Private Dancer (8 page)

but I said we'd have to be quick. It got me out of doing the shower show, and he had to pay the extra bar fine because they had to find two more girls to go upstairs to G-Spot. We changed and went to the Penthouse Hotel. I wanted to go somewhere closer, but the farang insisted on the Penthouse because the rooms have mirrors everywhere.

The farang was a bit drunk and it took almost an hour before we could get him to come. Wan and I did the full lesbian show, then he got on the bed with us. I tried to make him come quickly but he'd obviously done it with two girls before and he knew how to control himself. He'd ordered more beer from the boy who let us into the room, and by the time we'd finished I was really drunk. And sore.

When we got back to Zombie I had another beer and that's when Pete came in. He wasn't happy but I think I managed to convince him that nothing had happened. Sometimes farangs can be so stupid.

BRUCE He's a character, Big Ron. For a start, he tips the scales at something like twenty four stones. If he's in a bad mood he sits on his specially reinforced bar stool like Jabba the Hutt, the slug-like thing in Star Wars, glowering at everyone. Mind you, he has to put up with a lot. He's in the bar for something like fifteen hours a day, has to be because he knows that the staff would rip him off given half the chance. He was an accountant for a big bank in South Africa for years but left when Mandela took over. Made a fortune, mind, doesn't have to work again. In fact, I think he came to Thailand for a holiday, then stayed on, then decided to invest in a bar. Doesn't have much of a life outside Fatso's, it has to be said. When the bar closes he walks down to Nana Plaza, barfines a girl and takes her back to his hotel. Never lets the girl stay the night, he kicks them out once they've done the business. Not much romance in Big Ron's life.

He runs a great bar, that much I'll say. It's quite small with a horseshoe shaped bar in the middle. On the two longer sides there's just enough room for a line of bar stools, but there's more space where the door is. Big Ron sits there with his back to the door, facing the bar. All around the walls are hundreds of photographs of the regulars. He keeps a couple of cameras behind the bar and the girls are under strict instructions to photograph anyone doing anything stupid. There are pictures of guys being sick, guys unconscious, guys baring their chests or worse, guys with girls, guys with guys.

I'm in half a dozen photographs. Most of them were taken during Thai New Year when everyone goes crazy. The Thais reckon it's good luck to sprinkle each other with water - good news because it takes place in April which is just about the hottest time of the year. We've raised it to a whole new level, though. We get tooled up with state of the art water pistols and it's like open warfare. We drench people. Soak 'em. I led a few raids into the Siegfried Bar, down the road from Fatso's. Went in with a bucket of water and played havoc with the Germans. Just like the SAS, that's me. Short and stupid. No sense of humour, the Germans. You'd think we wanted to start World War Three the way they went on. The owner came out and tried to read the riot act, but we soaked him. Then a couple of German tourists came out to complain and we got them, too. Bloody funny.

Big Ron really got into the spirit of the festival. He had a big drum of water outside the bar and we dumped people in it as they arrived. He covered anything important with sheets of polythene and let the girls wear swimsuits. Bloody brilliant.

The Fatso's girls are something else. For a start, they all speak good English, which is unusual in Thailand. They're all lookers, too. I mean, they're not bar girls or anything, you'd get a slap across the face if you tried to pay their bar fine, but Big Ron has them in short black skirts and tight-fitting red jackets. Bloody gorgeous. They remember your name and what you drink, and they make a bit of a fuss of the regulars. I always make sure I give them a big tip. The last of the big spenders, me. It pays off, though. There's a tradition in Fatso's called Big Glassing. If you have four untouched drinks in front of you, they're poured into one of those long glasses they use for a yard of ale, then topped up until it's full. Then you have to drink the whole lot in one or lose face. It's a bugger if you're drinking vodka and Coke, I can tell you.

There's an old ship's bell hanging close to where Big Ron sits, and if you ring it once you buy everyone in the bar a drink. Two rings and you include the staff, three and you include anyone upstairs, too. It can get really competitive some nights as we all try to get each other Big Glassed. But whenever a Big Glass gets put in front of me, I know the girls'll have done their stuff. It's almost pure Coca Cola, no alcohol, so I can drink it without any effects. Well, I burp like crazy for an hour or so, but I don't fall down dead drunk like the rest of the guys. That's the way it works in Thailand. So long as you keep shelling out the bucks, everything goes your way.

