by James Newman
Joe had to hand it to the elf. He had the technique down. The two women were ready to fork each other’s eyes out to get to him first. Joe wondered about how men reinvented themselves in the east. They could be whoever they wanted to be. They could grow facial hair and become a guru, harvest civet-shit-coffee or learn to play the guitar. They could become yoga instructors, dieticians, health gurus, chess players, champion ping pong players. They could sit in a little beach shack and read Proust. True success in life was measured by the amount of women you slept with and how you managed to do so without guilt and without paying. The city bankers flashed around their money. The beach bums promoted their poverty as a thing of real value. It wasn’t the product that was important it was what you did with it.
The rat-eyed man was a winner.
It was eighty-nine days.
The truck descended and took a sharp right to a small town by the beach.
Joe rang a bell attached to the roof of the vehicle, the truck braked. A dusty road. Warm sun and the smell of grilled chicken.
The Sea Breeze Bungalow. Lamia. The yellow and red sign was faded by the sun. He walked along the dirt track past a laundry woman sat over a plastic bucket rubbing cloth together. He walked past two locals playing chequers with beer bottle-tops. They were sat on a stone table and spoke lazily as they slammed the bottle-tops down on the board. He walked past a small pack of dogs scratching in the sun. A cat. A bird in a cage. He made it into the reception. He placed a hand on the reception desk. There was a bell but he didn’t press it. A man with a bored expression approached the desk. The walk was not worth the man’s effort. Nothing was.
“Are you full?” Joe asked him. He had a shaven head and a large stomach. Bare-chested with more pieces of body-art than Joe had seen on any man. His face was like a hungry buzzard.
“Not full now,” A toothpick moved around inside his mouth. He picked it out and looked at the end of it. He put it back in his mouth and sniffed, “Up to you.”
“You had a lady from Finland staying here. She died in the sea. Alexandra. I want her room.” Joe looked directly at him.
“Up to you. We no busy. She stay room twenty-four. Why you want to stay in there?”
“She was my daughter,” Joe said. It was the easiest thing to say. The buzzard smiled.
“Up to you. Here key.” The buzzard handed Joe the key. Joe wrote a name in the admissions book. Mickey Mouse. The buzzard didn’t ask for his passport.
Joe walked down a pathway. The crushed shells crunched beneath his feet. The Bungalow stood fifty feet from the beach. A porch with a few potted plants and a hammock underneath a guava tree in full bloom. He walked inside. He put his bag on the bed and drew all the blinds. There was a bed, a chair, and a vanity unit. There was an attached bathroom. Joe ran water into the tub. He sat on the bed. Above him the ceiling fan groaned on every slow revolution before speeding up into a steady hum. Joe unpacked his clothes and placed them in a neat pile on top of a chair. He took out his recorder and checked the batteries. He checked the microphone and recorded some sounds in the bedroom and the bathroom. He recorded on the balcony. He wanted to hear what Alexandra had heard that last day.
Joe took out his camera. He photographed the bed, the bathroom, the balcony, anything that caught his interest. He took a shower and changed his clothes. He walked down to the beach and recorded the sound of the waves smashing against the rocks. Sunbathers waved away the Thai beach-sellers, fishing boats bobbed in the distance. A man with dreadlocks mediated on the rocks. The roar of a jet-ski blasted across the bay.
He walked back past the men playing chequers. Along the beach road the town had grown lazily on either side. There were bungalows and small hotels here and there. Bars and tacky discothèques. Women drank and played connect-four and back gammon with tourists. Here and there backpackers stood in the road reading guidebooks.
Joe reached a building. He couldn’t decide if it was an art gallery or a bar. He liked both so he walked inside. Inside futons and low tables. Oil paintings hung on the wall. Island scenes, harbours, still life in the tropics. There was a bar and an old aluminium coffee machine. The smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air like an angry thought. Joe walked up to the bar. Ordered a soda water with ice. He noticed a woman sat crossed-legged. A futon. She was toying with a chessboard. He stole a glance and noticed her body; tall, lean and slim. Her hair was long and wavy and reminded Joe of the ocean. A sea of hair. Sharp features. A long slender neck. Careful breeding. That hair went on forever. She didn’t belong there but neither did he. Another time. Another place. Her face was a puzzled fox both as innocent and as deadly as the bottles of vodka and rum behind the bar. Joe caught her eye and smiled. He took a sip of his water and walked over to her. His feet felt like blocks of concrete.
