Good Friends Read online

  “No. Why?”

  “Are you a picky eater? Any food aversions?”

  “No. I eat pretty much everything.”

  “Goody.”

  He called over the waitress and spoke to her in what to Caroline’s ear was perfect Thai. He slipped the girl a banknote and she nodded and went out the side exit that led down to the street.

  “What’s going on?” Caroline said.

  “A little surprise.” He scratched his chin. “So, a spot of medical tourism, is it? Or a longer stay?”

  “We’re here for a while.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my husband.”

  “And where’s hubby?”

  “Working.” She sipped her coffee. “And you? You speak the language, so I’m guessing you live here?”

  “Oh, God, you flatter me. I know a word or two of the lingo, that’s all. But, yes, I live here. For the moment. I’ll flit away when I no longer find it agreeable.”

  “And what do you do, Charlie?”

  He tilted his head winningly. “Such an American question.”

  “And one you’re not obliged to answer.”

  “No, no,” he said, waving a hand again, “I’m an open book. No secrets. I export jewelry. There’s still quite an appetite in Europe and the States for the baubles from here and Indochina.”

  He looked up as the waitress returned carrying something in a plastic bag. She set it down in front of Caroline, and opened it to reveal a brightly colored salad.

  “Som tum,” Charlie said. “Green papaya salad with shrimp and peanuts.”

  Caroline tasted it. Lime. Chilies. Something sweet she couldn’t identify.

  “My God,” she said, “this is delicious.”

  He grinned. “The best on the island. From a stall right down on the street. The locals travel miles for it.”

  She took another forkful. “There’s something in here I can’t put a name to...”

  “Probably tamarind.”

  “Yes. Mnnn. Please, can I pay you for this?”

  He waved this away. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Seeing your pleasure is payment enough.”

  Charlie looked over her shoulder and his smile vanished. He glanced at his watch, grabbed his phone and stood.

  “Oh hell, sorry, I’ve lost track of the time. I have to be down in Kathu in ten minutes. A bloody visa thing. You enjoy your salad and I hope to see you soon.”

  He waved and hurried out the exit, swallowed up by the glare.

  5

  Charlie Hepworth dashed out the door, past the ATMs and the mini mart, and down the ramp to where hundreds of scooters were shoehorned into a triangular parking lot.

  As he approached the bikes he passed a hunched woman in brown bush hat and men’s shoes, with a wooden box of lotto tickets hanging from her shoulders.

  Normally he would’ve stopped and had a flutter, but this was not the time.

  Looking back he vaulted a low rail and squeezed between two bikes, cursing as he saw one of them had left an oil stain on his linen pants.

  He spotted no one in pursuit.

  Yet.

  He found his gorgeous crème 1967 Vespa Primavera, as glamorous as an Italian starlet amongst the throng of ugly little Japanese bikes.

  Wheeling the scooter free of its neighbors, he glanced over at the hospital again.

  While he’d been chatting to the American woman he’d glimpsed an all-too-familiar bulky figure on an escalator.

  An Australian named Murray Muldoon.

  Last seen in Bali three years ago.

  Charlie had made him certain promises regarding a surefire investment in an eco-resort in Ubud that he’d never intended to honor, and he’d fled Indonesia owing the Aussie a small fortune. Muldoon, a heavy drinker and, in his day, a famously vicious Aussie rules football player, was not the kind of man you crossed.

  Had Muldoon seen him?

  Charlie couldn’t be sure but he didn’t intend to wait to find out.

  He stowed the Vespa’s stand with a flick of his espadrille, leaned the scooter a little to the left and kicked the bike to start it.

  Nothing.

  This was distressing.

  His Vespa, despite its Italian heritage, had never been temperamental.

  He kicked it again.

  Zero.

  He was sweating from the heat and agitation.

  Charlie stole another look back and felt a little froth of bile rise in his throat.

  Murray Muldoon was barging down the ramp, elbowing aside diminutive Thais the way he’d bumped aside opponents on his way to the try line.

  Charlie frantically kicked at the bike.

  No joy.

  Kicked again.

  This time the bike fired and he slalomed off toward the exit, but not before he heard Muldoon yell, “Come back here you fucking poofter bastard!”

  Charlie zipped into the road and fell in with a mosquito swarm of scooters and let them drag him toward the safety of Phuket Town.

  He needed a drink.

  Jesus Christ, he needed a brace of bloody drinks.

  Doubles.

  6

  When Caroline came downstairs it was dark.

  Michael was in the kitchen, cooking pasta.

  On her return from the hospital she’d passed his study and heard the rattle of his keyboard, so she’d gone into the bedroom without disturbing him and taken a nap.

  She sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter, watching as he emptied tinned tomatoes into a saucepan and chopped four cloves of garlic. He always made the same sauce. Marinara.

  “Everything go okay at the hospital?” he asked, scraping the garlic into the pan.

  “Yes,” she said. “Fine.”

  He was drinking red wine and raised the bottle questioningly. She shook her head.

  “We had a visitor today,” he said, adding basil to the sauce.

