Death on Petchburi Road

20^th December 1997.

I walked from Soi Miami and crossed Petchburi Tat Mai

The road looked clear enough. A few cars darted past but it was easy enough to gauge how fast they were going and how much time I had to cross their lanes.

I could have walked a couple of hundred yards down the road and crossed over the bridge but I wanted to head towards Asoke and get into the shade. Also, in the mid afternoon heat, walking over the bridge would have increased my perspiration to an alarming degree.

What I didn’t allow for was a bike to come speeding out of nowhere.

I felt like I flew as the world turned upside down. My head spun as I felt my body crash and skid along the road. The one thought that went through my head was: “So this is how I die.”

The bike that had hit me skidded further down the road too spraying glass and sparks.

For a moment I lay on the road divorced from reality. Unsure if I was alive or dead. It was a car passing me by with a hooting horn that made me stand up and hobble to the pavement.

Waiting for me was a red eyed man in blue wearing in a helmet and a woman in a pale green suit without a helmet looking distressed.

The woman started to cry as a bump on her head expanded like a balloon being pumped full of blood. The red eyed man just shouted at me in Thai. It took me a moment to pick through his words and understand that he was yelling about me owing him money. He wasn’t concerned about his passenger who looked none too well. He was thinking about his bike.

Half ignoring him I looked at from the point of impact I’d travelled and wondered how I was still alive let alone be conscious enough to listen to this cunt ranting on about the repairs needed to his bike.

A policeman with a friendly fat face appeared and suddenly became the recipient of the bike driver’s complaint. I didn’t know the policeman but I could see that he was immediately prejudiced against the bike driver in my favour. He told the guy to shut up and asked me what had happened. I explained as calmly as I could and the policeman was surprised that I was on foot. He looked at me and he looked at the driver and then asked me whose fault I thought it was.

I said it was an accident. Nobody was at fault. This appealed to the policeman’s reason and he told the biker that if he didn’t shut up he could be tested for drink and drugs. This did shut the biker up for a moment but then he started on at me trying to leave the policeman out of it. At this time I suddenly grew very worried about the woman in the green suit. I really didn’t like the look of her at all. She’d probably been riding side-saddle and didn’t want to muss up her hair with a dirty old helmet. Now she looked like it was only a matter of time before she dropped. “I’m not paying for this man’s bike,” I said to the policeman, “but I’ll pay whatever I’ve got on me to get this woman to a hospital.” The policeman saw that she was in trouble and stopped a taxi. I handed over a thousand baht which was all I had on me and was surprised to see the biker get in the cab with her. I’d figured him for a motorcycle taxi but it struck me at this point that he might have been her boyfriend. They drove off. The policeman wandered off feeling he’d done his job. I tried walking a little way only to realise that, perhaps, I needed to go to the hospital myself.

I never do the logical thing in such circumstances. What I actually did was limp all the way down Petchburi Tat Mai and then Asoke and go straight to the Apache bar on the Soi Cowboy.

I explained the situation to a close personal friend and she took me to the hospital where I got treated for mild concussion and had my cuts and grazes dressed by a painfully pretty nurse.

As incidents go this one was pretty mild. But it had a peculiar impact on me. For a few days I became tormented by irrational fears. I had a terrible sense that the world was ending and that my wife was possessed by demons. I also caught a dose of what felt like NSU but which turned out, after a barrage of tests both in Thailand and, later on, in the UK, to be nothing at all; a psychosomatic venereal disease.

I haven’t been to Thailand in nine years now. The last time was in October 1999 and that was only for a few weeks. Part of me wants nothing more to return for the sense of freedom and fun and the ease of life. I miss the friends I left behind there. Last night I dreamt that I was living back in Bangkok and that nothing much had changed in the intervening years. For a while I wrote stories about people I knew and nights I’d lived through in Bangkok. In my mind I can still find myself wandering through the labyrinthine streets between Sukhumvit and Petchburi Tat Mai or the streets up the other end of town between Patpong and Banglamphu. There’s a very real joy in looking back on my time in Bangkok and remembering all that I loved about the place and all the people I loved and still love who I first met there. Even my son is the result of this collision of worlds. All the same… There are times when I shut my eyes and see a heroin addicted girl with wrists dripping blood or of a body fallen ten stories being laughed at by a girl who’d never seen something so funny in her life or a friend on life support after drinking himself to diabetes and liver failure over some bargirl young enough to be his daughter or that girl standing there with a blister of blood growing on her head and knowing she might be really badly hurt… And when those things come into my mind the exile to the country of my birth doesn’t seem nearly so bad.

Jago Turner

© Jago Turner. All rights reserved by the author.