Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (10 page)

I grabbed the paperback I was currently reading from the bedside table and scooped the soaking wet lizard onto the cover of the book. There was an electricity junction box screwed to one of the walls and I put the sodden reptile on top of it to dry out. I thought the lizard might have drowned at first, but after a few minutes it scurried behind the gap where the plastic box met the wall. From then on, this convenient hidey-hole became the lizard’s home.

During my stay on Victory Hill the funny, now tailless little creature appeared in my room every day. I christened him ‘Stumpy’ due to his radical new appearance. Stumpy seemed to become quite tame and would run around on the wall near my head just under the light above my bed, catching tiny insects whilst I read a book. Sometimes I would put a few sugar grains down on the bedside table as a treat and Stumpy would gratefully make a feast of the ants that came to partake of the free feed. I grew inordinately fond of the diminutive lizard and I would look out for him every evening.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

One of the places on the list on the back of the photograph Ron had given me where he thought it possible I might find Psorng-Preng was called Phum Thmei. I had no idea whether the place was a bar, a restaurant, a street or even a person, so that afternoon I asked Narith if he knew exactly who, where or what this mysterious Phum Thmei was. The tough motodop driver gave me a wolfish grin and dug a sharp elbow into my ribs.

“Everyone knows Phum Thmei, my friend,” he told me. “It is the street that most of you foreigners call the Chicken Farm.”

I groaned. This was one place I had really not intended to inspect at close quarters.

It was around seven in the evening and I had spent the last couple of hours in my room in the Crazy Monkey plucking up the courage to visit Phum Thmei. All the horror stories I had heard from the boys in Pattaya had come back to haunt me. The three dollar blow jobs from someone it was too dark to see and the underage girls. The day old Bill was kidnapped by a bunch of half-crazy hookers who wouldn’t let him go until Thomas and Keeniaw Kevin pounded on the door until they let the terrified old boy out. The time Jim the Perv was disturbed by a rat running over his bare arse as he partook of one of the many services offered in the dim, dingy shacks. And the famous occasion when Dozy Dave had to make his way back to The Hill clad in nothing but his underpants because someone had pinched his trousers and shirt whilst he was otherwise involved with one of the girls. After listening to all these tales and more, it was understandable that I was very apprehensive about making my way down to this apparent hell-hole in the blackness of the night. Whatever you do, don’t go down there after dark, the boys had all warned me. I suppressed a shudder. For that was exactly what I intended to do. I was both surprised and saddened by the timidity the passing years had brought upon me, for I knew that back in my adventurous twenties I would probably have been in every one of the shacks in the Chicken Farm by now.

Narith told me there was little point in going to Phum Thmei during the daytime because the place didn’t come alive until after dark and most of the girls would still be asleep. When I mentioned my misgivings about the coming adventure to him he laughed.

“I’ll look after you,” he said. “You will need me to translate if you’re going to show that photograph around.” The motodop driver flexed his arm and showed me a bicep as big as a swan’s egg that I fervently hoped we wouldn’t need that night. “Buy me a couple of beers and I’ll make sure you get back in one piece,” he finished confidently.

I still didn’t much like the idea of a nocturnal visit and all afternoon I tried hard to persuade myself an afternoon trip to the Chicken Farm would do the job just as well. But of course, I eventually had to admit that going before the place had even opened up properly would be dicking out. Before I left I smoked a spliff hoping it would calm me down a bit and release the knot of tension that had tied my stomach into such a knot. In fact, the wacky backy had completely the opposite effect and by the time I left my room I had become completely paranoid and was anticipating wandering down some dangerous, unlit alleyway with shadowy hands reaching for me from all directions and danger hiding behind every corner. I had heard so many stories about the Chicken Farm, I didn’t know what to expect, and my imagination was working overtime. By eight p.m. I was still looking for a way out but I knew I had no excuses left when I saw Narith sitting on his motorcycle in his usual place outside his uncle’s restaurant as arranged. When he saw me coming he kicked his bike into life and made room for me on the pillion seat.

“Don’t look so worried!” he laughed at me. “You will probably enjoy yourself!” I doubted that very much.

