A Woman of Bangkok (43 page)

Going there in the
samlor
I was so worried and anxious I couldn’t sit still. I hadn’t been to Vilai’s house since that night when I’d first made her acquaintance. She’d always been very insistent that there was no need for me to do so—‘you want see me I come your hotel, darling’—nor had I ever felt any desire to argue, being fearful of what I might be confronted with if I did. But these were exceptional circumstances. She was in trouble; I couldn’t afford the time to go to the hotel and send her a note and wait for her to come; I knew I just wouldn’t have the courage or patience to stay in a hotel room until she showed up. I was racked with suspense and this once I must disobey orders and go and brave her in her den …

Because I had been in such a preoccupied state that first night I now had only the vaguest idea where her place was and what it looked like. I could recall a deserted alley and a corrugated iron door. When the
samlor
-boy turned into a narrow passage choked with stalls and pedestrians and the overwhelming cacophony of competing radios I thought he must have misunderstood me and brought me to the wrong place. I shouted the address to him again and he pulled up, nodding his straw-hatted head. I thought he was nodding acknowledgment of my words, but then I realized he was actually indicating a direction. On my left, behind a travelling dried-squid stall complete with charcoal fire and mangle for making the hard flesh harder still, was a twisted, rusted, groggy door with a lewd drawing chalked on it. I looked at it in amazement. I had a recollection of metal glistening like silver in the reflection of distant lights that night. Could this really be Vilai’s home? I glanced incredulously at the
samlor
-boy, but he only laughed and nodded again and made a disgusting sign with his fingers.

For a second I was tempted to do what I knew I ought to have done in the first place—go to my hotel and direct operations from there. But only for one cowardly moment. Then I got out of the
samlor
on shaky legs.

As soon as I knocked on the rust a sort of hush came over the street. Half a dozen ragged little boys appeared from nowhere and stood around me in a semi-circle, gaping. The
samlor
-boy, folding my bill into the top of his shorts, said something to the remarkably ugly old Chinese who was squatting behind the dried-squid stall. The old man cackled. The open shop-fronts behind me seemed suddenly banked with staring eyes. I felt a flush come up from my shoulders in a wave to the top of my head and I knocked again, loudly, conscious of making myself ridiculous yet once more.

Nobody answered the knock and I turned half despairingly. At that one of the small boys squirmed in front of me, rattled the door violently and bawled. From somewhere within came a grumpy female response and all the boys laughed at me—it was really so simple.

The grumpy voice sounded again, from just inside the door. Not catching a word I didn’t reply, but the half-dozen boys said almost with one voice,
‘Farang maliao
.’ There was the sound of a latch made from a piece of wire and the door opened inwards about one inch. I got a long narrow view of black hair, a very brown face, a dirty slip; was held by a surly eye. ‘What do you want?’ the half-mouth asked in Siamese.

‘I want to see Miss Vilai.’

‘She’s not in.’

‘Tell her it’s Reggie Joyce.’

‘She’s—Wretcher?’ The name seemed to impress her. ‘Do you live in a hotel in Bhalangpoo?’

‘Yes, yes. Miss Vilai knows me well. Please let me in.’

The door opened and I passed through. I heard all the boys laugh out loud and scamper away, shouting out my shame to the whole convulsed street.

I waited awkwardly just inside, half afraid that Vilai’s furious eyes were already on me. The house stood on stilts, so close to the gate I was almost under it. In the darkness under the floor was the usual clutter of jars and broken boxes and bottles and other rubbish. Water was dripping through the floor from an upstairs bathroom and creeping through black and green slime to a smelly puddle over a stopped-up drain. Behind the drain a half-grown mongrel who was black with mud halfway up his skinny ribs stood whuffing halfheartedly at me, ready to flee at a flick of my eyelids. The smell of the eternal puddle was almost overpowering.

The old woman finished latching the door and turned and looked me up and down critically. I could see she was wondering what on earth her Mem saw in me.

‘Is Miss Vilai in?’

