Days Volume Two

* Conquered, as if of no use, hands flying everywhere as he sank back into his own flesh, the subsequent days, the corporal punishment, the little boy with his hand out stretched in the freezing cold, waiting to be caned, the injustice perpetrated against unwilling spirits, what did it mean? That in the dank Asian heat the flesh was master? My wife, the coffee man points out as he gestures proudly at a good looking woman working at the front of the restaurant and making a two fingered explanation, we sleep side by side. He had watched him earlier, his not quite cocky but happy walk, and had thought: that man is happily married, happy with his life. How many children he asked in a mixture of hand gestures and English and broken Thai. Five, came the reply. Five! He expressed astonishment, she did not look like a woman with five children, and they laughed in a mixture of pride and amusement. While skinny, perhaps Aids ridden rent boys lie sprawled on hotel beds; and the tragedy that ha

* Ian and Gary are talking about why there are so many trannies in Thailand; comparing it to their own cultures where drag queens are the exception rather than the rule, imagine the smorgasbord, they speculate, announcing their own confirmed heterosexuality. As always Ian is propounding his theory on something, this time gender orientation; there's a whole scale, if you have the hormone imbalance, no way I was going to be gay, it just wasn't going to happen. He sat in the corner and laughed; there's might and night and peachy faced boys, sex workers and time out of mind; escaping, watching the sun set over the Chao Phraya River and watching Ian get hopelessly pissed; sitting with a group of Thais hanging around the river after work. There was a cheap bar and the owner had his shirt off, displaying his fat gut. Ian was singing the Bee Gee's "How do you mend a broken heart"; but cries of pain were as nothing, dying in the muffled heat. It was intolerable; d

* The air in Bangkok was different now, washed clean by morning rains; the stifling heat and the acrid pollution gone. As too was his state of mind, feverish, indistinct, living in the inverse, a psychotic negative of the real world. With a head no longer filled with post-apocalyptic imagery, it was easier to be free. But where was the excitement. Super Pussy shouted the Pat Pong sign, and in the warm drifting rain he and Ian sat at a corner bar and idly watched the atmosphere of a red light district during the day. Nothing like it. A boy, a girl, they flitter boy. An old man emerges from the bar. A homey worker keeps them company. They buy her, and the barmaid, a drink, grossly inflating their own bill. It was all expected. Stupid farangs wasting money. The terror was gone. In its place; he had no clue. The whispering dusk; rubbish drifting in a corner; a red light district out of hours; a sad regret; the stomach for nothing; they come they go, he said wryly, wasting thousands of b

* To change the world, or at least your world, you just change countries. Those indolent days were over just like that. The place was paralysed with Cambodian New Year, the streets were quiet. Ross and family went to stay in a five star hotel at Sihanoukville; and how many craven days would it take, how much humiliation could be poured upon one person? Brought crashing down. Infitisemal progress, all to be brought undone with a tragic love for rent, rough trade. Henrietta doesn't get the concept of rough trade, Suzy said, retailing the exploits of a boyfriend who had just been arrested in the main street of Moree for drunk and disorderly; that rust bucket town where dust and domestic violence mixed with the shabby disrepair of the streets, a town with whole sections where white people did not go, where the fetid dumps of public housing led across a darkened stream; no garbage was collected, no mail delivered, nothing, nobody worked. Any tougher and they'd rust; she was fond

* The shame guilt regret came early. The remorse was always there. That was how they captured him in the end, up a blind alley with the dark warehouses shadowing over. He always seemed to get sick in Pnom Penh. The place was always an assault. You should have followed your own worst instincts. Anything would be better than this; these muffled conclusions as he walked out of people's lives; stopped being the joker the courter the founder the father the eccentric and evolved behind closed doors; while the city was quiet because it's Khmer New Year today and most businesses are shut. In Thailand the buckets of water fly. In a crazy attempt at humour he lapsed into complete and total der silence. There wasn't anything worth talking about, not when so many others could do it for him. An anthropological study, these things. He woke up with a start at 2am to find a Khmer taxi girl nestled next to him. Two dollars for a ride. He had left the door to his hotel room open, easy to

* So the saddest times, deliberately askew, couldn't beat the adventures that we had had; those sad little dollops down through the gloom. Richard was dead long ago. But even he would have been interested in the news that Malcolm McLaren was dead. She said it in the muffled, muggy heat of a Pnom Penh backyard in 2010, but it immediately took him back some 30 years, perhaps more, to that day when, as per arrangement, he and Richard went to interview Malolm McLaren. They were the boys from Australia, bum f... nowhere as far as these London boys were concerned, and Madam Butterfly was just about to come out and opera kept soaring through their chaotic European experience. Who was to know that this would be our last? That this wasn't a precursor to an ever more fabulous life, but this was it. Richard drinking heavily in the early hours, shooting ridiculous amounts of speed. He was always up at three am, perfectly ready for a visit. That was the sort of friend he liked. He spent

* Muffled. As the sun set by the pool. The heat sapped any energy to do anything. The Khmers were already out dancing. There was a change of emphasis; and seasonally adjusted they could have taken on so many lives; but here they were, the aging, impossible parents lounging around while Henrietta prepared to go out with Laura. Some nights were meant to be quiet, indistinct. The house boy finished cleaning the cars. Another beer appeared in his host's hands. Ancient voices weren't going to toll this particular scene; this was all of our own making. And time, the cruelest river. Hard to believe she was cute once; when I met her, in 1989, he said to one of the geologists, and all these years later her thickened legs and scratched face and endless talk, with herself at the centre of the known universe, all of it had born fruit in this wasted afternoon. I'll do it for costs and a few hundred dollars, he said of yet another potential adventure, hiking in the remote parts of La

* They weren't that sorry to see him go. If he was used to abuse; what the world had to offer was even harsher. Hermetically sealed, there was no way in. But that didn't stop them letting it all hang out, or drift away, there on the balcony overlooking the Tonle Sap River, where the boats moved slowly past and time was infinite, where everything he had ever learnt went whisking out the window and all decency, all sense of loss, or even just appropriate behaviour, was easily dispensed with. Countless fog filled dreams. Twin fate lines. A crawling sense of behaviour; as if he was meant to sit here forever, just watching the river. On either side were houses on stilts, opposite a unique view of Pnom Penh, and as time passed the crowd grew, all to be here amongst you, all to celebrate the arrival, the transfer, the brief passing: an over-used dying fall. I don't want to go back, he repeated, and hands flickered down the back of his leg in a brief, surprising recognition. He

* Incredibly ancient, hostile in the wind but pleasant on the surface, confused and confounded by breaks in the armour, hostility again in the spirits in the walls, fond memories fading, the streets an assault, nothing simple, Suzy's manic pace keeping them hopping from one end of Pnom Penh to the other in the choked traffic and polluted air; past the Pnom Penh Hotel, down Russian Boulevarde, watching the sunset from the Foreign Correspondents Club or just screaming out: it's got to stop. So the walls were courageous, now, and the denizens evil in intent, and it was simply a mental trick to dismiss them all. Once again they went to the torture museum, S21, where of the thousands who passed through only seven survived and the sadness, the pain, the "time of bleak cruelty" as one of the notices described it, was quickly too much to bear, passing sad eyed tourists already shocked by what they had seen and read, and so we sat in the forecourt and the heat just hit them