Thai Girl (32 page)

‘This is where Papa die,' she said.

Ben stared at a mark on the tarmac, a dark stain almost like a pool of blood, blood spilled a decade ago. He shuddered at the thought of a violent death right here, so very close to home. Surely that could not be her father's blood.

They went silently back to where they had been waiting. Fon squatted down on her haunches while Ben stood and stared down the road for the bus. After some time he thought he saw one coming.

‘Is that it?' he asked.

Fon got up and looked.

‘Bus come,' she said, giving Ben her bag and running back to the house.

‘Where are you going?' he called after her.

‘To get Jinda,' she shouted as she ran.

Ben's heart sank.

‘So Jinda's coming to the hotel too?' he asked when she rejoined him at the roadside.

‘Of course Jinda's coming. Go hotel together.' She paused for a moment and eyed him with a quizzical look.

‘Ben? Ben? What you thinking?' Seeing Ben's embarrassment, she shrieked with laughter. ‘What you think I am? Bar lady, Pattaya?'

The hotel in Nang Rong had a smart air-conditioned lobby but the fan rooms they checked into were very basic. Fon and Jinda shared a room, with Ben in the next one along. After the overnight journey they were all ready to sleep early. Ben's double bed felt very empty but he slept well until he was woken all too soon by a loud knocking. He stuck a bleary face round the door; it was Fon looking infuriatingly fresh and breezy.

‘Morning, lazy
farang,
we go breakfast.' It was almost light.

‘Christ, what time is it?'

‘You not hungry?'

‘No, it's sleep I need.'

‘Kee-kyet!
Ben, you so lazy.'

Ben dressed quickly and joined Fon and Jinda in their room where, with lip gloss and eyebrow pencil and much jollification, they were putting the finishing touches before facing the early morning world of Nang Rong. Even this, so early in the morning, was
sanuk,
irrepressible fun.

The three of them wandered out into the drab streets of the town and found a market with food stalls on its fringes. They sat down on tin stools by one of the stalls, an old motorcycle and sidecar loaded with food and cooking utensils.

‘What you eat for breakfast, Ben?' asked Fon.

‘Muesli and tea.'

‘What's moosly?

‘It's a sort of rabbit food.'

‘Not have rabbit food, Ben. You like egg?
Farang
eat egg for breakfast.'

Bowls of noodles were quickly produced for Jinda and Fon, followed by Ben's tea in a glass with a spoon sticking out, tea of a dark earthy colour with a pale yellow pool of something nasty at the bottom. It turned out to be condensed milk and was disgustingly sweet. His eggs came in a mug, two eggs broken in together and hardly cooked, the whites still runny and transparent.

‘Nagliat!
How you eat that?' said Fon.

‘Not exactly the Hilton, is it,' he grimaced.

After barely surviving his breakfast, Ben went back with them to the hotel. He had kept quiet but now he just had to ask what they were going to do that day.

‘We go village, then Phnom Rung. You like temple?'

‘Yes, that most of all. I've never seen a Khmer temple before.'

They walked through the town to the bus station where they sat down opposite their bus, a large open pick-up with a steel canopy over the back, and waited. After about half an hour Fon decided it was time to board. The bus started up and went about two hundred yards but stopped again while more people got on with their goods and animals. Ten hot minutes later it finally moved off, Ben sitting next to Fon, sweltering in the confined space. Opposite him was a fat boy in a padded jacket zipped up to the neck, a farmer with a chicken on his lap and a gaggle of old women.

Only in the West, Ben thought, do you sit on a bus sullenly avoiding eye contact. If you are Thai village folk who have just been into town to market and are packed into a bus together, of course you talk. And if there is a pretty girl in stylish jeans and colourful top next to her foreign boyfriend, you want to find out everything about them. He was aware that all eyes were on the two of them.

Tongues soon loosened and Fon found herself engaged in good-natured chit-chat. One old woman was talking nineteen to the dozen, causing much amusement.

‘What's she saying?' asked Ben.

‘She ask we come from where and if we married already. Then she ask we going to get married … so I say no, not want
farang.
And old woman, she say, “If you not want the
farang,
can I have him?” What you think Ben? You like?' chuckled Fon.

‘Yes, very funny,' Ben replied. ‘But Fon, if they know we're not married, what do they think? It's obvious we're together.'

‘Thai girl with
farang
sell sex. That's what they think.'

On getting back to the house, Jinda and Fon went into a huddle with their mother in the kitchen. Things sounded tense but after a time Fon came over to where Ben was sitting.

‘Talk with Mama. Brother Somchai not send money. Say he send thousand baht … it not come. But no problem, today holiday so we go Phnom Rung. Mama come too.'

‘What time are we going?'

‘When we ready,' said Fon.

It was not exactly a village outing, but a pick-up had been taken for the trip and the neighbours were invited to pile in. Ben's hopes of getting to the temple in the cool of the morning were frustrated as they began an indefinite wait for anyone who wanted to join them. At last, late in the morning they climbed aboard and the pick-up pulled out onto the road and slowly gathered speed, bouncing on its hard springs. Ben found himself sitting at the back next to Fon and opposite some middle-aged ladies who had come for the day out.

The hot air rushed through the open body of the pick-up, bringing with it all the smells and sensation of rural Asia. For mile after mile the rice fields passed by on either side, the green of the trees contrasting with the muted browns of the ripening rice. In some of the fields that had not yet been harvested, Ben could see the workers swathed in clothes moving slowly forward cutting at the ocean of rice a handful at a time.

Several times he saw rice being threshed manually, the workers beating the rice stalks to dislodge the grains, raising clouds of dust. Once there was a mechanical thresher powered by a shiny blue Ford tractor doing the work of many hands. Its arrival was clearly an event, watched by crowds of onlookers, relieved of an unpleasant job but perhaps aware that mechanisation brings change.

