Dangerous Liaisons

Dear Sir,

Thank you so much for your concern regarding our recent setbacks. My husband Pierre, I assure you, will walk again and is making every valiant effort to keep smiling in spite of his temporary lack of front teeth.
As requested, here is an account of the fateful events of last month’s day tour to Khao Lak.

At six prompt on the morning in question, Pierre executed his daily exercises consisting of 40 push-ups (feet raised on the bed) and 30 sit-ups then strode through the balcony door for two minutes deep breathing. After 33 years of witnessing this routine, I had no reason to believe that anything untoward would happen that morning except, not to put too fine a point on it, there was no balcony attached to the room. It was later explained that the construction company “Was planning to add it to the hotel that very same day.” Quelle coincidence.

Pierre, a sprightly 60-year-old, jumped at the chance to prove his survival skills. Monsieur, given the circumstances he didn’t have much choice. The poor man plummeted three floors down, bouncing off a sunshade through an open window and rolled sans cullottes into a smoke-filled party. The semi-clad occupants of the room didn’t seem to object to, or even to notice his rather dramatic entrance, let alone his furtive nude exit. In fact, Pierre was rather thankful that his lack of attire blended in with the general demeanor of the party but later questioned why it was that people would choose to congregate at that early an hour of the morning dressed only in their underwear.

After a brief but rigorous interrogation by hotel security, Pierre was draped in a towel then escorted back to our room and croaked that he felt as fine as a spring chicken on the morning of 14th of July. I dared not question this analogy.

He was outside the hotel at eight o’clock, happily whistling Bach toccatas. Apart from the lesions to the legs, throat and upper body, he’d never looked better. He cheered as the tour minibus arrived and off we went through legions of careening motorbikes and cars.

Sir, if there ever was an occasion for an accident it was then, but our driver seemed used to the traffic madness and later pulled in at the first stop of our tour: a petrol station a half-hour north of the island to eat a takeaway breakfast.

Smoking at a service station has always seemed to me un petit peu risque but Pierre shrugged off protests from a group of Australian students, claiming that he never paid attention to the capricious laws of spontaneous combustion. He lit up with enthusiasm, throwing his semi-spent Gitanes in the general direction of an overflowing litter bin which, by the time we pulled out of the service area, was emitting a picturesque red glow. Several minutes later we heard a dull thud and a distant roar and then witnessed a column of black smoke rocketing up from the very place we had eaten! Obviously there’d been some sort of a mishap there. We were lucky not to have been there at the time, as Pierre dryly pointed out.

Once arrived at our trek in Khao Lak we disembarked while listening to Pierre’s daily but fascinating monologue on his philosophy of life — this time to the same group of Australian students. Warning us of an incoming storm, our guide beckoned us up a steep gradient into a shelter where a troupe of elephants waited. Unhappily, due to Pierre’s unfinished discourse, and because of the van’s door being locked, his listeners got stranded in the downpour and had to crawl up the muddy slope to the shelter. My husband, as gallant as ever, assisted a young Australian student by pushing her rear-end up the slippery slope with what looked like his forehead but the only thank-you she gave him was a swift uppercut and a heel to the jaw. Strangely, he didn’t seem surprised and soldiered manfully on up to the elephants once the rain subsided.

The elephant ride was certainly instructive. The mahout smiled, then gazed at my husband’s wounds and waved us aboard with a friendly but wary gesture. Pierre sat on the animal’s head. What happened next can be verified by the camp medic who later told us that if Pierre hadn’t have fallen from the beast after three paces it could have been a lot worse. As it was, the mahout swung down and picked my husband out from what some people politely call les devoirs de l’้l้phant in record time. It only took five minutes to shower him down, then off we went again. All along the elephant trek, jungle branches brushed against our cheeks leaving a trail of ant bites along Pierre’s handsome cheekbones but he didn’t care. His eyes, a la Napoleon, scanned the middle distance.

Embarking wooden rafts, we sailed serenely downstream. Pierre loudly quoted the poet Mallarm้: “Mais ๔ mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots”. Waving villagers lined the banks to admire my husband’s torso. The Australian student, who had altered Pierre’s countenance somewhat, reached for her camera bag and slipped, dropping it into the river. Gannet-like, Pierre dived in and retrieved it, gripping the strap between his teeth as he swam back to the raft. Hauling himself aboard, he smoothed his hair back, handed the bag to her and flexed his abdominal muscles. The poor girl couldn’t resist this show of masculine strength and was so emotionally moved that her friends had to surround her as she sobbed into her handkerchief.

Monsieur, for future reference towards Australian tourists using your tour, it behooves me to share the following: weeping and hysterical laughter sound strangely similar chez les Australians.

Then the same student removed a camera from another bag and photographed Pierre flexing his biceps, posing in front of her still-convulsed friends.

At the end of your delightful tour, sitting on the beach watching the sunset, we listened to Pierre’s life story. I was struck by his humility. Here was a man: a fully qualified factory sewing machine inspector, nom d’un nom, who’d had the guts, determination and vision to completely change his career in order to please his wife. It must have been hell for Pierre to move from sewing machines to curtain hooks but move he did: all for the love of his little Miaou-Miaou, as he likes to call me. I was overcome with love and leant against his magnificent chest in dreamy worship but a moment later Pierre sprang up and ran into the jungle with a primeval bellow.

Monsieur, in my humble opinion it wasn’t the tour’s fault that Pierre got carried away that evening. It must have been the magic of the moment, or perhaps the two bottles of Cotes de Rhone that he’d been tippling that afternoon. Minutes later he re-emerged from the jungle, semi-nude yet again, mud smeared over his Tarzan-like body, inviting the Australian student and her friends to join him in a romp in the greenery. I must admit he did rather insist and wouldn’t countenance an answer in the negative. And just where I stood in all this I didn’t know at the time. His whole attention seemed to be focused on the student, her friends and their rather large poitrines. After much conferring, to everyone’s surprise and my chagrin, three girls agreed to accompany him into the jungle for “a little bit of nooky”. I was shocked.

Minutes later, we were even more flabbergasted to discover that there are ferocious beasts still roaming the beachside jungles of Khao Lak. According to the students, a giant tiger attacked Pierre as soon as he had entered the jungle, dashing his head against a stone then swinging him around and crashing him against a tree trunk. His poor legs had been broken, evidently in an attempt to defend the girls’ lives. His front teeth were missing and he was incoherent. Later, upon interrogating one of the students as to what had happened, the tour guide was informed that, “it was a tiger what done it and that’s that.” Then the student went back to buffing her nails.
We carried our stricken hero to the minivan and drove back to Phuket International Hospital in a somber mood. The students, cracking open beer cans, tried to cheer the poor dear up with a lusty reggae rendition of “Frere Jacques” but Pierre was inconsolable.

The next day I arranged a flight back to France and have since been unable to obtain a detailed report from my husband of what happened that evening. He refuses to discuss the matter and seems oddly antipathetic to all things Australian. One would have thought that after a struggle with a savage tiger, an aversion to cats would have been the case but no. The first thing he did, once back home was to stagger to the fridge and trash the Vegemite.

I do hope this account of the tour helps. If you have any more inquiries I shall remain at your disposal. Good luck with your tour company and do watch out for those beachside jungle tigers.

Yours,
Madame “Miaou Miaou” Malget