Shadowboxer Page 5

  ‘Number three doesn’t have to come,’ Malu said quietly, pulling some dead leaves off a spider plant. ‘This is your chance to stop it. Go to Thailand. Change.’

  I shook my head. ‘You don’t get it. I don’t have a choice. My fuckups never quit until I’m all out of options.’

  ‘How do you think I felt when I went to boarding school with five pairs of Walmart underwear and there were girls there with their own polo ponies? You get used to feeling freaked out all the time. Being freaked is just a sign you’re challenging yourself.’

  ‘For real now?’

  ‘For real. Go with it. So tell me, are you going to that big place where all the Westerners go?’

  ‘Fairtex gym? No. It’s a tiny place. Mr B said they don’t have a website.’

  ‘So it’s authentic. Are you going to be in a little hut somewhere in the forest, picking fruit off the trees?’

  ‘It’s in Bangkok so I don’t think it’s a hut. It better not be a hut. I need a real bathroom. Especially with all that unfamiliar food and my... um... delicate stomach.’

  ‘I’m way ahead of you,’ Malu said. ‘I bought you Imodium AD on my way home. Four boxes. You won’t shit the whole time you’re out there.’

  Got Smelly Bottom

  RAIN DRIPPED THROUGH the leaky roof of the PortaPotty and plopped on my head. I was holding the last three sheets of toilet paper in my hand, trying to save them until I was sure the eruption in my guts had ended. So far that wasn’t happening.

  This kid called Pepsi was banging on the door and calling to me in a piping voice.

  ‘Come out now, Jade!’

  Sweat dripped off my eyebrows as another spasm gripped my intestines. It felt like a bunch of snakes were biting me all up and down my guts, poisonous snakes with fangs who also did that boa-constrictor-type thing that snakes do. At the same time. I just wanted to run away from my insides and leave them to shoot rocket fuel out my butt without me.

  But running away from my own insides was not an option. I opened my eyes. It was about 379 degrees outside and pouring rain in the building site adjacent to the gym. There was no seat, so I was squatting. My legs trembled with exertion and my teeth were chattering with that shivery feeling caused by shitting and hurling almost at the same time.

  ‘Please go away!’ I yelled. Malu had given me a Thai language book to study on the plane, but I’m not good at learning from books. So far I’d been getting by with gestures and English and the bits of Thai I’d learned over the years from Cake.

  ‘Time to eat, Jade,’ the boy sang, knocking again. I knew he was laughing at me; they’d all been laughing at me since the minute I got here. It was like I was some kind of traveling freak show. First I got on the wrong bus from the airport, then I got on another wrong bus to try to fix it. I’d walked about six miles, jetlagged, in the rain, until I found some college students who spoke English. They were so nice I almost cried, especially when one of them helped me buy this incredibly yummy fruit drink with salt in it.

  When I got off the bus I changed my mind about the college students. They must have tricked me. This couldn’t be the right place. Who builds a boxing gym in the most polluted area of the city, in open air under the arches of a superhighway? The air reeked of exhaust. Rain was pouring down in sheets from the roadway that passed overhead. Instead of houses there were makeshift shacks, and outside one of them two men squatted on the ground passing a bottle back and forth.

  I’d stood there in the warm dawn listening to the roar of traffic and shifting the weight of my bags on my shoulders. I could see the boxing ring and the bag alley, right out in the open by a railway siding. This couldn’t be it. A gym like this couldn’t have any association with Mr. B and his Humvee and his gold chains. No way.

  A tired-looking woman in flip-flops and a skirt had opened the doors of what looked like a shed and started sweeping the concrete. I remembered to make a wai, a polite little bow, before I showed her the address.

  She examined the paper. She didn’t smile, but her voice was soft.

  ‘Jade Barrera. I’ll get Coat.’ She turned and walked away.

  When I heard Coat my stomach had taken a dive, and my guts started to boil. This was the gym where I was going to spend my summer vacation?

  I’d waited on the wet pavement trying not to choke on the diesel fumes. I hadn’t expected Fairtex with clean mats and air conditioning and famous boxers, but I had expected to be able to breathe. Then I heard voices.

