Chavy woke with the sun, took a strand of hair from her eyes and rolled sideways into the river. Kicking her legs in the water, she held onto the edge of her punt and reached in to grab a small cake of yellow soap that sat impaled on a nail forced into the wooden hull. She slipped a hand inside her t-shirt and washed armpit and breast on her left side, and then swapped hands. Next she dredged the soap across the outside fabric of her shirt, pressed the yellow cake back onto its waiting nail and dived. She kept her eyes closed in the muddy water and dreamed of being on a riverboat, under an umbrella, smoking a cigarette, a glass of wine, a boy staring at her in rapture. And with one fierce wriggle of her body she pushed herself to the surface of the river and shook the water from her face.<br>
	Chavy leant her arms on the side of her punt, reached for her water bag and filled her mouth with clean water. She lifted the lid of her wooden box, removed a twist of brown paper and unfolded it. It contained salt, and she dabbed a damp finger in and rubbed it around her teeth, feeling her way to the back of her mouth. She twisted the paper and put it back in the box, picked up the remains of an old lime, popped it in her mouth and bit down to removed the last of its bitter juice. She spat the lime into the river and finished the last of her drinking water. Chavy grabbed her grabbed her plastic sandals, put the straps between her teeth, snatched a small water apple from her boat and made for land. She was good in the water, someone must have shown her how to swim when she was a child.<br>
	She climbed from the Bassac into the early heat of the day and the sun became her towel as she headed towards the city. Lines of women were bringing in their daily haul of vegetables; yardlong beans, Chinese broccoli, bitter melon and unripe luffa. They would have been up before sunrise to pull the produce from the sleepy earth and there should have been more women, and they should have been carrying more produce. At the market, stalls were thin, the prices high and the customers rank and poor. Chavy only went there to steal, and that was getting harder to do, as the women were now more alert to any loss. She walked along the sun-baked path, between the clouds of dust raised by sandals, pumps, buffalo hooves and the wheels of carts. She looked across the flat fields and the straight and lonely lines of sugar palms, last night she had heard the long rolling explosions getting nearer.<br>
	Chavy paused at the edge of the city and prepared herself for the suddenness of concrete after bamboo, the turmoil of the streets, the jostle and the forests of elbows. Chavy moved silent and near invisible through the mess of feet, the spin of rickshaw wheels. No one ever halted, if you didn’t weave you were felled and bruised. And if you drifted someone might steal you. Once a man had grabbed her hair and forced her face against a wall. He had bit her ear and tried to put a finger right inside her, but she had stomped on his toes and run away never seeing his face, or knowing his age.<br>
	She turned off the busy boulevard into a quieter street and came to the silent alley that led to Thy’s house. The entrance was flanked by his sentries, two smoking boys that flattened themselves against the wall as she squeezed past, as if one touch of her might be fatal. One day, when things had changed for her they would beg her for a kiss and say: but you knew us once, we all worked for Thy, do you not remember, we were friends? And she would laugh, and spit in their faces.<br>
	She stood outside Thy’s door and waited, behind her one of the boys said something and the other laughed. The door opened slightly, just enough to let her slip inside, and there was Theary, blank faced, mute and towering above her. She moved quickly past him with her eyes cast down. He was Thy’s brother and known for his brutality. Quite often she had overheard Thy’s boys talking in hushed tones about the hideous things he had done to someone who had displeased his brother in some business deal. But she didn’t trust one thing those boys said. They had less brains than teeth and they didn’t have many teeth at all, and those they did have were stained with smoking. And none of them were any older that herself and she was struggling to reach sixteen and failing. But she wasn’t stupid and so she avoided Theary as much as it was possible to avoid someone you met everyday.<br>
