Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (8 page)

“You were very lucky!” she giggled. “This is the first night for months that my husband has not parked his car in our yard—right where the gate fell!” She looked at me and raised her dark eyebrows. “If it had fallen on his car, it would not have been such a funny joke.”

Too right, I thought to myself, rubbing my punctured posterier and walking back to my room. I didn’t dwell on the matter for too long though, as the consequences of writing off a twenty-five thousand dollar vehicle belonging to an ex-Khmer Rouge captain when I had only six hundred dollars in my moneybelt were far too horrible to contemplate.

In the morning I apologised for my stupidity once again and offered to pay for the broken pot. I was told with many smiles that all was forgiven. Srey-Leak said they both hoped my bum didn’t hurt too much and perhaps they should have mentioned before I had gone out that the gate was a slider. As I have already disclosed, Victory Hill is a small hamlet and for more than a week afterwards the locals delighted in pointing me out to each other with many a surreptitious nudge and grin. Look! There goes Joe Bucket, the stupid
farang
who pushed a two-hundred-pound sliding gate off its hinges, narrowly escaping crushing an expensive car and receiving a couple of puncture wounds in his arse from a small dog for his troubles.

Fame at last.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

The morning after the incident with the gate I decided to take a walk down to the nearby Victory Beach. I had shown the photograph Ron had given me around the bars on the hill the previous night and although nobody recognized Psorng-Preng, plenty of people did remember the old sailor. The Mamasan in the Shark Bar seemed to know Ron very well and she told me he often used to spend his mornings down on the beach by the new pier.

As I left the Crazy Monkey, The Professor poked his head out of his room and asked me what all the noise had been about the night before. I struggled to keep a straight face when he told me he had thought the guesthouse was under attack from a gang of robbers and how he had sat up all night on his bed clutching a pepper spray and a large knife.

“I thought I’d eaten my chips,” he said in relief, when I assured him the disturbance had been caused by nothing more sinister than an inebriated Joe Bucket. “I wondered if I was going to wake up dead this morning when I heard all that din,” he said.

I asked The Professor if he fancied coming to the beach with me for a beer but he told me he was busy as he was going to a small stream where he was looking for unusual Cambodian aquatic life. He showed me his catching nets and buckets and told me how he waded around waist-deep in the water with his net, attempting to trap the creatures that swam in the muddy stream. Apparently his work was made extremely difficult by a large gang of local kids who followed him around from waterway to waterway, absolutely rapt at this strange form of insanity that The Professor was afflicted with. Unfortunately, some of the bigger lads had taken offence when the frustrated scientist yelled at them to piss off and leave him alone and they had recently progressed from simply jeering at The Professor onto throwing clods of earth in the water near him as he worked.

The Professor assured me he was an amateur naturalist of some distinction and I had no reason to disbelieve him until the evening he burst in through the side door and told me excitedly how he had spent the last couple of hours crouching uncomfortably in a wet ditch and watching a mynah bird through his binoculars.

“It was damp and cramped and the ants bit me to pieces, but it was worth it,” he said with satisfaction. “You don’t see many of this particular species about these days, you know,” he assured me, pointing out a black and yellow bird on one of the pages of a gigantic Field Guide to the Birds of Thailand. The Professor seemed so pleased with his day’s ornithology I thought it would be cruel to tell him that the rare species depicted in his book was exactly the same as the flock of bloody nuisance birds that had been after the bag of fruit I’d purchased from a beach vendor and had spent the best part of the afternoon shoo-ing away.

I walked past the dusty crossroads at the top of the track and did a right then made my way down the steep hill leading to the beach. Pale cream cattle with soft brown eyes and small horns and soft feathery tips to their tails were grazing happily in the coarse grass by the side of the road. They looked very healthy and well-cared for. A number of very small wooden houses that were little more than shacks on poles lined the track, the likes of which I had not seen since my early days in Thailand more than twenty years ago. A lovely looking Cambodian girl sat on the rickety steps that led up to the doorway of one of the small dwellings. She was combing the long, dark, shining hair of an equally attractive friend. I gave them the old Joe Bucket grin as I walked past and when they both smiled down at me the morning sun felt even more pleasant than it had done before. A very old lady sat on the steps of the hut next door and she stared at me expressionlessly as I went by and I realised with a shock that apart from the old lady on the boat, this frail old woman was the first really old person I had seen since I had arrived in Cambodia. Later I found out this was hardly surprising, because the median age of Khmer females was only twenty-one years old, and that of the men was even younger at twenty. With fifty-two per cent of the country’s population under eighteen years old and a life expectancy of just fifty-nine, this surely makes Cambodia one of the youngest populations in the world.

