A Woman of Bangkok (7 page)

I gaze blearily around the table. There is a ringing in my ears that is so loud it makes my companions’ words hard to catch, though they’re all shouting, you can tell that from the bulge of veins and muscles in their throats and the way the sweat is standing on their brows. A wedge of ache has been driven downwards between my eyes splaying them outwards, I no longer see my friends as an old master would have painted them, they are like his studies for a masterwork, a dozen slapped-in outlines, one of which is right, but it’s hard to tell which is that one. But they’re all good chaps, good chaps, an’ I’m blurry lucky—

Who the hell are they all, anyway?

First on my left is Windmill. Good old Windmill. Of all the people I have met in Thailand he is still the one I like the best. Yet even him I can’t wholeheartedly esteem. He has oriental characteristics which are disconcerting to a westerner. For instance he is never anything but
polite
with me, but he is
cordial
with his own race. While his mouth smiles over anything I say, his eyes don’t find me half such amusing company; the teeth flash but the irises fail to light up. He is still sizing me up and, I know, finding me wanting. And then he’s such a damned dandy; his case is as full as mine of lotions and perfumes, but whereas mine are samples his are for his own use, and in his hotel room a few minutes ago I caught him actually powdering his nose. ‘Not want it shine,’ he said. What real man knows enough about his own nose to know—? It took him as long to do his hair, alternately combing it and smoothing it with a podgy hand, as it used to take Sheila with all her golden mane. The ineffable sissy! But he is a friendly bloke and helpful and not easily upset by my western crudities of conduct. And this is all the more remarkable when you remember that he is a Mom, a prince of the fourth rank and it must seem to him that there is little compulsion for him to be courteous to a man like me, who have only plebeian blood in my veins, and a very uncertain claim to the title of Mister …

Next to him is a man with the promising name of Prosit. He is our agent in Korat and one of the objects of our visit is to make him get on his toes. He is a slight and boyish person with an extraordinary mouth, like a harmonica; when seen in profile, it protrudes beyond the end of his nose, which is not such an uncommon phenomenon, but seen head on it protrudes beyond his hollow cheeks, which seem to cave in behind it; at certain angles it almost blots out his ears. His eyes are deepset, huge, and anxious, and his skin is very dark; Windmill told me he is Thai all right, but from the deep South, close to the Malayan border; and his appearance is proof that more things are smuggled across borders than officials search for in the labelled bags …

At the far end of the table facing me is an American. The introduction was ill-managed and he appears to have caught only my Christian name while I have caught only his surname which is Boswell. He is nothing to do with Broderick Peers. He is in fact doing something he seems to be a bit vague about with a branch of the United Nations of which I have never heard before. He has been in Thailand for about six months. He was invited to join the party because he is occupying the room next to mine at the hotel and because Prosit seems to think that two white men meeting by accident in a Far Eastern city will automatically deem each other’s company indispensible. But I haven’t made my mind up about him yet. He has pale blue prominent eyes with drooping lids; with his high-bridged nose and receding chin they give him the look of a tired chicken; he seems very pale compared with the others, and his Hawaiian shirt is like a flowerbed; but he speaks slowly and clearly and his jokes are simple ones which call forth ready laughter from all—even from those whose grasp of American is so uncertain that they tend to be preternaturally solemn when using it.

They are all roaring now at one of his quips but I missed it.

And on my right, facing Windmill and Prosit, is Boswell’s right-hand man. I’ll swear he was introduced to me as Dr. Custard-tart. He’s older than the rest of us, with thick grey hair and oversized spectacles; with his sloping forehead and leathery skin he resembles a tortoise, and his head seems always to be on the point of sinking into his collar, as into a shell. His English is not too deft, but his eyes are light-coloured and shrewd, and his lips make a single straight line denoting authority, like the firm dash under a dictator’s signature. I think he could be relied on in an emergency, which is something that can’t be said for either Windmill or Prosit; they clearly take the line of least resistance always and everywhere, no matter where it leads …

At the head of the table is myself. I’ve achieved this exalted position not because I am important but because I am the latest foreigner to arrive in town and tonight they must do me honour. Tomorrow I shall find my true level, somewhere below the United Nations if not below the salt, but tonight it is to me that Windmill turns first, saying, ‘What d’you want to eat, Mr. Joyce? You want ecks? All Europeans like ecks, I think. Some Europeans in Thailand eat nothing only ecks.’

I reply, ‘If I am to eat eggs let them be the hundred-year-old variety, for young fresh eggs—’ But at this point my grandiloquence peters out and I realize that for the first time in my life I am tipsy. I blink hard several times as if it were my eyes, not my brain, that’s fuddled. ‘You know what I mean? Windmill, you know—what—?’

