Asian Heat (13 page)

I got to the
hospital, bought a bunch of flowers at the shop on the ground floor and went up
to the maternity ward. That’s when I found out that Nok had died.
 
It happens during childbirth, even
today.
 
Something goes wrong and
the mother dies. Sometimes the doctors and nurses can help and sometimes they
can’t. In Nok’s case they couldn’t.
 
The medical staff were smiling as they explained what had happened. That
famous Thai smile.
 
I can’t remember
exactly what they told me. All I can remember is the gleaming white teeth. They
were all smiling. Every one of them. They smiled as I dropped the flowers and
broke down and cried.

A nurse told me
that Nok’s family had taken her body back home and she would be cremated later
in the week.
 
And the husband had
taken the baby.
 
The baby was fine.
A healthy girl. Just over seven pounds. My daughter.
 
A daughter that I’d never see. I didn’t even know her name.
I guess that she’d live with Nok’s husband in Pattaya or maybe he’d take her
back to Australia. I’d never know. I didn’t know Ray’s full name or where in
Australia he was from. And even if I did find out who he was, what could I do?
Turn up on his doorstep and demand that he give the girl to me?
 
I’d lost Nok and I’d lost my daughter
and they were both lost for ever.

I went back to my
room. I spent the next three days getting blind drunk and staying that
way.
 
That was a year ago.
 
Now I’m back on track. You’ll see me
most nights in the café outside the Landmark Hotel. More often than not
there’ll be a pretty young girl with me.
 
I’m playing the numbers, you see. I’m on ThaiLoveLinks and any other
Thai dating site I can find. I talk to hundreds of girls every day and every
day I meet one. Sometimes more than one. And I’m going to do that until I find
the right girl.

I don’t drink
coffee any more while I’m sitting outside the Landmark. It’s whiskey. Thai
whiskey. I probably drink a bottle a day now, pretty much. Mainly at night
because that’s when I need it the most. I can’t sleep without whiskey any more.
Without the whiskey I keep thinking about Nok and our daughter and the pain is
almost too much to bear. The teachers at my school have mentioned my drinking
to me, but screw them. I’m fine. If anything the drinking makes me a better
teacher; it calms me down and stops me snapping at the little bastards.

I’ll find her
eventually, I’m sure of that. Somewhere out there is another girl like Nok, who
looks like Nok and talks like Nok and feels like Nok. I’m going to find her and
this time I’m not going to screw it up. This time I’m going to do the right
thing.
 
I’m going to marry her and
have a kid with her and live happily ever after. It’ll take time, I know, but
it’s just a question of numbers.
 
If I meet enough girls, sooner or later I’ll meet another Nok. That’s my
plan, anyway. Wish me luck.

###

I’m also
including three very short stories set in Thailand.

MASSAGE THERAPY

I first met Ricky
sitting at bar on Walking Street in Pattaya. He was tall and thin and pretty
much bald, hunched over a glass of iced water.
 
He seemed a bit miserable and I’m a cheerful enough chap so
I asked him what was wrong. He had one hell of a story – most people move
to Thailand because they want to start living but it seems that Ricky had come
to die.

He’d been a
butcher in the north of England. He’d owned his own shop and made a decent
enough living despite competition from the supermarkets.
 
He was a widower – his wife had
died of cancer in her fifties – and had two grown-up sons.
 
When he’d reached sixty Ricky had
started having problems with his waterworks and had to get up several times a
night to pee.
 
It got so bad that
he went to see his GP and the doctor referred him to a specialist and the
specialist told Ricky that he had prostate cancer.

According to
Ricky’s specialist there are two sorts of prostate cancer. There’s a
slow-growing one that can be treated and managed, and there’s a fast-growing
aggressive one that is invariably fatal.
 
Ricky had the second type. They treated Ricky, with drugs and radiation
therapy, but the cancer continued to grow and to spread. After six months they
told him that there was nothing else they could so they gave him a leaflet for
the McMillan charity and sent him home.

Ricky decided
that if he was going to die he’d do it under his own terms. He sold his
business and his house, gave most of the money to his sons and flew to
Thailand. He booked a suite in the Marriott Hotel
 
in Pattaya and kept a bottle of sleeping tablets in his wash
bag. His plan was to enjoy what little time had left and once the pain became
unmanageable he’d take the tablets.

He couldn’t drink
alcohol and most food made him feel nauseous but at least Thailand was warm and
the people were friendly. There wasn’t much I could say to him, but I did
suggest that he should have a Thai massage.
 
A good Thai massage done by a professional can really make
you feel better,
 
I told him. Ricky
said that he’d try. He left the bar soon afterwards, saying that he felt sick.
To be honest, I never thought I’d see him again.

I was wrong. I
bumped into him again about three months later, in the Golden Bar in Bangkok,
across the road from Nana Plaza. At first I didn’t recognise him. He had put on
weight and his hair was growing back. And he was drinking a beer. He grinned
when he saw me and told me he was feeling better than he’d felt for months. And
it was all down to Thai massage, he said. Or rather, a massage girl.

The day after
he’d met me in Pattaya he’d done as I suggested and tried a Thai massage.
 
He did indeed feel better and from then
on he had the hotel send up a masseuse every day.
 
Ricky had become disenchanted with Pattaya. “The world’s
biggest brothel, it was a big mistake moving there,” he told me. He’d moved to
Bangkok and checked into the Marriott in Sukhumvit Soi 2. He’d tried to book a
massage on his first night but they didn’t have anyone available, so Ricky had
gone looking for a massage parlour. And that was when he met Cherry.
 
She worked in a place in Soi 23, not
far from Soi Cowboy. She was in her forties, a bit chubby but with a lovely
smile, he said.
 
