Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen.
The next morning Johan tried to go to Chinatown without me. One of his dive team in Myanmar had a relative who owned a shop there, and Johan had promised to deliver jaggery balls to the owner’s five-year-old son.
I should have been suspicious—he never normally tried to do anything without me. But I wasn’t looking for signs. I was just on holiday in Bangkok, absurdly happy to see him after an absence of nearly three weeks.
And so, when he suggested I go for a massage or even a sleep while he made the delivery, I refused. “Since when was I someone who gets massages?”
Johan laughed. “You need a massage more than anyone I know, Carrie Cole. But that aside, Chinatown is intense. And the first thing you said when you woke up was, ‘I am jet-lagged to all hell, go away and stop talking to me.’ ”
That silenced me. I loved the way he quoted my own unreasonable words back to me.
I loved that nothing seemed to disturb him the way it did me, nothing seemed to linger for long.
“OK,” I conceded. I tried and failed to stop myself smiling.
“But I’m here to see you. Let’s go to Chinatown together now. Then get a massage together later.”
—
He was right, of course. I wasn’t ready for Chinatown.
I was still suspended in the woozy chamber of jet lag, unready for a place in which nothing—absolutely nothing, not one sight or sound—was identifiable.
It was an entirely foreign world within an already foreign world, nothing like the orderly Chinatown I’d visited in London with Maya and Mum.
This place was teeming, the streets lined with shops selling items I couldn’t ever hope to recognize, the air perilous with new, strange smells.
Dead, plucked ducks hung in windows with their beaks folded and clipped down; intestines were coiled next to birds’ nests made of swallow saliva.
Unfamiliar vegetables were being chopped on aluminum tables out in the street while black pigeons fought over the spills.
People, people everywhere, eating bowls of noodle soup, dried fish, white sticky globes in stews.
Every now and then I would see something familiar—the word fish, a pile of Dove soaps in a shop window—but beyond those few token things, I could have been on the moon. I held onto Johan’s hand as he ducked under verandas and stepped over stray dogs.
“OK?” he asked.
“Never better.”
He just laughed, as usual.
After ten minutes’ walk through that hot, unfamiliar-smelling air, Johan found what he was looking for: a café bar selling cups and bowls of something milky.
“This is it,” he said, pleased, although something about his body language felt off.
He was looking at a shop across the road, a dark, unlit cavern of a place with what looked like deep fat fryer baskets hanging around the doorway.
Near the entrance a man crouched on the floor, welding what I thought might be a large galvanized watering can.
I looked around the café bar. The walls were white, with painted pictures of happy people drinking the milky substance out of cups.
Every seat was taken, even though it was ten in the morning.
The white liquid must be good. It was being slurped with straws, eaten from bowls with spoons, with or without floating balls.
The menu featured several hundred different pictures, none of which my brain recognized.
“It’s a soy milk bar,” Johan said. “My colleague told me I had to come here for…hang on.” He consulted his phone.
“For a cold soy milk with soft tofu and a hot patongo.” He glanced around at a metal cabinet by the door, packed high with golden fried balls of something.
“Bingo! That’s the patongo. Kind of like a doughnut, with a coconut dip.
Apparently they’re sensational. Can you order for us, and I’ll drop off the jaggery balls? It’s the shop across the road.”
He pointed at the deep fat fryer basket place. Surprised, I looked across at it again. The walls and counters were lined with strange pieces of metal, possibly for catering.
“Your dive colleague knows those guys?”
“Yep. He’s Thai.” He got out his phone and showed me a photo message someone had sent him. It was indeed the shop we were looking at.
Sparks flew from the welder’s tools. He wasn’t wearing a mask. A child sat near him, staring broodily across the road. “Is that the kid?”
Johan shrugged. “Might be. I’ll find out. See you in a sec.”
“OK. I’ll do my best,” I said, turning back to the menu. “But I take no responsibility for what we get.”
He left, laughing. I watched him lope into the shop, unbothered by the strangeness of his surroundings.
He crouched to talk to the welding man, who pointed toward the back of the shop, but before he’d even straightened up, a smart young woman appeared.
