Fiction

She brings me my first one when I wake up. Then she goes to the street and gets us some food. She comes back and sits at the small table near the window and eats. I ask her to join me and eat beside me in bed. She shrugs her shoulders and keeps eating. That’s the way Jit is.

I've got seven friends, good friends, and they're all in the Rathole. No, make that eight, yeah, that's for sure, eight. If I fudged a little I could almost tell you that all nine of my friends on my friend list are there. Well, the last one he's not quite there yet but you can see it coming, his condition getting worse, and you know that like the others he won't be able to turn it around.

Riding down to Bangkok from Chiang-Rai, the train begins to pick up speed at the out skirts of town, past the endless stretch of fields of rice and corn still drowned in fog, past the temple spires piercing through the blanket of mist, past the village roads still sluggish and sleepy awash in the pale light of dawn goes on with its sad monotonous click-clack of wheels dragging me from this moment to a time and space in which I have lived before yet which seems so distant now in a fading evocation of nostalgic pain.

“You are a real sorry bastard aren’t you Ritter? You never go out with women. You act like a prissy pervert whenever you have to socialize. Oh yes, I’ve seen you ogling the little girls. I know what you are Ritter. So don’t you sit there and judge me.”

Our fragilities would collide with the Bar’s re-opening on August 2nd. I was sure.

What are you laughing at? Can’t you see I just killed your girlfriend?

I have a vague memory of waking up some time later with a tongue like Ghandi’s flip-flop. After gulping down a bottle of water from the fridge I decided, in the manner of eccentric drunkards, to make myself a cup of tea. After sculling it back fast enough to strip buds of my tongue I coughed, retched and flopped back into bed.

I was not surprised when I heard that Hans was dead. I had thought the end would come soon and it would be his liver. I guess Hans was right in being paranoid.

We arrived at the locked glass doors of the Sahara and found gay bellboy Manuel, who judging by his swollen eyes and furious blinking, had been snoozing somewhere on the sly. I was still slightly fearful of the young man – who after all has a key that can open every room in the hotel – so I clamped my arm tightly around Noy’s neck and planted a kiss on her cheek in an ostentatious display of my heterosexuality while Manuel unlocked the door to the lobby.

The brother wrote and wanted to know if the latest story he had been sent from Thailand was true.

Coming bathetic!

Joe was understandably delighted when his young wife presented him with twins. But an unexpected meeting with a face from the past reveals a family secret.

It was a month or five weeks after we d been together, I think. I’m not sure. It’s one of many things I’m not sure about. I had brought her photo up on the screen in Photoshop, and I did not remember her. I could remember nothing about her.

I spent about 20 minutes surrounded by motorbike taxi drivers to whom I repeatedly said ‘Bangkok Smile Dental Clinic, Asoke’. Out of the blue, one particularly scraggy individual had a Eureka moment and pulled me onto his bike. The mad little bastard zigzagged through traffic as if unaware of the fact that a mistake would mean the two of us being skinned alive by hot tarmac.

A gentle tale of true love, femininity and innocence from 2003.