The Museum of Doubt (26 page)

You want to find yourself a nice lad your own size, said Gordon.

I don’t want someone my own size, said Sheena. I had a boyfriend, five nine, very slim and good-looking. I was happy with him, even though he wasn’t into the music. I dumped him ’cause he always made me go round his mum’s house on my knees. She was half-blind and he didn’t want her to know I was so much taller than him.

Charlie should be here with the potatoes, said Gordon.

What’s wrong with you? said Sheena.

Nothing wrong with me. Careful.

There is. When you listen to enough soul music you learn soul-searching. I can search your soul.

Do I have one?

Yes. At the moment you’re empty, but there’s a lost soul inside you. A soul without a club. Without a club your soul is like a punter wandering through the empty venue of the man, without music to dance to or people to dance with. You need a club. The creed of White Sugar is my creed. There has to be music. The music has to have four beats to the bar. And you should never, never, betray anyone you love.

I’m in a club, said Gordon. The club of men.

I don’t know that club.

It’s a good one. But it’s not been the same since Smithie left.

I don’t know who Smithie is.

We were in Bangkok. Welcome to fantasyland, he said. And then I couldn’t find him. I heard a peacock screaming.

Gordon heard a peacock screaming in the garden outside the window. He got off the bed and watched the lustrous blue creature promenading across the lawn. The grass had just been watered. In the centre of the garden was a tree with a broad, sinewed black trunk and millions of tiny shining leaves. Smithie hadn’t woken him. Bangkok had turned cold. Gordon pulled the white bathrobe tighter and fetched a mini-Teacher’s from the fridge. A maid arrived and offered to do something to the bed.

Go ahead, said Gordon. Is it morning or afternoon? She was fine.

It’s six o’clock in the evening, said the maid. You just arrive?
She laughed and tore at the bedlinen with thin, powerful arms.

It’s freezing, said Gordon. Cold.

Air conditioning, said the maid. She leaned over the bed, smoothing down fresh sheets. You can change it. She finished the bed and showed him the dial. It’s too low. What you want, 25? She turned it so the arrow pointed to 25. Gordon moved towards her. She took a step away. Gordon loosened the cord of the bathrobe, dropped the minibottle into his pocket and took out a folded wad of banknotes.

Is sex with the maids included, or is it extra? he asked.

No sex, said the maid, holding her arms tensed in front of her, crossed at the wrist, palms outward. She backed towards the half-open door and opened it wide with her heel. No sex. All the maids are married. I’m not a maid, I’m the housekeeper, and I’m married too. You want to go to the red light district. Yeah, red light. Plenty of girls there for foreign men.

Gordon sat on the bed and suckled the bottle for the last drops. A boy in polyester blue with a six-hair moustache and an angry frown came to take away the things the housekeeper had left. He watched Gordon the whole time.

You look like my son, said Gordon. Although he’s a white man, of course. Where’s the red light district?

You take a cab, the boy said, and went out swiftly.

Gordon called Smithie’s room. There was no answer. It was getting dark. Gordon put on a cerise polo shirt, beige slacks and black moccasins and went out. He padded along the corridor to where Smithie was staying and knocked on his door, saying Smithie’s name, then shouting it. He drummed on the door with the knuckles of both fists. No Smithie. Gone off to find a drinking place. The drinking was the one, the one before the taxi, before the tarts. Only you had to be sure you drank together
otherwise where were you, you were heavily outnumbered by foreigners. They were small and polite and once your back was turned they’d come at you with their knives. It was a wonder Smithie’d ever done business with the Bangkokies. Said he’d played golf with them. Dodgy business. You had the advantage of height and weight, of course, but what was that when all you had in your bag was irons and the Bangkokie had his knife. Soon as they sensed the power of your swing they’d steer you into the rough and rush you. Bamboo stakes in the bunkers. Miserable.

He came to a door that led to the outside, to a path between hard glossy bushes, lit by globes of light, leading to the reception building. The door was pulled open as he was approached by a Bangkokie in a coffee-coloured uniform, like a policeman, only without a gun. The policeman smiled and nodded at him and saluted. Oh, they were polite. The heat closed around Gordon like the numbness brought on by certain pills and gases, irreversible once swallowed. He stopped and turned, moved his hands to catch a cooler pool of air, and the heat was everywhere.

