A Woman of Bangkok (25 page)

Outside the revolving doors she stood undecided for a minute. For one thing it was always good policy to wait a little and see if anyone followed you out. For another she wasn’t sure what to do next. She’d intended to spend about an hour in the Singsong, then study handbags, then buy a magazine and go home and read. Well, that was one thing she was definitely
not
going to do now: supposing Dick went to her house he must not find her there meekly awaiting his appearance. Handbags would be depressing objects for contemplation too, since they’d only remind her of the miscarriage of her plans for Wretch. She’d have to think of something else to kill time, if she could.

She stopped and looked up and down the street for inspiration but it only confused her further. It was choked with the usual traffic; overloaded, lopsided buses with battered tinwork and radiators pouring steam and water; wooden-wheeled rickshaws tugged by Chinese men in wheel-like hats, their black shirts plastered to their sweating shoulders and their black pants rolled up high on their knotted thighs; sleek luxurious private cars transporting the rich from homes that lacked nothing the heart could desire to resorts where they could throw away their inexhaustible wealth;
samlors
with strident bells; bicycles, trams, motor-scooters—everything except bullock-carts, it seemed … (Oh if only she could go back to the country once more where the bullock carts creaked through the forest—the ambling bullocks with their necks bowed under the massive beam, and the carter sprawled on top of his load, cattle and man alike in a heavenly dream, a million miles away from pain and racket and jealousies and unfulfilled desires!) … For here peace was impossible. The pavements were no less crowded than the road; the shops obtruded their wares upon them; in every shaded nook were stalls for the sale of mangoes, noodles, dried squid and lottery tickets; little naked urchins of both sexes went dodging and shrieking amongst the forest of legs. There were male legs in shorts or trousers or Indian
dhotis;
female legs sprouting naked from the hems of neat blue western skirts, or swathed in
passin
that made the road a rainbow, or merely hinted at in Chinese pyjamas of shimmering silk … And everywhere was a roar of voices that even the chorus of horns and grinding gears could not completely drown—everyone trying to make his own little individual voice heard above the universal thunder. Suddenly, the racket was overpowering and she turned giddy …

She moved into the shade. She stood studying the lottery tickets on a folding table while she recovered. It was silly to have got so angry. It was bad for you when it was hot.

She idly thumbed through the booklets. She couldn’t find anything attractive. 344193. 601995. 838371. None of them was particularly shapely. None of them struck her immediately as a number with a good chance.

‘How much?’ she asked the woman, for something to say.

The woman told her, staring: surely everyone in the world knew the weekly state lottery tickets were ten tics! She was a country type, this woman, very brown, with a roughened face but permed hair. She had a baby girl in her lap. Her dirty white slip was pulled up, and she was absent-mindedly massaging one breast. When the baby kicked and cried, she automatically lifted it into position. It sucked briefly, then pulled its head away and bawled. A pearl formed on the nipple and clung there, trembling.

The Leopard said, ‘It is a beautiful child.’ Actually she thought it was ugly. It was rather thin and completely bald. It was not half so beautiful as Mam, Udom’s sister, had been. ‘Why does it cry so much?’

‘The day is so hot.’

‘But not here. You sit in a cool place. There is a constant breeze.’

‘Babies always cry.’

‘But not without reason. Everyone likes to be happy. If one is without pain or trouble one laughs all the time. That is as true of babies as it is of adults. Or puppies.’ (Chokchai). ‘Or even birds, I imagine.’ (Had Chokchai come out from behind the water-vat yet?)

‘Does Madame know she has a stain on her trousers?’

The Leopard glanced down with annoyance. It was true. She must have done it when she knocked the coffee over. There was a string of brown blobs across the dazzling white. It looked dreadful. But there was nothing she could do about it now. It had already dried.

The Leopard threw down the booklets and her lips tightened. What was the use of her buying lottery tickets? She never had any luck. She’d never had any since the day she left home.

As she moved away, the woman was trying to make the baby suck again. That had been the first sign of fat little Mam’s decline, when she’d begun to refuse the breast.

