‘Gift Shop’ by Ellen Brickley

I expected to fall in love with Vietnam. I must have already been in love with Vietnam, though, because when I fell in love in the heat of summer 2014, it was for Cambodia.

People warned me about Phnom Penh, our first stop in the Kingdom – that it was rough, scary, far less westernised than what we had left behind across the Vietnamese border. It was so hot that I swore to myself I wouldn’t let my near-black hair down outdoors, in case I passed out and left my friend to take care of me. I imagined a crowd of strangers around my unconscious form while my friend said ‘She’s fine, honestly. She just should have tied her bloody hair back.’

I was down to the last hair tie from the packet I’d bought in Chau Doc. My hair is thick and it’s tough on hair ties. They explode off me. They felt like the last line of defense between me and humidity that regularly reached the 90s. 

Our guide dropped us to our hotel with a mini-lecture about how to avoid being victims of street crime, right down to removing our jewellery before going out on to the streets and not taking handbags on tuk-tuk rides unless we really needed to.

I told myself that it wasn’t very cosmopolitan of me to be nervous.

By the time we’d eaten lunch, I’d gone – for the first time in my life – from fearing something to loving it. The other way around is usually easier. That may have been the roasted aubergine and pork mince talking, but three days later, down to my last few riel in Siem Reap, I had to force myself not to go into actual debt to buy a book called Phnom Penh Noir. I wanted to know this country; noir, blanc and everything in between.

In between is rouge.

You cannot know Cambodia without learning about the Khmer Rouge.

The first thing I learned was that I’d been saying it wrong all my life (I had actually been saying Khmer Rouge on and off all my life – I come from that kind of family). Instead of KY-mer Rouge, it’s closer to Ki-MER Rouge.

The second thing I learned was that although Cambodians are by and large Khmer people, and their language is Khmer, when you type ‘Khmer’ into Google, it autocompletes to ‘Khmer Rouge’, in a postmodern and comparatively benign form of conquest.

The Khmer alphabet is twisted and beautiful, but incomprehensible to me. I’ve downloaded three apps to try to learn it, but I still have never managed to tell where each character stops and the next one starts.

That’s the thing about Cambodia. It’s hard to tell where things stop.

*

Our guide took us to the Killing Fields. ‘It’s okay,’ my friend and I kept saying to each other, the day before. ‘We can have cake or go to a market afterwards. Or just eat more local food. It’ll be a harrowing day, but we’ll be alright.’ We had been to the Anne Frank house together once after eating in Wagamama’s. I didn’t know which would be worse, cushioning tragedy with treats or not being willing to encounter tragedy at all as we travelled.

It felt like our job to learn what happened, to listen, but it also felt like it was nothing to do with us.

It took twenty minutes to drive to the most famous of the Killing Fields, outside the village of Choeung Ek. The road was bumpy, mostly dirt. It was my first trip outside Europe and the US. We had come from Ho Chi Minh City, which is full of concrete, steel, neon and incipient capitalism. We’d even found a cupcake shop there, and it had taken effort to avoid Starbucks. I could practically hear Marx’s disapproval when we excitedly ordered chai lattes in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.

Cambodia was certainly different.

Our guide told us about the Killing Fields as we stood together under the baking sun. He wore a cream-coloured shirt with an official crest stitched over his heart, which made him look like a soldier. He stuffed his baseball cap into his back pocket while we were in the car and slapped it on when we stepped into the heat. I let my hair down in the car, easing my last hair tie off carefully, so I could feel like me again, and I tied my hair up again when we stepped outside, so I could feel conscious.

I thought about the heat because I couldn’t think about the bodies.

*

There was a tree at the Killing Fields that I still don’t like to think about. I don’t talk about it either, because every time I try to, I feel like I’m back in a schoolyard trying to shock the older kids by saying fuck. But I can’t tell you about the Killing Fields without telling you that the tree was there. Don’t google it, though, promise me. Don’t try to find out what happened at the tree. Google ‘Khmer’ instead, and see how it autocompletes.

There are stories I can’t ever tell, because they’re not mine, and because I don’t really want you to hear them. I just want you to know that I have them.

Around the tree and the mass graves are bracelets made from coloured thread, looped over every upright structure like offerings at holy wells in Ireland. I asked our guide what they meant. ‘Young people, backpackers, like to leave them here,’ he said. ‘Like offerings.’