You OK, sir? said the policeman.

Open a window, said Gordon. It’s stuffy.

You’re outside.

It’s cold inside, said Gordon. Open the windows and it’ll even things up.

Sir, reception is straight ahead.

Gordon went to the reception desk and asked about Smithie. He’d left his room key and gone. No message.

He came here on a business trip once before, said Gordon. D’you know where he used to go?

Don’t know, said the girl at reception. She was fine. Maybe he went for a drink in hotel bar?

Gordon looked at her. She smiled. He asked her if sex with
reception clerks was included, or if it was extra. She lowered her head, shaking it violently, and began rearranging papers and pens on the desk behind the counter.

You want red light district, she said.

A woman in a black dress was singing in the bar, a Bangkokie with hair down to her waist, shoulders bare and a big voice. She was singing
I’ve Got a Crush on You
. Men dressed like Gordon were sitting alone with drinks, tapping one or two fingers on the table, nodding their heads and wagging their moccasins in leaden time. The singer had one hand on her mike and one hand resting on the lid of a grand piano. She turned to Gordon, sang: Sweetypie, and winked at him. Over 30. Too old. Gordon walked away, parted the doors onto the car park and crossed over again into the warm electric dark outside.

They were digging up the pavement on the big street, toiling with picks and drills in the night. The road was heavy with Japanese cars. Tired Bangkokies were leaning out of the glassless windows of a square old bus caught in the grind, pillowing their chins on the crooks of their arms and staring into the private spaces of the motorists. White shirts of streams of lean students and office folk flickered in the railings of a pedestrian footbridge straddling the traffic. Higher up overhead the sky was concrete, a V-bottomed causeway raised on monumental pillars, roofing the street. They kept themselves awful busy, the Bangkokies. What were they up to? It wasn’t till you went abroad that you realised just how many foreigners there were, and how busy they’d been while there was no-one to keep an eye on them. Working away, building away, more than likely swotting in their spare time. And still they couldn’t spell cock.

Outside a shopping centre steps led down to street level. Folk were sitting on the steps, groups of Bangkokie students
with folders in their hands, laughing, and groups of Europeans. Gordon stood in the middle of the steps with his hands in his pockets and surveyed the flow for Smithie. There were two white people sitting at his feet. There was a boy with a shaven scalp, dark glasses wrapped round his head and trousers with pockets down the sides, and a girl with a tally of silver rings on the rim of her ear, like a sheep of one flock, her wispy blonde hair bound tight with an etched leather clasp at the back. Maybe you could tell the age by counting the rings. They were resting the weight of broad satchels they were carrying on straps slung across their chests.

D’you know where the red light district is? said Gordon.

The couple turned round, looked up at him, and looked at each other.

Do you know? said the girl to the boy.

No, he said shaking his head and turning away.

I’m a tourist, said Gordon. Supposed to be here with a friend of mine but he’s gone awol.

We’re not tourists, said the girl. We’re travellers. What is it tourists do, Harry?

Sights, said Harry.

That’s it, said the girl. Seen the sights?

Sights? said Gordon. He checked the high windows overlooking the steps. Glint of a gunbarrel. Crosshairs on the man in cerise. That’s him, the one with the wad. Take him out. Hands grasping him by the moccasins, dragging him away into the shopping centre, head bumping on the steps, stripped naked in seconds, Mary and the runt collecting on the life policy. Too much to bear.

You haven’t got a camera, the girl said.

Too true, said Gordon. It’d hardly be worth their while.

Whose while?

The Bangkokians.

The girl laughed. Bangkokians. So what’ve you been doing.

Gordon said: I came to get my hole, basically. I was hoping to get sucked off by one of the young Thai girls. The trouble is you can’t enjoy buying a girl at home any more, they’re too bony and depressed, and you can’t talk about it with your pals. Whereas here they’re really into it.

God, you’re disgusting, said the girl.

