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.”
Thirteen.
The next morning Johan tried to go to Chinatown without me. One of his dive team in Myanmar had a relative who owned a shop there, and Johan had promised to deliver jaggery balls to the owner’s five-year-old son.
I should have been suspicious—he never normally tried to do anything without me. But I wasn’t looking for signs. I was just on holiday in Bangkok, absurdly happy to see him after an absence of nearly three weeks.
And so, when he suggested I go for a massage or even a sleep while he made the delivery, I refused. “Since when was I someone who gets massages?”
Johan laughed. “You need a massage more than anyone I know, Carrie Cole. But that aside, Chinatown is intense. And the first thing you said when you woke up was, ‘I am jet-lagged to all hell, go away and stop talking to me.’ ”
That silenced me. I loved the way he quoted my own unreasonable words back to me. I loved that nothing seemed to disturb him the way it did me, nothing seemed to linger for long. “OK,” I conceded. I triedand failed to stop myself smiling. “But I’m here to seeyou. Let’s go to Chinatown together now. Then get a massage together later.”
—
He was right, of course. I wasn’t ready for Chinatown. I was still suspended in the woozy chamber of jet lag, unready for a place in which nothing—absolutely nothing, not one sight or sound—was identifiable. It was an entirely foreign world within an already foreign world, nothing like the orderly Chinatown I’d visited in London with Maya and Mum. This place was teeming, the streets lined with shops selling items I couldn’t ever hope to recognize, the air perilous with new, strange smells. Dead, plucked ducks hung in windows with their beaks folded and clipped down; intestines were coiled next to birds’ nests made of swallow saliva. Unfamiliar vegetables were being chopped on aluminum tables out in the street while black pigeons fought over the spills. People, people everywhere, eating bowls of noodle soup, dried fish, white sticky globes in stews.
Every now and then I would see something familiar—the wordfish, a pile of Dove soaps in a shop window—but beyond those few token things, I could have been on the moon. I held onto Johan’s hand as he ducked under verandas and stepped over stray dogs.
“OK?” he asked.
“Never better.”
He just laughed, as usual.
After ten minutes’ walk through that hot, unfamiliar-smelling air, Johan found what he was looking for: a café bar selling cups and bowls of something milky. “This is it,” he said, pleased, although something about his body language felt off. He was looking at a shop across the road, a dark, unlit cavern of a place with what looked like deep fat fryer baskets hanging around the doorway. Near the entrance a man crouchedon the floor, welding what I thought might be a large galvanized watering can.
I looked around the café bar. The walls were white, with painted pictures of happy people drinking the milky substance out of cups. Every seat was taken, even though it was ten in the morning. The white liquid must be good. It was being slurped with straws, eaten from bowls with spoons, with or without floating balls. The menu featured several hundred different pictures, none of which my brain recognized.
“It’s a soy milk bar,” Johan said. “My colleague told me I had to come here for…hang on.” He consulted his phone. “For a cold soy milk with soft tofu and a hot patongo.” He glanced around at a metal cabinet by the door, packed high with golden fried balls of something. “Bingo! That’s the patongo. Kind of like a doughnut, with a coconut dip. Apparently they’re sensational. Can you order for us, and I’ll drop off the jaggery balls? It’s the shop across the road.”
He pointed at the deep fat fryer basket place. Surprised, I looked across at it again. The walls and counters were lined with strange pieces of metal, possibly for catering.
“Your dive colleague knows those guys?”
