A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ Somboon asked.

  For a moment I thought of suggesting the Bolero, but then I told myself that that was to be Frost’s outing, and moreover I didn’t want to appear cheap (as I possibly might) in the eyes of this youth. So I said, ‘Anywhere you like. You know this town. I don’t.’

  We went to a Chinese restaurant and then a movie and it was midnight when the samlor deposited me at the House again. Full of sweet-sour pork and rice and sharkfin soup, paying off the sweating samlor-man in Siamese notes under a blaze of tropical stars, I felt like a larger than life-size version of myself, the born traveller now, at home at the ends of the Earth. I walked into the lounge which was wide open to the night with all lights on and the ceiling fan swinging round and round. I decided I ought to have a drink before turning in. That surely was what a seasoned traveller, as much at home in Bangkok as anywhere else in the world, would do.

  I was just examining the mass of bottles on the sideboard, trying to decide what to experiment with next, when the office car came up the drive and stopped under the porch. I heard Frost’s voice and the slamming of car doors and after a moment or two he came in—with a woman.

  ‘Hey, Joycey, you’ve got the right idea. Fix one for me. And Daisy too.’

  He went to the radiogram and put on a few records. The girl flopped onto the sofa and after half a minute stretched out on it. I poured a whisky for Frost—I knew how much he liked by now—and took the glass and the soda water bottle to one of the armchairs. But he seemed to have forgotten about the drink as soon as the music began.

  ‘Come on, Daisy, let’s dance.’

  ‘I too hot.’

  ‘I know you’re hot. That’s why I brought you here. I’m hot myself.’ He pulled his shirt off and threw it away. ‘Take your shirt off, if you’re hot, sweetheart.’

  She tossed her head in my direction. ‘Who he?’

  ‘That’s Joycey. Don’t mind him. He’s going to bed in a minute.’

  ‘Why he no give me drink?’

  ‘Yeah, why don’t you give the lady a drink, Joycey old man? You’re not much of a host.’

  He went to the sideboard shouting ‘What’s it to be, Daisy old girl? Beer? Gin? Whisky? Methylated spirits? Arsenic? What?’

  ‘I want gimlet.’

  ‘You would want something like that.’ He began to busy himself while I, to whom until this moment a gimlet was nothing but a carpenter’s tool, tried to see what he was doing from the arm of a chair.

  The girl—if you could call her that—was looking at me interestedly. She was very well-built, not to say plump, with a great mass of black hair, brilliant dark eyes and a double chin. Her backless evening gown, white and to my untutored eyes, expensive-looking, threw into relief the tawny splendour of her skin. She seemed very free and easy in her ways, I mean lying full-length like that before she’d even been introduced to me. She said now, fixing me with her shining eyes, ‘You want dance?’

  I flicked my eyes nervously towards her and away again. ‘No’.

  ‘Please give me cigarette.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t any. I don’t smoke.’

  She laughed. ‘Not dance. Not smoke. What you d’ink? I sink only ollange clush, maybe.’

  ‘I drink a little.’

  ‘A very little, I sink.’ She suddenly sat up and to my amazement began undoing the zip at the back of her dress. It stuck and without any hesitation she came across to me and presented her back to me, saying, ‘Please help.’ I got up awkwardly. I think you could guess my feelings, Sheila. It was the first time I’d ever been asked to act as a lady’s maid. You yourself were always competent enough to manage your own clothes.

  I think she sensed my unease because before I’d accomplished anything she wrenched herself away from me, calling to Frost: ‘What is matter with your friend? Why he not enjoy he-self? Why he ’fray’?’

  Coming back with her drink Frost said, ‘He’s a good boy. That’s a type you never met before, darling, and I’m damn sure I could never explain it to you.’

  She said, stepping out of her dress, ‘He very han-sum. I sink many girl must like very much.’

