We enter a broad street flanked by shops. ‘This is it, ’says Boswell. ‘I been here before.’
My bowels re-echo, this is it. I have a moment of panic. I want to cut and run for the hotel. A hundred nonconformist ancestors lying straight and austere in the churchyards of East Anglia turn in their narrow graves. I hear the clatter of old bones and prejudices and I am scared. ‘Joyce is in a brothel and ten thousand miles away.’ But out of every gallon of my blood only one pint does not derive from those graves. It’s not miles which count, it’s the years. When I was young and malleable, straight from the furnace as you might say, I was clutched in the pincers of tradition and laid on the anvil of life; I was shaped by cruel repeated hammer blows and every blow a pulpit fulmination … Hey, where’s Bozzy? Wouldst that thou wert thy famed namesake, chum; then couldst thou jot down this my dictum, and work it up tomorrow morning and put it into a book, R. E. Joyce, His Life, Works and Women, and I would be famous forever …
Christ, it’s a rotten feeling when your head does a lurch to one side and the liquid brains slop to and fro …
Suddenly Custard-tart, who has been getting more and more excited since we left the ramwong, plunges to the left shouting ‘Follow me, Mr. Joy. Come on, Mr. Bosswill, this way. Let us take a walk in here.’ And he dives into a sort of tunnel, a square of black between dim-lighted shops. I stumble over rubble and potholes as we follow. The gateway to Hell? But that’s supposed to be easy, smooth. Maybe I’m heading for Heaven. I know that road’s all potholes, dug by the Devil. My old man’s a parson and he told me. Worthy father of a silly fool. Believes everything he says. Says only what he believes. What would he say if he caught me now, half-seas over and hell-bent for Jezebel?
‘Where’er she be—That not impossible Shee—Who shall command my heart and me—’
‘What?’ says Boswell. ‘God, what a hole this is.’
‘Where’er she lie—Lockt up from mortal eye—In the shady Leaves of Destiny—’
‘You’re drunk,’ he says. ‘Jesus, listen to that.’
I’ve already heard the sound and it has made my blood run cold.
‘Strewth, what are they doing to her?’ I cry, and almost reveal my innocence. But even as Boswell’s eyebrows shoot up I retrieve my honour with a cynicism: ‘Sounds as if she’s having a baby.’
Windmill has heard the long-drawn moaning too and he laughs his cheerful laugh and cracks some joke in Thai. Then he says carefully in English, ‘I think that woman earn her twenty tics the hard way.’
‘One of the twenty-four hard ways,’ I say and Boswell bursts out laughing and claps me on the shoulder. But all my viciousness is in the mind and that moaning, like a cat’s before the explosion in spits and yowlings and flying fur, has made me want to spew. God knows it was bad enough at the Bolero last night, watching the girls vying for the men and the men for the girls and finally just after midnight the exodus in pairs, the girl I liked the look of best … God, what a monster she had picked, and she practically had to hold him up, he was so tight …
Suddenly I am sick of Thailand where Sex stalks naked and men and women hurt themselves and each other so much in worship of him. It is more decent to hurt yourself in solitude, shut in with yourself and the horror; self-flagellation is fit only for the cell … But I am with this gang now; nor do I altogether want to escape.
It’s a curious street. At first I can’t make out what it is that’s so queer about it. Then I suddenly realize. There are no lights. On both sides there are the continuous walls of houses but there are no windows. What pale radiance there is comes from the moon. And there is no loud talking or laughter. There are men everywhere but they only whisper to each other, conspiratorially. There is an atmosphere of furtive suppressed excitement. Footsteps make no sound in the powdery dust. We might all be creeping about. Most of the men are dressed in white; they glide silently by, like spectres. Here and there a white form, dim, motionless, intent, stands with its eye glued to a knot-hole in the wall. Light coming through the hole makes a pale splotch on the face, like luminous paint … Once again, as at the ramwong, I get that feeling of being in a cathedral; sordid though this street is, the religious spirit of man is flowering in it, though in its crudest, most impure, most debased form …
Custard-tart has stopped by a denser patch of black in the black walls.
‘Do we go in here?’ Boswell asks him.
‘Of course. Go everywhere. See everything. Many young girl in here, very beauty-full, you must see them, maybe play game with them.’ He catches sight of me and says, ‘Mr. Joy, have you been to see Thai prostitute before?’
