A Woman of Bangkok (8 page)

I feel I want to be sick. As I did that morning back home when I opened my mother’s letter, ‘Dear Reggie, I have some news for you about Andy and Sheila Bowers which I fear will give you an unpleasant surprise …’ But don’t think about that. As I did that night when Lanky Spence fell right in front of me, and I rode into him, and saw his face scream as my front wheel hit him. All the props on which you build up your confidence knocked from underneath you. Yourself not the injured, but the culprit, right from the start. And the crowd booing, booing, till your heart breaks …

‘Try the
dum-yam-pla
, Mr. Joy. See if you like.’

It is a fish soup so hot that it takes the skin off my uvula and brings the tears to my eyes and no matter how carefully I swallow it some of it always seems to go down the wrong way. But I keep on spooning it up to seem willing. And the tongue is delicious, and the salt fish superb—so rotten it just melts in your mouth, and if you were stuffed to the gills you could still down another bowlful of rice taking it along with such a delectable condiment. When I have finished, I have just that degree of discomfort in the midriff which tells me I have truly appreciated the food.

I lean back to take stock of my surroundings. There’s no doubt it’s a pretty scruffy shop. On the uneven floor wobbly tables and chairs are crowded together. Two walls are covered by glass-fronted cupboards full of bottles of beer. The third is covered by advertisements mostly exhibiting blondes more or less nude, and half a dozen actual nudes in which the palm for artistry goes to the model rather than to the photographer. There is no fourth wall. On that side the fight of the hurricane lamps spills into the street, turning the passing tricycles with their glinting spokes and festoons of coloured lights into fairy chariots, making every girl who stalks softly by, majestic in her bright-coloured sarong, straight-backed and slim of form, at least as beautiful as a fairy-tale princess.

Behind, the velvety blackness of the tropical night is sparkling with stars: a perfect backdrop. Somewhere not too far away a
ramwong
is going on: the metallic percussive music falls through the air in long drooping silvered speedy lines, like the bent stalks of a fountain dropping into a floodlit pool. There is terrific sexual excitement in such music, I sensed it the very day I landed in Bangkok. It is quite different from any other music—fierce and impatient yet at the same time relaxed and happy—the music of a people who die young but without regrets, worn out by the unbearable pleasantness of life, its alternating delights of desire and satiation …

There is the usual palaver about paying the bill, everybody pulling out his wad (but some more slowly than others, and my own wallet always gets jammed in my pocket in the most exasperating fashion), and Boswell as an American makes the inevitable query, ‘Let’s see, how does this split up?’ which wipes out all Point Four munificence in a few syllables, and convinces the Far East that the Americans are a nasty mean race. Anyway it is up to Prosit to pay and we all know it except possibly Boswell: Prosit is host and if anyone else pays, he will lose face; our offers are only show, proofs that we are solvent; by retracting them, with bitter smiles, we acknowledge our social master. Later each in his turn will get an opportunity to make the supreme gesture—to pay for all of us—and that will be a memorable moment in his life, remembered by all present, in case he tries to evade another moment of glory when his turn next comes around again.

We debouch into the street. All Siamese bronchial tubes are emptied into the gutter. The westerners exchange tritenesses about the night. How cool after Bangkok. What stars. And look, there’s the moon. First quarter. No, third. Hell, I don’t know. Who looks at the moon anyway, nowadays? With MSA generators humming round the globe?

‘First we go to see
ramwong,’
Windmill says.

‘Why don’t we go in my jeep?’ Boswell asks.

‘I think not good. Better to walk. Then we can go
everywhere.’

‘Hell, don’t tell me you guys are getting self-conscious about driving up to the old red lamp in a UN jeep,’ Boswell jeers. To me he adds, ‘When the Thai start to get shy about seeing floozies it’ll be time for us westerners to go home—But that’ll never happen,’ he goes on cheerfully. ‘The whole economy of this country is founded on rice and prostitution. It’s the floozies that keep the bloody police in pocket money.’

‘The old League of Nations did a lot to clean up the white slave traffic in different parts of the world,’ I answer, being informative again, and wishing they’d got round to Korat.

‘Is that so? Well I hope the UN has more sense.’

