Black Tiger (7 page)

This had been brought to her attention by a man who, despite their mutual wariness, promised to be an invaluable ally. His name was Sya Dam. Like Sunii herself, he trusted nobody. Unlike Sunii, apart from his steely loyalty to the king, he was entirely without scruples, and therein lay his usefulness. Their association was a closely guarded secret, even from those nearest to them.

Sunii did not mention Sya Dam’s name in her last interview with Chee Laan on the eve of her departure. She sensed that the girl was tense with anticipation, straining at the leash. ‘We live in a dangerous world, Granddaughter. A world requiring brutal tactics,’ Sunii said. Chee Laan bowed her head, but her eyes were dancing with curiosity and excitement. Sunii regarded her thoughtfully. It was generally accounted lucky for a daughter to resemble her sire. But Chee Laan’s father had been ugly from his ugly begetting. Fortunately, with her delicate arched brows and neatly modelled chin and cheekbones, Chee Laan’s face already shared something of her grandmother’s charm.

‘We need to be prepared. The citadel of the mind and the citadel of the body, must develop defences. Your training will be rigorous, but you will emerge from it equipped to overcome all adversaries.’ Chee Laan’s brows contracted in puzzlement, but her grandmother continued: ‘It will not be easy. But I have confidence in your abilities, Granddaughter.’ Still, the thought of the challenge that, all too soon, the girl would face—and of which she was as yet unaware—made Sunii’s own unshakeable heart quail.

‘I shall not be able to sleep so close to other people,’ Chee Laan informed the nun, dropping her suitcase on her narrow bed. Chee Laan had been obliged to carry the case upstairs herself. There was no sign of servants, so they were surely the lazy types who always hid when there was work to be done. Her first impressions of Ste Anne’s Convent were no more encouraging than her impressions of Normandy itself: cold, grey, and shabbily down-at-heel. She surveyed the spartan dormitory, little suspecting that she would soon be longing for the comfort of that narrow bed as the height of luxury.

‘I am accustomed to having my own room,’ she explained patiently.

The nun stared at her. She had one of those faces Chee Laan had noticed before on deeply religious persons, such as Buddhist nuns at home in Thailand: a young-old face, unlined, innocent. Innocence in adults often seemed to be accompanied by simpleminded-ness. Nevertheless, the nun seemed a kindly soul, if a little garrulous. As the girls had struggled upstairs with their suitcases, she had kept up a constant chatter about how different things would be for them, how she hoped the cold would not bother them. Princess Pim, who possessed a kind heart and had had a private tutor in French, kept the conversation going. Chee Laan understood one word in twenty. The third Thai student was Salikaa, who had the glamorous sheen of a wealthy merchant’s daughter. She was paying no attention, burdened as she was by her oversized Hermes suitcase, her glossy fashion magazines, and her leopard-skin coat. Teetering on her five-inch heels, it was all she could do to negotiate the narrow, twisty stairs.

Chee Laan’s words seemed to depress the little nun, whose mouth turned down.

‘But,’ she protested, ‘everything is modern! The young ladies have cubicles. Privacy!’

Rather ugly blue curtains separated their beds. But these did not block out the sounds and smells of other human beings nearby: the murmurs, grunts, prayers, expletives, and whispered confidences. The smells of talc, deodorant, unwashed hair, feral and acrid, the damp scent of young female skin, the odour of feet and recently worn shoes were overpowering. One might as well have lived under a sheet of corrugated iron in Thonburi’s shantytown. And always the watching eyes of strangers, the creaking shoe-leather of the patrolling nun, the click of her beads running through her dry white fingers. Sometimes in those first days Chee Laan thought these repetitive noises would drive her mad.

They shared one bathroom, and its lock didn’t work properly. So it was that, one evening, Chee Laan walked in on Salikaa. She stopped, surprised. Salikaa stood with her back to Chee Laan, studying her appearance in a hand mirror. Mirrors spelled vanity, and were forbidden; Chee Laan’s had already been confiscated by the nuns. Salikaa had draped her towel round her neck like a kickboxer. Apart from that, she was naked. Chee Laan just had time to take in her long, muscular, golden back when the heavy wooden door groaned shut behind her and Salikaa spun round and found her staring. With a muttered curse, she tugged the towel from her neck and flung it over Chee Laan’s head. She twisted it about her throat, hauling her around, manhandling her easily. Unable to see, Chee Laan lost her balance, thrust out her arms blindly—but now Salikaa was behind her, pulling the towel chokingly tight about her windpipe.

