“I’d suffocate if I didn’t. But I put chopsticks in the window frame so they can’t be opened more than ten centimetres.”
That gave me a nice, secure feeling deep inside. All we could hope was that the stalker was chubby and easily fooled. We chatted for a while, then got ready for bed. I’d brought my cotton Hello Kitty nightshirt, but even that felt like armour in the stuffy room. The fan gave us hints of a warm breeze every ten seconds, just long enough between oscillations to get hot all over again. And who’s ever going to fall asleep in a strange room when there’s some pervert prowler skulking around outside? Da had obviously got used to it because she was asleep almost as soon as her body hit the thin floor mattress we shared. She was snoring, which was another reason I knew I’d never sleep. The clock said 11:45. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Getting knifed to death in the jungle was by far a better option than dying of heat stroke in a sarcophagus.
I unlocked the door and took a peek outside. The moon was three days short of full. Everything glowed. I put on my David Beckham sandals, closed the door behind me, and enjoyed a few lungfuls of night air. Were it not for our stalker, I might even have curled up beside the motorcycle and spent the rest of the night there. I took a stroll past the other unlit hutches and along the lane to the main road. I wasn’t looking my best, but there isn’t a lot of action after dark in Maprao. There were no cars on the road, so dogs slept on the tarmac with no fear of getting run over. It was a very peaceful time. I made a mental note to get outside around the witching hour more often.
I didn’t want to leave Da alone for too long, so I set off back along the lane to the terrace. That’s when I saw him. He was lanky with an untidy mop of hair, a nose like an anteater’s, and he wore a Liverpool FC first-team kit minus the socks and boots. He was looking in through the gap in Da’s front window and he seemed to be enjoying himself, if you know what I mean. I didn’t want to shout because I was afraid he’d run away and not be held accountable for his actions. I didn’t have a weapon on me. All I had was bulk. I kicked off my sandals and ran towards him as fast as I could. The sand driveway didn’t give me away. In fact, the first he knew of my presence was when I launched myself at him. I caught him sideways on and, as he was mostly bone, hitting him felt like running into one of those
model skeletons they have hanging up in sports injury surgeries. He collapsed against the motorcycle, hit his head on the handlebars, and crumpled to the concrete.
After a few seconds of feeling proud of myself, I started to wonder whether I’d killed him. I was feeling for a pulse when Da opened the door and smashed him in the head again. He was alive but doubly unconscious.
“Oh, Jimm,” she said.
“He’s not dead,” I told her. “Just resting.”
We dragged him inside and stood looking down at him.
“What do we do now?” Da asked.
It was a good question. I frisked him but I was surprised, given all the money that English Premier League clubs have, that the football kit had no pockets. I mean, where did they put their cocaine? But the point was, there was no ID on him. A driving license or citizen ID card would have made things a lot easier. If we knew who he was, we could threaten him. We could talk to his mother or, God help her, his wife. We could out him. But he was still anonymous.
“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to call the police?” I asked.
“I’m sure.”
“Then I’m a little stuck for ideas,” I confessed.
“Jimm, I really think he followed me on a motorcycle today. He had to get here somehow tonight. What if he parked his motorcycle on the far side of the bushes over there?”
“Good point,” I said. “I’ll go take a look.”
“You can’t leave me here alone with him. He might wake up.”
“You’re right. Do you have anything to tie him up with?”
We dragged the pervert, who was still amazingly at half-mast, into the shower area. Given the elegance of the architecture, I’d expected the toilet to be one of those holes in the ground with helpful tile footprints to show which direction you were supposed to be facing. So I’d been pleasantly surprised to find a shiny white commode with a plastic seat and cover. It was ideal for anchoring a scrawny weirdo. Da, fortunately, had a spool of nylon string, and I used some of the knots Captain Kao had taught me to tie the stalker’s hands behind his back and around the toilet. As he still hadn’t come around, I checked his pulse again and felt confident to head off into the undergrowth.
After a short, undignified stagger through the bushes, I came to another sandy path, but there was no sign of a motorcycle. I walked along the path in both directions and scoured the bushes for hidden vehicles, but found nothing. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes later when I returned to Da’s room. She was on her mattress holding her mouth and crying.
“What the...?” I said.
“He got away,” she said.
I ran into the shower area and looked with amazement at the toilet shrouded in pink string. I couldn’t understand it. Captain Kao’s knots had been known to tie together crippled fishing boats and tether rabid cattle. It didn’t make sense that a semi-conscious bag-of-bones pervert could get himself free unless he happened to be holding a penknife the whole time, which, admittedly, I hadn’t checked. I ran back to Da.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
That should probably have been my first thought upon returning to the room. I knelt beside her. Her lip was bleeding.
“I’m sorry, Jimm,” she said. “He surprised me. I wasn’t expecting....”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“Did you find a motorcycle?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“So we have no way of knowing who he is?”
“Not a clue.”
“But we can be pretty sure he’s learned his lesson,” she said.
“I.... What?”
“He won’t be back in a hurry after that little show.”
“Either that or he’s pissed off as hell, and bent on revenge, and he’ll be back fully armed before the night’s over.”
