Asian Heat (6 page)

Back in the room,
Dave went about his mission with military precision. He had Vee lie face down
on the bed with a pillow under her groin, which he figured would offer easier
access.
 
Vee helpfully offered some
KY Jelly that she had in her handbag but Dave drew the line at applying the
lubricant and asked her to do it.

Once Vee was
prepared, Dave stripped and had Annie undress.
 
Annie went down on her knees and gave Dave a blow job to get
him started, and once aroused, he and Annie lay down on the bed.
 
They caressed, they kissed, they
licked, they stroked, and then just as Dave was about to explode he rolled
over, mounted Vee, thrust himself inside her and came like a rocket. He pulled
out, taking care not to lose the condom, then rushed to the bathroom and spent
the next fifteen minutes in the shower.
 
When he finally felt clean, he went back into the room and found Vee and
Annie dressed and waiting to be paid. He fumbled the money from his wallet and
thrust the notes at them, not wanting to look them in the eye.
 
After they’d gone, he showered again
and then he went back to The Big Dog’s Bar and downed another half a dozen
beers.

That was Dave
pretty much finished with The Alphabet Game until about three months after the
Vee incident.
 
He was sitting in
Jool’s Bar just about to get stuck into a steak pie when one of his mates
turned up and told him about he’d met a girl called Q.
 
Dave immediately put down his knife and
fork. It turned out that the girl was actually named Cue, but that didn’t worry
Dave in the least. Cue counted as Q and the fact that Cue was definitely a girl
made him even more determined to find her and add her to his list.

The problem was
that Dave’s mate couldn’t remember exactly where he’d met the girl, other than
it was an upstairs bar in Nana Plaza.
 
He was sure about the name, though. Apparently the girl’s dad was a pool
fanatic. He had a son called Ball and had named his daughter Cue. Cue was a
dancer, and pretty, the mate said, and that would make it even harder to find
her because a pretty go-go dancer could be barfined several times a night. Dave
wasn’t deterred though, and once he’d finished his pie and chips and downed a
couple of bottles of Singha he went off to the plaza.

Looking for a
go-go dancer in Nana Plaza when you don’t know which bar she works in is akin
to looking for a needle in a haystack. There are literally thousands of them
plying their trade and they are in and out of the bars like jack-in-the-boxes,
off to a short time hotel with a punter and then back before their hair had
even dried. That was something Dave had told me the first time we met –
never go with a dancer who had wet hair, it was a sure sign that she had just
had sex with a customer. Anyway, he didn’t find Cue on the first night, or the
second. And he didn’t find her on the third night, either. But he did find a
Zed.

Zed was a
waitress in G-Spot, a plain-looking girl with dark skin and a snub-nose. Dave
didn’t give her a second thought as she took his order, but when she returned
with his beer he noticed her name tag. Zed. He asked her if that was really her
name and she said yes. She explained that her mum had two girls and she had
called the first one Ay. After the second daughter came along the doctor had
told her that she’d never have any more children so she had called her Zed. It
was a nice story, but Dave didn’t care about that; all he cared about was
adding Zed to his list. He immediately offered to pay her bar fine, but she
refused. He asked her why but her English wasn’t very good so he had to call
the mamasan over to explain. As it turned out Zed had just turned eighteen and
was a virgin.
 
At first Dave figured
that the mamasan was just trying to up the price but no, young Zed had never
been kissed and was determined to stay that way.

The mamasan
explained that Zed had just started working at the bar and had come with her
aunt, who was a stunning dancer. The aunt was duly summoned and she sat next to
Dave and professionally pumped him for a lady drink every ten minutes regular
as clockwork. Dave knew the girls made their money in three ways – a
basic salary, a commission on lady drinks, and on the money they got paid for
sex.
 
Once Dave had made it clear he
wouldn’t be paying the aunt’s barfine, she made sure she didn’t lose out by
knocking back tequilas as fast as she could.

Zed’s story was
pretty typical. She was from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia, and her
family were farmers who struggled to make a living. She had a sister who used
to work in Nana Plaza but she had fallen pregnant and was now living back on
the family farm with her six-month-old daughter.
 
She had two brothers who didn’t work and a father who had
walked out years ago so it had fallen on Zed to be the breadwinner and the aunt
had taken her along to G-Spot.
 
Working as a waitress meant a salary of about five thousand baht a
month, but with tips and commission on drinks she could earn three times that.
She slept on the floor in her aunt’s room and didn’t eat much which meant that
she could send home almost ten thousand baht a month, which would go a long way
in Surin.

Dave wasn’t
discouraged by the fact that Zed was young, and a virgin. He figured that all
girls started off like that, but eventually they were all neither young nor
virginal. It was just a matter of timing. The problem was that Dave only had
another week before he was due to go back to England and he was worried that he
might lose Zed forever.
 
She might
well get fed up with working in a go-go bar and find a job closer to home.
 
Again he wondered if it was a question
of money. He started negotiating with the aunt as she knocked back shot after
shot of tequila. He wanted to know how much it would cost to take Zed’s virginity.
Her aunt thought that fifty thousand baht – about a thousand quid –
might swing it, but when she spoke to Zed it was clear that she wasn’t
interested. The girl just didn’t want to have sex. Period.

The aunt –
her name was Lek - started to get a bit annoyed with Zed. The aunt seemed to
think that it was a good deal and that Zed should accept it because her family
needed the money. She pressed the girl so hard that eventually Zed burst into
tears and rushed off to the toilets. At that point Lek had offered Dave the
choice of two other virgins, either of whom would have slept with him for half
the money he was offering
 
to give
Zed.
 
