Some days of Mercedes' autumn

Her third child, Sin had long splayed feet and walked ungainly from his earliest days. He was flawed scion of an island family and his uncle worked out of Nakhon Si Thammarat as a hitman.

I first remember him on Chaweng beach, bathing with a furious abandon. About 1998.

He and Kit would became firm friends curdled by our frequent visits and their shared prowess with coconut, lizard and lime.

When they were 8 and 9 respectively we took our last holiday on Koh Samui. It turned out to be nearly a month of goodbyes, some quite abstract. The days ripped by the flailing hot season and my life in tatters too.

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One such afternoon Mercedes and Jaeb, her house boy were on the bleached flat roof across from our balcony discussing the relentless march of the foreign weevil destroying the palms. What else did they talk about? I could barely hear nor lip read. Now I wonder how and whether departure was insinuated.

The night before thieves had come to our apartment. They used an anaesthetic spray and in the morning we awoke to the loss of the usual clutch of credit cards, cellular phones, a passport or two.

I stumbled over to Mercedes’ place in the grip of manacle headache to find the interior doors shut tight.

Jaeb sulked terribly for the rest of the day and later even abandoned Kit near Sin’s school as punishment for some perceived impudence that I could never trace.

Their ménage was changing.

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The ghoulish flutter of madness no longer caressed my thoughts if I was hardly well when Mercedes and Sin came to see us in England, months after our return. She and Jaeb were recently wed and determined to move to Lake Geneva where she had ‘finished’ thirty five  years before.  And to educate Sin, mitigate his mild derangement.

Catherine and she gossiped all day in our kitchen. Harpies of deliverance.

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London. Two years on.

'Let’s get the boys together’ she had said. And so we took a morning train from Brighton to the shabby rambling apartment in a swanky West End square. The fading colossus of her wealth!

Geneva wasn’t working she explained. Though Sin was settled and Jaeb now part of the diaspora, resident visas beyond their reach.

It was a Sunday. Her grown up daughter, of fleet mind, and the father, a Barbadian cricketer turned TV pundit dropped by while later her first husband telephoned from under the antipodean sun.

We took the kids to a movie, ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’. They were mostly fantasy.

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Kit and I had travelled 24 hours by coach across France to see her,  on our way to Venice where Catherine was living.  During that arthritic night we were befriended by a trim disconsolate Bangladeshi in the seat adjacent, til morning at the Swiss border. Shouldnt they have known all passports are fake before detaining him?

That day out together in central squares and the flea market  we haggled over small chunks of lava or meteorite, remaindered books and crockery.

Until towards twilight,  while we were eating ice-cream and the watery plume hung over the lake, Mercedes, thumbs swollen with an aged congestion, recounted how Chinese malfeasants had first brought coconuts to Samui to use as packaging for opium.

She was going to sell the London flat, auction the estate in Thailand and they would head for New Mexico.

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Colonial waves continue to beat on indigenous shore.

Pity the littoral.

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