I Fancy A Beer

A short dark story, set in Bangkok

The air in Bangkok was a physical weight, a wet blanket of heat and exhaust fumes that clung to the skin. Tim, a young man from a drizzly English town, felt it pressing in on him as he left the air-conditioned sanctuary of the hotel lobby. He told Clare he needed cigarettes, a weak excuse, but the need to escape—just for an hour—was a sudden, sharp splinter in his mind. Their holiday, planned with meticulous detail by Clare, was suffocating in its perfection. Every temple, every market, every impeccably reviewed restaurant had been a chore, a box to be ticked.

The streets of the Sukhumvit district were a kaleidoscope of neon and shadow. The air hummed with a frantic, clashing energy—the blare of tuk-tuk horns, the sizzle of street food, the syrupy pop music leaking from countless doorways. A shifting guided him, an anonymous current of people, his feet taking him down a soi, a narrow side street that seemed to swallow the city’s noise. The bars here were more insidious, less garish, with dark, anonymous entrances. A hand, moist and insistent, clutched his wrist. A woman’s face, painted and smiling, beckoned him from a doorway. “Handsome man, you want lady? You want good time?” It was the third or fourth time this had happened. He was about to pull his arm free, to retreat to the sterile safety of the hotel, when he saw the sign.

It wasn’t a bar in any traditional sense. A single, flickering red neon palm, the fingers curled inward, was the only illumination above a blacked-out door. No name. Just the symbol. It seemed to promise a different kind of oblivion, a more profound anonymity. He was tired of being Tim, the tourist, Clare’s companion. He just wanted to be a ghost for a while. He pushed the door open.

The interior was a shock of noise and the cloying scent of cheap jasmine perfume and stale beer. A stage dominated the far wall, where three women gyrated with mechanical indifference to a pounding Europop beat. The air was thick, the lighting a low, bloody red. He ordered a Singha, the bottle sweating in his hand, and took a seat at the sticky, dark wood of the bar. The women on stage were grotesquely beautiful, their bodies impossible, their faces masks of calculated allure. He felt a voyeuristic shame, a disgust at his own presence here, yet he couldn’t look away.

He finished his beer and ordered another. The bar was nearly empty, just a few silhouettes at tables in the back. The woman who served him was older, her eyes flat and weary. She gave him a watery smile. “You alone, handsome?” He just nodded, taking a long swallow of the cold lager.

And then the world softened at the edges.

He blinked, but the red lights smeared into crimson rivers. The music became a distant, underwater thumping. He tried to stand, but his legs were filled with sand. He reached for the bar, but his hand seemed to move in slow motion, pushing the glass away. It shattered on the floor. The sound was distant, like a stone dropped into a deep well.

A pair of hands—rough, strong hands—gripped his arms. He tried to speak, to protest, but his tongue was a useless, swollen slug in his mouth. He was lifted, his feet dragging across the sticky floor. The face of the older waitress swam into his vision. She was no longer smiling. Her face was a mask of cold, professional detachment. “You want good time,” she said, but it wasn’t a question. “You get good time.”

He was propelled through a back door, into a fetid alleyway. The smell of rotting garbage and stagnant water was a physical assault, cutting through the fog in his brain for a single, revolting second. He was thrown against a wall, his head cracking against the brick. A man—sallow-skinned, with a shaved head and a gold tooth that glinted in the faint light from a window—stood over him. He grunted something in Thai and then began to go through Tim’s pockets. His wallet, his watch, his phone. All taken. The man glanced down at him, a look of pure contempt on his face, and then spat a thick glob of phlegm onto Tim’s cheek.

He was dumped like rubbish, a discarded tourist in a city that had chewed him up and spat him out in less time than it took to drink two beers. He lay in the gutter, the heat and the stench washing over him, his mind a broken kaleidoscope of flashing red lights and cold eyes.

Back at the hotel, Clare’s worry had curdled into a familiar, icy anger. It was past midnight. Tom’s promised ten-minute cigarette run had stretched into two hours. She’d called his phone twice; it had rung and then gone to a dead, hollow silence. She wasn’t worried for his safety, not really. She was furious at his thoughtlessness, his familiar, infuriating habit of drifting away, leaving her alone with her own meticulous plans.

She opened the “Find My” app on her phone. The little green dot was stationary, pulsing on a screen of a hundred identical streets. It was far from the hotel. In a district she’d been told to avoid. A knot of genuine fear tightened in her stomach. She gathered her things, her jaw set, her eyes cold. She wasn’t going to rescue him. She was going to drag him back by the hair if she had to, to make him see that his pathetic wanderings were an insult to her, to the trip she had so carefully orchestrated.

The taxi ride was a blur of screaming colours and frenetic traffic. She directed the driver with clipped, precise English, her anxiety morphing into a cold, hard fury. The taxi stopped at the entrance to the soi. It looked like a wound in the side of the city, dark and pulsating. She saw the red neon palm. Her tracker showed the dot was somewhere near this place. She paid the driver and stepped out.

The stench of the alley hit her first. Then she saw him. A crumpled heap against the wall, his pale skin luminous in the gloom. For a moment, her heart seized with a genuine, primal terror. She rushed to him, her anger momentarily forgotten. “Tim? Tim!” She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. His head lolled. His eyes were open but unseeing. There was a bloody gash on his forehead. And on his cheek, a drying smear of glistening, yellow-green phlegm.