She growled close to Chee Laan’s left ear, ‘Knock next time, little shit-for-brains! Did no one teach you manners in your Chink school?’ Chee Laan heard the door creak open, felt a rush of the cooler air of the corridor, and then a blow to the small of the back that sent her sprawling, still blindfolded.

‘Next time I’ll kill you!’ Salikaa did not bother to lower her voice this time.

The hot, damp frotté material rubbed against Chee Laan’s face. Gasping for air, she fell on her side on the wooden floor. She clawed off the towel and hurled it from her. She was lying in the corridor. The bathroom door was shut. She rubbed her bruises and sat for a while in the half darkness. As her anger subsided and her breathing and pulse returned to normal, she began to puzzle over the violence of Salikaa’s reaction. Chee Laan knew she herself had the quick-flaring Chinese temper—
Tsu mu
had reproved her for it many times. Even so, Chee Laan felt she should not have been so enraged by a friend barging innocently into a bathroom. She had realised early on in their acquaintance that Salikaa was wild and farouche, one step above a savage in some respects. But even for Salikaa, Chee Laan found the extreme overreaction bizarre and alarming. Shaken, she made her way back to the dormitory.

Pim had drawn back the curtains of her cubicle and was sitting up in bed, studying her French grammar. She looked up from her book, smiling. Then she caught sight of the blood spreading over Chee Laan’s forehead and the bruising on her neck. Her jaw dropped. She threw down her book. ‘What on earth has happened to you? Have you been wrestling a crocodile, my dear?’ She reached out a hand and touched Chee Laan’s face.

‘That crazy bitch,’ Chee Laan said, rubbing her face. She studied her hand, saw the blood, and grimaced. She told Pim what had happened.

Pim covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh, Chee Laan,’ she whispered, ‘you mean you didn’t know?’

‘Know what?’

‘Salikaa didn’t want you to see her naked! It’s—it’s a phobia.’

‘She’s just crazy!’ Chee Laan said.

‘You mustn’t ever, ever say anything about her attacking you!’ Pim urged. ‘Promise?’ She took Chee Laan’s face between her hands. ‘She is capable of anything, you know. You could get hurt. And her family, if that’s what they are…I mean, did you see them, at Don Muang airport, when we left? They’re lowlife thugs, Chee Laan, but they’re rolling in money. They have a long reach and plenty of friends.’

Chee Laan shook her head free.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘My own family have a couple of baht to rub together and a few ugly friends of our own!’ Her face softened as she looked at Pim. ‘But thanks for looking out for me, Pim.’

She never mentioned the incident again. She felt sure Salikaa had expected her to tattle to the nuns. When she did not, she earned grudging respect. Chee Laan was still angry, but she had been brought up to believe that anger diminishes one and is a sign of poor breeding. She fought her anger for a practical reason as well: she remembered her grandmother’s teaching, that anger impairs the judgment and weakens the power of argument. It hands the advantage to the adversary. She sensed that in the future, she and Salikaa might well stand on different sides.

And yet, while trust did not flourish between them, the unusual experience the three of them shared made of them co-conspirators. Chee Laan realised that, left to their own devices, she and Salikaa might well have allowed their mutual suspicion to escalate into open antipathy, but as the weeks went by they found themselves increasingly bound in the web of Pim’s generous affection for them both, and theirs for her. All three young women had previously led somewhat isolated existences, shielded by wealth or birth, and by vigilant attendants, from the world of their peers. While their characters and backgrounds were poles apart, thrown together in this strange land had deepened their loyalties to one another. Despite Chee Laan’s natural reserve, and Salikaa’s pathological secrecy, the alien environment in which they found themselves drew them together.

Chee Laan’s special childhood horrors still haunted her, even here in this cold, grey land: her brother’s assault, and sometimes the memory of the kite girl, falling, ever falling. Once she cried out in her sleep, and awoke to find Pim kneeling by her bed. Pim was shaking her arm and stroking her face with soft fingers, as a mother might have done. Chee Laan’s mother had never comforted her so.

Chee Laan shot bolt upright, feeling ashamed and vulnerable at the thought that she had woken Pim from her own sleep. But when she switched on the bedside lamp and looked into Pim’s sweet face, puckered with concern, Chee Laan felt she owed her friend an explanation, so she recounted her nightmare. ‘It’s strange it should still disturb me so. I was just a child,’ she concluded, her terror lessened now that she was wide awake.

