A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  Then One-Eye returns with a bottle of mekong in one hand, and three bottles of soda clutched to his bosom by his forearm, and five tumblers threaded on the five digits of his other hand. With a warning shout he slaps all this on the table. From the rags around his middle he produces a bottle-opener and with three flicks sends the caps of the soda water bottles spinning to the floor; they foam over and he sloshes the froth on the floor too. Meanwhile Windmill has folded one soft hand lovingly around the neck of the mekong bottle, inspected it carefully, up-ended it once, turned it sideways, and given it an expert smack on its bottom. Thus the cork is sufficiently loosened for him to be able to pull it out the rest of the way with his teeth. Soon each of us has a tumbler of golden liquid before him. ‘Yu ma’ I say privately to Windmill, but they all hear this time and suddenly it dawns on them that the new boy has cracked a joke in Thai, and Groucho Marx couldn’t get a more gratifying reaction.

  ‘What did he say?’ Boswell asks plaintively, jealous as the waves of laughter buffet to and fro.

  ‘He say mekong like horse urine,’ says Custard-tart, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. ‘Mr. Joy, you spick Siamese a little?’

  ‘Phud Thai nit noi’—I speak a little—I admit, and that, modest claim though it be, is sheer conceit, for about all I can actually say so far is Good day, Go right, Go left, Go ahead, Stop, and How much?—but the latter isn’t any use to me as I haven’t learnt the numerals. However I have now added Horse-piss to my vocabulary—always a useful term to know in any language.

  At the other end of the table, Boswell, nettled by my linguistic brilliance, is trying to gain credit for having lived six months in the country without picking up a single word of the vernacular. ‘Except Thank you, of course, and Tricycle, and—what’s that expression you use every two minutes—’

  ‘Express what?’

  ‘The one you use when you want to say Never mind, That’ll do, To hell with it anyway, Mañana-man—’

  ‘Mai pen arai?’ I ask.

  Boswell gives me a hard look, as much as to say, You’ve been studying, that’s not fair. But then the arrival of the first dish, my eggs, changes the subject. The chopsticks are plastic, not bamboo, and picking up a segment of egg is difficult, for the convex side—the ‘white’, now amber-coloured—is smooth and tough and slippery, while the yolk is a soft black yielding odoriferous mess. All eyes are fixed on me. My prestige can be raised in this hour. Dexterously I steer a piece into the clear, nip it exactly amidships, turn it over, so that the gluey black yolk adheres to the lower chopstick whilst the other chopstick rests lightly on the amber cheek to prevent side-slip, and sweep it in a gesture in which there is some nobility of style to my lips—and by Heaven it is delicious and I champ it in ecstasy, the saliva pouring in over my teeth to get itself mixed in the gobbet like the tide flowing into a bay through the piers of a breakwater. Boswell gazes at me with the expression with which he would watch a python engorging a live goat and then with a shudder, refuses to contaminate his lips with ‘such crap.’ I bungle my second piece but my reputation is made and anyway I am more successful with the third. Boswell balks again at dish number two, a sort of cold fat pork called, they tell me, mu pa roo. The third dish, geese-feet in asparagus stew, seems to infuriate him. ‘Haven’t they anything canned?’ he cries. ‘Something sahlid you can eat with a knife and fahk?’ Agitation turns all his oh’s to ah’s. But they have nothing canned in the place so finally he agrees to venture on an omelette. When it comes it is stuffed with meat and onions. He removes every vestige of meat and toys with the rest, enquiring what sort of oil it was cooked in. ‘Thank your God it isn’t t’ung-oil,’ I say, remembering some more Somboonana.

  ‘And what in hell is t’ung-oil?’

  ‘It’s the oil in the lamps of China. It’s also the oil in a good lot of American paints. Sometimes it’s used for cooking in China when they run out of pork fat. It has a powerful action on the guts, I believe. Something like cholera.’

  ‘Sounds even worse than horse piss,’ he comments, and I perceive that I am annoying him, first by eating everything they put in front of me, then by talking more Thai than he does, finally by handing out unsolicited information.

