The Queen of Patpong (12 page)

Kwan realizes she is holding her breath. She lets it out in a rush that draws Mr. Pattison’s faded blue eyes.

“That’s a year from now.” Her father comes back into the room and reseats himself on the bed. He scratches at the side of his nose. “I don’t need to think about that yet.” He puts his cigarette butt between thumb and forefinger and snaps it through the open door. Children scatter out of the way. “Ten thousand.”

“Just so you understand . . .”

“I’m not stupid. When do we make the paper?”

“We can do it tomorrow,” Mr. Pattison says.

“And you’ll give me the money tomorrow?”

“Will you be able to read it?” Mr. Pattison asks, not unkindly. “We need to know that you understand what—”

“She can read it,” Kwan’s father says, glancing at Kwan. “If she’s so smart, she can read it.”

“Then I don’t see any problem,” Mr. Pattison says. “We’ll come tomorrow evening, about this time.”

“With the money.”

“With the money.”

“Cash,” Kwan’s father says.

Mr. Pattison’s face doesn’t change, but he glances away, out through the door. It looks to Kwan like he is eager to be out of the room. “Of course.”

Teacher Suttikul stands up. “I’m so glad we could talk,” she says. “I know how much you love Kwan, and this is the best thing for her. You should be proud that you’ve reached this decision.”

Kwan’s father nods brusquely, but his wife gets up. She’s beaming. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much. Kwan is—” She looks at her daughter. “Kwan is my first baby. Even though she’s bigger than I am, she’s my first baby.”

Everyone laughs except Kwan and her father.

Teacher Suttikul holds out an arm, and Kwan gets up and goes to her. It seems to take five minutes for her to cross the room, and she can feel her father’s eyes on her every step of the way. When she’s finally side by side with Teacher Suttikul, the teacher barely comes up to Kwan’s shoulder, and Kwan is amazed all over again that such a small, unassuming person has such strength. The teacher puts an arm around Kwan’s waist and gives her a squeeze.

“That’s finished, then,” she says.

Kwan can’t say anything. She feels as though her throat has been tied in a knot.

Her teacher pulls a little flashlight from her purse. “Come on,” she says. “You can walk us past the dogs.”

The children scatter in front of them as they come through the door. Only one of them, Mai, is slow to move, and that’s because she’s staring up at the teacher. Teacher Suttikul slows and touches Mai’s shoulder. “Your name?”

Mai glances at Kwan for reassurance. “Mai.”

“Good, good. How old?”

“Thirteen.”

Teacher Suttikul beams at her. “Then I’ll see you next year.” She turns back to the room and calls out, “I’ll look forward to seeing Mai next year.”

Mai bobs her head and backs away. With Mr. Pattison in the lead, Kwan and her teacher go down the four steps and turn right, around the house, to get to the dirt street. Once they’re out there, the stars running like a spangled river between the dark trees, Kwan whispers, “Please turn off the light.”

Teacher Suttikul snaps off the flashlight, and Kwan throws her arms around the woman. Hugging her teacher with all her strength, and with her own heart pounding in her ears, Kwan still hears Mr. Pattison stop to wait for them, standing alone in the dark.

Chapter 9
The Broad Black Door

S
he can’t even smell the exhaust of Mr. Pattison’s motorbike anymore. She’s been sniffing for it, but it’s gone.

The last she saw of them was the wide cone of light from the bike’s headlamp, bumping away from her, leaving her by herself, dead center in the red dirt of the road, staring after them. Staring at the black and white stripes of Teacher Suttikul’s terrible blouse as it recedes into the darkness and the fuzziness of the nearsighted. Gone now, leaving Kwan more alone than she’s ever felt in her seventeen years.

