READ: An Excerpt from Colin Cotterill's 'The Motion Picture Teller'

Motion Picture Teller

COLIN COTTERILL

ALSO BY COLIN COTTERILL

The Coroner’s Lunch

Thirty-Three Teeth Disco for the Departed Anarchy and Old Dogs Curse of the Pogo Stick The Merry Misogynist Love Songs from a Shallow Grave Slash and Burn

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die

Six and a Half Deadly Sins

I Shot the Buddha

The Rat Catchers’ Olympics Don’t Eat Me

The Second Biggest Nothing The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot

Copyright © 2023 by Colin Cotterill

Published by Soho Press, Inc. 227 W 17th Street New York, NY 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cotterill, Colin, author. Title: The motion picture teller / Colin Cotterill. Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, [2023] Identifiers: LCCN 2022024746

ISBN 978-1-64129-435-5 eISBN 978-1-64129-436-2

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Classification: LCC PR6053.O778 M68 2023 | DDC 823/.914—dc23/eng/20220524 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024746

Printed in the United States of America

Bangkok 2010

PROLOGUE

There were two worlds. There was the real world, where Supot delivered letters for the Royal Thai Mail service, where everyone he met was an unlikely character even for fantasy. In this world, teenagers dropped lighted matches into post boxes; elderly transvestites invited you in for coffee and romance; paving stones subsided beneath your feet, leaving you ankle deep in muck; monks smoked a joint before heading off on their alms rounds; and office girls paid homage to the plaster elephants at the concrete altar in front of the department store, then returned to instant noodles and cheesy television soaps in their windowless rooms.

There was that world.

He was six paces into Nisomboon’s yard before he realized what he’d done. It was an increasingly common bout of stupidity. He should have rung the bell and had the owner come to the gate. Or, even better, he should have stayed in bed. All around him like slow-breathing land mines were the mid-siesta bodies of nine dogs, semi-rehabilitated and doubtlessly dreaming of postal worker kebab even then. They were probably rabid ex-street mongrels with issues, each with the capacity to rip the flesh from his bones. But they slept in peace in the midday heat under the shade of the sprawling banyan tree. There was hope.

He completed the walk to the house more silently than

any postman in the history of mail delivery. He placed the letter on the step of the open front door, then turned on his heel and prowled back toward the gate . . . and safety. Were it not for the clash of keys in the bunch on his belt, he might have got out of there unscathed.

Then there was the intended world—one that beckoned from a cruel distance. The world of motion pictures, where he spent his only truly happy hours. Where Brando pads his cheeks with cotton wool and Kelly risks pneumonia in the rain. Where Lang introduces the serial killer, Godard highlights the dangers of romance, Fellini encourages decadence, and Akerman demonstrates the beauty of housework. Where women are stabbed in the shower, seven men overthrow an army, and a computer takes over a spaceship. A world where anything is possible and preferable.

He sat beside Ali—his best friend—a spicy fish ball on a skewer poised at his lips. He had no idea what the actress was saying— she was speaking French, the language of seducers—but she was saying it so beautifully that he didn’t want to insult her by reading the Thai subtitles. Not while she was up on the screen acting her French heart out for him. He could pick out a semblance of a plot: there was some problem with her schoolmaster husband. Some deal going down with the man’s minor wife. But Supot could read that later. It didn’t matter. For now, he was in the trance of delight, riding around on this cinematic carousel for an hour or so. The truly great films could keep a person engrossed whether they were in Thai or Icelandic or Mauritian Creole. Language was superfluous, a supplementary bonus to a man who loved film.

If Supot Yongjaiyut had shown any aptitude at all, a mere glimpse of skill as a filmmaker, actor, or even a lighting

technician, he would have lived contentedly in the world of cinema. But he was without hope. Hopeless, some might say. He’d trawled down through his depths of creativity and imagination and found not one modest shoal, not one squirming sprat of aptitude. In fact, considering the natural ability of his mother, Oi, he even left the plausibility of genetic transference in tatters. She had been the talent of the family, and she’d kept her genes to herself.

Supot couldn’t complain, though. Oi undoubtedly loved her children. Where other mothers might have given themselves to an unsuitable replacement husband for their benefit, Oi never did. She vowed never to leave herself dependent on a man again. She worked two jobs and dedicated herself to doing the best for her kids—sending them to a good school and having plans for their futures. During the day she clerked in the office of a river barge company. At night she made tiny clay models at home to meet orders from Central Department Store.

