And then, one hot early evening in August last year, my rice-paper balloon burst into flames and crashed to the ground. I obviously didn’t pay enough tea money to the right people in a previous life. Our mother, Mair, despite her red-handed involvement in the affair, would continue to say it was fate. Karma, she called it, but I don’t think it was any coincidence that she’d rediscovered Buddhism at roughly the same time the dementia started to kick in.
That evening, almost exactly a year ago, will be forever burned into the DVD of my soul. It plays over and over even when I’m not switched on. I see the scene. Hear the soundtrack. I know exactly which frame’s going to freeze with the look of horror plastered over my face.
I’d had a great day, which made it all the worse. I mean, a great day. An old-timer in Maerim had been found shot through the temple with a pen gun. The police had arrested the teenager next door who had a history of trouble and a tattoo of a kitten impaled on a lance on his shoulder. I’d had dealings with him before. He had the devil in him, I knew, but I doubted he had the stomach for a killing. That takes an altogether different type of villain.
His grandparents had raised him, albeit badly, for the past thirteen years, ever since his bar-girl mother had dumped him and vanished without a trace. They obviously hadn’t been able to do the job any better with him than they had with their daughter. I went to interview the grandparents. The police case file was officially closed and the boy was at the start of a long murky tunnel that would eventually spew him out in an adult prison for murder. He’d threatened the old-timer in front of witnesses and the police had found the murder weapon under his bedroll. They weren’t looking any further. Dirt-poor family. No money for a lawyer. A nice neat victory for this month’s statistics chart. Granny was distraught – unavailable for comment. But there was something edgy about Granddad. He’d been the old-timer’s drinking buddy. They’d been friends since primary school. I could have marked his grunted responses and lack of eye contact down to angina or the fact he was missing his best friend, but I felt there was something else. He was a man who wanted to talk.
I went to the corner drink stand and returned with a half bottle of Mekhong whiskey. I suggested a toast to the deceased – wish him well on his way through nirvana to the next incarnation. Let’s hope he does better there. Granddad poured the drinks without saying a word. There was a slight shake to his hand as he passed me my glass. He raised his drink to his lips but it paused there. He snorted the fumes and looked down into the glassy brown liquor as if he could see his conscience.
“We were drunk that night,” he said, more to the whiskey than to me. I put down my own glass to listen. “We often got drunk but that night was more foolish than most. He’d just come back from Fang with half a dozen bottles of hooch and that sodding amulet. He’d bought it from some Akha hill tribesman, he said. It was magic, he said. He swore to me before he’d paid for it he’d seen the Akha stare down a rifle and not even flinch when his missus fired it at him. Bullet just bounced off him…he said.”
That was the start of the confession and neither of us touched the Mekhong whiskey the whole time. But I considered it eighty-two baht well spent. It turned out the old-timer had been convinced the amulet made him bulletproof and as the evening wore on and they got drunker and drunker, the neighbor goaded his friend. “Go on! Shoot me. Shoot me if you don’t believe me.”
“At first I ignored him,” Granddad said. “But he wouldn’t shut up about it. I knew the boy had a pen gun. I’d seen it. I fetched it more for a threat than anything else. Just to bluff him. Shut him up. You know? But it got him even more excited when he saw the gun. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t believe me. Go on you coward, do it’.”
“And you did it,” I said.
“Yeah.”
The boy was released and the old man was charged with accidental homicide. The Mail let me write it up as a personal account. The medusa didn’t like that. She took out all my adjectives and dumbed the piece down but it was still my story: How I solved a case the police had closed. There’s no way to describe how that feels. It should have been the happiest day of the week. I bought a five-liter cask of Mont Clair red to celebrate and two packets of Tim Tarn biscuits. I imagined we’d all sit around the kitchen table getting pickled, laughing at Mair who turned into a completely different person just from getting her lips wet with booze.
