A Woman of Bangkok (21 page)

Thus on an average she made about six thousand tics a month as near as she knew. At the present exchange rate—the dollar was going down as the baht strengthened—that worked out at about three hundred and fifty American dollars a month, a reasonable income anywhere, she thought, and in Thailand, for a woman, a small fortune.

But of course her expenses were dreadfully high. First of all there was the rent for the room. Nothing vexed her more than having to hand over three hundred tics twice a month—on the fifteenth and the thirtieth—to the Python’s uncle, for the privilege of living in this hole. That fair-haired English boy two nights ago—she’d forgotten his name and soon she’d forget him too, as she forgot every man she only saw once—he’d been interested in her budget, and good at mental arithmetic, and he’d worked out a lot of sums for her, in his head, sitting naked in the deckchair while she, naked on the stool, handed him slices of mango to eat. He’d told her she was paying seven thousand two hundred every year for her room and that in the four years she’d been here she’d practically bought the whole house. Yet there was nothing to show for all those thousands of baht. Indeed, a few nights ago, when she’d come home drunk from the Champagne Bucket followed by two Danes she didn’t want, and Bochang had been slow opening up and she’d kicked in the door in her fury, the Python’s uncle had made her fork out an extra four hundred for repairs to the door. If she couldn’t pay her rent tomorrow she and Udom and Bochang and Siput and her toilet-table and bed and deckchair and her few other sticks would all be dumped into the alley. Nor—now that a certain General who was powerful in the police force was so scared of assassination that he no longer went to places like the Bolero or admitted girls to his house or office—could there be any redress. Once she was thrown out she’d be thrown out forever, and the Python (who didn’t have to pay any rent because it was her uncle’s house) conscious of her own security would put on airs over the eviction. Anyway the General probably wouldn’t be sympathetic these days, she told herself, though once he had been a damned nuisance—a Thai she dare not refuse to sleep with, and he’d taken advantage of that fact, and slept with her ‘for love,’ not once, but a dozen times, giving her a certain temporary prestige but cheating her of thousands of baht …

Always if you sat still for a minute doing nothing your mind went into unpleasant channels like that. She jumped up and went to the mirror to take a quick reassuring look at herself.

Six hundred for the room. Five hundred for household food, including rice. Fifty for Bochang, who was so old and feebleminded that she couldn’t get a job anywhere else and indeed was glad to get this one. Another hundred for Siput, who was fat and only early-middle-aged and a grouser but who washed things so well that she had survived upheaval after upheaval. Five tics a day to her son for his fares to school and his midday meal, but he saved on it somehow and had started smoking she was sure. At least four hundred a month for her own fares, for she went everywhere by
samlor
, not only to the Bolero nightly at a cost of six tics, but, if she failed to pick up anyone there, then right across town to the Champagne Bucket, which kept open till dawn and admitted unescorted girls; and then there were all the daytime jaunts to cinemas, beauticians, hairdressers, goldsmiths and the like—oh, certainly her fares came to four hundred a month, probably more. And then there was all the money she
enjoyed
spending (as against the money she was forced to spend)—for coffee, for fruit (she had a passion for durian which tastes like toffee and stinks like rotten eggs and costs fifty tics per thorny football-size pod), for clothes and cosmetics, for having her fortune told, for lottery tickets—anything she fancied she bought immediately, for now she had money and could spend as she liked, but the day was coming when she would be more or less penniless, and she would be most unhappy then, but at least she would be able to look back with satisfaction to these days when she’d had money to burn and hadn’t stinted herself—another heaven in the past. She never stopped to calculate how much she threw away every month, maybe one thousand tics, maybe two, but anything that was left over she invested in gold and diamonds, partly because they never lost their value but also because she loved them. She reckoned that all the jewellery she possessed this morning was worth twenty thousand tics. Enough to get even the most greedy policeman on her side in the event of trouble, or to tide her over a quite lengthy sickness.

Bochang had brought in three dishes and set them on the floor and she was now down on her knees ladling big heaps of rice out of the tureen on to the three empty plates. The Leopard went to the door and called for Udom—that was a peace-overture: he could have starved to death for all she cared if she hadn’t known he’d been in the right—and then subsided cross-legged before her plate. As she arranged her sarong decently about her legs she ran a greedy eye over the food.

