Al Culler’s strange and savage saunter through the Thai and Cambodian badlands…

The screaming in my head wouldn’t go away. A mad mixture of traffic noise, the gearbox’s complaining whine and the unruly wail of the two-stroke engine down below my knees. Bangkok traffic at a standstill. Fuming cagers berserk on their horns, puffed up visages about to explode into rage. The vast majority of drivers up to their necks in huge finance payments just to make some necessary face.

The whole Thai edifice about to collapse after a military coup and fast exit by the prime-minister. Surface calmness laced by inner insanity and the sheer fear that things, for once, might actually be revealed for what they were. Would the Thais follow the Khmers into the psycho killing fields? Only real solution, join the masses and live for the passing moment, ignore the pure insanity of the natives when the lights are turned out and no outsiders watching.

Took the Yamaha TZM150 along the pavement. Ped’s going crazy as I stared them down. Used the wail of the degutted exhaust to clear a path. The front end flipped up a little as I hammered the throttle, a group of school kids scattered but smiling rather than scowling. Nearly took out the legs of a emaciated beggar who looked frightened out his tiny mind by the sudden, screaming, appearance of a motorcycle into his limited world.

Silom Road for a short stretch, going the wrong way against the traffic. Taxi and bus drivers out for my guts, but I floated like a butterfly, took the bike around their flanks and exited the maelstrom for the home stretch to the Soi 10 HQ.

Somgrai outside, as usual his tuned Honda in pieces on the pavement. A couple of far gone whores loitered nearby, not yet twenty but so out of it they might as well have been pensioners for all the joy they offered – having spent their youth in Chinese brothels where they were serviced by ten or so men every day. Somgrai an enforcer for the boss, the kind of malevolent presence that gave me pangs of remorse and fear even when I was completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

‘Bossy, wants to see you, boy.’ His leer indicated the time I’d sneaked a look at one of the packages I’d delivered might be about to catch up with me. Being only half Thai, and looking almost totally farang, I was the obvious scapegoat if anything went wrong – one of the major reasons for employing me as it was assumed that I had no face to lose. Having been educated in the UK didn’t help, my Thai laughable even by the standards of short-stay tourists.

The boss’s deputy a wheelchair bound lunatic, permanently high on drugs and embittered by the time he’d been crippled by a taxi. A pile of hard-core porn mag’s kept him amused when business went quiet.

‘Where the f..k you been, farang. Could’ve gone across Thailand the time you take. His Highness wants to see you, like yesterday.’

Another leer. What was it with these people? The rumour, the boss some kind of transvestite, caught in the act, bent over his desk with Somgrai doing the business. But the guy who’d seen it had disappeared the next day, fueling the gossip but never confirming it.

It was hard to believe. The boss looked like a throwback to the apes, built like a sumo wrestler; excessive hair sprouted out of ears, nose and throat… if he didn’t shave three times a day he’d turn into a werewolf. He looked as feminine as a Russian shot-putter. A weird mixture of Thai, Malay and Filipino blood, judging by the overwhelming effect of the ugliness the latter in dominance.

‘Ah, Marky, how you getting on?’

I tried to look enthusiastic without appearing foolish. The boss had the kind of temper on him that would, in saner circumstances, allow him a job as the head of a deprived state run school somewhere on the marginal borders, where it was hard to tell if the kids were Thai or Cambodian.

‘I can’t get in contact with that company you mentioned, where you worked before. All sounds like a load of bullshit to me.’

‘I want to live a long time.’

‘That’s no good. Gotta live for the moment. Go for it! No sense holding back. I was in your position once but I was top dog. Fastest guy across town. A cager got in my way he’d end up dropping a load. Know what I mean?’

I’d told a pack of lies to get the job, didn’t know whether I was coming or going but it wouldn’t do me any good to admit that.

‘I’ll try to speed things up a bit, but it’s a matter of wanting to make it into my twenties without ending up in a wheelchair or on a life support machine. Bangkok traffic defines the meaning of the word insane!’

‘You can’t think like that, buddy. You think like that you’ll end up a basket-case. Not making much money, are you? You have to pay for the privilege of a job in Thailand… You want to make some serious money, we can work something out.’

All through the conversation he’d been fingering his crotch as if trying to find something there or as if in the throes of fighting off some disease. The rumours crept back into my mind.

‘Er…’

‘Well, it’s all a matter of risk and reward. No need for you to know the details – that could be dangerous for you. Let’s just say I need someone with discretion who isn’t part of the crowd here. You don’t mix well. I can understand that being half farang. What I’m saying is from time to time there are some packages I need picked up and delivered off the record. 2500 baht a throw for you, cash in hand. What do you say?’

‘Well, it’s not drugs is it?’

‘I told you not to ask any questions, didn’t I, you stupid little prick? Look, you’re either in or out. And if you’re out then you’re out. Well, your record here isn’t much cop. Somgrai will want to put you to rights. Understand?’

‘Okay, let’s do it.’

‘Good. Come over to my place tonight and we’ll get you started.’

He passed me a slip of paper with a Sukhumvit address and tapped my hand with clammy fingers that should’ve belonged to a corpse.

‘Eight o’clock’ll be fine. Be on time, I don’t like people who don’t come on time. Know what I mean? I can see you’re my kind of man!’

‘Er, I’ll be there. Will you want me on the bike?’

‘Course, I’ll bloody well want you on the bike. Ain’t f…king cocktail time for you, boy. Not yet. Go do some work now and don’t f..k up again!’

The deputy drooling over a photograph of a white woman being taken simultaneously by three Africans, straining at the sheer size of them…

‘Hell, boy, I had a cock left I’d be in there like a shot. You know what the bastard got who run me down? 2000 baht fine! Just as well I’ve got connections in the Mafia, had the bastard kneecapped and castrated. He’s the same as me now, another no-f..king-hoper…’

Followed by a mad cackle that ended with the injunction to get over to Ratchadam to collect a parcel, like yesterday.

The TZM a war victim rather than a six year-old motorcycle. I was bone weary from a day’s work, with neither the energy nor inclination to look after it. Still, the 150cc single cylinder motor was one of the toughest in the business. And in Bangkok fast enough to make even the police look damn silly.

I breezed across Bangkok on the back of maybe getting ahead of the game, thanks to the boss’s offer. For sure, he was into some kind of weird shit, but who wasn’t, these days? My euphoria suddenly shattered by some cager cutting his bus-sized Toyota estate into my path. I hit the brakes and gears, swerved out of the collision course without really thinking about it. An old hand at the survival game at a mere nineteen years old, living on the edge where nothing but pure instinct ruled.

The cage careered off down the road for ten yards before squealing to a stop, entombed in more traffic. I went along his side at about 20mph, running a screwdriver the length of the cage and grabbing the bars just in time to hold the bike steady as it tore his mirror out of its mounting. Came out with a bang like a shotgun going off. That noise always made me smile because I just knew the driver had jumped out of his clothes.

Before the cager could extract himself I was a half a kilometre down the road, laughing like a madman. Even if he clocked my numberplate I’d never registered the bike in my own name. The only viable revenge, stick a gun out of his window and blow me away. Given the jerk’s auto he might even have the connections to pull it off without suffering any kind of police retribution.

It was hard to believe that Racthadam Road was anything other than plain old hell on earth. I barged my way through the ped’s and squealed the back tyre as I skidded to a stop outside a small office block. Nothing like a bit of noise, as if the machine’s about to go out of control, to get the civilians all squeamish.

‘Hey,whitey, you watch where you put that machine. This ain’t no GP!’

I ignored the guy – some American black GI doing the shops and probably pissed because the Thai women wouldn’t have anything to do with him – despite the fact that he looked like he was high on crack-cocaine and twice my size.

Once in the building, I was kneecapped into ecstasy by the sight of the receptionist… some Bangkok high-society frail with cheekbones that cut ice and lips bruised with lust. Her eyes were all cold fury; my lacerated leather jacket added up to zilch status, my entranced stare more an insult than a compliment. It didn’t stop me smiling like I’d won the lottery.

‘Er, come to pick up a parcel from Dobbermanley…’

‘No, Dobbley. Wait, not ready.’

‘You ever go on a motorcycle?’

‘What?’

‘What I’m saying is that if you’ve never been on a motorcycle I could take you out on mine. Kind of fantastic fun? Sanuk!’

I tried to keep the leer out of my voice and my smile, but it was hard going.

‘You crazy.’

‘Sure, sure, but the thing is you’ve blown my mind away and I couldn’t leave without trying.’

‘Impossible!’

‘Nothing’s impossible. Where you from anyway?’

‘Not talk. Go sit and wait.’

‘Look, I’m only trying to be friendly.’

‘Not want. I only talk for work.’

‘Jesus, what kind of shit is that…’

The next thing I knew, some jerk grabbing me by the collar of my jacket and throwing me across the room with enormous violence. I’d come off motorcycles enough times to know how to take a fall and bounce back on to my feet ready for more.

The guy was short but broad, planted on feet widely spaced. Hair cropped so sparse he seemed a dead ringer for ex-army. Looked like he’d withstand a nuclear blast. I picked up my helmet, appearing like I’d given up, suddenly coming up fast, flicking the thing at his head. Inspired by those old Kung-fu movies they keep showing. As he reared backwards under the onslaught, I charged his body. Off balance from the lid cracking into his face, by the time I reached him, he was flailing against the wall and I had all the time in the world to pump my knee into his groin. Die baby, die.

I picked my helmet up and decided to get out before the hooligan recovered.

‘You wanna ride, babe?’

The sudden adrenaline rush making me try once more, but she’d turned into an ice maiden and the thug was stirring on the floor. They were welcome to each other.

Outside, some kids were perched on the bike, making like racing stars… I screamed at them and they scattered; doubtless if I’d hung around for a few moments their extended family would’ve accused me of child abuse, Asian children revered as little gods rather than obese pains in the arse – the dreadful social workers in the UK weren’t the only arseholes in the known universe.

Kicked the bike into life, played with the throttle until the windows of the building threatened to shatter and skittered off the pavement into the traffic as if I didn’t have a care in the world, though I’d messed up another job and would have to avoid that area for a little while. No great loss.

Traffic impossible, five o’clock shadow across the city. Noise, smog and the odour of the brain dead but there was the narrowest of conduits between the stalled coffins and I took it as fast as I dared. Go too slow, some other biker would back end me, brain too fried by excessive speed; motorcycling and amphetamine both. I squirmed in the seat, making minute, high speed changes in direction to navigate through the protuberances poking off the cages, although it was sometimes fun to leave a trail of mirrors, door handles and aerials in my wake.

Home a cold water flat just off Rama IV, not far from the Klong Toey market. A five storey edifice, only twenty years old but fast fading and cracking up, the foundations subsiding and the excessive heat of the day running so deep into the concrete that it changed its molecular structure for the worse.

A little room right up under the roof but with its own toilet and shower; only 3000 baht a month. The Yamaha sat in a bike bay conveniently opposite, secured with three locks and an extra loud alarm system… I kept a couple of bricks to hurl out of my window if I caught someone tampering with the machine.

I kept leering at my female neighbours, young and old alike, but it was difficult to overcome the language barrier even when they blew half my mind away with huge smiles. I think I pissed the community off the time I came home drunk out of my mind, spent the night screaming and being sick; the first I knew of it, when I staggered out of bed the next morning, a huge pile of vomit in the washbasin…

Sukhumvit a weird trip. I’d left the flat with a huge surge of optimism, skipped down the four flights of stairs with enough energy to charge the whole building with good vibes. I even got a grin out of the security guard, a surly youth who spent most of his time trying to seduce the mistresses of the aged, almost infirm, couple of foreigners who inhabited the apartment block.

The ride to Sukhumvit Soi 41 passed without much incident, traffic still heavy enough to have the city engulfed in a fog of pollutants and fury. Burning along the inside of some portly cop on a sluggardly Kawasaki KH125, the only moment of real amusement. The change in air pressure and my brief blast on the horn made him leap in the saddle. He went so far as to turn on his siren at this massive loss of face but he had no hope of matching my acceleration and little inclination to risk his skin by emulating my crazed riding style. The Yamaha TZM shot through the narrowest of gaps with amazing aplomb, that would leave the cop’s bulging waist firmly wedged between the cages.

Once in Soi 41 I nearly ran down some old granny type as I made for the railings on the pavement, but she swerved out of the way with amazing agility. Some kind of foreign biddy, with a mouth on her like a foghorn. She soon cleared off when I went to open my fly. The usual three locks and alarm system would hopefully keep the jackals away from the bike.

The apartment was the top floor of some modern and ruinously expensive edifice, with a uniformed doorman and marble floor entrance hallway. My rotting leather and tatty jeans were well out of it, about as appropriate as a priest in a bordello. The lift shot up 25 floors fast enough to cause blurred vision and nose bleeds in the unwary or terminally ill. Spat me out into a small hallway that was nevertheless bigger than my apartment. Before I could knock on the steel encased door, it was pulled back and my slight forward momentum threw me into the arms of some kind of vile monster.

‘Oh, handsome boy,’ the katoey squealed in delight. Tried to tear my balls off with one hand, the other clamped around my neck attempting to suck off my lips. Insulted by my cock trying to do a rapid disappearing act, the thing reared back, tried to bare its fangs, bite off my whole head by the look of it, but not before I saved face by the simple expedient of head-butting it into oblivion.

Blood exploded out of its nose, the tearing of plastic rather than the breaking of bone; a few thousand dollars worth of carefully constructed surgery going west. Not that the surgeon’s artistry had done much to improve the appearance of the over-sized brute. The hormone treatments had the alarming effect of adding a foot or so to the transvestite’s height, miring the thing in maximum ugliness.

I staggered backwards, ready to do a runner, though there didn’t seem to be any stairs and by the time the lift came back I could’ve been lynched or mass male-raped. A quick glance revealed the whole floor degutted, one massive room full of cosmetically challenged transvestites, focused on our battle but seemingly indifferent to the outcome. It was like I’d just walked out of the headiness of a Bangkok night into the depths of hell. A gaggle of cronies eventually sauntered forward to gather the victim into their embrace, giving off enough bad karma to close down a Buddhist state.

A simian type in miniskirt, stockings, stiletto’s and a huge pair of false breasts under the flimsiest of black blouses, lurched towards me, tottering on the brink of a broken spine from the effects of too many stimulants combined with six inch high heels. I thought another fight was about to commence until I recognised something about the eyes…

‘Cool down, Marky, she just thought you were one of the leather studs we’ve hired for the evening. F..k, boy, can’t you do anything without messing up? She was just after a bit of fun, could’ve been the making of you. And we don’t want any more of that Ratchadam nonsense insulting the receptionist and beating up the security, what f..king planet are you on, boy? I got a right earful of abuse. Been taking too much ya ba, have we?’

‘What kind of shit is this? How can you get off on dressing up in women’s clothes, it’s…’

‘Quiet down, farang, we can’t have you screaming abuse in front of fifty cross-dressers, can we? You should try it, it’s incredibly liberating. You don’t even have to like the sex side of things. Besides, it’s a nice little sideline, 2500 baht a punter, work the figures out for yourself…’

‘F..k that. I’m not staying here with these lunatics. You can stick your job, I’m outta here.’

I turned round, walked into a brick walk, only it wasn’t concrete but the excessive bulk of Somgrai encased in a rather fey pink and purple jump-suit. I’d actually seen one guy smack him full in the face; all Somgrai did was shake his head, smile and then tear him limb from limb. I turned back to my erstwhile boss.

‘Er, well, as long as it’s just the odd pick up and drop off on the side I’m in. I’m not doing any of the sex thing, though, no way man. These monsters look like they’re dripping with the AIDS virus…’

‘I knew we could rely on you, dear. Let me make it very clear to you. We give you a package and an address. You take the package straight there, hand it over and get back to us. No peeking or stealing or even losing the contents. If you mess up, I’ll throw you to my good lady friends here and you won’t like that, will you? Got it?’

Before I knew what I’d done, I’d stamped my foot and given him a Hitler salute.

‘Oooh, you’d look real cute in a Nazi uniform,’ he simpered in a strange whisper, shrugging his huge fake breasts.

‘Er, well, I’ll get started then. It’s 2500 baht a run, right, and I get the money when I get back?’

‘Somgrai will sort you out. Maybe we can get you some extra work when you get back, know what I mean?’

I rather hoped I didn’t.

Somgrai grabbed my arm, dragged me away from the gay melee. Rapid descent in the lift to an underground parking lot. Ignored my questions. A huge Range Rover, in what looked like gold plate, unlocked. The low dive of an office obviously camouflage for a highly profitable business. Perhaps I should’ve demanded more dosh? Somgrai snarled, as if reading my thoughts, handed me a small parcel, pointed to the address on it and glared with all the insane ferocity of a Dobberman about to pounce. He didn’t have to tell me not to f..k up…

A brief blast through a nearly deserted pedestrian precinct, a sharp back wheel slide into a narrow alleyway, roar past some boarded up shop-houses. Switched the engine off, removed my crash helmet and waited. No-one had stayed with me, no-one following. Just the night noises – fat rats, distant traffic, rumbling buses and the faint screams of humanity jam-packed into the capital city.

Only when I was sure that I was alone did I take the parcel out of the top-box and gingerly unwrap the brown paper. Oh dear, what have we here? A couple of thousand ecstasy tab’s by the look of it. I quaffed a couple just to see what kind of quality was involved…

My next moment of consciousness, finding myself charging along Silom – flat out in third gear with the front wheel a few feet off the ground. I felt totally invincible! The bike an extension of both my mind and body, control an act of mental communion rather than physical action.

King of the road. Top dog. I wasn’t sure if it was the exhaust wailing with the pure bright joy of it all, or my own voice, or both of them inextricably mixed and mingled. Total and utter belief that I could both predict the movement of all the vehicles around me and that even if that prediction faltered I could react so rapidly and instinctively that there was absolutely no way I could be knocked off the Yamaha by even the most rabid, brain-dead cager.

The world fragmented into a trillion predictable pieces that strung out in the depths of my buzzing brain made some kind of brutal sense.

I flipped the Yamaha up a gear. The front end crashing down as the power dipped, the bars twitching in my hands and suddenly the whole bike wobbling wildly as the road surface became a series of craters. It was amazing what neglect and an excess of cages could do to a concrete surface in the shortest space of time – I was damn sure it wasn’t that bad yesterday.

Speed through it, a little voice in my brain shrieked defiantly. Throttle to the stop, the wobbling front end rearing so viciously that it obscured forward motion; the torque of the engine translating into backbreaking, arm-stretching acceleration that tried to knock my eyeballs out the back of my drugged head.

My vision went fuzzy with the rush of blood to my brain as I went flying backwards towards the horizon. The vibes from the engine transmuted into eardrums that popped from the sheer violence of it all. Those drugs, man, they amplified every sensation way beyond sanity.

The back end dug into a huge crater, the bike veering crazily sideways. I fought the bars with magnified muscle, a concoction of strength borne of prettily coloured tablets and the sheer, sudden desperation of my situation; swung my body in the opposite direction hoping to achieve equilibrium, finally slamming shut the throttle before the bike looped the looped and I dug a hole in the ground with my head. To no avail…

The Yam gave a final, desperate shrug, careered sideways. Instinctively, I kicked out from the machine before we went horizontal, shooting sideways, my feet snapping free of the downward projection of 250lbs of heaving steel, alloy and plastic.

The following moments by far the most dangerous, the real damage in most motorcycle accidents coming from the machine slamming into the rider; an easy trip to oblivion or vegetable status before you even know what’s hit you.

The resulting vectors of forward and sideway velocities could’ve hammered me into the tarmac at an angle and momentum sufficient to break my back and tear my limbs off, only I went with the flow, rolled several times before I bounced on to the pavement. Roll, baby, roll!

Turned the remaining momentum into an almost artistic leap to my feet. Staggered, held my balance and screamed with the sheer joy of still being alive and in one piece; rammed my fist in the air at beating the odds. Again! Narcotics exhumed from my body by the roller-coaster shock of it all, a rare moment of stone cold sobriety.

The Yam’s dance with the tarmac left it splattered on its side on the pavement, next to a line of lacerated, dented cages – at least having the decency to take out some of the new, expensive stuff with crumple zones that collapsed with little resistance, giving the bike an easy time.

Their drivers emerged en masse from whatever fantasies entertained them when entombed in the traffic. Sudden war-zone victims, shaken, decidedly not stirred, bug-eyed and out for a hanging. Road rage just didn’t come into it. The blast of malevolence and bad karma thrown in my direction enough to knock a weaker man senseless.

The obvious option to assume the worst and foot it out of there pronto. However, I could still hear the Yamaha’s engine burping away and the top-box was full of several hundred thousand baht’s worth of drugs. I flashed on the evening news’ headlines – drug crazed motorcycle maniac pursued through Bangkok by armed police… do not approach, believed to be highly dangerous. Followed by a vision of Somgrai tearing me limb from limb when he realised how I’d lost all his drugs.

Weaving, shouting, waving my arms around for all I was worth, I ran for the bike. Only one driver tried to get in my way but I slipped by him with all the verve of a desperate rugby player, turned and gave him a high velocity foot to his kneecap as he showed every intention of not giving up the chase.

Foolish man. For a moment, his screams drowned out both the bike’s engine and my own thoughts. His eyes a little crazy with the realisation that a farang had so rapidly and easily taken him out.

Lifted up the Yamaha like it was some tiny moped, threw a leg over the saddle, hit the clutch, gear lever and throttle in a flowing motion that would have won praise from the highest grade of athlete. The motor stuttered for a moment as the fuel flow stabilised, panic hit my brain as I thought it was going to stall but she caught, and that straightforward blast of, barely silenced, single cylinder stroker power was for an instant the sound of pure love, joy and harmony. F..k the world, I was going to make it!

The bars bent out of shape but the thing wailed away down the road, wobbling across a good yard of tarmac – the mass of damaged cages had left a vacuum, a clear ribbon of road along which we happily bounced and twitched, though I made damn sure I never applied such an excess of power that the front wheel left the ground. Neither the bike nor I were in any state for further madness.

I hid out in the back alleys of Silom, whilst the area was blasted by police and ambulance sirens. I hoped they would write it off as just another traffic accident with a bit of road rage thrown in for fun. Had they suspected the drug connection, a crazy armada of police and army helicopters, bikes, trucks and cars would’ve descended on the scene.

Of late, where drugs were concerned, the police and military had become infamous for shooting first and asking questions later.

I had to pull over; after the dissipation of adrenaline from the flight, the shakes descended. I just managed to get my helmet off before spewing up into someone’s tiny garden, pausing a moment to figure the huge pile of vomit would doubtless be good fertiliser, though the splodges of blood didn’t inspire any great belief in my personal longevity.

My throat burnt red hot with the pain of the unwanted evisceration, my legs weak and wobbly, causing me to collapse into an undignified heap on the pavement. I felt at any moment that my bowels would burst open in a complementary cleansing of my overwrought body.

My eyes and ears nearly exploded when a few gaudily dressed Yanks tottered past my shaking, subdued body. Forms from a bad dream where every movement’s strange and exaggerated. I let loose a massive fart, so profound in odour that I almost gagged again.

The American who looked less masculine and could possibly have been female in gender, bent down, patted my head and dumped a 1000 baht note into my upturned helmet.

‘Poor dear, looks like he’s another AIDS victim. Bangkok’s becoming more and more like a living hell.’

‘Or New York…’

Their impossible brightness caused me a moment of deep despair but the survival instinct was stronger. I popped half a tab this time! My vision went for a moment but came back stronger, my legs gained muscle power and I managed to stagger upright.

My body suddenly, desperately, needed twenty gallons of water. I leapt on the Yamaha and wobbled home to Klong Toey, through a series of intricate back lanes that if you didn’t know the route would end up dumping you in the docks. Not the kind of kick you need in the dark hours…

The wall of noise and heat almost knocked me over. A deep bass rumble that shook the concrete foundations of the underground Silom bar; 100 degrees of heat right out of a plague area, humidity turned up high.

The music might once have had something of Africa in it, but if played to a tribe in its transmuted form would doubtless spark a massacre. The heat generated by the huge cavern being filled with bodies; a mixture of underage teen’s and middle-aged swine, sweating like slaves, swilling back alcohol and milling to the indefatigable pulse of the music.

The huge Russians – some kind of steroid warriors who moved like they had hot pokers up their bums – on the door had looked me over in a predatory manner, placated only by the authenticity of my ruined, newly torn, leather jacket and heroin gaunt body from its recent purging.

They looked like either ex-KGB or Mafia or a particularly esoteric Russian combination of the two, and so nasty that even the Thai cops probably didn’t dare interfere with them. The entrance fee was 1000 baht, cash only, for the men but the underage girls got in for free!

A stage cut through the centre of the room, encased in chrome bars than ran into the blackness of the low ceiling. Caged inside were a dozen or so frails, wearing G-strings and high-heels. Looked like Russian prostitutes with the lithe bodies of ex-gymnasts or ballerinas, all so young and sexy that my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head. A weird contrast to the natural beauty of the Thai women who in their sheer excessive numbers, after a while, rendered themselves just a touch mundane!

I fought my way through to the bar at the far end of the cellar, stamping on the feet of a few of the older, larger hooligans just to let them know I wasn’t to be trifled with, and handed over 200 baht for a bottle of Chang beer that was so cold it welded my hand to the glass!

I downed it in one massive gulp, burped, and waved another couple of notes at the bar. After taking off a layer of skin on my hand, I was armed with my second bottle and pondering how the tab’s would mix with alcohol. F..k knows…

Scanning the crowd for a likely candidate, I saw the frail from Ratchadam. Not an ice maiden any more, decked out in a bright yellow micro-dress, a slender blur of golden flesh and black hair as she moved to the beat; not so much of the music but of her own inner energy.

I butted my way through the sweating crowd, careful to protect my groin from any contact with the men – in Bangkok impossible to tell who was straight, they all looked so weird and wired. My cock seemed bloated up to twice its normal size, some E tab’s having a reputation for giving the user a 24 hour erection! Stab that into the back of the wrong kind of guy, I’d either be beaten to death or force-marched into the nearest dark corner.

Everywhere I looked, near naked frails, not just on the stage, but the Thai teen’s were into all kind of contortions, gesticulations, that left their already minimal clothing displaced. A nipple here, a slash of pubic hair there, a spread-eagled butt to my right… I didn’t know where to look first! Spoilt for choice. These girls were so far gone on drugs, alcohol and the beat of the music that they didn’t give a damn any more.

