An Angel with a Gun

by Lilburne,Guy

  Chapter 2 - Life in three parts

  (Part Two)

  Something changed!

  I had been working at the same factory for just over 22 years. I was 38 years old now, but I looked older. I had already lost most of my hair and I looked a bit like Shrek. Some days I even had the same green coloured skin, but that was because of the chemicals I was using in the factory.

  When I was younger I always hoped that I would somehow grow into my looks. But now at 38 years old I had realized that it just wasn’t going to happen. I had to accept that I was one of life’s ugly people. I wasn’t too upset by this. I had seen lots of other ugly people and they all looked as miserable as me. This was something that I took a lot of comfort from.

  As I was growing into a man in the early years in the factory, I started to gain interests in manly things. I liked going for a beer on a Saturday afternoon and sitting in the ‘Snug’ at the King’s Head in Lower Lane. I used to meet up with some of the older men from the factory. We’d get betting slips from the betting shop next door and make bets on horse racing and football results. We’d tell jokes and stories. Well actually, they all told jokes and stories. I’d just listen, but I liked Saturday afternoons. We did the same on Sunday afternoons too, but without the betting. Over the years I started to talk more, because I had more to say.

  We talked about sex quite a lot. I didn’t talk about it, because I’d never experienced it. I didn’t know how old you were supposed to be to get sex and I didn’t know where I could get any, but I was getting interested in it. It didn’t happen in my teenage years, but I was very hopeful that my 20’s would be more productive. It didn’t happen when I was in my twenties either. When I got into my thirties I was a bit worried that I might have peaked already without actually trying it. Now at 38 years of age I was still waiting, but had more or less given up. I did have a girlfriend once, but we never really did anything. I think a lot of people must have been like me and never had sex. I would guess that about 50% of people in the world probably never have sex. So at least I wasn’t on my own. All the old guys in the factory thought that I was some kind of sex maniac. Every Monday they would say things like ‘I suppose you’ve been shagging yourself silly all weekend?’ I just laughed and didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t really lying.

  It was one Saturday afternoon when the events were destined to change my life. I was going to go and get my monthly hair trim before I met the older guys in the pub. As I was walking down the High Street I went past a second hand charity shop. I walked past it every Saturday, but on this day they had put some books in the window display. One of the books caught my eye. It was a travel book about Thailand. The cover was a photo of three young boy monks smiling at the camera from the back of a yellow tuk-tuk. I was transfixed. I stood there just looking at the book for ages. I’d never actually read a book before, but I was sure that I would read this one. It was for sale for one pound. I went in and bought it. It was a thick book and there were no pictures inside, but I just wanted it. I had heard some of the men in the factory talking about Thailand many times. A lot of them went there for holiday and the women loved them. Apparently Thai ladies love older foreigners. They love them even more if they are fat and bald, but I don’t know why. Some of the men had even told me that I would be considered attractive in Thailand. I found that hard to believe, but I had started to think that maybe they may be right. Over the next year I read that book from cover to cover and was strangely drawn to Thailand. I found myself falling in love with the place. It seemed so exotic and friendly, strange and exciting. I made my mind up that I was going to go and visit Thailand. I decided that the tropical island of Phuket was the place for me, and Karon Beach was the area that I wanted to stay. I worked all the hours of overtime that I could get and each week I saved my money. I was going to go to Thailand. I wasn’t going for sex although the lads all told me that I wouldn’t be able to avoid it. No! I was going to discover Thailand. I liked the gentleness and spiritualism that I had been reading about.

  I booked the flights and the hotel and crossed off each day on the calendar for the next nine months until finally, my dad dropped me off at Manchester airport.

  He had warned me about ladyboys and Thai-brides. In fact he warned me about it from that first Saturday when I had taken the travel book home. I’m sure that dad didn’t think that I would actually go, but nothing was going to stop me.

  “Don’t get coming home with a Thai bride” he said, as we stopped in the drop off zone.

  “I won’t dad.” I forced a smile, knowing that the next thing he would say was going to be about ladyboys, because he had been saying it since I told him that I was going to Thailand.

  “And make sure that they are real women. You don’t want any surprises in the knickers department.”

  “Yes dad. I’ll make sure.”

  “Have you got your passport?”

  “Yes dad.”

  “Have you got your tickets?”

  “Yes dad.”

  “Okay son. Well, be careful and I’ll be here waiting for you in two weeks.”

  “Thanks dad” I said. There was an awkward silence for a minute. I had never been on holiday without my dad before. We always went to our mobile home in Wales and this was the first time that I had travelled outside of the United Kingdom. I put my hand out and we shook hands and then my dad just leaned over and hugged me. It was only the second time that I could ever remember him hugging me and it was a great start to my holiday.

  “I won’t get out the car Steven. Don’t forget your suitcase in the boot.”

  “I won’t.”