  Kids started pouring out of the dorm. They were all boys, from teenagers on down to eight and nine year olds, more than a dozen of them. They were wearing shorts and filthy sneakers, no shirts, and they were all laughing like everything was one gigantic joke.

  ‘What is this, day care?’ I said. ‘Where are the adults?’

  A tall, stocky man showed up wearing a Fila t-shirt and shiny basketball shorts. He looked me up and down and sniffed, then gestured for me to join in the run. The woman took my bags and I was off, running along the railway siding through clouds of bluish exhaust in a neighborhood that made the Port Authority bus terminal look like the Ritz. I hadn’t slept longer than 20 minutes in the last two days, and I’d only eaten snacks from food carts off the street—and that fruit juice cocktail that had tasted gorgeous at the time.

  I knew a 10k run was a standard part of the day in many camps, but I didn’t expect it to kick in on the first morning. Maybe it was a test. Well, guess what? I failed. Because after only a couple miles I’d fallen behind the rest—even the eight-year-olds. The air was like hot sludge, and I was regretting drinking that juice. All the way back to camp, I was wishing I’d taken that Imodium before I started running. The only thing that kept me going was fear of messing myself in public.

  Finally it was over. We turned down an alley and returned to the highway, passing beneath its shelter and back to the open-air gym.

  ‘Please!’ I panted in my pathetic Thai, staggering after the others. ‘Where’s the toilet?’

  The boys all started giggling. Like they were embarrassed. I was the one about to mess myself—did I not have the right word for toilet? What was so embarrassing?

  ‘You want the day care toilet?’ A kid was speaking English with a huge smile. ‘Sure, no problem. I am Pepsi. I will be your guide. Come this way!’

  Great, I thought. I was rude, so now they’re going to take advantage of my delicate stomach and play games on me. I couldn’t blame them—I’d have done the same. But no way was I following him.

  Luckily I spotted a PortaPotty, which they obviously didn’t want me to see. It stood crookedly among tall weeds in what looked like a building site next to the gym. The bottom of the door had been kicked in. Snarling at the boys, I went in and held what was left of the door shut.

  ‘No!’ the English-speaking boy was shouting at me. ‘Not there!’ He grabbed at the door but I closed it and held it shut.

  Just in time.

  It smelled like something died. And there was no seat. Just a hole.

  There’s no feeling quite like squatting in an unfamiliar toilet knowing that a stranger outside is holding your passport and wallet and phrasebook.

  I was helpless.

  ‘You OK in there?’ said Pepsi in English. ‘You need some help?’

  ‘No,’ I gasped. I held that door shut for all I was worth. I could just see the Instagram post: Jade Barrera on PortaPotty, Bangkok.Nobody was getting a picture of this.

  The boy went away and came back. This time his hand reached under the broken edge of the ‘door’ and shoved half a roll of pink toilet paper at me.

  I burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, thank god,’ I sobbed.

  ‘We going now,’ Pepsi said in English. ‘Better hurry. You miss training.’

  When I finally showed up, the training was in full swing. The gym was open-air and everything looked like it was about to fall apart. Two older kids were doing pad work in the ring and others were drilling pads on the concrete around the ring. So
me were working bags. Some were doing sit-ups and lifting concrete weights held by ropes in their teeth. Some were jumping rope. Coat lounged against the ropes and watched the older fighters.

  I felt weak. I took a few swigs from the bottle of water in my bag, but it barely kept me on my feet. I’d thought the rainy season would be cool, but the place was like a steam bath. Everyone ignored me, so I decided to do bag work. The bag was hard, and where the filling had settled at the bottom it felt like concrete.

  All around me a random chorus of shouted ‘Ay’s’ and ‘Oh’s’ sang out as the boys trained. ‘Ai-ai-ai-aaaaaay!’ they’d yell as they let off a series of shots. The older boys were real hardbodies. They prowled around, stalking each other, one guy holding the pads and the other hitting, sometimes clinching, sometimes even throwing. They weren’t training in anything like all-out fight mode, but there was no way I could keep up with them the way I was feeling right now.

