A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  ‘I’ve got plenty of dough. You’ve seen it.’

  ‘Maybe you have plenty money, not like spand, then. I not like man who want to keep he money for he-self. Man truly like me, he not care how mutss money he spand when he sit wiss me.’

  ‘Have I complained yet?’ Of course I have, but an oratorical question doesn’t have to be founded on fact to sound good to the orator. ‘Come on. Less go.’ Shades of Boswell.

  ‘Must wait your change, darling.’

  ‘Why? You haven’t given me any change.’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Seventy five tics from the hundred I gave you to sit with me. Forty from the second one to take you out early.’ Hazily I am aware that everybody is getting up and that the band is romping through the shorter of the two Siamese national anthems. ‘Why’d you make me pay sixty tics to take you out anyway? It’s midnight now.’

  ‘When you want go it still ten to twalf. You take long long time pay your bill, darling, ’cause you d’unk.’

  The fact that I could have saved myself that sixty by just looking at my watch doesn’t make me feel any happier. ‘Come on. Less go. Less go. Damn the change.’

  ‘Boy coming now, darling. Wait. Must get your money back from him. Money you give me differnunt. You give me money ’cause you love me. You not love boy, do you?’ Tee-hee, tee-hee. ‘Here boy now, darling. Take your change quick.’

  I have no recollection of getting to the door, or through it, or getting into the samlor. The next thing I remember is riding in the samlor down the windy stretches of Rajadamnoen Avenue. A samlor is about the same size and shape as one of those double seats in the back rows of some cinemas which incidentally I have never occupied. I am aware that I am attacking her from all angles and that she is repulsing me with skill and that the samlor boy is pedalling like mad and it is all a great joke under the blazing stars and the streetlamps that go by like long yellow streaks. I haven’t the faintest idea where we are going and I don’t care. I wish I knew some of the arts of love-making instead of only being able to paw her about like a farm-boy at home getting rid of his first pay-packet after leaving school. I am crazy about this girl tonight, crazy as I have never been about any girl before, not even Sheila, and I wish that I could express the overwhelming feelings within me … Then abruptly we are squealing to a halt.

  ‘Hey, Joycey!’

  I imagine we have arrived and start trying to get out of the samlor but then I realize that the girl isn’t moving but is looking across me and upwards at an angle. I turn and there is Frost standing in the road.

  ‘Hey, Joycey, what the hell d’you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Hey.’ I’m quite bewildered. ‘Hey, Frosty.’

  ‘What are you up to, chum?’

  I wink.

  ‘You’ve been to the Bolero,’ he says accusingly.

  ‘That’s right. Where you been?’

  ‘Oh, around. I’m just going home. D’you know what you’ve got in that samlor with you?’

  ‘She’s my girl.’

  ‘She’s the one they call the White Leopard. She’s the worst of the lot.’

  ‘Goddam,’ the Mongol screams, ‘you talk too mutss.’

  ‘I think she’s the best of the lot,’ I say. ‘There wasn’t another one there that I’d touch with Ivanhoe’s bargepole.’

  ‘Bai,’ says the Mongol to the samlor-man.

  We begin to move. ‘You be careful,’ Frost calls after us. ‘I’m warning you, you silly sod. She’s—’

  I turn round and try to speak to him with severity, with dignity. ‘I think I can look after myself. Seventeen bloody women you know, old man.’

  ‘He very bad boy,’ the Mongol says, as the cool air begins to pour round our faces again. ‘All the time he talk too mutss.’

  ‘He’s a friend of the Black Leopard, if that’s what you mean,’ I say, with remarkable penetration for one so near drunk as I am, and then I put my arm round her again. ‘What do I care if they call you the White Leopard or the White Elephant for that matter? I love you, sweetheart, love you, love you, do you understand, and the sooner we get to your home where I can show you how much I love you …’

  Part Two

  THE LEOPARD

  ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’

  Satan, as reported by John Milton

  ‘What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience

  to words of command’

  Havelock Ellis

  ‘Do you think that Nature gave women nipples

  as beauty spots, rather than for the purpose of

  nourishing their children?’

