the beginning

of course i fell in love as soon as i saw him. it seemed meant, as if i'd been waiting all my life for just those tired kind eyes, just that sardonic twist of the mouth, just that mix of understanding and amusement. we'd been writing two halves of a news story, following the same subject from opposite ends of the world, for the entire year i'd been working as a journalist in paris. cambodia, a tiny country in south-east asia: me following what the cambodian peace process was looking like from paris, joe from bangkok. we'd been a duet without ever having met, writing to order, me sharing a car and petrol with some other reporters to make the day trip to the chateau outside paris for this week's talks over here, him doing the next week's, over there in Bangkok, then going back to whatever his ordinary life was in whatever the city was like, while the real people, the players, the ones we watched and reported on, the ones who would be making peace for Cambodia (or not bothering), whisked from Paris to Peking to Pyongyang to Bangkok to Jakarta to Washington to wherever in a perpetual whirl of super-power sponsored unreality, having noisy tantrums in grand hotels, calling each other vampires, or making films in which members of their extended family played lovers or warbled away on the saxophone.

all that time i hadn't known anything about him except that his italian surname name sounded the kind of glamorous name a renaissance prince with a tiger and a red velvet tunic might have. stories were good too. now, when he turned out to be american and look nothing like that, just long and thin with longish thinnish hair and jeans and a flappy denim on top, too neatly ironed to be cool, but nice, i took one blink and all those subdued little bits of text we'd each written, prince sihanouk did this and hun sen said that, printing out on to newsroom floors all over the world, forgotten within seconds, were suddenly transformed into a year's worth of love letters, a confetti of rose petals.

but how not to fall in love when i was already so excited at the adventure i'd somehow blagged my way across the world on? just flown right across the world, someone else paying, club class, reclining seats, soft blankets, long meals, film, champagne, air hostesses all beauties in shimmering silk, orchids everywhere, me in new sky-blue linen jacket (reduced in a january sale in bd haussmann but no one would know), a world traveller from Paris, so sophisticated that i could laugh in a tinkling grown-up sort of way at the fact that i was travelling with a Cambodian diplomat (-ish) friend with a thrillingly forbidden Khmer Rouge diplomatic passport that had got him almost arrested wherever we went. it was dawn when we got in, a sunny dawn through the plane windows, but nothing prepared me for the sweetness of the wind as i came down the steps. i didn't know the air was going to smell of jasmine and frangipani. i didn't know the streets in the middle of town would have tiny buildings on stalks, bringing luck, or songbirds being set free from their cages. i didn't know i'd be staying in the kind of hotel where there were floodlit elephants at the front gate, where your room was a vast floor space leading to a balcony with a view of a pool and stars and where beautiful women put fruit on the table and a chocolate on your pillow. i didn't know they'd give me papaya and lime and a garland of flowers that made me feel drunk with happiness when i smelled them.

how could i sleep? "go and take a rest" joe said when i called the office, eager to meet. he was disappointingly phlegmatic. "come round at four". i tried to rest. i swam. i walked round the air-conditioned halls and listened to birds and footsteps tripping on marble and watched dappled sunlight under the plants round the pool and read an exotic english-language paper. i showered. i walked round naked, tried out the white fluffy robe and the white fluffy slippers with paper wrapping round each one. put on my new striped teeshirt instead of the sky-blue linen jacket. then put on the jacket too. then it was too hot but it looked carefree and good. flat espadrilles, did they look carefree enough?

once we'd met, and i'd discovered i would always be in love with him, he started giving me things. piles of paper. "monitoring, khmer rouge outposts, sometimes some useful stuff," he was saying, almost absent-mindedly, walking round the office in a plate glass highrise, looking for more stuff to stuff into my arms. a nice voice; bit nasal. i liked the careful way his neat hands picked up the papers; fingers going down the pages as if he was caressing them, remembering something happy; wistful look in his eyes, as if he were saying goodbye to each of them. but he was going it a bit with the stuff. i was staggering under the weight of it by the time he stopped. looked consideringly at it. grinned and chucked his head sideways a bit; a characteristic. i drank it in. "that's enough for now, eh?" he said. i wondered what he was thinking. how much should i pay for a tuk-tuk back to the hotel, i asked. he pondered. 30 baht, not more, he said, but quietly and without force.

