Colin Cotterill - The Woman Who Wouldn't die

‘I doubt one person could handle so much merit,’ said the headman. ‘Bit of an overload.’

‘You’re right,’ said Civilai. ‘But fifty people could share it.’

‘Aye, that they could,’ agreed the old man. ‘That they could.’

Siri headed for the trees and studied the point where the cable wound around them. He saw no evidence of magic. Madame Daeng made for the Buddha idols. When she returned she had a small package wrapped in cloth.

‘What’s that then?’ Siri asked.

‘Surely we couldn’t go through all this excitement without claiming one little souvenir,’ she smiled.

‘Daeng, you’ve seen what the curse can do.’

‘All I saw were two cables snap. Bad quality.’

‘I strongly recommend you don’t take that souvenir out of this valley.’

‘Recommendation noted. Let’s go.’

‘Be it on your own head.’

‘I suppose the saddest part of all this is that the minister didn’t get to find his brother,’ said Daeng as they walked along the bank on their way back to the longboat.

Siri laughed.

‘Something funny?’ she asked.

‘You know I wonder whether anyone actually read the Cuban medical report of Major Ly’s jaw surgery.’

‘It provided some insight into his whereabouts?’

‘Pretty much pinpointed the location. I read through it last night. The last page of the file is a letter to the Cuban surgeon from a private hospital in Bangkok. They very politely requested a copy of the surgeon’s report and the X-ray, which I doubt he sent.’

‘Bangkok? What’s Bangkok got to do with all this?’

‘Oh, I have a feeling the minister’s brother might have had enough of all the warring over here and popped across the border. I imagine he’d collected himself a little nest egg from war booty which he used to establish himself in Thailand.’

‘As what?’

‘Ooh, at a guess I’d say he bought himself a gogo bar and drank and fornicated himself to death. I doubt he ever got his jaw working properly.’

‘That’s not a guess, is it?’

‘I might have dreamed some of it.’

‘Siri.’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘I will not have you dreaming of gogo bars.’

‘Sorry.’

When we fought hand to hand in the jungle I became aware that I was killing the children of parents. Young men who were stuck for a job so joined the army expecting a few years of pineapple eating in the tropics. It concerned me that killing was becoming second nature to me. Indifferent. Indiscriminate. Anyone in a French uniform. That wasn’t the way to do it. You needed to operate at a different level to make a difference. I made the decision to leave the jungle and my rebel friends and dig in undercover in the heart of the French administration in the south: back in Pakse where my mother and I had sweated in the steam of boiled bedsheets for twenty years. Like many who feared the reprisals of the French, my mother had returned to what was left of our village. In fact, a lot of the old faces of Pakse had disappeared. I suppose my old face had disappeared with them. Nobody recognized me. I’d become hard, my features angular. My hair was short and my body was lean and muscular. If I’d made myself up with some cosmetics and dressed like the French mademoiselles, I could have had my pick of the French administrators. I could have been the mistress of any one of them. But that wouldn’t have worked. It was a small town. Belonging publicly to one man would have closed the door on others. And I would have drawn ire from the Lao. I needed to merge. Be invisible again .

There were men. There were handsome ones and there were ugly ones. Cruel and kind ones. But, to a man, they had something in common. They were always superior. I was never more than an aperitif. I wasn’t in their class. I was an ignorant brown-skinned girl they sought to rescue. And so, they were clumsy. They released secrets through the sluice gates of cheap wine. They boasted over the telephone. They left documents lying around. In the beginning I was clumsy too. I hadn’t yet learned how to love mine enemy in order to garrotte him in his sleep. I needed to become an actress to mask the disgust that rose in my throat whenever I witnessed the excesses of our gods. Everything could have collapsed in that first week back in the town. It was as if all the trains of fate collided in one day in Pakse and there was only one survivor .

I was told of an agency that recruited French-speaking menial staff for the gods. I was interviewed by an officious Vietnamese woman whose French was awful. I had to match her mistakes and dumb myself down in order to sound competent. It was established from the beginning that she would be receiving 50 per cent of my income as an agency fee. I agreed gladly and noted her address. She sent me to the home of a Vietnamese couple. The wife met me at the front door of their fine wooden home on the bank of the Mekhong. She announced her name and status as if reciting lines in a school play. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. She called me ‘big sister’ and showed me to the servants’ quarters. There was a fat Lao cook, female but balding, a Vietnamese male driver with an abundance of female hormones, and me .

I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to learn by being in the home of a high-ranking Vietnamese official. I had no guidance. We were hardly the French underground. This was all my idea and it was an idea that felt heavier with every passing day. I was to clean the house, keep the garden and serve food when there were guests. One of the first questions the bitch at the agency had asked was whether I could read. It was a question I got to hear often. I’d told her ‘no’. Thus I was allowed access to the master’s office. There were so many documents scattered here and there and my French was basic back then. I didn’t know where to start. I knew somewhere in the piles of papers there would be information I could pass on but I was so raw that all I could do was start at the top and work my way slowly down .

I was halfway through that very first pile on my very first day when my heart was wrenched out of its socket. A deep male voice from behind me said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

I retreated from the documents with my head bowed. Didn’t dare look at the man who had caught me out. I cowered in a corner. Took courage from the knife between the folds of my phasin skirt .

‘I asked you what in hell’s name you think you’re doing?’

‘Cleaning, sir,’ I said, glaring at his boots — boots that should by rights have been taken off at the front step .

‘That did not look like cleaning,’ he said. ‘That looked like reading.’

I had an act already by then. I spoke slowly as if I were backward, blew into my lips as if every word was an effort .

‘I … I wish, sir,’ I said. ‘I wish I could read. The characters look so beautiful on the paper. I wish I could turn them into words.’

I shook with fear as might have been expected. He shocked me by kneeling in front of me but I kept my eyes trained on the parquet flooring .

‘You’re the new girl,’ he said .

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s your name?’

I had so many .

‘Sik,’ I said .

His hand reached for my chin and yanked it up so he could see my face. Still I forced my eyes downward .

‘Girls as pretty as you don’t need an education,’ he said. His Lao was competent but he was undeniably Vietnamese. There was something familiar about his accent .

‘You can make your way in the world with these.’