October 10, 2009

DESPERATELY trying to cheer myself up after a disastrous first 48 hours, and frankly quite a little fearful, I headed on down to the delicious beachside bungalow resort I'd recommended to my parents. We were going for dinner, and so I'd put on one of my customary long sleeve rolled-up shirts and applied myself with a little Pomegranate Noire cologne, a gift from my dear and much-missed, much-loved ex from her first New York trip, back in the not-so-far-off-at-all days when she loved me to death. The cologne is a Jo Malone product, of which I'm rather partial.

"Ooh," said my mother, as we walked, so terribly slowly, up towards the main road in Lamai, Koh Samui, my Thailand haven. "You smell nice. Is that your lovely Germaline?"

How apt, and what a metaphor, with which to introduce you to my latest instalment of Thai Tales...

1

IT STARTED with a dreadful bump in the night. Two, in fact.

The first, as I sat in my parents' living room watching crap on the TV and sipping a gin and tonic and eating a thoroughly white-peppered mush of microwaved Young's Admiral Fish Pie, came from directly above me, my mum's bedroom. I grimaced. But then I heard more noise. Slow grunting; a man dragging himself out of a door frame back towards his own bed, where he'd rested his head, apparently for the night, three hours earlier at 7pm. He'd gone looking for a nightcap, thinking it was downstairs, not up, but fell over.

The second came twenty minutes later: a crash, thump, shout of "bastard!" and a clatter. I rushed out of the room and up to the top of the fourteen stairs I'd learned to climb on as a child. Stairs where my brother, Tim, and I had hidden when we were supposed to be in bed, spying on what the adults were up to. We were always found out, of course, and used to get shooed back to bed. But roles reverse.

The toilet at my parents' house is a small single room, quite literally an old fashioned (if comparatively modernly decorated) water closet detached from the bathroom. It's one step lower than the landing, thirteen steps from the ground floor. There are African mementoes on the walls from their travels in his merchant navy days, paintings, and a wind-up clock, sitting on the landing windowsill, that chimes so often I want throw it into the immaculately clean wheelie bin outside. Grey one, of course. It's made of wood and metal.

Also there that night was my father, lying on that one step landing, his back to me, in pyjama bottoms, legs around the cistern, urine everywhere, toilet paper strewn across the tiled floor, his pants soaking in piss, his big toenail missing and the remaining gap bleeding, and his eyes shrunken into the back of his head through what we can only assume was a bottle of neat vodka he'd secreted away somewhere before he went to bed. He was, in the true sense of the word, arseholed.

Mum, of course, was panicking. I, on the other hand, was furious. But we had six hours before we got up. So I picked the useless bastard up and helped him back to what is my old bedroom, where pictures of my youth still hang on the walls and my childhood books stare out at me from the shelves. I plonked him down on the bed, firmly told him to stop waving clenched fists at me, and got told that I was "a cunt".

Then I washed my father's urine from my body, and wondered if there was even the slightest chance we would be allowed on the plane in a few hours time. Frankly, it didn't seem likely.

2

"WE DON'T need to be at the airport three hours before," I'd said.

"Yes we do," said mum. "After 9/11."

"But they've stopped that now."

"No they haven't."

Christ. Readers, take my advice: never, ever, EVER, travel with your parents. It doesn't matter that all three of you have traversed the entire fucking globe on your own or in company - a mum is programmed to be the highly-strung clucking hen when it comes to ordering taxis, finding check in desks, and where the gate is. Like no one else can do it.

But her panic, though irritating after a night largely without sleep (for her and me), was justified. We had to get this lunatic to Koh Samui. Or rather - we had to get ourselves to Koh Samui, and unfortunately had to take him there, too.

We woke, ish, at 4am, and then he took an hour to put his clothes on: ranted, sweated, cursed, shouted, moaned, swore. Everyone was a bastard.

And then taxi was late. Mum thinks we'll miss the flight. My father thinks he'll miss the 24-hour bar, which is a feat. I think I'll miss going to see the friends I so dearly want to go and see.

The cab arrived 30 minutes late. The family panic was clear. So he drove at a terrifying speed through rain and wind to Manchester Airport, where we arrived to find we were an hour too early (ticks one up to me, mum).

But.

Because my father walks on sticks, through his alcoholism, they accept that he's disabled, find him a wheelchair, and walk us through a check-in gate - which is not yet open, as mum insisted on us being there an hour too early - and also security.

And suddenly, he actually is disabled. He's that out of it, sat in the chair, that he takes on the persona of a paraplegic. I find myself, a little dazed, wheeling him to toilets, watching him wave his walking sticks at people to knock people out of the way, grumbling and growling and moaning about everything.

We're only at Manchester. We have three flights ahead. From Manchester to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Bangkok, Bangkok to Koh Samui, to see the friends, two of them in particular, that I cannot wait to see; need to see, frankly.

Tune in tomorrow to find out about the worst three flights I've ever had. And the horrible thing that happened next.

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