by Alex Gunn
One morning I left the house, as I do fairly early, and his front garden looked like the aftermath of an oriental-themed rock festival. There was a semi naked Chinese man passed out on the drive, another who had collapsed on a small card table scattering playing cards over a six square metre fall out zone. The whole garden was strewn with playing cards, half eaten plates of barbecue food, chicken bones, discarded snack packets, pizza boxes and empty beer bottles and cans. There was also a child’s toy fire engine with its lights still flashing that had rolled down their drive and into the road. I picked it up and turned it off to save the batteries and placed it carefully back just inside their garden. I also noticed a crate full of empty, cheap 12 Baht orange juice bottles, so at least they’re getting their vitamin C.
The crowning glory in this vision of debauched Chinese mayhem was a mountain bike that had been ridden into the giant water feature. Perhaps they had been researching the life of Keith Moon on the internet. Rock on Jerry.
A while ago Jerry got it into his crazed Chinese head that it would be a good idea to transform his very nice and very normal garden into a not very nice and not very normal private beer garden theme park and illuminated dining area. It looks like a fire sale in a garden centre.
There are now numerous life-size Romanesque white concrete statues of large bosomed and scantily clad ladies looking rather wistful and bewildered which have been placed in unfortunately prominent positions in his garden. They don’t look serene but slightly troubled; as if they can’t quite work out why they are there, which, given the location, would be a perfectly reasonable response. They look like they have just been unexpectedly released, in someone else’s toga, from a mental health unit which treats mild anxiety. The statue closest to our hedge looks like she’s hanging the sheets out at a nudist camp. The overall effect is to lend the garden an air of saucy but arresting perplexity.
As well as these Roman statues there are coloured flood lights arranged in artful ways, to illuminate trees and bushes in a wash of gaudy primary colours. There is a giant ornamental sun dial, large potted ferns, thousands of fairy lights, ornamental citrus trees in terracotta pots and a job lot of fancy wrought iron tables and chairs.
Inexplicably, in the middle of all this pseudo Mediterranean tosh is a large Japanese water feature in which a wooden bucket slowly fills up with water before clonking loudly against the side and draining into a little bamboo pond. It then jerks back to its original position before lurching through the whole series of movements again, and again, and again.
In the dead of night, when Jerry and his gang have all passed out, and the dog has eaten both children, and the TV has long since exploded, all you can hear is the endless clonking of this bloody Japanese water feature. It sounds like a massive death watch beetle slowly dragging its way around their garden.
An unfortunate by-product of Jerry’s garden’s bizarre transformation is his growing penchant for stuffing it full of his mafia chums and getting completely blasted. It’s like a never ending procession of welcome home parties for long term prison inmates, which, considering the circumstances might not be a million miles away from the truth.
When it’s not his Triad gang pals turning up for shore leave it’s the turn of his massive extended family.
A few weeks ago two old people arrived at Jerry’s who both looked like fat angry old Chinese men; they both looked like the character Odd Job from the James Bond movie Goldfinger, but fatter and a lot more angry and useless. They were both five foot tall by five foot wide and scowled at everything. It turned out to be Jerry’s mum and dad.
They had evidently flown over to see how their hare brained son had made good. They spent two weeks sitting out in the front garden on sun loungers (purchase of the day number 46) as though they were on show.
Occasionally they would get up very slowly, as if movement and perambulation was a new thing in their lives and waddle around the garden or a small way up the road and back. They would stop and stare at things as though they had never been on planet Earth before.
One day a bird landed in a tree in the garden, a bold old minor bird, the starlings of South East Asia, and they both stood up and walked over and stared at it for ages until it flew off. They silently turned around and waddled back to their chairs. They did this for two weeks.
They even did it to the guy who delivers bottled water on Saturday afternoons. As soon as he pulled up in his old truck they waddled out and stared at him through the passenger window, as though they were invisible and had no need to observe normal conventions that govern basic social interaction and respect for personal space. They were practically on top of him. They continued to stand and stare at him while he lugged crates of water backwards and forwards, up and down their son’s driveway. They watched him drive up the road and disappear, whereupon they waddled back to their chairs and sat down for a very long time.
They carried on like this for the duration of their stay; watching, scowling and staring, until one day Jerry put them in the back of his truck and drove them away. I imagine him reversing up to some remote cliff edge and just pushing them over, after which they would probably just get up, dust themselves down and carry on scowling at things. They looked indestructible.
At night, when Jerry and his family get back late, I lie in bed listening to the noise of madness. I listen to the noise of an aspartame and caffeine addled youngster tearing around their multi coloured flood lit garden with a baseball bat, (purchase of the day number 38), smashing at the trees and statues, or what’s left of them. Both Jerry and Mrs Jerry, I assume, too wasted and addled themselves to scream at them. The TV’s on at full blast and tuned into some Chinese pop music satellite channel and the Japanese water feature is clonking away. The younger child amuses himself by idly hitting the puppy with a squeaky plastic toy hammer, while the puppy jumps up and down yapping uncontrollably; perhaps it’s also high on too much fizzy pop as well.
