Then suddenly Udom stopped his stertorous breathing, swallowed frantically, choked and gave a sort of groaning cry and then restarted breathing, but even more painfully than before.
‘Oh, Wretch, Wretch—Udom—he die, I sink—’
‘He’s bad. We’ve got to hurry.’
‘Before you say not bad, just knock out—’
‘That was to stop you worrying. But you don’t worry enough. Now tell me the way to the nearest ron-piya-ban if that’s what you call it and I’ll really open the taps—’
Udom was rolling his head on her knees. She could feel the writhing of his neck muscles through the sharkskin. She was terrified. He mustn’t die in her lap—that would be the worst of bad luck forever. Nor did she want him to die in her house, for then it would be haunted by his ghost, and she’d have to move—but she couldn’t afford to move, for if she changed her address how could that small but remunerative body of old friends who for various reasons—wives, mostly—couldn’t come to the Bolero openly to pick her up, contact her when they got a chance? She’d lose not only a son, but business too …
She began to cry. ‘Bai ron-piya-ban, leu-leu bai’—go to the hospital as quick as you can—she sobbed.
He’d already got the car moving. ‘Which way from here?’ ‘Go straight, and when I ask, go this way.’ She motioned with her arm, because she always muddled the English for kwa and sai.
The hospital turned out to be even worse than she’d feared it might be. She’d never been in one before. All her ideas about them were founded on those in the movies—aseptic palaces run by famous actors and extremely chic nurses. But the reality was dingy and and unswept and (especially disgusting to a Thai woman) it smelled bad. The doctor had a broken lens in his glasses and his coat, far from being brand-new and snow-white like those Lew Ayres wore, was grey from a thousand imperfect launderings and spotted with blood. The nurses stared at her out of insolent country eyes and she saw instantly that no sympathy for her son was to be expected from them. And to do him justice Wretch himself seemed disappointed in the place. He’d carried Udom in as if he was carrying him into heaven, brushing past clerks and porters and making for a side-room where he’d laid him on a high white bed, and it had been gratifying to see the way everybody jumped to it at the foreigner’s entry—they’d have kept her waiting for a couple of hours, she knew. But then the clerks had started making a muddle of forms, the doctor had been clumsy and cruel in his examination, the nurses had got in each others’ way and giggled, and Wretch had become more and more exasperated. When she judged that he was exasperated enough she had proposed that they bow out, taking Udom with them, but he had ignored the suggestion. Apparently in his opinion a bad hospital was better than no hospital at all. She had shrugged her shoulders then. It was all Wretch’s idea, coming here. If anything went wrong he would be to blame, not she …
The doctor, who had put off talking to her as long as possible because he was not quite sure where she stood in the social scale and was afraid of demeaning himself by being too courteous to someone of no account on the one hand, or of not being courteous enough to someone who really mattered on the other, finally found himself forced to address her. He did it as neutrally as possible. ‘This is your son?’
‘Yes.’
‘The foreigner ran over him with his car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why has no policeman accompanied you here?’
‘None saw the accident.’
‘The boy will have to be admitted for a few days. Will the foreigner guarantee the fees?’
‘He will pay them.’
‘Do you know his name? Where does he live? Whom does he work for?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ll ask him.’ To Wretch, in English, she said, ‘What your name, darling? The doctor want to know.’
He said, ‘The name’s Joyce. But what’s he want to know my name for? I don’t think they’ve got the patient’s down yet.’
She said, ‘He want you—oh, I no know how you say.’ She puzzled it out. ‘I just woman, I Siamese—how doctor can trust me? Maybe I not tell him my truce name. He make my son well, then maybe he cannot get my money. But you foreigner—you alway say truce things—also foreigner always haff much money—’
‘Bags and bags of it, yes.’ He sniffed. ‘So he wants me to stand guarantor, is that what you mean?’
‘Yes, that what he want. Ab-solutely.’
