Bar Girl (2 page)

‘Thank you very much, Papa,’ she said, and gave a wai so low that she felt the small silver Buddha bump gently against her chin.

‘Now that’s over with, let’s have a drink.’

Her father had dismissed her already and was talking to the rest of the men. A bottle of whiskey was soon produced and the female guests made their excuses to leave, taking their children with them.

Siswan had said her goodbyes to her friends and family and had taken herself off to her bed. She showered, using the small bucket to throw cold water over herself, and carefully hung her dress on the rail that sufficed as a wardrobe.

Lying quietly in her small bed, she listened to the noise of the men below as they consumed more and more whiskey. Her father was the loudest of them all. She prayed that he wouldn’t hurt her mother tonight.

She fingered the small figure that still hung around her neck. This was the first piece of jewellery she had ever owned, or worn, and the chain felt strange against her skin. Not uncomfortable exactly, just strange. She wondered if the small figure minded being in contact with a female.

Despite the raucous shouts of the men below, Siswan fell asleep clutching the small silver ornament in her hand.

She awoke a few hours later when Bak entered their shared room. He stumbled through the doorway and she could tell he was drunk. She pretended to be asleep. She heard him undress and curse, under his breath, when he fell against his bed.

Their father was shouting downstairs. She could hear her mother’s quiet replies. She hoped she wouldn’t hear them fighting again. Why did men become so angry, she thought to herself. Why couldn’t they just be quiet and get on with life like the women?

‘Siswan?’ Bak whispered.

He was standing over her bed. She didn’t open her eyes but she could sense his closeness. He had been mean to her in front of her friends and she didn’t want to speak to him.

‘Siswan,’ he whispered again, more insistently.

She continued to pretend to be asleep. She didn’t know why, but she felt a little scared. Her brother was no longer her friend. He sounded so much like their father these days. Hard and cold.

‘I know you aren’t asleep,’ he hissed, close to her face.

She could smell the whiskey from his breath and felt afraid. She kept her eyes closed and continued to pretend. Her hand, beneath the single sheet that covered her, tightened on the small Buddha. Make him go away, she thought. She felt his hand on her shoulder.

‘Siswan. I have something for you,’ he slurred in her ear. ‘A birthday present.’

She could feel his foul smelling breath waft over the side of her face. He was so close she imagined she felt the spittle spray on her cheek as he spoke.

His hand slid down her arm and, as it reached her elbow, slid onto her waist.

‘Don’t worry. You can stay asleep if you want,’ he told her, as he slid into the bed behind her.

His hand slid down to her hip and she felt the hem of her nightdress slide up as he gathered the material with his fingers. She trembled at his touch. What was he doing, she thought?

Bak felt her thigh. He slid his hand down the length of her leg to her knee and then stroked back up again. She held her breath. She felt something hard in the small of her back. He moved up and down against her. She didn’t know what to do. This felt wrong. Very wrong.

Still pretending sleep, she shrugged away from him and moved further away in the small bed. She was almost on the far edge. Another move and she would fall out.

‘Don’t make a sound. Papa will come and you’ll be in trouble,’ Bak told her, as he shifted close to her once again.

She wanted to shout. She wanted to tell him to get out, to leave her alone. She couldn’t. She was frozen with fear. If she shouted, her father may come into their small bedroom. She would be in trouble. Big trouble. She wasn’t sure what was happening but she knew it was wrong, and she knew, with all her heart, that whatever it was, it would be her fault. Men were never wrong.

She felt Bak push against her again. Shifting back and forth, up and down. His breathing was becoming louder. More rapid. The stink of the whiskey washed over her. His hand was between her legs. Feeling. Touching.

‘It’s alright. Just a few more minutes,’ he whispered, into her ear.

She screwed her eyes tight. She could hear the shouts below. She heard the first slap as her father struck her mother across the face. She clung to the figure around her neck. The little Buddha smiled in her hand.

*****

It would be another year before Siswan did anything to stop her brother’s attentions. Sometimes he would abuse her two or three times a week. Sometimes he wouldn’t touch her for a fortnight. But, however long the periods in-between, he would always come back eventually. She lived in fear of him. Fear of what her mother and father would do to her if they ever found out about Bak.

