Platform (12 page)

'It's true that round my way, it's not the whites that make the law any more . . .' Lionel said, for no apparent reason.

'Exactly,' agreed Robert forcefully. 'You're scared, and you're right to be scared. I predict an increase in racial violence in Europe in years to come; it will all end in civil war,' he said, frothing at the mouth a little; 'It will all be settled with Kalashnikovs.' He gulped back his cocktail; Lionel began to look at him a little nervously. 'I don't give a fuck about any of it anymore!' Robert added, slamming his glass down on the table. 'I'm a Westerner, but I can live wherever I want, and for the time being, I'm still the one with the money. I've been in Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, the Ivory Coast. It's true the girls are less expert than Thai girls, they're less gentle, but they're nicely curved and they have a sweet-smelling snatch.' He was obviously lost in his memories for a moment as he suddenly fell silent. 'What is your name?' I took the opportunity to ask number 47. 'I am Sin,' she said. The Chinese at the next table had made their choices, they headed upstairs, chuckling and laughing; relative silence was restored. 'They get on all fours, the little nigger girls, show you their pussies and their arses,' Robert continued thoughtfully; 'and inside, their pussies are completely pink . . .' he murmured. I also got to my feet. Lionel shot me a grateful look; he was visibly happy that I was the first to leave with a girl, it made things less embarrassing for him. I nodded to Robert to take my leave. His dour face, fixed in a bitter rictus, scanned the room - and beyond, the human race — without a hint of affability. He had made his point, at least he had had the opportunity; I sensed that I was going to forget him pretty quickly. AO of a sudden he seemed to me to be finished, a broken man; I had the impression that he didn't even want to make love to these girls any more. Life can be seen as a process of gradually coming to a standstill, a process evident in the French bulldog - so frisky in its youth, so listless in middle age. In Robert, the process was already well advanced: he possibly still got erections, but even that wasn't certain. It's easy to play the smart aleck, to give the impression that you've understood something about life; the fact remains that life comes to an end. My fate was similar to his, we had shared the same defeat; but, still I felt no active sense of solidarity. In the absence of' love, nothing can be sanctified. On the inside of the! eyelids patches of light merge; there are visions, there are dreams. None of this now concerns man, who waits for; night; night comes. I paid the waiter two thousand baht and he escorted me to the double doors leading upstairs. Sin held my hand; she would, for an hour or two, try to: make me happy.

Obviously, it's rare to come across a girl in a massage parlour who wants to make love. As soon as we were in the room, Sin went down on her knees in front of me, took down my trousers and my underpants and took my penis between her lips. I immediately started to get hard. She brought her lips closer, slowly pushed back the foreskin with short thrusts of her tongue. I closed my eyes, I felt a dizzying rush, I thought I was going to come in her mouth. She stopped suddenly, undressed, smiling as she did so, folded her clothes and placed them on a chair. 'Massage later . . .' she said, lying on the bed; then she parted her thighs. I was already inside her, and I was thrusting forcefully in and out when I realised I'd forgotten to put on a condom. According to reports by Medecins da monde, one third of all prostitutes in Thailand are HIV positive. Even so, I can't say that I felt a shudder of fear; I felt slightly annoyed, no more. Clearly those ad campaigns warning us about AIDS had been a complete failure. I went a bit limp, even so. 'Something wrong?' she was worried, she propped herself up on her elbows. 'Maybe ... a condom,' I said, embarrassed. 'No problem, no condom . . . I'm OK!' she told me cheerfully. She took my balls in the palm of one hand, slipping the other palm on to my prick. I lay down on my back, surrendering myself to the caress. The movement of her palm quickened, I felt the blood rush back to my penis. Anyway, they probably had medical check-ups or something. As soon as I was hard, she climbed on top and went straight down on me. I laced my hands behind her back;

