Koh Pha Ngan
April 18th 1995
Kelly and Yoki were going to a place a couple of bays round the coast to the north and i thought i might as well tag along. We caught the boat there from the same place i'd arrived at from Mae Nam - in fact, it was the same boat. The place we went to was near Had Yuan, but i think the actual beach itself had a different name. There was a guest house there called the Sanctuary, which was run by europeans who had been given the land by some buddhist monks. I was told the story by an australian woman in Georgetown some time later, but i can't remember it exactly now. Anyway, it was a weird place, a sort of hippy ghetto, "traveller" guesthouse, but it was nice and the food was good.
The first night i was really tired and went to sleep at about five in the evening. I was sleeping in the dormitory, which was above the restaurant area and had eight or ten people staying in it. At about one in the morning i was woken up by loud, deranged shouting. One of the men who live there fairly full time was going off his head after drinking all evening. The way he was yelling really reminded me of two people i'd known at different times and in different cirumstances who went completely psycho sometimes after drinking. It was as if the alcohol - and they didn't need much - turned them into a completely different person. Which it didn't of course, it just brought out aspects of themselves that they'd managed to bury so deeply that every now and then, given the opportunity, they had to burst out violently through the suppression.
Anyway, this man sounded typically like the nasty side of this Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde personality coming out violently. It was that sort of situation where it doesn't matter what you say or do they won't leave you alone. They want a fight and they're not going to let you walk away. They'll follow you up the street screaming at you if they have to. Anyway, after listening to him yelling and smashing up the furniture for quite a long time, i got up and looked out the window. He was on the beach down below and he was holding a woman who was obviously his girlfriend in a very violent way. I watched for a while, getting more and more pissed off, but uncertain of what to do.
In this situation it's very hard to do anything that's not going to make things worse. If i'd shouted out "leave her alone!" he would have certainly got more agressive to her, and started saying she must have been having it off with me or something... In the end, it began to look like he was going to seriously hurt her soon and i shouted out the window "Shut the fuck up! We're trying to get some sleep up here!" I figured that was the only valid possibility that would do anything other than increase the focus of his attention on her. I had to distract him and maybe give her a chance to get away.
I knew what i was doing, but i was a bit surprised by the speed and violence of his reaction. He immediately spun round, grabbed a handful of sand and threw it up at the window. Then he stood up and ran into the restaurant and up the stairs to the dorm, shouting some agressive shit. There was no way i was going to get into a fight with him. If he wanted to hit me, then i guess he would have had to, but i wouldn't have hit him back - not unless i absolutely had to to save getting killed. Anyway, i had no intention of allowing anything to happen up there in the dormitory. There were other people there who would probably get involved. As it had been me that had started it, it wasn't fair to drag them in too. Also i had visions of us going through the window and ending up crashing onto the rocks below.
I never knew exactly how i did it, maybe i just went invisible... But somehow i managed to get out of the door after he'd come in without him noticing. He was yelling and shouting "where are you hiding?" etc and i called out to him when i was almost at the bottom of the stairs: "I'm down here. I'm not talking to you up there!"
Of course, he raced back down the stairs and stood facing me. I think the fact that i was being reasonable and in no way aggressive disarmed him quite a bit. He gave me a funny look, unsuccesfully trying to size me up, a bit thrown by my attitude and the fact that i was quite calm. But he was shouting at me and still freaking out. In the end, he pushed me, in the way that these weak aggro bastards do - they want you to hit them first, so they can find out if you're going to kill them or not, while it's still possible to get out of it alive. Anyway, i was foolishly standing just in front of a low table and when he pushed me i fell over backwards onto it. It was quite funny really.
At this point, some of the other people there, who i presume were his mates, joined in, obviously thinking he was going to kill me, and jumped on him. This was a bit of a relief, as it should have been them that dealt with him in the first place. Eventually it all calmed down a bit and i went back to bed.
Looking back on it afterwards, the whole thing was really comical. I wish i'd been able to watch it. First there's me shouting out of the window and then him racing up the stairs yelling. Then me racing down and shouting up at him. Then him racing back down.... etc etc!
Anyway, i achieved what i set out to do and the woman escaped. Until the next time, that is. Apparently he goes like that quite regularly. They all do, don't they. I lived with a woman like that for two years. At the end of it i couldn't work out why i'd stuck it for so long. But i knew really. It's like being in the front line in a war, you're under so much stress you can't think clearly enough to decide to just get up and walk away.