Shadowboxer Page 3

  When the needle went in, Mya had expected the young man to disappear. But he didn’t.

  Something in the young reporter had resisted.

  That was why Mya had to bring him here herself. Now she tugged on his filthy arms. He was skinny but tall, a dead weight. His head lolled back, long hair falling away from his handsome face. There was foam in the corners of his mouth and his eyes were half-open, unfocused.

  He needs a doctor, she thought.

  But he was dangerous. Johnny had said so when he brought the unconscious man to Mr. Richard’s house. Mya had been cleaning the tiny room that passed for a lab when Johnny carried the man and dumped him on the covered porch.

  ‘We caught him spying, sir,’ Johnny had told Mr. Richard in English. ‘Sending pictures of the house back to a paper in London. He was Marco’s translator but he didn’t give up when we took care of Marco.’

  Then he had handed Mr. Richard a silver phone, saying, ‘It’s password-protected.’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ Mr Richard had said. ‘If you knew there was a translator why didn’t you remove him?’

  Mr Richard’s voice was soft and sweet. He trembled when he moved, and his body was weak. He had a long, sticklike nose and crooked yellow teeth. He had brown spots all over his pink skin and a few strands of white hair on his head. The old Englishman didn’t look as though he could harm an insect, let alone an overfed American ex-soldier like Johnny. But Johnny was as afraid of Mr. Richard as the servants were.

  ‘We have been looking for him, sir,’ Johnny had assured Mr. Richard, pacing up and down the covered porch of the stilt house and glancing out into the trees in the twitchy, slightly-paranoid way he had. ‘You want him to disappear? There’s always the river.’

  ‘No. Bodies have a way of washing up. He must go where Marco and the others went. There must be no evidence left behind.’

  Mya scrubbed a beaker with assiduous attention. After only two years in Thailand, she understood both Thai and English but spoke both languages only haltingly. She didn’t let Mr. Richard know how much she understood because English was the language he used for speaking his secrets.

  She had learned her first words of Thai from Som, the monk who had come to the prison camp and offered to sneak Mya and some other children across the river to Thailand—for a better life, Som said. Som had told Mya’s parents she would be safe in Thailand, for there was a kind Englishman who ran an orphanage there, a good Buddhist. Mr. Richard wouldn’t mind if Mya ‘travelled’ in meditation. He would see that she was cared for until the violence in Myanmar was over.

  Mya could still see the look on her mother’s face. ‘Work hard and pray we will see each other again, but don’t disappear,’ her mother had said. ‘You know what I mean. Don’t go to your forest. It’s dangerous.’

  Forbidding Mya to go to the forest was like forbidding a fish to swim. The forest called her. Her mind would merge with the trees and plants that were nearby, and then she would simply slip over the edge of this world and into that one—she’d wander for hours among immortal animals and unreal flowers beneath great, brooding trees. ‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ her mother would say, exasperated. ‘The way you disappear when you are supposed to be watching Thiri, or the fact that you see ghosts and they don’t frighten you.’

  No wonder Mya had been the daughter that was sent away. But Som had not taken her to the orphanage with the others; instead, Mr. Richard had welcomed her into his own home. He had encouraged her to disappear. He needed her to harvest the medicines of the otherworld that she could enter so easily. He needed her to guide him when he took the night flower extract himself, so that he could visit the forest and return home safely with the help of the antidote. And sometimes she came on her own, to deliver packages to other children who had been sent into the forest from their masters in other parts of the world. She was a part of something; she’d known that for a long time. Until now she had believed she was part of something good.

  But now she was helping Mr. Richard abandon this young man who was not yet dead, who had no means to escape the immortal forest on his own.

  Mya’s throat was tight. She couldn’t believe any of this was happening. The young man was only a translator for Marco; half-Thai, half-British, according to Johnny, and probably innocent of whatever wrong his boss had done. If they left him here alone, he would die.