They’re far enough away now to take with them even the sound of the bike, and here she is, ducking into the undergrowth to the side of the road just beyond the village, out of sight of anyone who might come looking for her, anyone who might say any word at all to her, have any kind of plan for her. She’s thinking about ghosts and wishing she could have gotten on the bike. Just climbed up, wrapped her arms around her teacher’s thick, solid waist, and zoomed through the night. Away from the broad black door that’s just swung open in front of her.

Sold. Ruined.

Her father’s eyes when her teacher talked about prostitution, about families who—

She’s the center of a vortex of mosquitoes. Something moves, back in the bush. Everyone knows there are ghosts outside the village.

A breeze rattles the dry leaves on the bushes near her. If whatever made that noise is still moving, she won’t be able to hear it. She can smell herself, the salty smell of shock and fear.

She can’t stay here all night.

She feels like she’s turned to stone. Her feet are too heavy to lift. And even if she could lift them, where would she go? She can’t force herself to go home. She can’t be in the same room—she can’t even share the same light—with her father.

What she wants to do is drop to her knees and cry as she cried when she was a child, her throat wide open, her eyes running, and her nose streaming, letting out some of the grief that’s built up inside her, like smoke with no outlet. She wants to slice open the skin on her cheeks and forehead with her fingernails and then scrub dirt into the cuts, dirt that could never be washed out, that would scar her, and then nobody would ever want to . . . buy . . .

She realizes she has her palm pressed hard over her lips and that a moan is building behind them. She straightens. Pulls her hand away. She will
not
moan.

And as she feels her will strengthen, a new thought, even colder than the others, breaks over her. What had her mother known? How long had she known? Her
mother.

An hour ago,
Kwan thinks,
I was worried about staying in school.

She’s aware again of the door, broad and even blacker than the night that surrounds her. She imagines something on the other side, holding out a hand to her. Or maybe it’s not a hand.

The image makes her back prickle, and she turns slowly, seeing the dark, foamy shapes of bushes and, behind them, something bent and spavined, and she inhales quickly, the hand that had been over her mouth now pressed to the center of her chest, fingers splayed.

From the direction of the village, off to her left, a motorbike coughs a couple of times and roars into life. Kwan looks again at the twisted shape, sees that it’s not moving, and backs deeper into the brush, farther away from the road. She keeps her eyes on the road, trying not to imagine the twisted thing opening long-fingered hands behind her. As much as she needs to know what’s coming down the road, she looks over her shoulder at the dark shape. At first she can’t give a form to anything, but then the bike’s headlamp is turned on and the darkness thins, and she can see the bushes behind her, with nothing behind them but a spindly, dejected tree, and the roar increases in volume and whips past, dwindling into the distance. Two boys from the village, a little older than she, boys who are always in trouble for drinking and fighting. Boys without money. No one knows where they got the bike.

There is something in her left hand, the clenched hand. She lifts it to see what it is but then remembers. It’s Nana’s earring. Brought all the way here from Bangkok.

She sees her village with sudden clarity: Two rows of slanting, leaking houses, stinking latrines, badly chewed dogs. Dust and heat. People who are sometimes kind and sometimes cruel. Old people, young people. Working and living and dying. At the mercy of the weather, at the mercy of the rich. At the mercy of alcohol. Trapped in circles of karma that none of them can perceive, sentenced to a life of numbed endurance, voluble about nothing they care about, but slinging words bright and sharp as razors when tempers flare or the whiskey speaks. Mute as fish about the things that matter, the things they think about all the time. Hunger, work, injustice, endurance, the empty bellies of those they love.

The problem of their daughters. The opportunity presented by their daughters.

She could, Kwan imagines, just turn and walk down the road with the village behind her and never look back. Walk through the night until she sees a lighted window with someone behind it who needs her, someone who will take her in and let her help, let her wash and scrub and lift and carry. And never speak to her, never ask her anything. A smile in the morning, work through the day, a clean floor to sleep on at night. No one coming to the door. No one knowing her name.

Right,
she thinks.
Life is a movie.

