Dating : Ginny’s Tails

Part 9: The Departure

The day before Ben’s departure was a time of frenetic activity and mounting stress. He said his goodbyes to his friends, paid his bill at Cactus, giving Mama (the matriarch of Cactus) some extra money for allowing his dogs to remain there during his absence, and left contact numbers with her in the possible event that any of them ever required medical attention.

He trusted that she would remain true to her promises and assurances that his pack would be safe, but he also added a few incentives; including the promise to bring back an original Manchester United T-Shirt for Mama’s son (who was a fierce fan of the club) and acquire some choice videos to entice the customers to keep returning to her restaurants. In this, Mama could comfortably rely on his assurances that he intended to return in actuality and was not simply spinning the tale that others before him had spun without any real intention to do so. It was a question of trust and goodwill based on a sound business contract.

By the end of the day, the packing was complete, but still, his anxiety about forgetting some little detail kept driving him back to his bags and their contents for yet another check. He checked and obsessively re-checked that his passport was safely tucked away in his waist bag, with all the official documents and the necessary amount of cash required for his transit, until his head began to ache with the mounting doubt and stress that the repetition induced.

Ben hated this part of travelling; he regretted the feeling that he simply didn’t have a calm enough constitution for it. This wasn’t to say that careful planning and diligence in preparation for possible calamities that might lie ahead was a bad thing, but that it was the high level of stress to which he was prone in such circumstances that crippled him and often caused him to make mistakes.

His itinerary involved an early ferry crossing to Suratthani the next morning and then a bus ride to Bangkok. Once there, he would book a bed and breakfast for one night near the Khaosarn Road and then make his way to Don Mueang International Airport for his afternoon flight to London.

Ginny was aware that something was up and wouldn’t let Ben out of her sight. The other dogs seemed to be blissfully unaware of the significance of his activities, but Ginny was far more attuned.

Ben worried about how he would make his exit the following morning and expressed his fears to his friend Patrizia, a Swiss-Italian woman who ran an Italian restaurant with her Thai husband. As he sat with her drinking coffee, he exclaimed,

“How am I going to get out of here without freaking Ginny out?” He paused for a moment to pat Ginny, who was sitting under his chair, and then said, “I can tell that she knows I’m about to leave. She has separation issues, just like me, and she hates it when I don’t take her with me; even on little trips to Thongsala when it’s easier to take a quick solo round trip to get money from the bank.”

Ben remembered all the times that he had watched her mounting panic as she ran backwards and forwards on the beach, helplessly watching him leave on one of the local fishermen’s boats, and how she would relentlessly pursue him if he took a scooter along the washed out dirt track that was sometimes navigable between Haadrin and Thongsala. It was only when he acquired sufficient acceleration and managed to put a few corners between them that she would eventually cease chasing him. He couldn’t help worrying about the trauma that tomorrow’s departure might cause her.

Patrizia did her best to calm his mounting anxiety and assured him that Ginny would always be welcome at her place when she strolled by for a tasty treat of spaghetti and meatballs. Ben smiled as the image of her turning up to look for him and tucking into some tasty Italian cuisine popped into his mind.

Come night-time, when he was finally ready to retire to his bungalow, his girlfriend, Nin wanted to join him and spend the whole night. But this wasn’t possible if he was to prepare it for his final ritual cleansing the following morning. She even turned up with a pretty pink negligee and couldn’t understand why he eventually turned her away later that evening with a gentle kiss on her forehead and a resolute “No.”

Crazy Farang!

Ben’s pathological needs often outweighed even his most primal instincts and desires.

It was no surprise to him that he hardly slept that night and by the time he had finished his morning ritual he was completely exhausted. His life had become defined by this constant feeling of exhaustion.

When he emerged from the bungalow at the crack of dawn, he was startled by the presence of an ominous-looking oil slick that had encroached on part of the beach outside Cactus Bungalows. He had no idea what had caused it. Little black globules had washed up and lay scattered about on the sand. In addition to a rather grey-looking sky and the advance signs of rain, the world looked decidedly ugly and, somehow, full of menace.

He noticed that Ginny had a slight cough, which worried him because there had been signs of some sort of sickness spreading amongst the Haadrin dogs over the past few days. All in all, everything looked very grim indeed. It was as if the world knew of his departure that day and was conspiring against him.

Fleetingly, Ben’s torrent of emotions made him consider the possibility of changing his plans, but the rational part of his mind held fast and he continued to ready himself for the journey ahead.

During the past few days, he had done his rounds in Haadrin — feeding dogs and tending to any wounds that he discovered along the way — with a heavy heart. He couldn’t escape the feeling that he was abandoning the animals. He briefly thought that if his physical countenance could magically take on the character of his self-image, then he would start to sprout horns, a forked tail and break out in the unmistakeable reddish hue of a demon from hell. Sometimes, he even imagined that his canine friends were looking at him with despair and resentment in their eyes — accusing him of unforgiveable betrayal.

