A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  ‘Udom.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here.’

  He put down the magazine and approached on his bare brown feet. ‘What do you want, Mama?’

  She was intent on her work with her head jutted toward the mirror and did not immediately answer.

  Suddenly he blurted, ‘Mama, why don’t you cover yourself up?’

  She was astounded. ‘What you mean?’

  He made a gesture towards the slipped sarong. ‘You are not an old countrywoman,’ he muttered sullenly.

  She glanced down at herself in surprise, as if she hadn’t realized that there was anything there that could be offensive to anyone’s sight, and made a move as if to lift and fasten the cloth. But her hand stopped and she laughed instead. It was not a laugh of amusement. ‘What is matter?’ she enquired, returning her attention to the mirror and putting the finishing touches to her hair. ‘Why you not want look my—’ she couldn’t remember the English word—’my num? Maybe you sink not pewty, eh? You big man now, you know all ’bout num, you know some girl have num pewty more than me, yes?’

  ‘It isn’t that.’ He was deeply abashed. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything.

  And she was deeply abashed too. For she knew he was right. Nursing mothers could be excused, for it was too much trouble to be particular when the body had to be exposed every ten minutes or so, every time the baby cried. And really old women with grey cropped hair and betel-stained mouths and their sarongs put on in the old-fashioned way could be excused too for they had earned any comfort they could obtain. But she wasn’t a nursing mother—hadn’t been these twelve years—and wasn’t old yet and probably never would be. She was just coarse. She was becoming so coarsened by this almost nightly ritual of undressing to total strangers that she forgot the proprieties even before this son whom she wished to honour her.

  She was in the wrong but she couldn’t, she mustn’t, admit it. That would have looked weak, too. That was why she had begun to flog herself into a tantrum.

  He began to move away but she halted him sharply in Thai. He stopped because he still dare not disobey. He stood as though he were manacled by the feet, staring at the floor. He couldn’t conceal his shame and misery. ‘Udom, look me.’ Obstinately he kept his eyes downturned. ‘U-dom—’ There was still something in that tone which he couldn’t oppose. He raised his eyes. She was winning once more. Perhaps for the last time. She said, less steelily, ‘Look me here.’ She turned towards him and opened the sarong wide before securing it firmly. ‘Man see me at Bolero, he say, “That girl must have body very good, I sink I must have.” He come zis house, he want kiss, he want play. I say, “No, no: you cannot: must giff me money first.” Zen he giff me money.’ It was an old line: she never let any of them, Udom, Bochang, or Siput, forget for a single day that it was she by the labours of her body that kept them fed and clothed and sheltered. ‘I sink you not want hate anysing in your Mama’s body,’ she concluded. ‘If your Mama die, I sink you die too very quick … Now look my hair, see if you can see white.’

  He came nearer reluctantly. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that he was trembling. Fear—or some other emotion? A boy was not like a man: he was much harder to understand.

  He gave her head a cursory inspection. ‘There’s none.’

  ‘Again look.’ And as he still hung back she said in Thai: ‘Udom, please examine your Mama’s hair thoroughly, as she asks you.’

  It was only an excuse to have him stand close to her, of course. To feel his hands, however clumsy and indifferent they might be, laid on some part of her body. But there was a practical justification for the self-indulgence too (in case anyone should think she was yielding to sentiment). There were two white hairs, two which sprouted perennially, defying constant plucking, and in two weeks they could achieve almost an inch of growth. Dozens of times before he’d tracked them down, sometimes cheerily, chattering of school or the movies or his latest fishing expedition, sometimes surlily, deeply resentful of being forced into such an unmanly occupation, women’s work, a job Bochang should have done (and would have done) if only she hadn’t been half-blind …