Only knew this place existed because of the address on the carton; figured it was the last place Somgrai would come looking for me. I decided that after all the hassle and horror of the evening I’d earnt a much bigger stake in the pills – at 500 baht a pop a quick way to get seriously rich, much quicker than acting as a delivery boy, even at 2500 baht a go. Considering the risks I’d been running that was a real insult to what was left of my intelligence. There was nothing quite so intrinsic to a well run drug business as having someone who wasn’t a pure native as a fall guy!

As I neared the girl I saw that she wasn’t actually the same one I’d clocked before over on Ratchadam. Not that I was going to complain, she looked completely mind-blowing. She was swigging from a bottle of Singha as she moved to the music, staggering slightly under the effects of the alcohol, heat and noise. God knows how long she’d been at the beer but her eyes were far gone, some place else. I figured with a little bit of encouragement she’d happily exchange sex for some tab’s.

The babe wasn’t wearing any underwear, her dress hitched up almost to her waist. I stood behind her hoping she’d jerk backwards into my groin and be totally blown away by the surprise awaiting her. Somehow she kept well clear of me. Seeing as her beer was nearly empty, I staggered back to the bar again, almost bent double under the crippling force of my erection, bought her a new beer, dropped a tab in it and then forced my way back.

She didn’t object to the new bottle of beer but didn’t even crack a smile and did a swift turn out of my reach when I tried to get a hand on her arse. Bloody women, no figuring them out.

‘You keep yer hand off my woman, kid.’

A rather large German hoodlum, who was obviously brain-dead from an overindulgence in muscle building, twitched his upper body in what he supposed a threatening manner, but he had so overbuilt his chest and shoulder muscles that his legs had gone bandy; more the swagger of a desperate cross-dresser than a hard man.

At least the threat got my erection to subside. Instead I started to giggle hysterically, which left him with the perplexed look of a baboon just before an essential medical experiment went down! I half-heartedly waved him away, staggered off to a corner to view the results of my experiment in relative safety and obscurity.

In the darkened corner of the bar all kinds of shit going down. Hard to tell if drug abuse or sex dominated. Looked like a quick way to go down with AIDS. My attention distracted by the girl suddenly going into a manic bop, her head jerking back and forth like some mad head-banger, her body blurring so fast that under the neon she looked like she didn’t have any clothes on… my poor old erection came back with painful intensity.

Her boyfriend swaggered towards her, a look of consternation on his face that made him more and more the caricature of the perfect imbecile. When he went to grab her, she let loose a high-pitched scream that broke through the bass reverberations of the music.

The hooligan staggered backwards in shock as she attacked him with all the feline grace of a cornered cat; facial features switched from pure beauty to complete evil. Wave after wave of malevolence shimmied off her into the neon night, the same kind of deep-seated, amoral madness far inside her that had turned Cambodia into one huge death-camp.

Her fingernails raked skin off his face as expertly as some old hand skinning snakes but with the same manic intensity she’d brought to her dancing. Blood seemed to crescent out under the neon, catching the changing colours in an interesting rainbow effect. The German had to use all his strength to ward her off, his fearful yowl mouthed but lost to the manic music. Thrown a few feet she banged into a wall of people, stuttered; junky fix-deprived twitching.

The fight and flight had pretty much deprived her of all her clothes – slender body like a thirteen year-old, small breasts but huge erect nipples pointing upwards, a tiny vee of pubic hair that already looked damp and promising, and legs that ran all the way up to her waist. It was pretty obvious to me that I’d have to come to her aid.

Before I could move an old guy, bald head gleaming under the flashing lights, dressed like a fifties clerk, had appeared out of nowhere. He gave her an almighty slap across the face, a fast forming red welt testimony to the force employed. She stopped twitching, collapsed into the arms of the nearest guy, sobbing away like a baby deprived of its milk. Even then the way her body twitched was mind-numbingly sexy.

The thing that scared me about the ancient, on second glance he wore clothes that deliberately hid his muscle. The squat little guy went up to the steroid abuser, who was desperately trying to push the torn skin back into his face, and in a blur of movement, hands moving so fast I had no idea what he was doing, had the cretin bent down, holding him by the scruff of his neck as he marched him, like a cat with a kitten in its mouth, to the exit.

He gave me a malevolent glance as he bounced past on the balls of his feet, far too elegantly for a man of his bulk. All I could think to do was quaff another tab; only one exit and he’d just taken it.

As the stimulant took hold, the music swelled up and the walls of the cavern seemed to shimmer. I thought I was going to pop right out of my body but was distracted by a searing pain in my stomach; acid eating into the lining or my whole body consumed by a particularly toxic form of cancer. My skin coated in a layer of sweat, rivulets running down my face. The water smelt like it was tainted by excrement and I felt my legs go all weak and wobbly again.

Just as I was coming back into focus, a vision from hell popped up in front of me, materialising out of the ether of the club’s smoky atmosphere.

‘Where the f..k are my pills, you stupid little runt.’

My erstwhile boss was bursting out of the seams of his gross cross-dresser outfit, rage and fear mixed in equal amounts on his face.

‘You stupid little f..ker, the Russian Mafia are involved in this. You can’t piss around with them, they’ll chop your balls off!’

‘Save you on the surgery then won’t it, buddy!’

‘Ooh, I’m going to have you, sonny. I’m going to f..king have you! I’m going to make it slow and painful. Get the general idea?’

‘Yeah, I’ve always been shit scared of men who dress up in women’s clothes.’

He stamped his foot like an irate five year-old in the middle of a tantrum, which only made me smile all the more. The E made me absolutely fearless.

‘Don’t you laugh at me! I want my pills back now. Now, now, now!’

‘No need to get hysterical, perhaps we can do a deal. 100,000 baht and they’re yours.’

‘You mad moron, don’t you understand who you’re dealing with? You haven’t got a clue, have you, sonny? This is the big time and you’re nothing.’

‘Sure, but I’ve still got the tab’s and I reckon the Russians are going to kick your butt not mine if they don’t turn up.’

‘You don’t get it. This is their place. I came here to apologize for the delay – this dress is my disguise, idiot! One word from me, you’re dead meat.’

‘If you were going to do it you’d have done it already. And for Godsake do something about those tits, they’ve gone all lopsided. Do you know how grotesque you look?’

Something broke in the back his eyes, caused him to lunge at me with huge hands. If ever there was a simple rule in life, never insult a transvestite however ugly he might be.

I moved back sharpish, grinned as he got caught out by his high-heels. He moved too fast, tottering on the brink of a major fall from grace. I helped him along with a backhanded smack to his face, a rather fitting tribute to his questionable gender. Over he went.

A major dislocation of people as 200lbs of flailing limbs hit them, causing a wave of momentum across the room. The crush so great that the domino effect ruled. Screams, panic and mayhem were all grist to my mill. I loved it! I suddenly had the urge to machine gun the whole lot of them, burn the place to the ground, bomb the whole city, nuke the country into oblivion…

Whilst these fantasies wove their way through my bubbling brain, my body had taken on a mind of its own. With Ninja grace I snaked my way through the crazed crowd towards the only exit. I went with the flow, little shocks of pressure charging the atmosphere around me as I seemed to vibrate in concert with the atoms of the slender spaces through which I passed.

Someone screamed into the night, FIRE, FIRE, FIRE. It took a while to recognize the sound of my own voice. In the chaos I hoped to pass back out into the night unnoticed, the pressure of the bodies behind forcing us towards the small exit with the same kind of implacable force generated by gravity. One moment I was having the breath crushed out of me, the next I was free, in the heated atmosphere of the street. I felt incredibly high, like I could fly through the air; Superman on drugs…

‘Hi, farang, you wanna try me?’

The huge katoey – were they cloning like rabbits reproduced? – grabbed my arm so viciously that she practically pulled me off my feet. A couple of hundred thousand baht had gone west on facial surgery but all it seemed to do was emphasize the ugliness deep inside her.

Huge bloated body and shoulder muscles that could’ve majored at any wrestling match. Her presence sucked every ounce of joy and energy right out of me, a psychic vampire on the loose full up to her dilated eyeballs with every conceivable kind of disease. Her face blistered, seeping; the smell running off her body that of dead fish and semen mingled together. I nearly had to stop breathing to survive the encounter; the contrast with the wild beauty of the drugged girl so stark that I felt a deep sense of loss.

‘No thanks, no time.’

‘No problem, I’ll make you come quick. Any hole you want for 300 baht.’

‘No money’

‘Go-hock. Honey, you got any balls in there.’

Despite myself, when she grabbed my groin my erection blossomed again. My cock didn’t so much as unfurl as take off so rapidly that it threatened to break out of the confines of my jeans. Just for a moment I was tempted to take her up on the offer.

‘Oooh, baby, I’ll have some of that. Come on, let’s hit the alleyway. A quick blow job for 200 baht, no condom or anything. I’m make you blow your load in a couple of minutes. Divine Brown ain’t got nothing on me, honey.’

‘No money.’

‘F..k you, you f..king fag. Ain’t no real men left in Bangkok…’

She hobbled off down the road, a walking health hazard, a dank presence that swept up all before it, one step away from complete self-annihilation.

The Yamaha secreted in one of Silom’s many blind alleyways, the kind of dark hole, voids in the city, which you could wander into and never be seen again. I’d bribed a couple of vagrants to keep an eye on it but had still used the three locks. Typically, the tramps were curled up with the refuse sacks, snoring away despite the presence of a couple of bloated rats that were so big they could easily pass for cats in the darkness.

I gave the nearest guy a kick in the ribs to little effect, the temptation to beat the shit out of the moron running high. I was in an evil mood, not just the tab’s but the sheer sexual frustration of wandering around with a monster erection. Even the rats didn’t react to the violence, just eying me up as another possible tasty morsel.

At least the motorcycle was still in one piece. I was so out of it by then that I had a real job getting the locks off shaking hands and blurred vision meant I couldn’t suss which key went into which lock, and even if I was right I couldn’t insert the key without a lot of cursing, swearing and fumbling. I was suddenly desperate to get out of the area fast. For a good reason…

A deep, grave-walker’s chuckle, followed by the sound of a gun being cocked. Just a silhouette in the night when I glanced up, a shadow dancer that suddenly came into frightening focus with the kind of cynical grin that made me believe in the power of evil. Another Shithead!

‘I have to admit it, I kinda admire your cool, boy. That last episode in the club showed a strong survival instinct.

No skill just pure running on instinct – it’s quite a rare phenomenon. Alas, now you are dealing with a real professional. You can’t bluff me, kid!’

‘Shit, I thought I lost you in the crowd. I was blown away by the way you dealt with that muscle builder in the bar. Just took him out so fast I’ve got no idea how you did it. No need to get nasty with me, I know when I’m outclassed. I’m willing to cooperate.’

‘You’re still rolling from the drugs, son. Your eyes are completely ruined. I think you’re going to try something. I was trained by the KGB and honed by the Russian Mafia, you don’t get better than…’

I screamed and lunged at him, without even thinking about the consequences. I’d never even seen a real gun up close, but all those movie shots of blood and gore flashed through my brain for a microsecond. Do or die.

I went to wave the gun away with one hand and smash him in the face with the other, but he simply wasn’t there any more. I couldn’t believe how someone so large could move so fast. Before the shit went down there was the briefest of moments when I was totally consumed by fear, my stomach fell straight through my backside.

I felt fingers on my neck, then an incredible pain in my spine which went so heavy that my sight failed and I couldn’t even get a scream out, then all feeling going out of my legs, then being thrown face first into a wall, with a shove that was pure concentrated energy, like a motorcycle switching on 200hp of turbo-charged thrust. It all went down in nanoseconds.

My face burst into red hot pain, my legs still couldn’t hold me up, I tried to melt into the wall as I careered down it, to merge with the stone and disappear into another world. It didn’t work. Blood, tears and vomit erupted out of my head as it bounced against the damp wall as I finished my descent into reality.

‘Silly. Very silly. I could’ve shot you before you’d taken a step. Amateur hour stuff. That’s the problem with you half-casts, no training or discipline. When I was your age I could kill a man with my bare hands in seconds. And no tolerance for pain, look at you blabbing away like a baby. That secret is simple, concentrate on the pain, let it take over your whole spirit for a moment. And then, whoosh, it’s gone. The mind can deal with it in an instant, no problem.’

Take over my whole spirit? The f..king stupid prick, my head felt like someone was taking a lump-hammer to it, and my spine was still throbbing from whatever nerve endings the bastard had taken out. At least my legs had become reattached to my body and I was able to crawl up to a sitting position. I could barely see through the blood and my eardrums were buzzing away; chain-saw haircut.

‘No real damage done, son. Just a bit of torn flesh and bruised bones. I suffered much worse in training. It seems you have my drugs, which I’ve already paid for. Of course, your boss will have to give me my money back as he made the mistake of hiring you. Everyone has to pay for their mistakes – one way or another. But I still want my pills. Are they on the motorcycle? Answer or I really will lose my temper. If you cooperate I’ll let you leave, it’s not worth taking you out. And at least you have some spirit, not like these vermin here, sleeping with rats in the garbage. With a bit of military training you could make something of yourself.’

It took me a while to get my voice working again, at least all my teeth were still there and my eyesight was beginning to coalesce into a single image rather than a jigsaw puzzle of multiple visions. The Russian looked like he had six heads which were screaming, fighting, to get back on to his neck. I knew when I was beaten…

‘Half are in the top-box, the rest are stashed at my place. Look, I’ve been through hell tonight, can’t we work out some kind of deal? I’ve just lost my job and got two maniacs out for my blood. I need a break.’

‘Anything is possible. But I must have trust and you haven’t shown much of that so far… although with your boss it’s hard for anyone to take him seriously – he even suggested I might like to f..k him – to think that I have to deal with such scum after heading a division in the KGB! Without trust I can’t operate.’

With that he turned, flicked the gun in the direction of the nearest tramp and pulled the trigger. It was an idle, bored gesture as if it had no more consequence than flicking on a lighter. I was watching his face at that moment, saw one eye twitch and the corners of his mouth go all cynical. After the shot his face closed down, reptilian.

Whatever bullet he used caused the whole of the tramp’s head to erupt into a plume of blood and bone, the human brain exploding a far from pretty sight even in the shadows of the lane. The noise of the gun going off was strangely muted even though it ricocheted around the alley. Amazingly, the other tramps slept on, doped out of their minds on glue and god knows what else.

The sight of the decapitated tramp made me throw up again, vomit spraying out in an arc that was, thankfully, a millimetre off the Russian’s highly polished shoes. About a hundred rats scampered out from the refuse sacks, huge bodies wobbling on scrawny legs, showing a remarkable intelligence in getting out of the area fast. The Russian kicked out at them as they swarmed around his feet, his face full of sudden distaste at the proximity of such ugliness.

‘You see, I am without fear or conscience. Human life means nothing to me. I could take you out now and sleep peacefully tonight. But I dislike waste. You have potential and I need someone outside my circle of acquaintances to act in secret for me. But be warned, once you’re in there’s no getting out again. All or nothing!’

‘Er, what do you have in mind?’

‘First the drugs, then we can talk about the rest of it. We should get out of here now, the sound of one gunshot usually doesn’t attract much attention but you never know. And that nonsense at the club will have some cops in the area. We will go on your motorcycle.’

‘Well, I don’t have a spare helmet.’

‘Ha, so stupid! You are worried about petty laws after I just shot someone. From now on, my friend, all laws are cancelled. Understand? Don’t stop for the police.’

‘Yeah, f..k – em, I’ll go helmetless, too.’

‘That’s the spirit! I can see with a bit of training and effort you’re going to make it!’

With a two hundred pound monster perched on the back of the Yamaha, the first time I gave her some throttle the front wheel went skywards with a shoulder dislocating lurch. I screamed with the sheer joy of it! The Russian’s feet flew up, he grunted a stream of curses and clawed my shoulders like he wanted to break me in half.

I hit second, slammed the throttle shut for a moment to get the front tyre back on the tarmac and then clutched it around the first curve into the flow of slow moving traffic. The back wheel, aided and abetted by a thick block pattern tyre of obscure origin, slid through the corner, the back end snaking away merrily until the traction caught up with the road speed.

The cages still densely packed. I wanted to ride over their roofs. My hands twitched on the bars as the back of a black Merc reared up before us… no, with all the extra weight on board the roof would probably collapse, leaving us stuck in the passenger compartment. Not a manoeuvre my new employer would endorse, what with all the drugs on board, the fact that he was carrying a murder weapon and we weren’t wearing helmets; the state of Thai law the latter most likely to send the plod crazy.

I twitched the bars viciously, ran inside the Merc, giving the panels a good booting as we careered past. Rich bastard. The Yamaha was all over the shop, the prematurely aged rear shock down on its stops letting the cycle shake over the viciously pot-holed road surface. As I tried to clear the front of the auto, the enraged driver shoved his bumper at the side of the Yamaha. We went into an almighty wobble, but I let the engine have its head, accelerated right out of trouble; up to fourth with 100km/h on the clock through a gap between the stream of cars that feathered the mirrors and caused the Russian to narrow his shoulders.

I switched on to automatic pilot, let myself go, without conscious thought but totally aware of my surroundings, and the myriad possibilities of doom from the converging vectors of slow moving but deadly vehicles. They had no idea of how fast we could turn the tiny dot in their mirrors into the looming, frightening sight of the front end of a motorcycle with the light blazing on main beam in the forlorn hope of waking the bastards up. War-zone time!

Up to 135km/h for a brief moment then for no obvious reason, I slammed on the disc brakes… tyres screaming as they fought for grip on the road surface, the bulk of the passenger ramming forward, trying to crush my marital tackle into the back of the petrol tank. I wanted to elbow him in the ribs but if I took a hand off the bars they’d twitch into oblivion. Felt like my arms were going to break off under the sudden reverse thrust, but I grimaced, kept at it, happy at least that the road surface was dry and a terminal skid straight into hell was a long way off.

A suited, aged, foreign chap sauntered out from behind a bus as if the idea of a fast moving motorcycle speeding between the entombed cars was completely impossible. This hero from another world suddenly looked up as the noise of the tyres vaporizing broke into his consciousness – our eyes locked for a moment and I was surprised to see no fear there – a motorcycle with a pair of maniacs panting with the effort to stop the thing going end over end rearing down on him, he sidestepped at the last moment and let the Russian have it on his head with a large walking stick as we shook past him. A swipe clearly inspired by martial arts training.

The Russian screamed at me to stop, presumably so he could blow the brains of the assailant away, but I was already working the throttle, clutch and gears, getting back into communion with my mount, wanting to ride so hard and fast that the Russian would fall off; all weak kneed and desperate for mercy: I plunged into that crystalline high, searching for revenge, that comes from the fusion of man and machine.

I charged the Yamaha through the next mile or so of obstacle course, barely conscious of my actions, just letting the flow of the ride take over. Lumpinee Park rushed by to my left, in the darkness just a black expanse where only the cries of the desperate emerged.

Ahead, my vision blurred by the wind summoned up by the 90 to 120km/h velocity and my hair streaming out behind to whiplash the Russian’s face, I saw some kind of pile-up of vehicles. Suddenly, I wanted to go for it, launch the Yamaha in a massive spurt of power, take the bike right over the top of their roofs, fly through the night invincible… that’s the trouble with watching too many late night movies and eating too many pills.

My suddenly resolved vision revealed a couple of cop cars blocking off the road, lights flashing intermittently, their halo shattering into a million pieces, ruining my perception. The police sensibly stood behind the solid steel of their auto’s. A little voice inside me screamed: bluff them. Change up to top, charge through them at 150km/h. Either win out or end it all in a blur of blood and carnage.

I twitched the throttle back to the stop; still some power left. The Russian screamed at me to brake, using pressure on my neck to send jolts of pure pain up and down my spine. But even the pain resolved itself into the high, becoming a burst of pleasure. I couldn’t catch sight of the grin I was wearing just damn sure it’s a gruesome smirk!

Sanity suddenly hit me at the last possible moment. I braked until I thought my hands, wrists and arms were going to break off. The Yamaha shuddered, squealed, screamed… the forks right down on their stops, the back wheel leaping off the tarmac and rotating frantically suddenly freed of the friction between tyre and road. We turned into a giant pogo-stick for a few moments, my body battered every which way. The Russian screamed something but the words made no sense whatsoever.

Speed down to about 40km/h, with a sudden clearing of cars, we’re fifty metres off the police vehicles but the front tyre started to snake away. I let the brakes go and heeled the whole bouncing, out of control bastard right over. Foot down speedway style, back brake back on harshly, she skidded in a huge semicircle that nearly took the top of my head off with the sheer outrageousness savagery of it all.

I twitched the whole machine back up, a huge, kidney shaking wobble which nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets with the shithead on the back not knowing if he’s coming or going, but we pulled out of it, sped off back down the road into a rush of cages, taxi’s, buses and lorries.

I bopped with the oncoming traffic, causing a couple of no-hopers to skid into each other, until I could slide into a side-street. Holler off down the road, with the throaty scream of the highly tuned stroker engine bouncing off the hard concrete of the skyscrapers.

Blue lights and sirens conspicuous in their absence due to the traffic chaos we’d left behind. The Russian chuckled to himself, shouted I’d done well…

‘Most of the pills are here. They are serious shit, you’re lucky to be in one piece after eating so many of them. Half a tab will have most people way gone. They’re new stuff, not fully tested yet, could easily rip your liver apart. I never touch the merchandise, got much better ways to get my kicks – this is the first lesson you should learn. Now we get down to the serious business.’

‘You’re going to cut me in?’ “Like I said, it”s all a matter of mutual trust. You have to learn the rules. The first is that everything I say goes! No questions, only actions. Think of yourself as a member of the KGB in exile, you won’t go far wrong.’

‘Okay, no problem. Only an idiot would try to mess with you.’

‘Good. So we can move on a little bit. First I want you to strip off.’

‘Er, no way, man. You’re not another bum-bandit, are you? I had enough of that shit with my last boss. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.’

‘No questions, clothes off or I will have to finish the business in a way you won’t like. It’s either this or you go the same way as the tramp.’

He unfurled his gun, caressed its body and flicked its barrel in my direction. His finger went white on the trigger as if he could barely restrain himself.’

‘Hey, come on. What’s with all you dealers, can’t you get your sexual kicks in the normal way?’

‘Strip off. I just want to check out the condition of your muscle. We may have to set up a weight training program to get you into shape. This is a serious business we are in, you have to know how to look after yourself. React fast, instinctively.’

‘I’m in great shape, no fat on me, mate. You want to teach me some of that martial arts, I’m all for it but muscle building’s for morons.’

‘We shall see, now strip off. Everything, not just your shirt. Come on hurry up. God damn, what you doing with a cock that big, boy?’

‘It’s those pills, I think I’ve got a twenty-four hour erection. Those Russian strippers didn’t help.’

‘You’d tear someone in half using that thing. We may have to get it chopped down to size, you’ll look damn silly in woman’s clothes with that sucker sticking out.’

‘No way, man. I’m not dressing up as a woman. It’s not that big! It must be from my farang father, I know Thai men can’t compete.’

‘Impossible!’

‘No kidding. Anyway, are my muscles okay?’

‘Pure wimp, boy, but I’ll soon get you into shape. You ever been sodomized?’

‘No way. I told you I’m not into all that gay boy shit. That’s not part of the deal.’

‘Well, you look gay. I think you’ll find you like it when you give it a go. I used to come across a lot of Russian boys like you in Moscow, turn them out in dresses and sell their bodies to the tourists. Of course, drugs are much more lucrative but old habits die hard. And it’s the only way I’m going to truly trust you, boy’

‘Sod that.’

‘Shit, boy, I can’t get in the mood with that thing waggling in my face. I’ll do you later.’

‘No way.’

He seemed to leap the short distance between us in a nano-second, just a swirl through the atmosphere. The cold nozzle of the gun suddenly pressing into my throat, a hoarse voice accompanied by spittle sprayed into my ear,

‘It’d be such a waste to blow you away, son, just get down on your knees and pray for forgiveness.’

With all the clarity of the truly delusional, as soon as I was on my knees, he whipped the gun away and laughed like an out of control orangutan.

He suddenly gasped, collapsing on top of the bed, causing one of its legs to let loose, sending the whole lot over on its side. I started giggling hysterically at the sight of splayed Russian and his pitiful countenance.

‘Stop that crying, you must learn to take life in your stride. Now I can trust you. From now on I am your commanding officer, you will obey all orders without question. Understand?’

‘What sort of money are you talking about?’

‘Don’t worry about that. There are millions of dollars to be made. You’ ll have so much you won’t know what to do with it.’

‘Up front, like?’

‘First, you must do some work. Don’t worry about it.’

‘I want at least one hundred thousand baht a week.’

‘No problem. Let’s get out of this shit-hole. Forget your other clothes, I’ll buy you some decent stuff tomorrow. And wrap the pills up under your shirt in that bag. Hang it loose, no-one will see them’

The Russian, after reassembling his dignity, proceeded to pull the washbasin off the wall, with one mighty heave loosening it so it rested on the water pipe. Half the bottom of the basin fell out, porcelain shattering on the worn tiles. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, despite the battering my face had taken it looked positively angelic in its lines and angles, bursting with youth and health; the bruises and cuts miraculously healed!

‘Pathetic Thai workmanship. We must destroy all evidence of your being here. Standard operating procedure. Normally, I’d burn the building down but we have made too much of a spectacle of ourselves tonight. Better to flood the place.’

‘Er, what about my deposit, I had to pay 5000 baht up front to get in here.’

‘Don’t be petty. Come on, we need to get out of here.’

He tore the basin off the pipe, fierce plume of water gushing into the room. Outside, I locked up the door, in the hope that the whole building would be flooded out before they turned the mains off…

In the street, a strange rhythmic crunching noise… Somgrai wielding a massive sledgehammer on the Yamaha. Bits of plastic and metal flying everywhere, the poor old bike mangled almost beyond recognition. Enraged, I charged him, screaming abuse at the top of my voice, forgetting his reputation for violence and the minor fact that he weighed twice my own mass.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his boss, now encased in thigh length leather boots and an inappropriately short dress, languidly posing in front of the gold Range Rover. Somgrai saw me coming, turned, leered and made vicious with the hammer.

The downward stroke would’ve cut me in two if I’d been where he’d expected me. I was running on an excess of drugs, energy and anger rather than fear, sidestepped without thinking about it. Somgrai staggered forward under the momentum of the blow, his bull neck bared, inspiring me to try a karate chop. I got the full force of my body behind it, screamed with the sheer thrill of it.

My temporary elation vaporised the instant the blow hit home. My hand felt like it was broken and a searing pain juddered up my arm, through my shoulder and deep into my brain. I howled as it bit as hard as a dentist’s drill hitting on an exposed nerve.

Somgrai shrugged his giant head as he turned towards me, his eyeballs almost popping out with rage. He was fast metamorphosing, at least in my hallucinogenically ruined vision, into some anthropoidal brute; the harsher the violence became the deeper the animal resemblance.

