Barang by Alex Sinclair

Sihanoukville began dressing itself in a fresh coating of sleaze just as the night bruised the evening’s amber face.

Its nocturnal denizens awakened bleary-eyed to crawl out of a thousand tacky rooms and flee the judgement of mirrors, desperate for another drink, another fix, another sordid five-dollar fuck.

The corniced silhouette of Black Dog Island sat on the edge of the horizon like a giant dog turd before it was swallowed up by a final flamboyant flourish of pink and then crushed with a wall of absolute darkness.

An indolent sea breeze howled salt and dead fish into the feigned smiles of brasses cadging drinks from blotchy white sexpats in neon-drenched saloon bars.

This is where the river ended thought Rudy as he walked up beach road, a perennially twitchy waster with a busted nose on his way to tend bar at the Monkey’s Paw, Sihanoukville’s premier watering hole.

His amped-up eyes restlessly gunned the street as a toothpick danced in his lips, a habit that he had picked up from a father whom he aped but in truth had barely known.

His highwayman dad had chewed on toothpicks as he robbed banks with a starter pistol according to Rudy’s mother, and had even won himself a front-page headline in one of Blighty’s tackier tabloids.

“Useless bastard,” Rudy’s mother would spit between cigarette drags and glugs of cheap Pinot Grigio.

“Some banker robber. Never saw a penny off that cunt.”

The tide of syrupy euphoria from the codeine Rudy had crushed up and snorted was receding faster than his hairline.

He needed a bolt of whisky to numb his system, or perhaps a ragged bump of ice would be the ticket.

Rudy suffered from a cellular-level attention deficit; every particle of his being craved stimulus, just not the stimulus offered up by sobering reality, and Rudy dulled its sharp edges and defanged the monsters that lurked in it with anything he could get his hands on.

Already the moon was leering down on him, stupid and garish, which put Rudy in mind of a senile god smiling down at a creation it no longer recognised.

And what would such a god see?

An army of losers reigning in the hell of their own exile, drunk on the horror screaming up from the ground, seeking and running, everyone including himself pinned in place with freedom, everyone thinking expat meant ex-human.

Going native and going nowhere, the more entrenched in Cambodia you became the more of a foreigner you looked.

Living here meant being excommunicated from decency because god wasn’t here to judge and Buddha didn’t give a fuck what you did, he just nodded and smiled as you destroyed yourself.

Rudy had been here a year, and he was amazed at how easy it was to shrug off the snakeskin of your past life and re-emerge as the person you always feared you’d become.

The royal port town of Sihanoukville protruded from the arse cheek of Cambodia’s coastline like a venereal wart, a syphilis on sea that served as a dead-end refuge for ragtag legions of derelict sex offenders on the lam, disgraced Russian oligarchs, second-tier rape-happy motorcycle clubs, desiccated lounge lizards, ageing villains collecting skin cancer, fresh-faced backpackers looking for the briefest brush with the abyss before normality and all its tedium beckoned, Vietnamese hookers glazed with despair and as of late, an army of sword-wielding triads fresh off the boat from mainland China.

The mighty dragon of progress was coming, breathing fire into the economy, and high-rise casinos and super hotels were sprouting up across the coastline like mushrooms popping up from cow shit. In the faintest tendrils of dawn’s early light, the silhouettes of their steel skeletons could be seen climbing into the sky.

Even the golden lions, once the town’s grandest monuments, cowered in the shadow of an ominous skyscraper.

The future was on the horizon, and it had nothing to do with girlie bars or beachfront stoner shacks that offered two-dollar toasties and pre-rolled joints to unwashed white dreads.

The grand vision of the bong tom lek moi was a Macau with potholes, a resort town for the Asian elite to parade their wealth, but a certain insidious element had smelled opportunity and slithered across with the big wig developers.

Two rival factions dug in deep and duelled for supremacy, and scarcely a day went unpunctuated by gunshots.

Only last week Rudy had watched the old bill unzip a smiling suitcase on the beach to reveal the gory luggage of a dismembered goon stuffed inside, and the week before that a little kid had shot his friend’s brains out in a game of cops and robbers with a discarded revolver he had found by the roadside.

Soon the violence would reach fever pitch, and Rudy would be forced into Vietnam to the indentured servitude of the English teaching rat run, but before that he was he’d dodge the bullets and take Sihanoukville for all that she was worth.

He considered home and scoffed.

Regardless of criminal charges he might face should he lay a foot back in Britain for recreating Daddy’s misadventures,( replica pistols, crack cocaine and all-night off-licences were seldom a good mix) he wagered the dreary hopelessness of the failed British experiment would body him quicker than the all but guaranteed prison shanking that death had allocated him.

