Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“Well, if you say so…”

It didn’t seem quite right and Robert was about to cancel the whole thing, but then he thought of his desperation to get out of the city now and he nodded and went along with it. It didn’t seem particularly advisable to owe something to a man like Davuth, but now there was little choice.

“If the water rises we might get cut off. We might have to spend a night down there. Or we might get back too late and have to spend a night in Takeo.”

Robert said he didn’t really know where that was.

“Never mind. You’re not the guide! I know where it is and I know where we can stay if we have to.”

Takeo . The word had a dismal ring to it.

“You seem to be saying,” Robert ventured, “that it would be better to spend a night in Takeo and make it a two-day affair.”

“That, in fact, is what I would recommend.”

“But we can’t afford that, because that would make it a hundred dollars.”

Davuth smiled again. “I might be able to give you a special break. But you pay for my hotel that night and gas for the next day.”

Since that was reasonable, Robert agreed.

“It’s not very much,” the policeman went on affably. “Just a few more dollars. I can give my time for you and your lady friend.”

“I didn’t realize there would be a boat, though. I hate boats.”

“It’s not a long ride in the boat. You and your girl will enjoy it. Unless it rains!”

“It will rain.”

“Then you can sing in the rain.”

“Sing in the rain?”

Davuth laughed and his head rolled back a little.

“Simon, have you seen a series called Vikings ? It’s on HBO.”

The Englishman seemed irritated.

“No, not yet.”

“Ah, it is very good. They terrorize the Christians and have human sacrifices. They shave the sides of their heads. But you know they are good guys. They are like a loud football team.”

“Vikings?”

“Yes, it is barang history. I thought about it a lot.”

“I can’t believe you watch HBO.”

“I found it in the market in Pursat!”

“It’s amazing what you can find in the market in Pursat.”

“Everything.”

“Well, never mind about Vikings. When d’you think we can leave for Takeo?”

“Tomorrow morning will be sunny. No rain.”

Robert thought it over. Then he called Sophal and they talked. She sulked, but it was clear that her previous opposition to the idea had somewhat abated. She could sense that he wanted it and finally she agreed. “I’ll have to tell my father right now,” she said. “He won’t be thrilled.” He closed the phone triumphantly and said to Davuth, “You’re on. Let’s get out of here early. Say six?”

“Any time you like.”

The rest of the day Robert spent swimming at Le Royal, where he lay low, ordering sandwiches from the bar and drinking tonics with lemon, apprehensive at the idea of running into Simon or Sothea. He was the aggrieved party but now he had no wish to see them at all; it would be an unpleasant scene anyway and nothing good would come of it. Far better to let sleeping dogs lie and for all their cards to fall where they might. He no longer cared. He didn’t even care about his passport because if he ever needed a passport again he had resolved to simply go to the embassy on Street 240 and say he had lost his. But in the meantime he was Simon, and Simon had an easy life. Simon had time on his hands and did not worry about the clock. He had spent his whole life not working so he was used to this regal idleness. He took it in his stride.

As he did laps in the pool he eyed the rich barangs dozing on the loungers and he felt that in some way he belonged in their company. It was not a bad life out here when you got a little cash rolling. There were, in any case, far worse lives out there. After a while, it became sinister, the soft edges, the senses of timelessness, the lack of struggle. You went to seed quite quickly, but by the same token you didn’t mind as much. You looked in the mirror less and less and, in fact, you thought about others less and less. These were positive developments. But you couldn’t escape the going to seed. It was mental in the first place, which meant that it couldn’t be corrected. You woke, Robert continued thinking, every morning in the beautiful heat to the sound of the koel birds and you took your coffee in the sun among the tanagers. You drifted through the days and the nights and you forgot about the European Union and the council tax and the first gray hairs in your brows and the emerging sadness in the eyes. Or rather than forget them you failed to remember them anymore. Here it was a leaping from one hour to the next, and inside those hours were all the pleasures you needed and which elsewhere were so much harder to obtain.

When the day died away he dried off and roamed the streets as he usually did, stopping on corners in the dusk to gobble down prahok and cold beers and, on Street 130, the same fresh oysters he had enjoyed on the terrace of the Dutch painter. He went to the cinema and watched a ghost epic with screaming teenagers and old women who covered their eyes when the phantoms burst onto the screen. Afterward, he was less spooked and unsettled. The rain, the gutters racing. He went back to the Viet cafés and took a sweet Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk and smoked until his eyes watered and he felt the supreme, stationary happiness of which the many bodhisattvas have spoken.

He didn’t see anyone on his way back to his apartment and that night he slept with a generic Ambien and a bottle of gin by the bed. In the end, he didn’t touch the bottle and his dreams were logical and free of menace. It was always England in his Eastern dreams and by now he had come to accept that if he did not go back they would be of England for the rest of his life. And so: he came up to a farm called Eddington on the crest of the hill above his grandmother’s house — it was said to be named after Alfred the Great’s stirring victory over the Danes — and looked down at the Brighton racetrack in the distance, the place that Graham Greene had immortalized, and the Bevendean council houses with their sloping gardens of rhubarbs and runner beans and the cornflowers and poppies that had frothed up around the fields of wheat. He always came here in moments of crisis. He looked out and saw chalk paths — brilliantly white — cut into the grass and the stiles dividing the fields. And there was a man striding along the hill, his black coat flapping about his legs and some kind of crazy tam-o’-shanter on his head. The man came to a stop and then looked at him and Robert shaded his eyes and, for no reason, the light outside was inside his head and he heard larks high above the fields, that thin, warbling, continuous sound that he knew from childhood and that was, in a sense, always inside him as well. He looked up, at the broken and gaping roof, and as he did so a cloud moved across it and the sun dimmed—

In reality, his eyes opened and he heard something beating against the shutters — little wings — and he thought, Eddington, isn’t that where the king fought the Vikings? So it’s the Vikings!

He packed for a four-day trip, for who knew how long it would really last. In a sense the longer it lasted the better. He took his new shirts and a pair of swimming trunks he had bought for a dollar in the Psar and a banded straw hat from the same place. It only made him realize how tremendously little he owned in this world. He glanced up at a clock. It was five thirty and he had time for a coffee in the lobby and even a swim if he wanted, and yet in the end he had just the coffee and took it out onto the front steps to wait for Davuth and Sophal. The weather had changed for the better, just as the guide had said it would. He sat and sipped his coffee and laid his bag next to him. A blue sky emerged. Construction workers filed through the clear, dustless alleys and their feet were almost soundless. Fifteen minutes later Sophal arrived in a tuk-tuk with a small traveling bag and a large hat and when their eyes met it was a moment of peacefulness and reassurance. She asked one of the Colonial Mansions boys to bring her out a coffee and she sat down next to him and they soaked up the cool while the street came into definition. There was an apprehension just before the expected appearance of their curiously domineering guide, and within it they were thrown closer, like children about to be reprimanded.