A woman eclipsed
She knows how to avoid the scams in Bangkok, but in doing so, has also become suspicious of even the most honest gestures. Has lost out like someone who doesn’t stop to smell the roses for fear of being outside. Once, taking the city bus to Siam Square to catch an afternoon movie, a young, ferret-sized monk, wrapped heavily in faded saffron-coloured silk and smoking a cigarette, began talking to her in English. She smiled thinly and answered yes and no and umhum, and then got off the bus three stops prematurely and missed this rare—rare because she is a woman—opportunity.
Even though it’s a cosmopolitan city and white-skinned falangs can be found nearly everywhere, the hustlers in Bangkok can differentiate between the savvy foreigners who live there and the gullible ones who are there for a week to see the floating fruit and vegetable markets or the Royal Palace. Or the golden, reclining Buddha with a map of contemplation on the soles of its feet in Wat Po. The hustlers can spot those travellers who are merely waiting for a train or a bus to take them somewhere else: north to ride elephants and sample opium, or south to live cheaply on one of the island beaches. Madeline is a false target; she comes three times a year but she looks fresh enough—she even stays on the Kho Sarn Road with the backpackers because that’s the closest she can get to Bangkwan Prison without staying in one of the shadiest districts of the city—yet she knows not to believe the shiny clean face with the moon smile that tells her in near-perfect English: “for this month only, government make promotion for Thai emerald. You come with me to touris’ centre and I show you. You buy tax free and take home to you country for profit making. Or for souvenir if you like.” Big smile. The first time it happened, before she’d even met Seamus when she really was a tourist in Bangkok, she was at the temple of the tallest-standing golden Buddha, and was approached by a young man in a crisp white shirt and grey pants. He quantified the Buddha for her: height, age, weight, worth and how many people a day came to rub gold—thin and pliable as cigarette rolling paper—on its robes for luck and prosperity. They kicked their shoes off together and sat down on the rug in front of the Buddha, and he showed her how to tuck her feet under crossed legs, so as not to expose the soles to the icon. He then produced a pad and pen from his back pocket, and wrote down the name: Bangkok City Tourist Centre. “You hear of this place?” he asked. She said no. He wrote down a couple of dates and figures. “For this month only,” he said, “government make promotion for Thai emerald. You make big profit.” Urgent smile, he pushed the pad into her lap. “Or souvenir. Or gift for you family, from Siam.” She told him she had no interest in emeralds, and got up to put her shoes back on. On the street, afraid, hailing a tuk-tuk to take her back to the Koh Sarn Road, she wondered whether or not she should have at least paid him for the historical chit chat.
The first time she was approached by a bird keeper, however, she was taken for five hundred baht—three times as much as she paid for her room the night before. The bird keeper stood on the pier where she had been waiting for the Chao Praya water taxi. He stood there with three white doves crowded into a small cage, snowy feathers stuck through the caging like hair out of an old man’s ear. He stood behind a sign written in English: buy feedom for 500 baht… make dove fee. She had been on her way to the prison for the first time, via Chao Praya water taxi to Nonthaburri, and thought it fitting to let a caged bird go free. She paid the bird keeper his money and he opened the small chicken-wire door, pulled a dove out by its neck and placed it in her hand. She held her hand up like a pedestal and the disturbed creature stood stunned for a moment, then lifted off over their heads and sputtered cumbersomely over the roof of the nearest building. Two or three food sellers smiled and clapped, whooped goodbye to the dove, and Madeline felt pleased with herself. She archived the tangible memory of the bird’s talons digging into the flesh of her palm as it took off.
A few hours after this, she introduced herself to a smiling Seamus through two walls of bars set a metre apart, and told him about the dove. Now free for only five hundred baht. He smiled and looked at her as if she were four years old, and yelled (had to yell to be heard over the other prisoners and their visitors), “You wasted your money!” She asked why, and immediately felt guilty for telling him how easy it had been to buy the animal’s freedom. “Those birds are trained to go back to their masters,” he yelled, grinning. “You can’t free them!”