I lie awake listening to all this noise; all this unbridled madness and I wonder about Jerry. I wonder what it would be like to be him. I wonder what it would be like to do exactly as you please the whole time, to get up at 10 o’clock in the morning and start drinking beer, to have a limitless supply of money, to buy stuff you don’t need, to care so little about your kids’ education that you don’t even bother enrolling them at a school, to not care what anyone thinks of you and to get completely wasted every single night.
As I lie in bed listening to Jerry’s world, I feel like a quiet and distant moon at the edge of the universe. I think about the expensive mountain bike sticking out from the waterfall water feature and the Romanesque statues and the big stupid sun dial and the outdoor kick boxing equipment lying unused in the corner of the garden. I think of all the waste and feverish consumerism and wonder how and when it will end. Jerry’s world seems very far away from mine.
When we were young we were taught to save things, to be careful, to not colour over the lines, to look after things and not to waste the batteries. Jerry never thinks about the batteries, he acts like batteries never run out, and perhaps in his world they don’t.
Someone once observed that if you have money there is no risk in life, and perhaps this is what it is like for Jerry. He lives without fear and without risk. He lives without the batteries ever running out, and I wonder what it takes to be like Jerry. I wonder what it would be like to leave everything on all the time and not worry about the batteries, to live life without the handbrake on, or at least have a truck that works, or a new bike, or even a skateboard. With these thoughts about batteries and skateboards I drift off to sleep with the sound of screaming, Chinese pop music and clonking in the background.
On the other side of us lives Mrs Mad Old Lady. We call her this because she is mad and an old lady. She lives in a great big, immaculate house all by herself along with a miserable looking maid and visited by hundreds of fawning relatives. She is also obsessed with employing wo
rkmen to constantly carry out pointless tasks. It’s like Miss Havisham meets TV’s House Makeover team. What with Jerry one side and her on the other it’s like living in a deranged version of the Ideal Home Exhibition.
At first we thought she was normal until we came home one day to find that she had ordered a team of lumberjacks to cut down every tree in our side garden, including the wonderful old Tamarind tree, as well as a fully grown fruit bearing jack fruit tree. Between these two matures trees I had proudly slung a hammock for my boys which they both would sit in and swing backwards and forwards whilst singing the theme tune to Star Wars. They also cut down the biggest and most impressive fan palm in Chiang Mai.
When I arrived home the garden looked like the aftermath of the Battle of the Som. Plants lay broken in half, grass trampled and bushes no more than small collections of splinters.
In shock and bewilderment I asked her why she had cut all our trees down, and rather haughtily she replied with one word; “unhygienic” and she flounced off back inside her sterile house to bleach the cat.
“But…this is our garden…” I stammered.
“Unhygienic,” she called back over her shoulder.
“You can’t just wait until we’re out and cut down our garden,” but it was too late, she already had. It was so very wrong, like bull fighting and ginger hair.
Having cut down our unhygienic trees she then got another team of workmen to uproot her own palm trees and lay down a large pointless but immaculate lawn. This all took forever and involved her lording it over them and occasionally screeching “mai, mai, mai, mai.” She watched every move they made with her crazed and spiteful beady little black eyes.
I would feel sorry for her if she hadn’t cut half our garden down and was as spiteful as hell. Her husband had died several years ago (suicide I guess, if he had any sense. He’s probably this minute working out how to escape from her Spirit House) and she now amuses herself by bullying workmen, screaming at her maid and bleaching her driveway (as well as the cats).
After the lawn was laid she then employed another team of young men to come around every other day and water and tend it. They would walk up and down carefully drenching every inch and then cut and roll it while she shrieked at them from the doorway.
Eventually she got bored of this and employed yet another team of men to lay an immensely complicated irrigation system under the garden. This project took weeks to complete and involved her changing her raddled old Thai mind about a trillion times before she eventually allowed them to leave her garden.
When it comes on it’s like the fountain show outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Kids from the neighbouring streets cycle round just to watch it.
She’s hell-bent on using as much water as possible. She is single handedly going about draining the Huay Tung Toa Reservoir of every last drop of water, whereupon she will probably rip up the lawn and create a desert garden.
Her greatest pointless triumph so far this year was nagging the telephone company and the village maintenance people long and hard enough until they agreed to remove a completely harmless and innocuous telegraph pole which happened to be on the pavement outside her house. I dare say it was slightly obscuring her view of the opposite gutter. Or perhaps, it too, was somehow unhygienic.
The removal of the pole means of course that the telegraph wires hang down unusually low above her front fence. A problem she clearly didn’t foresee and which the telephone people were obviously too frightened to point out. Consequently, she often totters outside into the road and frowns up at the low hanging wires. I am extremely happy to report that it must cause her no end of anguish.
I assume she is trying to find a team of men willing to suspend the sagging wires from ropes attached to clouds, or perhaps launch her long suffering maid to the moon from a gigantic canon made from the off-cuts of the underground irrigation system, from where she would be able to lower hooks to catch the offending wires.
