Kanch': A Bridge on the River Home

"Please, you take bus to station," the man at the ticket booth called after him.

"What?" Offord replied incredulously. "Isn't this the railway station?"

"Yes, same same; old part, new part; you please bus to new part."

Offord let go of his bag. It dropped heavily with a thud to the concrete, pushing up motes of dust. Sighing, he straightened his back and scrutinised the surroundings, focusing for the first time on what had always been there. The ticket-seller had a point: if there were indeed two parts, this could only be the old one. It looked more like a refugee camp than a train station. The only train in sight was far off to the west side, resting, or dying, along a grassy track. It could not have moved in a decade, and probably would never do so again. Along the east side, a market had asserted itself, as happens in poor countries when land is left idle and unsupervised. It seemed to Offord that the vendors and stalls had stealthily and gradually sneaked in, past what little security there might have been, and pushed out the trains. All that remained of a functioning station was a ticket booth and the solitary, smiling state employee. Offord dropped his eyes and turned his back on the ugly mess. He was agitated, sweating, and in no mood for delays; he wanted to be rid of Bangkok as soon as possible. He retraced his footsteps out of the filthy station and boarded a red bus parked up in a pile of refuse.

The bus ride was short but succeeded in elevating his blood pressure further and adding more sweat stains to his already malodorous cotton shirt. Offord suffered in silence, closing his eyes in an attempt to reduce the pain. He reached platform three and his ride to Kanchanaburi by crossing two tracks, or rather by hopping through the two trains that were sitting on the two tracks. Finally, he heaved his big black bag up into the luggage rack and slumped down onto the bare wooden seat, trying to catch his breath. He fingered the cell phone in his pocket for a moment but was distracted by dazzling light. The glass window had gone but a wooden shutter remained; this he heaved up into the window frame, blocking out the intense sun. Sitting again, he withdrew the phone and flipped it on. He called up Fong's number on the small screen then pressed the dial button.

Goodbye Fong
"Fong? Fong are you there?"

"Shit! You slippery viper." Offord cursed

Fong's home number was on an answering machine, displeasing Offord immensely. He quickly hung up and thought about what he wanted to tell Fong, what kind of message he should leave, how he should say goodbye.

Victor Offord, the forlorn figure slumped on a hard seat aboard the Kanchanaburi Express, was an investment banker from The City, London; or rather, he had been an investment banker, a good one -- a stolid, respectable pillar of the prestigious establishment for which he worked. For eighteen years he had manoeuvred his way, through the ranks , sideways and upwards, to his present niche: a coveted posting in south-east Asia. He was here ostensibly to assist in the economic development of a potentially rich geographic region. In fact his company was ruthlessly exploiting weak regulation and plundering as much wealth from these newly-rich tiger economies as it possibly could.

Offord blamed Fong for what had happened. Fong, that slimy Asiatic, had become his nemesis. He closed his eyes and ran a blade across Fong's glistening neck.

Fong, the man who had recorded a sickly-sweet message to greet callers to his home number, was Offord's assistant in the Bangkok branch office -- his personal assistant. It was Fong who had corrupted Offord, in the insidious Asian way -- doing business behind closed doors, under tables, over dinners, drinks, and girls. Offord's seduction had been slow at first, until he had developed a taste for corruption. A taste for secrecy and danger , for the sheer fun of deceiving rich, greedy people out of the only thing that really gave them pleasure, and of course a taste for money -- more than he had ever dreamed of.

"Hi, friend. This is Charles Fong ; I'm..."

Offord stared into those inscrutable black eyes of Fong and could see no light. Two sparkling stones of evil set on a beguiling countenance -- a cameo of seduction, ready to snakecharm a soul.

Offord and Fong contacted legitimate bank clients after they had already made a deal with the bank and offered them better returns if they invested their own private money. Fong, the local, charmed the client with talk of safe overseas funds with fixed returns well above those of index-linked cash deposits. He promised secure channels beyond the reach of the taxman and regulation, and he guaranteed easy access to investments at any time. Safe, accessible, and growing: that's the way most people like their cash-pile. Offord, on the other hand, provided the air of legitimacy; his sound credentials could not be questioned and his solid standing in the banking world further beguiled their eager clients.

