Thai Diary 1
November in Thailand - first week
I don’t know exactly who is following this. Anyone looking out for posts from me will know there’s been a lapse.
We are in Lanzarote now, but last week, I was in Scotland for my mother’s funeral.
We had been with Mum in September, and we had planned to spend a month in Thailand, during which I was determined to keep a diary.
Mum died on the 13th of November. I will write more about that later. This is a rough summary of edited diary entries over the first week or so in Thailand.
We arrived in Thailand on the 2nd November. A long, relatively uneventful journey. Guided through Istanbul airport by a strange person who appeared from nowhere and as soon as he’d achieved his mission, quick, quick, keep up, past the Somalian women lying barefooted on seats in brightly coloured saris, disappeared. Stunned by the heat, the populousness, the traffic, the organised chaos of it all. Our lift arrived. We were late. Past gated communities, developments behind high walls, shanty, hugely overdeveloped yet with a sense of rawness to it all, like a Gold Rush. Went straight to the bar. Too late to eat. Not hungry. Drank a Singapore Sling, then a beer, then another beer, then a Long Island Iced Tea. Slept.
We took the shuttle bus into Patong. I got drunk. This is hyper consumerism to a level I have never seen. Scooters vie with blacked out drug dealers’ SUVs. Every seventh shop has a cannabis leaf on it. Or is a pub. Or a massage parlour (a significant number of which say ‘no sex’, the absence of which sign presumably means the opposite). Or a currency exchange. Or a junk shop selling tourist tat. The tourists team into a murky looking sea under a sky threatening thunder but perfused with bright, hot sun, over white sand that contains, along with coloured bottle tops, hundreds of tiny, exquisite bivalves which are the palest lilac, or pink, or cream, and iridescent with mother of pearl, though very faint (and evidently worthless - the bigger ones have all long since been gathered and sold). Our hotel restaurant table was decorated by a superb shell-skeleton, white as a piece of coral (lots of coral pieces on the tide line), but the texture of bone, toughened by erosion and smoothed by water, a whorl with extending spines like the helmet of a Roman soldier.
There are notices on Merlin beach saying something like “It is a criminal offence to remove any coral, living or dead, from this beach, and doing so will incur a fine up to 10,000 baht (roughly 300 euro)”. But it feels as though the horse has bolted. Although the sea is clean enough to swim out into, if you are prepared to slip delicately over the coral shelves which keep you to the shallows for at least the first 100 metres out and make swimming here while the tide is out almost impossible.
A woman artist, local, I imagine, had made a sculpture of bottle tops (the same plastic ones I saw in the sea), plastic bath scrub scrunchies, and other assorted discarded plastic, into a huge and very colourful, beautiful, and depressing sculpture which stands in the middle of the huge shopping precinct (these places are always air conditioned to hell). As is our superb apartment. Utterly simple, elegant and luxurious. If it has one fault, it is that one of the two bathroom doors sticks slightly. The wood has swollen in the heat. Mynah birds flit and sometimes screech in the cavernous concrete staircase. The pool is a long serpent that stretches the length of two Olympic swimming pools snaking between the apartment blocks. I’ve swum the length of it a few times, although there’s a sense of territoriality about the different areas of flats, many of which seem to be occupied, at the far end of the complex, by Russian speakers.
The concrete stairwell is cavernous, but it is generally so clean and smooth that it doesn’t need extra accoutrements. The materials are already good. And the maintenance is excellent. Though not cheap.