We had a small shop right beside the campus of Chiang Mai University. Most nights you could hear the high-pitched squeals of practicing cheerleaders – some of them female – and the late night drunken revelers careening their motorcycles into flower beds. Serious scholars retired to Starbucks for peace and chocolate croissants. Education had changed since I studied there. Our shop didn’t sell much: packet noodles, rice crackers, mosquito coils, shampoo, beer, that type of thing. We were a sort of rustic 7-Eleven. Mair had put in a few washing machines for the students to leave off their laundry and they’d invariably pick up a snack and a drink at the same time. And we were right beside a condominium full oifarang, the type of white-meat foreigners who couldn’t imagine a night of cable TV without half a dozen Singha beers. That was our customer base. We wouldn’t make it into Forbes but we did all right. The bungalow we grew up in, the only home we’d ever known, was at the back.
I’d taken a shortcut through the university, always an iffy move because the guards often left early to avoid traffic. It wasn’t yet four fifty but the side gates were shut. The padlocked chain was loosely wrapped. Lean Thai students could squeeze through the gap; overweight large-boned rapists could not. The girls could sleep easy in their dorms. I parked my motorcycle beside the guard post and inserted myself between the gates. A few more pizza dinners and I’d have to start driving the long way round.
I knew something was wrong when I saw my granddad Jah sitting on the curbstones in front of our shop. He was wearing his undervest and shorts and had his bare feet in the gutter. Neither the attire nor the setting were unusual. He liked to sit beside the road. Over the past few years, his reason for living had become the scrutiny of every vehicle that passed in front of our shop: study the number plate, look at the condition of the bodywork and glare threateningly at the driver. It was evening rush hour, his favorite time, but his head was bowed now and he was missing some fascinating evening traffic.
I asked if he was all right but he shrugged and pointed his thumb back over his shoulder. Granddad Jah wasn’t a great communicator and I had no idea what the gesture meant. He might have been telling me about the two customers waiting in the shop with nobody there to serve them. Heaven forbid he’d get up off his haunches and do a bit of work for a change. No. Too many passing cars to observe for that. I called out to Mair but nobody came so I served the customers myself and went through the concrete yard to our kitchen. I walked in on a scene reminiscent of a military court-martial.
At one end of the kitchen table sat my sister, Sissi, who at one time had been my elder brother, Somkiet. Filling up the space at the other end of the table was my current brother, Arny. He was what they referred to as a bodybuilder and this evening his T-shirt was so tightly strained across his muscles it looked as if it had been inked on. He had a wad of tissues scrunched in his right hand and it was clear he’d been crying.
Between these two sat our mother, Mair. She was dressed in a very formal black suit she generally reserved for sad occasions. She’d put on a little make-up, her hair in a Lao bun, and she looked like an elegant, middle-aged funeral director, more beautiful than I’d seen her in many a month. I did notice that the white blouse she wore beneath her jacket was buttoned wrongly. It might have been a fashion statement but I knew better. I couldn’t stand the silence.
“Somebody dead?” I asked.
“Us,” said Sissi, staring pointedly at the joists inside the roof. The temperature had reached 34 degrees centigrade that day but, as usual, she was wearing sunglasses and a thick silk scarf because she insisted her saggy neck skin made her look like a turkey. It did n
o such thing; her neck was fine. There really was nothing sorrier than an aging transsexual ex-beauty queen. At least I used to think so.
“Does anybody want to tell me what’s happened here?” I pleaded. Evidently not. Nobody spoke. The ceiling lizards were taking up their positions around the as-yet-unlit, fluorescent lamp above our heads and they were ticking with anticipation of a big night ahead. But my family was silent.
“She’s sold us out.”
The voice came from behind me. I hadn’t noticed Granddad Jah follow me in but he now stood in the open doorway with his arms folded. It had been such a long time since I’d heard him speak I’d forgotten what his voice sounded like. The family was complete now but unstuck. I raised my eyebrows at Mair. The most wonderful, if sometimes the creepiest, of my mother’s traits was that she never seemed to be fazed by anything. She would greet even the most horrific moments, tragedies and accidents alike, with the same sliver-lipped smile. Her pretty eyes would sparkle and there’d be a barely perceptible shake of the head. I’d often imagined her going down with the Titanic, Leo Di-Caprio splashing and spluttering beside her, and Mair’s enigmatic smile sliding slowly beneath the surface of the icy water. She was wearing her Titanic smile there at our kitchen table and I knew it masked something terrible.
