Bangkok A - Chapter 3

The arrangements were easy enough to make. I packed a bag and told the landlady that I would be going away for a while. A long while.

“Anytime you want to come back, you know that your room is waiting.” She had said, frozen with shock, the curlers almost uncurling themselves from her matted hair “I wish you tell me earlier,” she says “I can offer proper goodbye.”

Last thing I needed was a proper goodbye from that old crow.

“No need,” I tell her, “I will keep in touch.”

I walk down onto Sukhumvit road and hail a taxi and asked him to take me to Mo Chit bus station.

“Five hundred baht.” He says, thinking I am some kind of green, wet tourist. I speak in clear snaps of Bangkokian Thai. I tell him to “Kiss his sister,” and open the door of the taxi adding, “It only cost me ten baht, and she said it was good, real tasty.” I close the door and he drives off with the speed of a man with hate in his blood, and I fear, just for a moment, for the safety of his sibling.

I take the sky train option and save 460 Baht. Standing for most of the journey I look around at the office girls in the white blouses and dark blue skirts. The girls that work in the offices here only wear that type of outfit, which is essentially an extension of the school uniform. I look at the Fa-rang school teachers with their bleary hung over eyes, and sweat marks on their shirts. ‘flying saucers’ we used to call them in the city of London. Sweat marks under the armpits. These boys seem to leave the classroom and head for the bars and prepare their lessons whilst watching naked women swing around chromium poles. Now, buddy, that’s what I call homework. The lady teachers have their own bars where young boys do whatever it is that young boys do. Boys will be boys, Girls will be girls, I guess. Whatever. Can get whatever you want here, for a price. It is a happy place, kind of like London when Vickey was in charge. A good place for all you aspiring young artistes.

As we pass each stop on the elevated rails, I feel that a little part of my past is being laid to rest. Inch by inch. Getting away from it. Getting away. I can feel the dirt removing itself from beneath my fingernails. Getting away. Nice.

I feel somewhat lighter as I alight at the last stop. Push the ticket through the turnstile and past the barrier. A stall opposite the turnstile exit sells whale music in CD format to the left of the elevator. I’m not interested in whale music, not right now. Maybe later. Whale music is probably best listened to by whales.

A motorcycle taxi pilots me the rest of the way to the bus terminal squeezing between cars, and mounting the pavement on several occasions, the small Honda Nova motorbike darts through the Bangkok traffic, with an astonishing sense of self belief. The Buddha is smiling this morning. Oh yes, he smile. He smile.

Inside the bus terminal I look up at the boards and realise that I have no idea of where to go; mainly because all of the destinations are written in Thai. I can’t read Thai. There, I said it, I can’t read the language. Yet I complain when my visa application is rejected. How can you complain about a country when you don’t read the language?

It had to be Isaan, the place where nobody goes, but where everyone escapes from. The poor Northeast; but I only knew the names of places that Bargirls had mentioned – Chrorat, Buriram, Si Saket, Surin, Uban Thani, Nong Khai, Kong Khan. I ask a porter when the next bus is leaving for Isaan and he tells me a VIP bus for Si Saket was leaving within the next twenty minutes. I buy a ticket and a bottle of cold Japanese green tea, and board the bus excited about my new life. Excited.

Just then my mobile rings.

“Hello?”

“Joe?”

“Yes.”

“Marvellous these new telephone things?” said Phil. I could hear from the background noise that he had already hit the bar. When I think about it, I have never seen Phil outside of a bar. He seems to live in the things without actually owning one. Perhaps he does own one? Perhaps he owns them all?

“Never mind that; what’s the matter?”

“A job; I have a man sitting here who is offering a small fortune for your services.”

“He must be desperate?”

“Joe, I am talking big money, a fee just for negotiating…”

I turn the red button and watch the power switch off before pocketing the telephone.

The bus pulls off and I feel my body shake itself into a restless sleep, every molecule was asking for a beer. But I was stronger than that. I take an Atrax tablet, a mild tranquilizer with antihistamine effect. I sleep like a restless baby until we reach Pak Chong, a sleepy town outside the Kho Yai wildlife reserve. I take a walk outside the bus and buy a can of Singha beer, more out of instinct than anything else. I drink the beer, buy another, take a piss, and get back on the bus.

I was getting away from it all.

The rest of the journey was uneventful until we reached a small town past Buriram. I strike up a conversation with a Thai girl who had learnt the simplest English from a brief existence as a bargirl in Hua Hin. She was returning back home with a little money and the idea of starting a beauty salon. She had pale skin and an oblong face, with thin pink lips, and large brown eyes that looked as if they were questioning whatever it were that fell before them. To further the impression of inquisitiveness; she had a facial mole beneath her right eyebrow, and owing to the curvature of her eyebrow, it appeared as if a question mark had been drawn upon her face. She was polite, and asked where it was that I was heading. I tell her that I have no real direction and intend on seeing where the bus would take me. I tell her that I have no wife, nor family in the North East of Thailand and her eyes light up with an expectant glow. Forgetting herself, she quickly erases the evidence of her apparent sense of good fortune, by wiping her hand across her brow and down past the question mark. Once the hand had passed over the face, a stern look had replaced the one of excitement, and the question mark had become a sideways semi-colon.

