The Thief Page 7

  At dinner, the abbot asked if any post had come and was told that the rains had made the roads difficult and muddy, and he smiled and said it was to be expected and that he was not worried at all, and Remy watched him from the corners of his eyes and the edges of his smile, and said nothing.

  When the bell rang at three in the morning for the monastery to wake and pray beneath the moonlight, the oldest monk came to wake Remy, tutting all the way.

  “Good for you,” he said. “Come, come, good for you, try it!”

  And when the bell rang again for breakfast, the youngest monk came to him quietly, pulling him into a room away from the others, where he saw his bag, a dry sarong and hat, a stick to lean on, sandals and rice wrapped in leaves. The monk said:

  “Two weeks ago we were all told to look out for a foreign criminal on the run. The abbot said it was of great merit to hand him to the police or the soldiers, and so has decided we shall.”

  “Why would you tell me this?”

  “It is interesting, isn’t it?” asked the monk with a smile. “The others tell me I am not wise in my speech.”

  So saying, he turned away, and Remy picked up these meagre goods and slunk away without a word.

  Chapter 28

  A strange sight!

  A man, with an overgrown brown beard, brown hair, pale skin burnt by the sun, dressed in a medley of clothes that are halfway between a smuggler’s shirt and a monk’s robes, a rucksack on his back, limps towards Lampang.

  The land in the north is more mountainous, wild and beautiful. The water that sweeps down from the mountains carves great valleys, as if the rotation of the earth itself has turned all things into gentle curves: curving plateaus and curving streams; curving roads and curving trees. It is a land of pineapples, teak trees and white pottery fashioned with delicate kaolin clay. At dawn the low cloud caresses the tops of the mountains, burning away as the sun rises. By sunset the shadows have turned, a great twist of grey sweeping across the land, and the wind whispers through the forests and over the rivers with the smell of rotting leaves and fragrant flowers which open when the rains cease.

  Alone again, and injured, Remy Burke heads north to Lampang.

  Twice in two days he was nearly caught.

  The first – an army truck that came out of nowhere on a deserted, muddy road. The bridge had gone down on the main causeway, swept away by a flood, so the truck took this less travelled path, and Remy, hearing it approach, runs for the undergrowth, throws himself into its cover, cowers there as the soldiers drive by, heads down, tarpaulin flowing with the rains.

  The second – a police roadblock near the flat blue waters of Mae Wa. Someone must have seen him and spread the word– who? we wonder (a poacher and his son, who told a friend, who told a cousin, who knew the chief of police, who had received his orders in this regard not five nights since, and a warning that the suspect was most likely headed in his direction) – for there they were, three indolent policemen, their trousers splattered with the mud of the road, chewing betel nut and spitting red juice into the puddles at their feet, miserable in the rain, waiting for him to come.

  He watched them from a ridge some quarter of a mile above the curve of the road that they defended, lying on his belly as he assessed them and his path. He’d walked twenty miles to find the junction they guarded, and did not want to go back, not with his shoes rotting from the rains, his legs black with mud, his belly empty, his ankle sore. He hid instead in a little clump of dripping trees, eating his last banana and its flowers, shivering from the rain. Cold and damp now were settling in his throat and mind, making one ache, the other cloudy. How much longer could he keep this up?

  Not long.

  As long as it took.

  Shortly after sunset, the policemen on the road abandoned their mission, pedalling back to town. He slapped wet-footed past their cordon, saw the lights of a village ahead, did not dare approach. He slept badly that night and woke with a fever, and fished on the lake in the morning and caught very little, and felt sick after eating, but at least managed to keep his food down.

  Fever trapped him where he was. For three days he lay on the edge of the lake, drinking and stealing fruit from the trees, shaking and whispering comforts to himself. Sometimes he spoke French, sometimes English. Sometimes he remembered a story his father would tell as they walked together by the ghats of Varanasi, back in the days when empire was great and the rituals of the Hindus washing themselves in prayer was a thing to be indulged, a childlike game which the British would point and snigger at, and the polite ladies would turn away from, flushing hot to see so much flesh so easily displayed in the brown waters of the Ganges. Then his mind wandered to his mother, who took him one day to see the temples of lost Cambodia, whispering in his ear that he shouldn’t tell his grandfather she had brought him there, for it wasn’t considered right that a dignified lady take an interest in the barbaric traditions of the locals. Then she knelt by him and showed ancient carved texts, images of gods and kings, the graffiti of long-dead children scratched with a blade’s point across holy icons, the fallen stones of a place where once people went into the jungle to pray for rains to feed their crops, sunshine to harvest in. He’d run up and down the carved stones of the broken temples and laughed and asked if he could play hide-and-seek, while around them the jungle shrieked and the lithe monkeys blinked suspiciously over their trove of stolen mangos.

  That had been before the games he played became…something else.

  On the fourth day, the fever broke, and he lay naked in the water of the lake, eyes closed, head back, and listened to the rumbling in his ears. He caught one last fish and cooked it on hot charcoal, and watched a little boat sailing across the water, a parasol protecting its sole inhabitant, three lines suspended off its prow, until the owner of the boat saw him and, waving slowly, paddled closer.

