had to do was pretend to myself that I was living alone. I loved my job. I had my family to visit. I needed Yot to come home one day and say, “Jimm, I’m leaving you for a long-haired girl who wears dresses.” Then it would have been perfect. But he didn’t ever say it and he continued to share my house. I got tired of having him in my life. When I walked out I wasn’t making a stand, it wasn’t a statement; I’d just burrowed down to my threshold. He didn’t put up much of a fight to keep me.
How did this get around to me?
We didn’t hear from Sissi again until eight years ago when she turned up on the doorstep of Mair’s shop and asked if she could have her old room back. I was shocked at the difference time had made. She was looking every bit the twenty-eight-year-old ex-beauty queen. Her baggy clothes couldn’t disguise the fact she’d put on a lot of baggage and not even cement-thick make-up could tighten up the droop in her face. She’d let herself go and gave no impression she’d be chasing after herself any time soon. She also had no intention of telling anybody what had happened to her life.
I was still tinkering with my marriage at the time and living in my husband’s home so her old room was free. She moved into it with her overnight bag and her computer and there began her self-imposed exile. The only consolation was that you can’t have two recluses in the same house, there’s a regulation or something, so Mair broke out of her cocoon and started to breathe again. It was a great load off her mind and I often wonder whether that escaping load might just have contained fragments of her sanity.
It was at this time that Sissi began putting down the first few bricks of her Internet empire. She purloined the wireless Internet signal from the condominium next door and began a sedentary career at the low end of the World Wide Web pecking order. Apart from teaching herself the mechanics of this awesome network she started to pick up odd jobs: marketing, translating, editing. And eight years later she was already the George Soros of dodgy Internet business. Cyber-fiddles had made her a lot of money. I tried not to ask too many details because I didn’t like the idea of lying in court. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. But I’d picked up hints about scams she was particularly proud of. For example, she had a knack for hijacking other people’s porn sites and making them her own for a month or two. That was a big earner. I think she might have dabbled in Nigerian bank scams for a while and, of course, who hasn’t been involved in identity theft? I believe it was hacking that gave her the most pleasure. She could break into a site, clear it out in seconds and use the information to commit audacious crimes even before the site owner was out of bed the next morning.
There were days when I asked myself how I could dedicate my life to solving crimes and apprehending villains yet do nothing to bring Sissi to justice. And the answer came to me one evening when I was playing Grand Theft Auto III with her. Why, I wondered, was I getting so much joy from blasting innocent old ladies with a sawn- off shotgun? Of course it was obvious: because it wasn’t real. The world in which Sissi perpetrated her crimes didn’t exist. The online banks she robbed had no bricks or mortar or pens on strings; the charities she made up were never there to begin with. Even the identities she stole were fictitious. Nobody was born with a name or address or Social Security number. They were all artificial add-ons. So, who cared if someone borrowed them? It was like kidnapping Winnie the Pooh off the street, locking him in a cold, wet cellar, slicing off little bits of him and sending them in manila envelopes to the police. You know what? They wouldn’t care. He’s fiction. “Go for it,” they’d say.
That’s how I justify Sissi’s career to myself. Her success in the cyberworld meant she had no need whatsoever for the actual, tree-dotted world beyond her walls. After dark she might have squeezed through the gate of the university and done a little power walking but she was too ashamed of her looks to go out in public in daylight. Her looks, I might add, were far from frightening. Once she’d abandoned the demon drink and started to eat Mair’s nutritious but tasteless food, her old ruddy complexion began to break through the crust. Granddad Jah set her up a little exercise station in the backyard with a stationary bicycle and a fold-up yoga mat. She was looking better and starting to feel good about herself. She’d done one or two heavily disguised forays to Tops supermarket and even attempted a daylight stroll around the campus. And I think that’s why Mair’s act of treachery hit her so hard.
She was back in her shell now, a small dark condominium bedsit shell. She ordered in meals, had a young girl assistant who ran errands for her, and she disappeared completely inside her computer. I was one of her few links to reality so you can imagine how disappointing my regular reports from the bush had been to her so far.
“Hey, Sissi.”
“Wassup?”
Oh, I forgot to mention, Sissi and I throw large helpings of English into our conversations. If we were more confident we’d probably forgo Thai completely. This stew is our sort of private language. English is what they speak inside her computer screen and I get the feeling she doesn’t trust the Thai language anymore, or anyone who speaks it. The staff at her condominium think she’s a Filipina. I, on the other hand, speak English because I had an overseas bridging year between high school and university. I wanted to go to an English-speaking country but they were all full so they sent me to Australia. By the time I’d worked out what they were saying it was time to come home. Mass Communication was my undergraduate major and English my minor. I was halfway through my M.A. in English when Mair sprang her little surprise on me. I speak English with the sort of Thai accent that makes words sound as if they don’t have endings but Sissi understands me perfectly well.
“Nothing much. How’s the Net?” I asked.
“Rocking.”
“How’s Leather?”
Leather was her current online Lothario. They had a stormy frantic sexual monsoon of a relationship on the Internet. In his photos he was a sort of George Clooney in bondage gear. Sissi’s online persona was…Sissi, eighteen years earlier and knee-wobble gorgeous. In her mind that’s how she still was.
“He’s getting a six-inch screw in his scrotum,” she said.
“Impressive.”
“Yeah. How’s the chicken ranch?”
“Two new cocks just started last weekend. They’re on probation. If they haven’t performed by Friday they’re out.”
“How hard can it be?”
“Exactly.”
“Mair?”
“She’s…I think it’s good for her down here. She’s crazy about her dogs and we’ve got the ocean right here and…you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Sissi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got people dying down here.”
“Boredom?”
“No. Murder. Do you think you can help?”
“Bloody oath.”
I’d taught her that. It’s Australian. It means ‘yes’. It was one of the few things I learned down under. I talked Sissi through the VW situation right up to the last visit.
“And I found something, Sissi. This van had a shallow tool chest attached behind the driver’s seat. The tools were still in there. But I found a stash of grass wrapped in plastic. It was taped to keep it dry.”
“Did you smoke it?”
“Forty years on? I don’t think ganja improves with age, Sis.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“OK, but the point is, the water hadn’t got in. There was paper in there, two sheets torn into quarters. I imagine they were using them as papers to smoke the ganja. And they were torn from advertising flyers I’d have to assume were from the company they rented the van from. It was a Thai travel agency called Blissy Travel located in Surat Thani.”
“Phone number?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t long enough. They only had six digits back then. There’s no Blissy Travel in the book now and the post office in Surat told me the address is now a Honda service center. So I’m stuck.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
