his life. He might forget that any of this had happened. He was like that. The medicines he took made him kind and gentle, the sort of person one would do anything for. But without the drugs he could be ugly. Everyone feared him. She had no name for what he might do, no picture in her mind. Only a falling sensation in her stomach where imagination failed her.
She sat very still until the incense burned down to ash. Then she started to creep across the floor. Every time she moved, she sneaked a glance at Mr Richard to see if he was stirring. He wasn’t. The flesh of her legs stung as the blood began to return.
There was a stuffed monkey sitting on top of the apothecary chest, its glass eyes covered in dust. The monkey looked sick. Lots of its fur was missing. Mange, she thought. She wouldn’t touch it.
Mr Richard had dropped the phone on the floor. He lay so still she wasn’t even sure he was breathing. She had the urge to go over to him and poke him, but she would never dare.
Mr Richard did not move.
Then, without Mya thinking about it, her arm shot out and took the phone. She found herself slipping into the work room that smelled of herbs and incense. On the shelves above the apothecary chest were skulls of animals and jars of dark liquid. There were crocks of dried herbs, and dolls with sad faces. Blue computer light spilled over the high-tech equipment and shone on the dolls’ black-feathered hair.
When she opened the phone, lights came on and a chiming noise sounded. It had a touch screen in English.
One of the house servants was coming up the stairs. Mya held the phone behind her back, heart pounding.
Daeng came in, saw Mr Richard, and gasped.
‘Ploy!’ she shouted down the stairs. ‘Hurry, Mr. Richard needs us. Mya, why didn’t you call us? What happened to him? Quickly, quickly!’
Ploy helped Daeng carry Mr. Richard to his bed, where he remained unconscious for three days while they fussed over him and called a succession of doctors, and sent and received a flurry of jerky video calls from Mr. Richard’s computer.
Mya was largely ignored. She climbed the bodhi tree outside the house and standing on a branch too narrow to support anyone but her she peered through the window. While Daeng video chatted to Mr Richard’s wife in L.A., Mya sat on the branch pretending to talk to her mother on the password-protected phone.
As if Mya’s mother had a phone in the military camp. As if everything were different.
Charisma in a Bottle
M R R ICHARD STAYED in bed for a week. For Mya it was a holiday. No prayers. No helping in the lab with acids that burned fingers, no bitter smoke. No hours spent listening to Mr Richard’s teachings while the stuffed monkey watched over them with its dusty eyes.
Mya had placed the phone by Mr. Richard’s bedside and she had tried to forget what she had seen. She helped Ploy and Daeng with the housework, and for a change they treated her kindly. She was allowed to eat her meals with the women and watch TV at the same time. They gave her a beautiful red dress to wear.
This didn’t make her happy. She kept remembering the ghost boy.
You will never be free.
‘When will Mr Richard send me home?’ Mya asked Ploy one night, when they were down in the cool room watching a particularly emotional episode of the soap opera Nang Rai . And Daeng, who had been blotting her eyes with a napkin already, now covered her mouth and ran outside.
‘Your family have bad karma,’ Ploy told Mya over the sound of the electric bug-zapper. ‘You must do your work here if you want to gain merit for your family.’
‘I don’t understand why I can go to the forest if I have bad karma,’ Mya said.
‘Don’t be cheeky,’ Ploy said sharply. ‘You are very rude. Of course some children can go in and out of this world. Some of you are only halfway on this earth. That is the danger.’
Over the popping of dying mosquitoes, Daeng could be heard making a strangled noise just