NON'S TREE

Non, sitting in the hollow which he had dug for himself over the months between the roots of a giant tree, kept his eyes shut tight. He knew what he would see if he looked around. So he tried instead to focus on the blackness behind his eyelids. But of course it wasn't blackness at all, it was his friend Dui. Dui was smiling, laughing, playing in the stream, chasing the headman's pick-up truck through the dust, having his eight year old knuckles rapped by the teacher for farting in class, shouting defiantly at the road construction crew who even now Non could hear working their noisy and obtrusive way towards the village.

These images of fun and laughter cycled through Non's mind one by one, always the same, and every time Non tried to hold on to each vision as long as he could to keep the last one away. The track from the house, the road with a truck passing, the grey trunk of the tree. Go back, don't go round the tree, not this time, go home, Dui will be all right. He tried to block the memory out by screwing his eyes up tighter, that had worked for a few days. But it didn't work now, since they had made him remember, and it always came back in all its horror and the only way out was to open his eyes. So he saw what he hated to see. Being real, was it worse than the memory etched in his mind? Perhaps no-one else would have seen it even if they sat where Non sat, but every time when his eyes opened they focused on the darkening stain of Dui's blood on a tree root two meters from Non's foot.

He wasn't supposed to be there at all. Non's parents like the parents of all the other village kids had in shaking voices forbidden him from going more than ten meters from the house except to go to school. But hearing his mother whimpering and talking fearfully to the neighbours and making endless rituals at the spirit house frightened him, and he sneaked away through the fence behind the house and ran to his hiding place without stopping. His tree was his strength, and even with the visions and the stain of blood he felt a kind of peace there.

Could he have saved Dui? Non believed he could have. It had been his idea to go off to town after school that day. A shop had opened recently, selling motorcycles. Non wanted to know if they had the kind he had once ridden on with his uncle. "Let's go", he had said, "we'll be back before they get home from the fields." They were in their school uniforms, Non remembered it all clearly. They had to walk four kilometers in the afternoon sun, strolling, sometimes racing each other, kicking up the dust, climbing on the piles of red laterite dumped by the road crew, and once following a snake's winding trail into the ditch where they guessed it had launched itself into the water.

Near the town they took a short cut and climbed over a wall into a cassava drying yard. How many times had they done that? One time when Non was on top of the wall he looked back at the way they had come, and realised he could see his tree in the distance, towering up above all the others. Town was exciting and he liked to go there. But it was full of strangers, and seeing his tree somehow made him feel safer. So that day, too, he paused at the top of the wall to look back at his tree.

Dui was gone, what was there to do about it? Non wanted more than anything to be on his own, to be away from people moaning and warning him and frightening and threatening him. He went to his tree every day after school, sitting with his eyes shut, thinking, trying not to think, not wanting to talk to anyone.

They wouldn't let him do it. They found him: he had once shown his sister where he hid, and she remembered and came with his father to fetch him. "The police are here, you must see them." The police! His inside turned to water. The police. He had seen them cruising in their cars and on their motorcycles, and two of them had once got drunk with the headman and driven off noisily in the middle of the night.

The town had been busy that day, full of trucks and pick-ups, government officers in the noodle shops, their wives haggling in the cake shop, the last of the market stall-holders closing up for the day, farmers' sons repairing engines on the sidewalk in front of shophouse garages and women with heavy gold bracelets climbing the steps to do some after-hours business with the bank. And school boys like Non and Dui staring at televisions and radios and, less wide-eyed but more realistically, browsing for a new pencil or notebook or eraser in the stationery store.

The fear began in the village the day after Dui disappeared, long before they knew for sure what had happened to him. They guessed. They all guessed, and the guesses turned into one rumour after another. He had run away to live with his brother after his father had got drunk and beaten him for going to town. He had been seen on one of those trucks that came around every year collecting recruits for the sugar harvest over in the west of Thailand. He had been kidnapped by a gang and sent to beg in Bangkok. He was unconscious in hospital in the provincial town and no-one knew who he was. His father had sold him to a man wearing sunglasses who had driven out to the village one night in a Mercedes. If only one of those stories had been true!

People changed. They had been friendly, relaxed, confident, happy. Now they were fearful. Not knowing what to do, they blamed each other, blamed the spirits, blamed Non for going to town with Dui, and worst of all, they blamed Dui himself. He must have done something bad, they said. Bad things don't happen to people who know their place and behave properly. Was he disrespectful to the monk or to his grandparents? They remembered bad things he had done. Someone, of course, recalled the farting story. Twice, not just once. Then it was three times, or who knows how many times. Farting in class. You see what happens to people who fart in class and don't respect the teacher? The bad spirits are waiting.

