Missing in Thailand - by Debra Barnard - Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The tempter or the tempted,

who sins most?

William Shakespeare, ‘Measure for Measure’

‘He come!’

Ning stuck her head round the crude curtain which served to screen the steamy, fume-laden shack-kitchen from the eating area – plastic tables and chairs, a few grains of rice in the salt pots to counter the humidity, the container of toothpicks exposed to the air’s bugs and flies and dirty little fingers so often seen up nostrils and the plastic holder for paper serviettes which dissolved at the slightest hint of moisture.

‘Who come?’ barked Mai, irritable and hot. The evening was advanced and she hated, truly hated, having to work like this, feeding not farang – foreigners - but her greedy “husband” and his pals. Things had been better than this and she resented the downturn in her lifestyle.

‘Tall farang who come before.’

A smirk flickered across Mai’s taut features. ‘Rollee!’ she muttered. A determined glint darted from her eyes and, with a sharp nod, her mood lifted.

‘Toss,’ Ning said.

‘Toss yourself,’ Mai scoffed, ‘he mine.’

‘No, me have him,’ Ning squealed, feigning a sulk, pouting. ‘Toss,’ she persisted, slapping a 5 baht coin on the back of her left hand.

‘No way,’ the older woman retorted fiercely.

Ning knew her place. She would do as she was told or she would suffer Mai’s wrath.

Ning took the farang’s order. Kop and the others, had sussed-out his name and where he worked weeks ago but he only came in every few months, when his wife was away.

Kop was a pig, lazy and greedy. And he was useless in bed. Too much beer, too many rough Mekong whisky-chasers and too much ya-ba to get it up. She liked sex, she was used to sex and she needed sex. She knew she was on heat right now, despite her irritability, because of her irritability, and she was wet. Oh, to break the boredom, the tedium of cooking, and Kop, and Chiang Mai.

Mai paid special care to Rollee’s food, adding copious pong churot, mono-sodium glutamate, to make it tasty, irresistible. She had an agenda for tonight.

Ning kept his beer-glass filled. Between them they laced the beer with ya-ba, drugs.

A Thai copy of the new drug, Viagra, easily available within the ‘low life’ they lived among - and Kop knew where to get anything - would come later if things looked good. Ning would watch for her nod.

The farang ate and drank, grunting and mumbling as he relaxed, smiling, head nodding on long neck. He was the only westerner in the eatery. He always came in alone, somewhat self-consciously, always slowly with measured step; he was an odd-ball alright. Mai tidied herself, combed her hair which she’d coloured only yesterday. She was 32 and the years of toil as a hooker and part-time cook were beginning to show. Her complexion was less than perfect, the large brown mole, despised by northern Thai beauties, on her left cheek disclosing her hill-tribe origins but her eyes, large mocking eyes, were still her best feature. She pencilled her eyebrows, scratched some colour on her lips, smoothed the skimpy top over her small breasts, tried to disguise the cooking fumes in her clothes with a spray of cheap perfume – and she went out to Laurie.

The sap was already showing signs of intoxication. Kop, her pimp and third “husband” – she wasn’t divorced from the first really - had already called out a welcome and sent over a large bottle of Singha beer to him. The man’s face was unusual, well-honed and spare of surplus flesh, his nose crooked, quirky, his lean cheek-bones flushed already, his eyes close-set, hawkish, under heavy brows. He nodded to Mai in his polite way and, slurring – the beer was working – said in his dreadful Thai that her food was delicious. Mai pulled up the chair opposite Laurie, smirking to her left at Kop who raised an eyebrow of acknowledgement. Over Laurie’s head she gave a curt nod to Ning who obediently brought another beer for the sucker.

‘Enough, enough,’ he said, using the Thai word, lifting his long hands expressively, fingers spread over his glass, his plate. The conspirators giggled but no warmth reflected in their brown-eyed, impassive glances. Ning patted his shoulder and said, ‘One more, Khun Rollee, one more.’ They welcomed him back.

Laurie was feeling exasperated with his work, tired by the graft and the tedium of the different cultures, maddened by the new General Manager, the psychopath who made their life a misery at work, and perplexed by his own behaviour. He knew he should return to England, take a chance on the job market there, settle down again, make Ellen happy; and yet he couldn’t. He suspected he was on the slippery slope; the marriage, which he knew he wasn’t making an effort in, work-wise, Ellen never seeing him and getting damned crotchety because of it; he knew he was entirely to blame. He was driven by money and the security money brought yet it was affecting his health, his mentality and he had no answer for it. A mid-life crisis. Beer was not the answer – but it helped.