As I walked past the last house on the left side of the track a small monkey on a chain startled me as it leapt from its hiding place underneath a broken, bamboo table where it was shackled and made a grab at my beach gear. The links of the monkey’s rusty chain rattled as they slithered across the dirt and then pulled tight as the animal attained the limit of its tether and reached for my towel with black, claw-like hands. I gave a loud yell and jumped back in shock and two small Cambodian boys who were hiding in the branches of a nearby tree waiting for just this to happen laughed and squealed in delight as I sheepishly trudged on down to the beach with my heart pounding. I didn’t think the incident quite so funny. As a boy I always dreamed of keeping a monkey for a pet, but after more than twenty years in Asia I know just how vicious the little bastards can be and now believe they are much better off in the wild. In Lopburi, my friend Little John and I had watched the huge, one-eyed leader of the troop of famous monkeys that have taken over the Thai town grab a screaming, yowling kitten and fuck it up against a low wall with every appearance of great enjoyment. When he had finished the fickle Simian rapist picked up his hapless victim and hurled the poor creature five floors to the ground below from the rooftop where the crime had taken place. While we were there we also noticed that none of the Lopburi cats had tails; the owner of our guesthouse told us how the fun-loving monkeys delighted in biting them off. I had only been in Lopburi for ten minutes before one of the monkeys pissed on my head from above where he was sitting on one of the wire grills that protect all the windows and rooftops from the monkeys’ wanton vandalism. Far more sinister was the story told to me by a monk in Hua Hin. When I asked him where all the monkeys that used to beg food around the bottom of Chopstick Hill had gone he said they had been driven back up the rocky hill away from the tourists since one of them had snatched a baby from a push-chair and torn it limb from limb whilst the screaming young mother looked on helplessly.

The wide, sandy stretch of Victory Beach was almost deserted and I settled down on one of the half-dozen wooden sunbeds that belonged to a tiny beach bar called Cafe de Mar. I thought this rather a grand name for a establishment which was little more than a large shelf stacked with bottles surrounded by a rickety bar that looked like it had been knocked up out of driftwood. The Cafe de Mar stood in the shade of a huge, wispy tree that looked like some kind of conifer. There were also some coconut palms along the beach but it looked as though they had almost blown down in a storm and someone had propped them up on wooden stands so they were now growing almost horizontally. Although the gnarled trunks of the trees were leaning at weird angles, the crowns had already turned upwards and were growing towards the sun once again. Sun-beds and umbrellas had not taken over Victory Beach yet and there were no Jet-Skis so it was still pleasant, but I wasn’t too sure about the real airplane that someone was apparently turning into an internet cafe. I had just settled back with a banana milk shake and a novel when two small boys carrying trays containing carved seashells came racing across the sand towards me.

“You buy one!” You buy one!” They both clamoured. The larger lad—and obviously the leader—elbowed his smaller competitor roughly out of the way and he went sprawling into the sand, his half-dozen shells scattered around him. “You buy one from me,” the bigger boy insisted, and placed his tray directly in my lap where I couldn’t ignore it. Like most of the kids I had seen around Cambodia so far, both little boys were ragged and barefoot and they looked as brown and hard as baked chestnuts.

“Steady on!” I said to the bigger lad, waving an admonishing finger at him. “You’re twice the size of him!”

“No problem, he my brother,” the rough young enterpreneur assured me as if this made his violent behaviour totally acceptable, and he gave his sibling another hard clip round the ear for good measure just to show everything really was OK. The little boy in the sand looked up at him and laughed. There was now no doubt about it. Just as I had suspected when watching the street kids play-fight in Koh Kong, and when watching the boy on the boat enduring his mother’s spiteful pinches, these Cambodian kids were incredibly tough.

The elder boy helped his brother up with a yank on the little lad’s shaggy hair and pointed his finger behind me.

