Five Hours of Sleep, Twelve Hours of Fire

The market empties around one. By the time the last plastic stools are stacked and the ice box is drained it is nearly two, and I sleep until six. Not out of discipline. The meat seller on the corner opens at six-thirty, the good pork belly is gone by seven, and then I spend the whole afternoon apologising to people for what I do not have.

Siem Reap is cool for about forty minutes after sunrise. I walk to the market with a blue basket and a list my brother wrote in handwriting I can barely read. Two hundred skewers on a weekday. Two hundred and forty on Saturday, when the buses come through and everyone wants to eat standing up.

The marinade is the only part I do not rush

Lemongrass, garlic, palm sugar, fish sauce, black pepper, a spoon of oyster sauce. My mother says the sugar goes in last, and she is right, though I have never told her so. The meat sits in it for three hours minimum. If I am late it sits for four, and nobody has ever complained about four.

My parents came down from the countryside two years ago and have not gone back for longer than a week since. My father threads skewers at the low table by the door, glasses pushed up on his forehead. He is slower than me. I have stopped telling him to hurry, because the hurry was never the point.

The fire does not care how tired you are. It only cares whether you fed it.

Around three, while the meat drinks, I take the list to the café on the corner and order an iced coffee I drink too fast. It is the only hour of the day I sit down. I count last night's money, write down what we need, and look at the street until the ice is gone.

Five in the evening until one in the morning

At four-thirty we load the cart: charcoal, the grill, the cooler, two jugs of sugarcane juice, the folding tables. It is a hundred metres and takes three trips, and my father takes the heavy things and refuses to be told otherwise. The first customers are the early ones — drivers eating before a shift, the woman from the laundry who always wants three pork and no chicken.

My brother keeps the notes flat under a stone and counts between customers, lips moving. He is faster than I ever was. He wants a motorbike by the end of the year and keeps a folded photograph of it inside the money box, and he thinks I have not seen.

Peak is half past eight. Smoke, orders called over each other, a child crying somewhere behind the tables, my mother handing out paper plates. The smell stays in my shirt until I wash it. I have three shirts in rotation and I know exactly which one is the worst.

People think the grill is the work. The work is standing there at eleven when nobody comes.

At midnight the sugarcane press is switched off and we eat whatever did not sell, standing up, not talking much. My mother wipes a table that is already clean. My father counts the empty skewers before he will sit down, a habit he cannot explain and I have stopped asking about.

I sleep five hours and dream about the market. Not the fire — the market, the aisles of it, the sound of ice going into a glass. Somebody told me once that you should not dream about your work. I do not have another five hours to dream about anything else.