‘Wait here.’ She kicked off her sandals and shuffled up a ladder past the bathroom door. Watching her ascend, I marvelled at what monstrosities women, once presumably reasonably fair to look upon, can sometimes turn into. Corpses still able to move …

Standing at the foot of the ladder, I heard her go down a passage, tap at a door, and mutter ‘Mem.’ So Vilai was in … Then the old woman began in the exasperating Siamese manner to alternately tap and mutter, tap and mutter, never raising her voice above the conversational tone or giving the door a solid bang—and prepared to go on like that forever, it seemed. Often I’d heard boys in hotels thus ineffectually working away at a door for an hour or more—it has something to do with the fact that the soul goes roaming while the body sleeps, and if the body wakes too suddenly it may do so before the soul has had time to return to it and then the soul can’t find its home and becomes a wandering ghost and a public nuisance. I made a move towards the ladder and the mongrel retreated about five yards and went into a paroxysm of accelerating yaps that finally merged into one long-drawn hysterical howl. Only somebody who’d been drugged could have slept through the racket he made and Vilai wasn’t that. Her voice sounded angry—the way it always sounded when she was awakened—and I felt a rush of jumbled emotions—at any rate she was alive—and quite unchanged …

The dog had made so much commotion that I hadn’t been able to hear what was going on upstairs.

Then the old woman appeared again at the top of the ladder. She paused there to gather up her sarong in the spidery monkey fingers of one hand and holding it between her knees began to descend.

Before she was halfway down Vilai arrived. She shot to the top of the ladder and jerked to a stop. She was still tucking her sarong in on her chest. It was a plain black sarong such as country women wear. She had nothing else on, not even sandals. Her hair was what Sheila would have called ‘a sight’. Her face wasn’t made up—or rather it only showed a few traces of make-up left over from last time …

‘Why you come to my house?’ she grated. ‘I
ask
you many time, I not want you come my house.’

It was the reception I’d half-expected, and that made me twice as resentful about it. It was like dropping potassium permanganate into water and instantly what was colourless is purple. All my pent-up anxiety and fear for her, all my unwilling love, all my guilty sense of imbecility and besottedness, all were transmuted at a stroke into rage. I could feel my features wrenched into epileptic disorder. I could hear myself screaming: ‘You bitch, you low-down bitch! You sent for me, didn’t you? You implored me to come at once! God damn it, I nearly killed myself to reach you—I nearly killed myself—’

She came racing down the steps and hurled herself upon me. Her face was a picture of concern. She threw an arm around my waist and tried to draw me under the house. ‘Wretch, Wretch,’ she said earnestly, in a low voice, ‘you not want make so mutss noise. Usser pipple sink you d’unk—I not like that. This my house; every pipple here know I very good girl—’

I started laughing then. That concern for me (as I’d thought it was at first) and the feel of her arm about my body, had put ‘paid’ to my rage. But immediately it had appeared that what I had thought was concern for me was actually concern for herself—and it was really too funny—

She placed a box for me and I slumped down on to it, half-laughing and half-crying like a hysterical girl.

She stood in front of me, gripping her biceps with opposing hands and shifting her weight uncomfortably from one leg to the other. The old woman was there too, discussing me critically with her Mem. A third woman now arrived from behind all the rubbish, a very fat one with a crimson bodice that she was struggling to fasten as she approached.
‘Ami mai-di?’
—what’s the matter with him?—she asked, and Vilai’s answer was as clear as a bell:
‘Mao
.’

‘I’m not drunk,’ I said sulkily.

‘Then why all your clo’ dirty like you fall down on road?’

‘I had an accident. In the jeep.’

‘You haff accident, why you not go hotel, haff bass, before you come see me? I not like man come here see me wiss cloze all dirty. Pipple sink I very low dirty girl, haff dirty man come see—’

‘Oh, shut up about my clothes!’ I’d got over my hysteria and was turning angry again. ‘If you didn’t want me to come straight here to see you, why did you send me this ruddy telegram?’—and I whipped it out of my pocket, though it was by now illegible and in shreds. ‘From the way this telegram was translated to me, I reckoned you were already tied to the stake and the rotten English had their torches to the faggots. But you don’t look even singed to me. In fact you don’t look any worse than you normally do when you aren’t made up—’

‘What matter wiss you? All the time you spick too mutss, too fast: I not unnerstand—’

I got up off the box. ‘What’s the trouble, Vilai? Why did you send me this telegram? Is it a hoax, or is there really something wrong?’

She said, a little uncertainly, as I thought—‘I haff trouble, yes. Bad, bad trouble.’