“No, Jimm. Those people are cowards. We won’t see him again.”
“Maybe not,” I said, totally unconvinced. “But I should stick around, just in case.”
“That’s kind of you, Jimm. But you haven’t slept a wink and I doubt you’ll get any rest here tonight. I think I’ll take you home. You’ve earned a comfortable bed and an air-conditioner.”
She was already dressed before she got to the end of the last sentence. It’s true, I was tired, but I should have paid more attention to the sudden change in her attitude. She’d gone from timid tit to philosophical owl in the space of twenty minutes. She even smiled and cracked a joke while she was dropping me off. I was sleeping at the resort in a porta-office while our gorgeous resort took shape around us. I’d forgotten to turn off the air-conditioner before I left, so it was a bit like stepping into Sweden. But I had a duvet and it was all fine, the bank was paying for it. But even then, with only my nose peeking out from under the cover, I couldn’t sleep. The only thing that could explain Da’s mood swing was that she’d recognized the stalker. He might have even been a neighbour, which would explain the absence of wheels. Perhaps she knew the pervert’s mother and planned to have it out with her – woman to woman. But if that was the case, why wouldn’t she tell me?
*
It was a week later when I saw the pervert again. Or, at least, I saw his face. It was on one of those nasty, plastic advertisement hoardings they stick up at street corners. A travelling concert would be arriving at Rat Bumroong temple in time for Thai New Year, and all the boys and girls on the poster would be singing. As always there was the huge face of one semi-famous TV actress cum chanteuse, surrounded by singers nobody had ever heard of. Anteater-nose was one of them. It didn’t take long to find out the itinerary of the roadshow, just a phone call to the manager and I had dates and times. I went to
see the show at the football stadium in Chumphon town. I don’t know why I didn’t bother to inform Da of my plan. Perhaps it was her insistence that everything would be fine being in conflict with my belief that it wouldn’t.
I’d taken Arny to the concert because, A, he loved to go out at night to crowded places, and, B, he had no taste in music so, in his mind, the concert was every bit as good as the Stones. He worshipped the TV actress who couldn’t hit a note with a hammer, and he even knew some of the other airbrushed pseudo-celebrities on the bill. There was a C, too. I needed him to drive us there because I was still submerged in the shame of my felony. I’d been to the post office to pay my fine. They had a postal order payment service, so it was a pretty standard operation. The girl at the counter had been fined for speeding thrice in the past month and thought it was a laugh. But I had Granddad sitting on my soul, and I really needed to get him off.
There was an interminable wait for Anteater to sing his three songs. In fact, I’d almost given up when he slouched up onto the stage. His nose was even more prominent that night, thanks to a large, white band-aid stretched across his cheeks. He had a pleasant enough voice although he did miss a couple of notes when he saw me standing off to one side of the stage. I was surprised he recognized me, considering he’d only seen my face for a few seconds before I knocked him out. The audience had thinned out after TV woman’s brief appearance, so there were only the diehard music fans and homeless people cross-legged on the grass with bottles of this or that stimulant. Anteater skipped the last few bars of his final number and made a hasty exit stage left. I’d stationed Arny there for just that eventuality.
“So, we meet again,” I said, catching up with him.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “Get your monkey out of my way.”
“He’s not a monkey, are you Arny?” I said. “He’s a professional hit man, so I’d be nice to him if I were you.”
Anteater didn’t notice my brother blush with embarrassment.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, looking around at the sparse audience. A large woman in a boa climbed up onto the stage to take his place at the microphone.
“I’ve come all this way to see you,” I said. “You should be proud.”
“What do you want?” he asked. “I don’t have any money.”
That was pretty obvious from everything we’d witnessed that night. It was a budget caravan of would-be’s and has-beens clinging on to that futile hope of being discovered or rediscovered. None of the singers would achieve the lofty heights of the middle-aged star who’d briefly made it on Channel Four before dropping back into the reserves.
“We don’t want money, you creep,” I told him. “We want justice. We want you charged with perversion. We want people like you behind bars and flogged and castrated.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are, but the incident with Da–”
“You don’t get to call her by name.”
“Whatever,” he said, getting more sweaty and uncomfortable. “But it’s been settled.”
“Oh yes? How do you figure that?”
“We made an arrangement. If she’s supposed to be a friend of yours, you’d know that.”
“She wouldn’t make an arrangement with someone like you.”
“Then how do you think I got away?”
“Tell me.”
“She untied me. She let me go.”
“You hit her.”
“No, she smacked herself in the mouth. Made her lip bleed.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because it was mutually beneficial. Ask her what she does on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Now, can I go?”