He was so conflicted internally that there were times when he felt unrestrained anger at himself, uncontrollable frustration regarding the indifference of others and the overbearing sense of responsibility that this placed on him, and he even experienced a distorted rage for the dogs for simply existing as a seemingly insoluble problem that would not go away.

Fortunately, Ben had sufficient presence of mind to know that these were not defining indices about his true nature, but were borne of unconscious frustration, helplessness and despair in the face of needless suffering. He just couldn’t do it all himself. He was shouldering a burden that went way beyond his own personal resources. Yet, he still couldn’t shrug off his feeling of guilt.

Ben speculated that this probably had more to do with the subjective side of empathy and his own deeply buried feelings of abandonment that he was equally unable to resolve. His grief for the dogs was probably also grief for himself in an endless process of mirroring.

He remembered one evening, many months ago, when a particular dog turned up at his bungalow and made his way up the steps to the deck. He was very old, completely devoid of hair and known locally as ‘The Ghost.’ His skin was grey and in the moonlight he had a kind of spectral appearance. He moved very slowly and didn’t seem to belong anywhere. Ben had seen him many times. But most disturbingly, he had seen him looking back. This triggered Ben in a way that he could not fully fathom and he mourned the fact that he had tried to avoid him as often as possible. When ‘the ghost turned up at his bungalow that night, he couldn’t even bring himself to pet him.

“Perhaps it was as though he was looking into a mirror.” Ben thought. He hated mirrors!

The trouble was that he tended to focus on his failures rather than rejoice in his victories. And so, despite all the good that he had done, he primarily carried the weight of disappointment in his own weaknesses, somehow being incapable of exercising any reasonable degree of self-compassion.

This spilled over into his perception of the world around him, where the despair of his interior life became a manifestation of the universe itself — like a Shakespearean tragedy — and everything bad that happened in the world was somehow Ben’s fault. His rational mind knew that this wasn’t true, but it didn’t lift his mood. The feeling ran deep and remained intractable; its origins were so firmly embedded in the subterranean depths of his unconscious.

As always, Ginny accompanied Ben on his rounds, carefully keeping her distance when he tended to female dogs. It often amused Ben how the same-sex rivalry was a canine copy of the human one, though rather less subtle. Over time, the other dogs began to accept that she was part of the package when it came to his arrival for the distribution of food and tolerated her presence — even in those potentially inflammatory situations when females were nursing their young and were hyper-sensitive to the presence of other females.

Sometimes Ginny would choose the cover of the trees lining the beach on their walks to avoid the direct sunlight, keeping him in sight, but sparing herself the discomfort of the scorching heat of the day. Ben could not always see her at those times, but he continually felt her presence and knew that she was watching him. So he talked to her.

“Yes I know you’re there watching me Gin, thinking that I’m crazy walking in the sun, when it’s so much smarter and more comfortable to walk in the shade. But I’m only human, eh?” He would say out loud.

As he scanned the beach ahead, Ben thought about what had become an enduring enigma to him. Despite the high number of feral animals in Haadrin, he never saw any dog shit!

“What happens to it?” He wondered. “Do the dogs bury it, eat it, or do they go to some mystical place that exports it to an unseen dimension?”

Ben had asked Ginny these questions many times, but he only ever received what appeared to be a look of deprecation as if she was saying “Silly human! Don’t you know that I’m contractually obliged to remain silent regarding such doggie affairs?”

All anthropomorphisms aside, he resigned himself to the thought that this was yet another magical mystery of these marvellous animals of Haadrin that would forever remain as such…and he was content, suspecting that there was really nothing magical about it at all, but that it just represented another limit to the presumption of human imagination.

Ben was reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s story Rikki-tikki-tavi (from The Jungle Book) and what he says about the mystery of how the mongoose survives its encounters with poisonous snakes. Exotic theories had popped up over many generations and had been written into folklore and natural history books — such as the consumption of a magical herb after the mongoose is bitten — but the reason was simpler and much more amazing.

“The victory is only a matter of quickness of eye and quickness of foot — snake’s blow against mongoose’s jump — and as no eye can follow the motion of a snake’s head when it strikes, that makes things much more wonderful than any magic herb.”

The machinations of the natural world are far more extraordinary in their ordinariness than we humans can imagine.

And now, to his regret, Ben had to leave his non-human friends for a while to return to the somewhat unnatural world of what the famous naturalist Desmond Morris called “The Human Zoo.” He was going to miss all the wagging tails.

His thoughts turned to the complex question of how he was going to make his exit without Ginny running after him. Ben had exhausted all the tricks that he had contrived in the past because she could outsmart him at every turn. The only real option open to him to him was to ask his girlfriend to persuade Ginny to take a walk as he made his escape.

This is what she did at the appointed time. But the ruse was as unsuccessful as any that Ben had tried before. After mounting the back of the jeep that was to take him to Thongsala — as it began to accelerate away from the town of Haadrin — he heard Ginny’s call and watched helplessly as she appeared in the distance, frantically running after him until his vehicle increased the space between them and he couldn’t see her anymore.