She made straight for Johan and started talking to him.
She was smiling; she briefly put a hand on his arm.
Johan smiled back, because his default was always to smile, but he seemed taken aback.
For a second his eyes veered across the road in my direction.
The woman said something else, flicking a sleek ponytail over her shoulder.
He looked at me again, then back to her.
He gestured toward the back of the shop but she shook her head, still smiling, pointing at herself.
A hand briefly on his arm again. Even from across the street I could see how immaculate she was, how out of step with the chaotic, cluttered surroundings of the shop.
“Hello?” a voice said behind me, and I turned to the kindly woman at the counter, who helped me order what Johan had said we needed. She spoke English, and she was patient as I buffooned with my wallet of unknown currency.
When I looked for Johan again he was further back in the shop, talking to someone standing under a dim hanging bulb.
It didn’t seem to be the woman; she had gone.
Out in the street, loud music started from somewhere.
I could only see Johan faintly, obscured now and then by passing tuk-tuks and flags and people queuing behind me, but I sensed something wasn’t right.
I wish I could somehow have known, in that moment, what was happening, because it was the beginning of our end. I wish I’d run over and put a stop to it all. But I couldn’t know, didn’t know—and I still don’t know, to this day—what took place in that shop.
A moment or two later, he reappeared.
“Everything OK?” I asked. He spotted a couple leaving a table near the counter and steered us over.
“I think so,” he said. “It wasn’t quite the warm welcome my colleague said I’d get.
And the kid did not seem bothered by the jaggery balls.
I was told he’d be bouncing off the ceiling when I turned up.
Nobody makes jaggery balls like the Burmese, apparently.
” He shrugged, said something in Swedish that apparently shared some basic DNA with you win some, you lose some, and I let it go.
The soy milk drinks and patongos were delicious.
We explored the nearby shops, filling Johan’s now-empty bag with Chinese lanterns, friendship bracelets, and beads of all colors for his best friend’s kid back in Sweden.
We photographed birds’ nests and shark fins and stood for ages in a small temple under hundreds of swaying lanterns, the air oddly silent save for what sounded like a shop-counter bell.
We made up a story about Kiri and Bastard, two dogs we’d dreamed up, and had to leave the temple because we were laughing too much.
Then we went back to our hotel and slept all afternoon, because the rain had returned and besides, it was too hot to do anything else.
When I woke he was standing by the window, looking out. There was no view to speak of, just a wall a few meters away with rain hurtling past, but I sensed he wasn’t really looking anyway.
“Everything all right?”
“Oh, hey. Yes,” he said, but there was a small pause, and I knew he was lying.
I asked if he was sure, just like we always do when we really mean, I am unsettled by your mood, please tell me what’s happening. And he said he was sure, like we always do, when we are not OK but haven’t yet found the words to explain why.
—
He was still off when we went out that evening. I suggested the night market but he said it would be crawling with tourists, and how about we went to one of the go-go bar districts?
“Really?”
“Why not!”
“I didn’t have you down as a go-go bar kind of a guy,” I said, after a pause.
“I’m not. But do you not find the whole thing quite fascinating? As a cultural phenomenon?”
“Er…Well, no.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t the infectious barrel-roll of sound I’d come to love.
“We don’t have to, if you’re not keen,” he said, coming over to me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, a towel around my middle. “I’ve just always found these sorts of places fascinating.”
“No, I’ll come…”
“We can call it research,” Johan said.
“What are we researching? Sex? I think we’re very good at that already.”
He smiled. “Me too.” He rubbed his right eye, which, I’d noticed, had been twitching.
“Rubbing it won’t help,” I said.
He laughed weakly. “Yes, Doctor Carrie.” He sat down next to me. “What I probably need to do is take a rest.”
“Have you had much time off since you flew out?”
He shook his head. “I can only dive for two hours at a time, but there’s been a lot of other stuff. I haven’t stopped at all.”
I squeezed his leg. “Perhaps we should just stay in.”
“Maybe. But I want to go out too. Shall we?”
I started laughing. “Oh, for God’s sake. Fine. Yes. We’ll go out.”
And so off we went, into the boiling evening.
—