Sex, Drugs & No Idea

7: In The Heart of Darkness

S-21 Prison wasn't one of those places that could be experienced from the comfort of an armchair, skimming through pictures on Google or Instagram. Perhaps it's a characteristic of all places that have borne witness to the most despicable and calculated iniquities––Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Ukraine and Rwanda––but one has to be there, and be able to touch the walls and smell the air and hear the silence. It's a chilling and changing thing, to stand next to wall with a bullet hole in it and know that some poor bastard had their brains blown out right there. It's a palpable thing. You can almost see the ghosts.

It was fifteen minutes after lunch that Charlie realised he'd eaten something with nuts in. He could feel that gradual swelling in the back of his throat, the tickling itch that forecast a future spent neck-deep in the nearest toilet. Before he succumbed to the nagging nausea though, the boys and he took a turn around the fine establishment that was S-21; the prison where the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed about twelve thousand people.

"Makes my old university dorm-room look lavish in comparison," Hugo said grimly, as he and Charlie stood in one of the tiny cells. The average cell was perhaps two and a half meters by half a meter and there were no loos.

Charlie speculated as whether prisoners were embarrassed at having to take a dump on the floor in front of other prisoners and guards. Then he thought that having Death standing by their shoulders and audibly sharpening his scythe would probably leave them little room for other worries.

Charlie stumbled from room to room and cell to cell, gazing in horrified rapture at the walls of portraits of dead prisoners' faces, before eventually throwing up in a tourist toilet in the corner of a courtyard.

At the end of the tour of the prison Charlie sat outside and waited for the taxi-van with the rest of the boys.

What a form of tourism, he thought, you pay money to feel sad and angry at the world, and a bit guilty too.

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An hour later, and all around there were cripples, mothers with their naked children, beggars and drug-dealers. All of them a sort of visible background noise. Men with broad and greasy smiles and three teeth tried to sell the six travellers sunglasses even though they were wearing them already. Hands plucked as they passed, whilst pleading girls with no shoes cursed them as they walked passed without acknowledging them or their crying babies swaddled in colourful cloth.

They were balls-deep in the main market of Phnom Penh, Phsar Thmei, which had been cranking since nineteen thirty-seven and, to Charlie's total lack of surprise, it was mostly full of crap.

They were all the same these places, wherever you went––Guatemala, Bali, Thailand, Morocco or Turkey. They were all cheap football shirts, knock-off trainers, sunglasses and watches of varying degrees of quality, lighters and novelty t-shirts of the type that Charlie's mum adored, and other dross. It was all crap, it never lasted and they all brought something, and so it went on and the planet wept.

Charlie managed to walk away with only a fake basketball shirt and a Zippo lighter with a beautiful engraving of Goofy firing an AK47 on it.

They walked back to The Top Banana. Charlie went quickly to the room and threw up again. He was stifling. He pulled on his newly acquired basketball shirt and went up to the bar and started to drink in that steady, purposeful way that people do when they want to leave sobriety behind as quickly as possible.

It had been a death-filled day. And Charlie knew that the dead didn't leave the living alone when they slept. She wouldn't let him sleep. He had to blot Sophia out and drown her deep so that he could catch a wink, even though he didn't want to because he missed her in everything he did and the pain was the only fresh thing that he had left.