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The Conrad Press - Robin Newbold

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137 pages

English

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'Bangkok Burning' is a brilliantly unsettling thriller about the dark side of desire. It is also something of a warped love letter to a place teeming with a rogues' gallery of characters, for this is not just about one man's struggle but a portrait of a whole city on the brink. Closeted forty-year-old Graham Floyd, trapped by anxiety issues and an abusive marriage, finally escapes, running away from his lifeless existence on a smile and a whim, swapping dreary south London for the brutal chaos of Bangkok. He soon finds himself prey not only to Natasha, the transsexual nightclub schemer he loses his heart to, but in thrall to the slimy American millionaire Svengali who owns her. In a place where Graham is at last true to himself, will he triumph in a fight to the death to get what he really wants?

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Thriller

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Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	01 janvier 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839781551
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Bangkok Burning
Robin Newbold

Bangkok Burning
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com   info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839781-55-1
Copyright © Robin Newbold, 2021
The moral right of Robin Newbold to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For Gil

Ship me somewheres east of Suez,
where the best is like the worst,
where there aren’t no Ten Commandments
an’ a man can raise a thirst.
From Mandalay by Rudyard Kipling.

Chapter one
On the run
G raham knew he only had seven days, just a week to get what he craved – a new life.
A cacophony of voices in pidgin English broke him out of his trance, the grabbing, everywhere hands accosting him as he neared the entrance. He was back, the tawdry plywood exterior looking even poorer than he remembered illuminated by the tacky red neon sign announcing Christie Cabaret Show. Greeted by the same throbbing Thai pop music, beating in time to his heart, the gutter stink of cheap perfume, the place looked much smaller and far more decadent than it had in his mind’s eye over the last few weeks. In his dreams he’d expected to walk in and find her, poised, as if she’d been waiting for him, but Graham felt cheated as he looked around frantically at the other ladyboys. Though how he hated that word, the fact he could possibly be desperate for one of their ilk. Staring out at the braying red-faced punters, Thai girls curled serpent-like around bovine white men, their eyes calculating every move, brains computing every sentence uttered he saw a kind of hell and of Natasha there was no sign.
‘God,’ he said to himself, feeling his muscles tense, mouth desert dry, palms leaking sweat, chewing at nails so destroyed blood was oozing out of them.
‘Can I help you, Sir?’ said not a divine being but a heavily made-up boy.
‘Where’s Natasha?’ he said, wheeling around, scanning the bar again.
‘Natasha?’ said the boy with a shrug.
He flopped down at a bar stool overlooking the ramshackle stage, sighing as the first strains of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ – one of wife Sheila’s favourites – struck up and a ridiculously elaborately dressed ladyboy appeared, lip-synching in all the wrong places.
‘Beer, please,’ said Graham to the boy who’d continued to hover and he was gone with a practised and unnecessary shake of his arse.
‘All right, babe. As one alcoholic would say to another, you look like you need a drink,’ said a man to his right, fruity voice cutting through the din, a gnarled hand seemingly weighed down by a worrying amount of gold jewellery enveloping his arm. ‘Great this, ain’t it.’
‘Graham, what’s yours? Though everyone calls me Gray as in Mr Gray. Like my life,’ he said, turning to look at his new best friend, taking in the yellowing skin which was the hue of old newspapers, the gin-coloured hair.
‘Nigel… Nigel Monroe.’
‘Good to meet you, Nigel Monroe.’
‘You can live like a king ‘ere, dear,’ he said, voice a shouty amalgam of Cockney and camp, raising a glass unsteadily with one hand, patting the boy’s arse with the other. ‘These girls, you see, know what they want and how to get it.’
‘Do you know Natasha?’
‘Let’s see, I’ve been here since 1990, so that’s twenty years now. Twenty bloody years man and boy…’
‘Where were you before?’
‘Before? Was there a before?’ he said, looking out into the middle distance. ‘All over. And you?’
‘South London.’
‘Don’t sound like it.’
‘I don’t have a strong accent. Guess you could say I’m well read. Like my crosswords and that. But, come on, what have you been doing here?’
‘Ah, the first rule of being an expat, never ask that question ‘ere,’ he said, shakily raising a hand. ‘People get offended. But, you know, this and that…’
As he tailed off, Graham sensed regret, his companion staring off beyond the nonsense on stage and into the darkness beyond, as though wondering how he’d ‘lost touch’, so the phrase went, with friends and family, with his roots, with who he actually was, traded it all in for a seat in a dive bar in a city halfway around the world. He didn’t want to bloody end up like that.
