Holiday in Cambodia (14 page)

‘That story,’ said Meg.

‘That’s what I forgot to say. Oh, well I’ll just tell you.’ He sat up in his chair. ‘So we’re still sitting like this and she’s telling me the whole story.’

‘That story.’

‘I know, right? I take her face in my hands again like this,’ Steve made a V with his thumb and forefinger and fit it around Meg’s chin. His fingers went right up to her eyelashes. ‘And I say to her, “Don’t do it again.”’ Then I kiss her. Like this.’ He craned his neck and kissed Meg very deliberately on the lips, then he pulled back to look at her.

‘Don’t do it again,’ said Meg.

‘That’s what I said.’ He leaned in. Meg jolted her head back and her chin fell from his fingers.

‘That story you told.’

‘Forget it. Me and that girl? It was a kiss goodbye. Nothing more between us.’

‘The story about the penises.’

Steve smirked and sat back.

‘Yeah?’

‘It was
my
story. I told it to you on Sunday.’ Steve shrugged. ‘It was
my
story that
I
told to
you
,’ Meg insisted. He stared a moment, then burst into laughter. It lasted until Meg knocked her glass of gin and tonic and it splashed over Steve with a hiss.

Ta kept telling her to shut up, but without much guts. She went back to sucking on a bottle of Sprite in the doorway while the rest of us sat out on the concrete slab in the cool after the downpour. Three stairs down, motorbikes were weaving in the street, slapping mud. I tried to yank the knots out of Soklay’s wet hair, but she kept chatting and running inside to see the dogs because she’s fourteen and can’t handle how we just sit and wait for things to happen.

‘It’s just going to happen, girl,’ said Aunt, who’d come with her son to collect rent. I knew it was the last of Ta’s money. Aunt flattened the notes into her purse and positioned her backside on the seat of her son’s motorbike.

‘Clean Soklay up or something and give her this, she’s skinny,’ she yelled up to me, holding out a plastic bag. It was warm and had a big warm pot in it that smelled of restaurant. I gave it to Soklay and all the women watched the pot.

The
yaba
man had come early in the morning. Ta asked him to give her less than usual so she had money for rent. She said it over and over until he snapped, ‘Shut up, crazy bitch. I’m not deaf!’ When Ta had her hit, the yaba man smiled over at me like an evil fish. A shark or an eel or the ghost of one. He pursed his lips and threw his chin, like, You want? I turned away and heard his horrible teeth laughing behind me and went to clean my room out from the night before. Soklay was crouched in the hall. She’d been told to watch. She watched us pay rent and she watched us go in and out of the rooms.

‘
Don’t bend hard wood; don’t educate a prostitute
,’ Aunt would quote. ‘Just learn the little thing you can.’

I found Soklay later, washing in the yard. She was small in a wet sarong – like a cat or a dog after rain. For a moment I pretended I was the man who would look at her for the first time. She saw me and said, ‘Do you want to bathe, older sister?’ I said yes and she said, ‘Too bad, I’m special today.’ She can be a bitch.

I have a piece of mirror and when I got back to my room I looked at my tangled body in it. I tried to remember the man who first looked at me – his yellow beard and balding head, his legs bowed like a child when he walked towards me naked, his anger when I cried. He knew how to say
beautiful
in Vietnamese and how to touch me like a father. Then he gave me back and gave Aunt the money and I went to my room and from then on I paid rent and made money along with all the other women.

A policeman came and asked for Soklay.

‘She’s sick again,’ I said. ‘Do you want a massage?’

‘How much?’ he asked with a grin. It’s always free for him. I took him to my room and he undid his pants. Soklay always wanted to know what happens next.

‘You’ll find out when it’s your special time,’ Aunt always told her. Once Soklay asked Ta what happens and Ta said, ‘Then they fuck you.’ Soklay wanted to know what that
was
and Ta barked with laughter.

Aunt came by again and again to keep an eye on Soklay. I was busy. Men arrived on their motorbikes and crossed the concrete slab. In the afternoon some foreigners walked past. I yelled, ‘Hey, massage?’ They came up the broken stairs, laughing as though they’d had ganja.

‘How much?’ said the tall one. I pointed to the sign: Massage 8000. The man did a calculation. ‘Two dollars?’ he asked. I nodded and, because foreigners get confused, I pointed to each of them.

‘Two dollar, two dollar, two dollar,’ I said. Two dollars each. The man laughed.

‘Is that with a happy ending?’ he asked and laughed again.

‘Happy,’ I agreed and smiled, but just with my lips because my teeth aren’t so nice now.

We had three foreign men and Aunt was pleased. She asked me how much and I told her and she said that price was okay for a rub but to charge five times the normal for sex. The one who came with me was small, like a Cambodian. The tall one had chosen Srey Mom, who’s pretty, and the other man got Ta. She can be confident when she’s on it and she dragged him into her room by his belt. The small man sat down on my bed and let me take off his shirt. I rubbed his back and then I rubbed his front and then I undid his jeans and rubbed his penis. I reached for a condom. I pointed to it and said, ‘Ten dollar,’ then I hid it and said, ‘Twenty dollar’ – you have to charge more if they want skin because you might have to go to a doctor. He didn’t understand so I did it again. But this time I put the condom packet near his penis, which was big now – ten – and then took it away – or twenty. I laughed and forgot to cover my mouth with my hand.

‘Oh, oh. Ten dollars! Ten,’ he said and laughed too. So we had ten dollars and the man was happy and he shook and shook. Then he fell on top of my back and kissed my neck. One of his friends said his name through the thin wall and I pulled the condom off and showed him – no holes. He laughed and got dressed and pulled a note from his wallet.

Soklay was dressed up like a bride. Aunt had been having a go at her with lipstick and some pins for her hair. We’re always new wives, even if every husband isn’t our first and our prices go down with every birthday. Soklay watched him leave.

‘That was a foreigner,’ I told her.

‘I’m not stupid,’ she snapped and went back to glaring at the puppies that Aunt must’ve told her not to go near.

‘Foreigners got dicks like elephants,’ Ta sniggered from her doorway. ‘Split you in half.’ A big, childish tear pushed from Soklay’s eye and made a track through the powder on her cheek. Aunt made a disapproving sound in her throat.

‘Let’s play cards,’ I said quickly and took Soklay’s hand. I led her to the mat at the entrance, so men in the darkening street might see her and be drawn inside like flying ants to a light. Before Aunt left she brought over the big pot and laid out a bowl for me too. The food was cold by then but still delicious.

‘Where will he take me?’ Soklay whispered.

‘To a hotel,’ I said. She was letting me paint her nails. I had to concentrate under the dim bulb light because my hands will shake at anything.

‘What will his name be?’

‘Bob.’

‘Bob?’

I nodded. ‘Or Dave.’

‘Day,’ Soklay tested. ‘Day.’ The nail colour she’d chosen was the same as the little budding flowers on her dress.

‘Will he like me?’

‘
A soup may be bitter but it must be hot; a wife may be brown but she must be young
,’ I quoted. She nodded. She knew that one.

‘I’m young,’ she said after a while, ‘and beautiful. He’ll love me and marry me.’

‘He’ll fuc–’ Ta started from her stool outside.

‘You’ll spend a week with him and then you’ll come back to us,’ I interrupted. Ta went back to muttering.

‘Then I’ll be like you, older sister,’ she said and turned her painted fingers to hold mine. I rash easily. The skin on my palms is raised and sore: the yaba and the makeup and the pink soap I wash with between each man. I turned her soft hand over again and blew on her nails.

They came for her while I was in my room with the old man from the shop that sells T-shirts. I see him gladly almost every night, but this time I wanted him to hurry and used tricks to make him quick. I could hear the commotion outside. He finished and dressed and paused by the door. I hugged him fiercely, how he liked it. He put his small, strong arms around me and rocked me as if I were a child and moaned. He wouldn’t let go for a long time. When I came out, Soklay was gone.

‘Where’d they take her?’ I asked. Ta pointed past the old pool, where faded French words written in Khmer said ‘Le Cercle Sportif’. The other women were asleep already and all the puppies except the runt were feeding from their mother. Ta and I waited on the stools out front for Aunt to come back and lock us up safe for the night.

‘Who came?’

‘It was Aunt and Uncle and this other man in a car, a real nice car, a new one,’ Ta chattered through her yaba. ‘It was all real nice at first but Soklay was taking her sweet time and Aunt lost it and then Uncle came in –’

‘Who was the other man?’

‘He came for Soklay.’

‘Who
was
he, Ta?’

‘A rich man. He was waiting to take Soklay to her foreign buyer, car with a driver inside. I could see the diamonds moving on his hands like this.’ She clenched and unclenched her tiny ringless fists to show me and suddenly I needed a hit. I looked desperately up the empty street, the same direction Soklay had gone, and listened for the footsteps of the old man or some drunk foreigner or Aunt’s motorbike.

‘Do you have any?’ I said and Ta sniffed without taking her eyes off the night.

‘Took it all.’

The night beat at my ears like water.

They did a good sandwich at Le Cercle Sportif – very much a club sandwich but with a slice of thick fried bacon in it that soaked through the bread. I found myself craving one every day at a quarter to twelve. I put my swimming trunks in a towel and my work in a paper pocket and hailed a cyclo, usually young Ponleak, to take me down there. At the entrance of Le Cercle, two men were standing on ladders trying to string a giant banner baring the title ‘UNESCO 1951 Bathing Suit Competition’.

I was working for UNESCO and it was my esteemed job, along with two other judges – one a Miss Fannie Roux, who had taken it upon herself to find me the paper in the mornings and often dined with me at night, and the other the rotund director of something or other, Gustave Babin, who had been drunk since the Sunday plane – to judge the competition that coming weekend. My boss, Alex, had the idea that I should start going to the pool in the lunch hour.

‘A bathing suit judge shouldn’t look pale, Grant,’ he’d told me over a mid-morning sherry. ‘It looks as though he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

All along the pool edge were the browned limbs of perpetual summer. Some browner than others because they were French and Cambodian. Some assisted by the bottle. Dominique Rossi was always at the pool when I arrived. I knew from the competition entry forms that she still went to the International Girl’s School, so she must have skipped out on class to go to the pool at lunchtimes. I didn’t say hello to her – I didn’t know her, really. Her uncle had introduced me to her and her mother, a subdued woman as good-looking as her daughter, at a UNESCO function. I’d felt the mother’s fingers flinch when I took her hand while Uncle Rossi told me that Dominique was entering the competition.

‘I’m one of the judges,’ I’d replied, letting go the reluctant hand.

‘Dominique, this is Grant Baths, one of the judges!’ said Mr Rossi. The girl had turned and taken me in. I had the distinct feeling that I was being analysed and rejected with swift teenage rapacity and wanted to explain that I really hadn’t been a contender in the first place. Instead, I’d excused myself to speak to an acquaintance whose name I had forgotten. I was single. Out of a ratty divorce that had me fleeing across Indochina to what they called the Paris of Asia. I didn’t like Paris, or Asia particularly, but Phnom Penh had plucked the boulevards, bougainvillea and Bollinger from France’s capital and done away with the rest. What was left was the sense of a city that was formerly troublesome but had since had a rather pleasant lobotomy – an effect reinforced by most of the promenading expatriates.

I got a good half hour in on my work reports before the sandwich and the gimlet came out. As usual the waitress had asked me, ‘With or without?’ ‘With’ meant I’d had a rotten sleep – the electricity was off in the hotel and the fan had stopped swishing the thick heat over me in waves, or I’d just lain there in that placid country trying not to equate the motorbikes outside with the memory of bombers in the French skies – and needed a steady shot of gin with my sandwich to get me through the day. ‘Without’ was for the rare days when I was well slept and wore the face I’d had before the war and the ex-wife. With this face I could take Fannie out along the quay at night.

‘With,’ I’d said today and the waitress had smiled as though I’d made a joke, but with sympathetic eyes. I’d forced myself to watch her walk away in a black Khmer skirt with red stripes that managed to make her lithe frame look hourglass.

My headache subsided with the gimlet. I took a great bite from the sandwich and felt able to look around the pool. The rest of the private-school set, the girls who had stayed for their late-morning classes, had arrived and arranged themselves in an aspect of the sun. They waved at Dominique but after a few smiling words they remained apart from her. Dominique stretched and rolled onto her stomach. Her face was hidden under a mess of black hair and she was still there when I’d finished my lunch. I read all about the King and his concubines in the local paper and successfully avoided any articles about England. When I was good and hot and covered in a slick of sweat, I went for the water. It was cool and shivered around me as I scooped along the bottom. I could see a few legs running through it near the surface, the wobbly blue, then the sun shimmering determinedly. As I came up through the break for a gasp of air I thought of Fannie with a hungry longing.