"...not by the phone right now, so...;

Offord vented his nostrils and could smell the stench of money, dirty money, drifting up on eddies from the foul sewers within.

Instead of channelling the money into secure deposits, Offord was hedging it on risky international markets, making bets against the rise and fall of all kinds of indexes, in an arcane way that only investment bankers know. Offord knew. And profited. Offord watched the filthy rich vying to get richer; greed knows no international boundaries, he thought. Somebody already filthy rich always wants more, and if he can get more without any risk to what he already has, he will happily sink himself deeper in filth. But his knowledge alone was not enough; he was not omnipotent. Nobody can divine the ways markets suddenly and irrationally move, against logic and expectation. The markets moved, suddenly, and for Offord catastrophically. He was left wildly out of balance, hanging in a financial limbo.

"...please leave me a message, and ..."

Offord opened his ears and could hear the song of a sorcerer, the velvet tones of deception.

Fong shed a skin and effortlessly slipped into a new modus operandi, busily wining and dining both new and old clients, some of whom were themselves embezzling from their own employers -- companies and institutions. But the new money was just filling holes in the scam; the old money was still gushing out. The situation was bad, but it got a lot worse.

"...I'll try to get back to you as soon ..."

Offord's fingers, still clutching the blade, felt the warm, sticky blood oozing from the gash. His parched tongue could taste the bitter venom of Fong's dead soul.

When the south-east Asian economic crisis hit in the summer of that year, once-wealthy Thais started to call in their investments, desperate to cover themselves with hard currency. Offord's comfortable world quickly collapsed: his bank, in the wake of the financial typhoon, was running for cover, back to London; his creative embezzling scam had fallen apart; and desperate Thais were screaming at him for their money back. And if that weren't enough, the Burmese woman with whom he had fallen in love had fled the turmoil of his life and gone back to her mother -- in Kanchanaburi.

" ...as I can. Thanks, friend."

Offord redialled Fong's answering machine, still unsure as to what he was going to say. He was barely able listen through the syrupy instruction on Fong's answering machine.

"Fong, Offord here; I'm getting out. Maybe Tut can make my life better again. She can lead me out of this. Time to shed a skin. Bye."

He hung up, let down the shutter, and, as the Kanchanaburi Express pulled out of Bangkok Noi station, he dropped the cell phone onto the hot stone flags of platform three.

Leaving the Past behind
Offord knew that someone would come after him. He wasn't melodramatic in his foresight, or eager for its realisation, but he had a strong sense that he would be caught and have to face the consequences of his own greed and stupidity; and have to pay back for what he had done -- in a way that depended only on who caught him first. He hoped that when payback time came it would be the Thai authorities that uncovered him, whichever branch it happened to be, and not gangsters working for his clients. Anyway despite his acceptance of fate, that dull, non-verbal, subconscious foreboding, he would try his best to stay alive and out of jail.

The train pulled out of the station into the hideous suburbs of Bangkok, and Offord closed his eyes to the poverty. He drew up thoughts of adventure and meditated on them. He had thought his life was adventurous -- living as a wealthy expat in an exotic part of the world, taking huge financial risks, and making unimaginable sums of money. Part of that adventure was the danger that it would all collapse and take him down with it. Well, collapse it had, and Offord was going down and getting desperately close to the bottom.

He snoozed for most of the jerky three hours to Kanchanaburi, waking once only on his hard seat to share sweet, sticky-rice cakes with a fat mother and her angelic children. Entering Kanchanaburi, the train slowed then lurched to a halt in stages, as each carriage rode its sleepers into the next. Sure that the jolts had ended, Offord stood up and retrieved his bag. He said goodbye to the generous mother, even managing a smile for her children, then jumped down onto the busy platform.

He stood still for a moment, taking in the station; he patted the back pocket of his cotton trousers, making sure that his wallet was still there. Not that it contained much -- a little cash and a few bits of plastic, which would probably be useless by now. He consciously suppressed his instinct to hail a taxi and head to the best five-star hotel in town. He even eschewed the sun-blackened tricycle drivers who pestered the dozen or so just-arrived tourists. He heaved his bag over his shoulder and strode confidently out of the small station. A few determined tricycle drivers followed him for a while but soon the heat got the better of them.

