The Half-Child Read online

  PRAISE FOR ANGELA SAVAGE AND

  BEHIND THE NIGHT BAZAAR

  ‘Taut, edgy and vividly realised, Night Bazaar

  delivers the ironies and moral complexities

  of the best crime thrillers.’

  GARRY DISHER

  ‘Keeney emerges as an appealing character,

  emotional and yet capable of cold-eyed action.

  She smokes too much, speaks Thai fluently and

  likes a drink and a shag…I’m looking forward

  to the next instalment.’

  Age

  ‘Coolly elegant with a lovely sense of place, Savage

  directs her authorial tuk-tuk into the literary

  precinct without sacrificing the requisite violence,

  corrupt police, edgy social commentary and the

  need for her heroine to become a lonely social

  crusader in the best hard-boiled tradition.’

  Weekend Australian

  ‘Like her heroine, Jayne Keeney, author

  Angela Savage has made an impressive

  debut in her first novel.’

  Courier-Mail

  ‘Angela Savage’s debut novel explores the seedy

  underbelly of Thailand’s northern city through the

  eyes of a vibrant, appealing character.’

  City Weekly

  Also by the author

  Behind the Night Bazaar

  Angela Savage travelled to Laos on a six-month scholarship in 1992 and ended up staying in Asia for six years. She was based in Vientiane, then Hanoi and Bangkok where she set up and headed the Australian Red Cross HIV/AIDS subregional program. Her love affair with Asia continues and she has returned many times since, most recently spending 2008 in Cambodia with her partner and their young daughter. Her first book, Behind the Night Bazaar, published by Text in 2006, won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for unpublished manuscript. Angela lives in Melbourne.

  The Half-Child

  ANGELA

  SAVAGE

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown

  in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Angela Savage 2010

  “Can’t Fight This Feeling”

  (Kevin Cronin)

  © 1984 Fate Music (ASCAP)

  International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission

  for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or

  omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be

  incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no

  part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into

  a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

  permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2010

  Design by Susan Miller

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Savage, Angela, 1966-

  The half-child / Angela Savage.

  ISBN 9781921656545 (pbk.)

  A823.4

  For Olgamary Savage, née Whelan

  Much has she loved

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Pornthip heaved herself up on her elbows to look at the baby.

  ‘Look ying,’ the nurse said.

  She held the squirming newborn aloft, tilting her so Pornthip could see. A bloodied cord dangled like rope from the baby’s belly, sticky white cream smeared on her skin.

  The nurse dabbed at the mess with a cloth.

  Pornthip had wanted a son, someone to grow up and look after her, but it was not her fate. She’d given birth to a baby girl, another body to protect. She forced herself to sit up.

  ‘Please give her to me.’

  The nurse hesitated, looked to the other woman in the room. Asian but not Thai, Pornthip realised. The woman also wore a nurse’s uniform, but the medical equipment around her neck and her manner denoted seniority. She mouthed something to the Thai nurse and shook her head.

  Pornthip lunged towards the baby. ‘Give her to me!’

  Shocked, the Thai nurse handed over the baby. Pornthip eased herself back down on to the pillow and laid her daughter on the papery gown covering her chest. The baby, eyes squeezed shut, opened and closed her mouth like a little bird.

  ‘Nok noi,’ Pornthip whispered, adding in a louder voice, ‘She looks like a baby bird.’

  Nok—that would be her cheu len, her nickname.

  ‘Would you like to try and feed her?’ the nurse asked.

  The foreigner protested, using words Pornthip didn’t understand, and moved to pick up the baby.

  ‘Let her be,’ Pornthip said. She tried to tighten her hold on her daughter, but the outburst had drained her last reserves of strength. ‘Why is she here?’ she asked the nurse, nodding at the farang. ‘I don’t understand.’

  The nurse said something in a low voice. The foreigner turned on her heel and left the room.

  Nok snuffled like a piglet. The nurse gestured for Pornthip to raise her head, untied the strings of the hospital gown and tugged at the neckline to uncover Pornthip’s breasts. Nok latched on to Pornthip’s nipple and began sucking noisily.

  Mae Yai’s voice came back from across the years, warning Pornthip’s mother not to put the baby on the breast before the milk came in. Pornthip couldn’t remember which of her eight siblings, all born at home, her grandmother had been referring to, or why the first milk wasn’t good for the baby.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the Thai nurse reassured her. ‘It’s good for the baby.’

  Pornthip felt a stab of pain followed by a wave of pleasure, and sank back against the bed. If her mother was still alive, she’d have taken charge. Pornthip would be confined to the house to lie with the baby in a heated room for thirty days while her relatives tended to them. Her body would have had time to recover from the birth.

