Private Dancer (34 page)

I heard Wan outside the room, shouting my name. She must have followed me. I went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around my neck and tied it to the shower, then I dropped to my knees. Was I trying to kill myself? I don't know. I wanted to die, but I didn't want to kill myself.

Does that make sense? I wanted Wan and everyone to know how upset I was, but I don't think I really wanted to be dead. I often wondered if Mon really wanted to kill herself, whether she thought we'd realise what she was doing and cut her down before she died. I knew Wan was outside, and I knew she'd come to my room, and the towel wasn't very tight around my neck, so I suppose I wasn't really trying to kill myself. Not really.

Wan had a key to my room so she let herself in. I'd left the bathroom door open and she started screaming when she saw me. She was with two other girls from Zombie and they untied the towel and helped me down. Wan was crying. I told her I was all right but then I must have fainted. The girls took me to hospital but I was all right really.

Wan stayed with me while the doctor examined me, but the other girls went away. I guess one of them must have phoned Sunan because when I went home Sunan called me. She said she and our father were in the pick-up with Bird and that they thought I was dead. I said it was all a misunderstanding and that they should just go back to Surin but Sunan said no, she wanted to see me. She was really angry but I wasn't sure if it was because she thought I'd killed myself or because she'd driven all that way for nothing. You never can tell with Sunan.

PETE At first she wouldn't let me touch her, but eventually she put her head against my chest and slipped her arms around my waist.

“Pete, he not my boyfriend. He my drug-dealer. I not have anyone, only you.”

I rested my chin on the top of her head. She smelt fresh and clean as if she'd just gotten out of the shower. At first what she said didn't register, then the words sank in.

“What? What do you mean?”

“He come here to sell me yar mar. Have police too much so he come my room. He not my boyfriend, Pete. I not have Thai boyfriend. I love you too much.”

“Why, Joy? Why did you need yar mar?” “Because I think too much. I not want to think too much.”

I sat down on the bed with her. She started crying and I kissed her wet cheeks. “You don't need drugs.”

I looked around her room. A half-packed bag stood by the door. She saw me looking at it. “I go back to Surin,“ she said. ”Sunan come to get me. Then we go Surin. My father worry too much.”

“Why?”

Her hand went up to her neck. For the first time I saw the red mark there.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I want kill myself,” she said flatly.

“Why?”

“Because you not want to see me.”

“What did you do?”

“Same Mon.” Mon had hanged herself. I stroked the mark on her neck.

“Where?”

Joy nodded at the bathroom.

“You're crazy,” I said. She was wearing a brown halter top with a teddy bear on it. I ran my finger around the tattoo on her left shoulder. She really was crazy. Had she really tried to kill herself? It didn't make any sense. She had nothing to gain and everything I knew about Thais suggested that they didn't do anything unless there was a pay-off.

“Why, Joy? Why did you want to kill yourself?”

She shrugged. “Bored,” she said.

“Bored with what?”

“With my life. With everything.”

“With me?”

She looked up at me and smiled. “I never bored with you, Pete. I love you too much.”

I kissed her on the lips. Hard. She pulled me back on to the bed.

DAMIEN A lot of the girls take drugs, but I won't allow them to bring them into any of my bars. Any girl caught with drugs is sacked on the spot, and the mamasan usually gives them a clout around the head for good measure. The cops are hard enough to deal with without bringing drugs into the equation. Having said that, most of the girls take drugs. Amphetamines, mainly, but some are on heroin and cocaine. We even have a few on Ecstasy but I try to discourage that. For one thing, it affects the way they dance, and for another, they get all lovey dovey and forget to ask the guys for money. Bloody dangerous, is E, shouldn't be allowed. Bad for business.

If they're on heroin, the mamasan makes sure they don't inject. No point in marking the merchandise, and a line of scars on the arms isn't exactly a turn on, is it? Some of them inject between their toes or under their fingernails, and that we let go. What the eye doesn't see, blah,

blah, blah. The drugs keep them working, you see, and that's all that I care about. A girl with a habit to feed is going to go with as many customers as she can, sometimes several times a night.

Every time she leaves the bar with a customer, the bar gets 500 baht. The girl gets 100 baht at the end of the month, and we keep the rest. So if a girl is bought out every night, the bar pulls in 12,000 baht. Good money, huh?

Usually the girls start on amphetamines. It gives them the energy to dance all night. And the rest. When the girls first come here, they've probably never had sex with a farang. They hear stories about how well endowed we are compared with Thai men and it scares them to death. So the older girls give them yar bar, Dutch courage if you like. Then they don't give a shit who they make love to. Some of them smoke it, others just swallow the tablets. So long as they do it outside the bars, I don't care.

PETE After we'd made love she fetched me a glass of water and sat on the edge of the bed as I drank it.

