Storyteller Page 19

  Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is, however. When we reach Kuala Lumpur, we meet him at his office for an interview.

  ‘Are you going to win this election?’ I begin.

  ‘Well, initially I said I was cautiously optimistic, but now I think with the upsurge in growing support, I’m very confident that we’ll make it.’

  ‘You have to win thirty-five seats to get that majority. That’s a big ask, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really, because we are able to consolidate our position in the five states – including Kuala Lumpur, six states. So we have been enormously successful in our penetration into the rural heartland, particularly around Johor, Sabah and Sarawak, where we failed miserably in 2008.’

  ‘What will prevent you from winning?’

  ‘Massive fraud.’

  The opposition then produces evidence to support its claims that the government has registered foreign migrant workers as residents to stack its numbers and is flying them into key seats. These are claims the government denies.

  David has been very tolerant of my general fragility throughout the weeks of the trip, although I haven’t told him exactly what’s going on. A day or so before the election I clear time for a blood test and then have to wait twenty-four hours for the results.

  We’re just heading out to do an interview when I get an email from the clinic.

  Negative.

  I’m on my way down in the lift when I open the message and I have to bolt back to my room. David and Alan do the interview without me. I call Rowan and cry down the phone. I feel very lonely. We both do.

  After two positive tests and so many symptoms, I assume that I was pregnant and lost the baby on the shoot. My doctor concurs. It was two babies in fact, twin girls.

  I lie on my bed until I’m all cried out. Then I get up and wash my face.

  We’ve had no access to Prime Minister Najib Razak in the lead up to the election so we follow him to a big rally at Klang, just outside KL. I have a live cross to do for ABC News 24.

  David is worried about me and I finally tell him the whole story as I stand in the live-shot position before we go to air. We’ve set up on a grassy verge in front of a beautiful mosque and he’s framing up the shot and sorting out lighting while I’m fiddling with my earpiece and microphone and getting into position. It’s dusk and the area has the feel of a carnival as people start to turn up for the rally. Bells ring at a nearby temple amid occasional bursts of ‘Gangnam Style’, a Korean pop song, from speakers on stage. Soon the call to prayer will begin from the mosque behind me.

  I don’t want to get upset and ruin my makeup before we go live, so I blurt it out in an abbreviated way. David’s not all that surprised. He’s aware of our trouble having a baby and he knows how important it is to me. ‘Can’t you try again?’ he asks.

  My eyes fill with tears. I sigh. I’m not sure if I have the energy left. I think it’s time to enjoy what I have.

  We cross to ABC News 24 and I chat to the presenter, Jane Hutcheon, about the rally, the lead up to the election and its likely outcome. We’ve carefully timed the cross before the noisy call to prayer, but of course it begins halfway through our conversation, all but drowning me out. I grin. It’s all part of the atmosphere.

  For the next few days none of us get much sleep as we cover the last of the rallies, the election and its aftermath. I toss and turn in bed anyway.

  The opposition wins the overall popular vote but too few seats to take government. The Barisan Nasional coalition is returned. Recriminations and allegations of fraud get some attention, but not enough to really change anything.

  By the time I get home, Rowan has taken off to Pakistan for work. As always, Arkie and Pearl are very pleased to see me and my presents for them, this time a handful of lollipops from the KL hotel and a miniature world globe each, with countries covered in pictures of native animals. The kids spin the globes around and around like lottery wheels, then stop at Australia and study the emus, kangaroos and koalas.

  We all have mixed feelings at the idea of going back.

  For Arkie and Pearl, Australia is an idyllic land of seasons, family holidays, clean air and endless green space. Neither can remember living there. Returning will be a big adjustment for children who have grown up in the tropical humidity and cultural intensity of Southeast Asia, where they’ve been exposed to poverty and grit. Arkie wants to go, for football, family and friends. Pearl, not so much – Asia is her home.