Smithie! shouted Gordon, trotting down the steps. It was him! In the cream-coloured suit, moving comfortably in the crowds on the far side of the street, carrying a shopping bag, looking back over his shoulder. Gordon stood on the edge of the traffic and shouted Smithie’s name. Bangkokites looked at him quickly and looked away. The jam had freed up and the traffic was moving. Smithie! The man had an echo in the mob. Another moving thing was moving with him. When Smithie’s jacket slipped out of sight behind delicate swinging arms in teeshirts, the other thing vanished, and when the linen number emerged, paused darker against the food platters in the window of a noodle shop, a shrunken shadow stood still beside him. Smithie looked down at the shadow, his lips moved. The shadow looked up, it shook its head, Smithie moved on, and the shadow followed. Smithie! Over here! Gordon jogged to the footbridge and peered across the street again. He saw Smithie stop at a turning, by a postcard carousel, and the shadow stop too. It was a boy, maybe 13 or 14. A boy in a striped teeshirt and shorts. Smithie pointed at something in the shop behind the postcards. The boy nodded. Smithie went in and came out a few seconds later with a package. The boy reached out his hand. Smithie laughed in the way Gordon knew, in the way Gordon remembered, even though he couldn’t hear it, he could hear it, the laugh of having the advantage and loving it, that time he’d
had the cream doughnuts and Gordon had wanted a bit, he’d had the air gun and Gordon had wanted a shot, he’d had that lovely wee lassie from Manchester and Gordon’d wanted a go. Smithie always gave and Gordon always got but only after he’d followed and waited. Over by the souvenir shop Smithie laughed and walked around the corner into the side street, out of sight. The boy waited for a second and went after him.

Gordon ran up the stairs of the footbridge. He lost his wind halfway up. He leaned back against the railings, gripping the metal with his hands, the sweat dribbling over him, letting his head settle. He crossed the bridge slowly, keeping one hand on the rail. He paused halfway and looked down at the hosts of cars changing their grounds in the populous night world. They moved in a kind of tunnel, made by the tarmac under their wheels, the causeway overhead and the heavy hanging signs in gold and dull paint and neon, in English and Bangkokish letters. Gordon came down off the bridge and looked in the window of the noodle shop. There were a couple of dozen bowls in rows in the window with plastic samples of dishes, fanned hands of sliced meat and dumplings and greens on beds of noodles. Gordon was hungry. He could smell a twisted braid of food scents, a sharp green herb, dark gamey meat, limes, something sweet and the essence of fish. He walked away and entered the McDonald’s on the next block for a quarterpounder with cheese, large fries and a cup of tea. You could feel it going down into you square, marked and filling the space, like the falling bricks in the Tetris game Kenneth used to kill time with. The poor old Bangkoksters, they must have been grateful when Mr McDonald came along with good dry, solid, guaranteed rounds of bread and meat, food that wasn’t slippery, wasn’t bobbing up and down and wasn’t festering with spice. It was enough to bring tears to your eyes, if you were a poof that is, otherwise you took the grief of things and you stowed it away in
that space just about where your stomach was, if you were a man. Gordon always had a lot of grief stored in there. But that was the thing about grief, it didn’t take up space, it was space. It was tricky carrying all that empty space around inside you without losing your balance. That was the advantage of quarterpounders. They dropped right into the space. Mr McDonald knew there was nothing else you could do with that grief, you either let it out and had everyone thinking you were a soft case, or else you filled it with something heavy, bulky and cheap, i.e. the quarterpounder. Gordon ordered another one.

Outside the McDonald’s two policemen stood by their motorcycles. They had white crash helmets with raised black visors, skintight grey uniforms and tight-fitting jackboots. They were lean and fit like deer and everything shone in the lamplight, the helmets, their badges and buckles, the chrome on their bikes.

Which way to the red light district? said Gordon.

The policemen watched him. They were still. They stared and their faces didn’t move. They blinked, but seldom.

Which way to the red light district? said Gordon.

One of the policemen turned on his heel and stepped into the road. He raised his arm and held it stiff in the air. With his other white-gloved hand he took a shining whistle and blew a single note. A taxi stopped. The policeman leaned in to speak to the driver.

Good lads, said Gordon.

You go where driver takes you, right? Don’t go running around. He’ll take you to a nice place.

Gordon settled into the cool yielding interior of the cab and closed the door. The car murmured up to speed.