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I saw her each day on Khao San Road. In her late fifties but maybe younger. It's hard to tell after the harsh Asian sun have burned a skin to a leathery darkness. She wandered around wearing ancient flipflops, loose blue jeans and a looser blue-grey shirt with a neck as wide as the blades of her shoulders. Her feet were usually black with soot and dust but she didn't smell. Her hair was matted and thick but lacking any grey. Her features scored with the lines of age and her teeth only half present but she didn't seem to think much about this. When she walked she walked as if she was the Queen of Bangkok. The most beautiful girl in town. There was a swing to her hips as if she was still the good time girl breaking the hearts of GI's on R & R. Sending them back to the war with dreams of her sweet young flesh. Of course at times she would laugh at herself and her lack of beauty like a crone knowing full well that her looks had vanished but she played a game for herself and everyone else that she was still the dream date. Thais are not always kind with their words. At times they would cast some remark about her to her face that probably stung but she bore it with the grace of a superior being. The fact that when she leaned forward her shirt opened revealing not shapely breasts but udders that looked as though the flesh had been sucked away through the teat was not her concern. If someone made a remark about this it was probably just that they were jealous because once she had been so beautiful and her beauty was such that they would never know.

Not that anyone treated her as a madwoman. She was an eccentric. A character. And people would often ask her to eat with them.

One day after a cop out breakfast at Buddy's I walked into the narrow curling alleyway that led from Khao San Road to Rambutri Road and she came up to me and hurled herself at me embracing me tightly and kissing my chest. "I love you" she said. "I love you... I go with you for fifty baht."

"Sorry... I've just had breakfast. Maybe another time."

"But I love you now." She said and kissed me again and again on the chest before leaning her head on my chest.

"Pba... Pba..." She said nodding at me. "Pay duay." Her grip on me was like a vice. Age had certainly not made her feeble.

"Sorry... I would go with you.... But I`d be afraid you might break my heart."

At this she let me go and cackled. She looked after me as I walked on. "Never mind... Maybe tomorrow."

"Yeah... Maybe tomorrow." I said... Mildly shocked to have been accosted but accepting that this was part of being in Bangkok. I checked my wallet just in case and immediately hated myself for thinking that her game had some ulterior motive.

I looked back at her as she walked on away as if there was another man around the corner who would happily take her to his bed. Her walk swaggered and I thought, for a second, I saw the ghost of a younger women imposed over her.

I never really thought about this much. I was still new to it all then. I suppose I thought she was just some madwoman swimming in a mental landscape of white lies and illusions. But who knows. Maybe she was the Queen of Bangkok.