Woman at Window by Alex Sheal / Fiction / Untitled Books

He went to lengths to live as much like the Vietnamese as he could.

Woman at Window by Alex Sheal

Light fell across the room, dimly revealing his mattress, a half-empty bookshelf and a desk scattered with paper and photographs; but the illuminated rooms of the facing apartments remained invisible. My heart jumped a beat when I saw that newspaper page

I met him in Hanoi three years ago, and we became sort of friends. We worked at the same private language school, teaching English to wealthy Vietnamese; but, like most people in that line of employment, he had other interests. He was a photographer, had done some shoots for Elle when he lived in Paris, had snapped Coco Chanel's apartment on the Rue Cambon, and covered railway strikes and race riots for other Parisian magazines. He'd uploaded most of the journalistic work onto his own website, which was how I knew for sure he'd done what he claimed. Language teaching attracts all kinds of talkers, so you take what most of your colleagues say with a good sprinkle of salt. However, you had only to glance at the man's photos to believe in his talent. He had a knack for tipping ordinary scenes on their heads, giving everyday moments an odd comedy. I hadn't the first clue how to take decent pictures, and the whole process made me yawn, so perhaps my opinion counted for little; but what I saw of his work impressed me. When he found out that I wrote stories, we got to talking about certain books and writers, and that led us onto the idea of collaborating on a project. He'd met some fishermen on Cat Ba Island, four hours east of Hanoi, had taken portraits, and shots of their sea-bleached trawlers and ancient equipment. He wondered if I wanted to join him on a trip to Cat Ba, knock out a few descriptions to go with the photos on his site. I travelled out of Hanoi most weekends anyway - aimless jaunts to whichever part of the north seemed inviting at the time - and I thought it couldn't hurt to work alongside such a talented individual, so I agreed to go.

For reasons that I won't waste time on here, the Cat Ba project never really left port. But we met at cafés a couple of times to swap ideas, and I got to know the man quite well. Dublin-born, he'd travelled across Europe and Asia in the past few years, teaching at language schools and taking photos wherever he went. He had a restless way about him, which is one reason I liked him, and also why I think he unnerved many of our work colleagues. In conversation he could leap from French politics to action movies of the 80s, to the decline of the Glaswegian docking industry, to his latest fling - one text after another would tinkle through on his mobile from whichever local girl he was seeing at the time - and back to French politics, in the time it took to sink two sips of café den da. His mood seemed to soar and plunge in accordance with these unpredictable switches of topic. One minute his eyes glittered with laughter, and his shoulders shook with giggling; the next his face paled, his brow clouded over, and he looked like he'd long overspent his forty years in the world. I thought that volatility - plus his pale skin and passport - explained his popularity with girls. And I never once thought of him as dangerously unstable, or as someone who could eventually crash with such force.

He went to lengths to live as much like the Vietnamese as he could, eating all of his meals on street stalls, at those miniature blue tables they set outside; and renting a two-room apartment down a snaking alleyway, far from the backpacker burger-joints and travel agencies of the Old Quarter. He cycled everywhere on a prehistoric bike he had bought for the equivalent of three dollars, and he had an old Hanoian's head for shortcuts and backstreets all over the city. He hated the sparkling shopping centres and office complexes that bragged of Hanoi's new money; and mocked the Irish bars and air-conditioned restaurants that most of the city's expats haunted. He shook his head in astonishment whenever we saw tourists in the street, calling them 'khoia tai', or 'potatoes', the Vietnamese slander for white foreigners. That said, he himself spoke no more than five words of Vietnamese after six months in-country, and his usual garb - sandals, khaki shorts, a red T-shirt with an enormous gold star on it, and a floppy sunhat bearing the flag of Vietnam - made him look he'd just hopped off a package-tour minibus.

If you listen to a person talk for long enough, you'll start to hear the story they secretly want to tell. Our man had lived in Paris for fifteen years, and at a certain point had fallen in love with a woman named Marie-Roget. All he ever told me about Marie-Roget was that she had hair as black as midnight, that they had shared a house together for a year, and that, three months after they'd split up, she'd hanged herself in a hotel room. I didn't know if this catastrophe had led to his leaving Paris after such a long time - he told me he'd quit the city because he couldn't find work - but I suspected that it must have had some impact on his decision. I learned that he'd spurned the bottle soon after Marie-Roget's suicide, although he never once explicitly connected the two events. Naturally I shied from asking too many questions about such a sorrowful part of his life; in any case, the man's penchant for flitting from subject to unrelated subject got you in the habit of drawing lines between dots. There seemed little risk in stroking your pencil across the page one more time and concluding that Marie-Roget's death had provoked some changes in his life.

Not that I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work him out. I found life in Hanoi too straightforward to worry about other people's heads and the problems they had piled up in them. I'd cleared out enough problems of my own back in England; or at least boxed them up and put them in storage. For the first time in history, I had my own house, a monthly pay check, and a second-hand motorbike to putter about on. I spent mornings leafing through photocopied novels and listening to old albums, afternoons smoking in street cafés, and evenings teaching the present simple to clock-watching corporate students. The monsoon had petered out, and it only poured down once in a while, without flooding the roads; the midday heat rarely boiled to a point above bearable. Pink-blossomed trees paraded the wide boulevards of the city-centre; cool winds rippled the lakes. In short, my boat sailed on smooth waters, and - for all that it sounds selfish - I had no interest in anything that might have capsized it.

