TurkFist's World

Alcohol and sex dance in arabesque when Turk, the omniscient protagonist sleeps, wakes to go about his business often in the vicinity of Bangkok’s 3 main falang red light districts in each of the forty or so stories already published on Thailandstories. com. and some more on Thai360.com. That’s about the dimensions of the oeuvre.

The basic model, under the aegis of prostitution, is Turk meeting a girl who is not an ordinary girl and things happening before they separate, usually finally. The conceit is there is much more going on.

The first story on Thailandstories ‘Beer Bar Seven’ (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/beer-bar-seven.html) sets the mark so formidably high that even Turkfist may subsequently stumble. Structurally it is rather typical and contains many of the persistent motifs sprinkled throughout his work.

"She sits there somewhere between boredom and satori”

This is his heaven and hell already and the beer bar ambiance is meticulously further conjured by;

“A group of Arabs ahead of me pass by the bar dressed up to the nines like extras from Lawrence of Arabia who've forgotten to take off their gold Rolex's.”

and contrasted;

“I look away from her and watch a man in a dirty white T-shirt tossing a wok of pad tai…… The noodles fly into the air and seem to hover there for a fraction of a second before returning to the pan.”

As he enters the bar and because she stares we suspect there is going to be something special between them.  Avuncular tender, he takes her hand, small and fragile as a child’s, while TurkFist the eponymous author calls her ‘Wan’ who is pale and anaemic we must suppose and still he can not resist some salacious detail of her nipples. Though later when she takes Turk's hand "in her two hands and places it in her lime green lap " the narrative is clearly  working toward this heart-rending exchange;

"When you watch the sun setting what do you feel in your heart?"

"I wonder if I will die in the day-time or the night-time." She answers.

Here on in it is downhill, a jagged sleigh ride with the bathetic discordant yowls of Argentinean tango passing on the way:

“She leans her gently perfumed soft head on my shoulder.
I feel for a little while like I'm another innocent in a stupid world. But I'm not."

Before the crescendo collapses into an exhausted akimbo;

"But it's not true. If I had a good heart I'd have given the money to her, or some charity, or some poor kid on the street. I was just buying a half hour of innocence.
And now I could go back to being a cunt. "

If the story were only measured by the descriptions of Turk’s wry self-loathing and Wan’s bruised innocence in their broken world it would still be very good but on close reading what impresses are its depths of seamless integrity.

From the first lines which artfully link sex and alcohol, Turks ostensible cruces, by comparing Wan to “an alcopop in a darkened bar.” and her clothes which  “glow like a gin and tonic under an ultra violet light”

The 'older woman' who massages Turk  masquerading as comic cameo is carefully rendered and should be there for verisimilitude and more thoroughly to keep alive the archetype of the knowing mother / wife pimping her daughter. It is about here too that one of the author's recurrent furious coquettes occur; “A few years ago her beauty and her sweetness would have had me. Now I look at her and I wonder if she's even legal”. Yet the ‘ago’ which has led Turk to all this we never more than teasingly know, in any story, though exception beckons in "Invitation"  http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/258994/ (Thai360) and "Once Upon a Time in the Eighties"   http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/once-upon-a-time-in-the-eighties.html (Thailandstories).

Evocative sartorial shards; the “polyester and cotton fabric of the trousers” of the poor bargirl, some customers who “wear football shirts”, and Arab pedestrians sporting expensive horology

You may wince at a memorably apposite metaphor where beer  “tastes as bitter as ear wax and aspirin”

Humour tinkles; "I come from Bangkok. Pleased to meet you."

                              "Nooo." She says laughing. "Farang not come from Bangkok."

And we already know she is a like an alcopop so when he kisses “banana flavour lips” what else could she taste of?

To both being momentarily lost "as though she's forgotten what her role in the world is" and later him suffering a similar amnesia.

Time is passing. “The sun is starting to set as the older lady goes to get the drinks”. It is not only setting on the day, but also on our heroes, alas the story too, and leading to the crepuscular anguish of the season of Wan’s death.

Turk is a cunt (he opines)

Turk cannot love. He is wounded but can still stem the flow.

© Icarus. All rights reserved by the author.