The sight of that—the brutal, casual degradation of it—triggered something in her. The fear evaporated, replaced by a cold, clear rage that was more potent than anything she had ever felt. It was a feeling of supreme clarity, a sense of righteous purpose. They had not just robbed and beaten him; they had defiled him. They had taken her Tim, her possession, her carefully managed project, and turned him into a piece of street-trash. They had, by extension, insulted her.

She found his phone a few feet away in the muck. The screen was cracked. She pocketed it. Then, leaving him slumped where he was, she walked back to the door of the bar. The red neon palm seemed to be laughing at her now. She pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside.

The place was deserted, save for the old waitress who was counting a stack of grubby baht notes at the bar. She looked up, and for a split second, the mask of professional indifference slipped, revealing a flicker of annoyance. “We closed,” she said.

Clare ignored her, looking around the room. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, took in every detail: the cheap, garish wallpaper, the threadbare velvet curtains, the mechanical figures on the stage now frozen in mid-gyration. Her gaze settled on a control panel near the back of the stage. The main power switch was clearly marked.

“Where is he?” Clare’s voice was unnervingly calm.

The waitress’s face hardened into a sneer. “No farang here. You go out.”

Clare walked to the stage and flicked the main power switch. The music died with a sickening choke. The neon signs went dark. The only light now came from a weak emergency bulb over the bar, casting long, distorted shadows. The silence was thick and sudden, broken only by a panicked shout from a back room. A door burst open, and the sallow-skinned man from the alley emerged, his gold tooth glinting. “What the fuck?” he yelled, his voice a mix of Thai and English. “Who do this?”

Clare watched his approach, her heart a slow, steady drum. He strode up to her, his face inches from hers, his breath a foul gust of whisky and cigarettes. He shoved her, hard. “You pay! You break, you pay!” he snarled.

Clare didn’t move. Her body absorbed the shove. She looked past him, at the other people now emerging from the back. The older waitress, a younger, terrified-looking girl, and another man, thin and twitchy, his eyes darting. The collection of vermin who had preyed on her Tim.

She pulled a small, matte-black canister from her jacket pocket. A canister of industrial-strength pepper spray she’d bought years ago in London and always carried in her bag, a talisman against the city’s imagined threats. She’d never used it.

“Have you ever been in the sun?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “Real sun?”

The man with the gold tooth looked confused for a moment. Before he could react, she sprayed him directly in the face. He screamed, a high, piercing shriek of pure agony. He clawed at his eyes, his skin, the capillaries in his face bursting under the chemical assault, turning him into a weeping, red ruin. He dropped to his knees, howling.

The thin man lunged for her. She pivoted, spraying him too. He stumbled back, howling, his hands a blur of useless motion.

Clare was on the older waitress in an instant. The woman tried to fight, slapping and scratching with her long, fake nails. Clare grabbed her by the hair, a greasy bundle of dyed black, and slammed her head onto the corner of the bar. Once. Twice. The woman went limp. Clare let her drop to the floor like a rag doll.

The younger girl was frozen in a corner, shaking, a whimper caught in her throat. Clare walked over to her. The girl started babbling in Thai, her hands raised in a futile gesture of surrender. “Please, please... no...”

“Did you help him?” Clare asked, her voice as cold as the hotel air-conditioning. “Did you laugh?”

The girl shook her head frantically, tears streaming down her face. “No, no, I just clean! I just clean! Please!”

Clare looked at her, at her innocence, at her pleading eyes. It didn’t matter. She was part of it. She was part of the filth—a receptacle. Clare sprayed the canister directly into her open, screaming mouth. The girl gagged, her body convulsing. She fell, twitching and choking.

Clare stood in the centre of the room, breathing heavily. The silence was profound, broken only by the wet, gurgling sounds of the dying and the whimpering of the blind. She looked at the mess around her. This was her work. This was her will made manifest.

The door to the bar swung open. A dark silhouette filled the frame.

It was Tim. He was swaying, leaning heavily against the doorjamb, clutching his head. “Clare?” His voice was a weak, ragged croak. “What... what happened? I... I feel so sick.” His gaze travelled past her, into the depths of the bar. He saw the figures on the floor, the grotesque tableau of suffering. He saw the blood, the tears, the inhuman mask of the man with the gold tooth, his face a single, silent scream frozen in a mask of red.

His eyes went wide with a horror so absolute it seemed to suck the air from the room. He looked at his girlfriend, the woman who had seemed to be a mere accessory to his life, and for the first time, he saw the perfect, unbreakable blankness in her eyes. He saw the thing he had never seen before: the monster he’d been sleeping next to. She was not a woman. She was a force of nature, a judge, a jury, and an executioner.

Clare smiled at him, a small, soft smile that touched her eyes with chilling tenderness. “I found you,” she said. She crossed the floor, stepping over the prone body of the older waitress without looking down. She took his trembling, clammy hand in hers. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” she said, her voice now warm and almost maternal. “You look like you need a shower. And you have a cut on your head. I’ll look after you.”

Tim could only stare, mute and shaking, as she led him out of the bar and into the still-steaming Bangkok night. The red neon palm flickered once, twice, and then died. As the door closed behind them, sealing the chaos inside, a shrill, frantic screaming began to emanate from the building. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated terror. Tim opened his mouth to speak, to scream, to denounce her, but only a dry, rasping sound came out. His voice was gone. He was broken. He was hers.

Clare walked with him back toward the main street, her hand never leaving his. In the morning, he would be better. She would make sure of it. She would take him to the hospital for his head. She would bring him soup. She would love him. She would never let him wander off again.

The END

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