  It was like life, she thought, that these two white hairs, which augured what she feared most of all, the loss of her power to attract and fleece men, should be the means of bringing her into this close communion with her son. She never felt nearer to him except on those rare occasions when he could be induced to pluck her armpits (and she could endure the pain of his clumsy efforts). But they had to be in love with each other for there to be any real warming satisfaction in such passages, and today they were put out with each other. She looked down sideways at his thin wiry brown legs sprouting out of his khaki shorts, at his broad flat feet with their spread toes—she felt his fingers amongst the roots of her hair, making temporary partings this way and that—but they could have been anybody’s legs, feet, ringers: they were as ugly, as unlovable, as those of the night …

  Bochang came in with the rice in a big white enamel tureen and a handful of plates and cutlery. She stooped with an exaggerated groan to place them on the floor. As she set out the three plates at the three corners of a triangle with a fork and spoon on each she said in her jocular way, ‘So! Now we have a new lady’s maid. And a very pretty little lass she is too.’

  She was of course joking and anyway Udom was too slow in the uptake or too absorbed in his quest to realize that he’d been insulted. But his mother was promptly ablaze.

  ‘Take care what you say, you old hag, or very soon we may have a new cook too.’

  She shook her head violently to free it from Udom’s hands. He looked down at her blankly: ‘But Mama—’ He’d only just started to pry. He’d thought that by searching diligently he would do his share towards restoring peace. But here was Mama apparently angrier than ever.

  She understood his bewilderment but it only increased her fury. She pushed him roughly away. One should be quick to take offence, to realize that one was being debased. Otherwise folk would think one was soft, would despise one. He should have sprung at Bochang with a maddened snarl.

  ‘Get out, both of you. I want to dress.’ To Udom she added venomously, ‘Or do you want to stay and see you Mama naked again?’

  He flushed with anger and defied her by taking his time about leaving. She took no notice of him, busying herself searching for underwear in a drawer, but in her heart of hearts she was pleased. If he had scuttled out cravenly like Bochang she would have been disappointed. But he had stopped to pick up the magazine, then sauntered across to the door, his face still angry. He had obeyed her, but not meekly. Her tyranny was harsh but it wasn’t breaking his spirit. When the time came he would throw off her yoke. But he wouldn’t just slip it and disappear by night. He would metaphorically beat her brains out with it. And in that moment he would become a man.

  She was being a good Mama to him. She was bringing him up the right way, so that he could face life and triumph over it …

  These would do for today … The panties were very brief, pink, with TUESDAY embroidered on them in silk. She put them on in the Thai style, before removing the sarong.

  After the sarong was off, she put on the brassiere. She put it on back to front round her waist, fastened it, then twisted it round and hoisted it into position. She squirmed like an eel to get her arms through the shoulder-straps and then spent a long time pinching her breasts and adjusting them inside the cups until they were settled to her satisfaction. Posing before the glass she turned this way and that, admiring the smooth fit of the pink cloth over her hips and bottom and the way the golden-brown flesh swelled out of the white cloth of the brassiere. Both garments were well-worn, but what did that matter? It was the outer trappings that caught the male eye. It was they that inveigled him into your room and once he was there a few holes in your pants didn’t worry him much. As long as they were clean he couldn’t care less, and hers were always scrupulously clean. Her daytime underclothes she wore only two days before Sip
ut washed them, the evening ones were fresh every night.

  She took out a clean sarong, red, with a traditional design in silver thread worked all over it. It was the sort of thing she had worn at home, when she was still a young girl, still good, still full of ignorant dreams that included one man, a big house, plenty of servants, one son and one daughter, jewels, good food, everlasting beauty, endless glorious leisure and no troubles from year to year until seventy years were spent. She fastened it nostalgically around her waist and squatted on the floor before one of the places to await her meal.

