Ghosts

For me every fever brings ghosts.

And this fever was no exception.

Like bugs in my brain the bastards wouldn’t leave me alone for five minutes. And the ghosts that come to me; they’re not cool ghosts with important messages or winning lottery tickets. They’re not even scary ghosts trying to terrify me with stories of what lies beyond. No… My fever ghosts are a bunch of babbling morons who won’t shut the fuck up. They rant on about some lost hair clip or the fact the cleaners can’t get anything clean because they don’t use the right washing powder. At their worst they get into petty arguments like some pantomime game of contradiction “Oh yes he does.” “Oh no he doesn’t.” “Oh yes he does.” “Oh no he doesn’t” and they can keep this up for hours. Fucking hours. Shut up! Shut the fuck up!… You’re all fucking dead!… It doesn’t matter!

Bastard fevers. In the morning I might think less of it. In the morning I could think it would have been better to take a couple of sleeping pills. In the morning the voices were obviously not ghosts. That’s the wonderful thing about the rational mind (not that mine is particularly rational); it finds it so easy to dismiss all the things that don’t fit a rational view of the world. All that crazy three in the morning shit is just crazy shit. It’s just the fever right? And when you see things… Then you’re just seeing things. They’re not there. And when you hear things… Then you’re just hearing things. It’s just the detritus of your mind firing back at you and if it fools you into thinking there are voices then that’s just further evidence of your feverish insanity.

In the UK I rarely got fevers like I get in Thailand. Every year there’s one mad flu which puts me out of action for a few days and sucks me into this madness. Then there might be the odd dodgy sea food platter which does the same. As a natural hypochondriac I will always assume that I’ve got malaria even though I haven’t left Bangkok in a couple of months (I’ve never understood why Bangkok mosquitoes are supposed to be safe in this respect). I always think I might be close to death. And it always depresses the fuck out of me that the dead who come to speak to me are so fucking boring.

And they really don’t react well to being told to shut up. I just got this volley of babble about how rude I was and how farang don’t understand Thailand and shouldn’t really be there. The thing is that they all speak in Thailand. They always speak in Thailand. If they were voices from my subconscious you’d think they’d be more likely to speak in English. But as they went on and on about how they’d been perfectly civil I was clearly someone who didn’t know how to conduct himself.

I decided that the best way to temporarily regain a little sanity would be to go out. Just get the fuck out of my apartment, walk around, find a bar, have a drink. People always say that when you have a fever you should sweat it out and drink loads of liquids. Was there any reason that I shouldn’t do this while sitting in some bar surrounded by vulgar people like myself? And as long as you’re spending money in people will keep serving you. If I fell asleep in some bar then that would be fine. They might even bring me a pillow. Thais know about sickness. If I found the right bar I could stay there until there was that first glimmer of dawn. Time moves a bit quicker in bars than it does in my bed. And all fevers have to break sometime.

The night air had a freshness to it. All right, it wasn’t a clean kind of freshness. This is Bangkok we’re talking about. But once outside I felt my head was clearer. I walked along Petchburi Tat Mai and saw that the world was still alive; still moving and going about its business. I might still feel like crap but I wasn’t in some Necropolis here. This was Bangkok; the liveliest town in the world at any time of night.

A taxi meter crawled beside me and I got in and asked the driver to take me to Prakanong. There are a good few bars around there that hadn’t got caught up in the whole sticking to the rules closing times that mainly affected farang areas and trendier places. I must have mispronounced Prakanong because the next thing I knew the driver was taking me through streets I really didn’t know at all. Noticing that the driver was not the driver on the license I stopped him and said “Yuut ti ni ko daay krap.” Maybe I was being paranoid but with a fever making my bones ache and my mind swim I didn’t want to get driven to a mugging. I paid him the fare and got out knowing that wherever I am in Central Bangkok I’d soon run into somewhere I knew. Besides which, all I really wanted to find was a bar.

