Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

So, anyway, we were at the fruit plate and well down the Hinnisy and Major Mana was slurring and his volume had risen. With a wink to the restaurant owner he’d slid his chair around so he could whisper secrets into my ear. As he talked about himself the entire meal, I didn’t have to lie about where I lived. He insisted on mixing our drinks from the rack of ingredients standing beside his chair. Without exception he’d put twice as much brandy in my glass and, without exception, I’d wait till he was distracted and switch glasses on him. Twice, he’d told me that he’d booked a motel room in case I wanted to rest after lunch. All the class of a dollop of lizard dung — I mean, really. Perhaps he’d never before had a lunch date who didn’t sport fur or scales.

At one stage he failed to return from the toilet. Given the time it had taken for him to find the outhouse in the first place, I wasn’t terribly surprised. A penis is a lot smaller than a toilet. I gave him five minutes, poured the remainder of my drink into the ice bucket and walked down to the main road where I’d parked my motorcycle.

“Did you have a nice Sunday?” Mair asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

But it was Saturday.

I still hadn’t forgiven her for what she’d done to us and I’d planned a full year of social disobedience, but as always it occurred to me that my acidity didn’t get through her leaden mother casing. Most of the time she was Mair: sweet, happy to listen to our problems, unintentionally funny, just normal Mair. But there were times she frightened us. Her slide had started with little things. You’d see a trail of ants leading to a cupboard and you’d find an open caramel pudding in there.

“Mair, why isn’t the caramel pudding in the fridge?”

“It isn’t?” She’d shake her head. “That’s funny. That’s where I put it, child. I can’t think who’d have moved it.” Then there were times she’d try to change TV channels with her cell phone or to get the local radio station on the microwave. It was probably a good thing that we’d moved to southern Thailand rather than southern Chicago. Mair would pull down the shutter and go to bed and leave fifty bags of rice outside the shop for the night. I can’t think why nobody ever helped themselves.

Since we moved down here, Mair had also started to develop inappropriate relationships. To understand this Thailand of ours you have to realize that some things are endemic. A politician, for example, cannot, by the very definition of a politician, be entirely honest. Honest politicians have no influential friends to help them over the first hurdle — vote buying. Then there’s the business community. Businessmen and women have no social obligations. The whole point of being in business is to screw — politely if possible but not compulsorily — the next guy. Which brings us to dogs. Millions are born every day. In human terms, the vast majority will not make it past their nursery school graduation. Only the fit survive which means teenaged dogs are already mean and nasty and thoroughly unlovable. Helping an infant doggy, therefore, is tantamount to defying the laws of the jungle.

But something happened in the heart of Mair when we moved south. It was as if Mother Teresa had possessed her soul. In Chiang Mai, she’d been perfectly content to chase away strays with a broom. But here she suddenly couldn’t pass a crippled animal without bursting into tears. She’d stop and talk to them. I mean, words. The type of googoo language you use to confuse newborn babies. Normally a stray would flee in panic at the sight of a person but there was obviously the scent of marrow about my mother.

The first sack of bones she brought home had elbows all over. The mutt had so little meat on her she could have been the Kombi driver’s family pet. Mair fed her and nursed her to health and named her John. Within the month, John was strutting around like Bambi, not quite coordinated but with that unmistakable swagger of hope. For the next six months the dog had nothing to worry about other than how quickly she could grow into her enormous feet and how many people she could charm with her damp dog smile. She didn’t fool me. She wasn’t tethered or caged but she stayed. I tried to explain the concept of Stockholm syndrome to my mother but she insisted that the dog remained with us because she loved us.

Buoyed by this miracle of life, Mair then picked up a naked and squeaking grub-like creature from beside the road one day. If not at death’s doorstep, it was, at least, in the front garden. She recognized a potential that none of us could see and took the bundle to Dr. Somboon, the livestock specialist. Dr. Somboon had set up his after-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 191. Thai Rat and the Mail wanted follow-up stories as soon as possible. I could see an end to the dark tunnel of selling empty bottles and used newspapers to the recycling truck. It was humiliating having to queue up there with our garbage. It was just one of the growing number of things I didn’t like about our life. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful for the opportunity to move to the backwoods marshes of Maprao but, purely for my own entertainment, I’d put together a list of my top unfavorite things about my new home.

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.