Out of the Shadows. Senta Holland

remember sitting in the travel agents in London, looking at the coloured bands spanning the map of the world, smooth and slightly rounded to fit the curvature of the planet. The bands were the journeys I could take. It was my choice. But there were certain conditions.

      I’d found my way around California, New Zealand and Australia and now I was stuck.

      ‘You’re going to need another stop on your round-the-world ticket,’ said the travel agent. A fingernail traced the coloured band, swerving slightly as if with the vibrations of the flight, predicting turbulence.

      I had heard of Bangkok. Of course I had heard of Bangkok. Enough that I didn’t want to go there.

      You see I didn’t know it then.

      On the other hand, it did seem to be well connected.

      Outside, the snow was falling in thick fairytale flakes.

      It mounted up on the pavement, it even covered the street, between cars, it was too abundant, the tyres couldn’t smash it down.

      I thought of my shoes. I was going to be dancing in wet slush before I got home.

      ‘OK,’ I heard myself say, ‘let’s put in Bangkok.’

      ‘Yes, I think that’s a sensible choice,’ said the London travel agent. ‘It’s a good place to get to somewhere else.’

      Sensible choice! Ha!

      The snow flakes, big as my palm, pressed their spokes against the window. They didn’t look real but they were. All snowflakes are like that, it’s just that usually you can’t see it.

       The back-up date

      The smells. The smells were so different. So very strong, so individual, like the soup of seven spices. And the sound. So much sound. So much sound altogether, so many layers: the crickets that never, never stopped, even right in the middle of the city, the cars, the horns, the music. And the people. So many people.

      I was overwhelmed. Just less than twelve hours ago I had been in the Australian desert looking at a sky with stars closer than humans. And all my life, right up to this point, I had always been a little chilly, somewhere deep in my bones. It was not good, but I was used to it.

      When I got into Bangkok I felt the heat and my body expanded. Then I entered the jungle. The jungle of buildings. The jungle of smells and sounds.

      My mind was flooded. My body was happy. This was her kind of town.

      We had made contact on the internet.

      I was by that time quite good at finding, selecting and meeting men. I had found them in London, San Francisco and Sydney.

      I had no great hopes for Bangkok, but I made dates. Of course. I always made dates, and apart from him I had a few back-up dates.

      Well, actually, my Nai was the back-up date.

      That’s why we met so soon, just hours after I flew in, into the new continent. It was the only way I could fit him into my dating schedule.

      So tired, the top of my neck was a glass fibre skull, I lay down on the strange hotel bed – run down and shabby like many before but filled with a different kind of air.

      The smells were everywhere and I couldn’t decode them.

      I could feel the moistness and remembered that the city swam on a vast underground river.

      I took out my little golden book that had become quite plump from its journey and I looked at his phone number.

      Part of me kept shouting: ‘I want to sleep! I want to sleep!’, another part was drifting off without speaking, and I kept waking, clutching the little book, staring at the number, looking at the small sturdy clock that was efficiently showing the passing of the new, Bangkok, time.

      It’s always scary, hearing the voice for the first time. It is often so disappointing.

      It confronts me with my dreams.

      Today, swimming in the jungle with my eyes closed, it didn’t feel so sharp. How to judge anything? I was in a different world.

      Still, when I heard him, I felt a little amused and I felt a little wary. Now I look back on it I smile how my impressions shifted – from the way he talked on the phone I thought he must be in his fifties. He spoke American with a softness of accent that seemed a little British and that reassured me. He was a man of many nations. He told me that he used to work for a newspaper, so I imagined an older journalist, maybe left over from the Vietnam War, maybe a correspondent who was no longer up to date and chose not to return to the Western life. Drinking gin tonics and relaxing into another rhythm. He talked to me with an old-fashioned American politeness, and he listened to me so that I felt less like a total stranger. Who had just flown in from another continent. Who he was meeting to discuss playing BDSM with.

      But what did I know? I had only been here for a few hours.

      I fought it but I did fall asleep again, just woke up in time to stagger up and put on my lucky red velvet t-shirt. And go out, into the smells and the sounds and meet him. In a place I would have to find without a map.

      Crickets were waving a carpet of silver sound the night we first met.

      The night we first met, boats and stars threw lanes of golden light on the river.

      They did, they did.

      Mosquitoes danced to their deaths.

      Exotic rum circled our blood.

      This is not the kind of observation that makes people take you seriously, and so maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it is true. It was that kind of night.

      I walked through the evening crowd, pavements submerged under stalls selling more smells, and many colours, swimming through the reef of people who belonged here. I didn’t, but I did not feel out of place. I just floated along with them. I could see the bar at once, it was quite big, open air, very loud. The sun had already set, at 7 p.m. in the summer, and the mosquitoes were flirting with electricity.

      I did see the bar but I didn’t see him. That is, I did see him but not the man who went with the voice of the afternoon. This was a young man’s bar.

      But he saw me.

      Maybe I described myself better to him than he did to me. Maybe I look more like my voice? Or maybe there just weren’t many white women of my age wearing dark red velvet tops moulded over DD breasts around. (In all my time in Bangkok I never saw more than four or six of them, including the two in my mirror.)

      He called. He called my name. ‘Senta. Hi, Senta.’

      I love it when I hear that name, and it means me.

      ‘Yes, I am here.’

      ‘Yes, I am Senta.’

      Yes, I am Senta. You just created me. Well, I created myself. But you called me. Called my magic like a spirit.

      Less than half a day in that strangest of cities and already I was Senta.

      Someone had called me by my name.

      I recognised the voice.

      It must be him. His voice came out of a slender young man sitting by himself on a bench against the wall, a well-worn backpack by his side. He was wearing a loose white shirt, he was very pale, and he had deep, dark eyes. Later I was told by other women that he was a very attractive man, after the fashion of the day. I have to admit I didn’t see that. All I thought was: he talks so old and looks so young.

      Out of shock I said ‘yes’, and there we sat, next to each other in the evening.

      When I think about it, the most wonderful lovers I’ve met never made much of an impact on me with their looks.

      At first I was just sitting there, looking at the young face, listening to the old voice. I decided to drink an orange juice.

      He looked at me, his eyes blazing,