  Ancient Roman Author

  Five

  There was a wild tattoo of ladle on stove and a jubilant yell; it could have been the start of another coup d’état; but she recognized it for what it was; the cook in the Chinese shop beneath her window proclaiming to all the world the emergence of a new wonder from his smoke-blackened kuo. And the rattle bong boom, and then the falsetto recitative, and then the bong rattlerattle bongbong boom of Chinese opera, competing as it alone could not only with a prodigious amount of static, but with the breathless descending xylophone runs of several different Siamese operas all being simultaneously purveyed by half a dozen radios within earshot. And the sweet, clear, inhibited voices of Siamese girl singers experimenting (as it always seemed to her when she was too sleepy to unravel the tune) first with this half-note and then with that, but never quite able to break free into a recognizable melody.

  And the sound of ice being pounded up in wooden troughs, and of motor samlors poppeting down the lane, and of a dog fracas dying out in prolonged heartfelt snarls and hysterical yappings, and of boys shouting ‘Lotter-lee, lotter-lee’ on behalf of their chronically insolvent government, and of Bochang the cook, screaming amicably at Siput the maid, and of somewhere a child bawling—bawling persistently but without conviction, as if he’d been bawling so long he’d forgotten the cause of his woe, but knew the wrong had yet to be righted. And over and under and round and through all else, as pervasive as the roar of a not-so-far-off waterfall, the continuous, low-pitched thunder of the traffic in the New Road.

  It was all as familiar as the face she examined twenty times a day in her mirrors. It was so familiar that by now she ought to have grown used to it, as one does to the beating of one’s own heart. And most of the time she was quite unconscious of it: it was just a cradle of noise in which she lay swaddled and unaware like a newborn baby. Yet once every day what was familiar became alien; once every day the cradle exploded upon her like a bursting bomb. And that was in the moment of her awaking.

  Somehow, although she had lived in this room for years—almost since she had first become a dancing-girl—she had never learned the art of waking up in it. But always she must start up with this violent jerk, and then lie tense and rigid, all ears, her breath held in. Only for a moment would the terror last, then something—perhaps the feel of the same old bed, or perhaps nothing physical at all, but just memory waking up a few moments after her body and reidentifying her to herself, would send reassurance in a great wave through her limbs. She would relax with a sob and collapse into the bed again, yearningly, as if the bed were sleep and sleep heaven, and all her desire to be merged and smothered in them forevermore.

  Today, perhaps for the two thousandth time (for that was a stupefying calculation the fair-haired English boy had done the night before last) the pattern had repeated itself, and she was now lying as she best liked to lie when alone, diagonally across the bed, face down, with limbs flung all ways. But of course there was no pleasure in the posture now, nor for that matter in the aloneness, for alas, she was no longer asleep. And, being awake, she was becoming aware of annoyances that only sleep had the power to blot out. Her hair had got under her face and a hairclip was biting into her cheek. Her brassiere was too tight and constricting her painfully. Her head was aching, her mouth foul, her stomach raw and unsettled, as so often after she’d dr
unk too much. Naturally, she wanted to go to the hongnam. And wasn’t today Friday, and therefore one of her shampoo and movie days, one of the two days in the week when she had to be up betimes? In a minute she’d have to open her eyes and look at her watch, and then, irreparably, the day would have begun.

  So, accepting the inevitable in her usual realistic way, she opened her eyes on the blanched, blinding light inside her mosquito net and blinked them very deliberately four or five times.

  First she put her hands behind her back and undid the brassiere. She pulled a pillow towards her, swept her hair from under her face and laid skin to linen. The hairclip which had been cutting her cheek fell out and lay on the sheet like a legless centipede. She felt so much more comfortable that she was tempted to try to doze off again, but she told herself it was Friday and she mustn’t. Stifling a yawn, she drew up her arm and glanced at the tiny gold watch which was clasped by a bracelet of tiny gold hearts to her wrist. The hands were in a straight line across the dial, with the hour-hand just past ten—it was in fact twenty-two minutes past—but she didn’t read the time as accurately as a foreigner would; she only looked at the hour-hand and to her it said approximately ‘Si mong chao’—the fourth hour of the morning—near enough her normal time of resurrection.

