City of Angels

On the front page of the Bangkok Post that morning there was a story about an amputee elephant being fitted with a prosthetic foot. It was the first time this had been done, the story said. The rest of the page was taken up with government corruption and an embezzlement scandal in a monastery up north. Janey read about the elephant as she sat at a battered metal table on Thani Street, and then she turned the pages and looked idly at jobs teaching English. She was sipping iced coffee from a plastic bag, through a straw, and eating small, puffy coconut pancakes. The cat she'd seen a few days ago as she ate pork noodle soup came weaving down the pavement, its eyes slightly crossed, its thin flanks sucking in and out as it breathed. The wound on its side looked as awful as ever, red, and scabby, but someone had put iodine on it now, so the ginger and white fur was spattered with purple. The cat walked unsteadily towards Janey and rubbed the side of its face against the leg of her chair. Janey moved her leg. Surely the cat would die soon. Half its fur had fallen out. It sat in a patch of sun, its thin tail wrapped around itself, and licked its paw in ludicrous imitation of a normal cat.

She was back in the tourist zone. A couple of blocks further south and she would be in Khao San Road, where neon signs advertised the Hello Restaurant and the Top Guest House and Wally's Travel. Cheap Mini Bus Tour! Laos! Hill Tribe! See Giraffe Neck Woman! Smoke Opium With Chief! said the handwritten signs outside Wally's. All the guest houses were seven storeys high and built from concrete. Signs outside them advertised email for one baht per minute, Internet, fax. Techno music pounded the air till five in the morning and stoned English girls with long blonde hair and thin legs teetered down the street on six-inch platforms, the tops of their breasts visible above strappy little singlets.

‘It is like another country,’ the Thai boy had said about Khao San page 82 Road, and Janey had nodded and agreed. They were eating dinner, bought from the market in small plastic bags closed with green rubber bands. The bags were puffed and cloudy with condensation. The Thai boy laid bowls out on the formica table and poured the food into them. He took a roll of what appeared to be toilet paper from the shelf beside the fridge and placed it on the table, among the bowls.

‘Can I help at all?’ said Janey, although it was clear there was nothing to do.

‘No, no,’ said the Thai boy. He laid a spoon and a fork before Janey and said to her, ‘Eat, eat.’

‘Thank you.’ Janey took some rice and just a little of the chicken curry, to be polite. The boy was expertly dismantling an entire fish, flaking the flesh from its long curved spine onto a plate. The fish's skin was greyish and shiny, and dotted with red and green chilli flecks. He levered a large chunk of fish into Janey's bowl and said ‘Eat, eat’ again.

The Thai boy's apartment was nowhere near the tourist zone. He and Janey sat on the bus—he insisted on air-conditioned, although she usually took the cheap open-window buses—for an hour and a half. By the time they reached his apartment block, just off Lat Phrao Road, Janey's was the only European face to be seen on the bus, or in the market where they stopped to get a bottle of water. People were looking at her, and at him. She was aware of the size of her hands, her feet, her shoulders. She looked at her bare arm and her skin tone seemed uneven and blotched, all white and mauve, unappealing.

‘Your hair is very good,’ the Thai boy said to her as he pressed the button for the lift in his building. A couple came down the stairs and glanced in their direction. Janey wanted to ask him if people thought she was a prostitute.

‘Thank you,’ she said, putting a hand to her hair, wondering if the blonde was a little too bright. Maybe that was why he'd liked her, though.

‘Like a doll's,’ said the Thai boy with a small laugh as the heavy metal doors of the lift slid open. He waved her in first and pressed the round black 6 button.

He called it an apartment and he had been living there for almost page 83 eight years, but to Janey it was more like a hotel room. A cheap, cramped hotel room with roughly painted concrete walls and chipped lino on the floor. She'd had a bigger room in the Yuttichai Hotel when she was down south in Prachuap. ‘Look,’ the Thai boy was saying to her. ‘Here is the bathroom. Here is the balcony.’ Janey liked the idea of a balcony—‘Oh, cool,’ she said—but this one was almost completely occupied by a folding wire clothes horse decked out with the boy's shirts and cotton trousers. He was dressed in brown and tan, his shirt tucked into his pants; he wore a little cotton sunhat, and glasses. At home she would never have looked at him. Janey squeezed herself into the space between the clothes horse and the wall and looked out across the city, at the rows of grey concrete-block buildings like the one they were in. The sky was blue but faded to a thick brownish murk at the edges; an occasional palm tree or frangipani poked up amongst the concrete. The traffic noise from Lat Phrao Road was a constant low roar. ‘Bangkok is very bad,’ the boy said, coming to stand behind Janey. He said Bangkok although she knew that wasn't the real name, the name the Thais used. Krung Thep, they said. Like Los Angeles, it meant City of Angels. ‘Very dirty place,’ said the boy.

‘Why do you live here then?’

He shrugged.‘For my job,’ he said, and he went back inside to pour two glasses of water. Janey looked out for a moment more—there were shirts hanging from clothes hangers above her head, and it occurred to her that perhaps the balcony was his wardrobe—and then went back into the room. ‘Now you take a shower,’ said the boy. He took a folded T-shirt and a pair of purple drawstring pants from the dresser, and put them in her hands.

‘I already had a shower,’ said Janey. She laid the clothes on the bed.

‘Take a shower,’ said the boy. ‘Take a shower! Put on clothes! You will be clean!’

‘I don't think I really need a shower,’ said Janey.

‘Take a shower,’ said the boy. ‘Please. Put on clean clothes. That is Thai style, Thai way.’

