by Peter Jaggs
Before I left for Sihanoukville some of the Pattaya boys told me to watch out for the light-fingered antics of some of the bar-girls in Cambodia, particularly the Vietnamese. I didn’t need telling that the country and her people are much less affluent than in Thailand, and the temptation of lifting a few extra bucks was obviously going to be stronger by those in more need.
Three weeks ago in Pattaya, the warnings of my cynical mates rang in my ears as I walked back from a pleasant evening spent perving at the knickerless table dancers in the Beavers gogo bar in Walking Street. As I passed by the counterfeit jewelry stall and glimpsed the glittering array of fake baubles on sale, a plan sprang into my mind. Like most ideas formulated when drunk, it seemed like a great notion at the time, so I purchased the item necessary to put my cunning plot into operation. A huge imitation gold chain that any gangster rapper would have been proud to hang around his neck.
Here in Sihanoukville an opportunity had now arisen for me to put my scheme into practice. I was in the bar of the Flea Dome again looking for Kung, but the Thai owners told me she was busy and had already left the bar with another customer. I was slightly peeved because I’d come all the way downtown to see her. However, there was another Vietnamese freelancer named May in there that I had liked the look of last time I had been there, and she was taking advantage of Kung’s absence to move in on me. Although she was nearly as pretty as Kung there was something about the girl that made me slightly wary. I wondered if perhaps it was time to put the devious plan Joe Bucket had devised back in Pattaya into action.
Having been around the bar scene in Thailand for more than twenty-five years now, I can pride myself on being a pretty good judge of character when it comes to bar-girls, and despite being sorely tempted by May’s perfect figure and attractive face, she worried me. There was something in the tone of her voice, the depths of her dark eyes and the confidence of her manner that warned me not to trust the girl as far as I could throw her. I wasn’t sure I liked the way most of the other girls in the bar seemed to avoid talking to her either.
In spite of my reservations, the more I looked at May and the more gin and tonics I drank, the more I wanted a closer look at what those skimpy tops and short skirts she habitually wore barely covered. Then I remembered the devious plan I had dreamt up back in Pattaya. I had forgotten all about it up until that night in the Flea Dome, but I realised it was now time to put it into action.
May was a professional and smart with it. I didn’t even need to tell her I had finally decided to ask her to come back to the Crazy Monkey with me that evening. Just by the way I looked at her she already knew I had weakened and that she was booked up for the night. I suppose Mystic Meg might have put the bar-girl’s perceptiveness down to her psychic powers, but in reality I guessed May had seen plenty of bar-hopping farangs in the past who had decided they wanted to take her away for the night, and she had developed the uncanny ability to recognize the look.
Whatever the basis for May’s uncanny sixth sense, she immediately became very attentive. The pretty Vietnamese hooker hung onto my arm all evening and allowed me to ply her with copious amounts of Angkor beer. At some point during the proceedings, to avoid any potential early morning problems with the confident bar-girl, I asked her how much money she was expecting me to give her.
“Twenty dollars,” she whispered into my ear, before continuing to demolish another glass of Angkor draft in a style that any docker on pay day would have been proud of. I certainly had no problems with that—so it was all systems go.
Much later, lying in the darkness of my room with May’s head on my shoulder, her silky black hair spilling over the pillow, I considered that twenty bucks to have purchased me somewhat of a bargain. May had applied herself to the tasks in hand with enthusiasm and apparent enjoyment and as an added bonus, I suspected that the extremely loud groans and sighs of her enjoyment had probably reached The Professor through the thin walls and wound him up a bit as well—even if they were contrived. No doubt he would have something interesting to say about that in the morning and I looked forward to it.