“Playing alone?”
“Observant,” she said.
“It’s my job. What’s your name?”
“Gantira.” She looked him up and down. “Been in a fight?”
“Maybe. That’s a pretty name.”
“Yes,” She said.
“Do you work here?”
“No I just drink here and play chess. I don’t like to work too much. I don’t need to.”
“I admire you,” Joe raised an eyebrow. “Would you like a game?”
“Why should I want to do a thing like that?”
“Maybe you like the thrill of winning.”
“Or perhaps you like to lose?”
“It doesn’t matter if you win or lose,” Joe said as he sat down opposite her. “It’s about how much you hurt the other guy. Everybody knows that, right?”
“Looking at that eye you must have killed the other guy. White or black?”
“Lady chooses,” Joe eased himself down onto the opposite futon. He could sense her energy across the table. When the booze left his life in its place was an ability to read people. She was interested, he could tell. He could read her. She was white.
“Very well, I shall be white,” She said. “White may win, black may win, or there could be a stalemate. Exactly how those things happen is where the interest comes. We both know the range of possible outcomes is limited. The good guys win, the bad guys win, or we're back to where we started.”
“It’s a minefield. My friends call me Joe.”
“Who needs friends,” She said, “Unless you have enemies?”
“I have no friends, that’s my problem.”
“Problems are often blessings in disguise. You are lucky nobody cares about you, darling.”
“Maybe. Maybe it means I’m just unlikable.”
“Hmmmm,” Gantira bit her bottom teeth lightly and began a bold offensive. Joe held back anticipating her moves took a pawn and a knight with two simple passages of play. Gantira began to employ the queen taking Joe’s bishop before retreating back to the safety of a reasonable corner spread. He had the impression that she had let him take the two pieces.
“You play well,” She told him.
“I haven’t played since I was a kid. I used to play for the church until the vicar realised that my parents were undesirable. I was kicked out of the club. It was at that moment I lost my faith in the church.”
“A shame. You could have progressed.”
“I did, but not at chess or religion.”
“Sounds like you regressed, being kicked out like that for something that wasn’t your fault.”
“Perhaps...”
They both had a small queue of each other’s pieces by their side of the board. On the board were a king and queen of each side, a stable of pawns, one black knight and a white rook. They played until Joe was captured in check three times before check mate became inevitable.
“I guess you’ve read The art of War,” He smiled at Gantira as he pushed over his king.
“I wrote it,” She said. “You play well in an obvious way.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she stood while bowing her head and granting Joe a tiny smile.
“Maybe. I sometimes go to the Beer house at night. It’s touristy but so is everything here.”
Joe watched her float away and sat for a moment looking at the chessboard. The pieces lined up by the side of the board.
Ninety days.
