Days Volume Two

* He didn't mean for any of it to happen, didn’t think the situation through for a second, it never occurred to him that a relationship sealed on the first morning with four shots of Vodka before breakfast might be fraught with alcoholic doom. Sober for weeks, he was starting to feel at least partially sane. He had no thought of becoming part of a tribe-let of marauding Thai boys, haunting karaoke bars – once classy brothels, now decaying dens packed with cheap girls and the smell of Thai men; on the hunt, always on the hunt. Oh they’re so naughty, the dry old queen – his alter ego – sighed. My money, their whiskey and girls. He would wake up sandwiched between sex workers of various genders, hands groping everywhere, the grunt of someone coming in the bathroom and think: nothing could be more beautiful. Swishy girls and high pitched boys; after cruel abstinence, time spent afresh and anew, woken, from a long sleep, if not at the end of his life then older, much older than

* I'm so hot I wish I could f... myself, Shawn declared enthusiastically on the phone, I keep catching sight of myself in the mirror and I'm transfixed, I can barely get out of the house. I wouldn't sleep with myself for a million bucks, he replied. Probably one reason I'm so generous to the Thai boys. All this banter while he tried to dispel the creeping sense of unease which had been invading his life for weeks. Where did the initial triumphs go? Why was he so worried? If all they did was pay for themselves, if the dancing boys beckoned from catwalks, dressed in their tight white underpants, what was the problem? Opportunities kept presenting themselves, but none of them were very ludicrous; none of them made ridiculous amounts of money. He was staunch and beknighted, glasped and clasped, groping and bewildered, craving affection and listening to the far off grunts, watching the lights come on and off in the building opposite as someone, he knew not who, moved from

* The thoughts were all twisted around inside, hollow of substance, insubstantial of will, everything coalescing. He needed to be free again. He didn't know what was happening. All things colluded to make the biggest con trick of all. I love you, the young man said, and love in this world was a practical thing, haunted, especially, by images of former lives. They lay bathed in sweat and nothing was consequential. The f... show at Night Boys was particularly athletic. Everything was hollow. Not like him or me, they said of a friend, a singer, who made a legitimate income. Although all was seen as legitimate here. Everything came round and round. Haunted by the light, by the right, by the triumphalism of the left. They so believed they were in the right; and dismissed the normal populace, which they were supposed to represent, as having done nothing, of being blind and ignorant, fools long before they emerged from the bush, the scrub, the mud, before these neanderthals crawled ont

* Strange how when he drifted off the air, so did his sleeping companions. All else was lost. He gathered himself up in the storm reaches, water swirling down a drain. He didn't know what situation he had got himself into. He didn't expect them to be anything other than devious. Consternation was at its height; but also a strange fog as he landed back where he had been only two months before; recycling hope, handsome boys, the gift of a smile. The flags still fluttered in the heat. The rickshaw drivers clustered outside the hotel. The begging families, a pregnant woman and her children camped on the pavement all day. The convergence of the Mekong and Tom Lesap Rivers. An ancient creek bed. A time far beyond anything he knew. Wasted moments and wasted days. Cruel discord. Laughter at its most manic. Head buried under the pillows. What have I done? Does love die as fast as it is born? Do moments of intimacy betray us at the heart? Did a lonely old man stumble into keeping a bo

* The towers went off in every direction, myriads of spikes heading off into the distance. Each contained thousands of stories. Sometimes he wished he could be part of all of them; embrace everything. From the street workers, the men pushing their trolleys of noodles, fresh fruit, drinks, through the benighted, chaotic streets. Everything came falling down at once. He saw some handsome Asian boy flirting with some fat American bastard in Soi Four, at the Balcony, and could see every bit of artifice that had been applied to him in that tricky face, the easy affection. He felt like a fool. Everything that had been applied to him. We'll look back and say, this was your drunk boyfriend, this was your getting sober boyfriend, this is your staying sober boyfriend, Jack, the gargoyle queen, had said. He felt a stab of I hope it isn't true; and in any event the years were marching so rapidly by it hardly mattered any more. Every trick had been applied to him. Oh what a surprise. The

* * Their Christmases came early. Pat called and everybody called. Family matters. He was seeking an end to the story so he could submit it to Hack Writers in time for their deadline; but the end hadn't happened yet and the repeated calls had done nothing but throw him, making him want to drink. Already there was suspicion and changed atmosphere on the home front; and nothing had happened, a couple of calls. An embarrassing incident left him fleeing to the dentist; and there he called back. I miss you. I never do with anyone like you. Same, he said, which was true enough. I just want to meet, talk, Baw said. I have a boy now, he said. I'm glad, Baw replied, happy for you. I just want to talk. We had some good times, and bad, he said; and they both laughed together because they knew how crazy it had all been; all the things they had done; all the places they had been; the bars they had stumbled out of; the nightclubs they had impressed, the clapped out buildings with their T

* Old people never vote Labor, Australia's first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, or probably said, depending on how much you believed the leak. They were all superficial, antagonistic, utterly incompetent. Labor was on the nose and they knew it. These things, this election form afar, the machinations of politicians in his country of origin, meant less than nothing here. Jack the high camp Washington lawyer who calls everyone dear, is off to Pattya with his boyfriend, who he calls a partner although they only spend a month or two together each year, that Jack who almost no one liked because he had an unerring ability to offend everyone, including Tommy. I've seen how Tommy lives and I don't want to be like that, he had said, referring to Tommy's tendency to wander around. I exercise, he said when he insisted on confronting him after the meeting, I've got a bone to pick with you, and so yes, I'm out about, in the confrontation they had after the meetin

* There were clouded times, but there were also times of infinite success, infinite happiness. And it was the latter that caused him so much grief. He didn't know who he was any more. He had never been happy, simply didn't do happy, and so it was a confusing quagmire, these balmy, blissful days, not on an island, not cursed by palm trees, but here in the heart of the city, in a sea of glass and steel, with skyscrapers for mountains and buildings for trees, hemmed in like the forest of old. Perhaps it was the same as that brief, blissful time, in another life, when he had returned from the township afar to that tiny, rustic village nestled in the foothills, and fallen in love in the cold European spring, and yes, been happy as the years rolled by and the children came along. He couldn't conjure her face now, not from so long ago, not across so many life spans, but he did remember that brief respite from the wars and angst that had bedevilled every last stay. Nate got into

* There were shifts in the pattern of distinction. There were ways forward; and a battalion of new beginnings. Doors, like those lined up along an old fashioned beach, painted different colours, rusty in the sun, cursory in their intensity, superficial in their beckoning desires. Doorways to another place, other places. To laughing, frolicking and dancing in the shallow water's edge; far from the deep where scientists kept discovering new creatures hidden in the depths. He stood in the glinting glare. He watched with envy as the boy kicked a soccer ball along the edge of the beach. His body ached from the last appalling binge. Everything was clouded. The glare was just a knife through a sodden heart. And then it all changed; by dint of change of landscape; and they were in other hotels, in other circumstances, in other bars, surrounded by other new found friends. These catastrophes were minuscule in answer. They fathomed from a random place. And when he landed in a new found pla