He knows but he’s incredulous. ‘You mean those ecks, black like jelly? In Thai we call
khai yu ma
. That means eggs like horse urine.’

‘It is a napt—an—apt description,’ I rejoin, ‘and the more my eggs taste like horse urine the better I like them.’

‘You’re depraved,’ Boswell shouts. ‘Eat your horse piss if you want, but give me a good rare-done beef steak.’

‘I think they not have biff steak,’ says Windmill. ‘But ecks like horse urine, yes, you can get everywhere in Siam. I order. What else you want?’

Several suggestions are made, and the one-eyed youth who, clad in nothing but a pair of torn shorts, performs the functions of head waiter in this establishment, goes howling to the kitchen, each undulating yelp a dish. Then Prosit, bracing himself like a man about to leap from the fourth storey of a burning building, leans towards me and says,

‘Mr. Joy, how long time you stay in Thailand?’

There are two possible answers—one month, if he wishes the question to be interpreted in the past tense, three years if the future is intended. I plump for the first and his mouth is like an estuary widening to the sea, his laughter is cackling and infectious.

‘So short time, yet already you like eat horse urine,’ he says delightedly. Then the laugh vanishes and the eyes become troubled again. ‘Ecks,’ he explodes suddenly; I realize he has been reviewing his sentence and found it incomplete.

But by then the damage has been done and Boswell is shouting, ‘Yes, and you ought to see him gobble up rats’ livers, he eats them with pickled walnuts for breakfast’ and more of the same until Windmill asks,

‘Where you have
khai yu ma
before, Mr. Joyce?’

‘In Bangkok. I’ve had ’em twice when I’ve been out with Somboon.’

‘Who?’ And then his eyes harden as he realizes who I mean. He doesn’t approve of my friendship with Somboon any more than Mr. Samjohn does.

‘Can you use the chopstick?’ asks old Custard-tart and when I nod ‘Mr. Bosswill can not.’

Boswell is hunting for an excuse but I save his face by saying, ‘P’r’aps he can’t use chopsticks but he’s an American which means he can cut up beef steak with just a fork—and that’s something no other nation on Earth can do.’ I proceed, quoting Somboon, ‘Personally I deprecate the Thai custom of imbibing rice off a plate with fork and spoon. That’s the way to eat apple pie. Rice should come in a bowl and be sucked up off two sticks—’ I give a demonstration of a Chinese human suction pump in action, but nobody has been listening to me.

Then One-Eye returns with a bottle of mekong in one hand, and three bottles of soda clutched to his bosom by his forearm, and five tumblers threaded on the five digits of his other hand. With a warning shout he slaps all this on the table. From the rags around his middle he produces a bottle-opener and with three flicks sends the caps of the soda water bottles spinning to the floor; they foam over and he sloshes the froth on the floor too. Meanwhile Windmill has folded one soft hand lovingly around the neck of the mekong bottle, inspected it carefully, up-ended it once, turned it sideways, and given it an expert smack on its bottom. Thus the cork is sufficiently loosened for him to be able to pull it out the rest of the way with his teeth. Soon each of us has a tumbler of golden liquid before him.
‘Yu ma’
I say privately to Windmill, but they all hear this time and suddenly it dawns on them that the new boy has cracked a joke in Thai, and Groucho Marx couldn’t get a more gratifying reaction.

‘What did he say?’ Boswell asks plaintively, jealous as the waves of laughter buffet to and fro.

‘He say mekong like horse urine,’ says Custard-tart, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. ‘Mr. Joy, you spick Siamese a little?’

‘Phud Thai nit noi’
—I speak a little—I admit, and that, modest claim though it be, is sheer conceit, for about all I can actually say so far is Good day, Go right, Go left, Go ahead, Stop, and How much?—but the latter isn’t any use to me as I haven’t learnt the numerals. However I have now added Horse-piss to my vocabulary—always a useful term to know in any language.

At the other end of the table, Boswell, nettled by my linguistic brilliance, is trying to gain credit for having lived six months in the country without picking up a single word of the vernacular. ‘Except Thank you, of course, and Tricycle, and—what’s that expression you use every two minutes—’

‘Express what?’

‘The one you use when you want to say Never mind, That’ll do, To hell with it anyway, Mañana-man—’

‘Mai pen arai
?’ I ask.

