Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

Less Than a Day

Just because I’m going to Bangkok, doesn’t mean I’ll …

Since he was talking to himself Fred didn’t need to complete the sentence. His internal dialogue consisted mostly of such snippets: loath the exploitation of women … anyway have a relationship … whatever that means

… at least think I do … giving it an effin good try anyway.

He was in a business lounge at Heathrow. To prove his point to himself, he fished out his mobile and dialled a number he knew by heart, but had not yet assigned to autodial. It rang until her voice began reciting her automatic reply. She had gone out of her way to be charming to callers both known and anonymous: do, do, try me again later, I’m in a meeting just now … Except she wasn’t in a meeting. It was quite early Sunday morning. Fred had to leave the UK on his day off in order to start work on his assignment Monday night, in order to get back to the UK, the office and her before the end of the week.

He knew it would be quite a squeeze, but no reason why he couldn’t manage. It was a straightforward story with a nice dark theme: middle-aged Englishman falls for Thai bargirl, buys a house in the country and a car for them, both of which he puts in her name: a magnificent two story Spanish-Asian fusion job with double car port and a Toyota 4x4. Then she dumps him.

Legally both house and car are hers: he no longer has the right to live in his own home. It turns out she had a boyfriend her own age just down the road in her village. Then, if that were not tragic enough, the poor guy-his name was James Conway, aged fifty-five-gets shot in the head when walking home from the local bar one night.

Cruelty and murder were like porn: readers were automatically hooked.

And there were enough middle-aged Englishmen living with ex-bargirls, both in the UK and overseas-perhaps a little paranoid about their relationships-

for the story to improve subscription numbers.

That’s why Fred’s editor wanted him to chase it. Fred was heterosexual and under thirty, which pretty much made him the obvious choice. More: Fred had spent a year in Paris, so he was cosmopolitan; it had to be him. Of course, the big-time media had broken the story already, for about a nanosecond. As far as Fred’s editor knew, no one was doing it in depth though. Except Fred, who would end up spending a whole week of his life on it, if you took the travel time into account.

‘While you’re there, see if you can dig up a few more yarns, the kind we can store for a while … You know the sort of thing.’

Of course, Fred didn’t know the sort of thing, and neither did his editor, but any old dark stories would do. Everybody said what a lucky chap he was, whilst secretly relieved they didn’t have to go themselves: such a long trip, no friends out there, not as if he was going to a beach or anything truly exotic, the murder happened in deep country, a place called Isaan. And, let’s face it, Thailand, for all its charm, was Third World, even though it wasn’t PC to say so.

The fact that she-her name was Penny, but since he could not claim a romantic connection with any other woman, she appeared in his inner life as simply she or her-was not answering her phone caused a mild panic, a fluttering somewhere in his stomach. She knew he was at the airport, waiting for a plane that would take him away for a week right at the beginning of their

… whatever it was. He sent a text message with a much jollier tone than he felt: Off to the wild East in about an hour, missing you already.

He hesitated before pressing Send. On an emotional level the message expressed a deeper commitment than either had agreed to so far. All they’d done was get drunk and stoned and have sex, but the sex had been so good-

they’d discussed it in real time over their mobiles the next day-that a re-run was certainly on the cards. Apart from that, their budding romance was conducted electronically: texts for short Hi theres, emails for longer, more structured sentences: God your tits are just, well, out of this world, I don’t just mean size, I mean everything, shape, firmness, proportion … I was thinking of them at five o’clock this morning … Sorry if this is too, you know …

Don’t worry, Sugarplum, I think we both had the bang of our lives, didn’t we? I know I did. I never would have guessed you were so big … I woke up thinking about your bits too …

Love? Hardly, whatever that was, but a beginning of something that had a chance of survival? Maybe. He was just sick and tired of the endless chase for emotional stability, but you couldn’t fess up to that, especially not at the beginning. Nobody could afford to be someone else’s crutch amp; crotch for life, not if you wanted to stay in the race, keep upwardly mobile, pay off the mortgage on your studio flat, think about buying a decent car-

finally. He pressed Send, anyway, wondering if he was being uncool. To be honest, he hoped for a reply within the minute. She took forty and, to his own astonishment, the wait caused him to come out in a cold sweat and an inner voice started saying nasty, vengeful things about her, until his phone whooshed-it was his main life style decision that he preferred whooshes to bleeps: Have a great trip, see you when you get back, you lucky dog.

