immy and I headed south again.
You
J can’t have a meaningful conversation riding on the back of a motorbike, but around midday, we were back in Nakhon Si Thammarat. I thought we were heading for the town centre again, but in his usual way, Jimmy turned off without saying anything and headed through side streets that skirted the town. Then he turned off again and headed towards the hills to the west.
We passed through a village, and I thought we were heading to the jungle again, until I saw a white and gold wall. Behind it was a Buddhist temple. We drove through the main gate;
Jimmy parked the bike at the shade beneath a tree and dismounted.
For a moment, he stood there rolling another in his usual way and licking the paper while I, of course, waited.
“Is this where the hornbills live?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he said. He pointed to the hills. “Maybe they’re sat up there, waiting for you.” He paused to suck some smoke but looked at me like I was stupid. “I thought you’d like to see where Cass stayed. I think his friend, the old monk, the one he called Ajahn Lee, has moved on, but the other monks should be somewhere around.”
It seemed like a good idea to me. I’d been thinking as we drove down that everything felt a bit of an anti-climax. It looked as if Cass was going to be OK, Mark was heading to Bangkok and seemed to be think he could influence things from there, and Jimmy and I were finished. What more was there to do? Anyway, I only had a few days left of my holiday.
The grounds of the temple were eerily quiet, but this was, after all, midday. The sun was overhead, the sky was pale blue with a scattering of small white clouds, and the heat was sticky and oppressive. Even the dogs lay asleep with only enough energy to raise their heads to check us out when we arrived. Having dismounted and distanced myself from the stink of Jimmy’s smoke, I took a breath of that sweet scent that had become so familiar to me since I’d arrived.
We never experienced scents like that back in Edmonton.
Back there, the only smells are diesel fumes and the stink that came each time we tipped bins of domestic waste into the back of the truck. I’d watch the black plastic bags burst and release all manner of disgusting human detritus as they were
mechanically crunched and compressed. Here, I’d passed a few smelly drains, but it was the scent from the clusters of frangipani flowers growing on the short trees with their big shiny oval-shaped leaves that I found so evocative.
The frangipani is, I think, the flower I would like placed next to my nose as I drifted off into my final long sleep. I don’t think Jimmy was giving much thought to his own death because, right then, he was breathing in another lungful of toxic smoke. Instead, he pointed to the hills behind a row of wooden shacks built on stilts beyond the main temple. “You want to take a stroll, Kurt?”
“Sure,” I replied.
“Can you stand the heat?” he said with a smirk.
Jimmy’s humour was never amusing so I shrugged.
Cass had said that he’d walked up into these hills with the old monk he called Ajahn Lee and I’ll never forget what he’d then said in the police station in Surat Thani. He was struggling to speak clearly and constantly scratching at insect bites. “I’d never talked to anyone like that before,” he said. “Ajahn Lee opened my eyes.”
Does it surprise you that a boy can grow into a man without ever having had a deep conversation with an older, wiser man? It doesn’t surprise me. Who had I ever met who influenced me? I’d known Willie in school, of course. Willie was a bit of a laugh and a sort of a cool rebel beneath his hair but, being a teacher, he’d had to toe the line or be hauled before a disciplinary committee and lose his job and pension.
I understood his predicament.
After that all I could think of was Coolie, Friggin, Lennie or Bungee and all I remember learning from Friggin was the words to Hoochie Coochie man. As for women there was only
my mother and Miss Edwards who would sigh and roll her eyes whenever she saw me coming along the school corridor.
I needed to feel it was OK to ask questions. I wanted to learn physics and chemistry without goggles on. If I blew the school up testing out aerosol cans over a pile of burning paper at the back of Miss Edwards class, so be it. I wanted to learn by doing things. I needed to know how accurate I could be if I flicked my pen top at the back of Miss Edwards head with the elastic band in my pocket. I didn’t just want to turn up to enable the school to tick a few boxes.
Courtney Learner: Attendance 100% but shows little interest and must learn to concentrate. Tick!
I reckon I learned more from You Tube clips that from school.
