‘She’s—Wretcher?’ The name seemed to impress her. ‘Do you live in a hotel in Bhalangpoo?’
‘Yes, yes. Miss Vilai knows me well. Please let me in.’
The door opened and I passed through. I heard all the boys laugh out loud and scamper away, shouting out my shame to the whole convulsed street.
I waited awkwardly just inside, half afraid that Vilai’s furious eyes were already on me. The house stood on stilts, so close to the gate I was almost under it. In the darkness under the floor was the usual clutter of jars and broken boxes and bottles and other rubbish. Water was dripping through the floor from an upstairs bathroom and creeping through black and green slime to a smelly puddle over a stopped-up drain. Behind the drain a half-grown mongrel who was black with mud halfway up his skinny ribs stood whuffing halfheartedly at me, ready to flee at a flick of my eyelids. The smell of the eternal puddle was almost overpowering.
The old woman finished latching the door and turned and looked me up and down critically. I could see she was wondering what on earth her Mem saw in me.
‘Is Miss Vilai in?’
‘Wait here.’ She kicked off her sandals and shuffled up a ladder past the bathroom door. Watching her ascend, I marvelled at what monstrosities women, once presumably reasonably fair to look upon, can sometimes turn into. Corpses still able to move …
Standing at the foot of the ladder, I heard her go down a passage, tap at a door, and mutter ‘Mem.’ So Vilai was in … Then the old woman began in the exasperating Siamese manner to alternately tap and mutter, tap and mutter, never raising her voice above the conversational tone or giving the door a solid bang—and prepared to go on like that forever, it seemed. Often I’d heard boys in hotels thus ineffectually working away at a door for an hour or more—it has something to do with the fact that the soul goes roaming while the body sleeps, and if the body wakes too suddenly it may do so before the soul has had time to return to it and then the soul can’t find its home and becomes a wandering ghost and a public nuisance. I made a move towards the ladder and the mongrel retreated about five yards and went into a paroxysm of accelerating yaps that finally merged into one long-drawn hysterical howl. Only somebody who’d been drugged could have slept through the racket he made and Vilai wasn’t that. Her voice sounded angry—the way it always sounded when she was awakened—and I felt a rush of jumbled emotions—at any rate she was alive—and quite unchanged …
The dog had made so much commotion that I hadn’t been able to hear what was going on upstairs.
Then the old woman appeared again at the top of the ladder. She paused there to gather up her sarong in the spidery monkey fingers of one hand and holding it between her knees began to descend.
Before she was halfway down Vilai arrived. She shot to the top of the ladder and jerked to a stop. She was still tucking her sarong in on her chest. It was a plain black sarong such as country women wear. She had nothing else on, not even sandals. Her hair was what Sheila would have called ‘a sight’. Her face wasn’t made up—or rather it only showed a few traces of make-up left over from last time …
‘Why you come to my house?’ she grated. ‘I ask you many time, I not want you come my house.’
It was the reception I’d half-expected, and that made me twice as resentful about it. It was like dropping potassium permanganate into water and instantly what was colourless is purple. All my pent-up anxiety and fear for her, all my unwilling love, all my guilty sense of imbecility and besottedness, all were transmuted at a stroke into rage. I could feel my features wrenched into epileptic disorder. I could hear myself screaming: ‘You bitch, you low-down bitch! You sent for me, didn’t you? You implored me to come at once! God damn it, I nearly killed myself to reach you—I nearly killed myself—’
She came racing down the steps and hurled herself upon me. Her face was a picture of concern. She threw an arm around my waist and tried to draw me under the house. ‘Wretch, Wretch,’ she said earnestly, in a low voice, ‘you not want make so mutss noise. Usser pipple sink you d’unk—I not like that. This my house; every pipple here know I very good girl—’
I started laughing then. That concern for me (as I’d thought it was at first) and the feel of her arm about my body, had put ‘paid’ to my rage. But immediately it had appeared that what I had thought was concern for me was actually concern for herself—and it was really too funny—
She placed a box for me and I slumped down on to it, half-laughing and half-crying like a hysterical girl.
