My other “job” was at the Chumphon News. With the advent of desktop publishing and a wealth of smart unemployed journalism graduates, it was as if almost any town with a population over fifteen boasted its own newspaper. The News operated out of a house beside a busy main road. Its two regular contributors had flu, so, one day the editor asked me if I might interview a famous international writer for them. As famous writers were notoriously thin on the ground in Chumphon, I accepted with bells on. I had visions of Dan Brown on a rock-climbing vacation in Krabi, me flown business class to Bangkok for dinner with Stephen King, a weekend on Kathy Reichs’s yacht off Samui. But I did not have visions of Kor Kao, a ten-minute bicycle ride down the bay from our resort. I was suspicious.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Conrad Coralbank,” he said.
It sounded like a coastal preservation program. I could have feigned knowledge to impress the editor, but instead I asked, “And he’s famous?”
“Absolutely,” he said. He was a very literary man, but he needed to open the Word information sheet he’d put together before he could tell me what the famous author had written.
“He’s won stuff,” he said. “Awards and that. He writes”—he squinted as he read the English—“mystery novels set in Laos.”
Laos. Great. My ardor softened to a mushy paste of uninterest. Nobody would ever become famous by writing about a place that 98.3 percent of American high school students couldn’t locate on an atlas. Not even one with the country names written on it and an index. Admittedly, 34 percent of that sample couldn’t find Canada either. Laos—and I don’t want to sound racist here—is easily the most boring place on the planet. I’d been there several times on stories, and it’s a scientific fact that clocks move slower there. One second in Laos is the equivalent of twelve minutes over here. Getting something done was like wading waist-deep through rice porridge. This was clearly going to be one of those pump-him-up-and-make-him-look-more-interesting-than-he-actually-is pieces. Fluff. But it was work. If I did a good job, they might start giving me assignments. Plus, there was the bonus that I’d get to speak English. My latent second language only ever got a real run-out with Sissi in our long bilingual phone conversations. We prided ourselves on our skill at speaking English in foreign accents. I did a good Brazilian. She had Eastern Europe down pat. It didn’t, however, improve the actual language.
That was another good point. It would be a boon to find a down-and-out Westerner within cycling distance who could help me with my conversation skills. He’d probably be an alcoholic with skin allergies, grateful that a voluptuously curvy young Thai girl should stop by occasionally for a chat. I’d bring him a bottle of Mekhong whiskey, watch his liver-polka-dotted hands shake as he poured it neat into his cracked Amazing Thailand mug and partook of a grateful swig. Of course, I’d take the mace. Western writers in Thailand drew most of their inspiration from bars. He’d assume I was as loose as all the girlies in farang novels. That’s the problem, you see? When you have a government full of dirty old men who have more sex with professionals than with their own wives, it’s very difficult to dismantle a sex industry that for many years was the country’s only drawing card. The U.S. military left two-thirds of its combat pay in Pattaya. Word got around, and soon every Tom, Dick, and Helmut was on a charter flight to Bangkok. A lot of powerful people here got where they are today on the back of the male libido. You see why I could never write fiction? I get too tied down with issues. Nobody wants to read all this, so … Conrad Coralbank. The editor allowed me to sit and look him up online. His computer was dial-up. The connection was such that I drifted into a daydream where I was a Neanderthal staring at a rectangular block of stone, occasionally hammering it with my club. Then the Wikipedia page arrived. Here’s what didn’t surprise me. The photo was of a fresh-faced, big-teethed, blue-eyed man—late forties according to the caption—with fashionably long hair. They do that—authors. They dig out a picture from thirty years before that they kept because although it didn’t actually look like them, it looked the way they’d willed themselves to look at the time. They send it to their publisher who airbrushes out the pimples, and there it is: the jacket photo.
I was, however, thrown by the number of books he’d supposedly written and the awards he’d purportedly been nominated for, and by the fact that he was apparently married and enjoyed cycling, kayaking, and walking the dogs on the beach. None of that sounded particularly down-and-out to me. But, hey, anyone can write themselves a Wikipedia page, and if nobody who knows any better ever looks at it, nobody will edit out your lies. The net was Club Med for the scammer. So I wasn’t exactly shaken by this introduction, just a little stirred. And to stir me even more, Conrad had photos.
Conrad on the beach with his two Rottweilers. Conrad in the garden with his beautiful Thai wife, both smiling with seedlings in their hands. Conrad about to set off on a bicycle rally with the Pak Nam Mountain Bikers’ Club. And in every photo he was that same airbrushed young man from the jacket photo. There was one pensive black-and-white picture where he leaned over his keyboard in search of adjectives, and you could see his wrinkles. But they weren’t deep, merely the friendly parallel arcs of an artist’s pencil.
