A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  ‘What lies?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to tell you.’

  Bochang was just going out with the last remains of the meal. The Leopard went to the dressing-table and took a ten-tic note from her handbag. ‘I will give you not five tics but ten,’ she said, ‘but first, Udom, I want to know what lies you have been telling other boys. It is wrong to tell lies,’ she added, suddenly remembering her role as Mama and mentor. ‘The Buddha forbids us to tell lies, and so we should never do so, unless of course it is absolutely necessary. The Buddha will never blame anyone for doing wrong when it is absolutely necessary.’ She lay down on the bed again. ‘Now tell me what lies you tell your schoolmates.’

  The knowledge that he was soon to be wealthy loosened his tongue and soon as any Thai would have done, he began to enjoy telling the story, it began to seem to him like a joke. ‘When I first went to the school, when you had me sent up from the country one year ago, of course all the boys wanted to know where I came from, and who my father was. I said, ‘My father is dead.’ Then they asked, ‘Who is your Mama?’ and I said—’ He hesitated as if frightened.

  ‘You said, “My Mama is a dancing-girl at the Bolero”?’

  ‘No, no. I said you were a princess.’

  ‘What?’ The Leopard jumped up on the bed and her face was the picture of delight. ‘You told your friends your Mama was a princess? That was a very good lie, Udom. Very good indeed. It made your Mama look high, so of course it made you look high too.’

  ‘Yes, but they did not believe me. They said, “If your Mama is a princess, why do you come to school in a tram? Why doesn’t she bring you in a car?”’

  The beastliness of children, not to let a good romantic lie like that stand on its own sturdy legs! ‘So what did you say to that? I suppose you changed your story, and said I was a washerwoman like Siput.’

  ‘Of course not. If you change your story, no one will ever believe anything else you say.’

  ‘Then I am still a princess?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She felt like jumping out of bed and hugging him, but she contented herself with laughing happily into the pillow. Finally she said, ‘So your friends still think I am a princess. But how do you explain the fact that you still go to school by tram at a cost of ten satang?’

  ‘I tell them you are not only a princess but a doctor too.’

  She was startled. ‘A doctor? What sort of doctor?’

  ‘A doctor of medicine. The sort that gives injections.’

  ‘But why—?’

  ‘Don’t you see, Mama? You were a princess, but you were a doctor as well, and you’d had to go to America to study—’

  ‘I don’t like this lie so much,’ she said. For she’d often dreamed of being a princess but had never had any desire to study medicine. The whole idea of injections was bound up in her mind with the hazards of her profession and she disliked it—from either end of the syringe. She couldn’t identify herself with the dream. ‘I think it is a silly lie.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t understand. If you had gone to America how could you drive me to school in the car? I said you’d had to sell the car so that you could have enough money to fly to America.’

  ‘I don’t like this lie either,’ she said sharply. ‘You must always make people think that your Mama is very rich.’

  ‘Dear Buddha, how dense you are, Mama! It was a good lie. Everybody had to believe it, for how could they show it was a lie? But then you gave me this watch—’

  ‘What, does that come into the story too?’

  ‘If you had bought me a gold one as I wished everything would have been all right. But the first time I wore this one everybody of course crowded round to look and they asked where I had got it and I said my Mama had given it to me. Then Chalow—’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Oh, one of the boys—I don’t like him—he said, “But how can your Mama have given you this watch? Your Mama is in America but this watch is not an American watch. It is an Ernest Borel such as can be bought anywhere in Bangkok for five hundred tics.”’ His face twisted. ‘Then again everybody thought I was lying. So I had to think quick what to say.’

  ‘And what did you say, Udom, my son?’ (Even her gifts made trouble for him.)

  ‘I said you’d just come home again, and you’d brought me a lovely gold watch from America, but the customs man stole it—’

  ‘Good. Lies should always be easy to believe.’

  ‘And—and—you still wouldn’t be able to take me to school in your car, because now you were a very famous doctor and you had so many patients to go and see—’

  The Leopard couldn’t bear it any longer. She leaped off the bed, threw her arms round her son and hugged him.