  The gym might be shabby, but I had to admit the standards were pretty high.

  ‘Jade.’

  I hadn’t noticed Coat coming up behind me. Winded, I stepped away from the bag I’d been working on and wai’d to him; he’d squared up to me with a set of pads on his forearms. Towering over me, he nodded for me to hit.

  I was blowing hard by then, and nothing I did had much effect. Coat signalled the shots he wanted from me but kept his evasive footwork going so that I didn’t have enough time to get in. He was definitely checking me out, and I was coming up lacking. But I tried. I landed a couple of good round kicks, and I was aware that some boys had stopped training to watch the foreign girl. Coat turned to them and said, ‘keep working,’ with a smile, and they did.

  At last he let me rest. ‘Pepsi!’ he called. Pepsi ran over, looking eager to please. Coat handed me his belly protector and pads and I slipped them on. Coat indicated that Pepsi should train with me.

  Pepsi backed off, shaking his head and looking at the floor. He said something in Thai, and Coat laughed.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said. Coat didn’t answer.

  ‘Bad luck train with girl,’ Pepsi answered in English. ‘Jade, you train with Pook. Not me.’

  I could feel my blood pressure rising. I was ready to snap; but nobody else got upset. No shouting. No swearing. Pepsi smiled and looked at the ground, ducking his head. Not looking at me.

  ‘I train her,’ Coat said. ‘Am I bad luck?’

  Pepsi scuffed the floor with his toe.

  ‘OK, Pepsi. OK, come on.’

  Pepsi flushed. The other boys were giggling. He gave in.

  Coat showed us what he wanted us to do. Pepsi started putting his shots into me. He wasn’t messing around, that’s for sure. He might be young, but he was ferocious, and he didn’t get tired. Coat corrected me a couple of times on the way I was using the pad to signal, but overall he seemed pleased.

  He nodded to me, said, ‘OK,’ and then told us we could take a break.

  ‘I gotta go toilet,’ Pepsi said loudly in English, jumping up and down like some kind of pee bunny. Then he shot me a sly look and went across the gym to a door in the wall behind the boxing ring. He opened it like a game show hostess revealing a prize. There was a clean toilet and sink inside.

  I felt like crying. And maybe if I’d cried, things would have gone better for me.

  But I didn’t cry. I stalked across the gym, grabbed Pepsi by the throat and shoved him against the wall.

  ‘You wanna fight me, Pepsi?’ I snarled. ‘You think you’re funny? Let’s get in the ring and find out how funny I am.’

  He tried to shake me off, but I’m not that easy to shake, not when I’m mad.

  ‘I not fighting you,’ Pepsi said. ‘You unlucky foreigner, got smelly bottom, I not fighting you.’

  If I hadn’t been so mad, ‘got smelly bottom’ would have broken me up laughing. But I don’t back down.

  Coat had to pull me off him.

  ‘You fight in ring, not each other,’ he said. Then he added something more complicated in Thai, to Pepsi, and I wondered what it was, because Pepsi shut up after that.

  ‘Take a break,’ Coat said to me. The way he said it I knew I’d done wrong, but I’m damned if I know what I was supposed to have done instead.

  I peeled off my gloves and followed Pook.

  ‘You want to stay here?’ she said, softly. ‘Or go back to America?’

  I felt about two inches tall. I gulped. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

  Why do I always fuck up? Why? Why? Why?

  ‘Cake sent me a text about you,’ Pook said. ‘I see he was not kidding.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘Please let me stay. I’ll be very quiet. I won’t argue.’

  ‘You must do better. We see how it goes.’ She showed me the corner (literally) I was sleeping in, and the table where everyone ate meals. And where the extra toilet paper was kept.

  She showed me the toilet paper twice.

  Smart Phone

  LONELY AND ANXIOUS weeks followed the incident with the journalist. Mr. Richard was growing increasingly electric and unpredictable. He was working on the thing he called ‘the final medicine’ in his lab as though his life depended on it, and maybe it did. He had been sickly since the incident with the night orchid extract, and now he looked at Mya assessingly, as though judging her strength. He talked to people all over the world in many languages. He worked in the lab. He slept only fitfully, when he could no longer resist the hushing music of the rains on the roof of the forest house.