I zoomed in to his face until his forehead and chin no longer fitted on the screen. I’d lived here a year. Spent a lot of time by the roadside praying some gypsy family might steal me away. Why had I never seen Conrad Coralbank? Why had I never seen his tall, beautiful wife? With La Mae twenty kilometers south, and Lang Suan eighteen kilometers west, Pak Nam was his nearest metropolis. He’d have to pass our resort to get there. I’d spent hours in the Pak Nam 7-Eleven, marveling at the vast choice of potato chips, mixing myself various flavors of ice gunk, doing impersonations for the CCTV camera. Why had we never bumped into each other? Tesco Lotus? The Saturday market? Pak Nam Hospital? The two restaurants with menus? Passing on bicycles, sweaty from the climb over the Lang Suan river bridge? It seemed almost impossible not to have seen him. Good. A mystery.
3.
Make You Ten Years Older than You Look
(soap ad.)
It was mid-December and I’d just been to the post office to send off my packages to California. The wind had me home in half the time it usually took on a bicycle. It was the time of year when monsoons crept up from nowhere. When rainstorms drowned your carrots. When you walked along the beach and noticed a meter’s depth of sand had been slyly eaten away by the storm surges overnight. Twelve beachfront coconut palms had been whisked away since we arrived, leaving just one column of trees to protect us. The previous year the freshwater bog behind the resort had filled up with salt water and messed up the ecology. For six months there was no life there at all. Migrating birds rearranged their flight itineraries because there was nowhere to stop for a drink. Mair bought an inflatable paddling pool, put it on the roof of our potting shed, and filled it with tap water. Birds have beaks and claws, so she had Arny out there every day with his bicycle puncture repair kit until the pool was irreparable and the birds were long gone.
When I reached the resort, I found Mair up a tree and the dogs below, barking. I stood with them.
“Mair,” I shouted. “Why are you up that tree?”
“There’s a cat stuck up here,” she said.
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s camouflaged.”
“That would make it a green cat, Mair.”
“Don’t be silly, Monica. It’s white.”
“And you can’t see it because of the snow?”
She laughed.
“The clouds, child,” she said. “That’s why you can’t see it from the ground.”
“The clouds are dark gray.”
“It’s a dirty cat.”
“Of course.”
I found myself bogged down in conversations like this more times than I cared to remember. She always won because she was the mistress of her own logic. She climbed higher. One of her flip-flops fell off and the dogs ga
sped. Sticky ran off with it.
“Mair,” I shouted, “have you ever seen a reasonably good-looking old farang with a beautiful Thai wife living over in Kor Kao?”
“That would be Conrad and Piyanart,” she replied.
Mair knew everyone by name for twenty kilometers around.
“How come I’ve never seen them?” I asked.
“They drive a big gray S and M. Tinted windows.”
“Would that be an SUV?”
“That might be right.”
“So, how do you know them?”
“They stop at the shop sometimes. They get their drinking water here. Catch!”
The kitten dropped between the branches, screeching and flailing her claws. As cats have nine lives, I considered stepping back and letting her use one up. But Mair wouldn’t have forgiven me. So I held out my arms and steadied myself. I’ve never been much good at sports. If it had been a basketball, I would certainly have dropped it. But that’s because basketballs don’t dig their claws into your forearms and hang on. Before I could scream, it had disengaged, was on the ground, and fleeing the dogs. I swore and held my arms out in front of me so as not to drip blood on my white shorts.
* * *
“I’ve never tried it myself, but they say you stand a better chance of bleeding out if you run the razor blade along the artery rather than across it.”
“What?”
“If you’re going to slash your wrists.”
“I didn’t … it isn’t a suicide attempt, Da.”
“Right.”
“It isn’t. A cat did it.”
“OK.”
“Really.”
“Whatever you say.”
Each district down here has a health center. They’re identical. Designed by a sadist. No matter how sick you are, you have to do a Rocky Balboa up a steep flight of steps to get to the surgery. If you make it, you can’t really be that sick. But that’s just as well because, although technically there’s supposed to be a doctor attached to each one, it’s a lucky patient indeed who catches one in residence.
“Alone again?” I asked.
Da was a real nurse with a uniform and everything. She’d escaped Maprao after high school, had completed her nursing training in Bangkok, and—more fool her—had come back again. Her childhood sweetheart, Wood, had promised to wait those three years for her return. However, his mates had convinced him that a pretty young trainee nurse in Sin City would have suitors tripping over their tongues after her. So he’d given her three months and married the girl from the fluffy-stuffed-animal shop in Lang Suan. As he hadn’t thought to mention this in his annual Thai New Year greetings cards, she’d returned with only his un-smudged fingerprints on her breasts and walked in on a family meal with Wood, his wife, and their two toddlers. She’d stopped eating that day, moved back in with her mother, and taken the only available position, at the health center. She only had her enormous skeleton to thank for hanging on to her skin because now there was no meat on her to fill it out. You saw her type on the Fashion Channel all the time. The scarecrows of haute couture. I have no idea what kept her alive, but she exhibited no lack of energy.
“Yeah,” she said. “The doctor’s off at a conference in Chumphon. Child development. Back tomorrow. You sure this was a cat? It’s really deep.”
“Small. Fluffy. Obnoxious.”
“That sounds like a cat. Was it vaccinated?”
