Private Dancer (23 page)

Then he started coming in late. I got the feeling that he was staying out in the bars, drinking.

He'd complain of headaches and sit in his office, drinking black coffee and telling his secretary not to put calls through to him. That's no way to run a business. Not my business, anyway. And girls began telephoning the office wanting to speak to him. One in particular, a girl called Troy.

Several of the office girls complained to the office manager about the girl. She was impolite,

demanding to speak to Bruce, saying that he was a friend. The crunch came when Lek went into the house and discovered that Troy had moved in. Troy apparently told Lek that she was Bruce's wife. Lek was horrified. Bruce didn't seem to appreciate that no self-respecting Thai woman would want anything to do with a bargirl. Lek walked straight out of the house and refused to go back. And if that wasn't enough, I caught him showing the girl around the factory. It seems Bruce had some idea of hiring her to work in the office. I couldn't believe how stupid he was being. I'd have had a revolt on my hands. She was a bargirl.

A prostitute. A coarse, ugly, impolite girl, young enough to be his daughter. She was wearing tight jeans, high heels and a T-shirt that showed off her midriff - everything about her screamed prostitute. And he had the audacity to introduce her to me. She waied me and averted her eyes.

She knew how annoyed I was but Bruce didn't notice. He had to go. He'd lost everyone's respect.

He'd become a joke. I had to let him go.

I wasn't looking forward to searching for a replacement. It's so difficult to find decent farangs. Most want to come to Thailand for the wrong reasons. They don't want to come to work, they want to sleep with young girls. If I could, I'd prefer not to have any farangs working for me. Thai managers work hard and always consider how their behaviour affects the company,

they have a loyalty that you can depend on. Farangs are lazy and untrustworthy. That's my experience, anyway, and I don't think I've been especially unlucky. Most of my friends who run companies tell me that they've had bad experiences, too. When farangs first arrive in Thailand they work hard, but then they become lazy and start spending all their evenings in the bars. Then they get involved with bargirls and forget why they came to the country in the first place. It's as if all they can think about is sex. If you want to do business in Europe or America, you have to have some farangs working for you because Westerners always seem to feel happier if they can deal with their own people. But sometimes I wonder if they're worth the trouble.

PETE As soon as I'd wrapped up the London guide, I flew back to Thailand. Bruce had faxed me the address of his apartment but he'd have been better sending me a map because the taxi driver drove past the correct road half a dozen times before we found it. It was a brand new building and by the look of it most of the apartments were empty. Bangkok was in the middle of a property slump and rather than sell at a loss or drop their rents, most Thai landlords preferred to leave their properties empty.

The flat was on the twelfth floor. I knocked on the door and to my surprise it was opened by Troy. Bruce was lying on the sofa but he jumped up when I walked in. He'd shaved off his beard since I last saw him. He must have seen me looking at his chin because he grinned and rubbed it.

“Troy's idea,” he said. “She reckons it makes me look younger. What do you think?”

I thought he looked better with the beard but I didn't say so, I just said, yeah, it took years off him. He helped me carry my cases into the bedroom.

It was a huge flat, more than two hundred square metres, and the sitting room was about the size of a basketball court. There were three bedrooms. Bruce had taken the master bedroom but mine was big with its own bathroom. “That's Troy's room,” said Bruce, nodding at the room opposite his.

“How long's she staying here?” I asked.

“I figured we'd need a maid,” he said. “What with all our laundry and everything. I said we'd give her three thousand baht a month.”

“Plus her rent, right? She's living rent free, isn't she?”

He looked at me without saying anything for a few seconds. “Is that a problem?”

I wanted to say that yes, it was a problem. I wasn't sure that I wanted to share the apartment with a hooker. She'd be answering the phone, she'd be in and out of my room, she'd be there most of the day when I was working. Bruce should have told me he'd planned to move her in before he offered to share with me. It was one thing for two guys to share an apartment, it was something quite different for two guys and a hooker, albeit one disguised as a maid. “No, it's not a problem,“ he said. ”I just wish I'd known, that's all.”

“She works hard,” he said. “Wait till you see what she does with your shirts.”