Custard-tart, his official mentor, says, ‘You know, Mis’ Bosswill, tonight our jeep is red jeep. It is not good to go for a walk in red jeep. Police jeep is red. We not want frighten all the ladies.’ To me he continues: ‘It is same when we go to country. Go in grey jeep, everyone come, very happy have injeckshun. Go red jeep, everyone run away into jungle. Police always much trouble. Always want money.’ He turns to make the same observations to Windmill, speaking volubly in Thai: I hear the words
‘rod deng mai di, mai ao-la’
—the red jeep is no good, not wanted—and the word
‘tumluat’
—police—used several times.

‘Christ, I could do with a leak,’ says Boswell.

‘Same here.’

We go to the side of the road and let go. It’s the first time I’ve ever been guilty of indecent exposure in a city street. There is a grass verge and a hedge and the jet-black glint of water and over us the palm leaves chafing dryly, black against the now dove-grey, star-dotted sky. The fight of shop windows falls on our backs, women in wooden sandals go clacking by, but there’s absolutely no likelihood of our being fined five bob, as there would be a mere ten thousand miles to the west, in dear old England.

‘Jesus, what a relief,’ I sigh, and this is another innovation: the first time in my life I have used that name as an expletive.

It’s the first time I’ve seen the local Saturday-night hop. It’s alfresco, of course. There’s a core of blaze and racket, and round it a ring of men and boys all stilled and intent on the mystery. Without straining I can see over their heads. It’s hard to understand what holds them so spellbound. In the centre of the ring a man is singing into an amplifier. He has been singing, or rather yelling, indefatigably ever since we reached Korat, and he seems all set to continue his performance till morning. Behind his voice the xylophones and cymbals rattle out their long rapid cadences and the amplifier bawls them, hideously distorted, to all points of the compass. There is a bench loaded with girls; they are garishly dressed, some in western dance frocks, some in local style; they are heavily made-up and look unspeakably bored. A few others are going round the ring with young local men. The pace is a fast slinky trot with wonderful twistings of arms and hands, like the smoke curling up from a fag-end in a draught. At two-minute intervals a whistle blows; singer and orchestra stop short in mid-phrase; there is a shuffle of feet as males clear off the floor, females return to their bench; in twenty seconds the whistle blows again, the music clatters off to a new rhythm, a new troop of males comes on, bows briefly to its choice on the form, hands it a ticket and follows it into the ring. The spectators stand agog, as if the show were wondrous.

‘Why in hell do the Thai get such a kick out of this?’ Boswell wonders. ‘After all it’s only just walking round in circles.’

There speaks a representative of the race which produced the jitter-bug. Because the dancers never touch, because they do no fancy steps but just keep sliding forward in concentric circles, girls on the outside, partners a little to the rear, because the girls’ faces are as immobile as the painted waxen faces of dolls, because the dance consists mainly in those extempore posturings of arm and hand, it is a waste of time and fifty satang, stupid and pointless. He cannot read the erotic significance of the gestures (neither can I but I divine that it is there), cannot hear the edge of excitement in the music, isn’t subtle enough to realize that promise has a flavour as rich as fulfilment’s, that the easy embraces of the western dancehall spoil the palate for meatier fare, that this dance has something—he’d laugh like hell if I spoke the word—
holy
about it, the reverence of man for withdrawn mysterious exciting woman—a reverence felt even here, in a country where both sexes pretend to believe in the inferiority of one of them. ‘Hey, Windmill,’ he calls, grabbing my fat fellow traveller by the arm, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here. Take a walk.’ The mekong seems to be working in him too.

‘You not want dance
ramwong?’

‘Hell no. ’Nother sort of dance. Less go.’

‘Less go, less go,’ they all chorus.

So from the
ramwong
we cross a spacious square where the ancient main gate of the city stands up in white-washed magnificence under the moon. In a circle behind it stands a statue of Seratnari, Korat’s Joan of Arc, a heroine who led the Thai against the Laos, or the Laos against the Mons, or the Mons against the Cambodians, I’m not sure which (Windmill’s history notes are pretty garbled to my ears) but anyway she routed them whoever they were: there is a garland of faded flowers around her bronze neck and jeeps and
samlors
circle her in a clockwise direction. Scattered about are stalls, knee-high, tended mostly by women; the glare of carbide lamps falls seductively on their wares and not less seductively on themselves. This is the sort of setting in which I am accustomed to take my pleasure of the opposite sex, and fain would I stay here, feasting my eyes on so much colour and movement: ‘Women and fruit,’ I begin saying, mainly to Boswell, ‘that’s two of the elements in the world of Matisse: the third is sunlight, but that’s cruel; this night is kinder to one’s illus—’

‘Hey, Mr. Bosswill, where you go? Why you walk so fast?’ they are all shouting, and laughing and stumbling with the rest, I follow him, though my heart is in my mouth and my guts are working as they used to do before a big match.

