Fishing for Tigers Read Free Page A

a street lined with men carving tombstones I found myself breathing into a wall. I don’t know how long I stood like that, my forehead and palms against the cool, rough brick, with the chiselling of stone and the roar of motorcycles and chatter of language swirling around me. It couldn’t have been long – as I quickly learnt, a tall white woman with dark red hair is never left alone for long in Hanoi – but it felt like hours. Even my memory of it is protracted; I feel I leant into that wall for at least as long as I had spent on all of the planes I had caught in the week leading up to it, from LA to Perth to Sydney to Bangkok to here.
    Someone took my arm and led me into nearby cool dimness. Blur and noise and then I was sitting down and something cold and wet was pressed onto my face and then my neck and then my forehead. There was a drink in my hands and the chilled, sticky sweetness revived me enough that I had a moment of worry over the cleanliness of the ice clinking in the glass.
    â€˜Thank you,’ I said to the girl blinking over me. She said something in Vietnamese and I was saved from not responding by the man I only then noticed sitting across from me. He was as pale as I was, although several days of stubble darkened the lower half of his face. He answered the girl in what sounded to me like fluent Vietnamese and she giggled and scurried off.
    â€˜Always making people laugh,’ he said in an Australian accent. ‘Even when I’m just asking for a bottle of water. How’re you feeling?’
    â€˜Better,’ I said and drank some more liquid sugar. ‘Not used to the heat.’
    â€˜How long you been in Vietnam?’
    I couldn’t make sense of it. I knew I hadn’t spent a night in the hotel where I’d left my bags, hadn’t even eaten a meal. I knew the sun was as bright outside as it had been when I’d climbed into theBài airport cab. ‘Not long,’ I said finally. ‘A few hours.’
    â€˜Ah. It can be overwhelming at first.’ He took the water bottle from the giggling waitress and passed it to me. ‘Hell, I’ve been here five years and I still get overwhelmed sometimes. How long you staying?’
    I gave him the answer I’d given my sisters in Sydney. ‘I don’t know. It depends. If I like it I may never leave.’
    â€˜Really?’
    I shrugged as though it made no difference to me. ‘Do they have food here?’ I asked.
    â€˜They do, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I was actually on my way to lunch when I saw you lurching about out there. If you’re right to walk, there’s a terrificstand around the corner.’
    I went with him and didn’t feel too bad when he and the old woman behind the stove laughed at my clumsy attempts to scoop and slurp like a local. He told me his name was Matthew, that he was a journalist with the local English-language newspaper, that he lived in an apartment near the Hanoi Opera House and that he would never leave Vietnam at all if it wasn’t for his son back in Australia.
    â€˜His mother won’t let him visit me. She’s worried I’ll keep him here, I think. I visit him two or three times a year. Every time he seems to have grown half a foot. He’s twelve now and almost as tall as me. Lovely boy, though I’d never say that to him. He’s at that age, you know, wants to be a lot of things but lovely isn’t one of them.’
    I’d never been interested in children, not even my nieces and nephews. I certainly couldn’t have interest in the unseen, unnamed child of a man I’d just met. Yet I remember Matthew speaking about him, remember the exact look in his dark, watery eyes. It’s not significant, I know that. It’s because it was my first day in Hanoi, because I’d swooned in the street and been revived by sugar water and beef noodle soup and now everything was sharp and vivid and searing. I