‘Then what is it? Give me the facts. I might be able to help—’

‘Not want spick this place. Maybe bad pipples hear what I ask you. That not good.’

‘Then let’s go to your room.’

‘What?’ She gestured vaguely upwards and when I nodded, shook her head emphatically. ‘No, no, not want you go—’

She was so emphatic my suspicions were aroused. ‘Why not? Somebody else there already? Don’t tell me I have a rival!’

Her eyes blazed. ‘I sink you very bad boy, Wretch. All the time you only sink bad sing about Vilai. All the time you spick luff luff luff, but you not ac’ luff. If you not luff me, why you must come to my house like this?’

I seized her wrist. ‘Listen, sweetness. I’ve come through hell and high water to help you. I’ve cooked my goose as far as my firm is concerned and in fact my whole bloody life is in ruins. In other words,
I’m
in real trouble, Vilai, and if you aren’t—if you’ve just been playing with me—’

She gave a weary sigh and muttered what I thought was probably a curse. Then she said, ‘You hurt me too mutss when you angly to me like this. All the time you not trust Vilai. All the time you must try to hurt me ’cause you angly to me. You not good to me any more like before. But neffer mind. Vilai haff very strong heart, she not fray nussink … This time you can come my house, but I not want you come here again, you unnerstand what I spick, Wretch?’

She led the way upstairs. There was nobody in her room. She moved around clearing things up. There was a lot of empty soda water bottles scattered about and she’d spilt face-powder all down the front of the dressing-table. I pulled the door shut behind us and sat down in the deckchair. Behind a curtain I noticed dresses—innumerable dresses, hanging from a whole army of clothes-hangers. I didn’t remember having seen them on my previous visit. There was an expensive-looking radio, too.

‘Not many signs of poverty here,’ I remarked.

‘Please you not spick me like that. I want you spick me why you come here today, then quick-quick go.’

I didn’t know how to begin. I said, ‘Look, darling—’

‘Oh, God. You just want spick like fool, eh? You come my house in dirty cloze to make luff to me—’

‘No. I came here in dirty clothes because you asked me to. What’s behind that telegram, Vilai?’

She sat down with her back to me on a stool in front of the triple-mirrored dressing-table. She opened a drawer and turned over a lot of underclothes, selected one soiled item, then bundled it in her hand and began wiping up the face-powder with it. Her jewellery jingled musically as she moved tins, pots, vials, bottles, tubes, cartons—all the staggering mass of paraphernalia that faced her. I thought she wasn’t going to answer me but suddenly she dropped the duster and swung round. ‘Wretch, how mutss money you haff? I mean altogesser—in bank and—’

‘So that’s it! Just the routine stick-up! I might have known.’ I got up and started tramping the room. ‘If only you could have an
un
-financial worry just once in a while, Vilai, people might take your financial ones more seriously.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘Anyway you’re out of luck this time—I’m broke.’

‘Why you sit on my bed wiss your—’

‘Sorry.’ I almost laughed—only a woman, I thought, could worry about a man sitting on her bed in dirty trousers when she was in desperate trouble. I crossed to the deckchair again, took out my wallet and inspected its contents. ‘I’ve got about two hundred and that’s all—’

‘So! Now you start spick lie to me, like usser men—’

‘How dare you say that?’

‘When you come back Chiengmai you still haff littun money. And since then you haff t’ree, four pay-day—’

‘And no
you
… Is that what you mean?’

‘I sink you bad boy, now, Wretch. Before, I ask you giff me money, you neffer say “No haff”—you giff me. And if you no haff, you ask your frand bollow you, and giff me everysing I want. But now you spick lie to me, ask me you not haff money. That not truce word, Wretch—how can you spend so mutss up-country?’ She turned to her mirrors and thrust her chin towards the middle one. ‘I want ten t’ou-zand today, darling. I must haff. You cannot giff, I neffer want see you again. Can not.’

She spoke in such flat matter-of-fact tones that she might have been asking me to squeeze a blackhead out of her chin, instead of demanding five hundred dollars—two hundred quid—or else …

I got up and stood behind her. She continued to give her chin the sort of rapt attention an astronomer accords the heavens. I was tempted to grab her shoulders and wrench her round. Instead I burst out: ‘Suppose you tell me what you need this—fortune—for?’