The traffic lights weren’t working (as was often the case) and a policeman was standing beneath them directing the traffic. She waited for a chance to cross.
While she was waiting people started coming out of the cinema. They came at first singly or in pairs, lingering on the top step, turning, running together into groups, then dripping down step by step into the street. Like raindrops on a banana leaf. And soon the drizzle became a shower, and the whole leaf was wet with a wall of pouring water. The pavement before the steps filled up with the water, like a hoof-print on the ground beneath the leaf …
She decided to stay where she was for a while. Udom was somewhere in that crowd. She had no desire to meet him face to face here. The lunch-time scene was still fresh in her mind. It would only embarrass him if he had to acknowledge her. At the same time she’d like to see these friends of his that believed she was a princess, these boys that must never know what his Mama really was …
‘Vilai. Vilai!’
She’d been so intent on trying to catch sight of Udom that she hadn’t realized her name was being called. In any case it was a foreigner that was calling and he bungled the tones so badly the name was practically unrecognizable.
She automatically put on a brilliant smile before she located where the voice was coming from. She looked around her brightly.
‘Vilai!’
He was in a car that had stopped by the kerb only a couple of yards away. A nice-looking boy, though blond, with eager eyes. His head was thrust out of the window.
‘Why, hallo-o, how you do-o,’ she said, dragging some of the vowels.
‘Vilai, are you going to see Ivanhoe? I’m just going to see it myself. How about we go together?’
She took a step towards him, but then she suddenly recollected herself. Udom was somewhere close at hand, possibly watching her even now. And it wouldn’t be good for him to catch her talking to a foreign man on the street. He’d never be able to look at the matter realistically—‘My Mama is working’—and turn his face away. He’d be ashamed of her, hurt worse than ever. His attitude was stupid, but nothing would make him see that. He believed that there were depths she still hadn’t plumbed, that she hadn’t yet sunk to picking up men, on the street, in her hours off work. And it was most important that she should not betray this trust in her. She could never bear to see reproach in Udom’s eyes.
So she erased her smile and glanced guiltily across the road.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the young man’s face drop. He pulled his head inside the window with a savage, insulted jerk. She felt a pang. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. He looked nice. And she knew him well too, if only she could place him.
Then she saw Udom.
He was crossing the street towards her. He was with two older boys. They were not walking nicely: they were swaggering, as if they thought themselves very big men. And all three of them were smoking.
Rage rushed into her throat, almost choking her. And she hurled her rage across the road like a death-ray to annihilate him. All day and half the night she slaved to make him happy. She suffered torments because of her love of him. Yet he did nothing but disobey her. Acting very low in public. Heaping shame on his mother. She could have killed him.
And such was the intensity of her wrath that it actually seemed as if she had somehow managed to project it across space and strike him with it as with an open hand. For she saw a sort of uneasiness come over him as he reached the island in the middle of the road. He took the cigarette from his mouth and looked about nervously as one does when one gets that uncanny feeling that one is being watched by unseen eyes. Then, as if inevitably, his stare swung round to her and she saw him trip with the shock of seeing her.
The policeman did some balletic movements, causing the traffic to cease flowing in two directions and begin flowing in two others. The car at the kerb got gratingly into gear. The cars on the far side of the crossroad, a handsome long green limousine at their head, moved forward with a surge of joy like children escaping from school.
And instantly she foresaw the events of the next five seconds as clearly as if they’d happened already. And because of this foreknowledge they seemed to develop with a goading slowness. Yet all her own actions were slowed down similarly, and she could do nothing to alter the course of fate.
Udom pretended he hadn’t seen her. He pretended he’d found something of interest in a shop behind him. He called to his two friends who were already in the roadway coming towards her. Then he stepped off the island away from her without looking.