As a result, I only clicked that something had gone wrong in our man's world when he stopped showing up at work. He was the kind of person you missed the moment he stepped out of a room, so everyone wondered where he'd gone when he stayed absent for a week. That's not to say that people flailed their arms and cried his name, or called for a search party; it was more like a certain painting, scorned and admired in equal measure, had one day vanished from the wall. The staff-room grew increasingly quiet; then I overheard one of the senior teachers saying head office had received a resignation letter from him. He had offered no explanation or excuse, the senior teacher said, just a note of gratitude for the chance he'd received. After that, I tried to ring the man a couple of times, but I only ever got a dial tone; and, for the following two weeks, I heard nothing more.

When he called me up about the woman, I was weaving my motorbike to work through honking rush-hour traffic. I felt my mobile reverberate in my pocket as I sat at some lights on Nguyen Luong Bang, and decided to answer: it could have been a class cancellation. His voice came faintly through the phone, and, what with the thrum of motorbike and car engines around me, I couldn't make out a word. I cupped my hand over my left ear and pressed the phone to my right, yelled for him to speak up.

'Can you help me?' I finally heard him say.

'Now?'

'Where are you?' he asked.

'On my way to work.' The countdown on the traffic light had reached ten, and people had already started to nudge forward on their motorbikes, engines revving. Exhaust fumes poisoned the air. 'I'll call you afterwards,' I said. I couldn't hear his reply, but I thumbed off and slipped my mobile back into my pocket.

I wrapped up my last lesson that night at 9:45, and by that time I had forgotten all about his call. However he had sent a short text message to my phone: 'Can u cm over tnite?' I texted him back for his address while scribbling down my lesson notes, and he replied instantly with his house number and street name. I figured I could get a bowl of pho for dinner from a street-stall near his house, so I headed out towards Kim Ma on my motorbike. The roads had emptied, and the city's traffic lights got switched off after 9pm to economize on power, so it only took me fifteen minutes to ride to his neighbourhood.

He lived down a backstreet near Chien Thang B-52 lake, where an American bomber had once crashed. The name meant 'Victory Against the B-52', and in daylight you could still see part of the plane's fuselage poking out of the algae-thick water, like a dinosaur's ribcage preserved in a bog. Apart from a stone plaque commemorating the shoot-down in Vietnamese, and the mostly-submerged wreckage, the spot had nothing exceptional about it. Shuttered houses, and shops selling groceries and engine parts bordered the lake, and a tarpaulin-shaded stall selling draught beer sat on one corner. On the baking afternoon I had visited, two months beforehand, four workmen lounging at the beer stall had gawped at me as I circled the lake. I had the sense they wondered what on earth I could want from the place.

At night, the unlit lake and its catch vanished from view; I motored past it without a second glance. My headlight guided me through the warren of alleys that led to our man's apartment. When I thought I had reached his building, I killed my engine and rang him on my mobile. He answered immediately.

'Who's that?' he said. He sounded spooked, as if I'd woken him from a nightmare. In any case, it seemed a dozy question given that my name would have flashed up on his mobile screen.

'It's me,' I said. 'I'm here.'

'Oh right,' he said, and rang off.

A few minutes later, he materialised from the shadows a little further up the backstreet. I would have mistaken him for a Vietnamese man in the darkness - he had a slight frame and height - were it not for the odd, ape-like way he always swung his arms when he walked. 'Thanks for coming,' he said as we shook hands. His voice crackled a little, and I sensed his preoccupation.

He led me round the corner from which he had appeared a few moments earlier, and told me to park my motorbike in front of a low wall next to two others. Then we climbed two flights of stone steps, into a quadrant of apartments. Lights glowed in most of the windows - like those of all the old Hanoi houses, they had metal grates across them - and I could hear TV sets blaring, a mixture of frantic Vietnamese football commentary and off-key singing. 'It's too noisy here,' he said. 'It goes on all day. People never leave you alone.' His voice sounded hoarse with fatigue; and this talk clashed with the usual descriptions of smiling neighbours, and local kids gathering at his window whenever he played his flute. I'd come to expect swings in mood from him; but I'd never heard him sound so jaded.

We stopped at a door, and he fished a set of keys from his shorts pocket. 'I need to get out of here,' he said, fiddling through the keys several times before finding the right one.

'I thought you liked this place,' I said, glancing around at the banks of shining windows. A baby started wailing in one of the apartments, and I heard a woman scolding it. At least, it sounded like scolding; but in truth I couldn't say for sure that the two noises even came from the same residence.

He furrowed his eyebrows as he fitted the key into the door lock. 'I did like it,' he said. 'But I need to get out of here now.'

I followed him into his hallway, and he shut the door behind us without switching on the light. 'Come upstairs,' he said, kicking off his flip-flops next to the door.