Offord's eyes couldn't find the River Kwai, but he walked in its general direction, guided by the body language of locals every time he hove to and wiped his brow. Twenty sweaty minutes later he spotted a Thai guest house, or at least a sign for one, partly hidden by big purple flowers and a banana tree. He was relieved. Tired and sweating profusely he trod the gravel path down to the river and his waiting hideaway.

Offord looked around and supposed that they didn't get too many investment bankers staying here, but it would have to suffice.

"You want loom?" An elderly Thai woman had materialised from nowhere and was addressing Offord in a pleasant sing-song voice. Her hair was streaked with grey, which made her look different and disconcerted Offord for a moment -- most Thais quickly dye their hair at the first signs of middle age.

"You follow me, please."

He did, through a lush garden that was almost a meadow, wild but not unkempt, over an elongated pond, and to a line of bamboo-and-brick bungalows.

"I'll take it," he said to himself, even before she had mentioned a price. When she did, he gave voice to his thought.

"Passport and pay please one night," she requested.

He gave her money for ten nights and lied that his passport would be here in a week, when his wife caught up with him. She took the money, said nothing, and disappeared -- back to wherever she had come from. Victor L Offord, high rolling investment banker from the City and one-time millionaire, stepped into his two-dollar-a-night bamboo hut and closed the door behind him.

River Nights
Offord was bitten awake by a thirsty mosquito, and quickly realising where he was, he fumbled to the door and pushed it open. Beyond the garden and the wide brown river, an orange sun was setting magnificently, burning away the dregs of daylight. Motionless, he beheld the beauty of what was before him and for an instant lost himself in its total captivating truth. He vaporised for that second, becoming one with the scene of glory. But just for a moment; he came to and scratched the bite behind his knee. A long-tail boat was screeching up river towards the bridge with a cargo of tourists, violating the peace.

Dusk had laid a mantle of surreal greyness on the garden, shrouding and subduing its colourful splendour; the rippling water of the river reflected lights from the far bank, each crest a different muted colour; and a crescent moon popped out and hung in the grey-blue, cloudless sky, quickly followed by stud-like stars being pressed through that metallic backdrop.

"Where am I," Offord uttered, in awe of the rich truth that had just entered his life.

Hunger forced a quick retreat to Offord's awakening spirit. Those few rice-cakes since breakfast needed some substantial company. The guesthouse restaurant looked nice, over there, spread along the ample bank of the River Kwai, half under the cover of a thatched awning, half out among palm trees, whose fronds swayed in silhouette against the evening sky. But Offord wanted to keep aloof, so he trudged back up the gravel path to the main road.

The street was busier than it had been a few hours ago when he had arrived, people were waking up to the cooler evening. Every other house seemed to be engaged in some kind of business that spilled onto the pavements -- selling things, mostly food. Plump mothers stood over fiery woks clutching metal fish-slices as if they were sidearms, tossing up the contents then stirring and scraping vigorously, suddenly cracking the slice against the rim of the iron utensil. Others were tending charcoal-burning barbecue grills, cooking sticked chicken wings and pork. Offord was not at all used to this. He had been in Asia for a few years, but usually not at ground level, always separated by a protective, anaesthetizing layer of whatever money could buy.

Offord picked a relatively hygienic-looking stall, sat down on a stool, and waited for a plate of fried rice and a papaya salad. He devoured his simple meal in silence then pulled out his wallet to pay. Still lying there, inside a plastic flap, was a snapshot of Tut, beaming at a distant wat. Before she had left him the picture had given him pleasure, or what he thought was pleasure. Now it gave him pain -- he had left it there anyway, as a reminder of how good life could be. Tut had become a faint hope in his plight, a line of escape out of the misery his life had suddenly become. A crossing. Tut was like the sunset he had seen a few hours before, a pervading truth that cleanses anything it touches; Offord's regret was that he hadn't let her touch him. He smiled, for the second time that day, but this was a deeper smile; it had real roots, inwards to his being.