That was six years ago, and she’s here again, for the second time this year, to see a man she fell in love with through two sets of bars and hundreds of pages of letters. She had initially visited him on a whim through the suggestion of someone else who was staying in her guesthouse on the Koh Sarn Road and said going to the prison to visit people from your own country with life sentences, maybe bring them some magazines and buy them coffee and biscuits and toothpaste from the prison kiosk, was a good way to kill time in Bangkok (it seemed—and Madeline learned this quickly—the only thing to do with time in this humid, chaotic city was to strangle it, creep up behind it in the night and suffocate it with any available means until the right train came to take you to somewhere else). She visited Seamus on a Tuesday, and then again on the Thursday, and wrote him the first letter while riding the train to Chang Mai on the Friday.
Oh, what people say in letters when they’re far from each other and in love! ‘What is happening to me?’ they say, and ‘I long to touch you, to smell you, to lick you,’ they say, ‘only a few more months, my darling,’ they say. For the first year Madeline lived for these letters. She smelled them and smelled of them, and slept with letters spread messily on the other half of her bed, one arm slung over so that it would be stiff in the morning from the position. The paper he used, and still uses, was thin and cheap, his grammar and scrawl almost indiscernible until she got the hang of it. She keeps Seamus’s letters in boxes around her flat in London where she lives alone, and leads a life of the cleaved—half-way between mourning and mooning. She works as an audiologist, tests peoples’ hearing, audio sickness. Spends a lot of her time in a sound-proof laboratory. Her friends and her sister have given up the futile act of persuasion; have stopped trying to orchestrate her love life by fixing her up with someone else, man or woman. They regard her as someone who has, for some reason, taken some twisted vow of chastity.
Apart from the practical novels she has written to Seamus, she also writes well-versed pleas to the Thai government, the British government, the British Embassy in Bangkok, the UN, Amnesty International, various media sources, human rights lawyers, political activist groups—anyone who might have some way of either getting Seamus out of prison, or at least moving him closer to home to serve out his sentence there. She has been told the equivalent of my hands are tied infinite times, in more than one language.
This morning, Madeline brings Seamus a package of disposable razors, a can of shaving cream, the latest Iain Banks novel and photographs from home. Any food has to be bought from the kiosk—the system’s way of keeping drugs out of the compound, Seamus has told her. But in reality, he says, it’s the guards’ safeguard to protect their station as the major suppliers. She sits in the registration waiting area, a yellowed canteen that offers soggy food, which sits warm behind sweaty glass. She’s wary of the clerk who now holds her passport. He is one of those people she always forgets exists until she is confronted by them. He’s like an old, framed picture in his window, with a thick, damp log book and the power of discretion that will result in whether or not she gets to see Seamus that day. A pale man, small and plump, a mole the size of a pea on the bend of his cheek where he smiles. Every time she sees him she’s amazed that she forgot him. After looking over the passport as if it’s the first time he’s seen it, he approves it, hands her a plastic yellow pass, and tells her to wait for the horn, which will sound more or less promptly at 4p.m. And it does, and she goes across the compound to the first set of gates. These guards, friendly enough, all acknowledge that they know her and wave her through without looking at her pass. They look through her bag, knowing it will contain goodies for the prisoner: reading material and personal-hygiene products, playing cards, socks, and perhaps a pair of her underpants, or one of her curls wrapped in cloth or tissue paper, or music cassettes. She’s never tried to smuggle in any contraband, but every time is paranoid that she has inadvertently put a knife in there, or a bag of speed—things she knows he wants the most.
They remove the items she’s brought for Seamus, for a more thorough inspection; they’ll give them to him later, after perhaps keeping a razor or two for themselves, maybe a pair of socks. The friendliest one, with his sinewy arm deep in her bag, smiles at her and asks, in Thai, how she’s been. “Is it cold in England? Where are you staying in Bangkok?”
“It’s warm in England,” she answers in Thai. “I stay on the Koh Sarn Road.”
The guard’s expression turns soft and ambiguous—Madeline’s Thai is elementary and her intonation dull—and he passes her a damp piece of card with a number on it, in exchange for her bag. She thanks him and walks through heavy doors to the second gate, through a metal detector, which she has always suspected is no more than an ornament, and is frisked.
In the prison, Madeline must have her legs and shoulders covered. Today she wears a red dress that hangs below her knees and makes little contact with the rest of her body. She considers Seamus in everything she does—she even wears her hair down so her neck is covered. He has a harder time if he can see her flesh, and worse than this, if others can see it. She sometimes imagines the electric green nightmares he must have over the forty-nine weeks of the year she isn’t there.