There were the inevitable prawns which she loved, today served up in a blazing paprika soup. There were curried bananas—the cheapest sort of curry this time of year—the curry being flavoured with powdered water-bug. There was a Thai salad containing cucumber, onions, white cabbage as hard and crisp as crackers, mint, the leaves of two different sorts of tree and a weed that grew in ponds, a big coarse-looking tomato, and
me-krua
which looks like a small green tomato but has a hard rind which bursts in the mouth and floods the whole cranium with a delicious spicy essence. The Leopard felt her saliva begin to flow. She seized a spring onion and began to munch along its stalk with relish.

‘What else is there?’ she asked eagerly, accepting the plate of rice Bochang handed her. ‘And where’s all the sauces?’

‘Have patience, please.’ Bochang’s tone was more that of a mother to a greedy child than of a poor old servant to her Mem.

Soon Siput arrived with the rest. Seeing that the Mem was already seated and eating she didn’t presume to enter the room: she sank to her knees in the doorway and then leaning forwards on all fours pushed the dishes across the linoleum to Bochang, who, crouched down too, took them and arranged them before the Leopard.

There were only two more—shreds of fried beef and an omelette. But more important than these were the condiments, five in all: a mauve sauce that is inseparable from salads, a black Chinese one made from soya beans, a brown Siamese one made from fish-salt, a red chilli one that was hot as fire and finally sliced green chilli in vinegar. Anything with chilli in it the Leopard placed close to her own plate and during the next few minutes she took such enormous quantities of pure fire into her mouth that she had to stop every now and then to blow on her tongue to cool it.

Siput remained on all fours for a few moments with her paps (which were offensive to the Leopard’s sight because they were fat and no longer firm and presaged what her own might soon become) squashed together more out of the skimpy white slip than in it; then she slowly drew back onto her heels and as slowly rose to her feet just outside the door. There, having first pulled one shoulder strap up her podgy dark-brown arm she undid her sarong, held it extended in her hands and waggled it from side to side to remove creases and folds, and then did it up again as if she were doing it up forever. And all the time her dark face, fat, fortyish, and disagreeable, but still not really ugly, watched her Mem speculatively.

The Leopard of course was aware that she was being watched, but she feigned not to notice.

She knew what was going on in Siput’s mind. Udom was a growing boy. He had the normal growing boy’s concern to be in at the very beginning of a meal. With that idea in view he had come up to his Mama’s room while she was still dressing, before Bochang had even brought the plates up. But at the present moment, when he ought to have been stuffing himself with good fare, he was sulking downstairs, pretending to read a magazine. It was obvious to Siput that mother and son had had words. But what about? And could she make any capital out of it?

That, the Leopard was quite sure, was the gist of Siput’s thoughts.

There was no love lost between her and this rotund maidservant of hers. Besides being revoltingly fat, Siput was sulky, quarrelsome and expensive. It pained the Leopard that she had to pay a hundred tics a month to such an unlovable creature when Bochang who was good fun and loyal and industrious in her slow muddling way was available for half that amount. The trouble with Siput was that she wasn’t beaten by life yet. She believed that if she lost this job she could get another. She was always threatening to leave. She even sometimes started looking round for a new place. But not very diligently. For, when all was said and done, she was well off in the Leopard’s service. The work was not hard, just washing and ironing for the four of them, keeping their quarters clean, and helping Bochang prepare the food, but that was not the point: she could have got an equally easy job elsewhere for just as good pay if not better. What kept her clinging to this place was the vicarious thrill she got out of serving in a house which contained three such women as the White Leopard, the Black Mamba and the Python. In a dim way the Leopard understood how Siput’s mind worked. All her life had been blameless because her husband had cherished her and supported her until so much of her beauty had gone that she’d lost all chance of going into a brothel, and when he’d finally taken up with someone younger and prettier, someone who wouldn’t presume so much upon old acquaintance as an old wife did, it had been too late for her to take up anything but sewing or washing. Yet she’d always been a woman of normal instincts and she naturally thought she’d missed a lot of the fun in life and now she tried to make up for years of dullness as best she could by living, continuously mildly scandalized, in this house where women were indubitably women …