‘I’ll tell Papa’ was all he had to say if she tried to fight him off. If she tried to stop him. He just smiled. She would never tell.

Her father declined into an almost full time drunken stupor. He was always angry. Always shouting. Most nights, if he wasn’t so drunk that he just collapsed, he would beat her mother. She could hear her cries. Hear the thuds of her father’s fists.

Some nights, when the cries were at their loudest and the thuds could be felt through the thin wooden walls of the house, Bak would come to her bed and touch her. He told her he would take care of her, comfort her whilst their father ranted and their mother cried.

It wasn’t the same as when they were young. He didn’t comfort her as he had then. Now he just took; never gave. There was no comfort or warmth in his touch.

During the day, Bak treated her no better, and no worse, than he treated his mother or any other female in the village. He behaved with complete indifference. It was as though he saw nothing wrong in what he did. She was just there to clean, cook, work and give him pleasure when he wanted it.

Siswan didn’t tell anyone what was happening. She saw no reason to ask for help. Who could help? Perhaps this was normal? Perhaps all women lived the same way? She didn’t know.

She worked hard and tried to take care of her mother as best she could. The woman was taking beatings from her father so often she could hardly work. Her face was swollen and her stomach a mass of blue and black bruises that never had a chance to fade away.

The rest of the villagers never spoke to her about her mother’s plight. They could see and hear what was happening, but they never said a word. It was unfortunate, they said to each other. Maybe, in her next life, she would meet a kinder man, they said. Maybe, in her previous life, she had not had a good heart.

Her mother increasingly hid within herself. She spent her time bundling the small crops that Siswan harvested from their fields and withdrew more and more from the world around her. As time went on, and the fists continued to land, she would seldom cry out. Just accept the punishment as just and well deserved. She declined in health.

Bak had introduced Siswan to some of his friends and, on occasions, she would be made to give pleasure to them in the fields away from the village. The first time, when she had refused, Bak had beaten her so hard and so fast, she was stunned.

He had never beaten her before and, even though he threatened her often enough, she had only ever felt his hand hit her once before. This time it had been different. No longer a boy, he hit her hard again and again and again.

‘You make me lose face, Siswan,’ he had told her. ‘You must not make me lose face.’ And he punched her so hard in the stomach that she had been sick in the field.

Bak had stood over her, waiting. He still wasn’t finished. Grabbing her by the hair, he pulled her head back and spat into her face. His saliva ran down her cheek.

‘I told my friends you would be a good girl,’ he shouted at her. ‘You will do as I say. Mama and Papa can’t help you now. Only me.’

She did as she was told. She pleasured his friends with her hands and her mouth and Bak left her alone. He no longer touched her or came to her bed in the night. He had passed her on.

‘Don’t let any of them enter you, Siswan,’ he told her. ‘You can do anything else for them but don’t let them enter you.’

She hadn’t understood exactly what he meant but, as time went on, she learned. She learned a lot. It was very seldom when a day went by without her having to leave the field where she tended the sage, and walk into the cane with some boy or another. It became just another job. Another chore she had to perform.

Over the course of the next year her father lapsed into a continuous drunken stupor. He became bloated and indolent. He lost his job and sat around the home mumbling incoherently. Her mother washed him and tried to feed him but all he wanted was the whiskey. The foul smelling local brew that was slowly, but surely, killing him. Siswan’s thirteenth birthday came and went without notice. The only good thing that came from her father’s increasing ill health was that he no longer had the strength, or inclination, to beat her mother. He became like a truculent child that needed constant attention. Too lazy even to use the hole in the ground that passed as a toilet.

The family became more and more reliant upon the money Bak earned. Siswan didn’t know what he did but without him they wouldn’t be able to live. What he told her to do for his friends seemed a small price to pay in return.

Bak provided just about everything the family needed. The few coins Siswan earned from the allotment were pitiful in comparison. He paid the household bills and even bought the whiskey his father craved. When he turned up one afternoon on a brand new motorbike he seemed, for a moment anyway, like the brother she had known so many years ago.

‘Where did you get it?’ she asked him.

‘From the garage in the town,’ he replied, with a grin. ‘It’s the latest model. It even has an electric starter.’