There was no lock on his bathroom door and she wondered if he was going to come in and do something to her, but he did not. She stripped page 84 quickly and stood under the cold spray, rubbing soap in white whorls of lather up her goosepimpled arms and into her armpits. Her legs were spotted with mosquito bites; there was a band of pale skin on her left arm, from her watch. The water from the shower ran along the cracked white tiles with their mildew spots and out a rough hole where the floor met the wall. She soaped and rubbed at the darkened soles of her feet but the dirt wouldn't come off.

In his T-shirt and the baggy drawstring pants she felt as though she was wearing pyjamas. She came out of the bathroom with the wet ends of her hair curling around her neck and caught sight of herself in the dresser mirror. The T-shirt came right down over her hips; she looked shapeless and lumpy, like an oversized child. ‘Now I will have shower,’ the boy was saying. ‘Then I will buy dinner. You stay here. Rest.’

‘I'll come down with you,’ said Janey. ‘Look round the market.’ Up here it was real Bangkok, real Thai, not like the area she'd come from, thick with tourists, European teenagers dressed as if off to a rave, Japanese couples with shaggy haircuts and pink-lensed sunglasses, Thai boys selling Nepalese T-shirts and faked hill-tribe crafts. Up on Lat Phrao Road it was entirely different. She wanted to see.

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘You will wait here. I will bring dinner.’ He took a T-shirt and a pair of yellow drawstring pants from his dresser and went into the bathroom.

Janey sat on the single chair and listened to the water running as the boy showered and looked around the room. It was a small room and cramped, the dresser pressing against one side of the table, the table only a few inches from the bed, barely enough room to open the fridge door halfway. Shelves beside the fridge held a few plastic bowls with faded Chinese patterns. She could see an electric jug and a rice cooker, but no stove, no sink. There was no shrine in the room, no place to burn incense to the Buddha, no formal framed portraits of the King and Queen, although she stood to look at a photo on the highest shelf of a man riding a bison and thought she recognised his face. ‘Is that the King?’ she said when the boy came out of the bathroom, a towel round his neck, his wet hair standing up in little soft spikes.

page 85

‘Yes, King of Thailand,’ said the boy. ‘He is very good King.’

‘But you don't have a shrine,’ said Janey. ‘You don't have any Buddhas in here. Do you?’

‘I am modern style,’ said the boy. ‘Modern style Thai. Not old fashion. Now. Can you eat spicy food?’

The Thai boy was called Lek although that was not his real name. His real name was Kitirach, and there was a joke he made about it sometimes, a joke involving the cartoon character Hello Kitty. As he trotted down the stairs of the apartment block he ran the English word nickname around his mouth. Lek meant small; there were thousands of Leks in Thailand. He wasn't so small now anyway. Five foot seven.

As he turned right onto Lat Phrao Road a young woman climbing down from a moving bus caught her heel in the door and tripped and fell face first onto the road. The bus jolted to a stop, the conductor scrambling down to help her, a murmur of dismay going up from people on the street. She had been carrying armfuls of shiny department store packages and her little parcels were scattered, their pink satin bows bent and dirtied; Lek bent to pick up a boxed bottle of perfume from the gutter. Someone else was hooking a hand through her arm, helping her up, brushing down her jacket. She was wearing a bright yellow suit and high sandals. Her hair was long and sleek. She thanked him and tried to smile but when he looked in her eyes he could see she was shaken and distressed. She looked as if she had been on her way to a party, but now there was a big dusty mark up the side of her skirt, a graze on her leg, a ladder starting in her pantyhose.

Lek dug in his pocket for money. Back at the apartment the girl was sitting at his table looking at a copy of Asia magazine that he'd dug out for her. She was a beautiful girl with light blue eyes and shoulders that were as wide as a man's. Her cheeks were pink and her hair was the strangest colour. When she walked in the door she forgot to take off her shoes—he had to tell her, and she'd already left dusty footmarks halfway across the room—and he felt a quick flash of anger, but then he reminded himself that where she was from, people wore page 86 shoes inside. She was embarrassed but he said, ‘No no, it is no problem.’ She was the guest after all. He took her sandals and laid them next to his own. They were about the same size; perhaps hers were slightly bigger.

The girl was from New Zealand. In the travel agent at the hotel where he worked he had seen pictures of New Zealand: its high snowy mountains, the bubbling, spitting geysers, the fierce Maori warriors with their tattooed brown faces and protruding tongues.

His own skin was a deep golden brown and he was hairy for a Thai. It was a family trait; his father's chest was thick with hair. His forearms were dark with it. It was only last month that Lek had seen his father again. Seventeen years had passed and his father was rich now. His second wife wore golden chains around her wrists and a diamond ring. They had a long-haired Siamese Kitten in the apartment, views over Lumphini Park, a Western-style toilet. The apartment block was like a hotel. There was a pool in the basement and even a gym. His father offered to show him but he said no. The servant brought them all iced tea on a tray. There were slices of lime in the glasses and a plate of poh pia with sauce for dipping. The kitten ran up and down, up and down the hallway. Then it danced into the living room and jumped onto the second wife's lap and she let it eat a piece of poh pia. The wife was slender and beautiful. She had plucked eyebrows and long, perfect nails painted pink. She looked half the age of his mother although that couldn't possibly be right.

