muzzle in the mouth – surrounded by the plaintive corpses of his children.
Who would stand in a circle, carefully and thoroughly firing arrows at women and kids? What had driven others to do this? Why did the men with the holes in their heads have no arrows in them at all? Were they the killers?
Grasping her emotions tight, she crawled away down the passage. Julia’s last action, as she left the cave, before she shinned up the metal ladder, was to turn and look at the wholly unearthed skull.
Sitting on the mud, it didn’t appear to be smiling any more. It looked like it was trying to speak, across the distance of the ages. Trying to articulate. Trying to warn.
Chapter 2
Vang Vieng was the strangest place Jake had ever been. Two years working as a photographer in Southeast Asia, from the full moon parties of Ko Phangan, where thousands of drugged-up young western backpackers danced all night on coralline beaches next to raggle-taggle Sea Gypsies, to the restaurants of Hanoi where Chinese businessmen ate the beating hearts of cobras ripped from living snakes while making deals for nuclear power stations, had inured him, he thought, to the contrasts and oddness of tropical east Asia.
But Vang Vieng, on a tributary of the Mekong River halfway up the long, obscure, serpentine little country of Laos (and as he had to keep reminding himself, Laos was pronounced to rhyme with how, not house) had shown him that the eccentric contrariness of Indochina was almost in exhaustible. Here was an ugly concrete town in a ravishing ancient valley – where hedonism, communism, capitalism and Buddhism collided, simultaneously.
He’d been here in Vang Vieng three days, taking photos for a coffee table book on Southeast Asian beauty spots. It had been quite a long assignment, and it was nearly over. They’d finished the tour of Thailand, spent two weeks in Vietnam, they already had Halong Bay in the can.
The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would cab it to Vientiane, the Laotian capital – and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.
That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.
It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then – there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker, in fact it was dwindling. All those people with cameraphones, all that easy-to-use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop: they made it all so simple. Literally anyone could take a decent snap. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Frank Capra.
Jake didn’t resent, morally or philosophically, this democratization of his ‘artform’. Photography had always been the most demotic of arts, if it was an art at all. Let everyone join in. Let everyone have a go. Good luck to them.
The pain of the process was merely personal: it just meant that his business was disappearing. And the only answer to this dilemma was either to become a war photographer, to become so brave or foolhardy he could and would take shots no civilian would ever dare to do – and he was increasingly tempted that way – or he could accept boring, commercial, uncreative but comfy assignments – like coffee table books on Southeast Asian beauty spots – where at least the air-tickets were paid for, the hotels were decent, the toilets non-squat, and he got to see the world, which after all, had been one of the reasons he had become a snapper in the first place.
He drank the last of his Red Bull, flipped the empty can in a bag of garbage on the roadside, and got back to work.
Photography.
Wandering down the languid, sunsetting, wood-and-concrete mainstreet of Vang Vieng, Jake paused and looked to his right, and quickly assessed – and took a quiverful of shots of the riverine landscape, framed by a teak-built house and a ramshackle beer-shop.
It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song river. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.
The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.
Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the digiscreen. No it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?
Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own wilfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.
He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure – to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy, and he’d realized he needed a job and so he’d remembered his childhood yen for art, and he’d squeezed into photography: begging for work in studios, laboriously teaching himself the craft, crawling back to a real kind of life.
And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism – just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.
But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.
A young suntanned barefoot ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt, and clicked his camera, once again.
The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behaviour. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.
Every cool and river-misty morning dozens of minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tyre inner-tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the riverflow, and then these western teens and twentysomethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beershacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.
By the time the innertubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.
Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously third world experience – when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twentysomething who came here. Laos was remote but not that remote: thousands had this ‘unique experience’ every week of every month.
But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed-up he’d have jumped in a tyre himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Han Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher Lager and crystal meth.
But he wasn’t a kid any more. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough faffing around; and anyway, these days, when he took drugs, especially something mindwarping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms – it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.
The light was nearly all gone.
The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope