The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) (6 page)

“Doesn’t matter. So, she was bitter. In this country, the majority of regional administrators she’d have to work for would be male. She was probably smarter than the lot of them. She gets more and more frustrated. Despite her great doctor–patient skills she gets a reputation as ‘a bad team player.’ Gets jogged down the ranks until she finds herself in a rural clinic. Bee stings and diarrhea and cat scratches. Anything more serious she has to refer to the hospital in Pak Nam. And she snaps. Decides she’s taken enough crap and can make a better living working in telesales. No need to clear it with the idiot male administrator at the Provincial Medical Placement Center because she has no intention of working as a doctor ever again.”

Da’s mug had been getting heavier as it hovered in front of her pouty lips.

“Wow,” she said. “That was insightful.”

“Thank you.”

“It was about you, wasn’t it?”

“Me? Don’t be … I’m talking about your boss.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Then prove it. You’re a journalist. Finding a lost doctor should be a piece of durian pie for you.”

“Why on earth should I?”

“I’ve worked with her for six months. If she’d had a bitter past, I didn’t see it. All I know is she’s a sweet lady. And she has manners. If she was planning to flee, she would have phoned me and told me. Not sent me a message. I think she’s hiding out. She knows there’s somebody after her.”

“Oh, right. ‘Them.’ You do remember the last time we talked you thought she was going nuts? There never is a ‘Them.’ We create our own bogeymen because life’s so boring. We need antagonists to give us a point. There’s nobody after her.”

“I can pay you.”

“No, you can’t.”

“I can. I have money.”

“I mean, you can’t because I’m not a private investigator. If that’s what you want, you can hire a pro like Nit the plastic-awnings dealer and part-time PI. He does missing persons.”

“I get the feeling it’s more than a missing person, Jimm.”

“You watch too much TV.”

“Perhaps I do, but if you were a sixty-year-old woman alone in the world, in trouble, wouldn’t you like to think there was somebody concerned about you? Concerned enough to go looking for you?”

She’d hit a nerve, damn it. I’d often visualized that future world with Grandad dead, Mair in an institution, Arny domesticated, and Sissi in jail. Me, alone, wheeling a Macro Supercenter trolley around the streets, wearing stockings and flip-flops, yelling at young people holding hands in the park, “Keep your filthy habits to yourselves.”

“I don’t want your money,” I told her. “But I can do this. I have to go to the
Chumphon News
office tomorrow. You said your doctor was at a conference at the Novotel?”

“Three days. Child development.”

“OK. I’ll take the Mighty X and drive down there after my meeting. I’ll ask around.”

Da put down her coffee cup and wrapped her meatless arms around me. It was like being hugged by scaffolding.

*   *   *

It was, in spite of everything, almost Christmas. We celebrate this festive season along with Chinese and Hmong new years, Ramadan (although I’m not sure I haven’t insulted half the world just by saying so), and the holiday of any other country that has a CD of awful songs to play on a loop. Our commercial fathers see them as opportunities to squeeze ever more money out of consumers. At our local Tesco there’s hardly a gap between “Jingle Bells” and “
Wo Ai Ni
(I Love You),” and the Thai Float Float Your
Kratong
song. Festivals promote spending. But there is something sad about the sour-faced checkout girls in their red and white pointed elf hats. One poor Muslim lass was even forced to wear one atop her hijab.

It must be said that a Tesco Christmas with its flashing Christmas tree lights and its tinsel is not for the benefit of the odd Englishman, German woman, or American couple who wander in there. Expats are few in Lang Suan and their spending power is negligible. In fact, I wouldn’t wonder if they’d prefer not to be reminded at all. The rather inebriated
farang
who stole into the store with a machete one afternoon and decapitated the jolly dancing Santa bears testimony to that theory.

Like Tesco, Christmas at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort was not a celebration of Jesus getting hammered to a cross and bleeding out. But I tend to believe that most of the people who celebrate the day barely give a thought to that aspect either. No, for us it was a chance to put our predecessors’ beautifully hand-crafted English sign out front:

CHRISTMAS IS A TIME OF CHAIR.