Troy was in the sitting room, watching a Thai variety show. She was wearing hot pants and a tight white T-shirt that left nothing to imagination. I knew she was twenty-one but she looked much younger.

It was about ten o'clock in the morning and Bruce suggested we go down to Fatso's Bar for breakfast. I asked him if he didn't have to go to work but he just shrugged and said he'd call in sick.

In the taxi he asked me if I'd been in touch with Joy. I told him I'd no idea where she was.

“Are you going to look her up now that you're back?”

I shrugged.

“I'll give it a week,” he said. “You'll be back with her.”

BIG RON Was I surprised that Joy had a husband? Was I fuck. It's her instinct to lie, to get as much from a farang as she can. It's like the story of the scorpion and the frog. You heard that one? There's this frog sitting down at the edge of a stream. A scorpion comes up and asks the frog if he'll carry the scorpion across the stream. Scorpions can't swim, you see. Now, the frog's not stupid. “If I let you on my back, you'll sting me,” he says.

“Why would I do that?” asks the scorpion. "I want to get across the stream. If I sting you,

you'll die and I'll drown."

The frog thinks about it and then says okay. So the scorpion climbs on the frog's back and the frog starts to swim across. As they reach the midway point, the scorpion stings the frog. With its dying breath, the frog says to the scorpion, “Why did you do that? Now we'll both die.”

As he disappears under the water, the scorpion shrugs and says, “Instinct, I guess.”

It wouldn't matter how much Pete loved Joy, how much he gave her. It wouldn't matter if he meant to marry her and take her away from the life that had pushed her into prostitution, no matter what he did or what he promised, she'd follow her instinct.

It's like we say here. You can take the girl out of the bar, but you can't take the bar out of the girl.

PETE I left it a week before going to Nana Plaza. I'd been in Fatso's, but Rick and Jimmy were playing silly buggers, Big Glassing anyone who went to the toilet. Bruce was doing his old trick of getting the girls to pour his away when no one was looking, but I couldn't be bothered playing that game.

I sat outside and had a gin and tonic. It tasted as foul as ever. It came out of a Beefeater bottle but whatever it was, it didn't even taste like gin. It was always a shock to the system because Big Ron served large measures of the real stuff, but once you stepped inside the Plaza you had no idea what you were drinking. Most of the guys stuck to bottled beer in the Plaza, because at least a Heineken was a Heineken.

One of the dancers came out and sat down next to me. It was Wan, the girl who used to do the lesbian show with Joy. I bought her a cola and she clinked glasses with me. I asked her if she'd seen Joy but she shook her head. “She go back Surin,” she said. “Pete, why you not go party?”

I told her that I knew Joy had a husband and that she'd lied to me. Wan looked at me with wide eyes and denied that Joy was married. I wouldn't have expected her to say anything else.

Joy was her friend and I was an outsider. I don't know why, but I told Wan the whole story. About the private detective, the photograph, and how I wanted to get my revenge. She sat and listened, sometimes smiling,

sometimes shaking her head sadly. I asked her what she thought.

She shrugged. “I don't know,” she said in a sing-song voice.

I asked her if she thought Joy loved me. A stupid question, and I hated myself for asking it.

Wan looked at me earnestly. “Joy love you too much, Pete. She have you only one.”

JIMMY We all thought what Pete did was a hoot. The farang bites back. But I think he made a big mistake because it meant a serious loss of face for Sunan and Joy, and I don't think Pete appreciated what that means. Thais will wait years for revenge if they have to, but they never forget an insult.

They can be very creative when it comes to getting their own back, too. The big thing here with unfaithful husbands, is for the wives to get a bit handy with the old kitchen knife. The unkindest cut of all. But they don't do it in anger, they wait, they wait until the husband thinks he's gotten away with it, then slash! Blood on the sheets and the guy has to use a pair of tweezers to piss. It happens so often in Bangkok that the hospitals here have got really proficient at sewing dicks back on. Micro-surgery, they call it, they reconnect all the vessels and nerves and stuff and apart from a ridge of scar tissue around the base of the thing it's as good as new. The doctors are now so good that, providing the dick is wrapped up in a pack of frozen peas or suchlike, there is more than ninety per cent chance of repairing the damage.

