Читать книгу Catching the Sun - Tony Parsons - Страница 9

I walked from Farren’s home back down to the security gate, pausing to let a flock of two-stroke bikes pass by – all the cleaners and cooks and maids coming to work, two or three of them perched on some of the bikes – and I tasted the diesel of their little machines on the back of my throat.

I watched the tribe of helpers hurrying to their work in the big white houses and it seemed strange to me, like something from a hundred years ago, a world divided into people who were servants and people who were served.

I headed down a track through the mangroves that eventually led to the bay until I came to a single-storey building with blacked-out windows. It looked like an abandoned barracks at an army base. But this was the heart of Wild Palm, and as soon as I opened the door I was hit by a barrage of noise.

A long table, covered with phones, computer screens and half-eaten food, surrounded by a dozen men and women – mostly men – all of them dressed for the beach, all of them speaking urgently into handsets – cajoling, pleading, bullying, laughing, taunting and selling – always selling. None of them were over thirty. All of them were talking English but the accents were from the US and the UK and South Africa and Australia. I walked to the far end of the room to the water cooler. Some eyes flicked my way, but they all ignored me.

I sipped from a polystyrene cup, and nodded at a young Englishman called Jesse. He was very white – his skin, his cropped hair. For someone living in the tropics, he looked as though he had never been touched by the sun. He was wearing a baggy pair of Muay Thai shorts and nothing else. He cradled the phone between his neck and shoulder as he doused a bowl of noodles in sweet chilli sauce.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he was saying, the accent from the north of England. ‘I’m at Heathrow. Just checking into my flight for Thailand. Excuse me a second,’ he said into the phone, and then he stared at me, the pale eyes wide, as if I was someone else, in some other place. ‘Seat 1K?’ he said. ‘Oh, that will be fine. The vegetarian meal, please …’ The eyes flicked away, and I noticed that there were three watches on his thick white arm, all of them set to a different time zone. ‘Sorry about this, John,’ he said into the phone, and the eyes were on me again. ‘Do you have my Gold Executive Club Number?’ A pause. I sipped my water, trying to fit the words he was saying to the place he was in. But I saw that was impossible. ‘Oh, it’s in the system already?’ he said, eyes wide with surprise. ‘Perfect. Sorry, John – the hassle of modern travel, eh? What’s that?’ A burst of mad laughter. ‘Yeah, you’re right there – at least I’m in First Class.’ He covered the phone with his hand. ‘Don’t you have anything to do?’

‘Getting you,’ I said. ‘Bringing you to the house. That’s what I’ve got to do.’

‘Where were we?’ he said into the phone, raising five fingers to say he would be right with me. ‘As I say, I’m leaving London right now and coming to Thailand. I am going to be there with my boss, Mr Farren, for forty-eight hours. And there’s a brief window of opportunity – a brief window – for a serious investor such as yourself who was smart enough to retire to Phuket with his lovely young Thai wife. A high-yield investment programme. New beachfront apartments in Hat Nai Han. You got it – just south of Hat Kata and Hat Karon. I shouldn’t really be telling you this …’

I watched him over the rim of my polystyrene cup. His pale features creased with concentration. There was a script on the table in front of him. But Jesse did not need it.

‘Phuket has one of the fastest-growing property markets in the world,’ he said, his voice lower now. ‘The cost of living is low but rental returns are high. You retired to the most prosperous province in Thailand.’ He paused dramatically. ‘When the other Asian Tigers were mewing for mercy, on Phuket you were still roaring … on Phuket you have muscles on your muscles … Phuket me love you long time … Phuket me love you too too much … Phuket your only problem this side of the grave is wealth management … on Phuket you will live forever in the lap of luxury and the gods will get down on their knees and bow before their master …’ He winked at me. ‘Listen, we’re getting ready for take-off,’ he said. ‘I am going to have to turn off my BlackBerry now. Oh, glass of champagne, please! No nuts! Do you have the extra-large sleeper suit? Look, I’ll call you when I land, John. A beer at the Sunset Bar in the Chedi? Sounds good.’

He hung up and stood up, and I saw his gaudy Muay Thai shorts. The first time we met he had told me that he came to Phuket for the martial arts, that there were serious Muay Thai training camps all over the island and any day now he was going to cut back on the Tiger beer and get back in training.

We walked up to the house together.

‘What’s it like in First Class?’ I asked him, still somehow believing that what he said on the phone had some roots in reality.

Jesse adjusted his Muay Thai shorts, and his blue eyes got a faraway look. ‘I reckon it rocks, don’t you?’ he said.

I nodded towards the house. ‘The Aussie I picked up at the airport,’ I said. ‘Baxter. He doesn’t seem very happy.’

