My room was like any hotel room in any other city, other than a vague smell of mothballs. I sat on the window ledge and smoked cigarette after cigarette as I looked down at the vast sprawl of high-rise buildings and web of electric lights. I wondered in which direction the woman Lim lived and what their flat looked like. Why had Lucan Maybury – Cockroach - gone to jail, and what had he done to end up in a place like the Bangkok Hilton?
I watched an old episode of the ‘Water Margin’ on TV and when the Asian voices became too much of a shrill I found an old episode of ‘The Fall Guy’. It was like travelling back to childhood, only this time I was in trouble and there was no one to hold my hand. I called the Embassy from my cell phone. Jeffries gave me the details of the flight taking Skip back to England the following day; I would have given anything to have gone back with him.
It must have been after midnight by the time I put the light out and tried to get some sleep. I lay on the bed thinking of Skip and what I’d do with my life when I returned to London, if it was London I decided to return to. I couldn’t stay here much longer. Events were clearly telling me to get out of Bangkok - I wasn’t welcome. But I’d promised Skip’s Father to find out who his killers were, it might be the last thing I’d do in my friend’s memory. And I was no good at funeral speeches. Besides, I would never make it back in time now. I was certain the men at the market were near the root of his death, but how deep did the roots go? I had to go and see Casbaron, and if he wasn’t answering his cell phone I’d seek the location on the business card.
There was no noise in the corridor. Each time I heard the rattle of a room-service trolley come out of the lift, I sat up in bed and waited for the knock on my door. When I thought about him now I no longer saw his ruptured body, instead I thought of his handsome face possessed with life, the good times, the comradeship and parties of our twenties; nights playing Playstation and talking nonsense; girls, friendship, his appearances on stage and television, and how proud I’d been of him. no one like my friend Skip, he was more to me than I realized; someone who understood my complexities and accepted them, navigated around that vein of violence that seemed never far from the surface within me. He was my best friend and knowing he was gone left me hollow.
That night I dreamt the trolley came trundling down the corridor, upon it was a silver banquet dish. The waiter had hazel eyes and snakes carved into his forearms, and when he lifted the lid it was the head of my taxi driver, King Kong, his penis thrust in his mouth.
- 10 -
I caught the riverboat bound for Bang Kwang the next morning. ‘Big Tiger’ as Thais call it, is the terminus for lifers and some of its long-term guests are European and English trafficking criminals. A site I Googled on the hotel’s computer that morning said a year in Bang Kwang was the equivalent to five years in an ordinary jail; such were the brutalities of the system and lack of vitamins in the food, the violence, the overcrowding. If you were English or Australian the die was cast against you - you were there for life even if you’d committed the same crime as an American. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing being a civilian of the most powerful nation on earth; get caught with heroin and you serve a minimu fixed term and are then returned to your country after a short while. Such are the vagaries of economics and if Thailand plays ball with your country then maybe your term is mitigated. I surmised Mr Maybury wasn’t born under the stars and stripes. Either that or he was a killer.
The absurdity of my situation hit me as the boat made for open water; I didn’t have a passport, the body of my friend was flying back unescorted to Devon, while I was going to Bang Kwang to visit the rot of society. Why? Moments like this remind us of our futility but also resilience. I had to do something. The boat moored up against jetties en route and gradually fewer people boarded.
I watched the occasional glint of temples winking at me through the smog like buried treasure. Thais visited them continuously, making offerings of prayer and alms to the monks in the hope they’ll be blessed with good luck in the next life. Everything about them appeared based on self-satisfaction, an agenda. Like those young Thai women you saw hanging off the arms of ugly Western men, they’re patently not in love with them, but those empty evenings spent pleasuring them are all for a good cause – money which can be sent home to the family. Maybe they weren’t so greedy after all? Perhaps I was just objectifying my new enemy, blaming them as a nation for everything bad that had happened over the last 48 hrs.
After an hour it was just an old woman and myself left onboard as we approached the Nothaburi stop. I helped her off with her bag and she hobbled toward the clock tower looming in the middle distance that marked the area of the jail. The prison was in the middle of a town, its walls topped by razor wire. I went to the gate; on the lawn on the other side I saw a group of men practicing some kind of martial art, full contact by the look of it. As the guard took down my name and pointed to my bare legs, one fell to the floor clutching his eye. The guard didn’t take any notice, he was more interested in the fact I was breaking the rule of not wearing trousers into the compound. Fortunately, I’d been warned on the prison website and I had a pair of Thai fisherman pants I’d put on. He took me across the compound to a room where a man in a suit drew on a cigarette and had me fill in a visitors form.
‘You family?’ he said brusquely.
‘No, just a friend.’ I said.
He gave me a form to take to another office. The coldness and truculence on the prison bulls’ faces made me pity the relations who trooped over here from foreign countries to visit their wayward sons. Nobody wants to see their blood in a place like this, better to hand them a hypodermic laced with poison than live out their days in filth and fear. I walked out of the prison to the office, the little Thai woman from the boat struggling with a bag of shopping as she rocked toward the gate - so that was why she was here.