Now, once the wives realised that the doctors could sew the dick back on, they started to dispose of the organs. Up country, they throw it to the ducks. The birds fight like fuck for them,

apparently, must be a delicacy. Or maybe there's a revenge element, too, a chance for the ducks to eat humans for a change. Anyway, there aren't too many ducks in Bangkok, so the wives there started throwing them in the street. If a truck rolls over it, a cut off dick can be squashed flat until it's the size of a saucer. No bloody use to anyone, that. Or there's another variation - putting it in the blender. Thirty seconds at high speed and there isn't much left. Prick puree.

There was a great one in the Bangkok Post a while back. A woman in Khorat had found that her husband had a second wife. That's what they call mistresses here, mia noy, second wife.

They're not married or anything, and it's usually only a temporary thing, but the whole Thai marriage thing is a mystery anyway. So this woman waits for a couple of months until her husband has a dose of the 'flu, and she gives him a couple of tablets before he goes to bed, telling him that they're for his headache. Well, they're not, they're sleeping tablets, and he wakes up with a pain in his groin and blood all over the place. He goes apeshit, searching high and low for the bit she'd cut off, but she just keeps screaming at him that it serves him right. He checks the fridge, the back yard, the toilet, but there's no sign of it. He begs her to tell him what she did with it. She goes out into the garden and points up at the sky. Seems she'd tied it to a helium-filled balloon and let it go. Brilliant, huh? Guy's still with his wife, you know. Didn't press charges. I guess he realised that with a one-inch dick, he's not going to be able to get himself another woman. She probably makes him satisfy her with his tongue. See, that's what I mean about the Thais and revenge. They have a knack for it. Pete better watch his step.

PETE I'd been back in Thailand almost a month before I saw Joy again. At first I didn't recognise her -

she was wearing a big white T-shirt and black flared jeans that I hadn't seen before and she'd cut her hair so that it now reached to just below her shoulders. She'd dyed the front, too, red streaks that she'd tucked behind her ears. She was with Sunan and they got out of a taxi and walked into the Plaza together. I was sitting outside Zombie, watching a rugby match on one of the overhead televisions. Can't remember who was playing, and to be honest I wasn't even concentrating on the game, I was thinking about Joy. Everything about Nana Plaza reminded me about Joy. The girls, the music, the noise, the smells. That's what was so funny, really, I was thinking about Joy but when I saw her I looked right through her. It was only when I saw her face harden that I realised it was her. It was the hair, I guess, she looked totally different with shorter hair.

My heart sort of turned over and I smiled. She smiled then, as if she'd been waiting to see how I'd react before she betrayed any emotion. Sunan said something to Joy, then walked through the curtain into Zombie. Joy slipped on to the stool next to me. She was carrying her red purse and she let me take it off her. She didn't say a word, just kept looking at me and smiling. I opened the purse. The photograph was there. The photograph of the two of us sitting in the bar, taken more than a year ago. I was stunned. It was the last thing I'd expected. There was no way she could have known that I'd been in Nana Plaza, no way of knowing she was going to see me, so why the hell was she carrying my photograph.

“So, how are you?” she asked, the first thing she'd said since seeing me. Her first words and she was asking how I was. Again, it was the last thing I expected. I thought maybe she'd be angry, bitter, resentful maybe, but it was as if we'd never been apart. She sat next to me, her hand in my lap, smiling as if I were the most precious thing in her life. I took her left hand in mine and turned it over so I could see her wrist. There were three red razor scars there, alongside the old scars from the cuts she'd made when her mother had died and her brother had crashed her motorcycle. There were other marks running down her wrist, small black cuts. I frowned as I examined them. She turned her wrist so I could see them better.

Letters. P. E. T. E. Oh Jesus, she'd carved my name into her flesh. I traced the letters with my finger.

“I do for you, Pete,” she said quietly.

“Why, Joy? Why?”

“Because I want you know I love you.”

I didn't know what to say. I'd seen the photograph of her and her husband. Hell, I'd sent her a copy of it so she knew that I knew she was married. And she knew that I'd seen the questionnaire she'd filled in.