The Darkest Little Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

melodrama.’ I smiled and looked to where an army-issue pistol sat in a pot plant next to a box of opium peas and a 1955 record player. Had he only been wearing his silk robe tonight, Zhuan might have been a poster boy for melodrama. ‘If I were you I would turn to those novels,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could give you a little artistic grant.’
    I laughed.
    â€˜Thank you but that would be tantamount to theft on my part.’
    â€˜Suit yourself. Let me take one last pipe and we will go to the theatre.’
    â€˜Really, I can’t.’
    â€˜It isn’t the same going by yourself.’
    â€˜You should get a wife.’
    â€˜I would, but I fall in love too easily. I almost proposed to a woman once, and when I went to buy the ring I fell in love with the girl at the counter.’
    I smiled.
    â€˜Goodnight, Zhuan.’

6
    I gave Peter Pan’s scrap of paper to a motorbike-taxi driver and rode to the restaurant in a narrow, cluttered alley lit by neon Chinese script. The girl was waiting for me at the door with a middle-aged chef on a cigarette break. I introduced myself to both of them.
    The girl greeted me in French. I wondered why.
    â€˜Bonsoir, Mademoiselle,’ I answered.
    I had little notion of how poor my pronunciation was and I guessed the girl did not either.
    At this point, as always, I fought hard not to show disappointment. I knew very well I would be disappointed each and every time this scenario was played out, but I was addicted to hope. The pleasure was in the hour I spent at Zhuan’s, imagining that the next hour might really bring her to me.
    This girl’s name was Lien. I took her to a nearby cafe and we spent an hour drinking cheap Australian chardonnay and watching tropical fish swimming in a wall-length aquarium.
    I apologised to the girl for taking her out so late. She said she was often still working at one. Sometimes later. There was a bed behind the kitchen back at the restaurant where she could sleep. In the mornings she studied business at a District One college. She told me she did not care about money but she preferred her husband to be rich.
    â€˜A fine policy,’ I said. ‘I would not care about money then either.’
    â€˜Comment?’
    I gathered Peter Pan had told her I was French. Or rather, she had an ideal foreign man who might be romantically watching her from afar who was also a Frenchman. I smiled, imagining Peter Pan listening to the girl’s description of the man she hoped for and nodding yes to every item in the list to please her, as he did for me. Not worrying how difficult it would make things later. Well, I had asked for this. What a sad bastard child of memory and desire these dates were.
    I gave the girl 100 000đ for a taxi and walked home in order to be tired enough to sleep. On the esplanade rows of young women were burning paper money for the ghosts of unloved dead and sweeping the ash into the river, and in my mind’s eye I followed this Saigon road to a road in the far far distance, a darkening road of mud in a far northern province where floodwaters and cartwheels had cut deep gouges into the earth and I walked with a girl who had eyes the colour I had seen in the people of the central mountains, and when we reached her house she leant against the wall and sang a song from her home that was like song from another world and a dank wind blew across the rice paddies as the sun flared and then died and the wind was cold and blew her hair across the strange hazel eyes that I could only dimly see now in the dusk and I had known her just twelve hours and I would know her only twelve more and yet I knew then that I loved her …
    A motorbike-taxi driver grabbed me and forced me to look at a picture of a topless girl with fake eyelashes on his mobile phone.
    I shook my head and pulled my arm from his grip.
    â€˜Nam phut! … Five minutes!’ he said, grabbing my sleeve again. ‘Five minutes