She stood in front of me, gripping her biceps with opposing hands and shifting her weight uncomfortably from one leg to the other. The old woman was there too, discussing me critically with her Mem. A third woman now arrived from behind all the rubbish, a very fat one with a crimson bodice that she was struggling to fasten as she approached. ‘Ami mai-di?’—what’s the matter with him?—she asked, and Vilai’s answer was as clear as a bell: ‘Mao.’
‘I’m not drunk,’ I said sulkily.
‘Then why all your clo’ dirty like you fall down on road?’
‘I had an accident. In the jeep.’
‘You haff accident, why you not go hotel, haff bass, before you come see me? I not like man come here see me wiss cloze all dirty. Pipple sink I very low dirty girl, haff dirty man come see—’
‘Oh, shut up about my clothes!’ I’d got over my hysteria and was turning angry again. ‘If you didn’t want me to come straight here to see you, why did you send me this ruddy telegram?’—and I whipped it out of my pocket, though it was by now illegible and in shreds. ‘From the way this telegram was translated to me, I reckoned you were already tied to the stake and the rotten English had their torches to the faggots. But you don’t look even singed to me. In fact you don’t look any worse than you normally do when you aren’t made up—’
‘What matter wiss you? All the time you spick too mutss, too fast: I not unnerstand—’
I got up off the box. ‘What’s the trouble, Vilai? Why did you send me this telegram? Is it a hoax, or is there really something wrong?’
She said, a little uncertainly, as I thought—‘I haff trouble, yes. Bad, bad trouble.’
‘Then what is it? Give me the facts. I might be able to help—’
‘Not want spick this place. Maybe bad pipples hear what I ask you. That not good.’
‘Then let’s go to your room.’
‘What?’ She gestured vaguely upwards and when I nodded, shook her head emphatically. ‘No, no, not want you go—’
She was so emphatic my suspicions were aroused. ‘Why not? Somebody else there already? Don’t tell me I have a rival!’
Her eyes blazed. ‘I sink you very bad boy, Wretch. All the time you only sink bad sing about Vilai. All the time you spick luff luff luff, but you not ac’ luff. If you not luff me, why you must come to my house like this?’
I seized her wrist. ‘Listen, sweetness. I’ve come through hell and high water to help you. I’ve cooked my goose as far as my firm is concerned and in fact my whole bloody life is in ruins. In other words, I’m in real trouble, Vilai, and if you aren’t—if you’ve just been playing with me—’
She gave a weary sigh and muttered what I thought was probably a curse. Then she said, ‘You hurt me too mutss when you angly to me like this. All the time you not trust Vilai. All the time you must try to hurt me ’cause you angly to me. You not good to me any more like before. But neffer mind. Vilai haff very strong heart, she not fray nussink … This time you can come my house, but I not want you come here again, you unnerstand what I spick, Wretch?’
She led the way upstairs. There was nobody in her room. She moved around clearing things up. There was a lot of empty soda water bottles scattered about and she’d spilt face-powder all down the front of the dressing-table. I pulled the door shut behind us and sat down in the deckchair. Behind a curtain I noticed dresses—innumerable dresses, hanging from a whole army of clothes-hangers. I didn’t remember having seen them on my previous visit. There wa
s an expensive-looking radio, too.
‘Not many signs of poverty here,’ I remarked.
‘Please you not spick me like that. I want you spick me why you come here today, then quick-quick go.’
I didn’t know how to begin. I said, ‘Look, darling—’
‘Oh, God. You just want spick like fool, eh? You come my house in dirty cloze to make luff to me—’
‘No. I came here in dirty clothes because you asked me to. What’s behind that telegram, Vilai?’
She sat down with her back to me on a stool in front of the triple-mirrored dressing-table. She opened a drawer and turned over a lot of underclothes, selected one soiled item, then bundled it in her hand and began wiping up the face-powder with it. Her jewellery jingled musically as she moved tins, pots, vials, bottles, tubes, cartons—all the staggering mass of paraphernalia that faced her. I thought she wasn’t going to answer me but suddenly she dropped the duster and swung round. ‘Wretch, how mutss money you haff? I mean altogesser—in bank and—’
‘So that’s it! Just the routine stick-up! I might have known.’ I got up and started tramping the room. ‘If only you could have an un-financial worry just once in a while, Vilai, people might take your financial ones more seriously.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘Anyway you’re out of luck this time—I’m broke.’
