Private Dancer (20 page)

Three days after the five letters arrived, I got two more. Before I opened them, I checked the postmarks. They'd both been posted on the eighth, same as the others. I opened them. One was dated July 12, the other July 13. What on earth was she playing at? I read them, but all I could think about was that she'd written all seven letters on the same day. Why hadn't she put them in the same envelope?

July 12 To my love -

From Joy, woman in the room but not have heart in her. Pete, I not understand why I miss you a lot. Pete, I want you know me, understand me. I am sorry because I give you big problem every day. I not make you happy before you go England. Pete, I hope you can give time for me. Today I no good but tomorrow I can be good for you. I want your book everything be good. I like you come see me soon. Have time think about me. From me,

woman not have everything and not have heart. Pete, now I think you forget me.

Love you only one,

Joy.

July 13

To my love -

From me, Joy. Maybe you forget. I sorry I write to you too much. You can tell me if you not like. Pete, in England now very hot or very cool? How are you, Pete? Pete, I want you give your problem to me. I want see you. Love you in my heart, only you.

Joy.

JOY It was a real pain having Pete call me every two days. I wanted to go with Park back to his village. His parents needed help on the farm and they were pestering him to go. I really wanted to go with him because I knew that Daeng was there and I didn't want Park going anywhere near her, not after the time I'd caught him in bed with her. Daeng had managed to get two farangs to give her money every month, one guy in Switzerland and another from Germany. Park kept on teasing me about it, asking me why I had only one and why Pete only gave me ten thousand baht a month because Daeng was getting twenty thousand baht from each of her customers. Forty thousand baht a month. I told him not to be so greedy, that her customers would probably only send her money for a few months and then she'd have to go back to the bars. That was always the way with farangs. They'd come to Thailand and fall in love with a girl and then they ask her to stop work. They go back to their own countries and start sending money, but after a while the love fades and the money stops. I told Park that Pete was different, he'll be living in Thailand for a long time so he'll give me money for a long time.

Anyway, I could see that the prospect of Daeng and forty thousand baht a month was eating away at him so I did my best to keep him amused in Surin. I took him to karaoke bars and bought him bottles of Black Label and we went out to the cinema and treated his friends.

Everything to give him face, to make him look like the big man. It meant I was spending all the money that Pete was giving me, but at least he stopped mentioning Daeng.

Sunan came up from Bangkok with Bird and she offered to drive Park and me to Udon Thani but I said we'd have to wait until I'd spoken to Pete. I figured I'd tell him that my father was ill and that I was going to stay with him in the hospital. Sunan brought dozens of pairs of Levi jeans with her, real ones, not the fakes they sell in Patpong. She and a group of girls in Zombie had been having a competition to see who could get the most pairs. They'd tell all their customers who were going back to their own countries that they really wanted a pair of jeans. Jeans are really expensive in Thailand, but not so expensive abroad. So Sunan would tell two or three farangs every night, and give them her address. Maybe a hundred farangs every months, and about one in ten would remember, especially the ones she'd screwed. They'd been playing the game for two months and so far Sunan had more than twenty pairs, all different sizes. She'd been telling some farangs that she wanted a 26 inch waist, some 28 inches, some 30, and tell them different colours and styles. That way she'd get different sorts.

We had great fun trying them all on. She gave me a blue pair and a black pair and Park got two blue pairs.

We often have competitions like that in Zombie. We did one with Barbie dolls just after I started working in Nana Plaza. I got more than fifty, but Sunan had over a hundred, from all over the world. We took them to Chatuchak Market and sold them. She's so smart, Sunan. I've learned so much from her. She has a farang in Norway who sends her forty thousand baht a month and he only comes to Thailand three times a year. I've met him, he's about fifty with grey hair and he's got a really good heart. He always buys me presents when we go shopping together. His name is Toine or something like that and he's married with two children. He says that he loves Sunan and that he'd marry her if he could but he has to take care of his family. He writes a letter every week to Sunan and every month he sends her money, American dollars. I wish that Pete was more like Toine, it's a real nuisance having to get to the phone every two days just to sweettalk him. He keeps on asking if I love him or if I've forgotten about him. Why do farangs always talk about love? Thais hardly ever do. If you love someone you stay with them and you take care of them, you prove that you love them every day. Park never asks me if I love him. He doesn't have to. I buy his clothes, I pay for his motorcycle, I give him money to send back to his parents if they have problems, I show that I love him in lots of different ways. But farangs, farangs always want you to tell them, as if saying the words makes it true.

