Thai Tales - One

October 11, 2005

Memo to self #2: Never put the first rough drafts of your travel book, revolving around the 11 months you spent living as a bum on a Thai island, on the net...

PART ONE

1

YOU have to award credit where it’s due, I think, and there has never been a more deserving recipient of the How To Fuck Your Life Up gold medal than the person bashing these words into someone else’s laptop. The fact I’m bashing them into someone else’s laptop rather than my own is probably a good place to start, really, but that would mean missing out on what I think is an essential part of the story – the part, that is, where I get to blame it all on someone else: Womanis Horribilis.

But let me first set the scene. I’m English – though only by birth, sadly; I clearly lack the bristling spirit of those tortuous Merchant Ivory films and endless period dramas starring Helena Bonham Carter (see? Even the actors’ names are posh) – but am currently living in Thailand. Except that’s not really true, because I’m not living in Thailand, but merely existing here instead. On someone else’s porch. Someone else is a Danish guy called Mikkel, and how I came to be living on his porch is sort of interesting, too, and I promise we’ll get there, but it’s very important that you know that the only reason I ended up existing in Thailand, living on Mikkel’s porch, and bashing words into someone else’s – Mikkel’s, actually – laptop, is entirely and redoubtably because of Womanis Horribilis. That is to say: not my bloody fault at all.

Let’s roll back time, if you don’t mind too much, to last February, when I was working with a friend on a horrible little local newspaper somewhere in the UK. It doesn’t matter where, because local newspapers don’t matter, no matter what I tried to convince myself at the time. I allow myself this career snobbery because there was a time when I was Fleet Street Maximus, a reporter extraordinaire, a hack whose very presence was enough to have rivals trembling. Then a member of the Womanis Horribilis race entered my life again, brightened it up, then ruined it, causing me – making me – to become horribly addicted to cocaine and booze and therefore ultimately having to relinquish my crown and become, er, unemployed.

Anyway, that was then, and now is now – or at least, last February. I’ll be brief, here, because it’s boring, but suffice to say I made the heinous error of allowing yet another Womanis Horribilis to enter my life, brighten it up for six months, thereby drawing me into it’s cunning web of breasts and marvellous underwear and sunny smiles and charm and suchlike, only to then be ruined, naturally, which caused me to become depressed, somewhat, which caused me not to be able to work – the minx worked under me at the time; big mistake, gentlemen, so please take note – which caused my employers, eventually, to take such grand pity on me that they suggested – nay, insisted – that such was my pain and misery, I should take advantage of the permanent escape from the office that they were offering to me on an unwashed plate. And could I hand my company car keys back, too?

Ten days later, I’m on Koh Samui, a breezy little island off the south east coast of Thailand. Cheering myself up, really, because I needed to be cheered up. After all, it wasn’t my fault that Womanis Horribilis had treated me so badly. No-one could blame me, no-one at all. Okay, so I drank a little. So did she. Okay, so I drank a little bit more. She didn’t. But I remained the alarmingly witty and amusing companion I’d always been, even if perhaps she hadn’t quite seen it that way. But I digress. There I am, late November, slurping noisily from a pineapple daiquiri on Lamai beach while my friend from back home sleeps off the effects of the ten or maybe twenty Valium he’d consumed, rather greedily, the day before. Life was good. It was a little after ten in the morning, the sun was ablaze, I was half pissed already, a wrinkly old woman was pedicuring me to the max, and I was wearing a pair of ridiculous white cotton trousers. Couldn’t get better than this after everything that had happened at home, I figured. Certainly couldn’t get any worse, oh no. Absolutely not.

2

SEVENTEEN days later I celebrated my 33rd birthday, the first time I’d had the opportunity to do so on foreign shores in my entire life. It is fair to say it didn’t quite go according to plan. For starters, I was lucky enough to share my birthday with the honourable King of Thailand, whose celebrations, luckily for me, included the closure of all bars and the barring of selling alcohol for the whole 24 hours. Of course, a man of my stature and fondness for all things prohibited wasn’t going to let a little thing like a national holiday get in the way, so a party was held in my honour at Coco Bar the night before, and we got pissed as rats on illicitly obtained Sangsom Thai whiskey – which is really rum, but that’s Thailand for you – on the day itself.

Ah, Coco Bar. Now there’s a tale. Coco Bar is a little place that sits right at the southern end, on the corner in fact, of Lamai Beach – which is not the beach incidentally, but the main road running through Lamai, actually parallel to what is, indeed, the beach itself, and which I assume is for the sake of sanity instead called Easy Street by Mikkel. Coco is run by Sao – pronounced sow, but meaning not pig (which is known here as moo, just to confuse matters further, although cows are not called oink) but sister or girl, apparently – and Oiy, which I understood to mean sugarcane but in fact does not mean that in even the slightest sense; a pair of ladies who could hardly be more different. Or same, same, but different, to use the entirely senseless local parlance. Oiy is as thin as a rake, permanently cheerful, and happily cocooned in a relationship with a large, affable Irishman who normally lives in Amsterdam but has chosen to take residence on the island for the last eight months. For “large”, read “huge” – and not in a muscular fashion. The man wears tents, let’s put it that way. Sao, on the other hand, is squat and solid, allegedly a lesbian, allegedly furious that Oiy is with Tent-Love, permanently grumpy, pronounces my name Justin as Dut-Tin, and has a glare to stop a thundering buffalo dead in its tracks at thirty paces. And despite it being my birthday, and despite her arranging food and balloons and festoons of flower garlands and even a cake with my name and candles and everything, Sao is actually quite unhappy with me. So unhappy, despite this display of bonhomie, that she’s already arranging to have me at the very least beaten rather badly – beaten like a ginger stepchild, you might say - and at the most killed. And in Thailand, least and most are never really very far away from one another. It seemed I’d run up rather a large bill, or tab if you will, which Sao felt I was somewhat reluctant to pay off. Reluctant I was not. Unable, however, would be a far better way to describe it.

Before I left England, I’d done what most mature men with the best parts of their reckless youth behind them do, by completely disregarding the necessity of tying up loose ends. Loose ends of the type of cancelling direct debits to landlords I’d run away from, for instance. Or ensuring I was insured for my trip. Or telling hardly anyone that I was going away or where I was going, either. Hell, I didn’t need to. All I needed was my ATM card, my passport, a couple of pairs of ridiculous white cotton trousers, my mobile phone and charger, and my outstanding, globally celebrated wherewithal. And all was indeed well in Thailand for the first ninety minutes – stuck in Bangkok traffic with a taxi driver keen nevertheless on re-enacting Ayrton Senna’s untimely Formula One demise - until I arrived at my hotel. After hurling my bag into my room – helpfully bursting an economy sized shampoo bottle in the process, but not to be discovered until the following morning when searching, and I really mean searching, for clean clothes – I’d scampered off towards the Nana Plaza district in the manner of a puppy who’s been to the park before but is enjoying the fact it can pretend it hasn’t.

