“No, perhaps you’d like to make it next time?” I told her.
“I’m just saying, when Grandma made it…”
“When Grandma made it, she used tomato ketchup. Liters of it. It was inedible.”
“She’s gone, you know?”
“And I shouldn’t speak ill of dead cooks?”
“I learned all my culinary skills from her.”
“I rest my case. Do you want to call the others? It’s almost ready.”
“But … the color.”
“I’ll toss some crimson emulsion in it.”
“Yes. Good idea.”
“Mair. Where’s Capt—where’s Dad?”
“He’s in a safe place.”
“Why don’t you bring him out? Invite him for lunch.”
“Really?”
“He has to eat.”
“You don’t hate him?”
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“He left you with three young children. Vanished. We’re all screwed up in our own adorable ways as a result. But we met him as Captain Kow and we liked him … well, Grandad hated him, but he hates most people. Arny and I saw a lot in the captain to respect. He doesn’t seem like the kind who’d abandon a family without a good reason. We’d like to hear what that reason was. If it turns out to have been due to, I don’t know, boredom or another woman, general irresponsibility—then we can hate him with a clear conscience. But we’re prepared to give him a hearing.”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t think we should ask him to give his reason.”
“Why not?”
She adopted her famous everyone-else-around-me-is-going-down Titanic smile.
“National security,” she said.
“Mair … I…” But when I looked up from the noodles, she’d already turned tail and fled.
It probably meant nothing. It had become a catchphrase to cover a lot of ills. The six soldiers who’d turned up at Mair’s Burmese school and searched the six-year-olds’ satchels had cited national security as their motivation. But when Dad walked out on us, there had been no such concept. Was she saying Captain Kow was a spy? Was he involved in some political intrigue? I needed to look up what was happening in the country during the period he left. Now that would make a good story. My dad—shaken martinis and a gadget-ridden Aston Martin.
Grandad Jah was next in.
“It’s not red enough,” he said as he pored over my sauce.
“I’ll open my wrist wounds and bleed in it,” I said. I thought I’d muttered it under my breath, but he caught it, gave me that “Don’t get fresh with me, girl” look and sat at the table. All the windows were open, which was unusual. The weather had been mild for the past two weeks but not calm enough for us to venture back outside to the bamboo tables. The monsoon season liked to lull you into complacency, then blow your roof off. The Siam Commercial Bank was considering offering insurance against natural disasters, but they hadn’t quite got around to it. (I tried for a product placement incentive for mentioning them in my story, but Mrs. Doom, the manager, said there wasn’t a budget for it. What she meant was that she didn’t think anyone would read it.) I hadn’t told the family, but I’d put money aside from my modest savings and would be the first to procure said insurance. Divine intervention was our only hope. Sadly, the Gulf didn’t have so much as a decent volcanic fault line. Even the disasters were dull here.
Arny sauntered into the kitchen, squeezed my flabby waist, and said, “It’s not—”
“Don’t.”
“OK.”
I like my brother.
“Where’s the bride to be?” I asked.
Arny’s fiancée, Gaew, had been spending more time at our resort. She helped Mair in the shop. They’d become close. That wasn’t such a surprise, given that they were the same age. Arny had “saved himself” till he met the right one. He’d found her in the form of the ex-bodybuilding empress of Indochina, thirty years his senior, divorced. At first, we thought it was a blessing that she’d pumped so many steroids into herself that she hadn’t been able to produce children. Her fallopian tubes were solid brickwork. But recently I’d been thinking it would have been nice if Arny had stepchildren his own age to hang out with.
“She’s working out,” he said, with a look of pride that his elderly paramour could still bench-press sixty kilos.
“Bah!” said Grandad Jah. “Get yourself a mindless teenaged bimbo like the rest of them. It’s unnatural. A boy like you—with her.”
Arny joined him at the table. “Have you ever loved anyone, Grandad?” he asked.