Once through the second gate, she’s in something like a courtyard—more of an outdoor corridor. Running the length down the middle is an island flower bed, sparsely planted with bouganvillea trees and fuscia and purple orchids. Either side of the corridor is barred, and at the far end a sign directs Thai’s to the right, and foreigners to the left. She goes to the left-hand side of the corridor and walks parallel to the bars now, back towards where she came from, runs her fingers along the bars. A thick bench also runs the length of the corridor, and when she sits on it, at the end, her knees touch the bars. It’s through here that she’ll soon see her lover: one set of bars—close enough together so that she can only get her arm through to just below her elbow—and then another wall of bars, a metre away, lined with heavy wire mesh. The visitors sit outside, but the prisoners are on the other side of the mesh-covered bars inside a damp, cinderblock hallway, and so they’re shrouded in dark and distorted by the mesh.
April in Thailand, especially in Bangkok, is more than oppressive. It’s offensive—one could literally take the heat personally. Madeline has come this month though, this very week in fact, because the prison had scheduled tomorrow for the yearly contact visit. She and Seamus will be allowed to sit together in a room—with two other prisoners and up to four other visitors, and six guards—and touch. Hold hands and kiss lips. Bite fingers and smell each other’s breath and hair and skin. Crawl into eachother and construct an impermeable membrane around themselves so that the others in the room don’t count, and work very hard to remember every detail of the hour. Seamus has always had a habit of tracing the lines of her bones with his fingers; he learns her frame by rolling the knobs of her wrists between his thumb and forefinger, counting her vertebrae, drawing circles around her kneecaps, rubbing her jaw with his palm. Any actual love making between Madeline and Seamus has only ever played out verbally, or on paper, or in dreams. Madeline, nervous because she has a surprise today for Seamus, now battles with her dress while she waits for the prisoners to come out, pulls the clinging fabric from her legs and chest. Her hair is wet on her neck, and sweat streams perfectly down the contour of her spine (where, she imagines, her lover’s finger will trail, meandering over the bumps, in just twenty-four hours).
The long bench reacts subtly whenever another body sits on it, as other visitors position themselves to see their brothers or sons or friends, or random prisoners they picked out of a log book at the registration desk because they liked the sound of their names, like Madeline did the first time she came, as a sympathetic British traveler. She and Seamus often speculate on the chance of their meeting. She could have chosen any name, but because she liked his best, because she ran her finger down a list of random names that represented these random men living in this cement box, and liked his best, they found eachother. This is a conversation they’ve had many, many times. You’ve ruined me for other men, she once wrote. I’m doomed to love you until you die in there.
A woman, sweating visibly, sits next to Madeline a few feet away. Wipes her forehead with her t-shirt and blows air loudly through wet lips. She looks at Madeline and waves with a fat, pink hand. Madeline smiles only with the lower half of her face. The other woman whistles a little, indicating that at any moment she is going to speak, which she does.
“So, are you here to see anyone you know?” she asks in a soft, Canadian accent.
“My boyfriend.”
“No way! Oh my god!” the woman blinks industrially, produces warbling tears. “That’s really intense.” She shifts a little closer, the bench shakes. “Are you okay?”
“I’m great,” says Madeline, crosses her legs and strains to look through the bars and the mesh, down the hall where, any minute now, the prisoners will emerge from. She smiles at the woman and shrugs her shoulders, and then pretends to look for something in the folds of her dress.
And now the clank of walking chains; when humans bound by chains are walking, it sounds like the chains are doing the work, carrying with them the burden of flesh and bone. An echo accompanies the racket as well; even if the surrounding acoustics shouldn’t produce an echo, there is one. First the Thais come out, walking in stride like the most reluctant army in existence, dressed in orange, almost clinical, kit. They are led through the outside part of the corridor, just on the other side of the bouganvillea, and make cat calls to the visitors waiting. Madeline makes eye contact with one man, tall, skinny and very young. He’s swinging his arms, forcing the man behind him and the man in front of him to swing their arms because of the chains, and he grins at her, eyes closed, toothy, scrunched nose, like a ten-year-old would do. Suddenly there is a maelstrom of this tonal language that Madeline has so much trouble with, as the prisoners are led into the inside corridor to be unchained. Their visitors call to them urgently, and they in turn sit opposite, on the other side of two sets of bars and a wall of mesh. Even though she can’t understand the words, Madeline imagines what they must be saying in urgent, desperate and over-excited voices. ‘How is your health?’ ‘We miss you.’ ‘We brought money for rice.’ They scream at eachother to be heard over the orchestra of other people screaming at eachother to be heard, leaving little air space.