in the end i didn't try the tuk-tuk yet. his boss, david, who was short and round and nice, came back and showed me round instead. i'd met him once before in paris. his little brother was my friend there. so david seemed grown-up; too grown-up, almost, to be being so friendly and collegial. joe took me downstairs in the lift. "it is 5 pm on february 14, happy valentines day" the lift said in an american accent every time it stopped. joe twisted one side of his mouth up, a kind of smile. "talkin' lift" he said; not a comment, quite.

they both brought me to my hotel in the early evening and had a drink with me, on my balcony at first, then downstairs at the bar by a bamboo screen. i expect we ate something. i don't remember. i do remember ordering orange juice and realising, with indescribable joy, that it wasn't the same thing as European orange juice. it was clementine juice, sweet as frangipani. i only remember one thing that we talked about: joe saying of one of the cambodian players, hun sen, the prime minister, "he's exactly the same age as me, 39; a peasant boy; he's done good; i like him," and grinning to himself. i was surprised. hun sen was from the side i'd privately regarded as likely baddies - he ran a communist government installed by an invading vietnamese army, and he'd been in the khmer rouge once. mostly though i was surprised to think of this skinny boyish cambodian politician as the same age as this skinny boyish american journalist. so joe was old then. i was 24. then joe left to go home to his family and david raided the whisky in my minibar and told me about his plan to visit australia on holiday, and later, after he'd gone and my excitement had subsided enough to let me sleep, i pulled the sheet up over my head and smiled into another world.

it was probably only jetlag but i woke before dawn and showered and pondered vital sartorial questions (the sky blue linen jacket or just a teeshirt, the black one saying sun sea and fish?) and packed my bag. it still wasn't light and there were two hours till joe and i had to meet downstairs to go to the airport. we were both being sent to jakarta to the next round of peace talks and were to share a taxi to the airport. neither of us had been; i'd been reassured in the evening to hear him ask david tourist's questions. i wouldn't be too obviously the beginner, perhaps.

meanwhile since there was time i stopped a tuk-tuk. take me to the royal palace, i said, and we went off at a rattle through the dawn. it was right at the other end of town. i stared at the intersections and the building sites and the blossom trees over the fences and the women selling street food setting out their pans. by the time i got to the outside of the palace the picture sellers were just hanging out their brass rubbings of dancing girls on teh walls. "i've got no time to look more," i said to teh tuk-tuk driver. "will you take me back?" and he shook his head as though i were mad and turned the little milkfloat thing back and off we roared, into the fumes and the clouds of mopeds and bikes buzzing like mosquitos. the driver wanted 200 baht. i didn't complain. too excited. a bit scared too. and what was the difference?

rush upstairs. get bags, stuff posh fluffy robe in as stolen memento, get downstairs to pay, joe waiting like a dark shadow, meeting my eye, coming up on one side, heart lifting madly at the sight of him, then hideously discomfited when clanging asian voice said "would you like to pay for batlob madam?" in my other ear. "yes yes" i muttered, realising everyone stole the things and there was a system for stopping us all, face scarlet, waving my pretty french credit card, with its green shading into blue, as if it could stop my blushes. joe faded away again against a wall. i saw his luggage consisted only of a guitar and a tiny bag. i could just imagine what was inside. one change of shirt, underwear (white socks, he wore, and he called pants "skivvies") a spare notebook.

i'd taken too much. all those clothes bought at bd haussmann in a january fit of excitement. shoes with lacy bits cut in them and gold embroidery. all those printouts he'd given me. would i ever read them? would he think me a girlishly bad traveller?

"i went to the king's palace this morning," i said, as we settled into the taxi. "just time to catch a glimpse. couldn't go without seeing it." he nodded, looking surprised. "uh-huh," he said. but he was preoccupied. when we got to the airport he said, "i'll see you later. there's some stuff i gotta do," and he vanished.

it wasn't very friendly and if i hadn't been so full of milk and honey i might have been disheartened. but i got inside and saw whole halls full of rough silk in every possible colour, glowing and lovely, and fell in love again. spent an hour feeling it and imagining what i might do with it and buying two lengths of it even though i knew as i bought it that each was just too small to do anything useful with and that i was only buying as an expression of confidence and hope and happiness.

