by Tony Parsons
But he had turned away, and it was too late, and he was heading for the kitchen where my family were gathered around a small table helping themselves to an enormous plate of lobster noodles. Mrs Botan looked over at me, smiling, but then she saw her husband’s face as he shook his head, just once, and her smile faded, like that sweet imagined future that I, too, had wanted to believe in.
I loved the old man but I was not his son and he was not my father and all the wishing in the world would make no difference.
Nick was celebrating. From the way he was walking down the beach road, he looked as if he had been celebrating for quite a while.
He came into the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill, raising his hand in salute and somehow got his arm entangled in the fairy lights that adorned the entrance. It took a few minutes to fish him out.
Flushed and grinning with embarrassment, he staggered between the crowded tables to where I sat with my family at the edge of the sea, brandishing the newspaper he carried.
‘Rejoice,’ he said. ‘Rejoice.’
Then he saw the children and placed a theatrical finger to his lips. Rory was asleep with his head on his arms, while Keeva was drowsily spooning noodles into her mouth, her eyes almost closed.
‘They’re beat,’ I said. ‘But you look happy.’
He sat down and spread the newspaper on the table.
‘They printed it,’ he said. ‘My piece on the Chinese Old Town. Look.’
It was the newspaper he had worked for in London, open towards the back, at the travel section. There was a photo of the walled garden at the China Inn Café on Thanon Thalang and an article spread over two pages, with his name on it. In the picture an attractive young couple were smiling at each other over a shared Thai salad. I looked at the date at the top. The paper was almost a week old now.
‘Congratulations,’ I said, and I started reading the piece.
‘They chopped it down,’ he said, somewhere between angry and apologetic. ‘There was a lot more history in there. About how the Chinese came to the island and worked the tin mines.’ He shook his head. ‘How they built Taoist temples even as they were converting to Buddhism.’ His face looked stressed and sweaty under the fairy lights. ‘They even cut my line about the Shrine of Serene Light.’
‘You got your story printed,’ Tess said. ‘That’s the main thing.’
He brightened. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I did, didn’t I?’
Keeva placed her fork on her noodles and slid sideways into my arms. She was almost asleep.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ he grinned.
I only hesitated for a moment. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let’s have one to celebrate.’ I looked at the travel story before me. ‘How much they pay you for something like this, Nick?’
He didn’t hear me, or he didn’t want to think about it, because he waved his hand in the air to attract attention and a waiter I did not recognize came over.
‘Two Singha,’ Nick told him. ‘What was the question?’ he said.
‘Kai not here tonight?’ I said.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘My wife got a job at the other place.’ Halfway down Hat Nai Yang, where the strip exploded into light, we could hear ten-year-old Western music booming from The Long Bar. ‘That’s where I want to have a drink,’ he said.
From somewhere deep inside the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill, someone turned off the fairy lights.
The strip was still busy at this end.
The beach road was a noisy procession of bikes and scooters, with the odd taxi carefully inching along, and crowds of farang moving between the darkness of the road and the brightness of the shops.
Mr Peter was inside the dazzling interior of Peter Suit International, showing a man in shorts and a singlet that said Suck My Deck a swatch of pin-striped grey flannel, while his girlfriend took a seat and frowned at her mosquito bites. The middle-aged women in the massage shop were kneeling before a line of reclining customers and in the middle of the strip, one of Bon Jovi’s greatest hits was coming from The Long Bar. The first person I saw inside was Farren.
He stood alone at a table, a huge chunk of ice in a champagne bucket before him as he hacked and stabbed and struck at the ice with a vicious-looking ice pick. I guessed that the ice had come from the fish market next door and wondered if this was the first time their ice had ever been used for something other than cooling fish. He didn’t stop working on his chunk of ice when he saw us.
‘This is a courtesy to you,’ he told me. ‘Because we’re friends. Your pal was here earlier, embarrassing himself. Did he tell you that?’
I looked at Nick and he laughed and shook his head. He gripped my arms briefly and set off towards the bar.
‘Get him out of here before someone gets hurt,’ Farren said.
As Nick fought his way to the bar, I looked at Farren’s place. Bars in Asia must have looked like this for fifty years, bars that were originally designed to separate American GIs and British sailors from their pay packet. The business model still held, even after all those American GIs and British sailors had died of old age. The Long Bar was gripped by a fever and it was the fever of shore leave. It had the sweaty urgency of R and R. Good times, with the time running out. There were men, beer and girls everywhere. It resembled a bar like the No Name that you might have found on the Bangla Road, but it was bigger, because we were so far north, and because land was cheap up here. There was a long, oval-shaped bar around a central stage. Behind it, four Thai bartenders, two men and two women, struggled to keep up with the orders.
Every one of the bar stools was occupied by a foreign man, and most of them had a local girl or two hanging from their arms like human bracelets. There were more girls on stage, swaying with a kind of absent-minded lethargy to the music, and pausing now and then to adjust their pants in the wall mirror, or to check their mobile phones, or to chat with their friends. Mostly they just swayed and stared into the distance, their mind anywhere but here.