When he left his father asked him if he needed money. Only a week before Lek had given a thousand baht to his younger brother. His brother said it was for textbooks and for the dentist but Lek had his suspicions. It was probably for alcohol, women. Still he didn't say anything. Sathit buzzed the apartment from downstairs and Lek went down feeling the two crisp 500-baht notes inside his trouser pocket. He rode back up in the lift with his hands in his pockets feeling their emptiness. There were three weeks until he got paid and the rent was due on the 20th, but still when his father asked if he needed money he shook his head and said, ‘No, I'm fine. I can take care of myself. Thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’ said his father. ‘There's nothing you need?’ He was page 87 taking out his chequebook, taking out a pen, standing at the door. He looked at Lek with his eyebrows raised. It struck Lek that his father could just write in any figure, any figure at all. If Lek's brother was there he would take the money. He would ask for some outrageous sum, ten thousand, fifty thousand. A hundred thousand. Sathit would look his father in the eye and tell him coolly that he needed a hundred thousand baht. He would tell him that he was thinking of doing a Masters, a PhD. He would invent a medical condition, say he needed an operation, specialists, weeks in hospital. He would say he had some problem that could only be treated in Singapore.

Lek felt almost faint at the thought. ‘No, I have my own money,’ he said to his father. Self-sufficiency, he said to himself inside his own head, and he knew he was doing the right thing, but he felt dizzy and confused somehow.

‘Oh well. If you're sure.’ His father was screwing the cap back onto the pen, sliding the chequebook into his pocket. He asked Lek how his mother was and Lek swallowed hard and said, ‘Fine, she's fine.’ Then he took a step towards the door and said that he had to be going and his father saw him to the lift.

Out on the streets there was bougainvillea in flower. Its long branches stretched along the fences and dropped papery, triangular flowers onto the pavement, pink and yellow. There were cream-and-gold frangipani flowers rotting in the gutter, lotus ponds and ferns and statues behind locked black iron gates. Goldfish swam in those ponds, their long, transparent fins and tails trailing lazily. Pomegranates fell into the yards and rotted. Maids came out in their starched uniforms to feed the fish and to sweep the fallen leaves and fallen fruit out onto the streets, shooing away the stray cats who sneaked through the fence, or sometimes dumping a bowl of leftover rice on the pavement for them. Lizards watched from the fences with unblinking eyes.

He was from Sukhothai and he had grown up accustomed to the murmuring of the frogs in the ditches in front of the houses. There were frogs among the lotuses and fish too swimming in the murky brown water, the lotus flowers swaying above them on their long stems. There was no money after his father left and they all had to work—he was nine then, Sathit seven—but there were banana palms in the yard page 88 and the fish swimming back and forth in the ditches. He climbed the palm tree with a knife to cut bunches of bananas, dropping them for Sathit to catch while his mother sat inside at the black Singer machine sewing for a local company, her small feet working the treadle up to a fine pace, the needle flashing up and down, pins in her mouth. In Sukhothai the winters were cold. People stood around outside warming their hands over tubs of hot coals. He and Sathit and his mother and grandmother slept under the one quilt, pressing together for warmth. That time of year the fields were full of sugarcane waving its feathery heads and the mountains were distant and blue. Later came the corn season and then the rice. In the rice season—the wet—the fields were flat expanses of water reflecting the mountains and the sky, blue and green.

Sukhumvit Road was a steady press of traffic. At the big intersection with Asoke a traffic policeman was directing the cars, wearing a white mask against the pollution and blowing a shrill whistle over and over. Women waiting to cross held handkerchiefs to their mouths. Lek climbed the concrete steps of the overbridge and thought that he was a fool not to have taken his father's money. He was too proud. It had always been his failing.

The dinner was delicious although the boy didn't eat much, just some soup and a few spoonfuls of rice. He held a spoon and continually added more food to Janey's plate, saying, ‘Eat, eat.’ She offered him some money towards the food but he refused her, saying, ‘No, no, you are my guest. This is Thai way.’

‘This is so lovely,’ Janey said. ‘Thank you so much. It's delicious. Arawy maak.’ She smiled at the boy.

‘You speak Thai!’ he said.

‘Oh, not really. Just a little bit. It's very hard.’

‘You speak very well,’ said the boy.

‘No.’ There was a sharp fragment of chicken bone in her mouth; she removed it with a finger and laid it on the edge of her bowl. ‘Not nearly as well as you speak English,’ she said.

‘My English is not good,’ said the boy thoughtfully. He lifted a brimming spoonful of broth to his mouth. ‘In New Zealand,’ he said.

page 89

‘You speak English?’

‘Yeh,’ said Janey. She thought, and added, ‘Some people speak Maori. Mainly Maori people.’

‘Oh, Maori people,’ said the boy. ‘I know. They do this,’ and he demonstrated for her a pukana, his eyes bulging, tongue poking out. Janey burst out laughing. ‘How do you know that?’ she said.

‘From the hotel,’ said the boy. ‘I see the photos of New Zealand there. Very beautiful.’

She couldn't remember any of the actions, but when she had finished the boy clapped and laughed. ‘What does it say?’ he asked.

‘It—’ She realised she had no idea. She had memorised it like a parrot. ‘It's a love song,’ she said. That much was evident, although she'd never considered the words before, not at all. ‘The singer wants their lover to come back to them,’ she said. Haere mai ra ki ahau nei ra.

‘That is very beautiful.’ Dinner was clearly over; the boy was standing, clearing away the dishes, stacking them inside a red plastic basin. ‘I like that,’ he said, laughing. ‘You are very good singer.’ He kept laughing, and Janey became self-conscious. He stood by her dabbing at the table with a single square ripped from the toilet roll, and then he took the basin of dishes to the bathroom.

‘Can I do something? Please?’ Janey followed him and stood at the door. The boy was squatting on the bathroom floor, scooping cold water over the dishes, tipping it out onto the tiles. A few stray grains of rice swept across the floor with the water.

‘No, no.’ The boy waved her away. ‘You rest. Rest now. Lie down.’

She supposed that sex was why she was here, although she had expected some sign of it earlier than this. She sat on the edge of his bed and felt awkward. The baggy trousers made her hips look huge; the T-shirt, too long, was tight over her stomach.

page 90

‘Lie down. Rest.’ The boy had finished the dishes. He sat next to her and reached over and patted a pillow. ‘You must rest,’ he said. ‘You are tired.’