I laughed.
“I didn’t really have a chance to check its medical records.”
“Then you’ll need rabies shots.”
“What? Jesus! It was just a kitten. An innocent. I doubt she’d had enough life experience to be picking up any diseases. Can’t you just clean up the wound and give me a course of antibiotics?”
“It’s in the blood, Jimm. She could have got it from her mother. And it’s incurable. I’m giving you shots.”
“More than one?”
I hate needles.
“Four. One every three days.”
“Can I refuse?”
“Of course you can. But when you start exhibiting odd behaviors, delirium, combativeness, loss of muscle function, spasms, drooling, convulsions…”
“Hmm. I wonder if my grandad’s got rabies.”
“… chronic pain and eventually death, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I rolled up the sleeve of my fashionable but sweaty cardigan while she fumbled in the drawer for the meds. I located a vein and tapped it vigorously to make it an easier target.
“It’s not heroin,” she said. “Shoulder.”
“Shoulder? Are you sure? There’s nothing up there but flab. How’s it going to find its way to my blood? Can’t you just inject it straight into my heart?”
“I thought you didn’t have one.”
See? See what happens when you befriend the natives? You assume most of what you say goes over their heads, but these people remember everything. I’m constantly disillusioned. As a city girl, I’d always assumed evolution started in the sea, crawled up through the villages, and reached its peak in the coffee shops and garage music nightclubs of Chiang Mai. But I’m often presented with evidence that the suburbanites are hoovering up plankton and the advanced life-forms are living off the land and sea down here.
“I’d supposed, as a nurse, you’d have understood I was speaking metaphorically,” I told her.
She wrenched off my cardigan and exposed my braless Sydney Night Lice tank top. Lucky we were alone. It would have driven men insane with passion.
“So, where is Ed these days?” she asked.
She knew perfectly well where Ed was. Ed the grass cutter. Ed the boat skipper. Ed the builder. Ed the lanky, mustachioed breaker of hearts. He was with his girlfriend, Lulu, the slutty hairdresser. If men were awarded prizes for their taste in women, Ed had a Raspberry right there in his arms. He could have had me, if only he’d been more patient. He hadn’t learned the city rules. He’d expected me to agree to a date after one asking. That’s the way they do it down here. If you say “no,” it means “no.” So you give up. Ridiculous. Even then, muddled with intoxicants, before I knew about Lulu, I’d given him a second chance. I’d virtually thrown myself at him.
“You might feel a small prick,” said Da.
“What?”
She jabbed a javelin into the tender flesh of my right shoulder.
“Shit,” I said. “That hurt.”
“Sorry.” She laughed. “I hadn’t been expecting it to go in so easily. I’m used to durian skin. You’re a mango, Jimm.”
“Thanks.”
“You know? I’m worried,” she said.
“Whether you injected me with steroids by mistake?”
“About Dr. Somluk. I think she might be going senile in her old age.”
Da had come to the right place. I was a child of senility.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Sixty.”
“Da, that doesn’t even count as old anymore. Sixty’s the new eighteen.”
“She’s started with these conspiracy theories.”
She abandoned my arm and sat on the sink unit. Unlike ours at the resort, it didn’t creak. She barely weighed more than her uniform.
“You know?” she said. “All that ‘They’re after me’ stuff. ‘If anything happens to me, make sure they don’t get my documents.’ ‘They’re more powerful than you’d ever know.’”
“Did she ever mention who these powerful people might be?”
“No. That’s just it. She always says it’ll be safer for me if I don’t know.”
“So, you think she’s going nuts?”
“Most of the time she’s normal. You know? Friendly. Funny. Really good with the patients. The kids love her. Then, every now and then, she’ll come out with one of these rants. It scares me.”
I knew exactly what she meant. My own Mair had started out like that. She’d be talking about the cost of washing powder, then mention in passing that she’d been standing in t
he checkout queue behind Kim Jong Il, the North Korean tyrant, and even he was complaining about the dramatic increase in the cost of Fab. I suspected from experience that Dr. Somluk was on the same slippery shopping slope.
“What should I do?” Da asked.
“Do you think it affects her work?”
“No.”
“Then ride it.”
“Really?”
“It doesn’t sound like she’s ready for the loony bin just yet. Maybe the sea air will clear her mind. It’s helped Mair. Now, do you think I can get some Band-Aids on my bloody wrists before they get infected? I have a very serious interview to conduct this afternoon. I need to look my best.”
* * *
I had to prepare lunch before my appointment at Kor Kow. My short straw had committed me to the kitchen at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort, but in truth, nobody else in my family could cook. Even if they worked in the Oxfam mess tent feeding the starving masses, they’d get complaints. Unfortunately, I had a skill. They liked to watch me in the kitchen but deliberately failed to learn anything. I’d decided on kanom jeen with fish sauce that day because I’d made the sauce earlier, so I just had to boil the pasta. Still they traipsed into the kitchen to look over my shoulder. Mair came first.
“Are you sure the sauce is red enough?” she asked.
The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Page 2