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.