“Are you asking me if I’ve ever been a slave to mindless emotions?” he said. “Whether I’ve ever dipped into my meager police earnings to buy slowly decaying flowers for a woman? Whether I’ve been driven to write poetry or make promises of a lifetime commitment that no man on earth has ever kept?”
“No,” said Arny. “Not the actions. Just the feeling. Have you ever had your insides melt by being near someone?”
I thought I noticed a brief hesitation before Grandad spouted, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then you wouldn’t know,” said Arny. “It’s attraction. It’s like being a magnet that’s found a refrigerator it wants to spend the rest of its life stuck to.”
Arny had inherited my mother’s gift for horrible metaphors. But this was a rare moment of family bonhomie. Mair, whom I’d sent off in search of the men, had presumably forgotten why. She hadn’t come back. So it was a good chance to ask Grandad an uncomfortable question.
“Grandad, why do you hate our father?”
The fork he’d been juggling flew over his shoulder and missed Gogo by a whisker. She screamed.
“That isn’t an appropriate topic over a meal,” he said.
“I haven’t served up yet,” I reminded him.
He looked first at the door, then the window, as if sizing up an escape route.
“Ask him,” he said.
“We would,” said Arny. “But he’s vanished again.”
“That’d be right.” Grandad nodded. “He’s good at that.”
“Did you know before?” I asked.
“Know what before what?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Did you know our father was here? That it was the reason Mair brought us down?”
“No. I did not,” he snapped.
“But you recognized him when we arrived?” said Arny.
“That very first day,” he said. “I was almost on the first bus back to Chiang Mai.”
“So why didn’t you tell us?” my brother asked.
Grandad was squirming. He didn’t like being cornered like this.
“I was hoping that mother of yours would come to her senses,” he said. “Realize what he was and leave this forsaken wilderness. But instead she ends up … fornicating with him. It’s disgusting.”
“They’re still legally married,” I told him.
“Irrelevant,” he said. “People over forty should know better. All that physical nonsense should be out of the system long before then.”
“She’s obviously forgiven him for whatever it is he did,” I said.
“If you can forgive someone for being worthless.”
We found Mair painting flowerpots. She thought she’d eaten already. We sat around the lunch table with nothing much more to say, but I watched Grandad pick at his kanom jeen and two things occurred to me. One: that he didn’t have any more of an idea than us as to why Captain Kow had deserted us. And two: that he was a sad, grumpy, bitter old man. But it wasn’t him I felt sorry for. It was Granny Noi. I would have headed off to the pyre even sooner if I’d been married to him for fifty years.
* * *
It was 1:46 when I arrived in front of the big yellow gate in the tall yellow wall that bordered the Coralbank property. It was no wonder I hadn’t noticed it before. It was on a hill that formed the headland at the southern end of o
ur bay. From the road you saw only a dirt track rising between the trees. That road eventually arrived at Kor Kow Temple, but there was a flatter path along the beach that didn’t put a strain on your motorcycle. Nobody took the hill road and that fact made the headland a prime piece of real estate for a writer. The tranquility would only be disturbed by occasional temple fêtes.
The only thing that concerned me was how his pretty Thai wife might be coping with living above a temple. We have a lot of head and feet politeness issues in Thailand. It doesn’t worry me because I’m culturally ambivalent. And countless condominium owners in Chiang Mai have no qualms about riding their stationary bicycles on the balcony within view of the shiny domed heads at the neighborhood temple. But I know diehards who fear dispatch to one of the Buddhist hells for such sacrilege. What camp was Mrs. Coralbank in? I wondered.
All I could see from the gate was a curved driveway flanked with bougainvilleas. In the hot season they would be a glorious explosion of color, but they didn’t take kindly to being lashed by monsoon rains, so there they drooped, apologetically green. A button on the fence post had a semi-quaver logo at its center, so I pressed it. In the distance, I heard the first few notes of something classical. Something a more arty person than me would be able to name to impress a famous author.