As we walked his toe nudged a human tooth gently back into the grave where it belonged. There isn’t much money for maintaining the mass graves, so sometimes the bones come to the surface. The mass graves haven’t been fully excavated. Our guide told us that it isn’t all about money. ‘People disappeared under the Pol Pot regime,’ he said. ‘They disappeared and never came back. Most people don’t want to dig it all back up. They’ve said goodbye. They’ve moved on.’ He didn’t tell us if he lost anyone.

The memorial garden is beautiful. If you didn’t know that the curlicued stupa is full of skulls, it could be something you’d take a selfie in front of in downtown Siem Reap. I wondered if by coming here, tourists and backpackers, we were digging it all back up.

Signs tell you not to walk in the mass graves. The signs seemed to be the thing that stayed with my friend the most. ‘You know what that means?’ she said. ‘That means someone fucking did.’

The thing that stayed with me the most should have been the tooth, or the gentleness with which our guide put it back where it belonged. If I knew the words for different kinds of teeth, I could tell you which kind it was. I could draw it for you. I won’t, but I could.

But the thing that stayed with me the most, the thing that made me sit down to write this, the story I really want to tell you, is that the Killing Fields had a gift shop.

I bought a magnet there. If you came to my flat, I could show it to you. I could, but I wouldn’t.

*

After the Killing Fields we went back to Phnom Penh to see the Tuol Sleng museum of genocide. We live in a world with a museum of genocide. It doesn’t have a gift shop.

The last room of the museum, a former prison, has photos of people who died there. In front of them burns incense – you can make a donation and light a stick. I can’t remember what the donation was for. It didn’t seem important.

By the time I reached the last room, sweat was running in little rivulets down the back of my neck. I never knew what a rivulet was until I felt them on my neck in Cambodia – I didn’t know what lots of things were until they crept down my spine there. I made my donation, lit an incense stick and noticed that four others had gone out. I spent too long trying to reignite them. Colourful bracelets hung there, too.

On my right wrist, I wore a bracelet that I had gotten at a wedding two days before I flew to Asia. The bride and groom made a donation to a breast cancer charity instead of buying wedding favours, and the charity gave a small token for each guest. I’d put the bracelet on as my starter was served and hadn’t taken it off since. With my engagement ring several thousand miles away so I wouldn’t lose it off the side of a boat on the Mekong, it was a connection to the last time I’d seen my fiancé, to friends and to home.

The pearl colour was flaking off the beads from all of the anti-mosquito spray I’d been using. Everything about me, even the rivulets, smelled of Deet. I looked at the flaking beads, at the dangling ribbon-shaped charm. I looked at the bracelets hung in tribute and started to slide my own bracelet over my hand, but found that I couldn’t leave a gift given in charity and in love in this place. I couldn’t take a piece of my friends’ wedding day and leave it here.

Instead I tugged off my hair tie and hung it among the bright colours. I shook my hair and let it fall around my shoulders, soaking up the sweat.

*

I don’t remember if we did go for cake afterwards. I don’t remember what happened afterwards at all – the skulls, the signs, the stories and the gift shop drove everything else from me. All I knew was that I was walking through someone else’s land, that Angkor Wat was two hundred miles north, and that I would never know whose tooth my guide nudged back to its home earth – maybe no one would. I knew that I had stories, but I didn’t know if I would ever tell them, if they would ever be mine to tell.

But I did know that I would tell about the gift shop. That story was mine and I could tell it. A story about a woman who filled out an annual leave request form and sat in a bright room full of beech wood desks and asked a man wearing a tie to book her a flight. She came off a plane in Ho Chi Minh City and it felt like stepping into the bathroom after someone else has taken a shower, that same dense, wet heat. That she went to the Killing Fields, not knowing if she was a student or a ghoul, and that she was relieved to find that at least she wasn’t the person who said that the Killing Fields needed a gift shop. That if there was a gift shop, maybe it was okay for her to be there too. That she left her hair tie next to the incense burning for people who died.

It is not the story that should be told, or listened to. But I want you to know that I have it.

From issue #2: spring/summer 2016

About the Author
Ellen Brickley is a writer and reader of YA novels, a volunteer for National Novel Writing Month, and a civil servant. She tweets @EllenBrickley.