SEVENTEEN
OFFICER RANG drove to a small house on the island. He could smell fish being barbequed and hear the waves lapping onto the rocky bay. A pack of dogs barked and a cloud of bats wheeled in the evening sky. He walked down a dusty path to the house. It was nothing more than a rude fishing hut by the water. A wooden shack with a corrugated-iron roof. The land around the shack was owned by his paternal grandmother who was sat inside with the doctor. His grandmother had outlived both his parents and his wife. She was ninety-two years of age and still had most of her faculties. Solid practical thinking typical of the poor occasionally lapsed into snatches of vivid past remembrance. Stories of animal spirits and ghosts. Rang remembered listening to her words years ago with his brother. The days before money changed everything. The old woman’s past memories were a magical insight into the mysteries of the world. Sometimes she stopped half sentence and Rang and his brother Shogun as children would gather round, concentrating on picking up the thread, and wondering why the monologue would suddenly change direction, like a bird in mid-flight. Stories of colourful Thai nobles swooped into bland meditations on the price of fruit in the market...She was fond of amulets... She drank the stories... Rama... Sita... Ravana... Some said she was capable of reading into the future and some said this was just fruit born from a front row seat at the theatre of humanity for almost one hundred years, nothing magical, only knowledge... But what is wisdom if not magic? It is all we have in the end...Her hair was a short shock of grey on an oblong, heavily lined, tanned face. She had been a good-looking girl and woman and entered middle and then old age with a plodding perseverance of character. A young girl in the wake of King Rama IV’s reign and pubescent in the second world war, fully grown by the Vietnam conflict and already an old lady by the time of democratic reform. She had seen many conflicts, but that day she faced the conflict that is ultimately self-consuming. The final conflict. She sat in a squat position and coughed and spluttered as she tried to speak. Her thin body bird-like and frail, her eyes heavy and tired.
Rang waied his grandmother as he entered the house, and he then placed some documents on a side table. Land ownership deeds that upon her signature would free enough money for her treatment. He nodded to the doctor.
“Tuberculosis,” said the doctor “It’s quite serious.”
“Then move her to the hospital. But first I would like a moment alone with my grandmother.”
The doctor left the room and Rang sat down in front of her. He had a set of land deeds in his hand. Her signature would end his suffering.
“I have some documents grandmother. I just need you to sign and then the doctor will take care of you.”
“What documents?” The old lady barked. She looked at him suspiciously. In almost a hundred years she had not found time to learn to read or write. Born in an age where schooling was just becoming compulsory she had somehow kept putting it off. She trusted Rang and his brother the same way a child trusts a snake; with curiosity and excited fear.
Rang reassured her. “For the hospital. The doctor says you should stay a couple of nights and you have to sign the documents for insurance.”
“Insurance? What is insurance?” She coughed.
“Same as a guarantee, to make sure the doctor or the hospital doesn’t make a mistake. We need you, grandmother. Please sign,” Rang said.
“Be careful, luk, be careful...All that shines isn’t the truth. The truth is dull and grey and goes by other names.”
“Yes grandmother.”
“Be careful who’s money you pick up. It is made of tears. It will harm you. Your brother’s money is made of tears.”
“Are you going to let him take everything? Mintra and I have nothing grandmother.”
“So these papers bring out the truth. Daughter’s tears make her stronger. A drunk and money can never to be friends. It’s better to move in shadows than to be found naked in the light. All cats are grey at night.”
“Sign grandmother.”
“Never, you do not smile, luk. When the smile has gone the knife is not far away. When I pass, which will be soon, into the next life I will leave this land to Mintra. She is the only one I can trust with slice of the island, my part of the island. Brothers that fight like dogs. I will never let you have it, never,” She wheezed.
“Have you seen a lawyer?”
“It’s done. Your daughter will profit in my next life, nobody else.”
“Mintra?”
“She will have my land and only her. There is a clause in the deed, she can’t sell for twenty years.”
“Thank you grandmother.”
Rang watched the doctor lead her out of the house and helped her into the back of the doctor’s car. He followed closing the door behind him. He walked to the doctor’s parked car. She sat in the back seat confused and coughing, talking to herself; spluttering.
“Send the invoice for the medical bills to Khun Shogun’s address and I will see that is made good,” Rang told the doctor. He had a feeling that his brother wouldn’t pay. He smiled at the doctor and walked over to his motorcycle. He thought about his brother. A man who owned half the island and intended on squeezing his way into the other half. The man who would see his niece at a government school and watch his grandmother die. He mounted the motorcycle and started the engine. He drove away leaving a cloud of dust behind him.
His daughter would not starve after he had done what needed to be done. He will always be her father. He would stay strong, always.