We’re on the side of a hill. Phuket, or this little area of the island, near Patong, which is all I can talk about, is a series of hillocky, hummocky, rainforested lumps, not high (under 1000ft, probably, or certainly not more than 1000 metres), but steep, the red earth beneath exposed between the trees by a landslide, or an excavation, like a wound. On every patch of flat ground near the coast are endless hotels, interspersed with shanty shacks (one close by is obviously processing rubbish, largely generated in no doubt overwhelming quantities by the enormous number of tourists. There is a heap of black sacks, some opened, in front of a few rows of shacks, tin roofed, wooden framed, uneven, and a mound of rubbish with a skip nearby. People enter in twos and threes on foot, or sometimes on motorbikes. Maybe they get lucky occasionally and find a diamond. Or a brick of cocaine. Judging by the state of the huts, this has not happened to the current occupants. And so it is. We dump on them. And we depend on them. And they depend on us. And round and round it goes.)
Thinking of free will a lot. I didn’t choose to be here. But I am very grateful to be here, and very much appreciate the beauty, and the tragedy and ugliness in this place. I think the Thai people with their fatalism and acceptance would understand, though I have talked to very few Thai people. They are a truly polite, respectful people, at least in the contexts I have met them, with very few exceptions. The woman hurrying me along to buy a bottle of wine before her till closed automatically while the anti-alcohol laws restricted daytime sales (the law has just been reversed) was one. Does Thailand have a drinking problem? I’d have thought so, at least among those who can afford it. It’s very cheap, compared with Ireland, and good quality.
No road rage. And the only other instance I can think of was one of the waitresses who was off colour. I didn’t know if they were a LadyBoy (one of the others certainly was - they had an Adam’s apple) or a girl but they were sniffing with a cold, and while still very polite and respectful, evidently beyond being able to inject any enthusiasm into the display. That may be beneath many people’s attitudes: resentment, envy. Why not? The level of poverty here is exceptionally high, people living in huts made of bits of plastic and timber poles.
Yet the vast majority of the encounters are exceptionally warm and amiable.
We went to see a LadyBoy show and dined at the expense of Absolute who say there is no market for Noel’s fractional ownership at the moment. Not that we were desperate to divest of it, but it’s rather a different story from the one he was told when he bought it. .
Mum lay dying all that first week, though she did interact with people. I managed to speak to her once, via Jo. Hardly a conversation but she knew me, I think, for a moment.
Does it matter that I wasn’t there? I didn’t have a choice.
What can I say to set her free? All is forgiven? Is it? By her to me? You were a wonderful mother, not without faults, but exciting, and prepared to not care what other people thought of you. I remember so many wonderful things about being a child in Creagdhu, and you being wildly good fun, and adventurous, creative, brave, beautiful. It really was bliss at the beginning, living in English Charlie’s, then Creagdhu.
English Charlie’s is the name of my mother’s house (named after a tramp who made himself a little stone house on the site after the war, and used to do odd jobs and was a bit odd himself!). My grandparents had the house built for my parents but I was brought up in another house. It’s complicated…). It’s a beautiful house. I’ll put up some pictures some day soon. Creagdhu was the house my parents moved to when I was about three and which I considered and still consider my home place.
Would I have stayed in Scotland? In another life. What will happen to my connection to the place? It will always be there. But there will not always be somewhere to go. Exile. Emigrant.
Sister Stan died. Sister Stanislaus founded Focus Ireland and was among those who started the Kilkenny childcare course that was a milestone on N’s professional journey. She was an amazing advocate for social justice and a beautiful person inside and out.
I remember the evening through a haze.
There was that strange inauthenticity about the evening that comes from an event that is organised primarily in order to encourage people to invest. Having said that, it was a lovely evening, an opportunity to talk to other people (we talked to an Australian couple who were staying in another Absolute resort), to get a feel for the place, to have a look around.
I’d expected the Lady Boys to look like women. They don’t, to my eye at least. They look like very beautiful transvestites, often with implants, almost adolescent. Lip enhancement and a facility to wow the crowd. A Tina Turner lookalike, a Blondie. They belt out the songs and we (including me) select three are taught the strangely familiar hand movements of a traditional Thai dance. The comperes are Scottish and Russian and the Russian one has a much more vocal, loyal and engaged crowd. We English speakers are lame, by contrast.
