Penguin Books Australia

Welcome to the crazy country

ONE

I shut my eyes and clasp my hands in my lap schoolgirl-style, fingers threaded tight, as the plane drops down, down, down into the inky darkness. No turning back.

I've been humming the Hawaii Five-O theme song ever since we left Bangkok, I do this when I'm nervous, and so I conjure up an image of Jack Lord balanced on his surfboard in those great blue waves – handsome, hale and heroic. I remember how soothing I found him when I was a little girl, like a cup of warm milk; how he navigated his way so effortlessly through right and wrong, everything clear and on the table. See those big arms, that wholesome, tanned skin. I remember how my heart would sink when an episode came to an end and there we'd still be, Mum and me, mutely side by side on the couch in our dim, echoey house in Brunswick, with our plate of cheese-on-toast crusts and her fat tumbler of riesling, the weekend stretching out endlessly before us, not a hero in sight. Steve McGarrett, I would think, fretfully, where did you go?

The seatbelt light pings on and I open my eyes, wide as a rabbit. Reality comes rushing back. I take a deep breath. Any minute now we will touch down in Ho Chi Minh City and I will have to unbuckle my seatbelt and stand up, take my day pack from the overhead locker and walk off this plane. I will have to get through whatever it is you have to get through when you arrive at an international airport – and I have no idea what that entails. I will have to find my luggage and make my way to the hotel, somehow, in the middle of the night.

'Will it be humid? Even though it's the dry season?' I ask the blonde hostess who comes by with a trolley collecting empty cups and wadded napkins.

She sighs, she looks tired; all the stupid questions. 'Saigon's always humid. You won't be needing that jumper.'

She continues up the aisle while I look down, embarrassed, at my scratchy grey jumper, jeans and black boots. I could be off to the snow. And I only packed two T-shirts. What was I thinking? Jesus. I wasn't thinking – I'm too tired to think.

I stare down at my booted feet and before my eyes they seem to transform, to take on a new, more ominous character, because twenty-five years ago my father flew into Saigon in his army-issue black boots, on the Qantas troop carrier – the 'Skippy Squadron'. Is that why I pulled them on this morning in my rush to get out the door? And was my father frightened too, in his black boots, wondering what lay ahead?

A bolt of adrenaline shoots through me, making everything brighter, louder. And as the plane begins its final, sharp descent, I close my eyes again, and imagine Tim beside me in seat 44B, just as we planned; poring over the itinerary, talking me through it; close enough to touch.

Stepping out of the plane into the tropical night is like entering a steam room with a blindfold on. The black air is hot and damp and dense as wool and for a moment I feel like I'm going to choke. But there is no turning back. I wade down the metal staircase and onto a rusty shuttle bus. The terminal ahead sparkles blue, yellow and white.

As the bus moves off, people start to chatter excitedly. I sit alone and apart, staring out at the small, stick-like figures unloading baggage from the hold. They remind me of something I once read: how the cargo planes would come in steeply during the war to avoid ground fire. How they'd get right above Saigon before swooping down, like great grey raptors. I remember this but I have no one to say it to, and it's the strangest feeling, like I'm not really here.

The bus judders to a halt; we file politely off. A stout, middle-aged man in front of me is wearing a T-shirt that declares, with no apparent irony, Daddy Extraordinaire! What makes him such a great father? I wonder. I yank off my jumper, already damp with sweat, and stuff it into the top of my day pack.

Inside, the airport is musty and worn, hollow-feeling; it's not much more than a great empty shed. We're the only late arrivals and a queue quickly forms beneath slow-moving ceiling fans. I slip gratefully in. I will do what everyone else does. I can be just another sheep in the mob.

While we're waiting, I notice two uniformed men walking slowly down the length of the queue towards me, shiny rifles slung across their shoulders, faces closed. Another wave of adrenaline rips through me. I focus on breathing, in and out. This is peacetime, I remind myself. I am in no danger.

Somehow, I make it through passport control, baggage collection, customs, and onto the street outside. The group disintegrates and I am engulfed by cab drivers, all hard smiles and fast talking. I take a step back, trying to explain that I need to get to Pham Ngu Lao, the backpacker strip, and they're all nodding fiercely when a tall guy with dreadlocks bowls up. 'Hey, you going to Pham Ngu Lao? Want to share?'

I barely hesitate. 'Yeah, that'd be good.'

I get in a cab with him and his friend. They're from Sydney.

'Did you know that during the war Tan Son Nhat was the busiest airport in the world?' says the tall one, Mick. He is vibrating with excitement.

'Really?' I say, though I knew this – of course I knew this.

'We're going to find a bar soon as we've checked in,' offers his friend, Marcus.

'Nah, mate, before we've checked in,' laughs Mick. 'Fancy a drink?'

They look at me. I smile. 'I don't know. I'm pretty tired.' I want to explain: This is my first night in a foreign country. I have a broken heart and I've barely slept in ten days. This is not how it was supposed to be.

I press my face to the window but can't see much. Streetlamps shed yellowy light onto figures moving against shabby backdrops. We overtake dozens of people on bicycles but I keep missing their faces. Ghostly pale moths flit across the windscreen, engaged in some kind of extreme bug sport.

