where every street, every house, every tree was covered by closed circuit cameras. Every crime could be solved by replaying the tapes — something like England.
“Arny, little brother, I — ”
“He didn’t.”
Granddad was getting annoying.
“Didn’t what, Granddad?”
“He didn’t find what he was looking for.”
“What makes you think that?”
“There was a thick cloud cover last night. No moon to see by. He didn’t dare use a torch ‘cause it would have been seen for miles. All he had was his cigarette lighter and he used that till he ran out of fluid. He didn’t find what he was looking for.”
“Granddad Jah” — I tried to filter out the condescension — “the lighter could be anybody’s. It could have been dropped there a month ago.”
“Ha,” said Granddad. “You don’t spend much time in temples, obviously. The novices are out at first light with their long straw brooms and their litter spikes. Then all the widows come with their food donations and they’re on their hands and knees picking up rubbish. And then, just two days ago the place is crawling with detectives looking at a murder scene. Even the idiots they have in the CSD these days would have spotted a lighter. No, girl, the lighter arrived after all that. It was dropped there last night. It belonged to the killer and he’ll be back.”
He took his plate and dropped it in the washing up bowl and left. I was astounded that Granddad knew so many words. That was the most we’d heard him say since before Granny died. And, I’ll give him credit, it wasn’t such a bad point, either.
“Can I finish my story now?” Mair asked.
“Go ahead, Mair,” I said. “But I warn you, Granddad’s was a tough act to follow.”
“His name was Krit,” she said.
“Was that before Dad?” I asked.
“He was very good looking but he was a bastard. He was a lecturer at the university. He got one of his students pregnant and pretended he knew nothing about it. Don’t forget those were the days before DMZ.”
“DNA, Mair.”
“Before any of that. So, there was no evidence. No proof. But I knew the girl and believed her. Krit used to come into our shop and I cornered him one day. I told him I was a virgin and I wanted my first time to be with a real man, not one of the boys on campus. I wanted a man who knew what girls expected.”
There’s something squalid about sitting around the dinner table listening to your mother telling sex stories, but she had a way of making the dirtiest anecdote sound like a fairy tale. Arny and I were twelve again. We smiled at each other and nodded for her to continue.
“I was a little older than his usual taste but I was petite enough to get away with it, particularly in my borrowed CMU uniform. I arranged to meet him late one night at the Little Duck Hotel just in front of campus. I even booked a room. I was already inside when he arrived. I asked him to go and take a shower. By the time he came out I’d turned off the light. He could just see me under the sheet by the light from the bathroom. I told him to turn that off as well. I think he liked the dominant type. I told him I was completely naked and asked him to remove his towel and I heard it drop to the floor. That’s when I screamed. The door flew open, the light came on and three students from the campus photographic club rushed in with their flash cameras and took pictures of me and him running around in our birthday suits in a state of panic. It was such fun.
“For a month, photographs of Professor Krit appeared on telegraph poles and trees all around the campus. Only his head was missing. I have to say that once the raid had taken place, the poor man shriveled to almost nothing, so the photographs were terribly embarrassing. We’d written captions such us, ‘Do you know who this little fellow belongs to?’ and ‘Who is the little boy lecturer chasing this time?’ Of course you only saw parts of me in the photos. I had a very pleasant body back then but that didn’t mean I wanted everyone to see it, did it? As the month progressed, the photos showed more and more of Krit until it was obvious it wouldn’t be long before everyone on campus got to see his face. As we expected, the pregnant student was approached by a third party who agreed that everything would be ‘taken care of’, including a tidy sum in compensation. Once the taking care of was taken care of and the money safely deposited, I could see no reason to play the game anymore.”
“You stopped putting up the photographs?” Arny guessed.
“Goodness, no. I stopped cutting off the head. It had been a mystery for several weeks, you see? You can’t leave people dangling in mid-air, can you?”
We didn’t care whether it was true or not. Like most of Mair’s stories, we just appreciated it for the piece of art that it was. I was at the sink washing dishes and Mair came up behind me and put her arms round my waist. I loved the feel of her so close. I had to keep reminding myself she was in my bad books.
“That was a very good dinner, child,” she said. “I don’t know where you get all your skills from. Not from me, that’s sure.”
“With fresh produce you can make anything taste good.”
I sounded like an infomercial, but it was true. One of the few good things about living far from civilization was that you got to sample foodstuff before the chemistry lab laid hands on it. A few hours earlier, our dinner had been swimming blissful circles in a largely unpolluted sea, and chillies grew everywhere like weeds. The eggs were still warm from…well, you know where eggs come from. And you’d just reach out the window and grab a papaya. I had a small tented garden that might one day produce vegetables. Once you became self-sufficient you could say with authority where everything on your plate came from. Which couldn’t be said for the plastic container I’d come across in the freezer.
“Mair, what was that stew-like substance I found in the fridge?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, and gave me an ‘oh oh’ moment.
“That murky gray-green melted ice-cream-looking stuff.”
“Don’t touch that,” she said, and released me from her motherly embrace. “It’s a broth the woman at the petrol pump gave me to try.”
“We could have it for dinner tomorrow.”
“No. No, we won’t. She’s an awful cook. I took it just to be polite.”
And with that she left me to do the dishes by myself. Once everything was clean and stowed, I walked down to the beach. Gogo tagged along twenty meters behind me. If the moon was full as the calendar would have it, the clouds were so thick you’d never know it. Granddad Jah was right. The squid-boat lamps formed a sparkling chain along the sea line. It was like looking at the far bank of a wide river. I walked along the sinking sand until I reached one of Arny’s coconut tree logs. I sat with my back against it admiring the green and white cat’s eyes that blinked at me from the horizon. Gogo strolled past me, turned two circles, then lay on the sand with her back to me. She was about two meters away. As usual, she pretended I wasn’t there. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I clambered across to her and patted her — twice. There was no reaction. It didn’t matter. I only did it in case she turned up with froth in her mouth the following morning. At least then she’d have sampled a brief moment of intimacy with my name on it.
It had occurred to me very early in my incarceration in this colorless circus that I was slowly becoming a traditional Thai woman: regressing, slipping back through time to an age before cable and cappuccino. I looked myself up in one of those old ‘Understanding Thailand’ books for foreigners. Why was it, I wondered, that these books were always written by Western men, usually British, who professed to know us better than we knew ourselves?
I didn’t know the people in those books. I’ve never looked like any of the charming women in the photographs. Last year I wouldn’t have found mention of myself in them at all. I was born into an era that is rapidly freeze-drying and shrinkwrapping our culture, distorting it through Western and Eastern influences. I grew up dressing like Winona Ryder and listening to Bon Jovi. My mother was a Beatles fan. My second cousin’s girl is fourteen. She has dyed light-brown hair that stands up like a cartoon look of surprise, and she wears her jeans well below the belly button. All her heroes are Korean. So tell me, what is a typical Thai woman in 2008?
She’d be around 120–130 centimeters (I’m a palm print short of that range). She certainly wouldn’t wear flip- flops to go shopping, eschew the positive effects of cosmetics or consider dark skin to be more attractive than that of the cadaver-white actresses on television. She’d have a collection of cute e-mail emoticons larger than her spoken vocabulary but still have dreams to go to live in a foreign land. If the polls are to be believed, she would