As they neared the temple there was a downpour of rain and the rich smell of hot earth flooded the pick-up. Everyone moved forward into the lee of the cab to avoid the spray that was coming through the front and open sides. Sitting at the back, Ben enjoyed the closeness of the wet road rushing past beneath him, the water flying up from the wheels and leaving a foamy wake on the dark tarmac. Then it was dry and hot again and the vehicle began to climb, its engine labouring. He looked back at the road, a black ribbon falling away across the plains behind them, through limitless rice fields to the furthest horizon.

Ben had been reading that the temple of Phnom Rung was once part of the Khmer empire which for many centuries had controlled much of northeastern Thailand from its centre, the great city and temple complex at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Started in the tenth century, Phnom Rung was built in the crater of an extinct volcano, still dominating the landscape for miles around. Now its restored ruins made a good day out for both foreigners and Thais. Phnom Rung had become a major tourist attraction and its huge vehicle park was surrounded with stalls selling all that the sightseer could need, from souvenirs and trinkets to broad-brimmed hats.

Everybody got down from the pick-up and made for the shops. Ben found one selling the dried heads of tiny deer with bright red horns and what were claimed to be tiger teeth and the tusks of baby elephants. He had plenty of time to browse as the rest of the party seemed more engrossed in shopping than in going to the temple itself. Getting impatient, he urged Fon to make a move and leaving the others behind, they paid their entrance fee and climbed the rough laterite steps up to the temple.

The heat was pitiless as they walked the stone-paved avenue towards the sanctuary, but the beauty of the temple distracted from the discomfort as Ben came under the spell of its ancient red sandstone buildings. They were quite unlike anything he had seen in the West, free of the classical influence of the Mediterranean civilisations. Though cruder than Greek and Roman buildings, their effect was robust and dramatic, the last imprint of a vast civilisation and empire that had retreated south and decayed many centuries earlier.

They climbed a series of stairways and crossed the ‘naga bridges', paved causeways decorated with the heads of stylised serpents. They were now traversing the symbolic abyss between earth and heaven and were approaching Mount Meru, the heavenly palace of the gods. The way led to the main sanctuary, a tower of immense stone blocks, the upper part covered in elaborate carvings and surrounded on each side by entrance halls and antechambers, their roofs and gable-ends a mass of mythical figures and symbolic motifs.

On the lintel over the main entrance were intricate carvings of Hindu deities to whom the temple was first dedicated before Buddhism pervaded the region. According to Ben's leaflet which he stopped to read in a shady spot, the lintel depicted Vishnu, a lotus growing from his navel, reclining asleep on the milky sea of eternity. It was an enchanting place and for Ben a small miracle that he was here with Fon, briefly able to share with her the ancient culture that was her heritage.

From the highest point of the temple grounds they could just make out the blue backbone of the Dongrek mountains across the border in Cambodia. Puffy thunder clouds towered in the deepest of blue skies and far to the east a rainstorm blotted out a stretch of forest in a veil of white. It was a rich landscape of jungle and cultivation merging from green into blue and overlaid with irregular dark patches, the shadows of passing clouds. Ben and Fon were moved to silence, awed by the setting, as once had been the people of earlier times who sensed the holiness of the place and chose to build their temples there.

Fon seemed unusually quiet until she turned to Ben and said she was very thirsty. As he had left his water bottle in the pick-up, they wandered back the way they had come and stopped to buy a cold drink from a boy carrying an ice box. Resting in the shade of a tree, Ben noticed a winding path running into the undergrowth which led to some wreckage, possibly a plane in military camouflage, a few hundred yards away. He decided to take a look. It was an army helicopter, the fuselage split wide open. He could not recognise the type, but noticed manufacturers' writing in Russian and ‘Do Not Step' signs in English. As the cause of the crash was a mystery, he urged Fon to ask the boy if he knew anything about it. The story was simple. ‘Helicopter have monks inside, fly over the temple and go higher than the Buddha. So helicopter fall down, have accident.'

Back at the car park, Fon and Ben met up with the others, some of whom had not even left the shopping area, preferring not to climb to the temple in the heat. The next move was to sit down and eat at one of the many open-air eating places. Everyone was laughing and joking, a day out for the ladies being a rare and special event, all instigated by Ben's visit to Fon's home.

After the meal the pick-up took them back to the village. As it was going on to Nang Rong, Fon, Jinda and Ben stayed aboard and went back to the hotel, arriving there in the early evening. Jinda wanted to stay in the room, but Fon was full of energy and was determined to take Ben to sing karaoke. Only a short walk across the street, the karaoke bar was clean and modern but very dark. One of the many hostesses directed them to a table and took orders for drinks. A girl at another table was singing a Thai pop song, the video with the lyrics showing a half-naked model seductively rolling around on a beach. Ben's eyes almost popped out of his head but Fon did not even seem to notice.

Fon was keen to sing and asked for the list of song titles when the drinks arrived. She wrote down her requests and two tracks later, the microphone was brought to her as her first choice came on the screen. Holding the cordless microphone horizontally in front of her face and looking intently at the video screen, she sang with pleasure and absorption. Ben could now stare at her profile, listening to the disembodied voice coming from the speakers, hardly believing it could be hers. The style of the song was high-pitched and unfamiliar to him, but Fon was clearly an accomplished singer and everyone in the bar clapped when she finished.

As they were leaving the karaoke bar something crossed Ben's mind.

‘Fon, there's far more hostesses in here than they need to serve drinks. I don't get it.'

‘Why you not understand? What you think, Ben?'