  As soon as I shut the boot he drove away. I stepped out into the road and waved to my dad, but I don’t think he saw me because he didn’t wave back. I was nervous and excited at the same time. To tell the truth I was a bit scared. I had never been to an airport before and it was a lot busier then I had imagined and everyone, except for me, seemed to know what to do and where to go. I stood there for a while trying to work out where I had to go. There were some queues of people waiting at Check In desks, but then I saw a sign that said Departures. An arrow pointed the way ahead. I didn’t know what Check In was so I headed straight for Departures, because I knew that I needed to depart. I was soon told that I had to actually check-in first before I could depart. A very nice lady showed me to the Etihad Airways check-in desk and I checked in, departed and embarked on a long, long journey to The Land of Smiles. I had to change flights in Abu Dhabi, again in Bangkok and finally, 24 hours after I left my house with my dad, I landed in Phuket International Airport. The time difference meant that I had to put my watch six hours forward, so now it was actually 12:30pm in Thai time, but I was too excited to be tired.

  The heat and humidity made me sweat as soon as I stepped off the plane. I had never been anywhere as hot as this. I just couldn’t stop smiling. I was in another country and it felt so tropical. I paid 700 baht for a taxi at one of the counters at the airport. The lady gave me a pink coloured paper slip and told me to walk outside the airport and turn left. I did as I was told, dragging my suitcase behind me. A Thai man took the pink slip off me and grabbed my suitcase. I followed him across the car park and I was relieved to sit in his air conditioned taxi. He smiled a lot, but didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Thai. I handed him a printout of the hotel voucher, as supplied by Agoda, and the nice Thai taxi driver took me to The Whale Resort, Patak Road, Karon Beach. I loved the taxi ride to the hotel. All this was another world to me and it all looked so exotic. I saw some monks with shaved heads and wearing saffron coloured robes, just likes the photos that I had seen in my book. I saw two, three and even four people at a time all riding on motorbikes. I saw school children aged 11 or 12 riding motorbikes. I saw a motorbike with a BBQ welded onto the back and it was cooking as the little Thai man drove along. I even saw some elephants and they weren’t in a zoo. The
road seemed to go up and down hills and had some extreme bends. There was green jungle on one side and a fantastic clear blue sea on the other. I loved this place already. People were selling everything you could think of from the side of the road - fruit and vegetables, clothes and cooked food.

  The taxi driver took me to the hotel, which was at the end of a small cul-de-sac off Patak Road in Karon Beach. He got my suitcase out of the boot and another Thai man came running out of the hotel to carry my case up to the reception desk. I didn’t know how much to tip the driver, so I gave him 100 baht. It must have been enough because he smiled and did the prayer thing to me as well, holding the money between his hands with a great big grin on his face. I smiled back and did some nodding. I later found out that this greeting that all the Thai people do is called a ‘wai’. It looks very beautiful when they do it and I wished that I could do it as nicely as they do.

  I felt so happy being in Thailand. It was hot and sunny and so tropical. There were beautiful girls everywhere and they all liked me. Every time I passed a bar they all shouted out to me. They called me a ‘Handsome man’ and asked where I was going to. I think I was walking around with a huge grin on my face all day long. I had an oil massage from a very nice lady who kept accidentally touching my testicles. I had a lady from the first bar nearest to my hotel fall in love with me and she became my very first girlfriend. I rented a motorbike, even though I had never even sat on one before. I got sunburnt, but sorted that out with yoghurt. And then I met the flower girl!

  I knew that I loved her the very first moment that I saw her. I had never seen anyone so beautiful before. She had brown almond shaped eyes that were almost black, hair like black velvet that reached to the bottom of her back and the most fantastic smile that I had ever seen. She had walked up to me with an arm full of red roses for sale. She was the ‘Flower girl‘. She was dressed in rags and pregnant, but to me she looked like a princess. I had heard all the stories about all the beautiful Thai girls that loved foreign men and would do anything to please them, and to be honest that is one of the reasons that I went to Thailand, besides discovering the country of course! I just wanted to see for myself. I wanted my own Thai beauty. But it was not what I expected and nothing was as it seemed. It wasn’t about love and romance, it was about hard cash. Looking back, I don’t really know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting what I found. I had been in Thailand for two days before I met The Flower Girl. She was to change my life forever, in a way that you would never believe and that is why I just had to tell my story.

  Her name was Pin and even though I was badly sunburnt and had a black eye because of an incident in one of the bars, Pin still came over and spoke to me. She was kind and lovely. She really didn’t care what I looked like. I think that she was the very first person in all my life who liked me just the way I was. I bought all her roses off her and we got chatting. We spent a lot of time together and I knew that I was in love with her. But then she disappeared from my life as quickly as she had come into it. We had shared so much. She had told me all about the English boyfriend who had left her pregnant and alone. I was sad when I didn’t see her again and I was absolutely horrified when the police arrested me for her murder. It seemed that everything I told them about my relationship with Pin just didn’t make sense and they were convinced that I had killed her. It was a very frightening time for me. I remember being scared and hot all the time in cells that smelled really bad. A half Thai and half English police detective was in charge of my case. He was a nice man named Detective Sawat Deewat. He was incredibly handsome, just like a male model. He spoke with a Liverpool accent because that is where his dad came from. I really liked him and I told him everything that I could. He didn’t really believe me even though we had become friends and I was sent to Phuket Provincial Prison.

