Mugged By Monkeys – Prachuap Khiri Khan, Thailand.

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…Our mouths smell of whiskey and we are both breathing hard through our nostrils as we kiss, our sweaty faces sliding over each other.
I see a monkey over Katherine’s shoulder.  Two monkeys.  Three.
I pull away from the kiss.  We are surrounded by monkeys. They are in a ring around us.  They’re big, beady eyed… The monkeys edge closer to us and one of the larger ones bares its teeth and hisses…

Flashback: 2007

Katherine rolls out of bed and splashes water over her face at the chipped basin in the corner. She is pale and lean and has a smudge of sweat staining her knickers at the apex of her butt crack.
“Lets go out and explore the town” she says.
“I’m OK with that.”
I’m OK with staying in the hostel and continuing to explore her body as well, but it’s good to mix it up a little, I guess.
She comes back to the edge of the bed and stretches her arms over her head, yawning. Her small breasts squint at me, coyly.
“Come on” she says, in her cute Germanic accent, “we can’t stay in bed all week.”
I pull her onto the mattress with me and she giggles as we wrestle with each other.

Later in the afternoon we stroll down the main road toward the headland. The sun is low, and the day’s humidity is starting to settle down a bit. There are monkeys everywhere. They scamper across rooftops, go hand over hand along the power lines above the street.
The town is known for it’s monkeys. The Buddhist monastery has built a monkey temple on the headland.

“Where are you going after this” she asks me, taking my hand.
“I don’t know” I say. “Depends what rides I get.”
“So you’re going to keep hitchhiking?” she asks me. “Maybe you should get a bike and ride with me for a while?”
“Ride a push-bike in Thailand? In this humidity?” I laugh. “That sounds sweaty.”
I can feel her grip on my hand tighten for a second, and then she lets my hand go.
“Well, I’m not going to hitchhike” she says coolly.
The silence follows into the space we leave open there, and we walk quickly, swinging our arms, toward the sea front.

There’s raucous music. A casual sort of procession comes down the street, people in shorts and t-shirts playing trumpets, drums, tambourines. The bride and groom are riding in the back of a pickup, draped with flowers. The beat is quick, and everyone, including the musicians is dancing, and singing and drinking from bottles of Chinese whiskey. Katherine whoops and dances on the spot. Two happy, tipsy Thai mamas, gyrate over to us and drag us into the parade. We get caught up in the high energy straight away. We dance and sing along and the mamas press their bottle into our hands and we drink the throat scorching Chinese whiskey, and sing loudly, making up words that sound roughly like what the others are singing.

The parade goes round the town square and we dance along with it. Down the street, out to the beach, past the monastery. I’m lagging. The whiskey is making my head spin. We swing past the headland. I grab Katherine and drag her away from the parade. We collapse on the lawn of the monastery, panting. The parade carries on down the street, and all the Thai mamas dance with undiminished energy and enthusiasm, and the players blast out the raucous music as they bounce away around the corner out of sight.

We get our breath back, buy some water from a fruit stand. For a few coins, the shopkeeper gives us each a hand of bananas to feed the temple monkeys.

We walk to the foot of the steps that lead up the steep, overgrown headland. The forest on the sides of the pathway is lush and tangled, and we can see the resident monkeys springing from limb to limb in the canopy high overhead.
We set off up the narrow stone steps, sweating, still a bit light headed from the mama’s whiskey. Katherine is pink cheeked and her t-shirt clings to her bra-less chest. She smiles at me slyly as I admire her. I put my arm around her waist and kiss her mouth. We get into that for a while. Our mouths smell of whiskey and we are both breathing hard through our nostrils as we kiss, our sweaty faces sliding over each other.
I see a monkey over Katherine’s shoulder. Two monkeys. Three.
I pull away from the kiss. We are surrounded by monkeys.