I reached up and stroked her neck. The red mark seemed fainter. “Why did you want to buy yar mar?” I asked.

“I think too much. If I smoke yar mar, I not think too much.”

“Smoke? You smoke it?” I'd assumed that she swallowed the pills.

She smiled coyly. “You want to see?”

My jaw dropped. “You have some?”

She nodded. “You want to see?”

I wasn't sure. I was interested, but I'd always steered well clear of drugs. And what if the police should find me with drugs? They'd love to put another farang behind bars.

“You want to see?” she pressed.

What the hell, I thought. I nodded.

She stood up and went over to the wardrobe and put a hand into a shirt pocket. She came back and held out her hand as if she was offering sugar lumps to a horse. “Yar mar,” she said.

There were two small pills wrapped in foil in the palm of her hand. I picked one of them up and unwrapped it. It was smaller than an aspirin, a brownish-pink in colour. “And you smoke it?”

She nodded.

I handed it back to her. “Can you show me?”

“You want?”

“Sure.”

She grinned and took an empty cigarette packet, a cheap cigarette lighter and a pair of nail scissors from her dressing table drawer. She pulled the silver paper from the inside of the cigarette packet and wrapped it around the base of the lighter to form an oblong container. She twisted the end of the paper to make a handle, then pulled out the lighter. She held it up and proudly showed it to me. It was like a miniature pan. She flicked the lighter on and carefully burned off the paper, leaving only the foil, then she blew on it to cool it and put it on the bed. All the time her forehead was creased into a frown as she concentrated on what she was doing.

She used the scissors to cut an oblong of cardboard and then she rubbed it between the palms of her hands until it formed a tube. She licked the open end and rubbed it again.

I watched, entranced. Joy was clearly taking pleasure from the ritual, as if she were preparing to make an offering at a temple.

When she'd finished, she crumpled one of the tablets into the foil pan and slipped the cardboard tube between her lips. She flicked her lighter and held the flame under the foil. The pieces of tablet began to smoulder and she sucked the smoke through the tube. She inhaled, and took the lighter away, then blew plumes of smoke through her nostrils, her eyes on mine.

“You're crazy,” I said.

“Crazy for you, Pete,” she said. She leaned forward and kissed me, blowing the last of the smoke into my mouth. I pushed her down on the bed and she slipped her legs around me.

Afterwards, I asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to go back home, back to Surin. Sunan was driving down with Bird and several other members of Joy's family and Joy wanted to stay with them for a few weeks. I asked her if she wanted to move into the flat with me but she said no, she didn't think Bruce would want her there. She said she'd already spoken to the manager of the building and he'd agreed to give her most of the deposit back. I said I wanted to give her some money to take back with her but she shook her head. "I not want your money,

Pete,“ she said. ”I only want you love me."

I lay in the bed with my arms around her and told her that I wanted to give her money so that I wouldn't worry about her.

“Pete, I not go Surin long time,” she said. “I come see you next month, okay?”

I wanted to ask her not to go, to stay with me, to tell her that even if it meant moving out of Bruce's flat and getting another place to live, I wanted her with me. But I knew that it'd be better for her to spend some time out of Bangkok. There were too many temptations in the city: the bars, her friends, the drug dealers. A few weeks back in Surin would be good for her, and it'd give me time to find somewhere else to live. I was fed up with living with Bruce, anyway, with or without Troy.

I told Joy I'd get some money from the ATM and arranged to meet her at the German restaurant at eight o'clock.

SUNAN I was furious when I found out what Pete had done to my sister. How dare he hit her? How dare he? What does he think gives him the right to come to our country and slap around a girl half his age? Would he behave like that in England? Of course he wouldn't. The police would put him in prison. I told Joy, I told her straight, Pete was jai dam, black-hearted and she'd be better off without him. She kept saying no, she kept saying he was okay and that he hadn't really hit her hard but that wasn't the point and I told her so. He'd been manipulating her for months, using her,

taking what he wanted from her without giving her what she was entitled to.

If he wanted to treat her as a bargirl, he shouldn't have made such a fuss about her working.

He could have paid her bar fine as often as he wanted, slept with her, taken her on holiday, but at least she'd have been earning money. And if he didn't want her to be a bargirl then he should have married her. It's not as if he had a wife or anything. He wanted to have his cake and eat it,

whatever that stupid farang expression is.

Just look at what Joy's done to herself over Pete. She cut her wrists, she had his name tattooed on her shoulder, and now she's tried to hang herself. She doesn't seem to realise the damage she's doing herself. I don't just mean the scars, though they're bad enough, I mean the damage she's doing to her value. Her worth. The bars want pretty, young, fresh girls, they don't want girls with scars or tattoos. Farangs don't like scars or tattoos, they like their girls to have good skin. They don't even like scars from insect bites on our legs.

