shrugged. “Never heard of him.”
“Hal’s invited him along to hook up with Jeng,” Tom said, taking charge of our luggage trolley. “Phan said she wouldn’t come to the wedding unless Hal bought her some gold and set her sister up with some white cock.”
He said this last part in a suitably pornographic sort of voice. White cyooock! Andy and I guffawed with horrified laughter. I bent over double and had to stop walking for a second or two.
My heart raced. We were here and it was on. There was something exhilarating about it, if you put the reality of it aside and viewed it from a distance. A great story for the telling later. Welcome to Thailand.
“They’re all off for some sex touristing,” Tom said, matter-of-factly. “Although I’m not sure what Jean and Greg are doing. I don’t think they realise what they’re in for.”
Then Tom stopped walking and turned to Andy, looking slightly stricken. “I’m gunna need you to keep Hal under control.”
“Sure,” Andy said. “No worries, mate.” Andy slapped him on the shoulder in a big-brotherly way.
“He knows,” Tom said. “He knows he’s in serious if he fucks up my wedding.”
He resumed walking, pushing our luggage trolley for us, through sliding doors, along the white-tiled floors. His posture was the image of Hal’s; hunched shoulders, long loping arms, neck retracted into his collarbone in a slightly furtive, watchful way.
“Sunisa’s father is a policeman,” Tom continued. “I’ve told Hal he’ll end up in a cell if he shames her family.”
We all snickered with delight at the thought of Hal being bundled into a cell and locked there for the duration of the two-day wedding ceremony.
“That’d be great wouldn’t it?” I said. Andy gave me one of his cautioning looks that said, Go easy, that’s my dad you’re talking about.
Tom flicked a quick look around, then said in a low conspiratorial voice, “Seriously, Sunisa’s father has ‘disappeared’ about seven people. They’re buried in the fields somewhere on the outskirts of the village.”
I laughed incredulously, because I didn’t know what else to do. It was cartoonishly evil. Tom snickered too, his shoulders shook and he sniffed out his sneaky laugh. Tom and I had this affinity. We always ended up snickering longer than anyone else.
Outside the terminal, the air was thick as cotton wool and slightly rotten smelling. It bathed us. Tom lit up a fag without missing a beat on the pushing of the trolley or the leading of the way up through the levels of the car park. I was disappointed by the familiarity of its concrete tiers: we could have been in any Western city.
“Here we are,” Tom said. The lights on a Mercedes convertible flashed.
“What?” Andy gasped.
We were both surprised by Tom’s sudden, apparent affluence. Tom, who had landed broke on our doorstep more than a few times in the last ten years. Who hoovered our fridge, our wallets, our goodwill and then disappeared back to whatever city he was living in. Who hadn’t had a landline since the ’90s because he had burnt Telstra that many times in unpaid bills (and had run out of slightly off-kilter pseudonyms of his name to set up accounts under—Thom Saw, Todd Slaw, etc.). Tom, who probably owed Andy the price of the Mercedes in a lifetime of unpaid loans. A Mercedes convertible? Tom was an English teacher, earning Thai baht. We all know Thailand is cheap as chips, but I’m pretty sure foreign luxury cars come in at the same price point.
“Did you rob a bank, mate?” Andy said, pointedly.
Tom wore it. He sort of flicked his chin to it, his mouth stayed clamped shut, his eyes shifted. “Get in.”
We edged out of the car park and onto the open freeway. Tom put the top down and the air came rushing in. We were raised above the earth, on a great arcing roadway that stretched towards the high-rise jumble of the city in the distance. Freeways sprouted in all directions: great tentacles of curved concrete reaching across the landscape. Roads were not built on the ground, they were raised up in the sky, travelling unhindered over the streetscape, a method of A-to-B, urban convenience, nothing more.
The whole city—the sky, the buildings, the air—was the colour of a bruise, and with the fading light, the thick smog that blurred it to softness, it was strangely beautiful. The smell, damp and fuggy. Just a sly edge of shit. I decided not to take a set against it. I decided to embrace it: the modern ugliness, the crazy Asian urban jungle, the confronting detritus of a city’s underbelly exposed all over the streets as we ran the gauntlet between glossy high rises and half finished ghost buildings. Rubbish, rubble, sewerage, rats, mangy limping dogs.
I was here without my kids, What’s not to like? I convinced myself as I batted away the growing monologue about the state of the modern world, the dangers of pollution and open sewers, Hep A, Typhoid, Cholera, the poisonous consequences of mass population that emerge when a Western sense of order breaks down. I sank back into the leather seat and let my judgmental voice leak right out of me. It was liberating.
Tom smoked most of the way, and as is the law of smoking (she who is most bothered by cigarette smoke shall always find herself downwind), his stale smoke blew back towards me and wrapped around my face like a blow-away scarf. I didn’t complain, it was his car. (Or was it?) Who was I to tell him what to do? What does it matter? I told myself cheerily. You’re on holiday. Relax. Relaaaaax!
The sky darkened and lights came on. The traffic slowed to a peak hour crawl. Andy took a drag on Tom’s cigarette. I swallowed my inner fishwife and tried not to think about all the money he’d spent on hypnotherapy two years ago. I tried not to think of him as slipping out of my grasp.
Then Andy turned to me in the back seat and raised his eyebrows. I knew exactly what he was thinking. What’s with the car? The wordless communications of a ten-year marriage.
We still had it.
2.
Andy Straw was the sort of man who looked right into your eyes when he shook hands with you. When I first met him this gave me a thrill. I shook his hand and felt the corny old zap of attraction that you read about in romance novels. He was the sort of handsome that some women do and some women don’t. As it happened, I was in the ‘do’ category. He appealed to me physically. His face was just on the right side of handsome without being too blandly perfect. It seemed friendly.
He was also the sort of man who liked to make an impression. When we were told a representative from Sydney Council was coming to meet with us, we expected the usual humourless bureaucrat in a brown suit. Then Andy swept in wearing his fitted Jack London number. He had Rhonda the receptionist tittering like a schoolgirl. I heard the commotion and looked up from my computer to see him there, leaning over reception with his elbow cocked on the upper lip of the front desk. He was invading her space and she was enjoying every minute of it. Clearly, she was in the ‘some women do’ category, just like me.
Andy was doing what I now call his ‘Fake Salesman Laugh’.
It goes: huh-huh- HAAAA! Two short, one long and is always disproportionate to the joke. He can do it on cue and often does it AT me because he knows I am onto him. But Rhonda, a woman who fancied herself a fun sort of lady when the lights were low, was chuckling into her chins the way middle-aged women do when young men flirt with them. She was a soft target if ever there was one. I went out to meet him and he looked up at me and said “Hello,” as though my sudden appearance was the most enormous pleasure he’d had all day.
“Andrew Straw?” I asked.
He extended his hand and did that thing where he looked right into my eyes. “I’m the garbage guy,” he said without shame. “And you must be . . . ?"
“Nell, the bus shelter girl. Well, there’s a few of us and I’m one of them.”
“The Bus Shelter Girls, sounds like a band.”
“Or a community dance troupe.”
Then