Bangkok Knights (24 page)

“You
are
Noi from Ubon, aren’t you?” Meow asked as
Candidate #5 pushed past her to get at the phone.

“Ubon? No, I’m from Songkhla.”

“Oh, sorry. My mistake. Wrong Noi; this call is for Noi
from Ubon who is an Avon lady and who has a big family which is all sick at the
moment Excuse me.” Or words to that effect.

“Toylayl”
spat the lovely Noi. “Bullshit!” She was
clearly piqued.

Meow, on the other hand, was triumphant. As she and Lek
explained to Trevor later, after Noi had left, no polite Thai lady would ever
say
toylay,
even under direst provocation. Most polite ladies had never
even
heard
the expression. Besides, Noi had revealed the fact she had at
least a couple of dozen relatives that she wanted to keep for a nice surprise.

Just for now, however, Meow didn’t even deign to respond
to this great big less-than-refined cowlike creature. If anything, she became
sweet and refined enough for two ladies all by herself, and you could see this
really rankled with the buffalo.

After Noi sat down again, Trevor asked her if she wanted
anything else to drink, and she said yes. Imperiously she told Meow: “Bring me
a hot Ovaltine.” Not only that, but she did this thing in English, thereby
causing some loss of face to Meow, who didn’t understand at first and had to be
told again.

Eddie and I agreed this one was doing well. She’d borne up
under everything so far including Meow’s little stratagems, and all she’d done
was say “Bullshit”, which Trevor hadn’t even understood. Evidently he hadn’t
understood her to express concern for a small army of sick relatives either,
judging by the fond looks he was still lavishing on her. Yes, she was sailing
through it all like a prime candidate for dinner, minimum, and maybe even good
times in Kuwait and Norwich to come.

Then Meow came back with the Ovaltine. She came out onto
the patio balancing the cup and saucer carefully — nobody likes their Ovaltine
sloshing all around in their saucer — and no doubt forgetting for a minute she
was no great shakes at getting around on those high heels. Next thing you knew
she was doing her ‘Going to Chicago’ routine once more, and once again she
didn’t make it to Chicago or even to Detroit. This time she deposited the hot
drink in Noi’s lap.

Now, water buffalo are generally placid beasts, with or
without slabs of make-up they don’t want cracking and falling off. They are
slow getting riled; but when they do, it’s best to give them a wide berth.

Miss Calm and Repose was on her feet in a second, and the
air was turning blue with
bon mots
obviously selected from an impressive
repertoire. Trevor was probably grateful Noi wasn’t his new bride and Meow the
vicar’s wife back in Norwich who’d just poured tea on Noi’s pussy.

There was a lull wherein we all goggled in admiration at
her
tour de force
of expletive fluency. Into this breach sallied forth
Nixon, who until then had been somewhat withdrawn.
“Hial”
he screamed
with glee, ‘giant lizard’ being the vilest thing he could think of right then.
This was enough to set off the other birds, who tried a ragged chorus of
“Hial
Whoop!
Hial
Hello;
sawasdee khrapr
 together with a medley of
whistles and traffic noises.

Seeing she was in some danger of being upstaged, and not
taking kindly to being called a giant lizard by an ugly and obviously depraved
bird, Noi rounded on Nixon, countering with
“You,
hia!” delivered in
tones so forceful he fell right off his perch and into a stupefied silence.

At that moment a new element entered the equation.

“Oh, no,” said Eddie; and then Trevor said it too.

So did I, come to that; “Oh, no,” I said.

There in the doorway stood 100 pounds of lean, mean,
fighting machine. “Here you are!” she announced. “Where have you been?”

“Hello, Dinky Toy,” said Trevor cautiously, plainly skirting
the issue of his recent whereabouts.

“I wait for you all morning,” she continued. “And you no
come.”

“What do you mean? Come where?”

“You say you meet me at the coffee shop at the Sheraton
Hotel.”

Trevor was nonplused. He looked from Dinky Toy to Noi and
then back again. On second thought he also looked at Meow, who on the other
hand was looking from Dinky Toy to Trevor and back again with no little
interest. In fact, by this time everybody was looking at everybody else, and
nobody knew what was what.

“That was
Thursday”
claimed Trevor.
“Thursday
morning.
Today is
Tuesday.”

