The silence stretched. I took another swallow of whisky, my head swimming. I had a vision of the superficiality of my life, my relationships and my work. It seemed then that I was granted a terrible insight into the fact that what I had known all along amounted to nothing – and that I was equipped to apprehend only this reality. It came to me that what drove Sabine to kill herself might be preferable, however difficult to accept, to an existence of continued ignorance.
I found my voice, at last. “Can you show me?” I whispered.
His gaze seemed pained and full of compassion. It seemed to me that he wanted to share his burden then, but at the same time could not bring himself to be so cruel. “Simon, I’m sorry. I know you, and I know that you wouldn’t be able to accept...” He smiled, and reached out a hand to touch mine in a gesture of intimacy I had always thought beyond him.
We sat in silence, drinking, for what seemed like hours. I roused myself from sleep, sat up and yawned. Beauregard was still awake, staring into the dying embers with an ironic, unamused smile playing on his lips.
“I’m turning in,” I said.
He looked at me. “Good night, Simon,” he said, and there was something of a farewell in his tone.
I slept soundly, anaesthetised by the drink, until the early hours. As I lay awake, I thought I heard again the sound of voices from down below – and something told me that they did not issue from the television.
A part of me shied away from investigating, afraid of what I might find. Another part knew that I could not ignore my curiosity. I found my dressing gown and hurried down the stairs.
The same blue light leaked from the gap beneath the door, for all the world like the fluctuating glow of a TV set. I leaned my head close to the door, heard the rapid exchange of voices that might very well have been the charged dialogue of a drama series. I reached for the handle, knowing full well that the door would not open.
I turned the handle and leaned forward with all my weight. Slowly the door gave, opened perhaps six inches. The strange thing was that I felt no scraping resistance, as I would if a piece of furniture had been wedged beneath the handle. Instead, it was as if I was pushing against a constant, forceful pressure from within. I lodged my slippered foot in the opening and peered through.
The light had intensified, bathing my face with a dazzling blue radiance. As I screwed my eyes shut to filter the glare, I heard a woman’s voice: “You didn’t think for a minute that you could get away? Even here, in this Godforsaken wilderness?”
Then Beauregard’s: “I hoped, of course. I should have known...”
The woman laughed. “Even
they
couldn’t help you!”
“They did, for a while.”
“For a while, yes. It was only a matter of time before I overcame their resistance.”
I choked. I had an awful premonition. I had heard the woman’s high, stilted accent before, long before – twenty years ago, to be exact.
My eyes became accustomed to the light, and I stared, and saw at the source of the lapis lazuli radiation the figure of a woman: she was thin, dressed like a hippy, with a cheesecloth shirt and flared denims; she had her hair coiled in familiar braids and wore fastidious, John Lennon glasses.
Sabine...
Beauregard was kneeling before her, like a supplicant before some vision. On his face was an expression of such tortured anguish that the features of the Beauregard I knew were almost indistinguishable.
“What do you want from me?” he cried.
Sabine laughed. “I want to show you what it is like,” she said.
I could take no more. Whether in fright, or an inability to hold open the door against the pressure from within the room, I staggered backwards with a cry. The door snapped shut, and I was pitched into relative darkness. Sobbing, I clawed my way to the banister and staggered up the stairs. I made it to my room, switched on the light and curled myself into a protective ball, shaking with delayed and paralysing shock at what I had witnessed.
I must have slept, against all odds, though fitfully. I came awake often, and always the first vision that greeted me was that of the blue light with Sabine at its centre.
I awoke finally with a bright winter sunlight slanting into the room. It was late. Hurriedly I dressed, fingers fumbling with my clothes. I made my way down the stairs, and as I approached the study I relived the events of the early hours. I knew that this time I had to confront Beauregard with what I had seen.
He was no longer in the study. Not even his rucksack remained. I hurried to the door and flung it open. He had taken his leave, perhaps hours ago. A line of footprints, almost filled in by the new fall of morning snow, led away from the house and up the hillside to the far horizon.
~
If this were a work of fiction, one of my stories Beauregard so despised, I would take pains to craft a satisfying denouement; I would explain everything and tie up all the loose ends, in the manner that Beauregard disdained in his marginalia. It would be a ghost story, and I would show the reader what horror he had made manifest to Sabine all those years ago. The apparition of Sabine would be a Tulpa, a spectre from Tibetan lore, returned to haunt Beauregard for showing her what should have remained his own, private secret.