Luck is like money—to him who already has plenty, more is given. The Lord Buddha dispenses it, meting out much to those whom he thinks merit it, withholding it from those who by their acts displease him. But the trouble is that a mere woman cannot understand the workings of the divine mind. She herself for instance was a good woman, and the Buddha must know that; she never did anything wrong for the sake of doing it, but only to make money or because some evil spirit had temporarily taken control of her. Yet all her life her luck had been bad, as if the Buddha disliked her.

Was there ever going to be a change in her fate? Most of the time she faced the future unflinchingly, knowing it would be grim, and increasingly grim. But once in a while she liked to amuse herself with happier dreams. And it occurred to her now that she hadn’t been to a fortune-teller for weeks …

She signalled for a
samlor
, and five hurled themselves at her. She sized them up in her usual lightning style, selecting the best combination of man and vehicle just as at the Bolero she would select the best combination of man and money. The vehicle she got was sound enough though short on chromium and coloured lights. The man was rather old but he looked the hard-pedalling type and fairly tidy.

She asked the price and gasped at it and suggested an amendment and of course the man knew the amendment was correct and accepted it at once without rancour. She got in and arranged her legs to one side as if she’d got skirts on and they set off.

It was quite a long way to the fortune-teller’s she’d chosen. The
samlor-
boy was fast, daringly dodging in and out of danger, and continuously ringing his bell, as if trying to draw attention to himself with this dazzling cargo behind him. She assisted all she could with the navigation but he took no notice of anything she said. She also kept a bright eye on the shops, pedestrians, cars, and passengers in other
samlors
, for she was eternally vigilant, eternally on the hunt; you never knew when a chance to do yourself a bit of good would present itself.

Yet all the time she couldn’t keep the memory of that thin bawling baby from troubling her. And all the time it reminded her of another little golden-brown baby she had loved.

Mam would have been twelve or thirteen by now. That is the age when a mother really has to take her daughter in hand. Up till now she would have been a child, sexless, hardly distinguishable from a boy, always in mischief, like Udom, unconscious of herself, climbing trees to get her own green mangoes and blossoms and cicadas, never thinking of inducing the boys to fetch them for her. But at thirteen a girl starts to look at herself in the glass. By then she has learned all the useful stuff that a schoolteacher can impart, how to read and write and add up baht and satang. By then she is ready for the real education which only an experienced woman can give her. The Leopard was certain that no one could train a daughter better than she would have done. No daughter of hers would ever have suffered want. She’d have taught her how to make money and be happy. If she’d fancied marriage (and most girls did, for a start) she’d have made the right sort of marriages, to men who could have given her cars and prestige and set her up in businesses; and later, when they left her, she’d have known how to fix things so that her future needs were looked after. Mam wouldn’t have got married to men like Keo and Pichar, her own second and third husbands, the one already married to a bad woman and the other a drunkard. Nor would she ever have become a dancing-girl. She’d have lived an easy life and at forty—which was to say almost another thirty years on—she’d still have been miraculously beautiful. She might even have married a millionaire by that time. And then her Mama could have lived with her in comfort during the last days.

Udom was wonderful of course but a son was not like a daughter. A son never seemed to belong to his mother, to be part of her, in the same intimate, inalienable way that a daughter did. He was male and therefore he was apt to do incomprehensible things, and the bigger he got the further away he moved into a sort of fog. He went fishing all day for eels with very low naughty boys and his highest desire was to drive a
motor-samlor
. ‘Mama, I know where you can buy one for me, only three thousand tics.’ What sort of future was there in that? A man had to be born rich, it seemed, or the chances were he’d die poor. He even seemed to prefer it that way. But the most penniless girl could always better herself if she’d been taught by her mother how. All that was required was beauty, plus, if possible, a predilection for a life of pleasure, wit, charm, and brains—or at least hardheadedness. All these Mam would have had without a doubt. And throughout a splendid career she would have done credit to her Mama.

The
samlor
-boy screwed round on his saddle, still pedalling. ‘Is this the road Madame wants?’