He feared that fate would cheat him out of a criminal’s death, thus prohibiting his passage to Valhalla, and would instead neuter him with banality, killing him slowly over time; the colourless toil of the building site, the terminal blandness of the supermarket meal deal.

He reached the crest of the hill and made his way down the manky cracked tongue of the road toward the beach, dodging tuk-tuk drivers and grey rivers of raw sewage to push onward to the Monkey’s Paw.

#

If Sihanoukville’s netherworld had a nexus, then it was surely the Monkey’s Paw, the sick sleazy heart that sat at the centre of a spider web vibrating with bad juju and dodgy deals, a web that connected everyone to everybody else.

One wrong move made the whole thing shudder.

It was pumping hard when Rudy arrived, packed out with the premier league lowlives that infested southern Cambodia like a bad dose of crabs; Young Leopard was looking cadaverous, his skin stretched tight over his bones. The ex-monk patrolled the patchy pool table clutching a pool cue, his eyeballs smoking with ice abuse and scanning for a head to wrap the cue over.

Across the way, the twenty-stone clown loomed vastly ominous as an incoming asteroid, emanating bad vibes from the corner with an aura more toxic than an exposed nuclear reactor, nursing a mug of flat beer and wiping bullets of sweat from his face with fingers the size of overdone Cumberlands.

Next to him sat Rata, overlord of the chicken farm, his face lacquered with callousness.

God knows what those creepy cunts discussed, thought Rudy, but he had heard the rumours of murder and smoke babies.

Pulling sentry duty at the bar was Jack, drinking straight gut rot gin, the scar from the roadside accident that had half lobotomised him still grinning from the side of his head like the punchline of a permanent practical joke.

Rudy glanced at Jack as his scarified head lolled on its shoulders like a buoy bobbing in unsteady waters.

The geezer didn’t have an off switch.

Purring at his side and drinking a red bull was Srey Ti, the beachfront temptress whom Jack had fixated on.

Their courtship had been something like a lit match meeting a puddle of gasoline, nothing but a string of ugly drug-fuelled fights and vengeful indiscretions.

Only the month before Ti broke an ashtray over Jack’s head.

Jack had convinced himself with enough booze and delusion that they were an item, that somehow Srey Ti was his, and no one had ever bothered to tell him otherwise because they didn’t fancy being glassed for their troubles.

But they all knew Srey Ti belonged only to the highest bidder.

Rudy saw the tattooed flower climbing up one silken thigh, followed it past a miniskirt to the place where he knew it blossomed brightest, and then he let his eyes crawl higher up to her caramel belly with the pierced button and then the ripe breasts that he had suckled only the night previous, to meet the guilty mischief in her face.

Rudy suppressed a smirk and looked away.

What the hell.

He was only human.

#

In the back room, Danel was sitting on a stack of Klang lager with his head in his hands.

“It’s over Rudy, the triads have given me an offer I can’t refuse. All of this is yesterday’s memories.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean all of this is gone. They want to bulldoze it all and turn it into a condominium with a sky bar and a helipad. The end times have come upon us Rudy. Get out while you still can, or stay behind and die with the hippies.”

The thought of leaving Sihanoukville scared Rudy but it had been writing on the wall for a while.

Nothing good lasted and he had seen the various omens warning of the coming exodus; menacing fleets of 4x4s black and sleek as orcas tearing through town without regard for the sanctity of human life, and of course the remnants of the beloved golden Cabbage restaurant, caked in a frost of broken glass and spattered with blood after the two rival factions had fought a drunken battle with swords and chairs on the premises.

Rudy looked down at Danel, who was rubbing some crumbs from a baggie around his bleeding gums.

Danel had once been the lead bassist in a death metal clique called The Pestilence Of Arrakhan, and Rudy had always guessed that Danel secretly craved the apocalypse.

“What did they say? I mean are you sure it’s all over?”

“They offered me ten grand for the lease and said if I didn’t accept then they would make me, which basically translates as accept the money that we won’t even give you or we will chop you up and stuff you in a suitcase. So yes it’s over. Once I go the rest will topple like dominoes.”

#

Rudy manned his position behind the bar and knocked back a stiff shot of Jim Beam, feigning to mark the top-shelf drink onto his staff tab with a flick of the wrist.

“Do you have that money yet Rudy or do I need to put the frighteners up you?”

Rudy looked into the smiling face of the mayor, a tattooed troll with an impervious shock of curly hair that looked like it could break scissors.

“I’m a bit short at the minute. Can you wait another week? It’s been slow.”

A package of contraband poked out of his front pocket and there was a half-moon of crust encircling a great nostril.

He might as well wear a sign that says arrest me thought Rudy.

