Читать книгу Surviving Hal - Penny Flanagan - Страница 7

1.

At the baggage carousel in Bangkok Airport the girl beside us spoke in an abrasive nasal drawl that physically repulsed me.

“I’m goin’ straight to a bar an’ get pissed, it’s heaps cheap here, ay?”

I nudged Andy. He ‘tched’ in unspoken empathy and my agitation abated somewhat. We were here together, just the two of us. We’d left our kids behind for the first time in ten years. We were free and easy; untethered and set adrift.

I stayed close to Andy as he pushed our luggage-laden trolley down the concourse. Usually I am an independent sort of a woman, but here I felt some cloying need to grasp his arm and hold on for dear life. I was thirty-eight, he was not much older, but I imagined the two of us as an elderly couple, holding to each other in the face of a fast-moving and increasingly unfamiliar world.

The terminal was a deceptive bubble of airconditioning. Every now and then a door shifted open and the real world blasted in; a fog of hot, putrid air from a city rotten with the spoils of urban excess.

As we walked down the arrivals concourse there were eager crowds on either side of us. Everyone was expecting someone. We were expecting Tom.

A familiar-looking Thai woman caught my eye. I was just thinking to myself, Gee that stout little Thai woman looks just like Hal’s wife, when her eyes widened with recognition and she started squawking,

“Hal! Hal!”

She was waving her finger in our direction, no doubt grasping for the English words to say, “Your estranged son is here! And his pasty, uptight wife!”

Hal sprang out of the crowd like a demented jack-in-the-box. He seemed as surprised as us, then the realisation hit him; we were trying to slip into the country without him knowing. A resigned, ‘poor me’ look fell over his face. He thrust his hands into his pockets and hung his head morosely, the victim. I looked at Andy and could tell that it had started already. He felt torn between a deeply ingrained impulse to care for his father and, at the same time, to keep him at an arm’s length.

Nostalgia won out. Andy’s face brightened with a smile, then his shoulders folded around his father in an embrace. A split second of father-son dynamic unspoiled by history.

“Hey! Good to see you, you reeker.” Andy glossed over the betrayal with some family jargon.

Hal directed Andy towards Phan, pushing them together for an embrace. “Say hello to your stepmum,” he said, and even I had to laugh.

Andy gave her a kiss on the cheek and then everyone looked at me. I held up my hand in a ‘how’ gesture designed to keep everyone away from me. It worked for a while, then when I was distracted—sizing up the Thai woman lurking behind Phan and wondering who she was—Hal seized the moment, sidling up beside me and clamping his arm around me, claiming me as part of his farang clan in front of all these Thai nationals.

At that point, both Andy and I were thinking the same thing; Tom had sent Hal for us instead of meeting us himself. What a dirty thing to do.

It turned out Hal was there to meet his friends, Greg, Jean and Ivan, and take them all to Pattaya for a couple of days before the wedding. It was awkward. We hadn’t seen Hal for twelve months. Andy doesn’t exactly stay in regular contact.

The odd flurry of disjointed sentences spat onto an email arrives in our inbox from Hal every couple of months. Usually he wants something like mail forwarded from his PO box, that sort of thing. The last series of communications, increasingly solicitous, were to procure a long, specific list of ‘essentials’ from Australia, Andy to bring them. I thought the Savlon cream was fair enough, the Bushells tea (‘no bags, leaves only’), the specialised toothpaste, Vegemite (‘tubes only, no jars’). But manila folders? Do they not have stationery in Thailand?

We all stood around attempting conversation; awkward bursts of familiar sounding words that went nowhere. We tried to pretend it was normal that a son wouldn’t be in contact with his father regularly enough to prevent an entirely coincidental meeting at an international airport. I made small talk with Jean for a while. She seemed friendly enough. She had a crinkly smile and an honest face that I trusted. I wasn’t sure where Ivan fitted in but I assumed he was an old family friend. He was a short, stocky guy with a goatee and wrong-for-the-climate polyester pants. Andy said later, “Did you see his shiny pants? Weird.” And they weren’t just ‘travel pants’, either. He continued to wear them religiously over the next week or so, through the humidity and the stifling heat, in remote village and city alike.

Now, I’m not just saying this because of what I know now, but there was something about him that unsettled me: he was the sort of man who locks eyes with you and stands too close.

The woman loitering on the edges was Phan’s sister, Jeng, an identically stout woman all dolled up in lipstick and clicky heels. She was plaintive in both her expression and posture; hopeful and nervous but not entirely optimistic about whatever it was she was anticipating. She was introduced to me by Phan almost as an afterthought and met my eyes only momentarily; either I was of no consequence to her, or she had decided that she was of none to me. It was all hideously awkward. I longed to be beamed up and removed instantaneously without explanation.

Just as things were getting dire, Tom appeared, pushing through the crowds, waving his hand above his head in a full-arm movement like an air traffic controller. Hal saw Tom and calculated the facts quickly. Tom had kept our arrival time from him. We all stood around a bit more. The air was loaded with subterfuge from all parties.

Finally, Tom herded us off, the awkward goodbyes of the ‘I won’t see you again’ variety were assuaged by the promise of reunion at the engagement dinner later in the week.

“Who’s that guy, Ivan?”

“Some mate of Hal’s,” Tom replied, seemingly resigned to this, a person he didn’t know at his own wedding.

“Is he an old family friend?” I asked, looking from Andy to Tom.

It was a leading question. The subtext: if not, what’s he doing here?

Andy 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.