‘Back off, man, the Russian’s armed to the teeth and not afraid to use his gun.’

We both glanced over towards the Range Rover. Sleighy had his victim over the bonnet of the car, legs kicked out and dress pulled up to its waist. The shrill screaming had something of the lunatic asylum in it.

I glanced back at Somgrai just in time to see him start a backhanded slap at my face. I’d moved my head far enough away to take some of the force out of it but I was still swept off my feet.

I rolled with the fall, trying to get out of Somgrai’s range but I needn’t have bothered as he was much more interested in the Russian. He charged at Sleighy with a terrifying scream of rage. Sleighy gave one almighty twist to my past boss’s arm, breaking it with a loud crack, followed by an hysterical screaming fit as the transvestite thrashed around on the bonnet like a fish thrown on to land.

All Somgrai’s rage and forward momentum converted by a flick of the Russian’s wrist on to the fist that was flying through the air at his head. Incredibly, the huge bulk of Somgrai flew off the ground in an arc that took him over the Range Rover and splattered him head first on to the pavement. It was all over in an instant, blood pouring out of an ear of his stilled form.

‘You drive, I’ll interrogate this piece of shit in the back of the car.’

‘Drive? I’ve only ever ridden motorcycles.’

‘Don’t worry about it, it’s all the same. Throttle on the right, clutch on the left, brake in the middle. We’ve got to get out of here before the cops turn up. They won’t stop us in a flash motor like this.’

It was obviously time to quaff a couple more pills… the key was still in the ignition, the motor spat into life the moment I touched it. Power thrummed through the vehicle as I played with the throttle. Half a dozen dogs shot out of nowhere, sleazy specimens that dribbled drool but made an ear splitting racket. As I didn’t want to stall the motor, I gave the throttle some serious stick, hit on the clutch and shoved the gear lever into first.

When the clutch came up off the floor, the car bolted forward, ran over the body of the nearest canine; went out with a squeal. The narrow lane that led into Rama IV soon eaten up by the rapid acceleration. I steered wildly into the traffic, which late at night had eased considerably. I crunched up to second, almost running down a couple of ped’s as we lurched forward, one of the front wheels digging into a crater that left the driving wheel spinning in my hand.

The transvestite squealing in the back as the Russian tortured and interrogated him.

‘Where are the pills manufactured? Where’s the lab?’

‘I don’t know… aaaargh.’

A brief hole in the traffic allowed me to hammer the throttle to the floor in third. My heart stuttering away, palpitations that presaged a massive and fatal heart attack. Suddenly, a wavering green mini-bus and overloaded lorry tried to converge on the spot I was aiming for. Where the f..k was the horn…

‘Where’s the lab, you piece of shit? Tell me or you’re dead meat!’

‘I don’t know. That was Somgrai’s part.’

‘Liar! Thief! The tab’s are all mine now. The KGB has taken over your operation…’

Let’s see what this cage can do. Ram the gear into fourth, throttle still flat on the floor, a huge lurch, the old heap seemed to leap a few feet off the ground, wobbled, but made it to the gap before the other vehicles which veered away in defeat; salutations on their horns in protest. My heart stopped hammering but my vision seemed to narrow down to a tunnel of light, blackness all around…

‘Come on, you goddamn pervert, cough it out or I’m going to start cutting pieces of flesh off you.’

‘Noooo! I don’t know anything. You can have your money back but I can’t get you any more pills.’

‘What use is that?’

Just on the edge of my vision I saw the barrier coming down. It took me a moment to figure we were about to hit the railway crossing at 150km/h. I held the wheel in a death-grip as the whole car lurched across the track, the barrier bouncing off the roof. We bounded free, heading for the flyover at maximum velocity. I finally found the horn, something off a ship, sounded like hell was about to descend on Bangkok; a miraculous clearing of our forward path.

‘Hell, boy, you keep this car steady out there. I nearly cut my own hand off. You can slow down now.’

‘Slow down. Can’t do it, my body’s cramped up and my mind’s seized on speed.’

‘Boy, you slow down or I’m going to pistol-whip you.’

With an effort I got my foot off the throttle, the car back-fired once, settled to a stately velocity that still left most other vehicles going backwards. My vision started to expand then my hands began to shake fiercely, the car skittering from side to side, as we shot up the flyover, the whole edifice appearing to wobble alarmingly.

‘What have we got here, then?’

‘Don’t!’

‘Haven’t had the op, have we? I can soon put that right. Tell me where the tab’s are otherwise I’m going to castrate you.’

‘I don’t… Noooooo!’

‘Right, that was just a taster. Just a little nick to give you an idea of what it’s going to feel like. I don’t give a shit any more. The whole lot’s coming off unless you tell me where the lab is.’

Sliding down the expressway into heavy traffic, I got the shakes under control, wondering what was going to hit me next. I whacked the wheel over to the left, spun the back tyres as I rammed the gear lever into second and used maximum throttle. The car fishtailed, battered its way into the inside lane, which turning left into Silom had some movement in it. I felt incredibly high just to be alive, pulsing with energy and, er, lust.

‘Hey, Sleighy, can we have some rest and recreation in Patpong?’

‘It’s Colonel General Sleighy to you, boy. We hit the bars after we’ve secured the lab.’

In front of the Rover, a farang and his Thai whore in the back of a Tuk-Tuk, the elderly woman laden with gold chains around her neck; a heroin thin youth popped up out of nowhere, snapped the chains off the woman’s neck and ran through the traffic on to the pillion of a motorcycle moving in the opposite direction. Before either of the occupants of the Tuk-Tuk could leap out, the bike had wailed off down the road… the woman screaming abuse at the man as I edged the car around them; rivulets of ugliness and despair coursing off her body – the switchblade of modern romance for a Thai woman, if you coupled with enough ugly men it’d run deep into the veins until the original beauty dissipated.

‘Right, that’s it, mate. I’ve had enough, last chance to tell me where the factory is.’

‘I don’t know…’

The scream nearly shattered my eardrums, the transvestite now a eunuch thrashing about in the back of the Rover, Sleighy cackling to himself loudly. The traffic going into total gridlock before we made Silom. A police unit stationed twenty yards away but the layers of pollution kept them locked up inside a glass walled office, fed by the relative cleanliness of their air-conditioners.

‘Right, let’s abandon ship. This idiot can crawl to the hospital across the road and we’ll make faster progress on foot. Make sure you have all the tab’s with you. Not a bad day’s work, we’re got more than a thousand pills for nothing, which works out at a nice profit.’

Sleighy threw the bloody mess in his hand, the whole thing, at a pack of dogs which loitered nearby, unable to decide if they should attack or run for cover; the scent and psyche of foreigners not within their normal remit. Before the organ hit the tarmac, one of the dogs snapped it out of the air with its mouth. Its mates all piled in on him, flesh and blood exploding into the dense atmosphere.

‘That’ll teach the bastard not to mess with the KGB!’

‘F..k, man, this is one hell of a crazy day and it’s not even midnight yet.’

‘I’m just getting in my stride, son. Just getting in my stride. I’ve got some good contacts in Patpong, we’ll soon off-load the merchandise.’

Silom a mess. Huge pillars for the elevated train took up much of the road; what was left a series of fissures and craters that occasionally opened up and swallowed unsuspecting traffic. A red bus impacted into the side of an overgrown Merc, the VIP’s massive loss of face causing him to go ape. Hard to tell if he was a gangster made good or a politician at the trough – incredibly fat for a Thai, most of his hair gone, wild eyes and a comical brow that would normally have pegged him as the village idiot.

Every time I saw these kind of guys evil sparked off their bodies as if they were out of place and time, their natural mien the Cambodian Killing Fields. The bus driver was nowhere to be seen; probably fled the scene. I tried to pretend nothing was happening; to stare to invite retribution…

‘Oh tilac, you law makma. Young, young boy! You buy me Cola!’

‘Yeah, why not. The Russian’s paying.’

‘He jai dam, not like. Very bad man. He kill two girls who cheat him!’

The flashing lights of the Patpong bar would take out an epileptic, occasional flashes of white neon seared deep into my brain causing a momentarily concentration of consciousness. The girls all seemed underage, sixteen to seventeen, almost emaciated bodies in minimal bikini’s. Paradise and hell all rolled into one. The girl who’d wrapped herself around my groin claimed her name was Tai, age seventeen, and looked like she’d come straight from the Cambodian badlands. Heat poured out of her silken body, my erection gone completely wild.

‘You want to try one of these pills?’

‘What?’

‘Good vitamin!’

She shrugged her shoulders, as if there was nothing she could take that would prove worse than her past, swallowed two tab’s and tried to stick her tongue all the way down my throat. Her breath had the fragrance of death and when I caressed her armpit it was laced with boils; two indications that the virus was running rampant through her veins.

‘Hey, relax, let me breathe.’

‘You pay bar fine for me! Go short time for only 3000 baht.’

‘Not tonight. I have to work.’

‘Okay, give me hundred baht.’

‘For what?’

‘Tip!’

‘Your cola’s your tip.’

‘Twenty baht!’

‘No.’

Sleighy returned, swaggering, gave me a little smile that didn’t have a hope of reaching his eyes. He’d spent ten minutes in the toilet, communing with the attendant. A massive Thai, dressed from head to toe in black silk, sporting a permanent grin as if he couldn’t believe his luck and unable to keep his hands from caressing the Russian.

‘Right, I’ve set up the deal. You think that guy in the toilet is just an attendant but he’s actually on the payroll of the Triads. They’ve taken over this bar, that’s why all the girls are so young. Any other bar the police would’ve gone berserk but they daren’t piss around with the local Mafia, they’d get shot in the balls, or worse. They’re even crazier than the Russians – we haven’t got the manpower on the ground yet.’

‘The girls aren’t free agents, then?’

‘No way, they’re all on a short leash, allowed out for short time only at a nearby hotel.’

‘That one who was on my lap probably had AIDS.’

‘Too true, son, you don’t want to poke any of these babes, most of them spent their early years in brothels run by the Chinese. Been f..ked by hundreds if not thousands of Thai men, mostly without a condom. Many had to take more than ten guys a day!’

We were seated at the back of the bar, which horseshoe shaped ran around the stage in its centre where the suddenly ill-looking women gyrated. Before us, next to the bar, a bald headed, portly, snout faced chap sat; suddenly he bounded off his stool, made wild gesticulations with his hands and arms out of time to the music and snapped his head down on to the thigh of one the bar girls for a nuzzle. He repeated these gestures several times until the girl, whose dark skin and large muscles suggested she’d spent her youth cutting rice in Isarn, tired of the madness and smacked his face. The red welt on the pasty white skin testimony to her strength, the poor chap’s resemblance to an animated garden gnome further enhanced when he burst into tears.

‘These punters haven’t got a clue what they’re doing, son. Don’t know the score, just think they’re in paradise. Just wait until we get these pills on the market. They won’t know what’s hit them.’

‘Do you want the pills I’ve got strapped under my shirt now?’

‘Not here, you moron. The deal’s you go in the toilet with the Thai, give him the pills when I give you the nod. Meanwhile, his boss – that fat guy sitting in the corner over there – will hand over the cash. I’ve promised them regular deliveries so we shouldn’t have any problems. Your cut’s 50,000 baht.’

‘Sounds good.’

One of the hostesses a massive katoey with a visage permanently crunched up in disgust. She blocked the path of a customer, same height but twice her width with a face far gone on ugliness. A perfect match. The katoey couldn’t understand what the farang was shouting above the bass rumble of the music. He gestured with his hand in front of his groin, pumping his fist in a six inch arc. The disgust deepened on the katoey’s face as he pointed to the toilet behind him. I was suddenly hit by the hilarity of the gesture and his reaction, went deep into an hysterical laughing fit…

‘Hell, boy, get a grip of yourself. This is no time to start cracking up on me. I forgot to mention that I said you’d let the toilet attendant, Sombat, give you a length.’

‘No way, man. You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘I don’t think he’s very well endowed or anything. Probably come in seconds…’

‘No chance. I’m out of here. You can stuff your pills and your money. I’ve had enough!’

‘Calm down. I was just testing. Those Moscow boys developed a quick taste for sodomy. I was hoping you’d go the same way. We could pass you off as a farang and make lots of money on the side out of the Thai elite. Get us into all kinds of places.’

‘F..k that! Can’t you concentrate on the drugs. That’s going to make loads of money for us.’

The fat, ugly customer staggered from the toilet, something close to despair on his face, skirted past the katoey as if avoiding a dangerous snake but failed to deflect a pat on the bum and swift lifting of his wallet from his back pocket. The katoey quickly stuffed the wallet into his knickers, revealing in the process that he hadn’t got all the way, was still saving up for a plastic pussy.

‘One born every minute. Right the deal’s going down now. Get to the toilet and hand the pills over when I give you the nod.’

‘Okay, no problem.’

‘Don’t do anything until I say it’s okay. These Thais can turn nasty on a whim, sometimes they only think of the short term profit. So be ready to take Sombat out.’

‘Take him out? How the hell am I going to do that, he’s built like a…’

‘Don’t whine, boy. Just knee him in the balls or something. You have to use your initiative. I’m armed so if things turn nasty we’ll have the advantage.’

Sombat’s boss looked more like a teacher than a gangster. He wobbled across the room, proudly displaying a beer gut and flamboyant wig, eyes hidden behind thick glasses and sporting a set of rotten teeth, slapped Sleighy on his knee as if he was an old friend. Sombat greeted me by kissing his hand and waving it gaily in the air.

‘You pretty boy. Maybe we make boom-boom later?’

‘No way, mate.’

‘Where pills?’

‘Under my shirt.’

‘Give now.’

‘I have to wait for Sleighy to nod. He has to check the money.’

‘Russian very sexy man. We make boom-boom already.’

Sleighy gave me a casual nod. I quickly removed the package and handed it over, thankful to be finally rid of it the Thais liked to execute drug dealers on the spot! No wonder I was useful to the Russian, any problems he could deny all knowledge of the drugs and let me take the rap. I got out of the toilet before Sombat got ideas above his station in life, though in all probability he had a Merc hidden away nearby. In Bangkok nothing was quite as it seemed, layers upon layers of deceit; the old Russian doll trip.

‘Shit, buddy, we did it!’

‘You got some money for me.’

‘You’re worse than the bar girls – where’s my money, where’s my money?’

‘Come on, it’s been a hell of a night. I’ve taken a huge risk carrying the drugs for you.’

‘Okay, okay, here’s your fifty thou in thousand baht notes. Don’t wave it around like that, you’ll end up being mugged.’

Tai on the stage, dancing fiercely to the unofficial national anthem – One Night In Bangkok. She hadn’t yet developed any breasts of note and her G-string cut through the cheeks of her arse as if she’d regularly been reamed out by truck-loads of Arabs. Suddenly she went into the mad head-banging mode I’d seen with the other girl on the tab’s; tried to shake her head off her shoulders.

‘Hell, boy, those tab’s sure are something. You get a piece of ass motoring like that under you, you’d be in seventh heaven.’

‘How are we going to get some more?’

‘You know where your boss lives?’

‘Sure, I went there to pick up the pills.’

‘Moron! We could have hit it tonight.’

‘But it’s just a huge luxury penthouse apartment, no lab or anything.’

‘There’s bound to be something. We’ll move on it in the morning.’

Tai decided she could fly. She crouched on the edge of bar, kicked out with narcotically enhanced leg muscles, flew over the head of a startled waitress who dropped a bottle of Johnny Walker whiskey, made it over the edge of the bar and dropped on to the lap of a farang youth with the perfect grace of an Olympic gymnast. The shock of forty kilo’s landing in his lap at a rapid velocity meant he was thrown off the back of his stool, landed with the girl on top of him, frantically trying to unfurl his fly.

‘I think we’re on to something here. These pills sure get the juices flowing. Look at that little bitch going for it as if it’s the only thing in the whole world that matters.’

‘I think it’s time to get out of here. We don’t want to get caught up in a riot.’

‘Stop whining, boy, this is real life.’

The bar’s mamasan sported a kilo of gold around her neck. Her body and face ruined by too much whiskey; still a hint of how attractive she’d been twenty, thirty years ago her exact age impossible to determine under the layers of expensive cosmetics. She had a smile that intimated at how good times could be.

That smile wholly absent when she dragged Tai off the farang, force-marched her to the toilet. Through reflected images in the excess of mirrors, I saw the mamasan battering away at Tai’s head in a manner that would give a boxing champion pause for thought, if not inspiration. And yet the little Thai girl retained the sullen grimace of defiance through it all.

‘F..k, Sleighy, this is bad shit. Patpong used to be brilliant but it’s gone too hardcore now.’

‘Nonsense! It’s just real life catching up with you. I’ll meet you at the Rex Hotel’s coffee shop tomorrow at twelve o’clock. Tonight, you can play the tourist. Okay?’

‘No problem.’

‘You try running out on me, boy, I’ll track you down. You can’t hide in Bangkok. Oh, I’ll want you in a decent suit tomorrow, appearances are going to be important!’

The night still had a while to die…

‘You think you can handle this, Mark?’

‘It’s fantastic. A Yamaha Vee-Max, one of the fastest bikes in the world.’

‘The engine’s been tweaked, good for 150 horses. Kill everything else dead in a straight line. Not so hot in the corners but who gives a damn, right?’

‘Right!’

The 1200cc vee-four had a deep, gravelly wail that sent goose-bumps down my back, suggested supersonic speeds even when at a mere standstill. Long and low, its engine a brutally sculptured piece of metalwork; the whole not out of place in a museum of modern art.

‘I knew you’d like it. After what happened to the Yamaha I thought you deserved something special. I had a hell of a job riding the thing over here, car’s are my game but they are a waste of time in Bangkok. I wouldn’t mind a tank, though, that’d sort the natives out!’

I needed some inspiration. I’d spent the rest of the evening making love to a toilet bowl in a Patpong hotel, noxious sludge gushing out of both ends until I was dry-heaving with enough pain to cause me to pass out. The after-effects of the tab’s close to the death-zone.

I felt strangely light-headed when I’d woken up, as if, in the violent purging of my body, I’d only narrowly avoided death. A cold shower, five litres of water and purchase of a Pierre Cardin suit in Robinson’s Silom had revived me long enough to get a taxi across town to the Rex.

‘Think you can get us down to Pattaya, boy?’

‘Sure, but I thought we were going to hit the apartment. Try to get some more pills. I’m not sure if they’re good stuff, though, I spent most of last night being sick and thought I was going to die at one point.’

‘Yeah, I’ve got a bad feeling about those drugs, better to get out of town for a while. I’ve a nice house just off Beach Road. Time for a little R & R, as our Yank friends might put it.’

‘Shit, I wouldn’t have bought the suit if I’d known, it’s too hot for Thai weather.’

‘You look very cute, they’re going to love you down on the coast. We don’t want any hippies!’

‘Thanks for nothing. Let’s burn some rubber, then.’

The Vee-Max wasn’t built for the density of Bangkok traffic, its mass far too high for easy leverage around the cages. My strength sapped by the recent purgings and my resolution not to take any more tab’s – the last half dozen I’d flushed down the toilet.

A powerful motorcycle had its own buzz, 150 horses spinning the back wheel, kicking up clouds of dust; the acceleration slapping the handlebars from side to side in its ferocity. The series of pot-holes, craters and fissures that Sukhumvit Road represented had the massive Yamaha shrugging from side to side, flexing its suspension – speed seemed to help, getting up to 100km/h, or more, made her float like some huge amphibian on choppy seas.

Despite the bike’s large dimensions, the vee-four motor relatively svelte, allowing us to force our way though narrow gaps, reassured that the sheer momentum of the old beast would result in the sides of cars being unfurled rather than us unseated. A thought that seemed to communicate itself to the cagers – or maybe it was just the roar of the straight-through exhaust system that gave the impression of a Jumbo Jet about to make an emergency landing – as they veered outwards to let us past.

The Vee-Max engine much preferred to be left in top gear, the throttle alone sufficient to excite explosive power that tried to snap off my arms and break my neck in two. Sleighy out back muttered obscenities when I let loose with the full force of the throttle, the only thing stopping him being thrown off the saddle his grip around my waist.

I knew the back roads to Pattaya well. Headed down towards the coast rather than taking the more direct expressway, from which motorcycles were anyway banned. It took a mere fifteen minutes before we were in the countryside, as if emerging into another world after the densely packed and highly polluted concrete jungle of Bangkok.

I felt my lungs working overtime on the relatively clean air, force-fed by the 200km/h gale the Vee-Max had worked up. The road surface half neglected, huge lumps and deep pot-holes; a mere two cars wide with gravel paths on either side, then running into the grass and sometimes narrow streams. Paddy fields, wooden shacks, the odd misplaced concrete mini-palace… blurred glimpses as I fed the Yamaha through the minefield of ruined tarmac.

Coming out of the heat haze, a lumbering lorry veered towards our side of the road; the amphetamine charged driver only resolute in avoiding the ruined parts of the surface. Chicken time! I opened the throttle all the way, aimed dead centre for the lorry. Closing fast, we both hit the horn at the same moment. A blur of speed, noise and wind pressure, with a potential impact velocity of 350km/h!

At the last moment I twitched the bike with all my remaining strength, a whole body shuffle that jerked the Yamaha to the left and at precisely the same moment the lorry driver twirled to the right – neither of us thus losing any face!

Sleighy shuffled about on the back like a nodding toy dog in the rear window of a speeding car. I was nearly thrown off the bike by the slipstream as we snaked past the tail end of the lorry, the heavily decorated and chromed side blurring into a flash of red reflected sunlight.

Our new trajectory slammed us into the track on the side of the road at about 150km/h. The sheer weight and velocity of the bike bit deep into the gravel, finding firm ground underneath but spraying up a machine gun’s splatter of stones that ripped into our skin and almost closed down the forward view.

More by pure gut instinct than any skill, I tillered the Yam back on to firm tarmac, the whole wreck shaking wickedly as the suspension tried to sort itself out. I suddenly had to pull over to throw up, or rather dry-heave the last remnants of the narcotics out of my system. Sleighy went into a rant…

‘You mad bastard, you almost impaled us on the front of that truck. These Thai drivers don’t give way to anything unless it’s bigger than them. You should know that! We should have gone on the expressway, there’s nothing coming in the other direction that way! I don’t know why I bother trying to help you if all you want to do is kill us. You need some maximum military discipline…’

I got back on the Vee-Max, revving the engine into the red, making Sleighy do a running jump on to the back, otherwise he’d be stranded in the middle of the countryside. The Yamaha burbled along at 100km/h, barely ticking over in top gear but letting loose a relaxing wail out of the exhaust.

Several times I had to swerve on to the gravel to avoid being run down by trucks overloaded with cement, the relative lack of speed making the Yam squirm over the dubious surface. For half a mile the air choking thick with cement dust, a cancerous cloud that I sped through at 200km/h, holding my breath until we’d cleared the worst of it.

A huge circle of road had the Yam’s undercarriage grinding away as we regained the main road to Pattaya. The bike felt on the edge of its tyres, mere moments away from dropping over and depositing 300 kilo’s of hot metal on to us; we only survived by swinging out in the opposite direction to counterbalance the speed and mass.

The rest of the route two to three lanes wide, the outer lane the preserve of hideously expensive cars owned by the usual mad mixture of businessmen, politicians and gangsters. The speed limit whatever turned up on the clock with the throttle at maximum.

‘Let’s kick some ass,’ Sleighy screamed into my ear.

The glorious wail of the engine kicked in again, the front end actually rearing up at 150km/h as the full force of the power hammered into the back wheel. The nearby Merc driver took this as a grave insult, seeing two hoodlums on a madly swaying, speeding, motorcycle as an affront to his manhood.

The guy some fat, swarthy bastard who’d probably made it big in the drugs game and never looked back. When the bike had two wheels on the deck again, we seared away from him, twitching in front of his cage, going for 200km/h before the acceleration began to die a little.

The Vee-Max had the aerodynamics of a speeding elephant, the Merc sporting a wind tunnel tested chassis that made the maximum use of its power at high velocities. Thus as we screamed up to 250km/h did the Merc move in for the kill.

The mirrors, that could shake with a hint of vibration, cleared miraculously when the Yamaha was held flat out as if the designers had every intention of letting the rider see the cops when speeding.

The road ahead a chaos of fast moving cars, trucks and buses, squirting from lane to lane with neither rhyme nor reason, nor use of indicators. With the Merc trying to run us down from behind, there was no backing off, the only advantage the Vee-Max had its relative narrowness and thus manoeuvrability.

I thought, egg on the driver, close in on the back of an artic at 250km/h then twitch into the narrow gap between the stream of vehicles whilst the Merc impaled itself on the back of the lorry!

Before that happened I slid the Yamaha between two identical white BMW’s, both trying to race each other into oblivion but running out of steam at about 220km/h. They both skittered in the rear view mirrors as the Vee-Max hammered through them; then I saw the one in the outer lane give way to the black Merc; a perfect mirror of Thai society, the weaker showing deference to the more powerful, however they might have acquired their money and status.

I’d gained a few hundred yards in the manoeuvre, but the Merc soon edged up to our back mudguard again. Cars in front veering out of the way under the onslaught of our flashing lights and booming horns. Amazing what a bit intimidation can do to the minds of Thai drivers.

My right-hand mirror showed, with startling clarity, the mind warped face of the Thai peering over his driving wheel, eyes bulging with hate and vengeance; maybe he’d lost a mistress to a well endowed farang.

The next thing I knew, the Yamaha turning into a lumbering beast, an animal emerging from its belly that wanted to shake, rattle and roll its passengers into submission, even if in the high speed carnage it’d destroy itself. When the earthquake died down I realised that it was the front bumper of the Merc nudging into the back of the Yam that had caused the major trauma – blood sprayed back into my face where I’d bitten down on my tongue when trying to hold the Yamaha together.

Where before it had felt glued to the road by its high-tech rubber, the chassis became loose, spooky, as if another major trauma would cause it to unfurl and all hell break loose; whether this was just my shaking or some serious damage to the back end I had no way of telling.

I swivelled the beast into a gap in the centre lane. The Merc drew level, the driver hoping for an opportunity to swerve into us and knock us off, but I kept an inch or so away from the car in front, limiting the opportunity for revenge. Glancing at the driver, his face transmuted into some ancient Naga god, frothing at the mouth in outrage at us still being in one piece. For the moment.

I felt Sleighy shuffling around, caught a glance at his face in the right-hand mirror; mottled with a heady mixture of fear and rage. Felt the barrel of his gun sneak up my back, thought for a moment he was going to blow the driver away but he was contented with firing a few bullets into the back of the Merc – the tyre went with a louder bang than the gun going off, the auto degenerating into a wild swerve, speed vaporising as it danced with the central barrier.

