Текст книги "Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1"

Автор книги: O Thiam Chin

Соавторы: Stephen Leather,Alison Lester,John Burdett,Aaron Ang,Hari Kumar,Yusuf Martin,Christopher Mooney-Singh,Jonathan Lim,Erich Sysak,Annabel Pagunsan
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

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 daddyas 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.

‘Okay,’ Fred said.

‘So, one night it was all going perfectly. She kept on licking and I kept on thrusting with my butt, except that it went on for a long time and he wasn’t groaning the way he usually did. At first, I didn’t think anything usual was happening because he’d taken a whole Viagra and was going to be stiff for hours anyway.

‘I guess we went on like that for maybe twenty-five minutes or more, waiting for a tell-tale groan or two, and I was starting to get dry and her tongue was starting to ache before we realized he was having a seizure and couldn’t speak or move. So we both got out from under him, but by the time we laid him on his back he was dead. You could say we’d been having sex with a corpse.’

Startled, Fred stared at her. She was biting her tongue.

‘We ran to tell the mamasan, who came up and said we had to drag him downstairs because she wasn’t supposed to rent out rooms for sex and she wanted it to look straight before she called the cops. But before we dragged him downstairs, she had to close the bar. So we did and the cops came and called for an ambulance and we were left with just us girls in the bar.’

‘Okay.’

Lalita’s face was trembling uncontrollably. For a moment, Fred wondered if she, too, was not having a seizure. Tears started to stream down her face. Now she exploded.

‘It was just so fucking funny-all we girls and the mamasanhad a party all night and drank the bar dry. I mean, out-of-control funny and shocking, too, which made it even more funny.’ She struggled to keep her hands on the wheel in the grip of a prolonged belly laugh that caused her breasts to bounce and her shoulders to shudder.

Fred gave her a few beats to recover. ‘You weren’t sad in any way?’

She caught her breath. ‘Why? He was a nice guy and had a great life, but how long was he going to live anyway? He was already fifty-six. Better to go that way than in a wheelchair sucking on an oxygen tube.’

‘Right,’ Fred said, scratching his jaw.

She flashed him a glance. ‘What’s the matter?’

Fred wasn’t entirely sure what the matter was. After a couple of minutes he said: ‘I think I’m the opposite to that bloke. I think I’ve been dead all my life and I’m only just coming alive.’

‘Maybe you’re not so different,’ Lalita said. ‘He told me he played it straight until he was thirty, followed all the rules and married a farangfeminist who took everything including the kids. That’s when he saw the light.’

‘Of course, KhunJames Conway got shot: he was an asshole,’ the village headman said; at least, that was how Lalita interpreted his words-freely, Fred suspected. ‘He treated his wife like some kind of slave and he was in a bad mood all the time, always complaining. He had a drink problem and spent all his time at the bar. In the end they didn’t bother with cansof beer, they served him with packs of twelve.

‘He was an arrogant shit, always yelling and criticizing Thailand. How that guy could bitch! It was amazing. He could moan for hours about a cockroach crawling across the floor, on and on and on like a buffalo chewing grass. We know we’re poor and low class, but he didn’t have to rub it in like that. And he was a know-all-told the villagers how to do everything, even told them how to live. And he was insulting about Buddhism.

‘His wife did her best for the first year. She was very patient and she’s young, only twenty-three now. Then she lost interest and went over to her uncle’s place to socialize with her cousins.’

‘She was unfaithful to him?’ Fred asked.

‘Of course not. She married him properly, village ceremony and the legal thing, both. Isaan women take that very seriously.’

‘Do you know who shot him?’

The headman shrugged. ‘Who would know such a thing? Anyone in that village would have shot him if they had the chance. They’re quite primitive over there. Maybe someone just happened to have a gun when they saw him walking down the street-a kind of accident, if you see what I mean. Or maybe they drew lots.’

‘What about the police investigation?’

The headman stared at Lalita and made a gesture toward Fred, then snapped out something in Thai: ‘What investigation? Why would the police be interested? He was going to get himself killed wherever he went, and if someone’s caught, they will bribe the police chief, so nobody will ever know who did it.’

Now both the headman and Lalita looked at Fred as if he were retarded.

Fred didn’t know why he was enjoying it. ‘So he just got wasted for being an asshole?’ Fred summed up.

‘Right,’ Lalita said, not bothering to refer to the headman.

Fred did his professional duty and checked out the village where James Conway was shot, even visited the Sino-Alicante monstrosity the Englishman had built with its garish green tiles, blinding white walls and stark blue swimming pool.

They went on to the bar where he drank, the spot where he died. Nobody in the village would talk, not even to the point of saying where Conway’s widow was now.