No missing you too, he noted. And who was she with at nine o’clock on a Sunday that she couldn’t answer her phone or reply to a text message without making him wait more than half an hour? He felt the onset of depression.

Then his phone whooshed again: I’m gonna miss you too, Sugarplum.

Now he felt like a million. The odd thing, of course, was that their relationship-if they had one-would not actually change at all. Neither had had time to meet again for the action replay, and they could text and email just the same while he was in Thailand as when they were ten miles apart in London. So, in terms of cyberspace, nothing was going to change over the next week. Was it?

Fred took out a book he’d bought the day before by some expat Brit who’d made a name for himself writing noir novels about Bangkok bargirls.

He speed read it, skipping all the poverty-and-preaching stuff, grabbing what he needed. The main point was that Bangkok bargirls almost all came from this Isaan place, which was in the Northeast. He figured a smart move would be to spend Monday night doing the bars in Bangkok and learning about Isaan, so he’d have all the background he needed without having to schlep all over the countryside in a hire car. If he had any talent at all, he told himself, it was for finding the quickest smartest way to the guts of his stories.

2.

Fred wasn’t sure of anything except it was Tuesday and there was a body in the bed next to him. When he adjusted his mobile to Thai time, it was still Tuesday, but much later in the day and the brown girl was turned away from him. He stood up to walk around the bed and look at her. His first reaction was to congratulate himself on his good taste. This was a truly beautiful woman, with high cheek bones and an elegant gauntness, full sweet lips.

From the shape of the bed clothes, the rest of her was pretty well put together, too. When she smiled he felt even more pleased with himself.

‘Hi. I’m Lalita.’

‘Right,’ Fred said. ‘I’m Fred.’

‘I know. I wasn’t drunk last night.’

Fred nodded thoughtfully. ‘Would you mind telling me what happened?’

‘You got drunk and kept telling me how beautiful I was. You paid my bar fine, so I had to look after you. You were going to ring the bell, but I stopped you.’ Her English was almost perfect, with a mid-Atlantic accent.

‘Bell?’

‘Every bar has a bell. If you ring it you have to buy everyone a drink.

There were about fifty people there. I saved you about twenty thousand baht.’

He made the calculation. A thousand quid? Jesus. ‘Thanks.’

She smiled again. ‘But you were too drunk to get it up. You want to do it now?’

Fred blinked. ‘You want to?’

‘I don’t care. I want to get paid, but I’m not a beggar. So?’

He took a step forward, which brought him to the edge of the bed. He was naked except for his shorts, which she pulled down enough to expose his member. She rose to sit cross-legged on the bed, in T-shirt and panties.

He watched her cup one hand under his testicles and, with the other, slowly, expertly, and tenderly produce an erection. She made sure it was good and firm before putting it in her mouth. After a minute or so she took it out again.

‘You want to come like this, or you want to fuck me?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fred said, still half drunk, ‘to tell the truth I think …’ He put out a hand to steady himself on her thin shoulder. A spasm.

Now his sperm was all over her tiny brown hand. She shook it as if she was shaking off a cobweb. Suddenly anxious to save her from indignity-

beauty had that effect on him-he grabbed a box of Kleenex that was on the bedside table and handed it to her. She first cleaned him, then her hand.

‘Well,’ Fred said, still leaning on her shoulder and feeling dizzy.

She looked into his eyes. ‘You want me to stick around so you can do it properly? Or are you always like this? Are you alcoholic?’

‘How much d’you want?’

‘Two thousand baht, same as if you fucked me. That’s because I stayed the night with you.’

Two thousand baht: that was less than he’d spent on champagne on that one and only night with Penny. And it wasn’t even a full night. He’d had to get in his car at a freezing 3 am because she couldn’t sleep with someone else in the bed with her. ‘I understand.’

‘So?’

‘We don’t have to do it. Just stick around for an hour or so, I’d like to ask you some questions.’

‘Again?’

‘Was I that drunk? Did someone spike my drink?’

‘Why would anyone do that? Have you been looking at one of those websites?’

A pause while he looked around the room. ‘Maybe I do have a drink problem,’ he said, mostly to himself. He remembered, now, how wired he was when he hit the bars. When wired, he drank. It went with the job.

In London, if you wanted people to talk, you bought them drinks. No one likes to drink alone, so you drink with them.