The Chicken Farm was across the railway lines and down near the port about five minutes drive from Victory Hill. We jolted over the rusty rails of the train track and turned a sharp corner, then made our way down a bumpy, unmade track. At first there seemed to be nothing down the unmade road but stones and dirt, but we soon came into an area where wooden shacks were lined all along one side of the road—which had more ruts and potholes than a building site. There was nothing on the other side of the track apart from a large field behind a wall built of blocks. All the small huts looked like badly repaired farm buildings and were hammered together from a collection of wooden boards and corrugated tin. Some of them were dimly-lit by electric lights and some were illuminated by oil lamps. There was no music playing down Phum Thmei and just like my first night on The Hill during the power-cut, I had the feeling I had stepped back in time; only this time it was for real.

We rattled and thudded over the holes in the dark road until we reached the furthest hut along the track. Narith said the shacks at the far end of the Phum Thmei were occupied by Vietnamese girls whereas those nearest the port housed Cambodian women. About halfway down there was a larger block building and I was astonished to see it was a tiny guesthouse. I wondered if anyone was actually pervy enough to stay in such a seedy location, until I realized it could be a fine place for a sex-starved sailor with a night or two’s shore leave whose ship might be docked in the nearby port. Narith asked me where I wanted to stop first and I said I would leave it up to him. The ramshackle huts all looked pretty much the same to me and none of them looked particularly inviting. I suppose there were about thirty of them in all and I knew at once I was on a fools’ errand if I expected to find Psorng-Preng in such a tumbledown, hotchpotch of darkened buildings. Whatever had old Ron been thinking of when he had sent me down here? I wondered if despite his apparent sharpness the old sailor had perhaps been a bit senile and I hadn’t noticed.

The first hut we went to was the one at the very end of the road. There were four dirty plastic chairs placed outside and we sat down and ordered a couple of cans of cold beer which the Mamasan took out of a red cooler filled with tins and ice. Narith told me all the girls were Vietnamese. Two of them sat next to us. One of them was very pretty but her eyes stared vacantly into space and it was plain there was something not quite right about her. The girl who sat next to me was also attractive until she opened her mouth to reveal a set of broken, rotting teeth. I guessed the poor girl didn’t have enough money to get them fixed. Another girl came running out of the dark entrance to the shack carrying a kind of metal pan full of burning papers. She placed the makeshift incinerator in the road outside the shack and let the fire burn out; she was barefoot and I was surprised when she took a running jump and leapt over the flames; several of the other girls did the same thing. I looked up the track and I saw many of the huts had similar fires burning outside. Narith said the smoke drove the mosquitoes away from the buildings and the girls jumped over the flames for good luck. The small fires outside the huts lit up the darkness of the track for a while until the flickering, orange flames finally died and once again we were in virtual darkness. Every so often a group of shadowy cattle wandered along the dusty road slowly, lowing plaintively in the darkness.

Before we left I had given Narith Ron’s photograph and at my insistence he showed it to the Mamasan. She barely looked at it and shook her head. It was obvious she had lost interest in us when she realized we were not about to employ the services of any of her girls. As we drank our beer I asked Narith how the Chicken Farm had come about. He told me how someone who lived in one of the little houses along the track had thought it would be a great idea to rent out pussy to the sailors from the nearby port and the place had escalated from there. After that first shack had opened for business, one short year later the whole street had become a knocking shop. I gave a sharp intake of breath as I watched a motorcycle blast by at a ridiculous speed, wobbling and leaping dangerously over the ridges and depressions in the road. Narith told me there was a serious motorcycle accident in Phum Thmei nearly every night. Punters either drunk or high on sex and drugs flew over the treacherous surface away from the Chicken Farm only to hit a hole or rut and ended up splattered all over the road or up the block wall that ran alongside it.

We visited seven more shacks that night and not surprisingly, nobody had ever seen either Ron or his elusive girl before. As soon as the Mamasan of each hut knew we were not looking for business but searching for a missing girl they blanked us completely. In the second hut a skinny, sickly looking girl with bad breath was all over me and didn’t want to take no for an answer so I gave her a dollar to go away. This seemed to upset one of the other girls and a nasty little fight started and slaps were exchanged and some hair was pulled out before the Mamasan yelled at them to pack it in. Narith made me leave the fourth hut before I had finished my beer because four drunk Cambodian men had turned up and were giving us dangerous looks. Apparently, the dark-skinned teenager who had plonked herself in my lap was the regular girl of one of the guys and Narith thought it might be a good idea to bail out before he became jealous. The motodop driver got very annoyed with the Mamasan in one of the little brothels we visited because she was asking for ten dollars for a short-time and he didn’t see why the
farang
he was taking care of should get ripped off. They spoke sharply to each other for several minutes and I was a bit unnerved when all the girls and the Mamasan came to the doorway and shook their fists and shouted at us as we drove off, but Narith seemed to think the episode hilarious.