  Every day she gave Bochang fifteen tics to buy food. This was for fish, meat, vegetables, eggs, and sauces only: the rice she bought separately twice a month by the sackful. Fifteen tics a day came to about four hundred and fifty tics a month or more than most people in Thailand earned in that time, but she could afford to spend that much on food because she could earn it in one night with a bit of luck: certainly it seldom took her more than three nights to net that much …

  The economics of her life seemed to her simple. One source of her income was the Bolero. Every time a man paid ten tics to dance with her she got five of them. Every time he paid twenty-five to sit with her she got twelve of them. Every time he purchased a drink in her company she got five tics’ commission on it, no matter what it was. And if he paid sixty tics to take her out of the Bolero before midnight she got twenty of them. These were her wages, handed over every week by the cashier at the Bolero. In a good month they amounted to two thousand tics, for she was very famous and in great demand.

  The rest of her income came from sleeping with men. The amount of money you made this way varied a great deal from man to man. In her early days at the Bolero, when she had been so beautiful that almost every man who saw her had wanted her, she hadn’t known how to worm money out of them: she’d been content with fifty tics for a short time or a hundred tics for all night like any other high-class girl. Thinking of all the thousands she could have made if she hadn’t been so green she wanted to cry. Nowadays she never dreamed of sleeping with a man for less than two hundred (except on the rare occasions when he was a pewty pewty men but impecunious or when it was a matter of face to win him off some other girl), and usually she stuck out for, and got, three. The price, all other things being equal, went up in inverse proportion to the attractiveness of the man. Fat ones had to pay more than thin ones, and the bald had to fork out quite exorbitant sums. And if the intended victim proved recalcitrant what did she care? He was never any match for her in a quarrel; he paid her price, or he went. Too many men were bad for a girl, anyway. Twenty a month was enough, about half of them short time; that would net her another four thousand or so these days.

  Thus on an average she made about six thousand tics a month as near as she knew. At the present exchange rate—the dollar was going down as the baht strengthened—that worked out at about three hundred and fifty American dollars a month, a reasonable income anywhere, she thought, and in Thailand, for a woman, a small fortune.

  But of course her expenses were dreadfully high. First of all there was the rent for the room. Nothing vexed her more than having to hand over three hundred tics twice a month—on the fifteenth and the thirtieth—to the Python’s uncle, for the privilege of living in this hole. That fair-haired English boy two nights ago—she’d forgotten his name and soon she’d forget him too, as she forgot every man she only saw once—he’d been interested in her budget, and good at mental arithmetic, and he’d worked out a lot of sums for her, in his head, sitting naked in the deckchair while she, naked on the stool, handed him slices of mango to eat. He’d told her she was paying seven thousand two hundred every year for her room and that in the four years she’d been here she’d practically bought the whole house. Yet there was nothing to show for all those thousands of baht. Indeed, a few nights ago, when she’d come home drunk from the Champagne Bucket followed by two Danes she didn’t want, and Bochang had been slow opening up and she’d kicked in the door in her fury, the Python’s uncle had made her fork out an extra four hundred for repairs to the door. If she couldn’t pay her rent tomorrow she and Udom and Bochang and Siput and her toilet-table and bed and deckchair and her few other sticks would all be dumped into the alley. Nor—now that a certain General who was powerful in the police force was so scared of assassination that he no longer went to places like the Bolero or admitted girls to his house or office—could there be any redress. Once she was thrown out she’d be thrown out forever, and the Python (who didn’t have to pay any rent because it was her uncle’s house) conscious of her own security would put on airs over the eviction. Anyway the General probably wouldn’t be sympathetic these days, she told herself, though once he had been a damned nuisance—a Thai she dare not refuse to sleep with, and he’d taken advantage of that fact, and slept with her ‘for love,’ not once, but a dozen times, giving her a certain temporary prestige but cheating her of thousands of baht …

  Always if you sat still for a minute doing nothing your mind went into unpleasant channels like that. She jumped up and went to the mirror to take a quick reassuring look at herself.