At the back of the bar it opened out on to the beach, so that you could not really tell where the bar ended and Hat Nai Yang began. In the gloom, away from the stage, there were more high tables and bar stools, and they all had the men and the girls and the cup sitting among the drinks where bar bills were stuffed by the waitresses. I could not see Nick. And I could not see Kai. But I knew she must be a waitress, and my eyes went to them, looking for one with a golden streak in her hair.
In a place full of people wearing few clothes, in a place so full of naked flesh – the tiny brown-skinned girls dressed for the beach or bed, the larger, paler men with their bare white legs and fleshy, tattooed arms – the waitresses looked almost demure. They wore a sort of parody of a male evening dress – black bow tie, white shirt, short black jacket. It looked like the work of Peter Suit International. They did not wear high heels. The waitresses all wore flat shoes so that they could move quickly.
Kai was sitting at the far end of the bar, playing Connect Four with an expression of shy good humour on her face. She looked as if she had been playing Connect Four all her life.
‘The customers like her,’ Farren said, still furiously pummelling the ice. ‘She’s got that sweetness you don’t see a lot of in the bars. You know what I mean, Tom?’
‘She just got married,’ I said.
He laughed at me.
‘To a loser,’ he said. ‘Who can’t even support his new wife.’
His face was sweating from the exertion. A spray of ice flew out of the champagne bucket and across the bar.
‘I offered her more money,’ he said. ‘Seems to work every time. Look, your pissed friend can stay if he doesn’t make a scene.’
‘What did he do?’
Farren shook his head, unable to believe the stupidity of it all.
‘He wanted to play Connect Four with her,’ he said. ‘But you play with everyone or you don’t play at all.’
I moved through the bar. Kai caught my eye and looked away, and it was only when I was almost next to h
er that I recognized the men she was with. Even then, I wasn’t quite sure – with their shaven heads and bad tattoos they didn’t stand out from the crowd. But I knew them from the Harleys parked outside – the three from the Almost World Famous.
The bully’s apprentice.
The fat bastard.
And the big man with the bald head and the goatee. He was the one to watch, I thought. But it was the one with the goatee who held out a meaty paw.
‘We didn’t realize you were so tight with Farren,’ he said. ‘No hard feelings, mate.’
I smiled pleasantly and nodded.
‘I’m not your fucking mate,’ I said.
I turned away, looking for Nick, and felt a hand on my arm. A long-haired Thai woman of about fifty shoved her face into mine. She was dressed all in black, as if trying to fade into the shadows, but I knew that this was the mamma-san and that she ran the place. Her skin was like the surface of the moon.
‘Lindsay is busy now,’ she whispered confidentially.
‘Lindsay?’
She meant Kai. Lindsay was the bar name that she had either been given or chosen because she liked the sound of it. It was a ridiculous name for a chao ley.
‘But Lindsay will see you later,’ the mamma-san told me. ‘Until then, we have many nice girl.’
I shook her off and went out to the beach. It was cool now and the open air kept the numbers down. I found Nick sitting alone at a table closest to the sea, struggling to light a cigarette. I took it out of his mouth and threw it away.
‘You don’t smoke,’ I said.
He frowned in the vague direction of the cigarette. Then he looked at me. ‘You want a beer?’ He waved a hand in the air. He seemed drunker now, this close to his wife. ‘Two Singha!’ he said.
‘Let’s just go home,’ I said, standing up. ‘Enough for one night.’
Two Singha beers appeared before us. I sighed and took a swig. It was sharp and cold and it made me shiver in the late-night air.
‘I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime,’ he said.
‘She’s a waitress,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
‘You know what happens in these bars?’ he said. ‘You know about the bar fines? About the medicals the girls have every fortnight?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘The whole country is one big knocking shop.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said, taking his bar bill out of the cup on the table. I added up the chits and began counting out the money. ‘It’s there if you want it,’ I said. ‘Or you can walk away.’
‘But I can’t walk away,’ he said. ‘I have to watch my wife. To make sure …’ He shook his head and covered his face in his hands. I looked around, not wanting him to cry here.
‘Nick,’ I said.
‘To make sure she’s safe,’ he said. He looked at me with desperate, wet eyes, and shrugged. ‘Just to make sure.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But this is no good. Sitting here. Watching her. It’s not healthy, Nick.’
‘I’m not watching her,’ he insisted, and he drained his beer in one go. ‘I just want to sit here and be close to her.’
But that wasn’t an option. A bouncer came out to us and stood by the table, his hands by his side. His body language almost apologetic, but I knew that it could change in a moment. If Nick knew he was there, he gave no sign.
‘You hear about these Thai women who marry foreigners when they have already got Thai husbands,’ he said. ‘You hear about that all the time, don’t you? And they say it happens because they don’t think we’re really human. So we don’t really count, right?’
I thought about the cousin from Ko Siray and then I forced myself to stop thinking about him.
‘That’s the Singha talking,’ I said. ‘That’s not you.’
‘If anyone hurts her in here, I’ll kill them,’ Nick said, turning his head and shouting now.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Don’t go all Lord of the Flies on me.’