The mayor was enlightened with convict fatalism and believed his fate couldn’t be altered by mere inconspicuousness.

“Yes yes, of course, but make sure tomorrow comes Sahib, because usually it doesn’t. You can’t sell me a daydream Bwana. Take this and get flush. Full moon party next weekend.”

With a deft sleight of hand that would be the envy of any magician, the mayor palmed the package across the counter to Rudy, who quickly stuffed it into his crotch, not that anyone would care if they noticed.

Rudy had to smirk.

Getting flush just meant sinking deeper into the mayor’s pockets.

“And get me a draft Rudy, please. I’ve a terrible thirst on. I’ve been up all night sampling the latest batch.”

The mayor was the backpacker’s dream gone bad, a Peter Pan turned Captain Hook. He was Sihanoukville’s drug punter extraordinaire, a Fagin with a flick knife who had assembled an army of smurfs, small-time pushers too stupid to realise or desperate to care that they were just human shields put in place to prevent the mayor from going down by himself.

Rudy fell into the latter category.

He justified his recklessness by saying that he needed the money, but really money wasn’t the issue and besides, he spent most of his earnings on pizza.

Some drug lord.

It was another tightrope to tread like walking through the jungle barefoot or bombing down Victory hill on a motorcycle without a helmet, seven sheets to the wind.

Over time, danger became a jones just like anything else.

Rudy remembered the rush of that first run to Black Dog Island, his backpack stuffed with fifty grams of the mayor’s finest MDMA amethyst, his knuckles white, his veins mainlined with adrenaline as the speed ferry skipped over the waves.

A retinue of tourist police armed with Kalashnikovs had boarded just before the boat had left the pier and Rudy had been unable to control the speedball of dupers delight and fear that had gripped him; he had alternated between grinning like a lunatic as the police checked his passport and glancing into the foaming ocean, contemplating when it would be appropriate to jump in.

It was hard to admit, but dicing with total damnation kept Rudy’s dick hard. Maybe that’s what united everyone that decided to live here Rudy thought.

“Why are you so glum, Rudy? You should be happy, yes. It’s not gone yet and besides, there will always be somewhere else, yes. I’m gonna fly to Nepal, load myself up with hash, and then fly it into Bali. I’ll make a fortune.”

Rudy shook his head at the kamikaze talk he was hearing until he locked eyes with a tattoo on the mayor’s forearm that may as well have been the coat of arms for Sihanoukville and its ilk; a shark chewing up a screaming pin-up girl, with a rocker that read fucked forever.

Rudy grinned and realised it could have been his own epitaph.

He looked out and realised he’d miss all this nonsense should it go, and knew in his heart that it was already gone.

#

One more run Rudy promised himself as he held the sandwich bag of MDMA aloft, one more run and he would make a break for it with the profits.

Fuck the mayor and his money, he’d punt the Mandy on the next full moon party and shoot across the border.

He’d disappear into the maelstrom of scooter fumes that was Saigon, and he’d carve a new life for himself with what he owed.

He felt the familiar grip of apprehension.

Cambodia had a way of arranging impossible coincidences.

It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that by trying to run away he’d never leave and that Cambodia would somehow lead the mayor right to him.

Rudy wondered what the mayor would do should he ever catch him.

He wondered if the mayor was all talk, if all the fables he’d spewed of fighting to the death with cleavers on the Khao San road were just that.

He looked over at Srey Ti, who was languishing naked and half asleep on the bed.

The slug trail of his dried-up seed was still shiny on her belly and her face was flushed.

Christ Rudy thought, his ears still ringing with her screams.

There was always another reason to run away, always another calamity to swerve.

#

Rudy took his seat on the return ferry from Black Dog Island, mosquito-bit and stinking, and waited for the boat to depart.

Dawn had broken like a bloody bucket of entrails kicked across the sky and Rudy made sure to wear his fake Ray Bans, lest another passenger stare into his soul and see him for what he was.

No place made you feel quite as dirty as the island; the cloying humidity glazed you with a slime that one shower couldn’t budge and even the ocean was no salve; the crystalline waters worthy of a bounty advert were haunted with clouds of sewage and particles of human waste.

Rudy’s body was humming from the sustained assault of the full moon party’s formidable sound system and there was over a grand in US dollars stuffed into his backpack.

It had been a hard night’s graft, fifty or more cagey exchanges of palm-swapped currency and product.

It was like playing tag with bad karma; you just passed it onto the next punter.

Rudy clutched the high-voltage taser he had bought from the market and wondered if he would be able to use it if the time came.

He flicked the switch and watched lightning jump between the terminals, and then he checked his burner before throwing it into the water.

