All around the walls hung heavy sequined tapestries. Scenes of death, love, of the battle; of evil and good; of the demons and the heroes of the Ramakien, all portrayed in relief. Rich gold embossed details on coarse brown fabric. A Burmese man sat at a table tuning a receiver to the World Service.
Dressed in faded denims, he wandered past bottles wrapped in shining glittered paper for the connoisseurs of fine liquors. His shirt was stained and punctured with wear. Jeans stretched, they hung loosely around his buttocks and were frayed at the ankles. Sweat gathered in black shavings where the plastic straps of his thongs rubbed his toes. And he shuffled around the aisles, parted the hair away from his eyes and stared along the display for the right whisky.
A Thai soldier adjusts his steel-rimmed sunglasses. He stands legs astride, feels the tension in his thighs, holds the gun from the hip. He raises a bottle of whisky to his lips, eats glass he does and watches old American war movies. Likes to sprinkle bullets in the air when he's alone, and when he's not he fucks with boots on. She can see her face in the shine.
To the left, the broken dam had caused the valley flood… The water chased the road around each curve, disappeared behind cleared out mounds of mud then came back to swamp them in a pall of grey mist. Black trees stuck out leafless and drowning, isolated stick creatures stretched out as frozen cracks on the surface. Wooden huts sat like fat shining slugs on gnarled logs in the water, some huddled close, linked with rotting planks, while others were pushed away from the pack, as if they had quietly lost their mooring and had absent-mindedly floated away.
“Cholera is not that serious. You can cure it easily…”
A pale moon, the color of muslin, lit the town with the soft touch of cat’s fur. It remained un-wavered by thin grey wisps of cloud that passed in front; the streets were dark with shadows that bulged and re-formed as the figures moved through them, slow stately figures gliding like statues on air, and the women treaded with the soft pat of thongs as girls who kicked puffs of dirt around them flitted this way and that behind serene mothers.
It was on a new continent that I pushed past the hustle and bustle of the main streets and followed the line along the shore. Further from the town piles of rejected drums lay like scattered rocks by the roadside. The Garifuna are famous for their drumming. On a boat to Caye Caulker a man had advised that the only good accommodation was three bamboo tree houses hidden away in a small bay further south; he kept repeating, “Go to the tree houses, go to the tree houses.”
Karin was with a friend. They came over together, grabbed another chair for our table, and then they sat down. Karin looked pleased to see me. Her friend looked at me with contempt. I didn't look pleased to see Karin.
Karin skipped through the barriers and past a security guard. She took one final look back at me, over her shoulder and her eyes were green as the misty slopes of her Cambrian childhood, glistening despite the cold neon lights.
Alone again, and I had all the time to look at the room. It was unseasonably hot and I switched the fan to circulate the heat from the walls. It started slowly, each blade cutting the air in steady breaths until it spun into a whorl that swept the hair away from my face. The light was off and from the window, dusk shifted a red and orange hue across the walls. I looked out and beyond the river. The silhouettes of corn terraces scanned the valley, black mountainside beneath red shimmered light, a dying sun that left colours in the water like blood on oil.
