She slipped out of her T-shirt and panties, pushed him back on the bed so she could pull his shorts off, straddled him, worked on both his and her private parts until both their bodies were ready for fluid exchange, then reached behind him to find a condom, which she spread wide and slipped on.
Now she eased him inside her. He couldn’t believe it. Exactly five and a half thrusts and he was jerking uncontrollably again. She eased herself off of him, carefully removed the clotted condom, cleaned him again, took the condom to the bathroom, returned, naked, with another of those incredible smiles.
‘Why are you crying, Fred?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fred said.
‘Don’t know?’
‘I think it might be because you’ve just made a fantasy come true, and that scares the living shit out of me.’
She blinked. He’d lost her in his culture shock. ‘You need an interpreter when you go to Isaan?’
‘Oh Christ yes,’ Fred said, wiping his cheeks with a Kleenex.
‘You’ll have to pay my bar fine for as long as it takes.’
‘Whatever,’ Fred said, ‘It’s all on expenses.’
‘Really?’
‘I mean the interpreting, not the sex.’
She pulled on her T-shirt and panties and fished a mobile out of a handbag. She spoke rapidly in Thai, then closed the phone. ‘You have to pay for a week, in advance. Give me the money so I can take it to the mamasan now. Or is a week too long?’
‘How about we make it a year?’ Fred said.
That made her laugh, an old-fashioned belly laugh like his granny used to have. In London they didn’t laugh like that anymore.
‘Eleven hours,’ Fred muttered, looking at his cellphone.
3.
‘D’you love me?’ Fred said.
‘Of course not,’ Lalita said, ‘I hardly know you.’ She smiled. ‘I love your money, though, and the way you’re being so nice to me.’
‘Aren’t your other customers nice to you?’
She thought about it. ‘English are mostly nice, but they drink too much and get hysterical. Germans are too harsh, but okay… Japanese are weird but have tons of dough and- ’
‘Stop,’ Fred said. ‘D’you always have to be so honest?’
‘Why? In your country you’re not honest?’
‘No. We lie all the time.’
‘About what?’
‘Compared to you, everything.’ He let a beat pass, then added: ‘I love you, though.’
‘Liar.’
He’d let her drive the hire car. She explained that there were surely going to be cops to bribe sooner or later, and the bribes would be lower if she was at the wheel, rather than a farang.
‘So, are we near the village where that bloke was murdered?’
‘Not so far, but we’re not going there. We’re going to the village next door.’
‘Why?’
She frowned as if he were retarded. ‘Because at the village where he was murdered they won’t tell us anything. They’ll be afraid of losing face. At the village next door, they’ll tell us everything so the village where he was murdered will lose face.’
‘Got it,’ Fred said.
Paddy fields the dense green of pool tables, ramshackle wood houses on stilts. The roads were almost deserted except for a few pick-up trucks with farm labourers in the back, their faces swathed in cloths and T-shirts against the sun and dust. Lalita reached across to his crotch and squeezed.
‘You feeling horny?’ Fred said.
‘No. I almost never feel horny. I’m just taking care of you. I’m at work, don’t forget.’
‘You’re going to kill me with being so honest.’
‘You want me to shut up?’
‘Oh, no,’ Fred said. ‘I want to die this way. Please, keep up the torture.’
She laughed that laugh. He’d noticed that whenever death was mentioned, it made her laugh. She’d told him it was from Buddhism: death was a kind of joke, once you got the message. Then she asked in a humble tone he’d not heard from her before if he minded if they stopped off for half an hour at her own village, which was on the way. Her grandmother was dying.
‘Sure,’ Fred said, ‘I have a thing about my own granny.’
‘You see her much?’
‘She’s dead.’
Lalita laughed.
He waited while she ran inside a small shack on stilts. Two kids played in a mud patch, an alcoholic grandfather sat and stared at him as if he wanted to kill him, an exhausted middle-aged woman in a worn grey sarong put her hands together to greet him. When Lalita ran out of the shack again, she introduced her mother. Then they were off.
‘Whose are the kids?’ Fred said.
‘My sister’s, but she did her head in with meths and they locked her away in the funny farm.’ She shrugged. ‘Someone has to give them a chance.’
She didn’t say it, she didn’t need to: that bunch of losers in the shack was the reason she sold her body. And they’re not even her kids, Fred thought, with an incredulity that was hard to live with. 4.
Fred said: ‘How come you speak such good English, Lalita?’
His memory of the night before had recovered somewhat. He recalled that apart from her good looks and great body, Lalita had stood out from all the other girls for her mastery of the language-and superior intelligence.
It was entirely possible that she had chosen him rather than the other way around. She could be playing him like a penny whistle-which didn’t bother him at all. He was enjoying the tune.
‘I had a sponsor,’ Lalita said, ‘A sugar daddy as you call it. He was an engineer. English, but spent all his working life in the United States. That’s why I speak the way I do. I lived with him. I mean, he had a big apartment in Bangkok and I lived there full-time. He travelled all over Southeast Asia on his engineering assignments. When he was home, we spoke English, when he was away I studied English-there was nothing else to do. It was part of my contract with him that I wouldn’t take on other customers. I was only nineteen and my brain worked good.’
‘What happened?’
Fred saw something strange in Lalita’s face. He was not used to Thai features. He couldn’t tell if a memory was causing her extreme pain-or something else.
She inhaled heavily. ‘You really want to know what happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, see, he would often be away for months at a time, sometimes six months, and he said his work didn’t allow him to fool around with other women, so when he returned he was pretty horny. I wasn’t enough for him on the first nights back, so I had to arrange a threesome. I was fine with that, because it was always fun and relieved the pressure on me. I would find a girl in one of the bars which had upstairs rooms and I would have to tell her in advance what he wanted, otherwise everyone could get all tangled up and lose the moment. He liked to fuck me doggy-style while she lay underneath pointing the other way so she could lick his balls and his ass.
‘Now, to understand you have to know that while she was licking him he couldn’t move without interrupting her work and bumping her on the nose, so he would stay still and I would move in and out.’ She gave Fred a glance.