When we get into the centre, though, it's like someone switches on the lights, turns up the volume, and suddenly here we are, in a big, strange city, late at night. The cab slows to a walking pace as we enter a swarm of bicycles, motorbikes and cyclos. I wind down my window. Engines rev, horns burp, billboards flash. I smell petrol fumes, sewage, some kind of barbecued meat. I have an image of Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, wandering dazed – ruined – through the pumping Saigon night. Did it look the same in 1969? Did it smell the same? What was my father thinking when he saw these streets for the very first time?

I exhale loudly and Mick notices. 'Yeah, man, fucking awesome! Welcome to the crazy country!'

On Mick's direction, the driver stops outside a bar on Pham Ngu Lao, not far from my hotel. We unload our backpacks and pay the driver. 'You coming in?' Mick asks.

'Nah. Thanks anyway. Thanks for the lift.'

'See you round then.'

I hear him hoot as they go in, one of those victory calls, as if to say, we did it! We made it to 'Nam! It makes me cringe and yet as soon as they're gone I am missing them, their familiar accents and Sydney surfer style.

I'm about to go in after them – just one beer, to help me arrive – when a young boy approaches. He can't be more than nine or ten. Harnessed to his front is a box so loaded with newspapers it looks like he's about to tip over. 'Hey, you! Madam! You buy newspaper from me. Very cheap!'

I shake my head, no thanks.

He narrows his eyes and looks me slowly up and down then shakes his head back at me, perfectly mimicking my tight smile, before turning and walking away, muttering something in Vietnamese.

I am overcome with shame, and a strange sense of failure – what am I even doing here? – and it's enough to send me forward again to the Hotel Van Mai, to the room Tim booked six weeks ago, before everything came undone.

It was not long after five o'clock, ten days before we were to fly out. I was in the kitchen. I heard the key in the front door and heard it closing. I lit a match and put the kettle on. Beautiful late-afternoon sun was making the back courtyard glow.

I waited but he didn't come. I walked into the living room. He was standing in the doorway to the hall, facing me, strangely upright. Tim? I went over to him and stretched up to kiss him but he stepped back – which is what I see, over and over.

I asked what was wrong, because that morning everything had been fine. Has something happened? He wouldn't look at me. His nostrils were flared and he was frowning slightly, as if puzzled by something.

Tim?

So he looked at me then and I wished that he hadn't because he was empty in the eyes, already gone, like everything in the world that was good and true had been a dream. He said he didn't love me any more and that he was leaving. Just like that, in a single breath.

I sat down on the floor, right where I was standing. Book, our cat, rubbed himself hungrily against my legs. The kettle was whistling and sputtering. Tim walked out.

The woman at the hotel desk barely looks up as she hands me a pen and four different forms. She's eating something from a cone of newspaper and her munching is extraordinarily loud. I sit on a crusty brown vinyl couch to fill out the forms. The paper is the colour of weak tea; it is thick and grainy; I have to write the same things again and again.

While she's checking over the forms, I take a look around. It's an old hotel, the cheapest we could find, falling apart at the seams. Faded, chipped, mosaic floor tiles, peeling pea-green walls, a single naked bulb lighting the entire foyer.

A shimmer from beneath the staircase catches my eye; I wander over. Lurking in the shadows is a kidney-shaped, in-ground pond, floating with lurid green plastic lily pads. An unused spotlight is mounted on the underside of the stairs, directed at the pond, and I picture this place as it might once have been – brightly lit, noisy, welcoming people with purpose. Diplomats, maybe; merchants; foreign correspondents; men of war.

'Your room ready,' the woman calls impatiently, as if I've kept her waiting.

She refuses to return my passport and I am too tired and bewildered to argue. I follow her silently up the concrete stairs, straining under the weight of my pack, all the way to the fifth floor. The corridor is narrow and poorly lit; voices seep out from behind closed doors. There is a smell of damp clothes and incense. The woman unlocks Room 513 and in the time it takes me to walk inside and take off my pack, she disappears, key left hanging from the door.

I close it, bolt it, perch on the edge of the bed. The mattress is hard, made up with faded butter-yellow sheets, a mosquito net hanging from a hook in the ceiling. An ornate carved wooden armchair squats next to an ornate carved wooden coffee table. The same green walls and tiles in shades of cream, brown and blue.

I find the dial for the ceiling fan on the wall opposite the bed and turn it on; it creaks slowly into action, sending a beige gecko skating across the ceiling. We don't get those back home. I open the door onto the small balcony and step out. There's some kind of food stall on the footpath right outside the hotel with a few tables of customers. The rest of the street is still. If Tim were here we'd go down now, have some supper. But I have to stop thinking this way. I'm not even hungry.

I check out the bathroom. There is no toilet! Just a hole to squat over with grooved footrests and a pink plastic bucket beside a rusty tap for flushing. A hand-held shower is hooked onto the wall above a single cold water tap, the drain-hole right in the middle of the floor. A small hand-basin beneath a pock-marked mirror.

I glance at my reflection but it gives me the oddest sensation: I don't feel connected in any way to the girl in the mirror with the thin, pale face, eyes so big and dark and worried. I don't have any sense that she is me or that I am her.

Where in the hell am I?

I go back and lie on the bed, lights on, pack still zipped at my feet, and curl up small, tight and very, very still.