Читать книгу Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau - Steve Tolbert - Страница 7

Mae Sot, Thailand.

Back from a distant place in her mind, full of family and friends. The prattle of motor scooters outside, Pink’s ‘Bad Bad Day’ coming up through the floorboards, on the end of her bed the dark figure of a man preparing to leave.

‘Try each day to smile. It is good medicine.’ If you saw me now, dear abbot, you’d understand how difficult that is.

She looked across the room at her low table, its candlelight glow. White lotus flowers in a small vase on one side of her small Buddha, burning incense sticks on the other. The incense was strong, stronger than the man’s alcohol breath. She inhaled the incense deeply through her nostrils while staring at the flowers, until the man left, leaving her with twenty-five minutes to do what she pleased. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered. She meant it. At this hour of night, time alone was a gift.

She got out her English dictionary, a pen and writing pad from under the bed and set about composing a haiku, adapting something the big-nose westerner had shouted out as they came up the stairs together. She wrote:

The best of Thai life –

A monastery by day,

The Snake Skin by night.

Had he stayed she would have asked him which monastery he’d visited that day because she suspected he hadn’t visited any. She stood, put on her lilac robe and went out along the corridor to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later she returned showered and dried and perfumed, mascara brushed through her eyelashes, her blue body-paint tears and lightning bolt, silver eyeshadow and gash-red lipstick all back in place, her white wig brushed free of tangles. She lay back down on her bed listening to Pink’s ‘Sober’, then to laughter and screeching from the room above, soon drowned out by the rumble and roar of a passing truck.

The nightmare of her recent past, not a good place to revisit. Despite the noise – as familiar as her own heartbeat – her mind went back there anyway. The same faces as always formed, their voices rising and falling: her own, Thant’s, the old nun’s, the abbot’s, Mister MI’s and others’ from that day, and every day and night since.