He’d never had such a complete memory blackout before though.

Maybe it was the jetlag. He shrugged. ‘Did I ask you about Isaan?’

‘Yes.’

‘And about that case?’

‘The English guy who got shot to death? Yes.’

Fred pulled his shorts back up and sat next to her on the bed. There was something deeply troubling about this situation that he could not quite put his finger on. She was so friendly, chummy even, like they were old pals. It wasn’t right to feel this relaxed with a stranger, a whore, in a country he’d been in for less than a day. Culture shock: he couldn’t think of anything so thoroughly un-British. Where was the paranoia on both sides, the mutual contempt between prostitute and client, the guilt, the nausea? And how was it he was starting to feel horny after he’d just come? That hadn’t happened to him since he was sixteen. He slipped a hand up her back under the T-shirt, then round to her breasts. Full, young, firm. He felt that hand again, working the outside of his shorts this time. He groaned with a sense of foreboding: If this is as good as it looks where the eff have I been all my life?

She slipped out of her T-shirt and panties, pushed him back on the bed so she could pull his shorts off, straddled him, worked on both his and her private parts until both their bodies were ready for fluid exchange, then reached behind him to find a condom, which she spread wide and slipped on.

Now she eased him inside her. He couldn’t believe it. Exactly five and a half thrusts and he was jerking uncontrollably again. She eased herself off of him, carefully removed the clotted condom, cleaned him again, took the condom to the bathroom, returned, naked, with another of those incredible smiles.

‘Why are you crying, Fred?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fred said.

‘Don’t know?’

‘I think it might be because you’ve just made a fantasy come true, and that scares the living shit out of me.’

She blinked. He’d lost her in his culture shock. ‘You need an interpreter when you go to Isaan?’

‘Oh Christ yes,’ Fred said, wiping his cheeks with a Kleenex.

‘You’ll have to pay my bar fine for as long as it takes.’

‘Whatever,’ Fred said, ‘It’s all on expenses.’

‘Really?’

‘I mean the interpreting, not the sex.’

She pulled on her T-shirt and panties and fished a mobile out of a handbag. She spoke rapidly in Thai, then closed the phone. ‘You have to pay for a week, in advance. Give me the money so I can take it to the mamasan now. Or is a week too long?’

‘How about we make it a year?’ Fred said.

That made her laugh, an old-fashioned belly laugh like his granny used to have. In London they didn’t laugh like that anymore.

‘Eleven hours,’ Fred muttered, looking at his cellphone.

3.

‘D’you love me?’ Fred said.

‘Of course not,’ Lalita said, ‘I hardly know you.’ She smiled. ‘I love your money, though, and the way you’re being so nice to me.’

‘Aren’t your other customers nice to you?’

She thought about it. ‘English are mostly nice, but they drink too much and get hysterical. Germans are too harsh, but okay … Japanese are weird but have tons of dough and- ’

‘Stop,’ Fred said. ‘D’you always have to be so honest?’

‘Why? In your country you’re not honest?’

‘No. We lie all the time.’

‘About what?’

‘Compared to you, everything.’ He let a beat pass, then added: ‘I love you, though.’

‘Liar.’

He’d let her drive the hire car. She explained that there were surely going to be cops to bribe sooner or later, and the bribes would be lower if she was at the wheel, rather than a farang.

‘So, are we near the village where that bloke was murdered?’

‘Not so far, but we’re not going there. We’re going to the village next door.’

‘Why?’

She frowned as if he were retarded. ‘Because at the village where he was murdered they won’t tell us anything. They’ll be afraid of losing face. At the village next door, they’ll tell us everything so the village where he was murdered will lose face.’

‘Got it,’ Fred said.

Paddy fields the dense green of pool tables, ramshackle wood houses on stilts. The roads were almost deserted except for a few pick-up trucks with farm labourers in the back, their faces swathed in cloths and T-shirts against the sun and dust. Lalita reached across to his crotch and squeezed.

‘You feeling horny?’ Fred said.

‘No. I almost never feel horny. I’m just taking care of you. I’m at work, don’t forget.’

‘You’re going to kill me with being so honest.’

‘You want me to shut up?’

‘Oh, no,’ Fred said. ‘I want to die this way. Please, keep up the torture.’