  Almost seven years since Arkie was born, I remain just as conflicted about my twin lives of work and family. What could be better than travelling the world, being allowed such privileged, intimate access to people’s lives and being trusted to tell their stories?

  Nothing can possibly compare to that, except being home.

  It’s time to consider what’s next. Just where will that spinning globe stop?

  Rowan walks in the door and dumps his bag. He grins and hugs me as the kids jump on both of us.

  ‘How was Pakistan?’ I ask.

  ‘It was fine,’ he says. ‘Glad we’re all home.’

  We smile at each other. He starts rummaging to find his own presents for the children while I pour coffee.

  My phone rings.

  It’s Foreign Correspondent.

  Am I available?

  Of course I am.

  Where to?

  EPILOGUE

  October 2013

  I’m packing up our Bangkok life.

  Six weeks from re-entry to the other world that is Australia I start pulling the detritus of five years in Asia out of cupboards, throwing things out, bagging up toys and clothes for charity and giving stuff that the kids no longer use to friends with babies and toddlers.

  When we landed in Phnom Penh, Pearl was just a few months old and Arkie had just turned two. Now five and almost seven, they will start a new life in a country they call home but where they’ve barely lived.

  It will be a tough transition for all of us. We’ve sold our little cottage in Melbourne’s inner west and we’re on the lookout for a new house and a fresh start, something to focus on as we wind ourselves down to the different pace of life in Australia.

  My feelings are very mixed. I’m certain I will be bored. The excitement of covering breaking international news will be missing; the access to other countries and cultures suddenly rare. I will miss Bangkok’s humid caress, its warm, blue dry-season mornings, its teeming wet-season storms. I’ll miss the quiet evenings on the terrace in our tropical garden, the only noise the whoosh of the ceiling fans and the occasional toot of a passing moto in the Soi outside.

  Years of being on call 24/7 has drained me though. It’s time to go.

  I start to relax a little as I tidy up and make plans for the move. My replacement is appointed and we discuss housing options and schooling for her children by phone. I’m pleased to see another woman with kids taking on the job but I also know how tough it will be for all of them. Nisha will stay on and help them cope. She’s the key to survival as far as I’m concerned.

  Rowan and I are off to Hong Kong for my brother Troy’s engagement party and his fiancée Amanda’s birthday. It will be the first time we’ve been away together without the kids. The theme is 1920s glam and I have a beautiful cheongsam made out of pale blue Thai silk covered in creamy roses to wear. I go online and order a pair of very high heels, the kind I’ve barely worn since before children and foreign postings, and a flowery 1920s hairpiece. Mum and Dad will both be flying from Australia to Hong Kong for the party and Dad will courier my accessories. I’m looking forward to it. Last time we planned a trip to Hong Kong Ba died and we went to Melbourne instead for the sad farewell. This time Rowan plans to take me to all the places where his family went when he lived in Hong Kong as a kid. We promise to bring Arkie and Pearl back a present each. Nisha will look after them.

  It’s Wednesday evening and I’ve just arrived home from the office to start packing for the trip when I hear the news that there’s been a plane
crash in Laos. A Lao Airlines turbo prop has crashed at Pakse in the south of the country, just across the Thai border. The plane was carrying more than forty people. I call Jum, who is just sitting down at dinner in a restaurant with friends, and we both head back to the office.

  Very soon we hear that five Australians were on the aircraft along with Lao passengers and crew and others from places like Thailand, the US, China and France. It went down in bad weather on approach to the airport at Pakse and crashed into the Mekong River.

  I know that area quite well. We spent some time there in 2010 when we shot a piece for Foreign Correspondent on the damming of the Mekong. I sit in my office on the seventeenth floor in central Bangkok and remember that muddy, brown, wide river at the height of the wet. The tail end of a typhoon is crossing the region. Even in Bangkok, deafening torrential rain has been hammering down. It’s into that they were flying.