  He was scandalized. ‘Mama—’ He struggled to break free and she had sense enough not to hold him against his will. ‘Mama,’ he cried, ‘give me the ten tics and let me go to the movie.’

  At that moment she’d probably have given him a thousand if he’d asked for it. Well, a hundred anyway. She handed the note over without any further hesitation. And with it she gave her commendation. ‘Udom, sometimes you are very naughty and make your Mama angry, but in this matter you have been a good boy. You have lied well. If you are going to be a liar, you must be the Number One Liar in Bangkok. It is the same if you’re going to be a cowboy, or if you’re going to be good. I would rather you were going to be good, but I don’t want you to be just a little bit good; if you are going to be good you must be the Number One Good Man in Bangkok, you must not be number fifteen or sixteen at anything, for you Mama is Number One Bad Girl in the world I think, and you must always be Number One too, or you will put your Mama to shame.’ But he’d already gone. She followed him onto the landing and shouted, ‘Don’t be late. Get home before I go to the Bolero.’ The only answer was from the front door, which slammed.

  For once she didn’t drift automatically to her mirror. She went straight to the bed and lay down. Already her mind was beginning to gloss over the pain of the scene, to make it more acceptable to the memory. She said to herself, ‘My son doesn’t want to be seen on the street with me, but it isn’t because he is ashamed of his Mama, it is because he has made all his friends think I am a princess …’ She tried to laugh at the absurdity of children, but suddenly tears came instead and poured down her cheeks into the pillow.

  Six

  A sparrow slapped onto a window spar and stuck; examined the room with bead-like eye.

  The Leopard didn’t stir. The tears had long since dried amongst the mascara. The second-hand of her watch was scurrying round and round the dial. An artery in her throat pulsed visibly, rhythmically, sturdily, as if it too were keeping track of the time. But for two hours she had been letting her beauty run away without caring. She had temporarily died.

  She was dreaming that she was at home again, a young girl. It was evening; Jamnien and she were sauntering back from the river in the twilight; there was a purple cloud in the West dividing the dull gold below from the silver and blue above. They were both in fresh sarongs; the wet ones they carried in their hands; they had towels over their shoulders; their hair curled damp against their cheeks. They walked carelessly, sometimes bumping against each other, or scuffling with extravagant giggles, or stopping to muse hand in hand or with their arms round each other’s waists, watching the green parrots arrowing nestwards over the treetops with their wild remote cries like those of ghosts in the dusk, or the bats, swift and erratic as thoughts, wheeling noiselessly in and out of the lower branches. Jamnien was excited about something; this time it was about a letter that some boy had slipped her on the way home from school; it was a love-letter, of course; it contained a lot of poetry and one quite outrageous proposal. Vilai, felt very superior to Jamnien—how gullible the girl was! Obviously half a dozen boys had worked on the letter in committee—but at the same time she felt a pang of envy: why didn’t she ever receive any love-letters herself? Could it be that she was unattractive to men?


  Then suddenly, as if to scotch that doubt, the scene shifted to the Bolero; men were milling about her in an importunate ring; most of them were Americans, very tall and handsome, with clean lines to their loins except where their wallets bulged their hip-pockets; and there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t have given his whole right arm clean up to the shoulder, and his wallet, to win her for that night. She was dawdling over her selection, trying to determine which candidate combined in himself the most money with the best looks and the pleasantest disposition, so that she’d have no regrets on any grounds whatever, when suddenly there was a stir and they all cleared off; she was left deserted at her table; and looking round … Looking round she found Jamnien had appeared; Jamnien, still young and straight from the river in nothing but a sodden black sarong; Jamnien, looking lost and childish, yet all the men had run to her and kneeling before her were casting jewellery and wallets as big as briefcases at her bare brown feet, and not one of them had eyes for any other woman, although she was still only a kid without a vestige of bust or make-up. Then the knife really twisted in her heart, but she got out her compact as if she didn’t care, and sprung the lid to powder her nose; and there, shatteringly, horrifyingly, in the mirror was her own face, gone to pieces all of a sudden without her realizing, overpainted, creased, with cheekbones jutting like boulders and a great oozing sore on the chin …

  She awoke with a tearing sob. For a little while she lay quaking while the phantoms dissolved in the light. Then with a curse she brought up her wrist to look at her watch. She stared at it incredulously. Past two o’clock? With another curse she leapt off the bed and rushed downstairs, ready to murder the first person she encountered because she’d been left to lie so long.