The emphasis is very much on opulence, the raffle feels like it’s fixed, with the Russian compere selecting only Russian speaking people’s tickets. Coincidence? Conspiratorial whispers… the buffet with a huge range of hot dishes, Thai and European, and salads, and fruit and dessert items, and we are brought endless drinks, a Tom Yam and a Mai Thai.
I go and stand outside and the area is seedy. There’s a man sitting in the security guard’s chair and when the receptionist asks him to vacate it, he says, I’m waiting here until someone sorts out the hot water in my room. It’s a hotel where you could probably hire a room for an hour. For sex. N’s been offered a penthouse there in place of the condo he has a fractional share in here. He’s not keen. We talk about it a bit. It would mean investing more. We ask to see a penthouse but they’re all occupied. Noel declines the offer.
We talk about death. About whether or not we will meet after death. Of course, I don’t really think that anything that makes us who we are as humans survives after death. Unless we’re entirely relational beings, with no essence, which is also possible. My history, though, my trajectory, will be gone, and so will N’s. I can’t really imagine this. It is impossible to imagine. I say maybe something about us, some spirit, might interact again. He says no, Lucy will always be essentially herself.
Mum was always essentially herself.
Rabrinadrath Tagore’s poem, which we read to each other at our wedding, implies that we have met before and that we will meet again. It’s such a wonderful idea. It’s probably untrue, though, isn’t it? I will always love you. How can that translate into reality? I don’t know.
We stopped in The Dublin Arms on the way home and listened to a strange Asian version of Galway Girl. Smiles all round. We listened to that in Killarney after our wedding. Patong is a dive.
We are within walking distance of four beaches. We went to Paradise Beach in the first few days, a veritable homage to the end stages of capitalist culture, a charge to go there, and further charges for beach beds and umbrellas. We paid. Not expensive. 200 baht each. Expensive if you live here, though. Very shallow, very clear seas but crowded, hard to find space to enter the water, though everyone stayed relatively close to shore, so when I swam out a bit, there was no one. We had a beer in a beachside cafe, sitting on tall stools next to a French couple. We got the bus back up the hill, which was hair-raisingly steep.
The next night, I fainted, twice, after drinking, and I have a fat lip, grazed, and a graze on my chin, and a deep sense of foreboding. Is this how I will go? Face down? Two cocktails: a Singapore Sling and a Long Island Iced Tea.
We were sitting here on the balcony. It had just rained. The days so strange and dreamlike, the Mynah birds beginning to hoot and I know despite the overwhelming presence of tourism that I am in a rainforest. In a tropical paradise that doesn’t belong to me but that I feel a deep affinity with and a deep sadness for. The tragedy of the situation rips at me.
N had been on the phone to a friend of his and I had been drinking steadily and had an open can of Singha in front of me. I said to him, after we’d had a brief chat about his friend and whether he’d started treatment yet, that I’d go to bed. It was about 9.30pm. I remember going into a sort of dream state, and a demon figure, dark, malignant, standing in a corridor or cave. And having no sense of fear, only a kind of acceptance. And then N was at my elbow, swearing and shouting (he said he’d thought I was dead) and I came around and knew at once I’d bashed my mouth, so I just said, have I knocked out my teeth? Are my teeth okay? And N looked through the blood and said, I think so, so I managed to walk to the bathroom, slightly unsteadily, N beside me, and as I was leaning in to fill my mouth with water and spit out the blood and inspect the damage, I fainted again. This time, N said, I’d managed to lower myself onto my knees and my head was supported by the side of the sink, avoiding more damage. He helped me up again, and this time I managed to inspect my mouth, and saw that my teeth were all there but that my upper lip was fat, and cut, and my chin was badly grazed. I brushed my teeth and N guided me to bed and put ointment on my wounds. I kept telling him that I was alright, and how sorry I was. He woke at four, he said, and didn’t go back to sleep again, just kept watch.