‘I am tired,’ Janey agreed. She did what he said and lay down on the bed. It was as hard as the floor, as hard as the bed she'd slept on in the cheap guest house in Chiang Mai, a thin fibrous pallet over tight woven wire. The room there was thick with the stench of smoke and there were cigarette burns on the dresser. Men with rough skins and unkempt hair stood in the hall talking in low voices. They were German and English and Thai and glanced at her as she walked down to the bathroom, her soap dish and toothbrush in one hand, sarong over her arm. She could feel them still looking at her as she went in, and she was uncertain as she slid the bolt across on the flimsy door; she kept her foot pressed against it, just in case.

‘Are you hot?’ The boy was suddenly solicitous getting up to aim a fan, and a second fan, in her direction. They whirred gently. He sat on the edge of the bed and announced, ‘I will give you a massage.’

‘Really?’

‘I am expert in Thai massage. You must turn over, like this.’

Janey turned onto her front. Her face was in the pillow and the boy's hands were pressing gently up and down her legs, his fingers finding the massage points, pushing into them through the thin fabric of the trousers. It had not occurred to her that morning to shave her legs, but the boy made no comment. She wondered if he was becoming aroused. She herself was sleepy and enjoying the cool stirring of the air from the two fans. The boy moved up to knead between the thin bones of her hand and then up her forearm. He laid his hands on the back of her shoulders and she supposed she should do something, put a hand over his, turn over, pull him down on top of her. She could hardly be bothered but then she did it anyway. He was next to her and they were kissing, awkwardly, his tongue lying over hers. Her arm was pinned between them uncomfortably. She freed it and put both arms around him, hugging him to her. She could feel his penis, small and hard against her leg, jutting forward in his soft baggy pants; she let the back of her hand brush against it.

It was so strange to be touching somebody who was not Martin. page 91 Lek's shoulders felt tiny and narrow; they were no wider than her own. She reached down to the hem of his T-shirt so she could lift it off over his head. Underneath his skin was deep gold and his nipples were dark and flat. Martin's nipples were bright pink; there were freckles strewn across his chest, and curling golden hair which glinted red in the light. His ribs were sharp and evident under the skin, but he was flabby, too. He had small breasts which jiggled and dropped forward when he bent over. Janey ran her hands across Lek's chest. He had a surprised expression on his face that she couldn't quite interpret, as if perhaps he wasn't enjoying this, either. He leaned forward and put his tongue into her mouth again. Janey sat up for a second and pulled off her T-shirt. She undid her bra and dropped it over the side of the bed, and she lifted her hips so she could take off the trousers. She was naked now on the scratchy tartan blanket, the twin streams of air running across her from the fans. Lek was putting a hand between her legs, touching her pubic hair in a way that seemed inquisitive rather than desirous—she wondered for a second if he was a virgin, she had no idea about the sexual behaviour of young Thai people—and mainly Janey was thinking about how she wanted a glass of water. She sat up and ran her arm down his back. It was long and smooth, the little chunks of vertebrae showing through the skin. Martin's back was rough, hairs across the shoulders, moles, a few pimples. Peeling skin from sunburn. A pink scooped suntan mark from the neck of his singlet, white below. Lek's back was quite beautiful. She put her mouth on his shoulder. ‘You think I am too dark?’ said Lek to her.

‘What?’

‘My skin. It is not white.’

‘So?’

‘White skin is nicer. Better to have white skin.’

‘No,’ said Janey. ‘Not at all. Don't be ridiculous. Your skin is beautiful. Come here,’ and she pulled him closer and began to kiss him with a little more effort, running her tongue around his lips, closing her eyes, wanting to reassure him and to convince herself, as well. In a little while he laid her back on the bed and got on top of her and fucked her. His eyes were closed and he was gasping as he moved over her. His penis was not that big. She was looking across at the fans page 92 and thinking about the way the blades moved so fast that they became transparent, and about the big ceiling fan in the OK Guest House on Thani Street, the way it jittered and swung unevenly when it spun, how nervous she became that it might break off entirely and fall down on her as she slept. Her poor vulnerable body, covered only by a sarong: a thing spinning that fast, she wouldn't have a hope, she would be cut to pieces. She had never heard of such a thing, but she was new in Thailand then and everything was making her nervous, the black dogs on the street baring their teeth, the gecko crawling up the mesh screen of her window, bacteria swarming invisible over food fried on the street in huge woks of foaming oil, bacteria in the water and in the ice. She had ordered a pineapple smoothie from a street vendor and panicked to see him scooping ice cubes into the blender. ‘No ice!’ she said to him, shaking her head frantically. ‘Clean!’ said the vendor exasperatedly. ‘Clean!’ but Janey backed away in a panic and went into the crowd. At the OK Guest House she tired to sleep with the fan turned off but it was stifling. She padded downstairs to the bathroom with its claustrophobic low ceiling and had a shower to cool herself. The bathroom was so small that the shower sprayed directly onto the toilet; everything in the room was wet. Janey hung her sarong and T-shirt on a hook on the back of the door, trying not to spatter them with water, slapping at the fat mosquitoes which came down at her bare body whining like dive-bombing aeroplanes.

Lek came inside her with a long hard breath. She wanted him to hold her but instead he moved away and sat up. He was sweating; their skins had been sticking together, his stomach slapping down on hers. ‘Now I will take a shower,’ he said to her.