  Phuket Provincial Prison was over 100 years old - 111 to be exact. And it was built to accommodate 800 prisoners. When I arrived there at 4:30pm on a hot and humid Wednesday, there were 1615 inmates, of which 38 were foreign nationals. This included two young Swedish blokes who had already been there for over a year waiting for trial, after being charged with killing some other Swedish bloke. There were also 90 ladyboys and about a quarter of them wore negligées instead of the issued blue shorts.

  I was ‘processed’, which included taking my orange jump suit off and being given a pair of blue shorts to wear and nothing else. This, as it happened was a blessing, because the prison was even hotter than the rest of Phuket and that was very, very hot. The leg irons were re-applied, but my hands were left free. I was taken to my dormitory, which I shared with another 231 inmates. There were no beds. We slept on the floor and we were locked in the dormitory from 6pm to 6am each day. Smoking was not allowed anywhere in the prison, which did surprise me. There wasn’t a problem with drugs in the prison, but there were a lot of black market cigarettes being bought and sold. Prisoners were like naughty schoolboys, sneaking off for a quick puff. This brings me back to the ladyboys! The ladyboys here had some kind of status and were, without doubt, the queen bees amongst the other inmates. Some of the ladyboys were feminine and quite pretty. Well, for blokes anyway. Some of them were just like really effeminate blokes. I spent the rest of the day keeping myself to myself and trying to look dangerous, so that nobody would mess with me. It must have worked, because they didn’t.

  I sort of just settled into prison life over the next few days. Well, I had no choice really. Up and out of Dorm at 6am. Food was rice in vegetable soup once a day, but you could work and earn money for extra food, which most people did, and so we ate twice a day. The prison was very overcrowded and, if you moved at night, people would just spread out and take your sleeping space. The foreigners, or farangs as the Thai’s call us, mostly stuck together. But, to be honest, I preferred hanging around with the Thai prisoners and I made some friends. Most of the day was spent out in the main quadrangle and it was baking hot in the sun. But I have to say that the prison wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. There were even some palm trees, which reminded me that I was on holiday. OK. I was starting to realize that it was going to be a longer holiday than I had planned and, even though the prison wasn’t the wicked dungeon that I had imagined, I still wouldn’t recommend anyone to stay there.

  On my first full day in Phuket Provincial Prison I was still trying to keep myself to myself and look tough, when two ladyboys walked up to me. I saw them looking at me from a small group on the other side of the quad. The leader of their group seemed to be a very tall ladyboy. She/he was one of the ladyboys who was wearing a negligée instead of shorts. The tall one and one of the others walked towards me.

  “What’s your name, darling?” said the tall one, who had a very deep voice, but a great pair of breasts for a tall man.

  “Please don’t make me your bitch” I said out loud, without really meaning to.

  They both put their hands over their mouths and giggled and became all girly.

  “You funny, darling” said my very tall friend.

  “My name Aa and this is my friend Bee.”

  I became really good friends with Aa. She was a lovely person and suddenly I was part of a gang. Okay it was a gang of ladyboys, but they all liked me and they made sure that nobody was going to do me any harm. I told Aa all about the ‘Flower girl’ and she loved hearing my story. It was Aa who eventually helped me get out of prison. I didn’t escape or anything like that. With the help of Aa we found new evidence and I was released as an innocent man. Aa was also eventually released and we stayed friends when we were both free. I believe that she has her own salon now and she does the hair and make-up for the ladyboys who dance at Simon’s Cabaret Show in Phuket.

  I had gone to Thailand for a holiday, but it had turned out to be so much more than that. Some of it was better than other parts, but looking back, I don’t think that I would change any of it, because it all went to make me the man I am today. I
t all went to give me a story, which I would have never otherwise have had. On the flight back to the UK I sat next to an author. I told him my story and we sort of made friends. He met me again back in England and he made a lot of notes when I told him my story again. My story was later published as the book called ‘The Flower Girl’. It’s a good story and if you haven’t already read it yet, then you should!

  Chapter 3 - Life in three parts

  (Part Three)

  This was the start of my new life!

  I couldn’t help but wonder when was the last time that they had had a monk here in Khanchanaburi before the strange farang monk who stood before them now? It was as if they were waiting to see what I was going to do next. I didn’t really know, but I knew that I was going to be staying for a while. I had no plans to do anything else and in any event, there wasn’t an ATM for miles. I had no money on me, so I was going nowhere soon. Even just by being there I felt that I had given them some kind of hope and certainly there was some kind of expectation. I remember thinking that I hoped that they didn’t expect too much. I was always better in life when people didn’t expect anything from me. That way they wouldn’t be as disappointed as people usually are when I get involved with anything. I had a good heart and I wanted to do good things, but I just wasn’t quite sure how I could do that. I just wasn’t born smart.

  “I am going to need help to rebuild this temple from the ruin it has become” I said to the crowd in my best Thai. “Can anyone help me?” I thought that I sounded quite biblical. I even sounded as if I knew what I was going to do. Maybe plans just sort of formulate as you go along. I was hoping that this would be the case in my case.