‘You know, I never touched beer until I was twenty-four years old,’ I find myself saying. ‘Then one night I came home from the dirt-track—this was after I’d packed up riding; I’d just gone to spectate—and accidentally at supper I knocked over my cup of tea twice running and my old man said ‘you’ve been drinking’ and he and my mother gave me such a bloody jawing, though I was stone-sober … The very next night I went into a pub and got myself half a pint; I couldn’t see any sense in being called a drunk if I wasn’t one. That’s the first time alcohol passed my lips.’ (This is an incident from
Perfidy:
I don’t want him to know that I first broke the pledge only one month ago.) ‘ Since then I’ve shipped enough to sink the
Queen Elizabeth
. I’m just wondering if it’s going to be the same tonight.’

‘Whadya mean?’ he asks, not very interestedly.

But I can’t bring myself to admit that I’ve never been to a whore-house before, and am fearful that if I take the plunge tonight I shall be going for the rest of my life. It is important to have men respect you. They never will if you claim to be chaste. Just assume you’re a liar.

We enter a broad street flanked by shops. ‘This is it, ’says Boswell. ‘I been here before.’

My bowels re-echo, this is it. I have a moment of panic. I want to cut and run for the hotel. A hundred nonconformist ancestors lying straight and austere in the churchyards of East Anglia turn in their narrow graves. I hear the clatter of old bones and prejudices and I am scared. ‘Joyce is in a brothel and ten thousand miles away.’ But out of every gallon of my blood only one pint does not derive from those graves. It’s not miles which count, it’s the years. When I was young and malleable, straight from the furnace as you might say, I was clutched in the pincers of tradition and laid on the anvil of life; I was shaped by cruel repeated hammer blows and every blow a pulpit fulmination … Hey, where’s Bozzy? Wouldst that thou wert thy famed namesake, chum; then couldst thou jot down this my dictum, and work it up tomorrow morning and put it into a book,
R. E. Joyce, His Life, Works and Women
, and I would be famous forever …

Christ, it’s a rotten feeling when your head does a lurch to one side and the liquid brains slop to and fro …

Suddenly Custard-tart, who has been getting more and more excited since we left the
ramwong
, plunges to the left shouting ‘Follow me, Mr. Joy. Come on, Mr. Bosswill, this way. Let us take a walk in here.’ And he dives into a sort of tunnel, a square of black between dim-lighted shops. I stumble over rubble and potholes as we follow. The gateway to Hell? But that’s supposed to be easy, smooth. Maybe I’m heading for Heaven. I know that road’s all potholes, dug by the Devil. My old man’s a parson and he told me. Worthy father of a silly fool. Believes everything he says. Says only what he believes. What would he say if he caught me now, half-seas over and hell-bent for Jezebel?

‘Where’er she be—That not impossible Shee—Who shall command my heart and me—’

‘What?’ says Boswell. ‘God, what a hole this is.’

‘Where’er she lie—Lockt up from mortal eye—In the shady Leaves of Destiny—’

‘You’re drunk,’ he says. ‘Jesus, listen to that.’

I’ve already heard the sound and it has made my blood run cold.

‘Strewth, what are they doing to her?’ I cry, and almost reveal my innocence. But even as Boswell’s eyebrows shoot up I retrieve my honour with a cynicism: ‘Sounds as if she’s having a baby.’

Windmill has heard the long-drawn moaning too and he laughs his cheerful laugh and cracks some joke in Thai. Then he says carefully in English, ‘I think that woman earn her twenty tics the hard way.’

‘One of the twenty-four hard ways,’ I say and Boswell bursts out laughing and claps me on the shoulder. But all my viciousness is in the mind and that moaning, like a cat’s before the explosion in spits and yowlings and flying fur, has made me want to spew. God knows it was bad enough at the Bolero last night, watching the girls vying for the men and the men for the girls and finally just after midnight the exodus in pairs, the girl I liked the look of best … God, what a monster she had picked, and she practically had to hold him up, he was so tight …