Catching the Sun

‘Where were we?’ he said into the phone, raising five fingers to say he would be right with me. ‘As I say, I’m leaving London right now and coming to Thailand. I am going to be there with my boss, Mr Farren, for forty-eight hours. And there’s a brief window of opportunity – a brief window – for a serious investor such as yourself who was smart enough to retire to Phuket with his lovely young Thai wife. A high-yield investment programme. New beachfront apartments in Hat Nai Han. You got it – just south of Hat Kata and Hat Karon. I shouldn’t really be telling you this …’

I watched him over the rim of my polystyrene cup. His pale features creased with concentration. There was a script on the table in front of him. But Jesse did not need it.

‘Phuket has one of the fastest-growing property markets in the world,’ he said, his voice lower now. ‘The cost of living is low but rental returns are high. You retired to the most prosperous province in Thailand.’ He paused dramatically. ‘When the other Asian Tigers were mewing for mercy, on Phuket you were still roaring … on Phuket you have muscles on your muscles … Phuket me love you long time … Phuket me love you too too much … Phuket your only problem this side of the grave is wealth management … on Phuket you will live forever in the lap of luxury and the gods will get down on their knees and bow before their master …’ He winked at me. ‘Listen, we’re getting ready for take-off,’ he said. ‘I am going to have to turn off my BlackBerry now. Oh, glass of champagne, please! No nuts! Do you have the extra-large sleeper suit? Look, I’ll call you when I land, John. A beer at the Sunset Bar in the Chedi? Sounds good.’

He hung up and stood up, and I saw his gaudy Muay Thai shorts. The first time we met he had told me that he came to Phuket for the martial arts, that there were serious Muay Thai training camps all over the island and any day now he was going to cut back on the Tiger beer and get back in training.

We walked up to the house together.

‘What’s it like in First Class?’ I asked him, still somehow believing that what he said on the phone had some roots in reality.

Jesse adjusted his Muay Thai shorts, and his blue eyes got a faraway look. ‘I reckon it rocks, don’t you?’ he said.

I nodded towards the house. ‘The Aussie I picked up at the airport,’ I said. ‘Baxter. He doesn’t seem very happy.’

Jesse laughed at that.

‘Farren will sort him out,’ he said.

We were on Bangla Road, the great gaudy strip of Patong, and there was a gibbon in a cowboy hat outside the bar.

‘Hello, sexy man,’ one of the girls said to Baxter – fifty-something, fifteen stone, pale and shaky from the long day – and the gibbon bared its teeth and had a good old laugh at that.

I looked up at the cracked neon sign above the bar. The gibbon in the Stetson followed my eyes. The sign said NO NAME BAR. I looked at the gibbon – the endless limbs, the dark triangle of its face, and eyes so black they seemed to carry the night inside them – and the creature examined its fingernails, massively bored. I don’t think I had ever seen a gibbon in my life before. But somehow a gibbon in a Stetson outside the No Name Bar did not look as strange as it should have.

Bangla Road was a bedlam of bars. They all played their own music, and the songs and the bars and the girls all seemed to melt into one another, and drain each other of meaning. There were bars down the side alleys, bars up a flight of stairs that you could see from the street if you craned your neck, and what looked like giant bars the size of supermarkets until you went inside and realized that the place was actually made up of countless tiny bars, all identical apart from the different songs, where girls hung on poles as if they were on a tube train, or played Connect Four at the bar with customers, or yawned on a bar stool, staring into the wintry glow of their phones.

Bangla Road had a kind of debauched innocence about it because the street was a tourist sight, and entire families from Australia or Europe wandered the strip, gawping at the chaos, soaking up the famous naughty Thailand night. But more than anything, Bangla Road was a place to do business.

‘Is this the place?’ Baxter said, staring beyond the gibbon and the girls at the dark howling interior of the bar. He turned to Farren, who had a protective arm around the Australian’s shoulders. ‘What was the name of those two girls I was with last time?’ he asked.

Farren patted Baxter reassuringly on the back.

‘Number 31 and number 63,’ Farren said. ‘Lovely girls.’

They went inside. Jesse and I stood on the street, staring at the gibbon. It had a soft brown coat with a white trim of fur around its face. I stared again at the eyes. They were totally round. Moist and black and bottomless. It hopped on a stool between the two girls and examined its fingernails.

‘Body massage?’ one of the girls said to me. ‘Hand massage?’

She touched my arm and I pulled away.

‘Why would I want my hand massaged?’ I said.

Jesse laughed. ‘Forgive my friend, ladies. He is fresh off the banana boat. You haven’t quite got the hang of it yet, have you, Tom? They don’t massage your hand or your body. They massage you with their hand or with their body.’ The gibbon chuckled at my dumb mistake. I shot it a filthy look. ‘Slip them a few extra baht and they’ll even wash behind your ears,’ Jesse said. ‘Come on.’

We went inside the bar. Farren and Baxter were talking at a table. We joined them. A round of Singha beers appeared in front of us. Farren signed the chit, not taking his eyes off the Australian.