The very sky itself is hot and white and impatient, and Madeline’s right leg begins to jig involuntarily, her lips purse and she strains again to look down the inner corridor, imagines what changes Seamus may have undergone since her last visit at Christmas. Christmas in Bangkok was lousy and wet. Even the Koh Sarn Road was empty of people. Seamus’s mother was supposed to be there, and even her depressed and guilty company would have been welcomed by Madeline, but the flu found her a few days before her flight. Now, another set of chains come walking, fewer, slower. Her leg is bouncing now, and her hand shoots down to steady it. Dry-mouthed, she stretches her neck like a crane, looks down the dark hall and sees the shadows of the first people. They’re at the far end of the corridor, and muddle around while the guards stick their little keys into all the little locks, undoing the chains. This practice of putting the chains on for the benefit of the visitors seems to Madeline like some futile theatrics. An attempt to show order where there is no order, constraint where constraint isn’t necessary. It’s far too hot to escape; a man would die from the effort. The walls are too high and anyway, the prisoners are too undernourished and lethargic to attempt anything so heroic. As far as Madeline knows, there’s never been a breakout at Bangkwan Prison.
And then Seamus is in front of her, his body pressed against the bars and the mesh, a bandana wrapped like a skull cap on his head, unshaven, faded prison kit hanging off his shoulders. “Maddie,” he says, gripping the bars, “you came. I’m always afraid you aren’t going to come.” She can barely hear him.
“I’m always afraid you aren’t going to be here!” she yells and stands up, presses her own body into the bars.
He sits down heavily, with a lot of effort, and winces.
“What’s the matter?” she asks alarmed.
He says something that she can’t hear.
“Seamus, you have to speak up. What’s the matter?”
“There’s something wrong with my legs.”
“Not again?”
“My feet started swelling last week and now it’s up to my knees,” he says too quietly.
“Pardon?”
“I said my feet are swollen and it’s all the way up to my knees!”
“Shit!” She looks around for someone to complain to, sees no one.
“How have you been?”
“Fine, but how have you been?”
“Apart from my legs, I’ve been great because I knew you were coming. I got a letter from mom; she won’t make it down now until Christmas and she sent some money.” He shrugs, studies her for almost a minute. “I don’t know Madeline, I can’t think of a single thing to tell you about me; my news isn’t exactly significant. I’ve been waiting to see you since January, and now that you’re here I can’t think of one fucking thing to say. I don’t know,” he shrugs again, leans over to scratch his leg, “some of the Nigerians are on again about getting home—they’re sure this time it’s going to happen and they’re getting the ump with everyone. I’ve been thinking about you a lot.” He holds his hands up, fingers wide. “Look how much my hands are shaking.”
Of this speech, Madeline hears only a few words; Seamus isn’t speaking loudly enough and the woman sitting next to her is doing her best to yell questions at the man she’s visiting. “Is it true all of you have to sleep together on the floor?” the woman, continuously wiping sweat from her forehead, yells incredulously. “I mean that’s really unbelievable!”
“Are they treating your legs?”
“They’ve given me some ointment, but I suspect it’s only toothpaste.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“Yes, they’re treating my legs! Tomorrow I get to touch you!”
“I can’t even think about anything else! I can’t eat! It’s been two years!”
“No Madeline; it was only last year.”
“No, Seamus love, remember last year it was called off because of a fight.”
Seamus puts his head in his hands and rubs the bandana back and forth over his skull, draws his fingers like claws over his reddened face. “Maddie, I’m sorry. Sometimes, time.”
“It’s fine love, it’s all right. Time is crap.” Again, she searches in the folds of her dress. “I have a surprise for you though. I think you’ll be pleased.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a new job.”