Within minutes, I’m propped at a bar with a condomed Singha beer – they slip them in foam “condoms” to keep them cool in the preposterously hot heat – being mauled by four or five lithe young things who shared a common interest in near nakedness. I didn’t pretend to understand a word they were saying – apart from the bits where they said, in English, “sexy man” and “handsome man”, anyway. But so on and so forth, and my one night’s stay in Bangkok turned into two nights’ stay in Bangkok, the company of four women – separately, lest anyone think I’m some kind of pervert or, worse, a sex tourist – and the hasty departure of nearly four hundred crisp English pounds from my wallet. Still, I thought, what’s money – I had plenty left in the bank, and I still had my clothes, albeit sticky ones, my passport, my ATM card and my trusty mobile phone. Armed to the max, you might say: the new buck in town.

Touchdown in Samui, as I’ve said, was a day late, but the friend I was meeting was entirely unaware of this because he’d been eating Valium for a week in much the same way the rest of us breathe. Only just after one-thirty in the afternoon, and after falling for the taxi driver’s guff about “no touriss (that’s tourists, to you and I) now, no money”, I finally arrive at Coco Bar, which the driver had pretended not to know, just to bump the fare up with the clearly naïve and shockingly tan-less newbie, to find my companion draped over the bar, a Beer Chang-with-condom before him, hooded eyes shielded by shades, a look on his face that gave neither the impression of life or death, and a shrieking, near six-foot harridan of a woman beside him. At that point I should have ran while I had the chance, burying myself inside a little mud hut near to the hippies where I would smoke ganja and drink home brew while reflecting on all that is good in the world. Instead, however, I chose to get absolutely shitfaced.

3

TRANVESTITES are a common sight in Thailand, where they are known as katoey, but one should not begin imagining a land full of hulking six foot Mr Universe entrants wearing dresses while holding arm-wrestling competitions at the local buffalo stadium. Many of the katoey are in fact quite stunning, easily mistaken for women, even when they haven’t had the full nip and tuck that most of them crave. Certainly, they’re a damn sight more attractive than the hulking six-foot Mr Universe entrant from Somerset who sat next to me for six hours on the second leg of my flight to Thailand, from Qatar’s Doha airport to Bangkok, who looked about as much like a woman as I do an aardvark, and who helpfully had diabetes, which twice offered me the joy of watching her/him/it lift the hem of an ankle-length skirt to the top of a muscular, stocking-clad thigh, which was then tugged down to the knee in an unsettlingly provocative way, before insulin was injected. Worse, old Mr Universe-Love was a civil servant in to the bargain. Wouldn’t you just know it?

However, whatever they look like, one cannot with all honesty ever escape from the fact that they have been born men, men with balls and shaving rash and the propensity to burp after drinking too much. And only a slightly different individual or a complete fool, an idiot extreme if you will, would take one home. I fall into neither of those categories, however, because I did not take one home: I took two.

Seasoned world traveller that I am, and this being merely my third time in Thailand and therefore aware of all the pitfalls/temptations here, you would think me either homosexual or plain perverted to do such a thing. I prefer to use the adjective “shitfaced”, however, because that is how I came to be in such a predicament. After the consumption, say, of three crates of Beer Chang – just don’t, by the way – and a vat of Jack Daniels, plus a few lines of the good stuff (which was in fact crap stuff) and god knows what else, Valium-Love and I decided to leave the confines of Coco Bar, where by now, after only a few hours, I was something of a popular fellow, having rung the drinks-all-round bell a few times (something else you should avoid, because people who normally sit nursing a cheap Beer Chang for about two hours suddenly get a raging thirst for expensive imported spirits), and wander down Lamai Beach – the one that isn’t a beach, and that Mikkel calls… oh, you know.

We’d settled in a bar where two ladies with a lot of make-up were paying me an undue amount of attention. I knew one of them was a katoey, and I confess right away to thinking: Bugger it, I’m thousands of miles away from home, Valium-Love is so out of it he won’t ever know, and hey, when in Rome… So an hour later they totter while I stagger, all in the general direction of my poorly located bungalow, poorly located because it is at the top of a steep incline not designed for ease of access by permanently drunk touriss. We enter the bungalow – and I remember this with alacrity, like all good, heart-clenching nightmares – and turn on the light. The katoey no longer looks like a katoey, but more like Mr Universe-Love of Somerset’s civil service. Suddenly chickening out, I hand her/him/it 1,000 baht anyway and show her/him/it the door, and off the fellow goes into the darkness, to be followed by the sounds first of click-clicking high heels and then a howl of manly fear as he fell rolling down the incline. (Actually, that last bit didn’t happen, which proves there isn’t a god, but I will wish to my dying day that it had). Happy and relieved to have rightened this scenario, however, I leapt onto the bed like an Olympic high-jumper and proceeded to remove my clothes. Nadia, for that was her name, appeared from the bathroom in just a pair of panties, perky breasts pointing wickedly in my direction and a look on her face that said soft music and a carpet of roses probably weren’t going to be needed.

Oh, how we danced. We rolled this way and that, bodies entwined, certainly in the her-hands-around-my-Pork-Love-sense, kissing in a manner that put battling walruses to shame. But bugger this, I thought – which looking back was a timely, if somewhat spooky thought process – it’s time for the real action. And so, after a loving grope of her pert little bottom, I ripped off her panties. And that was when I saw something rather unusual, if you consider an erection sat bobbing on top of a set of balls attached to the same body as the best tits this side of Titdom unusual, that is. But… but… but…. (and not butt, butt, butt, okay?). Where the fuck did that come from? Where, exactly? My mind coagulated into a drunken mess of horror, confusion and melting desire, but with a body that was, quite literally, refusing to back down. And it didn’t get the chance, either, because Nadia – and by now, I admit, I was beginning to wonder if that was not an alias – was suddenly yanking away at it with even more vigour than before, and then saying hello to it in a far more intimate manner. As all good men of fine stature and hearty valour do in such circumstances, I decided action needed to be taken. One blow job later, however, I was nodding off to Beer World while Nadia was telling me she loved me and wanted to stay with me forever.

I’ve had better mornings, it’s fair to say. It was just lucky I woke first, because it’s one thing waking up with your own morning glory at the ready, but I still can’t counter the thought of what may have happened had Nadia woken before me. I made loud, manly farting noises in the bathroom which awakened the still-alarmingly-fine-breasted fiend in the bedroom, and told her she’d best be off, there was a 1,000 baht note on the bedside. “My name’s Neil, but only call me Nadia,” said Neil, not quite understanding my urgent need to have her vacate the premises. But soon she got the message and the bungalow door opened and closed minutes later. Emerging from the bathroom I felt a sense of utter shame, but also one of relief: at least no-one would ever find out.

So imagine how joyous the world became four hours later when, while toasting a good night out with Valium-Love, I discovered that Nadia’s best friend was Ploy, a katoey who just happened to work behind the bar in Coco Bar, where we were at that very moment sat. Marvellous.

4

SO Womanis Horribilis had struck again, albeit in a slightly more underhand way than usual. More so, in fact, because I was to discover later that Neil – who at the time of writing I have never even laid eyes on again, thank Zeus himself – had helpfully decided to give himself a tip on top of the 1,000 baht I’d generously given already, by stealing my rather nice little Samsung mobile phone. That is, the phone that had all the numbers I have in the world inside it, half of which I will never be able to retrieve, and which is worth around 17,000 baht out here in the Land of Smiles.

This left me, then, with my trusty ATM card, my now slightly less sticky clothes, my ridiculous white cotton trousers, and my good friend Valium-Love in a state of near apoplexy due to non-stop hysterical laughter which only ended when he managed to surface into the real world in order to run, 100-metres style, to the nearest email bureau to tell everyone back home, including many he didn’t know, what had happened in Dut-Tin’s bungalow the night before. I’d been in Samui for less than a day.

There really was only one thing to do, in the circumstances, and that was to get drunk to the max. Other customers began to trickle into the bar, whereupon they stayed for the length of Valium’s rendition of his “bender” mate’s nocturnal activities, before hurriedly leaving for somewhere with a better class of patron. We drank and drank and drank until we could drink even more, and then decided it was time we saw more of Samui. Our adventurous spirit awakened, we stumbled out of Coco Bar an impressive 150 yards to a bar on the beach – Auy Bar. With us came two of our new found friends, Baz from Liverpool and Jacques from Amsterdam.

Baz was a fine fellow, a man in his late forties with a genuine zest for life. Diminutive but stocky, he had a kind word for everybody and certainly no-one had a bad word to say about him, either. Jacques was also an interesting chap – he was taking a year’s sabbatical from his high-flying job in advertising, where he was involved in writing slogans and helping to direct television campaigns for Heineken and such like. He lived, he told us, in a house in central Amsterdam, the property being near to the canals and worth approximately three quarters of a million pounds, drove a company 5-series BMW, liked to listen to The Prodigy on his many car journeys to Paris, but had needed to recharge his batteries. He was 42, and if he didn’t take a break now, he probably never would.

He was living with Jieb, a cheerful, somewhat raucous – and, it has to be said, somewhat plump – girl from Coco Bar. They’d been together four months, had recently acquired two black puppies, and they lived just across the treacherous hill from me at the Amadeus “Resort”. As we sat there in Auy Bar, Jacques told us how he’d got a bit of a problem. He was under some kind of confusing Flemish tax audit that essentially meant his bank account had been frozen, which was a pain, because he had the equivalent of 900,000 baht in there. A Beer Chang costs around 50 baht here in the bars, and a month in Amadeus is around 5,500 baht, so you can imagine that wild times would be around the corner when his money was finally released – minus a fine of around 100,000 baht, sadly – in three weeks’ time. Could we buy him a beer? Of course we could. Valium and I would never turn down the chance to buy someone a beer if we were able, Baz too, and besides, I have to confess we were more than interested in helping him spend his mountain of happy paper when it was finally in his pocket again.

As we sat there, a particularly attractive farang – foreigner – sat down on one of the sun loungers in front of Auy Bar. As we nodded our lecherous approval, while at the same time vowing we’d never go back to European women because we’d learned our lessons the hard way and had learned them well, the girl was disappointingly joined by a rather dashing fellow - dashing because he was a handsome chap, looking a bit like he’d just appeared in a Gillette razor advert, and dashing because it dashed our hopes of talking to the woman that we wouldn’t even want to talk to because we’d all learned our lessons.

However, their conversation was brief, much to our collective delight, and Gillette Man then headed in our direction, wielding an expensive looking digital camera. “We’ll have that off later,” said Valium-Love out of the side of his mouth, only half-joking because he and I are, after all, from Merseyside. Gillette introduced himself as Mikkel, from Denmark, who was on Samui with his filming partner, Rebecca, making a television documentary for Danish TV about the scene over here – farang men with Thai girls, protracted relationships and so on. His English was excellent, but moreover he appeared to like my jokes – but then I am something of a jester, something I’ll get to later – and it turned out Baz was working as a cabbage picker on a small Danish town island 40 kilometres from Mikkel’s home town. Our new friend joined the little coterie with remarkable ease.

So there we were, Dut-Tin, Valium-Love, Baz, Jacques and Mikkel, with The Lovely Rebecca sunning herself in the foreground, enjoying our beer and generally enjoying being rather fabulous people. Mikkel and I instantly hit it off, being such great guys that we are, and all was well in the world.

Well, sort of. What I didn’t know at that point, and couldn’t have, really, was that I was in the company of one man who would almost get me killed, and another who would narrowly prevent that from happening.

5

NIGHT fell, and it was back to Coco Bar again, whereupon I continued to gorge myself on the delights of Beer Chang, Jack Daniels, Sangsom and Cokes, and later, when things began to go a little hazy, the delights of Dang, another of the bar’s accommodating staff members. Dang had pursued me the night before, apparently, and was a little confused as to why I’d instead sought the attention of two blokes instead. I was too, in fact, and so to rectify the matter – and to futilely attempt to rid the sorry episode from my mind – I agreed with Dang that she should accompany me up the Impossibly Steep Hill of Sorrows, whereupon she proceeded to roger me in a manner one can only describe as “to the max”.

She wanted to do the same thing the next morning, too, but translation difficulties meant she failed to grasp that I was hungover to the point of expiry, that I needed sleep like I needed air, that her constant manipulation of my nether regions was frankly a waste of time in my condition, that I was no longer wearing the miraculous beer goggles of the night before, and that she had the face of a wildebeest after it had been set upon by a pride of starving lions. Womanis Horribilis to the max, you might say. Valium-Love helpfully referred to her later as Orang-u-Dang, which put me off forever.

