Bangkok Noir

“It certainly wasn’t the worst thing you did. You were lying to people for years about serious things. Pretending to talk to relatives on this side. Having the mourning ones hand over their valuables. Giving them false hope. You’ve pissed off a lot of folk, Samart. A lot of lost souls are dying to meet you. We have a little admiration society. We Buddhists may not have a heaven, Teacher Wong, but we have a nice selection of hells. We’re on our way to one I think you’ll enjoy.”

The scene beyond the windows had passed quickly through purple dusk to a mauve-black night. The only lights beside the road came from bushes burning. The car began to slow and figures stepped out from behind the bonfires. It occurred to Samart that whoever researched for the Living Dead movies had done a field trip to purgatory because zombies really did look like that. Some of them made Halfhead seem positively pretty. They laboured painfully toward the car as it rolled to a stop.

“Look,” Samart said, holding back his panic, “I want to lodge an appeal. I get sent to hell because I got the lottery numbers wrong? That’s ridiculous, and it’s not fair. I was just starting to make something of myself.”

“Based on lies, Samart. As always. Do you really think it doesn’t matter? People came to you out of desperation. They wanted help. My husband was a security guard. He got laid off during the recession. He was depressed. He turned to drink. Our poor but happy life was disintegrating. My neighbour told me you had a gift. I came to you and…”

“I know you?”

“You probably don’t remember me. I’ve let myself go a bit since then. I told you about our problem. I gave you a sack of rice and my mother’s ring and you gave me the lottery numbers. I asked if you were sure. You were confident. You said you’d seen the numbers in a dream, but you couldn’t be certain what order they would appear in. I believed in you. I put all the savings I’d hidden away from my husband, sold our fruit handcart, borrowed money from friends and bought every ticket—every combination of those numbers. Every ticket I could find from one side of the city to the other. And the lottery numbers were announced, and not one of your numbers came up. Not one, Samart. Now what are the odds of that? There should be a prize for having no numbers, don’t you think?”

“It’s a gamble. You can’t blame—”

He was interrupted by the clawing of blackened fingernails against the windows. To his horror, Halfhead started to wind down the glass.

“Well, I do,” she said. “You gave me your word and I believed you. My husband was sober when I told him I’d lost all our money. He smiled and walked out. When he came back a few hours later with the machete, he was drunk. I don’t know where he’d found the booze. We had no cash. He’s a strong man. It only took one blow to do this. Impressive, isn’t it? Split down the middle like a coconut. I didn’t feel a thing. Not until I got here. Then the hurt and resentment began.”

“I didn’t…”

“Yes, you did. And you deserve whatever’s coming to you. You’ll have an awful time here, Samart. My job’s done. I’ll eventually move on to somewhere with better décor, but you’ve accrued so much bad debt, you’ll be here for a very long time. You’ll have an age to meet all those spirits you claimed to be talking to when you were back there. And you’d be surprised how many of us gals are still in need of a good invoking from time to time. You’re going to have your work cut out for you, Teacher Wong.”

Icy hands reached in through the window and caressed the petrified shaman, lifted his shirt, pinched at his soft flesh. His eyes were red even without the benefit of makeup. His heart was full and heavy as lard and sliding gradually down to the hole in his front. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he imagined his future. A miserable future without end. And as if all that weren’t bad enough… the beer was crap.

Colin Cotterill

Colin Cotterill was born in London and trained as a teacher and set off on a world tour that didn’t ever come to an end. Colin has taught and trained teachers in Thailand and on the Burmese border. He spent several years in Laos, initially with UNESCO and wrote and produced a forty-program language teaching series; English By Accident, for Thai national television.

All the while, Colin continued with his two other passions; cartooning and writing. He contributed regular columns for the Bangkok Post. It wasn’t until his work with trafficked children that he found himself sufficiently stimulated to put together his first novel, The Night Bastard (Suk’s Editions. 2000). The reaction to that first attempt was so positive that Colin decided to take time off and write full-time.