I've been trying to get Joy to apply for work in Japan or Hong Kong, or maybe even Canada,

but who's going to want to employ a girl with the sort of scars she's got? She's crazy, but it's Pete that's made her crazy. Before she met him she had Park and she worked and she made good money. Okay, she spent a lot on drink and drugs, and she was always too generous with her friends, but at least she was sending money back to Surin for our family. Once Pete got his hooks into her, she stopped sending money to Surin, so our whole family suffered. When Mon died it was me that had to support the family, me. I had to work harder, hustle more, and I got no help from Joy. Now that wouldn't have been so bad if Pete was going to marry Joy and support her, be it in Thailand or in England. Then at least he'd be taking care of her and she could get him to give money to the family. But he left her in a limbo, and our whole family was suffering because of it. And on top of all that, he hits her. He hits her and abuses her so much that she wants to kill herself.

I thought Joy was dead, I really did. One of the girls from Zombie rang our village and left a message with the old woman who answered the phone, saying that Joy had hanged herself. As soon as I heard what had happened I telephoned Joy's room but there was no answer, so of course I got Bird and my father and our brother and his wife and we all got into the pick-up truck and drove to Bangkok. I was in tears, I was sure she was dead, it'd be just like Joy to kill herself the same way the Mon had done. Mon and Joy were so similar, they looked alike and behaved alike, and I know that Joy came close to killing herself after our mother died. Father was pale with anger, he kept saying he'd kill Pete with his bare hands, and I knew he meant it. Joy was always his favourite, he made no secret of that.

I didn't tell him about the private detective, that Pete had tried to split up Vernon and me.

How dare Pete do that? What goes on between me and Vernon is nothing to do with him.

Nothing. What does he think gives him the right to try to screw up my life? Just because he's in a mess, just because he can't handle his own life, he wants to make it difficult for everyone else. I can handle Vernon, so it wasn't a major problem. Same as I can handle Toine in Norway. I bet Toine will still send me money when I'm in America. I'll just tell him that I'm there studying. It'll all work out fine. But no thanks to Pete.

All the way to Bangkok I was using my mobile phone, calling everyone I knew until the batteries went dead. No one knew for sure what had happened, though several of the girls from Nana had heard that she had hanged herself.

About two hours outside Bangkok I made Bird stop at a callbox and I rang Joy's room again.

She was there. I was so relieved I almost fainted. She explained what had happened, and I told her not to go anywhere. Father started crying when I told him Joy was all right.

When we got to Bangkok, we all hugged Joy and told her she had to go back to Surin with us.

She said that she had to see Pete, that he'd promised to give her some money. Father said he wanted to go with her, but I knew that he wanted to do something to Pete, so I said that he mustn't go. I'd already decided what I had to do. Joy always carried a photograph of her with Pete in the purse she took to work, and while she was in the bathroom I took it. Bird saw me but he didn't say anything. He knew what I was going to do and he just smiled. I told Joy I was going out to buy some medicine and told Bird to make sure she stayed in the room until I got back.

PETE I went back to the flat. Bruce wasn't there and he didn't turn up while I showered and changed so I left a note for him, just to say that Joy was okay. I went to the Thai Farmers Bank near Sukhumvit Soi 8 and withdrew eight thousand baht on my Lloyds Bank Visa card and another seven thousand baht on my Standard Chartered Visa card. Fifteen thousand baht. I wasn't sure how much money I had left in my bank accounts, but I figured I had enough to cover it. Without a regular pay cheque, it wouldn't take long for both accounts to run out, I'd always pretty much spent everything I'd earned. I was going to have to do something about getting a job, especially if I was going to get a place for me and Joy. I'd need a deposit and a month's rent in advance and deposits for the utilities and stuff. I figured I was going to need at least fifty thousand baht up front.

I had an hour to kill before I was due to meet Joy so I went to Fatso's Bar and had a couple of gin and tonics. Big Ron rang the bell and so did Jimmy, so that was two free drinks, but I didn't return the favour because I was going to have to take care of my money.

Nobody mentioned Joy's suicide attempt but I knew it'd only be a matter of time before Bruce started spreading the word. There were no secrets in Fatso's Bar, it wasn't just the bar where everyone knows your name, it was the bar where everyone knew your secrets, from Big Ron's genital warts to Jimmy's cocaine habit.

The guys were talking about death wishes, and I tried to explain how I'd always had an urge to throw myself off tall buildings. Always had, ever since I was a kid. It wasn't that I wanted to kill myself, that's definitely not the case, but whenever I was high up I always wanted to lean forward and imagine what it'd be like to plunge to the ground.