Two days later – two days of constantly being inebriated in either Coco Bar or Auy Bar, running up a large bill in the former – I met Pookie, who was so attractive – to me, anyway – that I was bizarrely convinced she was a katoey (paranoid, moi?). She was tall, with long, slim legs, and had a balcony – to quote Mikkel – that you could perform Shakespeare from; none of the features you would normally associate with Thai ladies. And so, in what must be one of the finest chat-up lines this side of stupidity, I asked her: “You’re a lady-boy, aren’t you?”

She was impressed by this, I could tell, as she proceeded to acquire the enigmatic smile so synonymous with the Far East. She didn’t talk to me again that night, most likely unable to trust herself at the hands of my unassailable charm. Luckily, over the course of the next few days, we did indeed become acquainted, enjoying our little chats at the bar. Gallant as ever, I was desperate to rip her clothes off in the bar itself, perhaps to the sound of Queen´s We Are The Champions in the background, but instead – canny as I am – I decided to wait until her large and extremely dangerous-looking Danish boyfriend had departed for Scandic shores.

Unluckily for Pookie – and for me, too, it must be said, seeing as it killed our friendship just as the aforementioned clothes-ripping had begun – a few days later I went to the ATM only to discover that the cupboard was bare. Remember that thing about typing up loose ends? Well, the direct debit to the landlord was the one I really should have paid more attention to. Men-folk – what are they like?

With a sinking heart, I realised I was now a full time vagrant living in Flat Broke Central, and the folks back home didn’t quite seem to understand the Thai way of dealing with these things. Think machetes, Thai boxing, swimming with fish, that sort of thing. Not really the thoughts that send you off to a childlike slumber.

Not that things were completely out of hand, really. Things can be sorted out. Money can be arranged. The fact that it is ten wallet-busting days before Christmas and it’s the worst possible time ever to ask people for loans hardly comes into it. No, what you really need if you want to get into serious, gut-wrenchingly fearful trouble, is a Jacques. And as I believe I may have mentioned, I was blessed to have one of those already.

6

THE average wage for what we charmingly call bar girls – well, they are girls, and they are in bars – is around 3,000 baht a month, plus board – sharing a single room with up to six other girls – and a cut from any drinks they get bought by drooling, ogling farang folk who are perhaps not in touch with their honourable side. That 3,000 baht a month is about fifty pounds, and is below the minimum wage. Teachers and police officers make barely more. Land of Smiles it may be, but Land of Big Bank Accounts it is not, unless of course you consider the corrupt officials and, of course, the Thai Mafia.

Samui had had a bad year, touriss-wise. What with fears over terrorism, war in Iraq, the Sars virus, people just weren’t coming out here. The bars were empty and no-one was making very much money. More still were losing out. Touriss are the lifeblood of this island, along with coconuts, but the latter are a bit bland and don’t sit at bars all day listening to blaring, scratched Led Zeppellin CDs.

Jacques had arrived in August with his pockets apparently stuffed with 1,000 baht notes. He spent money here, he spent money there, and the bar owners certainly regarded him as a pleasing and welcome guest. So nice, in fact, that when his little difficulty came up, they enthusiastically allowed him to run up bills in their bars. In Coco Bar, for instance, he had a 48,000 baht bill outstanding. But that was no problem, because he had all that money waiting to be released. He owed Amadeus – that of the Fabled Hill of Treachery - 10,000 baht, but that was no problem either. And the bungalow he’d stayed at before Amadeus also happily waved his bill until the Big Pile arrived.

It caught on around Lamai, too. At Chutinan bar next door to Coco Bar, Jacques had a bill of 9,000 baht. Over the road at The Tavern, 28,000 baht. Tent-Love, the boyfriend of Coco Bar’s Oiy, generously lent him 30,000 baht. He even owed the local Minimart for beer and cigarettes. And so on. But none of this was a problem, because the Big Pile was merely weeks away. Plus, Jacques told me, he was going home for a couple of weeks in February to sell his three-quarter million pound house and return, majestic, to invest it in the tills of Lamai’s finest drinking establishments. No problem. Just you wait.

Sao at Coco Bar, grumpy like few Thais can regularly be, was pissed off, though. But because Jacques was Jieb’s girlfriend – she of the loud laugh and the fat bottom – she kept most of her seething anger to herself. Instead, she decided to ask when I was going to pay my bill. “Ask” in the manner of a menacing demand really, and fair enough. After all, it was her cash. Now, I knew I’d run out, and told her so, and I also knew that one way or the other I could get my hands on money. She seemed to doubt this, and without me knowing was already making plans to have me taught a lesson, the Thai way – that is to say, not a lesson in Buddhism, more a lesson in how to get your head kicked in so badly that you will either be left retarded or dead. This is no exaggeration. Upset a Thai at your peril, because assassinations cost merely 5,000 baht – ninety pounds, say – and hitmen are easily come by. Think about it: Thai men watch farang men shagging their women all year round and throwing their money around in bars. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to batter one of those – and get paid for it?

So Sao brought it up with me – not the beating, but the bill – and I made more futile attempts to get some money from home. The family weren’t listening, however, as they were concentrating on the preparation of revolting mince pies and on shooing away money-grabbing carol singers from their doors.

I was irked by this, knowing what I did about Jacques, even if he did have his Big Pile on the way. And one night at Coco Bar, fuelled by beer-on-tab, I asked him when this miraculous money was going to arrive. After all, he’d just asked me to lend him one hundred pounds when my money arrived which he would return when his did. He suddenly looked a little uncertain.

I asked him why a man with a swanky house and a great company car didn’t have a credit card (I don’t have one because no financial establishment in their right mind would issue it – and believe me, I even tried the stupid ones). Or why his mates back home couldn’t send money. Or his barrister brother. Or his mother, who had inherited millions years ago. Or even his old work colleagues – he was a shareholder and director. Basically Jacques, old fella-me-lad, what the fuck is going on?

I suggested he leave his half-empty Heineken bottle at the bar, seeing as he hadn’t paid for it, and, using grapples and hooks, haul his way up the Hill of a Thousand Sighs and fetch his passport, just so we could check he was who he really said he was. Oh, and could he tell me the name of his firm so I could give them a ring, too? Just to be on the safe side?

