Private Dancer

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Man poot a-rai?’ asked Sunan.

  I couldn't make out much more, but that was enough. What they'd said was innocuous enough. Joy had said I wasn't there. There was a machine. And Sunan had asked what I'd said. But it was the way they'd referred to me that made my heart sink. When Thai people talk about each other, they usually use their names rather than pronouns. When they do use pronouns, however, they're used to denote status. If it's someone older or more respected, they'd say ‘pee’ for he or she. If younger, ‘nong’. Between equals they'd use ‘kao’ for he. But Joy and Sunan had used ‘man’ as the pronoun, and man wasn't used for people, ‘man’ was used for animals. It meant ‘it’, but ‘it’ doesn't convey the contempt implied when a Thai uses it to refer to a person. It's a huge insult. It was how they really felt about me. I was nothing, I was a source of money and that was all.

  I poured myself another gin and tonic, put my feet up on the coffee table, and waited.

  She called three more times before six o'clock, but still didn't leave a message. I wondered if they'd cut the cake. I wondered how many bottles of Black Label they'd ordered, and if they'd brought enough money to pay for it. I wondered if they realised that I wasn't coming, that they'd have to pay for their party out of their own pocket, and that they'd lose the deposit on the gleaming red Isuzu SLX. I wondered if Joy realised she'd been caught out and that I knew she had a husband.

  She called for the last time at eight o'clock in the evening, which was two o'clock in the morning in Bangkok. She was on Sunan's mobile but it sounded as if she were outside. Her voice was soft but she didn't sound upset. ‘Pete, where are you?’ she said. ‘Why you not here with me, Pete? I love you, only one.’

  That was it. No anger, no recriminations. I felt like shit. I wanted to call her back, to say that I was sorry, that I still loved her no matter what she'd done, no matter what lies she'd told, but I kept staring at the photograph of her and her husband and convinced myself that the only way to win the game was never to talk to her again.

  I wanted her to know, though. I wanted her to know that I wasn't just one of a thousand stupid farangs. I wanted her to know that I knew, that I'd won the game, that I was smarter than her. I made copies of Phiraphan's report and photocopied the photographs and put them in an envelope addressed to Joy at her home in Surin. I was about to seal it when I had a thought. I got all the photographs of her, the ones taken in Zombie and the ones from our trip to Isarn, and I tore them all up and put the pieces in the envelope, too. I took the envelope to the Post Office and got stamps. At the last minute I almost baulked, I stood at the post box and I couldn't let go of the envelope, I stood for what seemed like hours with it half in and half out of the slot. Then I took a deep breath and opened my fingers. The instant it dropped through the slot I wished I hadn't done it, but it was too late then. I wondered how she'd react when she opened it and saw for herself the evidence of her betrayal.

  JOY

  How did I feel when Pete didn't turn up? How do you think I felt? He was a farang, and farangs tell lies. Eighty per cent of farangs lie. They say they love you when they don't mean it, they say they want to take care of you and then they don't. I think the way he lied was terrible, though. My father and two of my brothers and almost a dozen cousins came all the way from Surin to celebrate our birthdays, his as well as mine. They were all very angry at Pete but I told them that he'd had a problem back in England. Sunan lent me some money to pay for the party but she made me promise to pay her back. I didn't know what had happened, whether he'd been delayed or whether he'd decided not to come.

  Park said I was stupid to believe anything a farang said. He said they come to Thailand for only one reason and that was to fuck Thai girls and that we should just try to get as much money from them as we can. He says they're not people, they're dogs. He didn't go to the party, he went to see his friends at Nana Plaza, but he came around to the karaoke bar when Nana closed. Park was annoyed about the Isuzu, but he had no reason to be because it was me and Sunan who had pawned our gold as the deposit. Why did Pete do that? Why did he make us spend money if he never intended to buy the pick-up truck. I never asked him to buy me the truck, it was his idea. Okay, I'd always said that I wanted one and that it'd be good for our family to have one, but I never told him to buy it for me. There was no need, I can earn enough to buy one in less than a year. Same as Sunan, she bought a Toyota for Bird and she's almost paid it off already. A girl can earn good money in Nana Plaza, giving farangs what they want.

