mules carrying a kilogram at a time in swallowed balloons in return for $30,000 a trip had been an underground characteristic of the trade between Australia and Thailand until recent times when detection techniques improved.
Why was anyone pretending sainthood?
The Thais vindictive and outlandishly dishonest behavior in demonizing him while mythologizing and turning into a cultural icon in every discotheque in the land sex worker who had so successfully ripped him off had already proven the truth of what he had been saying.
And now he was back in Australia, the country to which he had never intended to return.
What passed as refuge was in reality the very last retreat.
He was not in any fit state to see or talk to anybody, much less those he knew intimately; and did not know how long he could survive in this place where he did not want to be.
From the colorful crowds of Asian cities he was suddenly facing nobody but his aging mother. Her religion forbade remarriage and thus she had lived alone for years in the same house. As far as he could see, she had barely changed in appearance or personal habits in 20 plus years.
She still held the beliefs derived from the same fundamentalist branch of Christianity which had been the bane of his youth; its end time rhetoric having added to his own free floating anxiety and sense of impending doom.
As he was to discover the Land of Smiles was better named The Land of Hungry Ghosts; and many Thais also felt an unnamed fear, clinging closely to each other.
Author Dean Koontz put it thus: “With higher intelligence comes an awareness of the complexity of the world, and from this awareness arises a sense of mystery, wonder. Superstition is the darker side of wonder. Creatures with simple intelligence fear only real things, such as their natural predators. But those of us who have higher cognitive abilities are able to torture ourselves with an infinite menagerie of imaginary threats: ghosts, goblins and vampires…”
Fortunately religion was not discussed.
There was nothing worth watching on television, outside only sleet gray skies and freezing temperatures. Through the windows he watched boiling clouds sweeping over the nearby Macquarie Pass, the road which had been cut into the steep rise of the Great Dividing Range from the coastal plains. The hills served as a backdrop to the suburban sprawl which even in the two years he had been away had spread even further up and down the coast.
The first Crisco advertisement he saw on television, promising the bounty of the season, Christmas hampers crammed with hams and puddings, for those sensible enough to have signed up for the company’s payment plan, convinced him he had entered the world of the truly ordinary. That Australia could be as utterly mundane as he remembered.
The accents were the same, the advertisements exactly as he remembered. Little, it seemed, had changed in the time he had been away.
Tacky is as tacky was.
The politicians, from what little he was taking in, were parroting virtually the same words as last he heard.
Bob Brown, the aging, ascetic leader of the Greens, was as lodged just as firmly on a high moral platform as ever.
The ruddy faced Rudd was no longer Prime Minister but as always, never skipped an opportunity for a photo-op. Just as Michael remembered he kept popping up regularly on television where he could be seen as popular while not saying a single serious word. As so often before, he saw him parading on the TV screen dressed in a white apron at a barbeque for the party faithful in his own electorate, beaming at all and sundry.
It was a miracle how Rudd squeezed in any electoral work at all between gallivanting around the world on a frenetic first class tour, first in his role as the most travelled of all Australian Prime Ministers and later as Foreign Minister, a coveted position he was later to lose in a piece of idiotic in-party maneuvering entirely worthy of him.
The utterly compromised country’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, remained to his surprise largely unpopular; just as passing Australians had informed him over the previous two years. At least judging from his few encounters with her as part of the Sydney media pack she had seemed far more charming, intelligent and across the brief as Deputy Prime Minister than her leader ever had.
The various tennis tournaments leading up to the Australian Open were in progress but stirred little interest. The newspapers he had once been so proud to work for appeared dry as dust. He scanned them with barely a flicker of interest.
Michael was not the same person who had left the country two years previously, every illusion swept away.
For days he did little but lie on the couch, waiting for the ghost he had become to return to some semblance of humanity and unusually for him, slept. It was the single most inactive moment of his cluttered, hyper-active life. He had never before lain on a couch for days on end. All he felt was washed white with fear, disappointment, emotional loss and confusion.
Shame and embarrassment at what had happened meant it would be weeks before he felt comfortable with the children he had largely brought up on his own and who he had once been inseparable from.
His suddenly quiet life could hardly have been a greater contrast to the amphetamine and alcohol fueled nights he had spent with handsome young men or in the easy company of aging prostitutes, behavior which had made him the subject of some infamy.
His Happiness Trap had just about killed him. As Dr Russ Harris in the book of the same name wrote: “We lead our lives ruled by many unhelpful and inaccurate beliefs about happiness — ideas widely accepted by society because ‘everyone knows they are true’. On the surface, these beliefs seem to make good sense… But these erroneous beliefs are both the cause of and the fuel for a vicious cycle, in which the more we try to find happiness, the more we suffer. And this psychological trap is so well hidden, we don’t even have a clue that we’re caught and controlled by it.”
Michael barely said a word for days. He was in no mood to talk to anyone he knew; and particularly not to someone like his mother who, like most matriarchs, had an extra-sensory perception about their off-springs’ states of mind.
She was quietly concerned, made sure he was fed but said little. There was only one comment on his depleted physical and mental state: that he was the worst she had ever seen him and he should probably be in hospital, if her religion had not forbidden belief in conventional medicine, it being God’s work to cure the sick.
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