He left the bar, but didn’t reappear for three hours – and only then at the back of the place, outside, where he asked if he could perhaps have a word with me. The great 42-year-old advertising genius was in tears. He was, in fact, unemployed, having been sacked in April for generally being a hopeless alcoholic. He had no car, no swanky house, no family to talk of as they’d disowned him years ago. He had no friends, and he had absolutely no way of getting any money. We worked it out – at his guess he owed 148,000 baht in Lamai, but given his propensity for bullshit you can probably add another 50,000 baht to that, or even double it. He’d overstayed on his visa and so couldn’t leave Thailand without a huge fine and a threat of jail – not like comfy old Broadmoor, those places – and he was very, very scared. He still had his two dogs, though, which he’d allowed other people to buy food for from day one.

Not good news, really. But the next morning I figured it was time to get rid of the fucker because he was making life difficult for everyone, not least of all me. I told Coco Bar and Amadeus the whole story, and after much animated Thai screeching and frantic arm movements, they decided not to kill him, or even hurt him. They just told him to leave, never come back, ever, and it might be an idea if he left right away. Which he pretty much did.

Two days later, Jieb, who had been inconsolable at losing her beloved boyfriend, despite his dishonesty, decided to go up north to visit her family. Subsequently it turned out she was joined by a Dutch guy called Jacques, who’d managed to get hold of 14,000 baht from somewhere. He’d got away with the whole thing, leaving everyone out of pocket – I’d been buying him beers for weeks along with many others, as well as all the bills he left behind – and was now living hundreds of miles away, free from harm. Until he runs up bills in the country, that is, which is when he most definitely will be fed to the pigs.

Nice ending so far for Jacques, then, but just one minor problem. After thanking me for exposing the charlatan, the Thais had someone else in their sights, and that person looked an awful lot like me.

7

THE person who looked an awful lot like me was still with Pookie at this stage, although things were starting to unravel. Not least because she had a sick grandfather at home who needed money for medicine and such like, and not least either because she urgently needed to hire a motorbike for a month and needed to pay in advance – a mere 3,500 baht. And it’s true, she did need a motorbike because Lamai is all of a mile long with the same shops every three yards, and with an endless stream of shared taxis beep-beeping at you morning, noon and night which will take you almost anywhere on the island for 50 baht. Very necessary, indeed. However, she wanted what she wanted, which was on top of what Sao wanted from me, and things still weren’t happening in terms of cash arriving from Blighty.

I’d stayed the night at Pookie’s place, and had just enjoyed a pleasant minute or two’s love bout with aforementioned beauty, when there was a knock on the door. Pookie stepped outside, and I listened through a hung-over mist as she had an animated conversation in Thai. Minutes later she reappeared and told me Sao would like a word. Yikes, I thought. But despite their murderous intentions, they’re always pretty polite about such matters, and, being of aware of this, I instructed Pookie to tell Sao to bugger off until I woke up in an hour or so, except in a possibly more eloquent fashion, obviously. Sao left, then Pookie went off with a friend somewhere, and I began looking around her room in earnest for large containers of high-dosage tablets of any kind with which to kill myself.

Unlike any other native of the surrounding quarter hemisphere, however, the only slightly medicinal items she possessed were “ladies’ things”, nail clippers and cotton wool balls. Not exactly killing machines, any of them, though handy if I’d ended up with Nadia, I suppose. So there was no other option – go for a very long walk and try to work out something in my head that I knew before starting out on the very long walk was never going to be sorted out, or at least not in my head anyway.

That day I walked some fourteen kilometres, armed with a bottle of warm water, 15 baht in my pocket, in blazing heat. Somehow I made it back to Lamai, had a couple of beers on the beach in Auy Bar – on tab, of course, and tried to collect myself again, whilst at the same time being perversely impressed that my aching body had got that far. Then Mikkel and Rebecca appeared, to tell me that everyone thought I’d done a runner, very possibly with Pookie who hadn’t been seen either. That night I stayed in the hammock at the side of Auy Bar, just to be alone, you understand.

Falling out of a hammock into a bar in the morning is kind of handy, however, as it means you’ve nowhere to trek to the following day. And I stayed there, saying hello to Valium-Love and Baz when they popped in to see if I was alive, until Mikkel arrived late afternoon asking if I’d like to see The Rock. As long as it was miles way from Lamai, I said, and he said yes, it was.

So off we went to the south of the island to the south-eastern end of Bang Kao beach, a still untouched part of Samui where, so far, there are no people on the beach offering a steady stream of henna tattoos, pedicures, manicures, sarongs, pictures of the King, ice cream, corn on the cob, eggs, som tam (a surprisingly tasty Thai salad which belies the word “salad” because, with its mixture of unripe papaya, chillies, nam pla (fish sauce), tomatoes, lime juice and truly evil, mushed-and-fermented-in-the-ground-for-months baby crabs, is not unlike pouring molten rock into your mouth), massage, fake snakes – more on those later – doughnuts, spring rolls, and bizarre silk prints the likes of which no sane person would ever consider putting on even their toilet walls. In fact, there are no people there, and the view from Mikkel’s Rock, under which nestles a monk’s former home, is spectacular. It probably won’t stay such a secluded place for much longer, as Mikkel ruefully pointed out, as the land behind it is being cleared, probably for a new spa to provide colonic irrigation for the enlightened masses. And it’s not that much of a secret anymore either, seeing as Mikkel has taken half of the island’s female population down there to “watch the sunset”.

We sat and drank Singha and smoked Malboro Lights and watched the sun go down, which though beautiful, was not really the most pressing thought on my mind at that moment. Mikkel asked how much shit I was in and I nonchalantly pretended not much; just needed a few days to get things sorted, really. Amazing, isn’t it, how we’re – or I am, anyway – unable to admit failure until the shit has long passed through the fan?

Anyway, Mikkel certainly got the message later, as we’d been sitting in Bee Bee’s bar having drinks and he had to scoot off for a minute or two to find The Lovely Rebecca. While he was gone, a couple of police officers began wandering up and down the soi – side-road – showing mugshots of someone to punters sitting at roadside bars. Convinced the pictures were of me, and shaking like a leaf, I skulked from the bar and headed for the beach, constantly looking behind me and jumping at shadows, leaving a no doubt delighted Mikkel to return later to find me gone but a bar bill waiting. That night, I hid on top of Auy Bar in the open-air balcony upstairs.

He wasn’t best pleased when he saw me the next day, needless to say. But then I wasn’t either. I’d been sat at Auy Bar for the best part of twelve hours and finally decided what I would have to do. It wasn’t hard to work out, either. I was scared of dying but petrified of being hurt or killed. The sea was right in front of me, the sun had gone down, I was drunk enough to do it. Just had to get into the water and take a swim, and keep on swimming till I could swim no longer. But I hadn’t reckoned on Mikkel.

