I rent a moped and drive out myself. The road is pot-holed, the land parched dry, and the trucks whip the dust up into my face. Scattered shacks, scattered locals flit past. A woman at a well with a wailing baby strapped to her back, gnarled looking men smoking by the roadside, Oxfam-calendar children waving and shouting, asking for pens and chocolate. Scrawny cattle and mangy dogs eye me with lost, pleading gazes. The noise of the wind in my ears makes me think of helicopters, whup-whup-whup, hovering in front of a gaudy crimson sun.
When I arrive beggars of many sizes and shapes, some curiously deformed, all with rags and runny noses, swamp me. Please sir, you very handsome, America No 1. I tell them I am English and the children amongst them shout about David Beckham. Tiny brown hands paw at my arm. I pay my admission and see the sights. I have been told they are harrowing over fruit-shakes and cheap beer last night on the guesthouse veranda, with a view of the lake.
They’ve excavated thousands of skulls and piled them up in tower, which must’ve been purpose built. Grim job for an architect I think. It’s got a nice looking roof, oriental, like on a pagoda. The sides of the tower are glass and tourists crowd around gazing in at the central pillar of human bone. Shabby signs have been put up detailing the age and sex of different groups of skulls on display. ‘Girls under 16’; ‘males over 35’. Someone must have gone through and collected all the similar ones together. I don’t know what’s happened to the skeletons. Mouldy dead clothes lie at the tower's base. I hope my T-shirt is not disrespectful.
Some Australians are taking photos, but I left my camera at the guesthouse. The skulls respond impassively, eye-sockets deep and unseeing. A tour party approaches and huddles around ogling as the guide points out different markings on the skulls, showing the cause of death. This cranium fractured in a way that indicates stoning, that in a way that suggests the use of a pickaxe. Not so many people were shot, explains the guide, as ammo was short. He is sombre and severe, but he sounds a little insincere – he is too brisk and professional to really be thinking about what he is saying, he is an exaggerated parody of the pensive, serious thing you do at this sort of place. But then he must do this every day, maybe every hour, and familiarity numbs everything eventually. At least he’s trying. Thirty percent of the population died he says, there are nine thousand skulls in the tower he says. I think of them all laid out flat stretching off into the distance, like fields of eggshells crunchy underfoot.
I look around. It is too hot, and I’m drenched in sweat. The grass here is dead or dying, crinkling up over the holes gouged in the earth, like craters from a meteor shower. Signs are up explaining in bad English that they were mass graves, some for women and children, and some for men. The gruesome details seem unnecessary: many were decapitated, hundred of bodies were rammed into each hollow, they smashed babies against this tree to kill them, and so on. I feel sick, and am glad – that is what this place is supposed to do to you if you’re a conscientious person. I want to be able to cry, but I haven’t for years and in any case the tears would just mingle with my sweat anyway, so it’s a pretty pointless gesture.
I look in the gift shop, shooing off the beggar children, and buy some water, leaf through some guidebooks. Beer and football T-shirts are also for sale. I wonder what places like this in Europe sell. They’re mostly off the backpacker trail so I doubt you could pick up Beck’s T-shirts or Munich football strips. I feel heavy and serious. The heat is at its peak, so I decide to wait out midday here, although I’ve seen everything, meteor craters and nine thousand skulls. I buy some crisps and sit outside in some sparse shade, under a thin tree in a dusty land.
Tourists are coming and going doing the rounds. There are a lot of nice looking girls about. There are some richer locals around, and they’re pretty like all the guidebooks say. A bit thinly built for my tastes, and I’m never sure which ones are prostitutes. The ones in rags won’t be, but they’re not my thing, and they probably don’t speak any English. There's a great looking one over by the children’s grave though, delicate and exquisite, with a tight top and sleek jet black hair flowing down a slender, smooth brown back. A lot of the locals are friendly too, chatty and giggly, real girlie girls.
Most here are foreigners though, young backpackers, offbeat alternative girls, adventurous and exciting, having rejected the tame castles of Europe and endless highways of America. These are girls who like an edge to their travels, a thirty percent of the population massacred edge. Confident, smart, up for it girls in tight tie-dye vest tops showing bronzed midriffs, the hairs on their arms bleached blonde by the sun. Back in town they’re everywhere, buying trinkets for home at the market shacks, drinking in the cafes of the tourist enclaves, sheltering in the shade of the run down old villas and temples.
Now one girl especially catches my eye, your classic tall blonde beauty, toned, tanned, pert with sky blue eyes and sunshine coloured hair. She glides through the grass taking it all in with a grace inappropriate for the situation. The kind of woman men wish all women would look like. Perfection. Potentialities whirr through my mind, knock at my heart. Maybe she’s Scandinavian; that would be nice. A name like Trudy Johannson, I could go visit her in Norway, see the fjords, have a sauna, talk about the excellent welfare system. Makes a change from England, watch the football, go to the pub, get caught in the drizzle. Trudy and I would be good. She’d be sassy but tender, with that well-spoken reserved sexiness of the Swedes. Or Norwegians, whatever. A pure, well-mannered love, long-lasting.
