The Forgetting Time(36)
“No dolls,” Anderson said.
Angsley patted Anderson on the hand. “Just meet the girl.”
*
The girl lived a few hours north of Bangkok in a village in Uthai Thani province. The boat sputtered through the slums on the outskirts of the city, then moved past larger, more rural dwellings, wooden houses with piers at the ends adorned with tiny wooden temples, spirit houses for the dead. The harvested rice fields were golden brown on either side of them, dotted here and there with an ambling water buffalo or a small shack. Anderson felt the images taking the place of thoughts in his mind, soothing him, until he was nothing but a white hand skimming the surface of the water. The jet lag was catching up to him at last and he dozed sitting up, lulled by the hoarse, steady roar of the motor.
When he awoke a couple hours later the air had grown hot and thick in his lungs, and he was blanketed with sunlight. He realized he had dreamed of the baby. In the dream Owen was whole, a beautiful child with blue eyes like Sheila’s that regarded him pensively. The baby sat up and reached out to him like the boy he might have been.
*
They approached a small wooden house on stilts surrounded by lush foliage. How Angsley identified this particular house from the identical ones that lined the road near the pier was a mystery that Anderson didn’t bother solving. An older woman swept the dirt floor in the shadows underneath the house, chickens muttering around her ankles. Angsley wai’d to her, his head bowing over his hands, revealing the naked spot of pink scalp at the center of his skull. The two of them had a discussion.
“The father is working out in the fields,” Angsley said. “He won’t talk to us.”
“Your Thai is pretty good, right?” Anderson asked. It occurred to him they ought to have hired an interpreter.
“It’s good enough.”
It would have to be.
They climbed the stairs. A simple room, well swept, slatted wooden windows looking out onto cropped fields and blue sky. A woman was placing an array of food on a table in battered tin bowls. She was wearing the same kind of brightly patterned cloth the old lady wore, knotted right above her breasts. She was lovely, Anderson thought, or had been, not so long before; anxiety seemed to have caught her beauty in its net. When she smiled at them, worried lines rippled from her dark eyes, and her crimson lips parted to reveal bright red teeth.
“Betel nut,” Angsley murmured. “They chew it here. Some kind of stimulant.” He bowed his head respectfully, hands together: “Sowatdii-Kap.”
“Sowatdii.” Her eyes darted from one of them to the other.
Anderson looked for the child and discovered her crouched in the corner, watching the yellow lizards frisking in the ceiling dust. He was dismayed to see that she was wearing nothing. She was frail, almost emaciated, her face and concave belly painted with a white powder he surmised was used to keep away the heat: two round circles on her cheeks, a line down her nose.
The woman had laid out a villager’s feast for them: white rice and fish curry, though it was only ten in the morning, and tin cups of water that Anderson was sure, as he sipped, would make him ill. He couldn’t risk offending her, so he filled his roiling stomach, the taste of metal coating his mouth. Outside the window, a man shepherded a water buffalo across a field of golden stubble. The sun barreled through the slats in the windows.
Angsley walked over to the child. “Got something for you.” He pulled the doll from his bag and she took it soberly. She held it in her outstretched hands for a moment, then cradled it in her arms.
Angsley lifted his brows meaningfully at Anderson across the room, as if to say, “See? She loves it.”
They set up at the wooden table, now cleared of breakfast. Two white men, a nervous woman, and a little naked girl who couldn’t have been more than three holding a grotesque red-haired rag doll. She sat quietly next to her mother. She had an uneven birthmark to the left of her navel, like a splash of red wine. She clutched the doll tightly in her hands, watching her mother shave papaya into long, even strips with quick fingers.
They talked to the mother. Angsley spoke in Thai first, and then in English, for Anderson’s benefit.
“Tell us about Gai.”
She nodded. Her hands didn’t stop moving. The strips fell away from the papaya into a tin bowl. Every time a sliver dropped from the knife, the little girl shuddered.
The mother spoke in such a low voice that Anderson was amazed Angsley could even hear her to translate.
“Gai’s always been different.” His voice, translating, was almost robotic. “She won’t eat rice. We try to make her, sometimes, but she cries and spits it out.” The mother made a face. “It’s a problem.” There was her tense, thin voice, and then Angsley’s low flat one. The emotion, then the meaning. “I’m afraid she’ll starve.” As if reminded of this, she picked up a piece of the papaya from the battered tin bowl and handed it to her daughter. The girl clutched the doll in her left hand and reached for it, gripping it as if with pincers; Anderson saw that three of her fingers on this hand were deformed. It was as if these fingers had been drawn sloppily, in a hurry, without the refinements of nails and knuckles. The girl caught him looking at her fingers and she curled them into a fist. Anderson looked away, ashamed of himself for staring.
The mother stopped peeling papaya and let loose a stream of words. Angsley could barely keep up with her. “My daughter says that last time she lived in a bigger house in Phichit. The roof was made of metal. She says our house is no good. It’s too little. It’s true. We are poor.”