Private Dancer

by Stephen Leather

If nothing else, it made me realise how precious life is, how we have to grab everything we can in the all too brief time we're alive. One minute we're here, the next we're not. I'm going to make sure that I pack as much as I can into my life.

  Sunan's arriving next month, and Joy's coming with her. Both their visas have been approved and I've paid for their tickets. It's going to be a whole new life for both of them. It'll be good for Joy, being here will help her get over what happened to Pete. They'll both be able to enroll on English courses, and I've already found a great place for a restaurant. It's a short walk from my apartment, with a bar on the ground floor and a small eating area upstairs. I reckon that by taking the bar out we'll be able to get another dozen tables in. The kitchen'll need fitting out but I think I can get everything straightened out for twenty thousand bucks. I've already sent photographs to Sunan and she's really excited.

  Moving to San Diego is going to be the making of Sunan, I know it is. It'll get her away from bad influences of Bangkok, the bars and the bar girls. She'll have to settle down, and I'll know where she is every hour of the day. Okay, I'm not a hundred per cent sure that she loves me now, not totally, not in the way that I love her. But I know that once she's here, once she has a business to run and a real home, she'll grow to love me.

  She's so excited about the restaurant. She's already planning the menu and the table settings and stuff. As soon as she's over here and got everything ready, we're going to bring Bird. Apparently he used to be a chef, and he'll be company for Sunan and Joy. It's going to be great. We're going to be one big happy family.

  BIG RON

  Was I surprised at what happened to Pete? Of course I fucking wasn't. He was on the road to ruin as soon as he let her get to him. A lost cause. A sad fuck. The whole saga was like a fucking fairy tale. Grimm.

  Extract from CROSS-CULTURAL COMPLICATIONS OF PROSTITUTION IN THAILAND by PROFESSOR BRUNO MAYER

  Relationships between farangs and prostitutes rarely reach a satisfactory conclusion by Western standards. There is always a level of mistrust, based on the fact that the girl is an active prostitute when they meet and the fact that their initial sexual encounter is, almost without exception, paid for. The farang is thus never sure of whether the girl loves him, or his money, and while this is not a problem from the girl's cultural perspective, it is not something that the man can accept from his Western viewpoint. The farang who does take a bargirl as a regular partner, to the extent of living with, or even marrying, her, often fears that she will return to a life of prostitution. This remains a constant source of unease. The girl, too, remains in a state of jealous tension. She knows that she met her farang protector in a bar and she is all too well aware how easy it would be for him to visit another establishment and meet a younger and prettier girl. The combination of mutual suspicion and mistrust, coupled with unending requests for money to support the girl's family, leads more often than not to arguments and the break-up of the relationship.

  In an attempt to distance the girl from her previous life as a prostitute, a farang might decide to take the girl back to his own country. The radical change in the girl's environment almost always results in unhappiness and the eventual dissolution of the relationship. Unless she has travelled she will be ignorant of the man's country and customs, and will have only a rudimentary understanding of his language. This, coupled with the loneliness resulting from the forced separation from her family and friends, leads to tensions and conflict, resolved only by the girl returning to Thailand.

  Either way, once the relationship has ended, the girl will almost certainly return to the bars and to prostitution. This is accompanied by an initial period of depression as the girl accepts that she has lost the reasonably comfortable life that comes of having the support of a farang and has to revert to the relatively unstable lifestyle of a bargirl. This period is quite short, however, and after a week or so she will once again be content in the disorganised and dissipate way of life, drinking bouts, drug-taking and card-playing, funded by sexual encounters with strangers. Until, of course, she finds herself another farang provider.

  BRUCE

  It's like the Buddhists say, right? What goes around, comes around. I was never happy with the way he treated Joy, making her jump through hoops like a trained animal. If he'd done the right thing by her at the beginning, if he'd just let her live with him, then I don't think any of this would have happened. Serves him right. Funny thing was, day of his funeral I found the watch. It was in the pocket of the jacket I'd been wearing when I got back from Nong Khai. I must have put it there without thinking, then hung the jacket up in the wardrobe. I still don't know what happened to the business cards, though. Right bloody mystery, that. Don't expect I'll ever find out where they went.