  Her victim was Udom’s new pup. Udom was always getting new pups, creatures that began sweet and kissable but too soon turned gaunt and mangy and so were inevitably kicked out by Bochang or herself. But Chokchai had barely started this cycle yet. He was still about the size and shape of a ball of brown wool, and irritatingly innocent. So now, instead of divining that she was in a temper and giving her a wide berth, he came cavorting up, and when he smelled the red toenails, which were associated in his mind with several ecstatic slobberings and ticklings in the past, he wagged his tail so hard he fell over. And he was still on his side, struggling to right himself, when five of the red toenails caught him just where he was fattest.

  He sailed through the air, obviously almost enjoying the new sensation, until he hit a corrugated iron partition and fell to the ground in a welter of dismay and shrill puppy howls of shock.

  He then scooted away as fast as he could, tumbling over twice with frantically-scrabbling legs before he finally managed to round the corner of the partition. She smiled in spite of herself at his comical anxiety to get away from trouble—just so sometimes she couldn’t run away fast enough from some horror in her dreams—and she followed him to make peace, but he’d gone to earth behind the kitchen water-vat and it was damp and smelly there, so she couldn’t be bothered with him any more.

  Besides, there was something else to think about. She was now in the grip of a new importunity. Every day you had to go through the same sequence of events, it seemed. You woke up, had a coffee, bathed, fed, dozed a few minutes, then this … She ran upstairs, hoping to have time to fetch a cigarette, but there wasn’t even time to get her sandals. She had to enter the hongnam just as she was, bare-footed: a revolting business.

  She tossed bowlfuls of water all over the squatter, tore at her clothes and plumped down.

  The pain got worse, so bad she started to groan.

  She never thought of putting the blame on too much chilli. She cast her mind over the last few days, trying to recall a single sin that the Lord Buddha, knowing the full circumstances of her life, could possibly hold against her. She judged her actions in the light of the five normal precepts which are all that the Buddha, knowing we have to make a go of it in a wicked world, expects the laity to observe. Thou shalt not kill, lie, steal, commit adultery or get tight. Where had she transgressed? Certainly she hadn’t killed anyone, though she’d felt like killing Siput and of course the Black Leopard more than once. She hadn’t lied either, except forgivably in the routine of business, like telling that nice English boy she was only twenty-nine and that her real name was Vilai and that she never slept with a man all night for less than five hundred tics (but instead of coughing up another three hundred he’d gone home early). Again, she hadn’t stolen anything—in fact when she’d emptied Dick’s pockets she’d returned forty of the sixty-six tics she’d found in them, though morally they were hers: it was he who was the thief, he’d slept with her and not paid: what was that but out and out robbery? Then adultery. How could she commit that? She’d been finished with her third and last husband for seven years at least … Only drunkenness was left, then. Well, admittedly she’d got drunk in the last few days, twice. But surely the Buddha wouldn’t blame her for either lapse. It was part of her job to get drunk. Every drink she put into her own belly at the Bolero put five more tics commission into her handbag. The Buddha knew she had to have that money, for who in the world would give her a single satang? She had to earn every one herself. Those six peppermints which—what was his name? Wretch, or something like that—had forced down her throat, were not in the circumstances so much six peppermints as thirty tics: the price of a bag of rice; she’d had to drink them so that Udom wouldn’t starve. And last night she’d only guzzled because Dick liked her to. In fact the Buddha, being just, must realize that she’d already been paid out for getting drunk last night, thoroughly. Her present misery must be a reprisal for some other misdemeanour, committed, perhaps, weeks ago …

  There was one more bout of pain but it was fairly mild and came to nothing. She tore a piece of paper from a wad that hung on a nail and with it picked up the dipper in the smaller of the two vats. Quickly she washed herself clean, dropped the dipper back in the vat and threw the piece of paper into the old petrol can. She dipped up clean water out of the big vat and washed her feet and fingers in it, dried herself on the sarong, and pulled TUESDAY up into place. Then she hurried to her room. It was time she went out: the day was half gone; too soon it would be time to be getting ready for work …

  Half an hour later she entered the Singsong Lounge. The first person she saw there was Dick. The next was Wretch. And they were sitting at the same table together, talking, as if they were friends.

