A Happy Ending Or The Beginning Of The End

Amusingly, H (ex-GF, see first Tears Not Shed submission) seems to have had a make-over and cut back on the alcohol, plus found a serious sponsor. For someone nearer fifty than forty she appears to be in reasonable shape – certainly compared to British women of a similar age – and her nice (surface) temperament must shock foreigners in a bar scene that has gone all hardcore. I did not ask her to marry me (until it was too late) because of all the red flags and I have only come across one Thai woman (C) who I would have immediately married regardless of the consequences.

C was already married, at sixteen, to a large German athlete type. C was also the best friend of the gal (M) I was seeing at the time (I was 33 and C was 18 and it was Bangkok in the 1980’s when almost anything seemed possible) and had a sufficient sense of morality to tell me that even if she was not married she would not upset her friend by stealing me off her. M had foolishly introduced me to C and been a bit pissed off at my obvious lust and mad grin.

So C and I sort of ended up as friends and I consoled her when the German husband went off the rails on drugs and madness, telling her that getting married at sixteen it was easy to make a mistake. I was out of lust mode by then, rather like being in the presence of Kate Moss and knowing she was totally out of my league but happy to occasionally enjoy her company (I wish!). Nevertheless, C always hovered somewhere in the back of my mind and new girls were compared to her and found lacking, very unfair to them but I can’t help having my brain seared by an astonishing beauty, can I? I was still locked into that jaw-dropping moment I first saw her!

C ended up taking her husband back to Germany, rather like one might take a disgruntled child back to its parents, and living there long enough to get a German passport. I did meet her in Bangkok on one occasion, this time she had hooked up with an even larger and younger Teutonic lad (I was definitely not her type) and her English was underlaid with an ugly German accent but she still looked totally stunning, at 30, in the way that the gals sometimes did back then – five foot nothing, 40 kgs of leanness and cheekbones that cut ice. Her boyfriend had a menial job back home and was likely to drag her down into a domestic abyss, except she was unable to bear children…

Fast forward to August this year, a heated day between endless rain down on the (UK) southern coast and I seemed to be back on a roll, selling my house at the top of the market and buying a villa on the outskirts of Alicante, Spain – I had enough dosh to sort out a permanent visa there. Contracts on the sale had been exchanged and I had two weeks until the money was in my bank. What could possibly go wrong? A detached villa on the Costa Blanca, walking distance to one of the tram stations between Alicante and Benidorm, cost a third of what I got for my house in Blighty and the exchange rate against the Euro was tolerable. The new villa, admittedly, was barely habitable but renovating it would give me something to do.

One of the few advantages of being nearer to seventy than sixty is free bus travel, and having already sold off my vehicles and most of my personal possessions I availed myself of the free travel to have a last look around the coastal towns. To be honest, somewhat dismal compared to what is on the Spanish costa but sitting upstairs on a bus does give you an interesting view of the young ladies cavorting on the pavement.

It was a weird day, as if the gods were taunting me. The bus had stopped for a driver change (they don’t seem to work for more than 30 minutes at a time, for some reason) and an absolutely divine Thai (I think) lady was spied on the pavement. Luckily I had my sunglasses on so the naked lust was well hidden but bloody hell… And then another Thai lady boarded the bus, tattoos snaking out of a tank top that showed off pert breasts and large nipples. I could guess where she spent her youth until she got lucky, judging by the huge diamond engagement ring she sported…

She sped off into the distance when I got off at my destination, excited and disgruntled in equal part. I was halfway to incanting that I wished H was here but managed to change the name to C – you have to be careful what you wish for, in my extensive experience. After a wander around the town and walk along the seafront, admiring the young ladies in bikinis – about as close as I can get to a go-go bar these days – but you can’t linger or they will think you are a pervert and god knows what would happen if you got an obvious erection. Certainly not a happy ending.

Back on the bus, full of people my own age trying to soak up meaningless time and not one of them of any sexual interest. BTW, I am often chatted up by elderly ladies, divorcees who managed to make off with most of the loot, but poison dwarfs to my eyes. Halfway to my destination, almost nodding off from the sheer boredom of it all, I was startled into alertness by a scream and an Asian lady pointing her finger at me whilst her face dissolved into a movie star smile. In fact, the gesture was identical to a photo (a real photograph, pre-digital) I have from the late eighties in which C and M posed for a shot, a moment of possibility etched in film. The elderly horde on the bus adjusted their hearing aids, hopeful of some free entertainment, shocked and horrified that a woman under fifty would show interest in a male who was nearly seventy. C was actually 52 but could pass for forty to my besotted eyes.