  Instead, she was alone with her daughter in a strange place. She had no money, no job, no idea who the baby’s father was—not that it would make any difference. In the months leading up to the birth, she’d slept rough on the beach or streets. Eventually a security guard too
k pity and let her doze in his sentry box for a few hours in exchange for a nightly blow-job. No place for a baby girl.

  When she’d gone into labour at twilight on the beach, she’d panicked. She’d only ended up at the hospital because a farang woman found her, bundled her into a songthaew, and paid to have her admitted. But the foreigner had gone away, and Pornthip had no idea what to do next.

  Her mouth was dry and her body ached with exhaustion and hunger. After months on the street, she was nothing but skin, bones and distended belly. What Nok found to suck from her underfed body Pornthip did not know, though the baby seemed content shuffling from one nipple to the other.

  When at last she broke away, Nok lay on Pornthip’s chest, opened her eyes and met her mother’s gaze with a look that might have been wonder.

  ‘Sawadee Nok,’ Pornthip said.

  The baby frowned and opened her mouth.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Pornthip whispered. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

  At that moment the door to the delivery room opened and the boss-nurse reappeared with a white man in tow.

  Pornthip blanched, hastened to cover her exposed breasts. The abrupt movement upset Nok, who started to cry. To her surprise, the farang man took a white towel and draped it over mother and baby like a blanket.

  ‘She’ll be feeling cold,’ he said in Thai, rubbing the baby’s back through the cotton.

  Nok stopped crying and fell asleep.

  Pornthip stared at him. He had blotchy skin and a huge nose. Wiry grey-brown hair sprouted from inside his nostrils and ears, like tufts of grass from rock. He looked like the buffoon in a village talok troupe.

  ‘Hello little sister, I’m Khun Frank,’ the man said.

  ‘Connie here—’ he tilted his head at the boss nurse ‘—tells me your name’s Pornthip.’

  She nodded, kept one hand on the small of Nok’s back, raised the other in a half-wai.

  ‘And you’ve just had a beautiful baby girl,’ Frank continued. ‘Congratulations.’

  Pornthip tried to speak but her mouth was too dry.

  ‘You need a drink?’

  The Thai nurse approached but Frank dismissed her with a wave. Pornthip thought she choked back a cry as she scuttled out of the room.

  Frank gestured at Connie, who came forward with water. He held the glass so Pornthip could drink through the straw.

  ‘Khop khun na ka,’ she said, lying back down again.

  ‘So tell me, Pornthip, how do you plan to care for the baby?’

  Pornthip’s eyes filled with hot tears. Could he read her mind? Was another farang about to come to her rescue?

  ‘Mai roo! I don’t know.’

  Connie handed Frank a clipboard.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘You’ve been through so much.

  And it says here—’ he leafed through some papers ‘—that you’re only sixteen. Is that right?’

  Pornthip nodded.

  ‘You’re exhausted. You should rest. Connie here will give you something to take away the pain and help you sleep.’

  He might look like a clown but his voice was calm and serious. Pornthip watched the farang nurse prepare a needle.

  ‘Just relax,’ Khun Frank said. ‘We’ll take care of everything. We know you want what’s best for the baby and so do we.’

  Pornthip nodded.

  ‘Family?’ he asked.

  ‘Brothers and sisters in Kalasin,’ she said. ‘Mother and father dead.’

  ‘Would you like us to help you go home to Kalasin?’

  The prospect brought on a fresh wave of tears.

  ‘Can you do that?’

  The nurse moved forward and inserted the needle into Pornthip’s arm.

  ‘Yes, we can do that,’ Frank said. ‘And we’ll also make sure the baby is well looked after. I mean, it’s not realistic for you to take her with you, is it?’

  Pornthip frowned, confused, as the words penetrated the euphoria washing over her.

  ‘She’ll need food, clothing, shelter. And you know you can’t provide for her,’ he continued.

  ‘I don’t want to leave my baby.’

  The words came out slurred, without the force she intended.

  ‘Don’t think of it as leaving her,’ Frank said. ‘Think of it as giving her the best possible start in life. She’ll be cared for by a mother and father who’ll be able to provide her with all she needs. And when she gets older, you’ll be able to visit her.’

  Pornthip smiled, her anxieties fading.

  He snapped a sheet of paper on to the clipboard and placed a pen in Pornthip’s hand.

  ‘All you need to do is sign here and leave the rest to us.’

  He balanced the clipboard on her chest, blocking her view of the baby. Pornthip didn’t read well at the best of times and the words danced on the page.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ she muttered.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Frank said. ‘Here, let me help you.’

  Pornthip felt his hand close over hers. She peered where he pointed, scrawled on the dotted line.

  ‘You’ll look after my Nok, my baby bird?’ she yawned.

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ he said.