I felt invulnerable. She started to move her pelvis slowly, her pleasure mounted, I parted my thighs to penetrate her more deeply. The pleasure was intense, almost intoxicating, I breathed very slowly to hold myself back, I felt, reconciled. She lay down on top of me, rubbing her pubis hard against mine; I moved my hands to stroke the nape of her neck. At the moment of orgasm, she became still, gave a long moan and then collapsed on my chest. I was still inside her, I could feel her pussy contracting. She had a second orgasm, a very powerful contraction from deep inside her. Involuntarily, I hugged her to me and ejaculated with a roar. She stayed motionless, her head on my chest, for about ten minutes; then she got up and suggested I take a shower. She dried me very delicately, patting me with the towel as you would a baby. I sat down on the sofa and offered her a cigarette. 'We have time . . .' she said 'we have a little time . . .'. I learned that she was thirty-two. She didn't enjoy her work, but her husband had abandoned her, leaving her with two children. Bad man,' she said, 'Thai men, bad men.' I asked her if she had any friends among the other girls. Not really, she told me; most of the girls were young and brainless, they spent everything they earned on clothes and perfume. She was not like that, she was serious, she put her money in the bank. In a couple of years she would be able to give this up and go back to live in her village; her parents were old now, they needed help.

As I was leaving, I gave her a two thousand baht tip; it was ridiculous, it was far too much. She took the money incredulously, and bowed to me several times, her hands together over her chest. 'You good man,' she said. She slipped on her mini skirt and her stockings; she had two hours left before they closed. She accompanied me to the door, bowed again, her hands together. 'Take care,' she said again; 'be happy.' I walked back out into the street, a little pensive. The following morning we were due to leave at eight o'clock for the last leg of the trip. I wondered how Valerie had spent her free day.

Chapter 11

'I bought some presents for my family,' she said. 'I found some beautiful shells.' The boat sped through the turquoise waters, between chalk crags covered with thick jungle; it was exactly how I imagined the scenery of Treasure Island. 'When all's said and done, nature is, well . . .' I said. Valerie turned an attentive face towards me; she had tied her hair up in a chignon, but a couple of stray curls fluttered in the wind on either side of her face. 'In the end, nature sometimes. . .' I went on, discouraged. There should be lessons in conversation, the way there are ballroom dancing lessons; I'd probably spent too much time doing accounting, I had lost the knack. 'You realise that it's December 31st . . .' she observed, unruffled. I looked around on all sides at the endless azure, the turquoise ocean; no, I really hadn't realised. Human beings must have had a lot of courage to colonise cold regions.

Son stood up to address the group: 'We now approaching Ko Phi Phi. I tell you before, here cannot go. You put swimsuit on, go now? Walk, not deep, walk. Walk in water. Not take luggage, luggage later.' The pilot rounded a headland and cut the engine, the boat continued to drift into a small cove which carved a curve into the middle of cliffs shrouded in jungle. The clear green water broke on a beach of white sand so perfect it seemed unreal. In the middle of the jungle, before the first slopes, you could make out wooden huts built on stilts, their roofs thatched with palm leaves. The group fell silent for a moment. 'Earthly paradise . . .' said Sylvie softly, choked with genuine emotion. It was hardly an exaggeration. That said, she was no Eve. I was no Adam either.

One by one the group members got up, stepped over the edge of the boat. I helped Josette down to her waiting husband. She had hitched her skirt up to her waist and was having trouble getting over the side, but she was thrilled, she was virtually wetting herself with excitement. I turned round; the Thai boatman waited, leaning on his oar, for all the passengers to disembark. Valerie sat with her hands crossed in her lap; she shot me a sidelong glance and smiled in embarrassment. 'I forgot to put on my swim-suit . . .' she said at last. I lifted my hands slowly in a gesture of helplessness. 'I can go . . .' I said stupidly. She bit her lips in irritation, got up, took off her trousers in a single movement. She was wearing lace panties, very sheer, not at all in the spirit of the trip. Her pubic hair peeked out at the sides, it was quite thick, very black. I didn't turn away, that would have been stupid, but nor was my gaze insistent. I got out of the boat on the left-hand side, offered her my arm to help her down; she jumped down from the boat. We were in up to our waists in the water.