I grinned, hammered the Vee-Max back into the outer lane and rode with the throttle to the stop all the way to Chon Buri. At a petrol stop on the other side of Chon Buri, Sleighy had spat fluent Thai at one of the attendants, the only bit I caught was 500 baht and eighteen years old. The Russian wobbled off on weakened legs to the toilet, helped along by the youth who bore a stoic grin.

His colleagues all over the Vee-Max whilst they filled her up with fuel. I felt elated at still being alive, disturbed at not wanting to run out on Sleighy whilst I had the chance. At least the Russian had devoted his life to the avoidance of boredom. It took him three minutes to emerge from the toilet.

‘Hell, boy, nothing like a quick f..k after a bit of excitement. That guy in the Merc’s an ex-general who made a fortune out of Cambodian border trade before he was forced to resign. He’ll be eating his own flesh at the massive loss of face back there.’

‘He won’t come after us?’

‘Not in Pattaya, he won’t. He’s in a feud with some of the gangsters down there, won’t dare show his face.’

‘Can he trace the bike?’

‘Only to a dead Russian in Bangkok. Don’t worry about it, what will happen, will happen – mai pen wry! The next stretch of road’s heavily policed, so keep the speed reasonable, right?’

‘Sure, I’ve had enough kicks for one day.’

‘Hah! Just wait until you get to Pattaya!’

I kept the Yamaha’s speed down to 120km/h, just a gentle blast through the rolling landscape, despite the heat and humidity greenness ruled, the foliage threatening to take over cleared spaces in a matter of hours if they weren’t constantly tended.

The only irritations, great plumes of dust kicked up by the other traffic and the searing heat, the sun left raw in an ice blue sky whose clearness was a revelation to Bangkok dwellers. Off the main road, down twisting lanes to make it into Pattaya by the back door, the Vee-Max squirming in the corners, scraping out holes in the tarmac when the suspension bottomed out on the pot-holes.

The blueness of the sea came as a shock to the system; an idyll that wholly belied Pattaya’s reputation as a haven for gangsters; psychically and physically polluted to resemble nothing more than Patpong-on-the-Sea! Sleighy directed me to Soi 13, stopped us outside a two storey house with a small front garden.

The Russian general covered in dust, a coal miner emerging from a day’s work; a glance in the bike’s mirror at my own face revealed a similar visage, white holes around the eyes when I took my shades off. Skin burnished a deep red beneath the blackness by the constant exposure to the sunlight, already I could feel the pain throbbing from the sunburn.

I forgot all that when I saw the Thai girl lounging on a chair in the house’s garden. Her perfect body deep brown from the sun but shining with health, a swathe of black hair down to her waist, high cheekbones that would still be stunning in fifty years, almond eyes that shone with lust when they looked at me and some resonance deep from her soul into my own mind that turned me weak at the knees and had me fighting for breath. Sleighy whispered,

‘You even think about touching her, I’ll blow your balls off. She’s all mine…’

Pattaya. Can’t move a millimetre without the gossip wire reverberating; no real surprise that Mai, with a gentle knock on the door – so distinctly female that not even I could go into paranoid overdrive at the thought of police about to plant drugs – tracked me down to a Beach Road back-street cockroach hotel.

Mai had evidently found me with ease – amid the crippled, obese and just plain mad farangs who’d invaded Pattaya it wasn’t difficult to trace the progress of one relatively young man in a dust coated black Pierre Cardin suit, wholly inappropriate attire in the Bermuda short and tee-shirt infested seaside resort. The tourists had an inexplicable urge to display their excess fat.

All it took was her movie star smile without a hint of the usual vampire, I’m-going-to-eat-your-bank-accountalive, grimace and I was completely lost… but with Thai women illusion and reality were inextricably bound, only the moment and its passing mattered. Thai time engendered the perfect lie because what was true one moment with one man could, with a new guy, be completely reinvented the next instance.

The wild warmth coming out of her tiny body, the tensile strength of her limbs; intoxicating in the way that apparent fragility had switched into strength… feline softness and heft spun off under a few thousand years of perfect genetic breeding backed by the pureness of a country diet – rice and fried insects.

For a moment I wondered what the hell she was doing in my room. Our conversation necessarily brief, though full of smiles and laughter under the far from benign gaze of Sleighy, who’d soon sent me packing with instructions to find a hotel room nearby and report to his bar that night.

Mai ended atop my damned body, a cascade of hair falling over my head. The indentation of her body on mine playing havoc with both my mind and heart, both racing like an engine marooned in neutral with the throttle stuck wide open – the air-conditioner suddenly speeded up as if in sympathy.

Not just the smoothness of her skin but also the excessive heat rolling out of her body, a mini nuclear reactor. Only a hint of breast but large nipples erect and bloated with lust… to the Western mind, perfect Oriental form; something the Thais had turned into a minor industry but I was too busy gorging on the Goddess Lust…

Dream hit reality, control suddenly total – I felt I could come in the next moment, the next hour, the next day or hold off forever. Onslaught of sensation and deep into heaven/hell went I…

Beach Road a mixture of reflected neon and dark holes in the desert of lust. The sea breeze broke through the sultriness of the night though the crashing of the nearby waves drowned by the chants of girls in the beer bars, the wave after wave of music and the wail of modified motorcycles racing along the sea front.

Looking to my right I sensed rather than saw the deep expanse of water. I was at once high at having found Mai and desolate that she had returned to Sleighy’s house to ponder her options, having admitted the Russian’s reputation for violent retribution.

Moscow Mania my destination.

‘What you want, boy? You don’t look Russian!’

‘I’ve a meeting tonight with Sleighy, er, Colonel General Sleighy.’

‘Comrade Colonel General Sleighy to you, boy. Why didn’t you say so? You are his new boy?’

‘Well, it depends what you mean by boy – we will be working together, for sure.’

‘Lover!’

The simian beast on the door roared with laughter at his wit, huge shoulders heaving, taking up all of the doorway. As he fell forward on to his knees, the hysteria probably heightened by steroid abuse if not a hard-core cocaine habit judging by the globules of mucus that spat out of his reddened nose – running right though his body, I edged past him, a rapid swerve into the pulsing neon embrace of the Moscow Mania bar.

The Thai girls appeared tiny in contrast to the massive bulk of the Russians, swilling back Vodka and beer as if there was no tomorrow – evolutionary no-hopers, throwbacks who didn’t realise that there was no longer a space for them in the modern world. Swine and Angels mixed together, stirred up and shaken into a reluctant embrace that only existed on the back of the rapid flow of money from one to the other.

Sleighy at the back of the bar, surrounded by a mass of equally squat Russians, spooning cocaine up their noses fast enough to combat their shaking hands.

‘You are late, boy! You moron! What have you been doing?’

‘Just hanging out, having a look around. I didn’t realise the meeting was urgent.’

‘You’re in the KGB in exile now, all orders have to be obeyed to the letter!’

‘Er, well I’ll remember that next time. I thought I was on R & R for a while.’

‘Make sure you come on time next time. Insubordination results in death. Understand, boy?’

I made with the Nazi salute and stamped foot which engendered a general murmur of approval, no doubt taking some of the hooligans back to their days in dank, dark interrogation dungeons.

There was a sickly smell in the air, something rotten and corrupt yet oddly alive. Sleighy threw me a bottle of ice cold Singha beer with a flick of his wrist and violence that suggested he was waiting for a laugh when I dropped it; I caught it without any effort and savoured the coldness of the first taste of beer that day.

The inside of my mouth burning up from the residue of Laotian food that Mai had consumed before our tryst, a heady mix overloaded with the onslaught of heat from her body. The thought of Mai and Sleighy, in all his macho absurdity, in the same bed suddenly made me want to throw up but I got myself under momentary control.

‘You want some more pills? You’re such a bore when you’re straight.’

‘Nope. I’ve given them up. I reckon that last lot nearly took me out.’

‘I think they needed a little work. Sergi here reckons he can get us a new batch. You can take them down to Bangkok tomorrow.’

‘No way. They shoot drug smugglers in Thailand. The police don’t mess around, these days and there are army roadblocks all over the place.’

‘You will do as you’re told, boy!’

The drone of music, the bass turned up as high as it would go, ceased for a moment, the neon turned black, and the girls dancing on the stage did a runner. The tourist dollar meant that the old style go-go dancers no longer sufficed, replaced by a heady mixture of live sex and strange vaginal acrobatics; time to exit. I was young enough to still get a thrill out of watching twenty near naked girls merely dancing and gyrating on the stage.

Lights back on, Turkish belly-dancing music came in hard, almost wailing out of control. On the stage a forty year-old dark skinned farang, running to fat around her waist, and with a huge pair of breasts that bounced all over the shop, in desperate need of silicone implants. When she stood upright for a moment, the breasts turned tubular, long ugly things that hung down to her waist as if she’d dropped a dozen kids. A massive bush of pubic hair glistened under the neon, would easily have provided full coverage for Sleighy’s bald pate, though this wasn’t a thought I had any inclination of communicating with him – not wanting to be stomped!

I flicked my attention off her, the brutality of her appearance a bit of an affront after Mai, to find the eyes of a savage beast devouring me, some kind of cross between an Alsatian and Dobberman, tied on a leash in the corner of the bar. Its obscene tongue lolled out of its slobbering mouth as if it hadn’t had any water for days and even the ice cold blast of the air-conditioners had failed to rid it of the sapping heat and humidity of the Thai coast. The native populace had perfected the art of minimal movement and maximum revenue; the farangs, animals included, just didn’t have a clue.

‘Sleighy, I don’t want to watch this.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t want to watch this? It’s the best show in Pattaya. That Brazilian woman’s an expert, you give her a length you’d never be the same again – she has marriage proposals every week. These Thai women haven’t got a clue – all they have going for them is a bit of youth and beauty.’

‘I still don’t want to watch her.’

‘Don’t be stupid, I’ll introduce you after the show – she likes young boys. You can take her in any hole you want, if that’s what’s worrying you. You sure you don’t want some pills, you sure look like you need them. You turning square on me, boy?’

‘No way, man.’

‘We could even make up a threesome, put on a bit of a show for the lads.’

‘F..k that.’

I tried to distract my attention by scanning the room. The Thai girls had all turned their backs on the stage, though they were still fed snatches of the scene from the thousands of small mirror-tiles that lined the walls. In the rarefied neon they seemed to have suddenly aged ten, twenty years, their haggardness a reflection of their lives; past the point where they harboured any hope of plugging into easy farang money.

The men, in contrast, leaning forward over their massive beer guts, appeared unusually animated as if they were about to be let into one of the great secrets of life. The only other thing in their world the bottle of cheap vodka each held as tenderly as they might hold the love of their life, in the unlikely event of such a match turning up.

Sleighy searching his groin with one hand, drinking raw Vodka from the bottle with the other, his eyes and lips bloated into a semblance of some reptilian survivor of an age when man didn’t rule the earth. He looked on the verge of completely losing whatever minimal control he might once have exercised.

‘You know, the bitch is pregnant – three months gone. We’re all waiting with baited breath to see how the baby turns out. She might hatch a very strange creature, indeed. But even if she does, it’ll just make the carnival of her life go on and on. The more the merrier.’

‘This kind of shit shouldn’t happen. There’s no need for it, Sleighy, Thailand’s overwhelmed with beautiful young women.’

‘Stop talking nonsense, boy, this is the future! Anything goes!’

When my eyes came back to the stage, the woman was on all fours, some divinely cut katoey hulking over her… the monster bared its teeth, face reflected, distorted, in the mirror at the back of the stage, a jolt from its wolf-red eyes that was 5000 volts of pure electricity in its evil. An embrace of death it seemed to say even though the urge to kill was temporarily subsumed beneath a raging carnality. It plunged deeply into the woman, shook its flanks and went into a series of jerks, a pantomime of lust because deep in its genetic code copulation had neither meaning nor purpose other than as a mere power play.

Transvestite and woman, both, howled, a resonance that cut through the primitive beat the music had taken on, so deeply toned that it made my teeth rumble. The caricature of hate deeply etched in the trannie’s face by some form of dark osmosis erupted also on the visages of the Russians, their true spirits breaking out in the frenzy of lust. The only silver of sanity I possessed, at that moment, my own reflection majored in disgust and dismay.

A spotlight shone on the action as the woman turned towards the mirror with the katoey atop her, legs spread wide revealing… revealing that the freak-show ran really deep; that rarest of creatures an hermaphrodite with both cock large and pussy tightly coiled! The odd pulse of white neon magnified the needle marks on its arms and legs; a heroin junkie working for constant stimulation, beyond heaven or hell.

Sleighy in a grappling match with an outsize Russian, fighting to see who would leap on the hermaphrodite first. The other Russian looked like he could take on a locomotive, huge muscles bulging, glistening with sweat. For once Sleighy lost as he took a knee between the legs whilst engorged, face turning from red to white to grey. It seemed a fitting moment to make my exit whilst he was down on his knees, head tucked into his groin, trying in his mad manly way to subdue the need to scream.

My last glance at the bar revealed the beginnings of an orgy with the Russians hammering away at both themselves and the Thai frails; anything went behind closed doors, one hole as good as another.

After the dingy atmosphere of the bar, the sea air pure oxygen. It didn’t last. A long, loud line of screaming American sailors drove me down a narrow alleyway and thence up almost vertical stairs into another neon speckled bar. Before I made it to the top of the steps, a six foot five tall katoey – with a face traumatized by a back street surgeon on a bad day – flounced out of the bar. She shimmied as close as she would ever get to joy when she saw me beneath her.

‘Oh, handsome boy! I love you too much. You are mine for tonight!’

‘No way!’

I moved to the right, getting intimate with the railing, to allow her to pass but she opened her arms in a wide embrace and gave me a vampire smile graduated on sharpened teeth that never got close to reaching the remoteness of her eyes. Without even thinking about it, I feigned left and then bounced back to the right, missing her embrace by a matter of mere nanoseconds.

‘Menai, menai, menia?’

Where you go! I screamed above the torrent of abuse she poured forth whilst she glided past me, her high-heels going clack-clack-clack as she went down the stairs on her back, having lost her footing trying to keep up with my Ninja-like speed of movement.

Her face a picture, well worth framing, of utter confusion and bewilderment as she tottered past, fear added to the recipe as she was spirited out of my life. It was only afterwards that I realised how close I’d come to being battered down the stairs, raped and robbed. Some transmutation of my reflexes appeared to allow me to react much faster than I’d ever managed before.

The tout at the top of the stairs exclaimed that there wasn’t a cover charge, beer only 100 baht.

I entered the relative safely of the bar. Neon, noise and iced air bit deep into my mind as a squat Thai levered the hefty steel door open. The usual stage in the centre surrounded by stools and alcoves. I headed for a dark corner, hopeful that the only entertainment was going to be the brace of naked dancers on the stage. Another ice-cold beer but I didn’t touch it because there wasn’t an accompanying bill.

‘Where’s my bill? How much is a beer?’

The waitress walked off so I went to the bar to repeat the question.

‘200 baht for the beer, 800 bar for the show. 1000 baht total!’

‘No way, man. I was told 100 baht for a beer and no cover charge. I haven’t touched the beer, I’m out of here.’

I was hiked off my feet by a hideous creature and carried a couple of yards across the room until I was stopped by a wall. The katoey put me down with a thump,

‘Why you no pay,’ the monster screamed into my ear. “Only 1000 baht, not big money for farang.”

‘I’m half Thai!’

‘Impossible, too white!’

‘Too true!’

‘Why you no speak Thai?’

‘I stayed in the UK a long time.’

‘Oh, very bad, not stay Thai. Okay half Thai, half price – 500 baht!’ “100 baht! The tout outside said there was no cover charge.” The weird animal who was holding my throat seemed to become ever more bloated as the rage set in.

‘You pay now. 200 baht for drink, 300 baht for look show. Very good show. Pay now or I kill you!’ The high pitched whine made me want to throw up.

It shook me so furiously by the throat that I thought my head was going to fall off. The temptation to knee the transvestite in the balls high, only the minor fact that I wasn’t sure how far it had gone in the process of changing from a man to a woman stopped me. There was no point risking a move unless I was sure it was going to be effective.

For all I knew, it could have had its cock chopped off and reformed, inverted, into the requisite female anatomy… Bangkok doctors as expert in doing sex changes as they were in sewing on penises cut off by irate wives who found out that their man was two-timing them. Such a common occurrence that the police rarely bothered to prosecute the wife, which more than encouraged the savage retribution, often topped off by throwing the member to hungry animals.

‘Okay, you not pay for beer, we go toilet make love. I can do everything for you. Number one for make love. Okay, go now.’

We were in a dark corner of the bar, away from the curious glares of other customers but still able to view the stage where naked women writhed with gross indecency. The music drowned out most thought, not that much thought was needed in such places, and the katoey had to scream just to be heard. Thais are generally insensitive to the bass spectrum of music, turned way up until the floor and walls bounce to its beat.

As if sensing my inclination to test out its masculinity, the sister of terror removed one hand from my throat and started exploring my crotch with the other.

‘Oh big cock! I like, you make love me. No condom. I make good for you. Number one. Okay! Have to do quickly, I not wait.’

The hooligan who was trying to strangle me to death was desperately trying to open my fly with the other hand, apparently unable to wait until we reached the toilet. My cock had retracted until it was almost impossible to detect. I began to hope that my subconscious would enable it to disappear fully into my body, an art perfected by an ancient tribe of Amazonian Indians whenever they went to war.

My arms free so I brought my hands down on the huge backside and started to pull up the mini-skirt until it was around its waist. The monster loosened its grip on my throat when I started to caress the surprisingly hairy arse, slowly pulling down flimsy knickers… it was, in fact, still a man.

‘Oooh! That’s good. I’m hard already. Take me here! Right now!’

Wild breathing resulted from my tender ministrations, huge gasps of rotten air blasted straight into my face. The creature frantically ran both hands up and down my back, all but crushing me in a bear hug. It was a marginal improvement on having the breath choked out of me by hands that felt so rough they must have spent their youth abused in the rice fields.

When I felt the bitch’s cock shoot up between us I viciously brought my knee up with the maximum velocity I could muster, so hard that my kneecap jarred.

Demented scream that blocked out every other sound for a moment. Then the wretch fell away from me, collapsing into a heap on the floor. I did not feel in the least bit sorry for the abortion, however pitiful looking in the slight neon, dress scrunched up around waist, both hands clamped on cock and a deranged scream now drowned out by the music but evident from the desperate curl of the transvestite’s lips.

Had I not been gasping for breath I would have managed a victorious smile and finished off the job by kicking in the hideous head of the creature, which in its agony had splintered into a million lines of ugliness.

I knew that I had only swapped one problem for another. Whenever a farang attacks a Thai he attacks all their friends who are only too willing to rush over to render the foreigner a vicious beating. My last sight of civilised life might well have been of the winsome girl on the stage trying to swallow a huge, engorged cock, but the volume of the music and deep shadows gave me a few moments of respite.

There was no way I was going to be able to fight my way out through the main entrance which had clanged shut with a final bang. The Thai men in the bar looked like they were especially chosen for the potential of their vicious, crazed reaction to bill defaulters, let alone attackers of innocent transvestites. I backed a yard along the wall and into a short corridor that led to the toilets.

Skunk zoo. A quick look in the gents revealed all the potential exits well barricaded, the floor awash with urine and shit. The ladies consisted of a couple of open holes in the floor with some ancient crone collapsed on the floor, a needle hanging out of her arm. She was all but dead to the world, so I shot the bolt in the door and made for the window. A small hole with a bit of glass taped in position, pulled away with absurd ease.

To what was left of my mind the old dear on the floor looked a dead ringer for someone in the advanced stages of AIDS. She crawled across the cubicle and grabbed hold of my leg with one hand.

‘Honey,’ she wailed.

With the other hand she pulled the needle out of her arm and attempted to stab me. The sliver of blood running along its tip looked less than healthy, so I kneed her in the head before she could complete this murderous act. Not difficult, her movements incredibly slow.

So light in mass that she flipped backwards with surprising rapidity, whacking the back of her skull on the wall. An eggshell thumped by a lump-hammer. She slumped on to the floor. The urine splatter on the wall had blood added to its patina. My catalogue of offences multiplied rapidly, by the looks of it adding murder to the grisly list.

I consoled myself with the thought that Thais were tough creatures and in all likelihood she’d wake up in the morning with just a bad head and a fervent craving for H.

I was halfway out of the window, trying to waggle my hips through it, becoming totally terrified that I’d end up stuck there with my arse sticking out – even the mentally retarded katoeys would be able to work out a suitable punishment – when they started thumping on the door. Desperation worked, I finally plunged down about ten feet, hoping I wasn’t going to land on a stake or something equally sharp.

As soon as my hands hit the gravel, I rolled forward, thumping the back of my neck something chronic but then getting rid of the momentum, somersaulting off walls and black bags for a few yards. I bounced up, ran like hell for the first bit of neon I could see and made it back to the nearby hotel in record time. Blacked right out.

In the morning I had the feeling that something was desperately wrong. My reflection in the mirror ruined, the top layer of skin on my face dying from the sunburn from the previous day’s motorcycle trip – aging me by at least twenty years. But the feeling of despair went much deeper than that, though waking up looking like a terminal AIDS victim didn’t exactly help any.

I decided to cut out on Sleighy, with or without Mai. The Russian’s connections were a quick way to an early death and he was completely off his head.

Checking out of the hotel I saw the cover of the Bangkok Post – a two inch headline screamed, “Ecstasy Drug Kills Five In Patpong!” They mentioned the bar where we’d sold the pills, the fact that many more were ill than dead and that a major police crackdown had been launched on drug dealers.

This was bad enough, the real horror, the Chinese gangsters who were running the girls in the bar would be out for massive revenge and retribution, and they didn’t piss around with fines or prison sentences!

Already I thought I saw suspicion forming on the face of the portly receptionist behind the counter. Or maybe she was just whacked away by my snake skin face, an almost psychic transformation as if the events in Moscow Mania bar had bit so deep into my consciousness that I’d been left physically wrecked.

The heat of a Pattaya morning incredibly intense, lacking the dense cloud of pollutants in Bangkok that effectively filtered out much of the sunlight. Walking a yard I was covered in sweat but still not distracted from the dark depression deep inside my mind, lead weights bearing down on my shoulders.

Beach Road littered with ever hopeful hookers, most looked like they had been drinking cheap Thai whisky all night long. Packs of rabid dogs ran amok amongst the older, slower moving tourists, who also had to contend with Thai youths who found it amusing to snap the odd venomous snake into their faces. The sea retained its deep blueness, reflecting the sun and silhouettes of the ships out in the bay.

I hammered on Sleighy’s door, listened, heard inside faint screaming and the hollow thud of powerful blows. I prised a window fully open, levered myself in with one heave, rolled with the flow of my fall and bounced on to my feet.

The only noise, Sleighy ranting away in Russian. When I walked through the main room, which look like it had been gone over by a desperate pack of vandals, to the back bedroom, Sleighy turned towards me, snapped up his gun and pressed the trigger.

Instinct deserted me in that moment of annihilation. That was all it took for the hammer to snap down, much louder than expected in the suddenly silent room. There wasn’t an explosion or a bullet, the gun empty. Sleighy laughed until snot ran out of his nose. His right leg trembled out of control, sending his whole body into a spasm, the leg muscles undoubtedly weakened by the steroid inspired expanse of his barrel chest – naked he looked vastly more impressive than he did when wearing his mediocre clothes.

‘Shit, Sleighy, you’re out of your head… what have you done to Mai, you bastard!’

Over the Russian’s shoulder I saw Mai in a pool of blood, flowing out from the back her head. Her once beautiful eyes popped wide open but as empty as my heart momentarily felt. There was something about the stillness of her body that left no doubt that she was as deprived of life as the tiled floor on which she lay, the blood already loosing its redness to congeal into dense black ink.

The blood matched that on the gun that Sleighy now reloaded with bloodied, shaking, hands, that twitched spasmodically as he pointed the weapon in my direction.

‘The bitch was f..king around. Wouldn’t tell me who, so I took her out. I know it wasn’t you as you’re bent as a three baht coin – you’re the only one left that I can trust, you’ll have to take her place. I’m going to track her lover down and shoot the bastard in the balls.’

‘You didn’t have to do that to her – she was so young and beautiful.’

‘I told you, loyalty is the only thing I care about. Someone goes behind my back, they are dead meat. I will do the same to you, so be very careful.’

The room seemed to shimmy for a moment, edges of my vision clouded by darkness. I wanted to tear Sleighy apart, limb my limb, until his fatally ruptured body only had a final bullet in the head to look forward to.

Rage ran through my mind, a burning vitality that I had deep trouble holding in check. It blew away the depression with the intensity of its energy. But he still had the gun pointed at my head; now a glimmer of suspicion in his eyes – but he was so out of it by then that he would’ve viewed a ninety year old eunuch as a possible suspect. His finger tightened, whitened, on the trigger, I tried to distract his attention.

‘We’re really in the shit now. We’re all over the front page of the Bangkok Post, those pills we sold have killed five people.’

‘You f..king moron! Can’t you get anything right – you ripped off dud pills – for Christ sake! The Chinese will go berserk.’

‘I should have realised – they really messed me up, had me right out of my head and I nearly died in the night. God knows what they did to those little girls if they had HIV ruined bodies. Are we safe in Pattaya?’

‘We’re not safe anywhere, idiot. My Russian colleagues will sell me out rather than face a fight with the triads – they are hard-core bastards who only care about the money and we don’t have the manpower for a gang war. We’re both dead meat if we don’t get out of Thailand fast.’

‘They don’t know my name or anything. Perhaps they only want you, I was just along for the ride. They know you and your connections, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone for the deal so easily.’

‘Fat chance of them letting you off, son. They will already have people watching the airports and train stations – no easy way out. They don’t know we are in Pattaya, yet. We have to move fast.’

Mai’s body suddenly seemed to glow in the grey atmosphere of the room and I felt like I’d been caressed by an ice cold breeze, the hairs stood up all over my body and something like an electric shock hit my heart.

I suddenly knew that Mai wanted me to take out Sleighy right there and then but I’d have to bide my time, wait for my moment of revenge. Let Sleighy work out how to get us out of town without being killed off by the Chinese.

‘Where can we go?’

‘Keep calm, don’t go bursting into tears on me. I don’t need that shit after Mai. The bitch tried to run a pack of lies past me but I could see the truth in her eyes, and finally she said she wanted to leave me. I couldn’t have that – I’d lose too much face and Pattaya’s a small town.’