Despite my feeling of well-being I am not as young as I used to be, and both the night’s revelry and my attempts to keep up with the athleticism of a twenty-year-old Vietnamese good-time girl had taken their toll. I drifted off to sleep happily, safe in the knowledge that my shrewd plan would protect me from any nocturnal pilfering. Before we had embarked on our games, I had hidden my wallet in a handy recess I had previously found where the skirting board didn’t quite meet the wall. I also unclasped the huge, fake gold chain I had purchased at the stall along the Beach Road back in Pattaya from around my neck and placed it ostentatiously on the bedside table.
May didn’t even seem to have noticed the big gold necklace and I felt a bit guilty and wondered if my suspicions were unfounded and I had been mistaken about her, after all.
Of course, when I awoke at around ten in the morning both May and the fake gold chain were gone.
I settled back down amongst the pillows again chuckling happily to myself and feeling very clever. I had scammed an extremely enjoyable night of sex with a lovely looking young girl and taught a sneak-thief a lesson into the bargain. On top of that, the nasty streak in my ego was looking forward to hearing The Professor asking me to keep the noise down during my boisterous sex sessions. Of course, I wouldn’t tell him that I had found it difficult to keep pace with May and I’d been relieved when she finally decided it was time for some sleep. Yes, it had certainly been a hard night and I was still tired, so I treated myself to a lie in. Still grinning contentedly, I soon dozed off again, congratulating myself on an excellent night’s work.
I was woken up a couple of hours later by a loud banging on my door. I guessed my visitor would be The Professsor in complaining mode, so I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door, looking forward to some fun. May stood outside. She was dangling the fake gold chain between finger and thumb and looking at me unblinkingly.
“This chain is a copy,” she told me, without a hint of embarrassment over her pilfering.
“I took it to the gold shop and they laughed at me.”
May’s eyes were beginning to flash dangerously now, and she threw the offending piece of bling on the bed.
“So you can have it back. And I will have my twenty dollars, please.”
By now, the girl’s eyes had narrowed and her nostrils were flared and her hands were clenched into small fists. It seemed she hadn’t much enjoyed being made a fool of at the gold shop.
I debated arguing with the smouldering bar-girl but decided against it, remembering how I had promised myself a quiet life here in Cambodia. After all, what had I really lost, anyway? With this in mind, I self-consciously retrieved my wallet from the niche in the skirting board where I had hidden it the night before and extracted twenty bucks and gave it to her.
Instantly, May was all sweetness and light. Smiling happily, the girl tucked the notes into her ample cleavage and gave me a big hug and a long kiss. It appeared we were friends once again. Since I had forked out the remittance that May knew she was entitled to for her night’s work after all, she had obviously concluded that our two preceding misdemeanours were best forgotten by all concerned.
“Do you want me again?” she asked me hopefully, slipping her hand underneath my towel in an obvious attempt to coax me into sampling another twenty bucks’ worth before she left.
Despite May’s apparent ardour, I guessed this touching display of affection was probably an attempt to make up for her wasted journey to the pawn shop rather than a desire to experience the delights of Joe Bucket’s body for a second time.
I gently but firmly declined the shameless Vietnamese bar-girl’s offer and led her to the door by her hand, which I had rescued with not a little difficulty from underneath my towel. I opened the door and pushed the girl outside gently, giving her tight buttocks a light, playful slap as I did so. There were no hard feelings between us now at all.
“No thank you, May,” I told her, as she gave my plonker a last, lingering hopeful squeeze and kissed my mouth wetly. “You wore me out last night!”
The Professor chose just that moment to open his door and peer out at us. The look of sheer disgust he gave me made the whole adventure worthwhile. Embarrassed, he darted back into his room at once, muttering something about Pattaya perverts and not expecting anything less from a resident of the devil’s playground.
When May finally accepted I was not in the mood for an encore, I closed the yard door behind her and watched her walk away down the track. I have always had a sneaking admiration for those genuinely brazen people who are truly unabashed when faced with the undeniable guilt of their misdeeds and I had to admit, May was in a class of her own. I considered that the pretty Vietnamese girl could claim a gold medal for audacity for this morning’s bare-faced impudence, and I was secretly impressed.