‘No.’
‘You must come often. Have you wife in Bangkok?’
‘I have no wife anywhere.’
‘No wife? You are very lucky. How old are you?’
That’s usually the first or second question you’re asked in Thailand and the fact that he hasn’t put it to me before tonight shows how animated our proceedings have been. Then the door opens and I don’t have to tell him even now. There’s more important business afoot. (Or in bed.) Years seem to have slipped from Custard-tart’s shoulders. He skips through like a boy. I follow like an old man, last of our group.
It is a ghastly place. Earth floor. Wooden walls on three sides, black with dirt and covered with cobwebs. There are a few photographs of past and present favourites of the establishment and a few pin-ups. The latter, cut from film magazines and pasted up years ago, are torn and peeling off; the old-fashioned hairdo’s make the leers look obscene; I perceive that beauty has to be up-to-date to be seductive. A rickety staircase, little more than a ladder, goes up steeply into blackness. The fourth wall is a corrugated iron partition with a gap in it. Over the gap hangs untidily a dirty cretonne curtain. Benches are placed against the walls. There is no other furniture. And the place is deserted. One forty-watt bulb, encrusted with fly-droppings and hung high up, reveals this much to us.
‘Where everyone go?’ Windmill asks fretfully.
‘All busy, I expect,’ says Boswell.
‘Let’s go,’ I urge. ‘No good wasting time here.’ Such a den cannot possibly house—that not impossible—
Then the cretonne is agitated and Custard-tart’s face, which I hadn’t missed, comes through, less like a tortoise’s now than a leprechaun’s. His forehead is shining with sweat, his huge glasses are glazed twin pools, his straight line of a mouth has split into two, revealing teeth which stay clenched even when he laughs. ‘Come on,’ he cries. ‘Very speshull lady in here.’
The feel of that curtain which I have to get hold of revolts me. We pass down a damp passage between corrugated iron walls to a source of light. And damn—it is Sunday night. Out of the shadows I hear my old man’s voice. ‘Let us now sing hymn one hundred and seventy-two. “Lead, kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom.” And mayst Thou not lead Thy children up the garden path, for Thy Son’s sake. One. Seven. Two.’ Then the organ sketching the first two lines, slowing up on the second, and the congregation rustling to its feet on the penultimate syllable, and then—
It is a smaller room than the first, and seems brighter-lit, and it contains a table and chairs, and a glass of dilapidated flowers, and its own staircase, and one girl. I hardly dare look at her. Very speshull lady? I can think of other terms that would fit better. Drab. Slattern. Trollop. Good old words. Fit her like a bra. Judging by their expressions Windmill, Prosit and Boswell agree with my view.
All the same I resent the candour with which they allow their faces to express their distaste. God knows I feel the same as they do, but I can put myself in her place, and I get hot on her behalf. They are sneering at her as they would at a piece of inferior cloth a salesman was trying to palm off on them. There is chivalry in me yet—Ivanhoe was never downright discourteous even to Jewish wenches—and I am angry with them.
Rebecca is indifferent. Her face is a mask. A pale, moon-shaped mask, puffy about the eyes and jaw-line. But those eyes are alive enough, dark
and intense under the accanthic folds, with short, sticky lashes: the eyes, I suddenly perceive, of those little patient ponies of the East which have been beaten and starved all their lives and expect nothing but thrashings and starvation forever, being unable to conceive of death. Her arms are brown, the upper arm fat, with a slack curve of muscle abaft the bone; the forearm slimmer, ending in beautiful hands, as good as Sheila’s. Windmill says something to her and suddenly she laughs, the red daub of mouth divides into two with teeth between. Four or five are gold, and one is missing altogether. She talks to him huskily.
I gather that all the other girls are engaged. She doesn’t seem to expect any of us to want her. She makes no attempt to seduce us. She seems dead from the mouth down.
‘Mr. Joy, you want?’ Custard-tart shouts to me.
I don’t by any means, but I hate to hurt her feelings.
‘Of course he doesn’t,’ Boswell says. ‘Rejoice is an artist, a poet. He’s like the rest of us, he wants to get the hell out of here. Come on, less go.’