That night, the first night of his new life, Offord sat in the garden until the noise of the last of the floating bars, discos, and karaoke bars had drifted downstream leaving an unhurried peace, the kind that can only be found in Asia. It wasn't quiet -- it never is -- but the distractions were made by contented people, at peace with themselves and their surroundings. Offord realized that he had nothing to do: no monitors to gaze at, no data to scrutinize, no deals to clinch. Nothing. An uninvited space grew in his mind as he sat with the frogs beside the pond.

At last he moved back to his porch from where he watched a magnificently silhouetted five-inch lizard defying gravity against a luminous, spherical lamp-shade, gorging itself on anything that flew into the light. Nature had regained the airwaves from man, and the night's stillness was vibrated only by the sounds of frogs croaking and leaping in the pond, geckos calling to each other, an owl, and other unidentifiable calls from the wild. It was a symphony out there, Offord thought, a wonderful harmonious arrangement performed by nature's orchestra. He slipped under the mosquito net of his small bed and wondered why he hadn't heard this before, it must always have been here.

Crossing Bridges and People
Early the next morning, sharpened by sleep, Offord padded through the verdure of the garden and slipped out of the guest house unnoticed. He felt lighter, unburdened, and was beginning to notice his surroundings with more awareness than before. He moved slowly along a low hedge, in awe of the multi-coloured butterflies that gave flight as he approached, some the size of small birds, their delicate wings propelling them into invisible eddies and currents of air.

Today he would begin his search for Tut, which would not be difficult, he knew. Simply finding her was not the problem. Words would be the problem, conveying meanings in a way that would illuminate the truth within him. Words could defeat him, and he wished that she could just look into him and see everything that was there. Things that he could not even verbalize for himself. Words could apologize and promise, hide things and expose others, but they would never be able to crystallize what he had just begun to find in himself.

Where the gravel path met the main road, Offord turned left then stopped at a roadside stall to buy a bag-full of fried bananas from a listless vendor whose loose clothes were begrimed with the soil of his trade. Munching on his breakfast, he continued towards the bridge.

Tut's mother was a poor Burmese immigrant who sold kitsch to the many tourist that were daily bussed into Kanchanaburi and its famous 'bridge on the River Kwai'. Every day she laid out cheap souvenirs on a table and waited for passing tourists to stop and buy something. She was part tribal , not really Burmese. She had fled Burma during one of the many military campaigns against tribal insurgencies in the east part of the country. Tut's father, also half tribal had been pressed into the Burmese army. This much Offord knew about Tut's mother, but what he didn't know was what she looked like

After half an hour of hot tarmac, Offord turned a slow bend and walked into the foreground of The Bridge on the River Kwai. He halted and gazed up at the bridge. His mind swam with visions of his dead grandfather and Tut's mother, both of whom he had never met but were suddenly very important in his life. Grandpa was a family hero, much talked about back home in Islington, a perverse source of everlasting pride. Tut's mother was his only way to Tut.

Offord shook off any premonitions and re-focussed on the famous bridge, spanning three hundred meters to the other side He was strangely disappointed: he had been expecting a more grandiose structure, worthy of the thousand of lives that perished during its construction, his own grandfather's included. His eyes followed the arched sections of black iron above track level, leapfrogging across the river in three bounds. Then he looked down at its concrete supports, giant elephant legs, helplessly stranded in the murky brown water. Offord walked up to the bridge and smoothed the black iron with his hand. He noticed a metal card affixed to the first arch; it revealed the name of the Japanese company in Tokyo that had constructed the bridge. Offord suddenly remembered that this wasn't the original bridge, that had been bombed to the bottom of the river by Allied air-attacks before the end of the war.

Surprisingly few tourists were viewing the bridge and railway, still a little early, Offord supposed. But a group of colourfully dressed women were setting up their wares by the railway

Facial contours, complexion, eyes -- they all set apart Burmese from Thais, and Offord was easily able to distinguish the local women from their neighbours across the jungle border. To the nearest squatting Burmese woman he showed his photograph of Tut. But she couldn't grasp the situation and tried to sell him some postcards; then some Burmese jade and ivory; then, as he retreated, some Burmese cheroots and coins.

