From the edge of the crowd, Jim watched Gemma climb onto a table.
“Wooo! It’s Friday!” she cried, punching the air like a YouTube Zumba instructor. Above her, a flickering neon sign buzzed pink: Bangkok’s Biggest Happy Hour!
He smiled — she was marvellous — you couldn’t help but cheer. Then he looked away, sipping his Singha beer. Lately, he found all the hilarity exhausting.
They shouted each other’s names like long-lost friends, even though they’d all left the same staffroom a few hours before. It was half performance, half fever dream. Rumours circulated that student enrolments were slipping, contracts quietly left unrenewed, and here they were dancing hard on the ever-thinning ice.
“Jennaaa!”
“Steeeve!”
Laughter. Someone knocked over a fake candle. The bar smelled like overripe fruit and hot bodies.
“Come and dance, Jim, you boring bastard! Wooo!”
Gemma bounded over and flung a garland of pink flowers round his neck. She slopped her SangSom rum and Coke onto his shirt and didn’t notice — or maybe she did and laughed louder.
She was a wonderful early-years teacher — warm, creative, absurdly patient with four-year-olds. But she carried that manic energy into everything, like she was afraid it might vanish if she didn’t keep feeding it.
He knew what people whispered about her, but he pushed it away. If he’d once joined in that kind of crass talk, it repelled him now — just as it did to imagine what was said about him. It was easier to misread someone than to know them.
Sometimes, when her children had toddled home, he’d catch her resting for a moment in the corner of the staffroom — just for a second, perfectly still and quiet, eyes closed, like she’d let herself stop holding it all up. Then she’d spring back with a joke, a gesture. But the pause stayed with him. It felt true.
A line from Somerset Maugham came to him, about the British colonialists in East Asia. How some of them never grew up after crossing the Suez Canal. There was some truth in that. The good pay. The cheap drinks. The sun always shining. No mortgage. No winter. Maybe it was the absence of expectation.
Maugham’s colonials had danced and sweated on verandas in Penang and Singapore; Jim’s crowd were just as giddy, sweating through floral shirts and glittery tops in nightclubs.
A century had passed and the empire was gone, but its ghost still lingered in the staffrooms of British schools peddling the illusion of Surrey gentility in the tropics. What were they but overgrown adolescents paid to play in this unreal bubble while the locals poured the drinks and swept up the broken glass?
The pretence of a constant good time had to be maintained lest the doubts creep in, bringing it all crashing down.
He glanced at the garlands still looped round his neck and gave a small laugh. Fifteen years earlier, he’d been just as caught up in the dazzle. For a while. When Bangkok made everything new again in the heat and the light.
He set his bottle down, straightened his back, and stepped into the fray.
“Yesss, Jim!” someone shouted. “He lives!”
He raised his arms and started the air-punch dance — left, right, left, right. There were cheers, laughter. Someone looped another garland over him, this one already wilting. The beat thrummed in his chest. Gemma spun in and did a little shimmy. He grinned, playing along, hoping that some genuine joy might kick in if he just kept moving.
Scott from Phys Ed — all teeth, sweat, and lager breath — grabbed him round the neck in a mock headlock. “Jimbo! Bloody legend, mate.”
Jim laughed, stumbled a little, clapped Scott on the back in a suitably manly way, then gently eased himself free.
He suddenly caught sight of himself in the darkened glass behind the bar — he looked like a drunken uncle at a beach wedding. Paunch protruding, red face, hairline edging back. The too-loud shirt clung damply to his back. Nothing fit. The two garlands drooped round his neck like a child’s costume after the party.
He let his arms drop, gave a vague thumbs-up to no one in particular, and edged away from the dancefloor.
He slipped away through a sliding door and found the narrow terrace, half-shielded by potted palms and coils of fairy lights. No one followed. Outside, he fished around for the soft pack of LM Blue in his back pocket — crumpled, half-empty. He lit one with a lighter borrowed from a local trans woman in platform heels, smoking alone and scrolling through messages. She wore a sequinned top that caught the light in flashes of green and violet, paired with a narrow black skirt slit high. Her lipstick was the soft waxy pink of rose apple. Their hands brushed as he gave back the lighter. She looked up, met his eye for a second, and smiled. A kind of recognition passed between them. Then she turned back to her phone.
He leaned on the railing and inhaled deeply. Below him, Sukhumvit Road kept pulsing — late-night shoppers, crawling taxis, scooters weaving through traffic like bright fish through a reef. The scent of garlic and green curry paste frying in oil, diesel fumes, sewers, and night-blooming jasmine. Somewhere beyond, the last Skytrain of the night hummed along the elevated tracks, its windows glowing soft and yellow. It slid across the skyline like a metal ghost.
He exhaled and felt his shoulders loosen. He liked Bangkok best like this. When it lowered its voice.