She laughed that laugh. He’d noticed that whenever death was mentioned, it made her laugh. She’d told him it was from Buddhism: death was a kind of joke, once you got the message. Then she asked in a humble tone he’d not heard from her before if he minded if they stopped off for half an hour at her own village, which was on the way. Her grandmother was dying.

‘Sure,’ Fred said, ‘I have a thing about my own granny.’

‘You see her much?’

‘She’s dead.’

Lalita laughed.

He waited while she ran inside a small shack on stilts. Two kids played in a mud patch, an alcoholic grandfather sat and stared at him as if he wanted to kill him, an exhausted middle-aged woman in a worn grey sarong put her hands together to greet him. When Lalita ran out of the shack again, she introduced her mother. Then they were off.

‘Whose are the kids?’ Fred said.

‘My sister’s, but she did her head in with meths and they locked her away in the funny farm.’ She shrugged. ‘Someone has to give them a chance.’

She didn’t say it, she didn’t need to: that bunch of losers in the shack was the reason she sold her body. And they’re not even her kids, Fred thought, with an incredulity that was hard to live with. 4.

Fred said: ‘How come you speak such good English, Lalita?’

His memory of the night before had recovered somewhat. He recalled that apart from her good looks and great body, Lalita had stood out from all the other girls for her mastery of the language-and superior intelligence.

It was entirely possible that she had chosen him rather than the other way around. She could be playing him like a penny whistle-which didn’t bother him at all. He was enjoying the tune.

‘I had a sponsor,’ Lalita said, ‘A sugar daddy as you call it. He was an engineer. English, but spent all his working life in the United States. That’s why I speak the way I do. I lived with him. I mean, he had a big apartment in Bangkok and I lived there full-time. He travelled all over Southeast Asia on his engineering assignments. When he was home, we spoke English, when he was away I studied English-there was nothing else to do. It was part of my contract with him that I wouldn’t take on other customers. I was only nineteen and my brain worked good.’

‘What happened?’

Fred saw something strange in Lalita’s face. He was not used to Thai features. He couldn’t tell if a memory was causing her extreme pain-or something else.

She inhaled heavily. ‘You really want to know what happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, see, he would often be away for months at a time, sometimes six months, and he said his work didn’t allow him to fool around with other women, so when he returned he was pretty horny. I wasn’t enough for him on the first nights back, so I had to arrange a threesome. I was fine with that, because it was always fun and relieved the pressure on me. I would find a girl in one of the bars which had upstairs rooms and I would have to tell her in advance what he wanted, otherwise everyone could get all tangled up and lose the moment. He liked to fuck me doggy-style while she lay underneath pointing the other way so she could lick his balls and his ass.

‘Now, to understand you have to know that while she was licking him he couldn’t move without interrupting her work and bumping her on the nose, so he would stay still and I would move in and out.’ She gave Fred a glance.

‘Okay,’ Fred said.

‘So, one night it was all going perfectly. She kept on licking and I kept on thrusting with my butt, except that it went on for a long time and he wasn’t groaning the way he usually did. At first, I didn’t think anything usual was happening because he’d taken a whole Viagra and was going to be stiff for hours anyway.

‘I guess we went on like that for maybe twenty-five minutes or more, waiting for a tell-tale groan or two, and I was starting to get dry and her tongue was starting to ache before we realized he was having a seizure and couldn’t speak or move. So we both got out from under him, but by the time we laid him on his back he was dead. You could say we’d been having sex with a corpse.’

Startled, Fred stared at her. She was biting her tongue.

‘We ran to tell the mamasan, who came up and said we had to drag him downstairs because she wasn’t supposed to rent out rooms for sex and she wanted it to look straight before she called the cops. But before we dragged him downstairs, she had to close the bar. So we did and the cops came and called for an ambulance and we were left with just us girls in the bar.’

‘Okay.’

Lalita’s face was trembling uncontrollably. For a moment, Fred wondered if she, too, was not having a seizure. Tears started to stream down her face. Now she exploded.

‘It was just so fucking funny-all we girls and the mamasan had a party all night and drank the bar dry. I mean, out-of-control funny and shocking, too, which made it even more funny.’ She struggled to keep her hands on the wheel in the grip of a prolonged belly laugh that caused her breasts to bounce and her shoulders to shudder.

Fred gave her a few beats to recover. ‘You weren’t sad in any way?’

