It was one of those strange moments of synchronicity that life offers, when otherwise mundane events turned in to focus on the same point. This was how the unlikely elements of Crackers, a drunkard Australian expat, and The Kiwi, his submissive and diminutive friend, for a rare few seconds become more than the sum of their parts.
Crackers and the Kiwi – who was to remain nameless forever to me – were ticking away the moments that make up a dull day the only way they knew how, by drinking. Crackers had emigrated from Australia to Thailand and now ran an Aussie bar in the nascent tourist town of Kanchanaburi, near the more famous River Kwai. The Kiwi's presence was never explained.
They spent their days sitting at bar stools which afforded them clear views down the long strip which made up the town. They'd move as rarely as possible to which end Crackers kept a small buzzer with him which he used to signal his Thai wife - who remained inside - to bring them more beer.
Crackers was conceived as a bellowing guffaw by some belligerent creator but had been over-filled with flesh so that his distended belly seemed like the last, frantic efforts of his skin to contain him. He was devoid of any genuine humour, however, so what was left was a roaring, bloated shell of mirth, holding only the appearance of joy. Needless to say, he was an unattractive man, taken to accompanying his slurring brutish attempts at wit with his own laughter.
The Kiwi was short, his bare knees poking from baggy shorts to dangle high above the ground. Next to the tall Crackers he seemed even shorter. Incessant ham-fisted jokes from Crackers on the theme of height ensured that no one present would escape the observation.
The Kiwi's skin was leathered by years of sun and sat creased and inflexible on his face. His expressions were there to be seen by anyone who followed the lines. Cracker’s frequent obscenities grasped his scalp and yanked a squinted grimace of a smile from the leather, with the Kiwi’s eyes glinting with genuine amusement from somewhere underneath all that age and skin.
A young Australian couple sat at the barstools with them as we arrived, to all appearances relishing in the company of this pair. Somehow the topic of the Kiwi’s dead wife had entered the conversation and now the couple were being regaled with anecdotes from the funeral.
It seemed no great revelation that the Kiwi had no children of his own; his chosen lifestyle did not suggest responsibility had featured heavily in his life. Instead he had married into parenthood, for better or worse.
So it came to pass that we were witness to this drunk man who chose this most inappropriate of audiences to hear what happened at his late wife's funeral. He had reached the part where he was explaining how – whilst his wife was still alive – his adult step-children had reacted when he asked to be called, ‘Daddy’.
There was no irony in his voice as he said this to the bar. It saddened me to think that he was so driven on this; being from a single-parent family myself I knew precisely how difficult the thing he asked of them was.
The eldest of these children, a Catholic minister, had been the only one to stretch as far as an ungodly reaction and told him to, ‘fuck off’. With a knowing look the Kiwi brandished this vernacular to us as it was a noose of irony instead of simply an impassioned voice from an angry man.
It was clear that relations hadn’t improved over time. It seemed easy to sympathise with the minister as the prospect of the Kiwi as a family patriarch was not an entirely joyous one. He had obviously fled his life and come to Thailand to lick his wounds and live vicariously through the passing travellers and their bravery.
Yet as the story unfolded, details of the funeral emerged. It seemed that despite his marriage to their mother none of the step-children mentioned his name in their eulogies. The years of his life he had dedicated to nursing his dying wife went unrecognised. He deserved only one oblique reference to ‘that ugly old bastard down the road who looked after Ma.’
It was hard to ignore this sudden shift into something more serious. The world was listening as well as a new song started playing over the bar’s speakers: Pink Floyd’s Time. It sounds too appropriate to be true, staged even, but it is true that as I listened ever more intently to this story David Gilmour sang: ‘The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older...’
Not one to be denied recognition, however, the Kiwi had his say at the wake which was held at the eldest son’s house. Watching his wife hanging on in quiet desperation touched this man, despite his appearance. The burdens of caring for a loved one as mortality gradually blanches them, until they finally fade away and begin to disappear from even your memories, should be cursed on no one.
He slipped into a familiar routine at this point, giving me the impression that we were not the first to hear this story. First he stood up from his chair, barely raising his head above Crackers, and introduced himself to everyone as, ‘that ugly old bastard down the road.’ He used a pantomime aside to tell us how fervently he had raided the wine cellar.
Surrounded by the imagined empty bottles pilfered from the minister’s cellars, he then primed the room for his recompense, ensuring that we all were looking on: ‘If you offered this much wine every Sunday then maybe you’d get more people coming back next week!’
He reported the success of his own wit and laughed hoarsely so we could all be clear that this was the punch-line and with that ended his monologue. He sat down and his shoulders dropped again. It was scant few seconds before Crackers cleared the Kiwi’s disjointed capitulation with some base observation about why he’d married a Thai woman, and with that the mysterious coup de grace was banished from the conversation.
We finished our drinks and left the bar, pausing only to rescue the young Australian couple from the incessant chatter of Crackers. Appearances were deceiving me all around as what I had taken for relish earlier was a manic take on self-preservation. The couple had only just left Australia for the first time and had yet to learn what Aussie bar meant outside Australia.
I found myself uniquely troubled though. As we walked down the road I saw Crackers slap him on the back, echoes of his voice pursuing us down the street.
Was the Kiwi bitter, or had his quick wit salved the years of rejection for him? It felt like I had heard a different story from the one he told. I was amidst a bitter family grieving the loss of the one thing that held them together, whilst the Kiwi was caught up with a petty rivalry and damaged pride.
He had existed, for that second, at the point of catharsis, ready to receive the compassion and affection from this audience of travelling youngsters that had been denied him by his step-family; not for the first time he had blithely tossed this moment aside, unaware of its importance.
It is a strange thing to consider but I wonder if the Kiwi had shown me the first moment of genuine pathos I had witnessed in life. I had certainly seen sad events, broken hearts and damaged families, but none that made me realise a person was beyond understanding their own sadness.
I began to wonder if he even realised how his story had ended, if he was even aware that it became a cruel and elaborate joke at his own expense. He created such a cacophony of ideas that I was unsure if I was in the centre of some massive cathedral hearing choirs of compassion, or in the middle of a shattering mania, eggshells and china crushed under my feet.
These are the things I thought, as I walked down the road and out of his life.
