Better A Fake Love

An introduction to Thailand and its charms.

I walked along the beach alone. I felt the warmth of the sand and the beauty of life. The water crashed against the shore. People had their bodies on display. Their flesh was offered to the sun and to onlookers. I was jetlagged. I went back to the wooden hut beneath the shade of towering trees. I drifted off to sleep thinking of the sea and the sunset and listening to the far off sounds of music and pleasure. 

 

At midnight I awoke. There was a thud, thud, thud, in the distance. People were out raving somewhere along the coast.

 

I walked in flip-flops and shorts across the dry dirt ground, through the trees, over a wooden bridge spanning a stream, and out past the now closed restaurant to walk along the beach again, seeking out the sound of music and friendly chatter. There in the distance they were, young western men and women, drunk, drinking blood red cocktails, and dark liquid from a small bucket. With numerous straws resting around the rim, the bucket was passed from person to person amongst a group of friends, old and newly acquainted. I stood at the bar and drank beer. I watched until I had enough courage from the drink. I began to dance on the sand. 

 

A young northern European girl was open to chat. She was enjoying her escape from normal life. I thought she was looking for a guy for the night but I wasn’t experienced enough to clinch a deal. I imagined being invited back to her guesthouse or hut. Rather than act on the desire, I drank and, after we parted, moved to stand out closer to the sound of the sea. I sat down on the sand for a moment.

 

The next thing I knew, I was hearing the lapping of the waves and something was sniffing near me. I opened my eyes. It was light. The sun was beating down on my face. A dog rummaged through some litter nearby. No-one was about. I slowly got up to stumble across the beach to my hut again. The beautiful warm morning sun was on my skin. My aching body felt good; used. I smiled, looking out to the sea and then to the restaurant still closed at that early hour. Life was more meaningful here than in dark and damp England.

 

That was back when I’d first come to Thailand and visited the southern island of Koh Chang. I was incredibly naïve �" an ex-Christian, looking to experience life. I found joy and pleasure in the tenderness and smiles of the men and women, but especially the women. It was all like a healing balm. I soon met Thai women who showed interested in me. This was a completely new experience. Women had rarely shown interest in me in England. Partly, that was due to my aloofness, my shyness, and my Christian faith. These things had prevented any blossoming of the animal side of me. In Thailand the women approached me aggressively, with the veneer of sweetness and charm.

 

I remember in Pai, in the north of Thailand, a hippy’s haven, a restaurant made of bamboo on three-foot stilts. Bamboo matting beneath us supported our weight on the floor. The river rippled nearby. The lights sparkled across the water. People sat in groups around the low circular woven reed tables, either crossing their legs in Buddha-like pose, or leaning to one side, supporting their weight by the hand or elbow, like some Arab or Israelite in the desert. Smoke from cigarettes and rollies wafted up my nostrils. This mixed with the bitter taste of beer at the back of my tongue. Pungent smells filled my being. There was a strong ambience of river and chatter and night air. I sat in shorts and t-shirt. My body was warmed by the alcohol.

 

A drama teacher from the US, grey-haired, mature, astute, wise and masterly, told the five of us sitting around the table about how he’d travelled through India with his wife, eating opium to keep his spirits up, and how she’d never known.

 

“She wouldn’t have been able to accept it.”

 

He was fatherly and invited me across the river to smoke some opium. I walked across the bamboo bridge over the river to the slightly more up-class wooden hut structure. After taking off my flip-flops and he his sandals, we went inside. Ritualistically, the old gent took out some cigarette paper. He proudly spoke of how earlier that day he’d been up to see some hill-tribe girls and boys who sell the stuff. He smiled eagerly, clasping the screwed up piece of paper, in which was contained the sticky brown substance. He smeared it on the cigarette paper, curled the paper a little to hold it in his fingers with one hand. With the other he dropped in the dried leaves of marijuana. Gently, like holding a baby, he took the paper in both hands, licked along one side of the paper and adroitly spun the paper around and sealed the revered product. He held it high.

 

“Look at that.” He brought it close to me. “Look at this.”

 

I was sitting, watching. I felt a little awkward in the drama teacher’s hut, just the two of us. But I had a lot of experiences to catch up on after having wasted most of my twenties on religion.

 

The old man fired it up, the paper sparkled, the leaves caught, and he sucked, breathing in deeply, holding the potency in his lungs briefly, before blowing out into the still air of the room. He handed it to me. I was excited and nervous. I wasn’t a druggy. I’d smoked a bit of marijuana back in England during the last few post-religious years. I thought I knew how to make it look natural. I sucked. The smoke came into my lungs. Nothing special happened. Not yet. “Maybe later,” I thought. We smoked, passing the article back and forth, intermittently thinking and trying to dream. But nothing really hit. Again, I felt a little uncomfortable, just me and the gent.

 

“I better be going. Let’s go back over the bridge.”

 

“Sure, yeah.”

 

We went and sat back around the low tables by the river, drank beer, and then I went off on another drinking round of the three bars, the same three bars I had been frequenting most nights �" Shisha Bar, Beebop, and Bamoo Bar. By four in the morning I was vomiting in the last of them.

 

“Let me handle this. I’m a professional,” said the suave young Brazilian, and he handed me a big bottle of water. I chugged it down, all of it. Someone phoned Achara, a girl I had been seeing. It didn’t take her long to arrive.

 

“Where the f**k have you been,” I said, fired by the drink and the drugs. She hadn’t come to the bars to meet me as expected.

 

Achara quietly picked me up, supporting me with her arm, and we walked out of the bar and along the quiet road, back over a big concrete bridge and turned right down the side street towards the river and our own bamboo room by the bamboo restaurant. On the way, I needed to pee. I exposed myself to a guy on a bike �" some guy Achara seemed to know; some guy who’d just pulled up wanting to talk to Achara. “Some arsehole,” I thought. I peed out towards the river, drunk and happy and free, but then I wondered where Achara had been. Who was that guy? Achara took me back to the bamboo hut and we slept together, touching skin, not alone, not bored. “This is life,” I thought, drifting off to sleep.

 

I and this exciting woman stayed together for ten months. We were playful and naughty. We had regular sex and she fed me egg sandwiches. We fucked up in the loft room, where we stayed for a while, above the kitchen of the bamboo restaurant. The bamboo structure must have shaken but I didn’t think about that at the time. We fucked in the shared toilet. We had sexual relations on buses and on a sofa in a rented cinema room. We drank a lot. She was very outgoing and I felt great jealousy when she chatted with other men. The young man who had come over to the restaurant to flirt with her and to show off some of his acrobatic and dance moves �" the same one I’d exposed myself to on the way back from the bar, I later guessed �" said to her of me, “What’s wrong with him?” I was sullen and quiet in his presence.