“And this is my sister,” he said, and I turned around to face one of the most beautiful Asian girls I have ever seen.

The girl was around seventeen and wore a white, broad-rimmed sunhat that set off the cascade of jet-black hair that fell around her slim, shapely shoulders. To attempt to describe her any further would be to do her an injustice; she was simply perfect. She immediately took over the sales pitch from her young brothers who shut up at once, recognizing that their sister stood far more chance of persuading a horny foreigner to part with his money than two snotty-nosed little boys. The lovely girl could speak English very well and simply to keep her around for a while I purchased two crappy bead bracelets I didn’t want, a ring which fell apart the next day and a key chain made from a seashell that I had absolutely no use for whatsoever. I unashamedly paid an extortionate price for the rubbish items just to see the girl smile. After fleecing me in the nicest possible way the Cambodian beauty gathered up her wares and floated off down the beach like a dream.

When she had gone her young brother immediately plonked his tray back in my lap—obviously very jealous of his sister’s success—and tried to sell me a shell.

“You buy one,” he told me firmly, and looked at me accusingly as I watched his sister’s erection-inducing buttocks undulate enticingly under her tight sarong as she walked away.

“Tomorrow,” I told him, dragging my eyes away reluctantly from the young girl’s behind. The boy seemed unwilling to let a deal slip by without more solid confirmation and he stuck out a small hand.

“You promise,” he ordered me, adamantly. To shut him up I agreed, and shook his hand, marvelling at the strength of the little fellow; then he grabbed his young brother by the ear and they both shot off across the sands after Miss Sihanoukville. Poor kid. We both knew full well however long he lived, however hard he tried, and whatever business courses he completed he would never possess the attributes necessary to put him in the same sales league as his sister. In fact, I tried to wriggle out of the deal we had made, but I was forced to buy a handful of his shells in the end as he was obviously going to make life unbearable for me until I kept my promise. As for his sister—after I had been in Cambodia for a while and when the gorgeous girl decided I had bought enough crap and was not a complete plonker—she relaxed enough to tell me something about herself.

“My name is Jorani, which means ‘radiant jewel.’ I am nearly eighteen years old and I was fortunate enough to be born very beautiful. My husband, Heng (meaning lucky), is twenty-eight. He runs the little bar under the big Casurina tree opposite Snake Island where I first saw you. The bar cost nothing to set up because the land is owned by a friend and the wood we used was washed up during a storm. I bought the first bottles of drink with money I made selling trinkets to the tourists. It is a lucky place and many farangs come to cook themselves in the sun there and swim in the sea. Of course, I always tell people on the beach that I am not married
—
especially the men
—
because this is better for business. I earn more money than my husband’s bar does, simply by selling the souvenirs I make and cutting the finger and toe nails of tourists.

My best customers are the farang men who come to our country to have sex with Cambodian and Vietnamese girls in the Chicken Farms and the new bars that are opening up around town and on Victory Hill. When they see me
—
just like you did
—
they will usually buy a bracelet or two for a price that it would take a good Cambodian craftsman two days to earn. I spent two years teaching myself to speak English with the help of an old phrasebook a backpacker left in the trash-bin in a room of a guesthouse after he had checked out. The cleaning girl salvaged it and I bought it from her for fifty cents. That book changed my life. Being able to speak English
—
together with my looks
—
allows the farang men to engage me in conversation. Many of them do so just to see if there is a chance I might be desperate enough for money to have sex with them. They also often want manicures just to keep me around.

Some of the really ignorant men try to touch my breasts and bottom as I work but when they do this I stop what I am doing and leave. I make sure that they pay me first, of course. Last year a smelly, fat Englishman got very angry when I would not take no for an answer and told me to fuck off and hit me across the face. I told Heng and he found out that the same farang had been bringing very young girls back to his room and doing bad things to them. A little later the farang was found dead with his throat cut on the beach outside the bungalow he had rented. I don’t know who did it and Heng says he doesn’t either and refuses to talk to me about it any more.

Some of the men think I am a poor, naive Cambodian girl and try to trick me into coming to their rooms by telling me they would like to marry me and make me rich. Of course, not all the farang men are bad. Many of them are just having fun on holiday and want to talk to a beautiful Cambodian girl who can speak English very well.