  A scowl appeared on Frost’s face. She took the drink from him and sat down on the sofa and sipped it and put it on the floor and then got up and began laying her dress smoothly over the back of a chair. With as much care as if it was going to be there for quite some time. She was clad only in a bra and panties and a bracelet or two and white high-heeled shoes and I’d never seen anything like it before except in movies and magazines. She stooped to remove her shoes and then she took another sip at her glass and then suddenly she turned to Frost with her arms up. ‘OK, darling, we dance?’

  ‘I think I’ll say goodnight,’ I said, but the gramophone was making too much racket; they didn’t hear me.

  I edged across the room to the stairs. As I ascended like an angel up Jacob’s ladder I couldn’t help a backward glance at the naughty Earth. The two were doing a waltz, I suppose it was, with long slow strides involving a dip and a swirl; each stride was longer and more tottery than the last and when they collided with the table on which I had stood Frost’s drink, there was no help for them, they and the table and the drinks all went over together behind the sofa. I couldn’t see them but I heard the bump of their contact with the floor and then their laughter, continuous helpless laughter as if something very funny had happened.

  I rushed upstairs and I was so agitated I forgot all about knocking on Drummond’s door.

  ‘God damn and blast you—’

  He was sitting on his bed stark naked. On the stool in front of his dressing-table was a Siamese girl in a sarong. I just saw that she was doing her hair as I ran between them to my own room. For some reason I bolted my door. I could hear Drummond cursing for what seemed hours. Later they were downstairs and I could hear him complaining to Frost again. I got out Spengler’s Decline of the West, which I had found in Mr. Samjohn’s half of the house the night he invited me round there, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. I was too upset by the rawness of life in the East.

  Next morning the atmosphere was wintry round the breakfast table and yesterday afternoon Mr. Samjohn called me into his office and said that while they were so pushed for room at the House it would be better for me to put up at a hotel. Windmill knew just the place in the Chinese quarter of Bhalangpoo, not too expensive but very comfortable, and the office car would pick me up every morning at eight fifteen.

  So here I am, Sheila, and such have been the outstanding incidents of my first week in Bangkok …

  October 17

  Sheila, my lost darling, I promised you a weekly letter but I’ve only written one in a whole month and this second one I’m writing now is going to be very short because tomorrow I am going upcountry on my first field trip and I want to finish it before I leave. And in a few minutes Somboon will be here to take me out to a farewell party for just him and me. This time I am definitely going to go with him to the Bolero, for Frost will never take me there now. Frost dislikes me. Samjohn dislikes me. Drummond dislikes me. They all dislike me for the very good reason that they have me on their consciences; they know they had no right to evict me from the House. That is the real root of their dislike but there are side-roots too. There are the facts that I am not too bright at my work and that I lead a blameless life except for my two or three bottles of beer a day, that I am friends with Somboon who in their opinion is a very minor character and that the awkwardness which comes so often into my manner when I try to fraternize with my fellows gives them the impression that I am priggish and contemptuous of them.

  Only one person thinks highly of me—Mrs. Samjohn, and she’s a repulsive old frump. But she thinks I am handsome and lonely and intellectual and she has invited me five times to the House for dinner and included me in a party that went to the seaside at San Soek one Sunday. The other members of the party were Mr. Samjohn and a fat White Russian couple and it was a tight fit in the Riley. Th
e sea was so full of jellyfish that bathing was out of the question so most of the time we just sat under the coconut palms which fringe the shore, drinking coconut milk with whisky in it and slapping at ants. But the sea and the sky were beautiful and so were the sands and the people and children sprawling and lazily playing on them, and I enjoyed the day. I hope tomorrow’s trip is equally pleasant. It had better be, because it is going to last for six weeks.

  I’m sorry to be so brief, Sheila. Although I don’t write often it’s not because I don’t think of you. As a matter of fact during this last month in Bangkok you have been in my mind more constantly than you have ever been before, even when we were closest to each other. For it seems we take ourselves with us wherever we go; if we are obsessed in London, we shall not shake off our obsession merely by removing ourselves to Bangkok. But I’m still looking forward to tomorrow.