I walked and walked and it felt weird because I really didn’t recognise this area at all. I saw a street sign but the name was obscured by graffiti. I saw a gang of kids up ahead who looked like they were yelling at each other like they were ripped on ya ba and looking for shit. Coming from the Scooby Doo and Shaggy school of avoiding shit and running away I slipped down the nearest Soi and kept walking trying to convince myself that I wasn’t a chicken. It was just that this Soi might have a bar on it.

That’s when my paranoid fever fantasies really hit me. I started seeing shit and wasn’t sure what was and wasn’t there. I saw shadows moving behind wheelie bins. I saw katoey faces glowing radioactive white emerging from walls. I saw things moving around my feet, rats or cockroaches or stuff that was neither rat nor cockroach. Then the ghosts came back. Whispering now. Whispering threats as shapes moved around me. Nothing seemed completely still and my head started thumping so badly that I thought I was going to be sick.

Then I saw it. The bar. Lit up like a Christmas tree with fairy lights. The writing was all in Thai made to appear like handwriting and thus completely illegible to my, at best, pathetic attempts to read Thai.

The odd thing was that it looked very familiar. It looked like somewhere I’d been to before. A place that had once sat nestled in the middle of the Arab quarter between a couple of tailors. I figured it was completely plausible it would be full of gun toting nak laeng but what the fuck. I needed something to wash down a couple of Tiffy before my head went off like Scanners.

I pushed the door open and it was like stepping into the seventies. Eric Clapton was playing on the jukebox and the whole place had this red velvety antique look to it. It was one of those long thin bars and it had a couple of small stages with three women dancing. Two of the women looked past the usual sell by date for go-go dancers but the third was young and beautiful with a sweet kind of body and dark ringed eyes. There were a few customers dotted around the bar. None of them looked like gangsters. They all seemed pretty quiet. Two or three had women with them who looked either fat or old or heavily damaged in some physical way.

The barman was exceptionally thin. Almost skeletal. But he broke into a warm smile as I approached the bar and put down the glass he was drying.

I ordered a Klosters and a glass of water. There was no Klosters but he offered me a choice of beer Sing and Heineken. I went for the Heineken and explained that I just needed the water to take some Tiffy with. He passed me the water and said the waitress would bring me the Heineken.

I went to sit down and closed my eyes after knocking back the pills. There was a smell that I couldn’t quite put my finger on; a cross between rotting wood and wet dogs. When I opened my eyes the beer was already in front of me.

My eyes settled on the prettier dancer. The more I looked at her the prettier she got. The darkness ringing her eyes seemed to accentuate her beauty in some way. It made her look like the night. She wore a one piece orange bathing suit of the kind that go-go dancers in farang bars only wear if they’re covering stretch marks or if they’re new and haven’t got used to their job. It seemed weird that such a beautiful girl would be dancing in a bar so off the beaten track. Maybe it was a family bar and she was genuinely just there for decoration.

I didn’t mean to stare. Even after the Tiffy I wasn’t exactly in the most social of moods. It was just that she made me feel a little better; like the world was still okay. It wasn’t all ghosts and rat shadows. She didn’t dance with any real skill; it was just one of those shifting weight while hanging on to a pole numbers but the more I looked at her the more I started to fall in love with her. She was full of shadows but they were the kind of shadows that turn cowards into heroes and have scoundrels wanting to come good.

The waitress came and placed a bowl of peanuts and a plastic cup containing my bill in front of me. I thanked her and tried to hide noticing that there was something really wrong with her face. It was as if the whole left side had been partially melted and she was made out of wax. It gave me a shock but I hid it, I think, by looking at my dancer. She was just coming off the stage to be replaced by a woman who looked as though she’d had about nine children but who was not afraid to wear a two piece bikini that showed her scarred midriff.

My dancer came straight to my booth and sat beside me offering her hand and saying. “Hello Khun Law. My name Toom.”

Close up she was incredibly beautiful but she looked as if she hadn’t slept or seen the sun in weeks. I took her hand and without a word she lay her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her so her head was on my chest and I could feel the warmth of her body flowing into me. In one split second I loved her so much that I didn’t want to let her go ever. I wanted to stay with her here.

