Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (5 page)

hammering. My brother had not gone abroad with us because he was away at university, so I bore the brunt of my disappointment alone. It rained on our return. I was
17
.

Having missed my O level examinations by moving to America and then leaving there before I got the chance to finish high school meant that I had no academic qualifications. Sixth form college appeared and disappeared in a fit of my academic rejec- tion.Who needed qualifications anyway? And I wanted to prove it. Following six months of studying for exams I should have taken two years earlier the head of the college called me to his office and asked if I was happy.

‘No,’ I replied,‘as it happens, I’m not.’

Politely he asked me if I’d rather leave. I did and the sense of relief was wonderful. I was free. I was an adult.

Shortly before leaving the college I started going out with Spike, a wild-looking, unconventional and rugged
37
-year-old father of a four-year-old daughter. He was perfect.

‘How old did you say he was?’ asked my dad, his eyes squinting as I spat out yet another lie.

It was a terrible time for my parents, especially my dad, and I can see now that it wasn’t right.They couldn’t stand Spike but I didn’t care.

Once again my parents moved house, this time to Aberdeen in Scotland, and I decided I couldn’t cope with another move. Winchester, then America, then Winchester again. Now Aberdeen.Where the hell was Aberdeen anyway?

So my parents left for Scotland and I rented a room in the house of an old lady whose son was a transvestite. I would like to say it was great, I really would like to, but we never hit it off and I decided to leave.After moving out I lived with Spike for two and a half years and we shared his passion for antiques. Before long we set up our own business stripping pine furniture and, later, once I realised that Spike was not the man of my dreams, I set up on my own buying and selling antiques and bric-à-brac. For a while I

lived a peripatetic lifestyle moving to Salford, then Halifax before settling inYorkshire, in the house I live in now. It is a small, two-up and two-down terraced house facing south onto the CalderValley. I bought it from the landlord after renting it briefly and set about fixing it up. Before long I was living happily alongside my beautiful border collie,Kara, two cats and a parrot. I doubt I was ever so happy. Around November
1990
I was working at home, not particu- larly looking forward to another inevitable freezing winter standing at markets and fairs, hoping for a decent sale. A black sports car pulled up outside and one of my friends, Shanty, jumped out of the passenger side.A rather dashing looking man, with jet-

black hair, stepped out the driver’s side.Who was he?

Shanty brought him into the house, introduced him as John, and promptly drove off in his car. It was a rather strange introduc- tion but given my lack of convention I was curious to find out what this was all about. John explained. His girlfriend of two years had just left him and, in a fit of desperation, he had promptly bought a flight ticket to Thailand with the intention of drowning his sorrows on a tropical island in the sun.

In a few days he would be travelling there but he had got cold feet about going alone and wanted a companion; none of his friends could travel at such short notice. Shanty couldn’t go either; however, she knew someone who might be interested in going.

‘Travelling companions,’ said John, matter-of-factly.‘No strings attached. I’ll even lend you the ticket money.’

In that moment my life began mapping itself out for me. I was lured by the magnetism of curiosity. Within two days I had my visa, enough spending money for a few months, and someone to rent my house. My best friend, Holroyde, would take care of the dog. Shanty would take care of the cats and collect the rent from the house to keep up the mortgage repayments. I began dreaming of tigers, elephants, rain forests and sandy beaches. It seemed like such a wild thing to do; I didn’t even know the man I was going with.

Most of my friends thought my trip was a fantastic idea. Holroyde had some reservations.‘Please don’t go, Sandra,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a strange feeling about this.’

The trick about premonitions is knowing when to listen to them and when to ignore them.They happen all the time.Yet even the most hideous premonition would not have prevented me going. I said all my goodbyes.

‘Be careful,’ said my mum.‘See you soon.’

Two hours into the flight and John was driving me crazy.While he spent the entire journey in his seat, I spent the flight sitting next to the toilet looking out of the little window at the back of the plane.

Two middle-aged men on the plane told me they were going to Bangkok for the girls. ‘Best women in the world, Thai women,’ said one.‘They’ll do anything for a few baht.’