She molded little market people, bunches of fruit, carrying baskets, and sleeping dogs between her clever fingers. She painted them with brushes as fine as a baby’s eyelashes, varnished them, and baked them in her old Chinese oven. Every evening, Supot and Tam would finish their homework and sit on either side of the table watching her, wondering whose mother this woman was. If she was really theirs, they thought, surely, they would have inherited something of her. Surely, she wouldn’t have produced these two clumsy people with hands like hoofs.

Supot and Tam tried. Goodness how they’d tried. They turned out whole tribes of deformed elephant-man market people and dogs as ugly as congealed mucous. They painted eyes that filled up whole heads and bananas that contaminated all the fruit around them with their hepatitis yellow.

Oi always giggled at their efforts, not to embarrass them, but because she was realistic. There’s no justice done in telling your children lies. Very soon they all saw the funny side, and their clumsiness lost its stigma. She told them that the Lord Buddha shared abilities around. She admitted she had certain gifts, but that her children had other skills to make up for those they lacked. To this day Supot was still searching for his prowess.

Now, he was thirty-two, reasonably good-looking as far as postmen went, but somewhat economical when it came to facial expressions. The span between boredom and shocked horror was barely perceptible, no more than an eyebrow shift. He had feelings as deep as any, but they rarely inconvenienced his face. To the customers on his route, he often seemed to be drunk in thought, philosophically high, even on days when he was as empty-headed as an egg puppet.

If you asked, he would tell you he had a mental disability. He was the first to confess to it. He didn’t need to compare himself to the genius of his film idols or even to normal thinking folk he met every day. Standing alone on a street corner, he could feel it. He probably should have qualified for a disability pension, but his defect wasn’t listed in the postal service manual. Otherwise, he could have collected his compensation check alongside the armless and the legless. Supot, “the original thoughtless.”

Memories from his childhood would suggest he once had an imagination, or part of one at least. He could remember sitting with Oi sharing theories about where his father might have gone in his hunt for a heart. The heart-hunt series had been Supot’s last original work. It had grown out of Oi’s telling him how a glittery lady had stolen the heart of her husband. To a three-year-old, the image of his father

traveling around Thailand trying to get his heart back had been as vivid as the golden roof of the Grand Palace across the Chaophraya River. Together, he and Oi sent the treacherous man on mythical journeys through dark northern forests and sandy southern islands. Never did the man find his heart. Never did he return.

But imagination had left Supot somewhere along that journey, and now he could barely come up with excuses for being late to work. Naturally he had no less of a capacity for lying than any, but once a man convinces himself he can’t do a thing, no amount of counseling will make him believe otherwise. He’d been a postman for almost ten years. But if you asked him what he did for a living, he would answer that he was working at the post office “for the moment.” It wasn’t a career. It was just a job he did while he waited for his “big something.”

The setting for Supot’s unwanted life in late 1996 was a suburb called Bangkok Noi—Little Bangkok. In the mind of someone who hadn’t been there, the name probably conjured up an image of a quaint place with narrow streets and flower boxes. And there could have been a time in Thailand’s past when that was how it looked. It had once sat immune like a foreign land on the west bank of the river. But Greater (and uglier) Bangkok soon gobbled it up. Bangkok Noi turned from a destination to a transit route. It was sliced through, hemmed in, and overpassed from all directions. It ended up caged like a dove in a latticed concrete dome. It was blinded in a fog of exhaust fumes, and its song couldn’t be heard through the relentless noise of traffic. If it hadn’t been for the river at its back, the suburb would certainly have died without a trace.

But people like Supot, those who had been born there,

had gone to school there, and lived all their lives there had a strange ability not to see the concrete crowding in on them. There were still little streets here and there, and canals with pink orchids drooping over them. If that’s all you bothered to notice, that’s all there was.

A tall thin man in a pirated Abibas T-shirt was walking along the racks of videos like a person of knowledge at a gallery. He read the details on the spines and nodded recognition. At that pace, assuming he didn’t take time out for meals or toilet breaks, it would’ve taken him four and a half days to read to the very last title. Ali couldn’t wait that long.

“Can I help you?” Ali said.

The man looked up, surprised. “Ah. Yes. I’m looking for something, you know . . . happy.”

“Um. Happy,” said Ali. “Now there’s a concept. Happiness, you do realize, is relative.”

“Eh?”

Allah was, without question, living inside Ali. He could feel His presence, and he was delighted to have Him. But He wasn’t alone in there. There was a devil in Ali too, and that beast took over the reins more often than Ali would have liked. It wasn’t clear whether Allah stepped out from time to time and the devil took advantage, or that this was the normal process of Islamic Enlightenment, the constant juxtaposition of internal goods and evils. On this particular evening, with a monsoon rain beating against the shop window, Allah was not at home.