How many glasses had he had now? Surely not three? He couldn’t take it. A sixteen hour working day, poor canteen food at lunchtime, then several pints of beer at night. He wanted to say that he should leave but his tongue seemed paralysed. He heard a buzzing in his head. Was he hallucinating? He saw an aura of blue. His shoulders sagged. A limpness flowed through his arms, his wrists, his hands and fingers. A warm tingle pierced knotted muscle as his shoulders were manipulated, his neck caressed. Was he enunciating the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahhs’ of pleasure this tension-reliever gave him or was his imagination playing tricks? He felt, or dreamed, that little hands, four little hands, slipped into his own long, slim ones and determinedly tugged him to a standing position.

‘Whooa,’ his head spun, his long legs were jelly-like. Female giggles and raucous male laughter penetrated the fog of his mind as he wobbled and blundered out onto the rough pavement, tripping and stumbling over the stinking gutter, past the honk-honk and knowing looks of the tuk-tuk drivers…

The room, more a window-less cell, was ill-lit, sparse and cheap, the bed narrow, short and unclean, the air fetid.  

Still in her underwear, Mai sat on one of the two plastic chairs, her legs outstretched, ankles crossed, sulkily picking at her fingernails, the boredom palpable. In the poor light, a glow provided by one cheap table lamp, she was neither seductive nor pretty; a care-worn tramp in a gloomy, seedy room. Her mocking eyes gazed down at the farang, a huge disappointment in one sense but, Mai knew, very valuable for the future, if only for the immediate future. The ya-ba and the tiny bit of Viagra had given her enough time, more than enough time, to do what she had to do. His black leather wallet, protruding from a pocket in his Chinos, had yielded just enough baht, not much but she had enough ‘alternative currency’, to reimburse her, or rather Kop the pig, for the beer, the food and the drugs. Stealing just two 1000 baht notes from his wallet, she had also plucked his company business card and his home address card. Currency enough!

He had been a difficult lay though. Even in his drugged and drunken state he had put up a good fight, honourable bastard. Before he’d passed out she’d heard him try to resist, saying he was ‘too old and past it.’ She’d worked hard, stroking and caressing the places she knew, from experience, most of them liked, if they noticed.

‘N, no, naughty,’ he’d mumbled.

Working quickly, she deftly positioned herself on his erection, sufficient for her opening, slack now after two child-births but tight enough for farang, and had expertly sat on him, her buttocks nestling into his hairy groin, his hip-bones too broad for her slight Asian frame. How she hated these hairy foreigners, hated the way their coarse pubic hairs chafed her moist vagina, making it sore. She would never get used to them. She felt his big hands on her hips as she raised herself, pulled his penis and paused, pushed down, rose, pulled and paused. And she’d tightened her grip, her sphincter muscles taut. At his thrust, though, when he finally threw his head back, groaned and succumbed, his subconscious senses had alerted his conscience, sending signals of danger, and he had pushed her off - or she had lost it. Curse him.

And then he slept.

Sober and angry, she thought to cram every wasted seed into her in the hope that she would have yet another meal-ticket – a passport which would take her from the night-time drudgery of the shabby eatery, to give her and her alone, prestige - clothes, jewels, a mobile ’phone, and possibly another husband. Even one who might soon die!

But the fleeting thought was futile and now she was tired and bored and wanted to be rid of him. She wiggled her toes in annoyance. She put out her foot and nudged his, overhanging the thin mattress, his beige socks still on but one hanging half off, disturbed when she’d pulled his trousers down in her anxious attempts to undress him, seeing already that he was too far gone to be of much use to her, the sock limp as he now was. He lay diagonally across the bed, hands on hairy chest, corpse-like, his legs together. He did not move.

Cat-like, she sneaked into the small spare space, a triangle made by the angle of his legs, towards the bottom of the right side of the bed. From the depths of his sleep he gave a whimper, pained, childlike. He moved, groaned, turned away from her, curled himself up tightly, perilously near the edge. At his stirring, she sprang back to the plastic chair, resumed her pose, waited for his awakening. He remained still, his breathing barely audible.

Time passed.

Behind a crude screen, in the corner of the room, the slow rhythmic plunk, plunk of a dripping tap cut the silence. A whiff of ammonia from the open, squat-style toilet drifted over the air-less room.