  But by this time the Thai and I have finished the hors-d’oeuvres and are ready to begin serious eating. Another solemn discussion takes place. Dum-yam-pla appears to be a must. I haven’t any idea what dum-yam-pla is and await its appearance with interest. They ask me what I propose. I prefer to leave it to them. Windmill suggests stewed ox-tongue and Custard-tart, prawns. Prosit is all for salt fish. One-eye goes off howling again.

  ‘Where you go when we finish eat?’ Windmill asks me, slopping more mekong into my glass. He has never looked more affable.

  ‘Whither thou goest I will go,’ I reply. ‘Is there any place you can go to in this town?’

  ‘I think maybe we take a long walk,’ he says, and there seems to be something meaningful in his tone, and of course it’s unheard-of for Windmill to go on foot anywhere.

  ‘Does Mr. Joy want to take walk?’ Custard-tart interrupts, and suddenly he squeezes my hand and says, ‘I think Mr. Joy is very nice man to know. Talk a little Thai. Eat like Thai man. Like to take walk like Thai man too.’

  I still don’t get the point and say lamely, ‘Well, it’s too early to go back to the hotel yet. Better to go for a walk if there’s nothing else to do.’

  ‘Yes, yes, much better, I think so too,’ cries Custard-tart and he laughs immoderately. D. H. Lawrence once heard a tortoise scream and got so worked up he wrote a poem about it. I’ve just heard one laugh and it’s the dirtiest laugh I’ve heard for years.

  Boswell is looking at me sardonically and he says, ‘You may know a bit about the lingo but it’s clear you’re still only a greenhorn in Thailand. “Take a walk” means something extra special when your host invites you and the rest of the company is all male. What it really means is, “You wanna go to a brothel?” You’ve just said you do.’

  I’m so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my condition: I’m ‘properly gobsmacked.’ I’d been thinking I was holding my own in this male company. I’m drinking as fast as they are. With two well-chosen words I created the biggest laugh of the evening—and in a foreign language, too. But there is more to being a man than being a good fellow. Going to a brothel is something I have never contemplated doing, even in my loneliest dreams. (In fact I don’t think there are any brothels in England—I’ve never heard of any anyway.) And the thought that I have just said that I would like to go to one—tonight, in a few minutes—causes a queer agitation in me, a physical agitation. And an idea swirls round in my brain, making it spin faster than the beer and mekong do. Of course. Of course. That’s what I ought to have done years ago. Instead of trying to break my dam-fool neck on the speedways. Instead of writing all those sexy poems—‘Upon her Navel’—‘O like a bow is the bony spire of her spine’—and all the rest of them. Instead of gobbling a whole bottle-full of barbital tablets; instead of drinking too much beer and mekong, which just makes you feel dizzy in the head and insecure lower down …

  I feel I want to be sick. As I did that morning back home when I opened my mother’s letter, ‘Dear Reggie, I have some news for you about Andy and Sheila Bowers which I fear will give you an unpleasant surprise …’ But don’t think about that. As I did that night when Lanky Spence fell right in front of me, and I rode into him, and saw his face scream as my front wheel hit him. All the props on which you build up your confidence knocked from underneath you. Yourself not the injured, but the culprit, right from the start. And the crowd booing, booing, till your heart breaks …

  ‘Try the dum-yam-pla, Mr. Joy. See if you like.’

  It is a fish soup so hot that it takes the skin off my uvula and brings the tears to my eyes and no matter how carefully I swallow it some of it always seems to go down the wrong way. But I keep on spooning it up to seem willing. And the tongue is delicious, and the salt fish superb—so
rotten it just melts in your mouth, and if you were stuffed to the gills you could still down another bowlful of rice taking it along with such a delectable condiment. When I have finished, I have just that degree of discomfort in the midriff which tells me I have truly appreciated the food.

  I lean back to take stock of my surroundings. There’s no doubt it’s a pretty scruffy shop. On the uneven floor wobbly tables and chairs are crowded together. Two walls are covered by glass-fronted cupboards full of bottles of beer. The third is covered by advertisements mostly exhibiting blondes more or less nude, and half a dozen actual nudes in which the palm for artistry goes to the model rather than to the photographer. There is no fourth wall. On that side the fight of the hurricane lamps spills into the street, turning the passing tricycles with their glinting spokes and festoons of coloured lights into fairy chariots, making every girl who stalks softly by, majestic in her bright-coloured sarong, straight-backed and slim of form, at least as beautiful as a fairy-tale princess.

