The Magic Faraway Tree’s been hyperactive lately. I’m coming to see the streetscape as litmus paper, revolving though rainbow colours as it reveals the changes taking place in the solution below. These may be the predictable annual changes of the seasons, or the less predictable landmarks of the human life cycle. They may be the complicated, seemingly random events of the civic diary, or the dependable events of the cultural one.
The weather, too, has started free-wheeling through assorted climates. Grapes, apples, pomegranates and persimmons appear in the streets. The mid-Autumn festival has begun. It’s a traditional celebration of harvest and full moon. Every child is playing with a colourful new toy and red paper lanterns decorate doorways. Family altars are cleaned and laid with new offerings of food and cakes. The cakes are round like the moon.
Mooncakes are to the Mid-Autumn festival what Easter eggs are to Easter. They’re peddled from stalls every few metres along the streets. Packed flat in gold-trimmed red boxes, four to a box, their translucent whiteness is visible though the plastic window in the top of the box. Every man woman and child on the street seems to be munching on one. They look delicious, but I can’t get any joy from eating them. In my mouth, the pastry is waxy and tasteless, the sweet fillings disappointing, at best.
The staffroom at Global, where I still work two days a week, is littered with mooncakes. The Vietnamese staff cram them down between classes and insist I join them. Sometimes, to my displeasure, I find a whole egg yolk inside. I’m offered a mooncake at Nguyet’s place. The next day Nga brings me a box. I find several boxes of the things at Natassia’s place.
‘What are you going to do with these?’
‘I don’t know,’ she tells me, looking concerned. ‘A student gave them to me. I don’t like them.’
Mooncakes are probably not in Hien’s good books either. They’ve put her on the sidewalk. The marble Nam Bo entrance, her former abode, is barricaded and under guard. It’s become a temporary selling post for mooncakes, and she’s been evicted, banished to the broken paving along the side of the supermarket.
I whiz past her on the back of a friend’s bike late one night when the streets are quiet. She’s a small bundle of rags. She’s sitting with her head on her knees, possibly sleeping. For the first time, I wonder where she goes to the toilet. Under her knees is the torn plastic bag that is now her most precious possession. She acquired it recently from unknown sources.
The bag is not full of food, fresh water or blankets. It’s full of cheap wool in garish shades. Hien’s found a way to occupy her time during the day – she knits. Where once I would find Hien in a group, drinking tea with the other homeless people, now she sits apart, her brow lined with concentration, needles clicking like tap dancers. When I pass her by day she reaches around in the plastic bag and extracts a new item for me.
Already she’s knitted me a bright orange scarf and a small fluoro-yellow handbag. For a button, she cleverly knitted a yellow flower, which holds down a yellow loop of wool. ‘Wash it very thoroughly,’ she mimed, folding the bag, and scouring it between her knuckles. I took it home, washed it in the style demonstrated, and hung it on the wooden hat-rack that stands in the corner of my bedroom. I wondered hopefully whether there’ll be any fancy dress parties while I’m in Hanoi. Lately, she’s been working on something with both hot pink and lurid yellow.
During the Mid-Autumn festival I meet a friendly Indian woman at a small supermarket in the diplomatic area. Her European husband is a consular official. We drink coffee next door and she tells me about the Hanoi Women’s Club. ‘The women are a little bit snobby, you know, but they do good work.’
‘Any charity work?’ I ask her
‘Oh yes. Charity work.’
‘There’s a woman with TB,’ I blurt out. ‘I want to help her and I don’t know how. I tried the Red Cross …’
‘No problem! You need to talk to Madeleine,’ she tells me, and writes down the woman’s number for me. I realise I’ve happened upon the right contact. I can save Hien.
I’ve been researching TB, and I’ve learnt that it’s bacterial and curable. ‘Even people close to death can make a complete recovery’ one site tells me. But the bacteria die slowly – the course of antibiotics takes at least six months to complete, several pills, taken several times a day. Start skipping pills and you risk encouraging antibiotic-resistant strains. Homeless people have to be observed to ensure they follow the prescription. I want to get Hien into a Directly Observed Therapy scheme. Apparently the DOT scheme exists somewhere in Vietnam.
I ring Madeleine, a long-term expat. She knows a woman who has set up a hospice for sick homeless people. She gives me the number and I call the woman.
‘Sure darling,’ she says. ‘You bring her to me and we should be able to admit her. Do you know the nature of her sickness?’
‘Yeah – she’s got TB.’ There’s a silence. My heart pounds. Surely this isn’t a problem …
‘Oh. … Sorry darling. We can’t help her. TB is contagious. She’ll infect others on the ward.’
‘What about a private room?’
The woman laughs mirthlessly. ‘She needs a room with special air vents and protected staff. We don’t have that kind of funding!’
I push her and she gives me the name of ‘the perfect woman to talk to’. A couple of days later I catch her. Her organisation is having funding difficulties. She can’t help me. She gives me a third number, a clinic somewhere to the north. I ring. Same story. A medic there suggests I try the Hanoi Family Practice, a medical centre for expats run by a philanthropic Israeli guy.
I give it a rest. Perhaps I’ve been getting obsessive. Natassia tells me Zac’s worried about me. He thinks I’m going to get hurt, that I need to learn to disengage.
When I next see Zac he gives me a comical lecture on the Importance of Being Selfish. ‘Let ‘what’s in it for me?’ be your motto,’ he tells me, paternally. He draws on Darwin’s natural selection, on Richard Dawkins’ theory of the Selfish Gene. He quotes, misquotes, distorts and falsifies any number of respectable theories. It’s impressive rhetoric. In conclusion, he explains that there’s no point in worrying about people that aren’t family or friends.
Substantially entertained, I contemplate his philosophy. It makes sense for him. Most of his gruffness is self-protection. I suspect he was bullied at school. Yet, true to his ideology, he’s very loyal to his friends. And contrary to his doctrine of parsimony, he’s also generous.
But he’s a menace. Inspired by Natassia and her Angel 80, Zac’s gone out and hired a motorcycle. I thought nothing of it at first, but now I live in fear of having to get on the back. When a group of us go out together I clamber for the back of Natassia’s bike even before she’s sitting on it, insurance against being left to ride with Zac.
It’s not just that he occupies the entire saddle, forcing the pillion to hang by a mere pubic bone and two handfuls of Zac’s sweat-soaked back. It’s not just that in this heat he smells rancid. It’s that he drives like a total arsehole. For a guy eaten up by road rage even when he’s sitting on the sidewalk, he now has the ultimate means of expressing it. He revs hard at pushy motorists, playing chicken with them until they peel off horrified. He executes kung-fu style kicks out at teenagers who try to overtake him while he’s turning, although he frequently makes the same selfish manoeuvre. He overtakes on the inside, rides aggressively into oncoming traffic if it enables him to cut corners, verbally abuses the motorists around him at regular intervals, revs the bike too high, kicks the gear pedal almost unconscious to change gears. In short, he rides rather in the fashion of an expat. But with an added factor that I’m slow to recognise. Incompetence. Eventually I ask Zac exactly how much motorbike-riding experience he has.
‘You want the truth?’ he asks me.
‘I’m suddenly not sure,’ I reply, nervously.
He tells it anyway. He’s never ridden a motorbike. He’s never driven a car either. He doesn’t have a license. He pulled off a coup in bullshit at the hiring place, feigning a language barrier, giving the hire-guy obscure answers to questions, signing whatever needed signing and somehow managing to ride the bike out of the shop without revealing his complete lack of knowledge of gears or road rules.