have experimented with booze, drugs and?or sex before she reached fifteen. She’d wear her hair long because men preferred long hair and, heaven knows, our only purpose for being on the planet is to flutter our tail feathers and snare us a mate. Sissi might argue that I’m only talking about modern gals in big cities but I know for a fact the mentality goes all the way down the food chain to the smallest village.
So where do I fit exactly? I’m thirty-four. I have the type of face that looked adorable on a twelve-year-old but that will pucker like an old peach by the time I reach fifty. I wear my hair short. I have small but whimsical breasts and a little pot belly that makes me look four months pregnant when I sit at the computer. I’m moody for long periods either side of that inconvenient time of the month — two weeks on either side. In fact, I’ve never seen what it is in me that attracts, not a deluge to be true, but a steady drizzle of male interest. Perhaps the boys’ mothers taught them what a nice homely girl should look like. “Get a housewife in the kitchen, then go find yourself something sexy, son.”
But suddenly there are shadows of me between the pages of the Thai Female chapter. I’m slowly becoming charming, heaven help me. Since we moved south, I’ve been forced into a state of politeness, returning smiles from people I don’t know and making conversation. In Chiang Mai I could walk around in a non-seeing social trance. I’d never find time to cook, shop, garden or feed livestock, but suddenly that’s my life. And here, although I dread to say it, I feel inferior to men. They can all cut down trees and drag heavy nets full of fish and dig wells and tap rubber and build. And all I can do is gut fish, and I learned how to do that on YouTube.
This had been one interesting day. It had begun with a death and ended with a tale of revenge. It concerned me that Mair should choose that particular night to tell that particular story. If she’d been capable of humiliating a professor when her mind was still in reasonable working order, I wondered what her unfastened self might think suitable for a dog killer. It was time for me to keep a close eye on my mother.
I was woken early the next morning by the steel drum version of ‘Mamma Mia’ on my mobile phone. We were five kilometers from the nearest landline but some communications billionaire had acupunctured our country with cell phone towers. I could see the nearest from my window, its regal rust-orange beauty marred only by the unsightly mountain view behind it. The call was from my former colleague, Dtor. She was breathless to tell me that our Government House had been invaded by old yuppies in yellow shirts overnight. Politics used to be a lot more complicated before the recent introduction of the English Premiership system of colored shirts which helped no end to know who was who. The yellows, headed by a media magnate and backed discreetly by the military, were locked in battle with the red shirts, mostly from the north, backed by an ex-football-club owner, ex-prime-minister, ex- telecommunications czar, ex-policeman currently in exile. It was a matter of time before we got the black and white stripe and the large pink polka dot factions. I kept thinking, “If you could just give them a ball…”
According to Dtor, during the night, the yellow shirts had strolled through police lines, staged a bloodless takeover of our seat of power and changed the curtains. The Bangkok middle classes had revolted. It might help to think of it like the Richard Branson party staging a sit-in at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Couldn’t happen, right? That’s what I’d thought. But there they were. Thai politics. I’d had the opportunity to switch to the political desk. They’d told me crime wasn’t safe for a wee girl. I fought them out of the idea. The point was, in Thailand, murder and theft and violence were tangible. Politics was all smoke and mirrors and, basically, silly.
What worried me about the situation in Bangkok, apart from the fact we’d be a laughingstock in the world press, was that important things like police inquiries and monk murders and autopsies would no longer be getting any attention. All the policemen would be lined up around Government House in their macho black riot gear. And nobody knew who was in charge. The incumbent prime minister and well-respected television chef was being ousted for cooking on prime time while the country fried around him. Police chiefs were being replaced and dispatched to inactive posts with such regularity that there were more inactive police generals than active ones. So it seemed to me we’d be on our own in Pak Nam for quite some time.
Oh, and one more thing Dtor told me; the head in the plastic bag at the end of a rope? It was a suicide.
My second call of the morning was from Sissi. We had a bit of a chuckle about politics but finally moved on to something serious. The Chinese family, Chainawat, who had sold the land to Old Mel was based in Ranong on the Andaman coast. She gave me an address and several phone numbers for Chainawat Inc. and the personal number for Vicha, the current CEO. The family had, at one time, been involved in a variety of small businesses and investments but had recently amalgamated all their efforts into the fishing and real estate industries. They had some fourteen thousand hectares of land held in speculation in the south and operated a fleet of deep-sea beam trawlers that dragged enormous nets across the seabed and devastated the corals. Good for profits, sorry about the environment. Sissi hadn’t been able to find any other dirt about the company’s holdings but she was still digging.
Blissy Travel, the company mentioned in the ganja papers, was dissolved in the late seventies when the expected tourist boom in the south didn’t happen. Blissy had been set up by a local Surat businessman called Somjit Boondet. He seemed to have vanished after that for twenty-odd years until, in the year 2002, a Somjit Boondej arrived on the business registry as the district manager of the Surat branch of the Home Art Building Accessories Mega Store.
“I see this a lot,” Sissi told me. “These slight inconsistencies in spelling. It could be a legitimate clerical error — happens all the time — but if you’re an old cynic like me you’re more likely to suspect foul play and less likely to be disappointed. I know from experience how easy it is to lose your old ID card and apply for a new one. You slip the typist a thousand
“Jail?”
“You’re good at this. Songkla Correctional Facility, 1979 to 2002.”
“Ooh, that sounds serious.”
“Manslaughter. Negligent homicide. And do you know why he’d had to serve the complete term? No pardon, no early release for good behavior? Because he killed a tourist couple.”
“What? That’s great. I mean, not for them, but, you know.”
“I knew you’d be pleased.”
“It evidently wasn’t serious enough to get him a criminal murder rap.”
“The prosecutor was certain. He pushed for life.”
“Sissi, you’re…”
“I know.”
The day couldn’t have started any better. Two leads and I hadn’t even started breakfast. I showered and dressed and stepped on Gogo on my way out of the hut. She shrugged as if being stepped on was her lot in life, and fell in behind. I wanted to know why she was sleeping in front of my room but, well, she’s a dog and I didn’t know how to find out. Apart from our five ‘luxury seaside cabanas’ (small conjoined concrete boxes with no refrigerators or ambiance) there were four less luxurious huts off the beach where our family lived. One apiece. According to Kow the squid-boat captain, the way the monsoons were chomping at the coastline every year, it wouldn’t be long before our back cabins were beachside and our cabanas were floating somewhere off the coast of Vietnam.
I didn’t see any movement in the other three huts. I was usually the first one up in the morning but that day Mair was in the shop working on what she called a display. It involved piling sardine cans into pyramids and putting a ribbon on the top. I pointed out that customers were less likely to buy the sardines because they’d be afraid of disturbing the ribbon. She told me that was nonsense.
“Ed came by again,” she said.
“Do I know Ed?”
“He’s the tall man who does the grass.”
He sprang to mind immediately: lanky with big untrustworthy eyes and a mustache that looked stuck on. Far too young.
“And?”
“He was asking about you.”
“Asking what?”
“You know. If you’re single.”
“But you told him, right?”
“Told him…?”
