by Tony Parsons
Farren often did business at night. Phuket had two seasons – wet and dry – but the heat was always with us, and in the day it could kill you. So business was often conducted in the cooler, darker hours, when it was easier to work, and think, and sell, and dream.
‘A mean streak,’ Farren repeated. ‘A lovely people who are capable of extreme cruelty if you push the wrong button. Just like the Brits.’
It wasn’t a criticism.
‘Come on, Jesse!’ Farren laughed. ‘Murder the little bastard!’
Leaning against the ropes on the far side of the ring, Jesse gamely motioned for his opponent to come forward, and he did, the Thai kicking him high on the thigh again, and then again, and then again. Three kicks that blurred into one kick and seemed to shrivel something in my lower stomach.
Farren turned away and clinked beer cans with the Russian, who seemed to be having a rare old time. We were in the VIP section. There were only a dozen seats in there, but if you were in the VIP section they put a rope around your little area, and gave you a plastic bag that contained two cans of Tiger beer. I took a nervous swig of the can I was holding.
Jesse lunged forward, hunched down and fists flying, one last desperate try at getting past the kicks that were crippling him. But the Thai lifted one knee and it met Jesse flush on the chin and he dropped into the arms of the referee who hugged him like a loving parent and waved it all off. I felt a sickened relief that it was all over.
The little Thai did a series of perfect, joyous backflips, and his bare feet cracked against the well-worn canvas of the Muay Thai ring like pistol shots.
Pirin, Farren’s Thai, was in the corner and he looked at me now and nodded, but the band had stopped playing and there was a brief moment for talking normally.
‘All good with you and the family, Tom?’ Farren said, and something must have passed across my face because he leaned in and poked his finger against my chest. ‘We’re going to get you that car,’ he said, and I could smell the Tiger beer on his breath. ‘That old bike is not good enough for you.’
This was the chance I had been waiting for.
‘I like the bike,’ I said. ‘I can fix it up.’ I hesitated for just a second. I had been thinking about this for a while. ‘But it’s my visa,’ I said. ‘It’s a tourist visa. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me – I really do – but I want to be legal.’
I shook my head, not knowing what else to say. That was it really. I wanted to work. I was happy to work. But I wanted to be legitimate. And Tess wanted it for me too.
‘But everyone comes in on a tourist visa,’ Farren said. He clapped me on the back and it was a good feeling. ‘We’ll sort out the paperwork later,’ he told me. ‘We’re not going to let the little men stop us with their bloody paperwork, are we?’
‘No,’ I said, smiling back at him, and enormously relieved even though nothing had changed. ‘No. We’re not.’
I climbed into the ring where Pirin was nursing Jesse. ‘Always the same in moo-ay tai,’ Pirin said, and it sounded strange to hear the national sport of Thailand pronounced with a Thai accent. ‘Kick loses to punch. Punch loses to knee. Knee loses to elbow. Elbow loses to kick.’ We helped Jesse to his feet. He could just about stand, although his pale blue eyes scared me. They didn’t seem to be looking at anything. ‘And Jesse loses to everyone!’ Pirin laughed, and slapped him on the back.
Jesse looked at us. ‘What happened?’ he said.
‘Cha-na nork,’ said Pirin. ‘Knockout. But you fought bravely. There’s no shame. Be proud of your heart.’
‘No,’ Jesse said. ‘I mean, what happened to me? I used to be quite good at all this.’ He looked at me, bleary with sadness as much as anything else. ‘I really did. Quite good, I was.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I saw your fights. You showed me the DVD, remember?’
‘You saw my DVD?’
We gently helped him between the ropes and into a chair in the little VIP section. There was a backstage area by the toilets where the fighters prepared and got patched up and exchanged equipment – a surprising amount of sharing went on – but Jesse did not look ready for the long walk to the toilets.
Farren was making his pitch to the Russian.