Offord mounted the tracks and started to walk over the bridge. The planks nailed between the rails were worn smooth by the daily flow of human traffic that pads over the bridge. The sightseers point, stare, ponder, buy a few souvenirs, take a few snapshots, then shuffle back across, trying not to knock each other off as they go. Offord slid past the first hawker on the other side, a smiling Thai woman with a baby tied to her back. The next was also Thai, but younger, and certainly should have been in school. At the edge of this knot of hawkers was a round-eyed, sparkling woman who should have been a film star. She frowned at Offord's picture and motioned to a row of colourful stalls under the bridge. He looked down, straightened his body, and backed away, barely thanking the movie star for her help.

Walking down the black iron steps, off the bridge, Offord fixed his blue eyes on an elegant woman seated behind one of the tables. Her obsidian hair, pulled back by a yellow band, was bunned on her crown, hoisted off her slender brown neck, She was having an animated conversation with the adjacent stall-holder, her slender neck somehow moving her head from side to side in a way that kept her face vertical at all times, instead of nodding to the sides at an angle. Her interlocutor seemed mesmerized by her grace an tranquility. Everything about her was Tut, or rather everything about Tut was her.

She ceased her conversation as he approached and readjusted her posture to the business at hand, opening herself ready to envelop a new friend for the fleeting moments it takes to sell a souvenir. But Offord wasn't interested in her nick-knacks, and he could see that she knew it -- she resisted the usual banter that begins such an encounter. Her bamboo-like fingers reached for the photograph, but they didn't take it; instead she gracefully reclined her body back into its sitting position and raised her eyes to his.

While she was Offord's lover, Tut had never told her mother about him. It would have only been worth troubling the older woman if they had been going to get married, which never seemed to be necessary. Mother's mind was firmly fixed in the past, ingrained with the conservatism of generations of her forebears. But now she knew, had been told something. Offord sensed that he was not a stranger to her and felt no obligation to justify his presence to her.

"Tomorrow," she said, still holding his eyes.

Offord acknowledged, and with a nod he obsequiously withdrew himself from her magnetic presence.

A ragamuffin, barefooted little girl followed him back over the bridge with armfuls of Burmese ivory and gems -- obviously fake. But Offord cared not: he had stepped over one hurdle today and was ready to face the next.

Burying the Dead
Unfortunately for Offord's wilting body, the war cemetery was far from the bridge, along a blazing, heat-shimmering road, back towards town. He moved slowly, keeping in the shade of the magnificent jamjuree and kiris trees where he could and pausing often to replace lost body fluid. A mid-day tropical sun can inflict severe damage o human body unfortunate enough to be caught in its relentless fire. He was a noticeably solitary figure, plodding along the tarmac: locals do not venture out at such an hour, and if they do, never on foot.

Offord was upon the cemetery before he saw it -- high walls kept out unwanted eyes. It was strangely out of place, he thought, immaculate amongst the chaos of its surroundings. Nature usually gets the better of man in the contest in any Thai garden or park: humans simply manage the surface, subduing the worst excesses of intangible natural forces. But here, man's logic and industriousness had been victorious, leaving a neat and ordered cemetery -- as if death needed a rational hand to maintain its dignity.

Offord stepped into the entrance: a truncated stone wall with a big opening pushed through it. Out of the sun, he felt better and sat down on a stone bench. A small safe, set into the wall of the entrance, caught his attention. Under its etched crucifix, Offord read the words 'Cemetery and Memorial Register'. He turned the handle and swung the door open. Nothing, no register, just an empty cavity and a sign apologizing for its absence and telling him to contact cemetery staff during working hours, or the resident caretaker, or the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Maidenhead, England. Offord squinted through the sun and saw no staff or caretaker's house, and however good the mail service was between here and Maidenhead, he couldn't wait. He walked on through the monumental entrance and stepped onto the cemetery turf.

His eyes quickly darted along the neatly laid out lines and rows of thousands of small brown stones, identical save for the arrangement of letters on the surface -- the a's b's and c's giving meaning to someone somewhere. He started to walk towards the grey monument, somewhere near the centre of the graveyard, then turned in along a row of stones. The names were familiar to him, as were most of the ranks: Jones, gunner; Peterson, bombardier; Crook, private; and Arthurs, corporal. But some of the regiments seemed obscure: The Gordon Highlanders, The Herts Yeomanry, The Loyal Regiment, The 135 th Field Regiment .... He had no idea which regiment his grandfather had served in, but it probably wouldn't have made any difference -- the stones didn't seem to be laid out according to regiment.

