Читать книгу Bangkok Busted: You Die for Sure - William John Stapleton - Страница 3

Where are we? he asked one of the hostesses on the Thai Airways flight after he woke from a brief alcohol induced sleep.

His reputation for instability, so ably fanned by those he had offended, already preceded him. Michael was surprised the airline's crew had let him drink at all, much less knock himself out.

“We are one hour from landing, sir,” she responded in a politely dismissive tone, clearly aware of his identity.

“Landing where?” he asked.

“Sydney,” she replied, shaking her head and saying loudly enough for him to hear, “no wonder”.

Michael’s heart hit the floor as he watched the hostess continue her way up the aisle, collecting the detritus from yet another of the traveling herds which had filled the world's skies and beaches since he first began traveling half a century ago.

Sydney!

Now was the time, fractured, out of the story line, an unplanned curve in history. He had never felt so lost. No longer bound by children, a regular job or the various therapeutic programs which once kept him functioning as a semi-normal individual, he had no idea of his next move, his motives, or in a very real sense even who he was.

Once satisfied with observer status, even that no longer survived.

“I suppose he will end up in the harbor one day,” a man had commented on the plane, dismissing as absurd the audacity and stupidity he showed in daring to comment on the regions criminal organizations; perhaps driven beyond all normal boundaries of self-preservation by the suicidal bender he had embarked upon.

Michael had never wanted to see the so-called Harbor City or the beauties of its much spruiked beaches, Opera House or Bridge everagain.

The claim Australians regularly make that they live in the best country in the world never rang true for him.

He had not felt at home there for years and experienced no sense of home-coming, despite the extremity of the circumstances.

When the job evaporated and the children grew old enough to look after themselves Sydney, the city he had once loved so much for its wild parties and peculiar sense of having never meant to be there, walled as it was by sandstone cliffs and perched on the edge of the most ancient of continents, became nothing but a brightly colored trap.

Christmas and New Year in Australia sounded romantic enough.

But as the London papers crowed, the Great Southern Land's famous summer of sun, sex and surf had disappeared.

The plane taxied through squalls of cold rain to exactly where he did not want to be: home under leaden skies.

As things turned out, it did not stop raining for weeks over the Christmas holiday period, when Sydney's beaches are usually crowded with sun lovers from all over the world, baking themselves brown. In contrast the Thais do everything they can to lighten their skin tones, tanned skin being associated with peasants working in the field.

The reality of thumping back into the homeland to which he had determined never to return struck quickly.

After some time pacing around the terminal trying to locate the shuttle bus driver, he endured the ride through all too familiar landscapes, from the cluttered industrial and commercial mishmash of buildings in Sydney's inner-west to the barrenness of endless miles of neat, heartless suburbia.

While he stared blankly at the landscapes through which they passed, his spirits sank even lower, if that was possible.

For a start, particularly after his acclimatization to the heat of Asia over the past two years, he felt cold, the last thing one expects of an Australian summer.

Michael was still fleeing something he could not see, the false accusations of pedophilia concocted by Aek and the bar X-Size in Bangkok and Surai from the Happy Café in Phnom Penh, the handsome, charismatic, sex mad and money hungry bastard he had slept with briefly and who subsequently kept breaking into his apartment and rifling through his belongings and his computer. Anything to please the criminals of Bangkok.

Their first attempts at denigration, driven by the fact he had dared to write about a routine experienced by many foreigners, of being robbed and deceived by one of their sex workers, had turned his life in Bangkok into a living hell.

They had, without any evidence, called him Thailand’s number one drug driver. He could barely walk five feet without being abused.

The “Spiderman” accusations came later, in Cambodia, where such accusations were immediately life threatening amidst a population which already distrusted foreign tourists, most particularly older men on their own.

Because of the country’s history of attracting foreigners who liked their prey younger than young, they already glared at single foreign men as if they were about to eat their children.

Spiderman or drug dealer, his enemies couldn’t make up their minds. Neither claim was true but they did prove one thing. That the claims he had made were true.

The criminal thugs who ran the sex trade in Phnom Penh and Bangkok, so blatantly linked to the drug trade and protected by the respective country’s police, would stoop to any level to attempt to discredit someone who had dared to tell a common story from personal experience about being robbed and deceived.

His head swirled with exotic images and question marks over what had happened and why; how much he was to blame and how much he could shift responsibility onto the astonishing bastardry which had been directed at him.

"You die for sure," was one of the most common threats he received.

There were many things Michael still did not understand about the events of the previous year; including why he had suffered such excessive levels of surveillance, harassment and vitriol.

Warren Olsen had already put it far more simply than he could in his book Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: “How do you tell when a Thai sex worker is lying? When their lips are moving. What if their lips are not moving? They’re planning the next lie.”

All the surveillance proved was that he was not the most orthodox of tourists, as if Thailand was full of saintly visitors who came there to look at the country’s many beautiful temples. The country was full of foreign men there for one purpose only, to party to excess. Some of these men were truly disgusting creatures, and he shared the locals distaste for them.

For decades Thailand had been known for its relaxed attitudes to prostitution and recreational drug use. Forty years before, amongst the cognoscenti, the country had been renowned for having the world’s best heroin.