‘Let’s get out of here on the Vee-Max. They can’t have people everywhere and we can blast through anything on the bike – no way anyone will run us down.’

‘Right. It’s not that bad yet. I have plenty of money and another batch of pills. Let’s ride over the border to Cambodia – the triads are too scared of the Khmer Rouge to have moved in yet. Besides, there’s no room for any more gangsters, the whole country’s crooked.’

Sleighy slapped the gun down on a nearby table, turned to his left with his usual speed and picked up a large canvas bag – opened it, spread it wide to show me the thousands of Ecstasy tab’s he’d bought. His grin bore all the marks of the truly insane and as he snapped the bag shut, threw it on the floor, I saw his tiny erection poking out of his shorts.

‘Cambodia? That’s one big death camp. I don’t want to go there!’

‘Stop whining, I tell you it’s the only safe place left. We’ll make a killing on the pills in Phnom Penh. And those Cambodian women will do anything for ten bucks. It’s the new paradise, not ruined like Thailand by the tourist dollar.’

‘The reason the tourists don’t go there is because they don’t want to get shot up.’

‘I’m armed and properly trained. It’ll be a dark day indeed when some amateur gets the better of me. There’s really no choice in the matter. If you want to stay here and face the Chinese alone that’s up to you. They have to have someone as a scapegoat. If we disappear they’ll hopefully trace the pills back to your boss and take him out.’

‘There’s not much left they can do to him, you’ve already castrated him.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, that will be the least of his worries. There’s no more time to waste talking, let’s get out of here while we have the chance.’

As he talked, the Russian pulled on a black jump suit, combat boots and military belt, hanging absurdly under his huge gut. The effect far more frightening than sexy. Sleighy walked into the kitchen with the gait of a gorilla, came back with a container, slopped gasoline over Mai and the rest of the room. The smell of petrol mingled with the odour of death, the combination making my body go all light and turning my stomach queasy .

‘Got to give her a good cremation and the fire will destroy all the evidence – the last thing I need is the cops trying to track me down for murder.’

‘You can’t do that, she needs a Buddhist priest for the cremation.’

‘Don’t be stupid, boy – you’re not giving me any grief are you? Maybe you and Mai had something going after all? We don’t have any time for that nonsense and you know what the Thais are like, as soon as they see an angle on a farang they go rushing to the pigs for retribution.’

‘It ain’t nonsense, it could make all the difference to how she does in the next life. I still don’t see why you had to be so extreme.’

‘Next life? Some hope. We’re all going to burn in hell, her going up in flames just a taste of all our futures. No-one, these days, is innocent enough for another life.’

Sleighy’s eyes lingered on the dead body, already totally lifeless, devoid of any of Mai’s beauty and the hair turning lank under the onslaught of petrol. Other than the deep sense of loss and barely controlled rage I felt nothing; the body was empty of the lifeforce and it didn’t really matter what happened to it next.

‘Here, it’s going to be a hard day. Take a couple of these pills. They’ll get you in the right frame of mind. Don’t worry, they are good stuff – even I’m going to indulge for once, I can’t face the future otherwise.’

‘Sleighy, I’ve had enough of the tab’s but maybe for this last adventure I need the kick.’

Swallowing the pills, we exited the house. My last view of Mai, her body consumed by yellow flames that cackled with an identical outburst to Sleighy’s attempt at laughter; the grin of the truly demented finally reaching his eyes.

Sleighy caressed my neck in a death-grip. The texture of his skin old leather. The reason for the vice-like grip, the maniac was standing on the saddle, screaming Russian lullabies at the residents of the Pattaya suburb. Without the choke-hold I could’ve viciously wound the throttle open, the resulting, mind blurring, wave of acceleration spitting Sleighy off the back of the bike in a cascade of tearing flesh and bone. Sleighy’s first taste of E sent him completely, utterly, out of his mind.

The initial effect of the tab’s on myself less violent than the earlier ones, just a fantastical thrill at still being alive and in one piece despite the pall of smoke that hung over Pattaya in the mirrors. The pulse in my brain: live for the moment; live for the moment. The Vee-Max felt sluggish, as if I was connected to the machine through a layer of rubber at all points of contact; its acceleration a series of stutters the cold 1200cc engine needing a little time to warm up.

Sleighy doing a dervish dance, one foot resting lightly on the saddle, screaming at the top of his voice as I eased our velocity up to 90km/h on the main road to Rayong. Sleighy’s performance received salutations from the horns of nearby cars and waves from Thais on the roadside. Hardly the best way to inconspicuously exit Pattaya.

I suddenly had the urge to hammer open the throttle and damn the consequences. The engine roared as it came on cam, the acceleration so fantastical that it almost blew my eyeballs out the back of my head. Sleighy’s grip tightened, almost snapped my neck off until he suddenly scissored his legs outwards, collapsed down on to the seat with enough violence to send the Vee-Max into a 200km/h wobble.

I hammered the throttle back, jammed on the brakes, the handlebars twitching in my hands. The bike felt as if both tyres had deflated and the road had turned into a series of massive craters. The combined mass of close to 1000lbs tore into the suspension which had completely lost control. It wasn’t until we hit 100km/h that the giant, speeding pogo-stick responded and I managed to get the weaves down to a mere single lane of carriageway.

In the mirrors a slightly distorted vision of Sleighy, all frog-eyed and porcelain-white teeth glinting savagely in what would be foolish to mistake for a grin.

The Vee-Max straightened out when I whacked the throttle back open, Sleighy embracing me in an intimate bear hug, his rancid breath whispering in my ear to go for it. Throttle to the stop through the gears, the front end lightening and twitching but the fearsome momentum keeping us on line.

A slinky new BMW that was trying to overtake us, shot backwards without a hope in hell of matching our demonic pace. Stuck the beast in the outer lane, throttle to the stop in top gear, the wind pressure making me squint my eyes until they were almost closed and the fierce force on my arms, shoulders and neck almost unbearable; 250km/h on the clock and we ain’t stopping for nothing!

Something switched on in my brain, my senses sang with the speed, and adrenaline shocked my system into overdrive; nothing mattered or existed except for the few hundred yards of tarmac out front which my narcotically motored brain claimed all for its own.

No matter that we had to thunder between two overloaded, weaving, wobbling artics, no matter that I nearly dislocated my shoulder when I had to twitch around a fool in a large Honda sedan who was weaving drunkenly from lane to lane, and no matter that we buzzed a cop car that actually shook on its springs, caressed by a sonic boom conjured up from the way we battered through the air. All that mattered was my conviction that, come what may, we would surely survive.

Only the industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Rayong caused me to desist. A ruined landscape that took my breath away. Something corrupted my vision, the cars metamorphosing into huge monsters whose grills snarled with reptilian life. The roadside trees had branches which fluttered like snakes and the paddy fields were infested with massive maggots.

The bars shook, wavered in my hands and when I looked down I thought I was holding on to the head of some monstrous lizard. I screamed, let go of the bars and tried to leap off the bike whilst it was motoring along at 60km/h; only Sleighy’s bear-hug stopped me.

The Vee-Max flopped dangerously from side to side, the exhaust backfired violently like a machine-gun on the rampage and sweat poured off my body despite the violent self-produced wind created by our progress.

I shut my eyes, twitched my head a few times and was relieved to find the bars were back to normal, although all the bones in my body seemed to have turned to rubber. I managed to head the bike for the side of the road, but the only reason we didn’t collapse into a heap was that Sleighy managed to get his feet down before the bike went sideways. I staggered off the machine, suddenly racked with sobs, bent over crying like an abused baby. Between the hysterical cries I spat out Mai’s name, a mantra that might let me hang on to my sanity.

Sleighy pulled me to my feet, gave me a backhanded slap that nearly tore my head off, his face purple with rage and eyes full of blood with pinprick pupils that showed no mercy.

He stood feet apart as if planted as solidly into the ground as some fabulously ancient tree, but it didn’t deter me, after snapping out of the crying fit, from pumping my knee into his groin. Power, fuelled by hatred, suddenly ran through my body, focused on my knee and only after the third jerk, the time between each so rapid the movement but a blur, did I find myself pumping into fresh air.

Sleighy collapsed on to his knees, hands massaging groin and a massive outpouring of bile shooting from his lips. Tears ran from his eyes which appeared to have popped right out of his head; the mask of benign civility which he liked to sport had dissipated completely, leaving some ancient, primeval visage that had hints of a Doberman in ecstasy and some furious power all of its own.

In no way could it be called human. When the bile ceased pouring from the Russian’s mouth, what remained was a chant that gurgled and steamed for a good five minutes until the Russian shook himself back into normality.

‘Boy, you’re learning. You ever do that again I’m going to blow you away. You wait until we hit Cambodia, I’m going to f..k your arse until you walk like a bronco rider. Got it?’

‘It’s those pills. They’re another pile of junk. What the hell are they laced with?’

‘Don’t blame the pills, if you can’t handle them then you shouldn’t take them.’

‘You can talk, you were up on the saddle screaming in Russian as we rode out of Pattaya.’

‘I was not! You must have imagined it, boy. I’m not letting you have any more pills, you’re a maniac.’

‘I still think the pills were laced with something hallucinogenic.’

‘There’s maybe a tiny bit of LCD in them, just to give them an added kick.’

‘You’re the one out of your head if you think that kind of shit’s safe.’

Sleighy tried to give me another slap to the head but this time I saw it coming, sidestepped out of the way. He looked momentarily shocked that I wasn’t where he expected then stepped rapidly back when he saw me coiling my muscles for a kick to his kneecap. The gun appeared in his hand with all the aplomb and impossibility of a magician’s trick, aimed at my groin…

‘You not careful, I’m going to cut you down to size. Got it?’

‘Let’s get out of here. We’re supposed to be on the run, not creating a spectacle.’

The Yamaha responded instantly and evocatively to my fevered inputs, as we cut around the northern edges of Rayong, hitting a narrow trail that would lead us across country to the border. The gravel track sprayed up a huge cloud of dust that we stayed just ahead of. Anyone viewing the spectacle wouldn’t be able to tell if we were some huge lorry or small motorcycle, our progress as effectively masked as if we were able to call forth demons from the earth to make us invisible.

Reptile country, though never far from concrete civilisation, infested with massive snakes, crazed creatures straight out of a horror movie and a plethora of insect life that had long mutated against the onslaught of pesticides. Huge cockroaches that sauntered through the air on wings; devilish bats with rat heads that dived bombed the unsuspecting and wild dogs that shone with wolf genes, wanted to tear the throats out of slow moving animals.

Not the kind of place to break down or run out of fuel. I held a steady pace of 70km/h, light on the controls and ever watchful of the way ahead; the roadside confrontation had cleared my body of the effects of the tab’s and I was quite happy to obey Sleighy’s injunction not to take any more.

The feel of my knee hitting his groin with maximum velocity gave me a high that rolled over any lingering depression whilst my right hand twitched slightly with the thought of pulling back the trigger of his gun and watching his head explode into a million pieces of bone and brain.

The closer we came to the border, the less intense the traffic, just the odd pickup truck wanting to play chicken. I just kept dabbing away at the Vee-Max’s powerful front light, blinding the oncoming driver and twitching the Yamaha on to the grass at the last moment.

I saw at least one car swerve wildly off the road, impale its front wheels deeply in the mud and felt sure I could hear the echo of wild dogs braying for the blood of the stranded occupants. Sleighy would occasionally grunt a new direction, somehow knowing the way, but his grip on my body was now a lot less intimate, as if he’d concluded that our alliance would soon end.

At a roadside restaurant just short of Ban Puk Kad, on the Cambodian border, I managed to extract a plate of fried rice from an old crone whose almost Negro skin had about a hundred years worth of crevices – she might in reality have been merely forty years old; the combination of near destitution and fierce heat aged the locals rapidly.

The fried rice, remnants of vegetables, egg and chicken tasted delicious, something a five star restaurant couldn’t emulate, certainly not at the ten baht she’d demanded. Sleighy had gone off to talk to a fellow countryman who’d married a Thai and settled nearby, in the hope of finding out where we could cross into Cambodia without a run in with the police, army or Khmer Rouge.

Phnom Penh about 400km away taking the most direct route, but it was unlikely we’d get away with such an easy escape and it’d take the rest of the day to get there.

Five minutes into the food, the ground began to shake as if an earthquake was about to go down, but none of the Thais showed the least concern, slopping away at their food as if it was possibly the last time they’d ever eat and nodding their heads to the inevitable ghetto-blaster throwing out some Lao dirge.

The music completely drowned out as some monster truck bellowed along the road, throwing up a massive dust storm and coming within inches of the tables as it thundered past. A huge bundle of sawn tree trunks piled precariously on the bed of the truck, wobbling to the tune of the suspension over the rutted road.

‘Bastard,’ someone screamed – it took me a while to recognise my own voice. Luckily, I’d wolfed down the food before the layer of dust had a chance to ruin it. The only shade from a huge old tree that had somehow escaped the loggers. Looking up I was sure I could see a massive python, or some equally nasty snake, rustling through the leaves.

The Thais nearest me burst into laughter at my startled expression then insisted I have a glass of rice whisky with them. It took all my concentration to stop myself throwing up, tasted like paint-stripper might! At least the almost immediate intoxication made me forget about the snake hovering above my head.

I was on my fourth glass, having difficulty seeing straight, when I felt the cold steel of a revolver stabbed into the back of my neck.

‘Where Russian?’

The voice a high pitched squeak of an eunuch. I immediately thought it my was my old boss out for revenge but then realised the recovery from castration would’ve been impossibly quick. The gun jabbed in my neck again.

The Thais had quickly done a disappearing act, faces full of a mixture of fear and reverence. I was becoming pretty tired of people poking guns at me

‘Where Russian?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go-hok!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He stepped back, when I turned around I saw it was the Thai whose Merc Sleighy had shot off the road. The guy couldn’t keep still, hopping up and down on his feet, jerking his head every which way, but still keeping the Magnum aimed at my head – one bullet from that kind of gun and there wouldn’t be anything left above my shoulders!

‘It’s you! I recognise the motorcycle.’

‘There are lots of Vee-Max’s in Thailand.’

‘Go-hok. Liar!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Car ruined! Ten million baht!’

The rage too much for him, he flipped the gun upwards and hit the trigger. A sonic boom, then the earth shook as the bullet splayed into the tree behind me, leaving a dinner plate sized hole in the massive trunk.

‘Where Russian?’

‘He’s gone to talk to someone. I don’t know where.’

‘He come back?’

‘Yes, for sure. Listen, I didn’t know he was going to go crazy with the gun.’

‘Not care. You all die! Lose too much face already. Stupid farang, come close Cambodia – this my home.’

‘We’re only passing through.’

The Thai’s eyes were almost leaping out of their sockets, greyness seeping out from under the natural blackness of his skin giving it a distinctive green tint, looking more and more like a giant frog mutated by a nuclear holocaust. At least a bullet in the head would be quick and painless, or so I thought…

‘Die slowly. I shoot one limb, one day, until no more left!’

‘There’s no need for that. I know how you can get your money back.’

‘You have money? Maybe you can live.’

‘No money but…’

‘No money, you die!’

‘But I know how you can get some. Many millions.’

‘Go-hok!’

‘It’s the Russian, Sleighy. He’s wanted by the some people in Bangkok. They will pay big for him.’

‘Who want him?’

‘You have to agree to let me go first.’

‘Can not!’

‘Okay, but you won’t get your money back if you shoot us.’

‘Want money, want kill!’

He was just about to do it, too. The branches above us creaked, I glanced up to see a huge snake free-falling down towards my table. I rolled back over my stool, went head over heels, left the mad Thai gangster blasting away at the snake, which writhed in fury, tried to whip-lash him into submission.

I left them to it, swung a leg over the Vee-Max just as Sleighy turned up, took one look at the fracas, leapt on the back, bear-hugged me; screamed go for it.

Even with the Vee-Max’s headlamp on full, the path through the forest still murky. The tyres sliding and slithering over the leaves, tree roots and possibly snakes. The bars shook in my hands, forcing me to use all my muscle to keep the bike from falling sideways.

Sleighy was ranting and raving in Russian on the pillion. We’d both ingested enough E to keep a whole rave club going all night long, freaked out by dreadful conditions in the real countryside, but they were either a pretty poor concoction or our bodies had rapidly adapted to their chemistry.

I was beginning to think the forest would never end when suddenly the path twisted on itself, drove forward into the startling light of a naked landscape. Cut off by a wide river and a yard wide wooden bridge that looked close to collapse.

With a mad Thai gangster immediately to our rear and an horde of irate Triads not far behind, not to mention pissed off police, there was nothing for it but to charge forwards at 50km/h; hope for the best. Sleighy so freaked by our prospects that he tried to dry-hump me as the bike hurtled forwards, teetering close to oblivion.

The bridge creaked and wobbled, held until the front wheel was within spitting distance of dry land… oops, we added bridge breaking to our long list of crimes but had sufficient momentum to hurtle over the end, flying through the air like a delinquent elephant… the gods took their revenge in almost breaking our backs when we landed on terra firma with a huge thump!

I could tell we’d arrived in Cambodia by the thousands of tree stumps before us, the whole horizon completely denuded of foliage. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the rape of the land, by the sheer savage greed that had ruined hundreds, thousands, of years of evolution. The tree stumps seemed to scream out to me, to hit me deep in my brain.

I rolled the Yamaha to a stop, staggered off, fell to my knees and embraced the nearest tree stump. Tears rolled out of my eyes as I sobbed like an abandoned baby. Sleighy reared up behind me, pulled me to my feet and started slapping my face. I was like a rag-doll in his hands until pain overwhelmed the hysteria. Weird shit, those pills, seem to directly connect me to the suffering of the land.

Sleighy affected in a different way. As if the essence of deep Cambodian evil had immediately wormed its way into what was left of his soul, he drew his gun, searching for some living creature to blow away but the whole area was so desolate that even the most desperate of reptiles wouldn’t want to make a home there.

‘Man, we gotta get outta here,’ I screamed at Sleighy. He ignored me, emptying the bullets out of the chamber of the gun until only one remained.

‘It’s destiny time, boy.’ He spun the chamber, flicked the gun in my direction and hit the trigger, sporting the kind of primeval sneer that eviscerated what little remaining humanity he might once have possessed. The gun clicked on an empty chamber; the movement so rapid that I didn’t even have time to flinch.

He fired a second time, a tree stump exploded in a flurry of dead wood. The shot echoed in the air whilst the maniac once again filled the gun with bullets.

Move, move, move… I ran for the Yam, leapt on board, hammered the electric start, the engine screaming into life straight off. First gear, clutch down, maximum revs. Down flat on the tank, weaving the Yamaha all over the shop with Sleighy’s curses lost to the exhaust and finally, but too late, letting loose with his gun.

I was free of the bastard at last; let his brain cook up some insanity in the Cambodian badlands. The heat alone enough to blow away most people, let alone the brooding madness of the landscape.

When the track hit the main road, only one way to go down! The road rutted, pot-holed and strangely corrugated; the big Yamaha settled to a 150km/h wallow and I tried to see through the heat haze.

There were a couple of times when soldiers indicated I should come to an orderly halt, instead I hammered the throttle and the bike went almost vertical. The trip was a speed haze, an out of body experience whose duration I couldn’t even guess. Only temporarily broken by the need for gas from small roadside vendors.

Only on the outskirts of Phnom Penh that I slewed to a halt. You don’t argue with a bloody big tank whose twenty foot long gun was pointed at you, do you? It was at this point that I focused on the fact that I had a bag full of speed tab’s strapped down on the rear rack and had illegally entered the country, on, in all probability, a stolen motorcycle.

The guy in charge had enough medals to make Idi Amin look demure. A couple of his cohorts grabbed my arms whilst others poked me with sub-machine guns. They needn’t have bothered, without the support of the Yamaha I could barely stand, the chemical reaction from the drugs and surreal heat wrecking my body. They started tearing off my clothes but not interested in my body, just to see what else I had hidden away.

My money added up to about 500 dollars cunningly concealed in my boots; the loose change brought a frown of disappointment all round. The drugs well received, a sudden shift in atmosphere, wide smiles and much instant joy, although it didn’t reach very deep into their eyes.

‘Very bad, very bad!’

The guy in the medals growled, looking a little taken aback when he glimpsed my cock.

‘They’re not mine, they belong to Sleighy, a Russian.’

‘Shut up. This is Cambodia. We can do what we like. Shoot you in the head no-one care. Maybe!’

‘I don’t want to go to prison.’

‘We are not the police, this is the army.’

‘Look, you can take the drugs, sell them for lots of dollars.’

‘And the motorcycle.’

‘How…’

‘Shut up! You can walk into the city. You can even keep your dollars.’

‘I…’

‘Shut up, go! Or I shoot you!’

I put my clothes on as I staggered out of there fast, energy suddenly hitting my muscles, fearing they would put a bullet in my head just for the kicks! Leave no witness deeply embedded in the national psyche.

My poor old body already had zero fat on it, the sweltering heat doing in my brain as I staggered towards the capital; a crazed determination, fueled by anger, making me turn down the moto riders’ offer of a ride. Baby, I high on rage here and I can f..king levitate all the way to Phnom Penh!

Staggered into the first bar in downtown, air icing through dank clothes. Narrow room, a small stage in one corner on which two girls danced, their bodies covered by flimsy bits of cloth that left very little to the imagination.

‘Darling, darling. Where you go? I sit with you?’

One of the girls flew into my arms, all but knocking me over, persuading me to sit in a small booth with a shelf for a table and a rather small stool on which to perch, which in my worn state appeared to wobble all over the place.

Two other foreigners sitting at the bar, sixty or seventy carrying twice their ideal body weight, slumped over the counter, peering at the girls on the stage.

‘What name you?’

‘Mark.’

‘I Sow. Where you come?’

‘Bangkok.’

‘Oooh! Very good. I like too much. You buy cola?’

I managed to disentangle the frail and sent her off for a bottle of beer. She came back after a few seconds, clamped herself on my groin and stuck her tongue halfway down my throat, almost causing the pair of us to fall off the stool. The weight of her body on my bruised neck sheer agony but she refused to unfurl herself until I was handed an ice cold bottle of beer with which I caressed her naked back.

She leapt off me, pouring forth a stream of vicious Cambodian that was mostly submerged beneath the usual loud music.

‘Give me tip. You not buy cola, one dollar! Now!’

Her face had lost its lustre of beauty, she appeared suddenly transformed into an old hag who would as happily cut off your balls as tell you the time of day.

‘Cheap Charlie! Very bad man. Shit man’

In the space of a passing moment of obvious contempt she turned from niceness personified to the nastiest nag in the world. A mixture of sullenness and stupidity that exploded into violence; beneath the velvet skin the muscle all hard-core rice cutter.

The tempo of the music slowed momentarily and the two girls on the stage clapped their hands. A sign for my assailant to clamber into high heels and head for the platform, her parting words echoing into a sudden lull in the drone of the music.

‘You shit man. Smell same dog. Very ugly. No Cambodian girl go with you.’

I felt saintly in my tolerance of such abuse, knowing full well that in all likelihood her parents had sold her to a local brothel when she was twelve or thirteen and her ruined spirit was carrying the detritus of thousands of spent cocks.

One of the girls wore a red bikini that made her skin look all the blacker. She was tall for a Cambodian, as slender as a young boy, with small breasts and a face with such strong cheek bones that she would still look stunning when she was forty, unless the life as a bar whore turned her so sour that it completely destroyed her.

‘Hello. I’m Wan, who you?’

‘Mark. You look like a movie star.’

Laughter shook her body and filled me full of lust.

‘I half Laos not all Cambodian. Not look same.’

‘Sure, Laotian girls are too sexy. Very hot. How old are you?’

‘Only eighteen. Only work one month.’

‘Where’s your boyfriend.’

‘Not have. Make love one man only. One time. Foreigner. Give me big money for cherry.’

‘It was good?’

‘No. Hurt too much The man very old. Ugly and fat. Smell like pig.’

The only way she was able to convey this important information by shouting it into my ear-lobe whilst caressing my cock through my trousers. The heat coming out of her hand intense.

‘You speak good English.’

‘I go school in day. Want to finish bar. Work for good job.’

‘Why work in bar? Very dangerous now.’

‘Need money for family. Oooh, too many sister. No money in Cambodia.’

The pensioners still slumped over the bar, changed their positions slightly to allow two girls to rest their heads on their laps. Their bored expressions didn’t change as they were unzipped and fat, erect penises extracted. Gulped down with bored, resigned expressions. One of the ancients reaching down a hand to caress the top of the Cambodian girl’s head.

‘You can do that,’ I asked Wan.

‘Can do anything. For money!’

Having swiftly consumed the first bottle of beer I began to wonder if the strange taste in my mouth was the aftertaste of fear, the remnants of some tourist’s sperm from the girl who had stuck her tongue down my throat or merely the possibility that powerful drugs had been added to the beer which would make me black out and if I was lucky wake up the next morning naked and destitute rather than ending up merely dead.

‘Get me a beer and a coke for you.’

‘Cola for me? Thank you!’

My thoughts interrupted by the Cambodian trying to pull my cock out of my pants, having surreptitiously undone my fly. The heat from her hand made me rock hard but the length of my member made it difficult to disentangle from my jeans and underwear.

‘Hey, slow down. We can go somewhere.’

‘No, I not wait. Want now. Make me horny.’

She all but threw me off the stool and tore my jeans off.

‘Ooh! Too big. Too big. I want now. You give 20 dollars?’

‘No, for free.’

‘Not free. I not foreign girl. I do for work. Not love. 10 dollar, okay?’

She had trouble forcing her mouth down on my cock but she was persistent, moistening the tip of my member with a few flicks of her obscenely long tongue, digging deep down into my psyche when she ran her tongue over the bloated head of my member. Tight throat, on each stroke she flicked her snake tongue around my cock whilst she squeezed the root with her hand. An hour ago I’d found hell on earth now…

I had to count the cockroaches running up the wall of the bar to stop myself coming quickly, huge, fist sized fellows that scampered along so slowly that I could’ve, at my leisure, crushed them to death with my fist. There were also a couple of smaller roaches that actually had wings, some mutant aberration of the species that could hop slowly through the sky in a nerve-racking manner; probably powered by wasted semen.

The Cambodian a hard worker, finally managed to swallow the whole length of my cock, her eyes bulging slightly as her lips came down on my balls which she was all but crushing with her hand. Deep throat baby, snake tongue, back and forth, over and over… exploded into her when she had the full length right down her throat. Still shooting out semen when she flipped her head out of my lap and she took a large quantity over her face. It didn’t seem to faze her, she clamped her mouth on mine and let some of the juices flow back into my throat, flicking her tongue as if trying to retrieve the fluids.