Along the rows and lines he went. Simple epitaphs -- 'George Rawlings, Srgt, Norfolk Regiment. Your courage will always be with us' -- conjured up squalid prison camp, forced labour, and brutal guards. He could see the bulging rib-cage of Srgt. Rawlings as he heaved back-breaking sleepers along Death Railway, goaded by the bayoneted gun of a sadistic camp guard. Jack Prewit, Orderly, Royal Medical Corps, he envisioned dispensing rations of quinine in an unsanitary camp hospital to a gangly line of skin and bones. He wondered what had killed Orderly Prewit. A disease? Cholera, dysentery, malaria, or scabies. Or had it been brutality. A bayonet, a whip, water torture, or a punishment hole dug in the baking earth. Or had poor Prewit just given up hope and turned his back on the insanity that life had become. Offord suddenly felt disgust at what he was doing -- looking at the war dead. He noticed a coach-load of sight-seers fanning out over the grounds and wondered why they came here, to see what exactly. The lalick birds in the giant jamjuree tree were the only ones who really knew how to enjoy the cemetery. And where were the thousands of Asians who had laboured and died alongside the Allied POWs, the Tamils, Chinese, Malays, Burmese, and Thais. He felt uneasy and decided to give up his search. He walked to the end of the row he was in, turned back up towards the entrance, and suddenly saw his name on a brown stone, "Offord". He stopped and read. 'T/219219 Driver S.G.J. Offord. Royal Army Service Corps. 13 th May 1944 Age 31.

So, grandfather, you were a driver. He smiled and thought of all those ridiculous stories he had heard about grandfather fighting the Japanese through the jungles of Malaysia and Borneo and suddenly liked him all the more for being a driver and not a daredevil jungle commando. Offord made a note of the number at the top of the stone (for what he didn't really know) then sidestepped tourists back to the exit.

Getting Out
Reclining in a cane chair under a palm tree back in his blooming garden, Offord pondered his options. His mind whirred like a movie projector and he saw himself on celluloid: black and white scenes from old spy films, in which he kept getting apprehended by polite, grey-coated officials. Leaving the country now through official channels would indeed be foolish, as those mental movie clips were warning him, certainly if he tried to fly out. An overland crossing might be safer, especially in a remote jungle area, away from modems and fax machines, but could still be risky. Fleeing over a river or a mountain would be easy, but then what? He wound on the reel to the scenes about his capture in a militaristic state without papers, stamps, and visa: charges of espionage, a Burmese Changi Prison, months in solitary confinement, torture .... Surrendering himself in Bangkok would be better than that. Offord regurgitated his meditation on adventure and decided to update it.

Nobody had come looking for him yet; how could they? The only thing to link him to Kanchanaburi was Tut, and only Fong and a few others knew about her. A bull-frog started to croak as the buzz of a cicada subsided. Offord wound down into a doze.

Menial Affairs
"Huh?" Offord replied.

A matronly-looking Thai, with a flat face and grey-streaked, bunched black hair, had just uttered something unintelligible to him and was laughing at the way he was bent over a bucket of soapy water trying to wash his shirt. His own odour had pinched his nostrils when he stirred awake on the cane chair, and he had decided to scrub up a little. She threw him a scrubbing brush.

Offord liked the way the local people undertook the mundane chores of everyday living, with smiles and laughs. Preparing food, cooking, washing clothes, sweeping the floor -- were all done with zest, albeit slow zest. He had previously thought himself above such lowly activities (as an investment banker with a six-figure salary), and had always hired people to take care of that drudgery. He now realised that he had been missing an important part of life. The hired hands are not your hands, and the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and the bed you sleep in, all lack a vital part of you. He smiled to himself, contented, as he wrung out his cotton garment and hung it on a green-leafed bush ready to catch the next morning's sun. money can't buy this, he thought.