There were some nights, brief and perfect, when he still felt deeply alive in this city — a quiet bar, a small conversation, a shared table with someone who didn’t need to shout or pretend. He might have liked to bring Gemma somewhere like this, just the two of them talking softly over beers, but tonight had reminded him of what he usually kept at bay: that he didn’t quite fit in. Not with this crowd. Not in this club.
There still was a version of Southeast Asia that called to him, had always called to him, but it was becoming harder to find. He was sure he wouldn’t find it on this stretch of Sukhumvit Road, or on Khaosan, or any party strip where people drank out of buckets and bellowed each other’s names.
He wondered if Gemma ever found her way to the quiet corners. Not just in the staffroom, but out here, when the music stopped. He hoped she did.
Smiling, he drew again on the cigarette and watched the red rear lights of the train vanish around a bend.
In the heavy tropical night, he was still struck in quiet moments by the surreal and disquieting sense of being adrift — like waking up in a strange house. The heat, the traffic, the shrines, the street food. He had come east in search of adventure after his parents died. Maybe leaving was his way of coping. He drifted through India and Southeast Asia for a year until the money ran out. Then he landed a job at Queen Mary College, off Ekkamai Road — air-conditioned classrooms, shady gardens, a manicured sports pitch, a class of twenty earnest eight-year-olds from eight different countries. It was a far cry from the draughty Victorian primary school in Pembroke Dock with rattling radiators that froze up in winter.
He lingered on the terrace, smoking and thinking. The smoke curled into jasmine-heavy air, thick and sweet. The scent caught him unexpectedly — it reminded him of a woman and a place long ago. Not in this humid heat, but a coal-fire warmth: perfume from a pale green bottle with a gold stopper, Yardley Imperial Jasmine in golden letters. It had always looked to him like something precious from a faraway land — though in truth it was a moderately priced fragrance from Woolworths. The scent had mingled with the papery, toasted wisps of tobacco that once drifted from her cut-glass ashtray. Together they made a smell he hadn’t realised he still remembered. Before he knew it, the night’s neon glare had softened into a gentler light, falling on lavender-polished wood. Not a moment in time exactly, but a place: a sitting room, and in it, a teak cabinet with glass doors and delicate brass hinges.
*****
Aunty Wendy’s flat had always felt safe. It wasn’t a museum — he could touch things, open drawers, breathe. The place was a mismatch of fittings from the sixties through to the eighties — orange Formica, thick patterned curtains, a rotary dial phone in avocado green on the sideboard, its cord always tangled, a notebook full of numbers written in thick blue felt tip. The horse racing was often on in the background, turned down low, the murmur of commentators calming as water running over pebbles. Still, everything had its place, and everything was spotless. Even the quiet seemed to welcome him.
But the object of greatest wonder was the tall teak cabinet in the corner. It seemed to glow from within, its warm wood catching the afternoon light. Behind the glass panels, her treasures were carefully arranged, and the doors were always locked. Aunty Wendy kept the tiny brass key on a chain at her neck. She would carry out the ritual with the solemnity of the Mass — unclasping the chain, selecting the key, turning it slowly, as if the cabinet held not just objects but stories, memories, spells. He sat cross-legged on the carpet as she unlocked the doors, holding his breath, waiting for something sacred to be revealed.
Inside were fragments of other people’s homelands, carried back to Wales as curiosities: a dainty lacquered box from Burma, a miniature Chinese fan with a crack down one bamboo strut, a silver Malaysian moon-kite pendant, and a little jade lion with one paw missing. And then there were the photographs. A shot of a tennis party in Penang — sepia and heat-bleached. Another, its edges curling with age, marked simply: Singapore, 1937. The women were in white dresses and straw hats, and the men in cotton suits. They stood like dolls, their faces tilted toward a sun that only shone in memory.
Each object carried its own weight, and Aunty Wendy knew each one — where it came from, where she bought it or who gave it, how it should be dusted. She told the stories gently, sometimes with a kind of grandeur, sometimes like she was teasing herself.
She always dressed carefully. Skirts, blouses, jackets that held their shape. A matching handbag, if she had one. She had a real fur coat kept on a padded hanger in a cloth cover. Her things were tidy, of good quality, as if her body too were something to be tended. She liked to shop. Never saved a penny, Jim’s mother said, rolling her eyes. But Aunty Wendy was generous, too — never arriving without a treat or a trinket: a quarter of barley sugar, a small toy, or a pair of socks folded in tissue paper.
The oldest of three daughters, she was raised in a miner’s cottage in Tonypandy until her father — Jim’s great-grandfather — was killed in a pit explosion. Their widowed mother, turfed out of colliery housing, moved them to the wild north of Pembrokeshire, where her own roots lay. Jim didn’t know how Wendy came to fly the furthest. By contrast, her sisters followed the path of domestic service in the industrial towns of South Wales. How had she made the connections to diplomatic families who had trusted their children to her care and carried her east?
