Read Online Love Songs from a Shallow Grave by Colin Cotterill - Free Book Online Page B

country .”
    I took the pencil and paper and sat poised to write .
    “ I’m ready, oh masterful one,” I said .
    “ All I expect is that you tell us your real name and describe in detail when the Vietnamese first recruited you as a spy. Tell us the name of your coordinator in Hanoi and what information he told you to gather. As simple as that. You write it. We file it. You go home .”
    I did my best to match the man’s smile tooth for tooth. And, yes, I did, I considered writing his confession. I wondered what the odds were of being released if I made up a story and names and places. But, deep in my soul, I knew there was no point. They could either execute me as a confessed spy or just shoot me or torture me to death as the fancy took them. I’ve heard and seen too much of what they’re doing here. I will never see the outside of this school .
    “ Any chance of a bit of lunch before I start?” I asked. “Writing fiction can really take it out of a person .”
    The man sighed and carried his heavy smile to the door. He stood there and watched me tear off strips of paper and put them into my mouth .
    “ It has no nutritional value, of course,” I told him between mouthfuls. “And all that glue and chemicals won’t do me a lot of good. But it should quiet the grumbling in my gut for an hour or two. If I close my eyes it’s just like eating noodles .”
    The smiling man slammed the door behind him .
    It’s dark now and I feel an ache in my stomach. I wonder whether it’s dark because I ate my homework and I’m being punished, or because the world has come to an end and there’s nobody to turn on the power. And as I lie back contemplating being the last person on earth, starving to death in a classroom, something moves in the darkness and takes hold of my hand .
∗
    “…and he was dead.”
    “He was dead?”
    “Completely.”
    “He was dead?”
    “Is your needle stuck?”
    “What happened to the Hollywood ending?”
    Siri and Daeng lay on their mattress. It was one a.m. Whatever bribes needed to be paid to whomever on the Thai side of the river had been paid and the street lamps burned yellow there. The glow shimmied across the Mekhong and crawled up the Lao bank. Despite the drizzly clouds that masked the starry sky, there were no longer any completely black nights. Even by the dim light that filtered through the rose-patterned cotton curtains Siri could see his wife clearly and she could see him. There would be no mistaken identity on that bed.
    “It wasn’t a Hollywood film, dear husband,” she reminded him. “It was pure Chinese propaganda and Wei Loo was dead as a beefsteak by the end of it.”
    “But Ming Zi had spent two hours looking for him.”
    “Tough! It epitomised the futility of false hope.”
    Siri sat up on his elbows and was starting to wish he hadn’t chosen this time to have Daeng tell him the story of the movie he’d missed, The Train from the Xiang Wu Irrigation Plant . He couldn’t hide his devastation.
    “But what’s the message?” he asked. “Struggle, struggle, struggle and you’ll end up with a dead boyfriend?”
    “All right. I’m not quite at the end of the film yet. Wei Loo had died constructing a dam. We get this in flashback through sepia lenses. There’d been a freak flash flood and he’d rushed to the site, rescued all his colleagues, and sacrificed his own life to prevent the dam being washed away. Once she’d recovered from the shock, Ming Zi understood there was more to life than personal relationships. She realised that love for a mega-project and the development of the country was more satisfying than mere love for another human being.”
    “Rot.”
    “She found solace. As, coincidentally, she was also a qualified hydroelectric engineer, she applied for the position of project coordinator on her fiancé’s dam. Of course she didn’t play the sympathy card. She didn’t tell anyone who she was. She was appointed purely on her qualifications