“That’s brilliant Maddie. What, at another clinic?”
“At the clinic?” she says, still barely able to hear him. “No, not at the clinic, this is a totally new job.”
“So what job?”
“I’m going to teach English.”
“English! But what about the ear stuff?”
“I’m going to teach English here, at a language school in Bangkok. So we can be together.” She tucks her hair violently behind her ears, lips like dried apples. “I know you were against this but that’s just stupid. Your mother hardly makes it down anymore and now your legs, and I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s what I want.”
“Maddie,” he says, rubbing his head again. “I never wanted you to change your life for me.”
“That’s what life does Seamus, it changes.”
“My life doesn’t change, it just gets shorter.”
“What did you say?”
“I said my life never changes! Nothing happens!”
“It’s going to change now.”
Seamus smiles weakly, shakes his head. The woman beside them is now telling her inmate visitee about the total eclipse of the sun that will take place tomorrow, the first the world has seen in almost twenty years. Bangkok is in its path, she tells him, and that’s why she’s here.
“Seamus?”
“I really, really don’t want you to do this.”
“I can’t hear you!”

So here’s a common theme, she thinks: he’s trying to spare her, but really, he would love it if she came to live here. So she persists on trying to convince him it’s the right thing to do, and says goodbye for the day with her arm stretched as far through the bars as it will go. She watches him get up and limp away, and waits there until she hears the sound of locking chains. Tomorrow, when she has him in her arms, it will be easy to show him she’s right.
Waiting to collect her bag, Madeline is again next to the woman who has come here to see an eclipse. Madeline, more relaxed now, asks her what she makes of all this.
“It’s really grim,” she says, smiles at the guard as he hands over her bag. “The guy I saw is Nigerian and says he’s getting out.”
“The Nigerians always say that.”
“Really. He sounded so sure.”
“Well he probably is sure, but he’s wrong. People with drug charges don’t get out of Thai prisons.”
The two women walk together out of he prison, back down the dusty road and to the pier to wait for the water taxi. The other one’s name is Cait. She’s a writer and a butcher, tells Madeline about how she gets up at 5a.m. to carve lamb chops, t-bone steaks, pork sirloin, fillet mignion. She deep fries the pork crackling to make Hungarian popcorn and hand stuffs the sausages with sage, or rosemary, or oregano mixed in with the ground meat. She writes stories in the evenings, many of which have been inspired by customers: one man who comes in on a Tuesday to buy pig snouts, which he uses to make head cheese, has been used as a prophet. Another woman, who looks peculiarly like Stephen Hawkins and is addicted to Cait’s sausages, has also popped up in her narratives.
On the water taxi now, they find two of the plastic, bucket seats empty near the front side of the boat, port side. A small boy sits behind Madeline and pulls on the back of her seat, rocks hers slightly and catches bits of her hair in his fingers, wet and sticky from a soft mango. It’s nearly 6p.m. now, and the sun is setting huge and fantastically, throws its last photons into the toxic net of air over Bangkok, resulting in hot reds and blazing pinks spread out like wings.
“Do you mind if I ask how your boyfriend ended up in prison?”
“He made a stupid mistake when he was twenty,” Madeline tells Cait. “Someone he met traveling offered him a lot of money to carry a few kilos of cocaine back to England.
Cait snorts, wipes her brow even though the river breeze has dried it. “Not very smart, was he?”
“He was young. It was over ten years ago when there weren’t as many travelers in Thailand. Lots of people were getting away with it. We think he was probably set up; the Thai governement can’t afford to lose the revenue they get from drug trafficking, so they don’t like to arrest the local guys at the top. But they have to arrest somebody to make it look like they’re trying. So, they set up the foreigners.”
Cait shakes her head a little, looks across the water and then back at Madeline. “Where were you when this happened?”
Madeline, now accustomed to others’ shock when she tells them she actually met Seamus after he was incarcerated, tells it frankly as her seat bounces and the little one behind her garbles frantically in Thai.
“I couldn’t help it,” she says. “I know what you’re thinking—everyone thinks it—but you can’t help who you fall in love with.”
Cait’s face is unreadable as she asks the FAQ’s: how long have you been with him? Have you been faithful? What about sex? Are you crazy?
“When will he get out?” Cait finally asks.