A clerk in a low-ceilinged room gave me yet another form to take back, ‘Go to building one, you not have too much time now sah, visiting hour soon be over.’
I hurried back. A man escorted me across a courtyard with whitewashed walls. The inmates looked grey and fearful, the air thick with desperation and the smell of human waste. So many of them crammed into little holes, looking out like moles at the sunlight reflecting off the white square. I was left with a turnkey at the end of the quad with olive-drab sweat marks under his arms and a long black truncheon. He regarded the slip of paper and stamped it, motioning me to follow him into a room.
I waited for Maybury, the veterans’ address-book in my bag beside the Mars Bars I’d bought from a 7 Eleven by the ferry - which had unfortunately melted. The map and key were still under my mattress back at the hotel. I hadn’t had time to find a book of poetry and felt I should have made a little more effort, but it was too late now. The din from the prison cells echoed through the walls, the shrill of Thais, the ugly sound of laughter from men with so little to laugh about. I nodded to the old woman whose son appeared on the other side of the chicken wire, his arm punched with heroin holes, jailbird tattoos littering his neck. I felt stupid for coming here.
I was pointed out to Lucan Maybury by the guard, the lanky figure looked confused at seeing me as he shuffled over, his hands chained. He wore a white dirt-stained shirt and jogging pants full of holes. Around his scraggly neck was strung the familiar Marine dog-tag and a cardboard sign that read, ‘4234’. I noticed blood marks on his back as he maneuvered himself into the chair, his eyes a chemical blue, rattling nervously to and fro.
I rose to greet him, ‘Thank you for seeing me Mr Maybury, Lim told me where you were.’
‘Is she alright?’ he said in an Australian accent, his face crossed in doubt.
‘I think so - I mean we never met or anything, I just had your number and called it.’
I took out the Mars bars, ‘I brought you these.’
Maybury pointed to the man with the truncheon.
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br /> ‘I’ll give them to the guard.’ I said.
Richard Burton once described Peter O’Toole as a “beautiful, emaciated seabird”. Minus the “beautiful” the description served the man before me perfectly; an injured old gull with broken wings. He brushed his long hair from his face and self-consciously smoothed it across his scalp. He was looking at my neck. ‘It’s been a while since anyone called me by that name. Who are you, why did you come?’ he whispered.
‘I’m Jacques Deschamp’s son, my name’s Alain… I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about my father.’
He leaned back in his chair, pursed his lips and sucked in his breath as he made contact with the back of it. Maybe it was the summoning of the past that stole away his respiration for he was looking at the floor now. ‘Scarecrow?’ he said feebly. ‘Jesus, now of all times!’
‘What happened to your back?’
He glanced at the guard watching us by the door. ‘Don’t point to it, please, it’ll only make matters worse. I get nightmares some nights, it disturbs the other men… one of those little bastards told the guard and they had me whipped in the quad.’ Maybury’s eyes started welling with water, ‘I’m okay though, I can hack it… it’s just night-times.’
I didn’t know what to say. ‘Why?’
‘I’m scared of the dark… I was in the tunnels, each time we went down we used to say a little prayer and look at the sky, then in to the dark and the shit. They were clever little bastards - Christ they were clever - used to stick U-bends in the tunnels full of water so when we gassed them the fumes couldn’t get around the turn. Sometimes they’d rig a pole full a snakes that was triggered by a wire - you tripped it without knowing and next thing you had a couple of black cobras wriggling down ya.’
I wasn’t really listening, Bangkok felt like an open wound and being here made me feel even worse, sordid even. ‘You knew my dad, can you tell me about him?’
He looked at me, cautiously studying my neck and then darting his eyes back to mine, ‘You know your dad, he had the same mark of Cain as you,’ he pointed to the birthmark on the side of my neck, ‘almost in exactly the same spot. You look like him too, your nose. You a boxer?’
I nodded, ‘Used to be.’
There was a heavy, uncomfortable silence. ‘I owe my life to him, and look what I did with it.’ He motioned to his surroundings with a lacklustre sigh. ‘He gave me an escape route and I pissed it up the wall.’
‘How long do you have in here Lucan?’
He smiled through peeling lips, ‘I don’t know, something like ninety-four years to go. After your first appeals fails and the second, the little man from the Aussie Embassy stops coming so regularly… you kind of lose track of time outside.’
A bell sounded and the woman speaking to her addict son anxiously put her finger to the mesh to try and touch him. He stared blankly back at her without moving a muscle.
‘That means we’ve only got five minutes.’ Maybury said.
‘Lucan I need to know if you can help me with something - two things.’
‘I don’t think I can help you now, it’s too late.’
‘But you don’t know what I’m asking yet?’
Maybury shook his head like a difficult child. ‘They know,’ he whispered, looking at the guard, ‘I can’t say, they’ve got my kitten.’
‘Who?’
Four minutes to go. The jail bull seemed to flex with the knowledge the little contact the inmates had with the outside world would soon run out. I needed to know about the gang with the double snake tattoo on their wrists; if Maybury had muled drugs in the underworld then maybe he knew of their organization, their snake symbol. And I needed to know about Dad; I was damned if I was going to leave empty handed. If necessary I’d have to come back again tomorrow.
