Glow (7 page)

Gandayaw was not only a boom town but also a border checkpoint, because in exchange for a forty-five per cent royalty to the government, Lacebark ran the Concession like a sovereign enclave. They couldn’t patrol more than a fraction of the perimeter, but it was rumoured that if they found you ‘trespassing’ in the forest you might be beaten or even shot. Although some of Gandayaw’s savage new prosperity came from Lacebark’s executives and managers and engineers, much more came from its private security corps, who could often be seen swaggering like conquerers through the town with AK-47s strapped at their sides on their way to meetings with liaison officers from the Tatmadaw. Mine workers coming home from the Concession never seemed to want to talk much about life inside, which led to a lot of stories among the children of Gandayaw: that the Americans kept order with robotic tigers they brought to the forest in shipping containers; that when men died in accidents, which was often, they were reanimated and made to keep toiling. Even back then, Cherish had a feeling that one day she would have to see the Concession for herself.

The farthest she ever strayed into the forest as a child was one day at the end of the rainy season when she saw a fox drinking from a puddle by the ridge at the edge of town, and while her mother was distracted she followed it into the trees. The fox moved quite slowly as if it wanted to help her keep up. After a few minutes they came to a clearing where a deer was eating berries from a
longan
tree. Noticing the fox, the deer stopped eating, whereupon the fox crouched down and wiggled its hindquarters from side to side like a cat does before it pounces. Cherish was surprised at this because there was no way the fox was big enough to take down the stag, whose antlers were like a pair of crowbars. But when the fox did make its leap, it tacked too far to the right, so that the stag could easily bounce sideways out of the way. And after that the fox paid the stag no more attention. Instead, it pawed and snuffled at the ground where the stag had been standing. Cherish tiptoed close enough to see that the fox was grazing on white grubs about the size of the dung beetle grubs her uncle sometimes liked to cook in a disgusting omelette. Then she heard her mother screaming for her, and she ran back towards the ridge, resigned to a spanking.

It wasn’t until she was falling asleep that night that she worked out her theory of what must have happened. The fox had deliberately made the stag lurch to the side so that it would stretch out the skin of its flank, where some sort of insect had laid its eggs. When the skin went tight over the ribs, the grubs popped out like beans from a pod, and the fox got an easy meal. Cherish did wonder why the stag couldn’t have performed the same surgery on itself without the fox’s help, but perhaps it was for the same reason that she couldn’t scare her own hiccups away so she always had to get Zaya to do it. Years later she would still imagine hiccups as pallid larvae jumping out of her mouth.

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.’

‘Me too.’

‘Did you ever find out who that guy was?’ Raf says. ‘Your father?’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think of him as my father. He’s just a genomic precursor.’

‘Right, sorry.’

‘He must have come to Gandayaw in 1990. Some Lacebark exec who got tanked up on Johnnie Walker one night and raped my mom. And I guess Zaya must have been there too. In the room, or watching through a doorway. He would’ve been six years old. That’s why she sent Zaya away when she saw the guy in the car. She must have thought there was a chance Zaya might recognise the guy too, and if he did, he’d go apeshit and get himself killed. She was probably right about that.’ Cherish purses her lips. ‘I always used to find it weird, what that prick did. Like, if you can rape someone on a business trip, how can you also care enough to pay for a new life for your little rape kid? But now I think it was a self-esteem thing. Status. He was thinking, “I know I’m not the type of guy who has a kid growing up in this shitty town full of hookers and guns and speed. So I’d better throw some money on the ground to make sure.” Or maybe he did feel genuinely guilty, too. Who knows? We never saw him again.’

Raf scoops up the last of the stir-fried beans. ‘Was it weird, moving to America?’

‘Was it weird? Eating macaroni cheese in the cafeteria at a middle school in Echo Park after spending my entire life up to that point in a mining town in southern Burma?’

‘Sorry. Stupid question.’

Every time she smiles she puts his heart in her mouth like a wonton. ‘Yeah, kind of, but then again it was definitely no weirder for me than it was for, like, the Liberian boy sitting next to me. So it’s not like I won that contest.’

‘Where’s your brother now? Still in Gandayaw?’

‘No. But my mom’s still in Los Angeles.’ She pushes away her plate, casting into shadow the little golden flowerbed she’s cultivated beside it by picking the foil absently from the neck of her beer bottle. Her phone beeps from her pocket and she takes it out to read a text message. ‘Hey, I just need to talk to the chef for a minute,’ she says. Raf eats the last of her rice. When she comes back from the kitchen, she’s putting something in her purse but he doesn’t see what. She also has the bill. ‘They’re going to wrap up a couple slices of mango cake for us,’ she says as she sits down. ‘Do you have plans tonight?’

Yes: Isaac has a new Xbox game. ‘No.’

‘Well, shall we get some more booze and go back to your apartment? I’m not drinking any more of that god-awful vodka you had.’

On the way here they stopped off at the block with the Myth FM transmitter so Raf could take Rose back up to the roof. As much as he wants to climb into a dryer with this girl and never get out, there’s also part of him that doesn’t even want to leave the restaurant, because he knows that wherever he goes next he can’t conceivably feel as much well-being as he does now. There’s no clock on the wall and no other customers, and time in here only moves as fast as the Maneki Neko cats can waft it forward with their plastic paws, so why stir? But he still nods and takes out his wallet to find his share of the bill.