‘Fun. Too much water. Go everywhere. Too big cock. I think I die. Ooh! Too much water. Give me 50 dollar. Now!’

The pensioners still being serviced by the other girls, they didn’t seem to notice or care what had occurred elsewhere; basking in the glow of Vitamin V. I had the feeling they had settled in for the night and if I came back at closing time they would still be there with the girls working away at their ancient cocks. Wan didn’t rush off to the toilet to spew up or even bother to clean off the rivers of semen on her face, just wiping it into the pores of her skin. Good vitamin.

‘No, we agreed 10 dollar.’

Her hand squeezed my cock so hard it brought tears to my eyes.

‘50 dollar. Now. 50 or I cut off cock!’

‘Okay, okay. Cool heart. Just let me pull my jeans back on.’

‘Give money now!’

‘Look, I’ve only got 15 dollar. The drinks cost five so that’s ten for you.’

‘No good. 50 dollar.’

‘You check my pockets. No more money.’

‘Bullshit!’

‘You check. No more money.’

‘10 dollar nothing to me. Not enough.’

‘Look, I have to walk home. No money for taxi. No more money.

‘Okay, you come back next time. Give 40 dollar.’

Fast exit before she changed her mind, money hidden in my boots. Hit on the first hotel I came to, infested with hookers but I fought my way through them, collapsed into a deep sleep in the fury of an air-conditioned room, my last thought, these Cambodian gals were crazy bitches…

When someone started hammering on the hotel room’s door, I was naked except for a towel around my waist. I tried to ignore the noise, fearing it was the police out for easy money. The knocking persisted for ten minutes until I finally gave in, the door threatening to pop out of its flimsy frame. I wished I hadn’t bothered.

‘What you do? Why you not open door? You have girl hidden here?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I come see you. Think you too much, darling! All the time!’

Wan, stunning, an exotic blend of Oriental blood.

‘All you think about is how to take my money.’

‘Nooo! Never!’

Wan pushed her way into the room, slamming the door behind her. Standing close, she thrust her hand through the towel. She was all skin and bones with a corroded iron core running through her. My cock started to come up hard yet again; the only energy keeping me going through the morale sapping temperatures, the city experiencing a record, forty degrees plus summer of agony, despair, violence and madness.

‘I stay you tonight. Have no money, no-one to love. Nothing in future.’

‘No way. I have to go out now.’

‘I go with you.’

‘I have girlfriend. I go see her. She’s a very nice girl, never work in the bar.’

‘Why you not love me? I stay you long time if you want. One year for free.’

She was running her fingernails along my cock as she spoke until I put some distance between us, which brought the spite back into her face. No easy escape from the gals in Phnom Penh,

‘Make love you too much, darling.’

‘No thanks.’

‘I stay you now.’

‘No, you have to go.’

‘Okay, make love then I go.’

‘No, you have to go now.’

‘I not go.’

She sat on the floor, a sullen expression on her face. The beauty drained out of her so fast I was tempted to pick her up, throw her off the balcony out of pure disgust.

‘If you don’t go now I’ll phone the office downstairs. The security guards will throw you out.’

‘I not care. I stay you!’

‘No, you have to go now.’

‘Not go.’

I lifted the phone, started to punch in the numbers when the frail hurtled across the room, grabbed the phone out of my hand, tearing the wires out of the socket.

‘You’re crazy! You can’t stay here. I don’t want to see you again.’

‘Okay I go. Give me money.’

‘No money. Foreigner hippy.’

‘Twenty dollar. Have problem my family. Papa ill. Very ill.’

‘No chance. No money.’

‘Ten dollar. You give I never come back again.’

‘Look, no money. All I have is five dollar.’

‘Not believe. Foreigner too much money.’

‘Okay, you can have two dollar. I will not eat today. I will have to walk everywhere.’

‘No good. Five dollar.’

‘No money.’

‘Okay, I stay.’

‘Impossible. Go now.’

‘Give me twenty dollar. I come see you next week.’

‘No way.’

‘I go toilet first.’

After ten minutes I began to worry. Hammering on the door for five minutes before it opened. The cubicle splattered with blood. Wan stood there, wrists slashed, tears streaming out of her eyes. I was thrown into a full scale panic, full of visions of trying to explain the dead body to skeptical police and ending up sentenced to life imprisonment.

‘What the hell did you do that for you crazy bitch. Don’t just stand there bleeding over the room. Let me see your wrists…’

A loud voice hammered away in my head: get out, get out, get out – crazy, f..ked up Cambodians! Another look at her wrists, the panic began to subside. The cuts superficial, nothing a visit to the hospital wouldn’t solve.

Then my heart lurched as her facial structure caught a pulse of red neon from outside, redefining her as the most beautiful woman in the world; could fall in love on a whim… another mad mantra fought its way through the ruined circuits in my brain – crazy, f..ked up foreigners!

Wrists bound with hankerchiefs, I led her down to the street, where she fled into a loitering taxi – for once the meaningless Khmer smile replaced with a killing-field glare. Those Cambodians, man, those grins are going to get so heavy their teeth will explode into a million shards.

Cambodian night – I’d slept like eighteen-f..king-hours – dead man’s head even along the main river. Child beggars took one look at me, moved to the edge of the river’s boulevard. Plenty of light from the riverside cafes, the city’s main artery of civilisation with some silly prices for fried rice – four, five dollars. Found a couple of mango’s in a convenience store that had bunged them in the freezer, pure nectar!

The police stopped me as soon as I ventured down a murky alleyway, most of the shops already closed down for the night. Identical twins save for ten years in age. So thin that it had to be lean muscle from Cambodian boxing. Their dog brown eyes glistened with something too obscure to get a fix on. They pushed me into a darkened doorway. My back against the wall they started to pat me down.

The elder one grabbed my balls gently; I wasn’t sure if he was looking for contraband hidden in my underpants or desperate for some cock. There was no telling me with Cambodian men; so much confused machoness and sexuality. The other took out a bundle of five dollar notes from my pocket, counted through them, not impressed with the total. He gave me back the money without taking a cut whilst the other still gently stroked my groin. Was I supposed to get an erection? And if I did would he drop his pants there and then?

I let my mind go empty and my eyes vacant, hoping that if I imagined I wasn’t there they would cease to see me.

It seemed to work. After the younger one spat out some words, they gestured me on my way. To celebrate my luck I hustled on down the road, neon glittered like diamonds in the night, its siren call deep in the my heart.

Sharky’s. The dive aptly named; the wheelchair bound embittered by a hefty flight of stairs to the huge room above the street soiled by pimp moto-boys. Central bar, snooker tables and about a million or so gals. The babes as demure as rattlesnakes on heat; just as dangerous. Even more treacherous because they could look so beautiful and innocent even whilst planning to dupe credulous tourists. I unfurled a bunch of notes, imagined myself about to be pounced upon by a mass of vultures.

Found a bit of bar to lean against. Two distinct tribes roamed the room, mostly in packs of three or four. Buzzed first by Vietnamese babes, all honey words and skin until you met their eyes; frenzied coldness just held in check by the quest for easy money.

Reluctant and young, the sweetest of the bunch moved in for the kill – long time for ten dollars, do anything I wanted to her body. In the West she’d would’ve been overwhelmed by offers but in Cambodia, just another ex-brothel girl who’d been broken in by a thousand or so locals, not a condom in sight!

‘Honey,’ she screamed in my ear over the stomach churning bass of the sound system, “I love you too much. You buy me drink!”

I pointed at myself and shouted at the top of my lungs, beer, beer. She made a gesture with her hand at the bar, the signal repeated until it reached someone capable of pulling an ice cold Beer Lao out of the freezer. I watched its repeat path back to my eager grip. With a beer bottle in my hand I always felt safer; could always upend it and smash the damn thing into someone’s head.

The frail sat in my lap continued to wriggle about and shout entreaties into my ear, which I continued to ignore. Her skin had none of the feral heat of the younger girls who hadn’t stayed too long in the bars nor had too many spent cocks inside them. Damp from the humidity; the bar’s huge twittering ceiling fans merely circulating the dead air that drifted in from open windows.

Took her ten minutes to suss that I wasn’t interested… not a nice parting; had the feeling that in other circumstances she would happily have cut me up.

Whilst foddling her body for free I’d eyed up the packs of girls sauntering through the room, looking for that elusive heart-stopper who’d instantly kneecap me into ecstasy. Being the last romantic in a Phnom Penh dive full of ex-brothel gals not a combination made in heaven.

Some old biddy gave the game a try and even ignored my blue-eyed glare. She moved off a yard and spent the rest of the night trying to stare me down. Then I almost fell for a little Khmer gal who could speak no English and looked about sixteen but she reckoned twenty, writing her age out in the beer swill atop the bar.

She wanted food rather than alcohol, the bar conjuring up some slop that I would’ve refused at death’s door. She tucked into it with religious fervour. Conservatively dressed, I could only guess at the sublimeness of her compact frame, little sparks of sexual lust running through my body.

After half an hour of total culture shock, as in no way to communicate with her, decided not to take it any further. I’d ascertained that long time (using hand signals and pointing to my watch) was ten dollars but there was something of the country peasant to her that was too deeply engrained, too far away from my remit for me to entertain.

I gave her the change from the bill as a tip; no sooner the money in her hand that some old dragon reared up from the ground and scored the couple of dollars – some bitch mamasan with a couple of pieces of coal for eyes. Lucky escape, thought I.

But not yet. The babe decided I was taking her out of the bar, trailed me to the door until I told the security guy it wasn’t going to happen. The intensity of her determination frightening and I only escaped because she was distracted by the security guard.

I was quite happy to leap on the back of one of the moto-taxi’s; looking back I saw her in the street sporting a far from happy expression. God knows how crazed she would’ve gone if we actually made love.

Moto drivers in Cambodia a lottery. The tracks of foreigners well worn, this one just hustled on over to the Heart of Darkness without being asked and was happy enough with a dollar for the ride. The Heart closed down for renovation, which turned out to be an aphorism for some locals having a shoot-out in the bar. These places have to keep their reputation motoring. The area spotted with bars, no problem.

The first dive I tried had some girls dancing on a central stage around a small bar, but no-one stunning. Beer Lao in an ice-cold bottle some recompense. Buzzed by a worn out hooker, I opened my arms in a gesture and told her I had no money. She screamed something at me in Cambodian and went for an empty bottle. Before she had a chance to inflict any damage, two of her friends dragged her off me and pulled her away towards the toilet. Her face a caricature of hate! Bloody hell, only been there for a minute and nearly caused a riot. Must be doing something right.

The girls left me alone after that. My attention flitted between their poor attempts at dancing; they were at least honest with themselves for once in that they looked as they felt; as if they hated themselves, and the customers, almost to a man over fifty and fifteen stone.

There was one young couple, the girl looking on disapproving and disconcerted as her erstwhile partner was submerged beneath a barrage of frails, having made the fatal mistake of buying two of them a drink.

Dancers change, the whole lustre of the night transmuted. My eyes stayed glued to a performer who could’ve passed for eighteen and who looked new on the circuit, although for all I knew she could have served a five year apprenticeship in a local brothel. Her skin glowed in the neon, her cheek bones so high and taut that she’d looked more beautiful when she was ninety than most Western girls manage at nineteen, and the contrast of frail body with facial strength so sublime I was nearly kneecapped into ecstasy.

Another beer in my hand, bottle ever ready for trouble. Quell all desire the wise would boringly intone but in Asia there are other, more amusing, ways of quelling desire than the metaphysical; meditation for the mentally retarded and terminally rejected.

The more I studied her progress down the length of the stage the more enamoured I became. Girls like her didn’t last long in the bars. They were either bought out permanently by some foreigner or moved up to a higher class establishment.

Eventually, she came down off the stage, grabbed her kimono, fell into my lap and asked me my name.

‘You buy me a cola, Mark?’ I took a deep breath to stop myself retching up as my stomach had turned on me. Her skin black even for a Cambodian, her face just short of really beautiful and her body slick and sexy.

‘Fat man have big money,’ she told me, gesturing at an Arab. “He give too many girl five dollar just for talk, talk.”

I bought her a cola. The tiny glass of coloured water arrived and I told her it had to last for one hour! She wasn’t sure if I was joking or not and sipped it as if it was the finest wine.

‘Fat man take friend last night, have cock small, small. Only make love one minute. Give 30 dollar! Too much money!’

The thought of the nubile in the arms of the hideous ancient, however briefly, made me want to throw up. So I did. I’d drunk too much beer and my stomach had rejected it. I usually managed to make it to the toilet but this time I couldn’t be bothered. The whole illusion of Oriental bars came crashing down, couldn’t do anything to stop the noxious flow. The two bar girls who copped a load too astonished to start screaming for a moment.

But only for a moment, the next thing I knew I was being slapped around by two large Cambodian hooligans who had appeared out of nowhere. They enjoyed themselves so much, throwing me out and inflicting violence upon my body, that they even forgot to demand money for the drinks let alone for the damage done to the dignity of the barmaids, who I had seen rushing for the toilets, actually giggling.

Kicked in the stomach a few times, tried to throw up again, only bringing up air. In the midst of this madness, a hand clamped on my arm and pulled me upright. I wasn’t so far gone that I failed to notice the power pulsing through the paw. Sleighy leered, threw me into a loitering taxi…

The bar located in one of the small alleys north of the town centre, the entrance just a door with a bit of neon and some Cambodian scrawl. A narrow passageway led deep into a complex of three storey shop-houses that needed to lean against each other to stop themselves collapsing into a heap of rubble.

A burly guard half-heartedly patted down first Colonel Sleighy and then myself. We handed over the extortionate twenty dollar entrance fee to the doorman, who was about knee-high, three times wider than he was tall but apparently happy with his station in life.

‘Hell, Mark boy, you’ve never seen the like of this place before. What we’ll see tonight, foreigners don’t normally get to see – some real live action like we used to get in Saigon. You wouldn’t believe what we got away with there…’

Sleighy suddenly speaking with an American accent with the childish enthusiasm to match despite the pain from his bruised kneecaps and cut up face – resultant from a run-in with the army. He seemed to have completely forgotten that I’d run out on him, didn’t even rage when I told him what happened to the bike and pills. An euphoric reptile at home in the Khmer psycho babble.

I tried to filter out the overdone tales of debauchery in Vietnam, the way his brain appeared to function it was doubtful if he had any clear recollection of the place; indeed, even if he had really been there. He popped three pills, shuddered hugely and led the way into a small room.

A tiny stage at one end, a bar running the width of the room at the other and a dense crowd of Cambodians who momentarily stopped chattering when they saw us enter. We found a wall to lean against, our relative tallness, even the mere couple of inches in Sleighy’s case, allowing us to see over the heads of the Cambodians.

We ordered a couple of bottles of beer at five dollars a throw. In five minutes we’d spent more than the average Cambodian made in a month. The stage had a small bundle of flesh, swathed in chains, collapsed on to the floor. The Colonel agog, his full attention focused on the body on the stage.

The music blanked out any conversation, a wild, frenzied noise with a girl wailing about the loss of her man or having to sleep with men she didn’t like… not that I could understand a word, that was just the way it sounded to me. It was totally unlike jazz but had the same kind of instant rapport with the psyche.

The beer incredibly cold, a sharp pain shooting up into my forehead and staying there for over a minute. So traumatic that I wanted to scream my head off but managed to keep a grip on myself. Sleighy shouted something at me but I couldn’t understand a word, so I just shrugged my shoulders and tried to look cool.

The Cambodians still eyeing us as if we had no place being there. I was thankful for the massive muscular appearance of the Colonel, at least he gave an illusion of toughness whereas I just looked wrecked.

Some very wicked men in evidence, looked like they spent their time robbing, mugging and inflicting huge violence on anyone who got in their way or could prove an easy source of money. They didn’t bother with the ubiquitous smile most Khmers sported for the tourists.

Perhaps Colonel Sleighy sensed my apprehension, took my hand and placed it inside his jacket, where I felt the cold steel of some kind of gun. The huge grin of perfect teeth, either expensively capped or entirely false, didn’t reach his eyes which were grey blue dead.

The only indication that he was less than at peace with himself, the buckets of sweat rolling off him despite the icy blast that cut across the room from a couple of air-conditioners. We were too far away to be splattered by the torrent of water one of them leaked; by the way it shuddered in its frame on its last legs .

I felt something run over my foot, looking down saw a huge rat scurrying across the bare concrete floor. Black-grey with a tail as long as its body. It circled back to Sleighy’s foot, sniffed, turned up its nose and darted away between two Cambodian men who were feeling each other up. In a sudden flash of white neon I saw that the rat’s fur was really grey, the blackness coming from the liberal covering of lice.

The music reached a crescendo of incomprehension then died away to nothing. A chubby Cambodian walked on to the stage and unfurled the piece of flesh and bones. My heart almost stopped. She had the most beautiful face that I had ever seen, nineteen or twenty.

Her body backed that estimate up with a lack of breasts or the development of real curves. Her hands chained behind her back and her ankles shackled so that she stumbled slightly as the Cambodian turned her around so that we could all get a good view of her backside.

Sleighy’s eyes glazed over, digging one of his claws so heavily into my arm that I thought he was trying to break it in half. He had to use all his restraint to stop himself bobbing up and down in sheer joy at what was to come.

‘Hell, boy, this is sure going to be some weird trip. They don’t get much stranger than this.’

The Cambodian spoke rapidly – the only word that I understood Vietnamese – patting her body, large paws everywhere. The girl stood there taking it all, her eyes far away, body taut with anger.

The Cambodian pulled out an old revolver from behind his back and stuffed it between the girl’s legs, slowly massaging her pussy. He sniffed it and made a repugnant face, which had the crowd in hysterics, calling out in Cambodian. Working themselves up to a mob frenzy, I was only glad that their concentration was now such as to ignore our presence.

He moved the gun up to the girl’s mouth and stuck it harshly between her teeth, a trickle of blood emerging from what must have been the most sensual lips in Asia. The whiteness of her teeth extreme. With the gun in her mouth he ran his other hand all over her body, lingering over the tiny nipples and pushing a finger or two inside her vagina.

He said something else which had the crowd in hysterics. The Colonel whispered, in a sudden lull in the music,

‘She’s still a virgin and for sale to the highest bidder. Fancy your chances, son?’

My legs went all weak on me, staggered along the wall to what passed for a third world toilet and must’ve blacked out for a while because the world had turned a nasty shade of black when I emerged…

The small room in total bedlam by the time the final player in her sexual ruin approached. Togged out in some kind of military uniform, with enough stars and medals to equip a platoon, he flipped the girl over and took her virginity in a matter of seconds. When he pulled out, a thin river of blood and semen ran out of her pussy.

The Colonel in a frenzy of excitement by then, his eyes popping out of his head and his whole body appeared to shimmer in anticipation. The excess flesh on his skin quivered wildly, his hand shook where it was again trying to break my arm in half and he was slightly crouched forward as if waiting for the command to charge off to the stage.

I could feel the energy running through his body, electric shocks ran up my arm. Had there been a TV in the room it would’ve been blitzed by a storm of electrical interference.

The Cambodian boss went over to the girl, gave her a few kicks and then force fed her a huge quantity of water. Her body covered in sweat and semen, which the Cambodian spread deep into her skin with one hand. He said something to the crowd which had them in hysterics again.

Then he went into a tirade against the Vietnamese, the uproar that followed drowned out even the music, which itself had sounded like sheep being slaughtered with an out of control chainsaw. All pretence of a smiling countenance long since lost by the Khmers; exulting in letting their true natures loose.

Frail lying on her back, legs spread wide and eyes closed. I think everyone in the room wanted to leap on top of her and hump their way to ecstasy, but that was not to be. Sleighy pushed to the stage and handed a revolver. The total silence in complete contrast to the earlier madness, every soul agog. Either with anticipation or envy.

I manoeuvred my way over to the door. Wanted to be first out if things went wild. Because of my relative height I still possessed a clear view of the stage. Sleighy had the smile of the embalmed on his face when he leant down, put the muzzle of the gun, chrome glinting in the neon, to the girl’s head and pulled the trigger without a moment’s remorse. Just before the blast went off, the girl opened her eyes… no fear, no pain, just Asian acceptance of the brutality of life.

One of the most beautiful heads in the Orient exploded and then dissolved into a bloody mess, a great fountain of blood spurting on to the Colonel’s once white jacket.

I threw up over three Cambodians standing in front of me. My whole stomach seemed to pump out its contents before I’d realised what had happened. I could only take so much even in my highly developed state of cynicism – my whole body unhinged by the pills I’d been popping. The crowd had, anyway, gone quite crazy with the macabre death of one of their ancient enemies. They were screaming, waving beer bottles and jumping into each other’s arms with enough fervour to give the average gay massive sexual urges.

Colonel Sleighy, despite his foreignness, greeted like some great hero, patted on the back and whirled around the room. He pumped his hand in the air, saluting the great victory made over a devious foe.

The Cambodians in front of me were real hard cases, who after recovering from the shock of being covered in noxious muck at their moment of mutual ecstasy, looked about them for the culprit. I pointed up to the ceiling, figuring that with such a pathetically superstitious breed, they would take the hint that some deity had punished them for being in such a dubious dive.

They looked like trouble with enough muscle for someone twice their height, not that they would need it. Cambodians could kick-box most opponents into oblivion without missing a breath. Before they could interpret such an omen, we were all pushed forward towards the door, which had suddenly swung open into a dark corridor.

The Cambodians kept shrieking, which I took to mean that baton wielding, gun totting police had arrived. I wasn’t quite first through the door, which was lucky as the chaps in front knew the way out the back rather than straight into the arms of the law. The great mass of petrified people behind me meant that should I lose my footing I would be stomped to near death and left to answer to the police.

If I’d known where I was going I could have quite easily pushed past the Cambodians in front, who had spent more time lounging on street corners and ingesting wayward drugs than keeping their bodies in shape… a beer belly a sign of manliness in Cambodia not an object of general derision.

We went down stairs, round corridors, up more stairs, across a roof, down yet more stairs, then up again, then down and finally out into a deserted alleyway that gave on to the centre of town.

I didn’t want to hang around to find out if the vomit sodden Cambodians still held a grudge. Whilst I was trying to figure which way to go, Sleighy bounded up and gave me one hell of a pat on the back. If one could judge from a person’s eyes he was in heaven. My mouth sour from all the vomit I’d spewed up contrasted with Sleighy suddenly dancing with joy. He slapped me on the back again, which nearly finished me off.

‘Gee, boy,’ he shouted. “That sure was fun. Let”s go get us some more beer.’

I couldn’t disagree with that sentiment. I wasn’t sure exactly where we were, somewhere off the main mecca of the river zone, but Sleighy swaggered off up an ominously dark lane as if he had an idea of where he was going. His knees appeared to have undergone a miraculous cure.

For all I knew, we were walking through a pitch black alley so he could show his physical prowess when some group of glue sniffing, hypodermic wielding kids tried to mug us. After a few moments my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I stopped snagging my feet on the ruined pavement, full of fear that I was going to plunge down some rat and snake infested 100 foot hole.

5am in the morning. Came to a couple of bars, really shop-houses with blanked off windows and a few neon tubes glowing ominously. Most bars had closed down by now, only those that paid huge bribes to the police or were, indeed, run by the police kept going into the early hours of the morning.

‘You been here before,’ the Colonel asked. I didn’t even know where the hell we were. “Me, neither,” Sleighy screamed. Why he should start screaming at the top of his voice way beyond my comprehension. He added to the carnage by banging loudly on a heavy wooden door. It opened an inch or two almost immediately. Then it went wide and a massive creature flopped out, its ugliness pulsing in the neon overflow.

‘Oh, handsome man,’ the katoey twittered, throwing herself on to Sleighy. Though shorter than the transsexual, the Colonel used his bulk to stand his ground. Had it chosen to attack me with such velocity I would have been flung to the tarmac before I knew what had hit me. I smiled to myself, hoping Sleighy would employ his skills learnt in Russia to send the monster to another, presumably better and brighter, world, when to my astonishment he lifted the giggling katoey off the ground and carried the monster into the establishment.

I suddenly noticed a group of Cambodian men loitering opposite the bar, the only option to follow the Colonel inside or risk a mugging. I immediately doubted the wisdom of my decision. A youth grabbed my hand and pulled me down on to an ancient sofa next to Sleighy. The katoey was already kneeling in front of him, running a hand over his crotch. The air of dilapidation ran around the dimly lit room, everything looked about twenty years old. Including some of the men sitting or dancing on the stage.

I flicked my eyes over about a dozen young men, all naked as the day they were born. Crazy Cambodian music poured out of the speakers. At least the fridge was still working, I gulped down a large bottle of ice cold beer in almost one go.

About six boys, only wearing underpants, surrounding me, touching me up, saying how handsome I was and would I like to go upstairs with one or even all of them. The muscles in the nearest felt like steel. My stomach felt like it was about to let loose again but another ice cold bottle of beer placed in my hand and I suckled on that for a while. Not surprisingly, at that time of the morning, we were the only customers.

The guys on the stage were all fingering erect cocks. Mostly only an inch or two in length even when fully hard, two of the men who were taller and older than the others sported larger members, three to four inches long; about as good as it got for Oriental men. The glands glistened in the neon.

I spilt half a bottle of beer over the katoey’s hideous head. The katoey’s face had a sour look which an impromptu half litre beer shampoo did little to improve. Sleighy seemed to have stopped breathing, only the whites of his eyes visible as his head lurched backwards. He’d even forgotten to drink his beer so I swapped my empty bottle for his.

Sleighy had insisted on paying for this excursion and admitted liking nothing better than a fight over the bill, with the proprietor, at the end of the day. There was no check in sight, always a very bad sign.

The katoey came up for air, letting off a vicious stream of Cambodian that had the crowd of boys who had gathered to watch the strange spectacle in hysterics.

Hoisting a skin tight dress up to its waist, revealed that it had gone all the way with the sex change operation. I almost gagged on the rancid smell that came up from the plastic pussy. Even though the level of light was low the large, leaking sores that poked through excessive pubic hair were all too plain to see.

She plopped down on to the Colonel. He gave a sudden groan, startled eyes taking in the horrendous scene. He tried to shake the katoey off, but she clung to him, desperately pumping away. They both shuddered suddenly, Sleighy going limp again, sinking back into the wobbling sofa.

The katoey bounced up, running a hand down to her vagina, revelling in the Colonel’s juices flowing out of her. The sour look replaced by one of pure vindictiveness. Pulling down her dress, she flounced off, apparently not demanding any money for pleasuring Sleighy.

Sleighy’s eyes sprang open, his right hand searching for a bottle of beer. “Hell,” he screamed. “That was one hell of a dry pussy. I think she took off a layer of f..king skin. Not a bad head job, though.”