  Here’s Somboon. All my love. Your ever-dog-like

  Reggie

  Three

  There are five of us around the table. And I’m not by any means the least boisterous of the gang.

  I’m still uncertain how it’s all come about. I was supposed to get up frightfully early this morning to catch the Korat train. But I had one bottle of beer too many at the Bolero last night and I was still snoring when Windmill arrived. Luckily he was in plenty of time. I washed and dressed and Duen drove though the morning streets and we still had twenty minutes to wait before the train pulled out. As soon as we were out of the station Windmill said, ‘You want beer?’—‘What, at this time of the morning?’—‘Why not?’—‘OK then.’ And since then it has been beer beer beer all day long. Bottle after bottle on the train. Bottles at the hotel as soon as we arrived. Bottles at the club to which we repaired as soon as we had bathed and changed. And in a second they’ll be ordering more, I suppose, in this chophouse.

  I gaze blearily around the table. There is a ringing in my ears that is so loud it makes my companions’ words hard to catch, though they’re all shouting, you can tell that from the bulge of veins and muscles in their throats and the way the sweat is standing on their brows. A wedge of ache has been driven downwards between my eyes splaying them outwards, I no longer see my friends as an old master would have painted them, they are like his studies for a masterwork, a dozen slapped-in outlines, one of which is right, but it’s hard to tell which is that one. But they’re all good chaps, good chaps, an’ I’m blurry lucky—

  Who the hell are they all, anyway?

  First on my left is Windmill. Good old Windmill. Of all the people I have met in Thailand he is still the one I like the best. Yet even him I can’t wholeheartedly esteem. He has oriental characteristics which are disconcerting to a westerner. For instance he is never anything but polite with me, but he is cordial with his own race. While his mouth smiles over anything I say, his eyes don’t find me half such amusing company; the teeth flash but the irises fail to light up. He is still sizing me up and, I know, finding me wanting. And then he’s such a damned dandy; his case is as full as mine of lotions and perfumes, but whereas mine are samples his are for his own use, and in his hotel room a few minutes ago I caught him actually powdering his nose. ‘Not want it shine,’ he said. What real man knows enough about his own nose to know—? It took him as long to do his hair, alternately combing it and smoothing it with a podgy hand, as it used to take Sheila with all her golden mane. The ineffable sissy! But he is a friendly bloke and helpful and not easily upset by my western crudities of conduct. And this is all the more remarkable when you remember that he is a Mom, a prince of the fourth rank and it must seem to him that there is little compulsion for him to be courteous to a man like me, who have only plebeian blood in my veins, and a very uncertain claim to the title of Mister …

  Next to him is a man with the promising name of Prosit. He is our agent in Korat and one of the objects of our visit is to make him get on his toes. He is a slight and boyish person with an extraordinary mouth, like a harmonica; when seen in profile, it protrudes beyond the end of his nose, which is not such an uncommon phenomenon, but seen head on it protrudes beyond his hollow cheeks, which seem to cave in behind it; at certain angles it almost blots out his ears. His eyes are deepset, huge, and anxious, and his skin is very dark; Windmill told me he is Thai all right, but from the deep South, close to the Malayan border; and his appearance is proof that more things are smuggled across borders than officials search for in the labelled bags …

  At the far end of the table facing me is an American. The introduction was ill-managed and he appears to have caught only my Christian name while I have caught only his surname which is Boswell. He is nothing to do with Broderick Peers. He is in fact doing something he seems to be a bit vague about with a branch of the United Nations of which I have never heard before. He has been in Thailand for about six months. He was invited to join the party because he is occupying the room next to mine at the hotel and because Prosit seems to think that two white men meeting by accident in a Far Eastern city will automatically deem each other’s company indispensible. But I haven’t made my mind up about him yet. He has pale blue prominent eyes with drooping lids; with his high-bridged nose and receding chin they give him the look of a tired chicken; he seems very pale compared with the others, and his Hawaiian shirt is like a flowerbed; but he speaks slowly and clearly and his jokes are simple ones which call forth ready laughter from all—even from those whose grasp of American is so uncertain that they tend to be preternaturally solemn when using it.