COME INSIDE AND HAVE A BEAR

I’d been tempted to fix it, but it got more responses by being wrong. Nothing delights tourists more than showing us up as ignoramuses. It really didn’t make much difference to our monsoon traffic, but the odd traveler did pull up in front and take a photo of the sign, maybe even pick up a can of Leo from Mair’s shop and pose beside it. And who knew? Maybe some day in the future the photo would go viral on the net and foreigners would come homing in on us from every corner of the planet. Right. Desperate, I know. But I’d run out of marketing ploys to get us back on our feet. I had more important things to do.

Whenever the kitchen, or the climate, or the fact we were here at all depressed me, I would always flip open the last surviving menu from the old regime. I would delight at the possibility of serving CRAP FRY RICE and ROAST LAMP to be followed by SUNDAY WIPING CREAM. But the crap and the lamp and the wiping cream did little to cheer me up as I gutted mackerel for dinner that day. I looked out at the lifeless Gulf. The times that scared me the most were these, the quiet days. When the wind was low and the waves were gentle and there was a lilac tinge to the sky. They were ominous days that hinted that the next monsoon was just beyond the horizon. A raptor was skimming across the wave tips. The hawks gave me heart. They migrated from northern China to Malaysia. But it was a long flight. They got bored. Probably suffered from deep-vein thrombosis in their wings. And a lot of them would say, “Bugger it,” and camp down behind our resort for the season. I loved watching them soar above the beach, swooping down to the surf for fish. I kept telling myself they were wise creatures and they would alert me if they sensed a hurricane coming. Our dogs, on the other paw, would be halfway to Phuket at the first hint of bad weather.

*   *   *

Over dinner, Gaew had told us about the Seniors’ bodybuilding tournament she’d recently attended in Hong Kong. I decided this was as good a time as any to relate my visit to Conrad Coralbank’s house. I left out the part where he’d desired me with a passion and just told them about the house and the answers he’d given. We were on dessert—ordained nun banana in coconut sauce—when I dropped the bombshell that his wife had left him.

“I’m not surprised,” said Mair. “I did notice a considerable age difference.”

According to Google, the pretty wife was the same age as me.

“I don’t see that age has anything to do with it,” said Gaew.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” said Grandad. “You robbed the cradle yourself. Didn’t you?”

“Grandad!” said Arny, almost angrily.

“What?” Grandad stuck out his grasshopper chest. “You gonna defend your great aunt’s honor? Challenge me to a duel? You’re going out with a woman the same age as your own mother. Disgusting.”

“You can’t—” Arny began, but Gaew put a hand on his arm.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Let it go.”

“Don’t humor me,” said Grandad. “Defend yourselves.”

Mair, who could always be counted on to inadvertently deflect tension, came out with, “William seduced me in the classroom. On a desk, in fact.”

First there was silence, then Gaew laughed.

Grandad said, “Oh, don’t!”

“Who’s William?” I asked.

“He was good-looking, too,” said Mair. “An Irishman. Twenty years my senior. I’m not saying all British people are good-looking. Some are downright ugly. Goodness, I wouldn’t touch Mark Jagger with a pool cue, but your author reminds me a lot of William. He came to Chiang Mai University for a couple of years to teach literature.”

Grandad stood up in a huff, put his bowl in the sink, and left the kitchen.

“Go on,” said Gaew.

“There’s no ‘on,’” said Mair. “William had ginger hair and smelled of tobacco. To make matters worse, he wore corduroy. I could never let myself be seduced by a man in corduroy.”

We laughed.

“So there was no seduction in the classroom?” I asked.

“Not by William, heaven bless his soul,” said Mair. “But I knew it would shut somebody up. My father’s been very testy lately. I mean, more so than usual. I think something’s wrong.”

That was it with Mair. You never knew. One minute she’s putting together a chain of extension cords so she can vacuum the beach, the next she’s defusing volatile moments over dinner. I didn’t necessarily believe there had been nothing between her and William. She was sexually active in the sixties. You see? No Thai stereotypes in our family. Good Thai girls back then didn’t even let their fiancés have a peek until the honeymoon. I bet there were a lot of disappointed honeymooners. But Mair didn’t give a hoot. If her recent stream of consciousness was to be believed, she’d left behind a trail of drooling lovers.

“So I think you should make a play for him,” said Mair.

“William? He’s probably dead by now,” I countered.

