Ned Beauman - Glow

Zaya was Cherish’s half-brother, six years older than her. His father had died of a viper bite not long after Zaya was born, leaving their mother a young widow. So when dollars invaded Gandayaw, their mother had started a beauty stall selling shampoo and thanaka paste, from which she earned just about enough to feed her children when Cherish was growing up. In those days, her mother mostly seemed sad, her brother mostly seemed angry, and Cherish herself mostly felt puzzled and out of place: she knew she looked different from her relatives, and at a certain point she worked out that her father must have been a white man, but no one wanted to tell her anything more. Later, she would come to feel as if her personal indeterminacy was designed to click right into the general indeterminacy on which her home town ran: intelligent kids can’t bear the feeling that the world is spinning and meshing all around them in ways they aren’t supposed to understand yet, but because of how deals are made in a place like Gandayaw, even the canniest adult has to accept that for every three parts of the machinery she’s learned to follow there are seven or eight farther back that she’ll never even glimpse.

When Cherish was ten years old, however, something happened that showed her far more of the machinery of her own life than she’d ever seen before. One morning a few days after that year’s lantern festival, she and Zaya were on the way to buy vegetables with their mother when a black Mercedes-Benz drove past, so slowly that perhaps one of the passengers had told the driver he wanted to get a good look at the town. Cherish had seen a lot of cars like that before, and was more interested in establishing diplomatic relations with a macaque on a chain that she could see in a bar across the road, but her mother stopped dead. Then she grabbed both her children by their arms and dragged them off into an alley. Here two crows bickered on the support struts of an air-conditioning unit.

‘What are you doing?’ said Zaya.

‘Go back and open the stall,’ said their mother.

‘Why?’ Zaya’s friends all made fun of him when they saw him on his own behind the baskets of cosmetics, even though most of the time those boys were quite an earnest, secretive gang, muttering about politics and crowding around half-broken radios. Some of them smoked yaba tablets, sucking the fumes off heated foil through a plastic straw like a butterfly’s proboscis, but not Zaya himself as far as she knew.

‘Just go back and open the stall. Cherish and I have something to do. We’ll be back later.’

After Zaya was gone, their mother led Cherish aimlessly from shop to shop for a while, but eventually they made for the main Lacebark building. At four concrete storeys this was the tallest structure in the town, although like a consular office it didn’t really belong to Gandayaw but to the foreign territory of the Concession, and indeed a tunnel was popularly rumoured to lead from its basement all the way to the mines twelve miles away.

‘Are we going inside?’ said Cherish. The day was hot and she had her longyi folded up to her knees.

‘No.’ Instead, they sat down in a tea shop where all the seats were made from the top halves of old swivel chairs lashed with bamboo rope to drums of laundry detergent, weighted down with rocks. They must have waited there for at least two hours, although it seemed more like a month to Cherish, who’d never been so bored in her life. She passed the time watching an old man, hairless and hunchbacked, an animate nub of ginger root, who hobbled up and down the street selling cigarettes and flowers. Just as she counted his seventh lap, three white men in business suits walked laughing out of the Lacebark building, and her mother jumped up from her stool and hurried across the street, pulling Cherish with her. A black Mercedes-Benz was waiting for the men, perhaps the same one as before, and beside the car were four bodyguards with guns, but the approach of a woman and her young daughter must have seemed so innocuous that no one really noticed them until Cherish’s mother was thrusting her towards the tallest of the white men and screeching in English, ‘Your child! Your child! Your child!’

The words might have been plain enough, but at that moment it didn’t occur to Cherish what they actually meant. What she did understand straight away was that her mother was doing something unbelievably dangerous. For both of them to be marched off at gunpoint and beaten up in the pit behind the disco would have taken only a word, maybe only a gesture, from one of the men in suits. And indeed the bodyguards were now reaching for their pistols. But then the tall man, the object of Cherish’s mother’s fury, must have said something to hold them off. Cherish looked up at him, and he looked back down at her with the stunned expression of someone watching the flame from his half-smoked cigarette consume an entire heap of rubbish, a bit guilty for his carelessness but at the same time quite impressed by this reminder of his powers.

There was a pause in which no one seemed to know what to do. The tall man’s two colleagues looked especially awkward. Then the tall man stepped forward and murmured something to Cherish’s mother, who nodded before crouching to kiss Cherish.

‘Go to your brother,’ she said. ‘Wait for me at home, the two of you.’

‘No!’

‘Go, sweetheart. I’ll be back.’

So Cherish obediently crossed the street, but rather than carrying on towards the cosmetics stall she pressed herself against the wall of the tea shop so she could watch what would happen. As the other two got into the car, the tall man and one of the bodyguards led her mother around to a side door of the Lacebark building and disappeared inside. Cherish burst into tears and dropped to her knees in the dirt, certain that she would never see her mother again. On his way past, the hunchbacked pedlar drew back his lips to give her what was probably supposed to be a comforting grin, but in the darkness of his mouth there were only two brown incisors that dangled from his gums like bats from the roof of a cave.

5.49 p.m.

Raf takes a swig of beer. ‘So what happened?’ he says. He has that feeling of mild inadequacy he gets whenever he listens to anyone who’s had a truly eventful or difficult life.

‘I was wrong! That afternoon, my mom came back. My brother was about a minute from making a commando assault on the Lacebark building, but she came back. She said we were going to America. Everything was arranged. And that was the last night I ever spent in Gandayaw. The next day, a jeep took me and my mother to an airfield near this town called Kyaukme, then we got a flight to Bangkok International, then another flight to LAX. All the paperwork was already waiting for us.’

‘What about your brother?’

‘He wouldn’t come. He said we couldn’t “abandon Gandayaw to the white men and the Tatmadaw”. Like the three of us were the last line of defence.’

‘So you left him?’

‘My mom pleaded. But he just went off into the forest with his friends. He said he wouldn’t show himself in town again until we were gone. It must have torn my mom to pieces, but we were on somebody else’s schedule and there wasn’t a lot she could do. She knew how stubborn Zaya was. She used to tell me he’d follow us one day.’

Raf doesn’t want to interrupt the story but he can’t stop himself from informing Cherish that this chicken curry might be the best curry he’s ever eaten.

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

It’s fragrant like getting knocked down in the street by one of those trolleys from the flower market would be fragrant, and the hot capsaicin buzz feels as if it’s seeping directly through his soft palate into his medulla oblongata, about a hundred times as good as ethylbuphedrone. ‘I wish I knew how to make one like this.’