Ghost with a guitar

'How are you, Mali? Do you remember me? I am Muss.'

That was Muss, my Thai bass-guitarist friend, whom I had not seen in 18 months.

The other night, he turned up at Mum's shop in Thon Buri.

Muss - who is polite, and knows his manners - introduced me to a girl he brought with him. 'This is my latest girlfriend,' he said.

They sat the the bar. I was sitting with a group of regular customers at a table nearby.

The regulars are all much older than Muss, who is in his mid-20s. In another age, I befriended Muss. I took him home to sleep at my place a couple of nights to keep him company.

He was still at performing arts school, with another six months left before graduation. He did not mix with his student friends much, and felt lonely, so asked if he could sleep with me at my place.

I took him home. He suffered an allergic reaction to the air-conditioning. I held him in my arms as he tried to sleep on the floor instead. He managed to get some sleep. I had none.

Those days are over. I no longer take lonely young men home, and they are sensible enough not to ask.

Muss still has the shoulder-length hair of old, but has dyed it a blondish yellow. He wore a green T-shirt, and army shorts.

His girlfriend, who had a jaded Khao-San Rd look, has also dyed her hair blonde. I warmed to her. No one likes to be referred to as the 'latest conquest'.

'Can't you think of another way to introduce your girlfriend?' I asked Muss, as I slipped back into parental mode.

'She does not want to hear that she is just the latest in a long line of girls.'

Muss looked at me perplexed, until his girlfriend explained to him what I meant.

'Oh...sorry,' he agreed.

Muss has kept his big chest muscles, and his baby-face features. He had spent the last 12 months working on an album with his five-member band. They had just finished work.

I excused myself from my circle of drinking friends, to join him briefly at the bar.

Muss borrowed my phone, so he could dial his own number into my memory.

'I change my phone number often, but I see you still have the same phone after all this time,' he said.

'Do you still have the photographs in your cellphone which you took of me?'

'No - I have only just deleted them,' I said, which was true. After two years of thinking about Muss, and wondering how and where he was, I had finally taken the decision to delete his pictures from my phone, not even one week before.

I wanted to talk more, but I couldn't. A young, obnoxious type who had evidently arranged to meet Muss sat opposite us and was intent on having his say.

Muss wants to find a distributor for his album. The young man opposite, largish and wearing a black cap, looked like a typical entertainment industry type: full of himself.

He urged Muss to have patience. 'Jai yen yen,' he said over and over, as if trying tio explain why he couldn't distribute the album, despite Muss's pleas for help.

The black-hatted man spoke patronising nonsense..like an over-aged teenager trying to impress.

Reluctantly, I took my whisky bottle, and returned to the table occupied by my regular drinking friends. They are in their late 30s, or older. Some have families. Most have jobs, and are relatively settled. I have 'upped' myself since the days I drank with Muss and his friends, in the sense that I now act my age.

My friends have passed Muss's phase. He is still at the stage where he has yet to make anything of himself, and is looking for people who can give him a hand-up.

The last time we met, Muss asked me to pay his rent for one month - as a loan, of course. My partner had just been admitted to hospital, so I said no. I never heard from him again.

'Muss is like that - he makes friends with people to get things out of them,' a mutual friend told me once.

No wonder, then, if Muss cannot find a steady girlfriend, or even steady friends. He is too busy trying to impress as he tries to get ahead in life.