Boswell gives me a hard look, as much as to say, You’ve been studying, that’s not fair. But then the arrival of the first dish, my eggs, changes the subject. The chopsticks are plastic, not bamboo, and picking up a segment of egg is difficult, for the convex side—the ‘white’, now amber-coloured—is smooth and tough and slippery, while the yolk is a soft black yielding odoriferous mess. All eyes are fixed on me. My prestige can be raised in this hour. Dexterously I steer a piece into the clear, nip it exactly amidships, turn it over, so that the gluey black yolk adheres to the lower chopstick whilst the other chopstick rests lightly on the amber cheek to prevent side-slip, and sweep it in a gesture in which there is some nobility of style to my lips—and by Heaven it is delicious and I champ it in ecstasy, the saliva pouring in over my teeth to get itself mixed in the gobbet like the tide flowing into a bay through the piers of a breakwater. Boswell gazes at me with the expression with which he would watch a python engorging a live goat and then with a shudder, refuses to contaminate his lips with ‘such crap.’ I bungle my second piece but my reputation is made and anyway I am more successful with the third. Boswell balks again at dish number two, a sort of cold fat pork called, they tell me,
mu pa roo
. The third dish, geese-feet in asparagus stew, seems to infuriate him. ‘Haven’t they anything canned?’ he cries. ‘Something sahlid you can eat with a knife and fahk?’ Agitation turns all his oh’s to ah’s. But they have nothing canned in the place so finally he agrees to venture on an omelette. When it comes it is stuffed with meat and onions. He removes every vestige of meat and toys with the rest, enquiring what sort of oil it was cooked in. ‘Thank your God it isn’t t’ung-oil,’ I say, remembering some more Somboonana.

‘And what in hell is t’ung-oil?’

‘It’s the oil in the lamps of China. It’s also the oil in a good lot of American paints. Sometimes it’s used for cooking in China when they run out of pork fat. It has a powerful action on the guts, I believe. Something like cholera.’

‘Sounds even worse than horse piss,’ he comments, and I perceive that I am annoying him, first by eating everything they put in front of me, then by talking more Thai than he does, finally by handing out unsolicited information.

But by this time the Thai and I have finished the hors-d’oeuvres and are ready to begin serious eating. Another solemn discussion takes place.
Dum-yam-pla
appears to be a must. I haven’t any idea what
dum-yam-pla
is and await its appearance with interest. They ask me what I propose. I prefer to leave it to them. Windmill suggests stewed ox-tongue and Custard-tart, prawns. Prosit is all for salt fish. One-eye goes off howling again.

‘Where you go when we finish eat?’ Windmill asks me, slopping more mekong into my glass. He has never looked more affable.

‘Whither thou goest I will go,’ I reply. ‘Is there any place you can go to in this town?’

‘I think maybe we take a long walk,’ he says, and there seems to be something meaningful in his tone, and of course it’s unheard-of for Windmill to go on foot anywhere.

‘Does Mr. Joy want to take walk?’ Custard-tart interrupts, and suddenly he squeezes my hand and says, ‘I think Mr. Joy is very nice man to know. Talk a little Thai. Eat like Thai man. Like to take walk like Thai man too.’

I still don’t get the point and say lamely, ‘Well, it’s too early to go back to the hotel yet. Better to go for a walk if there’s nothing else to do.’

‘Yes, yes, much better, I think so too,’ cries Custard-tart and he laughs immoderately. D. H. Lawrence once heard a tortoise scream and got so worked up he wrote a poem about it. I’ve just heard one laugh and it’s the dirtiest laugh I’ve heard for years.

Boswell is looking at me sardonically and he says, ‘You may know a bit about the lingo but it’s clear you’re still only a greenhorn in Thailand. “Take a walk” means something extra special when your host invites you and the rest of the company is all male. What it really means is, “You wanna go to a brothel?” You’ve just said you do.’

I’m so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my condition: I’m ‘properly gobsmacked.’ I’d been thinking I was holding my own in this male company. I’m drinking as fast as they are. With two well-chosen words I created the biggest laugh of the evening—and in a foreign language, too. But there is more to being a man than being a good fellow. Going to a brothel is something I have never contemplated doing, even in my loneliest dreams. (In fact I don’t think there
are
any brothels in England—I’ve never heard of any anyway.) And the thought that I have just said that I would like to go to one—tonight, in a few minutes—causes a queer agitation in me, a physical agitation. And an idea swirls round in my brain, making it spin faster than the beer and mekong do. Of course. Of course. That’s what I ought to have done years ago. Instead of trying to break my dam-fool neck on the speedways. Instead of writing all those sexy poems—‘Upon her Navel’—‘O like a bow is the bony spire of her spine’—and all the rest of them. Instead of gobbling a whole bottle-f of barbital tablets; instead of drinking too much beer and mekong, which just makes you feel dizzy in the head and insecure lower down …