  The forest was moving around her. There were immortal beings here instead of earthly animals. Things with big eyes, iridescent scales, flashing claws. Creatures that dissolved as smoke, then reappeared somewhere else, as bright and unreal as reflections on still water.

  Mya could go no farther. She stopped dragging the man, as if to catch her breath. Mr. Richard caught her up.

  ‘We have had a narrow escape,’ he said. ‘Why do you look at me like that?’

  Mya said nothing.

  ‘This fool would have destroyed me and turned you over to the Burmese army. The orphanage would have been closed down, and then what would happen to all the refugee children I care for? Mya, the small-minded are always a danger to people like us. After this man’s soul has grown and learned, he will return to the world to try again in another life. Do you understand?’

  Mya nodded, even though she didn’t understand why someone who wasn’t dead in the first place had to reincarnate. She offered a silent prayer for the man’s protection. When Mr. Richard led her away, she tried hard not to look back, but she couldn’t help taking one little glance over her shoulder.

  In the darkness between trees, she saw golden eyes and a black mane. The lion’s gaze followed Mya.

  Mr. Richard was not well. He appeared insubstantial, even as the apparitions in the trees were becoming more solid all the time. A group of deer were soundlessly keeping pace with the humans. Their coin-colored eyes flashed, and one of them assumed the form of a young woman just for a moment. She smiled at Mya.

  Embarrassed, Mya looked away. Mr. Richard staggered a little.

  ‘I must return,’ he said. ‘The night orchid hurts me.’

  He sank to his knees. His eyes closed. He wrapped his arms around his gut, clutching the pain from the plant extract he had injected in himself to come here. Tears streamed down his face.

  Mya felt suddenly alone. She had lived her first ten years in a forest village and she was at ease with the smells and subtle sounds of the earthly jungle, but this forest was not the same. It was a place of many moods, and she would never understand it no matter how many times she came here. Now the trees seemed to crowd around her. They were huge and green with moss. Their leaves hissed and muttered. The deer girls had gone, but Mya knew there were other creatures living here, beings from stories and songs. You never knew what was waiting for you in the shifting green shadows.

  Like that face. She could just make it out. A child’s face, hovering in the air above the suggestion of hands and a body. A boy, not much older than Mya.

  A ghost.

  The ghost looked at Mya and before she could look away, he had appeared right beside her. Quick as a thought. He was vividly present, complete with the smell of rotting flowers.

  ‘Do you know what he is praying for?’ said the boy. Mya shrank away, shaking her head no. ‘Protection from ghosts. He has murdered so many, you see. Even a monk.’

  Mya reeled. ‘That can’t be. No one would hurt a monk.’

  ‘I was like you once,’ the ghost said. ‘You think if you do everything right it will get better. It won’t. You will never be free.’

  Mya shrank away, quivering. The ghost’s ill-will flooded over her like cold water.

  Mr. Richard got to his feet. The boy had gone without a sound. Mr Richard reached over and gripped Mya’s hand.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said in Thai, reaching into his pocket for the envelope containing the antidote he needed to return home. His movements became quicker and more frantic as he didn’t find it. Without the antidote, the night orchid that had brought him here would damage him—even kill
him, as he was trying to kill the young stranger.

  ‘Mya, where’s the envelope?’

  Mya stared blankly. He always carried some of the antidote with him. It was a blue powder made from the venom of a naga. Mr. Richard had all sorts of pills and ampules and atomisers in his many pockets. He was a chemist, after all.

  His face was strained.

  ‘Help me look,’ he said. ‘Must have dropped it. Retrace our steps...’

  They began to search the forest floor, but Mya wasn’t even sure which way they had come. She couldn’t see any marks made by the young man’s body where it had been dragged. Mr. Richard moaned and clutched himself and began to froth.

  ‘I can’t see,’ he said. ‘I’m going blind. I mustn’t die here. I am so close to immortality...’

  He fell down. She stopped and went to him. She’d never seen him like this. He must have taken too much of the night orchid.

  ‘What do I do, Mr. Richard?’ she said, kneeling on fir needles. The boy’s ghost formed over Mr. Richard’s head and she shuddered.