  He never mentioned the young journalist again, and he didn’t even try to get into the phone. It just sat there, unnoticed amid the mess of vials and papers, even though Johnny stopped by and offered to take it to a hacker he knew in Bangkok. ‘What the journalist found out is immaterial,’ Mr. Richard told Johnny. ‘He’s not coming back.’

  Mya couldn’t be sure whether Mr. Richard really didn’t care about the information stored on the phone, or whether he just didn’t trust Johnny. He didn’t seem to trust anyone lately. Something was happening to him. This was not quite visible, but almost. Once when Mr Richard was sleeping she saw a ghostly image of him rise from his body and drift towards her, wavering, until it disintegrated like smoke.

  She did not want to share her body with him.

  One night she woke to the sound of distant music. It seemed to be coming from the meditation porch. Mya rose and slipped her red dress over her head. As she made her way barefoot through the blotchy, leaf-tossed darkness she realized the sound came from beyond, from the little work room adjacent to the open porch. Mya hesitated. The masks on the walls were shrouded by shadow, but the blue computer light emanating from the laboratory made the stuffed monkey’s glass eyes gleam. A bitter smell came with the light. Mr. Richard must be working again.

  The music was a tinny little melody, repeating endlessly.

  The mysterious password-protected phone was ringing.

  Mya’s breath caught as she saw Mr. Richard’s body slumped across the desk. As she approached, she saw with relief that he was breathing. A smear of saliva lay on the formica counter by his open lips. Jars and bottles were open. The sleeping computer screensaver cycled images of gods and animals from old temple artwork.

  The phone rang and rang. Mr. Richard had obtained a charger for it and plugged it into the wall socket. Did password-protected mean you needed a password to answer it, or just to make calls?

  Mya picked it up and pressed the green button. The ringing stopped. She said nothing, but listened.

  The voice was familiar, like the back of her hand, like the edge of sleep, like—

  ‘Mya? Mya, I know you are there.’

  Mya knew this voice. And the woman was speaking Burmese.

  Mya’s heart fluttered. ‘Mother?’

  There was a silence, in which Mya decided that maybe she was wrong. Maybe the voice was not quite right. But it had been a year since she’d heard her mother’s voice. Maybe...

  ‘Mother?’


  ‘Mya, listen. There isn’t much time.’

  ‘Where are you? Mother, where are you?’

  There was a pause. Mya burst into tears.

  ‘Stop crying. Listen to me. Write this down. Quickly. Write down this password.’

  ‘Password?’

  ‘For the phone. Write it down.’

  Mya grabbed an envelope and wrote down the Western letters and numbers with a ballpoint pen.

  ‘Now listen to me. You have to get out of there. Take this phone and go. Now.’

  ‘But, Mother, where are you?’

  ‘It’s not where, it’s when... Mya, I can’t explain. Just go!’

  The line cut off. Tears streaming down her face, Mya pressed buttons randomly in a desperate attempt to get the voice back. But it was no use.

  Mr. Richard stirred.

  Mya was sweating but her fingertips felt icy cold. As if he suddenly sensed her there, Mr. Richard jerked awake. He recognized her and relaxed.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Mya had slid the phone behind her back, but it was still plugged in and if he woke up properly, he’d see the wire trailing to Mya’s side. And she still had a pen in her left hand. The slip of paper sat on the table beside the keyboard, the nonsensical selection of letters and numbers that would unlock the reporter’s phone.

  Where was she supposed to go? Her mother hadn’t told her anything. Mya couldn’t just run into the woods...

  A memory came to Mya. Her mother’s voice, the words she had spoken while they were in the prison camp.

  ‘When the soldiers first came I should have sent you to run away into the forest. You might have had a chance, then—the forest is your place, Mya. Here there is no chance. If I could do it again I would send you to the trees.’

  Mya took a long breath. Her mother hadn’t warned her to run back then, but the voice on the phone was telling her to go to the forest now. It was a sign. She could run blindly, just take off and leave it all behind.