She screamed and leaped leadenly forwards. She heard a squeal of brakes as the nice boy in the near car avoided her. But she had eyes only for Udom. The long green beautiful car was gathering momentum as it escaped from under the policeman’s arm. It moved with the silent deadly stealth of an arrow. It didn’t really hit Udom. He blindly stepped into it somewhere near its tail. The impact sent him spinning back towards the island. He tripped over its edge, crashed against one of its iron posts, and fell in a little heap. And she was hung over the roadway, trying to run, but her numbed thighs were scarcely movable. And she would never reach him.
‘Udom! Udom! Udom!’ She was transfixed by the terror in her own voice.
Suddenly she was grabbed by the arm. An English voice shouted roughly in her ear, ‘What the hell are you up to, you stupid bitch? Trying to commit suicide? I as near as dammit belted you.’
She couldn’t answer. She raised a hand and pointed dumbly towards Udom.
‘Well, what’s he to you? He’s a silly little bastard that tried to commit suicide too. Is he your brother, or something? Maybe it runs in the family.’
‘He my son.’
‘Your—son?’ There was so much agony in his voice that she was compelled to throw him a glance. And of course seen full length he was unmistakable. No wonder his face had looked familiar, stuck out of the window. And now it was wearing an expression which was also becoming familiar, that Chokchai expression again—as if he’d just had another kick.
‘Wretch!’ she exclaimed, overwhelmed with relief. ‘You here? You help me, honey—sweetheart?’ He looked sick, and she added an unusual word for her—‘please?’ And then, suddenly breaking into tears, ‘Oh, Wretch, come quick and help me with my son.’
Seven
Wretch was wonderful. It was he who proved to her that Udom wasn’t dead. He did it in a brusque manner that under any other circumstances would have seemed insufferably rude. ‘Stop squawking and feel his pulse.’ He got hold of her hand and pressed two of her fingers against Udom’s wrist. ‘Feel it? He’s nowhere near dead. Just knocked out, that’s all.’
‘But why he not speak? Why he shut eye, lie still like he d’ad?’
‘He’s knocked out, I tell you. Like in boxing … What the hell does that bloke want?’
It was the traffic policeman. He’d left the traffic to fight its own battles and had come to see why a crowd was collecting here. She got up—for careless of the white slacks she’d fallen on her knees beside Udom—and began telling him. And all her seething emotions—horror at what she had witnessed, a sickening fear for Udom, fear for herself if Udom should die—gave added power to her natural eloquence. Words poured out of her in a passionate stream, fascinating the crowd but confusing the law.
For she told them all about Udom being a good boy except that sometimes he was disobedient and smoked and played around with the other boys instead of coming straight home from school. That this morning he had asked her for five tics but because he’d been specially good she’d given him ten and he’d come to see this movie over there, first house. That she had subsequently visited a palmist who had told her her son was in danger so she had immediately come to the cinema to save him. That the samlor had been slow and so she had actually arrived a few seconds too late to prevent the tragedy, with the result that her child now lay at their feet with blood pouring from his head (there actually was a small trickle from one ear) and every bone in his
sweet little body broken.
As rhetoric it was magnificent, but as evidence it was worse than useless, it was misleading. The policeman even thought it was deliberately misleading.
For one thing was already crystal-clear to the policeman. He hadn’t actually seen the accident happen, but he was positive that it was the foreigner who had caused it. Else why was he displaying so much interest in the case? Kneeling in the dust and applying a very fine clean handkerchief to the bleeding ear? Straightening the body out and feeling it all over for broken bones? Every gesture was a confession of guilt. In the middle of her testimony he went away to write down the number of Wretch’s car.
Wretch became impatient. ‘How much longer are we going to be fooling around here? Has that gamboge-topee’d prat sent for an ambulance yet, or not?’
‘Who you mean?’
‘That so-called policeman.’
‘Send for what?’
‘Am-byou-lance, darling. Don’t you know what an ambulance is? A special motor for taking injured people to hospital.’