Wretch with the queer recklessness of foreigners promptly gave his real name and the name of his firm. The doctor was much more impressed than she was. Blodderlick Peers. Everybody knew that name, of course. It belonged to one of the oldest and best-respected of the foreign firms. But the firm was British, not American. It employed nice boys but it paid them next to nothing. No wonder Wretch winced every time he parted from a hundred-tic note. He might have enough to pay the hospital bill, perhaps. He’d have to have enough, since he’d brought Udom here. But after that he’d be played out. However crazy he might be about her (and, in spite of all his tantrums, he was continually throwing infatuated glances her way) he’d be no more use to her …
At last they were ready to leave. They left Udom lying on his back on a stretcher. Wretch had had a long talk with the doctor in English. When it was over he tried to take her arm to lead her out but she eluded his hand indignantly. These men! Acting like that in front of the doctor! Spoiling her story and making her look cheap! She threw a last glance at Udom. She wanted to hug him, but the doctor’s and Wretch’s insistence that he must be kept quiet had impressed her at last and she controlled the impulse: a kiss might kill him, she thought. ‘You are quite sure he will be all right?’ she asked the doctor doubtfully. The doctor was positive. ‘Just a bump on the head. But we must keep him under observation for a few days. You will of course come back shortly, or will send somebody else to look after him?’ It would have to be Bochang, she supposed. She nodded and just touched Udom’s wrist. It was clammily cold. She was sure she’d never see him alive again.
Out in the hospital courtyard, while Wretch was opening the car door for her, she vomited. He had to help her into the front seat, because suddenly her legs were boneless.
In the car she laid her head on the back of the seat and gave herself over to her misery. Never before in her life had she known a prophecy come true with such alacrity. She had expected to have time to make plans and offerings at the temple, but horror had struck like lightning. And now she had more pain than ever to bear.
She was so overwhelmed by her troubles that she completely forgot about Wretch until she realized he was asking her which way to go at a crossroads. Then she quickly recollected herself.
‘Stop here. I get out.’
‘But can’t I take you to your home?’
‘No, no. I get out now. Go samlor.’
He turned nasty again. ‘You mean you don’t want to be seen getting out of my car at your house? Somebody else is waiting there for you?’ He couldn’t keep the suspicion to himself. ‘Dick?’
‘All the time you want to fight wiss me,’ she complained. It was a serious blemish on an otherwise likeable boy. ‘Stop car.’ Dick had never entered her mind as it happened.
He pulled up with a jerk and as she opened the door, not giving him time to run round and be gentlemanly, he grabbed her elbow. His voice was quite broken. ‘Vilai!’
‘What matter?’ His fingers round her arm were like manacles but they were trembling. She tried to shake herself free but he hung on. He was too emotional altogether and she clicked her tongue in disgust. ‘Let go my arm—you not want me call policeman, do you?’
‘Vilai. Sit here a minute. I want to talk to you.’
‘No time now. Must hurry. Get ready go Bolero. Saturday night big night always. Many men. All want Leopard. Tee-hee.’
‘You’re going to the Bolero tonight?’
‘Of course. I must go sair. It my shob. If not go, must pay manager eighty tic tomollow.’
‘I should have though
t your son was more important to you than eighty tics.’
‘He is. He very important me. He only sing in world I love more than myself. I sink he sick at home I not go Bolero. But you take him ron-piya-ban—OK. What I must do? Sit in that place all night while he do like this’—she imitated his breathing—‘all the time? I sink that no good. Only make me very unhappy. Not halp hem get well—’
‘But, hell, tonight he may peg out. Have you thought of that?’
‘Peg out—what mean?’
‘Die.’