And there we were, right back to where we had left off, both with tales of woe to exchange. Mine mostly in my last contribution. She had ended up tiring of Germany and jumped at the chance of escaping to the UK with a chap on a Stag do (not the one getting married). She had somehow gone from large athletic types to a thickset, almost dwarfish, guy who was almost my age, which immediately pissed me off, although I was “enjoying” the company of H at the time. The dwarf looked awfully like an elderly version of someone who lived around the corner from me and used to shout abuse when I walked home from school, when I was about seven, and once chased after me. When he had me cornered against the front door of the parental home, he tried to kick me but I caught his foot and threw him on his back just as my mother opened the door to find out why someone was swearing like a docker. He left me alone after that and the last I heard of him was that he had been put in prison after trying to take down a petrol station with a sawn-off shotgun.

Too much of a coincidence and his name did not match but he was nevertheless in prison after killing someone who looked at him the wrong way and C had divorced him. We both seemed to have terrible taste in partners but C now had British, German and Thai passports – in some ways she was very intelligent but in others… C had invested all her money in Isarn land and built a house (minor mansion from the photos) there for her retirement (she reckoned she had been a sales lady in various shops, but who knows…), all in her mother’s name… her mother had passed away but left the land and house to her much younger husband (not C’s father), basically wiping out 30 years of work! Such was the loss of face, she did not want to visit Thailand again, which was fine by me.

C was working in a nail saloon that I had walked past many times, merely noting that it was run by Asians but of no real interest to me, and sharing a house with a mixture of Thais and Filipinas who were mostly care workers of one sort or another – plenty of money to be made even at minimum wage as long as you worked the hours and managed to keep the rent and food costs down – there were about ten girls packed into a three bedroom terraced house that cost £800 a month. Three or four gals to a bed, lovely! Two of the gals were dating Brits, the rest had husbands and kids back home who consumed most of their money at an exponential rate. They could have multiplied their income by a factor of ten if they went over to the dark side and it was reassuring to see that C had settled in amongst them rather than ended up living with a load of massage gals.

C was the eldest but had the best figure and most beautiful face (almost another species) – she was a vegetarian and didn’t drink alcohol. A stark contrast to the Filipinas who slurped at endless bowls of gruel and proudly patted their ever expanding stomachs. They were not impressed with me at all, far too old, skinny and hard blue eyes that frightened rather than excited them – I must admit I have the same effect on the local yokels who sometimes collapse in a drunken and drugged haze on my garden gate, they soon piss off despite being a lot larger and younger than me. But C does not seem to see me like that, I guess I look at her in an entirely different way – the big grin on my face completely out of my control.

M – C’s best friend back in the eighties – had died in a motorcycle accident when she was forty, run over by a lorry that didn’t even bother to stop. The mind of the Thai sisterhood works in weird ways and it would not have surprised me if C had still resisted me if M was still alive! But she wasn’t. C could not believe that I still had that photo of her and M – the sort of little detail that lets you worm your way into the heart of an Asian woman. Anyone looking at the photo would guess that C was the girlfriend of the photographer rather than the sullen looking M, so full of joy and happiness in that moment. Until I met C, I thought M a beautiful and sexy creature but her features looked crude in comparison. One thing led to another, as it does, and C still had the heated passion of a teenager – as I had always suspected.

She moved out of the rented house, complaining the Filipinas were constantly screaming at her that she could do a lot better than me, into my detached residence as the clock ticked down for a fast exit to Spain (her German passport being a lot more useful than the British one, post Brexit). Her presence had the effect of completely wiping all my past sexual adventures out of my mind, blurring faces and bodies… my friends were shocked by my appearance, wondering how I had managed to drop ten or twenty years off my features – one reckoned he had never seen me smile before!

Being of a paranoid nature it did occur to me as a bit of a coincidence that a Thai woman I had long admired turned up just as I was coming into a large chunk of money and I could even conjure, in my mind, a series of connections between H and some other girlfriends that might lead to C. But as I said she was the one woman I would go for regardless of the consequences… One of the disadvantages of being nearer to seventy than sixty is that there is always the chance that if you get down on one knee you may not be able to get up again but in the grand scheme of things that was one risk I was more than willing to take…

The author of this article can be contacted at : tearsnotshed@gmail.com