Colin Cotterill - Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

Siri climbed to the top of the pile, crushing plants underfoot, and looked into the neighbour's property. At one time it had been a mechanic's yard or the car park for some rich man's automobile collection. It was one large oil-stained slab of concrete. But it had its own brick wall. It ran parallel to that of the embassy and was only a metre and a half tall. Why the neighbour would need a wall of his own and why it wasn't built flush with the embassy wall he had no idea. But there was a gap, no more than sixty centimetres, between the two. That, Siri was certain, was the way out. He leaned casually onto the top of the wall, glanced back towards the embassy; then, certain there was nobody standing behind him, he slipped over the wall into the gap.

He felt rather foolish pinned between the two walls and had no idea what he'd do if his theory proved to be wrong. But he sidled to his left to where the Khmer Rouge wall towered above him. The intersecting angle was bricked also but it was apparent that the blocks were not cemented, merely piled one atop the other. From a distance nobody would have noticed. Siri began to disassemble the temporary wall. Brick by brick the far side revealed itself to him. The contrast between the view ahead and the oasis behind was as drastic as that between heaven and hell. The entire block immediately at the back of the embassy compound had been levelled, apparently by a bomb. Rubble and shattered glass and broken lives were strewn fifty metres in either direction. Beyond that, the surviving buildings stood bruised with soot and dejected like mourners around a grave.

Siri stepped cautiously into this other world and carefully replaced the blocks behind him. It was a peculiar Alice Through the Looking Glass feeling. He had the overwhelming sense of being behind the set at a film lot. Backstage, there was no pretence, no need for flowers and new paint. He picked his way through the debris until he was on a dirt street. There were no body parts amongst the rubble. No flies in search of lunch. The only sounds were far off and there was no movement. No birds, no dogs, no life. The buildings on either side seemed to stoop forward with curiosity to watch him pass. Some doors were open, others were padlocked. Those windows with glass were shattered. Every building had its own unique display of dead plants: dead orchids in half-coconut shells hanging from an awning, dead crown-of-thorns in a row of coloured pots, dead vines climbing a three-storey building, losing their grip, hanging over the street suspended in free fall.

Another street, open doors and front yards with small cemeteries of dead consumer goods. A toaster oven. A television. A rice cooker. Like fish washed up on a river bank, no life source. No point. Embarrassed cars stripped bare, left with only their carcasses. A dove in a rattan cage, unfed, feathers on a white ribcage. Broken bone china cups crunching underfoot. At each intersection a pyre of the questionably valuable. The sooty smile of a piano keyboard. A child's high chair in charcoal. The black shadow of an antique French bureau, once priceless, now worthless.

Siri walked slowly along the unpaved lanes, his hands clenched into fists. He stepped into unlocked apartments and found himself in interrupted lives. The subliminal message, 'Had to pop out for a minute. Be back soon' was pinned somewhere in the air around them. They sat humble and faithful like stupid dogs waiting for their owners to return. A letter, half-written, undisturbed on a desk. A plate of putrid fruit on a kitchen table. Toy cars parked in front of a Kellogg's packet garage on the floor.

He heard a noise.

He was at a row of two-storey Chinese shop-houses and, illogically, he walked from one to the other trying to locate the sound. His instincts and the amulet at his neck told him to walk away. But the ghostly loneliness of his promenade so far had been unnerving. Noise was a welcome ally. Even if it was a stray cat, or an orphan child, or a cheetah escaped from the Phnom Penh zoo, it made no difference. He could use the company. He stood below a balcony and heard the unmistakable sound of drawers being opened. No animal he knew of had perfected the art of opening and closing drawers.

He walked in through the shopfront. They sold baskets there, finely woven bags and purses, stacks of place mats and coasters. All too delicate to be pilfered by an army. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed or destroyed. The till tray remained open, bank notes were pinned inside it under wire clips. Siri walked up the staircase at the back of the shop noisily, he thought, in his leather sandals. He followed the sounds into a kind of study with cabinets and bookshelves against one wall and bank upon bank of chests of drawers. And, on his knees rifling through them was a child of thirteen or fourteen. He had already amassed a small pile of booty on the floor beside him, mostly ballpoint pens and coloured pencils. He was so engrossed in his search that he hadn't heard Siri enter.

The doctor smiled. He was about to turn and leave the child to his treasure hunt when he noticed the muscles on the boy's neck tense. It was as if he sensed a presence. He turned his head and saw the old man standing there. He seemed to tremble. His eyes widened and he fumbled around him for something on the floor. He found what he was looking for on a shelf in front of him. His pistol was fat and clumsy in his hand, but holding it seemed to give him confidence. He was no longer afraid. His face hardened and it was then that Siri recognised him. He'd looked into those eyes every night for more than a week. This was the young assassin from his nightmare. The boy was real. So was the gun. He climbed to his feet with the weapon in front of him and snarled and spat out words Siri didn't understand. The gun was the child's courage, his image, his personality. Siri knew it had killed before. The boy swaggered up to the old man and levelled his personality at Siri's forehead.

It was a performance that had never failed. Siri was certain men, women and other children had quaked with fear at this same show of strength. Siri knew the boy would have no qualms about pulling the trigger He smelt death on him like the scent of gunpowder on a shooter's hand. Siri knew that if he spoke just one word of Lao it would be his epitaph. So he kept quiet. He smiled and raised his right hand and he slapped the little boy hard across the cheek. The blow snapped the boy's head to one side and the gun suddenly looked more like a plaything in his hand. He stared at Siri in amazement and the doctor glared calmly back into those young eyes. What thoughts, what memories passed through the child's head in those few seconds? Confidence was suddenly replaced with indecision which rapidly became humiliation, and the boy began to cry. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he huffed back the sobs. At that moment, the little soldier was three years old again, and helpless, and just a child.

Siri turned away from the shaking gun barrel, shook his head, and walked back down to the street. He paused by the front shutter to catch his breath. He didn't know why he wasn't dead. Perhaps, being elderly and white-haired, it was conceivable he was one of the mysterious brothers of the Red Khmer. The boy might have seen the old man in a motorcade or heard him talk at a training seminar. Everyone over sixty looked the same. But, more likely, it was because the doctor had shown no fear, and it was fear that satisfied the blood lust of the little killer. Without it, the kill meant nothing. There was no power-fed adrenalin. Nothing to disguise the fact that every day was a trauma for the child.

A block away, Siri's legs began to wobble and he caught hold of a tree trunk, hanging on to it for dear life until the shakes worked their way out of his body.

"Not the way you'd planned to go, Siri," he said. "Not in the script. A Douglas Fairbanks ending for you, old boy. A fitting hero's exit. Not popped by a little lad with a grownup's gun. No, sir."