Not all the bar-girls around Sihanoukville were as light-fingered or mercenary as May. There was a girl named Pheakdei working at the Shark Bar, and I had been trying in vain to persuade her to check out the interior of the Crazy Monkey since I had arrived in the country. One night, I dropped a twenty dollar bill on the floor of the bar. The note blew under a chair and I didn’t notice a thing.
Pheakdei could have easily pocketed the money and I would never have known, but instead she chose to retrieve it and give it back to me. Of course, I am not suggesting all Cambodian bar-girls are as honest as Pheakdei, but it happened. I rewarded the girl’s honesty by giving her five bucks and buying her a drink. We sat together at the scarred, wooden counter of the Shark Bar for an hour and the sweet teenager told me about her life in Sihanoukville.
“My name is Pheakdei, which means loyalty or honesty. I am eighteen years old and I was born in Kompot. I am trying as hard as I can to learn to speak and write English so one day I won’t have to work in a bar anymore. I am the second of five children, three boys and two girls. Every month I go home for a day and when I tell my mother how much I hate being a bar-girl she tells me I should hold my head up because I am only doing what is necessary to help my family.
Mother says I should be proud to remember how we once had everything, and although this was such a long time ago I know it is true. Although my father has been gone so long I can hardly remember him, I can still remember the cows, buffaloes chickens and pigs that lived in wooden pens and grazed on the land around our house. Mother says in those days we always had as much to eat as we wanted and our family never went hungry like so many others did.
One evening my father went off to collect one of the buffaloes from where it was grazing and he never came back. This meant mother was on her own with four young children and a new baby to care for, so of course, we soon lost everything we had. I think mother knows what happened to my father but she won’t tell me. She gets very upset if I ask about him, so I don’t talk about it any more.
I live alone on Victory Hill in a small room around the corner where I pay twenty dollars a month rent. I go home every month on the bus to give mother the money I have earned and to see my brothers and sisters. My eldest brother is the only one in my family who is happy that I am working in a bar. This is because before I brought any money into the home he was forced to work on a sewing machine which he was very embarrassed about because it is considered woman’s work. As soon as I started in the bar he went back to the lower paid job of a builder’s labourer which he loves.
It is a four-hour round trip to my home. I just have time to eat a meal with my family before coming straight back again so I don’t miss a night’s work at the bar. My salary is forty dollars a month, but if I am ever late or too ill to work the boss cuts ten dollars from my salary. Although Monsieur Louis doesn’t hesitate to dock the money of a girl who doesn’t turn up for work he is a good man, and he is kind to all us girls who work in his bar and never shouts at us unless we misbehave or are lazy. He also never forces us to sleep with the customers that come to the bar and leaves it up to us to decide if we want to go with a farang or not. I suppose he knows that one day most of us will.
Nearly all the new girls who come to work at the Shark Bar tell themselves they will not sleep with the men who come to drink here. They promise their mothers they will only work for the salary and the tips some of the farangs give us and the commission we get when a customer buys us a drink. But we all come from very poor homes and the longer we stay the harder it is to turn down the chance of the twenty-five dollars or more we could get for sleeping with a man. This is a great deal of money in Cambodia and would go a long way to helping our families. In some cases it can even buy the medicine to keep a sick relative alive.
I have been here for three months now and have done nothing more than allow the customers who buy me drinks to hold my hand, hug me and squeeze my bottom, but like so many of the girls who come to work here I know it is possible that one day my family’s circumstances might make it necessary for me to do more, and this makes me very sad.
Every weekday morning I go to school for five hours and I work very hard to study and improve my English. The school is a very good one although it is expensive and charges fifty dollars a month. I hope and pray that one day the ability to speak and write the language might give me the opportunity to find work that I am not ashamed of doing. If I could choose to do any job in the world, I would like to be a hairdresser”.
Funnily enough, after hearing Pheakdei’s story, I stopped trying to fuck her anymore.