When I was at university I joined the parachuting club, just to see what freefalling was actually like, but I'd hated it, hated everything about it, the flight up, the sensation of falling, the landing. But I never lost the urge to jump. Weird. I guess it's a compulsion, but damned if I can explain what it means. I tried explaining it to Big Ron, and he kept nodding and agreeing with me.

He said that he knew exactly what I meant. Then he said that whenever a girl lay on her back and opened her legs, well, he just had the irresistible urge to dive right in, then and there. He laughed like a hyena and I realised he was taking the piss, as usual.

I went to the German restaurant to wait for Joy. She was late, but I didn't mind, it gave me the chance to have a few more drinks and get my act together. I'd call Alistair and see if I could convince him to give me my job back. I was sure I could get him to see my point of view. I was a good writer, one of the best, and I had a hell of a track record. I could be an asset to the company, and with Joy back in Surin there wouldn't be so many distractions.

BIG RON Pete was in a right state when he came into the bar, knocking back the gins like there was no tomorrow. He kept rambling on about Joy loving him, that she was different from all the other girls who worked in the bars, that she'd proved that she loved him and that he was going to marry her and take her back to England. Then he started telling us about how he liked to stand at the top of tall buildings and imagine what it was like to throw himself off. It sounded as if he was thinking of killing himself but didn't want to come right out and say it. You know, like calling the fucking Samaritans and talking about the weather. That's what it felt like, anyway. Like he was on the edge and all it was going to take was one small step or push and that'd be it.

I guess part of the problem is that he's lost his job and doesn't have any money coming in. He hasn't told anyone here that he was sacked, but Bruce filled us in a while back. Doesn't look as if he's looking for a job either, he spends most of his time in the bar or over at Nana Plaza. He looks like shit, he hasn't shaved for days or showered by the look of it. He's a mess, and unless he pulls himself together no-one's going to employ him.

Thailand can do that to farangs. It lures them in with promises it fails to deliver, beautiful,

sexy women, long, hot days, exotic food, smiling faces, but it's all a mirage, it doesn't really exist, and by the time you find that out it's too late, you're heading for the rocks and there's nothing you can do to change your course.

The guys who survive, guys like Jimmy and Rick and me, we see through the mirage early on and we accept it for what it is. We adapt. Guys like Pete, they believe the illusion, and they keep believing it right up until the moment it destroys them. That's where Pete's heading. Destruction.

And Joy's the siren whose song is pulling him towards the rocks.

PETE Joy was more than an hour late. She said that Sunan had arrived in Bangkok with her father and that they hadn't wanted her to come to see me. “They very angry you, Pete, but I tell them no problem, I tell them I love you, only one.”

She looked stunning. She was wearing black Levi jeans and a black T-shirt and as usual she was tottering on chunky high-heeled shoes. I ordered her an orange juice, and when it arrived the waitress looked at the razor scars on Joy's left arm with wide eyes. Joy didn't seem to notice. She never made any attempt to cover up the scars and if anything appeared to want to flaunt them,

because more often than not she wore short-sleeved shirts. I asked her if she was hungry but she shook her head and said she'd already eaten. I realised that was probably why she was late, she'd gone out for dinner with her family. I felt a flare of anger but just as quickly I decided that I was being unreasonable. She hadn't seen Sunan or her father for some weeks, it was only natural that she'd want to spend time with them.

I told her what I planned to do, that I'd move out of Bruce's apartment and get a place for just the two of us, and she grinned. “Ching ching?” she asked. Was I serious?

I told her that I was, that I wanted to marry her and take care of her.

“Maybe I not go to Surin,” she said. “Better I stay in Bangkok with you.”

I told her no, that it'd be easier if she was away for a few weeks, plus I thought that it would be good for her to be with her family for a while.

“Okay,” she said. “I do for you.”

I told her the story of Mary and her cat. She listened seriously, from time to time asking me to explain words that she didn't understand. When I finished she reached over and held my hands.

“Pete,” she said, “I not same your friend's cat. I not need a second chance.”

I was so pleased she'd understood the moral of the story that I didn't point out that it wasn't a second chance she was getting, she'd used up her second chance months ago.

I paid the bill and we went outside. I held her in my arms and she looked up at me with her big, trusting eyes. I kissed her and then buried my face in her hair and hugged her, so tightly that she gasped. I loved her more than I'd ever loved anyone in my life. She was my life. Right there and then I'd have died for her. I tried to tell her how I felt, I tried to put the feelings into words,

but Joy just laughed.

“Pete, you drunk,” she said, but I wasn't.

I said I'd get her a taxi but she said I should go first. She kissed me again and said that she loved me. I told her I'd phone her in Surin the next day. And the next. And every day until she got back to Bangkok. Tears welled up in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. I suddenly remembered the money and I took it out of my back pocket and gave it her. Then I waved down a motorcycle taxi and negotiated a price to get back to Soi 23.