‘Okay,’ Fred said.
‘So, one night it was all going perfectly. She kept on licking and I kept on thrusting with my butt, except that it went on for a long time and he wasn’t groaning the way he usually did. At first, I didn’t think anything usual was happening because he’d taken a whole Viagra and was going to be stiff for hours anyway.
‘I guess we went on like that for maybe twenty-five minutes or more, waiting for a tell-tale groan or two, and I was starting to get dry and her tongue was starting to ache before we realized he was having a seizure and couldn’t speak or move. So we both got out from under him, but by the time we laid him on his back he was dead. You could say we’d been having sex with a corpse.’
Startled, Fred stared at her. She was biting her tongue.
‘We ran to tell the mamasan, who came up and said we had to drag him downstairs because she wasn’t supposed to rent out rooms for sex and she wanted it to look straight before she called the cops. But before we dragged him downstairs, she had to close the bar. So we did and the cops came and called for an ambulance and we were left with just us girls in the bar.’
‘Okay.’
Lalita’s face was trembling uncontrollably. For a moment, Fred wondered if she, too, was not having a seizure. Tears started to stream down her face. Now she exploded.
‘It was just so fucking funny-all we girls and the mamasan had a party all night and drank the bar dry. I mean, out-of-control funny and shocking, too, which made it even more funny.’ She struggled to keep her hands on the wheel in the grip of a prolonged belly laugh that caused her breasts to bounce and her shoulders to shudder.
Fred gave her a few beats to recover. ‘You weren’t sad in any way?’
She caught her breath. ‘Why? He was a nice guy and had a great life, but how long was he going to live anyway? He was already fifty-six. Better to go that way than in a wheelchair sucking on an oxygen tube.’
‘Right,’ Fred said, scratching his jaw.
She flashed him a glance. ‘What’s the matter?’
Fred wasn’t entirely sure what the matter was. After a couple of minutes he said: ‘I think I’m the opposite to that bloke. I think I’ve been dead all my life and I’m only just coming alive.’
‘Maybe you’re not so different,’ Lalita said. ‘He told me he played it straight until he was thirty, followed all the rules and married a farang feminist who took everything including the kids. That’s when he saw the light.’
‘Of course, Khun James Conway got shot: he was an asshole,’ the village headman said; at least, that was how Lalita interpreted his words-freely, Fred suspected. ‘He treated his wife like some kind of slave and he was in a bad mood all the time, always complaining. He had a drink problem and spent all his time at the bar. In the end they didn’t bother with cans of beer, they served him with packs of twelve.
‘He was an arrogant shit, always yelling and criticizing Thailand. How that guy could bitch! It was amazing. He could moan for hours about a cockroach crawling across the floor, on and on and on like a buffalo chewing grass. We know we’re poor and low class, but he didn’t have to rub it in like that. And he was a know-all-told the villagers how to do everything, even told them how to live. And he was insulting about Buddhism.
‘His wife did her best for the first year. She was very patient and she’s young, only twenty-three now. Then she lost interest and went over to her uncle’s place to socialize with her cousins.’
‘She was unfaithful to him?’ Fred asked.
‘Of course not. She married him properly, village ceremony and the legal thing, both. Isaan women take that very seriously.’
‘Do you know who shot him?’
The headman shrugged. ‘Who would know such a thing? Anyone in that village would have shot him if they had the chance. They’re quite primitive over there. Maybe someone just happened to have a gun when they saw him walking down the street-a kind of accident, if you see what I mean. Or maybe they drew lots.’
‘What about the police investigation?’
The headman stared at Lalita and made a gesture toward Fred, then snapped out something in Thai: ‘What investigation? Why would the police be interested? He was going to get himself killed wherever he went, and if someone’s caught, they will bribe the police chief, so nobody will ever know who did it.’
Now both the headman and Lalita looked at Fred as if he were retarded.
Fred didn’t know why he was enjoying it. ‘So he just got wasted for being an asshole?’ Fred summed up.
‘Right,’ Lalita said, not bothering to refer to the headman.
Fred did his professional duty and checked out the village where James Conway was shot, even visited the Sino-Alicante monstrosity the Englishman had built with its garish green tiles, blinding white walls and stark blue swimming pool.
They went on to the bar where he drank, the spot where he died. Nobody in the village would talk, not even to the point of saying where Conway’s widow was now.
But Fred knew he was only going through the motions. When his mobile whooshed with a message from Penny (Where are you Sugarplum? Look, I know I’ve been a bit standoffish, but I’m coming round, give me time and I’m yours, okay? Just don’t go needy on me-you have that needy thing, frankly, and it scares me-I have to be all about me right now, that’s all, nothing else in the way), he muttered something obscene and deleted the message.
He’d already written the Conway story in his head. He was clever with words and would make the investigative reporting good and noir, but the message was plain for anyone with a brain: Jerk had it coming. He also knew how he would end the report: By the way, I resign. Then he walked with Lalita through the village to a meadow that sloped gently down to a bubbling brook.
‘Any land for sale here?’ Fred said.
‘Plenty. If you’re serious, we should go back to Bangkok, then I’ll return alone to negotiate-you will get a better price that way.’
‘All in your name, of course?’
‘It’s the only way.’
‘I want the house in wood on stilts. What about the car?’
‘It will be mine too; you can’t register in your name with a tourist visa.
Don’t do it if you’re scared.’
‘I’m not,’ Fred said. ‘But if I turn into an asshole, don’t shoot me yourself. Let someone else do it. I wouldn’t want you to do jail time for a selfish slob like me.’ He thought he was making a joke, but his eyes teared.
Lalita was silent and frowning for a long moment. ‘You really can love me that quick?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Fred said, then bellowed at the sky, ‘HEAD OVER EFFIN HEELS, DARLING-as my granny used to say.’
He checked his mobile. Twenty three hours and forty-one minutes since he’d landed.
AQUA-SUBCULTURE
Lee Ee Leen, Malaysia
I sold beautiful curiosities in my shop, so it was only fitting that one walked in.
However, it was not an antiques shop. My merchandise was a living example of years of human manipulation in enhancing specific genetic traits in fish.
I stocked common goldfish, black goldfish supposed to guard the family home from bad chi, calicos, neon tetras, comets and bubble-eyed imported specimens. I rented a corner lot squeezed next to a dim sum restaurant in a neighbourhood shopping mall; contrary to what you may have overheard in the management office, my fish did not end up as fillings in the wantons served up for the lunchtime crowd. A week after I had expanded the shop to include marine fish, Andie sauntered through the door.