But life is not fiction; there are no neat resolutions and answers, no cosy denouements to satisfy and entertain. I have presented the incidents as they occurred, and for the sake of my sanity I prefer to think that what I saw last night was no more than the product of my drunken imagination, fuelled by lack of sleep, Beauregard’s recollections, and my own confused thoughts of the poor German girl who was driven, for reasons that will remain forever unknown, to end her life.
I often think of Beauregard as I sit here and type my safe, satisfying little stories. I consider the torture of inhabiting a world that ordinary people are unable to perceive, and I see him walking, always walking, through freezing winter landscapes, pursued by the spectre of the young girl who forever haunts his guilty conscience.
Li Ketsuwan
Never go back, poets and wise men tell us, but we do go back. There is something instinctive about returning, a base desire of the heart, even though the head knows better. Never go back, but I was returning: I was driven by necessity. I was going back to Paradise after a year spent in Hell.
I arrived in Bangkok on a direct flight from London. I left the capital immediately on a train bound for the northern city of Chiang Mai, dozing fitfully to the rhythmic pulse of the rails, the sing-song glockenspiel chatter of my fellow passengers. Three hours later the train drew into the town of Khon Khai and I alighted.
The platform was deserted. Sunset lay gaudy acrylic tones across a flat horizon. Crickets thrummed their monotonous double-notes like faulty electrical appliances. I was back, and the sight of the ramshackle town, stark unshielded bulbs illuminating bamboo kiosks on flimsy stilts, the aroma of barbecued rat and chicken, tore the months away from under my feet: it might have been 2002 again; I might have arrived in Khon Khai for the very first time.
I made my way to the town’s only hotel, a whitewashed hovel with a corrugated tin roof opposite the station. I booked a room for three days, surely long enough to do what I needed and be away.
I showered, changed and left the hotel. I would go first to the Café Bar, where Li had worked, and ask for her there.
“Mistah Grant! Mistah Grant!”
I turned, surprised. A wizened old man, bent almost double, plucked at my shirt with fingers like mangled cheroots. He stared through eyes scummed with a porridge of glaucoma.
Last year I had thought him blind, so how did he recognise me now? After the events of the past few months, Thailand frightened me. Its people were savages, in league with elements of nature we Westerners had long since out-grown.
“Christ, it’s...” But I had forgotten the oldster’s name.
“Mistah P,” he said. “You need anything, Mistah Grant?”
“I’m looking for Li,” I said. “Is she still in town?”
He peered up, past me, with his ruined eyes. “Li? Li Ketsuwan? Mistah Grant, you not hear? Li have accident. Bad accident.”
“What happened?” Despite myself, I felt my pulse quicken.
“She found in jungle. Broken back. Never walk again.”
I stared at him. “Someone attacked her?”
“No. No attack. Accident.”
I thanked him and hurried along the busy main street towards the Café Bar, my height, my colour, turning heads, raising smiles and humorous comments.
~
In October 1999 I was called to Thailand by Kelvin Anderson III, the megalomaniac director of a dozen blockbuster movies and three that had won Oscars for Best Film. He was shooting my latest script on location in northern Thailand, but wanted to see me about certain changes he required in the final scenes. I suppose I should have been grateful that he’d consented to consult me, rather than rewrite the scenes himself – but I’d written a dozen drafts of the screenplay by then and I was thoroughly tired of the trite and hackneyed script.
However, Anderson had money and power. He called, and I came.
I reworked the scenes with Anderson during the day, and at night drank ice-cold Singha beer in the town’s noisiest bar with the rest of the cast and crew.
I recall vividly how I first met Li.
The script called for some reference to Thai myth or magic, and one of the crew, a local, told Anderson that he knew a woman who might be able to help us.
Anderson gave me the task of questioning her.
Duly, one evening, I was taken by the Thai to a quiet bar overlooking the river and introduced to Li Ketsuwan.
I had expected some old crone – the Thai equivalent of Gypsy Lill, hunched over a crystal ball in some curtained booth.
She was slim, and attractive in that dangerously slender way that only Thai woman manage to achieve, combining sensuality and an almost anorexic gamin quality.
It was impossible to guess her age. She might have been anything from sixteen to forty.
