White Crocodile Read Online Free Page A

summer ball in the officers’ mess four years ago. She had noticed him immediately: something to do with his height perhaps. He was half a head taller than most of the other men in the room, and well built, not in a body builder’s way, but loose and athletic. He had sandy blond hair, cut short, and the palest blue-grey eyes she had ever seen, the colour of a clear winter sky. But, attractive as he was, his physical features weren’t the main reason she had noticed him. He was standing alone, and what drew her to him was how comfortable he was in his self-containment, surrounded as he was by a heaving mass of drunken extroverts. She had seen a reflection of herself in him. That same distance, that same separation she felt from other people. The image she retained of their meeting brought to mind the Robert Doisneau photograph of lovers kissing, freeze-framed against the blur of a busy Paris street.
    She had felt a fierce love for him virtually from the moment they met. She realised, soon after they were married, that the love she felt had blinded her to the reality of his personality. Controlling behaviour had seemed protective; overly intense and uncompromising behaviour, adoration and concern; introversion and suspicion of others, mysteriousness. As the only child of a single father overwhelmed by his parenting responsibilities, who had farmed her care out to friends and an ever-changing roll call of nannies, she wasn’t used to being the centre of someone else’s world, and that feeling had been intoxicating.
    Now she just felt exhausted by it all, empty.
    Why did it matter if he called her? She was never going back to him. Distance protected her, made her strong enough to resist. She could speak to him without being sucked back into that same old pattern of needy love, violence, guilt and apology. She placed a hand against the flat of her stomach.
    ‘It’s fine, Luke.’
    He was managing a troop of thirty Khmer clearers, teaching them Western military disciplines so that, in time, they would become skilled enough to be self-sufficient. He sounded softer, more relaxed than she’d known him in a long time, and she felt relieved that he had found a life beyond her that might make him happy. But a couple of months after he arrived, his tone began to change.
    ‘It’s different when you get under the surface,’ he said one time, his voice rising against the static crackle on the line. ‘You start to see the other side.’
    ‘What do you mean? What other side?’
    ‘You remember when you called me outside because there was a cat in the garden? What, two summers ago?’ She was baffled by the non sequitur, and then a burst of interference and the faint words of someone else, another conversation, crossed the line.
    ‘Luke, I can’t hear you.’ The memory came into focus though. A stray cat hanging around in the back garden one morning. When they’d approached it, they’d seen the fur on one flank stirring, the pale, bloated bodies of maggots. It watched them with unperturbed green eyes; leapt the fence when Tess had tried to tempt it close enough to catch with a saucer of milk.
    She heard a sigh, pixellated by the crackle. He was talking about the UN brokering peace after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. ‘They did it, sure. But at the same time they screwed around, didn’t bother to use condoms and kickstarted AIDS. They were out here to help, for fuck’s sake. Like that cat. Perfect one side – then you see the other, the hidden side.’
    She drew a long breath, closed her eyes. ‘But that was almost thirty years ago, Luke?’
    He laughed bitterly. ‘Cambodia has an AIDS epidemic, now. So they’ve not just got the mine problem they started with, they’ve got an AIDS problem too, caused by the bastards who were supposed to be helping.’ She heard the familiar anger rising in his voice, and shivered despite herself. ‘And that attitude, that disregard for people’s rights, for their lives , it pervades