He asked again about the trouble I was in; this time I told him. He asked what my family could do; I explained they didn’t seem to be listening. He asked what I thought I could do; I told him what I’d been thinking. I asked if he’d phone my brother, Mark, to see if it would make a difference. He said yes. The call wasn’t to be made until later that evening, and Mikkel went off to find The Lovely Rebecca, leaving me to stew in my own discomfort. But after a minute he returned, an intense, serious look on his face. He told me what I was considering was grotesque and to consider the intense grief I would leave behind for others. Then he was gone.

Mikkel was right, of course. The idea was grotesque, and the after effects would presumably have been horrendous. But at that moment all I could think of was the grief I was causing while still being alive.

The sea carried on swishing into shore and every crash of a wave made me hanker for a world away from this one. I was a very unhappy, frightened man.

8

BUT Mark came through, and more than in the nick of time. Mikkel had been pressing me on whether I could sort things out, and subsequently agreed to make the phone call, because, unlike me, he knew exactly what was going on. It was he who persuaded Sao not to do anything. It was he who told the people at Amadeus they would be paid. It was he who somehow managed to give me some sort of piece of mind.

He made the call in the early hours of December 18, three days before the day he’d been told I was going to be taught my proverbial lesson. Probably by a local hitman who could easily have been a member of the police, because that’s very common over here. Three days to live, or at least live as I do now. Think about it. Mikkel had known, but had sensibly decided not to tell me beforehand.

And even though I had already been petrified, it was terror in its most naïve form. When Mikkel told me later, about the December 21 do-him-in-date, I experienced the sensation commonly referred to as blood-curdling. Literally, everything seemed to freeze, but not in a cold way – more like my blood had turned to concrete. It was shock, I suppose, and it only lasted a second or two, but I’ve never had a feeling like it before.

I’d put myself in the situation through idiocy and self-denial. Exposing Jacques’ shenanigans had ironically pushed me ever closer to doom. Mark came in at last and bailed me out. But Mikkel saved my life. So cheers for that, mate. It’s fair to say I owe you more than a pint or two…

9

A BRUSH with death is followed by a period of self-reflection and, perhaps, a few life decisions. Once the bills were paid, I reflected on myself in the mirror and decided that I was a lucky bastard who still had cash in his pocket. And it was Christmas, after all. So I decided to get pissed.

It was the usual crew: Valium-Love, Baz, Mikkel, The Lovely Rebecca and me. At Coco Bar I was now Mr Popular again with Sao, though not nearly as popular as Mikkel, who suddenly found himself in the enviable position of being unable to pay for any his drinks; unable, that is, because they wouldn’t let him. I, on the other hand, still had to pay for mine.

Pookie had moved on, though not in a Womanis Horribilis way, not really. When we were together, a couple of Swiss gentlemen had arrived and one of them, Mario, a twat with a pony-tail, who really desperately wanted to be Italian but remains to this very day Swiss, had taken a real fancy to her. He liked to sit at the end of the bar drinking coffee and looking cool, but this was difficult for a few reasons.

First, after he stared at Valium-Love once too many times, Valium-Love had asked him, rather shortly, if he had a problem. Mario decided he didn’t, quite quickly really, and then it was smiles and handshakes and would we like a beer? Another was that his travelling companion, who’s name was allegedly Stefan, was in fact Gollum out of the Lord of the Rings movie series. Uglier than a warty toad that gets shunned even by its own family, Gollum walked with a slight hunch in his back; he was bald, with grey, bulging eyes, horrendous teeth, and he liked to maul the bottoms of the girls in Coco Bar before, we assume, batting them over the head with a shovel and carrying them back to his cave before they woke up in time to do anything about it. In fact, we did actually see him with a shovel one day so if there are any Thai girls missing on Samui, the police could do worse than to have a word with him.

And this was Mario’s best mate. So yes, poor old Mario wasn’t having much luck with his trying to be cool thing, but he was having a lot of luck with Pookie. To my horror, I discovered she had since taken up with him. Talk about fickle. Okay, so I’d run out of money, disappeared for a few nights, almost got myself killed, almost got her killed by implication, not given her any cash, and was too pissed most of the time to have sex with her (in the evenings at least). But I wasn’t from bloody Switzerland. And at least I didn’t have a Gollum, either.

Pookie, to be fair, looked a little sheepish, and I could grant her that. Especially one night in particular when Mario ditched his traditional coffee in favour of some kind of gay Swiss shandy-type drink (probably), which appeared to make him rather tipsy. Bear in mind, men with pony-tails pretending they’re Italian rarely lose control and certainly don’t make fools of themselves. But Mario simply couldn’t help himself that night when, entirely alone with a bar full of open-mouthed punters watching, he started leaping around the floor in what took me a minute or two to realise was a dance routine, tearing his T-shirt from over his head and swinging it around and around. Pookie looked mortified, while Mikkel and I could only look on and dream we’d had a camera. We doubted that the fact he was performing this ludicrous routine to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s ultra-gay anthem “I Will Survive” made him look much cooler, either.

In fairness, however, she could have done far worse. She could have ended up with Crawford, perish the thought, or Harvey, the latter of which still makes my bottom itch just at the thought of him. These two could bore the Statue of Liberty into a yawn; they could have sent Saddam’s troops screaming into the desert without a shot being fired; if you could bottle up their brain-addling conversation and sell it in Boots, it would be the number one best-selling natural antidote to insomnia within a fortnight. No, really.

Crawford was an American – a fat, bearded American from Washington DC, now living in Japan with his Japanese wife, who I first thought was just enigmatic but later realised was probably just catatonic after years with this revolting, avaricious, bore of a man. Crawford didn’t have conversations, casual chats on the beach – Crawford gave lectures on astronomy, on tidal forces, on the Bush administration, on the great corporate lie, and on everything else he clearly didn’t have a fucking clue about. But he did manage to amuse Mikkel and I to the point where we almost choked.

It was end of monsoon, so some days could be glorious and others with high winds and tides and occasional bursts of thick rain along the beach. At those times – though we never really needed an excuse – we would sit in the comfort of Auy Bar and watch people bum-surfing, a practice that involves sitting just where the waves crash and then being dragged up the shore. We didn’t really understand the pleasure of being used like balsa wood against the sandpaper of the beach, but then not everyone can be great like us.