The mules carrying a kilogram at a time in swallowed balloons in return for $30,000 a trip had been an underground characteristic of the trade between Australia and Thailand until recent times when detection techniques improved.

Why was anyone pretending sainthood?

The Thais vindictive and outlandishly dishonest behavior in demonizing him while mythologizing and turning into a cultural icon in every discotheque in the land sex worker who had so successfully ripped him off had already proven the truth of what he had been saying.

And now he was back in Australia, the country to which he had never intended to return.

What passed as refuge was in reality the very last retreat.

He was not in any fit state to see or talk to anybody, much less those he knew intimately; and did not know how long he could survive in this place where he did not want to be.

From the colorful crowds of Asian cities he was suddenly facing nobody but his aging mother. Her religion forbade remarriage and thus she had lived alone for years in the same house. As far as he could see, she had barely changed in appearance or personal habits in 20 plus years.

She still held the beliefs derived from the same fundamentalist branch of Christianity which had been the bane of his youth; its end time rhetoric having added to his own free floating anxiety and sense of impending doom.

As he was to discover the Land of Smiles was better named The Land of Hungry Ghosts; and many Thais also felt an unnamed fear, clinging closely to each other.

Author Dean Koontz put it thus: “With higher intelligence comes an awareness of the complexity of the world, and from this awareness arises a sense of mystery, wonder. Superstition is the darker side of wonder. Creatures with simple intelligence fear only real things, such as their natural predators. But those of us who have higher cognitive abilities are able to torture ourselves with an infinite menagerie of imaginary threats: ghosts, goblins and vampires…”

Fortunately religion was not discussed.

There was nothing worth watching on television, outside only sleet gray skies and freezing temperatures. Through the windows he watched boiling clouds sweeping over the nearby Macquarie Pass, the road which had been cut into the steep rise of the Great Dividing Range from the coastal plains. The hills served as a backdrop to the suburban sprawl which even in the two years he had been away had spread even further up and down the coast.

The first Crisco advertisement he saw on television, promising the bounty of the season, Christmas hampers crammed with hams and puddings, for those sensible enough to have signed up for the company’s payment plan, convinced him he had entered the world of the truly ordinary. That Australia could be as utterly mundane as he remembered.

The accents were the same, the advertisements exactly as he remembered. Little, it seemed, had changed in the time he had been away.

Tacky is as tacky was.

The politicians, from what little he was taking in, were parroting virtually the same words as last he heard.

Bob Brown, the aging, ascetic leader of the Greens, was as lodged just as firmly on a high moral platform as ever.

The ruddy faced Rudd was no longer Prime Minister but as always, never skipped an opportunity for a photo-op. Just as Michael remembered he kept popping up regularly on television where he could be seen as popular while not saying a single serious word. As so often before, he saw him parading on the TV screen dressed in a white apron at a barbeque for the party faithful in his own electorate, beaming at all and sundry.

It was a miracle how Rudd squeezed in any electoral work at all between gallivanting around the world on a frenetic first class tour, first in his role as the most travelled of all Australian Prime Ministers and later as Foreign Minister, a coveted position he was later to lose in a piece of idiotic in-party maneuvering entirely worthy of him.

The utterly compromised country’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, remained to his surprise largely unpopular; just as passing Australians had informed him over the previous two years. At least judging from his few encounters with her as part of the Sydney media pack she had seemed far more charming, intelligent and across the brief as Deputy Prime Minister than her leader ever had.

The various tennis tournaments leading up to the Australian Open were in progress but stirred little interest. The newspapers he had once been so proud to work for appeared dry as dust. He scanned them with barely a flicker of interest.

Michael was not the same person who had left the country two years previously, every illusion swept away.

For days he did little but lie on the couch, waiting for the ghost he had become to return to some semblance of humanity and unusually for him, slept. It was the single most inactive moment of his cluttered, hyper-active life. He had never before lain on a couch for days on end. All he felt was washed white with fear, disappointment, emotional loss and confusion.

Shame and embarrassment at what had happened meant it would be weeks before he felt comfortable with the children he had largely brought up on his own and who he had once been inseparable from.

His suddenly quiet life could hardly have been a greater contrast to the amphetamine and alcohol fueled nights he had spent with handsome young men or in the easy company of aging prostitutes, behavior which had made him the subject of some infamy.

His Happiness Trap had just about killed him. As Dr Russ Harris in the book of the same name wrote: “We lead our lives ruled by many unhelpful and inaccurate beliefs about happiness — ideas widely accepted by society because ‘everyone knows they are true’. On the surface, these beliefs seem to make good sense… But these erroneous beliefs are both the cause of and the fuel for a vicious cycle, in which the more we try to find happiness, the more we suffer. And this psychological trap is so well hidden, we don’t even have a clue that we’re caught and controlled by it.”

Michael barely said a word for days. He was in no mood to talk to anyone he knew; and particularly not to someone like his mother who, like most matriarchs, had an extra-sensory perception about their off-springs’ states of mind.

She was quietly concerned, made sure he was fed but said little. There was only one comment on his depleted physical and mental state: that he was the worst she had ever seen him and he should probably be in hospital, if her religion had not forbidden belief in conventional medicine, it being God’s work to cure the sick.