Some places: Bangkok

He was handsome. Twenty-two, twenty-three. Butter-blond. Standing in the road, hand grasping a pillar. He had that glowing wholesomeness that seems to be a Swedish birthright.

He never made a noise. I glanced away, and when I looked back, he had fallen to the floor.

I was in a restaurant in Khao San Road, a grubby, despicable travellers’ ghetto in Bangkok. A year previously, I had succumbed to pneumonia here. I’d come back because I was sick of being scared of this place. Just twenty-four hours out of Heathrow, I’d arrived to this.

Memory shifts with the years. I used to remember seeing a sparkle of glass next to his hand. Now I see a syringe. Did my wife see it, tell me about it, and now I see the syringe too? I don’t know.

But I do remember this. The restaurant staff surrounded him. The owner picked up a telephone and dialled. We’d all stopped eating. The staff cleared for a moment, and I saw his face. It was a frigid blue.

The ambulance came and the medics tried to revive him, but they didn’t move him. They waited for the police to take their photographs. That was the moment we knew.

What’s strange is my lack of emotion. This man died five metres from my face, but I watched it coolly. Is this a survival mechanism, this ability to face tragedy and not be upset? Only in retrospect does his death fill me with an awful sadness.

I hope he had identification on him. I cannot bear the thought that somewhere – Uppsala, maybe, or Utrecht or Minneapolis – there might be a family still hoping that their boy will return from the south-east Asian darkness. It would be obscene for me to have this knowledge and not them.

Not that I could bring them much comfort. Only that he died quickly and was not alone. Not much comfort at all.

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