  The man was a fisherman, sixty if he was a day, missing three teeth, two on the bottom of his jaw, one on the top.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  “No, not lost – looking for a way across the lake.”

  “Get in, then, get in!”

  He got in.

  Across the waters, the fisherman talked brightly, of his wife (dead), his sons (noble), his daughters-in-law (not good enough though at least they tried) and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren (beautiful, all of them, so very beautiful). His seven sons had themselves married and produced between them some thirty-eight grandchildren for him to call his own, and of these thirty-eight, twenty-nine were already churning out offspring – each of which he could name and character – bringing the total number of direct blood relatives within a twenty-mile radius of this lake to seventy-three.

  “It would have been seventy-four,” he sighed, “but one of them moved away.”

  Which was, in its way, a kind of death.

  On the other side of the lake, Remy stood unevenly on firmer shores and said, “How far is it to Lampang?”

  “If you follow the road, about two days’ walk – but the road is on the other side of the water.”

  “And how far if I stay away from the road?”

  “Four, five days of hard walking. But you don’t want to do that – you’re injured, you’ve been sick. Stay at mine a while; my daughter-in-law will look after you.”

  “I cannot. When you go home, you will find that people ask after me. A foreigner, a tall man with fair skin. They will tell you I’m a criminal.”

  “You’re not a criminal!” chuckled the old man. “I’ve got seventy-three children – do you think I don’t know a criminal when I see one? You’re a pilgrim, sure as these eyes can see by sunlight!”

  “Then you understand why I take the harder road.”

  The fisherman shrugged. “The Gautama tried starving and suffering on his path to enlightenment, but it was only with a full belly that he truly achieved Nirvana – at least, that’s what I think.”

  And as they turned to part ways, Remy hesitated, then turned
back. “May I…?” he began, then stopped, stumbling, not on the words, but the very notion of what he was about to speak. Trust had grown thin, so thin, and now it stuck in his throat, but he took a long, slow breath and tried anyway. “When you tell people about me – and feel free to do so – will you tell them…?…tell them I asked the way to Phrae. Tell them that my ankle was very bad, and you did not take me across the water. But if you would be very kind, do not tell them for a day. Or two? I have nothing to offer but my gratitude, and my word that you do no harm to any man and a great deal of good in doing so.”

  The fisherman sucked in his lips as far the tip of his nose slanted downwards, seemed to quiver on the verge of being swallowed whole, a face collapsing into a face. Then he smiled, waved his hands joyfully in the air and said, “Well, no one listens to me anyway!”

  Remy bowed low and walked away.

  Chapter 29

  Four days later, hobbling out of the forest and the hills, he came to Lampang.

  Once the pride of the Lanna kingdom, the city still maintained its walls, its gold-plated temples, its fondness for spiced banana and its pride, seeming in its mountain-shadowed way to proclaim that it was still a state unto itself, needing little of the outside world to bother it. Go to Chiang Mai or Bangkok, or cross the border to Myanmar if you felt the need to run to work, to argue in the streets, to buy exotic things or banter in loud voices through the dead of night. Lampang was a quiet place for quiet people, and heaven forefend that it change.

  Remy stood a while on the side of the hill, watching this little place, houses on stilts on the rolling Wang River, which, like so many waterways in this land, flowed eventually back to the Chao Phraya and south to the sea. He listened to the sound of the horse-drawn traps bouncing through the streets, the cry of the elephant drivers hauling their goods into town, the rattle of harnesses and the slosh of oars, all noises travelling gently upwards, amplified by the distant rising of the mountains on either side.

  To enter Lampang was a risk, for there would be authorities there that would be watching, however well he had lost his pursuers in the mountains, and no matter if they believed the fisherman’s tale of his turning east towards Phrae, not west to the river. (Good fortune: the fisherman lied, feeling jubilant as he did so, and the word reached Abhik Lee, who diverted a general and all his troops to Phrae at once, and sent his hunters back into the hills and found no trace of Remy as he did.)

  Yet whatever his fortune, he would be noticed, and his position given away by his entering the town. All of Abhik’s resources would turn, they would come seeking him, and he would have to run again, where before now he had merely wandered.

  A great risk: a terrible danger.

  One that now, with a half-nod of his head, he took.

  Chapter 30

  Oh Remy, oh Remy, what are you doing?

  You are buying two tickets at the railway station in Lampang – one to Chiang Mai, the other to Bangkok.

  We watch the bewildered expression on the vendor’s face as you make your purchase, precious baht which you have nursed so carefully coming from your bag.

  We watch you head onto the platform, a tattered man in tattered clothes, an every-which-way ragdoll – the police will come for you soon, they will come, but first comes the Chiang Mai–Bangkok train, a great new roaring thing with a diesel engine, black and proud, clattering like a laughing dinosaur’s jaw, easing into the station with a scream of steel. You board, heading north, bold as anything, smiling your most serene smile, sit in a compartment with two other travellers – a woman who holds a sleeping baby, and a man in a business suit, Japanese, who smiles courteously at you over his newspaper and then looks away and never looks back.

  Remy studies the landscape as it grumbles by. There is much he needs to note.