  Pornthip smiled and closed her eyes on the image of her daughter’s sleeping face.

  The farang bundled the baby in the towel and lifted her off the young girl’s chest.

  1

  At four o’clock on Tuesday morning a concrete girder as big as a bus fell from the sky and crushed a taxi, killing the driver. There were no passengers in the vehicle— fortuitous but not surprising. A driver would have to be desperate, wired on ya ma and Red Bull to be trawling Sukhumvit Road for a fare at that hour. Like most of his ilk, the deceased was a failed farmer from the northeast. He left behind a widow, three sons and a daughter, whose future now depended on how many of their chickens survived the cool season.

  Tragic though this was, the Thai press couldn’t help speculate on how much worse the accident would have been had it occurred at almost any other hour. The front page of Thai Rath featured a diagram demonstrating how an incident of this kind during Bangkok’s peak times could kill dozens, if not hundreds of people.

  The diagram came to life in Jayne Keeney’s imagination as she was forced to a standstill on Silom Road alongside an orange crane dangling a metal strut from its jaws above her head. She could picture the crane opening its maw, the beam plummeting towards her. She inched her motorbike forward, narrowly missing a hole in the bitumen, and brushed up against the flimsy blue-striped plastic sheeting, all that separated her from the Skytrain building site. There was no escaping the sense of impending doom.

  The girders in this stretch, the site of what would be Silom Station, were wide enough to cast a shadow over six lanes of traffic. Concrete pipes stacked in pyramids threatened to tumble on to the road at any moment, flattening labourers, pushcart vendors and traffic police. Great bundles of metal rods would gouge out the eyes of any who veered too close.

  On a nearby footpath, all that remained of a pedestrian overpass was a set of stairs leading nowhere.

  Jayne had always thought Bangkok would make a great setting for a disaster movie. The Skytrain construction sites strewn across the city made it look as though disaster had already struck.

  The bus in front of her belched thick, black smoke that crept under the visor of her helmet and stung her eyes. She cursed herself for taking the motorbike, but after more than four years in the Thai capital, it simply didn’t occur to her that she might walk anywhere. Only crazy farang tourists walked. Even pushcart vendors left their carts locked by the side of the road at night and set aside enough baht to take a motorcycle taxi or tuk-tuk home.

  At the end of Silom Road, Jayne turned right into the relative peace of the Dusit Thani Hotel grounds and parked her motorbike beneath a teak tree. It was a mark of the hotel’s quality that such rare trees were preserved in its grounds rather than sold off for timber. To the amusement of the doorman, she pa
used to check her reflection in the spotless exterior windows, fluffed up the black curls flattened by her helmet and wiped the grime from her pale skin before nodding for him to let her in.

  The spacious hotel lobby was carpeted in red and gold, with pillars covered in tan leather. Elaborate bouquets of tropical flowers almost brushed the ceiling. Jayne had dressed up for the high-class venue, substituting her usual T-shirt, chinos and runners for a dark-green blouse, black A-line skirt and strappy sandals. But creased and grubby from the journey, she fell way short of the grooming standards set by the women at the reception desk. Their crimson silk jackets and matching skirts looked ironed on, hair pulled into buns tight enough to cause migraines. Jayne was reconciled to the fact she could never compete with local women’s commitment to the riab roi principle of tidiness and decorum. Still, she thought it was excessive for the receptionist to wince when Jayne asked her to page Mister James Delbeck.

  The man who appeared was stocky and ginger-haired with a weather-beaten face, as ill at ease in his expensive suit as Jayne felt in her semi-formal attire. His red-and-white striped tie was knotted loosely, the top button of his pale blue shirt undone. Gingery curls crept above his collar at the back of his neck. The same fuzz coated the wrist that extended from his sleeve as he introduced himself as Jim. The backs of his hands were dotted with the round pink scars of excised cancers. Similar scars marked the bridge of his nose.

  He smelled of something loud and pricey, and carried a flash leather briefcase. New money, Jayne guessed. Farmer or tradesman turned entrepreneur. But for all the props, Jim Delbeck lacked the pomposity and nervous energy typical of the Australian businessmen who came to Bangkok to negotiate deals. Puffy-eyed and greying, he looked defeated.

  His thick, shiny business card bore a logo in the shape of a truck and listed his position in corporate jargon that suggested authority and a six-figure salary. She felt sheepish exchanging it for one of her own, a modest scrap of paper with her name, ‘Discreet Private Investigator – Speaks English, French and Thai’ and her mobile number, printed in English on one side and Thai on the other. Jim responded with a satisfied nod and gestured towards the lobby bar.

  Jayne followed him to a corner table. He pulled out a chair and waited until she was seated before taking his place. A single white lotus floated in a glass bowl in front of them. An indoor fountain bubbled in the background.