He gurgled on a bottle of beer that one of the boys had procured, slumping back into the sofa. Meanwhile, the hardest looking lout in the place had plopped down on to my lap, wriggling his taut little arse all over my crotch. He guided my hand down to a thin cock that was as hard as steel and so hot it seemed to burn a hole in my fingers.

On the stage, the guy with the biggest cock in the place swaggering about. He must’ve spent most of his time working out as he insisted on showing everyone how big were his arm and leg muscles with grotesque contortions. This went on for about five minutes, during which I had to work hard to dissuade the guy on my lap from undoing my trousers and letting my cock out, though it felt so hard that it would burst right through my underpants and jeans.

My eyesight started to go then. A sure sign I’d had too many beers. I blinked a few times, grabbed a firm hold on the guy on my lap and gulped down some more beer. My stomach churned over but it seemed to help a little.

The katoey came on to the stage wearing black stockings, suspenders and little else, breasts sagging, swinging where the silicone implants had gone awry. A sight straight from the depths of hell, I wanted out of there fast.

Sleighy snoring noisily whilst a couple of the lads played with his cock which he had forgotten to put away. They tore off his shoes, pants and underwear. His huge beer gut turned them hysterical with contempt. It was only a matter of time before they found his gun and then all hell would break loose.

The gay on my lap restive, pointing to the ceiling, whispering that for five dollars I could do anything I liked to him and that I’d only have to pay the bar two dollars for the use of the room.

My mind was fighting a battle between a massive hard on and a churning stomach. His skin hot, silken, the kind a woman getting old would kill for. He went into his groaning act once again, muttering hopefully.

Whole squadrons of cockroaches crawled over the walls, which were a sort of murky brown – a favourite colour amongst Chinese landlords as it was so hideous it was ridiculously cheap. The air thick with mosquitoes; I could feel itchiness seeping into my back where I had been bitten by the devious creatures. My heart and head about to implode, the only mantra running though what few brain circuits that remained functional: get the f..k out; get the f..k out…

A dollar tip to the lad on my lap all it took. The exit different to the entrance, through corridors and down stairs, a maze-like journey that had I been forced to do it myself would have left me totally lost. A whole series of town houses, their walls knocked through to provide an easy means of escape from the periodic police raids. A cruising moto-taxi a sight for sore eyes…

Wan dead to the world on the bed in the hotel room. Her wrists bandaged after I’d dumped her into a taxi and sent it to the nearest hospital; hoped never to see her again. Some hope! No doubt she had waxed lyrical to the hotel’s desk that she was my wife to be or some such nonsense; driven not by romance but sheer poverty and desperation.

Naked when I pulled the sheet back, my cock suddenly electric. I had to have her. Time dissipated, blurred, expanded, contracted – I went right out of my mind, surprised to find I had the f..k of my life. She rode me until I died a death and blacked out with the faintest echoes of our screams reverberating around the room…

I jumped a foot in the air. The door rumbled on its hinges, buckling in the frame as some maniac battered away at it. The noise so loud that I could only just recognise the screaming voice as foreign rather than Cambodian. This at least ruled out the proposition that the perpetrators were the Cambodian police.

Colonel Sleighy burst into the room, making me leap backwards a yard or two to avoid being knocked to the ground. His squat frame shimmered with repressed violence. Grabbed me by the throat and threw me up against a wall, knocking the breath out of me and then cutting off any more chance of inhalation with a steel grip on my neck.

I managed to turn sideways fast enough to deflect the kick from his knee, whacking my thigh rather than my balls. Screaming incoherently, shaking my body like it was a mere rag doll. No hard task for him as he weighed three times my mere 65 kilos and had sumo-wrestler-arms.

Stunk like he’d been rolling around in a pile of garbage. Facial skin yellow, wrecked by a day’s growth of stubble. His scalp bald, didn’t shine with vigour, ruined by lumps of diseased flesh. The “whites” of his bulging eyes bright red. Pupils almost non-existent; ice blue irises a match in coldness only to my own on a bad day.

Our eyes locked for a while, I put my mind somewhere else but not so far away that I was unaware of the Colonel’s manifold weak spots. He was not a complete fool, not above admitting to a shattered kneecap on the wrong leg. Not that it really mattered, as I could not recall which leg had been shattered by a bullet. His ribs busted and a wrist broken. His nose a failed piece of plastic reconstruction, which a good slap across the face would surely collapse, leaving him howling on the floor in well deserved agony.

The only problem with any of these strategies, failure to completely implement them would leave him totally enraged and result in myself being torn limb from limb. The pain in my leg eased its way into my consciousness, although paradoxically the thigh felt numb and I knew if I put any weight on it I would go into a screaming fit.

The Colonel switched his vision from me fast enough to catch a glimpse of Wan about to whack him over the head with a bottle of beer. There is nothing more frightening than a big man who can move fast on his feet. One moment he had me by the throat in a death-grip, the next he had grabbed the bottle of beer as it swung down towards his head and half-nelsoned the frail who screamed viciously at him in Cambodian, kicking backward with her feet off the ground.

He threw her away as if she was nothing, apparently not in the least impressed by her complete nakedness, although even after being viciously attacked by an enraged madman I could not but help notice a strong stirring in my loins. She rolled down the short length of the room before leaping up again, giving us a full frontal view in all its glory.

Sleighy laughed hysterically, tore off the cap of the bottle of beer with his teeth and downed the amber nectar in one gulp, after ingesting a handful of prettily coloured pills. I had to hobble on one foot between the enraged Cambodian who had taken a large knife out of her bag and Sleighy slumped down on the floor, as if he had just dropped in for a friendly chat.

My thigh still hurting like hell, it took a lot of effort to restrain Wan, whose fragile body had turned to spring steel, her deep brown skin gone white at the knuckles where she brandished the knife with the intention of finishing off Sleighy. The anger added to the beauty and lustre of her cheekbones.

‘Cool heart,’ I repeated over and over again hoping that the words would get through to her. Cambodians held having a cool heart as a great virtue but practised such perfection as rarely as they obeyed the teachings of the Buddha. Psycho Nation! When I felt the tension go out of her body, I let her loose and staggered to the fridge where there was still a decent quantity of beer.

I threw one to Sleighy, who caught it without any effort. I opened mine with the bottle opener, doing the teeth trick would have pulled out all my teeth rather than gained access to the beer. My hand shook as I upended the beer and watched Sleighy play with his second bottle.

‘Where the f..k did you get,’ he suddenly screamed. I tried to looked suitably surprised and nonchalant that my whereabouts would be any cause for aggravation. Sleighy visibly shuddered, taking a huge gulp of beer, bunching his free hand and slapping it down on to the concrete floor which seemed to rumble ominously in response, as if a mild earthquake was shuddering through the whole building, a reality that would cause much of Phnom Penh’s shoddily constructed housing to collapse. I held my breath as I surveyed the damage.

‘Those bastards in the gay bar must have put something in my drink,’ he continued. “I woke up to find myself tied face down on a bed. Completely f..king naked. Then one after another those gay bastards f..ked me up the arse. Can you believe that? I could hardly walk after they”d finished. Man, I could be full of AIDS by now.’

It was hard going to keep a straight face but I just about managed it. The thought of someone like Sleighy, who bounced about full of macho bravado, being bummed by dozens of limpid Cambodian gays was almost too much for me to bear. If Sleighy had done the decent thing and left right then I would have rolled about on the floor in hysterics, laughing so hard the Cambodian frail would probably have walked out in disgust, deducing that she had fallen into the hands of a complete raving lunatic rather than someone who was likely to completely transform her life.

To distract my mind from this doubtless suicidal course, I glanced over at Wan lying sprawled on the bed, the thin sheet doing little to conceal the form of her juvenile body. I was beginning to get another hard-on. Sleighy noticed my lack of attention, growled ominously and continued,

‘When they’d finished they threatened to cut my cock off if I went to the police. Said the police wouldn’t help, anyway, as the joint was owned by one of the Generals. F..k it, man, those cunts won’t know what’s hit them by the time I have f..king finished with them.’

Sleighy glowering and shimmering with rage again. The recollection of taking cock after cock was proving too much for his temperament. He smashed the half empty bottle of beer against the wall, beer and glass reflected off the plaster over his body but he did not seem to notice.

‘Where the fuck did you get?’ He repeated, shaking the remnants of the broken beer bottle in my direction as if to say if I didn’t give an immediate and truthful answer he’d ram it down my throat by way of retribution.

‘I went off with one of the boys.’ I muttered, hoping Wan would not hear or understand. “You know how it is, you get drunk out of your head and just about any hole will do when you get a hard-on. I figured you”d had your fun for the night and left a pile of bills for my share of the beer. Shit man, it was you who wanted to go in the damn place, I would have stayed well clear myself. I just followed your lead. Can’t blame me for that, can you?’

I staggered to the fridge whilst I was laying this line of half-truths upon Sleighy and threw him another beer, opening one more for myself. He looked like he was going to burst out of his clothes with rage and I decided it would not be a good idea to ask him if he had a hard-on whilst he was being buggered by cock after cock. Sleighy’s countenance was already disturbed enough without my trying to take the piss out of him. Screaming almost incoherently, he continued,

‘Me and some Russian buddies are going to take that place apart tonight. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll come along. About time you saw some real action. Man, these guys really hate Khmers. They’re fuck and kill merchants. Take a delight in f..king some young cunt and then strangling her as she’s threshing about. Prefer a straight kill myself. We’re going have a ball tonight, boy. Be just like the good old days.’

I could just see the headlines the next day. The police would go wild tracking down the foreigners who caused the carnage. Probably grabbing anyone who even fitted in the vaguest way the description of the perpetrators if they did not have a cast iron alibi. I began to wonder if Sleighy was actually an American pretending to be a Russian…

Sleighy must have caught the look of amazement on my face. Leapt up and hurtled across the gap between us in a most unseemly lack of time. Grabbed me by the throat again, uprooting me from the cane chair in which I’d been happily slumped, resting my injured, throbbing leg that did not react well to its sudden use.

‘It’s mostly your damn fault and you’ll do something about it else I’ll take you out as well. I’ve had enough of you young bastards f..king around town like you own the darn place.’

The Colonel was almost gurgling as he said this and it took me a moment to understand his words. The lack of oxygen reaching my brain probably didn’t help one tiny bit.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Wan had uncoiled herself, she held the knife pointed downwards, a look of defiance on her face. Jesus, the last thing I needed was to explain to the police why I had the dead body of a huge Russian in my hotel room. Sleighy suddenly released me, threw me back down into the chair; saving himself from a knife in the back.

‘We meet at my hotel at seven o’clock tonight. You can go into the bar alone, scout out the territory and report back. No f..king with the gooks this time, you pathetic pervert. I knew you were gay, just f..king knew it! Nothing to it. We’ll do the serious business. I don’t suppose you’ve even fired a gun before? Uh, bloody useless. Never mind, we can handle the fire-power, you can go get pissed in another bar, about all you’re f..king good for.’

The Colonel calmed as thoughts of revenge ran through his mind but not for very long.

‘I’m going to shoot every f..king gay pervert in that bar up the f..king arse. If you’re not at my place I’ll do the same to you, buddy.’

With that final warning still ringing in the room Sleighy turned to look at Wan, still holding the knife. The sheet had fallen away revealing her whole body in its pubescent perfection. My cock caused a huge bulge in the shorts I was wearing, threatening to leap out of the waist-band. Things were rapidly getting completely out of control. Instead of lusting after the frail I should have been trying to placate the Colonel whilst planning to get the first available plane out of the country.

Sleighy probably toying with the idea of regaining his manhood as rapidly as possible but the huge knife Wan held must’ve dissuaded him.

‘These young ones are a waste of time. Just take all your f..king money and break your heart every time. You need to find an old widow who’s past worrying about dollars. This velvet bit of trash is the kind of crazy bitch who’d cut your balls off if you play around…’

Sleighy suddenly enraged by the sight of my cock bulging out of my shorts. Whether it was envy, recollection of his being bummed or merely my lack of serious attention, I don’t know. Maybe all three. I saw the movement in his eyes and turned sideways again, moving in towards him. His kick caught me just above the kneecap with enough force to take my legs out from under me.

The pain made me howl loudly enough to make Sleighy smile widely. He bounced on his feet for a moment, trying to figure out if he should finish me off there and then, but decided against it. He lurched out of the room, howling hysterically to himself, slamming the door so heavily in its frame that a slab of plaster fell off the wall.

The room wrecked, littered with broken beer bottles, spilt beer, ruined plaster and haphazard furniture. In that mess Wan looked all the more wonderful, she seemed to glow before me as she helped me stagger to the bed…

The bus rolled out of Phnom Penh, the stereo turned up loud enough to bounce the windows; the video flickering into some mad sequel of Cambodian violence upon violence. The air-conditioner had given up, the heat outside so fierce that it made breathing difficult, let alone walking. Air-conditioned ecstasy exchanged for fear inspired fast exit from town.

As soon as the vehicle gathered a little momentum, Wan curled up in a ball, using my lap as a pillow for her head, dead to the world. I had a paperback to read but couldn’t get into it, even though the pills were out of my system the way my cock was trying to unfurl out of my pants and straight down her throat too painful and distracting.

The sweat ran off me by the bucketful. Even if one was available, the humidity ran so deep that taking a shower a complete waste of time – moments after finishing it’d feel like you’d never ever touched any damn water.

Fell into a fitful sleep. I came out of a hazy dream that had me wandering from doctor to doctor showing them two broken teeth, to find I was about to drop a load. An incredible pain shot through my stomach as I flung Wan off me and rushed for the toilet at the back of the bus.

A huge turd in the stainless steel bowl but I ignored it and dropped my pants, letting out a heavy detonation along with about a ton of shit. I almost gagged on the smell, looked behind to see the whole toilet splattered with excrement, so violent its evisceration. Other times I would sit on the throne for hours waiting for something to happen.

The stainless steel bowl appeared to lack any way of flushing it and there was, of course, no paper. Someone started battering on the door. I threw a couple of handfuls of water over the toilet bowl and used a hand to clean off the worst of the stuff from my arse. My eyes ranged frantically over the tiny cubicle trying to find a lever to flush the toilet but there wasn’t one anywhere in view.

The ancient crone who was waiting outside wasn’t very amused when she stuck a head into the toilet, started chattering away loudly in Cambodian until a small crowd gathered to study the strange toilet habits of the foreigner. I fought my way through them, the smell fast taking over the bus.

The driver pulled over, went back to see the cause of the commotion. He roughly pulled me out of my seat and would have started thumping me had not Wan awoken, viciously screaming Cambodian.

He was eventually placated by my offer of ten dollars but we didn’t move off until the mess had been cleaned out by one of the bus boys. Wan besides herself with anger at the massive loss of face incurred by the mad foreigner and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the journey, sitting rigidly in her seat, looking straight ahead as if she wished I’d disappear in a puff of smoke. The way things were going, it would’ve been more fun to be on Sleighy’s mad team of assassins.

The bus pulled in to a huge roadside restaurant just outside Pouthisat. I didn’t get out; the bus would probably have left me stranded in some strange Cambodian city where anything might happen. Wan didn’t move either. Outside I could see some of the Cambodians pointing in my direction, chatting to people from other buses. Judging by the way they were chortling they found my habits most amusing, the high point of their otherwise mundane day.

Back on the road, the driver started acting very erratically. Running right off the tarmac, churning up huge clouds of dust that quickly turned the windows opaque. Spinning the bus between cars like he was in a golf trolley rather than a forty ton bus with sixty people’s lives in his hands. The Cambodians showing not the slightest concern at such suicidal tendencies.

When we were running through open country, with sheer cliffs on either side, the driver calmed down a little, contenting himself with driving on the throttle and horn. The bus bounced over the rutted road surface, the back end occasionally twitching violently through the more vigorous curves. The stereo still raged although the video had long since finished. We were four hours out of Phnom Penh with another half hour of tedium before we reached the home of the frail.

After what seemed like hours the bus pulled off the road into a clearing in front of a few shacks that wavered in the superheated air despite the absence of any wind. We were the only people who got off. Wan eased up a bit as soon as the coach pulled away; the sixty people who had witnessed her loss of face were no longer eyeing her disdainfully.

The only taxi in the place an ancient American behemoth, looked so old it must’ve been a leftover from the Vietnam war. Sisophan fifteen minutes away, through huge paddy fields and the odd cluster of houses. At first, the town looked okay. Quite a few relatively modern concrete houses, some temples and a huge government building and police station. We went past these buildings, took a turn to the right and suddenly left them all behind. My heart sank as the taxi pulled over in front of a dilapidated wooden structure, stood on marginal stilts, which seemed to quiver in the afternoon heat haze.

Out of the taxi, I could hardly move. My limbs felt so heavy I had to stagger forward like some kind of cripple. It didn’t really matter, her parents completely ignored me and there wasn’t even any kind of affectionate greeting between them.

The old man spent his entire life high on rice whisky, leaving all the work to his wife and relatives. The mother moved with all the grace of a young girl despite a body wrecked by dropping eight girls. Wan the youngest, the others married off to Cambodians except for the eldest girl who was working in Tokyo.

The stairs up to the house almost vertical and loose enough to flap about disconcertingly as I lumbered up them. One big room split off into a couple of bedrooms by strategically placed pieces of furniture. An ancient fridge rumbled, a TV set was covered by a piece of hideous cloth and bits of matting were spread on the floor. The floorboards quaked under my weight, giving the impression that if I was to bounce a foot in the air, they would splinter into a million pieces when I hit the deck again.

I managed to croak out, “water, water.” Some tepid liquid delivered into a cracked glass out of an old plastic container in the fridge, which I noticed was turned down to the lowest possible setting – dubious wiring might overload, sending the shack into a raging conflagration, or the fridge on its last legs. The water murky with bits of what looked like dead insects floating in it. Consternation ensued when I refused to drink it.

The old man shook his head and eyed me as if I had just been let out of a lunatic asylum. Wan having trouble stopping herself going into a vicious tirade. I saved the day by demanding beer, and lots of it. The father’s eyes almost lit up at the mention of alcohol. Despatched with a ten dollar note to secure a decent supply; I had little hope of seeing any change from it.

Seated on the floor, daughter and mother chattering away in Cambodian; I hadn’t the faintest idea if they were deep in an argument, complimenting each other or commenting on the weather. Their expressions betrayed nothing. I spent my time fending off the hordes of mosquitoes overwhelmed with enthusiasm for juicy foreign flesh. I took out my mosquito-killer heater pad from the bag, slid in a tablet and hooked up the plug to the precarious electrical system. If I hadn’t acted then my skin would have ended up looking like that of a heroin addict in the morning.

The old woman looked in horror at this device. Hissing at her daughter, holding her nose and choking on the fumes the tablet was giving off. Meanwhile, a huge quantity of huge red ants appeared from nowhere, marching fearlessly across the floor, apparently ready to build a nest under my feet. I recoiled backwards, leaping to my feet an expression of utmost horror doubtless written across my face whilst dripping off gallons of sour sweat.

‘Foreigner Crazy!’ the old woman shrieked between coughs, probably the only English she knew. The ants seemed to settle down on the place where I’d been sitting, so I moved to the other side of Wan. My eyes rolled over the room, trying to seek some saving grace within the desolate house, but it had little going for it. The heat alone was enough to turn anyone insane, the floorboards hot to the touch and the sweat rolled off me so rapidly I was sure the quickest way to lose money was to try to open a sauna.

The old man and a gaggle of cronies returned. They carried half a dozen bottles of beer and about two dozen bottles of rice whisky. They formed a circle around me, pushing the women out of the way. They all looked skinny enough to be heroin addicts; the solo diet of rice whisky encouraged emaciation. The beer wasn’t cold but they had a couple of bags of ice.

After about ten minutes of firing incomprehensible questions at me in Cambodian, they seemed to tire of the interrogation and chatted amongst themselves, leaving me to the serious business of lowering my body temperature as quickly as possible by drinking as much beer as I could manage.

An ancient tried to strike up a conversation by making obscene gestures and feeling up my body. What he wanted I never did figure out, the only word I could understand was handsome, which he repeated over and over again. Some desperate gay?

One of the others kept making gestures of smoking but his hands were empty. I shook my head, but he kept going for about ten minutes until he finally gave up in disgust. The place filling up fast, a huge, surging crowd gathering to view the strange creature from outside Cambodia.

Either that or the free drink had drawn them like vultures. Wan extracted twenty dollars to buy some food and further supplies of alcohol. I had gone through the six bottles of beer in record time, which at least seemed to impress the natives. Kept offering me glasses of rice whisky.

The sun disappeared, deafening insect noise and a fluorescent tube flickered at the kind of rate that would send an epileptic into a terminal fit.

After the eighth or ninth beer I slumped back into one of the cabinets, only on the periphery of what was going on. It was still incredibly hot and impossible to even think about falling into a drunken slumber. Wan nowhere to be seen, so when I suddenly felt the need to throw up a gallon of beer there was no-one to explain to the Cambodians the sudden sight of a foreigner leaping to his feet, hurtling across the room and leaping out of the door, landing with a crunch on bare feet two yards below. I managed to turn my head away from the house before spewing up a huge quantity of beer and rice whisky.

I crept up the stairs fearing the worst, but they were all so far gone on the whisky that they barely seemed to take any notice of my madness. I wanted a couple of bottles of water to clear out the sour taste from my mouth but there wasn’t any that was drinkable so I had to hit the beer again.

Wan appeared from nowhere, demanding that I sleep, which seemed improbable given the huge mass of people screaming at each other, the swarms of mosquitoes and the way the building quaked every time someone so much as moved a buttock, let alone walked across it.

My stomach went again, Wan to led me to the toilet. A concrete bunker with slits in the side and a hole in the ground. A couple of containers full of stagnant water, a thick swarm of mosquitoes vied with ants that ran up and down all the walls. It was the kind of place you rushed into, dropped a load and rushed right out again, counting yourself lucky if you didn’t get more than a dozen mosquito bites or didn’t gag on the overpowering stench.

Wan reluctant to leave, perhaps fearing that the incident on the bus would be repeated and she would never live down the shame of having the family toilet coated in shit. I brushed her outside but could still see her hanging around through the slits.

The pain in my stomach had passed by then so I ended up just having a piss, the pain in my cock suddenly hitting me as the fluid flowed out. Any thought of having a shower ignored as throwing that water over me would leave me covered in slime and god knows what kind of nasty creatures.

Back in the house I was offered some rice and fish. An almost hushed crowd watched me dig into this feast. The rice okay, the sticky stuff, but the small fish were full of tiny bones that clogged up my throat. I seemed to spend hours separating out the bones with my fingers in my mouth. Wan’s mother cackled,

‘Foreigner Crazy’ which was soon taken up as a chorus around the room. The old witch grabbed a whole fish, crunched on it and swallowed the lot as if the bones did not exist. She seemed to expect me to follow suit but I just grabbed a bottle of beer for comfort.

After that bit of amusement I was shown to a corner of the room where a bit of mat was spread out and told to sleep there. I hunched down, but the hardness of the floor, the terrible heat, the huge amount of noise and the sheer wretchedness of my situation were too much.

I tried to take my mind elsewhere, imagining that tomorrow I would be some place new with a couple of air-conditioners and Wan doing crazy things to my body. Should I confuse mind bending sex with love… not likely, given that she was probably an ex-brothel girl!

My stomach still felt wretched and in that disturbed state between consciousness and sleep I felt no qualms about letting loose massive detonations into the room. Time somehow went by, as it has to.

I opened my eyes to see a huge cockroach trying to enter my mouth. Before I could stomp on the damn thing it scuttled away. A whole tribe of the fist sized creatures were taking over the walls and floor. I didn’t know whether to scream or cry!

‘Get marry now,’ the first thing I heard when Wan shook me awake. Despite being only 6.00am a whole mass of people assembled in the twittering house. I was somewhere between throwing up due to a churning stomach and wanting to commit suicide thanks to a head that felt like someone was attacking it with a lump hammer; an effect of a few hours deprivation of rice whisky, the only excuse the Cambodians needed to go on week, month, long binges without any sleep.

I mumbled something that could be taken in any number of ways, but judging by the smile on Wan’s face was assent.

‘Give 1000 dollar. Make party,’ Wan screamed at the top of her voice, the noise perhaps presaging our future together.

The sound tore the top of my head off. I just had time to turn away from her and spew up over the edge of the house. Then I became aware of the heat boiling the blood in my veins, the stench of rancid sweat and the skin dissolving fever that ran through my body. Someone had the presence of mind to hand me a bottle of tepid water that to my blurred vision seemed clear of any obvious parasitic lifeforms. I drank the water down in one go, felt ten times better.

Whenever anyone mentions marriage my first thought escape. At that moment I didn’t feel safe trying to stand up, let alone doing a runner. Not that it would’ve been easy from a village where no-one spoke English and even if they did it was unlikely they would help me desert Wan as it was pretty obvious that everyone was in some way related to everyone else, cousins of cousins turning up at the mere hint of a party and free drinks.

‘No more money,’ I managed to croak. Claiming poverty the only way out.

‘Go back to Phnom Penh to get some money.’

Within minutes of arriving at the house I’d already decided there was no way I was ever going to come back. All I needed was some way to get out of there in one piece, without losing Wan too much face. There was no way of knowing how she’d react if I told her what I was really planning – she could let her family tear me to pieces or even become so hysterical with rage and fury that her minimal muscles turned into steel, motoring her into a knife-wielding frenzy.

Ice crept into my heart when I saw the beauty drain out of her face after my admission of poverty, a second layer of skin and bones formed; if I’d ever wanted to know how she’d turn out in ten or twenty years I had my answer in that regenerated visage, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

‘Have money,’ she insisted, tearing into my denim jacket that had fallen on the floor and then my jeans which were still clinging to my body, soaked with what I hoped was sweat. Her parents and relatives viewed her sudden frenzy with concern and consternation. Even in all the weirdness, even when I felt so emaciated and tired out that I only had a few hours to live, when her slender, heated fingers caressed my cock in their haste to extract money from my pocket, I got a hard-on so obvious that one of the nearby peasants, who looked like she was fifty going on eighty but might not in reality be more than thirty, giggled hysterically, the great mass of her body trembling.

Wan sprang back with the last of my loose change in her hand, almost whiplashing me with her mane of hair. A few strained, silent moments passed as she counted the money.

‘Forty dollar!’

If she had stamped her foot in frustration at this exclamation I wouldn’t have been surprised. Her parents looked somewhere between being mortally insulted and disconsolate.

By then I had gathered the strength needed to head down the rickety steps to the toilet, leaving them to their shouting match, Pandemonium breaking out in my wake, sending waves of pain through my head, which seemed so weak that if I pressed hard against my skull the bones would collapse.