“Mair, what have you done?” I asked.
“She’s sold it all,” Sissi blurted out. “The house, the shop, everything.”
It couldn’t be true, of course.
“Mair?” Again I looked at her. She raised one eyebrow fractionally. No denial. It felt as if the floorboards had been pulled out from under me. I plonked down on one of the spare chairs.
“We’re going to have a better life,” Mair said. “I decided it’s time to move.”
“Please note the high level of consultation,” Sissi hissed.
“How could you make a decision like that without talking to us?” I asked. “This is our home. We all grew up here.”
“We should all die here,” added Granddad.
“A change is as good as a holiday,” said Mair. “I’m thinking of you all. You’ll thank me for it.”
“Is it too late to unsell?” I asked Sissi. She was our contract person, our unpaid clerk and accountant. I was sure she’d have checked the paperwork. She pulled a wad of documents from her Louis Vuitton local rip-off handbag and dropped them onto the table.
“The deed is signed, witnessed and incontestable,” she said. A shuddering sigh erupted from the Arny end of the table. Granddad was seething in the doorway. We all knew the land documents should still have been in his name but he’d listened to Granny on her deathbed. Listened to her for the first time in his life.
“Sign them over to the girl,” she’d said. “You could keel over any second, then the bastards at City Hall will suck all the taxes and rates out of it. There’ll be nothing left. Sign it over to the girl.”
So, that’s what he’d done, a final promise to a woman he’d never really honored or obeyed. The one time he’d done what she asked him, and look where it got us all. As the sole owner, his daughter had no legal obligation to involve them in her decision. No legal obligation.
I took some time to think.
“All right,” I said. “Look. Perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.”
“It isn’t?” Sissi was sizzling like pork in deep fat.
“No.”
Of course I was lying. I was as upset as any of them but I had to put some temporary repair work into my family.
“No. Look, we all know this house needs a lot of work,” I said with a knowing look on my uncertain face. “The roof leaks even when it isn’t raining and we’ve got a world of termites. We could use the money from the sale of this place to find somewhere better…” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Arny shaking his head. I thought if I ignored him the gesture would go away. “Perhaps a little out of town, a short commute. We could even have a little yard with – ”
Sissi let forth with that haughty laugh she’d learned from her TV soap.
“Oh ho. But you haven’t yet heard the best part,” she said. “There’s more to it. The move is already taken care of, little sister.”
“I don’t get it,” I admitted.
“The money I got from selling this old place I’ve invested in a lovely resort hotel in the south.” Mair beamed with pride. “We’ll all have such a lovely time. It really is a dream come true.”
It was the type of dream you have after eating spicy hor mook and sticky rice directly before you go to bed. I could feel the knot. The south? They were blowing each other up in the south. Everyone was fleeing north and we were supposed to go south?
“How far south?” I asked.
“Quite far,” she said.
Two
“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, SAGINAW, MICHIGAN, SEPTEMBER 29, 2000
The new owners were building a tall skinny condominium on our home so we had exactly two months to dislodge ourselves from our heritage. Thirty-four years of my junk and memories packed into cardboard boxes. And it was a journey into the unknown. All Mair had to go on was a computer-generated artist’s impression of the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant at Maprao in Chumphon province. I had to look it up. It’s one of those Thai provinces nobody ever goes to. You have a rough idea where it is but you couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. If it was a country it would be Liberia.
We had family powwows in that first month, each of us stating our case as to why we couldn’t possibly leave Chiang Mai. Sissi had her computer business and was certain they didn’t even have electricity in the south. Arny was in training for the Northern Adonis 2008 Bodybuilding competition. Twice he’d been a flick of a pectoral from making it to the nationals and we were all convinced this would be his year. He needed access to a weight room and steroids. Granddad Jah cited the fact there were more homicides in Nakhon Sri Thamarat than any other province in the country. (Not terribly relevant as Chumphon was two provinces removed.) And me? Damn. I was a heart attack away from my leather chair. I loved my job. I would no sooner voluntarily leave Chiang Mai than I would spend the night in a bath of weasel mucus. I couldn’t go. I wouldn’t.