‘There is something unresolved in your life, Chee Laan,’ Pim said. ‘Dreams are like ghosts. They return to haunt one because they seek solutions.’

‘But she was just a coolie.’ Chee Laan shook her head, trembling still from the vividness of the dream and puzzled by the strength of her reactions.

Pim frowned and drew back a little. ‘What do you mean, “just a coolie”? You think, therefore, that she is unworthy of consideration? Rousseau says there is no such thing as natural inferiority. When we Thais call others low-class, or of dirty blood, these are ignorant prejudices, which successive ruling parties have cynically exploited to oppress the people and maintain the status quo.’

She used the language of the revolutionary. It did not surprise Chee Laan. Pim had already hinted that her royal parents had sent her to France in the hope that she would not only improve her French but would forget all of her socialist inclinations.

‘Power has only one duty: to secure the welfare of the people,’ Pim continued.

‘For my people, the first duty is to the family,’ Chee Laan said. With a stab of irritation, she realised that her tone was almost apologetic, as though she were suddenly ashamed of being Chinese. Trained since earliest childhood to recognise that she belonged to the oldest civilisation in the world, with the longest-surviving traditions, Chee Laan had never felt ashamed before.

‘Don’t pay any attention to me, Chee Laan! My father calls me a pinko hothead!’ Pim swept back her long, soft switch of hair and laughed softly. She squatted back on her heels and gently smoothed Chee Laan’s pillowcase. Then, to Chee Laan’s surprise, she climbed onto the bed, lay down beside her, and stared at the ceiling. Chee Laan had never shared a bed with anyone else. She edged toward the outer side of the mattress and copied Pim’s posture, lying flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, too. She tried to adjust her breathing pattern to Pim’s.

‘The only person who understands how I feel is my brother,’ Pim mused. ‘Toom.’

‘I saw him at the airport,’ Chee Laan remembered. The two girls, wearing their new, specially selected travelling outfits, each surrounded by a bustle of chattering attendants, had been observing each other surreptitiously. Chee Laan remembered the fine-featured, studious-looking young man who held Pim’s hand the whole time and whispered to her, as though they were all alone. She had found him attractive, despite his rather long hair and the huge spectacles. ‘Is he your twin brother? You’re very alike.’

‘Twin souls, not biological twins. He is a year older. But we share a birthday, so many of our astrological elements are similar. Except, of course, that Toom is brilliant. He studies science at Cambridge—my father’s old college. Although Father, unlike Toom, was not really clever enough for Cambridge.’

Chee Laan grunted, reflecting that if you were a prince, or your father had a fat chequebook, it was not so necessary to be clever, perhaps. Even though her family was not of royal blood, they certainly belonged to the Bangkok plutocracy. Had not her own ignorant brother Pao been awarded a scholarship to Taiwan, financed by Bangkok’s Chinese business community, where he was to study calligraphy and classical Mandarin? The Lee Family had put up most of the money, much of which went into the pockets of university officials, and the rest, his generous allowance, into Taipei’s thriving entertainment industry. Pao greatly enjoyed his time in Taipei, but to this day, his calligraphy remained inferior to that of his sister.

‘My father adored Cambridge,’ Pim mused. ‘He loved the life. Intellectually, it hardly made a dent on him. It certainly did not affect his politics. But he realised sending me there too would hardly cure me of my socialism, especially as Toom is there. And he holds old-fashioned views about the education of women. So I was packed off to this backwater.’ She made a vague gesture toward the blue curtains and the worn floorboards.

‘And thanks to you,’ Salikaa’s harsh voice suddenly sprang up from the other side of the curtain, ‘I ended up here, too!’ She thrust the curtain roughly aside, stepped up close to the bed and stood gazing down at them, her eyes gleaming with mockery. ‘Remember the headlines in the Bangkok papers: “Princess to study in France!” Vichai, my stepfather, saw it as an opportunity.’

Pim looked so mystified that Chee Laan took pity on her. ‘Let’s face it, Pim,’ Chee Laan said, hauling herself up onto her elbow and looking down into her pale, puzzled face. ‘It’s all your fault. My grandmother saw the same headline. Our families hope that, being thrown together here, we’ll become bosom pals. They see our friendship as a potential social advantage.’