The sky finally runs out of juice later in the afternoon, and, in my neighbourhood at least, the flood recedes and things return temporarily to normal.
In the evening I head to a restaurant near Natassia’s place to meet her and Zac for dinner. I last spoke to Zac early this morning. The line was crackly as he told me his neighbourhood had flooded and the lower floor of his house was several centimetres underwater.
Tonight I manage to score Quan as my xe om driver. We pass through town heading north towards Natassia’s place at sunset. This is the furthest Quan’s ever taken me and I become swept away by the romance of the trip. I look at the back of his beautiful brown hands on the rubber grips and sigh with longing. He has the broad, solid hands of a practical man and he keeps his fingernails short.
The horizon is an effulgence of pink and crimson as we pass between West Lake and Chuc Bac Lake – ‘Lover’s Lane’. I survey the lovers lined up on their motorbikes, and throwing decorum to the wind, I wrap my arms around Quan. He doesn’t show much reaction, but then, he’s concentrating on the road. Snuggled behind him, I feel our connection is mutual. We’re from two different worlds, but joined, I feel certain, by a powerful chemistry beyond culture and station, beyond our control, by a mutual empathy that can never be expressed in words. The ants are running wild across my heart as we pull up outside the restaurant. I dismount and turn to face him.
That’s when I remember that I haven’t set a fare. Since getting to know them, I’ve always given my local xe om drivers a flat five thousand dong for any ride, whether only a block, or across town to the UNCO school, but this trip is further than that. I should have agreed on the amount before we set off. I know Natassia pays her driver 6,000 for the trip, but she’s a seasoned bargainer – I would have offered more. There’s an awkward moment while I pull out my wallet. I wonder whether he’ll charge me at all after what seemed such a romantic ride.
So when he looks me in the eye, licks his lips, and says ‘Hai muoi nghin’ – ‘twenty thousand’ – I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face. Only greenhorn tourists on their first trip would pay a sum like that for a xe om.
‘You greedy arsehole!’ I say to him in astonishment. After a moment I reach for my wallet. ‘Here’s your money, I hope you enjoy it. You’ve just lost a customer.’ I shake my head slowly from side to side, hoping he’ll understand that he has made a terrible mistake.
But whether he comprehends or even perceives my hurt, he shows no reaction. He takes the money, nods, and revs off.
‘Carolyn, what do you expect? He’s just a xe om driver,’ Natassia says by way of comfort, when I’m slumped at the dinner table. ‘How can he ever appreciate a person like you?’
I turn to Zac, certain of his support, and notice he’s not paying attention. He sits quietly, and his face is dark.
‘Zac! What’s up?’ I ask him.
‘He had a bad weekend,’ says Natassia. ‘A very bad weekend. He was telling me about it.’
I turn to Zac. ‘What happened? Did your place flood?’
Zac turns to me slowly, dramatically.
‘Tell her about the eeeels,’ begs Natassia, two anecdotes later.
‘Hmm? Ah yes. The Water Pump Incident.’ Zac has picked up greatly. An attentive audience always lifts his mood. Each anecdote has been more entertaining, yet more damning than its predecessor.
By Saturday afternoon Zac’s staircase had become a vertical jetty. Where the stairs used to touch down, in the kitchen, was no less than a metre underwater. He eyed the fridge, which was now bobbing up and down a bit, and wondered if the water below could be capable of electrocuting him.
He spent the rest of the day and night in his room, polishing off a leftover barbequed duck, wanking over his collection of Japanese porn and watching DVDs. All perfectly enjoyable. But by this morning, a glance down the stairs showed him the water had risen to a metre and a half. His kitchen now looked like a Roman cistern. Zac had no intention of spending any more time within the crumbling cement walls of his room. Something had to be done.
Peering from the top floor down at the water he saw a ripple. Movement below. What could it be? He inched down the stairs towards the surface, strained to see deep into the murky water, and that’s when he made out the outline of an eel. Wait! – two eels. No, a colony of eels. They’d obviously escaped from their breeding tank at someone’s house nearby. The slimy grey-brown fish propelled themselves in formation around the sunken furniture – in and out between the legs of the kitchen table – round and round, behind the bobbing fridge …
It’s the proof Zac needed. The water won’t electrocute him. He ran upstairs and changed into a pair of shorts he pulled off the dirty washing pile. He grabbed his swimming goggles, and headed down. He half walked, half-paddled to his front door, which locks at two levels – one of them well underwater. Reaching down, he couldn’t work the lower lock. There was only one solution. Securing his goggles, he took a deep breath and went under …
‘No way!’ I cry out, horrified. This can’t be right.
This detail of the story is new to Natassia too. ‘Since when do you have swimming goggles?’ she asks.
‘Hey! I’ll show you them next time you’re at my place. And I’ll show you the tide mark on the wall where the water came up to,’ he shoots back, huffily. In fact, he will. This part of the story holds water, so to speak.
He unlocked the front door and the top metre of liquid gushed out through the padlocked metal grill beyond it. The water levels in his alley had receded dramatically and neighbours were out with their water pumps, trying to drain their homes.
Zac doesn’t have a pump, so he fetched a bucket, and got to work, bucketing the water from his ground floor. This is hard labour in anyone’s language, made worse by the fact that the Vietnamese love a spectacle, and Zac is one at any time of day. In no time, a crowd started to gather. Then a middle-aged woman approached Zac and started yelling at him.
That did it. He lost it and unleashed a hysterical torrent of verbal abuse upon the stunned woman, mercifully in English. He’d whipped himself into a frenzy when the woman’s son came over. He spoke English.
‘My mother try to offer to you use her water pump,’ he explained.
But Zac was not cowed. He simply declined the offer and got back to work. By now the Vietnamese audience was in the tens, and news of the event was being communicated outwards. A woman turned up and started selling hot green tea to the crowd, then Zac’s next door neighbour, capitalising on the new market, started charging 1,000 dong for the privilege of sitting on her fence so that onlookers could view the event in comfort.
‘1,000 dong? Bullshit!’ I cry out.
‘They wouldn’t pay that much!’ adds Natassia.
‘Dude!’ says Zac, in the tone he uses when he’s lying through his teeth. ‘You don’t understand how dumb these people are.’
Of course, it’s rarely the locals who come out of Zac’s stories looking bad, and he knows it. Mostly, he manages to come out of even his own version of events looking twice as bad.