‘Less go, less go,’ they all shout, and we all troop out. I can’t help looking back. She is lighting a cigarette that Windmill gave her, and she stares straight back at me with sombre unblinking eyes. I am sorry to be leaving. She is about as attractive as a lavatory seat. But she would do. I feel the first tingling of interest in our expedition. Can it be that amidst all this filth and unloveliness—
‘Till that ripe birth—Of studied Fate stand forth—and teach her dear steps to our Earth—
‘Till that divine—Idea take a shrine—Of crystal flesh wherein to shine—’
‘What in God’s name are you muttering about?’ Boswell ejaculates.
Not for the world would I tell him. And anyway his attention is instantly diverted. For the first room we entered is no longer empty. On a bench against one wall sit two girls. On the bench against the opposite wall sit three young men. The latter are looking at the former. The former don’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. They sit awkwardly with their legs to one side, supporting the weight of their bodies on one arm. The Thai as I have already noticed are a remarkably supple race, and their supporting arms are not straight but kink inwards at the elbow, as a westerner would say, the wrong way. One is dressed in a yellow blouse and a sarong like a navvy’s handkerchief, red with white spots; her brow is of the kind called beetling, and overshadows her other features—the great deepset brown eyes, the small tilted nose—except for protruding lips, which are peony-red and startling; she is maybe seventeen years old. The other is more seasoned, with dangling hanks of hair and a dangling lower jaw—the adenoidal type. Her blouse is green with red, white and black flowerets on it; her sarong is black. Her toes, bare in wooden sandals, are the scarred spatulate toes of one who seldom wears shoes.
‘Humph, dishtinct improvement,’ says Boswell, and drops down on an empty bench.
‘You like? You want?’ cried Custard-tart instantly. He has all the instincts of a pander. He approaches the younger of the two girls and tries to catch hold of her hand. He says a few words to her in Thai but she doesn’t reply, only gives him one surly glance and turns away again. ‘I think she very good,’ he tells Boswell. ‘Her breasts very hard. You come and feel.’
‘Hard as goddam rocks, I expect,’ says Boswell dismally, but to my dismay he heaves himself off his bench and drops between the two girls. Ostentatiously they wriggle away from him. He puts his arm around the younger one and grabs a handful of flesh. For five seconds there is no reflex. Then she tries to shake herself free. The belatedness of the movement amounts to an invitation and its nature must be gratifying to Boswell’s arm. He laughs and she makes an offended exclamation and strikes out at his chest. It is an ineffectual female slap that titillates rather than intimidates and he laughs again. Then she smiles, unwillingly, it seems, turning her head so he can’t see. If it wasn’t that her mouth is so plastered with paint it would be an attractive smile. It creates a deep dimple in one cheek.
Custard-tart is in ecstasy. He speaks to the girl urgently and she replies dubiously and he urges her again and suddenly she twists into Boswell’s lap and puts her arms around his neck and presses herself against his Hawaiian flowerbed, giggling. His face appears beaming over her shoulder and his eyes are screwed up but Custard-tart shrieks (like Lawrence’s tortoise) ‘Her breasts, Mis’ Bosswill, they good not good? Very hard, I think’ and Boswell opens his eyes and says, ‘Not hard at all, but getting harder. No toomers.’ The pronunciation is so American I almost miss the word. ‘Plenty of dimpling, I think, but non-carcinomatous, not pathological at all. Hey, Rejoice,’ he shouts, catching sight of me, ‘what you looking so effing miserable for? Horse piss making you feel sick?’
‘Just bored,’ I say feebly.
‘What, in a brothel?’ he yells. ‘It isn’t our sex that gets bored in brothels. Take a seat, pal. Make yourself at home.’ The girl on his knee objects to his attention wandering from her and with a petulant shimmy brings it back to herself. His hand, very white and long-fingered, lingers down her spine. Shamefacedly I slink to the only unoccupied bench. The three young Thai men on the neighbouring form—they are only young country boys in shirts and shorts with check scarves tied round their waists, but one of them has a battered Homburg too—watch me and grin. They are more sophisticated than the rich westerner. I flush.
‘Mr. Joy. You want this other lady? Very beauty-full.’ Custard-tart at work.
Front her, accost her, board her, woo her, sir knight. The raddled hag.
‘She has hollow cheeks and a hollow chest,’ I say, struggling to sound tough and at my ease. ‘No, thanks.’