The bouncer put a thick hand under Nick’s elbow and lifted him out of his chair. The Thai had the moves. With very little effort he had lifted Nick up and, still by doing nothing more than elevating his elbow, he was pointing him towards the exit. I stood up and, across the table, shoved the bouncer in the chest as hard as I could. He looked at me and then smiled. He thought he could take me and he was probably right. But he wasn’t totally sure. Because this drunken Englishman mattered more to me than he did to him.
‘We’re going, okay?’ I said, and he let Nick go.
Now I took Nick’s arm and walked him back towards the bar. He was smiling to himself.
‘Do you know the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice?’ he asked me.
‘Let’s just go home, okay?’ I said. ‘You can crash at my place for tonight.’
‘Orpheus went to collect his wife Eurydice from the underworld,’ he said. ‘She had died on her wedding day. A satyr attacked her and she fell into a nest of vipers. But the music that Orpheus played to mourn his lost wife was so beautiful that the gods wept.’
Nick began weeping himself.
‘I think I saw the movie,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘And Orpheus was told that he could collect his dead wife from the land of the dead and take her back to the land of the living on one condition – he must not look at her until they had both reached the land of the living.’
We stepped off the beach and into The Long Bar. It was even more crowded now and our progress was slow. I saw that Kai was still playing Connect Four with the bikers. One of them, the small, ratty one, had placed a familiar hand on her arm. Nick didn’t look at them. Nick was trying his best not to look at them. He was Orpheus in the underworld.
He stared at the stage where, after some shouted commands from the mamma-san, the listless go-go girls had been replaced by a two-piece Filipino band, a male guitarist and a girl singer. The guitarist went into the opening to ‘Hotel California’. He was very good. The girl began to sing about a dark desert highway, and she was very good too.
‘I think if I can leave here without looking at her, then we will be all right,’ Nick said. ‘I really believe it, Tom.’
‘I’m sure that’s right,’ I said.
A young blonde woman – very pretty, very drunk – climbed on stage and began bumping and grinding and laughing. The Filipino musicians smiled good-naturedly, for they had seen it all before. They kept smiling even when she seized the microphone and began to sing along to ‘Hotel California’, even though she was from somewhere in Eastern Europe and was clearly no expert on the Eagles.
‘I love her, you see,’ Nick said.
‘I know you do,’ I said.
We pushed through the crowds.
The stage invader’s enormous boyfriend attempted to join her in a duet but he was too fat and drunk and the steps to the stage were designed for nineteen-year-old Thai dancers, not forty-year-old East European gangsters. He collapsed halfway up the stairs and threw in the towel, screaming at me in some unknown language as we passed him. I think it may have been something about his girlfriend’s wonderful voice.
We finally reached the door.
Nick turned and looked back.
He could just not help himself.
The game of Connect Four had finished and Kai was at the bar, shouting an order at one of the bartenders. He had looked back before both of them had reached the land of the living.
‘Black at the wedding,’ Nick said. ‘Did you see the black at our wedding?’
On the other side of the beach road there was a shop like a glass box. It was one of those vague businesses where you could rent a bike, book a tour, change some money, buy Muay Thai tickets or get your laundry done. There was nobody in the shop apart from a baby in a wooden playpen who was practising her standing up. I was watching the baby and wondering where her parents were, and I did not see the motorbike until it almost ran us over.
I stepped back and the bike raced up the road. It had a sidecar with a metal freezer. The rider was so young that
he was still wearing his school uniform. I watched the bike stop further down the street outside one of the massage shops. The rider removed a handful of ice cream tubs from the sidecar and handed them to one of the women in return for a fistful of baht. I had not noticed the blond streak in his hair when he nearly ran me down.
So it was not until he was stuffing the money into the pockets of his school trousers that I realized the midnight ice-cream man was Chatree.
I went to get a sleeping bag from the house and brought it out to the shed. Nick was attempting to light another cigarette and this time I took the entire pack away from him. There were jerrycans full of oil and petrol in here, as well as the bike. He made no protest. The night had worn him out.
‘I was glad that you were at the wedding,’ he said. ‘My family – they didn’t get it. But I knew you understood. Kai is special – every man thinks that about his bride, I know. There’s a magic about her.’ He looked at me and he did not seem quite so drunk now. ‘My wife is unspoilt,’ he said.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ I said. ‘The pair of you will work it out.’
I really believed it. He would sell more stories and there would be more money and they would work it out. I moved to the door and waited until he had settled himself inside the sleeping bag before I turned off the light, and it was as if for just that moment I was his parent and he was my child. Then I killed the light and there was only the pale glow of the stars and what was left of the moon.
‘There’s this thing that we say to each other,’ he said sleepily, talking to himself now. ‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ he said. ‘Chan rak khun ja dai. We say it all the time.’
‘I know you do,’ I said.
And I still did not know what it meant.
Tess woke me in the middle of the night.
‘Smoke,’ she said. ‘Smoke!’
I was out of bed and pulling on my trousers and already I could smell it, this thick, acrid smoke filling the night, and the back of my throat. I headed for the door, hearing my wife calming our waking children behind me. Mr and Mrs Botan were already on their veranda. Chatree appeared by their side, rubbing his eyes. Mr Botan raised his hand and pointed.