She couldn’t understand all those long words and in reply to a question from the spectators now about forty strong, began giving another vivid but quite different account of what had happened and why and how.
In the midst of it, Wretch swore. He stooped and picked up Udom in his arms. She was startled by such abruptness. ‘Where you go?’
‘Go my car, darling. Take the kid to hospital. We can’t hang around here all day. He’s concussed. He needs a doctor.’
He strode away with Udom dangling limply across his chest. The spectators fell back from before him, looking up into his angry blue eyes with their mild brown ones. The policeman was crouching in front of the car examining it for dents or bloodstains. She ran after Wretch and got in front of him to open the door.
‘No, the back one.’
He manoeuvred Udom through the narrow opening and laid him out on the back seat. All his movements were surprisingly gentle and careful. He might have been handling his own child.
‘You going in the back with him? Or in the front with me?’
Her first impulse was to say ‘In front wiss you.’ For Udom was dirty after rolling in the road. Also he looked as if he were dying, and she was afraid of him. His face had gone yellowish white, his eyes were shut, his mouth hung open and out of it came an occasional choke or strangled gasp. She knew he was a great deal worse than Wretch appeared to think. And her legs had begun to shake uncontrollably, and she was afraid she might faint.
But she knew what was expected of a mother. ‘I go back.’
‘Good.’ Wretch went in first and held up the boy’s head while she seated herself, then lowered it into her lap. As he backed out of the far door he said, ‘Keep him still. I’m an old dirt-track rider and I know about these things. Broken bones don’t matter a damn, unless you ram a rib through your lungs: just get ’em properly aligned, and in a few weeks they’re as good as new. But concussion’s funny. You’ve got to keep the patient quiet, or else no telling what may happen.’ She hadn’t understood a word but she was comforted by the sound of his voice. It was confident, and it gave her confidence too.
She caught hold of one of Udom’s limp hands. It was ten years since he’d last slept in her lap. How many times since then she’d longed to have his body nestled against hers, unresisting, in willing embrace! And now her wish was granted—but in what circumstances! She couldn’t hold back her tears, for the second time today.
The policeman wrenched open the door and climbed into the front passenger seat. ‘There are wheelmarks in the road,’ he said, ‘but they aren’t very clear. Probably the brakes are defective. Tell him to go to the traffic police station for a brake test. This instant.’
Wretch, in the act of getting into the other front seat, exploded with wrath. ‘Where does this sot think he’s going?’
‘He go wiss us, darling.’
‘What for?’
‘Because accident. Must go wiss us.’
‘But why? I didn’t run over the kid. Why the blazes doesn’t he go and look for the car that did it?’
‘He sink you do it, darling.’
‘Then tell the twerp to think again.’
‘I tell him before, darling, but he still sink not true. He sink why you worry to me, my son, if you not do? He sink maybe you, me, fix price very quick before he come. He sink you, me, fix price, then we not give policeman nussing for fix for us. He angly to us, he sink we try to cheat him.’
Wretch swore. Then he took a deep breath and started shouting at the policeman in Thai. It was such terrible Thai that the policeman didn’t even realize he was being addressed in his own language. After a moment or two she interrupted.
‘I am sorry to trouble you with these wearisome details, Officer. But truly it is not this foreigner who tried to kill my son. It was someone in a big green car going the other way. But this foreigner is a friend of my husband. That is why he wants to take my son to my home—because he is my husband’s friend. He happened to be passing when the accident occurred, and so he came at once to help me—’
‘Has he a driving licence?’
‘He tells me he wants to thank you for your interest in the case—I do too—but we both feel it would be a waste of your time to bother about it any more. For unless we can find the green car that ran down my son there will be no satisfaction in it for anyone. I—I mean my husband—will have to pay the doctor’s bills out of his own pocket, and as he is not rich—’
The policeman gave her jewels a hard stare. ‘Who is your husband?’