Already the mayor had called ten times as if sensing something with a clairvoyance born out of a lifetime of treachery. Men like the mayor had a sixth sense for skullduggery and recognised the scent of a rip and run often before the act had even been consummated.

He thought of the mayor, whom paranoia and guilt had now percolated into a bogeyman, and realised he could see himself in him; when he stared at the mayor he was staring at a version of himself that his own choices had marooned in the future.

It was easier to make him a monster than to deal with the cold facts of his treachery which he justified with the convict’s credo, handed down to him word of mouth from his father; do unto others before they do unto you.

#

Back in his digs, Rudy had to fight the urge to curl up and die and packed as quickly as he could, stuffing his clothes and possessions into his army Bergen.

He hit the street brittle as blown glass and wished for the night to give him the anonymity his slyness needed, but he was afforded no such mercy.

The sun wilted him with its righteous glare and as he walked he realised he had nowhere to hide.

Rudy flinched at every backfiring engine and clenched his teeth at his own shadow.

He looked up to the sky; ever since he had decided to snake the mayor he couldn’t shake the feeling that a large piano was dangling above him from a very thin rope.

He was in no state to defend himself; if the mayor jumped out now he would likely shatter into pieces.

He approached the bus station just as crates of chickens and polystyrene boxes of seafood were being loaded onto a peeling minibus which a scuffed sign tucked into the windshield  proclaimed was destined for Ho Chi Minh City.

Rudy paid for a one-way ticket and climbed aboard, eating his last two Valiums to calm himself down.

He took a seat next to a window spidered with cracks and rested his brow against it.

He sucked dead air and looked out to the street, and his blood froze.

There was the mayor mounted on his scooter like a garden gnome from hell, shooting daggers into the bus station with the manic intensity that only a wronged ex-con could possess, and then he was gone, carried off by the current of traffic.

Rudy turned his face away and sank into his seat, willing the engine to roar to life and save him.

It wouldn’t be long before the mayor did a lap of town and came back to the station to take another look, wouldn’t be long until the mayor found him cowering and he couldn’t be certain he would be able to hold his mud and die like a man.

Rudy sighed as the engine spluttered to life and nearly wept as it carried him through town and out of sight.

#

Soon the flimsy imitation of civilisation that Sihanoukville offered gave way to the moon-like landscape of the Cambodian countryside. Rudy was surrounded on both sides by shimmering swathes of paddy fields with the monsters of his better conscience in hot pursuit.

Clouds of red dust rose from the road, and sitting in the distance were the faintest jagged outlines of the mountains.

Stringy farmers the colour of burned copper toiled in the shadows of their stilt houses with ancient implements as regally crowned buffalo chewed dead cud and stared, shitting where they pleased.

Rudy let the rhythm of the road lull him into a fitful sleep, and when he opened his eyes the bus was slowing as it approached the border.

Up ahead sat a shabby cluster of administration buildings, manned by bored immigration officers armed with Chinese pistols and total indifference, the playful Khmers clad in drab tan, the stern Viets on the other side in dark green.

The driver pulled to rest next to the largest building with an asthmatic wheeze of knackered brakes and a dismissive wave of his hand before he popped the doors and beckoned the passengers off.

Rudy climbed down and made his way into the hall with the immigration desks, dodging old ladies offering ridiculously trumped-up cash exchanges, dollars for dong.

Beyond the touts was a yawning officer directing passengers with hand gestures to a phalanx of immigration desks as solemn as a line of judges’ benches, the gavels and wigs swapped for exit stamps and peaked caps. Border crossings always made Rudy feel guilty.

As Rudy joined the queue of tired travellers to await his turn he realised with a sudden bolt of horror that he hadn’t packed his passport.

The piano dangling above his head finally dropped, and it crushed him with a sense of defeat so total he had to fight the urge to cry for his mother.

He swayed, concussed and unsteady as a past-his-prime fighter.

Rudy bent down to search his meagre luggage for something he knew wasn’t even there.

Rudy had ensconced his passport in the safe at the Monkey’s Paw for safe keeping when he had first started working there, and the memory of having put it there had been washed away by a hundred or more boozy nights.

Rudy stumbled poleaxed outside into the waning sunlight.

He stared down the potholed road the bus had just brought him down, and he pictured it as the mayor’s tongue, leading Rudy back into the mayor’s funhouse entrance of a mouth no matter how hard he struggled.

Paranoia gnawed at him and he felt fixed on a track that he couldn’t steer himself away from.

The mayor had somehow colluded with fate to trap Rudy in a corner.

He was a puppet on a string.

He had to go back the way he came.

“Shit,” he said.

Alex Sinclair

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_Lions_roundabout_Sihanoukville_Cambodia.jpgWikicommons – Golden lions on a traffic roundabout in Cambodia.