‘I just want my money back,’ Baxter was saying, much calmer now, encouraged by Farren’s thoughtful nodding. ‘My wife says that foreigners can’t buy land in Thailand. She says it’s illegal.’

Farren took a cheque out of his back pocket and gave it to Baxter. The Aussie put on his reading glasses, peered at it in the darkness. And smiled at Farren. The two men laughed and Farren clapped him on his back.

‘Jesse,’ a girl said. She was holding a Connect Four board and despite the fact that she was dressed as a cowgirl in a mini-skirt she looked like a kid asking another kid if he fancied a game.

‘Legend has it that all these girls are grand masters of the game they call Connect Four,’ Jesse said, rising from his seat. ‘We shall see.’

A girl sprayed my bare arms with Sketolene mosquito spray.

‘What did you do that for?’ I asked, recoiling at the stink.

‘Nuts are not available,’ she said, as if that was any kind of answer.

‘Your wife is quite right,’ Farren was saying to Baxter. ‘Under Thai law, foreigners are not allowed to own land. However, foreigners can own a building, a leasehold of up to thirty years, or a unit in a registered condominium.’ He leaned back and sighed with contentment. The Singha beer in his fist was beaded with sweat. Here I am, his body language said. Exactly where I ought to be. And only a coward or a fool would not choose to join me.

‘Foreigners can’t own land in Thailand,’ Farren repeated. ‘But foreigners are allowed to have a licence to print money. You can lease land for a period of thirty years and have the right to renew a further two times, giving a total of ninety years. How long you planning to live for, Mr Baxter? Just kidding. Or, even better, you can set up a Thai company that you control and which is allowed to purchase land totally legally.’ A girl tried to perch on his lap but he declined with a polite smile and she disappeared into the darkness of the No Name Bar.

‘But if your wife has doubts,’ Farren said to Baxter, ‘then let’s have some sanuk and you can go home with your money. You know sanuk? It is a very Thai concept. A lot of farang think it means fun but sanuk is far more than that. It means finding pleasure in everything you do. Finding pleasure in all things. It’s not hedonism. It’s a philosophy, a credo, a way of life.’

The two men clinked glasses. I went to the bar and watched Jesse playing Connect Four. He was playing with a different girl now. The prettiest girl in the place, who wore jeans and a T-shirt and served behind the bar. They had already gathered an audience. Every time it was her turn, the girl slammed small blue discs into the slots on the board. Jesse laughed, shook his head.

‘The reason they always win is because they are allowed to set the pace,’ he told me, dropping a red disc into a slot with slow deliberation. ‘And you have to play at your own pace, not theirs,’ Jesse said.

The gibbon hopped up on to the bar and straightened the rim of its Stetson. It seemed fascinated by Jesse’s ground-breaking Connect Four technique. Girls climbed on bar stools to get a better look at the action. It was like watching James Bond blowing them away at baccarat at a casino in Monte Carlo.

The wall behind them was covered in photographs and I wandered over to it. I didn’t see any of the faces in the bar in the photographs. These were all the girls who had worked here in the past, and the men who they had known. Everybody was gone now. Years of thin women with smiling faces and the men, older and whiter and drunker, all mugging for the cameras, all seeming to have the night of their lives. I wondered what had happened to them, all those girls and all those men, and if they missed the Bangla Road and the gibbon in the cowboy hat. Although I guessed it must have been a different gibbon back then.

A roar from the bar. Jesse had won again. Now a small stout woman in her forties was rolling up her sleeves and taking her seat opposite Jesse.

‘Oh no,’ Jesse laughed, his pale face shining like the moon in that unlit bar. ‘Secret weapon. They’re wheeling out the mamma-san.’

‘I beat you,’ the mamma-san said, with no trace of humour in it. ‘I beat you good, white boy. Oh – such a white boy, you are, I never saw such a white boy.’

The mamma-san reached for Jesse’s face and took a fistful of his ghostly flesh in one of her small brown hands. The No Name Bar girls laughed with appreciation.

‘Want a bet?’ Jesse said.

‘Yes, I want bet,’ the mamma-san said, and the girls all cheered.

Jesse rolled his eyes.

‘But what do you have that I could possibly want?’ he said, and the gibbon’s mouth stretched in a huge and mirthless smile.

When I went back to the table Baxter was entwined with girls. Their thin brown limbs snaked around his waist, his neck, his khaki shorts. The girls chatted among themselves, examined their nails, and stared into the glow of their phones while absent-mindedly rubbing his old didgeridoo. And now it was Baxter who had his cheque book at the ready. A girl approached Farren but he held up his hand. He had lovely manners. She shrugged, smiled and walked away.

‘Explain one more time,’ the Australian said. ‘About setting up a Thai company that I control.’

The thing I was realizing about that Phuket, the Phuket of bars and beer and girls – the hundreds of bars, the thousands of girls, the ocean of cold Thai beer – was that it offered more than anyone could ever possibly want or need. And although, as Jesse said, I was fresh off the banana boat, even I had already worked out that they were not really selling sex on the Bangla Road.

They were selling dreams.