Sometimes I go out into the road, where I know she can see me and I also stare up at the sagging wires in a pained way and shake my head, as if to say, “if only these wires were not hanging so low your house and your life would be perfect and hygienic.” I’m not sure what effect this has on her but I’m hoping it might push her over the edge. It’s an experiment in progress. I’ll let you know how it works out.
I’m hoping that she will eventually get the army in to flatten her house and garden, cover it in concrete and erect a stainless steel bunker in which she would sit on a spotless zinc throne attended by her increasingly miserable and long suffering maid. Perhaps then one of her many sycophantic, fawning family members will realize she is completely batty and cart her off to the nut house.
We can but hope. Raddled old bag.
By comparison, on the other side of the street opposite us live Han and Jazz, a very quiet and pleasant, if somewhat bizarrely named, young Korean couple who do nothing except play golf and go shopping. They are a bit like a quiet, sophisticated version of Jerry and Mrs Jerry. They also have a pair of mountain bikes and sometimes zoom off for an early morning bike ride as I am trying to start my motorscooter on my way to work, wondering how they can afford to indulge in a life comprising of endless gentle sporting and leisure activities.
So, for now, along with Thom and Khun Sonthaya this is me and my familys little world; the golf obsessed Han and Jazz opposite, Jerry and the Hong Kong Mafia next door and on the other side, Mrs. Mad Old Lady lording it over her sterile joyless little kingdom.
Two months into our second year and so far life is looking okay-ish, I think.
Chapter 5
Songkran
Mid April : The first rains of the season…at last.
“Sir, you go to Chiang Mai Songkran today with wife and students (meaning children)…drink whiskey…much ting tong.” Taxi driver on the way to Bangkok Airport.
The seasons change in Chiang Mai with the apocalyptic force of colliding planets. There’s no sliding gently into autumn with subtle changes of leaf colour from verdant green to brilliant gold here. Northern Thailand has the seasonal shifting of a sledge hammer meeting thin ice. The dry season gives way to the rains with an energy last witnessed when the continents and oceans were themselves forged from a primeval soup, or when my sister kicked through my bedroom door after I shaved the mane from her Barbie Horse with my Dad’s new electric razor. It is, whichever way you look at it, an astonishingly powerful event (the weather in northern Thailand that is and not the experiment with the Barbie Horse).
From January to April the relentlessly hot dry days get hotter and longer; every day feels like it can’t possibly get any hotter as temperatures rise steadily towards the forties. I think 44 degrees was the hottest this year recorded in Chiang Mai, which in technical language is known as “unbelievably bastard hot.” It’s just a shade cooler than “bloody hell my heads on fire,” which was the exclamation made by the guy who measured the hottest temperature ever recorded by modern (and, I assume, extremely sweaty) man on the planet, in the Sahara Desert. The temperature and pressure builds up to a tremendous force which seems to be released in a moment of cosmic mayhem around mid April.
Dark clouds roll across the sky at super high speed and thunder claps explode shaking houses and dislodging pictures from the wall. Everything that is not bolted firmly to the ground gets blown away.
Jerry’s large canopy that he bought to park his truck underneath, after he converted his carport into a kind of outside barbecue-park-beer garden with combined children’s play area and brothel, blew up into the sky with such force that it sailed over his garden and into the road behind us. I don’t think he even noticed. The mangled wreckage hung from a tree for a while until the security guards dragged it back to Jerry’s house, where it remains to this very day on his front lawn, like a huge, dirty, crumpled ghost.
Unsurprisingly, the shifting of the seasons and arrival of this
dramatic weather also marks the beginning of the new Thai year. For those of you still following the ancient Brahmaic cosmological calendar this also coincides with the moving of the sun out of Pisces.
As I assume that most of you are not following the old Brahmaic cosmological calendar and can’t be bothered squinting at the sun everyday and burning out your retinas to follow the subtle solar changes, the Thai New Year is marked for convenience, rather than solar accuracy (an ongoing bone of contention for the Chiang Mai Brahmaic Fundamentalist Society), on the 14th April, and the Songkran Festival spreads out either side like a sick teenage hangover.
It’s interesting that Thailand didn’t subscribe to the western calendar until as late as 1940, just within living memory of some of those cool old dudes who still make a living peddling their old bicycle rickshaws around the moat. Before this date, January 1st and all the other dates, months and seasons that hold our world together, were as strange and unusual to Chiang Mai people as Brahmaic underwear would be to us today (according to ancient Brahmaic tradition, underwear, especially for young children, was imbued with powerful magic and protective magical writing and magic charms in order to ward off evil spirits. There are some great examples in the Chiang Mai Museum. This tradition has partly been absorbed into modern day Thai Buddhism with magical protective writing which is tattooed straight onto the skin of many Thai men and women by Buddhist monks). Bearing in mind the relatively recent arrival of the modern western calendar, it is little wonder that there’s still such confusion surrounding the actual date of public and religious holidays and why it’s always such a shock and surprise to all foreigners when the little laminated signs appear in the 7 Eleven telling us that it’s a religious holy day and therefore we can’t buy a bottle of beer until Pisces has moved out of Leo, or whatever.