  (Who are these travellers? Why, she goes to visit her mother who is dying for the twelfth time and will die three more times again, each time complaining vociferously to the assembled, summoned relatives that she has been abandoned by her family, before finally she passes away in 1947 from a fall in the street which knocks her head, and from which she doesn’t wake. And he? Why, he knows about railways, has studied railways and studies now the railways that connect China to India, and will one day very soon, from an office, orchestrate on maps and with carefully marked little notes, the construction of railway lines by captured slave labour, and say when the war ends that Japan only meant to bring freedom to the people of the East, only an end to tyranny. So we see them, these fellow travellers on this train, and they being known, we turn away.)

  At Chiang Mai, you get off this train, then board the train heading in the opposite direction, south to Bangkok, and as it begins to move from the platform, you jump off again, hopping from the open balcony at the back of a carriage onto the gravel, rolling as you land, then pick yourself up and dust yourself off, and run from the track.

  We watch Remy – now we watch him, squatting by a little well outside the square line of the city’s moat, pumping water into a cup, shaving with his nearly blunted knife the great growth of beard that smothers his jaw and chin, dragging it back to reveal the pale skin beneath, shockingly untouched by the sunlight compared to the browned rims of his eyes. He sits now and scrapes the hair from his head, blood flecking water as he scratches it to near-baldness, before popping a wide straw hat on top of the exposed flesh and wrapping his skinny, burnt body in a dusty robe.

  What does he look like now? A wandering monk, perhaps, if you do not look too closely. A beggar. A madman. A holy man. A parched prophet from the desert.

  Whatever he is, he does not look much like Remy Burke.

  He sleeps rough on the streets of Chiang Mai that night, while the wild dogs circle each other and wonder if he is prey. It is one of the most peaceful nights of sleep he has had for a very long time.

  When the sun rises, he steals a bicycle and pedals some twenty miles out of town, arriving in a stinking sweat a few hours before midday. He reaches a bridge across a low stream, a single-track thing of already rusting iron, which no train dare cross at more than a snail’s pace, and as the flies gather around him and the forests ripple, he sits down cross-legged on the side of the track to wait.

  He breathes, and it seems to him that his breath is wind, that wind is air, that air spins across the world, through the lungs of Abhik Lee, pacing the platform of Lampang waiting for the train, through the flamed nostrils of the players and the pieces of the Gameshouse, across the waters of the Chao Phraya, and out to sea. It seems to him for a moment that he is nothing, and he is not afraid.

  Then comes the singing in the tracks, the pumping of the engines, the growling of the train. He rolls down on his belly, waiting for the train to arrive, hidden in the undergrowth. The Chiang Mai–Bangkok express, heading south, kills its speed as it approaches the bridge as it did yesterday when he rode it north, the engine barely chugging, and at a meagre four or five miles an hour, it begins its cautious crossing of the ways.

  Remy waits until the first few carriages are over, then without a sound rises up from the undergrowth, jogs until he is running, running until he is keeping pace, and with a great heave and flap of robe, pulls himself aboard the rear of the last carriage of the train, and up into safety.

  Chapter 31

  Stops on a line.

  Lamphun, Phitsanulok, Lopburi, Ayutthaya, Don Muang.

  Remy sits and watches the countryside and cannot remember the last time he felt so relaxed.

  The compartment is empty until Ayutthaya, when a British man in a linen suit and his wife get on. The man smells profoundly through the layers of his sweat-stained jacket, but this doesn’t stop his wife wrinkling her nose at the sight of Remy and whispering in prickling English, “He smells terrible.”

  “He’s just a monk, darling,” whispers the man.

  “Can’t we go to another compartment?”

  “Darling, you’re making a fuss – we can’t always avoid the natives.”

 
With a grunt, the wife settles down in the seat as far away from Remy as she can, while her husband positions himself between them as a form of shield. He looks at Remy and smiles, proclaiming in extraordinarily accented Thai, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” Remy replies in the same language, pressing his palms together, and turning away to look out of the window before they can see his own smile.

  A world outside. Motion without movement. Workers resting beneath the shade of a banana tree. Mangos rotting on the earth. Nets thrown into a river by stick-skinny girls. The banging of the gong from temple. Many stops, waiting for another train to clear the narrowest point in the track ahead. Sometimes the rain falls; sometimes the skies clear, brilliant blue flecked with white that turns black again as quickly as the clouds parted, and turns the distant hills and fields to dusty grey.

  The British man says:

  “Can’t trust these people, these Siamese, to do anything. Can’t trust them to get a job done. ‘Tomorrow,’ they say, and then the next day: ‘Tomorrow.’ You ask what the hold-up is and they say, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ and when you insist they say, ‘I need to order a part.’ Why didn’t they order it yesterday? ‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ they reply, and that is the end of the argument! No, better off with a Chink. Hard worker, your average Chink, but wily too, will rob you if you blink but if you show him who’s master, make it clear you’re not having any funny business, they’ll do all right by you. Your Malay is the laziest of the lot, but responds well to the rod, but your Jap! Gotta admire a Jap, you have. Damn me if the blighters aren’t almost like us!”