They are in a ring around us. They’re big, beady eyed. There are maybe fourteen adults plus a lot of smaller ones, sidling around us. The monkeys edge closer to us and one of the larger ones bares its teeth and hisses. The teeth in the monkey’s mouth are huge. Each fang stands out, drooling and yellow. All the monkeys bare their teeth and take a step toward us. The hissing turns into snarling. A dozen sets of teeth snarling.

Katherine holds onto my arm and presses against me like she would like to climb up onto my shoulders.
“What the fuck are they doing?” she asks me in a high pitched whisper.

I ease my hand of bananas out of my bag. Moving slowly, eyes locked on the biggest monkey, I drop the bananas on the ground and back away. Katherine flicks her own bunch onto the path next to mine. We move away and the monkeys stand aside to let us pass. We move on, up the steps. The monkeys watch us go, standing still. Their beady eyes look crazy. When we get to the turning in the path, the biggest monkeys seize the bananas and tear the hands apart and the whole lot of them go crazy fighting over the fruit.

We get to the top of the stairs and walk out onto the small plateau on the headland. The monkey temples is a concrete structure with a shrine and a magnificent view of the bay. The roof is stripped of it’s tiles. Inside, the temple is ransacked and ruined. The shrine vases are smashed on the floor, and there is monkey shit everywhere. Two very young, fat little monks are sweeping the floor with bamboo brooms. They look fed up.

Katherine and I sit on the steps of the temple and look out to see, watching the sun set. Two small monkeys seat themselves on the temple roof and contemptuously toss tiles down at the sweeping monks, who try to ignore them, as they dodge the falling tiles.
We decide to skip the sunset and walk back down the stairs before nightfall.

The next day we walk out to the island at low tide. The sand flats are grey and muddy, but the island is lush with jungle, and the sand on the beach is soft and fine. I find a secluded inlet away from the landward side, and we dump our bags and head for the water.
There is broken glass all over the sand below the water line. I put on my sandals and wade cautiously into the water. It’s warm and smells like fish soup. I step hesitantly around a broken bottle and lower myself into the murk.
“It’s alright” I call to Katherine, who is watching me from the beach.
She shakes her head slowly.
“This beach is fucked” she says. “I don’t want to swim in mud with broken glass.”
“It’s really OK” I call out to her, trying to sound enthusiastic.
I splash some water over myself, smiling at Katherine, trying to show how refreshing the water is. I avoid wetting my hair. I don’t want to smell like shrimp paste all night.

I drag together a big pile of springy green creepers. I hang my mozzie net from a tree limb, and spread out our sleeping bags on top of the bundled creepers.
We lie down together in the humid darkness, enclosed by the stony arms of the tiny bay. The darkness is deep. The moonlight is just a dim glow behind the perpetual foggy cloud cover. I can hear mozzies droning around the perimeter of my net, looking for a way to get at our warm naked flesh.
I stroke my hand over the sweat slick reach of her stomach and press myself closer to her, even though the humidity is stifling. I feel her curl her neck back toward me, and our mouths close into each other.
We fuck fast, panting. I grip her skin urgently, feeling the filaments of muscle in her back and abdomen clenching under my palms.
After, we fall on our backs on the crackling, leafy mattress. I’m so covered in sweat my eyes sting.

In the early morning we walk back across the low tide estuary. Our sandals get stuck in the deep mud sometimes and we laugh as we struggle and splash around trying to get them free.
We get up to the town spattered with grey blobs.

Katherine collects her bike from the bushes where she hid it beside the road. We stand awkwardly for a few minutes, in the shade of a huge tree, trying to find the right words to farewell each other. We try a kiss, but we can’t recapture the passion of the previous week. It feels like something has departed already.

She gets on her bike and rides steadily away down the road. I stick my thumb out and watch her go, in glances, over my shoulder. Every time I look she is a bit further away. She doesn’t look back.

A band of monkeys gather on a low branch of the tree and watch me silently. I cross the road and stick my thumb out again facing the other direction. I don’t want to pass Katherine riding her bike along the road. After a while the monkeys decide I have no food. They lose interest in me and swing away down the power lines toward the beach.

 

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