  David arrives and the three of us set about sourcing information, and sending material. We’re all so familiar with each other that we operate like a well-oiled machine. It’s late when I send Jum home; David and I waiting around to cross live into the ABC’s News Breakfast. I’m looking at the passenger manifest when I get an email from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs to say that there were six Australians, not five, on the flight. That seems odd. Then I realise with a sick thud in the belly, that there were two children on the plane, one a baby on his mother’s lap.

  The rain is still falling in sheets the next day when we head to the airport to fly to Pakse. I haven’t been able to say goodbye to Arkie and Pearl because they were already at school when the decision was made for us to go to the crash site. I’m nervous about flying in this weather, and about the horror we’re going to witness. There’s something too close to home about this. It feels like it could have been anyone of us on that plane; our own children.

  We take off into the downpour in Bangkok and land through fluffy white clouds into bright sunshine at Ubon Ratchathani on the Thai side of the border. From there we drive into Laos.

  The bodies are being kept at a Chinese temple in central Pakse. The busy road outside is muddy and crowded with people all peering in the open double door at two rows of wooden coffins and bodies wrapped in plastic on the floor. There’s at least one small bundle and the medical staff on duty tell us the body of the youngest person on the plane has already been recovered. Later, rescue workers show us photographs of their recovery of the baby’s body. David, Jum and I all catch our breath at the pictures; once seen, never unseen.

  We head to the crash site by boat and walk up onto the island where the plane made a great ditch in the earth when it struck before it cartwheeled into the Mekong. A rice farmer tells us it was raining lightly and the cloud was very low when he heard the aircraft come loud and close overhead. He waves his arms wildly as he describes its sudden lurch to the side and the crash and a ‘boom’ before it disappeared under the water.

  ‘It must have been very frightening for you,’ I say, with Jum translating.

  He shudders. ‘So scary, I was shaking,’ he says. ‘I went to try to help the people but the plane was gone under the water.’ He squats under a tree, peering at me with rheumy eyes, shaking his head.

  The river is in flood, a series of typhoons have fed its flow and it’s carrying the rich silt downstream to Cambodia and Vietnam as it has every year for millennia. Its strength is a problem for search teams. Divers looking for the plane struggle against the current, and rescue teams looking for bodies search up to eighty kilometres away for those swept far from the crash.

  We head back by boat to file from the hotel. The driver cuts the engine and we bob in the centre of the river as I do a piece to camera, reporting the discovery of the body of the little Australian boy and possibly his Lao–Australian mum.

  On deadline, we are speeding back along the Mekong when we spot something floating in the water and fishermen in a long, flat timber boat waving their arms. It’s a body.

  We call the retrieval team and tell them where we are. We can’t wait for them – we have to file.

  ‘Can you tie something to it that floats so we can see it?’ the rescue worker asks Jum on the phone.

  There are a few bright orange life jackets in the boat and we consider attaching one to the body, which is bobbing in the water next to us. One of the fishermen is vomiting over the side of his boat while the others, bizarrely, take photos with their phones. While we ponder, we see a rubber ducky speeding towards us in the distance: the recovery team. We ask the fishermen to wait for them, and we move on.

  When I get back to Bangkok there’s the usual feeling of disconnection. As on so many other trips a piece of me has been left behind in Laos. I think a lot about the relatives of those killed, among them a family of four from Sydney and a father and son from New South Wales. They were just living life.

  Arkie has been worried about me. Before I left he overheard me on the phone talking to the foreign desk about the death toll and the storm blamed for the crash. On the phone and by text message since my departure he’s asked me repeatedly, ‘What’s the weather like in Laos Mummy? Has the storm stopped?’

  When I get home I ask him if he has any questions and they come in a flood. I try to answer them carefully, enough to help him understand but not to scare him. ‘Airlines should put airbags on planes Mummy, to keep the people safe.’