The toilet less intimidating and filthier in the harsh daylight. A venomous cockerel tried to take lumps of flesh out of my leg but I battered it with my bag. The fear coursing through my body made it easy to empty my bowels even when precariously perched over the hole in the floor, from which anything from a huge snake to an enraged baby crocodile might emerge.

Naked, I threw some dubious water over my skin, waving my hands like a madman to ward off the insects. By the time I was dressed in fresh clothes, I could see clearly, the hammering in my head was but a far distant echo and my body temperature was almost but not quite close to bearable.

The silence when I staggered back into the house more evocative than many a whole novel. Reflected in the faces were outrage and hostility where before the revelation of my relative destitution there had just been indifference and bewilderment. Wan, still in fast physical decline, shrugged off my proffered hand with a gesture that indicated she would like to have done nothing more than totally ignore my meagre existence for the rest of her life.

‘Go to Phnom Penh, have more money there,’ suggested I, trying to keep the whine and desperation out of my voice. Right then I would’ve happily given a 1000 dollars just to be back in the relative comfort of the hotel.

‘No, make marry. Now!’

More chattering followed, the incomprehensible tone of Cambodian bouncing around the room until my head began to hurt. I picked another bottle of water out of the fridge, which was turned up a notch and threatening to vibrate across the floor, as an antidote to the rising heat of the day and to keep my body occupied enough to stop the shakes from breaking out.

I peered out of the glassless window down the dirt road that led to the main part of town but could see no taxi I could summon; the walk back to the main road and the bus would take at least two hours, which in the desert-like heat merely a prolonged form of suicide.

The crowd began to unravel, money dispersed, errands run and around where I’d been slouched the men formed a circle; jabbered, screeched, screamed; invocations to the rice whisky god until bottles and glasses appeared. After the first few glasses, even when watered down with Coke, an effeteness that sent disconsolate murmurs around the room, blurred vision replaced the fear and loathing.

The smell of slaughtered and then cooking meat wafted up through the holes in the floor, fought and lost to the wail out of a stereo that the young men were warming up to by bouncing around, waving their hands and mouthing off to the tune. The noise drowned out all other sensations. Machine gun the lot of them my last coherent thought for a while…

A stranger who it took me a long time to identify sitting next to me. Wan’s size and had her magnificent mane of hair but the face was caked in layers of make-up, rogue and lipstick obscured her best features; the translucence and the sheer excess of her beauty had been excised by a malevolent cortege of so-called friends to the extent that if I had ever seen her in a bar I would’ve run a mile, in fear of instantaneously communicable diseases. I was suddenly thankful that my vision was still blurred.

We sat together, though not communicating with each other, whilst a parade of all her family came forth, muttering what sounded like obscenities at us in turn, placing white string around our wrists, my arm held out in front of me for an inordinate time.

Before us, a cane basket filled with what was left of my forty dollars, the five dollar notes on top, bulked out beneath with many more smaller Cambodian notes to give the impression of much greater wealth. Each of the relatives or friends added to the pile of money with low denomination notes as they muttered words at us in turn.

Rice whisky taking effect, the men in a relatively ebullient mood, the women had sly, doubtful expressions as they took their place at the outer ring of the activity. By the time the procession of supplicants had ended my arm was ready to fall off but still there was one more ordeal, as the eldest of the elders went into a long colloquially in place of the usual Buddhist monk who would’ve cost serious money to hire.

When it was finally over, Wan gave me a fleeting smile that broke up the layers of her make-up, but I flicked my eyes down to her sarong that did little to hide the wondrous lines of her body, hoping to fill myself full of the energy of lust. I failed dismally, the heat seemed to disconnect all my extremities from the rest of my body.

The music turned up so high that the whole building vibrated to its spectacular bass rhythm. The young men danced, jumped and screamed to the tune. The older men hit the rice whisky in a sudden fervour.

The girls and older women congregated in groups, Wan talking with each in turn. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, filled up a large tumbler with pure rice whisky and slouched against the heftiest of the wooden pillars that supported the house – I wasn’t sure if it was I who was lurching out of control or the whole doubtful edifice, or a combination of the two.

One of the older men came up to me and started to make obscene gestures, feeling me up and waving his hands about in a drunken frenzy. In normal circumstances I would’ve kneed him in the balls but didn’t figure that the general reaction of his friends and relatives would be at all favourable.

He lurched this way and that, went into a headbanger’s salutation and then almost tripped up over his own feet. Lurching sideways he tried to take me with him, but I was quite agile whilst drunk, able to shrug him off. He bounced on the floorboards a couple of times before slumping down into a deep, dead sleep that wasn’t even disturbed when I gave him a surreptitious kick in the balls as a mild form of retribution.

By noon the heat omnipresent. The whole building close to spontaneous combustion on the back of the broiling warmth that had seeped into the wood. The fumes from the mosquito pad deemed too noxious – every mosquito within ten miles alerted to my presence, whole swarms of the buggers taking turns to descend on my bare skin en masse, leaving me with the pockmarked arms of a far gone heroin addict even though my kill rate was in the hundreds – some of the mosquitoes so bloated on the sweetness of my blood that they could barely move, an easy target.

Each time I clapped my hands upon another creature the nearby Cambodians looked on astonished; soon the chant reverberated around the room again, “Foreigner Crazy, Foreigner Crazy.” Too f..king right, thought I, this is one crazy foreigner.

I caught Wan’s eye across the room. She looked far from elated, far from overwhelmed with enthusiasm or even passion for what was supposed to be the most important day of her life. The certainty that I had stayed there too long, that it was time to get out fast, rested firmly in my mind.

A tumbler of whisky and a plate of steaming rice hidden under some greasy pig portions thrust into my hands. Wan’s father appeared to my left with a murderous glare. Naked except for a bit of washed-out rag around his waist, flexing still impressive muscles in an otherwise emaciated frame. I tried a smile in his direction for which I received merely a shake of a fist. I concentrated on the food for a while, trying to ignore the pulses of hostility thrown in my direction, body language overcoming any lingistic difficulties.

By the time I had finished the food Wan had sidled over, having disgorged the inch thick make-up and outlandish lipstick. When I flicked my eyes at her I caught her face at an angle that emphasized the lines of her cheekbones and the sun streaming in through the holes in the roof highlighted the extraordinary translucence of her skin.

The old man had a choking fit when the all too obvious consequence of this re-emergence of her sexuality was revealed by my erection; an act of pure lust that overcame the debilitations of excessive heat and alcohol. He slouched away in disgust and dismay at this all too apparent attack on Cambodian manhood, whilst Wan promptly destroyed the moment.

‘Take Pa Phnom Penh. Give 1000 dollar.’ I waved my hands wildly at the unlikelihood of this scenario, laughed at its total impossibility and then tried a caress on her shoulder in a gesture of reconciliation.

‘I don’t have that kind of money. Maybe 30, 40 dollar? One year’s time I can get more money.’

‘Now!’

‘No way.’

Claiming poverty always the last way out, but it received universally amongst the Cambodians a look of complete contempt so wholly had the impression of improbable wealth taken hold. Wan stormed off in a fury of repressed aggression.

One of the older Cambodians waved an empty whisky bottle under my nose and was just as annoyed when I again claimed poverty. In a few minutes the crowd had cleared out, not having any interest in staying once the food and drink were finished. I managed to stagger to the corner of the room where I was supposed to sleep and passed out the moment my body hit the deck.

Before dawn, Wan shaking me awake although I was not really asleep.

‘Go city, crazy Pa.’

The room relatively deserted. Just the old man with a couple of cronies who appeared to be having a lot of trouble restraining him. He looked across at me with whisky mad eyes, appearing as if he wanted nothing more than to tear me apart limb by limb.

Jesus, what a f..king family. I was quite happy to grab my bag and walk all the way back to the relative civilisation of Phnom Penh if it became necessary, anything to get out of the dump.

I could see that the old guy was still strong by the way the muscles rippled over his skin as he tried to tear loose of the Cambodians restraining him. They were all so far gone on rice whisky that the whole bunch threatened to topple over at any moment. If they fell into the flimsy side of the building they would take out the whole wall, causing the hovel to collapse like a house of cards.

I was feeling so pissed off that only with great restraint did I stop myself poking out my tongue or giving a reverse Winston. Instead, I gave him a wide smile that contained much more sarcasm than joy. His eyes glowing with wolfish intensity, he threatened to throw all his friends off him at any moment. Even if I took him out, it wouldn’t have gone down well with Wan…

We walked about fifty yards, some youth loading up a mini-bus with produce until the roof buckled under its weight; doubling the height of the vehicle. We were first in, but the wagon soon filled up. I was crushed into a narrow space with some old crone sitting at my feet in an area that would have driven a cat into yowls of protest.

Ragged ancient eyed me malevolently as soon as she realised I was not about to give up my seat, whilst I had to use all my willpower to resist throwing up over her. No time to hit the toilet during our exit and the heat already tearing my body apart, although my head was for once dangerously, unnaturally clear.

I had assumed that the vehicle was only taking us to the main road where we could catch the big bus, which would have been bad enough, what with my clothes drenched in sweat and my stomach rumbling like a cement mixer about to disgorge its contents.

But, no, it lurched past there, if hurtling into the luckily sparse flow of traffic could be thus described. The driver looked completely mad, muttering away to himself for the whole journey in a bass rumble that shredded my nerves. I should have been more worried by the fact that the pilot was swigging from a bottle of whisky with one hand and using the other to affectionately pat the bare legs of some ancient hooker who sported an excess of cosmetics and a fixed grin as she ground ice between her teeth.

I was rather more worried by other things, the proximity of Wan sending my cock into a massive erection, bulging out of my jeans, inches from the face of the old dame who was crunched up on the floor at my feet.

I was suddenly full of fear that she was going to pull a blade from her handbag and go into a mad rage that she would later use as an excuse for castrating foreigners, probably receiving a minimal sentence for her heinous crime.

Such attacks on outsiders viewed as a great joke by most of the Cambodian populace. Luckily, she came up with a huge nail file which she employed for the next few hours to sculpture her talons to vulture sharpness. wouldn’t have been surprised if she had started on her rotted-out-by-beetle-juice teeth.

It soon became apparent that I was going to be stuck in this contorted position for the next four or five hours. I kept thinking perhaps I could strangle the small bundle of bones at my feet and throw her out of the window, allowing me to stretch my massively cramped legs.

None of the famed surface Cambodian friendliness here, everyone looked like they wanted to tear everyone else limb from limb. Even the Cambodians were beginning to sweat in the harsh heat; water pouring off my body by the gallon and my mouth as dry as a sixty year old spinster’s pussy, probably tasting even more rancid.

I tried to amuse myself by looking out of the window, but this just emphasized the way the driver was rolling the vehicle all over the road in tune with the riot of music that was screaming out of the bouncing speakers.

Looked down at Wan slumped into my body, but despite such intimacy she seemed a million miles away, her frame as tense as my cock. I ran a hand through her hair, down the back of her neck, exulting in the texture of her mane whilst wondering if I could stop myself from taking her the moment we got back into town.

I felt an incredible, irresponsible lust seeping through my body. I could almost welcome the mad youth at the wheel, still steering with his knees, running the vehicle off the road; at least then I could have torn Wan away from the crowd, ripped her clothes off and taken her every which way.

Despite the marriage, any form of affection impossible in the openness of her parent’s hovel and two days without sex whilst still in close proximity to her driving me crazy even when I was filled with grave doubts about our future together.

I stretched my legs. And let out a huge fart. My body smelt like I hadn’t taken a shower for months. I ran a hand through the matted hair under my arm, placed a finger under my nose and nearly threw up.

I was eyed with almost awe by the rest of the occupants, so bored out of their heads – except for the old dear at my feet, who was probably using all her restraint to stop herself giving me a blow-job – that they spent the whole journey studying my strange, foreign form.

Their mutterings occasionally interrupted by almost hysterical laughter that ran through the vehicle in short bursts only to die out as quickly as it started. They occasionally prodded Wan, screamed long questions at her but received only monosyllable replies, probably along the lines that I was married to some especially deranged relative, several times removed, and she was only making sure that I didn’t get lost on the way back to town.

By the time we hit Phnom Penh I was in an incredibly foul mood and Wan wanted to kill me as apparently her family had demanded I hand over some even more ludicrously large amount of money than first hinted at – they having been conditioned to large chunks of cash from their eldest daughter’s Japanese boyfriend, a man, from the photographs I’d seen, who was as close to seventy years as he was to 200 kilograms!

When I saw somewhere in town I knew was near the hotel I tried to wake her, but she shrugged me off, acting as if I’d tried to stick my cock straight down her throat in full view of the assembled throng. She slid back into her dreams whilst the other Cambodians gave me murderous looks for daring to molest a girl so young and beautiful I should be profoundly grateful just to be on the same planet as she, let alone the same bus. I would have liked to see their faces if they ever saw Wan thrashing about in ecstasy on my cock.

I put my sunglasses on, closed my eyes and let out a fart with such a loud detonation that the driver jumped in his seat, grabbing the steering wheel, waiting for the crazy skid to come from the blown tyre. It was only when the smell reached him that the truth hit home.

One hell of a quick way of getting off the bus. Fortunately, Wan still dazed from her slumbers, looked perplexed when the mini-bus roared off with a derisive blast of its air-horns.

She looked around, totally lost as to where we were and what had happened. I pointed to my legs, hopped around frantically, said, “Too much car.” She didn’t find this amusing at all. After verbally abusing five drivers who wanted about ten times the going rate, the final leg of the journey was done in silence, in a bouncing, weaving taxi.

After the horrors of the mini-bus the fresh if heavily polluted air and the luxury of some leg space were so wonderful that I was almost bouncing with joy in my seat! Wan sulked as far away as possible in one corner of the weaving vehicle which threatened to either roll right over when going around corners or end up crushed under the diesel belching buses as the driver, with a total lack of concern, cut a path through the traffic.

Back in the hotel any feeling of elation soon dissipated. Wan immediately collapsed into a cane chair, staring off into the distance as if I could not possibly exist, her face taking on such harsh lines that her visage could easily be mistaken for one of the hardcore hookers.

Closing in on Wan, I ran a hand on to her shoulder, wondering how her body could suddenly turn into iron and how the silkiness of her skin could completely vanish. My cock, as sensitive as ever, felt gutted, as if there was absolutely no hope of ever again achieving an erection. I wanted the sublime high of that direct brain-cock connection that sometime hit me from nowhere.

Wan didn’t try to shrug my hand off but the negative psychic forces screaming off her body didn’t need any help from mere physical actions. I was hard pressed to stop myself from whacking her around the head, an assault that would either result in her going berserk or merely running to the pigs, who would turn up demanding a huge bribe to stop the prosecution for attempted murder.

I pulled her off the chair, dragged her the few feet to the bed and threw her down. She landed with a gratifying thump but it failed to elicit even the most mild of screams. She was wearing a pair of flimsy cotton pants that rode up deep into the cheeks of her arse; a sexual artifact so sublime that I felt a pulse of lust in my cock.

I lay down beside her and tried to envelop her whole body with mine. The brittle hardness of her frame tempered by the wild heat flowing out of her, not even extreme anger could damp out the fires of that minor furnace.

I rolled her over and tried to stick my tongue all the way down her throat. Her lips stayed clamped shut with all the rigor of a Catholic nun. I tore her shirt apart, her breasts too minimal to need a bra and thus open to my mouth. As hard as my lips and tongue worked, no response, Wan having shut down her whole body to erotic sensation.

Whilst I worked her nipples I forced a finger between her legs but only after a great struggle to get a knee wedged there first. The fabric of her pants so thin that I could clearly feel the contours of her vagina, about the only part of her body that wasn’t rigid with anger.

I pulled the drawstring of her trousers and ripped them and her knickers off with a fluidity that was surprising given the way she was kicking her legs all over the place. I didn’t mind, her raging resistance made my cock try to bounce out of my jeans; it took me longer to undo my zip than it had to pull off her pants. When she saw my engorged member she didn’t swoon with lust but tried to throw herself off the bed.

I caught her halfway in her escape, used the momentum of my own body to throw her back down on to the mattress. She squirmed, tried to scar my face with her fingernails and thrust a knee between my legs, but I had mass and lust on my side, ended up turning the frail sideways and then down on her face, where her hands could do no damage and her feet kicked harmlessly backwards, her legs spread wide open.

The hardness of her frame still there, but the mass of her hair, the way she snaked beneath me and the intense heat of her body sufficient to make my cock feel like it was about to explode, so hard that I did not need to use a hand to help guide myself inside her.

I was running wild on anger, the pain hitting the head of my member as I pushed into her dry pussy having no effect. I got in about an inch, playing mind games, just moving in and out very slowly like she was still a virgin and I wasn’t going to plunge in all the way until she was wild with lust.

She had given up on the squirming and kicking act, turning her body dead to everything, making it feel like I was f..king a plastic doll. Even when I pulled out gave one hard plunge into her there wasn’t a flicker of reaction from her body, nor the slightest hint of wetness inside her vagina. How could such a young kid become so dead to sexual forces in such a short time?

I pulled right out of her, plunged back in to the devil’s hole, my own tumescence making up for the dryness and hit her body with all the force I could muster. The tightness extreme, no way in, but I persisted until I felt her flesh give a little and then plunged in with all the violence I could muster. Wan gave a little squeal but the strength of her anger high enough to overcome the pain that must’ve been running right through her body.

The way she opened up to the whole length of my cock contrasted with the steeliness of her forty kilos, the sheer sensation of her body giving way to me, sent me out of control. Huge spurts of semen as my cock jerked spasmodically and my brain seemed to leap to a new level of perception.

After I pulled out of her, I lay on my side next to her and, as I fell into a deep sleep, I had the idea that the rigidity of her anger had begun to dissipate. Illusion and delusion nothing new in the Orient…

Morning sun streamed ferociously into the room, awoke screaming in agony. The pain so bad that it took me a while to locate its source. I staggered off the bed, promptly tripped over my jeans which were still wrapped around my ankles. My head hit the corner of a cane chair which flipped over on top of my prone form.

The pain from that debacle made absolutely no impression on the existing agony. I pondered, as I threw the chair off and crawled up the wall, whether it would be better to bounce my head against the concrete or throw myself off the balcony.

I pulled my jeans and underpants up, thankful to note that the pain was not caused by castration. The latest victim of a Cambodian girl’s angst reported in the Phnom Penh Post to have promptly died of a heart attack when he awoke to find his crotch an empty if bloody mess.

Through the red haze that swamped my vision I managed to note that Wan was nowhere to be found and in a momentary lull in the pain that was throbbing through my head, I made it to the wardrobe to find that her clothes were gone. Welcome to the shortest marriage on record even when backed up by the best sex in the world.

The pain intensified, so debilitating that there was no way I could indulge in any self pity at the loss of the frail. That would probably catch up with me later, if I wasn’t distracted by yet another mind-numbingly beautiful Oriental woman.

In the wardrobe’s mirror, one side of my face grotesquely bloated; running my tongue over the top of a back tooth, one of the few that had survived the ministrations of various mad dentists, sent a sudden shock right into the depths of my brain; so fierce in its intensity that I could not imagine that taking 10,000 volts would be any worse.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had a tooth go so rotten that it died a death, formed an abscess, the puss having no escape out through the tooth, going instead deep into the gum.

The pain that shot through my head had never before been so intense, my teeth clamped so hard together that they threatened to grind each other into oblivion. Buckets of sweat rolled off my body, the odour of fear and death filling the room.

I grabbed my money and passport from where I kept them hidden, shoved my feet into some flip-flops, the boots requiring too much effort to contemplate, and hobbled out of the hotel.

I needed the support of the wall for a while, my brain so overloaded with the pain that it could not even manage something as simple as walking, even my breathing had turned as wretched as an eighty year old asthmatic!

Each step sent a tremor through my whole body, the merest movement amplified the heinous pain in my mouth. By the time I hit the main drag I was muttering to myself, just short of going into a terminal wailing fit.

The Cambodians found my ruined appearance highly amusing, pointing fingers and going into gigging fits. The roar of the traffic added to the chaos in my head as did the indecipherable chants of the jumping children who had formed a procession in my wake.

Into the first pharmacy, almost collapsing on the glass case that separated me from the drugs. The pain so intense I would’ve killed someone if they demanded a prescription… a quaint Western concept in the Orient. Penicillin my mantra for the moment, pointing at my bloated face and screaming abscess, abscess, at the amazingly attractive gal in a white jacket.

My poor old cock turned into a steel rod that threatened to bend me double where I stood. Pain and pleasure merged, surged, until I felt my brain was going to explode right out of my head. I swallowed ten times the recommended dosage of antibiotics and ordered a couple more servings for later. Then felt my whole body about to detonate and asked the girl if I could hit the toilet…

By the time I made it to the cubicle I only had a moment to slide the lock shut before my knees went and my vision filtered out until I was looking down a long tunnel that suddenly went black. I collapsed on to my knees alongside the toilet for a few moments until enough cohesiveness came back to let me stagger upright, pull down my jeans and pants, sit down on the toilet seat and drop the whole contents of my bowels in one huge evisceration. Maybe I could make big bucks out of a rice-whisky and Ecstasy diet?

No sooner had that been effected than I had to turn around and regurgitate the contents of my stomach, the blood and puss from my mouth adding to the terrible odour. I swallowed more pills to make sure some antibiotics hit my system whilst fingering my rock-hard cock. I burned through the pain of my bloated face by doing a quick hand job, full of the echo of sodomizing Wan – had to be the ultimate sexual kick in the Orient. I ate my own semen, desperate for some good sustenance; at least I was still one up on the Indians who like to drink their own urine.

Walking back to the hotel, my trousers hung loose around my waist as if I’d lost a kilogram or two in the last hour. I could feel the pain seeping out from my bruised mouth; every passing second the intensity fading into a milder thrumming. What was left of my mind moving towards elation that the body had escaped the trauma almost wholly intact, the episode merely a huge hint to get out of town as fast as possible.

Stumbled down the narrow, slum lined alleyway that led to the hotel. Never a quiet place, with wailing infants tottering in front of screaming motorcycles as their owners tried to tune their engines whilst dogs snarled or wailed at their fate in life.

The chaos much more intense than normal. Six police cars, maybe more as large groups of Cambodians had congregated to find out what all the fuss was about, obscuring what was really happening. Huge crowds gathered at the merest hint of free entertainment.

The cops assembled outside my hotel; inspired me with no confidence whatsoever – either Sleighy captured after attacking the gay bar, accusing me of setting up the operation or Wan had gone running to the cops with stories about my raping or sodomizing her.

The theories were, in fact, endless – any foreigner who rumoured to have money could be arrested at any time on almost any charge on the whim or greed of any of the many corrupt cops. As soon as I saw the police I did a rapid backtrack into the obscurity of the alleyway.

The first taxi driver looked at me as if I was a monster from the swamp, promptly driving off, muttering Buddhist chants under his breath. The fifth finally comprehended my guttural mutterings, my mouth too stiff, bloated and painful to allow clear articulation. Agreed to take me to my destination but only at twice the going rate. The taxi down on its springs, the air-conditioning coming from huge holes in what was left of the floor.

When I looked in the cracked vanity mirror I began to understand why I was receiving such horrified stares – my cheek bloated, my lips had turned blue where they weren’t obscured by puss which had also dribbled down on to my chin. My skin a deathly white, my whole body still shaking mildly; an addict desperate for a new infusion of heroin or smack. Rather than hurtle abuse at me the kids had run away screaming.

I watched the scenery move past slowly as the driver tried to weave a path through the chaotic if mostly stalled traffic, the only vehicles attaining any kind of speed the small motorcycles that outnumbered the cars by about ten to one.

So many attractive young girls on the pavement but my cock was subsumed beneath the pain in my head and the angst in my soul. The whole force of the stimuli emanating from the streets no longer had any effect on me; I had seen too much and done too many doubtful things. My brain full of cool English nights and the civilization of the Western world.

The taxi driver’s grasp of English sufficient to offer me the delights of a massage parlour or brothel, the wrecked state of my face being no cause for concern in such places; being amongst foreigners the norm rather than the exception.

When I demurred he insisted, with something like pride, on relating on how he had been paid for a taxi ride up country by a hooker with an hour in a hotel room. The result of the tryst a dose of VD, on which he had blown lots of money on doctors fees trying to effect, unsuccessfully, a cure; sending his wife, once she had become infected, into a knife wielding rage that he only escaped by throwing himself off a first floor balcony. She had only been reconciled to his infidelity by a twenty-five dollar gold chain.

I had the idea that this tale was related in sympathy with the state of my face. I tried not to show too much interest, encouraged he would probably have dropped his pants to prove his story by showing me the wrecked state of his crotch.

By the time the driver had finished his gory tale, which did nothing for the composure of my mind, we were moving relatively rapidly outside the madness of Phnom Penh. The car weaved all over the shop, each and every bump throwing it way off line.

Rattling over a particularly vicious series of bumps, a heinous pain shot through my head, making me howl loudly enough to cause the driver to leap in his seat, sending the car veering off towards a meandering bus itself protected by a halo of screaming music.

The blast on the bus’s horn shook the whole car, the driver over-correcting, almost taking the taxi off the road. I removed the cassette of inane Western music, threw it out of the window with one hand whilst inserting some hardcore Khmer music with the other.

The driver responded by putting his foot down hard on the throttle and handing over a half empty bottle of rice whisky which he had secreted down the side of his seat.

A few gulps of this helped me regain my composure and dampened out the thrumming pain that was taking over my head. The whisky so strong that it cut right through the taste of decay and puss that permeated my mouth and throat.

He mumbled away in Cambodian, taking great delight in removing his hands from the wheel to make large gestures, half-heartedly correcting the trajectory of the car with his knees.

The music so loud that there was no way we could effectively communicate; exactly the way I wanted things. It seemed fitting to leave Cambodia on the wild tone of the crazed dirge of a people who would take up any excuse for murder and mayhem. They tried on a huge smiling front but could only fool some of the people some of the time.

In Cambodia, to leave the country with some money left, your cock in one piece and your mind less than totally wrecked a major achievement for anyone who had lived there for a few days. I held hold of this fact as we rolled up at the airport, paid the driver ten dollars for his trouble and staggered out of the taxi. The half bottle of whisky had killed the pain but it made walking almost impossible.

In any other country I wouldn’t have made it past the security guards, but the antics of foreigners were so strange to Cambodians that almost anything went. For once the fear and paranoia dropped away; I knew all I needed to get on the first aeroplane out of the damnable country was money – to buy the ticket and if necessary bribe the custom’s officers.

I tried to rearrange my bloated face into a grin and wasn’t sure if the chortling sound was a bout of laughter or screaming…