i don't remember seeing him till the hotel in jakarta. i was scared at arrivals, especially when they nearly wouldn't let me into indonesia. i hadn't bothered to get a proper visa after i'd seen brits didn't need tourist visas. but you did need visas to work. and i proudly filled in that i was coming on the JIM-II peace talks on my entry form. they let me in in the end though. it would all have been ok except that i then compounded the mistake by wrongly identifying the boss of the jakarta office, a handsome, wooden sort called jeremy or john or something of the sort, as another friendly type, and told him the story as we set up a temporary office in the hotel where we were to stay and the talks would be held (the hotel where they filmed a year of living dangerously, as it happened). he instantly gave me a funny look. "if you've got no visa i don't think you can write," he said, with vague menace in his voice. "ahhh...." joe said peaceably. the moment passed. later though jeremy-john took another opportunity and said, "you're just a trainee aren't you? you're not allowed to make intercontinental trips" and i saw the mean little enemy's look in his eyes again and realised i should be on my guard with him. but it didn't matter. i was here, and however much he said, suspiciously, "so how did you get them to send you when you are Just A Trainee?" he couldn't actually send me home. so i smiled, and smiled, and felt a villain - but a clever one, more or less in control of the situation.

(the true answer to his question was that i'd got here through a mixture of blackmail and rat-like cunning: i'd told my reluctant boss in Paris that if he didn't send me i'd take up my cambodian friends' offer of a free trip to Jakarta on my holiday, and go anyway; in the end the reluctant boss, who had spent so much time in the past year trying to get me to do demeaning things like the filing, because i was a girl, that half the office was on his case for sexism, had seen things my way and given me the trip as a kind of farewell present before i started a new job in london. it was just as well he did fork out for the ticket. the cambodians i regularly had lunch with, three brothers called khek who called themselves prince sihanouk's ambassadors at large, ministers for sport and tourism and the like, had certainly expressed a hope that i would go to the jakarta talks. but no one, in actual fact, had ever offered to pay for a ticket for me. i suspect it wouldn't have been in the least proper if they had. and even if rumour had it that one of the khek brothers made his money from illicit earnings, round the back of the hotel they owned near trocadero, they were the acme of three-piece-suited respectability, especially khek lerang, my favourite brother, with whom i'd just flown to bangkok).

when we'd all met and had a drink in a concrete lounge, joe and i went to a deserted noodle-bar place on the ground floor of the hotel and ate something. he didn't really eat i saw. jst picked a bit. no wonder he was thin. and i had no appetite. just wanted to look at him. just needed to listen really hard because i couldn't understand most of what he said. he talked like tom waits. so quiet you couldn't hear, but so poetically that you really wanted to. nasal asian twang. played guitar in a dixieland band (q to self: what is dixieland) in a piano bar in patpong (q to self: what is that). knew prince sihanouk to be self-confessed playboy (q to self: how does anyone know if you confessed to yourself you're a playboy and why would you do such a thing). talked about the asian "thing about face" (q to self: what face?). had a friend called keith who would be here tomorrow. washington post. and one called mary kay. and one called mieke. was the child of navy family, brought up in philippines, learned taganrog (q to self: what is taganrog?) loved the country came to bangkok blown away by the place stayed on learnt thai enrolled at university became first student to study like a thai, in thai, got degree. spoke thai at home with wife and two kids, boys, 10ish, one called marino. went back to states, enrolled in government programme for spies, learned chinese. learned chinese so good he passed out top in exams. wanted so bad to be a spy speaking chinese. then they wouldn't let him become a spy speaking chinese. he was too good at it, had entered into the psychology of an alien nation, goodbye mr joe. so he joined the navy instead and went travelling to the middle east on a warship.

"only time i ever got to speak chinese in line of duty was in the middle east. there was a chinese tanker behaving suspiciously coming into harbour. captain asks them what they're doing, no reply. is there anyone on board who speaks chinese? he asks, and i say me," he bows self-deprecatingly. "talk to them, then, the captain says. and i talked to them and was able to tell the captain they were behaving suspiciously because they had a cargo of urea on board that had shifted and they were sorting out the problem. and he was astonished. goddam you're good! he says. i impressed the hell out of him by knowing the chinese for urea. but do you know what the chinese for urea is?" and he paused, an elongated jazz beat of suspense. "no" i said.

"ulea" he said, and we both howled with laughter over untouched noodles under the neon.

