Mature

Meg had breasts like water balloons only half filled with water but when she danced nobody seemed to care. Once she'd eased off her industrial strength bikini top she rarely let them hang pendulously. Rather she flung herself around so that the breasts developed a life of their own swinging independently of each other and defying any natural laws of physics and geometry. Men would stare. Women would stare. People walking past the bar would feel an irresistible urge to step inside and get a closer look.

A cool warm beer and a dirty minded ugly hooker is all you really need to make an evening turn out perfectly. I'd been tripping from bar to bar to bar enjoying a variety of clamping embraces and under the table gropings before finally holing up in a tiny no stage place well off the beaten track. It was one of those bars where all the women look either well passed their prime or like they'd never had a prime to be passed.

With the dawn a thin sliver of daylight slipped beneath the door introducing unwelcome light into the room. I kissed Gob's behind and switched on the TV. CNN stocks. Donald Duck speaking Thai. A sweet and beautiful girl singing crappy alphabet songs to kids. I couldn't find the porn and imagined all the blondes with their huge breasts crashed out as the cameramen went to get their breakfast. I ended up on a Thai music video channel and lay back.

Having been caught a little short I called room service and ordered condoms and coffee. The condoms were overpriced but the coffee was pretty reasonable. Gob liked her coffee black but felt it needed at least five sugars. As I watched her sitting there completely naked tearing open each sachet and emptying the white crystals into inky black coffee I couldn't help feeling as though I'd stepped into some French existentialist movie about beautiful intelligent young people on a road to nowhere. The fact that neither of us were intelligent or beautiful was neither here nor there.

Gob had worked in the same bar for seven years. Seven years of thrusting her groin against a chrome pole like it brought her close to orgasmic bliss. Seven years sucking cocks of all shapes and sizes; all colours and smells. Seven years of telling every man who fucked her that he was the best. Seven years of seeing the interior decor of hotel rooms but almost never seeing the breakfast menu.

It was a warm and gentle evening out on the Piazza by my apartment. I was surrounded by beautiful women and the air was alive with the gentle song of chirruping cell phones.

The other night, Saturday, I was drifting from bar to bar. I think I was hoping to run into Nam. Three different people had now mentioned seeing her. I don't know what I would have done if I had seen her. Those meetings never work out the way you think they're going to. I imagined us just sitting across from each other in a bar neither of us approaching the other. Then I imagined a different scenario where I was sitting in a bar and she slipped behind me and whispered something enticingly obscene in my ear. Then I saw her sitting with the drunken boyfriend she had tied around her erotic little finger and getting him to start a fight with me.

I started the day with a little red pulse throbbing behind my eyes. A dull persistant hammering ache. Not the finest or most auspicious of beginnings for any day. A pulsating scarlet ache behind the eyes. A gut that felt ready to explode. My dick didn't feel that fantastic either.

The air in my room felt like warm syrup. All around me were the usual sounds of motorcycles entering and leaving the courtyard and the pleasant familiar jingling sound of the couple upstairs throwing bowls at each other. Everything was as it should have been. But then, suddenly, I couldn't breathe. I sat up in bed wheezing and panting and trying to seize at whatever oxygen was left. It felt like a classic phii bhop attack but I knew the real cause.

It was late. The kind of late teetering on the brink of early. Everything was closed down. The bars had been put to sleep hours ago. Sukhumvit Road may have been lined with a few katoey but even those looked ready to pack up and go home. The whole town was close to shutdown. But Foodland was open.

While I was in the shower Kim had turned out the lights and drawn the curtains casting the whole room into darkness. I had to try and mentally reconstruct my own room to avoid bashing my shins into the furniture. The sound of a luuk thung singer blaring from the next room's CD player merged with the sound of cats drawing up battle plans by the garbage shelter but it didn't matter. Neither did the occasional high pitched mosquito whine or the chainsaw-like motorbike and tuk tuk engines coming and going in the courtyard outside. Once on the bed, next to Kim, it was like being in a cocoon. The world outside was nothing.

The next time I saw Kim she was dragging drunks and tourists into one of the more hands-on bars of the Soi Cowboy. She wore a black dress that clung to her figure in all the vital places and, as she'd put her weight back on, there were more of those vital places to cling to. Her hair was cut short in a Louise Brooks kind of bob that framed her face and emphasised her cheekbones. She also seemed to have gained an air of confidence that, earlier on, I would never have thought a part of her. She owned her little piece of the Cowboy like an animal owns its own territory.

I first saw Kim two years earlier in a bar called Sexy Jukebox. It was a ramshackle bar that stood with its back to the railroad tracks on Buckskin Joe's. Every time a train went past or Metallica boomed out on the stereo the walls shook and liquor bottles rattled. The bar hadn't always been called Sexy Jukebox and it's not called Sexy Jukebox now. It had started out as a family bar but the family moved out and it changed hands about five times. I don't know who owns it now but when Kim first went to work there it was visibly run by a woman called Goy. I knew Goy quite well...

The silence and the stillness lasted minutes... Probably it became a game after a minute but we kept it up for a while longer. It was like the child's game where you try and stare each other out without blinking or laughing. But the world seemed to pass in those few moments.

May was a tall girl... Well... Tall for a Thai. About five foot ten. This height was mainly due to her legs. She had these long legs that looked as though they had been artificially stretched as if on some medieval rack. When she walked she walked as if she'd not yet got the hang of having such long limbs, like some creature in the throes of adolescence who had just woken a few mornings ago a little bit further from her feet.