‘A foreign buyer in Thailand needs to bring in one hundred per cent of the purchase price in foreign currency,’ he said. ‘We can help you with your FETF – that’s the Foreign Exchange Transaction Form you need for the Land Department. Then Wild Palm helps you to set up a Thai company that legally owns the land. A Thai company that you control. You are allowed to own up to forty-nine per cent of the shares.’
Then there was what they called the money pause.
Farren was silent, staring at the Russian, giving him the chance to ask the obvious question – But how do I control a company if I own less than half of it?
The Russian did not ask the question.
They never did.
Jesse sat with his head between his legs and Pirin and I stepped aside to allow two Thai fighters to enter the ring. Their bodies shone and dazzled under the lights and although I had taken it for sweat, I saw now that they were oiled. There were curved rope bandanas around their foreheads, and thin coloured scarves around their biceps. They both circled the ring, lightly touching its ropes.
‘Keeping out evil spirits,’ Jesse said, and I looked at him, expecting to see mockery in his face. But his eyes, closing as I looked at them from the beating he had taken, were misty with belief.
The two Muay Thai fighters got down on their knees and touched their heads to the ground. They spread their arms wide and then, still on their knees, one leg out and one leg back, they began rocking on the rear foot. It was somewhere between a prayer and a warm-up, a stretch and a meditation.
‘The wai kru,’ Jesse said.
‘Remember and respect,’ Pirin nodded. ‘Your ancestor. Your teacher. Your country. Your god. Your king.’
The fighters were in the centre of the ring, smiling – unbelievably smiling – gently touching gloves, gently touching foreheads, gently patting each other on the shoulder, offering an almost fraternal support to their opponent. No, there was no ‘almost’ in it. For even their smiles were gentle. They did not look as though they were about to fight. They looked like they shared a mother.
‘Ah,’ said Pirin. ‘Showing more respect.’
But it did not look like respect. It looked like something deeper than that. It looked like something stronger than that. And I felt that for all the similarities that Farren saw between the British and the Thais, they had things that we did not. They were better at showing love to each other.
The fight began. With the fights that involved Westerners – and it wasn’t just Jesse, there were a few farang on the bill – the fights all began at the same unforgiving pace. But when two Thais fought, they seemed to share a dance before the fighting began – rolling their heads, and practising a few shy kicks and bashful strikes, as though they might call the whole thing off and have a cup of tea and cuddle instead. But then it suddenly escalated and they tore into each other without mercy, and when you saw two Thais fight full out, the ferocity of it trapped the breath in your chest.
‘Look at that,’ Jesse said, perking up. ‘It’s like ballet with blood and broken bones and no protection. Can you believe it, Tom? No protection. No headguard. Not even a bloody vest. Just a genital cup and a magic tattoo.’
‘A magic tattoo?’ I smiled.
Jesse nodded at Pirin. ‘Show him,’ he said.
Pirin lifted up a T-shirt that said Stockholm Marathon 2002. There was a tattoo of a tiger covering his entire chest.
‘Makes the wearer invincible,’ Jesse said, and he chuckled, as the north of England staged a brief comeback in his traitor’s soul. ‘Until he gets hit by a tuk-tuk.’
Pirin was pulling down his T-shirt.
‘Very good protection,’ the Thai confirmed, as if discussing the contents clause of a reasonably priced home insurance policy.
&
nbsp; Jesse began to weep and I put my arm around him and rocked him as I would one of my children as he hid his face against me.
‘Maybe it’s not for me,’ he said into my chest. ‘Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I am wasting my time. Maybe I have been kidding myself.’
Pirin tucked in his Stockholm Marathon 2002 T-shirt, and he stared at the broken boy in my arms thoughtfully, and then he told us about the man who would know of these things, as the band played faster still.
The fortune teller’s office was a stone table cemented to the ground of an alley on the dimly lit edge of Phuket town.
The mor duu, Pirin called him – the fortune teller – was a plump old man with a fine head of white hair, and by his side was a battered briefcase that spilled out ancient books and pictures of holy men all sitting in the same position – legs crossed, hands resting lightly in the lap of their saffron robes, and nobody saying cheese for the camera.