  Back in the office I comment to a colleague that I really didn’t want to go, to see, to report such awful tragedy; that I’m sick of being afraid to answer my phone, to hear what horrible news is at the other end.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s so hard, but it’s also such a great story.’

  And I realise something.

  They’re no longer just stories to me.

  Rowan flies to Melbourne to try to find us a house to live in on our return while I go back to packing.

  Protestors are on the streets again, just as they were when we moved to Bangkok almost four years ago.

  David, Jum, Khun Tu and I shoot a couple of stories at the packed rallies which are opposing a blanket amnesty bill for those involved in political unrest. The wave of protests is mostly a reaction to the prospect of Thaksin being able to return to Thailand. As we prepare to leave it seems little has changed since we arrived, although I’ve experienced so much since then that it seems like a hundred years ago.

  Arkie and Pearl are excited about the move but uncertainty about the future has been weighing heavily on Rowan and me, and the kids are aware of it. A massive typhoon is set to hit the Philippines but I tell the foreign desk that I won’t be able to leave Bangkok until Rowan gets back – I don’t want to leave the kids with only Nisha this time, particularly with protests brewing. Nevertheless I don’t sleep for worrying the night before Typhoon Haiyan is due to make landfall.

  Initially there’s little information available about what damage the super typhoon has caused, but what is known is that it’s probably the most powerful storm ever to hit land. Ominously, the communities hit are slow to make contact as a result of downed communications.

  At Auskick, where Arkie plays Aussie Rules football once a week, I half watch the match while making phone calls to our fixer in Manila and the desk in Sydney. Reports are starting to come through that the damage from the storm is massive, tsunami like, due to a storm surge that has washed out whole communities.

  Somehow our fixer gets us listed on a military aircraft from the Manila air force base to the worst hit city, Tacloban, on the island of Leyte, at 0600 the next morning.

  I call David: ‘Let’s go.’

  Arkie finishes his match and we get in the car to head home. I tell him that I have to go to the Philippines that night.

  He looks at me bleakly, in tears. ‘Mummy, when we go back to Melbourne, can you not be a foreign correspondent any more?’

  ‘Yes, okay mate, but first we all just have to tough it out for a few more weeks.’ I feel bleak too, to be leaving them after all while Rowan’s
still away. Nisha arrives as I pack, then I leave for an overnight flight to Manila and what’s looking like a massive disaster.

  David and I are equipped with a generator and disaster kit containing food supplies and water – all power, water and communications have been knocked out by the storm. Landing at 4 a.m., we get a cab to the air force base where we’re lucky to be put on a C130 cargo plane to Tacloban.

  The aircraft is packed with soldiers as well as local people who want to get home to their families. It’s mostly standing room only and we all brace when the big plane takes off and push against a pallet of equipment threatening to slide backwards as the aircraft lurches into the stormy sky. I then squeeze in among the people sitting on the floor and try to catch a power nap before we land. There won’t be much sleep for the next week or so.

  We get off via the big ramp at the back of the plane into belting rain. It’s chaotic as soldiers begin unloading equipment and the civilians make a run for what remains of the airport terminal. David and I have far too much gear to carry between us and we’ve been unable to get our fixer on this flight so we’re on our own. The terminal is terribly damaged and there’s no dry space; water is pouring through what remains of the ceiling and the floor is thick with mud carried in when the sea took over the city. Eventually we drag all of our equipment under a patch of roof, but we’re missing a box. In the chaos of disembarkation our disaster kit has disappeared. I hope it’s in the hands of one of the many in need, but it leaves us with no food and without key equipment. Luckily we still have water.

  David and I drag some debris from around the airport – flat pieces of chipboard and plastic signage that’s been flung about in the wind – and use it to make a platform for our kit to keep it off the wet floor. We carry some rows of airport seating that have been washed out into the car park back under what’s left of the terminal and use it to make a corner where we can work. We then leave all our gear and strike out into the devastated surrounding streets.