  Behind, the velvety blackness of the tropical night is sparkling with stars: a perfect backdrop. Somewhere not too far away a ramwong is going on: the metallic percussive music falls through the air in long drooping silvered speedy lines, like the bent stalks of a fountain dropping into a floodlit pool. There is terrific sexual excitement in such music, I sensed it the very day I landed in Bangkok. It is quite different from any other music—fierce and impatient yet at the same time relaxed and happy—the music of a people who die young but without regrets, worn out by the unbearable pleasantness of life, its alternating delights of desire and satiation …

  There is the usual palaver about paying the bill, everybody pulling out his wad (but some more slowly than others, and my own wallet always gets jammed in my pocket in the most exasperating fashion), and Boswell as an American makes the inevitable query, ‘Let’s see, how does this split up?’ which wipes out all Point Four munificence in a few syllables, and convinces the Far East that the Americans are a nasty mean race. Anyway it is up to Prosit to pay and we all know it except possibly Boswell: Prosit is host and if anyone else pays, he will lose face; our offers are only show, proofs that we are solvent; by retracting them, with bitter smiles, we acknowledge our social master. Later each in his turn will get an opportunity to make the supreme gesture—to pay for all of us—and that will be a memorable moment in his life, remembered by all present, in case he tries to evade another moment of glory when his turn next comes around again.

  We debouch into the street. All Siamese bronchial tubes are emptied into the gutter. The westerners exchange tritenesses about the night. How cool after Bangkok. What stars. And look, there’s the moon. First quarter. No, third. Hell, I don’t know. Who looks at the moon anyway, nowadays? With MSA generators humming round the globe?

  ‘First we go to see ramwong,’ Windmill says.

  ‘Why don’t we go in my jeep?’ Boswell asks.

  ‘I think not good. Better to walk. Then we can go everywhere.’

  ‘Hell, don’t tell me you guys are getting self-conscious about driving up to the old red lamp in a UN jeep,’ Boswell jeers. To me he adds, ‘When the Thai start to get shy about seeing floozies it’ll be time for us westerners to go home—But that’ll never happen,’ he goes on cheerfully. ‘The whole economy of this country is founded on rice and prostitution. It’s the floozies that keep the bloody police in pocket money.’

  ‘The old League of Nations did a lot to clean up the white slave traffic in different parts of the world,’ I answer, being informative again, and wishing they’d got round to Korat.

  ‘Is that so? Well I hope the UN has more sense.’

  Custard-tart, his official mentor, says, ‘You know, Mis’ Bosswill, tonight our jeep is red jeep. It is not good to go for a walk in red jeep. Police jeep is red. We not want frighten all the ladies.’ To me he continues: ‘It is same when we go to country. Go in grey jeep, everyone come, very happy have injeckshun. Go red jeep, everyone run away into jungle. Police always much trouble. Always want money.’ He turns to make the same observations to Windmill, speaking volubly in Thai: I hear the words ‘rod deng mai di, mai ao-la’—the red jeep is no good, not wanted—and the word ‘tumluat’—police—used several times.

  ‘Christ, I could do with a leak,’ says Boswell.

  ‘Same here.’

  We go to the side of the road and let go. It’s the first time I’ve ever been guilty of indecent exposure in a city street. There is a grass verge and a hedge and the jet-black glint of water and over us the palm leaves chafing dryly, black against the now dove-grey, star-dotted sky. The fight of shop windows falls on our backs, women in wooden sandals go clacking by, but there’s absolutely no likelihood of our being fined five bob, as there would be a mere ten thousand miles to the west, in dear old England.