  We all had a good time at the party, anyway. My father got drunk and started to cuddle me but I pushed him away. I'm too old for that now, I told him. They all sang happy birthday to me, just like farangs, and everybody said it was even better than last year because there weren't any farangs around.

  Afterwards, when Park had come, we went back to Sunan's room. Park and I had a big fight because I could smell perfume on him. He'd been with some slut, I was sure of it, but he denied it. I said that Thai men lied as easily as farangs and he slapped me, hard, across the face. Two, three, four times, until Sunan told him to stop. I was right, though, it's not just farangs who lie. Thais lie, too. Eighty per cent of them.

  PETE

  Joy called several times the day after the party and once on the day after that. ‘I love you, why you not come see me, Pete?’ she said on the answering machine. ‘I go back Surin. I wait for you in Surin.’

  I felt like shit. I didn't feel like I'd won. I kept picturing her with the cake, waiting for me. I wanted to telephone her and say that I was sorry, that it had all been a mistake and that I was coming after all. But at the same time I wanted to call her and gloat, to rub her nose in what I'd done to her.

  I'd imagined that after the party, after I'd got my revenge and everything, I'd be able to walk away, that I'd never give her another thought. I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong. If anything, now I wanted her even more.

  I tried to take my mind off her by playing games on my computer. Most of the time I played Risk, a war game, a game of strategy where the aim is to conquer the world. I played for hours every day. But half my mind was still on Joy. I still wanted her. I still wanted to be with her. I propped the photograph of Joy and her husband against my VDU to remind me of what she was and what she'd done. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't work on the book, all I could do was to play Risk and pace around my apartment. I barely slept and I didn't want to eat. I didn't shower and I didn't shave. I lost about two kilos in a week and I looked like shit.

  I played Risk so much that I began to win every game against the computer, even when it was set at its most competitive level. I played on autopilot, barely considering each move. I knew how to win, I knew exactly what to do so that no matter how the game started I would win. And once I'd reached that stage, the game stopped being fun any more. I played. I won. Where was the satisfaction in that? It was the same with Joy. I'd played the game and I'd won, but it didn't mean a thing. I was older than her, I was better educated, I had a well-paid job and the freedom to go wherever I wanted. Of course I'd won the game. I was better equipped to play. One afternoon I closed the Risk file and started writing. I wrote about Joy. How I'd met her. How I'd fallen in love with her. How she'd betrayed me. And how I got my own back. I wrote through the afternoon and late into the night. I didn't finish until three o'clock in the morning. I'd written almost four thousand words.

  That night, for the first time, I slept without dreaming about her. When I woke up, I read through what I'd written. Parts of it made me smile, and parts of it made me miss her so much that I wanted to phone her up there and then.

  I e-mailed what I'd written to Alistair in Hong Kong and a couple of hours later he e-mailed me back: ‘Pete - what a sad fuck you are! Great piece. Why don't you try and sell it? Esquire or GQ would snap it up. How's the book going?’

  I messaged him that the book was on schedule, even though it wasn't. I'd spent so much time pining for Joy that I'd have to work night and day for the next
month or so if I was going to meet his deadline.

  ALISTAIR

  Hiring that private detective was the best thing Pete could have done. Joy was driving him crazy and his work was suffering. I tried to be subtle about it because I was so far away, but he was missing deadlines left, right and centre. I was under pressure from head office to put a rocket under Pete, but the times I mentioned it to him he didn't seem to be listening. All he'd talk about was Joy and how she'd lied to him. For a week or so he seemed to stop working completely. I wasn't sure what to do. To be honest, he sounded like he was close to a nervous breakdown and I thought that if I gave him a hard time I might push him over the edge. Looking back, maybe I was being too soft on him. Maybe what Pete needed right then was an almighty kick up his arse.