“He won’t. Remember I told you about the Nigerian? They’ll die in that prison.”
“Can’t you do anything? Can’t your country do anything?”
“They’ve got their hands tied,” Madeline recites, without even knowing she’s said it. “It’s a political pile of shit,” she says, and laughs, surprising the monkey child on the back of her chair. “It’ll be a lot easier now though, because I’m moving here in a few months.”
“That’s good,” Cait says, nods slowly, looks at Madeline through squinted eyes.
That evening, they eat dinner together at an outside kiosk on the Koh Sarn Road, stir-fried morning glory and pork, scratched-glass bottles of Coke, surrounded by steam from a dozen woks, searing grease over open fires. Another child has latched onto Madeline, carries a tray attached to a string around her neck; she’s selling gum, pencils, matchbooks and playing cards. Cait coddles over her and reaches into her own pocket for money, but Madeline ignores this little brown thing, who can’t be more than six, or weigh more than forty pounds. The girl pinches Madeline’s arm so painfully that Madeline instinctively raises her arm to hit the child in the face, and stops mid swing. “They’re relentless little scruffers,” she says, apologetically, and pats the child, with eyes like chocolate buttons, on the rear. “Scoot!”
“Madeline, you should come with me tomorrow to see the eclipse. I’ve rented a water taxi to take me out to a small lake, called Prao Thani, or something like that, to watch it from the water. Out of the city a little.”
“Did you really come all this way just to see an eclipse?”
Cait raises her eyebrows, and then scrunches them, pulls back her head and nods yes, tells her she wants to write about it.
“It seems like a long way to come,” says Madeline.
Cait smiles a little, folds her hands on the table and leans towards Madeline. “You’ve come a long way too. You should come with me. I don’t even know when the next one is expected.”
“What time?”
“It’s supposed to be over Bangkok, or I should say Bangkok is supposed to be under it, at 4:18p.m. tomorrow.”
“Thank you. I’d love to come, but I can’t; I’ll be with Seamus.”
“Are you serious? Go see him the next day, come on,” Cait says, playfully.
“It’s good of you to offer, but tomorrow is important.”
“Can’t you see him earlier? A total eclipse of the sun, come on. This is one of the most beautiful things nature has to offer.”
“I can’t change the visiting hours.”
“So run outside for quarter past four, then go back in. It should take about half an hour.”
“But we only have one hour. I really appreciate it, maybe we can meet after and watch it on TV together. Will it be on the news?”
“It’s been on the news all month, where have you been?”
Madeline pulls her lips in and smiles, slurps her last dreg and leans back in her chair, shuts off. Cait waves a fist of money in the air and yells to the waiter for the bill.

Today, waiting to go to the prison again, Madeline keeps well hidden in a café in the back of an alley off the Koh Sarn Road, wary of running into her new friend. She drinks a bad cup of tea and contemplates the choices she makes, considers the fact that for him, the freedom to make choices, at least, would be something. She loves him more when thinking about what he doesn’t have.
Many people have the same idea as Cait; it seems everyone around her is talking about renting boats and getting as far away from the city as possible to see the eclipse, to avoid the influence of harsh lights and neon billboards, to be able to truly gauge the influence a blackened sun has on the earth. One of the most beautiful things nature has to offer. Ha! Not more beautiful than love, Madeline thinks, to stave off a reluctant, growing curiosity. Special glasses shaped like boxes are being sold on every corner, out of every kiosk; Madeline wonders if this has been going on all week and she missed it. Bangkok anaesthetises her. It’s like the feeling of being in an airport, that purgatory between here and there. No time zone in an airport, no currency; always the same food and book shops and tie shops. Once you’re in you cannot leave, but if you must leave you cannot come back. Difficult to find significance in anything other than the location of the departure gate and the digital clock that hangs over it. All that concerns her now is him. That she will soon be touching him, and proving to him she’s right about moving here.
