First published in The Great Outdoors, 2019
Heng began to wake up and became aware that he was swaying in a net and he was going to vomit. The throbbing in his head was deafening. As he slowly regained consciousness he realised the sound was all around him, coming from a large engine that was also shaking the room and filling it with acrid fumes. He spewed onto the floor and a rat came to investigate. He felt sick and groggy but gradually able to take in his surroundings in the dim light. He was lying in a hammock in the cabin of a boat at sea. He had never been in a boat before, not at sea anyway.
He had just been in a bar with Nalinee, one of the bar girls, getting drunk and negotiating the price of her sexual services, he recalled. The bar had begun to spin and he fell to the floor. He felt like he was dying. How could he be on a boat now? Maybe he had died and gone to hell for his sins. A man entered the cabin carrying two buckets and spoke to him in Thai. He threw one bucket of water over Heng and set the other on the floor with a scrubbing brush. Could still be hell. A Thai demon.
He became aware of someone quietly crying, a teenage boy lying in a hammock at the end of the room. In another hammock was an older man, sleeping fitfully and waking as a hacking cough racked his frail body and shook the hammock. The coughing fit subsided and the hammock swayed gently back to the pitch of the boat.
Presently another man, tall and thin, stooped through the doorway into the fetid cabin and greeted Heng in Khmer. Heng recognised him as Prak, the man in the bar who had tried to recruit him to work on a fishing boat. He swung his legs out of the hammock and rose unsteadily to his feet. As the ceiling was too low to allow him to stand upright he struck his head and fell to the floor into his vomit.
“You should have taken the job,” said his countryman, “now it has taken you.”
“Why?” said Heng. “I was going to work in the canning factory. I don’t like the sea and I can’t swim. Why am I on this boat and where are we?” he demanded, angrily.
“We are in the South China Sea, now far from the mainland of Thailand and Cambodia. The captain needed more deckhands. People don’t like this job. Hard to find the workers. He was ready to sail and he was desperate to get someone.”
“So you poisoned my drink,” said Heng.
“No, not me. It was Lek, the first mate. You’ll be all right. You just have to work hard.”
“Will they pay me?”
“No, but they will pay the man who brought you to Thailand.”
“So, I’m a slave.”
“I’ll try to help you escape but it will be difficult if you can’t swim.”
*
Heng did not trust Prak and resolved to find a way of escape himself. In the meantime he worked long hours, often all day in the hot sun, and at night, with the rest of the crew, he cast the seine net to catch the small silver fish drawn to the flood lights of the boat. They scooped up the fish in the big net and drew the ropes in like filling a sack. One night the boat was pitching in the swell and waves were breaking over the deck. Heng stepped carefully on the wet deck but could not see the spilled fish under his bare feet. He crashed onto the wooden deck and slid to the edge, where he clung to the gunwale till the boat righted itself and he struggled to his feet.
The crew sat together on the deck once a day for a meal of a bowl of rice with bits of squid or other small fish. But there was no routine to the work. It depended on finding fish, or on the whims of the captain. Always there was work. Even when there were no fish, there were nets to mend. The captain was a short, thick man who wore a red bandana on his head and a sword in his belt, a cutlass. He strutted around the deck shouting orders like a demented bloody pirate.
After one long, exhausting shift Heng sat dejectedly on his hammock, staring at his hands, which were covered in cuts from the fishing lines and the fish scales. He had stitched a deep cut in his hand while he was mending the nets. His hands were constantly wet and inflamed and the cuts would not heal. They did not seem to be his own hands but looked like malevolent alien things that threatened to clutch his throat and strangle him.
Heng had been working all day alongside Leap, his young roommate. His was a familiar story: he came from a poor family in Cambodia and was smuggled across the Thai border with a promise of work in the construction industry. He was delivered to the fishing boat instead and the captain paid off the trafficker. Leap worked to pay off the debt and to make some money for his family. He received no money himself and could see no end to his indentured labour. He lay in his hammock and sobbed miserably at night, as did Heng on occasion.
The older man was not working. He had been coughing and feverish for several days. His condition grew worse and he was unable to get out of his hammock. Lek and the captain came below to check on him and, deciding that he was unlikely to recover, they carried him onto the deck and threw him overboard.
The next day a very large boat approached and Heng and another worker called Arun were shackled on the deck with leg irons. “It’s the mother boat,” said Arun. “It takes all the fish.” Arun was another young Cambodian and also spoke Thai, but rarely spoke to say anything. He was housed in a different cabin and was also apparently considered a flight risk. He did not always work on the deck with the others but was sometimes kept in the captain’s cabin for the captain’s own use.