Before going to the beach, Valerie looked again at the shell necklaces she was taking back for her nieces. Immediately after graduation, her brother had got a job as a research engineer with Elf. After a few months of on-site training, he had left for Venezuela - his first assignment. A year later, he married a local girl. Valerie had the impression he hadn't had much previous sexual experience; at least he had never brought girls home. That's often the way with boys who study engineering; they haven't got time to go out, to have girlfriends. They spend their free time on trivial hobbies, complex role-playing games or chess on the internet. They get their degrees, find themselves their first jobs and discover everything at once: money, professional responsibility, sex; if they are posted to a tropical country, it's rare for them to resist. Bertrand had married a very dark mixed-race girl with a superb body; several times when they were on holiday at her parents, on the beach at Saint Quay-Portrieux, Valerie had felt a violent surge of desire for her sister-in-law. She found it difficult to imagine her brother making love. Still, they had two children now and seemed to be a happy couple. It wasn't difficult to buy presents for Juana, she adored jewellery, and pale stone stood out beautifully against her dark skin. On the other hand, she hadn't found anything for Bertrand. When men have no vices, she thought, it's very difficult to guess what might make them happy.

I was leafing through a copy of Phuket Weekly I'd found in the hotel lobby when I saw Valerie walking along the beach. Further along, a group of Germans were swimming in the nude. She hesitated for a moment, then walked towards me. The sun was dazzling; it was about midday. One way or another, I would have to learn to play the game. Babette and Lea walked past wearing shoulder-bags but otherwise they too were completely naked. I registered this information without reacting. By contrast, Valerie's eyes followed them for a while with shameless curiosity. They settled themselves not far from the Germans. 'I think I'll go for a swim . . .' I said. 'I'll go in later,' she replied. I entered the water effortlessly. It was warm, translucent, deliciously calm; tiny silver fish swam close to the surface. The slope was very gentle, I could still touch bottom a hundred metres from shore. I slipped my cock out of my trunks, closed my eyes and visualised Valerie's vagina as I had seen it that morning, half exposed through her lace panties. I was hard, that in itself was something; it could be considered motive enough in itself. Besides, you have to live, you have to relate to other people; I was generally too uptight, and had been so for far too long. Perhaps I should have taken up some hobby in the evenings - badminton, choral singing or something. Even so, the only women I was still able to remember were the ones I'd fucked. That's not nothing either; we build up memories so that we will feel less alone at the moment of death. I shouldn't think like that. 'Think positive', I murmured in English to myself, panicked, 'think different'. I made my way back to the beach, stopping every ten strokes, breathing deeply to try and calm myself. The first thing I noticed as I stepped on to the sand was that Valerie had taken off her bikini top. At that moment, she was lying on her stomach, but she would turn over, it was as inexorable as the movement of the planets. Where was I exactly? I sat down on my towel,; hunched over slightly. 'Think different', I reminded myself. I had seen breasts before, I had stroked them, licked them; nonetheless, I found myself in a state of shock. I was sure that she had magnificent breasts; but it was worse than I had imagined. I couldn't tear my eyes from the nipples, the areolas; it was impossible for her not to notice me staring - even so, she said nothing for what seemed to me several long seconds. What exactly does go on in women's heads? They adapt to the rules of the game so easily. Sometimes, when they look at themselves naked in a full-length mirror, you can see a sort of realism in their eyes, a dispassionate assessment of their personal powers of seduction which no man could ever achieve. I was the first to lower my eyes.

After that, an indeterminate period of time elapsed; the sun was still directly overhead, the light extremely bright. I was staring at the white, powdery sand. 'Michel. . .' she said softly. I looked up quickly as though I'd been struck.

Her exceptionally brown eyes stared deeply into mine. 'What have Thai girls got that Western women don't?' she asked plainly. Yet again I was unable to hold her gaze. Her chest rose and fell to the rhythm of her breathing; I thought I saw her nipples harden. Right there, right then, I wanted to reply: 'Nothing'. Then I had an idea; not a very good idea.

'There's an article in English about it in here, sort of an advertorial'; I handed her the copy of Phuket Weekly. 'Find your long life companion . . . Well-educated Thai ladies, that one?' 'Yes, a bit further on there's an interview.' Cham Sawanasee, smiling, black suit and dark tie, answered the 'Ten questions you could ask' on the working of the Heart to Heart agency which he managed.

'There seems to be,' noted Mr Sawanasee, 'a near-perfect match between the Western men, who are unappreciated and get no respect in their own countries, and the Thai women, who would be happy to find someone who simply does his job and hopes to come home to a pleasant family life after work. Most Western women do not want such a boring husband.