Because today’s visit involves contact, she has to register early, with her passport, birth certificate, and a letter from the prison commissioner saying she is a ‘spouse or other’ to the prisoner, which she was given three years ago and is still valid. She recognizes many people; mostly parents and siblings of prisoners who have been here as long as Seamus or longer. It’s a melancholy bunch in a strange sort of mourning, smiling in that sad way people do when resigned to dire realities. They all wait in a canteen, going through the registration process, trying to speak Thai to impress the guards but finding it easier to do it in English. It’s 3:45 now, and it’s like Cait has scratched her own image into Madeline’s thoughts. Cait in the water taxi, the smoke of Bangkok rushing past and staying behind her, the inacurately named lake waiting ahead, no doubt filling with boats of other tourists with the same notion. Perhaps this is a scam too, thinks Madeline, smug now. Yes, a scam to get people to buy those silly glasses, and pay exorbitant prices for water taxis out to a lake that is more than likely within the city limits anyway. There’s no eclipse. Blame that on the Thai tourism commission, CNN, the BBC. Get them all excited about a grand spectacle then let them down. Ha.
Madeline startles herself with her own negativity and changes gears, imagines what this most beautiful thing nature has to offer is like, silently concedes that is does sound fascinating. The sun stays where it is and the moon passes in front of the sun. The earth, rolling on its own axis, catches this ray of black cast by the moon, like the moon cuts a dark path along a relatively tiny surface area of the earth. But not more sensational than what she has in her immediate future.
Four p.m. and the horn blows, Madeline forgets the eclipse and her body inflates a hundred times until there’s no feeling in her stretched skin. She makes her way towards the courtyard but is stopped by the man behind the window. “You for Saymus Johnson,” he says, with a heavy accent. The man in the window disappears, then reappears in a nearby doorway, motions for her to come inside. He’s about five feet tall and she feels embarrassed looking down on him. The man looks up at her, “I,” he starts, “I mistak, yes?”
Her face is lines of anger, “what? Can’t I see Seamus?”
“Saymus Johnson, yes,” he says, smiles and nods so his mole bobs like a balloon. He has her elbow in his hand and is leading her into an office, full of paper and empty of people, about two square metres in size. No windows and hospital-green walls.
“What’s going on? Is he okay?”
“I, English very bad,” he says. “Sorry. You waiting.”
He points to a chair and goes out, closes the door behind him. Madeline sits down and quickly designs this situation to fit her needs; they’ve decided to give her and Seamus ultimate privacy! They will bring him in here and lock the door from the outside! It must be a guard from one of the gates, the chatty one, who arranged it. Pulled the string of all strings for the lovers. Sympathy for the lovers. Goodwill for the lovers. She’s in the same red dress as the day before, and collects it in her hands, billows it out to get the air in, hugs her legs and shivers. Hot and cold at the same time, she wonders what they are capable of, once alone. Alone. What is an inconsequential eclipse compared to this? She wishes Cait (who she imagines now with a chain of sausages around her neck, box glasses to her eyes, face up to the black sun) all the goodwill she has coming to herself. Folds her hands in her lap and waits with a smile.
Waits for an hour, at least, no more smile but still a little hope; reckons it must be quite an ordeal arranging this illegal encounter. The door, which without her knowing has been locked this whole time, opens now, and as she expected, it is the chatty guard. Without coming all the way into the room, he tells her, in Thai, that Seamus chose to watch the eclipse today, rather than have his contact visit.
“What?” she says, smiling. She shrugs. “I don’t understand you.”
In English now: “today Seamus want to see the sun, I am very sorry. Didn’t he tell you before?”
“He’s watching the eclipse?”
“Yes,” he hits his forehead with the palm of his hand, shakes his head and smiles. “Ahh, eclip. Eclip.”
“So now can I see him?”
He opens his arms, palms up, and shrugs. “Visiting hour is over. You cannot see him today.”
“That’s not fair! You can’t do that to him,” she bleats, stands up, takes a few desperate steps to the left and to the right.
He raises his shoulders even higher and opens his fingers wider, handfuls of innocence. “Saymus Johnson decide! I’m sorry you sit here so long, they only tell me now you are here. You have to go now, maybe come back tomorrow and Saymus will want to see you.”
“Seamus Johnson? Are you sure you have the right person? He wouldn’t miss this day—I think maybe you have the wrong person.” She covers the room in two strides each way, pushes the walls, pushes her hair again and again behind her ears.
The guard closes his mouth and shakes his head. “You have to go now.”
She sits down again, slumps into herself like discarded clothing. “He chose this?”