Asian Heat (9 page)

“I do like Zed.
But I thought…”

“What? I don’t
understand?”

“Did you…”
 
He shrugged.
 
He could see from the confused look on her face that she
hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “Forget it.”

The minibus
driver beeped the horn again.
 
“Time to go,” said Lek. “We have to work tonight.”

Lek went over to
the minibus and threw her bag in the back. Dave picked up Zed’s bag and waited
for her to finish saying goodbye to her mother.

Zed came over and
took her bag from him. “My mother very happy,” she said. “She said you good man
for help her.”
 
Dave and Zed walked
over to the minibus. The three girls were already in their seats and Zed and
Lek climbed into the back.
 
Dave
tossed his bag in and took his place in the middle of the minibus. One of the
three girls in the front pulled the door shut.

Dave waved
through the window at Zed’s mother. Zed’s sister came down the steps of the
main house and Dave waved at her, too. She gave him a wai in return.

As Dave waved, he
saw a face appear at the window of the wooden shack to the right of the main
house. It was an old man, his face weathered and wrinkled, his skin the same
colour as the teak house “Who is that?” asked Dave, pointing at the old man.

‘Zed’s
grandfather.” said Lek.
 
“He’s very
old and bit crazy.’

“Crazy? In what
way?” The old man grinned. He didn’t seem to have any teeth, his mouth was a
red gaping hole.

Lek shrugged.
“He’s just very old. Almost ninety. He forgets things. They keep him locked in
his house most of the time because sometimes he wanders away.’

Zed said
something in rapid Thai and Lek nodded. “He got out last night.” she said.
‘They found him walking around at three o’clock in the morning.’ She shook her
head sadly. “It’s such a pity. He used to be very famous, he ran one of the
best massage schools in Thailand.’

Dave stiffened.
“Massage?”

The old man was
still grinning. He raised a gnarled hand and waved slowly.

Lek nodded. “He
was amazing. He studied Thai massage at Wat Po, but he developed his own
technique and he even massaged at the Palace. He was very,
 
very famous. No one could do Thai
massage like him. They said that his fingers were magic.’

“Magic fingers?”
said Dave. He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
 
The old man was still waving.
 
As Dave watched, the old man’s tongue
flicked out and licked his upper lip.
  
The massage he’d had the previous night had been
magic, there was no doubt about that. Magic. And the mouth that had swallowed
his load had been soft and warm and on reflection, almost certainly lacking
teeth. “What’s his name?” asked Dave, wondering if there was some upside to
what had happened to him the previous night.

“Somchai,” said
Lek. “Khun Somchai, the massage king.”

Dave pulled his
baseball cap down over his face. “Let’s go back to Bangkok,” he said.

“Are you okay?”
asked Lek. “You look a bit ill.”

“Just go,” said
Dave.

Dave stopped
playing the Alphabet Game after that.
 
He never went back to Zed’s bar, either.
 
He said the fun had gone out of the game.
 
I can’t say I blame him.

###

THE PREGNANT WIFE

The Land of Smiles,
they call it. Well I’m not smiling, I can tell you. I had a wife in Thailand,
and I had a daughter. And now I’ve lost them both.
 
And it was my own bloody fault.
 
The wife wasn’t mine, though, I have to admit that. She was
married to someone else. But the daughter was mine. Even though I never saw
her, and now I never will.

How did I get in
this state?
 
Playing the numbers,
that’s how. I wanted free sex and I found the perfect way to get it. I just
didn’t realise that in the process I’d lose the love of my life. And my
daughter.

My name’s Dave,
Dave Taylor, and I’m twenty-eight. I work as a teacher in a Thai school on the
outskirts of Bangkok.
 
It pays
quite well and there are plenty of holidays and I get to do some private
tutoring on my days off so I have quite a good life, everything considered. I
didn’t move to Thailand for the career prospects, hardly anyone does. Like most
guys, I came for the girls.
 
Literally. Thais girls are the prettiest girls in the world, no
question. I came out for the first time two years ago with a group of guys from
work. I was a solicitor in Derby, doing mainly conveyancing work. Boring as
hell, but it paid okay and at least I had a job.
 
Only half the guys who graduated with me found work as
solicitors; the rest are either on the dole, driving cabs or working in fast
food restaurants.

We had a blast. A
couple of my workmates were Thailand regulars so they knew exactly where to go
to get the biggest bangs for our bucks.
 
We were in Pattaya most of the time and I got laid every day. I’ve never
seen a place like Pattaya, it has to be the biggest brothel in the world. We
spent the day by the pool and the nights in the bars and massage parlours and I
had the time of my life. I had more sex in two weeks than I’d had in my whole
life.
 
The girls were just throwing
themselves at me. Wherever I went, girls would smile and say how handsome I was
and pretty much every girl I met wanted to go with me. Seriously. I was almost
having to fight them off. Don’t get me wrong, I got laid in England, but it was
never handed to me on a plate like it was in Thailand.
 
In Thailand I never got knocked back,
not once. If I wanted a girl, I had her. Simple as that. I was paying for it,
but that didn’t worry me one bit. Not back then, anyway. We were on holiday and
living like rock stars.

There was a
street with bars on both sides with rooms upstairs where you could have sex
with the girls. As you walked down the street all the girls would call out,
telling you how good-looking you were and how they wanted to go with you.
 
It was unbelievable. Amazing.

Then there were
the massage parlours where you could have a bath with two girls and then they’d
cover themselves with soap and rub themselves all over you. I had half a dozen
threesomes while I was in Pattaya. Brilliant. It was like a sexual Disneyland.