It was plain we were getting nowhere fast but I decided to try one more hut at the Cambodian end of the track before we left, just so I could tell old Ron I had given it a good go. When we pulled up outside the rickety shed it started to drizzle and the rain made the dirty street smell of cow shit and marijuana. The shapes of the huge cranes towered over the nearby port and could plainly be seen silhouetted against the night sky looking like the skeletons of giant giraffes. All the miniature brothels along the track had numbers scrawled on their wooden sides, presumably for those punters intending to make a return visit to their favourite girl. The last hut we tried was number fifteen. After we had ordered a couple of beers and taken a seat outside, the corpulent Mamasan looked at Ron’s photograph and nodded. Her fat jowls wobbled. She jabbered away in Khmer to Narith and he listened to her for a while and then translated what the grotesquely overweight, sarong-clad woman had said.

“She says she might know something,” Narith told me hopefully. “But she is not going to tell you a thing until you go with one of her girls.”

Luckily, the girl the Mamasan chose for me was really rather lovely. Mamasan told me the girl’s name was Nakry, which is a fragrant flower that blooms at night. Nakry was twenty-five years old. She didn’t seem to be able to speak a word of English and said very little throughout the whole experience apart from the words “I love you,” with which she assured me as soon as we had made our way down a dark, narrow corridor and into her impossibly small room. This was probably standard practice so that wary punters wouldn’t run away when they saw where they were supposed to perform. There was nothing at all inside Nakry’s room but a tiny bed and a few rusty nails banged into the supports of the plywood panelled walls on which to hang our clothes. There simply wasn’t enough space in the little cubicle for anything else.

Nakry had tried to brighten up her room with a few posters of Chinese and Cambodian movie stars and strangely enough, lots of glossy pictures of babies. I couldn’t help wondering why. Perhaps it comforted the girl to be surrounded by some kind of innocence in the desperate place and job that she lived in. A small laminated sign on the wall said ‘No condom, no sex,’ in English. Did anyone really need telling?

Hanging above the bed there was also a large, professionally-taken photograph of Nakry standing with a very handsome young Cambodian guy. The smiling couple were both dressed in traditional wedding clothes and Nakry looked very young. I pointed to the man in the picture and held my palms apart and shrugged. Nakry rolled her head back and closed her eyes indicating that her husband was dead. I made motions as if I were shooting a gun, then driving a motorcycle and a car and shrugged again, but Nakry shook her head and made digging and lifting actions. She then did her dead husband act again. I could only guess that her spouse had been killed at his job or had worked himself to death.

Nakry was dressed in a pair of white silk pyjamas which she peeled off as soon as we entered the diminutive room to reveal a fine body and a wonderful pair of firm, upward sloping breasts. She had a puff of black pubic hair that looked too large for her slim body and thighs. Even in the gloomy light, by the superb condition she was in it was obvious she had never had a child and as she helped me peel off my clothes in the cramped space I began to wonder if the Chicken Farm was quite so bad as I had previously thought.

The bed wasn’t up to much and consisted of a few planks nailed together covered with something that was much too thin to call a mattress. Nakry was an attractive girl and would obviously do just about anything she was asked to, but the surroundings and adventure of the night will always be much more memorable to me than the actual sex act was. When we were both struggling back into our clothes again I took a last look at those great tits and Nakry seemed amused when I waved them goodbye. I laughed with her, then realized I had done something that back in Pattaya I had sworn I would never do. I had just slept with a girl in the Chicken Farm and to my surprise, I had thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Mamasan had previously told me it was five bucks for a short-time. I considered I had definitely had the best of the deal so I slipped Nakry an extra dollar for herself for good luck. She threw her arms around my neck and gave me a long, wet kiss full on the lips. This surprised me because she hadn’t wanted my face anywhere near her mouth whilst we were on the bed. No doubt Keeniaw Kevin back in Pattaya would have been appalled at Joe Bucket messing it up for everybody else by leaving the Chicken Farm girls gigantic tips, but the whole experience had seemed like quite a lot for the price of a cup of coffee in a motorway service station back home, and I liked Nakry very much so it seemed like the right thing to do.