  He e-mailed me this story he'd written about the whole Joy saga. I was livid. Four thousand words. Four thousand fucking words. He was supposed to be working flat out on the London guide and there he was typing four thousand words on a Thai hooker. I was lost for words. I sent him some bland reply saying he should try and place it with a men's magazine, but what I really wanted to do was to grab him by the throat and bang his head against a wall. I mean, what the fuck did he think he was playing at? Who pays his wages? We do. Who's he responsible to? Us. But he was several thousand miles away and I needed the guide finishing so I couldn't sack him there and then, that would have been cutting my own throat. I was the one who'd recommended Pete for the London job and if he fucked up then it'd reflect badly on me, too.

  JOY

  I was so shocked when I got the copies of the questionnaire I'd filled in and the photographs. I realised why Pete hadn't come to Thailand, and why he hadn't been in touch. Why are farangs so devious? Why couldn't he have been more honest? And why had he torn up all the photographs he'd taken of our time together in Surin. Did it mean so little to him?

  I thought at the time that there was something not right about the man who came to our village. He was too smooth, and I didn't like the way the girl who was with him looked at me. Sort of contemptuous, like she was better than me. I thought it was because my family was so poor and she was from the city, but it was obviously because they were detectives working for Pete. It was a nasty thing to do, to promise me money and then not give it to me.

  Park was furious when he saw the photograph of him sitting with me. He slapped me and said that I was stupid, that we should have stayed in Bangkok. He stormed off and didn't come back for a week. I think he went to see that bitch Daeng, but when he came back he wouldn't say where he'd been.

  I cried and I cried and I didn't eat anything for two days. I wanted to die, that's what I kept telling Sunan. I was bored with my life, with everything. Pete wouldn't love me, he wouldn't take care of me, I'd have to go back to Nana Plaza to work and everyone would know that Pete had stopped giving me money. All the girls would laugh at me behind my back, they can be really cruel. I've done it myself, so I knew what to expect. It happened to my friend Cat last year. A customer of hers from France promised to take care of her so long as she went back to her village and kept away from the bars. He gave her twenty thousand baht and said he'd send her money every month until he came back to live with her. She had a big party and brought herself a mobile phone, walked around Nana Plaza as if she owned it. She went into Zombie every night, buying drinks and showing off. Two weeks later she'd run out of money and had to start dancing again. We all said how stupid she was. How easily she'd be duped by the farang. I didn't want the girls in Zombie to laugh at me, but what could I do?

  Sunan gave me some tablets to take. She said they'd make me feel better but they just made me crazy. I started laughing and I got the razor that Sunan used to trim her hair and I slashed my wrists. I wanted to hurt myself, to show everybody how angry I was, but I didn't cut myself too deep, not down to where the veins are. I wanted to hurt myself but I didn't want to die. I wanted Pete to know how much he'd hurt me. I got a knife from the kitchen and I used it to write a letter with the blood. Sunan was laughing at me, telling me that I was crazy. She doesn't understand me. I don't think anyone really understands me. Park, maybe, but even he doesn't understand why I cut myself. I get so angry sometimes, but there's nobody I can get angry at. If I shout at Park he just slaps me, if I shout at Sunan she hits me too. The only person I can really get angry at is myself, and when I do hurt myself I feel better for a while. Not for long, but for a while at least, and that's better than nothing. I wish my mother was still here. When I was little and I was upset I could always go to her and she'd pick me up and cuddle me and everything would be okay. But now I don't have a mother. Besides, I was a child then and now I'm an adult. I have to take care of myself.

  PETE

  About two weeks after I'd sent Phiraphan's report to Joy, I got an airmail letter from her. The letter inside was child-like and at first I thought it was written in brown paint. Then I realised what it was. Blood.

  Pete. I love you. I want go stay with you in England. I want you come in Bangkok. For you.

  Love Joy.

