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MARK AND LEK WERE SO tired they could hardly talk. Edward bought them a takeaway from the local Malaysian and they ate at the table in a silence broken only by mechanical pleasantries – What was the flight like? You must be tired, How kind of you to treat us like this when we should be ... – and the carping of a baby. Mark and the two Leks went to bed at ten o’clock.
Edward knew they’d have gone much earlier had it not been for a misguided sense of appearances. Lek had almost fallen asleep on her noodles.
An hour later, he sat out on the veranda overlooking the bay. It hadn’t take him long to discover how Lek II worked. She awoke every half hour. Mark or Lek paced up and down with her for fifteen minutes. She slept for fifteen minutes then she started crying again. Fifteen minutes pacing, fifteen minutes sleep, more crying. If she wasn’t attended to quickly, she yelled. Two hours after Lek and Mark had ‘gone to bed’, the pattern was unbroken.
Eventually, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He went upstairs. Mark was singing a nursery rhyme and trying to give Lek II a bottle.
“Can I take over for a while?” he said.
Mark looked like he’d won a prize. “Would you?”
“What do I have to do?”
“Just hold her firmly in your left arm like I am and sing some sort of tune – it can be anything. Everything’s equally wrong. She doesn’t seem to like tunes of any kind, but of course, that doesn’t bode well for her appreciation of symphonies and string quartets and the Stone Roses and what have you, so, as Lek rightly says, we have to keep trying. Where was I? Have you ever done this sort of thing before?”
“No, but right now I think I stand less chance of having an accident than you.”
“Because don’t drop her.”
“What if she finishes her milk?”
“She won’t. She hates the stuff. She only likes it the moment it comes out of Lek.”
“Can’t you get Lek to express some into the bottle?”
“This is Lek’s milk. But Lek – I mean, baby Lek: God help us, why did we have to call her Lek? As if things aren’t difficult enough – Lek refuses to recognise it as such. And since she can’t actually talk yet, it’s impossible to reassure her, you know?”
Edward took Lek II. “See the problem.”
Lek II opened her eyes, saw Edward and wailed. Edward was about to tell Mark to go back to bed, but Mark was nowhere to be seen.
Ten minutes later she fell asleep. Edward didn’t know where her cot was. Maybe he could sit down with her on the sofa, but what if he fell asleep with her and rolled onto the floor? He took her to his room, put her in his own bed and sat down on the bedroom chair to keep an eye on her.
On the other side of the island George was making his way up Khao Mai Thao Sib Song Mountain through the reed grasses and Hang Mar trees.
The lights of Patong Bay were spread out behind him. Above and in front of him was a weather observatory. He wasn’t aiming for the summit – apparently, it belonged to the air force, anyway - but simply to find some tranquil spot where he could sit down and pray undisturbed. He’d heard there were bears and wild boars on the island. He wasn’t sure whether they were confined to the Conservation Centres. In any case, he’d decided to take his chances.
He chose his position then unfurled a small rectangular mat he’d bought that afternoon. He turned to face the bay and sat down. There was a full moon and the sea reflected its brilliance like a sheet of corrugated steel. Cormorants dived into the luminosity and shot back into the night. He could just make out the dance music from the bars fronting the beach but he quickly abandoned himself to the thicker, denser quiet of the wilds. There was no wind.
He took his copy of The Prophet out of his pocket and scanned the section, ‘And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.’
It was inconsistent with George’s faith to think God was punishing him. But his more cerebral side was unable to shake the conviction. God was punishing him because he’d removed his dog-collar before introducing himself to Susan Swinter-Jones. That was why he had lost her and that was why he was now such a mess.
Which was childish. God didn’t punish people. Humankind’s misuse of free will was its own punishment, either in this life or in the next.
What had he seen in her? He couldn’t stop asking himself. Was it that she’d been crying? Had he felt sorry for her? Had she felt sorry for him and he’d felt attracted to her compassion? Was it just physical? Perhaps that was it. She was beautiful and she’d responded.
But no, it was more than that. He’d known lots of beautiful women but he’d never felt attracted to them like he felt attracted to her.
He wasn’t even sure she’d been that attractive, anyway. When the rain removed all her make-up, what he remembered was how human she looked and how she was even lovelier than before. But not everyone might have shared his view. Maybe she’d become attractive to him in the very mechanism of his looking at her. Maybe if he was to look at her now, he wouldn’t see beauty but just ordinariness. But again, he didn’t think so.
She’d been real, somehow: a real person. He didn’t know how to put it better than that. She’d forced him to be real, too. It was something like love at first sight, although ‘sight’ implied only one active sense. It was more like a vital connection. It had shaken him.
He looked up at the stars. The moon made them few and pale. He felt himself very small. But for God’s love, a nobody in the midst of nothingness.
Prayer, in his view, wasn’t about asking for favours. It was about reconciling yourself to God’s Will, to the laws God had built into the universe in creating it. Principally the laws of probability. Susan Swinter-Jones had gone. For better or worse, he’d lost her. He looked out across the sea and knew he’d never see her again. He’d lost her in the crowd, and it was six billion people thick. He could look for her for the rest of his life and be no closer to finding her.
Tonight, by mixed prayer and repentance and a Buddhist-type reflection on the impermanence of everything, he was determined to finally reconcile himself to his loss.
Edward stayed awake all that night and Lek II didn’t stir. At eight o’clock in the morning, he heard a scream. Mark and Lek rushed into his room. Mark was dressed in boxer shorts. Lek was putting on her dressing-gown. She put her hands beneath her hair and pulled it out from underneath the collar.
“Oh my God,” she said. “I thought she’d been kidnapped!”
“That’s just your parents’ idea, Lek,” Mark said. “It’s never going to happen.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“She hasn’t been kidnapped,” Mark said. “Let it go.”
Lek turned to Edward. “Why didn’t you bring her to one of us?”
“Ssh, you’ll wake her up,” Edward said.
It took Mark and Lek a moment to adjust. Mark knelt down beside Lek II. “I hadn’t thought of this before,” he said, “but she’s still breathing.”
“I think I’d have probably come to get you if she wasn’t,” Edward said.
“How – how long has she been asleep?” Lek asked.
“Well, let’s see. I took her off Mark at about one o’clock. It’s now eight.”
“My God, seven hours,” Lek said. She started to shake. She put her fingertips to her lips and turned to Mark.
“She must really ... like you, Edward,” Mark said tearfully.