Grumpily, the woman lay on the floor and dozed. And then she, too, slept.

Now he was moving and she was awake, alert. She stood up, shivered, shrugged her tense shoulders and waited stealthily in the room’s dark recesses.

He uncurled slowly and lay on his back, the palms of his hands opening loosely on his chest. His eyelids, flickering over leaden eyes, fought a battle between slumber and wakefulness, his joints, stiff and aching, felt solid, immovable, his stomach churned as nausea swept through him. He put a hand to his head as the throbbing in his forehead prevented him from rising. Comprehension at first evaded him and then, suddenly, through bruising pain, fragments of memory returned.

“Jesus Christ!” He still had his shirt on, unbuttoned to the waist but damp and crumpled. And his socks. “God, he’d still got his socks on! Was there a loo?” He didn’t know whether he wanted to pee or puke. His temples throbbed, the blood pounding. “Christ, I feel ill. My head feels as though it’ll break off at my neck,” he thought.

‘What’s the time?’ he mumbled, mouth dry, tongue furry, vision blurred as he tried to peer at his watch in the half-light, could not focus on the luminous dial, blinked, tried again. “Five forty seven, five forty seven – the morning – bloody hell.” His addled brain tried to grasp the magnitude of the situation, the enormity of the horror.

‘Where are my things?’

He felt very ill.

She came towards him, out of the gloom, smirking.

He blinked, blinked again, heavy eyelids scratching blood-shot eyes. “Who is she? Bloody hell, the cook – the cook from the eatery!”

‘There.’

‘Where?’ peering into the gloom of the room, only a sliver of dawn-light slanting in through the broken fins of a ventilator set high up the wall. ‘Where are my trousers?’

‘Here – I put. Worret in pock’t.’ She replied in her pidgin English.

‘Where am I? How did I get here?’

‘Tuk-tuk, I bring. Las’ nigh’ you drun’.’

‘Drunk, I’m never drunk. Where’s my car? What time is it? Christ what a mess! Do you want money? How much?’ he rasped, finding the wallet.

‘I take nuff, Rollee. You ole man, you go home now.’

“I must get out of here,” Laurie screeched to himself, fumbling with his clothes, lurching, unbalanced, dazed, his head throbbing, his bladder near to bursting. “No time for that, I must get out!”

Ill and disoriented he never knew how long it took him to retrace his footsteps - she’d laughed when he asked for help, ‘where are we, where is this place?’ the woman having no further interest in him – and finally reached his car. The streets were empty, the sidewalks unclean, as unclean as he - unkempt, unshaven, unwashed, undone - as he stumbled out of the grimy room, into the morning air, struggling to recall where he had left the vehicle, turning the wrong corner, retracing his steps, thinking back to last night now a lifetime away, what day it was. “Should he be at work?” Past bars, closed now, raucous pop-music silenced, neon doused, tawdry, vulgar, the mis-spellings of sign-writing no longer amusing in the harsh light of day; waste-bins, lid-less, overflowing, dogs scavenging; splatterings of lumpy vomit, cats, delicate noses twitching, cautiously sniffing, bellies brushing pavement, skulking away, feral; a whiff of urine; saffron glimpses as monks trod silently, their silver breakfast bowls glistening in the early light.

Laurie averted his eyes, looked away, shamed, as curious, knowing glances from the few early-risers, and tuk-tuk drivers, who passed him - a care-worn, crumpled farang staggering by - came his way, burning into his conscience.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

And the curious, bleary look from the guard as he passed through the barrier, in this still early morning, at the entrance to the housing estate, to his rented house, his and Ellen’s rented house. Ellen – loyal, fiery but fun, capable and brave. Ellen – black and white, never grey. Trusting Ellen. Ellen in whose vocabulary ‘adultery’ did not feature.

“What have I done? Jesus Christ.”

Sheer, undiluted panic overwhelmed him.

At the same eatery in the sleazy part of town, the following night, Ning stuck her head around the curtain. Business was brisk. Kop’s mates were demanding. It was the end of the month, pay day, and they had money to spend. Suthinee was busy. She was no less irritable. Kop had not been pleased with her and a couple of thousand baht for her work the night before had not placated his ugly, hung-over mood. She guessed he needed more dough for the habit she suspected him of.

‘Why so long?’ he had asked, querulous and aggressive. ‘Why you no come back our room, why you stay him long time? Why you come back morning?’

‘He ole and tired, he take long time,’ she barked, ‘but he work harder than you,’ she added with venom.