It's a great country. PETE I think the turning point in my relationship with Joy came after I'd known her for about six months and we went to Isarn for four days. It all happened by chance, actually. I was in Fatso's Bar and I got talking to a German guy called Bruno. He was in his sixties, bald as a coot with a beer-drinker's paunch and he seemed to know a hell of a lot about Thailand. He was a visiting professor at a German university and his field of expertise was tourism and hill tribes. He'd been coming to Thailand for more than twenty years and had a Thai wife, Pam. She wasn't with him in Fatso's; he said she'd let him off the leash for the night and nudged me in the ribs, hard. “She's Thai, she understands men,” he said.

He was writing a book on Thai arts and crafts and was planning to drive around Isarn visiting factories and workshops and attending a craft festival near Surin, where Joy was from. Bruno offered to take me along with him. I was keen to go because I would soon be working on the section of the book devoted to the north east of Thailand, and I could cover a lot more ground if I was with Bruno. Plus, he clearly knew a lot about the area and would be able to answer many of the questions I had.

Later, when I was in Zombie, I told Joy that I was going to Isarn and she started bouncing up and down on her seat. “Bai duey,” she kept saying. “Go with.” She told me that the places I was going to were dangerous, and that I'd be safer if she went with me. I explained that my friend Bruno's wife was also from Isarn and that she'd be able to look after us. Joy changed tack then,

saying that she wanted to see her father. I relented and said okay. I figured it would be a good way of deciding exactly what my feelings for her were. I'd seen a lot of Joy, but virtually all our time together was spent in Zombie, the outside bars in Nana Plaza, restaurants nearby or shorttime hotels. In fact, I'd rarely seen her in daylight; the entire relationship was skewed to the night. It was totally unnatural, so I was keen to see how we'd get on if we were together twenty four hours a day.

On the day of the trip we arranged to meet Bruno and Pam outside a big shopping mall close to the airport. Joy turned up with a change of clothes in a plastic carrier bag. I'd asked her not to wear so much jewellery or make up and she looked pretty. She looked young, too. Joy was twenty and I was thirty-six, but in the bar I never noticed the age difference. Standing outside the shopping mall I felt suddenly old and it seemed that all the Thais walking by were turning their heads to look at us.

When Bruno arrived in his Landrover, I realised why he'd been so keen for me to go with him.

Pam was driving but she'd sprained her wrist and had trouble changing gear. Bruno didn't have a driver's licence, but I did. For the next four days I did most of the driving. Bruno sat next to me and talked hour after hour as if he were addressing a lecture hall. Actually, that makes it sound worse than it was because he did have an incredible knowledge of the country and its people; it's just that he spoke in a hoarse whisper and often his English was twisted into German grammar which made it hard to follow what he was saying. We drove across to Khorat and then up to Udon Thani, about 80kms from the border with Laos, then cut across to Nakon Phanom to visit a ceramic factory he'd heard about, then down to Ubon Ratchathani, close to Cambodia. On the way we stopped off at several temples that hadn't been included in the earlier editions of my company's guide book, and Bruno took me to restaurants that were well off the normal tourist trail.

As I drove and Bruno talked, Joy and Pam sat behind us, gossiping away in their own language. It seems that Pam's village was in the same part of Isarn as Joy's and they got on like a house on fire. Pam was in her forties, darker skinned than Joy and plumper. Each night the four of us would eat together, then Joy and I would go walking around whichever town we were in.

She seemed happy to be away from Bangkok and the pressures of the bars. She told me about the food that was sold at the roadside stalls, told me stories about her childhood and tried to teach me words of Khmer. Thai was her first language, but she spoke Lao and Khmer almost as well.