  ‘Leave him here,’ snapped the ghost. ‘It’s what he’ll do to you one day, if he doesn’t sell you.’

  Mr. Richard didn’t seem to hear. He let out another groan.

  ‘Do what we always do,’ he managed to say. ‘Make the passage back to my house. Help me through... I need the antidote.’ He coughed.

  ‘Leave him here,’ said the ghost urgently. ‘Don’t you know he’s nothing without you? He can’t come here, and he can’t leave. Not without you.’

  Never listen to ghosts, Mya reminded herself. Anyway, she wanted to be back in the solid world, with its heat and smells and safe walls. With her heart and mind as well as her hands, she felt for the way back through the foliage. The forest began to tremble as its reality gave way.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ Mr. Richard begged.

  The ghost mocked, ‘Ah, now you know how it feels, yes?’

  But Mr. Richard still didn’t hear the ghost. He clutched at Mya, who closed her eyes and focused her mind on the place where she had come from: the covered porch of Mr. Richard’s stilt house. The forest began to open. She stepped out of the forest and on to the wooden floor, leaving the angry ghost behind.

  She was back in the heat of Mr. Richard’s wooden house in the forest. Under the stilt house chickens were squawking, and clouds of insects moved through the dappled sunlight where the forest met the covered meditation porch. Everything in the forest might have been a vision in meditation—except for the clumps of mud that lay on the wooden floor, fallen from the journalist’s boots as he had been dragged out of the world.

  She saw the envelope with a little of the blue powder spilling out; it must have slipped from Mr. Richard’s pocket. Mya snatched it up and turned back to the immortal world, still hovering in the air. The pathway lay up high, among the branches of the earthly forest, so that she seemed to be floating off the porch into thin air. Again she entered the chill of the immortal world.

  Mr Richard lay on the fir needles, writhing and moaning. She tipped a little of the powder onto his tongue. He stiffened, and although his eyes did not focus, he grabbed her hand and pulled it to his mouth. The powder spilled on him, on the dirt. Some made its way into him. He put his palms on the dirt and licked the spilt powder up like an animal.

  Mya tugged at him and he managed to crawl after her. He crawled out of the forest and between the wooden rails of the raised porch. There he lay on his back, breathing harshly at first, then deeply. In time the twitching subsided.

  Mya did not know what to do. If he woke up and found her in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, he might forget that she had saved his life. He might forget that any of this had happened. He was like that. The medicines he took made him kind and gentle, the sort of person one would do anything for. But without the drugs he could be ugly. Everyone feared him. She had no name for what he might do, no picture in her mind. Only a falling sensation in her stomach where imagination failed her.

  She sat very still until the incense burned down to ash. Then she started to creep across the floor. Every time she moved, she sneaked a glance at Mr Richard to see if he was stirring. He wasn’t. The flesh of her legs stung as the blood began to return.

  There was a stuffed monkey sitting on top of the apothecary chest, its glass eyes covered in dust. The monkey looked sick. Lots of its fur was missing. Mange, she thought. She wouldn’t touch it.

  Mr Richard had dropped the phone on the floor. He lay so still she wasn’t even sure he was breathing. She had the urge to go over to him and poke him, but she would never dare.

  Mr Richard did not move.

  Then, without Mya thinking about it, her arm shot out and took the phone. She found herself slipping into the work room that smelled of herbs and incense. On the shelves above the apothecary chest were skulls of animals and jars of dark liquid. There were crocks of dried herbs, and dolls with sad faces. Blue computer light spilled over the high-tech equipment and shone on the dolls’ black-feathered hair.

  When she opened the phone, lights came on and a chiming noise sounded. It had a touch screen in English.

  One of the house servants was coming up the stairs. Mya held the phone behind her back, heart pounding.

  Daeng came in, saw Mr Richard, and gasped.

  ‘Ploy!’ she shouted down the stairs. ‘Hurry, Mr. Richard needs us. Mya, why didn’t you call us? What happened to him? Quickly, quickly!’