As if in tune with my thoughts he said. ‘You shouldn’t be here, they’ll find you… probably got people on you already. They can even get in here; they come in and out as they like… they’re beyond the law.’
‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand. Which people?’
He started to cry, his fists tightening as he attempted to rein in the tears, ‘The same people who played the fix on me. I’d make fifty thou if I transported the H. They knew I had a problem - got strung out see - but I’m ok now, I’m clean, see?’ He showed me his arm pocked with old track marks, the veins dried out from too many fixes.
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry I’ve upset you.’ I got up to leave.
‘They put him with the worst kind of animal they could have… it’s no wonder your dad -’
‘What?’ I was shocked by his sudden change of tack; impossible to tell if it was to keep me here longer or whether he had something important to say, but I sat down again in my chair.
‘I don’t know if it was the Agency got him, the Hmong or Carabas, but he was through with the killing before we even started out… you could see it in his eyes, he wanted to go home.’
A minute to go, I hadn’t gotten a bean of information and my long trip downriver had turned into a farce. ‘Was my father’s body ever found, Lucan?’
‘Jungle full of ghosts, snakes with… heads on stakes out there in the woods, the horned god and his men.’ Then he looked at me very carefully, ‘The coming of the darkness.’ He said.
‘Please, just get a grip for a second. Who killed my dad?’ My voice was raised, the guard watching us.
Maybury shook his head. ‘They were all in on it. I didn’t have a chance from the start. I was going to go back to Oz set up a little bar on Bondi, just me and Lim - a new start… one more trip mate, you know? It would have been perfect.’ He threw his hands up in the air and looked around desperately, his display of emotion bothering the guard. He snapped something in Thai and banged his truncheon against the wall, a little chip of masonry crumbling away from it.
Compulsively Maybury brushed his hair across his scalp, his eyes darting manically. ‘They got me at the airport before I’d even gone through customs. It was a set up, a fucking set up to teach me a lesson after all these fuckin’ years. I knew things they didn’t want me to know, things about your old man, the black mountain… shit I didn’t care.’
‘What things?’
‘Jacques tried to get out, start a new life with the English girl, then they brought him back.’
‘Who? Who brought him back? You mean to the war… the last time he disappeared in ‘74?’
The guard clapped his hands together and the inmates palpably shivered. Maybury buried his head in his hands, webbed in biblical tattoos and psalm numbers. He looked up and wiped his baby-blue eyes. ‘You should go back to your life and leave what happened in the past otherwise you’ll end up like me, you’ll be fucked with no-one to help you. Maybe there’s still time if they don’t know you’re here yet. They’re already asking questions about you.’
‘It’s too late for that.’ I said solemnly. ‘Whoever they are have already found me.’
The bell sounded and the old woman tearfully said goodbye to her son. The guard barked and Maybury sat upright in his chair despite the welts in his back. He knew the drill; our session was over.
Time to come clean. ‘Lucan, look at me. My friend was murdered last night. These people asking questions about me, who are they? Are you saying it should have been me? For fuck’s sake, just answer me! Am I special for some reason?’
He shook his head. He must have been at least sixty-five, maybe seventy years old. Perhaps a patch of blue appeared in the muddied sky of his mind, ‘Go to Hanoi see Gerald King. He’s my only friend, he knew your Father. He’s a free man and he can talk and… maybe even help you. But the darkness, it’s their time now, it was predicted.’
I wasn’t interested in any darkness. ‘Gerald King, Hanoi, yes?’ I wrote it down on my
arm with a biro. ‘These people killed my friend, Lucan. Who are they?’
Maybury looked at his hands, I could hear a tremor in my voice. Like him, I’d broken into a sweat. ‘I suggest you go back to wherever you came from, or if you’re really determined go to Hanoi,’ He said, rising from his chair, ‘leave today… tonight, now.’
The guard took him forcibly by the arm, Lucan looked over his shoulder, the back of his shirt rowed in blood.
‘Thank you.’ I shouted after him.
He made a wai gesture to the guard who stopped pulling him, and turned and said, ‘God bless you Scarecrow.’ As he smiled at me, I was sure he was looking into my father’s eyes and not my own. The two of them had shared some dreadful knowledge, it was written upon him clear as the blood leaking through his soiled shirt. I waved back and part of me went with him to whatever fetid hole he’d be forced to return to.
I went back to the Asia Hotel as the sun was sinking, orange globs of sunset floating on the river. I thought about Maybury, was he mad or was there a connection between the past and my murdered friend? He said “they” had people all over the place, “they knew I was here”? They? Paranoia or something real? The only way to corroborate his claims would be to find Gerald King.
Early evening I showered, scrubbed the prison off my skin, shaved and caught a cab to the airport. I didn’t have anything smart to wear. I went to the Thai Airways desk and gave them my name. The pretty girl at the desk smiled and then looked in an envelope, her expression changing like sun swallowed in cloud as she read my details. ‘Please, hold on a moment Mr Deschamps.’
As I was waiting I saw a bunch of travellers on their way home, their faces brown and sculpted, eyes a burnt blue from too much sun. Why couldn’t it have been us? I asked myself again.
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