Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

'And on his behalf I demand some respect.'

They laughed.

'You know what you can do with your respect?' He smiled. 'You can stick it up your boyfriend's back passage.'

Arny surprised me by taking a step forward, but Ben rat was suddenly holding a flick knife, thumb against his chest, blade forward. I had no idea how he got it in his hand so fast, but he had a look on his face that said he'd used it before. He glared at Arny, who'd frozen to the gravel.

'Come on, Twinkie,' he said. 'Let's see how much skin you lose before you get to me.'

He smiled. All his left side teeth were missing. His lips were sucked into the void when he spoke.

'I'm a reporter for the Chiang Mai Mail,' I said, unable to keep the tremor out of my voice.

'Ooh, that's scary.' Socrates laughed again, and suddenly he had a knife too. What was it with these people?

'Write without fingers, can you?' he asked.

'You can't frighten me,' I said, although by then it was quite obvious from the lack of blood in my face that he could. He stepped right up to me and leaned down so my face was bathed in his wormy breath. I was determined not to step back. I glared, half-heartedly.

'Just in case you forget,' he said, 'you didn't find anything on the beach this morning. OK?'

I've learned that there are very few situations where smart-arse responses don't do wonders for the atmosphere. This was one of them.

'OK,' I said.

He looked at Arny, who was as white as Finland.

'OK?' he asked.

'OK,' said Arny in a remarkably high-pitched voice.

Before that morning, menace had always been a concept I'd had trouble defining. Here were two losers, skinny hombres, nerds with switchblades. See them shopping at the market and you'd think yourself lucky you hadn't been reincarnated as one of them. But even then, as you passed them by, you'd feel the loose connection. Smell the burning wires. There'd be something about them that would make your skin crawl. And you'd look in their eyes, and you knew they weren't playing. They were the real thing. They'd kill you as soon as let you have the last pumpkin (I'm still with the market analogy here). Menace, that was them. They walked a slow lap around us, prodding with the tips of their knives. I was half expecting them to piss up against our legs. They owned us.

The side window of their SUV shattered into a billion atoms of glass, accompanied by the sound of a clap of thunder. We all looked around to see what had happened. The rats saw him first. Grandad Jah was standing in front of the kitchen with this big black handgun. I have no idea where he'd got it from.

'I'm old,' he shouted, 'and I only have two months to live, so I have nothing to lose. Next bullet goes into the potted hibiscus there in front of you as a marker. After that will be the tall ugly freak, followed by one to the head of the short ugly freak. Or maybe I'll start with Shorty. Nothing wrong with my eyesight or my aim. Just my mind's a bit out of whack. Know what I mean? It's the medication.'

It was a monologue worthy of Clint.

He closed one eye, let the handgun swing as if he couldn't handle the weight, then let fly. The hibiscus was blown to kingdom come. I'd just bought it the weekend before. Little shards of pot rained down on us. The rats didn't run in panic like the villains do in the movies. They looked at each other, smiled, and walked to their vehicle with a touch of arrogance. They even paused to wipe the shattered glass off the seats before getting in and pulling away. They drove out in slow motion, both of them glaring at Grandad and nodding. Socrates rat pointed two fingers and fired them in Grandad's direction. I got the feeling we'd just made the very worst kind of enemy.

2.

Because a Fisher Softly Creeping,

Left Disease While I Was Sleeping

(from 'The Sounds of Silence' – PAUL SIMON)

'How are the drugs? You feeling any effects?'

'No.'

'That's impossible.'

'Not really. I haven't taken them out of the package yet.'

'Jimm, you promised.'

'I know. It's just…being a guinea pig for untested pharmaceuticals seems a bit risky to me.'

'They're perfectly safe. Trust me. I know the chemist. And the company pays a lot of money. And it's all legal. As long as you and Mair refuse to accept 'dirty money' from me, I have to find you an income elsewhere. And tell me you can't use a lot of money right now.'

'No, we could use it. But what if there are side effects they haven't thought about? What if my breasts swell up grotesquely?'

'Then you'd have two fewer reasons to be depressed. They're antidepressants, not hormone replacements. Take the damned pills. Fill in the damned questionnaire and take the damned money. You're an unemployed journalist in an unoccupied motel, who's rapidly approaching middle age with little hope of finding a man. You need income.'

I had so much I could have come back at her with, but there was no point in both of us feeling sorry for ourselves.

'So what makes you think I'm depressed?' I asked.

'Right, and what makes you think I haven't met a sweet girl and proposed marriage?'

My phone conversations with Sissi, nee Somkiet, were a lifeline from the constant sinking feeling of living in a coconut. She was plugged into the unreal world through the Internet. She played high-stakes poker in LA. Was a celebrity judge on YouTube Cover Dance, where desperate teenagers mimicked popular dance routines. Her alter egos dated the alter egos of losers from Brazil to Birmingham and had online sex. And she committed numerous felonies. For the previous eight years, since the mysterious disappearance of her German husband and benefactor, she'd been stealing money willy-nilly. She preferred to restrict her victims to pornographers, the wealthy-but- senseless, and celebrities. She was probably obscenely rich in some offshore bank where money is just a column of numbers on a screen. Money you'd never have to lick your fingers to count. But as she only lived inside her computer, that seemed appropriate in some way.

Her off-line self, once the most stunning Miss Tiffany Transvestite World in the history of the competition, was now podgy and unkempt and lived in a dark condominium in the northern capital. Apart from the occasional walk on the roof, she hadn't been outside for a year. Her food was delivered. A PA did all her real life business, and she hadn't felt the touch of a lover for at least six years. It was starting to concern me that I was the most normal person in my family. Just to let her know the actual world still had something to offer, I told her about my beach head and Grandad Jah shooting up the SUV.

'And I thought life would be dull down there,' she said.

'See? So why don't you come down? Mair would really like to see you. And you can protect us from the rat brothers.'

'Hmm. You do make it sound tempting. And you know I'd love to, but I've started this exfoliation course.'

'So come in a few days when you're finished.'

'It's a four-week course.'

'You're exfoliating for four weeks? I can't seem to picture you without any skin.'