“Tuesday? Anyway — Thursday... Tuesday: it doesn’t matter.
I took my day off so I no work today, and when I go to the coffee shop you
aren’t there.”

Dinky Toy was angry; she was close to tears.

Noi the Buffalo, meanwhile, was clearly not fond of
queue-jumpers. Who was this piece of baggage to come marching into the middle
of her imminent betrothal and start hassling the man to whom she would be
betrothed? It was distracting, not to say bad form, and God knows there’d been
enough distractions already, what with a bunch of sick relatives who never were
and a lap full of hot Ovaltine. And all this was not to mention the bitch Meow
who wouldn’ t go away even for a minute, doing this daredevil act on her
six-inch spike heels, and a gang of foul-mouthed birds who wouldn’t shut up. It
was enough to make you mad. This time she didn’t say
toy lay,
she said
something so interesting Lek and Meow wouldn’t even discuss it, afterwards.
Whatever it was, though, it proved effective—always supposing, of course, it
was designed to totally piss Dinky Toy off.

”You! You... you lady of the night!” Dinky Toy obviously
felt restrained in her choice of language, there in front of Eddie’s wife and
sister-in-law.

“Me?
Mel
Why you ...!” But I never got to hear
Noi’s rejoinder, Lek was making too much noise telling all these bad-mouthed
babes to get out of her house, where did they think they were, anyway?

The Cosmetic Imperative giving way before expediency, Meow
removed her high-heels. She wore an unpleasant smile. Somehow I’d never figured
her for a street-fighter.

Things were breaking fast. Eddie figured he’d better do
something, so he opened a couple of beers, neatly side-stepping Lek, who was
arming herself with a mop, and bringing the bottles over to our table.

“Is it okay without a glass?” he asked me, always the
perfect host.

“No problem.” The fewer breakable items around the better.
Especially ones that’d leave pieces with sharp edges.

Dinky Toy was reaching for Noi’s hair, and Lek was raising
the mop for action. Meow was moving in behind Noi with some mischief clearly in
mind. The birds were silent, the situation developing so fast it defied their
powers of commentary.

“I’d better do something,” said Eddie, taking a big hit of
beer.

I just loved Eddie’s brunches.

Later, in Boon Doc’s, we were all to agree that Trevor was
growing up; his recent experiences had been like some rite of passage.

Trevor had been sitting around, up to this point, looking
vaguely alarmed and trying to gaze sternly off into the distance. This was not
easy under the circumstances, however—not with all hell breaking loose, and him
the center of events, morally speaking at least.

I watched him get up and move to intervene between Noi and
Dinky Toy.

“I say, ladies,” he said, stroking at his upper lip, his
ears blushing furiously.

And that’s all he got to say. Lek had already started the
mop in full swing, probably meaning to bring it down between the belligerents;
instead, she caught Trevor alongside the head, rendering him even more vague
than was his wont. In fact, he was considerably dazed, not knowing where this
unlooked-for attack had come from. “Ow!” he said. “Bloody hell.”

“Another beer?” Eddie asked me, and I said sure.

It was hard to tell who loved him more: Dinky Toy grabbed
the mop away from Lek, while Noi grabbed Trevor in a hug and started asking him
if he was okay, the poor dear. Meow was right in there, as well, trying to pull
Noi off Trevor; she pretty clearly felt there was only room for one Florence
Nightingale on this patio, and she was going to be it.

Lek came over to our table to tell Eddie she was washing
her hands of the whole affair. And if Eddie knew what was good for him, he’d
see to it that the employees of Boon Doc’s did not come to the Cheri-Tone
again.

Understandably, perhaps, Trevor was by now somewhat unsure
of who was an enemy and who wasn’t, what with mops suddenly descending on his
head and large, buffalo-like creatures grabbing him and shrieking epithets in a
strange language. How was he to know, in his condition, that the buffalo was
merely screaming threats at Meow, and not at him? On top of all this, Nixon had
taken to screeching “Crook! Crook!” at the top of his lungs, which only
confused the situation further.

Trevor elbowed Noi in the stomach, and then fell down
together with her in a heap on the floor. Meow was pulled down in the same
heap, and Trevor managed to butt her in the head as he struggled desperately to
get out from under Noi. Eddie and I would’ve gone to his aid but, I am ashamed
to say, we were kind of helpless with laughter just at that moment.