She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, ‘OK. He die tonight. I at Bolero. I d’unk. I forget he hurt. I forget maybe he die. I very happy.’ Her heart felt like a hot stone in her breast. ‘Tomollow I wake up late. My cookee say, ‘Udom d’ad.’ I sink I cry then. I sink I cry very mutss. Eye get fat here, and rad colour. But what is use? Not make Udom come back from d’ad. Only make Vilai not pewty. So tomollow night, I put powder here’—she demonstrated—‘I put rad colour here, I dress very smart girl, I go Bolero, I get d’unk again, I meet nice man, I forget—’ She laughed a hard laugh and as Wretch had released her arm, got out of the car. ‘You not want sink so much, darling,’ she said. ‘Tonight I must go Bolero. Now you take my son ron-piya-ban I must have money more than before. Must pay for doctor, must pay for samlor, must pay for cookee go ron-piya-ban to look after him. But who giff me money if I not go Bolero, make for myself?’ She gave him a teasing smile. ‘You?’ A youngster from Blodderlick Peers! She laughed at the absurdity of the thought. ‘Bye-bye. I see you again sometime, maybe.’
‘Vilai!’ There was agony in his voice but she ignored it. Perhaps he’d been right at that. Perhaps Dick was at her home by now, with money.
She signalled a samlor and it swung to her with a squawl of brakes. She got in without giving Wretch another look and they set off, leaving the car on their left. A moment later it passed them, accelerating, on their right. Wretch refused to look at her and his chin was set at an offended angle. He muffed another gear change and nearly side-swiped a taxi in his anxiety to roar away from her.
Of course she was late for the Bolero and the manager fined her twenty tics. Ordinarily he fined the girls forty tics for being an hour or part of an hour late and the fact that he was so lenient meant that her story was getting good. With a few more revisions it would become a masterpiece. For even those who had only heard these imperfect early versions were held spellbound while she talked. And the manager, who heard women lying every night, was almost completely insensitive to women’s troubles …
She’d told the story now about a dozen times. And at each re-telling facts which did little to heighten the effect were dropped while fictions that heightened it considerably were added. Yet she was not just lying outrageously. She was only doing what the conscious artist must always do, attempting with whatever means were at her disposal to create in her listeners the full force of the emotions she had felt in herself. But since it was not their brother who had been knocked down before their own eyes and who now lay bleeding and insensible in a hospital ward, a bare recital of the facts of the case could not achieve that object. There had to be extra stimulation of their imaginations to bring their reactions up to the full pitch. She had to lie in order to make them understand. In fact she was an epic poet in style rather than a historian.
As usual she hypnotized herself with her own visions and it would now have taken a powerful intellectual effort, which she had no intention of making, to recall the actual drab facts of the accident. And the next time she told the tale—to Dick—she almost believed every word she said. She told him that Wretch had deliberately tried to mow her down with his car and that he had actually succeeded in laying her little brother low, that he was inspired by frantic spite because she’d consistently refused to sleep with him for weeks, that he’d driven off without stopping and left her to take the mangled child to hospital in a samlor, that the operation was going to cost five thousand tics and that even then it might not be successful, that the poor child had a broken back and a shorn-off leg and that they couldn’t stop the blood from pouring out of both of his ears, that if he lived he would be a burden on her and if he died she’d kill herself, and that it was all in fulfillment of a prophecy a priest had made to her when she was fifteen years old and still an innocent girl in her mother’s house.
But Dick was unresponsive. ‘Who d’you say did all this?’
‘Wretch. Boy wiss you at Singsong today.’
‘Seemed like a hell of a nice guy to me.’
‘You sink I not speak truce?’
‘We-e-ell, I don’t say that. He could have run over you easy—drives like he was at Indianapolis on Memorial Day. But he sure wouldn’t have done it on purpose. And if he’d known he’d hit your brother he’d have stopped—’
‘You not unnerstand. He hate me. Because I not—’
‘Look, Willy. This morning my ship’s still have trouble, see? They tell us to get the hell out till ten tonight. I get into the company bus to come to town. The other guys are worn out after last night; they can’t face it again. Halfway to Bangkok the rear diff seizes up—not a drop of lubricant. There we are, stuck. Blazing hot and not a drink for miles. Then along comes this guy Reg. He’s been out to Don Muang on business. He’s barrelling like hell but he sees me. Those tyres really whinny when he slams on the brakes. He backs up. ‘Having trouble? Can I give you a lift?’ There was no need for him to do that. He’d never seen me before. But he’s that kind of a guy. He’s the sort that’ll stop to turn a beetle over when it’s fallen on its back and can’t get righted again.’