But Fred knew he was only going through the motions. When his mobile whooshed with a message from Penny ( Where are you Sugarplum? Look, I know I’ve been a bit standoffish, but I’m coming round, give me time and I’m yours, okay? Just don’t go needy on me-you have that needy thing, frankly, and it scares me-I have to be all about me right now, that’s all, nothing else in the way), he muttered something obscene and deleted the message.

He’d already written the Conway story in his head. He was clever with words and would make the investigative reporting good and noir, but the message was plain for anyone with a brain: Jerk had it coming.He also knew how he would end the report: By the way, I resign. Then he walked with Lalita through the village to a meadow that sloped gently down to a bubbling brook.

‘Any land for sale here?’ Fred said.

‘Plenty. If you’re serious, we should go back to Bangkok, then I’ll return alone to negotiate-you will get a better price that way.’

‘All in your name, of course?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘I want the house in wood on stilts. What about the car?’

‘It will be mine too; you can’t register in your name with a tourist visa.

Don’t do it if you’re scared.’

‘I’m not,’ Fred said. ‘But if I turn into an asshole, don’t shoot me yourself. Let someone else do it. I wouldn’t want you to do jail time for a selfish slob like me.’ He thought he was making a joke, but his eyes teared.

Lalita was silent and frowning for a long moment. ‘You really can love me that quick?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Fred said, then bellowed at the sky, ‘HEAD OVER EFFIN HEELS, DARLING-as my granny used to say.’

* * *

He checked his mobile. Twenty three hours and forty-one minutes since he’d landed.

AQUA-SUBCULTURE
Lee Ee Leen, Malaysia

I sold beautiful curiosities in my shop, so it was only fitting that one walked in.

However, it was not an antiques shop. My merchandise was a living example of years of human manipulation in enhancing specific genetic traits in fish.

I stocked common goldfish, black goldfish supposed to guard the family home from bad chi, calicos, neon tetras, comets and bubble-eyed imported specimens. I rented a corner lot squeezed next to a dim sum restaurant in a neighbourhood shopping mall; contrary to what you may have overheard in the management office, my fish did not end up as fillings in the wantons served up for the lunchtime crowd. A week after I had expanded the shop to include marine fish, Andie sauntered through the door.

I tried not to stare at her. Beautiful women are often defensive and accompanied by protective items such as boyfriends and husbands. But she was alone, a towering, slim beauty whose physique almost blended in with the narrow shelves that overlooked the reef tank. With a Harley-Davidson biker’s cap tilted over her face, she lured me out from behind the counter.

‘How much?’ She tapped the glass of the tank to indicate the black-and-white cleaner wrasse, darting around the bigger fish in the tank like harried waiters. For a natural tank janitor and a collector’s item, I recommended a cleaner shrimp, a miniature automaton coloured like a barbershop pole and equipped with six jointed legs.

‘I am not a beginner,’ she stated in a lilting accent that was definitely not local. Her green contact lenses flashed in the fluorescent light. I was naive to think she was referring to her fish-keeping experience.

‘Come back in three days. Those wrasse are reserved.’ I lied.

Three days later, when I arrived at my shop, she was standing outside the shutter at a quarter to eleven. With those narrow hips wrapped in tight snakeskin jeans, she looked like a boy when viewed from behind. When she turned at the sound of my jangling keys, I saw her breasts constricted under a Boy London T-shirt. ‘Please wait outside, miss.’

I learnt her name after I had bagged a cleaner wrasse. The fish flailed as I handed her the plastic bag ‘It only has one hour before it suffocates.’

‘Kinky,’ she muttered as she took the bag. She was not wearing the green contact lenses this morning. I preferred her eyes naturally tawny. She told me her name because she was fed up with my calling her ‘Miss’ as if I were giving inept instructions to an artillery unit.

‘Andie,’ she said. ‘Like the actress, Andie Macdowell.’ She paused and waited for my response, as if I had flubbed a line of dialogue.

‘I wasn’t named after someone famous.’ I told her after some hesitation. I wished I was called Jacques as an alternative to my pedestrian moniker, Jack.

When I was young, I saw a documentary on TV about Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer. But local mispronunciation would flub the Gallic inflection of Jacques, and make it sound more like Jock.

Andie laughed and removed her biker cap. Her black hair fell to the waistband of her jeans. She looked like a mermaid, the black tresses and their green iridescence shimmering above the scaly fauxsnakeskin.

We met under the fibreglass model of a whale shark in the aquaria in Kuala Lumpur City Centre. I suggested the trip as a natural progression of shared interests. The aquaria were divided into biotopes: coral reef, Amazon River, Malaysian rainforest and mangrove swamp. A tunnel lit by neon-blue track lights connected each biotope.

