I spent this past week without the use of my hands and feet. You’d be right in thinking I fancy myself the Lady Gaga of CharmingVille, borne aloft on a marshmallow ‘n’ banoffee palanquin by topless glitterlings burnished to an ottery sheen with litres of virgin civet musk. I’d command my meaty, spangled minions to goosestep up and down the aisles of Bayon while I point operatically to the smoked salmon and order scads of Pol Roger. Unfortunately I am not Gaga. I am currently immobile because I’m infested with excruciating tropical buboes on all four extremities thanks to either amoebically moist gym equipment or a mani-pedi gone awry. Or the ancient sorceress from downstairs. More on her later.
Anyway, it’s gross and it hurts. From my ankles to my wrists I’m blain-free, but from there on out it’s like my purulent digits cameo’d on the Walking Dead without my permission. I won’t go into any more technical details except to say that I can’t walk, The Hubster’s feeding me with a spoon and I’ve watched every single episode of Melissa and Joey because my claw-hand can’t press the ‘Fuck off you awful, awful crap’ button on the remote. Thank you, Nils Lofgren (the Swedish scientist, not the guitarist from The E Street Band) who invented lidocaine: The Hubster fetched a ‘de la Gare dozen’ and I’ve sprayed it over all my festering, sausage-tight appendages. Under Doctor’s orders I also swab my soles and palms with 70% ethyl alcohol three or four times a day. It stings like buggery and I reek like the dancefloor at Heart. On the plus side, a low-grade fever and some dubious Pakistani antibiotics together with a vodka or three have given me a cheeky mid-morning buzz that only Walkabout aficionados will truly appreciate. Seriously, if I was a street I’d be Pasteur. As we speak I’m a little bit shitfaced and tapping out this week’s column one letter at a time using a chopstick jammed into the finally handy gap in my front teeth. I’m glad we got that all sorted then.
Bunster’s also more sullen than usual if that’s zoologically possible, given he’s an ungrateful killjoy at the best of times. To be fair though he has just returned from the pet dentist to get a molar spur removed. It was giving him all kinds of gyp, poor bugger, and he’s still not 100%. So each morning before work The Hubster whizzes us up a mutually acceptable Bulletproof Kale and leaves we two sorry malingerers to our own devices. For the next 12 hours me and my humourless orange sidekick sit together with a bowl and two straws, sucking through our various tooth holes and perving on the neighbours while the drugs kick in. I like to think of us as a postmodern, Bode’s-Side version of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The rabbit is perfect type casting in Jimmy Stewart‘s role, with his mangled leg and all, and I can be the cool, elegant Grace Kelly. But with pustules.
So it was that we two, supine and helplessly drug fucked in the balcony hammock, watched good old Psah Chas burn to a crisp. We’d been spying on the aforementioned crone across the road. By day she sits at her little kiosk, flogging phone scratchies and icy cold beer from her big orange esky, chewing betel and incantating. By night she sweeps a lot, which is apparently a very witchy sign, along with a shock of white hair and the generally accepted fact that she’s 170 years old. Perhaps she’d pony up some amulets or swivel her head 180 and laser-beam us with coal-red eyes. I willed her to give me a little something.
Minutes ticked by and I was about to give up when I noticed people looking north. There was a smokey tang in the air. Then I heard the sirens. Had my trotter boils allowed me to stand, I could have watched the action from the comfort of my own home or, better still, wandered down to gawk. Instead I made do with a MacGyver-style periscope fashioned from a moto wing mirror, packing tape and a stick from my artfully arranged driftwood collection. I couldn’t see the whole conflagration but enough flame and smoke to know the game was up for my go-to hair-extension place. I know it’s not about me, but this dermal plague had something of the dark arts about it, too. Maybe I should stop scoffing at the old duck downstairs and Khmer superstition in general. Although our beloved hamlet is a-buzz with Thai conspiracy theories, it just might be the old girl settling a beef the supernatural way.