‘Maybe he OK wiss men. But wiss women, differnunt.’
‘And now you’re just talking like an oriental. A westerner that treats his fellow men right’ll treat women better still—a hell of a lot better than they deserve, mostly. Women aren’t just pieces of tail in the West. They go through a door ahead of the men. They don’t tag along behind like in the Or-ree-ent, carrying the baby and all the baggage. They’re right out there in front.’
She gave up. She’d found out years ago that it was waste of time telling stories to westerners. They never accepted a tale at its face value and enjoyed without questioning the thrills the narrator had set out to give them. They always started pulling it to pieces, like a customs man tapping a heel to see if it was hollow. They expected a story to be merely true and didn’t care whether it was sensational or not …
‘You want dance wiss me?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Yeah, I guess. But it’ll have to be the last one, honey. Then I’ll have to be hitting the trail for the airfield …’
Just as she was accompanying him to the door (for he’d given her three hundred after all plus a few incidentals and though it wasn’t as much as she’d wanted it was more than she’d expected and she was sorry to see him going) a boy brought her a note.
‘What this?’
‘A letter.’
‘Who bring?’
He pointed with his chin. Another boy she’d never seen before was grinning at her from amongst the potted palms in the main doorway.
She turned the letter over. It was addressed in English.
‘What it say?’ she asked Dick.
‘It says “Miss Vilai” in big letters, and underneath in brackets it says “The White Leopard.” Do you want me to read it for you?’
She debated the point rapidly. The only Thai present whose translation she could trust would be the manager, but she didn’t want him to know too much of her business. As for that, she didn’t want Dick to know it either. She accosted the strange boy, who was smart and clean and rather good-looking. He did obeisance to her, which was extremely gratifying in front of Dick.
‘Who sent this letter?’
‘A foreigner.’
‘What is his name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where does he live?’
He pointed with his chin and named a hotel she’d never heard of before.
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Dick said, ‘If you want me to read that billy-doo you gotta give it me quick. I’m running it mighty fine—’
She handed him the letter.
He opened it and unfolded a single piece of paper. As his eyes ran down the dozen or so lines his puckered eyes began to smile. Finally with a short laugh he handed the letter back to her. ‘That guy sure does hate your guts,’ he said drily.
‘Who?’
‘Reg. The guy that tried to bump you off with a car.’
‘It from he?’
‘Yes. Surprised?’
‘What he say?’
He took the note back and read it quickly in a toneless voice. ‘“Dear Vilai: I hope you can get someone to read this to you. I am sorry I upset you this afternoon. I should have realized how upset you must have been by the accident to your son”—I guess he means your little brother—“and been more decent to you. Vilai, I can’t bear the thought of your dancing at that goddamned Bolero, pretending to be gay and happy, getting drunk to make yourself forget, while all the time Udom is badly injured. I know you are not really as hard and bad as all that. Is it just the money you must have? I will pay all the bills for you, darling. But please, immediately, come here to this hotel, where you can rest decently, and tomorrow if you like I’ll take you to the hospital to see the poor kid. Do please please come, Vilai. I can’t come to the Bolero for you; I can’t bear to see you working there, especially tonight. Reggie. PS. Please tell the bearer if you will come or not. It is torture waiting for you here.”’
She took the note back again. ‘He little bit mad, I sink.’
‘He sure is. Well, you’d better cash in on it, kid. So long.’
She called a samlor to take Dick to the taxi-station and by the time he’d vanished waving into the wide dark spaces of Rajadamnoen Avenue she’d decided what to do. ‘Go back to the hotel and tell the foreigner I must have sixty tics to pay the manager, else I cannot leave the Bolero until closing time,’ she told the boy. Then she went back in the Bolero to augment her income if possible.
A Woman of Bangkok Page 22