  Six hundred for the room. Five hundred for household food, including rice. Fifty for Bochang, who was so old and feebleminded that she couldn’t get a job anywhere else and indeed was glad to get this one. Another hundred for Siput, who was fat and only early-middle-aged and a grouser but who washed things so well that she had survived upheaval after upheaval. Five tics a day to her son for his fares to school and his midday meal, but he saved on it somehow and had started smoking she was sure. At least four hundred a month for her own fares, for she went everywhere by samlor, not only to the Bolero nightly at a cost of six tics, but, if she failed to pick up anyone there, then right across town to the Champagne Bucket, which kept open till dawn and admitted unescorted girls; and then there were all the daytime jaunts to cinemas, beauticians, hairdressers, goldsmiths and the like—oh, certainly her fares came to four hundred a month, probably more. And then there was all the money she enjoyed spending (as against the money she was forced to spend)—for coffee, for fruit (she had a passion for durian which tastes like toffee and stinks like rotten eggs and costs fifty tics per thorny football-size pod), for clothes and cosmetics, for having her fortune told, for lottery tickets—anything she fancied she bought immediately, for now she had money and could spend as she liked, but the day was coming when she would be more or less penniless, and she would be most unhappy then, but at least she would be able to look back with satisfaction to these days when she’d had money to burn and hadn’t stinted herself—another heaven in the past. She never stopped to calculate how much she threw away every month, maybe one thousand tics, maybe two, but anything that was left over she invested in gold and diamonds, partly because they never lost their value but also because she loved them. She reckoned that all the jewellery she possessed this morning was worth twenty thousand tics. Enough to get even the most greedy policeman on her side in the event of trouble, or to tide her over a quite lengthy sickness.

  Bochang had brought in three dishes and set them on the floor and she was now down on her knees ladling big heaps of rice out of the tureen on to the three empty plates. The Leopard went to the door and called for Udom—that was a peace-overture: he could have starved to death for all she cared if she hadn’t known he’d been in the right—and then subsided cross-legged before her plate. As she arranged her sarong decently about her legs she ran a greedy eye over the food.

  There were the inevitable prawns which she loved, today served up in a blazing paprika soup. There were curried bananas—the cheapest sort of curry this time of year—the curry being flavoured with powdered water-bug. There was a Thai salad containing cucumber, onions, white cabbage as hard and crisp as crackers, mint, the leaves of two different sorts of tree and a weed that grew in ponds, a big coarse-looking tomato, and me-krua which looks like a small green tomato but has a hard rind which bursts in the mouth and floods the whole cranium with a deliciou
s spicy essence. The Leopard felt her saliva begin to flow. She seized a spring onion and began to munch along its stalk with relish.

  ‘What else is there?’ she asked eagerly, accepting the plate of rice Bochang handed her. ‘And where’s all the sauces?’

  ‘Have patience, please.’ Bochang’s tone was more that of a mother to a greedy child than of a poor old servant to her Mem.

  Soon Siput arrived with the rest. Seeing that the Mem was already seated and eating she didn’t presume to enter the room: she sank to her knees in the doorway and then leaning forwards on all fours pushed the dishes across the linoleum to Bochang, who, crouched down too, took them and arranged them before the Leopard.

  There were only two more—shreds of fried beef and an omelette. But more important than these were the condiments, five in all: a mauve sauce that is inseparable from salads, a black Chinese one made from soya beans, a brown Siamese one made from fish-salt, a red chilli one that was hot as fire and finally sliced green chilli in vinegar. Anything with chilli in it the Leopard placed close to her own plate and during the next few minutes she took such enormous quantities of pure fire into her mouth that she had to stop every now and then to blow on her tongue to cool it.

  Siput remained on all fours for a few moments with her paps (which were offensive to the Leopard’s sight because they were fat and no longer firm and presaged what her own might soon become) squashed together more out of the skimpy white slip than in it; then she slowly drew back onto her heels and as slowly rose to her feet just outside the door. There, having first pulled one shoulder strap up her podgy dark-brown arm she undid her sarong, held it extended in her hands and waggled it from side to side to remove creases and folds, and then did it up again as if she were doing it up forever. And all the time her dark face, fat, fortyish, and disagreeable, but still not really ugly, watched her Mem speculatively.