She fixed a fictitious first name to a family one that is respected throughout the length and breadth of Thailand and gave the address of a rich American bachelor in Bankapi. While the policeman was jotting it all down she said to Wretch, ‘Giff him twenty tic, darling.’
‘What in blazes for?’
‘Because he interest to us. We haff accident. He must reet in his littun book. We make trouble for him, much trouble.’
Wretch smiled grimly. ‘You’re a pewty girl. I’m a nerty boy. And the policeman must reet in his littun book. And meanwhile the kid’s just about breathing his last … So I give this sleuth twenty smackers, eh? The price of a maidenhead upcountry. Well, if you think he’s earned it …’ He pulled a green note out of his breast-pocket and thrust it rudely at the policeman. ‘Tell him I think your Thai policeman are wonderful.’
‘My husband’s friend says he thinks the Thai police are really wonderful because of their efficiency and their unfailing courtesy to all,’ she translated. And she added a lot more designed to prevent the policeman from taking offence at the uncouth way in which the money had been shoved at him. It was touch and go too, for Wretch would keep on interrupting her pleasantries with cross reminders that Udom would soon be a corpse. She ignored these and finally got the law mollified. But it remained surly, quite omitting to bid Wretch farewell and giving herself only the most perfunctory obeisance, as if it thought she didn’t amount to much, even though she was travelling in a private car, and had a husband with that distinguished family name she’d mentioned, and that address in Bangkok’s most swanky suburb …
They had a bit of unpleasantness in the car. Wretch was most unreasonable.
‘Where do we take him, Vilai?’
‘Go my home.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. He’s hurt. We’ve got to take him to hospital first.’
‘No time. Must go my home now. Get ready to Bolero.’
‘What?’
He threw a glance over his shoulder. It was angry and incredulous. She couldn’t see any need for that and was annoyed. But he was being nice to Udom in his rough way so she kept the peace. She just said sensibly, ‘More batter we go my home, darling. Then my cookee go fetss doctor—’
They’d crossed the intersection. He pulled up in the gutter and with the engine still running, turned to talk to her seriously. ‘Look here, you callous bitch. If the Bolero is more important to you tha
n your son, hop out and clear off there. I’ll take the poor little sod to hospital.’
‘Why you angly to me?’ She was genuinely puzzled. His only reply was a snort. She grew resentful. ‘I do not like you angly to me. Why you not take my son to my house, like I ask you? He not your son, he my son. Why you must take your house?’
He cried, ‘God the All-Highest! Do you think I’m trying to kidnap the brat? I haven’t got a home to take him to, as it happens—I live in a hotel. I want to take him to a hospital. Don’t you know what a hospital is, dimwit? Doctors in long white gowns. Nurses in funny hats. Beds in rows—’
Doctors and beds were English words she was familiar with and she at last grasped what he was getting at. She was horrified. ‘You mean ron-piya-ban?’ she cried, and her tone expressed her consternation. ‘Oh no, I not want my son go there, oh no, oh no.’ She shook her head resolutely, her lips pursed.
‘But why not, in Heaven’s name?’
She couldn’t remember the English for anterai, so she spoke the Thai.
‘Anterai? Dangerous? What the hell do you mean? It’s not dangerous to take your son to hospital, it’s dangerous not to take him there.’
She still shook her head, muttering again ‘Anterai mark.’
‘But what makes you say that? At the hospital they have trained personnel. They have equipment. They deal with hundreds of cases daily—’
And that was the point, exactly. ‘Too many pipple go ron-piya-ban. What the doctor care my son? He not know me, not know my son. How can he care my son, when so many pipple go see him? He care everybody?’ She laughed derisively.
‘You care for plenty of men, don’t you?’
It was like a backhanded blow across the mouth. She was dumbfounded by his bitterness and savagery. She was far too hurt to retaliate at once. She just said quietly, ‘I not care man. I only care myself. And my son.’ And subsided into silence.
A Woman of Bangkok Page 21