I never used to tell farangs that I loved them, I thought it was stupid, but Sunan taught me that it's better to say it. You get more money. Especially if you tell them while you're screwing them,

just before they come. You breathe really heavily and gasp that you love them, they really like that. And at the airport, of course, when you're saying goodbye to them. If you say you love them and cry, they give you money, it works every time. I usually go with Sunan and Toine to the airport and the first time I saw her cry I was really surprised, I didn't know what was happening.

Toine gave her ten thousand baht and a big hug, and afterwards Sunan explained that she was doing it because that's what farangs do when they say goodbye. I asked her how she could cry so easily and she said she thought of something sad. That's what I do now when I go to the airport with a farang, I think about my mother dying. It works. Eighty per cent of farangs give you money when you cry.

PETE I was sitting at my desk going through notes on up-market London hotels when Phiraphan's fax came through. The first sheet was his report and I read it as it came off the machine. Married without registration. I read the phrase a dozen times before the sheet spewed out of the machine.

Married without registration. That meant they'd gone through the marriage ceremony but hadn't registered it with the authorities. But married was married, whether or not they'd done the paperwork. According to the report, Joy and her husband had been living in the house in Surin for the past three months. Ever since I'd started paying her a monthly “salary”, in fact. Phiraphan said that the whole village knew that Joy was married, and that Joy and Park had known each other for more than a year. A year. That meant that she'd known him before she met me. It had all been a lie. Everything she'd ever said to me, her declarations of love, her insistence that she had only me, that she didn't have a husband or boyfriend, none of it had been true.

The second sheet was a questionnaire that she'd signed. There were two signatures on the form. I guessed that the second one was Park's.

The third sheet consisted of two photographs. The quality wasn't that good but the top one was of Joy and a Thai man, the other was a picture of Joy's house. It took a couple of seconds for the significance of the second picture to sink in. Then I realised. Since I'd been there an extension had been built on to the side, an extension sheltering several pick-up trucks and a motorcycle. And it was probably my money that had paid for it.

I sat down and stared at the pictures. She had a husband. A husband. She'd gone back to Surin with him. She was living with him. She was keeping him, with my money. She was making love to him. Sleeping with him. She loved him.

I dropped the sheets of fax paper on to the sofa and paced up and down. Maybe there'd been a mistake. Maybe Phiraphan had made it up, maybe he'd wanted to justify his fee. You could never believe anything a Thai told you, nine times out of ten they'd tell you what you wanted to hear.

I picked up the sheets and read them again. Everyone in the village knew about Joy and her husband. I'd been to the village with Bruno and Pam. I'd been introduced to Joy's family and friends at the birthday party. If what Phiraphan said was true, every single one of them had known that I was being deceived, that I was being played like a one-string fiddle. I stared at the questionnaire. It was definitely her signature. It was definitely her in the photograph.

No, there was no mistake. No doubt. She was married and she'd been lying to me from the moment I set eyes on her. I wanted to telephone her there and then, to accuse her, to scream at her, to ask her why, why she'd lied to me, but I knew there was no point. First, she'd deny it.

She'd try to convince me that there'd been a terrible mistake, that I was the only man she loved.

And if that didn't work, she'd just cut off all contact. I'd never hear from her again and she'd find another stupid farang to subsidise her lifestyle. She was playing a game with me, the game of conning the farang. That's all I was to her, a farang to be played with. Big Ron had warned me, and God knows I'd heard all the stories myself, I knew the dangers of falling for a bargirl but I'd always believed that Joy was different, that Joy was being straight with me, that she wasn't playing a game. I'd been wrong, right from the start.