Mostly I saw Fannie as a friend, but now I remembered her big occasional laugh and her wicked hazel eyes on an otherwise sober face. I ducked down and tried to hold that feeling with my breath as long as I could before releasing it in a rush of bubbles. Then I did a few laps of overarm and rested my elbows on the edge of the pool, panting. I’d surfaced right by Dominique, who had turned onto her back and lay very still in the February heat. Little pearls of sweat gathered on her skin. I could have reached out and taken hold of her ankle. I gripped the pool edge with both hands to push myself away but she opened her eyes and said something in Italian.

‘Could you say that in French, or Khmer, or English for that matter?’ I asked in French, treading the water.

‘I said, it’s perfect,’ she repeated three times in the three languages I’d requested and closed her eyes again.

Two days later I’d had a good sleep and ran into Fannie in the hall at work as she came out of a meeting. I pretended to listen to her talk about reports until the board members passed and then I whispered, ‘Come along the quay with me tonight. I’ll take you to dinner.’

Her eyes flashed and she moaned, ‘I
would
but I’m completely stuck with Mr Pork Pie.’ It was her name for the fat director who would be the other judge of the competition.

‘Why are you stuck with him?’ I laughed.

‘Because
you
disappeared and Alex won’t.
Someone
has to look after him.’

‘So you’re going out to dinner with him instead of having a fun jaunt with me?’

‘Yes, unless you want to take him.’

‘No thanks.’ Fannie shrugged and started to walk away. ‘Look,’ I called, ‘why don’t we both go out with him? We’ll take him to dinner, feed him steak until he bursts and then have our little date later when he’s snoring like a beast.’

‘That’s a lot of steak. Okay.’ Fannie shot me her best smile before walking away with her boy’s gait to her next meeting.

That night we met Mr Pork Pie at the Hotel Royal. He was astride a high stool boring the bartender and insisted that we join him in drinking gin. I ducked my head out to tell the tuk tuk driver to park and considered leaving then and there but knew there was only so much Fannie would forgive me for.

‘Now, we’ve got to go over the competitors,’ Pork Pie was saying. ‘It’s not just about the body, you know, it’s the breeding. The breeding really matters. I know, I’ve seen a lot of these competitions in my time and believe you me, breeding counts.’ He fumbled with his wallet and dropped it on the floor.

‘Make him stop saying
breeding
,’ I whispered to Fannie, who snorted and made to hit me on the arm. Pork Pie righted himself with a grunt and resumed his lecture.

‘Take me, for example: Director by age thirty-two, board member by forty, I served as a senior officer in the war and am chairman of the returned servicemen’s league. I’ve been married twenty-six years. Nothing wrong with me. You fought,’ he turned to me.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘In the 11th Armoured, too, the Black Bull, a very impressive division.’

‘Those who survived were quite impressed to have.’

‘They’ve re-formed, haven’t they?’

‘None of my concern.’

‘Still, it makes up for things rather,’ he went on.

‘Makes up for what?’

‘I’m saying it doesn’t matter. Now, Miss Fannie here, I’ve been hearing great things –’

‘Sorry, Fannie, but what does it make up for?’

The man gathered himself up at various points and then settled into his flesh again.

‘You’re a divorcee.’

Fannie put a hand on my shoulder. I tried not to flinch but she felt it and took her hand away. My ex-wife had left me for one of our old, dear friends, who didn’t have the problems I’d brought back from the 11th or anything much at all except a house in Torquay and the ability to touch another without thinking on it first.

‘So?’

‘So, my friend, it doesn’t look good for the girls. Think about it – here they are living these good young lives, trying to do everything right in this wretched country and they’re being judged by people of moral ambiguity.’ The bartender had been attempting Singapore slings at Pork Pie’s request. Now they arrived and I took a big gulp of mine and coughed.

‘Moral ambiguity!’ I laughed and glanced at Fannie. I’d barely laid a finger on her. She read my face and flushed but relaxed her shoulders. Pork Pie produced a grin and suggested we dine at the Royal instead of venturing into the street. I’d picked out a French restaurant whose steaks were far superior to the Royal’s, but it would be easier to get Pork Pie full and drunk and upstairs to his room from the dining room, so we crossed the lobby with our drinks and sat down under the chandeliers. I spoke to the waitress for a while and found out she was from Oddar Meanchay – about as far away from Phnom Penh as you could possibly get and still be in Cambodia.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. Her hands were small but strong, with callouses around the sides from shaking rice or pulling something else from the fields. She was very beautiful.

