Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Mair, is that you?”

She’d run her race. Done her dash. Her bag of tricks was upended and she had no more passion. Even her stories became gray, as if she could no longer see her life in the Technicolor it once was. I was flying out of the missile hatch just as she was docking. Overnight we changed places and once more we’d become unfamiliar. I missed my exciting mother but I learned to love her as a different person. But then, three years ago, she’d started to put her handbag in the washing machine, to walk into my bedroom thinking it was hers, to give customers four five-hundred- baht notes as change for a five-hundred- baht note. Those cracks were few but through them I saw the light of somebody I recalled. She began to surprise us with stories, blurt them out with no rhyme or reason. And her voice would crackle with joy as she recalled a place or an event. There would be gaps like a dream remembered upon waking but it made the stories even more mysterious.

When they’d first begun I’d thrilled at those moments and urged her on. But slowly, far too slowly, I came to realize that this was my mother traveling backward on a mechanical walkway, passing through time, past huge placards advertising moments from her life. And I began to fear that one day she’d be so far along that escalator she’d no longer recall where it was she climbed on or who was there to see her off. Now, three years on, the condition was no worse, suspended as if the walkway had broken down and a team of men in blue overalls was underneath trying to get it going. So, sometimes, ever so gently, I dared to nudge her along to another placard. There was one I desperately wanted to see.

“We had another bat fly into the bulb on my porch two nights ago,” I said. “Smashed it completely. But that bat just shook off the glass shards, walked around in confusion, then flew on out of there. It didn’t panic at all. It was like a pet. It made me think of…Thanom.”

Mair smiled. I’d pressed the secret code button and was ready to enter that hidden room where she and my father kept a pet bat.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“You told me. You said you and — ”

“No, I mean, how do you know it walked around in confusion? If it smashed the light it would have been dark. It was cloudy two nights ago.”

“I heard its footsteps in the broken glass.”

“Bats never were ones for walking, you know?”

See what I mean? When my mother wasn’t out of it, she was completely in it. Saner than all of us. The pet bat story would have to come in its own sweet time. I stood to leave.

“On your way out can you remember to put water in John’s bowl?” she said, without looking up. “She’ll be thirsty.”

I phoned Sissi later.

“Sis?”

“ Nong .”

“How’s Leather?” I always liked to ask how Leather was because, in his own weird, probably nonexistent way, he was a benchmark of stability in Sissi’s life.

“He’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“I deleted him.”

“What did he do?”

“He announced he was coming here on holiday.”

“Oh, that’s terrible. Is it terrible?”

“Of course it is. I don’t want to see what they’re really like.”

“He might have been nice.”

“He calls himself Leather and whips women online. He’s either a factory worker or a bus driver.”

I felt sad. Really. I’d like to see her settle down with a bus driver.

“So, who’s next?” I asked.

“I’m giving up on men for a while.”

This sounded a lot like me in Pak Nam. I told her about Ed and my temporary dip into gaiety.

“Have you ever considered…?” I began.

“Women? No, don’t even joke about it,” she said. “Who would stoop so low. No, little sister, I’m going to be an auntie.”

I had to think about that.

“Wouldn’t that involve either Arny or me doing the business?”

“Ha! I should live so long.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“No, I’m going to be an auntie to thousands, perhaps millions. Do the words Cyber Idol mean anything to you?”

“No, of course they don’t. It’s a very Asian thing. Started in Korea. It’s now even bigger in Japan and it’s slipping south.”

“Does it involve singing and being humiliated by impresarios with limited talent of their own?”

“Not even. This is the ultimate self-makeover site. You have young girls who look like, say…you, and you set up your homepage with photos of what you actually look like. And the site has make-up and hair and — get this — Photoshop advice to do whatever it takes to make you look absolutely stunning online. There are no rules. You can pull any trick in the book to make yourself look like a babe. Then you enter online beauty competitions and the Web audience votes for their favorite and it doesn’t matter that everyone knows you’re a dog underneath. It’s all about what you can do to give the impression that you’re glamorous. And they have the same thing for men: the hair, the zit removal, the corsets and the airbrushing and you end up with these darling Barbies and Kens dating each other on the Web.”

“It sounds sad.”

“It’s wonderful.”

“It’s not real.”

“It’s better than real. It’s totally honest. They all know they’re unattractive but they can live these lives as beautiful people.”

It didn’t sound honest at all.

“How do you fit into this?” I asked.

“I know the geniuses who set up the site. They want me to be their style guru. I’ll be giving advice on how to dress, how to move, how to present themselves on Webcams.”

“Are they paying you?”

“You know how I’ve always wanted to give to charity but I could never find the right one? Well, this is it. I’ll be doing it pro bono.”

“A very worthy cause.”

And an appropriate choice of guru. Auntie Sissi encouraging an entire generation of empty people to pretend to be something they weren’t. The thought of it depressed me. After another twenty minutes I was able to wrestle the subject around to crime.

“Sissi, do you have any moral objections to hacking into the DRA computer banks?”

“That’s the Drug…Rehab…?”

“Department of Religious Affairs.”

“Oh, absolutely not.”

I gave her an update of the Wat Feuang Fa case and told her what I needed to find out.

“Any chance of getting back to me by tomorrow night?” I asked.

“I tell you from experience, religious sites are so easy to hack I know monkeys that could get into their inner sanctums. They all believe they don’t need security ‘cause they’re protected by a Higher firewall. So, it’s all an agnostic’s playground. You want me to leave any mystic symbols to screw their minds up?”

“No, just a simple smash and grab will be fine. Thanks.”

When I hung up it was ten thirty, half an hour after my bedtime. I was just about to step into the shower, then stare forlornly at myself in the full-length mirror when my cell phone rang again. I’d forgotten to turn it off.

“Hello?”

“Little scribe? Are you awake?”

“Chompu? What’s up? Are you lonely?”

“Hardly. I’m surrounded by men in uniform.”

“Are you fantasizing?”

“Er, no. I’m on speaker phone. We were wondering if you could pop down to the station.”

“What? Now?”

“There’s been an incident.”

Arny and I arrived at Pak Nam police station at ten fifty. We had a long-standing arrangement whereby if ever I had to leave home after dark for anything that wasn’t a date (three in the past three years) he’d come with me. He pretends it’s because he’s worried about the truck getting stolen but I know if he didn’t come he’d stay awake all night worrying about me. Mair succeeded in making us all weird in our own ways but she also gave us a deep sense of loyalty. We walked up to reception and a sergeant, slightly crooked like a bamboo root, was sitting on a stool behind the counter. I’d never seen him before. He looked nervous.