  JIMMY

  The guys from Fatso's went to the funeral and there was a piss-up afterwards but it wasn't much of a send-off. There was a rumour going around that Pete had left everything to Joy but I don't know if it's true or not. I decided to pop into Zombie, and bugger me but who should I see dancing stark bollock naked but the girl herself. First time I'd seen her dancing in a long while, she was always waitressing when Pete was around. There was a girl who looked just like her dancing a couple of poles down and I figured it was her sister. When their dancing shift finished I waved them over and bought them colas. Within minutes the sister, Dit her name was, had her hand on my thigh. I asked if I could barfine both of them and ten minutes later we were back in my apartment.

  I always get a kick out of sisters, you'd be surprised how many there are working the bars. Joy and Dit had obviously worked together before: Dit stuck her tongue down my throat while Joy gave me a blow job, then they switched places. I wanted them to do a lesbian show for me and they balked at that, but I put a lesbian video on, and after watching that for a few minutes they got into it. Lesbian Lust, it's called, I got it in Hong Kong a couple of years back and it's never failed me yet. Joy and Dit started licking each other out while I wanked myself, then I screwed Joy while Dit kissed her. Did them both without a condom. Hate the things, they take all the fun out of screwing. They started moaning about wanting me to put one on, but I told them to fuck off, I know full well that they don't make their Thai boyfriends wear them.

  It was a hell of a night, screwed them in all sorts of combinations, and by the end of the evening they seemed to be enjoying the lesbian thing, too. I went to shower and when I came back they were at each other like dogs on heat, fingering each other and kissing. I was too knackered to join in so I gave them a thousand baht each and kicked them out. I figured it was the sort of send-off that Pete would have appreciated.

  EPILOGUE

  Sunan arrived in San Diego in December 1996, just in time for Christmas. Bird arrived soon after, with Joy. Vernon and Sunan were married on St Valentine’s Day the following year. Plans for the Thai restaurant were put on hold when Sunan fell pregnant. Bird couldn’t settle in the United States and decided to return to Thailand in the summer of 1997. He asked Sunan to go with him, but she told him that she wanted to make her life with Vernon. She gave Bird a hundred thousand baht that she’d saved over the years. Bird wished her well and never saw her again once he returned to Thailand. Vernon introduced Joy to several of his friends in the hope that she would find someone she could settle down with, but she never really felt comfortable in America. She returned to Bangkok in the spring of 1998 and started dancing in Zombie again. In October an Australian walked into the bar who was the spitting image of Pete. Joy paid her own bar fine to go with him and they haven’t spent a night apart since. They were married in 1999 and his parents and brother flew from Melbourne for the ceremony. The Australian returned to Melbourne in 2000 to take up a new job and Joy went with him. She’s pregnant now with their second child. The tattoo is fading, and the Australian never mentions it.

  Vernon and Sunan have three children, all boys. If Vernon’s family and friends have noticed that the eldest boy looks nothing like his father, they’ve ne
ver said anything.

  Bruce was sacked from the handbag factory. He tried to get another job in manufacturing but word had gotten around that he was an unreliable employee and he wasn’t able to convince anyone to take him on. He got together a small group of investors and set up an English restaurant down the road from Fatso’s. He even poached one of the chefs from Fatso’s and two of Big Ron’s waitresses. He spends twelve hours a day in the restaurant and is putting on weight.

  In 1999, Big Ron met the love of his life in a go-go bar in Nana Plaza, married her and has two beautiful daughters both of whom, thankfully, take after their mother.

