Chapter Twelve
Twelve.
It’s impossible to limit Thailand to just words, Johan emailed the night before I flew out to meet him.
Thailand is a feeling. It’s all your senses working at once.
Even when you’re far away from the smell of cooking, or flowers, or drains, or exhaust fumes, it has its own unique smell.
You’ll see things you’ve never seen before and you’ll hear things you’ll never hear anywhere else.
And the things you will taste! It’s the finest food on earth. I love you. Fly safe.
We had been together three months, and I was intoxicated.
Much to my mother’s disappointment, I’d shelved plans to work abroad in favor of a surgical reg job at St. Mary’s in Paddington and I’d moved in—officially now—to Johan’s flat.
My core training was over and I had three weeks of total freedom before I began my specialist training. Life felt very sweet.
The taxi ride from Bangkok airport was everything Johan had said it would be.
Illuminated signs and video screens blazed through tangled cables, dank alleys, traffic lights clogged with tuk-tuks.
On the radio, the Black Eyed Peas and Eminem segued into Thai folk with quivering, melancholic female vocals.
At a busy intersection I opened my window and damp heat rolled in with the smell of sewage and burned sugar.
An advertising screen across the road showed a bunch of men dressed as chickens.
Behind them, high-rise blocks reached upward, holding balcony after balcony of clothes drying on hanging rails.
The advertising screen changed, offering sweets, then beauty products, then something unidentifiable in a carton. Everywhere, rainpools steamed. It was monsoon season and the bloated sky seemed ready to explode.
We’d booked a midrange hotel two streets back from the river, somewhat misleadingly named the River Paradise Lodge.
It was a nice place, though: a terra-cotta low-rise centered around a pretty courtyard where signs instructed me to “deeply relax and enjoy the bounty.” I tried to enjoy the bounty for a while, but within fifteen minutes I was on my feet.
The afternoon was burning on toward evening and I wanted to see more, to get some sense of scale.
There was still time to kill before Johan arrived.
After a short walk I found myself at the edge of the Chao Phraya River, in the shadow of a five-star megahotel.
I stood by the brown mass of water for a while, watching tourist boats, army barges, river taxis plow slowly upstream.
The sky was covered in thick, ominous cloud and the air so humid my clothes were already damp to touch.
I felt small, standing there. As a core trainee that feeling hadn’t been unusual, but I’d still been on the front line, making a difference to peoples’ lives. Here, I was no more than a speck.
I went back to the River Paradise to check if Johan’s flight had landed. It had, twenty-seven minutes ago, which meant my wait would soon be over. My body began to hum with anticipation.
I walked to the backpacker area, down Soi Rambuttri and into the Khao San Road.
I wandered in a daze through stalls of belts, T-shirts, friendship bracelets.
There were kiosks selling pad thai for seventy pence and massage shops full of seemingly enormous European girls being massaged by petite Thai women.
I hovered next to a bar with free Wi-Fi to check my phone but there was nothing from Johan yet, just a string of emails from Imperial College Trust about my contract and an offer of sex from a friend at medical school who went through his little black book of commitment-phobic women on a monthly rotation.
I ignored it. I’d be with Johan soon. I couldn’t stop smiling.
Darkness began to settle, although if the air had cooled I couldn’t feel it.
Under strings of fairy lights there were stalls of sliced fruit tightly cling filmed in ice carts, marinated balls of unidentifiable meats on sticks, piles of knockoff designer handbags wrapped in cellophane.
Above me twisted the same filthy tangle of cables and wires I’d followed on every street from the airport.
The air smelled of meat, unfamiliar herbs and spices, incense.
I needed to eat. I wandered back to Soi Rambuttri, where I’d feel less conspicuous eating alone if Johan didn’t turn up. I sent him a message from a pretty restaurant under a spreading tree, sharing my location.
I was still heavy with exhaustion and brain fog.
It had been many years since I’d given up caffeine, beyond the occasional cup of tea—any kind of stimulant impeded my steady-handedness as a surgeon—but in this moment I could readily understand why many of my colleagues survived on coffee, Red Bull, even the odd recreational drug.
The humidity thickened in my lungs. I couldn’t think straight. Where was he? It was out of character for him not to message me. He’d been messaging nonstop from Yangon Airport.
At the end of the street, some fifteen meters away, there was a kebabed alligator on a cart. I watched the customers—mostly male tourists—as they laughed, fascinated, terrified, watching their dinner being carved into a plastic box.
A slim girl gave me a laminated menu full of amusing English translations and photographs of food.
Across the road, two meaty-armed men made short work of long glasses of Chang, filmed with condensation.
Between them sat a local girl of indeterminate age.
They both had a hand on her thighs. Revolted, I turned back to my menu.
The time difference, the adrenaline, the sheer otherness of this place was making me panic.
Where was he? Had something happened? It was nearly eight thirty.
The waitress came back and I ordered green curry, because it felt like an obvious thing to do. She brought me a vodka and Coke, which I knew to be a mistake the moment I smelled it.
I leaned forward on my knees, trying to clear my head. Maybe I should go back to the hotel.
Then, suddenly: him. Kneeling down in front of me, brilliant eyes smiling. His hand, so familiar, on my hot, tired leg.
“I’m sorry, Carrie. It took ages to get my dive kit through customs. Then I had to get it into a storage place.”
He kissed me, asked how I was feeling, and I reflexively answered, “Good.”
“Really?” He laughed gently.
I shook my head.
He didn’t need to ask what was wrong. He’d done jet lag before, many times. He just came and sat beside me at our little pink table.
“I ordered food,” I said, pathetically. “I should have waited, I’m sorry. I just felt…”
“Hungry and tired,” Johan offered, and I nodded.
He took my hand. On the screen across the road Robbie Williams was riding a black horse through a snowy mountain range, looking brooding and ridiculous.
I could vaguely hear the words of his song above the voices around us, the sounds of people from around the world coming together to eat and drink.
A stray dog paused to look at us for a moment before moving on to eat some spilled rice.
“We’ll take it easy,” Johan said, smiling right at me, and I had never loved him more. “Food, sleep, some carefully considered sex, minimal sightseeing. Until Carrie Cole is back in the saddle, and then I imagine she’ll have her own agenda.”