	She went into the dark little kitchen area, took the kettle off the gas ring and went over to the tap and began to fill it. The tap came right out of the floor on one leg and looked like it had appeared there by accident and had never been able to escape. It shook when you turned it on. Once she had told it that there was nothing to be scared of and then she remembered that the world was full of things to be scared of. When the kettle was full she put it on the gas ring and took a match from a small box, she slid the match along the wall and watched it catch. The gas popped when she lit it. Outside in the wash area she picked up the bucket, brought it back in and half filled it with cold water. The kettle sung and she turned off the gas and added the boiled water to the cold water in the bucket and headed back outside again. This was her place of work, a walled off concrete area under a roof of corrugated iron held up by two wooden posts. On one post there was a handgun hanging from a piece of cord, it was worn and dirty and she had never seen it used. She had held it sometimes and no one had rushed out to beat her. It was quite heavy but she liked the weight of it, but she had never tried the trigger.  On the other post a pair of scissors hung from a nail. In the centre of the concrete floor was a single hole, and in the corner were the things she needed for her work, a glass jar, an enamel bowl, a sponge and a cake of soap all sat on a low wooden stool.<br>
	Theary came out with Thy in his arms and placed the stump of his brother upright over the hole in the centre, turned and went back inside. Chavy knelt down behind Thy and steadied him as he strained to do his morning toilet. The smoke from his cigarette drifted across her face but she couldn’t enjoy it, because she had to hold her breath against the stink of his dung. The toes of his one foot wriggled like impatient infants and when he was done he relaxed and spat out the end of his cigarette. She eased him to the ground so that he was lying on his side with his back to her. She looked at the greasy hole and wondered how far the turds fell and if they sailed away, how far?<br>
	Chavy took the bucket over to the corner and dipped the glass jar into the water and filled the enamel bowl, she picked up the sponge and soap and brought them over to Thy. She wondered what he must be thinking as he lay there. Business she imagined, threats and boasting.  She wet the sponge and passed it over the bar of soap and began to wash around his rectum. She liked to think of herself as someone who could be trusted to do a delicate job, she was a nurse, brisk and efficient. She had known nurses that time when she was taken ill, and she had an ambition to be just like them. She squeezed out the sponge, poured the water from the bowl down the hole and went to the bucket to get fresh water. She rolled him over on his back, his eyes skywards and her not there at all, and washed around his groin. He wet himself at night and there were red sores in the morning. She replaced the water again and soaped and rinsed his chest and around the stumps of his arms. The Theary came out just at the right time, as he always did, as if he had been watching her working, picked up his brother and took him inside to dry.<br>
	She went to the room where Thy slept and bundled up the sodden straw, took it out to the back and flung it in a corner, it would be gone by the next day. She went into the kitchen where Pauk was eating at the table, his eyes hidden by the mirror shades he always wore, his baseball hat perched on the back of his head. He was one of Thy’s boys, although older that the rest and she thought that he looked at her when she came in each morning. But of course she couldn’t see his eyes. Thy was now dressed in one of his bright picture shirts, strapped to a metal chair with a soft scarf while Theary shovelled fried rice and egg into his brother’s mouth.<br>
	She boiled the kettle three times in a row and hated standing there. They never asked her why she needed so much water. And everyday she waited to be asked and told to stop. There were empty wine bottles on the floor in the corner of the room and she was allowed to have any of the dregs that still remained. As the men sat in silence and the water boiled for the third time, she poured what little was left in three of the bottles into a fourth. She filled her canvas bag right up to the brim with the boiled water and it was time to go. Theary handed her a portion of fried rice and pork belly wrapped in a page of newspaper, her reward for the job that she had done.<br>
	Chavy went down to the river and sat upon the wall that ran along the quayside. She opened the newspaper and snatched up a piece of fatty pork and stuffed it in her mouth. She swilled it down with a glug of wine and looked across the river with some pride. She watched the life along the water and hoped that it was watching her in return. The fishing boats, motor launches with their guns, a very few foreigners under sunshades on boats that went nowhere, all watching her enjoying fatty porn and wine. She dandled her legs above the water and noticed that there was a tear in the plastic of her right sandal; a small piece of wire would hold it, if she could find one.<br>
	Stevedores were unloading barrels and bails onto the quayside, she waved but they were hard at work, singing as they heaved their cargo. She picked up her water bag and slung it on her shoulders, finished the wine and flung the bottle out into the river, proud of the distance it covered.