She listened, glancing at me with massive eyes, while my guide told her what I wanted. Then she flicked a tiny, elegant hand on a slim wrist, indicating that I should take a seat among the locals who were waiting to consult her.
Amused by her abrupt dismissal, and admiring her for not being cowed by an obviously moneyed Westerner, I took a seat and watched her at work.
Perhaps ten locals presented themselves over the course of the next hour.
She sat behind her table with a fixed expression of stony neutrality as she listened to their complaints.
Sometimes she grabbed their hands, rather roughly, and read their palms. Sometimes she looked into their eyes, pulling up their lids like a horse-doctor. One old woman talked for a long time, at the end of which Li pulled a leather pouch from the pocket of her red dress, opened it on the table, and consulted what lay there.
Tiny bones, what looked like the eye-balls of small animals, gold symbols, so far as I could make out.
At the end of every session she would reach out to the supplicant, span their forehead with her long fingers, and rattle off a rapid-fire burst of incomprehensible Thai.
At last it was my turn to approach the table. It was late, almost midnight. The bar was empty. I looked around for my guide.
Li interpreted my need.
“Is okay, Mistah. You not need him. I speak English okay, yes?”
I smiled. “Great. I’m with the film people.”
She tilted her head, like a bird. “You the writer-man, no? You need see me about last scene. Witch-doctor, only we don’t call them witch-doctor. And he wouldn’t cast magic spell like you say in film, no!”
I stared at her. “How do you know that? We haven’t even shot the scene.”
She just shook her head, as if impatient. I wondered later if she’d heard about the script from one of the Thais working on the set.
I questioned her, and she told me everything I needed to know. She was quick, intelligent, and very, very beautiful. When my audience was over, fifteen minutes later, I wanted to extend our time together, find some excuse to keep her talking.
I said, “That’s great. Would you like a drink? We could—”
“Don’t drink. Alcohol bad for me. One hundred baht, Mistah Grant.”
I passed her a handful of soiled notes. “You’re very beautiful,” I said. I expected some positive response. In London I was never wanting for a willing woman.
Before Thailand, that was.
She dismissed me with a contemptuous scowl and slipped from the bar through a rear exit.
Later, alone in my hotel room, I could not sleep. I listened to a mosquito drone in the darkness and imagined Li’s slim body pressed tight to mine.
~
I turned off the main street and approached the broad, slow river. Moonlight reflected from the water in a quick shimmer of cusps and curlicues.
The Café Bar was still there, raised on stilts beside the river. I climbed the rickety wooden steps and stepped into the familiar long room, lighted by dirty strip fluorescents and occupied by half a dozen dedicated drinkers, tired men in shorts and vests drinking brandy from chipped tumblers.
I half-expected to see her at her usual place at the back of the bar, but the table was taken by a gaggle of argumentative locals, playing cards.
I approached an old woman behind the makeshift bar and asked if she spoke English.
She frowned at me, shot off a round of plosive vowels and gestured over my shoulder. When I turned, a thin, rat-faced man in his thirties was standing at my elbow and bobbing his head.
“Ah, Mistah. I speak English. What you want?”
I ordered two beers. “I’m looking for Li,” I told him. “Li Ketsuwan. She used to come here to...” Words failed me. What did she do? Work her magic? Cure the incurable? Foretell the future?
He was nodding. “Ah, Li. She no longer work here. Two years ago, now, she go.”
“Does she still live in the town?”
“Ah, no.”
“Do you know where I can find her?”
He turned and fired questions at the card players. A minute later he hurried behind the bar and stared at a map of the region pinned to the timber wall. He gestured me over.
With a long finger-nail he indicated a town about fifty kilometres north of Khon Khai.
“Li Ketsuwan, she live here now. After accident, she go.”
I took a long pull of my beer and regarded my informant. “What happened to Li?” I asked. “What kind of accident did she–?”
He was shaking his head. “No one know that. Very mystery. She go in jungle one day. After that, never walk again.”
I finished my beer, thanked him, and left the bar. In the morning I would take a bus north to the town of Tak Buri.
I was walking back down the busy main street when I thought I saw her – not Li, but Sonia. She was standing beside the cart of a street-vendor selling banana fritters, watching me. I stopped in my tracks and stared. Sonia was six feet tall and platinum blonde, a model and a wannabe movie star. In the street crowded with diminutive Thais, she stood out like a stork among penguins.
It was an illusion, of course – like all the others that had plagued me for the past year.