There were two motorcycle shops in town, and Non and Dui had gone to both. Neither had anything like Non's uncle's machine. But there were rows of shining bikes, red, blue, green. One machine was different from all the others, with white cowling sweeping back from the front wheel and up behind the seat, and with a picture of a smiling girl pinned to the wall behind it. Non and Dui had never seen anything like it, and they stared at it for long, speechless minutes.

Dui walked ahead as they left the town, striding along and calling to Non that he would be first back home. Non didn't care, and took his time. He went down the embankment for a pee, and a car went past. As Non came back to the road he saw the car stop by Dui in a cloud of dust 50 meters ahead. The door opened, Dui looked back, waved, and Non thought he saw him laugh as he climbed in.

The day his father and sister found him at his hideaway, Non arrived back at the house to find two policemen waiting, drinking whisky from tall glasses and talking to some neighbours who had come up on to the verandah. They were saying something to Non's mother about widening the road.

The questioning was another nightmare, or an extension of the same one, Non couldn't say. Everyone was there to hear what he would say, listening for some new tidbit that they could use for their own purposes later.

Confronted with this crowd, Non's mind went numb. He couldn't remember what had happened. He didn't want to remember. Yes, they had been to town. Yes, it was Non's idea. No, they had been many times before and got home before anyone noticed. On that day they had wandered around the shops looking at motorcycles, trying to find one like Non's uncle's. No, they hadn't stopped anywhere for a drink, they had no money. No, he couldn't remember seeing anyone special or unusual, they were all strangers, they were all looking at the two schoolboys, no-one any more than anyone else.

But that was not the painful part. The pain came later. There was the growing pain of realising something must have happened to Dui, the pain of sitting at the tree day after day wondering where he was, the pain of hearing the stories and rumours and not knowing if any of them was right. There was the pain of seeing the village take over Dui's life and go prying into it to learn his secrets, their secrets, as if that explained his disappearance.

All of this came out in a bubbling, sobbing jumble of words that neither the villagers nor the police understood, and they laughed at him as if he was mad.

That still wasn't the worst. The worst was ahead, like a black chasm which Non knew he would have to peer into but which somehow he couldn't approach. He didn't want to go on, he had said enough, the police knew what he had seen, why must he tell them again? He couldn't remember, he tried to push it from his mind. The policeman, the fat one sitting opposite, shouted at him to make him remember and speak. And Non felt himself being dragged towards that chasm, down the track which he had loved, towards the tree, stepping over the roots.

Coming from around the tree, he saw first a leg twisted at a strange angle and he knew already that it was Dui. Then the khakhi school shorts. He wanted to run back to the house but something made him go on to see the rest. It came back frame by frame, slowly but there was no way he could stop it. There was no shirt, just the olive skin, clean and smooth from the waist to half way up the chest. And then a hole, a bloody mess with something plastic in the middle of it, and the throat bloody and the face thankfully twisted away so Non couldn't see it. That was the last vision, the chasm he hadn't been able to look into. The hole in the chest, and the plastic bag. That was what Non couldn't understand, the money. Why was there money, in a plastic bag like the ones they poured drinks into, in Dui's butchered chest?

The police left leaving more macabre rumours than ever to spring up in the village. The killers had sold part of Dui to some foreigners. The killers were part of a strange group who ate parts of children. Dui's parents had used the money to buy a new television set. Every story seemed to Non to be worse than the ones before. Dui had been his best friend, they had shared the secret of seeing the headman's daughter with Dui's brother before he left for the city, and of the gap in the wall where you could see Khun Somboon's family in their bedroom. Now there were no more secrets, Dui wasn't his friend any more, he belonged to the village for everyone to gossip about. Non ached to see Dui smile and laugh, for his friends to be able to play in the stream like they used to and for people to speak once again about the rain being late and the price of paddy and whether a diesel engine is better than a petrol one.

The road crew reached the tree a week after the police had been. Non came out of school and found a mess of vehicle tracks and broken branches and an ugly pile of earth. The road crew was shutting down their huge machines for the evening. Non wandered down to where a tangle of roots pointed to the sky and looked out on the treeless swathe of brown earth where some people were sticking cassava stalks in the ground. At least the bloodstains were gone.

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[Though this is not very pleasant, it is based on what I believe is a true story from the province of Prachinburi in eastern Thailand. There were actually three boys killed, according to the version I heard. The nature of the killing, including the money in the plastic bag, is according to the story as I heard it. The names of the boys, ideas in Non’s mind, the tree, and the circumstances leading up to and following the boy’s death are completely from my imagination. Perhaps there are some ideas here that say something about the real nature of village life in modern Thailand.

PL, August 1990]