‘Yes. Stop here.’

The prophet was snoring on a bench at the back of his office. Even the stars hadn’t been able to foresee a client on such a hot afternoon and he awoke with great reluctance. Then he was hawking and spitting for five minutes behind the curtain and between spits he cursed and grumbled a great deal. She waited tranquilly. At least it was cool in the darkened office. A small boy brought her a glass of iced tea. And the charts and globes and wheels of fortune were fascinating.

Finally the seer shuffled in. His spirits visibly rose when he saw what his client was like.

‘You were sleeping, doctor?’

‘Never mind. It is always a delight to be awakened by a beauteous woman.’

‘But not such a delight as to go to sleep with one, eh?’

They both laughed. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Then he spat juicily on the floor, and seated himself opposite her across a loose-jointed table.

He was a fat dwarf of a man with close-cropped skull and a face, that was more shrewd than mystical. His ears were enormous, and of course it was primarily they that inspired her confidence, for everyone knows that big ears with fat jutting lobes to them denote infinite wisdom—the Buddha has ears like that too, as you can see in every temple. Moreover, this man had a wart on his chin, and out of it were growing a few whiskers which had never been shaved; they were now about four inches long, and they denoted wisdom too, also good luck. In fact the man, in spite of his short fat body and soiled singlet and shorts, was plainly endowed with supernatural gifts, and she ought to come to see him more often. But he lived rather far from her house—at least five tics by a
samlor
. And since you had to pay him at least ten tics if you wanted a reliable forecast …

She extracted that much from her bag and laid it on the table.

The seer joined his palms under his chin and did a moderate obeisance to her, but he didn’t deign to pick the money up—not yet. ‘What does Madame wish to know?’

‘The future.’

She stretched her hand across the table and he got hold of it with his, which was hot and rather grimy. He pored over it for a considerable time. Eventually he heaved a sigh. ‘Madame has suffered greatly.’ His voice was deep with sympathy.

She thought his fingers had stiffened on hers until she realized it was hers in his. She relaxed them but remained moved. Practically all the doctors began by telling her this, and it never failed to impress her. For she was absolutely certain that her fundamental unhappiness did not show in her appearance. A tragic-looking dancing-girl would get nowhere. The truth could only be written in her palm, and there, apparently, it was written as clearly as the sentences in a confession—for those who could read the script.

He went on, his voice still deep, in measured cadences, rather priest-like, ‘There have been periods of distressing poverty. There have been periods of terrifying sickness. There have been periods of friction with relatives. There has been the infidelity of loved ones. There has been a most unhappy marriage—’

‘Two.’

He turned her palm towards the door and examined it closely, ‘Yes, two,’ he concurred. He emitted another sigh, this one tremendous. ‘Truly the sufferings of some women—’

But this was just wasting time. ‘I know you can read my past, Doctor,’ she said; ‘you’ve read it before. But I have given you these ten tics’—she picked up the note and put it down again—‘to tell me about the future. And please will you make haste, as I want to go to the movie at four o’clock.’

‘At Chalerm Krung?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is only a minute’s walk away.’ He returned to his studies for a time, then looked up at her. ‘Much is revealed here to such a man as myself. What in particular does Madame wish to know?’

She could hardly control her exasperation. He shouldn’t be hedging like this. For ten tics—

He must have sensed her impatience, for he went on rather hastily, ‘Many are the women who come to me asking what joys and afflictions will be theirs in the days to come, and I tell them the truth as I see it. But Madame is not like those women. They are poor, but Madame can afford jewels and fine clothes. They are sick, but Madame is in the best of health. They are tormented by faithless husbands, or jealous husbands, or cruel husbands, or impotent ones, or they are temporarily husbandless and anxious; but Madame (I see from her hand) is indifferent to husbands, jealous, faithful, past or to come. There is much in this hand which is of consuming interest, but I am at a loss to understand why Madame desires to have time’s secrets divulged. She has so much—what more can she possibly desire? Or if she fears—what can she possibly fear?’