SF. Pt.14b. Another day, another beach.

Arthur leans back in his deckchair and stares out across the Gulf of Thailand. He can do this for hours. When he lived on Samui he spent most of his day on Chaweng Beach, always on the same stool in the Coconut Bar, staring out to sea. But that was before Chaweng became a sort of tropical Skegness. He’d moved to Lamai, barely one jump ahead of the fish ’n chips shops, and thence to Isaan, the undeveloped Thai hinterland which he had found much more to his taste. Isaan was slow, unhurried, with little in the way of tourist attractions. It was easy to slip into the rhythm of the place, wet season followed dry, hot got hotter, and days blurred into one another. One evening by the bug zapper, Tui, his wife of 7 years, had suggested a trip to Pattaya. Arthur had agreed. A change was as good as a rest…not that he really needed one, but he had always liked Pattaya. It was honest in its own seedy way; never pretending to be other than what it was. Until quite recently anyway…when the local authorities started performing mental acrobatics trying to balance sin and safety.

Let’s be honest, thinks Arthur. Pattaya has become a zoo. Americans had started it of course with R&R for soldiers from Vietnam. But look at it now! Germans, Chinese…even Russians! Scandinavian drunks, English soccer hooligans, chavs or whatever they call them, all looking for booze and cheap sex. And not all of them are middle-aged, balding and pot-bellied by any means. Some are quite young in fact. Bored with Benidorm, heard about Thailand, having a laugh like. Too many people that’s the trouble thinks Arthur. Look at them all…

There was a time when Arthur felt personally affronted by the Thais eagerness to embrace modernity. Progress will ruin this country mark my words he used to mumble. Now he just accepts it. In fact Arthur doesn’t care much what the Thais do with their cities anymore. Neither does Tui, who, sensibly, is in another deckchair, to his left, tucking into a plate of deep-fried prawns she just bought from one of the vendors that swarm like sand flies among the pink and red foreign bodies. This is Tui’s second visit to Pattaya and she loves it, doesn’t find it tacky at all. Neither, after a beer or two, and a bit of a paddle, does Arthur. He is content to just lie back and relax. Try to anyway.

Chewing gum? No thanks. Newspaper? No. Not even the Bangkok Post, thrust uninvitingly in his face by yet another vendor, can hold his attention for very long. Hang on a sec…he buys one anyway…Britain hands Basra over to Americans, Major Offensive In Pakistan…hmmm…the world is a mess to be sure…but Arthur is more interested in watching the clouds. He isn’t looking for omens or anything but he enjoys the constantly changing and evolving shapes. Above him immense billows are forming faces of Bush and Obama, Brown and Blair, Putin and Bin Laden…potent images that dominate his thoughts these days. Apocalyptic thoughts. More and more he is seeing pagan gods among the clouds…vengeful old Egyptian and Hebrew Gods…Osiris, Anubis, Set, and Yahweh, Zeus programming a handful of smart-bolts, Mars in his war chariot, crisscrossed by parasailers…and of course old Priapus is up there too, ogling a banana-boat-load of topless waving bargirls.

It must all mean something thinks Arthur…these images from school history books surprisingly well etched into his memory, redolent of English summers, hours spent avoiding homework, lying on his back in the long grass listening to the sharp clack of willow bats meeting leather cricket balls. Then Sunday School and another kind of God…a stern but loving god who valued good table manners highly…who thought that children should be seen but not heard and whose first commandment was “thou shalt not pick thy nose or otherwise embarrass thy parents in front of the neighbours” and the second was “don’t play with your winkle there’s a good boy Arthur”...

British and American soldiers getting bumped off left and right, lots of angry young Muslim men with time on their hands, mosques been blown up. It must all worry people surely…assuming people worry about anything beyond their own narrow confines. It worries Arthur. Last time in London he felt like his every move was being recorded on CCTV. Get picked up by the wrong camera and you too could be blindfolded, dragged off to be half-drowned and sodomized by Dobermans.
Goodness, thinks Arthur, blinking in the sunlight, where does this stuff come from? I never used to have such thoughts. Life used to be so simple before…before what? Now it’s all Ishtar and Gilgamesh and Dionysus (what’s he doing in there?) weeping in the ruins of Babylon trounced by Armoured Fighting Vehicles and Cobra Gunships driven and/or piloted by wholesome young men and women from Texas and Indiana eager to demonstrate that everything is manageable if you just punch in the right data.