She takes three deep, silent breaths. She’ll be able to go to school. Teacher Suttikul won. She’s got what she wanted. School, learning, working to make herself better. The story she’s been trying so hard to write, the story of a village girl who is led to a treasure by the ghost of her dead grandmother. How happy the treasure makes the girl’s poor family. The story Teacher Suttikul likes. The word Teacher Suttikul said: “college.”

Her father’s eyes. The way he watched her when she crossed the room to get to Teacher Suttikul. Their cold weight on her back as she and her teacher paused in the doorway to talk to Mai.

And she knows, deep in the pit of her stomach, that the wide dark door is still open and that school is not on the other side of it.

The moon has begun to lift itself above the hills to the east, just a sliver of silver so far, a crack in the black sky, not much thicker than a pencil line. It brings a chill, chalky light with it, and Kwan uses that light to look down at the earring in her hand, sparkling cold blue. To her own surprise, she reaches up and, working by feel, removes the little steel stud in her left ear and puts the sapphire in its place.

It seems to throw off a sort of warmth. She imagines she can feel it, not only in her ear but down the side of her neck and across the top of her shoulder. Like a soft fall of light. She likes the feeling. Something about it loosens the tangled knot that’s squeezing her heart—not much, but some.

Her father will not take the earring from her. She will wear it, even if people laugh at it. She’s used to being laughed at. It hurts, but it doesn’t scar.

She has fingernails. She has teeth. She has fists. The house is full of knives. Her father will find it hard to push her through the dark door. Pocketing the stud she removed from her ear, Kwan pushes her way through the brush and takes the road back to her village.

SHE SEES
the dark shape on the wooden platform by the side of the road, the platform on which her father and his friends drink and play cards. She stops, hoping she has not been seen or heard, hoping it is not her father who sits there, but then the figure speaks.

“Where have you been?” Nana’s voice.

“Down the road,” Kwan says. What she felt there, what she thought there, is her secret, not to be shared even with those she trusts. And she doesn’t trust Moo. Now, with all that has happened, she remembers that she didn’t much like Moo—Nana—when she lived in the village. Moo was five years older than Kwan, a hot-tempered girl who fought with other girls frequently, usually girls smaller than she. She was fat then, and she used her weight as a weapon, bulldozing her opponents to the ground and kneeling on them, digging her knees into the most sensitive spots and bearing down. She once put her hand in a plastic bag and used it to pick up some dog droppings, which she rubbed in a smaller girl’s face. Kwan finds it difficult to see the angry fat girl in the self-possessed, attractive woman who has come back, at least temporarily, from her years in Bangkok.

Nana says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why?” Nana hadn’t even seemed to notice Kwan on her earlier visits to the village.

“To talk.” Nana’s voice is silky, even friendly, but it doesn’t sound personal. Nana could be talking to the night, to the rising moon. “Don’t you ever just want to talk to someone?”

With the moon a little higher in the sky, Kwan can see that Nana is wrapped in a light blanket, probably to protect herself from mosquitoes. “I’d think Bangkok is full of people to talk to.”

“Bangkok is . . . I can’t even tell you what Bangkok is like. You have to see it for yourself. You’d love it. But it’s not the same, the people there. They’re not from here. They don’t know what our lives were like.”

“
Are
like,” Kwan says. “I still live here. And I thought all the girls like . . . like you . . . came from Isaan.”

“Most of them do.” Nana wastes no energy on resolving the contradiction. Instead she picks up a pack of cigarettes from the platform and puts one in her mouth. She lights it with a slender, gleaming lighter not much bigger around than the cigarette. As she draws in the smoke, she glances up at Kwan and then lifts the lighter for a better look. “You’re wearing it,” she says.

Kwan’s hand flies to her ear. “Please put out the flame.”

“Sure.” The lighter clicks off. “Who don’t you want to see you?”

“Everybody. I mean, anybody. I don’t want anybody to see me.”