Dave wasn’t interested. Zed
was the one he wanted though, truth be told, it wasn’t the girl; it was the
name.
 
Eventually Zed reappeared,
her eyes red from crying.
 
Dave
wondered if Zed would lower her defences if he got her drunk, but she only
drank Coke.
 
The aunt, however, was
a real pro and continued to knock back tequila shots with gusto.

He asked Lek what
Zed’s problem was and she told him that Zed was determined only to sleep with a
good man. A kind man.
 
A man who
would marry her and take care of her and her family.
 
Dave realised that if he was ever going to have sex with
Zed, he would have to become that good man. The only snag was that he was
heading back to the UK in just over a week.
  
He chatted away with the aunt, using her as an
interpreter because Zed’s English was pretty much limited to ‘yes’, ‘no,’ and
‘what you want to drink?’

Apparently Zed’s
family lived in a run-down shack miles from anywhere and much of the money Zed
sent home was spent on improvements. The house, Dave decided, was the key to
proving to Zed what a good-hearted guy he was. So he suggested that he take Zed
home for a few days. The only places he’d been to in Thailand were Bangkok and
Pattaya, and while he’d heard stories of what life was like up country he’d
never been.

Zed and Lek had a
quick discussion in Thai with lots of nods and grunts and then the aunt said
that yes, he could take Zed home for a couple of days but Lek would have to go
with her and Dave would have to pay their barfines for two days and give them
three thousand baht each as well.
 
Dave did a quick calculation in his head – four barfines was two
thousand and four hundred baht so the total outlay would be eight thousand and
four hundred baht, which wasn’t far off two hundred pounds.
 
He asked Lek how they could get to
Zed’s home and she said the best way would be to hire a minibus.
 
The round trip would probably cost
about ten thousand baht. Another two hundred quid.
 
If that meant he’d get his way with Zed he figured it would
be money well spent, so he agreed. The two girls both squealed with joy and
hugged him and Zed kissed him on the check which Dave took as a good sign.
 
Lek said she’d arrange the minibus and
driver and that they could leave the day after tomorrow. Dave spent another
couple of hours in the bar, during which time three other girls from Zed’s
village asked if they could tag along.
 
Dave figured the more the merrier.
 
He left the bar at one o’clock in the morning and Zed gave him another
hug and a soft kiss on the cheek which he took as another good sign.

The minibus left
Soi 4 on Thursday morning at eight o’clock.
 
The minibus had seen better days and so had the driver, a
wizened old guy with leathery skin and a huge mole on his nose.
 
Zed and Lek sat at the back and the
three dancers accompanying them sat just behind the driver which left Dave a
row of three seats to himself so that he could spread out.
 
He’d checked out a map in his hotel and
it looked to be about five hundred kilometres so he reckoned it would take
about six hours to get there.

As it turned out,
that was overly optimistic.
 
They
crawled along at below forty miles an hour. When Dave asked Lek why they were
going so slowly, Lek spoke to the driver and discovered that one of the tyres
had a slow leak and the driver was looking for a garage.
 
It seemed incredible that the driver
had set out on a five hundred kilometre drive with a faulty tyre, but for the
next hour and a half they crawled along until they reached a garage where an
elderly mechanic spent half an hour working on it.
 
They picked up speed then, but after another half an hour
the driver decided he was hungry and stopped to eat at a roadside restaurant.
The girls were also happy to eat but then, as Dave had discovered over the
years, Thai girls were always happy to eat.

They stopped
twice more for food on the way to Surin and once for fuel. The minibus ran on
some specialised liquefied gas which could only be bought at certain filling
stations and the one they went to already had several dozen vans lined up so
they had to wait for an hour to get served. The upshot was that the drive took
almost ten hours in total and it was getting dark when they arrived at Zed’s
home.

It turned out
that Zed’s family didn’t actually live in Surin, which is a pretty large city
with a population of about 50,000.
 
Surin was about fifty kilometres away from her house. The nearest ‘town’
was about twenty kilometres away but ‘town’ was stretching it. According to Lek
there was a post office and a small government office, two banks and a
three-storey department store but not much else.
 

Zed’s home wasn’t
even a village; it was just a ramshackle collection of wooden shacks either
side of a potholed, dusty road. They pulled up in front of a wooden house on
stilts and the driver walked around and pulled open the sliding door for them.
Zed’s home was built of
 
teak with
a corrugated iron roof and sheets of corrugated iron over half the windows.
As
 
Zed ran up to the house calling
for her mother,
 
scrawny chickens
wandered around and a couple of mangy dogs looked at Dave disinterestedly.
 
The girls began pulling their bags out
of the minibus. On either side of the main house were two smaller wooden
shacks, not much bigger than garden sheds.

“What’s the story
with the windows?” Dave asked Lek, pointing at the main house.

“No have
windows,” said Lek. “No money for windows. Zed’s family very poor.”

Dave gave Lek the
money to pay the driver and told her to make sure that the guy knew he was to
come back on Saturday morning to take them to Bangkok.

A middle-aged
woman walked carefully down the steps, gathering up her long skirt with one
hand and holding on to a handrail with the other.

“My mother,” said
Zed. She waied her mother, putting her hands together as if in prayer and
touching them against her chin.

Dave immediately
waied the woman as well and she smiled and returned the wai. She wasn’t what
Dave had expected at all – she was tall and very pretty, with
waist-length hair and cheekbones that could have cut glass. Part of him
wondered why the mother hadn’t gone to work in Bangkok because she would have
had no shortage of customers.
 
Zed’s mother spoke no English so Lek came over to translate.
 
Another woman came down the wooden
stairs from the house carrying a baby and Zed waied her. “My sister,” she said.
“Ay.”