Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau. Steve Tolbert

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      playing LADY GAGA

      being NAN PAU

      Steve Tolbert

      [Lacuna]

      2017

      Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, institutions, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

      Published in 2017 by Lacuna in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

       http://www.lacunapublishing.com

      Lacuna is an imprint of Golden Orb Creative

      PO Box 428, Armidale, NSW 2350, Australia

       http://www.goldenorbcreative.com

      © Copyright Steve Tolbert 2017

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievals system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Australian Copyright Act 1968, without the permission of the publisher.

      All enquiries to the publisher: [email protected]

      Cover design by Golden Orb Creative

      Cover photograph © Warrengoldswain | Dreamstime.com

      Text design and production by Golden Orb Creative Typeset in 11.5/14.5pt Minion Pro

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

      Tolbert, Steve, author.

      Playing Lady Gaga, being Nan Pau / Steve Tolbert.

      ISBN: 9781922198280 (paperback)

      ISBN: 9781922198297 (ebook)

      Subjects: Rangoon (Burma)—Politics and government—Fiction. Rangoon (Burma)—Fiction. Thailand—Fiction.

      For Sue and Elise

      Contents

       Prologue

       Part One

       Part Two

       Part Three

       Part Four

       Epilogue

       Notes

       Acknowledgements

       About the author

      The Burmese say if a man has no education he becomes a soldier. If he has no brains he joins the police. If he has no luck he goes into a monastery … There are many monks in Burma.

      from Rory Maclean’s Under the Dragon (HarperCollins, London, 1998), page 218.

      Prologue

      Mae Sot, Thailand.

      Back from a distant place in her mind, full of family and friends. The prattle of motor scooters outside, Pink’s ‘Bad Bad Day’ coming up through the floorboards, on the end of her bed the dark figure of a man preparing to leave.

       ‘Try each day to smile. It is good medicine.’ If you saw me now, dear abbot, you’d understand how difficult that is.

      She looked across the room at her low table, its candlelight glow. White lotus flowers in a small vase on one side of her small Buddha, burning incense sticks on the other. The incense was strong, stronger than the man’s alcohol breath. She inhaled the incense deeply through her nostrils while staring at the flowers, until the man left, leaving her with twenty-five minutes to do what she pleased. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered. She meant it. At this hour of night, time alone was a gift.

      She got out her English dictionary, a pen and writing pad from under the bed and set about composing a haiku, adapting something the big-nose westerner had shouted out as they came up the stairs together. She wrote:

      The best of Thai life –

      A monastery by day,

      The Snake Skin by night.

      Had he stayed she would have asked him which monastery he’d visited that day because she suspected he hadn’t visited any. She stood, put on her lilac robe and went out along the corridor to the bathroom.

      Ten minutes later she returned showered and dried and perfumed, mascara brushed through her eyelashes, her blue body-paint tears and lightning bolt, silver eyeshadow and gash-red lipstick all back in place, her white wig brushed free of tangles. She lay back down on her bed listening to Pink’s ‘Sober’, then to laughter and screeching from the room above, soon drowned out by the rumble and roar of a passing truck.

      The nightmare of her recent past, not a good place to revisit. Despite the noise – as familiar as her own heartbeat – her mind went back there anyway. The same faces as always formed, their voices rising and falling: her own, Thant’s, the old nun’s, the abbot’s, Mister MI’s and others’ from that day, and every day and night since.

      Part One

      1

      A year earlier. Yangon, Myanmar.

      Mya Paw Wah and her brother – Thant first of course – stepped off the bus and looked down the road, black exhaust sticking like cobwebs to their skin. The slap of bare feet on the pavement turned their heads. Four monks passed carrying their begging bowls upside down. One limped, wore an eye patch and had a jagged scar running across his nose and cheek. He looked over at Thant and smiled, baring broken and missing teeth.

      Damn, thought Mya. Why did monk whoever-he-was have to hobble past now? And if he had no choice, why couldn’t he at least have kept his face turned away?

      ‘Khoo Tone,’ Thant said in a low voice. ‘We used to play football together. Two years ago he scored three goals for us in our regional final, the winning one in the final minute.’

      Mya glared at Thant, knowing exactly what he was thinking. ‘What happened, did he run into a goal post?’

      He ignored her, continuing to watch the monks. ‘Do you know why they’re carrying their bowls that way?’

      The topic of troubled monks was not what Mya wanted to talk about, especially now. ‘They’re not hungry, I guess. Come on, let’s go or I’ll be late for school.’

      Thant stayed put, irked by his sister’s indifference. ‘To show they’ll accept nothing from the police or military. Khoo Tone didn’t get his face broken on the football pitch. It happened in a police interrogation cell. If monks aren’t safe in Myanmar, what chance do the rest of us have for better lives?’

      There was another way to end this. ‘So was he in last year’s protest march too?’

      Thant