‘What is wrong?’ Windmill joins in the arraignment. ‘Why you sit alone? You must enjoy yourself. Make like at home. Anything you want to do, these girls must let you.’ He tries to get the disengaged one to cross to me.
I look at her. She looks at me. The divine spark is not kindled. Undoubtedly she would let me do anything as Windmill said but there’s nothing I desire to do. Except clear out. When can I decently do that?
‘My chace hath another hart in view,’ I say. Christ, why am I getting so depressed? The mekong?
But it isn’t that and I know it. It is those austere white bones ten feet below the blowing nettles paled by the fenland moon. It is the voice of my old man, ‘You will find my text this evening in the Gospel according to Saint someone or other, chapter this or that, verses so and so.’ It is knowing that I am not an ordinary sinful man, the type who commits this sort of enormity in a light-hearted manner and forgets it tomorrow. It is memories of Sheila. Syphilophobia. And my ingrained timidity …
‘I just want to look around,’ I say. ‘But I don’t fancy anything here.’ I try to sound like a fish-buyer looking at boxes of haddock. ‘Isn’t there some other joint we can go to?’
Windmill, Prosit and Custard-tart are eager to try elsewhere. But Boswell has his nose in that girl’s hair and his hands inside her blouse, one behind and one in front. He is making a lot of noise. The three young Thai boys, obviously unused to seeing a westerner unbend, are deriving entertainment from his performance. The girl suddenly grabs his hands and jumps up from his lap. She holds his hands in both of hers and tries to pull him to his feet.
‘Bai,’ she commands, jerking her head over her shoulder. ‘Bai.’
‘She want you to go to bed with her,’ says Custard-tart. ‘You want?’
‘Why not?’ says Boswell. ‘What are you guys going to do?’
‘If you want her, we wait for you here, while you finish your game.’ He talks to the girl who answers briskly and then returns to tugging Boswell’s arms. ‘ She say she want thirty tic.’
‘Thir-tee tics!’ Boswell exclaims. ‘Jesus, she must have a pretty exclusive brand of spirochetes, if she wants all that for them. That’s nearly two dollars.’
Custard-tart addresses the girl again and she pulls even harder at Boswell’s arms. She is really rather pretty, if she wasn’t so daubed up, and whe
n she stops tugging momentarily to tuck her blouse into her belt of brass links there is grace in the movement and her form has neat girlish curves under the gaudy cloth. She says something more and grabs Boswell again. ‘Bai, bai, bai,’ she orders him peremptorily.
‘OK, she say twenty tic,’ Custard-tart interprets. ‘I fix it.’
I’d give her thirty—maybe more—I’d give her anything she asked for, I catch myself thinking to myself, but Boswell seems to be still hesitating and losing patience. The girl stamps her foot and re-seats herself on his knees. Why are you holding out on me, her expression seems to say, when you are demonstrably so ready to pay up? What occidental oddity of behaviour is this? She puts her arm round his neck and nestles her cheek against his. I desire her myself now, well, slightly. If Boswell renounces his claims …
But at this point, fate intervenes and what was up till now merely a sordid night out becomes a red letter night, one of those dates in your diary which in future years you will read with special pleasure or skip with a feeling of pain, it is far too early yet to tell how it will all look to the memory, the one thing you certainly know is there’ll never be a forgetting, tonight will be sewn into the consciousness of Reginald Ernest Joyce, it is giving a new twist to his character.
For the girl coming down the rickety staircase now from the regions of gloom above is not one of those multitudes of girls—‘inopportunely desired on boats and trains’ as Louis MacNeice says—whom you have noted swinging along roads with that swift hip-dipping gait of the woman under a laden shoulder-pole, or riding in samlors with their noses up, or stooping in pools to wash the family water buffalo, or pulling their skirts down as they pass you on bikes, or bringing files at your behest, or lifting their blouses to feed other men’s heirs: no, this is one of the ‘very speshull ladies’ whom Custard-tart mistakenly sought for in the inner room, a lady like Sheila, your love for whom has held you in thrall these four long years, or Annette, or Dilys, who seemed to the youth you were then—that very speshull youth, these ten years dead—La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Helen, Beatrice, Dulcinea, yes, Moll Flanders too: Woman, to put it in one fruity word, with all the solace for man that word implies to the hapless bachelor: Woman personified in one woman’s form …
A Woman of Bangkok Page 7