I told them I was going to Thailand to see tigers and elephants and the jungle.‘You’ll see them,’ they said,‘or at least parts of them, in tourist shops in Bangkok.’

Suddenly I had a feeling I was travelling with the wrong person, to the wrong country, and for the wrong reasons. I took a drink.

It’ll be fine, Sandra.

Two months was a long time to be away. I would cope.

three

Opium Mountain

I have only been away for two months but it feels like a lifetime.

Life here is wonderful and I am enjoying Thailand far more than I ever imagined. I have decided to stay on and look for a job.

Thailand has taught me so much … life is a gift and being here, in what is considered the drug centre of the world, I no longer need or want to smoke marijuana. I love the food, the people, their culture, the climate and everything about this lovely country. The mountains were wonderful and the beaches are more beautiful than I ever imagined possible. I love it here.

I love you both Sandra

Letter home, late January
1991

Before long it was dark. No twilight, no warning, just pitch dark, as if someone had switched off a giant city light. Stupidly, we had decided to save the taxi fare and walk to Bangkok. An hour later and we didn’t appear to be anywhere nearer the neon and gleaming, flickering city that lay up ahead. We had landed in the darkness of another planet.

A battered, white Toyota pulled up along side us. The driver, a squatting gargoyle with teeth like crumbling tombstones, beamed out and asked,‘Where you go?’

‘Bangkok.We are going to Bangkok.’

The driver looked bemused.‘Bangkok very big, you walk long time. I take you.
150
baht?’

We hadn’t actually given much thought to where we would stay. John and I both were totally unprepared and knew nothing about the place. My dreams were of jungles and tigers and a part of me had imagined they would both be waiting for me when I arrived.The last thing on my mind was urban chaos. Quickly, we threw our small bags into the back of the car and jumped in.

‘
Wow!
’ I squealed,‘This is amazing!’ Giant, colourful billboards were everywhere, covered in pictures of smiling Thais looking clean and exotic. Shops were crammed full of television sets, orna- ments, toys, clothes, shoes – anything and everything.There were children, so many beautiful children, in their school uniforms; blue and white for the girls and beige and white for the boys. In and out of the traffic we weaved.

With increasing degrees of weariness police, wearing skin-tight uniforms and mirrored sunglasses, attempted to direct vast queues of vehicles. The chainsaw-like drone of the traffic grew louder. The heat penetrated my skin.

An old man – his hands fat and plump, like overripe bananas – waddled under the weight of a heavy load. Steam erupted from pots cooking on charcoal fires and glass cases held noodles of all shapes and sizes. Bangkok was hot, mercilessly so, chaotic, exotic and slightly uneasy. I was drawn to it like a pretty pink moth.

John was still a problem. The doubts I had on the flight over seemed to multiply by the time we left the airport. He was loud, arrogant and self-centred. Like an oversized child he irritated me constantly throughout the journey. Was it simply nerves on his part? Somehow I doubted it. I decided not to stay in his company for much longer than I needed.

‘No room, no room.’ Because I was young and blonde, wearing tight trousers, no bra and a small T-shirt, most guesthouse owners, I later learned, saw me as competition for their own girls and, after

about an hour of searching for accommodation, the two of us had almost given up.

John had been given the name of a hotel, but when we arrived it proved far too expensive so we tried to find somewhere else in the Soi Nam du Plee area of Bangkok; this was the ‘old travellers’ district where backpackers could find cheap rooms and even cheaper girls for the duration of their stay.We hadn’t known at the time but this was one of the many red-light areas the city boasted. The Thai woman sitting outside Anna’s Guesthouse eyed me with suspicion, but looked at John and told him yes she had a room, but it was downstairs.The woman, who was swigging from a bottle of cheap whisky, was fat and wore a tight-fitting pair of

shorts, plastic flip-flops and a Manchester United football shirt. ‘You look at room?
100
baht a day.’ Sitting alongside her was a

very blonde, very suntanned European girl. Neither of them smiled, but the blonde sniggered as we accepted the offer to look around.

The light was on. It was nothing more than a square box but didn’t look so bad for the money, so we took it. John immediately left to go for a beer and I paid the woman.The room was roughly two pounds a day.