‘Another shower?’ She sat up and tried to touch him, but he was standing up, wrapping a sarong around his waist. She wanted to say, Kiss me. She wanted him to look in her eyes, to stroke her hair back from her face, to touch her check, hold her. It was four years since she had slept with someone other than Martin and she was guilty and glad at the same time, triumphant to have finally done it, yet startled, disconcerted, imagining that this meant things were finally over, unable to believe that it could really be so.

page 93

At the airport Martin kept crying and she wished she'd let her mother drive her instead. His eyes were watery and pink as a rabbit's. The airport was busy, but the other passenger were careful to avoid looking at him. Janey got a cappuccino for herself and a long black for him and sat down at a table with a pale wood top, her eyes on the screen which listed the flight numbers and times of departure. Check-in. Boarding. Final Call. She stirred sugar into her coffee and put her hand under the table to check that her bag was still there. ‘It's only two months,’ she said. ‘It's just a holiday. I need a break, that's all.’

‘It doesn't feel like that. I feel like you're not going to come back. I feel like we're not going to be together again.’

Janey raised her eyebrows. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should have thought about that before you went and—’

‘Oh, don't,’ said Martin. ‘Fuck. Janey. For God's sake. I know what you think. But it was just an accident. Really. I know it's hard for you to believe that, but—’

Janey stopped listening and let Martin's voice blend into the airport muzak, a tinny instrumental version of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. She watched the glowing blue screen—BA7340 to Sydney had taken off, GA713 to Denpasar was delayed—and thought of the counsellor they'd been seeing. The counsellor's name was Heather and she had asked Martin if he genuinely regretted his behaviour. That was what she kept calling it: his behaviour. ‘Surely you realised that Janey was likely to find this upsetting, and that as a result she would question your commitment to her,’ she said. There was a crystal hanging in her window, turning lightly in the breeze. As the sunlight hit it tiny rainbows dashed all up the wall. Janey watched the rainbows move and flicker and waited for Martin to say something.

‘Well, yeh,’ he said. ‘I mean, I guess I knew she'd be upset. But it doesn't mean anything. It was just one of those things. It's not that I'm not committed to the relationship. I am. Really.’ He scratched at the rash on his neck and for a second Janey saw him through the eyes of an outsider, a gangly boy with curly ginger hair and a soft stomach, a boy who broke out in patches of eczema when he was under stress. There was a definite whine to his voice, something she hadn't noticed page 94 before, and for the first time she wondered what it would be like to be on her own.

At their last session Heather was annoyed with Janey for going to Thailand. Janey sat in her usual chair frowning. She hadn't expected a counsellor to get angry with her. ‘It seems to me that we're only just starting to make progress,’ Heather said in a tight voice. ‘Do you feel uncomfortable with that, Janey? I thought you had a commitment to working through this process with me and Martin.’ Martin looked at her avidly, wide-eyed, nodding.

Janey shrugged and looked at the window. It was a grey day and there were no rainbows forthcoming from the crystal. ‘Too late now,’ she said without looking at Heather. ‘I've paid for the ticket and that's that.’

‘Well!’ said Heather. ‘I must say that that is very disappointing to me, Janey. How do you feel about it, Martin?’

‘I don't care how he feels!’ said Janey. ‘I just need a break! Give me a fucking break!’ She got up and went over to the window. Martin and Heather were looking at each other and any minute now Heather was going to ask Janey if she was feeling angry and why that might be, as if it wasn't totally obvious.

At the airport she was sitting across from Martin and wishing that he wasn't there. He was crying quietly with his mouth open like a child and she wanted to tell him to stop it. She had checked in her backpack and watched it slide away from her on the conveyor belt, the first to start on this adventure. Janey put her hand in her bag and felt for her boarding pass. On the video screen her flight had moved up three places. As she watched a message appeared next to it that said Proceed to Gate. She drank her cappuccino in one swallow—it was weak, and only lukewarm—and stood up.

‘You don't need to go yet,’ said Martin. ‘You've got three quarters of an hour.’

‘I like to leave plenty of time.’ Janey said. ‘I don't like to rush. You know that.’

In the plane she kept thinking that she had made a mistake, that she should have stayed home and then they could have tried again. She page 95 wondered if she could change her ticket: two months was a long time. Anything could happen in two months. The stewardesses came by in their long silk dresses, which were lime green and fuchsia pink and purple embossed with gold. They smiled the chilly smiles of stewardesses and poured Janey a gin and tonic and said ‘Here you are, madam’ in accented voices, slurring the Rs like Americans. The plane was as big as a city, as big as a football field. It shook and rattled and bounced. It was too hot in the plane. Janey took off her sweatshirt. The stewardesses brought her beef stew with gluey mashed potato and green beans in a small curved dish, and a salad which was nothing but floppy torn pieces of iceberg lettuce and a single half-round of cucumber. She ate one bite of an insubstantial, cotton-wool-like bread roll and one spoonful of a custard tart, and then she waited for the stewardess to come for the tray. Out the window were soft grey clouds and above, a dazzling blue sky, fading to pink towards the east, where night was coming. It seemed wrong somehow that this high the sky was always blue; it was as if there was no real weather, as if the weather was no more than an illusion. Janey put the soft foam pads of her headset to her ears and listened to Lionel Ritchie singing ‘Close to You’ and Bette Midler singing ‘The Rose’ on the easy listening channel. After that came ‘Ebony and Ivory’ and she pulled the plugs from her ears and slept instead for a while. It didn't seem long but then the stewardesses were handing out steaming hot towels with tongs and bringing round fruit salad and omelettes, pouring coffee from tall metal pots. Janey drank two cups of coffee and took out her guidebook. She looked at maps of Banglamphu and Chinatown and read through the names of the guest houses, over and over: this one was clean, this one had friendly staff, this one had a good library and a pleasant palm-lined courtyard. That sounded nice. She took out a pen and marked it.