  Keeping her cheek to the pillow, she heaved herself over onto her back and lay with her legs spread and her eyes again closed. The brassiere still fitted cosily because she kept its wings pinched between arms and sides but her sarong had come undone and only a corner of it lay across her legs. Without opening her eyes or moving her head, she fished around for it and spread it more tidily over herself, her jewellery jingling. For she was Siamese and in spite of being also, as she liked to boast, the Number One Bad Girl of Bangkok, she retained a lot of her national, Buddhist, no even more fundamental than that, her feminine modesty, and especially she abhorred exposure of the lower part of her body except in the acts where such exposure was practically unavoidable.

  She had kept her head still because when she let it lie to one side like this the ache didn’t see-saw round her skull so much, but as the pain in her head subsided, other discomforts become more noticeable and with a sudden groan she sat up, tore the mosquito-net apart and swung out her legs. She fished with her feet under the bed until she found the special sandals which the Siamese wear when they go to the bathroom and with agile toes fetched them forth and manœuvred them on. Then, snatching up the sarong and throwing it loosely round herself, and keeping the brassiere still nipped in place, she crossed to the door, unbolted it, and went out.

  Clapping down the wooden ladder on her wooden soles she called, ‘Bo! Bochang!’ loudly several times, her voice harsh and rising. At first nobody seemed to hear but just as she reached the bathroom door and was filling her lungs for a real bellow the volubility below stairs ceased, there was a pause, and then Bochang’s voice, politely modulated, floated upwards. ‘Arai?’ What?

  ‘Oliang yen, keow.’ A glass of iced black coffee.

  ‘Oh.’

  The first today. She shoved open the hongnam door and shoved it half-shut behind her. Sunbeams slanting through the roof lit up the familiar equipment of a Siamese bathroom—on a raised square concrete throne the oval squatter, with a small round hole at the deep end and corrugated footrests like those on vintage motorcycles; the small jar of water beside it, a substitute for toilet paper; the old petrol tin full of soiled pieces of paper and flies; the huge earthenware vat of bathwater with its own clean dipper; and that fantastic system of tiny gutters and holes like mouse-holes which testify to the ingenuity of Siamese plumbers and also perhaps to their whimsical humour. Whipping off the sarong she squatted on her heels and relieved herself on the floor. Reaching for the dipper in the big vat she threw a little water between her legs and over her feet and then, filling it again, sluiced her urine down the nearest mouse-holes. She wiped herself sketchily on the sarong, re-donned it, this time doing it up securely round her waist. Then she went out, wrenching the door open and dragging it to behind her, all her movements being neat, rapid, and unnecessarily violent.

  Back in her room she went automatically to her dressing table and seated herself on the stool in front of her three mirrors. First she took a general view of herself and then, thrusting her face towards the middle glass, a more detailed one of her face. The first showed her a statuesque body that was already well-fleshed and likely any day now (she feared) to topple over into grossness and unsightly folds. The second showed that her lipstick like the mascara was smudged (but that was only to be expected), that a new pimple was coming on her chin, that the whites of her eyes were anything but clear this morning and that the skin below them was not taut but puffy and discoloured. It was here, around the eyes, and in the two lines which curved deeper month by month from the wings of her nostrils down to and around the corners of her mouth that she saw most clearly the advances of age. She writhed back the smudged lips from her teeth and examined them closely. They at any rate were always in tip-top condition. But her tongue was like an autumn leaf, pink round the edges but yellow down the centre, down and round that central groove which was like the spine of a dying leaf. She sighed, got up, and, as all Siamese women do all day long, undid and did up her sarong again. Then she went to the bed and pulled the two pillows together and plumped them up and set them against the headrail, and she was just going to lie back against them when it occurred to her that Bochang was being a long time—goddam—so she went to the door and shouted ‘Bochang!’ and getting no reply, ‘Siput!’