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh huh. There was a woman in the living room when I got home. At first I thought she was you.”

  “Not the woman from next door?”

  He looked up, surprised. “Yes. You’ve met her?”

  “No. I saw her when I was walking on the beach this morning. Who is she?”

  “Her name’s Liz Keller. She’s our landlady.”

  “Really? I had no idea we had a landlady.”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “What did she want?”

  “To introduce herself. See if everything’s okay. Apparently she arrived last night from Zürich.”

  “She’s Swiss?”

  “No, American.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “A little gushy and overfamiliar. You know the type? I’ll bet she calls celebrities by their first names, as if they’re her besties.”

  Michael strained the pasta and added it to the sauce. He dished the food into two plates and set one down in front of Caroline and sat opposite her.

  “So you thought that she was me?” Caroline said.

  “Only for a second. Up close you’re not at all alike. You’re way out of her league.”

  She dragged down the side of her mouth in a sour smile and said, “Want to hear something really weird?”

  “Sure,” he said, twisting spaghetti onto his fork.

  “When I first saw her I thought she was me too.”

  He stared at Caroline as he chewed.

  She said, “This morning, on the beach, I was in a kind of a stupor. The heat and the ocean. I was wandering along daydreaming when I looked up at what I thought was our house and saw myself on the deck and for just an instant I had a kind of out-of-body experience.”

  “That is weird.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Michael’s phone rang and he looked at it and said, “Sorry. Work.”

  She nodded and he walked out onto the deck talking about stress bearing beams.

  Caroline toyed with her pasta and found herself thinking about snow and ice and blood and low-rent loo
k-alikes.

  7

  Liz Keller rolled a joint, her fingers deft and practiced.

  She ran the rice paper across the tip of her tongue and glued it closed, creating a tapering white cylinder the length of her pinkie.

  She used a beeswax coated hemp wick to fire up the joint. Not for her a lighter’s foul butane or a throat full of sulfur from a matchstick.

  With the capacity of a free diver she held the weed in her lungs and then slowly released it in a fragrant cloud. She was smoking the local sativa strain, with its distinctive earthy smell.

  Perfect for mellowing out.

  Liz sat on the sofa in the living room with her feet curled under her, eyes closed, listening to Portishead’s timeless “Strangers.” A few years ago Jürgen had installed an obscenely expensive sound system, and it did full justice to Beth Gibbon’s soaring, ethereal voice.

  Jürgen, of course, had played nothing but eighties soft rock.

  Phil Collins.

  Air Supply.

  Foreigner.

  The fucking philistine.

  For a moment Jürgen was right there in the room, wasted on cognac, lip-syncing to “I Want to Know What Love Is” as he danced his hard paunch toward her.

  His idea of foreplay.

  But when Liz opened her eyes she saw only the moon reflected in the ocean and the winking lights of fishing boats on the horizon.

  Jürgen Keller’s lip-syncing days were over.

  He was worm food in Zürich’s Sihlfeld Cemetery.

  Liz’s chilled mood had soured and she stabbed the joint dead in the ashtray on the side table.

  Her phone had lain on the table muted and ignored the whole day and she saw she had a slew of voice and text messages.

  They would only bring her down even more.

  Better to Marie Kondo the fuck out of them.

  Liz clicked out a tray on her phone, revealing the two SIM cards inside.

  She lifted one and applied it to the flame of the hemp wick that was still burning. It flared and smoldered and shriveled. She dumped the residue in the ashtray.

  She’d get a new card in the morning.

  Liz clicked back the card tray, leaving the second SIM undisturbed.

  Only one person in the whole wide world knew that number.

  8

  Caroline stood under the tepid shower washing her hair.

  She stepped out of the stall, dried her body and wrapped herself in a towel.

  The bathroom was almost forensic in its sterility. It was her favorite room in the house. The only one without windows.

  Caroline stared at herself in the mirror above the sink, water from her hair like teardrops on her cheeks. There were lines on her face that had not been there a year ago. Lines that were the product of suffering. Suffering that had not led to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. She had learned no lessons worth learning.

  Turning away, she made a turban of a hand towel, and dressed in panties and white T-shirt. She flossed and brushed her teeth.

  Opening the door she left the en suite. Michael lay on the bed reading his iPad, wearing only boxers.

  The aircon was cranked to its maximum, but still the room was hotter than she liked. Michael enjoyed the heat. A warmer blooded creature than she. He scratched at his chest hair, looked up at her and smiled. In his tortoise shell reading glasses he looked like a porn actor’s idea of college professor.

  She laughed at this notion.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head and sat at the vanity and clicked on her hair dryer, the howl ending any attempt at conversation. Staring at her twin reflection in the wing mirrors, she dried and brushed her hair.

  When she was done she killed the dryer and saw that Michael had set the iPad down on the bedside table. He removed his glasses and watched her.

  Staying seated on the vanity stool, she swiveled to face him and said, “I also met somebody today.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Uh huh. A man.”

  “A man?”