‘Arapaimas mate for life,’ I point out to Andie at the Amazon River tank.

Two behemoths drift past us in the green water, their bony heads etched with curlicues and ridged scars.

‘Fools.’ She set her lips together in a compressed line.

‘Sea slugs are hermaphrodites-but can’t self-fertilize. They still need a partner,’ Andie informed me as she pressed her palm on the reinforced glass of the cylinder tank for invertebrates. A specimen unfurled its fuchsia plumes as it clambered over a Venus’ Flower Basket, a glassy hollow sponge that imprisons a pair of male and female shrimp for life.

We followed yellow arrows plastered to the wall of the tunnel to the special aquaria exhibit of the month-Australian sea snakes. A large open tank was covered with mesh wire, flanked by signs that unnecessarily warned visitors not to put their hands inside the tank. I peered through the wire and saw two banded sea snakes entwined in a tight double helix, their bodies rippling together in gentle languor. Inspired by this demonstration, Andie slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed until I jerked in pain.

I guided Andie to the shark tank, expecting a little more tenderness from her. A nurse shark burrowed its snout into the sand, scavenging for leftovers.

The PA crackled and a voice announced feeding time. Kids rushed to the glass as a diver descended into the tank clutching a wire mesh bag of frozen fish. The diver dealt out the fish like an underwater Jesus feeding the five thousand; the food in the bag did not run out.

Aware of his audience, the diver let his hand linger in the maw of a black-tip reef shark to the shrieks of alarm from the children. Andie smiled at this spectacle, her lips stretched back, revealing teeth that overcrowded her mouth. She was all torpedo sleekness in a grey, sleeveless dress.

We exited the aquaria and flowed into the lunchtime crowd.

Andie stayed in a service apartment opposite KLCC. A basket of fruit on the coffee table enhanced the sparseness of the living room. I noted the absence of an aquarium.

‘What did you do with the wrasse?’

‘I bought it as a gift.’ She waved her hand around as if the question were lingering cigarette smoke and changed the subject. ‘Are you hungry?’

We phoned for sushi from a Japanese restaurant near KLCC that provided delivery. Our food would arrive in thirty minutes. Andie selected a pomegranate from the fruit basket. As she started peeling away the skin of the fruit, she told me a story.

A beautiful girl was born to a Thai mother and Swiss father. Her father left not long after she was born. When the girl came of age, she found out that she was different from her friends. She looked like a girl, but was not one on the inside.

‘How so?’ I asked Andie.

‘She can’t have children. She has no womb,’ Andie replied, and with the sudden shift to present tense, I realized she was talking about herself. Andie had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome; her body had resisted the development into a male by remaining stubbornly feminine. She was not a transsexual and she hated the term ‘intersex’.

‘I’m not a freak!’ Andie ranted, ‘I’m not caught between the two sexes.

Males and females are the ones who are strange, because they are the ones who are incomplete. Women are always searching for their other halves and all that magazine bullshit.’

Andie took a deep breath, piled the pomegranate seeds into a glass bowl and joined me on the sofa. She put her head in my lap and asked me to drop the seeds into her mouth. I asked her what I had done to earn this pleasure.

‘I just spent a whole afternoon with you,’ she smiled up at me. ‘And you’re the first guy I’ve met around here who doesn’t ask dumb questions about me. You live in the “now”. Suppose it comes from watching fish all the time.’

The seeds burst with a tart pop. As the juice spilled, it stained my fingertips scarlet. Like the diver with the shark, I let my fingers remain between her lips for a second too long. She sucked and nipped the pads of my finger, not quite playful. If she drew any of my blood, it mingled with the juice.

Over one of our sushi dinners, I mentioned mating to Andie, about how marine creatures did not go through the awkwardness of sex on dry land.

When she had cleared her plate, she went to the bathroom. Andie called for me after ten minutes. I heard the taps running from outside and knocked on the bathroom door.

She poured in the bath salts and the foam and issued me instructions:

‘Don’t turn around until I say so.’

I heard the taps running, water gushing out. Inspired, I invented a name for a new cocktail: ‘Sex in the Bath’. Foam spilled over the rim on the bathtub and drifted over to my bare feet.

‘You can look now.’

Andie had skimmed off a layer of thick foam and fashioned a bikini out of it: bubbles shining on her wet skin like sequins sewn onto a body stocking.

The water sloshed around as I climbed inside the tub. I lifted aside a handful of wet hair pressed against her shoulder blades, strands of kelp left on white sand at high tide. The strap of lather on one shoulder had split. I nipped and rasped my teeth along the ridge of a collarbone until I reached the notch at the base of her neck. I dipped my tongue in, the skin tasting salty the same as the mussels at dinner a few hours before. The rest of the makeshift bra had dissolved, exposing her tiny rosewood nipples. My hand reached between her thighs and sought out her niche, fingers discovering that her hole was as shallow as a navel. Andie gasped and shoved me back with the contained violence of a self-defence class. We slid in rhythm against the wall of the tub. Male sea snakes cannot disengage from females until mating is complete.