She didn’t say anything else. She just looked down into darkness like some living painting. I nodded to the barman that I was buying her a drink. He smiled a warm smile as if he was happy to see Toom with somebody decent.

Toom’s warmth seemed to be easing away my headache and nausea (although it was probably just the Tiffy working). It was easy to believe she was some magical being giving me life. By the time she spoke I felt fine.

“Why you don’t come here before? I see you walk past many time.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know. I do feel like I’ve been here before but… I don’t really know this part of town.”

She looked at me and searched my face for something before saying “I want you come back here. I want see you again. You can come back here?”

“Of course.”

“You must come late. If you come early I’m not here.”

“Is this bar open every night?”

She nodded “But must to be careful. You know?”

I thought she was talking about the whole opening hours fiasco and nodded.

She smiled but her smile never looked exactly happy… Just relieved.

She took my hand and looked at my fingernails which needed cutting. She immediately called over to one of the other dancers who was sitting by the bar and got her to throw over some nail clippers. Then Toom took great care to cut my nails close to the quick. I felt a small stab of pain and watched blood seep painfully from the middle finger of my right hand.

Toom tried to cover this from me as if my not seeing it would mean I couldn’t feel it and then she said “Sorry na” before carrying on with cutting the rest. She then put the nail clippings in a small velvet bag. “This is for evidence.”

“What?” I said but then realised that there was no small velvet bag and that I’d clearly just hallucinated this last part.

The dancing stopped and we were sitting together in silence, Both of us were still. Neither of us seemed to want to move from this position of me just being there with my arm around her with her sheen hair touching my cheek. She kissed me silently on the neck and I noticed a couple of the Thai customers looking at me and realised that being a farang in this Thai bar for Thai customers with the prettiest girl in the bar might not exactly endear me to the other clientele but none of them seemed bothered by me. They were just looking at me the way they might look at a television.

I said to Toom “Can we get out of here?”

She looked at me as if I had just suggested we go jump off a bridge. “I’m live here.”

“I’ll take you for breakfast. Nothing else.”

She shook her head. “I think you don’t understand me. But is okay. You can come see me every time.”

The barman called to her “Toom.”

She nodded leaned into me so her breasts pressed into me and kissed me briefly on the lips before saying “Bar is closing now. You have to go. You come back tomorrow.”

I nodded and got up.

Through the darkened glass of the bar window I could see the first sign of the dawn. I laughed at the thought that the bar was like some vampire that had to return to the grave before the sun got too high. I counted out the money and handed them to Toom with the bill. She got up and went behind the bar. I lost sight of her and the waitress with the half melted face brought me back my change.

I looked around to see if I could see Toom but I couldn’t see her at all. In fact most of the other customers seemed to have silently left. Only the skeletal looking barman remained.

I walked out of the bar feeling really strange. Out on the street the orange sun hit my eyes and my head started pounding again and I started walking. I felt my pocket and found I still had the Tiffy that I took in the bar. I walked back a little but couldn’t see the bar.

I made a note of where I was and grabbed a motorcycle taxi to take me home.

Lying in my own bed again I drifted off to sleep. When I woke up the whole night seemed so surreal that I would have put the whole thing down to some fever dream if it wasn’t for my too short fingernails and the wound where Toom had cut the nail on the middle finger too short and drawn blood.

I told the story to a couple of friends and they both came to the enlightened conclusion that I had narrowly escaped from a bar filled with vampires, zombies and witches and I’d be lucky if those finger nails and the blood hadn’t been collected and used in some terrible black magic ceremony which would turn me into a) a vampire, b) a werewolf or c) an insurance salesman.

When the fever passed I just dismissed it all as I usually do. The way I see it is I found myself in some freaky little retro dive in some three figure Soi off Sukhumvit and fell in love with the first pretty girl I saw. That’s the easiest way to see it. I have enough fucking ghosts in my life as it is.

© Turk Fist. All rights reserved by the author.

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