‘Why you sit on my bed wiss your—’
‘Sorry.’ I almost laughed—only a woman, I thought, could worry about a man sitting on her bed in dirty trousers when she was in desperate trouble. I crossed to the deckchair again, took out my wallet and inspected its contents. ‘I’ve got about two hundred and that’s all—’
‘So! Now you start spick lie to me, like usser men—’
‘How dare you say that?’
‘When you come back Chiengmai you still haff littun money. And since then you haff t’ree, four pay-day—’
‘And no you … Is that what you mean?’
‘I sink you bad boy, now, Wretch. Before, I ask you giff me money, you neffer say “No haff”—you giff me. And if you no haff, you ask your frand bollow you, and giff me everysing I want. But now you spick lie to me, ask me you not haff money. That not truce word, Wretch—how can you spend so mutss up-country?’ She turned to her mirrors and thrust her chin towards the middle one. ‘I want ten t’ou-zand today, darling. I must haff. You cannot giff, I neffer want see you again. Can not.’
She spoke in such flat matter-of-fact tones that she might have been asking me to squeeze a blackhead out of her chin, instead of demanding five hundred dollars—two hundred quid—or else …
I got up and stood behind her. She continued to give her chin the sort of rapt attention an astronomer accords the heavens. I was tempted to grab her shoulders and wrench her round. Instead I burst out: ‘Suppose you tell me what you need this—fortune—for?’
‘I neffer spick you that. Can not.’
‘And I know very well why you can’t, too. I’ve been rooked by you too many times already. You aren’t in trouble at all. It’s all a yarn. You think I’ve got money now, and you’re just trying to—’
My voice trailed off, because she was crying.
Whenever she did that she put me in a quandary. Cynicism about woman flourishes in vicarages and I’d known since childhood that all women except a few outstandingly good ones like your own mother can cry to order and often do when they want to gain a point. On the other hand all women good and bad can be made to weep real tears too—tears of distress that well out of their eyes involuntarily. And the problem for a man is to distinguish between the genuine article and the false. Which was worse, to be made a fool of or to act ungenerously? There wasn’t any doubt in my mind: if I let her down I’d have to live with the memory for the rest of my life. I was going to help her—but I’d be gruff with her to save face …
‘For God’s sake stop that sniffling. What in hell have you got to blubber about? You sent for me and here I damn’ well am. You know quite well I’ll do anything, anything, you ask, to help you.
‘What can you do? You spick me you not haff ten t’ou—’
‘I can do plenty. At least I can do something besides continually ramming my hand into my hip-pocket. I can use my brains, for a start.’ I brushed against her experimentally but she jerked away with a scornful exclamation, still weeping. So I said, ‘Look around you, Vilai. This room’s crammed with money. There’s a radio for one thing that’s worth a lot more than sixpence. There’s clothes—stacks of them. And somewhere there’s all your jewels—’
She spoke with a sort of incredulous fury. ‘What you mean? You want I sell my gold?’
‘Of course. Why not? You’re rich, Vilai. If you really want to raise ten thousand—’
‘Ugh!’ I’d seldom heard so much disgust in a voice before. ‘Once I sink Wretch good—I sink no man in world good more batter than he. I sink he say he luff me, he spick truce. But now I know Wretch mai dee—mai dee mark. He bad, like usser man. He spick me sell my sings—’
‘And why in blazes not, if it’ll keep you out of trouble?’
‘Sick, seffen, eight year I work work work. No pipple giff me nussing. I dancing-girl, everysing I haff I get my-self—’
‘I know, I know. Nobody could call you lazy, whatever else they might say … But surely this is why you’ve worked so hard, Vilai? So you’d have money for a rainy day—’
‘Wretch.’ Her voice was peremptory. ‘You giff me ten t’ou-zand—you haff in pocket now?’
‘No.’
‘You can get for me, giff me tomollow?’
‘No.’