Mair didn’t seem to care. Her mind had already left the smoggy northern city and was sipping iced water on a balcony overlooking the gently lapping Gulf surf.
“Don’t you all fret.” She smiled. “Your Mair’s big and ugly enough to look after herself. You all go off and have a nice time. Don’t worry about me. I can always hire staff.”
I don’t think she was being sardonic. I think she really believed she could do it all alone.
“It’s only a small resort,” she said. “Just the five rooms. No harder than bringing up four lively children.”
Unless there was something she hadn’t told us, there were only the three of us, but numbers were getting a little complicated for our Mair. In fact a lot about life was starting to confuse her. So, that’s why there we were, two months later, middle of the monsoons, victims of filial obligation, hanging on desperately to the end of the earth; Mair, me, Arny and Granddad Jah. Sissi moved into a studio apartment in Chiang Mai with her computers and her scrapbooks. She has issues, you see. One of those issues involves not being seen in public, a bit like what’s-her-name in Sunset Boulevard. And ‘public’ especially applies to sweaty rural fishing communities. She was torn between familial duty and life. This wasn’t the first time she’d been torn so she knew how to handle it.
Arny and I resiliency dedicated our deeds to looking after Mair and our words to bitching about everything wrong with our lives. We’d moved to a village surrounded by coconut groves called Maprao. That means ‘coconut’. We’re in the middle of a bay called Glang Ow, which means ‘middle of the bay’ and our nearest small town is at the mouth of a river. It’s called Pak Nam. I probably don’t need to translate that one for you. Pak Nam sits at the mouth of the Lang Suan river which runs through Lang Suan d
istrict from Lang Suan town. Lang Suan means ‘behind the garden’, so we can only assume that the river once flowed through someone’s backyard.
There are twenty-eight villages called Maprao down here, thirty Thai Bays, thirty-four Middle Bays, and thirty-nine River Mouths. In the south 1,276 villages are named after fruit and vegetables. Exactly 2,567 bear the name of a person who used to live there. It is precisely this absence of imagination that epitomizes the south for me. I doubt anyone down here would even care enough to sit in front of a computer screen and work it out. If southern Thais had colonized Australia I imagine the year 2000 would have seen the opening ceremony of the Big Harbor Olympics.
The computer-generated Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant was terminally flattering. The actual place was a dump: girded with mosquito-ridden bogs, bombarded by monsoons three months a year, miles from the nearest tourist route, and…depressing. Each storm season the sea claimed a little more of the beach so when we arrived everything was lined up along a crest of sand with the potential to drop into the next high tide. As if ignorant of the place’s failings, Mair worked in the sparsely stocked resort shop and sang a lot. Arny managed the accommodation, and I drew the short straw and ran the kitchen. And, for almost ten months, I had tolerated, withstood, and suffered, not exactly in silence, until that wonderful day when Captain Kow rode into town on his Honda and announced that two bodies had been found buried in a VW Kombi.
♦
After asking directions for ten minutes and not really understanding the replies, I had somehow managed to stumble upon Old Mel’s plantation. None of the palm fields are fenced down here. Anyone could pull up in a semi-trailer and make off with forty trees if they so wished. But they never did. I was sweaty and wobbly from the ride and I wheeled Mair’s bike up the sand track. There were dogs. I’m not a big dog fan and these two weren’t going out of their way to convert me. They snarled and salivated at my ankles all the way to the rear of the plot. There was a police truck parked up ahead and a gaggle of onlookers beyond it. In the U.S. you might have found a police cordon with a sentry but Pak Nam’s finest were posing for photographs in front of a rapidly expanding pit. All the neighbors had brought along a hoe or a pick and were slowly digging out the VW as if it were some long-interred dinosaur.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 2