Michele – FEEDBACK PLEASE

Michele – FEEDBACK PLEASE 2 chapters

I heard later that it often starts like this. A perfectly beautiful day, clear and full of promise. The sun shining. You are deeply in love with life, perhaps also with someone you have recently fallen for, and you are quietly savoring the moment, reveling in how recent events have turned like a field of golden sunflowers towards you. You feel smugly blessed by all the gods who may or may not exist. There is a glow about the day. A self-indulgent openness as you sip your coffee, the silk of your nightgown sliding sensuously over your skin as you sit on the high stool at the kitchen counter.

The next moment, all is chaos. The men at the door banging. I open it in all innocence. They hurtle in armed to the teeth with sub machine guns and night sticks and fists and masculine bravado. Leering, they wrench my hands behind me to handcuff me, and my dressing gown falls open, revealing my breasts. Grabbing papers from the table, the desk, they scoop up my computer, they shout at me in Thai and bad English. I’m pushed, my breasts still showing, out the door and trapped between them as they guffaw to each other in the tiny apartment elevator. Then shoved, stumbling into a waiting police van, which in reality is just a pick-up truck with a cage in the back, I am zip-strapped to the floor. People on the street stand frozen in various postures holding tightly to the hands of their children, huddling in horror as they watch the foreign lady be taken away.

Now I wait, pacing the crammed prison cell. Angry. Frightened. Isolated by language. I don’t even know what I am waiting for. For some clarity first of all, some logical reason as to why I am here in this nightmare instead of my beautiful apartment. When the van arrived at the prison, a group of hard-faced women stripped and searched me, then threw me a crumpled pile of prison clothes. The uniform, designed for tiny Thai women, was almost as obscenely revealing as the dressing gown I was arrested in. I have no phone, no way of contacting anyone. I keep asking to call my embassy, but there has been no communication since I was thrown into this cell. There are at least two dozen other women in the room, one suckling a sickly baby at her breast. The women have given me space—although there is precious little of that. At first I refused to sit on the filthy ground, but now exhausted I squat on my heels, my back pressed up against the cold unpainted cement wall.

I am given a small blanket, and as it nears nine o’clock (I can barely see a giant clock on a wall down the hallway) the women begin to arrange themselves for the night. I can’t believe it. Like sardines in some kind of insane parody of cooperation, everyone lies on the same side (the left) and pushes up against the back of the person ahead. There is no possibility of turning over, of lying on my back or switching sides. Jammed up against a woman who smells of rotting teeth and indigestion - not surprising considering the horrendous food we were given for supper, and another with bony knees spooning up behind me. We are within inches of an open toilet. I want to retch. I squeeze my eyes shut when someone comes and sputters in loose flatulence over the open hole. All I can do now is pray that someone knows I am here. But who would? And then it hits me. Someone has turned me in. Who or how, I have no idea. The only option while I lie sleepless in this hell hole, is to figure out who amongst the people who know about my business would have had me thrown in jail.

So, let’s go back to the beginning and try to unravel this mess…

One Year Earlier

I stare at the multi-coloured arc of broccoli, carrots, beans and shrimp flying through the air and expertly caught by a tiny brown man wielding an enormous long-handled wok. His culinary juggling act is doing its job and a crowd has gathered, tourists oohing and aahing while capturing it all on their phones while locals form an ever-lengthening queue to place their orders.

And, while it smells delicious, I turn away bored and miserable. For the past month, I’ve been eating at places like this all across Bangkok. And it’s true that it’s remarkably delicious, but at this point, even the playful street circus is beginning to wear on my nerves. I’m tired of all the grease. I’m tired of everything fried. I’m tired of…all of it!

What I want right now is something I can ill afford: a nice cool glass of white wine and a beautiful, classy rooftop lounge to enjoy the view while I nibble at some equisite, exotic delicacy designed as much for beauty as for taste. But instead, day after day, meal after meal, I find myself perching precariously on yellow plastic stools, rubbing elbows with work-weary noodle-slurping laborers as scooters and cars wheeze gasoline fumes onto our meals. I am not used to being poor. I have never been poor. But here I am, counting my last few Bhat and wondering how on earth I am going to get by.

One thing I do know for sure, I am not going to ask anyone for money. Certainly, not that bastard Maurice, who I had been sleeping with and promoting his artwork full time without getting a single euro for my efforts for the past three years. Sure, he never let me go hungry and constantly said, “Here honey, go buy yourself something sexy,” as he handed me his credit card, knowing my weakness for designer clothes. But when I discovered that my shopping sprees were simply opportunities for him to hop into bed with his latest artist’s model, I finally had had enough. With only a couple of hundred euros over airfare, I got as far away from him as I possibly could. Which was why I was here in Bangkok.

On this particular day, an unhelmeted teenager veered around a gaggle of dazed tourists, and, losing control, drove the front wheel of his scooter into the table where I was sitting eating pad thai along with a couple of other street diners. The table - an easily collapsible, folding one - was thrown to one side and my neighbour’s meal of hot spiced shrimp and vegetable curry went hurtling out of his hands, skidded over the edge of the table and landed in a fiery hot splash of greasy lumps and bright red broth straight into my crotch, and then flowed like some kind of obscene menstral mishap down the inseam of my new white pants. “Fuck,” I exploded in shock. “What the hell!” I turned to shout at the teen who was scrambling to heave his scooter backward. He gave me a look of horror, and then, spinning in a circle, he gunned it down the street. The owner of the stall rushed over with a rag to try and wipe off the food, but it only made things much worse. Shaking off any more attempts to help, I stormed away. At this point, there was nothing else to do, but go back to the dirt-cheap women’s hostel I was staying in several subway stops away and change into clean clothes.

I knew I was probably destroying the expensive fabric as I furiously scrubbed soap into the ballooning red and orange stains on my formerly gorgeous pants. Tears of frustration ran down my face, ruining my makeup. “God damn it,” I raged, my roommate giving me plenty of space as I flung clothes across the room looking for something clean and presentable to wear. When I reached the bottom of my suitcase and saw the soft pink silk dress that had been my last shopping splurge still wrapped in tissue and tied with the grey satin ribbons, I burst into tears. This dress alone could have me living high on the hog for a month in this city. Well, hell and damnation. I was going to put it on and hit the city. I checked my wallet. I could afford one fancy drink. And a drink was exactly what I needed right now.

And that, my friends, was how I found myself strolling like an heiress into the sumptuous lobby of the Chatrium Riverside Hotel, the place where my world would turn around.

END OF CHAPTER TWO

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