“Well,” said Ali, “I mean, for example, what makes Saddam Hussein happy could be something dark, something sinister, like Tarantino.”

“Taran . . . ?”

“He may see humor in John Travolta accidentally blowing a man’s head off. Blood splattering the interior of the car.”

“I—”

“Teacher Pratheep, our very own senator with a social conscience, on the other hand, may find happiness in something lighter. Perhaps the softer but no less biting wit of Woody Allen or Jacques Tati. Just how happy are you planning to get?”

It was apparent from the pause-button expression on the thin man’s face that he had no idea what Ali was talking about. Ali was used to that.

“In fact, I was looking for something by the Mom Jokmok comedy troupe from Channel Seven,” said the man. “The ones with the bald midget. You know them?”

“And that would make you happy?” Ali asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Right, then. Over there on your left, you’ll find the complete gallery of their greatest works. They produce a new tape every eleven minutes. Take your pick.”

The man couldn’t have been more excited if he’d discovered the gold left behind by the Japanese invaders in the Second World War. He started to study the spines Ali had pointed out.

“There are so many,” the man said. “Which one would you recommend?”

“Recommend?” Ali put his finger on his cheek and considered the choices like a gourmet going down a menu. “I think number nine. That’s probably your style. It has a very nice selection of fart jokes.”

Going with Ali’s suggestion, the tall, thin man brought his choice to the counter, paid his fifty-baht rental fee, and was allowed to take advantage of the week’s special: a copy

of Seven Samurai to take home and watch absolutely free of charge. There wasn’t much hope, but Ali never gave up on his life’s mission to elevate the tastes of his regular clientele. Every now and then one would emerge from the darkness and be dazzled by the brilliance. Most, however, would come back and tell him why they hadn’t found a fondness for the “foreign muck” he’d given them. He really understood how the Mormon fellows must feel; they ding-dong their way from house to house, enjoying only abuse and failure in the hope that one day they might stumble upon a convert. Ali was the Mormon of motion pictures.

The tall thin man left . . . happy. Happiness was what he’d come for, and happiness was what he got. One more satisfied customer for Ali’s Video Rental. As the door shut, the bell tinkled. It was a real bell, not like the electric burp at the 7-Eleven. It was genuine brass caressed gently by a tongue of rubber every time the door opened and closed, making a tinkle like ice in real cut glass. Its infrequent sound rankled the nerves of Ali. Twenty-five customers from nine to nine was a good day.

Ali had bought the place knowing he would never make money out of it. He’d sat his stunned mother down at the kitchen table one day and told her, “Ma. Money shouldn’t be a reason for doing things.”

That message had come as a surprise to his ma because she’d spent a lot of money sending him to do the MBA at Bangkok University. It wasn’t the most prestigious MBA of the ninety or so on offer around the country. Nor was it the cheapest. But it was good enough to give him the acumen he needed to make his family wealthy.

He’d learned everything the university expected of him and one thing it hadn’t. He learned that he didn’t like

making money. He learned that gratuitous wealth was unIslamic and unnecessary. The national MBA philosophy was, “Amass lots of money and use it to amass lots more.” When you made too much you had to change your lifestyle, so it didn’t look like excess. It was like having a suit that was too big for you and putting on weight to fit into it.

He lied about his doubts when the faculty gurus asked him; he feigned avarice and passed second in his class. He’d had offers from greedy companies with logos and retirement plans, and he’d turned them all down. When the family asked him what he’d decided to do, he took them all to the high street and pointed to the spot where his share of grandpa’s inheritance money had gone.

They called the imam to the house that same evening. He was a dry-skinned elder with penetrating eyes that peered out through a curtain of unruly brow hair, an Asian Gandalf. Islamic holy men don’t perform exorcisms as such, but it was obvious, even to him, that the boy was possessed. This was Thailand before the economic tiger was cruelly spayed. It was unimaginable a smart young Thai with an MBA wouldn’t want to climb up on its back and ride on into glorious capitalism.

It was a month before the family gave up on him completely. It was as if he’d gone into an asylum. They would talk about him in the past tense, even though he was still living at home with his ma. They’d talk about how successful he could have been, if only . . .

Ali was as content as an aardvark in an ant farm. He had everything he needed: his own shop with a small viewing area where he and his best friend, Supot, could spend endless hours watching films; a girlfriend called Kwang, whom he’d been dating since primary school and would one day marry. Probably . He had a steady if not spectacular

income, a good face with a structurally sound jaw, and his faith and health. Nothing about his lifestyle was likely to give him a heart attack. All he had to do was wait for his “big something.”