Crawford, on the other hand, loved it, and would stand with hands on hips facing the sea, food-encrusted beard mottled with water, long, greying hair swooping back into the wind, his massive pot belly stretching almost as far as the knees of his ridiculous shorts, which were decorated with the Stars and Stripes he claimed to despise. He probably thought he looked wise, like Neptune, surveying his world and enjoying what he saw. In fact he was more like Canute; that is to say, about to make a complete show of himself before what he imagined was his adoring audience.

He’d been floating, seal-like, in the heavy tide, but sadly a few feet out and away from where he would be dashed, we hoped, to the waiting sand. So with nothing better to do, we ordered another couple of Sangsom Cokes, and waited. And waited. And waited some more. After an hour we feared it would never happen, and then: Fah-lump! He was hurled down onto the beach at force, disappearing beneath the spume for seconds, before he reappeared some fifteen feet along the beach. He tried to get to his knees but was hit by a second wave which sent him tumbling again.

The roar of the waves was deafened only slightly by the roar of laughter from Auy Bar, where we held onto our chairs crying tears of mirth, watching as he then hauled himself onto all fours and remained that way for almost five minutes, head bowed, desperate to get his breath back. No doubt Mrs Crawford had a fun time hearing exactly how rip tides work that night.

It’s just sad that Crawford and Harvey never got to meet. They were a double act made in hell. The Lovely Rebecca had been sunning herself on the beach one day before Christmas when Harvey had introduced himself. All I could see from my vantage point in Auy Bar was a middle-aged guy in black shades, black vest, black shorts, and the required Buddha wrist string, chatting away to her. Then he was walking towards me and Mikkel in the bar.

“Hey there,” he said, all Cliff Richard-style pronunciation, and I noticed he walked as though there was music on somewhere. “I hear you used to be with Sky.” He thrust out a hand and offered a winning smile. “Name’s Harvey. Sure, I was with them at the start up” – though he said “starred up”, and then added: “Yah, I was one of Rupe’s boys.”

Aghast but finding myself speechless, he then added, without any prompting: “I actually secured the whole idea of the soccer deal, right? And the Carlsberg sponsorship – that’s why their logo is green. Sure. But now I’m into mobile technology, 3G, right? Hey. Own company, own boss. I’m the fucking CEO, right? And I just had to get away because, right, the lawyers, the accountants – everyone on at you. And as a CEO you have to take this, but not this CEO. This CEO needed a break, sure, hey, away from the treadmill, right, yeah.” And so on and so forth.

Then he said: “Anyway, this Nigeria deal, yeah? They want me to set up-“ he said seddup- “a system where the Nigerians can download soccer clips to their mobiles. Just me – well, me and the company I’m CEO of. Right.”

I’m thinking: Hello? Do you know me? Am I Nigerian? Have I slipped into a parallel universe? Did I, in fact, take that long swim after all? At that moment Rebecca appeared behind Harvey looking sheepish. Sheepish because she’d clearly told Harvey I used to work for Sky so that she could get rid of him, and sheepish because we’d had a bit of a snog the night before on her porch. Probably more the latter, really, but we’ll get to that.

And besides, Harvey’s going like a non-stop steam train to Tedious City. “There you are,” he says to Rebecca, “I’ll give you my card when I’m finished on Nigeria.” Then: “Actually, this phone deal I’ve seddup is pretty (preddy) neat. It’s for blue chips, big fish, guys in the City (ciddy).” And so Rupe’s Boy describes how he’s CE Fucking O of lapdance.tv, a website where city gentlemen can download pictures of lapdancers to their mobiles.

We didn’t like Crawford very much, but we all probably would have married him given the choice of that and another four seconds of Harvey. Still, The Lovely Rebecca and I would get our revenge.

10

SPEEDOS. Now, what are they all about? It’s a fair question, but unless you’re German, you probably can’t answer it. We actually came up with the theory that a pair of extra tight-fitting Speedos are handed out to every German male leaving the country. They’re awful garments, forcing even the most heterosexual man to stare at men’s crotches just so you can say things like “Christ, his balls must be killing him” or “He wants to get a shuttlecock down there”. I hate them. We all hate them. And they should be banned.

Needless to say, Harvey had a pair of Speedos, black ones, of course, to match his sleeveless black vest, his black shorts, his black shades, and his dyed black hair. We’d managed to extricate ourselves from his company that first day with a reasonable excuse, something along the lines of: “Please, I nearly took my own life the other day, don’t put me back there again,” and had also avoided him the day after by variously jumping behind the bar, burying ourselves in the sand or diving into the sea. Some members of the group even began trying to levitate.

But two days later, on Christmas Eve, Rupe’s Boy makes an appearance again. Knowing that Mikkel and The Lovely Rebecca are making a documentary – although I was beginning to suspect they were spending far more time drinking pineapple daiquiris with me, or in The Lovely Rebecca’s case, pineapple shakes (and more on those later, too) – he suddenly appears, all black shorts and “hey, sure, right”, and sets up a camera. “Yah, okay. I’m filming the filmmakers, you know. Just for a joke. Right, haha.”

We wondered why he would do that – or, in Thai, whydoyoudooda? We also wondered why, once he stopped filming, he stood right in front of The Lovely Rebecca, pulled his top off, flipped off his flip flops, and then, to our shared horror, about a foot from her face, tugged down his black shorts to reveal the aforementioned black Speedos. Then, with a quick burst of “sure, hey, right, okay”, he pranced down into the sea like someone out of Baywatch where he then stood, up to his waist, constantly throwing his head back like the sun was there especially for him. The man was 52, incidentally.

After a while he came out, stood once again in front of The Lovely Rebecca while drying off his face and declaring “sure, guys, sure. That’s what a CEO deserves for makin’ and breakin’. That’s what Rupe used to say. Sure, right, okay, hey”, or something like that. Then, aware he was not being responded to, but with skin thicker than a rhino, did that strange dance-walk thing into his flip flops and danced off down the shore. We saw him later on chatting to another bunch of bemused holidaymakers, only they were sat down and he was stood in front of them, in his Speedos and shades, playing air guitar to a Queen record that was blaring in the background.

Sadly, he had left behind his fake snake, a piece of tat he’d bought from a beach vendor which he used to shake at the Thai girls “just for a bit of fun, sure, hey” who were no doubt amused because even though they went to the beach every day of their lives, had never seen one of these children’s toys before. Sure, right? (Harvey sidenote: He told us he’d been with two 19-year-olds – together – the night before, and not paid them, because you know, hey? Sure they had kids, but the doctor hadn’t done too much of a bad job butchering them. The young ones are just great, sure. But, hey, right, I’m not a paedophile.)