‘It must have been expensive,’ she said.

Siswan was careful to keep the tone of her voice light. She didn’t want to upset Bak. It was good to see him looking cheerful again.

‘I bought it on credit,’ he looked at her. ‘It wasn’t much.’

‘Well, I’m pleased for you. Maybe you could take me for a ride?’ she smiled.

‘Maybe later,’ he said. ‘I’m going out with my friends tonight. Make sure you give Papa his whiskey.’

She did as she was told. Sometimes Bak would go out all night and she would help her mother take care of her father. Washing him was the worst.

‘Where does Bak work, Mama?’ she asked, as she rinsed the cloth they used to wipe away her father’s waste.

‘I don’t know,’ her mother replied, quietly.

Siswan looked at her mother closely. The woman was old. Older than her years. She never smiled and her eyes seemed far away. She no longer taught Siswan anything new and seemed reluctant even to talk to her. Without the beatings from her father her mother’s previously swollen face had become loose. The skin sagged under her eyes and chin. She looked like a woman that had lost. Whatever it was that she had been fighting had won.

‘Are you alright, Mama?’ Siswan asked her.

Her mother looked at her and, for a second, there was recognition in her eyes. A look that scared Siswan. A look of condemnation.

‘Everyone knows what you do,’ she spat the words at her daughter.

‘Everyone!’

Siswan looked at her in shock. The words cut through her. Each one left a welt in her mind much worse than the swishing sticks on her skin. For a moment she didn’t know what to do or to say. She felt stunned. What was it? What had she been doing that would make her mother speak so cruelly?

‘What, Mama?’ she cried.

‘You are a whore, Siswan. A dirty whore!’

The sound of her mother’s voice cut into her. What she did with the boys had made her into something bad. Something worse than all the foul names she had heard her father call her mother over the years.

It must be what she did in the cane fields. There was nothing else she had done that would make her mother speak to her in this way. Suddenly, she felt dirty. Sordid. Feelings that she had never experienced before, welled up inside her.

‘I only do what Bak tells me to do,’ she shouted back.

‘What you do is wrong.’

Her mother was drifting away again. Her voice became tired and frail once more. Siswan wanted to shake her mother. She wanted her to stay with her. To talk to her. To tell her what she should do.

‘Mama!’ she cried.

The woman who was too old, too tired, turned back to dress her husband. The eyes withdrew, leaving Siswan alone once more.

‘Oh, Mama,’ she cried, quietly. ‘Oh my poor Mama.’

It was all her fault. What she had allowed Bak to do, what she did to the boys, was wrong. She felt dirty. Alone. Scared. She had made her mother ill. Made her father ill. She didn’t know what to do. The enormity of her realisation threatened to overpower her. She felt sick. Powerless to do anything. She cried into her hands.

*****

Once she had accepted her role in the life Bak had chosen for her, Siswan had learned to switch off her mind to what she did. It had been very easy after all. She had quickly learned what it was that they wanted and she had performed the tasks easily enough. The young men wouldn’t take very long most of the time.

When they had finished most of them quickly pulled their trousers back up and walked away. On those occasions she would just go back to the fields and work. Sometimes the boys would want more. They would want to touch her, or even kiss her. She let them. It didn’t matter to her what they wanted as long as they didn’t enter her.

Once she had learned what it was that some of the boys wanted to do, especially the older ones, she had found it easy to convince them not to get carried away.

‘I’m having a period,’ she would tell them.

If that didn’t work, she would struggle just enough to stop them from pushing into her and, after squirming away, would be able to control their passions with her mouth. Most of them seemed to prefer that anyway. She had been surprised at how quickly their passions had died once they had shuddered and trembled under her caress.

One or two had wanted to talk. Mostly afterwards. It seemed as though they wanted to offer some kind of explanation. A reason for having done what they had, up until a few minutes before, insisted upon. They acted like guilty young children trying to explain their reasons to an angry parent.

She hadn’t understood why they needed to talk. Why they had wanted to explain. She just listened and smiled. She hadn’t cared, or minded, that much. A smile, or a word or two in the right places, and they seemed satisfied until the next time. She had just accepted her life. Got on with it as best as she could.