Or maybe just a fling, a quick tropical union to brag about at home. I could ask her to dinner, talk about the horrors here, and the dark peculiarities of this troubled little country. You can get weed put on pizzas in all the big waterfront restaurants, you can buy a rocket launcher and blow cows up at a shooting range a lot of people go to. I’d tell Trudy all this, and she’d giggle, and twirl her hair. Back to the lake, where all the hotels are, leave the late night human wreckage watching Star Wars on the guesthouse TV, back up to mine. Coming together in a sticky clammy Asian night, alive with the sounds of birds and insects, cocooned together. Humid and sweaty, perfect Trudy, white teeth in a white face, white skin pulled taut over a white skull.
You can taste the heat. I wonder whether the sun bleaches the skulls, maybe they put something in the glass to make sure it doesn’t. Poor people, everyone who would grieve for them died brutally at the same time. That’s what we’re here for now, I guess, to grieve, although no one asked the dead if they wanted to be displayed, exposed to our pity. But then no one asked them if they wanted to die. Life’s cruel like that.
The pretty local girl is leaving. She wrinkles up her nose at me as she passes, making a silly exagerated face of horror, and rolling her eyes. I grin back sheepishly, and she says ‘very bad’. Then she walks past, and hangs around in the dusty car park until a young guy on a bike comes and picks her up. I think about making a move on Trudy, but this is hardly the place. Besides she’s pretty now, but I’ve got to look at the big picture in somewhere like this. That toned flesh of hers will all go, decaying away, leaving only bone. Lust, love, pain, all chemical reactions in a brain doomed to be extinguished, sooner or later. Faith, warmth, sex. Skulls with staring eye sockets.
I leave. Later at the guesthouse I see Trudy again and start talking. She's not actually called Trudy. Her name’s Rachel and she’s from Birmingham. I eventually sleep with her, and am pleased with myself. Afterwards I lie there next to her, thinking of little brown hands pawing my arm, pick-axed tie-dye girls in beer T-shirts, the local rolling her eyes and me, ‘very bad’. I think of the skulls, and in the dark see them piled up in the shadows, jumbled in the corners of my pokey little room, staring down from the ceiling, out from the four walls, up from the floor, like a tomb. I stare back, sweating and sighing, feeling the rhythm of Rachel’s breathing as she sleeps next to me. I lie there through the night, staring deep into their eye-sockets, trying not to blink, wishing more than anything that I could care about them more.
Ben Coren
With a pencil behind his ear and paint in his hair, the man hunched over the workbench and carefully applied the last coat of varnish to his crossbow. He dragged the brush with the wood’s grain and left a glistening trail of brown varnish that highlighted the pattern of the wood. The man reached to his right and picked up his mug of coffee. He took one long deep gulp and then put the mug back in its place. The steam from the coffee mug danced upwards and mixed with the dust-filled air to make a grainy smoke that shone red then orange in the cobwebbed window filtered early evening sunlight. At his feet the cat made a figure of eight around his legs before nimbly jumping onto the bench. The man gently patted the cat’s head and then, leaving his work for a moment, turned and lifted the cat down, placing it in the box he had made for it. The cat purred loudly and then circled in the straw before settling to rest.
The man picked up his brush once again and dipped it in the varnish tin, dabbing excess on the lid. Turning back to the crossbow he continued with his work, dragging the brush towards him in line with the knotted grain. At his back he heard the shed door creak open and turned his head to see who was there. He stared for a moment at the door ajar and then observed a boy enter with muddy face and dishevelled hair.
“Why is the sky red?” the boy asked in a tinny whine. The man stared expressionless for a second and then returned to his work. He hunched forward and resumed the varnishing.
“Why is the sky red?” the voice came again.
He applied the last stroke and rested the brush on the varnish tin lid and then leant back to admire his work. The varnishing was finished and in the morning the crossbow would be shot for the first time. The cat stirred in the box and stretched before jumping onto the man’s lap where it received affectionate caresses.
“Why is the sky red?”
The morning came early; the skeleton of the moon could still be seen hanging from a branch of the bare November tree. Dew lay heavy on the grass and in the east the sky shone red as it had the night before. At the end of the garden furthest from the house the man bent forward and cocked the bow. He stood up straight and gently dropped the bolt into its chamber and then raised the butt of the bow to his shoulder, lining up the sight with the tree some thirty yards ahead of him.
In front of the tree, the boy stood smiling with his arms at his side, perfectly still in an attempt to keep the apple on his head from falling. Without moving he called in the direction of the house
“Mother, mother…come and watch father”
The back door of the house opened and the mother came out. The man aimed the sight on the centre of the apple. From the corner of his eye he noticed the woman’s arrival and, glancing at her briefly, lowered the sight a little and squeezed the trigger.
Duncan Brett