‘Listen,’ he said, his turn to put a reassuring hand on his neighbour’s arm. ‘I need to find someone… a girl.’
‘A girl, eh?’ said Nigel, stroking his stubbly chin. ‘And who might she be?’
‘Natasha.’
‘Ha, bullseye,’ he shouted above the din of the warbled bars of Whitney. ‘But she ain’t no girl. Very pretty mind.’
‘So?’
‘And I, eeee-I, will alwayssss love you…’ came the racket from the stage as if to mock Graham, the ladyboy’s eyes boring directly into his, while Nigel had gone back to concentrating on his real interest, the drink in front of him.
‘Very popular that one,’ the old man replied finally, as the seemingly infernal noise from the stage ceased, a mischievous smile lighting up his face. ‘I’d talk to Mark if I was you.’
‘Who the hell is Mark?’ he said, familiar knot of pain across his shoulders, arms trembling.
‘Mark, babe, is the owner of this fine establishment… I told her to engage with the fucking audience, why is she looking at the floor?’ he said, pointing at the ladyboy nominally on stage, for she clearly wasn’t interested, Nigel slamming another empty glass down on the counter.
‘What’s it gotta do with you exactly?’
‘You’re speaking to Nigel Monroe of the Nigel Monroe Dancers fame, West End impresario and choreographer,’ he said, the boy refilling his glass, ushering away another empty bottle of whisky from the scene like an embarrassment.
‘The Nigel Monroe Dancers?’
‘Those big telly shows in the seventies and early eighties. The glitz was personified by the Nigel Monroe Dancers. Even made it on Top of the Pops once,’ he said, spreading his hands as if to reveal a name up in lights but there was only a dark emptiness.
‘I see,’ he said with a tight smile.
‘I’m creative director here.’
‘How about Mark? When can I speak to him?’ he said, wanting to get back to the topic but wondering how someone barely able to raise a glass to their lips through the fog of alcohol could possibly direct anything.
‘He’s around. Probably out back getting hammered again. But he’ll be back. Where else would ‘e be?’ said his companion, patting Graham’s knee.
‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here. What the hell am I thinking?’ he said, though he thought back to when he’d first seen Natasha – her ample, perfectly symmetrical breasts spilling out of a skimpy basque top, crimson lipstick accentuating the lure of her mouth, unruly shock of blonde hair hinting at sexual abandon. Before ‘seduction’ was just a word from the crossword puzzles he obsessed over to distract him from the paucity of his life.
‘Go on then, what’s your story?’
‘Story? There’s no bloody story,’ Graham said above the thumping disco beat, mimicking the palpitations of his heart he’d been suffering the last awful three years, since that day, that bloody day, the bastard day of the accident that changed everything. ‘I made the mistake of coming over here earlier this year with the missus on my fortieth birthday, didn’t I. Natasha, she was giving me the eyes… I couldn’t help myself. We kissed. I can’t stop thinking about it. My life back home in England, it’s so empty.’
‘What about the wife? Kids?’
‘Kids? I don’t even wanna go there, Nige. Another time. But my wife, Sheila, she hates me. We haven’t touched each other in years, bloody years. I sit driving my cab through the night, those cold London nights, rather than go home. It’s freezing on those winter nights with the pissheads getting in, throwing up, running off but I prefer it to her cold, hard back. So bloody cold.’
‘And where you meant to be now?’
‘Told ‘er I was going to Canada to see my brother for a week. He emigrated there years ago but he’s got terminal cancer. All the nonsense about life being too short but it really is.’
‘I know, babe. I know.’
‘Every chance the wife gets she tells me how crap I am, how I don’t amount to anything. She blames me for everything. Is it any wonder I’m having a breakdown? Doctor gave me these pills but I haven’t taken ‘em yet. I feel enough of a bloody failure,’ Graham said, waving the packet of happy pills in the air, defeatedly chucking the box down on the bar, shoulders slumping, blinking back tears, again.
‘Dear, it’s the way it works I’m afraid. Life I mean,’ Nigel said, holding up a placatory hand as he did so. ‘Not being funny but look at yourself in the mirror, look at me… no, go on, I mean take a fucking good look. What could you or I have that could possibly be of interest to these twenty-year-old visions of beauty? It’s not our looks, it’s not our sense of humour, it’s not even our great personalities.’
‘I know but…’ he said, looking out at the lithe bodies on stage, then catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar, the image Nigel had warned him about – and he took in the thinning blond hair only partially disguising the pathetic balding pate, the craggy forehead lined with twenty-plus years of worry, the length of his marriage, the darting, desperate eyes.
‘Graham, ain’t it. You need to hear this and we’re only going to have this chat once. After this, like all of us, you’re on your own,’ said Nigel. ‘It’s a so-called playground for white men, a paradise if you like, but we’ve created a monster. Look around you. I know for a fact most of these boys have several different foreign boyfriends all unaware the other exists, all under the illusion they are paying for little Johnny to go throu