  She didn’t give any indication that she’d seen them, of course. She walked unhurriedly to the bar and seated herself on one of the high stools. There was a mirror running the full length of the bar; in it she could keep Dick under observation, also anyone else who might be interesting. And they wouldn’t know they were being watched, or alternatively, if she wanted them to, they would. She knew how to use that mirror …

  The barman didn’t speak, he just raised his eyebrows, acknowledging a customer who was regular but whom he didn’t esteem—a tart who came in unescorted, flirted shamelessly with foreign men, and never gave a tip, unless her change happened to be negligible and she wanted some dupe to see her nonchalantly wave it away. She was so used to the expression it couldn’t hurt her any more. She was almost too polite to him, for she had to be careful with waiters; they were legitimate sailors on the high seas where she committed her acts of piracy; like samlor-boys, they could be useful when friendly, but they were potentially dangerous if they disliked you. This one was a pig, but she had to treat him cordially, as if he were a fellow pirate.

  ‘I think I’ll have iced coffee with milk today, please, and three cream-puffs.’

  Rich men had to pay for the smile she gave him free, but his expression didn’t alter. He turned away to get what she wanted. She stole one glance in the mirror at Dick, then switched to her own reflection. She shook her head vigorously, not because her hair was falling between her shoulder blades in the wrong sort of disorder, but because any men who were already watching her would be fascina
ted by the movement. For the same reason, apparently quite forgetful of her surroundings, she preened herself in the mirror, straightening her back, placing her hands on her hips, and lifting and expanding her chest. She had put on a vivid red blouse, sleeveless and simple; it was perfectly cut for her purposes, loose enough to strike a good man as not immodest, yet not so loose that it wouldn’t reveal some of the modelling when she wanted it to, as now. Her sharkskin slacks were just right too, dazzlingly white, and moulded in unwrinkled relief to some of the best parts of her figure. Only the handbag was not quite what she wanted; it should have been white plastic but it was mere raffia and besides she’d had it for months; but perhaps if she worked Wretch right … He seemed like the best bet.

  The barman brought her order. ‘Things seem quiet today,’ she said, ‘or perhaps it’s because I’m later than usual.’ She spoke brightly and he heard all right but he refused to respond to her sociableness, turning away wooden-faced without a word. Then she lowered her head for a long refreshing drink.

  With her head down she looked up artfully under her lashes to study Dick in the mirror. What with the dim cool greenish sub-aquatic light, the confusion of heads and tables and palms and posturing waiters and pirouetting fans, and the state of her eyes, which were not so good as they had once been, she couldn’t make out the features of his face, but she could tell a lot from its angle. She was sure he had seen her and was hoping she hadn’t seen him, sure that in a minute or two he would try to make an unobtrusive getaway. She could make out that much as clearly she thought, as if he’d spoken his thoughts in her ear.

  She bit a cream-puff in half and the cream blupped richly onto her tongue but she hardly noticed how delicious it was.

  What a cad Dick was turning out to be! Just like all the other men. Talking all that nonsense about love—but it never meant anything. Cheating her last night. Lying too—saying he’d fly at dawn—yet here he was at midday as large as life at the Singsong. He must have had more money than he’d declared all along too, for the Singsong was expensive. Or had he contrived to raise a few dollars this morning? If so why hadn’t he come straight to her house to pay his debts? He knew the place all right and it was only three minutes’ walk from here. Once before when his plane had been delayed by engine-trouble he’d knocked on her door before she was up and spent all day with her, and that time—it was in the days when he was still being good to her—he’d given her five hundred tics, so they’d both been very happy.