“Conrad,” she said. “Successful, rich, good-looking, reached an age where he probably isn’t interested in sex, as long as you can keep him away from the Niagara. Sex with old men isn’t really anything to write home about. He’d be perfect for you.”

“It’s Viagra, and what makes you think he’d be interested in me?”

“Don’t be silly. Look at you,” she said. “Take him a pie. Englishmen like pies.”

“Where would I find a pie?”

“Bake one.”

“We don’t have an oven.”

“You need an oven?”

Like I said, she wasn’t spectacular in the kitchen.

“Bananas, then,” she said. “Bananas are international. Nobody’s ever disappointed with a banana. You know? I wondered where she’d gone, that wife of his. I haven’t seen her for, ooh, two weeks?”

“Do you mean two months?”

“I think I know the difference between a week and a month,” she huffed. “She was here on December the eleventh. The day they delivered the chicken manure. She had to step over the sacks to get in the shop.”

Of course, there was no way Mair could confuse November and December. She’d get my name wrong four times a day. She’d phone our old distributor in Chiang Mai and complain that we hadn’t received goods from him that we hadn’t actually ordered for a year. Who knows when the bride of Coralbank was actually in our shop?

“Oh, manure, that reminds me,” she said. “I need you to take Gogo to see Dr. Somboon tomorrow.”

“Can’t. I’m going to Chumphon.”

“Not a problem. He has his livestock work during the day. He won’t open the clinic till five. You’ll be back by then.”

“What’s wrong with Gogo?”

“Nothing yet. I made an appointment to have her neutered.”

“Oh no. Absolutely not.”

“I suppose you’d sooner she pumps out puppies till her tits are dragging along the ground?”

“Neuter? Objection? No. Me take her? Not on your life.”

“Why not?”

“Dr. Somboon doesn’t have a nurse, Mair. He makes you stand at the operating table and hold the victim down just in case she wakes up in the middle and goes nuts when she sees her insides spread out on the table. I’m not going to be a witness to the end of a woman’s hopes and dreams of a happy family.”

“She’s a dog, darling.”

“Dogs can be symbolic. Let Gaew take her.”

“I’m off to Petchaburi for a seminar on steroid abuse tomorrow,” said Gaew.

“Arny?”

“Blood,” he said. “You know how I am.”

My brother was built like the Coliseum, but the slightest dribble of blood and you’d need a team of paramedics to bring him round.

“Jenny, my child,” said Mair. I assumed she was talking to me. “Gogo needs a liberationist. Someone to explain to her how she’s no longer obliged to be any dog’s doormat. Those little bristles on the doormat of indignity no longer have to prick her underbelly even if the word ‘Welcome’ is spelled out beneath her.”

“That dog hates me,” I reminded her.

“Then it’s your chance to bond. One female whose ovaries are in a pedal bin with one other whose reproductive system is unlikely to be put to use.”

“In that case, why don’t you take her?”

“I won’t be here.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see your father.”

“Oh? Where is he?”

She looked out of the small kitchen window to a point where the indigo sea met the charcoal sky. There was one green light flickering out there. We all stood up at the window.

“That’s Captain Kow?” asked Arny.

“He’s out there all by himself,” said Gaew. “There isn’t another boat in sight.”

“Isn’t he brave?” said Mair. “No other fisherman dares go out in this season, but there he is in the sea putting rice on our table.”

“Mair,” I said. “There’s a very good reason why nobody else is out there. It’s the season when little shiplets get smashed to matchsticks. You get seasick in a pedal boat on a reservoir. You are not going out there.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“It’s all part of the process.”

“Of what?”

“Reconciliation.”

“Mair. You sold our home and dragged us kicking and screaming to this hellhole for him. Don’t you think you’ve done enough to prove your worth? How many tests is he going to put you through?”

“There are a lot of things you don’t understand. This was my idea. To live his life. See the world through his eyes. Understand the sea.”

Arny stepped in.

“Mair! That’s a boat. A squid boat. It doesn’t have a cabin. That’s really romantic under a starry sky with no surf, but this is the monsoon season. You’ll be exposed to the elements. They don’t have coastal patrols out there to rescue you.”

“Fear not, little Arthur,” she said. “I have a survival kit. It includes a waterproof groundsheet and an umbrella. I go prepared. Don’t worry about me.”