I paced up and down the flat, faster and faster, wanting to do something, wanting to react, but feeling totally powerless because she was so far away. That's what the hurt the most, the fact that I couldn't confront her with her infidelity.

I kept looking at the photograph, hoping that there had been some ghastly mistake, but it was definitely her, sitting next to her husband and smiling prettily at the camera. It was the same guileless smile she had in the photographs that Bruno had taken of the two of us in Isarn. How could she do it? How could she lie to me? How could she write the letters she'd written?

I'd told her, before she'd agreed to stop work, I'd told her that if she had a Thai boyfriend or a husband I didn't mind, I'd still be her customer. I'd still see her, I'd still give her money. But if she wanted me to take care of her she had to be honest with me. She'd looked me straight in the eye and lied. She had no one, she'd said. She only had me. Why had she lied? And what about Sunan? And her father? And all the people I'd met in her village? The girls in Zombie? They must all have known that Joy had a husband and that I was only the farang meal ticket.

I looked at the photograph again. It was the kitchen of her house, Joy and her husband sitting at the kitchen table, the table where she'd given me a cup of tea to drink. He was wearing a denim shirt that looked several sizes too big for him. I stopped pacing and stared at the photograph. I recognised the shirt. It was one of mine. I'd given it to Joy two or three months ago. She'd come back to my hotel in a tiny tank top and I’d wanted her to wear something less revealing when she left in the morning. I'd given her a pale blue denim shirt and told her that she could keep it. It looked much better on her than it did on me, but she'd gone and given it to her husband. How could he wear it? Didn't he have any shame? I was sleeping with his wife and he was wearing my shirt. Was the money that important to him? Or did Joy mean so little?

None of it made any sense to me. If he really loved her, why didn't he take care of her? Why didn't he get a job and ask her to stop work? How could he live with himself, knowing that his wife was sleeping with another man? How could he wear the fucking shirt? Didn't it remind him of what his wife was doing? And what about Joy? Didn't she think about me every time she looked at the shirt? Didn't it remind her of the time we spent together? Didn't it remind her of me? Or was it just a shirt she'd conned out of the stupid farang? Maybe it was a trophy of sorts.

I looked at the photograph more closely. She wasn't wearing the Mickey Mouse watch I'd given her. She always had it on in Bangkok, it matched the one I wore and she always made a big thing of showing them to her friends. Now she was back in Surin, she wasn't wearing the watch. What did that mean? The shirt was okay but the watch wasn't?

It was as if I was involved in some weird game but that I hadn't been told all the rules. I didn't even know how I could win. If I stopped giving her money, Joy would just go and find some other farang to support her and her husband. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I wanted to win, I wanted to show her that I wasn't the same as all the other farangs who were being fleeced in the bars. I wanted to show her that I was different. I paced around my apartment,

wracking my brains. If I was going to get my own back I was going to have to take my revenge Thai-style. I was going to have to think like a Thai.

NIGEL Pete telephoned me one evening and told me that Joy was married. Can't say I was all that surprised, I mean most of them have husbands or boyfriends. Why wouldn't they? They don't work in go-go bars because they want to meet the man of their dreams, do they? They work for money, it's just a job like any other so of course they don't cut off all their relationships. Did he really expect a hooker to be faithful to him? Well, maybe he did, but that's his own fault. I'd told him enough times the way things were, and so did the rest of the guys in Fatso's. I made sympathetic noises but I couldn't say too much because there was a pretty little thing from GSpot lying next to me and although her English wasn't too hot a lot of these girls understand more than they let on. Pete kept saying that he wanted to get his own back and I tried to talk him out of it. “It's a bloody game to them,” he said. “And I want to show them that I'm a better player than they are. I'm not going to let them win,” he said.