  And just in case there was any doubt where the blood had come from, there was a small picture, drawn in blood, of a cut wrist and drips falling from it.

  Underneath, in green ink, she'd written: ‘I want see you now.’

  I stared at the letter, wondering if she'd really done it, if she'd really cut her wrist for me. I knew she'd done it before, she had the scars from where she'd cut her wrist when her mother had died, and she'd done it again when her brother had crashed her motorcycle. But had she cut her wrists because of what I'd done?

  It was the last thing I'd expected her to do. I thought that maybe she'd have written me a letter saying she never wanted to see me again. Or maybe a letter saying that she was sorry for lying to me. But I guess what I really expected was for her to cut off all contact, to admit that the game was over and for her to walk away, to go back to her previous way of life, fleecing farangs in Nana Plaza. But her letter was just a declaration of her love, saying that she wanted to be with me. It didn't make any sense. She had a husband. She was with him, spending her money - my money - on him. How could she want to be with me? How could she think that I'd believe that she wanted to be with me? I thought I understood Thais but her letter made no sense to me at all.

  I'd won, I'd proved that she had a husband, that she'd been lying to me. There was nothing she could do to turn back the clock, so why mutilate herself?

  I wondered how she'd done it. Had she got drunk, or had she done it when she was angry, with a knife or with a razor blade? And of all the things she could have done to prove that she was sorry, why cut herself? I sat with the letter in my hands and tried to get inside her head, but it was impossible.

  The day after I got the letter in blood, I received another envelope, this time containing a six-page letter, written in green ink, half in English, half in Thai. She repeated over and over how much she loved me, how much she missed me and how much she wanted to be with me. Nowhere in the letter did she mention the fact that she'd lied or that she had a husband. It was as if the whole private detective incident had never happened, total denial.

  I put both letters in the top drawer of my desk. I don't know why, but I couldn't throw them away. I'd accepted the fact that I'd never see her again, that it was over, irrevocably over, but I wanted to keep the letters.

  I started working on the London book, fifteen or sixteen hours a day, and I didn't shave or shower for days on end. I got up, I worked, I ate, I slept, and I got up and started work again. Joy didn't call and there were no more letters. As the days passed, I spent less and less time thinking about her, and when I did it didn't hurt as much. The anger faded first, and then I stopped missing her, and after a few weeks I could laugh about what had happened.

  ALISTAIR

  Pete really buckled down to work and tore through the London guide book. I was getting revised chapters every two or three days, and he did the complete index in forty-eight hours. He was the Pete of
old, fast, accurate and writing with flair, showing all the qualities that had led me to recommend him for the job in the first place. I was well pleased with his performance and so were head office. I actually put through a memo recommending we increase his Christmas bonus.

  I was looking forward to getting him back to Bangkok. There was still work to be done on the travel recipe book - Cooking Across South East Asia we'd decided to call it - and head office had decided they wanted books on Cambodia and Laos. There were sections on Cambodia and Laos in our South East Asian guidebook but they were becoming increasingly popular as tourist destinations and justified their own volumes. Pete was the perfect choice as editor, now that he'd put the Joy thing behind him.

  PETE

  Bruce phoned me up a couple of days before I was due to go back to Bangkok. He'd been offered a better job with another company and he'd decided to accept. Apparently Saravoot had been pissing him about something rotten. He hadn't delivered the company car that he'd promised, and he'd stopped paying the rent on Bruce's house. The reason Bruce had phoned was that as part of the package the new company had put together, he was going to be living in a large three-bedroomed apartment in Soi 23, a couple of miles down Sukhumvit from Fatso's Bar. He asked me if I wanted to share and I said that I'd give it a try. It'd been years since I'd lived with anyone, and almost twenty years since I'd shared with another guy, but I'd always gotten on well with Bruce and figured we probably wouldn't get on each other's nerves. He'd be out at work all day, he said, and most nights we'd be in the bars anyway. He said he'd fax me directions, then asked how Joy was.