The mother boat drew up alongside and the hold of the fishing boat was emptied of its cargo. Some supplies were also brought aboard. Heng extended his leg to show the chain and looked imploringly at any of the crew who made eye contact but no one showed any concern. He wondered if he would ever see land again. There would be fresh water again at least. For two days the only water he had was from the foul tasting ice the fish were packed in and it made him feel sick.
The fishing continued as always to fill the hold again. The catch was dumped in a vat and the deckhands sorted the fish into buckets: the herrings in one bucket, the mackerel into another and the assorted rubbish fish into another. The little silver fish all looked the same; herring or mackerel, what the hell did it matter which bucket… Heng felt a stinging blow across his back. Lek had struck him with a length of bamboo for not sorting the fish properly. Heng felt also the sting of humiliation of being beaten like a dog and not daring to retaliate.
All the deck hands sorted the catch, watched over by Lek, pacing the deck. The heat was oppressive, even in the evening and they had to work quickly to get the fish on ice but they could not afford to rush and mistake the sorting. Lek stopped and stood over Leap, who was clearly stressing under the glare of the lights and the glare of the stick wielding supervisor. Leap, in his confusion, tossed a herring into the rubbish bucket. Lek shouted at the hapless boy, who then dropped a fish on the deck. Lek lashed out with his stick, once, twice and with the third blow, Leap grabbed the stick and wrenched it out of Lek’s hand. He laid into Lek with a frenzy of blows till he was tackled and restrained by the other officers. They pinned him face down on the deck and the captain stood over him. The little pirate captain drew the cutlass from his belt. The frantic fish sorting stopped. Everything stopped. The blade flashed in the floodlights. He struck the back of the boy’s neck with a hacking blow and continued till his head was completely severed. He kicked the head overboard like a football and his henchmen threw the body after. Heng had never seen a severed head before or a body without a head. It was horrifying and mesmerising. He could not look away.
The captain, bloody sword in hand, bellowed at the deckhands to get back to work. Heng could not believe what he had just seen. The boy’s blood mingled on the deck with fish blood. His life was worth no more than the fish. Less. The fish would fetch a certain price at the cannery and be exported as pet food.
*
Still the drudgery continued and Heng wondered if God would continue to punish him for the rest of his days. When alone in his cabin, he cried out to God and he prayed to The Blessed Virgin, as they did at the mission school. He repented of drinking and whoring and his many other sins and prayed to be given a second chance. He would be content to live humbly and honourably if he could just be free of this wretched existence as a slave on a fishing boat.
Some days later Heng spotted another boat in the distance and as it drew nearer the deck hands were sent below and shackled in the hold. The next day a police boat came and officers boarded the fishing boat. They demanded the release of Heng and Arun. “Rescue at last, thank God,” said Heng, as they headed back toward the mainland. Arun began to tell the officers of the beatings and killings on the fishing boat but they told him to sit down and shut up. The police launch motored on for a time and then slowed as it approached another fishing boat, just as decrepit as the one they had just left. One of the officers boarded the fishing boat and Heng and Arun were also brought aboard. The skipper of the fishing boat paid the officer a sum of money and the police left. “We are slaves,” said Heng, hopelessly, “sold to another master.”
As an experienced deck hand on a fishing boat, Heng had become a valuable commodity. He worked the nets as before and sorted the fish day after day, enriching another pirate captain. This one at least did not carry a sword, but just as ruthlessly worked his crew, though Heng did not witness any more deaths. The same mother ship unloaded the fish when the holds were full and Heng was shackled again until the ship had sailed away.
*
Heng lost track of time. He had given up carving a notch every day in the wooden railing. In the months that passed he set foot on land once. That was when the boat went to dock and the captain dropped off a group of workers beforehand on a small atoll. The island was as much a prison as the fishing boat and held the men till it returned for them.
More months passed and one day a different mother ship, accompanied by a police boat, came to unload the fishing boat. As they drew nearer Heng could see that bastard, Prak, on the police boat. A few officers quickly boarded and took command of the fishing boat. Heng thought he was going to be delivered back to his previous boat but found instead that they were heading back to port. Prak was now working for Stella Maris in Songkhla, tracking unregistered fishing boats. With the help of Human Rights Watch, pirate captains were being prosecuted and made to pay wages owed to captive workers.
With the money from months of back pay, Heng was able to get himself cleaned up, eat decent food and celebrate his freedom by going to the bar and drown the horrors of what he’d endured. He’d gone from beggar to banquet. He drank glass after glass of Mekhong whisky, making up for lost time, all the while casting his bleary eyes over the bar girls. Which would it be? They all looked so delectable. Heng luxuriated and savoured his prospects.