Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“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 have experimented with booze, drugs and? orsex 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…”