She caught her breath. ‘Why? He was a nice guy and had a great life, but how long was he going to live anyway? He was already fifty-six. Better to go that way than in a wheelchair sucking on an oxygen tube.’

‘Right,’ Fred said, scratching his jaw.

She flashed him a glance. ‘What’s the matter?’

Fred wasn’t entirely sure what the matter was. After a couple of minutes he said: ‘I think I’m the opposite to that bloke. I think I’ve been dead all my life and I’m only just coming alive.’

‘Maybe you’re not so different,’ Lalita said. ‘He told me he played it straight until he was thirty, followed all the rules and married a farang feminist who took everything including the kids. That’s when he saw the light.’

‘Of course, Khun James Conway got shot: he was an asshole,’ the village headman said; at least, that was how Lalita interpreted his words-freely, Fred suspected. ‘He treated his wife like some kind of slave and he was in a bad mood all the time, always complaining. He had a drink problem and spent all his time at the bar. In the end they didn’t bother with cans of beer, they served him with packs of twelve.

‘He was an arrogant shit, always yelling and criticizing Thailand. How that guy could bitch! It was amazing. He could moan for hours about a cockroach crawling across the floor, on and on and on like a buffalo chewing grass. We know we’re poor and low class, but he didn’t have to rub it in like that. And he was a know-all-told the villagers how to do everything, even told them how to live. And he was insulting about Buddhism.

‘His wife did her best for the first year. She was very patient and she’s young, only twenty-three now. Then she lost interest and went over to her uncle’s place to socialize with her cousins.’

‘She was unfaithful to him?’ Fred asked.

‘Of course not. She married him properly, village ceremony and the legal thing, both. Isaan women take that very seriously.’

‘Do you know who shot him?’

The headman shrugged. ‘Who would know such a thing? Anyone in that village would have shot him if they had the chance. They’re quite primitive over there. Maybe someone just happened to have a gun when they saw him walking down the street-a kind of accident, if you see what I mean. Or maybe they drew lots.’

‘What about the police investigation?’

The headman stared at Lalita and made a gesture toward Fred, then snapped out something in Thai: ‘What investigation? Why would the police be interested? He was going to get himself killed wherever he went, and if someone’s caught, they will bribe the police chief, so nobody will ever know who did it.’

Now both the headman and Lalita looked at Fred as if he were retarded.

Fred didn’t know why he was enjoying it. ‘So he just got wasted for being an asshole?’ Fred summed up.

‘Right,’ Lalita said, not bothering to refer to the headman.

Fred did his professional duty and checked out the village where James Conway was shot, even visited the Sino-Alicante monstrosity the Englishman had built with its garish green tiles, blinding white walls and stark blue swimming pool.

They went on to the bar where he drank, the spot where he died. Nobody in the village would talk, not even to the point of saying where Conway’s widow was now.

But Fred knew he was only going through the motions. When his mobile whooshed with a message from Penny (Where are you Sugarplum? Look, I know I’ve been a bit standoffish, but I’m coming round, give me time and I’m yours, okay? Just don’t go needy on me-you have that needy thing, frankly, and it scares me-I have to be all about me right now, that’s all, nothing else in the way), he muttered something obscene and deleted the message.

He’d already written the Conway story in his head. He was clever with words and would make the investigative reporting good and noir, but the message was plain for anyone with a brain: Jerk had it coming. He also knew how he would end the report: By the way, I resign. Then he walked with Lalita through the village to a meadow that sloped gently down to a bubbling brook.

‘Any land for sale here?’ Fred said.

‘Plenty. If you’re serious, we should go back to Bangkok, then I’ll return alone to negotiate-you will get a better price that way.’

‘All in your name, of course?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘I want the house in wood on stilts. What about the car?’

‘It will be mine too; you can’t register in your name with a tourist visa.

Don’t do it if you’re scared.’

‘I’m not,’ Fred said. ‘But if I turn into an asshole, don’t shoot me yourself. Let someone else do it. I wouldn’t want you to do jail time for a selfish slob like me.’ He thought he was making a joke, but his eyes teared.

Lalita was silent and frowning for a long moment. ‘You really can love me that quick?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Fred said, then bellowed at the sky, ‘HEAD OVER EFFIN HEELS, DARLING-as my granny used to say.’

* * *

He checked his mobile. Twenty three hours and forty-one minutes since he’d landed.