My livingroom had a built-in marine aquarium, equipped with backlit glass, harsh and vivid like a screensaver. The cleaner shrimp from my shop were servicing a blue-striped angelfish.

‘Humans think they can study animals in tanks and cages, and put them into categories.’

Dressed in a terry-wrap robe, Andie walked over to the window, her profile slashed into shadows by the Venetian blinds. Her rants began like our lovemaking, a sharp tangential stab in a random location, growing in intensity as she located an available target.

I tried to distract her. I pointed to the aquarium. ‘Are you talking about my fish?’

‘You make them sound like they’re your property.’

I went over and put my arms around her to soothe her displeasure.

‘You don’t own me-I’m not one of the fish in your shop.’

‘I have a duty to my shop.’

‘Your shop is your property, which has its own set of conditions. She loosed the belt on the robe and opened it before taking my hand and pressing it on her soft breast, ‘Duty is unconditional. When you’re with me, you are beyond all that.’

‘No.’ I struggled to deny my body’s responses. ‘Can we talk about you?

Or us??’

Andie rolled her eyes at me and pushed me back towards the sofa.

‘Remember the deal, Jack? You don’t ask dumb questions about me or anything. We enjoy what we can when we can.’

On the sofa, the bathrobe fell down around Andie as she climbed above me, a goddess holding up the canopy of the night sky with her body. It was dim under her robe as the moist velvets of our mouths mingled. When she placed her mouth around what she humourously called my ‘seahorse’, I forgot about duty or business.

Andie was right; my shop was my property and my duty although I had been neglecting it. Dead live food drifted in plastic basins, air pumps broke down and filters clogged up with algae and gave off the metallic tang of nitrates.

My courtesy transformed into curtness with customers. As families waited for a table outside the dim sum restaurant, they allowed their children to wander into my shop. I shooed them away with a broomstick, annoyed that these conventional lives and their offspring had intruded into my floating world.

A man entered the shop, tall and white-haired, his skin so tanned that it gave off a violet lustre in the strip lights of the fish tanks. His appearance attested to a life spent under the sun. The juxtaposition was odd; what was his interest in an indoor hobby like aquarium fish-keeping? I realized the connection when he put a plastic bag on the counter; the cleaner wrasse was swimming inside.

‘I’m returning the wrasse. My wife told me she bought it from here,’ he said with a faint European accent.

I did not answer and tightened my grip on the broom handle. Andie had lied to me about her marital status. Deceived as I was, I had no desire to be killed by a jealous husband.

‘Okay, relax.’ He held up a gnarled hand to assuage me. ‘My ex-wife.

Well, not until she signs the papers. If she signs them.’

I waited for him to get interrogative. Would he ask me to step outside for a fistfight in front of the dim sum restaurant? When I still did not speak, he said, ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘Andie has no real friends in KL. I suggested a change of scene to her.

We even bought a studio apartment in Mont Kiara last year.’ He pushed the wrasse towards me. ‘Since no one’s going to live there now, there’s no need to decorate it.’

I opened the till to give him a refund for the fish.

‘No, please. I insist.’ He refused the money. I asked him what was his job. ‘I own a scuba-diving school in Thailand. Hey, maybe you should try it one day.’

I ignored his offer and blurted, ‘Do you still have feelings for Andie?’

He smiled as if I had articulated something he could not admit to himself.

‘We live apart, but we are not separated. She goes and returns. Nothing’s definite with her and that’s the deal.’

‘I know.’ I agreed and thought of the male and female shrimp inside the Venus Flower Basket, an arrangement of complete security but defined by soft translucent bars.

Andie sent a blank email with a photo attachment to my business mail address; a fuzzy snapshot of sea snakes mating, taken with an underwater camera. I replied with a brief thank you and never heard from her again.

My customers thought I had closed my shop for a month. Instead, I renovated it and got rid of the marine fish and invertebrate tanks. I applied for a license to sell dogs and cats. The shop was noisier with barks and meows, but at least it distracted me from thinking about Andie. My new employees did not understand why I was obsessed with checking the sex of new puppies and kittens. I was looking for recurrences of Andie’s condition in nature.

Of course, I never found any, but conventional family life found me when a petite woman walked into my shop one evening, tearful that her boyfriend had stood her up outside the dim sum restaurant.

However, my fiance baulked at making love in the bathtub. She told me I could get hurt. She did not understand when I replied that I had already been hurt that way.