There was a sign on the table, a drawing of the palms of a pair of hands, divided into sections. Pirin was ushered forward. Stuck to the wall behind the mor duu was a banner the size of a bed sheet, covered with drawings of elephants and warriors and peasants and gods and kings and assorted unidentified beasts. To me it looked more Hindu than Buddhist, more Indian than Thai. But what did I know? I assumed that the chequered board that was painted on the table was part of the routine. But as Pirin took his place opposite the mor duu, I saw that that was where the old men of the alley – they called it a soi, which could mean anything from a side road to a narrow little backstreet – played their games of chess. The mor duu took Pirin’s hands and stared at them as my friend gave him all his latest news and worries.
The mor duu – and maybe the all-seeing doctor is closer than fortune teller because Pirin was treating his session more like practical advice than an old girl with a crystal ball and big earrings looking into the future – read Pirin’s palms, and then flicked through one of the ancient books, now and then pointing to numbers with the tip of his heavily chewed biro. I couldn’t understand their conversation, but it sounded exactly like the meeting I had had with my accountant when he told me that my building business was finished and that I was bankrupt.
Pirin wai-ed and paid the mor duu, nodding at me as he stood up.
‘Now you,’ he said.
I laughed and shook my head, and pointed at Jesse, and said that this is the one who needs to know what the future holds, and if he is on the right path, and all that stuff, but the old seeing doctor was indicating the chair opposite him and Pirin was smiling encouragement, and Jesse was shoving me forward, and saying I should go first, as if he was scared of what he might be told, and in the end it would have seemed rude of me to refuse.
The mor duu took my right hand. I held out the left, trying to be helpful, but he shook his head and I pulled it away.
I grinned self-consciously at Jesse and Pirin as the old man rubbed the fleshy bit of my hand, where the thumb meets the palm, but they were both watching the face of the mor duu.
The tips of his fingers ran over my skin, and he poked and stroked the lines of my hand, as if they were the years of my life that remained.
I realized that I had stopped smiling.
He spoke to me in English.
‘An inch ahead is darkness,’ he told me.
I snatched my hand away and stood up and walked off, as Pirin and the old man barked at each other in Thai, something about money. Jesse came after me, but he was limping from the fight and I broke into a run and I did not stop until I found the soi by the stadium where I had left the bike. I shot past Jesse on the Royal Enfield, and he called out something but it was lost in the noise of my leaving.
I never rode faster in Phuket than I did that night. The roads, and the number of crashes, always frightened me, even during the dry weather, and I more or less attempted to stay within the speed limit at all times, and more or less on the correct side of the road.
But that night my heart was pounding with dread, and I flew home as fast as I could, up the long road out of Phuket City and past the wobbling flocks of drunken tourists who rule the beaches of the west, and then still further north, the fat farang and their burned faces and skinny girls way behind me now, up into the lush green far north of rubber plantations that were blacker than the night, even the green hills black, and passing through the villages that appear out of nowhere and are suddenly gone, as if you might have imagined them, and temples so big and golden and deserted that they can only be real but could be the ruins of some lost civilization, always on the lookout for dreamy locals taking a stroll and little children who stayed up very late and the odd water buffalo who had decided to sit down and take a nap in the middle of one of those dark dark roads, pushing the old Royal Enfield as hard as I could, the diesel roar mixing with the boom-boom-boom in my head, because I had to get home to my family.
The lights were all blazing. I left the bike out front and went inside, pulling off my helmet, my hair plastered down and wet, my entire body slick with sweat, and it took me a few long moments to realize that there was a row.
‘She’s being difficult,’ Tess said, standing above Keeva at the dining table. Our girl hung her head, a book open in front of her. In the corner Rory lounged in a chair, reading a handbook with some kind of rodent on the cover. He was keeping out of it.
‘She wouldn’t work today,’ Tess told me, and Keeva did not move a muscle. ‘She wouldn’t eat her dinner. So I have asked her to read and now she can’t even do that.’
