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Many years before, a chance assignment had brought me first to her younger sister, when having wandered into the Traditional Thai massage shop for only the second time, near the old Thermae of infamy, vaguely nauseated by the smell of burnt sleaze cordite lingering in my nostrils. I was looking for some kind of simple legit corporeal ablution, where assignation was just, strictly by number and queue.

So we settled for a near daily massages long drawn out and punctuated over three years holidays while I slowly learned that even if she appeared shy and good, that family was complicated. They were three older brothers and wives, who remain indistinct figures even today, and then Da straddled between her older sister Min and younger half-sister Ben. Their mother presided over all this, from Chang Mai, 56 years old, twice widowed and now dark shadowed by angina. She took care of the grandson Tong, only offspring of Da’s failed marriage from nearly a decade earlier.

The complications tentacled even as far as work. Since May, a colleague who had first worked on me there was cousin to her ex bitter half, and as I went often, we had to be careful to avoid her envies.

In retrospect, as a newcomer to the Orient, I may really have loved Da but it is difficult to know exactly. Certainly it is beyond cliché to say so much is uncertain there. Surely too she carried within her the acrid clove memory of betrayal and its fears. Whatever. We reached our high water mark and fell back one rainy week I stayed in Bangkok in the autumn of 2000.

She had already agreed to teach me to massage in a pokey hotel room in City Lodge on the corner of Soi 9 Sukumvit's Road. We met where she was already waiting outside, tense and small among the disinterested week-day morning pedestrian traffic. First though a foolishly necessary morning coffee in Clinton Plaza which doubled as an immersion in the limits of Thai style propriety. Since she evidently didn’t want to be there, was afraid to be seen with a customer, embarrassed to be even thought of as being with one, the falang stigmata.

By the third day she arrived accompanied by Min to play demonstration body, invisible and fat, not beautiful like her sister. Yet, by the fifth we had said goodbye.

I was able to stay away from Thailand for the next 2 years, sensing the Ebola soul dangers in the East. There was pressing business in Europe too. Our son had yet to leave babyhood, post-grad studies beckoned, and above all a need for a slow subterranean leave-taking clamoured imperatively. So by the time I risked return, although an inarticulate barb remained, the vital memory of the three sisters was largely faded. We had settled up-country only making it down to Bangkok for occasional weekends. It was one such when I saw her by chance outside the Plaza at the Sukumvit’s traffic edge, soliciting customers.

The first massage was dishonest, never hinting she was surrogate. And if she knew it she didn’t seem to care, operating that humorous pragmatism I came to know so well. She told me Da had gone back to Chang Mai which wasn’t all but enough to stay within the conventional borders of deceit.

Initially it was strictly service and customer and it is hard to say when we crossed into friendship or even why. I like to think only in part because she had become almost svelte and beautiful and when we moved to the city. Perhaps it was the day a few weeks before when I had come alone to look for shelter and she suggested checking out an apartment in a shabby high-rise a few Sois away from where she lived. We went together, agreed on a mildly swollen Thai price, and her transparency and honour grew on me.

A few weeks later she distinctly put herself out, that late night an African Islamic from the floor below turned off the power and half beat down our door. She walked over alone, through the perilous streets to ably marshal the gang of interested parties, security guard, block manager, policeman even, buzzing around our injury.

Min had loved her first boyfriend but married the second according to her mother’s wishes with a 10000 baht dowry when she was 17 in Chang Mai province. Their son was born less than nine months later. He was mildly handicapped, she having contracted and fought off malaria during the first 12 weeks gestation. They lived an ordinarily rural poor. Farming a little land which flooded too often, and seasonally migrating to work construction in the city. At some astrologically determinable point in her late twenties Da had called her from Bangkok, knowing of their wringing poverty and suggested she join her, working clandestinely at the massage parlour. So she lied to her husband and mother about a job in Robinsons Department Store and headed to the fringes of prostitution in the city. She found a room in Phra Kanong in a condo block where only women and married couples were permitted and started to evolve a viable personal economy.

She lost weight and her natural curiosity kicked in. Soon she spoke English well enough and was attentively courted by some of the exotic occidental men who were passing  through Bangkok. I personally know of an FBI agent seconded to the South East Asia modern opium wars, a retired English engineer who was occasionally accompanied by his son, and even Frank the gentle Belgian octogenarian. It was only he who nearly pierced her carapace before dying in Bumrumgrad, his family cruelly obstructing her last visits.

But sometimes she almost went too far. One day, I remember, flustered, she told me how the night before, after drinking at The Coliseum, Mario, an amorous unrequited Italian engineer, had exasperatedly frog marched her to the BTS. She had only just escaped by luring him the wrong side of the electronic ticket barrier moments before their love train arrived. There were many other men but she never succumbed. Rather, for 5 days every month went home to clean the farmhouse and minister her family

I visited her professionally a couple of times a week and while we strictly abstained I often wondered about sex and her customers. She always explained patiently; she would never initiate or give sign of what was available, but for the bolder ones, “Ok, feeling same same doctor.” A faint sadness flickering across her face. We grew extraordinarily close. One day I realized she was my best friend and was afraid she might fall.

Our most dangerous moment came the only time she took me to her hostel room on Suk.69. Strange men were not allowed and she had to sneak me past the grumpy-looking concierge. Once inside though, we didn’t find our stride, chatting awkwardly among the disposable detritus of a city life unsparingly displayed and her sad underwear dangling from plastic hangers. I was definitely interloper and soon enough she regretted the invitation. We scuttled back toward our comfort zone.

Safely, on Thursdays, her day off, she would often call by on her early morning way back from Phra Kanong Market and suggest we go to the Wat on Suk 77. We’d take a Klong Long tail, dodging the drops of filthy water before arriving and having the same, if cleaner, stuff thrown over us by the same monk each time.

There too we always consulted the temple fortune teller who, one day, guardedly coded dared tell us that my go-go queen was a gold-digger long before I had even confided to Min of her existence. And later, being told when the queen was hospitalized in The Lerdsin, after the motorcycle accident, she pinned the badge of accomplice discreetly beneath her lapel.

This arcadia could have gone on forever. We never found grounds for discord until the photo. This was the only print. I had seen it in her room. A degrading image of her as pre-nuptial 17 year old, posed in her wedding dress at a make-shift shrine. Catherine had suggested she could get it copied at the Emporium. Min, knowing little of modern sorcery, agreed. One evening, pummelling finished, she shyly gave it me to pass on. The thing was Catherine was extraordinarily busy in those days; her work a mess and our son furiously alive. She put it wearily somewhere on her table with a barely a word.

Weeks later when I awoke to the problem we searched and searched.

And so came about our first hiatus, disproportionate and hardly merited, which, as luck would have it, happened about the time, I was buying my go-go queen out of the bar. Just when I most needed good advice…..

 

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