The VIP

‘He is very important’ the Thammasat professors had told Catherine. So much so that he couldn’t even come to our house. I pooh poohed it gently. She listened to me then, and when he called was a little severe, cryptic down the line, requiring him meet her before any terms were agreed. He suggested a restaurant and she elected ‘The rib room’ upstairs at The Landmark.

They met for dinner with his young second wife, ex soap super-star, who was the student, as it turned out, but did not really want to learn English beyond mitigating the embarrassment and tedium of international parties. Inauspicious, though it was Chinese new year, and they stuffed a red envelope with crisp thousands which Catherine carried home, slightly disapprovingly, for Kit.

And he was as important as they had threatened. Suddenly I started noticing him on TV all the time, usually those stuffy occasions where the white bemedalled suits of the men are overshadowed only by the monumental hair of their women.

They did come to our house too, usually in the afternoons. Nee or I always took Kit out then anyway, either for him hang out with European friends or more often swimming or skating or to join a gymnastics class upstairs at the Emporium.

There was some comedy in their diminutive motorcade, with its single police outrider, struggling down Sukumvit 71, before pulling into the compound of our ungainly high rise. The driver would go off to eat on our vital Soi and then gossip with the condo security guards while he sat at a Carrefour trestle table reading our books in the otherwise bare, main room. She and Catherine working hard in the study.

One afternoon after the lesson the three of them slogged up Sukumvit in the Benz to meet Kit and me at Phrom Pong before we all went on to Pan Pan on soi 33 to have a pizza. Entering the restaurant reminded me of the time I had seen the prime minister there with his daughter and her friends; deep wais and scurrying staff stumbling to neurotically reposition already perfectly arranged napkins. We talked of many things; he in modulated American flecked English and she in varieties of pidgin. I steered a little near the waterfall trying to understand the minutiae of Chinese immigration and their ethnic domination of the Thais but otherwise he was charming and informative.

He was by now old though how much so was difficult to tell. Years of good living and surgery conspired to give him a kind of unsettling agelessness. As the younger scion of a banking dynasty he had studied economics in America and then worked in Thai industries during the heady tiger years though he ruefully bemoaned the splendid wealth of his older brother. His life now seemed to consist of a kind of pallid internationalism, friendship and support toward those who had to govern, and making merit via donations to Wats in different parts of the country. One in Pai I remember in particular.

She was an orphan of complicated lives.

At one point while He was telling us they were part of the delegation that would meet the royal dignitary flying in from Scandinavia that very evening she grasped Kit's hands turning them palms down. He was a wild creature then and she visibly recoiled from the speckled dirt under his nails.

It went on for a while like this. It was a faux pas when I leaned on his patronage to transfer Min’s brother in law from the post office job on soi 23 to Lopburi to be near the wider family and imposition again when we asked him arranged for kilos of our documents for the Italian lawsuit to be shipped via air for next to nothing.

Then quite suddenly she stopped studying.

Catherine said it was because of my nightlife.

We would still bump into them accidentally but cordially in malls. The last time the day before we left. Then we drank a coffee together and he asked me with curious fathomlessness what I did in my free time before wishing us a good journey home.

Eyes obsidian.

© Icarus. All rights reserved by the author.