What’s this glittering Grail-like object dangling before Arthur’s eyes…ah…a fake Rolex...no thank-you…

Meanwhile, up in the clouds, the gods are still hard at it…the sky is full of them today, jostling for his attention…inscrutable Old Chinese deities, a procession of anthropomorphic Hindu chaps. Buddha? Not that he was a god exactly but is he up there too? If so he is probably happy just to exist…probably doesn’t feel quite the same need to assert himself and vie for people’s attention as the other fellows…

Am I going to die here? Arthur wonders…in Thailand? People did die here…by ‘people’ he means expats of course. They die all the time…in accidents, from natural causes, poisoned by jealous wives. What happens to all the bodies? Does anybody really want them? Would Tui have his body burned or just have the bloody thing shipped back to England? Whichever was most economical probably. Her Majesty’s Government were unlikely to want it anymore…no I do not want a bloody cigarette lighter thank you…not even that phallic one. Very irritating these vendors. They have grown much more rude and persistent lately…in fact the worse business got the ruder and more persistent they became. How much could they make selling that stuff anyway…a hundred baht a day? Two? That woman with the cigarette lighters, she probably walks miles every day and if she’s lucky she might sell one…

Arthur starts to think about England. But not for long. Somebody is waving something under his nose...a grilled chicken foot it looks like…er…no thank you…but I will have …let me see…a boiled egg and a slice of pineapple…

From his deckchair Arthur has a panoramic view of the beach. Straight ahead is a charming vignette, a vestige of the Thailand he loves, a Thai family gathering toxic shellfish. Arthur finds the sight quite charming, three generations of Thais, seeing the ocean for the first time in their lives probably.

Would Arthur care to be young again? Yes and no. Certainly it would be nice to have a young healthy body instead of the pear-shaped bundle of twigs, with it’s various run down components, he currently calls home…it would be nice to have perfect hearing again too, real teeth, good eyesight, a bladder that he has some control over. Nice too not to have to listen to worrying murmurs from the prostrate region. But to be young in today’s world? No thank you. Not with things the way they are, polluted, over-crowded and teetering on the brink of some unimaginable disaster. He pities young people in a way…their heads buzzing with all kinds of useless rubbish, the minefield of ideas and misinformation they have to navigate…the dubious quality of their role models…the pressures to conform at odds with all the pressures to be different. Things hadn’t been like that in Arthur’s youth…or had they?

What? Oh you again…no I still don’t want the cigarette lighter…mai ao kap…no bloody want OK?

Arthur must have dozed off…when he wakes the sky is still there but the gods have scattered…replaced by Andy Pandy, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men and Muffin the Mule, and other early BBC icons. Arthur had watched the new black and white miracle along with thousands of other middle-class English children but it’s hard to say what he felt. He had watched the images mainly because they moved, not because he was particularly engrossed in the activities of a few primitive puppets or because he wanted to see what they did next. It was the potential of the medium that intrigued him…the feeling that if he watched enough of it something important might occur With luck someone might even pop up and explain what life was supposed to be about, but no…Bill, Ben, Andy, Muffin et al. were simply eased out, gently, by Tiswas and the Teletubbies.

What dear? Oh yes, thank you…Tui has just dismembered a crab and she is offering him a prime morsel … ‘I very angry,’ says Tui…she means hungry of course, it’s a long-standing joke they have, one of many based on language misunderstandings. Tui is obviously enjoying herself. Good for her. She’s had a tough life. Good to see her making the most of a day on the beach.

Coming to Thailand all those years ago had been the best thing he’d ever done. Of course the Thais are just as daft and materialistic as everybody else, even worse in some ways, but they’re friendly for the most part and nonjudgmental. He’s found a new life of sorts among them. Not that there can ever be any real escape from the past, Arthur knows that. And perhaps that’s why he envies the Thais their ability to live in the present. Say what you like about the buggers but they do seem to have a knack for taking one day at a time. Has some of it rubbed off on him Arthur wonders? Has he, almost by default, finally achieved some kind of Oriental oneness? Certainly there are times, like now, beaten to submission by the tropical sun, when he imagines himself with no tangible existence outside of his own imagination.

He looks across at Tui. He’d been lucky to meet her when he did. Bless her heart she had kept him off the bottle. Not that she’d ever really understood him…or perhaps she had…never beautiful…downright ugly in a way, with her nostrils and her mouthful of crooked teeth, this strange rather Simian little creature from Isaan who had so readily agreed to share his last lonely years. And she still has a smile that can melt his heart. Look at her now…got the bloody cell phone in her ear again. Could be talking to any one of dozens of sisters, cousins and friends back in Isaan. They all have cell phones now. What do they find to natter about? Anything at all apparently…the weather, the price of fish oil, who’s been to the wat and who hasn’t…nothing much more substantial than that. None of them has ever heard of Armageddon.

What a strange life it has been. So many twists and turns and people and events…so many choices…good ones and bad ones …that have brought him to this time and place. And then, as he watches, something very strange happens. The clouds roll back as if to demonstrate a new advance in special effects…the sky is filled with a vast blinding brilliant light…a revelatory flash as it were…and he catches a glimpse of Tui…off to his right…Our Lady of Pattaya …ordering another plate of prawns…it is the last thing he ever sees.