Colin Cotterill - The Woman Who Wouldn't die

‘No. It’s a date,’ said Siri. ‘I’m sure of it.’

The rowers at the front of the boat were yelling excitedly. They’d seen something in the water. Some tried to stand to see over the heads in front but the movement unsettled the fine balance.

‘What is it?’ Civilai asked.

‘No idea,’ said Siri.

The URC boat was steered without a rudder through some group osmosis which explained why it spent so much time zagging. But somehow it found its way to the left bank and defied the current that was so eager to send it home. Ugly barked. Everyone stared to the right. Nobody spoke. There was no breeze, no cloud, seemingly no weather at all.

‘My heavens,’ said Siri.

‘It … it’s waving,’ said Mr Geung.

Despite the fact that nobody was rowing, the boat held its place in the river and angled towards the open water where a hand protruded, its fingers splayed. It seemed to be telling them to stop.

A cacophony of sound drummed through Siri’s head: screams and gunshots and loud Chinese music. He pressed his palms against his ears, closed his eyes, and straight away he knew whose hand this was.

‘Grab it,’ he shouted.

They all looked at him as if he were mad. Nobody in their right mind would invite the Siren of the water to drag them down into the depths. Nobody would take hold of that dead hand and allow the evil spirits to escape into a live body. Reluctantly they rowed towards the hand. Siri dared touch it. He reached over the side of the longboat, lunged but missed. But Daeng behind him was more successful. She caught hold of the wrist with two hands. To everyone’s shock the hand arrested the flow of the heavy teak vessel like an anchor. The longboat wheeled around and Siri scurried back to help his wife. He took hold of the slender hand.

‘Row to the bank,’ he cried.

And row they did, as hard as they were able. But the hand in the river was stronger. Siri and Daeng held on with all their might but the boat was going nowhere.

‘Put your backs into it,’ Civilai shouted.

Every man, woman, amputee and child leaned into their oars if only to get away from that horrifying hand. After several minutes, the rowers were panting but the hand held firm.

‘It … it must be a very heavy hand,’ said Mr Geung.

‘Again,’ Civilai shouted.

The oars dug in with unprecedented coordination. The boat lunged. The hand conceded. It took some ten minutes to reach the bank. If the team had put this much effort into the races they would certainly have fared better. At the bank, the water they bailed out of the craft was half sweat.

Siri and Daeng were out of the boat and up to their waists in the river. Still they held the delicate hand between them.

‘This is who I think it is, isn’t it?’ said Daeng.

‘Yes,’ Siri replied.

Two of the few crew members under fifty jumped from the boat and, careful not to touch the body, they ducked below the surface. When they re-emerged, one of them said, ‘It’s no wonder we had trouble. She’s roped to some bloody great hunk of machinery.’

The two men dragged it to the bank and Siri and Daeng found Madame Peung’s body much easier to slide up on to the grass. Her ankle was tied by a short rope to an air compressor. Daeng told them she’d seen it the night before, stowed to the stern of the frigate. Siri could see no wounds. There were no bloodstains on her clothes. If her raised arm was a conscious effort, he had to assume she’d died from drowning. Yet in most cases, the victim’s face would be contorted in agony. Madame Peung seemed almost to be smiling. Even in death she was beautiful.

‘Awfully bad luck,’ said Civilai, who leaned from the longboat. ‘Fancy her getting her foot tangled up in the rope just as the compressor was about to fall overboard.’

‘You’d think she’d have seen it coming,’ said Daeng, and winced at her own insensitivity.

Siri felt a good deal sorrier for the death of Madame Peung than he had been for the loss of his books. She’d been kind to him. He liked her. But, quite clearly, the villains had no further use for her. If the water at that spot had been just twenty centimetres deeper, they’d have passed her by. But had she made some supernatural afterlife effort to raise her arm? To be seen? To have her body put down with respect so her spirit might move on? He wouldn’t have put it past her.

With the compressor as their reward — thirty kilograms of scrap metal — the two men agreed to sit with the corpse until the longboat passed on the return journey. They kept their distance from her. Siri had considered it disrespectful to go into battle with a body on board. Daeng and Geung took the two empty paddle spots and joined the uncoordinated splash upriver. Siri had several excuses for not picking up an oar, not least of these his injuries sustained in a run-in with the Khmer Rouge. Any other man would have enjoyed the three months of bed rest the doctors had recommended. Siri had been repainting the bathroom Wattay blue after only a week. A bathroom that was now in ruins. A good enough reason not to waste time painting bathrooms. Civilai cited the loss of his right earlobe as the reason why he didn’t rush for the vacant paddles.

The conversation amongst the rowers had taken a more serious tone. The discovery of the body had shifted them into a superstitious frame of mind. There was speculation that the great naga had taken another soul because the race organizers had banned the final party. This was where everyone took to the river in anything that could float to thank the great serpent for not flooding them the previous year. There would always be a lot of drinking and at least one near-fatality.

‘Civilai?’ said Siri.

‘Yes, brother?’

‘We’re heading after a boat with a machine gun attached to it and ten armed soldiers on board.’

‘It won’t come to that, Siri.’

‘If we happen to round a bend and there they are, they might come at us.’

‘And?’

‘And I think we should at least explain to our shipmates what we’re doing here.’

‘They didn’t ask when we set off.’

‘They hadn’t seen a dead body tied to an air compressor when we set off. We might need their help.’

And so, with the oars raised and their chests heaving, the crew listened to Civilai’s abridged version of why they were pursuing a Lao naval vessel.

‘Where would they be heading?’ asked one shirtless fat man with stomachs piled on his lap like hillside paddy fields.

‘It’s a point exactly twenty-two kilometres upriver,’ said Siri.

This was followed by a mass exchange of nods and a soundtrack of ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Sharp bend in the river? Rock cliff?’ asked the fat man.

‘Well, yes,’ said Siri.

Smiles. Chuckles. Knowing looks.

‘Frenchy’s Elbow. Might as well just leave your Vietnamese to it,’ said the old lady with the short oar. ‘They’ll be taken care of, all right.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Daeng.

‘It’s started,’ said the headman. ‘One body already and they haven’t even arrived there.’

‘Is there something at this place?’ Siri asked, although he knew there was.

‘Not something you could poke in the eye with a stick,’ said one woman. ‘But something just the same.’

‘Are there bodies there?’ Siri asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the headman. ‘Plenty. But your minister won’t be finding his brother at Frenchy’s Elbow.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the boat at the bottom of the river there went down about the same time your minister was born.’

A shudder ran up Siri’s neck. Nobody was rowing. The river was running fast from the floods in China. Yet they were floating at some speed … against the current.