  Ploy helped Daeng carry Mr. Richard to his bed, where he remained unconscious for three days while they fussed over him and called a succession of doctors, and sent and received a flurry of jerky video calls from Mr. Richard’s computer.

  Mya was largely ignored. She climbed the bodhi tree outside the house and standing on a branch too narrow to support anyone but her she peered through the window. While Daeng video chatted to Mr Richard’s wife in L.A., Mya sat on the branch pretending to talk to her mother on the password-protected phone.

  As if Mya’s mother had a phone in the military camp. As if everything were different.

  Charisma in a Bottle

  MR RICHARD STAYED in bed for a week. For Mya it was a holiday. No prayers. No helping in the lab with acids that burned fingers, no bitter smoke. No hours spent listening to Mr Richard’s teachings while the stuffed monkey watched over them with its dusty eyes.

  Mya had placed the phone by Mr. Richard’s bedside and she had tried to forget what she had seen. She helped Ploy and Daeng with the housework, and for a change they treated her kindly. She was allowed to eat her meals with the women and watch TV at the same time. They gave her a beautiful red dress to wear.

  This didn’t make her happy. She kept remembering the ghost boy.

  You will never be free.

  ‘When will Mr Richard send me home?’ Mya asked Ploy one night, when they were down in the cool room watching a particularly emotional episode of the soap opera Nang Rai. And Daeng, who had been blotting her eyes with a napkin already, now covered her mouth and ran outside.

  ‘Your family have bad karma,’ Ploy told Mya over the sound of the electric bug-zapper. ‘You must do your work here if you want to gain merit for your family.’

  ‘I don’t understand why I can go to the forest if I have bad karma,’ Mya said.

  ‘Don’t be cheeky,’ Ploy said sharply. ‘You are very rude. Of course some children can go in and out of this world. Some of you are only halfway on this earth. That is the danger.’

  Over the popping of dying mosquitoes, Daeng could be heard making a strangled noise just outside.

  ‘Aunt Ploy, please tell me, why is Aunt Daeng crying?’

  ‘Aunt Daeng is not crying, mouse.’

  On screen, two men were engaged in a long and tense staring contest. As this dragged on a bit, Mya whispered:

  ‘When I am thirteen am I old enough?’

  ‘Go to bed,’ said Aunt Ploy.

  On the screen a hi-so woman with bright makeup and tall, coiffed hair was now attacking
the pure and kind farm-born heroine by throwing a succession of vases at her.

  They feel sorry for me, she thought. It seems they think I’m going to die.

  Mya tore herself away from the screen and went outside. Aunt Daeng was nowhere to be seen. The chickens were asleep in the open space beneath the stilt house.

  High overhead, the silver slip of a jet eased across the dark sky. Mya watched it, wondering if her mother could see it.

  From the big open window above she heard Mr Richard’s scratchy voice on the phone. Probably to America, at this hour.

  ‘It’s too far for me to travel in my condition. Why can’t you come here?’

  A pause. Then:

  ‘You ask too much. You swear to me you had nothing to do with the reporter? Because I will find out if you are lying.’

  His tone was shrill. Mya wondered who he could be speaking to. He sounded childish.

  ‘Don’t pretend you ever loved me. You used me to get out of your sad life. I was younger then, and you were beautiful—but don’t forget where you come from. My wife knows everyone in L.A.. She can make you or break you at a word from me, and I expect cooperation. I expect loyalty. If you disappoint me you know the consequences.’

  There was a long pause. Mya could hear Mr. Richard pacing slowly up and down.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said at last. ‘Where are you? Yes, in about an hour’s time. Wait for me there.’

  Mya heard him put the headset down. She slipped behind the bodhi tree. But he knew she was there, listening. He knew everything. He called out the window.

  ‘Mya. I know you are awake. Come up.’

  The long rest seemed to have done Mr Richard good. He was not so pale as before, and his lips were no longer purplish gray.