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By Root 740 0

noise, roaring over a narrow pedestrian bridge toward the far end of town to a strip of bars and brothels. Generally, when you’re a Westerner encountering a roadblock, you try to bull your way through. Fully aware of your privileged position as a white man with money in his pocket, you slow down, just enough to be polite, maybe smile a little, then try to breeze through – as if roadblocks and checkpoints and armed police or military can’t possibly be intended for the likes of you. And this usually works, I was told. It was certainly what Tim and Andy expected when we came upon a floodlit square, a line of uniformed policemen stopping traffic. We slowed down a little but, in typical expat style, did not stop.

Suddenly, things got very dicey.

‘Stop! You stop now!’ screamed a uniformed cop with more confetti on his chest than the others in firing position around him. It’s unusual in an Asian country to see someone visibly angry. It’s just not done. When one loses one’s cool and one’s control, starts screaming and yelling and making faces, one is usually considered to have lost the argument. Hence the term losing face. The rule did not apply here. The cop doing the screaming was absolutely livid, his voice cracking as he shrieked in English and Khmer for us to stop and get off our bikes. His face was contorted with rage, muscles twitching beneath his skin like a nest of rattlesnakes in a thin cotton sack. There was the sound of klick, klack, klick, kachunk as six policemen flicked off their safeties and racked rounds into their weapons.

‘Oh shit,’ said Misha, who’d been shot already at one of these impromptu affairs.

‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ said Tim, stopping and turning off his engine. Andy did the same.

‘You stop! You get off now!’ screamed the lead cop, the others yelling along now in Khmer, their weapons fully extended. I dismounted first and immediately got a gun barrel thrust in my face, five or six people screaming at once. Another rifle prodded me to turn around, the little cop indicating he wanted me to put my hands on my head. Misha got off the back of Andy’s bike and, familiar with the drill, calmly placed his hands on his head, too. Andy and Tim were last, as it takes a minute to put down kickstands. All the while the screaming and the threatening continued, the gun barrels becoming more intrusive, no longer a prod, but a shove. When all of us were standing there in the middle of the street, our hands clasped on top of our heads, bikes silent, the little cop demanded to know if we had any guns. This seemed to please Misha, who translated.

‘Where you go?’ demanded the little cop, his face still red and twitching.

‘We’re going to the brothels,’ said Tim in English, following that up with a few words in Khmer and that evil laugh again.

As if by magic, the cop’s face relaxed, the picture of instant serenity and congeniality. Smiles all around. Like the maître d’ of an expensive restaurant, the little cop, who only seconds before had looked like he would most certainly be shooting us dead any moment – or at the very least dragging us off to jail – stepped back and to the side, arm extended in welcome, and ushered us theatrically through.

Fire Over England

England’s burning.

Turn on the telly, open up a newspaper, and you’ll see or hear about smoldering mounds of stiffened livestock, quarantines, checkpoints, disinfectant, and body counts. No one seems to know when the killing will stop – maybe, it sometimes seems, when every edible creature in the UK has been executed, burned, and bulldozed into a pit. Just when diners were learning to live with the remote possibility that the beef they’re eating could riddle their brains with spongiform bacteria, turn their cerebral cortices into loofahs, the foot-and-mouth thing (which does not affect humans) comes along, causing fear and uncertainty among the populace and giving yet more comfort and succor to the forces of darkness and evil.

The battle lines are drawn. Good and evil have met – and the front line is England. Nowhere else can the threat be so clearly defined.