In addition there was the matter of Udom. As the boy had become more nerty, and his Mama consequently harsher, he had veered away from her to other things—to more nertiness, like smoking, and going on prolonged fishing expeditions, and coming home very late from school and refusing to say where he’d been. She hadn’t realized that he’d veered away in search of sympathy too, and found it. When he pointedly refused to eat with her for a few days and took all his meals downstairs she’d thought his motive was disgust with her, not love of Siput. It was the eels that finally opened her eyes. That day the squabble was particularly violent. It was a Sunday and he’d been out all day from before she was up until when she was getting ready to go to the Bolero. When he’d come in there’d been a great commotion downstairs and she’d found him proudly exhibiting an enormous eel and some smaller ones. His face was shining with pride and joy and Bochang and Siput were making as much fuss of him as if he’d just won first prize in the lottery.

‘Look, Mama, a great big eel. I caught it myself.’

‘I’ll cook it tomorrow,’ Bochang was saying. ‘It will be wonderful curried.’

Without a word to any of them the Leopard had taken the eels from his hand, gone to the door and hurled them into the lane. Returning to the trio she’d burst into a storm of fury. ‘Do you want to bring shame on your Mama?’ she’d yelled at the boy. ‘Do you want all the people in the street to think that your Mama is poor, so poor that she has to send out her little son to fish for eels for her to eat? When I am sick, when I can no longer eff eff eff to keep you clothed and fed and at school, then it will be time for you to go out fishing for eels. Then maybe I shall not be ashamed to see you come home laden with eels, for a hungry belly knows no shame …’

‘Everything I do is wrong,’ he stormed back. ‘I wish I was dead.’And then suddenly he’d started to cry and had buried his head in Siput’s dirty sarong.

Even then the Leopard hadn’t wholly grasped the fact that that dirty sarong was comfort. She’d continued to shout, ‘Never go fishing again, and if you do, give everything you catch to your friends, not to me. Their mothers are not high girls like the White Leopard: doubtless they will accept your gifts without shame.’

Back in her room, trying to get on with her making up, she’d been bothered by tears obscuring her sight. He was so young, he just did what he wanted to do without considering how his pranks would be construed. He’d brought shame on his mother but instead of being repentant … She’d heard the door opened and slammed and her heart had gone cold: perhaps he’d run away for ever … When Bochang had brought up that night’s dress, freshly ironed by Siput, she’d asked, far too soon, far too obviously anxious, where he’d gone …

‘He’s gone nowhere. He’s downstairs with his Mama.’

‘What do you mean, idiot? I am his Mama.’

‘I think that is not so any longer. Once my Mem had a son who loved her very much but she did nothing but scold him. But Siput has borne and lost three sons and her heart is soft.’

‘It is your head that is soft, not her heart, you old buffalo. Your head is so soft today I can’t understand what you say.’

‘I am soft in the head, as Mem says, and moreover I am half-blind, but this much I can see with my poor eyes and understand with my soft head. My Mem is losing a son while her washerwoman gains one.’

She’d screamed at the old fool until her throat could scream no more but all the screaming hadn’t been enough to frighten the terror from her heart.

Why hadn’t she sacked Siput on the spot? The immediate reason had been that there wasn’t time, she was late for the Bolero already. Then there she’d met an old friend and fallen into a mellow mood. Over her third whisky she’d had a brainwave about the door slamming. Of course, Udom or Bochang retrieving the eels! She’d laughed so much that her friend had thought she was drunk already. And very sincerely she’d hoped that no one had forestalled them, for it would have been a pity to waste good food, a bigger pity still to make a gift of it to a complete stranger …

Well, she’d never seen any signs of their feast, but she knew they’d had it. And Siput had stayed on. Stayed on to annoy her on a good many subsequent occasions such as now. Why hadn’t she thrown her out? She was a snake, a fat snake, coiling herself around the innocent heart of a boy …