She was christened Blodwen, although she never used it. Said that the English children would have called her “Bloody Wen”, and perhaps they would have. She always went by Wendy, and signed it clearly. If she remembered the Welsh of her childhood, she’d folded it like one of her silk scarves and tucked it away. Had she felt early what so many of Jim’s students came to believe — that your own language and culture were provincial, embarrassing, to be set aside if you wanted to get on?
When she finally returned to South Wales, her travelling days behind her, she settled down with Viv, an old childhood friend. She was forty then, still younger than Jim was now. They only had a few years together before Viv died of a heart attack. She never partnered again. But she spoke of those years with a tenderness that caught you off guard.
She poured all her spare love into her great-nephews. Endlessly patient, quietly nurturing — always ready with a story or a biscuit. He had felt known in her presence. Seen. One day, when he was seven or eight, she’d let him choose a keepsake from the cabinet. He picked a tiny carved elephant, dark polished teak, no bigger than a matchbox. He wondered about the life of the person who fashioned it, in Thailand or Burma perhaps, surely long dead. Jim had kept it in a real matchbox lined with wrapping paper and still had it now, tucked away in a drawer in his flat.
He hadn’t taken it out in years, but now, with the city buzzing below, Wendy felt oddly close. He could feel the shape of her life in that room all these years on — the trinkets she tended, the care she took, the hush of a life arranged carefully around memory. The memory of Asia — her Asia — that had created a legacy she had unknowingly bequeathed. For a moment he almost believed she had stood on this same balcony, the city’s endless murmur folding time until past and present touched. Of course she hadn’t. But the thought lingered until it drifted away on the sultry air.
*****
He stubbed out the cigarette, drained his beer, and stepped back inside the bar. He skirted the dancefloor towards the lift. On his way out, Gemma — still dancing, mid-spin — seemed to sense him and looked up. He gave a small smile and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. She pulled a mock-sad face, but her eyes said she understood.
Out on the street, he politely refused the calls from motorbike riders and tuk-tuk drivers. The air had cooled a little. He turned down a side soi, feet finding the rhythm of the broken pavement. Somewhere, some street dogs barked at each other, then fell silent.
He passed a little night market — a tourist trap, really: fridge magnets, dangling keyrings, fidget spinners that lit up when tapped. His eye caught a glint: a small bowl fashioned from a coconut shell and lacquered in turquoise and green, like Wendy’s Burmese box where she kept her earrings. He thought about how the empire had ended, but the trade in knick-knacks went on — new relics for new expats to carry home as proof of adventure. Still, as cheap and mass-produced as they no doubt were, they might be useful for keeping something in. Keys, maybe.
He handed over a few hundred baht, then paused and, on a whim, bought another. Gemma’s birthday was next week, and perhaps she’d appreciate somewhere to keep her earrings.
At the end of the market, the crackle and spit of oil drew him to a street cart where chicken fried in a huge steel wok, wide as a bus hubcap. He bought a couple of pieces, still hissing with heat, and a tray of mango and sticky rice.
Clutching the bags in one hand, he walked on towards his apartment building by the park, the commercial bustle giving way to quieter domesticity. Tiredness settled on him and his knee ached. He didn’t feel quite young any more; neither did he feel old. Bangkok had a way of suspending time — not stopping it, exactly, but relaxing its grip. Most of his time there was behind him, and he knew it. Rumours of teacher cutbacks lingered. Would they keep a teacher pushing fifty at the top of the pay scale — or would he be forced to start again in Saudi, China, Wales? None of them appealed.
Recalling another line of Maugham’s, some men are simply born out of place — marked by a quiet strangeness and a longing for something enduring. Not quite belonging, but not quite lost. That, too, he thought, was a kind of home.
He wondered if Wendy had felt it too — her Asia not so different from his, though back then it had taken six weeks by ship to get there. Letters instead of WhatsApp. So very far away. Maybe the cabinet was her way of grounding herself once she came back — keeping part of that other life close, when duty or war or age pulled her home. Was she ready? Would he ever be ready? Would Gemma? He didn’t know. But he felt in his bones that it couldn’t last. Queen Mary’s called itself international but was built on the old colonial bargain: a British education in a tropical backdrop, framed against the real lives going on outside the gates. And sooner or later, someone would notice what was always there — that beyond the manicured lawns and Harry Potter aesthetic, the empire had no clothes.
A few lights burned in the windows of blocks and houses on either side of him as he passed, but the soi mostly slept. The bowls clinked softly at his side — slight things, yet oddly grounding.
In a few hours it would be light again. He would wake to the call of tropical birds and the citrus snap of morning. His head wouldn’t be quite clear, but he’d manage. He’d make tea and take it out on the balcony, the steam quietly rising into the air, as if searching for somewhere to belong. He’d listen as the city woke around him — motorbikes, car horns, the cadence of Buddhist prayer — each sound finding its place, except his own.