Nana draws deeply on the cigarette, her face gleaming a dull red in the coal’s glow. Then she releases the smoke slowly between her lips and inhales it through her nostrils. To Kwan it looks like a magic trick. “Want one?” Nana blows the smoke out and extends the pack.

“I don’t smoke. My father smokes all the time, and then he coughs all night. I think it’s stupid.”

“Up to you.” Nana’s eyes remain on Kwan’s face. “I remembered right,” she says. “You’re getting very pretty.”

Kwan has to review the sentence in her mind before she actually understands its meaning. “Me? Pretty?”

“Maybe more than pretty.” Nana slides aside and pats the platform. “Sit. You can’t stand there all night.”

“I don’t know.” Kwan doesn’t want to go home, but she’s not comfortable with Nana either.

“I won’t bite you,” Nana says. She smiles. “I’m not even hungry.” Then she reaches into the pocket of her blouse, finds something, and extends her hand. “Here’s the other one.”

“Why?” Kwan makes no move to take it. “Why are you giving it to me?”

Nana pauses and then says, “You didn’t listen to me this afternoon. When someone offers you something, take it.”

“That’s not the way I am.”

“You have so much?” Nana says. She sounds like a purring cat. “All your jewel boxes are full? You’re so overloaded that you couldn’t force the lid closed on a nice pair of earrings?” She drags on the cigarette again, and Kwan sees that Nana is wearing new earrings, earrings that have stones dangling on the ends of fine, thin chains.

“How many pair do you own?” Kwan asks.

Nana tilts her head to one side and looks up at Kwan. The little stones sway back and forth on their chains. “I have no idea.”

“Oh.” Kwan stands there, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of not knowing how many you have of anything. Finally she says, “More than five?”

Nana laughs with a lungful of smoke, then bends forward, coughing pale clouds into the night. When she’s got it under control, she waves her open hand side to side in front of her face, clearing away the smoke, and then wipes the corners of her eyes. “Many more than five. Probably thirty or forty. Please. Sit down. My neck is getting stiff. And take this thing or I’ll get irritated.”

Remembering what Nana was like when she got irritated, Kwan sits. After a moment she reaches for the earring, but Nana withdraws her hand, just out of Kwan’s reach.

“Let me,” she says. Very gently, she removes the stud from Kwan’s ear, drops it into her own lap, and inserts the post that holds the sapphire. Her hands are soft and smooth, not hard with calluses, like Kwan’s. When she’s slid the backing into place against Kwan’s lobe and the earring is secure, Nana pulls away a little and studies Kwan as if Kwan were something she had just made and she wants to check the quality of her work. Kwan drops her eyes in embarrassment. Eventually Nana nods. “Get rid of that rice-bowl haircut, feather it a little, and then let your hair grow a couple of feet,” Nana says. “Put about five kilos on you, get some decent clothes. Find some platform shoes that make you even taller.”

Kwan says,
“Taller?”

“You idiot.” The word would hurt, but Nana is smiling. “You have no idea what you look like. I mean, just
look
at this.” Nana puts out a thumb and sculpts the air just above Kwan’s cheekbones, then down over her nose and across her lips. “I’d give a hundred thousand baht for your cheekbones,” she says. “You’d stop traffic in Bangkok.”

Kwan pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them, curving her spine into the comfort of its familiar C. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Is that so?” Nana sticks her cigarette into her mouth. Then she puts one hand on the nape of Kwan’s neck and pulls Kwan’s head back, using the other hand to push the base of her spine forward. Kwan straightens, surprised at the contact. “There,” Nana says. “Like that.” She turns away and surveys the night, making sure no one is close enough to overhear. Then she hits on the cigarette again and flicks it into the darkness. It lands six or eight feet away with an eruption of red sparks. She leans toward Kwan so she can whisper into her ear. What she says is “If I’m making fun of you, why are you worth sixty thousand baht?”

The knot around Kwan’s heart tightens again, and she feels her mouth drop open.