‘Oh, my brother’s in the army now,’ she said with some pride. ‘So I could come to Phnom Penh and learn to waitress. My aunt came too, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘And she has a friend who works in the kitchen here so … I got this job.’

‘It’s a good job.’

‘How old are you?’ Pork Pie butted in.

‘I’m just eighteen,’ said the waitress.

‘Oh, well then, you’re eligible! She’s eligible!’ he cried, looking at Fannie and me.

‘Ah, I don’t think –’ Fannie began.

‘Of course she is. The competition doesn’t close until an hour before the parade. My dear,’ he turned back to the waitress, who was listening hard to the barrage of French, ‘how do you look in a bathing suit?’ The girl turned to me.

‘Did he say … a
bathing
suit?’ she asked me in Khmer.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand,’ she said to him in French and backed away, smiling.

‘A bathing suit. A so-called “bikini”. Oh gosh darn it, what’s the word in Khmer?’ he demanded but the girl was gone and a boy served us our steaks instead. Pork Pie didn’t notice.

‘To the young ladies of Phnom Penh,’ Pork Pie toasted. Fannie and I glanced at each other and raised our glasses. We were drinking champagne by then and it was working because I touched Fannie’s leg with mine under the table and her knee was lovely and warm.

When he’d finally exhausted the dessert menu, the dessert wine and all topics of interest to him, Pork Pie allowed himself to be escorted back to the lobby. On the way out I passed a table and spotted Mr Rossi. He was dining with Dominique. I sent Fannie on ahead with Pork Pie and bowed slightly to Rossi. Being the businessman he was, he recognised me immediately and stood.

‘Dominique, you remember Grant Baths,’ he said. Dominique smiled but stayed in her seat, offering her hand. Her fingers were hot. ‘The judge of Saturday’s swimsuit competition!’ Rossi announced grandly. I turned again to Dominique, who had proceeded to tuck into an enormous steak. Her uncle laughed. ‘She has the appetite of a teenage goatherd,’ he said.

‘A lot of the young women starve themselves before the competition. I’m very glad to see that’s not the case here,’ I said, addressing Dominique more than her uncle. She looked up and smiled with a huge mouthful of steak bulging out of her cheeks. A trail of bloody juice escaped her mouth and drizzled down her chin.

When I joined Fannie in the foyer, Pork Pie was chewing her ear off about something and her eyes were dull. She flicked them at me in desperation.

‘One of the contestants, back there in the dining room,’ I explained. Pork Pie bent his enormous neck to see Dominique, who was ordering dessert.

‘That little thing? She looks raggy. And what’s she eating there?’

‘The steak banquet, I’d say.’

‘Steak? Two days before the comp? She’ll get a gut. I’ll go and have a closer look, introduce myself, give her some advice …’

‘Yes go on, Por … Gustave. We’ll just be off …’

‘Breeding is what’s required … what? Yes you go, I’ll handle this …’ He staggered back to the dining room. I grabbed Fannie’s hand and she laughed with surprise. The tuk tuk driver was curled on a seat and smiled gently at us when we woke him.

‘The quay? I know. It’s not a problem,’ he said and yawned.

‘Remind me to pay him extra,’ I told Fannie.

But when I finally got her back to her hotel she was half asleep on my shoulder and mumbled, ‘Goodnight. Goodnight, my darling.’ I installed her with the doorman and went back to my hotel feeling something like happy. I quite forgot about the extra money for the driver.

I didn’t see Fannie the next day and didn’t mind. Sometimes the sight of her stomping through the halls and ordering people about destroyed the champagne memories of her hand against mine. The staff was split more or less in half under our command – she had hiring and finance and I had marketing and activities. I’d been told in confidence that many of my staff were glad they worked for me because I left them alone.

In the afternoons, Alex usually called me into his office for a ‘catch-up,’ meaning he wanted someone to drink with and Fannie wouldn’t have it. When I arrived he waved the gin bottle at me and (I hadn’t slept well) I nodded enthusiastically. Alex had been captured by German troops towards the end of the war and the scars escaped his white collar, ran like railway tracks up his neck and disappeared into his hairline. He couldn’t judge the bathing suit competition on Saturday because his wife, Serey, who worked with Fannie in finance, was jealous with good reason and had threatened to remove important parts of him if he looked at anyone else. Our last catch-up had been spent bemoaning this fact. This time we discussed the adventures of Gustave, and I made sure to mention Fannie’s nickname for him. Alex liked knowing that there was more to Fannie than a job well done.