When they came in to land it was just on midnight in Bangkok but six am in Auckland. The city spread out in all directions, its lights bright amid the smog. Neon signs the size of billboards flashed Samsung and Fuji. As they touched the tarmac the plane jittered and rattled and the roar rose up through it huge like a great hot wind. After that they seemed to be taxiing for half an hour, turning along lines and page 96 more lines of glittering, incomprehensible lights, green, red, white. Janey remembered landing at Heathrow with Martin and she turned away from the window. She stood alone in the line for Customs and she tried to smile as the Thai woman in the navy uniform stamped her passport but she felt like crying instead. At Heathrow she had gone to wash her face in the toilet while Martin waited for the bags. She was exhausted and dizzied from flying for thirty hours; she could hardly speak and she kept hallucinating flickering black shapes, but she and Martin were there on their trip and none of it mattered. She slumped on yellow plastic chair and Martin loaded the bags onto a trolley. Outside—the icy wind cutting through their clothes, Janey digging into her pack for a second jumper—he hailed a cab. She had never been there before but there was no need for a guidebook because she had Martin.

Now she stepped out of the air-conditioned cool of Don Muang airport and the night was thick with heat. It hung like a fog and smelt overpoweringly of motorbike fumes. When she got off the bus at Khao San Road it was almost one—she turned back the hands of her watch on the way, spinning them round and round—and she had stopped caring about palm-lined courtyards or a friendly family atmosphere. She climbed a flight of narrow stairs, swaying under the weight of her pack, and a woman in a headscarf with a lined, reserved face charged her 200 baht for a room with walls made from sheets of woodgrain formica nailed together and a gap of barely two feet between the bed and the wall. It was twice the going rate the guidebook had quoted and when Janey opened the louvre windows petrol fumes and the sound of drunken cheering came pouring in, but she paid the woman, carefully reading the denomination on each note, and slept with her earplugs in. In the morning there were tiny red bite marks on her arms and ankles but she didn't know what from. She went out to the bathroom and the woman from last night was sitting on the floor with two other women. They had a baby squirrel wrapped in a towel and they were feeding it from a baby's bottle and cooing. When Janey walked past they glanced up and nodded. She said, ‘Sawat-dii kha,’ hullo, but they didn't answer. In the bathroom she squatted and pissed into the squat toilet and a light spray of urine went on her left foot.

page 97

She had no bottled water to brush her teeth but she showered and washed her hair, and then she went out into the street and had poached eggs on toast in a café downstairs from one of the guest houses. Again it cost twice what the Lonely Planet had said to expect and she wondered how long her money would last. The café was bustling with Germans and Americans. They were shaking out newspapers over their breakfasts and pouring coffee from plungers; the men had sunglasses and clipped, greying beards. Janey looked around her and tried to smile but she couldn't catch anyone's eye.

Lek stood in the bathroom and let the spray of water run across his face and down over his body. The New Zealand girl had seemed keen enough to have sex with him—he'd heard that about farang women, although he'd never been with one before—but her eyes were sad throughout. He wished she would smile. He had looked down at their two skins where they touched and his own seemed darker than ever.

When he was with Usa she spent hundreds of baht trying to lighten her skin. The bottles were lined on her bathroom shelf, beautiful pale-skinned women smiling from the labels. Usa had a fit at him for going out in the sun, wandering round Lumphini Park for a whole afternoon with Sathit without even a hat to protect his face. ‘You look blacker than ever!’ she hissed at him. The afternoon was a waste of time anyway; Sathit turned up drunk, and wanting money. He kept running into young guys he knew and going off to talk to them in a low, urgent voice, while Lek stood around awkwardly with his hands in his pockets. In the end they went to an ATM on Silom Road and Lek got out a thousand baht. Sathit said it was for his fees and Lek just nodded. Then he caught a boat up the river past Yaowaraj and went to the apartment building where Usa lived with her mother and father and three younger brothers.

She was studying and it had put her in a bad temper as always. He could see it in the way she looked at him and he wished he'd worn a newer shirt. ‘You gave him a thousand baht?’ she said.

‘For his fees,’ said Lek.

page 98

‘His fees?’ said Usa. ‘I'don't think he's even a student. I don't think he's telling you the truth.’

Lek didn't think so either but he shrugged. Sathit was his brother after all and it was Lek's duty to look after him. ‘What can I do?’ he said.

Usa grimaced and shook her head.

Lek was clever but he was not educated enough for Usa. He was a country boy and his skin was dark. He wore cheap clothes from the piled-high stalls of Chinatown, bargaining the Chinese traders down as far as he could in a narrow alley thick with the scent of incense. He was learning English from a book, practising on the customers at the hotel. He wanted to make something of himself, but he had Sathit to support and his mother's medical bills to pay and there was no way he would ever get to university himself. ‘Stop giving money to your brother then,’ said Usa. ‘Spend it on your own studies. You know he'll never get anywhere. You known what he's like.’

Lek did know but he couldn't bring himself to cut off sathit's money supply. Things hadn't been easy for Sathit and anyway it was the Thai way that you supported your younger siblings. His mother had expected it. He expected it.

Usa was a modern girl and she was impatient with all that. She was studying tourism and English and business administration; she was a career woman. She thought she might study overseas, later, after she'd made some money. She sat on the one chair in Lek's room and regarded Lek as he came out of the bathroom in his hotel porter's outfit, straightening his cap in front of the mirror, and she tossed her hair and sighed a little. She let Lek make love to her on his hard cheap bed and she complained about the blanket scratching her and smiled when he said he loved her, but he knew that he would never be good enough for her, and a few months later she broke up with him and married a tall, light-skinned man who had just completed his business degree and was moving down to work in Singapore.