With English she spoke four languages, and I couldn't help thinking how different her life would have been if she'd been born to a rich family in Bangkok instead of poor farmers in Isarn. She had a natural intelligence and a quick sense of humour, and a sensitivity to my moods that I'd never experienced in a girlfriend before. When I wanted to be quiet, she'd be quiet, too, but she seemed to sense when I was bored and would start to entertain me, teasing and joking until I couldn't help but laugh at her. She was deferential to Bruno, pouring his beer for him at mealtimes, offering him water while we were driving, also referring to him as Pee-Bruno, a sign of respect.

At night she slept in my arms, kissing me on the neck whenever she woke up and whispering “chan rak khun”. I love you. “Chan rak khun ja dai.” I love you to death.

On the way back from Ubon Ratchathani to Bangkok we detoured to Joy's village, to the south of Surin. She got more and more excited as we got closer, pointing out landmarks to me and telling me the names of the villages we passed.

The roads got progressively worse until we were bucking along a road that was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass. The fields on either side of the road had few animals and what crops there were seemed ill-tended and spindly. I asked Bruno why the farmland was so poor and he said that Isarn got less rainfall than the rest of the country, and because the crops were generally of poor quality the farmers didn't have the money they needed to invest in fertilisers and pesticides.

We stopped off at a small market so that Joy could buy a large fish and some fruit as presents.

I'd given her five 1,000 baht notes so that she could give some money to her family. I knew how important that was to her. She'd waied me in the hotel room when I'd given it her, a gesture that I always found incredibly moving, far more so than if she'd just said thank you or kissed me.

Joy's house was about fifty feet from the road, a two-storey wooden house with a pitched roof.

There were no windows, just shutters, there were big pottery barrels connected to drainpipes which Bruno said would be the house's only water supply. Electricity came from an overhead cable from a series of poles that ran along the roadside that I'd assumed were telephone poles.

Bruno laughed at that, telling me that the nearest phone would probably be a mile or so away.

We got out of the Landrover and walked towards the house. There was no hard path, just a track worn across the threadbare grass. There was litter everywhere, polythene bags, pieces of newspaper, chocolate bar wrappers and there was a general air of neglect about the place. The wooden siding was rotting in places and one of the window shutters was hanging on one hinge.

Sunan and Mon came out to greet us. I was surprised to see them because Joy hadn't said that they'd be there. Sunan was in her bargirl's uniform of tight black T-shirt and blue Levi jeans and Mon was wearing a long pink dress and high heels. Mon was carrying her daughter, Nonglek.

Joy introduced them to Bruno and Pam and we went to sit on a low wooden platform at the side of the house. Joy took the food into the house while Sunan gave us glasses of water. I couldn't see whether the water had come from one of the rain barrels but I didn't want to offend her by asking so I just drank it. Pam, Mon and Sunan were soon deep in conversation.

Inside half a dozen young men were sprawled on plastic sofas watching a flickering portable television. They didn't seem in the least bit interested in our arrival. The ground floor consisted of one large room with an old dresser against one wall and wooden chairs scattered along the length of another. There was a poster of the King and Queen of Thailand on the wall behind the television, and hanging next to it a garland of yellow and red flowers.

“This is typical of this part of Thailand,” said Bruno. "The girls are the wage-earners, the men spend most of their time watching television and drinking. The girls are brought up in this environment and assume that it is normal behaviour.“ He nodded over at Sunan and Mon. ”Mon is the oldest so she presumably started work first. Then she'll have encouraged Sunan to join her,

and then Joy. The men live off the girls' money, the girls in turn get a feeling of worth by providing for their families."

Joy came out of the house and sat down next to me. “What you think about my house?” she asked.

“It's nice.”

“You want see my bedroom?”

“Sure.”

She took me inside. It was gloomy and smelled damp. To the left of the living room was a door that led to a small kitchen. Plastic bags of foodstuffs were hanging from nails, presumably to keep them away from insects. There was an old stove connected to a gas cylinder. It was caked with dirt and grease, as were the two woks that lay on the floor next to it.

Joy led me up a flight of wooden stairs. Leading off a short hallway were three rooms. Joy's contained a three-drawer cupboard and a rack of clothes which was covered with a sheet of polythene. In the corner were two rolled-up sleeping mats. There were two posters on the wall,