  “Yup.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “At the hospital. In the coffee shop.” Michael raised his eyebrows, smiling complacently. “He said he’d seen me before, and told me that I was walking better.”

  “He’s right. You are.”

  She shrugged.

  “Sounds like he was hitting on you,” Michael said.

  “He wasn’t. Anyway, I think he was gay.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, he was British, so it was difficult to tell.”

  Michael laughed. He had good teeth. She’d always liked his teeth.

  “He said I looked like the young Grace Kelly.”

  “Definitely gay.” He patted the covers beside him. “Why don’t you come to bed?”

  Caroline didn’t reply. Opening a drawer she removed a tube of moisturizer and started rubbing it into her face.

  Michael switched off the lamp on his bedside table. She could feel his eyes on her.

  She applied the lotion with exaggerated thoroughness, hoping he’d fall asleep.

  9

  Charlie Hepworth was as pissed as a fart, as his loathsome sadist of a father had been wont to say.

  The sighting of Murray Muldoon had sent him to a dingy backstreet boozer patronized exclusively by Thai working men.

  Safe from a farang like Muldoon.

  Two drinks had become many more and he was feeling no pain as he made his way into an alley in Phuket Town, the night air thick with the heady mix of spicy street food and over-burdened sewers.

  Charlie emerged between two crumbling buildings and made his careful way toward what looked like a semi-derelict bus depot, Asian hip hop thudding out into the night.

  He exchanged a few words with two massive Thais in sweats and a door was unbolted and rolled back to allow access.

  A crowd of men stood in a circle in the huge space.

  Charlie’s was the only pale face in the throng.

  He pushed his way through to the inner circle of the ring.

  A bank of blinding lights was suspended from the exposed lattice of ceiling struts, shining down on the stained concrete floor.

  The music cut and the voice of a man speaking speedy Thai boomed across the room.

  This was met with an ovation as two women in white robes emerged from opposite sides of the circle and stood back to back, raising an arm in turn as they were introduced to cheers and wolf whistles.

  One woman was tall and ebony with the face of a Nubian princess, her hair buzzed to her skull, tribal markings furrowing her cheeks.

  The other was Thai, squat with the wide face of one of the northern hill tribes, her short hair dyed blonde, standing in quills.

  The cheers swelled when a fat man in a suit the color of pond scum joined the women.

  He acknowledged the applause with beringed hands, smiling, revealing teeth studded with precious stones.

  Charlie knew him as Tua Hea, Thai for monitor lizard.

  The fat man encouraged the punters to bet on either sida (black) or sikhaw (white) and wads of baht were shoved into the hands of his flunkies who walked amongst the crowd.

  Charlie was going through a dry patch fiscally, but he had a good feeling about the black girl so he scribbled fifty thousand and his name on a scrap of paper and handed it to one of the men.

  The man tried to return it, but Charlie shooed him away, pointing to Tua Hea.

  The flunky went to the big man and showed him the paper, pointing at Charlie.

  Tua Hea stared at him.

  Charlie put his palms together.

  Tua Hea pocketed the scrap, then, without blinking, drew a finger across his throat.

  10

  When Caroline saw in the mirror that Michael was lying on his side facing the wall, she stood up from the vanity and crossed the bedroom with as much stealth as she could muster, willing her right foot not to drag on the tiles.

  Her beside lamp was the only light in the
room and she clicked it off and lay down on the bed, careful not to disturb Michael.

  But not careful enough.

  He rolled toward her and embraced her. He was aroused. When he tried to kiss her she pulled away.

  He said nothing. She could hear his breath as he lay back on his pillow. After a minute he left the bed and slid open the door, walking onto the deck.

  The moon was bright enough for her to see him standing by the railing, staring at the ocean.

  She knew she should call out to him. Tell him to come back.

  But she didn’t.

  11

  In the makeshift arena Charlie sucked the life from a Dunhill, trod on the butt and immediately lit another. Around him men were shouting and drinking, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and sour sweat.

  The last of the bets were in and the fat man spread his arms in a Christ-like attitude. When he dropped them the women, in perfect synchronization, opened their robes and let them float to the concrete. They were naked, their bodies oiled and glistening in the hard light, and the crowd erupted.

  After a flunky scuttled over and took the robes, Tua Hea barked, “Fight!” in Thai, clapped his hands twice and retreated into the throng.

  The women spun to face one another, crouching, circling, fists raised.

  Charlie was so close to them he could hear their breath and smell the fear on their bodies.

  With blinding speed the African swung a long leg, catching the Thai in her midriff, sending the shorter woman tumbling to the floor. Charlie yelled his appreciation.

  The tall woman flung herself at her opponent, only to be rebuffed by a kick from the ground that flung her backward, giving the bottle blonde time to spring to her feet and punch the African in the face, blood welling from her mouth.

  She tripped her and the two naked women were in a clinch, rolling on the concrete, faces contorted with strain.

  The African broke the clinch and was on her feet again. The Thai woman rebounded like a coiled spring and threw a flurry of blows which the African evaded easily, taunting her opponent, to the amusement of the spectators.