Kop’s eyes narrowed.

‘Rawung, careful, Kop, you put too much, I think he die.’

‘What you mean?’

‘Ya-ba too much. He pass-out in tuk-tuk, he sleep all night. I think he die. Be careful.’

Kop shrugged. ‘Mai pen rai – not to worry - he OK.’ There were bigger fish in the sea, Kop knew. He joined his drinking pals.

Ning poked her head into the kitchen. ‘One each tonight.’

‘Arai, what?’

‘One each tonight,’ repeated Ning, chuckling. Suthinee peered through a chink in the curtain.

‘I take blonde, other too fat. Good. Young. Hope he have big cock,’ her laugh was harsh. ‘Something easy tonight. Same routine then,’ she instructed brusquely.

‘Ka, yes,’ replied Ning, knowing that the older woman had given an order.

And so it happened, the same routine. Although Ning was not so lucky and was left wanting, Suthinee’s fortune changed.

Bavarian Kurt had joined his friend, Axel, in Bangkok after the long flight from Munich via Frankfurt. He was decent, staid, dour, preferred soccer to seduction and yearned for a blonde with comfort-cushions for breasts. Someone like Jutta. Not a scrawny Asian brunette.

Axel had kept his promise to his old drinking partner and showed him around Bangkok for a few days before they flew north to Chiang Mai for some more sightseeing and night-time fun. Axel was based in Bangkok but came regularly to Chiang Mai for his business, exporting ceramics. After several years here he was familiar with Thai life. This little eatery wasn’t quite what Kurt had imagined, feeling hungry for a big wurst and a stein, but Axel had said the food was good and near the girlie-bars they would go on to afterwards.

The waitress was obliging and not bad looking. Then the cook came out. Average scrawny build, long, straight hair, nothing special to look at, a large mole on her left cheek. He would call a lady ‘confident’; this female was cocky, brazen, nothing demure about her at all - but his attention was drawn to her eyes – larger than he had noticed on Thai girls before, hard and mocking, yes, mocking eyes. She had made a bee-line for Axel. The waitress, more reticent, attached herself to him. They ate and drank, the girls waited and pawed. Axel was getting under the weather. The heat and exhaustion of working fulltime in Bangkok were taking its toll. Kurt was still a bit jet-lagged but otherwise rested from his vacation. Bavarian beer was no match for the inferior Thai stuff and he was holding his own very well, ‘Jah.’

‘Buddy, I don’t like the way you’re going,’ he said to Axel after a while. ‘Think of Jutta.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ Axel said, extricating Suthinee’s persistent, menacing fingers from under his shirt. ‘This is how they are, all hope, hope for a poke, get used to it, OK? We’ll get going in a minute then you’ll see the other side of the Siamese cat, when we start to leave. Finish your beer.’

‘Jah, well, you drink it, I don’t need it. I guess I’m not stopping for more. I’ll go back past the night market and go to our room, OK? I’ll pass on the strip joint tonight. Be careful, verstehst du?’

‘Spoil-sport but OK, I’ll be back soon,’ growled Axel.

Axel’s head started to spin, to buzz; maybe it was the lights, strung on green plastic wires, devoid of shades, or the crude neon, or his over-indulgence of the beer but suddenly his vision took on a blue hue. Talking in her unusually low voice, encouragingly, coaxingly, she determinedly tugged and guided him over the uneven pavement, he tripping in the wet gutter, towards her room, another room, and she saw with wicked anticipation that his erection bulged against the front of his jeans, causing her own insatiable juices to flow in readiness. Axel felt high, he felt he was looking down on himself from above, or saw himself as the reflection in a mirror. Veins pulsed in his temples. He brushed a hand over the front of his Levi’s, feeling his straining cock; yet he was not in control of it. He felt no passion. He hated himself, hated her more and felt nothing but remorse – remorse for Jutta, pretty Jutta, trusting Jutta, Jutta waiting in Bangkok – remorse which quickly receded as his drugged and drunken state increased and he was on a roller-coaster and couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t get off …

And some hours later, ‘Gut Gott, Liebe Gott, Jutta!’

Suthinee sat, in her skimpy undies, patiently, provocatively astride a plastic chair, her features tweaked into a coy, seductive pose. The evening had been most successful, in all ways, she felt sure.

(End of Chapter 1.)

Debra Barnard

© Debra Barnard. All rights reserved by the author.

ISBN: 974-93040-3-9 

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