“No, you haven’t told me the interesting part yet. What was–”
But that really was all we’d get out of him because he did a runner. He was too fast for Arny, who was built more for lifting trucks than chasing them. And something told me he’d be leaving the off-key circus and we’d never see him again. But he’d left us with a mystery. Why would a woman release her stalker? I doubted they were in a relationship, even though Da did have some seriously bad decisions in her dating curriculum vitae. She’d clearly been terrified by him, so why would she not want him to suffer in some way? And, what did she do on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
The next morning, I stopped off at the clinic. The resident doctor, Narisa, confirmed that Da didn’t work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She didn’t know what the nurse did on those days. She assumed she had a part-time job that paid quite well, considering she was talking about buying a pick-up truck. I really wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery, and I decided that nothing worked better than direct confrontation. I was in the Mighty X and, was just coming up to the turn into Da’s lane, when she pulled out on her motorcycle and headed in the opposite direction. She was wearing a crisp, white uniform about a size too small. She hadn’t seen me. I’m not usually the following type, but I couldn’t resist it. She seemed in a hurry, so I put my foot down and kept a respectable distance between us. She drove into Lang Suan, zigzagged through traffic, and just caught the red light at Highway 41. I was six cars behind her. When the lights changed, she didn’t turn onto the highway, preferring instead to go straight across the intersection and onto the two-lane road to Hadyai. There were only the two of us now, so I had to watch my distance, and I almost missed her when she took a left after the temple. On TV they always made tailing look a lot easier than it is. I almost missed her again about two kilometres further on when she took a right on a dirt track that headed up into the hills. We hadn’t had rain for a while, so I kicked up a lot of dust, and I was sure she’d be able to hear the growl of our ancient truck as soon as she switched off her engine. I was in two minds as to what I should do next, but neither mind had considered the dead end.
The track ended at a wooden gate with a sign that read Stop Here. There were two motorcycles and one new truck in a small parking area. The first thing I noticed was that Da’s bike wasn’t one of them. The second thing I noticed was that none of the three vehicles had number plates attached. Odd, that. I reversed a little way and parked in a space in the bushes I’d just passed. I put on a hat and sunglasses and set off along a gravel path past the stop sign. I’d gone no more than 100 metres when I saw the house. It was a western-style, two-storey concrete building with floor-to-ceiling windows. You could see clean through to the back-yard pool. The garden was well looked-after, with pretty flowers and neat lawns. There was a swing in front of the house, and a lawnmower. On all four sides the garden was bordered by forest.
Da was outside the front door making a meal of getting off her motorcycle. It was as if she was stuck on the seat somehow, as she twisted this way and that, but couldn’t dismount. My first thought was that she had haemorrhoids and was in discomfort. The more she squirmed, the higher her snow-white skirt rode up her thighs until, at last, she was able to plant one foot at the end of one very long leg onto the path. She massaged her thigh muscle, then climbed down from the seat and stretched her arms above her head as if she’d just completed a very long drive. It wasn’t a particularly hot day, but Da decided to undo the top two buttons of her uniform, which afforded a glimpse of a scarlet brassière. I was starting to feel a bit guilty for watching her. Whose house was this? A lover? I couldn’t see any movement behind the huge glass windows. I wondered if I should just go back to the Mighty X and head off home. What if they had CCTV? This really was none of my business. But it was all too bizarre to ignore. I set up a base behind a bank of bougainvillea.
Da removed an overnight bag from the basket at the front of her motorcycle and headed for the front door. But, clumsy girl that she was, she dropped something. It was too small for me to see, but it was obviously important because she went to a lot of trouble to pick it up. Her skirt was too tight and her shoes too high to bend down, so she crouched beside the dropped object and twisted and turned again to get in the right position. It must have taken a good minute to retrieve whatever it was, and all that eff
ort had clearly made her hot, because she undid one more button. She was obviously very comfortable about being at the house, and was not at all embarrassed to be half undressed and sweaty.
She went to the front door and opened it with a key. That might have been the object she’d dropped. The front door was also glass, so I could see that she didn’t take off her shoes when she entered. In fact, she wore them all the way to the next room which, judging by the taps and a refrigerator, was probably a kitchen. She went to the fridge and took a pack of what looked like frozen fruit chunks from the freezer. She pressed the pack against her brow for a few seconds, then lowered it to her chest and held it there. I know from experience that ice can be cruel on the nipples if you leave it there too long, but Da obviously had no problem. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying it. A lot. I was starting to feel like an extra in a soft porn movie.
After taking a drink of water and spilling a lot of it down her uniform, she headed for the stairs. Halfway up, she remembered her shoes, and sat down on one of the steps to take them off. There was nothing lady-like in this performance. In fact, everything was on show. I was thinking how lucky she was to be alone and far from any neighbours, when out of the bushes far to my left, stepped a man. He was in his sixties, wore white slacks and safari jacket and cream loafers. His baseball cap was on backwards, and he walked towards the house.
I shouted, “Oi!” and broke my cover. He looked stunned to see me running towards him, and he clearly didn’t know what to do. Consequently, he did nothing for a few seconds. He then turned in my direction and started walking towards me. We met at the centre of the lawn in a scene that would have been dramatic if viewed in slow motion. As it was, I hit him at full speed, which in my case isn’t really that fast, and we both fell to the ground, winded. Far from being upset, he looked me up and down and smiled.
“Wipe that smile off your ugly face, you scumbag,” I said.
“Marvellous,” he said. “I hadn’t expected this at all.”
Number Ten Page 2