The evening entertainment had started to float by on the river. Rafts, upon which had been built bars, restaurants, karaoke bars, and even discos, were puled upstream by screeching long-tail boats. Fat cats from the city gorged themselves on sumptuous meals and expensive whiskies, bragging about deals made and money won and lost. Offord had been there and knew what they were made of, beneath their Rolex watches, designer cell phones, and tailored suits; and he thought he might not want to go back.

Reunion of Souls
Offord bent his knee and hoisted his tense body onto the sturdy iron bridge, thinking he was far too early. As he peered at a knot colourful women on the far side, something skittered up behind him and two warm palms slipped down his forehead to cover his eyes. He turned, stooped, and embraced his silent assailant, greeting her in her own dialect. Tut unfolded a splendid smile across her coffee-coloured face then shot a single kiss at his stubbly cheek. Offord was defenceless, his tension melted, and he subconsciously surrendered to this figure of joy that had just re-entered his sorry life. Stepping back out of her embrace, he raised both hands to her shoulders and looked into her deep eyes then refocused to look for Mother. Mother had already silently glided past and was now in the middle of the bridge with her bundles of trinkets. Offord wanted to thank the older woman for bringing her daughter to him (he couldn't imagine the words that must have passed between them); but before he could take a step, Tut clasped his moist hand and tugged him over to a whitewashed wall. Tut's mother disappeared over the bridge.

They sat on the wall next to short pilasters, which had blooming purple flowers spilling from their tops.

"I ah .... I don't.... I'm not sure... well, where to begin...." Offord said in staccato words and unfinished sentences.

His eyes left hers and he added with more vigour: "But I do know where I want to end."

He returned his eyes. "I want this to end with you and me away somewhere else, together. Away from Fong and the bank; away from everything. Just you snd me and a new beginning.

Tut didn't wince but he knew it sounded corny, like a badly written dialogue in a cheap romance, especially coming from him and in such a dramatic setting under The Bridge on the River Kwai. But that was the way it came out; that was exactly what he wanted to say.

"What do you mean, 'away from the bank, Fong, away from everything." Tut quizzed him.

Offord adjusted his position on the wall, looked up at the black girders of the railway bridge, and began to tell his story. He told her everything, boiled down to the essential truths and facts but omitting none of his skulduggery. She imbibed every word and said nothing, just gurgling occasionally at some of the arcane financial terms.

Tut seemed not at all disconcerted that he might be a fugitive on the run from sundry pursuers. 'We'll go to my house," she said.

"What!" Offord tried to sound startled.

"To my home in Burma," she added. "Don't worry, come with me."

"Uh, ...yes...." He said.

Of course Offord had been secretly hoping for such a response from Tut, having decided not to surrender himself to anyone, and he was glad that she had suggested it and not he.

"But how?" He pushed.

"Don't you see what is in front of you ? She replied motioning across to the bridge.

"Over the bridge and up the railway? Why, of course." He looked back at her.

"Yes, up the railway. Local trains run up to Nam Tok. It's very safe, especially for Robin Hood." Tut said.

Robin Hood? Offord wondered if she had misunderstood his confession but hoped that she had misunderstood the legend of Robin Hood. Or it could have been Burmese humour.

"And after NamTok?" He wondered.

Tut explained: "It's not so far on into Burma; many refugees come through the passes into Thailand; we'll just be going in the opposite direction; it'll be fine after NamTok."

He was amazed at her optimism and wondered what she meant by 'fine after Nam Tok'. Hiking through inhospitable jungle along the Death Railway, through Hellfire Pass, and into an unknown country didn't sound as though it would be fine. But he didn't press any further and resigned himself again to whatever may happen. Again the word 'adventure' popped into his head; he let go of her warm fingers and contemplated for a moment.

© Paul S. Davey, 2002

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Paul S. Davey is a freelance travel and fiction writer. He started life in the UK but now turns up in the strangest of places around the world -- usually with his notebook handy

novels:
Ghost Money first chapter of a new novel
Fei Azzis and the Water Table of Sa' An (coming soon)

travel:
Tryin' to Get to Mexico
Freedom in Cambodia
Saigon Gary
Pedalling Taipei
Tofu Culture
Urban Betel Adventure: Sex, Drugs, and Spitting
Hawking Carrot-Cake and a New President
Cambodia, Freehand