While I had been listening to Pheakdei, there had been a fight in the street outside. Earlier on, a drunken French tourist had wandered into the Shark Bar, but the barman had refused to serve him and he had left, cursing. The boozer must have continued being a pain in the arse because a wiry Cambodian motodop driver was now battering him up and down the street. The loud smacks of the motorcycle lad’s fists on the drunk’s face echoed through the night and it wasn’t long before he ended up flat on his back. Despite his bloodied face it looked like he was going to get up and have another go, but then Le Requin walked over to him and whispered something into his ear and the drunk climbed to his feet and slunk off into the night.
After I had enjoyed the impromptu boxing match and heard Pheakdei’s story I thought it was a good time to call it a night. Walking back to the Crazy Monkey, I was pleased when I passed a guy on a bicycle with a pile of crusty rolls in a basket on the front carrier. The vendors who sell these rolls fill them with meat, pickles and salad. They are a bargain at three thousand Riels and just the thing for a delicious midnight snack before bed. With this in mind, I stopped the bloke on the bike and ordered one. He made the sandwich up for me and I paid him and he pedalled off.
As I made my way down the street, I took a gigantic bite of the roll and very nearly gagged. Instead of my expected favourite filling, the guy on the bike had stuffed the roll with something that looked and tasted like a cross between frozen pork and ice cream. Just to make sure the sandwich was totally indedible he had then covered the whole thing with evaporated milk. I suppose somebody somewhere in the world must like these Cambodian delicacies, but Joe Bucket didn’t. The scruffy little dog that lived just around the corner got the rest of the horrible mixture while nobody was looking.
After that, every night when I returned to the Crazy Monkey the mongrel would be waiting for me around the corner with its tail wagging hopefully. The small dog would then keep me accompany all the way home on my walk back from the bar-strip, and it continued to do so until I left Sihanoukville.
What with Stumpy the lizard, Pheakdei the bar-girl and Scruffy the dog, I felt I was certainly making lots of new friends in Sihanoukville. However, I knew I was still no closer to finding Psorng-Preng than I had been to tricking that Vietnamese hooker out of twenty bucks, and time was running out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Almost every evening that I was in Sihanoukville, I used to take a stroll down the hill to the beach. I would walk slowly past the shacks where the
two pretty girls and the old lady lived, then sneak carefully past the violent monkey that had given me such a fright on my first day and walk to the end of the pier for an hour’s fishing with a hand line.
The pier at Victory Beach was one of the most solid constructions in town and was made of thick wooden poles supporting a cement surface that had been tastefully covered with red tiles. All along the one-hundred–and-fifty metre ‘L’ shaped length of the pier, there were strange Victorian-style lamposts that looked like something Jack The Ripper might have stood under whilst contemplating his next murder. Someone had obviously spent a great deal of thought and money on the pier and Narith told me it had been built in 2007 by a farang as the embarkation point for the nearby resort on Koh Pos Island. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in Asia, things had gone a bit wonky for the guy who had built the pier, and sadly it had never been used for anything other than tying fishing boats up to, evening strolls and angling.
Most evenings there were usually a few Cambodian fishermen trying their luck along the pier. These guys seemed to spend nearly all their lives on the colourful wooden fishing boats that were tied up alongside the jetty. They used nothing more sophisticated than handlines, and every now and then one of the shirtless, muscular fishermen would jerk his line and pull in a frantically wriggling Rabbitfish or an ugly brown Flathead and deposit it on the red tiles. Now and again the old sea-dog of a Captain who owned one of the boats would emerge from his hammock to catch his supper and he was so skilled he could virtually hook the fish one after another, at will.
The fish seemed to hole up under the bottom of the bobbing fishing boats and the dark-skinned Khmers used either small prawns, pieces of squid or sticky rice on treble hooks for bait. For my part, I couldn’t entice a thing to take my offerings but I didn’t care whether I caught anything or not, because the pier was a fine place to finish the daylight hours.