We’d hit the
go-go bars after nine o’clock and they were just out of this world. Drop dead
gorgeous naked girls dancing around chrome poles, all of them gagging for
it.
 
They’d go with you short time
at the drop of a hat and if you paid them more they’d stay with you all night.

I had so many
girls that I lost count. And most of them gave me their phone numbers and email
addresses. It was as if I’d suddenly become Brad Pitt.
 
I hated getting on the plane back to
the UK and I swore to myself I’d move to Thailand the first chance I got. The
problem was it’s next to impossible for a foreigner to work in Thailand. They
certainly wouldn’t allow me to work as a solicitor. I had two options really
– to save as much money as I could and take a few years off, or to find a
job.
 
I started scouring various
websites about living in Thailand and soon stumbled across the Stickman
website. Stick’s a Kiwi who used to work as an English teacher but gave it up
to run a website about all things Thai. He said the easiest way to live and
work in Thailand is to become an English teacher. The money isn’t great but
there’s no problem getting a work visa.

I spent the next
few months getting a TEFL – Teaching English as a Foreign Language
– qualification and then I quit and flew back to Thailand on a one-way
ticket. Within a week I’d landed a job teaching English at an upscale Thai
school in Soi 67 and found a small apartment a ten-minute walk away. I was set.

For the first
year or so I spent most of my evenings in the bars of Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy
and my nights bedding go-go dancers and hookers. I probably had close to two
hundred girls, I kid you not; so many that I can barely remember any of them.
Cost me a small fortune, it did, because while hookers are cheaper in Thailand
than they are in the West; they don’t do it for free.

You have to buy
them drinks and then pay their barfine so they can leave with you and they
usually want at least two thousand baht for short-time and three thousand baht
of they stay with you all night. So having sex with a go-go dancer can easily
cost you sixty quid or more. I went out to Thailand with about ten grand in the
bank and I went through pretty much all of it in the first six months.
 
I started to go easier then, but I was
still paying for sex. I know what they say – everyone pays for sex one
way or another. You either pay for a hooker or you spend money on a girlfriend
or a wife: either way you pay.
 
I
clearly couldn’t go on spending money like there was no tomorrow. It took me a
year to work out a way of getting laid for free – without the hassle of
having a regular girlfriend.

I first heard
about ThaiLoveLinks on the Stickman site. He runs adverts for ThaiLoveLinks and
other dating sites and said it was a great way of meeting girls. I followed his
advice and put up a profile and a photograph of me wearing decent jeans and a
polo shirt, taken at a distance so you could make out that I was young and slim
and Western but not so close that you could see my face. I didn’t want anyone
at the school to know what I was doing, for obvious reasons.

I took a great
deal of care with my profile.
 
I
made it clear what I didn’t want. I didn’t want a bargirl, or a former bargirl.
Once a girl had sold sex she wasn’t likely to start giving it away for free. I
didn’t want anyone with a kid, and I didn’t want anyone who had a husband,
current or former. I didn’t want tattoos. Not even a cute butterfly on the
ankle.
 
In my experience a tattoo
on a Thai girl means one of two things – she’s been in prison or worked
in a bar. So no tattoos.
 
I wanted
long hair, because I like girls with long hair. And I wanted her to be taller
than five feet.
 
It’s not that I
don’t like short girls, it’s just that I’m quite tall and I feel like a child
molester walking down the street hand-in-hand with a girl under five feet. I
said they had to live in Bangkok, because I wasn’t up for travelling around
Thailand on dates.

I was specific
about age, too. I didn’t want to hear from anyone over twenty-six. I know there
are plenty of fit Thai girls in their thirties and I’d been with more than my
fair share of thirty-something go-go dancers, but I figured I had to draw the
line somewhere so I drew it at twenty-six.

I didn’t go into
too much detail about myself. I said I was from England, that I was
twenty-eight and that I had a good job in Bangkok. I didn’t say I was a
teacher; I could tell them that when I eventually spoke to them. I said I spoke
a bit of Thai – which was true – and that I planned to stay in
Thailand – also true. I said I wanted a good girl who was looking to
settle down and have a family. Now that wasn’t the truth. Not even close to it.
But I figured if I said I was looking for sex I’d get the wrong sort of
replies. And if I said I was looking for free sex then I wouldn’t get any
replies at all.

Anyway, I put up
my profile and waited to see what would happen. I was inundated.
Seriously.
 
More than thirty
replies on the first day. Forty on the second. At the weekend I was getting a
dozen every hour. It was a flood. A tsunami.

Now it has to be
said that most of the women who were contacting me just hadn’t read my
profile.
 
About half of them were
living outside Bangkok, for a start. Most of them were in Isarn - the poorest
part of the country – in cities like Udon Thani, Korat, Surin and
Buriram.
 
Quite a few were from
Pattaya, which has more go-go bars and hookers than Bangkok, so no surprises
there.

Of the half that
lived in Bangkok, about a third were too old and another third were just plain
unattractive. But even so I was getting between five and ten good prospects
every day.

I’d reply to the
ones I thought fitted the bill and start chatting to them by instant messaging.
Some of them were really stupid and would ask for money right away. They needed
to pay their rent or their mother was sick and one even had the cheek to say
she couldn’t chat for long unless I sent her money because she had to pay for
her wi-fi.
 
Chatting through messages
gave me a good sense of how good their English was and whether or not they’d
lied about their educational qualifications. But after an hour or so, if they
hadn’t asked me for money, I’d give them my phone number and ask them to call
me.
 
I used pay-as-you-go simcards
that I changed every week or so.
 
If the phone chat went well then I’d suggest we chat using webcams,
through Skype if they had it. If the phone chat didn’t go well then I’d just
cut off contact and move on to the next girl.