‘It’s hot,’ Keeva said, looking up with narrowed, resentful eyes. ‘It’s hot all the time.’
‘Oh, do you want to lounge by the pool all day?’ Tess said. ‘Shall we rent a banana boat instead of working? Shall I get room service to send up a Knickerbocker Glory?’
Tess looked at me as if I might have something to say, or order from room service, but I shook my head.
‘I didn’t say I wanted ice cream!’ Keeva said. ‘I just said it was hot. And it is hot.’ Then the clincher. ‘I don’t like it here, okay? Is that allowed?’
‘I like it,’ Rory piped up, although nobody had asked him. ‘I like Mr and Mrs Botan. I like Mummy teaching us. And I like the island.’ He settled comfortably into his chair, turning back to his book with the rodent on the cover. ‘There’s more animals than England,’ he said.
Keeva erupted.
‘You like it because you didn’t have any friends,’ she shouted at him. ‘Only a hamster and me! Your sister and a pathetic hamster!’
‘I had friends,’ Rory said defensively. ‘Just not special ones. I was friends with everyone.’
Keeva’s face was cloudy with tears.
‘But I had Amber,’ she said, and her face crumpled at the thought of the lost friend back in London. ‘I had her. Oh, Amber, Amber, Amber!’
I was by Keeva’s side now and I touched her shoulder as lightly as I could.
‘Angel,’ I said. ‘It’s a big change and it takes some getting used to.’
She looked up at me as if I didn’t get it. ‘But I don’t want to get used to it!’ she said. ‘I miss my school. I miss London. I miss Amber.’
‘There’s Skype,’ I said, knowing how feeble I must sound to my daughter. ‘There’s email.’
‘That’s not being friends!’ Keeva said. ‘Don’t talk rubbish!’
‘Hey,’ Tess said. ‘Don’t you dare talk to your father like that.’
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I said, holding up my hands.
‘No, it’s not okay,’ Tess said. She pulled out a chair and sat next to Keeva, who ignored her. ‘Look at me,’ Tess said, and Keeva looked at her. ‘Listen to me,’ Tess said, and Keeva raised her chin, her mouth set in a tight, unhappy line. Tess put her face close. ‘We are here for your father’s job,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have a daddy or a mummy, okay?’
‘Tess,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
‘No, she needs to hear this.’
‘But I know about all this!’ Keeva said
quickly, anxious to head her mother off. ‘You don’t need to tell me.’
She swallowed hard and there was a silent pause where we all took a breath. We rarely talked about this stuff and, when we did, somehow it was always more in anger than sadness. All families have places they never go. With us it was the childhood that Tess had spent in care. There was no reason to revisit all of that. We wanted it behind us. We wanted it in the past. But it was never really behind us and it was never really past.
Tess began to speak.
‘The earliest thing I can remember is living in a home that wasn’t a home,’ she said. ‘With lots of other children whose parents didn’t want them, or couldn’t take care of them, or who had to give them up. And then I was farmed to other people’s homes – fostering, they called it – and some of them were all right and some of them were not so good. Because there were bigger children who didn’t want me there, or because they enjoyed being mean, or because of the adults who were around.’
‘Tess, this is enough now, okay?’ Trying to catch her eye, trying to get her to stop. ‘She’s too young,’ I said.
Tess ignored me.
‘None of them were real homes,’ she said. ‘So you – you, Keeva – you’re lucky.’
Keeva had begun to cry.
‘I know, I know, I know.’
‘You have a home,’ Tess said, and the anger was leaving her now, but still she went on. ‘And in that home is your father and your mother and your brother. And that home is wherever they are, do you understand me?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
Keeva’s tears fell on the pages of the ignored book before her.
‘Good,’ Tess smiled. ‘Now come here and give me a hug.’
Then they were in each other’s arms and apologizing to each other and telling each other how much they were loved. And I thought – She is a fantastic mother. Although when the time came she could be far harder on them than I ever could, I knew that Tess found their tears unbearable.