	The stevedores were always glad to see her, but too involved in their labour to speak or smile. The blind man sat on a bail, in ragged trousers, shoeless with calloused feet.  He pounded his guitar and bellowed a line and the stevedores repeated it back to him.<br>
	'Lift a weight a hundred times!’<br>
	-<i> Lift a weight a hundred times</i>-<br>
	Chavy took the blind man’s battered tin mug from by his side and skipped amongst them as she did each day, filling the mug with the water she had boiled.<br>
	'A hundred grains of rice you earn.’<br>
	- <i>A hundred grains of rice you earn</i>-<br>
	They took it from her roughly and drank without breaking stride.<br>
	'I hear someone saying.’<br>
	- <i>I hear someone saying</i>-<br>
	Later the boss Mr Deng would make sure she had something to eat.<br>
	'What’s that singing?’<br>
	-<i>What’s that singing?</i>-<br>
	That’s the sound of the Mekong stevedores!’<br>
	-<i>That’s the sound of the Mekong stevedores!</i>-<br>
	They slowed down very slightly towards the end and then the boat was empty and the quayside piled with barrels and bails, and they squatted down and passed round cigarettes. Chavy longed for one but they never offered. An hour passed before Mr Deng beckoned her over, he had the book in his hand. Chavy loved the covers of the books he read, with their dead bodies and beautiful women, soldiers and lovers. All in colour. <br>
	'I got to the end,’ he said laughing, ‘but there were no Tarantulas.’<br>
	Yesterday he had shown her a book called The Tears of a Tarantula, and she had asked if the story had many tarantulas in it, and how big they were, and how poisonous they where? Mr Deng said that so far in his reading of the book he hadn’t come across any tarantulas at all. And she had said that maybe they all appear at the end and bite all the bad guys, and the girls are all saved and the boys fall in love with them. But now she knew they didn’t.<br>
	She liked Mr Deng, she would have gone to live with Mr Deng if he had asked, he never mentioned family and she wondered if he lived alone. She would happily be his child, or his mistress if he demanded it.<br>
	Mr Deng stood, the sign that it was time to eat and they crossed the road to eat at the Chinese café that stood between a shop-house and a ship’s chandlers. The sun was at its highest now and no one would want to work this time of day. They sat inside and ate pig’s trotter stew with whole fat eggs. She lavished her meal with fish sauce until the taste of it made her tongue explode, and as she ate she thought about the bar she had passed by accident a few weeks ago. She picked up her bowl and drank the last of the broth and scurried off wiping the fat from her chin with the back of her hand.<br>
	The bar was set back from the street with a small shaded area in front for a few tables, chairs and potted plants. Each day, voices choking with melody burst from the open sides of the bar. And the boy came out into the street to tend the flowers with his green watering can. And each day she watched him do it hiding in the shadow of a building a few doors down. The music swayed her hips, coaxing her towards the sound and the boy, but she didn’t dare, didn’t dare to let it take her. Oh she wanted to, wanted to, to walk out into the sun and reveal herself, but she worried, worried that there might not be anything for the boy to see, for she sometimes wondered if she were invisible. No one ever talked to her apart from Mr Deng. And what is she were not real at all but a character in one of the books he read?<br>
	She watched the boy put down the watering can and look up the street towards her; he had never done that before. She froze, pretending to be nothing more than shadow and the boy went back inside and she just stood there breathing and waiting to see if he would come out again. He had forgotten his watering can. She would have happily have stayed that way for hours, but she had to leave, the city would hurt her after darkness fell. She had to go, she knew she had to. Her t-shirt was very thin and she looked down at the shape of her breasts. She looked the street up and down; it was deserted. She put her thumbs in the waistband of her shorts and pulled them down to show her belly, then she pulled her t-shirt up and let the city see her breasts. Then she gasped and pulled the t-shirt down again, pulled up her shorts and ran.




