October 31, 2009

1

IT'S REMARKABLY easy to define how unhappy you can be, yet seemingly almost impossible to accurately describe your joy, your contentment, that time you reach your goal. Someone recently asked what "joy" was, and I answered something about seeing someone you love fast asleep next to you with a smile on their face (which is indeed joyful, I reckon). But it was a passing, fleeting remark. Meant well, but not really considered.

Joy, to me, is really about being a glutton: Eating up and savouring every possible experience available, and then some. Forcing life down your gullet, using your stomach to digest, your bowels to eject, your throat to throw out, your pores to ooze, your hair to sweat, your nails to grow, scratch and break. Life is nothing without actually living: It's empty without challenge; stagnant without fear.

Chumbawumba had a point: You get knocked down - but you do get up again.

2

THE TEARS weren't mine, and they weren't unhappy ones, either. Maudlin, perhaps, but then Pen was allowed maudlin tears. Our deep and close connection was down to a former best friend of mine - and a former lover of hers - Keith, now passed, that makes our occasional and unexpected meetings so tinged with sadness; silver with a clouded lining.

We'd bumped into each other on Lamai Beach Road as I was heading towards my parents' bungalow hours before the horrors occurred: I'd recognised the legs from behind. But though long and lithe, and very, very pretty, Pen is anything but the bar girl. She manages one, sure; she serves drinks, too; and her latest paramour is also a farang.

But when I gasped her name - I thought she would have been hundreds of miles north of Samui with her family in Ubon - she delicately turned, said my name, ran straight at me, almost knocked me over, told me how lovely it was to see me, and promptly burst into tears.

That's the thing about Keith, you see: No one I know, or at least see, any more, knows how much I miss my friend. But Pen does. Pen, a girl on an island 6,000 miles from where I write this. It's like we've got secret tattoos of grief that only each other can see. He was the most maddening, stubborn, strong, courageous, reckless, generous motherfucker, and now he's gone, succumbed to a heart attack aged 34.

Like I said, though: They weren't unhappy tears. In every drop of moisture winding down Pen's face was a liquid memory of happiness, laughter, and, yes, joy: Keith had eaten life like it was the last meal on earth. I treasure Pen's happy tears as much as the memories of where they came from.

3

A FEW hours later, I am sat in the back of her now closed bar with my trousers around my ankles. We are not alone. With us are three scantily-clad bargirls. All four women are glistening in the darkness, the wetness of their skin catching the distant moonlight peeping in from the front.

They are wet, because they are covered in ointment. Ointment they are insisting on kneading into my battered knee and thigh, up and down and seemingly into my throbbing calf. I have still not yet been in Thailand for 24 hours, and I'm being manhandled by four remotely-moist women with my trousers at my feet bearing injuries my drunkenness was dreading on giving in to.

"Dut Tin," said Pen. "Why you always make trouble for you?" She jabbed a finger into my chest. "Always you find trouble! Why?"

Good point, I thought, if a little preoccupied by the beating and the death threat I'd just received.

Still. When the ointment was all rubbed in, and the girls had pulled my trousers back up, I was steered out of the back entrance of the bar into a darkened, quiet alley. My chest was pounding, my head throbbing, my leg booming, and my knee shrieking. My nose wasn't feeling too clever, either, and I looked like shit.

Ouy (pronounced "Oi!"), as it transpired to be her name, was out there already, kickstarting a motorbike. I looked back at Pen, who said: "You must to stay safe tonight. Ouy take you."

I didn't even know this girl, though - despite our recent leg massage experience. With Pen's help, I hobbled towards the bike.

"Come," said Ouy.

Oh. I see. Well, if you're going to put it like that...

"I call you Alek," she said, with a smile. And off we whirred, into the hot night, no helmets or harnesses, the wind whipping around our ears.

I was battered and bruised, shaken and upset, but drunk enough to take the whole thing on board. The rushing air was warm, and as we peeled off towards the south end of Lamai, skipping past soup carts, wanton ladyboys, the ping-pong noise of the 7/11 door, I glanced left and right to see my various refuges of six years before.

It seems a little strange, looking back, but that was when I finally started to smile a little.

I needed some noodle soup. I was finally at home.

* More to follow.