Beside the Thai boy Janey slept in fits and starts. It was hot and she woke in the night to see the spiky dark brush of his hair in the half- page 99 light He was sleeping on his stomach. She lifted her arm and tilted it back forth to try and read the time on her watch, but she couldn't. She imagined it was two, three. There was still a soft rumble of traffic from Lat Phrao Road.

She turned onto her back and tried to remember her dream, but she could only catch glimpses: she had been trying on clothes in a second-hand shop, the changing room somehow high up and open, exposed, like a balcony. She had clothes on hangers, a pair of trousers covered in sequins, a dress made from bright crocheted patches. The clothes were narrow and she didn't think they would fit but they did.

She put an experimental hand on the Thai boy's shoulder and he murmured something softly into the pillow. She wished she could wake him, have him hold her, say something comforting. She had never been a good sleeper, not even as a child. Martin had become accustomed to her and he would pull her close, barely waking, his own sleepiness and the depth of his dreaming lapping over her like a warm sea and eventually taking her over until she slept again too.

Every time she checked her email he had sent her messages, sometimes several a day. There were tourists all around her at the rows of computers, logging on to Hotmail, hunching over the keyboards and typing fast in German and Dutch and French and English. Janey had emails from her mother and from her friends Cath and Sally, and rows of emails from Martin. Martin was begging her to come home. He couldn't sleep without her. His bed was huge, empty, lonely, a mile wide. When he woke in the night the stars hurt his eyes and the moon was mocking him. He had terrible dreams, dreams where he was lost at sea, dreams where he walked for miles through long alleyways, abandoned brick warehouses on either side of him. In his dreams he was looking and looking for Janey but he never found her and instead he woke crying. I'm scared it's over between us, he wrote. Please don't tell me it's over.

Janey ground her teeth in fury when she read the emails. Isn't it a bit late for this? she wrote back.

Is there someone else? wrote Martin. Oh God. I can't bear it. Please don't let there be someone else.

page 100

After a while Janey stopped reading the emails, clicking instead on the little tick box so they would be deleted when she logged off. She didn't care any more what Martin had to say, what kind of pain he was in, how much he loved her. For a while she too had wished she could turn back time but now she saw that it was too late for that.

Martin had slept with his flatmate. He had taken her into his room and rubbed his hands over her breasts. He had stood behind her with his arms around her and his erection pressing against her from behind, and then he had turned her around and undone her top and run his tongue around the edges of her ear. He had lain down on the bed and taken her hand and whispered, ‘Come here,’ and he had pulled her down over him and taken her nipple in his mouth. He had pushed upwards against her and he had unzipped his pants and reached up under her skirt to pull hers down. He had fucked her from underneath, waiting until halfway through to put on a condom, then closing his eyes and letting out a small series of yelps when he came. Then he had smiled at her and hugged her tightly, nestling into her neck, giving her little kisses all over her shoulder and the side of her head.

Of course Janey didn't really know that that was how they had done it. But she had slept with Martin dozens, maybe hundreds of times, and it seemed likely, unless he had some fascinating new trick that he only wanted to use on the flatmate.

She turned over in the bed and slept again and then woke. Outside day was coming. The dark sky was fading to grey and the traffic noise was a low hum. Janey's shoulder hurt from the hard bed and the thin blanket was scratchy where it touched her neck. Next to her the Thai boy was waking too, muttering a little, turning onto his stomach, turning his head towards her. His eyes were still closed but his hand brushed her nipple and for the first time she felt a sexual twinge inside her. She moved closer. Her skin was so white against his. His lips were wide and sensuous. His nose was broad. His closed eyelids curved upwards elegantly like those of the Buddha statues she had seen at Wat Pho and Wat Traimit, their expressions cool and sad and peaceful, their skin a gleaming gold. Suddenly she wanted him to fuck her. She page 101 was naked—they were both naked—and she moved against him and moved her legs apart so her crotch was against his hip. She could feel herself humming with desire, buzzing with it.

It was over with Martin. It was really over. She let the thoughts of him fly away from her, let them go out into the thick city air, and her chest felt clenched and hard with sorrow. She was impatient for sex. She took the Thai boy's hand and put it between her legs. His finger touched her and she gasped a little. Then he was waking properly and lifting himself over so he was on top of her. He was fucking her—not a word spoken between them—and she could feel the tears coming into her eyes. She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him right down against her so he wouldn't see her crying, and he rocked and pushed against her and after a while he came, and then he saw her face and he put his hand to her cheek and said, ‘But I am hurting you!’

‘No,’ said Janey. ‘No. Really. It's quite the reverse.’

‘Reverse?’ said the Thai boy. He touched her arm. ‘You must not cry,’ he said, but she couldn't stop it now, she couldn't help it, the tears came streaming out of her, and her shoulders and chest were shaking.

‘Please,’ said the Thai boy. ‘Please. No.’ He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. ‘What is matter?’ he said. ‘Nothing is matter. Do not cry.’ She thought he would touch her and his skin would be a comfort to her, but instead he stood up, frowning. ‘I must take shower,’ he said. He wasn't looking at her. She could see he was embarrassed by her crying, but she couldn't stop it.

