Free Everyone Burns by John Dolan Page B

come in, but I demurred, saying I wanted a cigarette. I was feeling rebellious and strangely light-headed having escaped from Charoenkul’s office with a complete set of genitalia and only minor brain damage. I even thought I might leave a business card with the attractive police woman on reception as we passed through, but unfortunately she had been replaced by some guy with big ears and a constipated expression. Geoffrey Rush had also gone.
    Outside was like an oven, and the glare was blinding, but I lit up a cigarette anyway. PC lurked in the partly-shaded doorway.
    Is it ever going to rain again?
    DTs arrived with the car and PC squeezed himself into the passenger seat. While I was pointedly smoking the cigarette down to the butt, I phoned Da to let her know everything was fine, that I had not been arrested, and I was giving the local police some informal advice on a ‘Westerner problem’.
    “What sort of ‘Westerner problem’?” she asked, half-relieved and half-suspicious.
    “Well, apparently lots of European tourists have been demanding their money back, saying Samui girls are all ugly and not at all like the pictures in the brochures.”
    “Don’t make jokes. I was worried. The way you were taken off, I thought there must be some burning issue.”
    How right you are, I thought.
    “No. I’m just helping out with some cultural stuff: getting inside the farang mind sort of thing.” This at least was vaguely true.
    “Does that mean we get paid?”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “Will you be coming back to the office today?”
    “Is there anything in the diary?”
    “You know there isn’t.”
    “I’m not finished here yet. Let’s see how the time goes. I’ll call you later.”
    “Do you still want me to phone the ambassador?”
    “Very funny.”
    I rang off, flicked away my dead cigarette, and climbed into the car.
     
    DTs drove us slowly out of Chaweng, heading south. We were pressed in by pavements overflowing with brightly-coloured stalls, Indian tailors, racking stacked with glass bottles filled with petrol, women in polo shirts offering massages, double-parked motorbikes, panting dogs, and bemused tourists with peeling heads. The car bounced gently over dusty potholes as bikes weaved around us respectfully. PC read a newspaper while I tried to look inconspicuous. Being seen in the back of a police car is not a flattering character advertisement.
    Reaching the Samui Ring Road, the tarmac widens, and the building frontages recede back, allowing the traffic to breathe. Tourist sellers give way to more workaday commercial premises selling furniture, building materials, insurance and groceries. Intermittently, locals’ houses lean against each other for comfort, and spread naughtily into neighbouring vacant lots where greenery and cast-off rubbish grow and interbreed. As the road meanders slightly from side to side like a happy drunk, a view of sea will periodically break through on one side, and green hillsides muscle into sight above weather-worn roofs on the other.
    Approaching Lamai, we passed a police box from where a bored policeman waved a greeting which my companions ignored. They were concentrating on their bearings.
    “Just here,” said PC pointing ahead and to the right.
    DTs slowed the car and indicated, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic before turning gingerly onto a concrete side road.
    There were no inhabited buildings immediately in the vicinity of the turning, merely scrubland and some unhealthy-looking coconut trees. The concrete ran out after about a hundred metres, having rounded the grey skeletal remains of an abandoned building project. Presumably the road had been put in by the same overly-optimistic developer. The workmen having long since departed, nature was reasserting herself, and the unroofed structures were losing the struggle to stay above the rampant greenery. Part of the perimeter wall was, however, intact, although starting to crumble against the combined