I suppose I needed to get out and learn from experience like Cass.
I now know that inspiration can come from the most unlikely people. Cass had had his eyes opened by a Buddhist monk, and I was to be reminded of that some days later when we all met up in Park Road.
And then there was Winston. I remember him describing the hacking of Khan’s computer. He was on an emotional high, the likes of which I’d never seen in Winston before.
Enthusiasm exuded through every pore as he tried to explain to me, a refuse collector, about encryption keys, bit locker drives, and things he called Crypto walls and Torrent lockers.
Mixed in with his enthusiasm for weird-sounding technology, it was Willie said this and Willie said that. Willie suggested something, Willie thought this and Willie thought that. The night before, Willie and he had dismantled an old Wi-Fi router, and Willie had explained all the bits and pieces and
moved on to explaining radio and how a router converted signals into radio waves. In Winston’s opinion, Willie – a white, long-haired and somewhat eccentric teacher—really was the bee’s knees. It was obvious that Willie was going out of his way to build Winston’s confidence and enthusiasm.
Why? I suppose Willie saw something in Winston that no one else had even bothered to look for.
And then there was Walid, orphaned by war and who, like me, Winston, Kevin and Cass, knew nothing of his father. Walid was enthusing about ancient car maintenance manuals Gordon kept in a cupboard in his office.
“You should see this amazing collection, Kurt. They go right back to 1947. I’d never heard of some old British car makes like Austin, Riley, Morris, and Hillman. I never knew what a pre-selector gear box was until I read one of Gord’s books about Armstrong-Siddeley cars. And did you know about a German car make called NSU that started in business 150
years ago, Kurt? Gord’s got a manual on a 1964 NSU Wankel Spider. It’s real cool, Kurt. Gord told me all about Wankel engines. Did you know they don’t have pistons but what Gord called an eccentric rotary design? The rotor is similar in shape to the Reuleaux triangle, except the sides have less curvature.
And they give three power pulses per revolution. Gord says they are a lot smoother than standard piston engines, but they are not very fuel efficient. Do you want to see a cut-away diagram of one, Kurt? I’ll ask Gord if I can borrow it.”
I knew nothing of Winston’s and Walid’s new-found enthusiasms when I set off through the trees with Jimmy, but I could imagine Cass, brought up as a Moslem, walking this same steep route with an old Buddhist monk called Ajahn Lee.
So, Jimmy and I set off in the heat of the day with just two bottles of water, my wallet, my phone, and a last pack of peppermint Chiclets in my backpack. Jimmy had no bag, but the pockets of his baggy yellow trousers bulged and drooped under the weight of his phone, wallet, tobacco, and packets of Rizla paper.
We trudged upwards following a rough path that often petered out, forcing us to go back and try another route. At one point, we waded across a shallow stream and stopped to watch hundreds of multicoloured butterflies feasting on the mud, and I managed a good photo of a big white one with orange tips.
I offered Jimmy a bottle of water, but he waved it away and drank water from the stream instead.
Feeling like a wimp, I then did the same. Then I watched him remove his trousers and tartan boxer shorts and wash them in the stream. He hung them on a bush and then removed his sweaty tee shirt, washed it and hung that on the bush, too.
Then, completely naked except for a covering of tattoos that had so far stayed out of my sight, he sat on a fallen tree trunk and rolled himself another, blowing smoke up into the humid air. He seemed relaxed and very settled, but looking at a brown and white naked man is not my sort of relaxation.
“How long will your clothes take to dry?” I asked him.
“Do they need to dry. Kurt? They were wet with sweat ten minutes ago.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” I said feebly. “Normally, I try to wear dry clothes but under the circumstances…”
“If you don’t want to sit down, Kurt, why not go and look for a few hornbills? I don’t guarantee you’ll see one, but you might strike lucky. But watch out for Burmese pythons. They like to sunbathe at this time of day.”
“I like snakes,” I said. “The bigger the better. I’ll head on up.
Cass mentioned a nice view at the top.”
He said nothing but waved a hand that was more of a dismissal than a see-you-later type of wave, and I set off following the stream upwards.