Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

As he smiled his consent there was a quick sympathy between them, a little flash in the dark.

They took another tuk-tuk up to Monivong. When she was alone, she said, she loved coming to the kitsch Chinese seafood places at the far end of this boulevard, which lay well beyond the tourist city. They were places which her parents liked as well: Khmer, familial, with a touch of Chinese garishness. On the far side of Sihanouk, in the darker stretches of the boulevard, there were a score of these places identifiable by their stark white glare, their gold-and-red interiors and their fish tanks on the street.

There was Lyky, with its bright white interiors and glass-screened private booths and, farther down on the same side, Man Han Lou, a place of nacre cabinets and palms with its live fish tanks outside. It was there, in the end, that they ate. It was like a spare Chinese tearoom of former decades. They ordered sea bass barbecued in rock salt and rice prahok, because, she said, he had obviously never tried the national dish.

When it was finally dark outside strings of blue lights came on in the windows. They were content to talk about food for a long time; the ordinariness of the subject was a relief. The prahok, meanwhile, was a little mound of rice with flecks of red in it and when he put a forkful in his mouth the intense fermented saltiness of the ground-up fish made his eyes water.

“That’s — that’s something else.”

“I think it’s garum,” she said. “Some people say the Romans brought it here once upon a time.”

“It’s vile. But it’s delicious-vile.”

“That’s the supreme delicious.”

“Or the supreme vile?”

“It’s both. My father has to eat it every day. I can’t quite.”

“It’s like eating dead eels made into a paste.”

“That’s not far off. Afterward we’ll go for a drink and get the taste out of your mouth.”

Her eyes were merry, she had it all planned out.

“I’ll be awake for a week,” he said. Tears were on his cheeks.

They went over the Japanese Friendship Bridge on motodops, struggling through the swarms of bikes which from the air must have looked like ants competing for traffic space on a single banana leaf. He was behind her and could see the slim arch of her back in its white cotton dress bobbing and weaving ahead of him and the flicks of her hair as the river wind caught them halfway across. It was later than he had realized. How much time had gone by chatting over Vietnamese coffee?

The sun had begun to change color and dip toward the Tongle Sap, turning the water so bright that the longtails skimming across it were almost invisible. He felt a sharp exhilaration. The haze above the riverine construction sites burned a milky white, calm with a poisonous sultriness.

He followed her bike as it turned right on the far side of the bridge and moved quickly along a rural-looking road with small factories and warehouses and walls on either side. At its farthest end, where the road again turned right, there was a large beer garden called Golden Chroy Chang Var, with the girls seated outside in silk gowns. They were just gearing up for the evening trade. Here Sophal slowed, looked back at him and made an obscene but friendly gesture at the girls.

The road met up with the river and shadowed it and soon they were close to the machines and the cranes and the half-built skeletons of girders. Between the road and the water there was a string of shack bars held above the river by stilts and beams. The riverside was being redeveloped, and half of them had already been destroyed. In a few months they would all be gone, to be replaced by a treeless, shadeless river walk where no one would ever go. They stopped outside the last one in the row and went into an open-plan bar alive with a brisk wind. There was no one there. They went out onto a balcony with old leather chairs and a coffee table and fell into them with their legs up on the rail.

It was a sundowner bar, with waving reeds around it.

“I should be home playing Brahms,” she said after they had been drinking beers for a while. “But suddenly I’m bored with it. There’s a party later at a friend’s studio. A Dutch painter. Want to come?”

“All right, I could I guess. I don’t go to parties much.”

“It’s a small city, Simon. Soon you’ll know everybody who you’re ever going to know. It’s either depressing or comforting — depending on how you look at it.”

“I’m just going to go along with it. If it’s depressing I’ll take a lot of pills — they’re cheap here, no?”

“That’s wisdom for you. That’s what you ought to do.”

“I’m not leaving any time soon either. I like the sunsets here. I like a lot of things. I keep waiting for the homesickness but it never comes. It will come eventually, I suppose. Or maybe not. These old barang guys here don’t seem to feel it.”

“I never asked them, myself.”

“I don’t want to be one of them, though. That’s my worst nightmare. I can’t imagine turning into one of them.”

“But maybe they’re happy — that’s why they stayed.”

“Yeah, I guess. They feel at home, whatever that means.”

“That’s a good reason to live somewhere — I don’t think. You’re like me, though, you’re at a loose end. My father thinks it’s a disaster. A generational disaster. He thinks we’re all at a loose end.”

“Maybe we are. A generation of drifters.”

She blew between her teeth. “That’s a massive generalization. I don’t think it’s true at all. Why, are you a drifter?”

“Well, I never thought of myself as one. God no. Anything but.”

“You look like a drifter. You feel like one.”

“Really?” he said. He was a little incredulous.

“It’s just my instinct,” she said. “My instinct is you’re a bit of a drifter.”

He denied it again, but she was teasing.

“Look at you,” she said. “Your clothes are all wrong. I have to take you shopping or something. You’re dressed like an extra in a film. I should take you to Uniqlo or Muji or something. Unfortunately they don’t have any branches in Cambodia. No, I’m teasing. You look very beautiful in your clothes. But I wonder where you got them.”

“A tailor,” he said. “I don’t want to look like the usual barang slob.”

“So that’s it.” She laughed. “No wonder my father likes you.”

—

The lights of the city came on over the far side of the river. Longtails with bales of okra passed underneath, the men looking up for a moment, and the wide power of the Mekong nearby could be sensed. The hour of sunset and they switched to sangria. He thought wistfully of all the people he had left behind in his old life. Now he began to wonder if any of them would notice his absence in the longer term. In the shorter term, of course, they would, but in the longer term, in the grander scheme of things, it was not so certain. As long as he kept his parents informed, meanwhile, nothing would happen. He was now sure of it. The friends and his job would all pass away. The friends, few in number; the job, minor. People walked out on minor jobs all the time.

It was an inexplicable callousness, but it had just come upon him out of nowhere. How had it come about so easily? It had not even surprised him. It’s one thing to hate your life, but to merely dislike it — that was a greater mystery. There was no explaining that, because the dislike was total, not partial. There was no explaining that to even the most cynical Khmer girl. But somehow — a small miracle in itself — they understood it anyway and at a certain moment the questions died away.

They did now. Sophal told him about her father.