EIGHTEEN
THE BEERHOUSE. A circular bar. Joe sat at a stool with the backpackers. The travellers. They had dreadlocks. They had skinheads. They wore braids. They had tattoos. They had collective originality. A grey-haired American traveller stood up and began to preach. “I’ve swam with piranhas in the Amazon basin. I’ve played a major role in a Bombay production,” he adjusted his Vietnamese rice-picker’s hat, “I’ve seen things that would drive you crazy, man. There’s a fish man in Chonburi. He lost a wife and a house in a Siamese fighting fish bout. The Thais don’t like to lose. Never underestimate the old oriental face game. This dude calmly handed over the keys to his mansion kissed his wife goodbye and they later found him bobbing around beside the Si Racha pier. You don’t believe it man, just check it out. Google is your friend. Another dude in Japan had a business breading Kobe cows, dude. He had beautiful women who massaged his herd and fed them sake. Best steak a man can eat from Kansas to Kathmandu. He performed a ritual suicide after losing a distribution contract with a retail outlet. Cut himself up like the cattle he was peddling. Dude must have loved his work.”
Joe thought about it. The same old foreign guy drank in every tourist trap in the third world propping up the bar. Spouting out the same tired old kobe bullshit. Maybe the stories were true, maybe they weren’t. It didn’t matter. He remembered hearing the one in Mexico about the dreaded candiru that swam up the stream of a man’s urine whilst he was pissing in the Amazonian basin. The stories about black magic in Morocco. Barbarians in Budapest. There was danger everywhere. Some invited it, some avoided it, and some invented it. Some drank it and stuffed it in a pipe and smoked it. Some shot it in the main line. Some fucked it. Some photographed it and some tried to sell it. Some stuck a firecracker up its ass and lit it.
Joe ordered a soda water with ice. The adventurer was still talking. Joe walked over to him. “You ever see something strange in this town?”
“Shit, yeah. Just the other morning I saw two Thai’s dragging a dead guy into some shop house. It was early morning. I was still drinking.”
“That must of been something. Where did they take him? Was the dead guy a foreigner?”
“Into some fucking d
ive school. He had dark hair. I didn’t go up to take a closer look. The truck had blacked-out windows. Toyota. Everything about it looked like mafia, I’m not getting involved with that shit, man. That shit’s heavy.”
“Shit happens, man. I’m Joe. What’s your name?”
“The kids call me Hemingway. I’m a travel writer. But my real names Mike.”
“You live in town?”
“Last three years and counting. I got myself a cheap place near the temple.”
“Nice living man. Enjoy paradise,” Joe said and walked back to his bar stool. He took out a notebook from his pocket and wrote a few lines. It would be difficult to get Hemingway to sing in court but Joe didn’t see it coming to that. London could never win in a Thai court. He had other things on his mind. She said that she’d be at the bar. But promises that couldn’t be broken weren’t even worth making. Promises were made to be broken and lies were common currency. Shit, even Hemingway knew that. He figured that she had told him a lie, jai greng. It was her business. Had Alexandra drank at the Beer House? Joe realized he forgot to mentioned the Finnish girl to the American. A foam machine blasted foam onto the dance floor. Maybe she was a mermaid. Maybe she was a witch. Maybe she was both. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and Joe knew the feeling. He longed for a cigarette, craved a drink, but the steps kept him strong.
Joe looked around. It was a typical hippie hellhole. The bar had been thrown together from local stone, coconut timber and bottles of booze. It had expanded. Plants sprouted out here and there from pots and beds. A small stream with a sparkling water-feature ran through the middle of the joint where a concrete cupid pissed out a stream of water into an oily puddle. The music was trash but that was all that anyone expected. Three beer box tables stood to one side where a large screen projection showed Chelsea losing at home to Spurs. There was a dance floor with a machine choking out foam and lights doing the epileptic blink. Joe lined up another soda and set about it. It tasted like hell. The optics above the bar glistened at him. Johnny, black and red. Jim, good old Jim. Vodka Ronny, and Captain Morgan. All his old friends were lined up above the bar like bullets in a loaded gun. Even the odd one night stand with lady Bacardi or the old tequila temptress had her appeal. He was an outsider looking in at a party that could have been his funeral.