I slipped off my shoes and padded after him in my socks up the staircase. We entered his bedroom, and, once my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I made out his single mattress in the centre of the floor, like a raft adrift in the night-time sea. 'Why don't you switch on the light?' I asked him.

He had crept over to the far side of the room, where I guessed he would have a window overlooking the quadrant. However, no light entered the room, so I thought he must have pulled curtains across, or - a reasonable-seeming theory in the circumstances - that he had no window at all. 'Look at this,' he whispered, and I heard him rattle some curtains aside. Now light fell across the room, dimly revealing his mattress, a half-empty bookshelf and a desk scattered with paper and photographs; but the illuminated rooms of the facing apartments remained invisible. My heart jumped a beat when I saw that newspaper pages plastered his window.

'What's up?' I said, trying to keep my voice as even as possible.

'Just look at this,' he repeated. The window silhouetted his head; I couldn't tell whether he was looking at me or peering out onto the quadrant.

I arced round the mattress, and joined him at the window. He sat on his heels, peeking through a squared gap in the newspaper pages, which I realized at a closer look came from the English-language edition of Vietnam News. The light from outside scored lines in his face and made his eyes sparkle. He bared his teeth in a grin of concentration. 'What are you looking at?' I asked him. He waved me down, and I dropped onto my haunches next to him. We peered through the square of glass, shoulder-to-shoulder.

'The house directly opposite,' he whispered. 'Can you see?'

Lights shone in all but one of the facing windows; I could see potted plants on some of the sills, and the top half of a TV. 'What am I looking for?' I asked.

'A room just like this one,' he said.

'You mean without a light on inside?'

'And newspaper on the window.'

I stared at the only unlit window in the building opposite, and gradually, between its bars, discerned the print-lined pages. 'OK,' I said.

'She put those up today,' he explained. 'About an hour after I put up mine.'

'OK,' I said again. I had no idea what else to say in the circumstances. I felt like I had wandered down the wrong backstreet and lost my way. I could only put one foot in front of the other to find out where it took me.

'Now look at the bottom corner,' he went on. 'On the right.'

My eyes followed his direction, and I saw a patch of black in the corner of the window. I stared at it, but I couldn't see any shape or movement, anything that caught my eye.

'She's watching us,' he said.

'Who?' I heard myself say.

He let out a low sigh. 'She's been at the window all week,' he said. 'Whatever I do, she does the same. I close the curtains, she closes hers; I turn on the light, she follows suit. I put on a green T-shirt this morning, and when I looked out she was wearing one too.'

I stole a glance at his face. He looked sane; although it struck me at that moment that I had no clear idea of what sane looked like. He wasn't drooling, or muttering to himself. He wore a fraught but comprehending expression; like someone identifying the corpse of a loved one. I turned my eyes to the window again, stared at the corner of black until my eyeballs ached. Still, nothing formed. 'What are you going to do?' I said.

'Move out,' he replied. 'I can't go on here any longer.' We peered across the quadrant in silence. Life carried on in the other windows. A man sank shots of rice wine in front of a TV quiz show. A woman in another apartment yakked away on her mobile. My eyes kept wandering back to the corner of dark. 'It reminds me of when I was a kid,' he said eventually. 'Growing up in Dublin. My brother and I used to stay up into the night, daring each other to open this old cupboard we had in the corner of the room. He told me a devil lived in there, hungry as hell from all the years he'd spent locked inside. At first it was all bravado and threats: "If you don't open it I'll tell Mum about such and such...' But the longer we left it, the more frightened we got, till I thought the devil in there would burst out and gobble us both.'

'I didn't know you had a brother,' I said.

He nodded absently. 'Twin brother. You couldn't tell us apart.' We lapsed into a long silence. I could think of nothing to say: the whole night had wrong-footed me.

'Why don't we walk over there and find out what's happening?' I said, a while later.

'Is that a dare?' he replied.

'Um,' I said. We continued to gawp out of the window together. A light switched off in one of the ground floor rooms on the far side of the quadrant. I cleared my throat. 'Why did you need me to come over?' I asked.

'Just to prove I hadn't lost it completely,' he said.

I was going to say that I couldn't prove anything, but I held my tongue. I thought about the fuselage of that B-52 in the lake round the corner. This city, its shopping malls and street stalls, its air-conditioned office blocks, would rise and crumble; this apartment, and all the alleys that led to it would get razed, and still I could imagine that wreckage planted there in the algae. And the woman that I couldn't see would remain at her window, like a devil in an old cupboard that no one wanted to open.

The last time I saw him I was on my motorbike, waiting at some traffic lights on Hang Bai. He was stumbling along the pedestrian crossing, glancing backwards and forwards, pouring with sweat. He wore his usual red T-shirt with the gold star, but he had lost his floppy sunhat; his hair strayed wildly. Revving motorbikes lined up in front of him like a firing squad itching at their triggers. I thought about calling out to him - he walked close enough to hear me even above the engines - but I decided against it. The lights flashed green and I kicked up the gears. Like I said, my boat sailed on smooth waters.

Tuesday, 13 January, 2009

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Issue 24 / August - September 2010

He went to lengths to live as much like the Vietnamese as he could.