmed white amulet, his only protection from the Phibob, lay warm against his skin. It was beneath his shirt, impossible to see.

“I don’t see what’s here and now,” the transvestite told him. “I see what’s to come. But often the future explains the present.”

Suddenly and inexplicably, she began to giggle shrilly. A dog in the gutter fled in panic. It seemed to Siri, amidst a sudden atmosphere of foreboding, that the monster sitting before him might have swallowed a young girl whole.

“Oh, my. It’s late,” the little girl said in her tiny voice. “Just think of little me walking home through the dark streets. I have to scamper.”

She quickly gathered her cards and her bag and shooed Siri off the mat so she could roll it up. All these actions she completed like a ballerina on heroin. Auntie Bpoo had turned into a silly feminine thing that Siri wanted to slap the senses back into, but naturally he didn’t. She still outweighed him by some eighty pounds. Instead, he stood back in the Aeroflot doorway and watched her escape, stepping mincingly, hurriedly, past the black stupa. Siri was breathless and dumbfounded. There were few living beings that could make him feel inferior, but Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune-teller, had joined their ranks.

One hand protruded stiffly from beneath the white sheet. It lay, palm upward, on the side table, as if begging for the return of its life. Mourners in all white or all black filed past the body in disorderly fashion. One by one they dipped a tin cup into a clay water pot and trickled a little onto the ash gray fingers. They begged forgiveness from the corpse just in case there were any forgotten misdemeanors they had committed. Four monks sat to one side, chanting behind their ceremonial fans like shy table-tennis players. The sai sin string circled them and looped down to the body, a karmic telegraph, passing their messages through to the deceased. Dtui stood at her mother’s feet and thanked the visitors for coming. They smiled. She smiled. They joked. She laughed. There was nothing to be gained by turning a funeral into something depressing.

There were drinks in the yard of the little temple laid out on a long trestle table under the shade of a scrambled egg tree. There guests could sit and remember their nice friend Manoluk. They’d probably get rowdy and raucous after a few glasses of rice whisky and tell bawdy stories of her youth. If they didn’t know any, they’d make them up. Certainly, they’d talk of the eleven children she’d borne, and their thoughts would come to rest on Dtui, the only one she’d been able to keep alive, the one she’d spoiled and toiled to provide an education for. They’d raise their glasses to the big soft nurse and shout “Good luck” and play a few hands of cards before staggering off home. They would shed no unlucky tears to jinx Manoluk’s journey to Nirvana. Only in their dreams would their true sorrow show itself.

At 6 a.m., Siri had awakened in a sweat with the image of Auntie Bpoo still in his head. He’d dreamed of slow dancing with her in a French bordello. Her makeup had smeared onto his cheeks, giving him the appearance of a Comanche warrior. Members of the Lao People’s Party politburo were sitting around him at low tables wearing French berets. They cast circumspect glances in the direction of the dance floor. Siri looked over the hairy shoulder of his partner and counted them off, one by one. The president, of course; the prime minister; the heads of education and of agriculture. He’d located seven of the eight members but had no time to work out who was absent because a bomb-albeit a black, ball-shaped cartoon bomb-came flying through a window. It exploded and blew them all to kingdom come.