“Oh, I noticed you had Barry Mendelssohn’s Opus Four in G-strings as your bell charm,” I would say.
But I didn’t have a clue what it was. I heard a click and the gate began to slide open noiselessly. I decided to wheel my motorcycle down the slope to avoid an ungainly dismount in my little black dress. The wicked garment had already caused a smoldering in a group of house-builders I’d passed. They didn’t exactly shout or wolf-whistle, but I could tell I’d excited them. It’s disgusting how men can be such slaverers at the sight of an attractive woman in revealing clothing. I hoped Conrad wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I do have very nice legs, and my lips, as Mair is constantly reminding me, are sensuous. The bits in between could use some work, but eating is one of my few pleasures.
I don’t know why those thoughts were going through my head as I rounded the downward curve and came very quickly to a futuristic house. What wasn’t glass was orange-rendered concrete. It was a house that would change color with the seasons, as the rain soaked into the cement and then dried and baked. I could already see the entire living room through the glass with a full-sized pool table and a wall full of books. A cello, painted red, was suspended from the ceiling on a hangman’s noose. I had most certainly left Kansas.
A small male person who looked about twelve rushed up to me, shouting something. He had a deep baritone voice. He wrestled the motorcycle from me and shouted something else. I didn’t know what he was saying, but I did recognize it as Burmese. I asked him in Thai where Mr. Coralbank might be and he might have told me, but I don’t speak Burmese. He wheeled my motorcycle away and I was left standing on the gravel in my good shoes. Only then did I look up.
Wow.
Our Gulf Bay Lovely Resort was a motel with a two-dimensional vista. You could only attain a third dimension by climbing up a coconut tree. Ahead of me was the same murky body of water I ignored every day. It was still full of garbage the disgusting people in Lang Suan threw into the river, but from here it was the Mediterranean off the South of France. The view was majestic. You could see the beach road and the cliffs of Ny Kow. You could see the islands and the white breakers out deep in the Gulf and our home village being bombarded by the elements. Watch our palm trees topple and float away. With a high-powered telescope you might even see our family’s comings and goings. Watch me step recklessly from the open-air shower.
“You must be Jimm,” came a voice.
English. I was comfortable with the language, but I always seemed to lack that witty opening gambit that might establish my linguistic credentials.
“How are you?” I shouted to the breeze.
“Down here,” came the voice.
I looked down the forested slope that eventually gave in to the sea, and I made out a head in a cowboy hat peeking above a bush.
“Come and join us,” he called.
A cobblestone path led down from the veranda, and it was clear that there was nothing accidental about the vegetation. It was custom-designed to look aggressive and impenetrable, but it was a wimp of a jungle, landscaped to within a centimeter of its natural life. Every frond fell seamlessly against the next. At the bottom of the path were four blanched coral steps leading onto a manicured lawn about the size of two good paddy fields. It was a bizarre scene.
To my left stood four watermelons on posts, like coconuts in a funfair shy. Off to one side stood a young woman, attractive in spite of a face caked in yellow paste to combat the ravages of the sun. This was not the fine-looking woman I’d seen in the Internet photos. This one stood beside a heap of watermelons. She wore an ankle-length sarong, a long-sleeved shirt, a straw hat, and a nasty smirk, aimed in my direction.
At the other end of the lawn, dressed in shorts and a cowboy hat, was my author. He was in good shape for an older man. He had a six-pack. Arny had—I don’t know—a twelve-pack? But he was young and worked out every day. I imagined that, by fifty, my brother would have gone to flab and be embarrassed to take off his shirt. Conrad the mini-Destroyer had no such problem with his body. He was the type of man you instinctively knew would be good in bed. Here’s a confession. We women know. It’s an aura we can read. And don’t give me that “Decent women don’t” line. Culture and tradition and religion might shut us up, but we all get the tingle. This man was ripe. The fact that he was holding an axe did nothing at all to dissuade me.