  ‘Jesus, what a relief,’ I sigh, and this is another innovation: the first time in my life I have used that name as an expletive.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen the local Saturday-night hop. It’s alfresco, of course. There’s a core of blaze and racket, and round it a ring of men and boys all stilled and intent on the mystery. Without straining I can see over their heads. It’s hard to understand what holds them so spellbound. In the centre of the ring a man is singing into an amplifier. He has been singing, or rather yelling, indefatigably ever since we reached Korat, and he seems all set to continue his performance till morning. Behind his voice the xylophones and cymbals rattle out their long rapid cadences and the amplifier bawls them, hideously distorted, to all points of the compass. There is a bench loaded with girls; they are garishly dressed, some in western dance frocks, some in local style; they are heavily made-up and look unspeakably bored. A few others are going round the ring with young local men. The pace is a fast slinky trot with wonderful twistings of arms and hands, like the smoke curling up from a fag-end in a draught. At two-minute intervals a whistle blows; singer and orchestra stop short in mid-phrase; there is a shuffle of feet as males clear off the floor, females return to their bench; in twenty seconds the whistle blows again, the music clatters off to a new rhythm, a new troop of males comes on, bows briefly to its choice on the form, hands it a ticket and follows it into the ring. The spectators stand agog, as if the show were wondrous.

  ‘Why in hell do the Thai get such a kick out of this?’ Boswell wonders. ‘After all it’s only just walking round in circles.’

  There speaks a representative of the race which produced the jitter-bug. Because the dancers never touch, because they do no fancy steps but just keep sliding forward in concentric circles, girls on the outside, partners a little to the rear, because the girls’ faces are as immobile as the painted waxen faces of dolls, because the dance consists mainly in those extempore posturings of arm and hand, it is a waste of time and fifty satang, stupid and pointless. He cannot read the erotic significance of the gestures (neither can I but I divine that it is there), cannot hear the edge of excitement in the music, isn’t subtle enough to realize that promise has a flavour as rich as fulfilment’s, that the easy embraces of the western dancehall spoil the palate for meatier fare, that this dance has something—he’d laugh like hell if I spoke the word—holy about it, the reverence of man for withdrawn mysterious exciting woman—a reverence felt even here, in a country where both sexes pretend to believe in the inferiority of one of them. ‘Hey, Windmill,’ he calls, grabbing my fat fellow traveller by the arm, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here. Take a walk.’ The mekong seems to be working in him too.

  ‘You not want dance ramwong?’

  ‘Hell no. ’Nother sort of dance. Less go.’

  ‘Less go, less go,’ they all chorus.

  So from the ramwong we cross a spacious square where the ancient main gate of the city stands up in white-washed magnificence under the moon. In a circle behind it stands a statue of Seratnari, Korat’s Joan of Arc, a heroine who led the Thai against the Laos, or the Laos against the Mons, or the Mons against the Cambodians, I’m not sure which (Windmi
ll’s history notes are pretty garbled to my ears) but anyway she routed them whoever they were: there is a garland of faded flowers around her bronze neck and jeeps and samlors circle her in a clockwise direction. Scattered about are stalls, knee-high, tended mostly by women; the glare of carbide lamps falls seductively on their wares and not less seductively on themselves. This is the sort of setting in which I am accustomed to take my pleasure of the opposite sex, and fain would I stay here, feasting my eyes on so much colour and movement: ‘Women and fruit,’ I begin saying, mainly to Boswell, ‘that’s two of the elements in the world of Matisse: the third is sunlight, but that’s cruel; this night is kinder to one’s illus—’

  ‘Hey, Mr. Bosswill, where you go? Why you walk so fast?’ they are all shouting, and laughing and stumbling with the rest, I follow him, though my heart is in my mouth and my guts are working as they used to do before a big match.

  ‘You know, I never touched beer until I was twenty-four years old,’ I find myself saying. ‘Then one night I came home from the dirt-track—this was after I’d packed up riding; I’d just gone to spectate—and accidentally at supper I knocked over my cup of tea twice running and my old man said ‘you’ve been drinking’ and he and my mother gave me such a bloody jawing, though I was stone-sober … The very next night I went into a pub and got myself half a pint; I couldn’t see any sense in being called a drunk if I wasn’t one. That’s the first time alcohol passed my lips.’ (This is an incident from Perfidy: I don’t want him to know that I first broke the pledge only one month ago.) ‘ Since then I’ve shipped enough to sink the Queen Elizabeth. I’m just wondering if it’s going to be the same tonight.’

  ‘Whadya mean?’ he asks, not very interestedly.

  But I can’t bring myself to admit that I’ve never been to a whore-house before, and am fearful that if I take the plunge tonight I shall be going for the rest of my life. It is important to have men respect you. They never will if you claim to be chaste. Just assume you’re a liar.