Cherry had great
hands, he said, and had been trained as a masseuse at the famous Wat Po.

He felt so good
after the first massage that he went back to see her the next day. And the day
after. On the fourth day Cherry asked him if he wanted a ‘special’ massage.
 
He wasn’t sure what she meant but she’d
smiled and said that for a thousand baht he could have a happy ending.

Ricky explained
that he was ill and that he thought a happy ending was out of the question, but
Cherry said she would try anyway. Providing that he paid a thousand baht, of
course. Ricky had laughed and told her that if she could indeed make him come
he’d give her ten thousand baht.

Cherry had Ricky
roll onto his back and she poured a good measure of baby oil over his dick and
went to work.
 
To Ricky’s surprise
he soon found himself growing hard. Cherry was smiling like the proverbial
Cheshire Cat and she started caressing his balls.

Ricky hadn’t felt
so aroused in years but he didn’t feel that he was going to come, despite
Cherry’s valiant efforts. But Cherry knew what she was doing and she locked
eyes with him as she slipped a finger into his backside. Ricky gasped and
exploded like a geyser. “It was the best ten thousand baht I’d ever spent,” he
said. ‘The thing is when the doctors used to shove their fingers up my back
passage I’d scream like a banshee, but when Cherry did it, it was the most
erotic thing I’d ever felt. Really, it was just out of this world.’

Cherry’s happy
endings became a regular feature of Ricky’s life. He paid her for a two hour
massage each time, with the first ninety minutes taken up with a traditional
Thai massage followed by thirty minutes of her special oil massage culminating
in her own special version of the prostate exam.

After a month of
seeing Cherry every day, Ricky noticed that his appetite had improved and he
had started to put on weight. And to his surprise, his hair began to grow
back.
 
He knew that his condition
was terminal, but there was no doubt that he was starting to feel better. He
made an appointment with a cancer specialist at the Bumrungrad Hospital, one of
the best medical facilities in Asia. They gave him a through investigation and
confirmed what he already knew – he had prostate cancer. But according to
the Bumrungrad doctors, he was in remission.
 
The cancer was there but it hadn’t spread and it wasn’t
life-threatening.
 
Ricky was
stunned.
 
But the doctors were
adamant.
 
The cancer wasn’t killing
him. Or at least it was growing so slowly that it would be decades before it
put his life at risk.

“It’s Cherry,” he
told me. “I’m sure of it.”
 
And
with that he patted me on the back and went back to his hotel.
 
I watched him go, wondering if it could
possibly be true, that Cherry had somehow managed to massage away his cancer.

I met Ricky for
the final time in the Golden Bar, a few weeks later. He was halfway through a
bottle of Singha Beer and was as happy as Larry. He had just been to the
Bumrungrad Hospital and they’d given him the all clear. Not a cancerous cell in
his body, they said.
 
Pretty much
six months to the day that the National Health Service had given up on him.

“Bloody morons,”
said Ricky.
 
“They said I wouldn’t
last six months and now the docs here say I’m as fit as a fiddle.”

He looked good,
there was no question of that. He’d put on a fair bit of weight and his hair
seemed thicker and there was a glint in his eye that hadn’t been there the
first time I’d met him.
 
I asked
him what he planned to do and he grinned, reached into his pocket and took out
a small red box. He opened it and proudly showed me the diamond ring
inside.
 
“I’m going to ask Cherry
to marry me,” he said. “I know she’s not the prettiest but she’s a good sort
and she makes me happy.”
 
He put
the ring away. “And she’s the one who saved me, I’m sure of that. Her massage,
her hands, they healed me. If it wasn’t for her I’d be dead. Soon as I’ve
downed this, I’m heading to Soi 23 and going down on one knee. She can stop
work and I’ll build us a house up in Korat, where she’s from. Might even start
a butcher business. I love this country. ”

He finished his
beer, paid his bill, shook my hand and wandered down the road to get a
motorcycle taxi. That was the last time I saw him.
 
From what I heard later he got sideswiped by a truck that
ran a red light at Asoke, killed him and the motorcycle taxi driver stone dead.
Somewhere along the line someone stole his wallet and the ring.
 
I did go looking for Cherry to tell her
what had happened but there are a lot of massage parlours on Soi 23 and I never
did find her.

###

CAT’S EYES

It was her eyes
that I noticed first, even though I was sitting about thirty feet away from
where she was dancing. They were cat-like and as black as coal and she’d
emphasised them with mascara and eyeliner but even without the make-up they
would have stopped me in my tracks.

I was in Rainbow
Two, on the ground floor of Nana Plaza.
 
There are four Rainbow bars and they’re geared up for Japanese customers
rather than Westerners which means that most of the girls play on being cute and
young with vacant stares and their hair in curls or pigtails.

She was
different, not Japanese-style at all. And she had her hair up, held in place
with a clip, which is unusual for a go-go dancer. She wasn’t young either;
 
I doubted that she would see thirty
again. She had a real woman’s figure, nice full breasts and hips that curved.
And those eyes. My God, those eyes.

She was dancing
around a chrome pole but when she locked eyes with me she stopped dancing and
smiled. It was a full-on smile, loaded with self-confidence as if she knew
exactly what effect her smile had on a man.

When the dancing
shift changed she came and sat down next to me. Her name was Cat and she was
from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia.
 
She asked me my name and I told her. Roger. From London.
Actually I’m Simon from Maidstone, but I know enough about the Bangkok bar
scene to know that it’s best not to reveal your real name up front. I bought
her a drink and we chatted for a while, her fingernails gently scratching my
thigh as if they had a mind of their own. Her English was good and she had a
great sense of humour which usually means a succession of Western boyfriends.
When it was time for her to dance again, she stood up to go.