hours veterinary clinic, not because he was fond of domestic animals, in fact he found them most unpleasant, but because very few people took their ailing cows to a clinic in the evenings. And, of course, there was much more money to be made from pets. He’d put on rubber gloves before deigning to touch Mair’s latest find. He obviously recognized the angel of death hovering over the pup because all he could prescribe was euthanasia. But Mair wasn’t having any of it. She ordered a cocktail of drugs for a menu of ailments and spent two weeks nursing the skin bag back to health. She kept it there in a basket under the counter of her shop repelling the few customers who chanced by. When chocolaty hair began to sprout, Mair named her Gogo: Thai pronunciation for Cocoa. Gogo had a stomach complaint that prevented her digesting her food. She ate more than me and shat like a buffalo. Her condition made her permanently menopausal. For reasons I could totally understand, she didn’t like me. I didn’t like her back.
So, by the eighth month of our southern incarceration, Mair had already launched a new generation of offspring which she regaled with the same love she’d afforded her children. Me and Arny were starting to hope that our services would no longer be needed. Our rival siblings were sitting either side of Mair in front of her shop when I returned from the Internet cafe. Gogo turned her back when I arrived but it didn’t faze me. I was in a good mood. I’d sent my story to three newspapers and the photos had been snapped up by
1. Power cuts
2. The constant smell of drying squid
3. Neighbors with nothing intelligent to discuss
4. The thud of coconuts falling from trees in search of a head
5. A shallow sea so warm it breeds Jurassic life-forms
6. The drone of passing fishing boats at three a.m.
7. The close proximity of reptiles
8. No telephone line so no Internet
9. No nightlife (no daylife either)
10. Garbage from all the so-called high-class resorts being washed up on our beach.
The original list ran to sixty items but I didn’t want to look like a bitch so I parsed it down.
My household duties were laid out on a roster. The seafood invariably came to me, caught by neighbors along the bay upon which we lived. For vegetables, until I could convince the chickens to lay off my vegetable garden, I had to go to Pak Nam. Pak Nam, our nearest ‘town’ (sorry, I chuckled then), is ten kilometers from us over the Lang Suan river bridge. It’s such a dinky place it’s like driving a Humvee through LEGOland. One-man footpaths crowd in on you from both sides. Blind people on motorcycles and bicycles pop out of unseen side streets like computer game antagonists forcing you to swerve out of their way. Vendors push carts in front of you just for the fun of it. And Burmese, more Burmese than you can shake a cheroot at, all walking in the road as if they don’t have pavements in Burma: girls with ghostly powder-caked faces and boys with long checked tablecloths hanging from their waists. At last count there were two million of them loose in our country, all probably powdered and table-clothed and walking in the road.
The heart of this annoying hamlet is the 7-Eleven. It’s a bustling hub of Slurpee buying, exotic magazine browsing and self-watching in the CCTV screen above the counter. Local teenagers hang out in front on their motorcycles until seven p.m., sometimes eight p.m., largely because it’s one of the few places still lit after dark. If the 7-Eleven is too exciting for you, there’s always the post office. The concept of queuing, introduced to the rest of Thailand in the mid-1980s, has yet to make it to the Pak Nam P.O. Elderly ladies in floppy sun hats assume you’re standing behind another customer because you’re fascinated by the curvature of their shoulder blades. They smile at you, these old biddies, and step up to the counter in front of you. And they get served. But even at its busiest you will see no more than six customers jockeying for position. Our P.O. box is number two, which shows you how much correspondence passes in and out of Pak Nam. I imagine they merely lost the key to number one.
Along the street there is a small photocopy shop which specializes in gray, fluffy versions of your original. The manager puts on her shoes whenever a customer enters the shop. Next to that is a Chinese pharmacy which allows you to sample medications right there in the shop. They’ll give you a cup of iced tea if a pill needs to be washed down, and privacy if you need to apply cream to a delicate spot. There’s a hairdresser’s with a photograph in the window that gives the false impression that Julia Roberts is a patron, and no fewer than four traditional barbershops. As this is Thailand, there are numerous food stalls and seven restaurants which all have the belief that unpainted gray wood, Happy New Year banners and glamor calendars are an acceptable style of decoration in the food and beverage industry. Despite two small establishments masquerading as coffee shops, you can’t get a decent cup of coffee or an edible cake in Pak Nam. Not that you could park anywhere long enough to eat one. The spaces not taken by motorcycles and bicycles and handcarts are occupied by trucks delivering exciting goods you never actually see on sale in the shops. On very special days in Pak Nam, the intriguing odor from the fish factories squats on the town like an unwashed swabbing mop. This, is our nearest town. Have I made my point yet?
I often complained that I had the raw end of the sausage at our place as, apart from regular shopping trips into this metropolis, I was obviously the only one doing any work. Mair was in charge of the shop, which largely entailed standing at the cash drawer gazing out at the quiet road and chatting with the two or three customers who came in to buy something they probably didn’t need. I suspect they felt sorry for Mair. Everything in stock was in cans, packets, boxes or bottles and some of the labels were written in languages they hadn’t used since King Taksin ruled the country two-hundred-odd years ago. We had nothing fresh, exotic or home-made and, more importantly, nothing you couldn’t buy from Yai Yem’s much bigger shop half a kilometer along the road.
As the resort manager, Arny was in charge of the five budget bungalows that faced a largely uneventful body of water and the five thatch-roofed tables we playfully called a restaurant. Including the hectic Songkran holiday rush in April, that year we’d averaged two overnight guests and eight diners a week. Currently, our cash cow — no offense to her — was an ornithologist from Khon Kaen University who’d booked our end room for the week. She was studying the migration of hawks on a grant and was attracted to us, not for our five-star service or our luxurious rooms, but because we were so close to a bog which, evidently, the hawks were particularly fond of. I suppose I should be berated for having a fixed image of an ornithologist in my mind. There was nothing pasty, shortsighted, spidery or matronly about our own bird fancier. She was a Thai Indiana Jones type with tight-fitting safari shorts, muscled legs, luscious thick hair and a certain attitude that I admired. I have no idea where she ate or how she spent her day as she was out of her room before sunrise and back after dark. She’d paid in advance and was the nearest thing to an income our resort had experienced since we’d moved in.
With guests like this to manage, Arny found himself with a lot of free time, so he’d set up a flotsam gym on the beach. He’d improvised with old oil drums and car tires, bamboo poles and rocks. He’d chase crabs and swim till the jellyfish forced him from the water. It was all very sad to watch him roll half coconut trees from one end of the beach to the other because we both knew he wouldn’t be attending any bodybuilding galas for some time, if ever again. After school, teenagers, both boys and girls would sit in clumps at the extremities of the beach where he turned around. They’d smile and be friendly and exchange small talk but it’s hard to know what to say to someone like Arny. I got the feeling my brother was more of an exhibit than a celebrity.
Granddad Jah was responsible for sitting on the bamboo platform opposite and overseeing our desperate resort. He may have been distracted now and then by passing trucks and motorcycles and other old men who nodded as they passed and whom he ignored. But mainly he sat for hours beneath the banana leaf canopy, wearing one of his wardrobe of coral-white undervests…and he oversaw us. If he was formulating a grand plan for our improvement he never did share it.
Three
“ It’s a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.”