A truck trundled between us, and by the time it had passed she was no longer there.
~
I met Sonia Bellingham at the party of a fellow script-writer in Islington. The place was full of beautiful women, actresses and models, and slick young men, posing. I was alone. Since arriving back in London from Thailand a month earlier, my luck in the department of casual liaisons had been abysmal. At that time I had not worked out that Li might be responsible for this.
My host introduced us. Sonia – a name assumed because her real name, Pamela Watson, was that of another actress on Equity’s books – was a twenty-five year-old drama student, RADA trained, all pashmina and pearls, tall and slim and as elegant as a ballerina.
We seemed to hit it off immediately. We chatted for an hour, and I invited her to join me for dinner at the Ivy the following night.
The meal went well. We chatted and laughed, drank expensive wine, moved onto a club in Soho, and then took a taxi back to my place around two.
I had done the hard work; the rest, I knew from experience, would be easy: the first kiss, the first tremulous touches, the firmer grip, the thrust of body against body, the suggestion that we should move to the bedroom...
But she struggled, turned her head away when I tried to kiss her. She said, “I’m sorry. It’s me...”
I said, “I’ll be through here,” indicating the door to the bedroom.
I undressed and climbed into bed, and she appeared at the door, sheepish now, and undressed.
Still in bra and panties, she paused, and I said, “Here, let me.”
She rolled onto the bed, into my arms. I slipped a hand into her panties and kissed her.
And Sonia retched, then turned away and vomited a stomachful of expensive
pâté-de-foie
and lamb casserole halfway across the bedroom.
She dressed quickly, apologising all the while, and hurried from my apartment, from my life.
Except, over the course of the next year, I caught brief, almost subliminal glimpses of her, though when I looked again she was never there. At first I thought she was stalking me, following me around London and later out of town, wherever business took me.
Then, however, when I tried to follow her and failed, when she disappeared from sight like a wraith, I wondered if I were going mad.
I had no reason, of course, to suspect that Li was behind this peculiar haunting.
Why should I?
~
In the morning I took a local bus north to Tak Buri. The bus was crowded with locals, and was obviously not built for tall Westerners: there was little leg room and precious little space above my head. It seemed that we stopped every other kilometre to pick up yet more passengers, and after two hours I was all for alighting and taking a taxi the rest of the way.
At one point, I caught a glimpse of a reed-slim girl walking along by the side of the road, and my heart leapt as I thought I recognised Li Ketsuwan.
We rushed past her, and it was not Li, and I sat back and tried to relax. Soon I would find her, demand from her an explanation.
Soon, I hoped, my quest would be at an end.
~
I returned to the Café Bar the following night, back in 1999. I was both intrigued by Li’s intuition, and beguiled by her beauty. It was an allure quite unlike that of other women I had known. There was something raw and animalistic in her manner. I fantasised that she might possess a complementary sexual power, and was determined to experience it.
She saw only four locals that night, and I soon had an audience.
She was more accommodating this time; she actually smiled when I complimented her. When I asked if she would like a beer, she assented. “But not here, no. At hotel, okay?”
We moved to the down-at-heel hotel bar and drank into the early hours. I told her all about my life in London, about the films I wrote and the stars I knew. I was quite purposefully out to dazzle her, but she remained unimpressed.
“But you,” I said, a little drunk now. “Tell me about yourself.”
She pushed her lips into a moue like a crushed rosebud. “Oh, I am a ...” She said a word I had no hope of remembering.
She laughed at my quizzical expression, covering her mouth with a small palm. “In English,” she said, “I am witch.”
“You’re the most beautiful witch I have ever met,” I said.
“And you, Mistah Grant, you most best bullshitter I ever met!”
At the end of the night, as the bar was closing, I reached out and took her hand and said, “Come to bed with me, Li.”
She seemed to hesitate. She looked at me as if calculating something, then gave one quick nod and jumped from the bar-stool.
I followed her up to my room in a state of heightened sexual arousal, watching her tight bottom switch from side to side beneath the red dress as she climbed the stairs before me.
And what followed? Enough to say that it was the most fulfilling night of passion I had ever spent. Li was wild, and relentless, and totally uninhibited. She was an animal, sometimes frightening me with her savagery. Hers was an unrestrained display of primal lust which made me realise that the sex I had shared until then had been a pale imitation, a mere shadow-play, when compared to the real thing.