  Alistair moved to Bangkok in 1998 to take over the production of the guide to Thailand. He refused to even set foot in a go-go bar for the first year he was in Bangkok, then eventually relented and went to the Long Gun Bar in Soi Cowboy with three squash-playing friends. A girl from Surin who was dancing naked around a silver pole smiled at him and three months later they were married. He bought her a house, a pick-up truck and set her up in a small beauty parlour in Sukhumvit Soi 24 before discovering that she was still married to her childhood sweetheart, a motorcycle taxi driver who worked at the Asoke end of Soi Cowboy. Alistair quit his job and moved to Pattaya and in the autumn of 1999 was found dead the bottom of a high-rise hotel. Police closed the case as suicide brought on by depression.

  Somchai was arrested in 1997 after fleeing from the scene of his twenty-sixth murder for hire. He was using a new driver, a student at Assumption University who needed the money to finish his studies. The driver accelerated too quickly and Somchai fell off the back of the bike. He woke up in hospital surrounded by half a dozen police officers. Somchai asked for all twenty-six murders to be taken into consideration and in October 1997 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released in August 2004 along with 25,000 other prisoners to mark the 72nd birthday of Her Majesty The Queen. The wife of the Prime Minister gave each freed prisoner 200 baht to pay for their trip home. Somchai spent his money on whiskey and carried out his twenty-seventh contract killing two weeks later. The student who was driving the motorcycle was never caught. He finished his studies and now practices as a dentist in Soi Thonglor.

  Professor Bruno Mayer was killed in a traffic accident in September 2003 when Pam tried to answer her mobile phone while driving him to a craft festival in Chiang Mai. Their vehicle ploughed into a cement truck and they were both killed instantly. Professor Mayer’s wife refused to pay for what was left of the body to be shipped back to Germany and suggested that he be cremated in Thailand. She did not attend the funeral.

  Nigel set up an import-export business with a Thai businessman in the summer of 1997. The company was amazingly successful and by 2002 was turning over several million baht a month, mainly exporting Thai foodstuffs and furniture to the UK, and bringing fire extinguishing equipment from the UK to Thailand. The company moved to new offices in a prestigious block in Wireless Road and Nigel moved into a four-bedroom apartment a short walk from Nana Plaza. His apartment was raided by two dozen police officers on Christmas Eve 2002. Nigel was discovered with two underage prostitutes in his bed and four kilos of pure heroin hidden behind an air-conditioning unit. Nigel proclaimed his innocence (of the drugs, but not of the girls) and declared that someone must have set him up. The Thai businessman promised to do whatever it took to have Nigel freed, but despite his best efforts Nigel was found guilty of possession of Class A drugs and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in jail. Nigel hasn’t seen or heard from the Thai businessman since, but by all accounts the company (of which Nigel is no longer a director) is prospering.

  Jimmy started to get sick in 2003. It started with night sweats and headaches, then flu-like symptoms that he couldn’t shake off. He was diagnosed as HIV-positive at the end of 2003 and in the summer of 2004 he developed full-blown Aids. He went back to the UK to throw himself on the mercies of the National Health Service. He died just before Christmas 2004, denying his illness to the end.

  Copyright 2010 Stephen Leather

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. (No, really. It has.)

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. (No, really. They are all fictitious. Though Big Dave is Big Ron and he knows he is. And Jool’s on Soi 4 is Fatso’s. But I’m not Pete. Honest.) If you want to see more of my work, check out www.stephenleather.com.

  If you enjoyed Private Dancer, why not try Bangkok Bob and The Missing Mormon.

  Long-term Bangkok resident and former New Orleans cop Bob Turtledove has the knack of getting people out of difficult situations.

  So when a young man from Utah goes missing in Bangkok, his parents are soon knocking on Bob’s door asking for help.

  But what starts out as a simple missing person case takes a deadly turn as Bangkok Bob’s search for the missing Mormon brings him up against Russian gangsters, hired killers, corrupt cops and kickboxing thugs.

  And he learns that even in the Land of Smiles, people can have murder on their minds.

  Bangkok Bob and The Missing Mormon is about 63,000 words, equivalent to about 250 pages. You can find it at –

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004AM5MV6