In fact, it wasn’t just the one axe. He had an arsenal of them. There was a large case behind him that concertinaed open like a mobile bookcase. Except, these shelves held nothing but weapons with blades. There were knives, machetes, and axes lined up according to size on a rack. It was like a golf bag for lumberjacks. My guess was that the baby he held in his hand was around a nine iron. He was swinging it back and forth beside his leg. His gaze was fixed on the line of watermelons. His stomach muscles rippled as he took in deep breaths, then, like a Russian tennis player, he grunted loudly as he let fly the axe, underarm. It seemed to somersault through the air in slow motion until the last few seconds. If watermelons had ears it would have sliced off the left one.
The powder-faced girl squealed and clapped, but Conrad looked disappointed.
“Nice shot,” I said, still searching desperately for wit.
“No,” he said. “It was supposed to go through his nose and out the back of his brain.”
“Oh.”
“Never mind,” he said, and beckoned the girl who ran over with his shirt. He didn’t thank her, so I assumed she was the maid. It was sad to see his body put away. He was over his disappointment by the time he joined me on the steps, and he gave me a very polite wai, which I returned clumsily. Well, he’d sprung it on me. I wasn’t expecting a foreigner to welcome me with a traditional salutation. I didn’t get wai’d once all the time I was in Australia. Not even by the Thais. Conrad Coralbank was smiling at me. His teeth were too neat to be natural. His eyes were too blue to be eyes.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“Thank you … for … being here.”
I was doing really well. He was probably thinking the Chumphon News was a charity rag run by the educationally challenged. I was intimidated. I can’t deny it. He even looked like a famous writer. Some people look so much like a somebody that they have no choice but to become … it.
“They told me you spoke English well,” he said. He walked to the steps and stopped, so I assumed I was supposed to go with him. He put a hand on the small of my back and began steering me up. Normally I’d hate that. If anyone else had tried it, I would have taken a step forward and back-heeled them in the shin. But I’d seen the Duke of Edinburgh do it to Elizabeth, so I assumed it was a British custom. Who was I to deny a country its culture? His hand was war
m and seemed to be connected to some electrical source.
“I’m sure it wasn’t a result of the Thai school system,” he said. “Where did you pick it up?”
“Songs,” I said. “I can’t sing to save my life, but I liked to memorize lyrics. And our mother spoke English. She encouraged her kids to use it. It was a sort of game. We’d watch American movies on Beta, and Mair would test us at the end. She wanted us to be ready for the world outside our little shop. We weren’t your typical Thai family.”
I was babbling.
“And did you see that world?” he asked.
“Only the countries on our borders, and Hong Kong and Melbourne. I did a home-stay there when I was eighteen.”
We were almost at the house. His hand was still warm on my back, like a poultice.
“I was at the Sydney Writers’ Festival last May,” he said. “I’d never been to Australia before, and all I knew about the place was beer and cricket. But it was a pleasant surprise. Hundreds of people paying good money to listen to authors spouting on about what fonts they preferred and whether tight underwear restricted their creative flow. And for those not lucky enough to get tickets, there was a live audio feed for the masses outside on the lawn. I was delighted that the place was so culturally vibrant.”
We were already in the large aquarium of a living room. Glass on three sides. The gentle tickle of conditioned air, most of which was escaping through the open slide door. The girl with the powdery face either had a twin sister or she’d beamed up to the house on the transporter. Somehow she’d arrived before us. She was at the kitchen counter pouring what looked like iced benzene into two tumblers.
“You know, in Thailand we have a sort of custom,” he said.
He was staring at my feet, still resplendent in their three-centimeter heels.
“Oh, shit,” I said, kicked off my shoes and ran them back through the doorway. I could have blamed the house, him, the fact that none of this was Thailand. You didn’t take your shoes off when you walked into the 7-Eleven or the airport or Buckingham Palace.
“Sorry,” I said.
He merely laughed. It was the type of laugh you’d want to hear often. We sat at the huge table, and I pulled my trusty cassette recorder from my bag.
The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Page 3