  They are all roaring now at one of his quips but I missed it.

  And on my right, facing Windmill and Prosit, is Boswell’s right-hand man. I’ll swear he was introduced to me as Dr. Custard-tart. He’s older than the rest of us, with thick grey hair and oversized spectacles; with his sloping forehead and leathery skin he resembles a tortoise, and his head seems always to be on the point of sinking into his collar, as into a shell. His English is not too deft, but his eyes are light-coloured and shrewd, and his lips make a single straight line denoting authority, like the firm dash under a dictator’s signature. I think he could be relied on in an emergency, which is something that can’t be said for either Windmill or Prosit; they clearly take the line of least resistance always and everywhere, no matter where it leads …

  At the head of the table is myself. I’ve achieved this exalted position not because I am important but because I am the latest foreigner to arrive in town and tonight they must do me honour. Tomorrow I shall find my true level, somewhere below the United Nations if not below the salt, but tonight it is to me that Windmill turns first, saying, ‘What d’you want to eat, Mr. Joyce? You want ecks? All Europeans like ecks, I think. Some Europeans in Thailand eat nothing only ecks.’

  I reply, ‘If I am to eat eggs let them be the hundred-year-old variety, for young fresh eggs—’ But at this point my grandiloquence peters out and I realize that for the first time in my life I am tipsy. I blink hard several times as if it were my eyes, not my brain, that’s fuddled. ‘You know what I mean? Windmill, you know—what—?’

  He knows but he’s incredulous. ‘You mean those ecks, black like jelly? In Thai we call khai yu ma. That means eggs like horse urine.’

  ‘It is a napt—an—apt description,’ I rejoin, ‘and the more my eggs taste like horse urine the better I like them.’

  ‘You’re depraved,’ Boswell shouts. ‘Eat your horse piss if you want, but give me a good rare-done beef steak.’

  ‘I think they not have biff steak,’ says Windmill. ‘But ecks like horse urine, yes, you can get everywhere in Siam. I order. What else you want?’

  Several suggestions are made, and the one-eyed youth who, clad in nothing but a pair of torn shorts, performs the functions of head waiter in this establishment, goes howling to the kitchen, each undulating yelp a dish. Then Prosit, bracing himself like a man about to leap from the fourth storey of a burning building, leans towards me and says,

  ‘Mr. Joy, how long time you stay in Thailand?’

&nb
sp; There are two possible answers—one month, if he wishes the question to be interpreted in the past tense, three years if the future is intended. I plump for the first and his mouth is like an estuary widening to the sea, his laughter is cackling and infectious.

  ‘So short time, yet already you like eat horse urine,’ he says delightedly. Then the laugh vanishes and the eyes become troubled again. ‘Ecks,’ he explodes suddenly; I realize he has been reviewing his sentence and found it incomplete.

  But by then the damage has been done and Boswell is shouting, ‘Yes, and you ought to see him gobble up rats’ livers, he eats them with pickled walnuts for breakfast’ and more of the same until Windmill asks,

  ‘Where you have khai yu ma before, Mr. Joyce?’

  ‘In Bangkok. I’ve had ’em twice when I’ve been out with Somboon.’

  ‘Who?’ And then his eyes harden as he realizes who I mean. He doesn’t approve of my friendship with Somboon any more than Mr. Samjohn does.

  ‘Can you use the chopstick?’ asks old Custard-tart and when I nod ‘Mr. Bosswill can not.’

  Boswell is hunting for an excuse but I save his face by saying, ‘P’r’aps he can’t use chopsticks but he’s an American which means he can cut up beef steak with just a fork—and that’s something no other nation on Earth can do.’ I proceed, quoting Somboon, ‘Personally I deprecate the Thai custom of imbibing rice off a plate with fork and spoon. That’s the way to eat apple pie. Rice should come in a bowl and be sucked up off two sticks—’ I give a demonstration of a Chinese human suction pump in action, but nobody has been listening to me.