‘Do not cry,’ he said. ‘Do not cry. It is all right.’ He stood and went into the bathroom and she could hear the water of the shower running. She sat up too and pulled the scratchy blanket around her shoulders and her skin was pink and marked where the blanket had rubbed it in the night. She imagined Lek as he was in the next room, his head tipped back under the cold water as it sprayed over him and everywhere else too in the bathroom, hitting the cracked white tiles of the walls and floor and the low, stained squat toilet with the red plastic jug beside it for washing yourself after shitting. It was six am in Bangkok, which made it midday in Auckland. Janey rubbed the tears page 102 from her cheeks and pictured Martin in his shower at home, the sliding glass door pulled across, Martin rubbing shower gel onto his chest, his skin flushing pink where the hot water hit it. He had a sleek and renovated bathroom with spa jets in the bath and big square floor tiles in a checkerboard pattern. Everything in his bathroom gleamed. Bottles of shampoo and conditioner stood in rows, smelling of mint, peach, coconut, honey. By the time Martin finished the mirror was completely steamed up and when Janey went in next she would find he had drawn a heart in the condensation and written J & M inside it. The air was thick with steam and with the sweet scents of gels and washes and conditioners.

Janey stood and found the towel she'd used the night before. It was damp and smelt of soap. She assembled her clothes in a heap and she took them all into the bathroom when Lek was finished. She had stopped crying. She stood under the shower and let the cold water spray over her. She soaked her hair and opened her mouth to the water and as it ran soapy over the tiles and down the drain she imagined that her sadness went with it, that it was washing away whatever it was that still bound her to Martin. Then she imagined that her desire for the Thai boy was being washed from her too and that it was all gone, streaming through the pipes and into the sewers. She was breathing hard and she knew that she needed to go back to the OK Guest House where her pack still stood in the corner of a room with thin plywood walls, the ceiling fan turning lazily above it.

She dressed and came out of the bathroom and asked the Thai boy what bus she needed to take. He said to take 44 and get off at Sanam Luang. Did she know Sanam Luang? He looked relieved that she'd stopped crying. ‘I will show you where bus is,’ he said.

‘You don't need to.’

‘No. You are guest. First we will eat. Breakfast. Then you take bus.’

‘No,’ said Janey. She shook her head. ‘No. I've got to go now.’ She went across to Lek and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He flinched a little but she tried to ignore it. ‘Thank you for letting me stay,’ she said ‘You've been very kind.’ She felt in her shoulder bag for her wallet. ‘Here's some money for last night's dinner,’ she said.

‘No!,’ said Lek.

page 103

‘No, I want to.’ She took out a 500-baht note held it out to him.

‘I do not want,’ said Lek. ‘That is too much.’ He kept his hands at his sides.

‘Oh well,’ said Janey. She put the money on his table and slipped on her shoes. ‘Thanks again,’ she said, and she opened the door and went out into long corridor.

There were six more hours until Lek's shift started. He'd thought the farang girl might stay longer, eat breakfast with him, lunch, but she had taken her things and gone. Her hair—as yellow as a doll's—was wet and dripping onto her clothes. The money she'd left lay on the table. Lek flicked at it with a finger and it fell to the floor.

He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of water. He flipped open the top and poured a glass, and he sat at the table and drank.

He sat for a while longer. His mother was watching him from a photo on the bookshelf. She was young in that photo and laughing. There were other photos of her in an album, later photos, photos taken after the cancer got a hold and first she bloated right up and then shrank away so all her bones were visible through her skin. There were photos of her standing next to Lek and standing next to Sathit. Tucked inside the front cover of the album were the photos of Lek with his father and his father's new wife, still in the envelope from the camera shop. The young wife was beautiful and laughing. The kitten nestled up to her face, its creamy fur soft as soft, its eyes as round and blue as jewels.

He drank some more water. He was tired. He was out of the habit of having someone else in his bed, and the farang girl had tossed and muttered and moved around in the night. Then she had cried and cried and he hadn't known why. He had never seen another person cry so hard, and he wondered if he had done something, if he had upset her somehow. Mainly, though, he just wanted her to stop.

The phone started to ring. It was right next to him but he sat and watched it as it rang. It would be Sathit, asking for money. Sathit was the only person who ever rang. Textbooks, course materials, pens, a new briefcase: there was always something. Lek looked at the phone page 104 with interest and counted the rings. It rang fifteen times, then it stopped. Then it started ringing again.

He stood up. There was no food in the fridge and he needed something to eat. He picked up his keys, and he put the 500-baht note the farang girl had left into his pocket and went out the door. As he walked along the corridor he could still hear the ringing, but by the time he started down the stairs it was faint, and on the first landing he could hear nothing at all, only the traffic sounds from outside, and the soft noises of a woman swishing her mop in a bucket as she mopped along the fifth-floor corridor. He had seen her before, sweeping the corridor on his floor. She was a country woman, probably from the north-east: she had dark skin, a sarong, a scarf over her hair. The woman looked up as Lek passed and he nodded to her. She smiled back at him. She looked older than his mother and there were no teeth in her mouth, but her eyes were bright as bright.

In the market on Lat Phrao Road Janey bought chunks of papaya in a cellophane bag. She stood at the bus stop eating them with a toothpick and looking around her. Her hair was wet and pale around her shoulders and it was dripping and leaving wet spots on her T-shirt. People looked at her curiously and she smiled at them and said, ‘Sawatdii kha,’ and then they smiled back and replied, and in a little while the bus came and she ran to it and pulled herself on quickly like a Thai person, and she took a seat and waited while the conductor came round clicking the ticket machine and jingling the coins, and she paid and settled back in her seat for the long trip, and along Lat Phrao Road and then Kamphaeng Pet the markets were opening up, people calling to each other and pulling back tarpaulins, setting themselves up to sell fried fish and chicken curry and iced tea and noodles, and the grimy warmth of the day was just starting, the purr of the big city coming up as if from underground, and Janey remembered the market north of Khao San Road where they sold breakfast on the street, pancakes, and iced coffee, but that was still an hour's bus ride away, and she ate another piece of papaya and leaned right back in her seat, watching the city start to come alive.