  ‘Mem?’ came Siput’s voice from belowstairs.

  ‘Where is my coffee?’

  ‘Coming. Coming.’

  ‘I want it now. You know when I want a thing I must have it at once. Why do you make me wait?’

  ‘Bochang is so old. She walks slowly like a water buffalo.’

  ‘I think a water buffalo is like a racehorse compared with Bochang. She is as slow as one of those creatures that carries its whole house on its back.’

  ‘A crab?’

  ‘Yes. Or a snail. Or a tortoise.’

  This exchange made her immediately feel better. Conversation was one of the chief pleasures of her life. She delighted to egg Siput on to criticize Bochang. She delighted to make fun of Bochang whom actually she liked better than anyone else under her roof except her son. And this thinking of nice girlhood things like water buffalo and horses and tortoises—it was a chance word of Siput’s that had opened up that vista. Life was not all fun by any means and waking up into it was a daily trial; but since the trial was a daily one and unavoidable while you had breath in your body you might as well make the best of it; there was plenty of time yet before things became unbearable and you did away with yourself—that end to which you would come, according to all the priests and soothsayers in whom you believed, not until you were fifty years old—many, many years yet, or at least quite a good few …

  Going back to the dressing table she searched in the handbag she had used last night until she found her compact and a pair of tweezers. Then, lying on the bed, she re-arranged the pillows, one under her sideways-turned head and the other a few inches in front of her face with the compact-lid propped against it. She raised one arm under her head and fiddled with the compact until the mirror in its lid was reflecting her armpit to her eyes. Then with the tweezers she began plucking out the small hairs which were sprouting in it.

  This was a weekly chore and one she liked. While she worked she was wholly absorbed in the job. To her it seemed that her life was one long round of duties, from finding fault with her servants, which was her idea of housekeeping, to parting men from their money at the Bolero, and all these jobs she did, in her opinion, well: she was a good worker. But none of those other jobs was as agreeable to her as this one of making herself beautiful. For every day she must begin afresh, like a potter, her material nothing but clay. And every day, at last, sometimes after hours of labour, she would turn out another work of art. To be sure it
was always the same subject—the White Leopard, the far-famed dancing-girl, an idealization of her actual clay achieved with cloth and cosmetics—and to be sure beauty was becoming harder to achieve and never again would attain to the heights it had sometimes reached in the past—but it was not in the finished product she found her joy so much as in the processes of creation. Counting baths, she never spent less than three hours a day on her toilet; often, on days when she had a shampoo or a massage, it was more like five; but they were always the happiest hours of all, and nothing would induce her to skimp them.

  And this plucking of the armpits was one of the nicest of the various rites. For first of all you could do it in bed. Secondly there was an artist’s pleasure in sliding the blunt nose of the tweezers over the skin towards the quarry and then with a sharp flick uprooting it and laying it alongside all the other hairs which had likewise been individually uprooted and laid out on the sheet. Neatness and deftness were required, such as were possessed by the little lizards that lived behind her mirrors: just so they would creep up to a mosquito on the walls and then with a sharp stab of head and tongue dexterously, unerringly, snatch it. Thinking of the tweezers as chinchocks and the hated hairs as mosquitoes amused her and added to her enjoyment of her work. And then there was the pain. No question but that that pain—that succession of small stinging ant-bites all confined to one small area of the body—was a pleasureable sensation; it was stimulating, and she liked inflicting it on herself. A counter-irritant, it diminished the throb in the temples and the staleness of whisky in the guts. In fact, if only she could get a draught of iced-coffee down her gullet …

  With abrupt impatience she raised her head to shout but at that moment she heard the old woman shuffling and groaning on the stairs so she relaxed, setting up the compact-lid again because her movement had toppled it. And before Bochang appeared she began banteringly, ‘Goddam, old crock, have you been all the way to London by bullock-cart to fetch my coffee?’