I showered in the toilet that doubled as the shower area. The cold water was a welcome relief from the heat. Standing there naked over the drain in the floor, with cracked tiles all around me, I realised how pale my skin looked. Brown skin or white skin? In Thailand it said everything about you. I scrubbed my skin twice as vigorously in preparation for some colour.

While I stood scrubbing my body, massive, dark-brown insects scuttled around my feet. I was horrified. Back in the room, I switched on the light and was greeted by hundreds of these crea- tures from the shower, running off the bed, scurrying out of my bag and across the floor. No wonder the blonde woman outside had sniggered.

John was sitting in a bar with a middle-aged European man and

a young Thai girl aged about
16
or
17
, under an open-air canopy, in the car park of a brothel. A Chinese action movie was playing on a television screen.The girl sat next to the man, feeding him. Delicately, she nudged the food into neat piles on his plate as she prepared each mouthful, while speaking gently inThai. Her words sounded pretty, like an Asian nursery rhyme.

We drank cold beer. John became more obnoxious and loud with each bottle.

A man rode by on a bicycle, carrying a mangle and a rack. He wore a floppy straw hat, grimy shorts and a pair of flip-flops. He smiled broadly as he stopped and put down the rack and started rolling what looked like thin cardboard through the mangle.What was he doing? After a few minutes he passed me a paper bag con- taining the mangled cardboard and a small bowl made from a banana leaf full of thick chilli sauce.‘Yes,’ I thought,‘this is the real Thailand, at last.’ The cycle man and the barman both looked bemused as I gazed into my bag of delights.

It was dried, hot squid, with the texture of leather. It was foul so I gave it to the young Thai girl who was feeding the oafish European. The girl smiled and munched happily. I really was a long way from home.

John and I had to share the bed. He slept on one side while I slept on the other. Eventually I nodded off only to be awakened by several hundred insects touring my body. Over coffee the follow- ing morning, I really did consider taking the next flight home. Why was I here? After all, I couldn’t stand John and I didn’t know a single soul.What on earth would I do next?

John wanted to go south to the islands and he went off to buy a plane ticket; I couldn’t afford to fly down so I planned to travel elsewhere. Although I was relieved about leaving him, it took a deep breath to walk away.We said our ‘goodbyes’ and John disap- peared into a crowd.

‘Where are you going?’ said a girl, as she was getting off the bus that would take me north.

‘Chiang Mai,’ I replied.

‘No,’ she said,‘go to Wisid’s in Chiang Rai. It’s a great place.’

Chiang Rai was roughly a
15
-hour journey north of Bangkok and Wisid’s is situated in the province of northern Thailand, bordering Laos and Burma. I was sure there would be elephants, jungles and tigers.

With a guy I had met briefly in Bangkok, who was travelling north, we eventually found ourselves in a place five miles west of Chiang Rai. The little town I was entering lurched precariously close to being ancient.

We had taken a ride in one of the multicoloured, two-seater rickshaws peddled by an old local man who looked barely able to muster the energy to walk.A flash of dirt slipped past as he hauled us along the bumpy roads and I felt guilty watching the muscles of the old man’s neck and back rippling against his soaking T-shirt. He trundled on regardless.

When we reached the gates of a small wooden house on stilts our driver smiled, such a beautiful, charming smile, but his face was still puffing. His arms sweated and his stomach heaved. The fare was just
40
baht – about
70
pence – but I gave him
80
and his

face burst. He put his hands together in the attitude of a prayer and raised his fingers to the tip of his nose. He thanked me,Thai style.

Wisid’s guesthouse was a small, teak-wood building; open underneath for the simple reason that it is never a good idea to sleep at ground level because of scorpions and snakes. A family who spoke reasonable English ran the guesthouse.

It was stunning.There were raised wooden platforms covered in triangular cushions for resting on; there were plants blooming paper-thin, pink flowers. All around songbirds sang in large wooden cages suspended from the balconies, and friendly dogs flopped around in the shade. My room was large and airy with a bed big enough to sleep four people. For the first time since my arrival in Thailand I could relax.