“Then where you go?” she asks.

“Wherever. They have hotels in Isaan right?”

“Have. But not many, I think better you come with me.”

I am flattered but not to the point of taking up the offer.

“It’s ok. I think I need to go alone.”

With that she huffs and moves down the bus and for the first time it occurs to me that perhaps she was a he. It was something about the huffing, Thai girls don’t huff they sigh. Also, lady boys make good hairdressers; but maybe it was my inquisitiveness that was the problem.

The next few hours were a backdrop of rice paddies, buffalo herds, corn fields, Cattle Egrets (a white wading bird, like a small stork that appears to be the sole remaining visible species of bird within the Thai Kingdom) and lots of road side shops, selling rice, buffalo meat, corn and a small stork like bird called the Cattle Egret. We stopped at a couple of these outlets and I had a look around. Not much at all really, cigarettes, beer, globs of Thai food and strange fruit. ‘Where is the real Thailand?’ My silly-head kept asking itself. My not-so-silly-head would reply ‘Your standing in it buddy.’ And as always the not-so-silly-head was right.

I decided to disembark the bus at a small town called Prasat on the route to Surin. The reason for my disembarking was owed as much to the fact that a large number of fellow passengers disembarked, as it did to the fact that my bum was screaming at me to stop all this bus seat nonsense. Turns out the town had one hotel, and I secured a room under the name of Mickey Mouse; old habits die hard.

I took out a well thumbed copy of an old pulp novel and read random passages before sleep curled her therapeutic fingers around my temples and gently massaged my being into the void.

Sleep.

Next morning I awake with a start and checked the clock, 7am, I take a walk into town. It appears the town has a lively food market, vendors sit on the floor with their produce in front of them. The scarlet red and yellow chillies lay in long oblong wicker baskets. Various vegetables, pak choi, Spring onions, sweet potato, herbs, splashes of green. And the fruits are laid out in a rainbow of colour; custard apples, jackfruit, green mango, papaya, rambutan, tamarind, orange. The vendors point and smile as I walk past, obviously not too many Fa-rangs walk past. One old lady screams out she wants to marry me from behind a mountain of Asian pears. I pick up the fruit and tell her that if she feels that way then she can let me have the fruit for free, she laughs and waves me away. I bite into the fresh sea green fruit and walk through the market. I walk up to the foul lady who sells Chickens, Ducks and by the looks of it Cattle Egrets.

“Nee aria?” – What’s that I ask pointing at the bird with the long neck.

“Nok” – Water Bird she says.

Cattle Egrets.

I find an R.K minimart and buy a copy of the Bangkok Post and a small can of cold coffee, and take a seat in one of the chairs by the bus station. The paper had nothing of real interest and I had come to expect this. Normally one would see the occasional ‘man ate by Tiger’ in Thailand or such like. The only vaguely interesting story is that of a Taiwanese Shaman who had instructed his teenage son to make love with his wife, who was also naturally the boy’s mother. The Shaman had explained to the authorities that the boy was weak and needed to have sex with his mum to become strong and balance the yin and yang. The authorities have evidently taken the opposite view and both parents have been indicted on the grounds of incest.

“Bpai nai?” A man with a tatty, vaguely official looking uniform snaps me out of the story.

“Mai rui” I tell him I don’t know where I am going.

He smiles “Mai rui ah?”

“Chai. mai rui” I tell him and he walks away shaking his head at the other similar looking vaguely official like characters that approach me. Another mad Fa-rang passing through; and nothing to be concerned about they say to each other with a simple bemused look.

I finish the coffee and walk back to the hotel. I had not noticed how bleak the room was before. And let it be known that I am accustomed to bleak rooms. I have stayed in more bleak rooms than the average man, and I had enjoyed each bleak room more than the next. It’s what is inside your head that is bleak and once you have arranged the furniture inside your head then any room will do.

I turn the mobile telephone on and immediately it rings.

“Joe, Kid, I worry.”

“Like hell you do Phil. You have some kind of earner going on. Don’t think I am stupid.”

“Here’s what I got kid, a 100,000 Bart retainer non refundable and expenses on top. If you solve the case an extra million.”

“You’re lying.”

“Talk to the man yourself,” Phil hands over the telephone.

“Hello?”

“Joe. I am familiar with your work. I have a situation and I have a feeling that you are the man to solve it, but I understand that you have gone native on us. Is that correct?” His voice is English, well educated obviously rich or from a rich background. His choice of words is almost like military speech. A preciseness about his choice of words.

“I am doing some field research,” I tell him, “are the terms my elderly friend mentioned correct?”

“They are. But we need to speak in person.”

“Am afraid that is impossible, unless you want to meet me up here. I have an allergy problem with Bangkok at the moment.”

“That is no problem. Where are you?”

“Prasat.”

“Uncanny,” He says “there is a flight to Buriram tomorrow morning. I will contact you once I have landed.”

“Ok.” was all I could say.

“Good.” he added and the line went dead.

No harm in listening, I thought.