With a strength no doubt born of terror, Trevor did twist
his way free, but unfortunately at that very moment Dinky Toy brought the mop
down on what was meant to have been Noi’s head, but what was now Trevor’s head,
instead. Leaving Noi and Meow lying there in a great pile of moans and groans,
Trevor staggered to his feet and wrestled Dinky Toy for possession of the mop.

Then, just when you had to reckon the situation couldn’t
get any better, no matter what, it did. The
farang
ladies reappeared on
the patio. They took one look at this scene and sized things right up.

Trevor the male chauvinist pig was abusing this pile of
ladies, and it was plain reinforcements were needed.

“Right on, sisters!”

That’s exactly what they said, Eddie and I were later to
agree; it had been no hallucination.

With one exchange of glances, we tacitly concurred only a
blockhead would want to get involved in this fracas. Besides, someone had to
guard the beer bottles—you couldn’t have broken glass all over the patio; it
wouldn’t be safe.

The Furies beheld each other with amazement and delight.
The Revolution had come, just when they’d given up all hope for their Asian
sisters. But the frail young things needed help, beset on all sides the way they
were by Trevor the Chauvinist Pig. So in they sailed, hurling imprecations and
clawing savagely at the Man Who Would Be Married in a Hurry.

“You should be ashamed,” one of them told Trevor, as she
grabbed the back of his collar and pulled. You could hear a tearing sound,
punctuated by a hearty slap in the face contributed by the other champion of
female human rights. “Let go of this poor girl.”

The poor girl in question, commonly known as Dinky Toy,
freed forthwith and still armed with the mop, immediately set about her like an
old hand with quarter staves, and had the more robust but far less vigorous
Amazons dispersed in all directions in less time than it took Trevor to gasp
“Help, bloody hell.
Help.”

If there was one thing in the world that would’ve
established solidarity amongst these particular Thai women at this particular
time, it was an attack upon their hopes and plans for the future, as these were
embodied in the person of this vulnerable young gentleman. Noi and Meow were at
the traveling ladies like avenging angels, at one with Dinky Toy in their
willingness to fly at anything, no matter how large or foreign or slatternly,
so long as their Trevor was left intact to finish his interviews and then sweep
some fine and deserving lady away to greener pastures.

The Americans outweighed the Thai ladies by a good fifty
pounds, never mind there were only two of them while there were three of these
passive, oppressed young Asian items. Still, given the latter individuals’
spirit and vested interest in certain matters at hand, it was no contest. In
fact, the traveling ladies were no dummies, and they quickly saw which way
things were going. They had their consciousness raised in a matter of seconds,
and this consciousness told them there was a time to be concerned with the
plight of Asian womanhood, and there was a time to save one’s own butt.

As they beat a disorderly retreat towards the door, they
were joined by what must’ve been Candidate Number Six, Trevor’s last scheduled
interview. Whoever she was, she was young and pretty and Thai—definitely the
best prospect he’ d come up with so far by a furlong or more, if you went only
by first appearances. But these were the only appearances we had to go on. She
took one quick look at all the interesting things which were transpiring out
there on the patio of the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse, and clearly decided she’d
planned on a somewhat more tranquil existence than this traffic engineer
appeared to be offering, and perhaps she’d just go away, now, and find somebody
else to get interviewed by.

Trevor staggered over to our table disheveled, collar
flapping, and looked at us with hurt disbelief. “You just sat here and drank
beerl”
he said, as though it would’ve been more acceptable if we’d been drinking
maybe milk instead.

It was Dinky Toy and Noi who were now beating a hasty
retreat before Lek’s indignant onslaught. In fact, it was hard for any of us to
feel welcome, given the prevailing climate. Eddie and I slipped out to share a
taxi to Boon Doc’s with Dinky Toy, where we had a couple more beers and tried
to reconstruct the events of that afternoon.

As we left, the only one who seemed to have it all
together was Meow, who’d been standing there cool, collected and foursquare in
her bare feet. She’d been smiling serenely as she turned her attention back to
Trevor. Trevor was the only one who didn’t make good his escape. Except for
Nixon and Co., who were also encaged.