"it impressed the hell outta me that you went to the royal palace before dawn," he said as he turned in, a whoosh of dark shadow, at his own bedroom door next to mine. "i thought, whoo. goddam you're good!"

it was unreal what time it was. dark, the rainy season, tired, not tired, hungry, not hungry, scared, happy. hugging myself with happiness. the air conditioning in my room was fierce. it made me feel cold when i got up in the chill and saw the rain. i'd put on all my clothes then walk out into the heat and go back and redress in the coolest things. you spent all day dreaming of showering.

you spent all day hanging out in doorways, waiting for meetings to end, so you could crowd round the departing players and talkers and ask them what happened, then crowd round together mulling over what their enigmatic words might have meant. or you went into the big hall for the daily press conference, with the handsome indonesian foreign minister ali alatas presiding and trying to knock some sense into the heads of rival groups of cambodians who had done such terrible things to each other in the past that it was highly unlikely they would ever want to make peace. (they had to, of course, it was 1989 and the soivet union was on its way to the knacker's yard. no money to sponsor foreign conflicts any more. no money to prop up the vietnamese government to prop up the cambodian government. which left the chinese and americans, strange bedfellows joined by nixon's trip to beijing way back when, backing a peculiar coalition of the khmer rouge, former maoist guerrillas who had murdered a million people, and the former king-cum-god, sihanouk, who'd been imprisoned by the khmer rouge last time he trusted them but perhaps unsurprisingly because it had been his decision to let the americans bomb chunks of his country before the khmer rouge began that had sent all the nice intelligent teachers and intellectuals off into the bush in protest only to come back as a fully-fledged maoist movement a few years on. this coalition was already recognised by the UN instead of the country's actual government. this unlovely lot - and my 3 messieurs khek, who had charm and money - were bound, geopolitically speaking, to end up running things in phnom penh, so all the cambodians were going to have to come to some sort of accommodation as soon as possible.) in the afternoons, if you were invited, you went to little briefings with one or other player, where he explained his point of view less hurriedly. or you just swapped stories in the corridors with the other reporters and smoked. prince sihanouk's son, prince ranariddh, had called one of hun sen's delegate a vampire. they are all vampires, he'd screamed. sucking our blood! the khmer rouge front man with the sweet smile, who usually came to these things, was accompanied this time by some of the heavies and there was a lot of "no, HE's Brother Number Two" or "you're wrong, that's Ta Mok, HE's brother number three" or "is mieke sleeping with chris?". and there was old, old son sann, prime minister, bureaucrat, timeserver, both innocent and guilty, stubbornly refusing to join either lot, disagreeing with everyone. joe would turn up at the door where i was supposed to be waiting. jeremy-john always wanted me on doorstepping duty, or waiting out the ends of press conferences, and never writing, but joe was quietly helping me have fun. "didja know princess monique has a poodle. white. frizzy. disappeared one day. they say the guards hated the yapping little thing so much they ate it" taking me to meet keith and mieke and mary kay all discussing whether this meeting was too boring and hopeless to stick out and would it be more fun to try to get to east timor. drinking. eatnig peanuts. laughing.

and underneath a pain that just seemed like a distant story. one night there was haing ngor, who was the actor who played dith pran, the cambodian guy who gets left behind by his american colleague after the fall of phnom penh. in real life haing ngor had been in a khmer rouge camp but escaped. he ran through the forest. his family went in different directions. he never saw them again. he came to all these meetings, like a one-trick circus animal, with his protest against the mess the players had made of his country and life. joe and i interviewed him one evening - joe interviewed him and kindly took me along - and afterwards we went back laughing and walking a bit too close together to the room that was our office, to listen to the tape and turn it into a story. "we should have a joint byline," he said, when i thought of a phrase for the text. "no, it's your story," i said quickly, but i was bowled over by the kindness of the thought.

and then when we'd filed it we went to the bar with keith and some of the others - out of the dreary hotel for pretty much the first time in 24 hours, except for one outing to a restaurant where i drank something sweet out of giant green fresh coconuts with a london friend adn some of his indonesian mates but because joe wasn't there didn't really like it. out of the dreary hotel and into a cab in the rain and off to a bar to shout against the music and dance. the tarantula bar.

blahdy blah episode one

paris

valentine's day

tarantula bar

letters & archy

grauniad

paris

secrets?

music tapes

africa

disillusionment

spies?

letters later