‘Why you no can get?’
I sighed. ‘Because I’m a poor man. Use your crumpet, Vilai. Where do you think a chap like me—’
‘You could sell jip.’
‘What!’
‘Sell jip, darling. Many pipple want jip. Cowboy too—I sink cowboy giff mutss money for jip, then he look like soldier or plissman, can fright pipple very mutss, make them giff he money—’
‘My jeep happens to be upside down on a mountain two hundred kilos from here. Also it’s not my jeep. It’s the firm’s—’
‘What matter that? They not know what you do. You sell, giff me ten t’ou-zand, maybe twenty—’
‘You’re incorrigible, Vilai. Don’t you realize that if I did what you say I’d be finished? I’d be bundled off back home in disgrace. I’d never be here to help you in the next crisis—’
‘I not want you halp me nusser time. I want you halp me now. When you go back America, I halp my-self.’
‘England, darling. God damn it, I’ve been crazy about you for months—I’m calmly discussing going into crime for your sake—and you still can’t get my nationality straight …’
I was so exasperated with her I wheeled away towards a corner. She went to the bed and lay down. After a moment I mastered my feelings and seated myself beside her. She’d stopped crying but there was still a glitter of tears amongst her lashes. I couldn’t help noticing that her face was pinched and drawn as I’d only seen it once before, that day just after she’d lost her job. The skin in the eye-sockets seemed swollen and brown, as if it had been bruised and then treated with iodine. The lines from nose to mouth were carved deeper than before … She seemed to me very pitiable, and infinitely more appealing in this moment of defeat than when she was full of confidence and fight … When she turned and looked at me at last her eyes were beseeching.
‘Wretch, you very good boy, I know. Sometime you make me angly to you, then I spick you bad like usser man, but I not spick truce, darling. All the time I know you number one good frand for me—’
‘Yeah? And what about—?’
‘Sometime I mad because you so good. I sink if you bad more worse—if you cowboy—batter for me. If you so bad you not care what you do, you get money tonight—’
‘But I’ve just told you—’
‘I not mean sell jip. Batter way.’
‘Then spill the beans, sister. My morals seem to be get
ting more and more flexible. Maybe the crime won’t seem so heinous to me now as it would have done a few—’
‘Wretch, where that old girl liff?’
‘What old girl?’
‘The one that like you. The one that come your hotel see you, ask you go her home slip wiss her—’
‘You mean Mrs. Samjohn? I didn’t go home to sleep with her, darling. How many more times have I got to tell you she just wanted me to go to dinner—’
‘I ask you where she liff.’
‘Bankapi. Why?’
‘She haff—gold—very mutss—here, here, here.’ She touched herself in the usual places. ‘I sink she haff mutss mutss money. And she like you too, ’cause she old and ugly, you nice young—’
‘Are you suggesting I touch my boss’s wife for ten thousand? Let me tell you—’
‘What is tutss? I not unnerstand. But I know that old girl like you. I see her face when she look me, look you. I sink you go her house, she very happy to let you in. Then you spick her nice, she ask you go her bad room—’
‘And then I hit her over the head and rip off her jewels. Is that what you’re suggesting?’
‘I sink no need hit her head, darling. Can giff her somesing make her slip—’
‘Christ, you’ve really got it all worked out, haven’t you!’ I stood up and walked across the room to get away from her. ‘If only you used your brains for something else—’ Then I asked the question which had been uppermost in my mind all along. ‘Where’s Dan? Why can’t you ask him to do your dirty work for you?’
‘Dan? I not see him long time. He go to souse part of country.’
‘South? What for?’
‘Oh, I not know. He sink pipple sick there, more than Chiengmai … Wretch.’ She spoke rather sharply, and I turned round to look at her. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, Thai-style. She had a gun in her hand—I suppose it must have been hidden under the pillow. She wasn’t pointing it at me—it just lay on her palm, as if she were weighing it. She raised her eyes from the gun to me. ‘Wretch, I not haff ten t’ou-zand by twelve o’c’ock tomollow—’ She turned the muzzle towards herself and pressed it deep into her left breast.
A Woman of Bangkok Page 34