Hunters in the Dark Read Online Free Page A

holiday was always hard to fill satisfactorily. He called his parents and they sent him a little more money. “What
are
you doing there?” his mother asked, sounding as if she were on another planet. “It doesn’t sound like a holiday to
us,
Bobby.” What did it sound like to them?
    He was beginning to like the heat and the pace, the day-by-day gentle sinking into his own laziness. The other backpackers whom he met at the outside café in the passageway in Soi 39/1—a place he went every day for lunch—told him about Laos and Cambodia. They portrayed Cambodia as a tough paradise where you could live even cheaper than you could in Bangkok. He learned all about the gambling buses that went to the border from Lumpini Park every morning at 5 a.m. and the $3 flophouses in Battambang where you could live “like a fish.”
    Some nights he went down to the dingy eatery on the ground floor of the Rex and sat among the lonely old white men and their solemn girls eating spring rolls and drinking Coke. Even this place was better than being at a loose end at the pub in Elmer, the Jack and the Beanstalk. Even the girls here were more beautiful than the ones in the Jack and the Beanstalk. He read novels that he bought in the secondhand shops and later at night, with a few baht, he went down to Nadimos, a Lebanese restaurant on Soi 24, and sat outside next to a fake temple wall and smoked a shisha pipe with a Lebanese coffee in a copper pot and daydreamed. The towers all around shining with lofts and gardens, the ridiculous lions of the Davis Hotel across the street and the fat Arabs with their enviable molls lounging with their shisha and looking remarkably well maintained. There was a life here that he had never imagined. Even Bangkok was not at all what he had expected. It was not the city of
Hangover II
or
The Beach.
It purred with affluent leisure and women dressed to slay. It was a shop window with no glass. One could feel the sucking tide of Asian money flowing through it.
    It was in those moments at Nadimos under the awnings when the evening rain fell, smoking his shisha, that he realized how much he hated where he came from. He was certainly beginning to realize that he didn’t want to go back. Night by night the thought grew in immensity inside him until it no longer felt quite as incredible.
    To begin with, there was no future for him in the little village of Elmer. It was like a posting on a colonial frontier, except that the frontier was merely East Sussex. Elmer had a green like most English villages. There were timbered pubs and gardens that petered out into cornfields, and paths with stiles and fields with stooks in summer. You could walk around it in three hours.
    There was a railway station and an abattoir. It was sweet with old secrecies and it was home and would be for a long time. He hiked among the abandoned flint farmhouses above Bevendean when he dropped in on his grandparents. He had been going there all his life and it was like turning over stones that have been turned over already a hundred thousand times and yet what else was there to do but turn them over? He talked politics with his grandfather, an old trade unionist with a dark red china bust of Lenin on his front-room mantelpiece. Old Albert had once been a trombonist on a Cunard cruise ship and later a chauffeur for a famous professor at the University of Sussex. He was filled with quiet disdains. “Those blummin’ people,” he would say vaguely to his grandson, referring to the classes above him who were perhaps dying out as quickly as his own class. He complained bitterly about the trashy hip-hop blasting from the house next door as he was quietly trying to practice Count Basie tunes on his trombone in the basement. “Those blummin’ people, they play their blummin’ noise all night long at weekends. They’ve got no jobs.” The old man told him he should go and live in London. But Robert himself had never wanted to live there. He was not