I picked the snake up and ran to the edge of the water, preparing to hurl it over the surf at least sixty feet into the dreamy azure of the Gulf of Thailand. I wanted to do this because The Lovely Rebecca and I were snogging quite a bit these days, like teenagers, and it was a teenage demonstration of my manliness. I also wanted to never see the thing again, and needless to say I wanted to piss off Harvey. Sadly, my throw sort of went a bit wrong. Wrong in a sidewards sort of way. In fact, it went about twelve feet, to the right instead of forwards, barely landing in the water at all. It was, in fact, a quite pathetic throw, something Valium-Love and Mikkel were swift to point out. But I think The Lovely Rebecca understood the subtle messages behind it – one of carefree abandon, the other of ridding her aura of another, unwanted “snake”. Bullshit, obviously, but anything’s better than remembering the throw itself.

Besides, it was the last we saw of the snake. And when The Lovely Rebecca gleefully told Harvey later that someone had thrown it into the sea – his reaction: “That’s not a very nice thing to do” - it was the last we saw of him, too.

11

PINEAPPLE shakes are known throughout the rest of the world as a refreshing non-alcoholic fruit drink, normally served with real fruit, mixed with molasses, cream and ice and probably something else, too, except I’ve no idea what, because I only tend to stay on the side of the bar where people hand me full glasses and I hand them empty ones in return. In Lamai, however, “pineapple shakes” will from now on mean something else entirely.

Valium, Mikkel and I had noticed throughout December that our shared daylight hours were beginning to resemble the waiting room at the local Parkinson’s Disease clinic. That is, our hands and in some cases our entire bodies were rattling that much from the previous night’s excesses that we were unable to perform perfunctory tasks that other people of our ages can perform with ease.

Examples of these would include Mikkel’s visit to the immigration office in Nathon, where he needed to have his visa extended. So unable was he, at after two in the afternoon, to hold a pen with which to fill in a form, that I had to do most of it for him. He had the last laugh an hour later, however, when my pineapples came on so strong that, while attempting to pour some Singha into a glass at a beachside bar in Bophut, I almost threw the bottle onto the beach.

Both of us suffer the pineapples to the max, it must be said. We’re pretty sure it’s the climate. But it does make for embarrassing scenes at the email bureau where we both look like we’re trying to perform a piano concerto rather than type a letter.

Valium was no better, either, and could often be found propping up the bar in Coco drinking his Beer Chang using no hands, but a straw. And on that same Christmas Eve, his father, Dangerous Dave, arrived to show us how pineapples really can be taken to the max.

Valium knew his dad was coming for a visit, but wasn’t expecting him until the following day. So while the rest of us were on the beach preparing for The Lovely Rebecca’s last night, Dave turned up and gripped me on the shoulder and demanded a beer. Beer promptly fetched, I then thought it would be nice to prise Valium from his love-nest up the road by telling him someone was threatening me on the beach, and could he help me out?

Reluctantly, it must be said, he pulled himself out of his girlfriend Pen’s clutches and we walked, Valium, Mikkel and I, in that order of single file, down to the beach again, Mikkel and I sniggering as we watched Valium cracking his neck and limbering up as he prepared to do battle on the beach. On arrival, of course, there were hugs and lots of “you fucking bastards” and then a real battle did commence: who could get the most pissed?

That night was a strange one for me, because while we were celebrating Dave’s arrival, I was already lamenting The Lovely Rebecca’s imminent departure. We’d grown quite close, in a holiday romance, teenager kind of way. We’d even been sensible enough to not take our fling any further than hours and hours of snogs, an innocent intertwinement that I hadn’t experienced since I was about fourteen.

Of course, the fact The Lovely Rebecca had a boyfriend back home in Paris probably helped, but I think we both realised that if either of us donned the old jester’s shoes, things were going to get more complicated than they already were. Jester’s shoes? An olde worlde description for when a man – and I’m told even a woman, though surely not – reaches that point during the act of coitus where his/her feet are sent pointing and shaking into the air, depending on who’s on top, obviously.

So that last night we drank and we drank, and Dave got as shitfaced as he possibly could, which is considerable, please be assured. And that was how we got to witness the finest example of the pineapple shakes that the world has possibly ever seen.

Next morning, bright and early, Dave is declaring he is off the drink that day as he’s not feeling too clever. We pointed out that it was Christmas Day, it was 38 degrees, there was not a turkey in sight, and that we were getting shitfaced, come what may. Besides, The Lovely Rebecca was leaving today, and that was not something I was going to contemplate sober (although I don’t think I’ve contemplated anything sober for quite some years now – possibly about seventeen of them).

First Dangerous tried a bottle of water, but that went all over the table, his rucksack, the sand, but none in his mouth. So then he relented, finally, and asked for a gin and tonic. The drink duly arrived, but Dangerous found it impossible to lift up. His hand couldn’t even grip the glass, never mind raise it. So we tried a straw, but Dangerous couldn’t get his head to hold still enough to get his mouth around it. He decided to go to the toilet, but on his return he appeared to be having some kind of fit. He blamed the sand. And then he tried again with the straw, but still to no avail. In the end, Valium held the glass for his father while Dangerous, looking for all the world like he’d escaped a residential home, sucked gratefully on the straw.

And so, on the basis that just about the only thing we were fit to perform to any reasonable standard was the shaking part of cocktail preparation, the pineapple shakes were born.

Christmas and leaving do all in one day is a strange paradox, but these things have to be done. We shared a round of pineapple daiquiris and generally all agreed that The Lovely Rebecca had chosen the worst possible day in living memory to go home. Christ, I’d been almost dead the week before, then I’d had all spine-tingling teenage desires, and now she was going home. How does that work?

We went for a walk, she and I, along the beach, to say our goodbyes away from prying eyes. It was awful. She cried, and I wanted to, but couldn’t, not really, not after I’d made such a pathetic show of throwing the snake (almost) into the sea the day before. So I stayed stoic in the face of adversity.

It was mid-afternoon when she left, and before departing she gave me a book to read that she knew I would like. She was right, too, because I read it one sitting, and I’ll keep it forever because of what she wrote in the front – although I almost came a cropper when half the pages fell out and went blowing across the beach. I’ve had moments of less greatness – murder threats, obviously, and the opticians story that is yet to come – but there was no way I was going to lose those pages.

I last saw her drive away from the Aloha Resort car-park, looking remarkably endearing in her daft motorcycle helmet, knowing there’s a large chance we’ll never meet again. At least she wasn’t Womanis Horribilis, I thought, but it was small consolation. Glum, suddenly a bit lonely, and feeling a bit left out, I needed a plan.

And it started with a Sangsom Coke….