Jesse laughed at that.

‘Farren will sort him out,’ he said.

We were on Bangla Road, the great gaudy strip of Patong, and there was a gibbon in a cowboy hat outside the bar.

‘Hello, sexy man,’ one of the girls said to Baxter – fifty-something, fifteen stone, pale and shaky from the long day – and the gibbon bared its teeth and had a good old laugh at that.

I looked up at the cracked neon sign above the bar. The gibbon in the Stetson followed my eyes. The sign said NO NAME BAR. I looked at the gibbon – the endless limbs, the dark triangle of its face, and eyes so black they seemed to carry the night inside them – and the creature examined its fingernails, massively bored. I don’t think I had ever seen a gibbon in my life before. But somehow a gibbon in a Stetson outside the No Name Bar did not look as strange as it should have.

Bangla Road was a bedlam of bars. They all played their own music, and the songs and the bars and the girls all seemed to melt into one another, and drain each other of meaning. There were bars down the side alleys, bars up a flight of stairs that you could see from the street if you craned your neck, and what looked like giant bars the size of supermarkets until you went inside and realized that the place was actually made up of countless tiny bars, all identical apart from the different songs, where girls hung on poles as if they were on a tube train, or played Connect Four at the bar with customers, or yawned on a bar stool, staring into the wintry glow of their phones.

Bangla Road had a kind of debauched innocence about it because the street was a tourist sight, and entire families from Australia or Europe wandered the strip, gawping at the chaos, soaking up the famous naughty Thailand night. But more than anything, Bangla Road was a place to do business.

‘Is this the place?’ Baxter said, staring beyond the gibbon and the girls at the dark howling interior of the bar. He turned to Farren, who had a protective arm around the Australian’s shoulders. ‘What was the name of those two girls I was with last time?’ he asked.

Farren patted Baxter reassuringly on the back.

‘Number 31 and number 63,’ Farren said. ‘Lovely girls.’

They went inside. Jesse and I stood on the street, staring at the gibbon. It had a soft brown coat with a white trim of fur around its face. I stared again at the eyes. They were totally round. Moist and black and bottomless. It hopped on a stool between the two girls and examined its fingernails.

‘Body massage?’ one of the girls said to me. ‘Hand massage?’

She touched my arm and I pulled away.

‘Why would I want my hand massaged?’ I said.

Jesse laughed. ‘Forgive my friend, ladies. He is fresh off the banana boat. You haven’t quite got the hang of it yet, have you, Tom? They don’t massage your hand or your body. They massage you with their hand or with their body.’ The gibbon chuckled at my dumb mistake. I shot it a filthy look. ‘Slip them a few extra baht and they’ll even wash behind your ears,’ Jesse said. ‘Come on.’

We went inside the bar. Farren and Baxter were talking at a table. We joined them. A round of Singha beers appeared in front of us. Farren signed the chit, not taking his eyes off the Australian.

‘I just want my money back,’ Baxter was saying, much calmer now, encouraged by Farren’s thoughtful nodding. ‘My wife says that foreigners can’t buy land in Thailand. She says it’s illegal.’

Farren took a cheque out of his back pocket and gave it to Baxter. The Aussie put on his reading glasses, peered at it in the darkness. And smiled at Farren. The two men laughed and Farren clapped him on his back.

‘Jesse,’ a girl said. She was holding a Connect Four board and despite the fact that she was dressed as a cowgirl in a mini-skirt she looked like a kid asking another kid if he fancied a game.

‘Legend has it that all these girls are grand masters of the game they call Connect Four,’ Jesse said, rising from his seat. ‘We shall see.’

A girl sprayed my bare arms with Sketolene mosquito spray.

‘What did you do that for?’ I asked, recoiling at the stink.

‘Nuts are not available,’ she said, as if that was any kind of answer.

‘Your wife is quite right,’ Farren was saying to Baxter. ‘Under Thai law, foreigners are not allowed to own land. However, foreigners can own a building, a leasehold of up to thirty years, or a unit in a registered condominium.’ He leaned back and sighed with contentment. The Singha beer in his fist was beaded with sweat. Here I am, his body language said. Exactly where I ought to be. And only a coward or a fool would not choose to join me.

‘Foreigners can’t own land in Thailand,’ Farren repeated. ‘But foreigners are allowed to have a licence to print money. You can lease land for a period of thirty years and have the right to renew a further two times, giving a total of ninety years. How long you planning to live for, Mr Baxter? Just kidding. Or, even better, you can set up a Thai company that you control and which is allowed to purchase land totally legally.’ A girl tried to perch on his lap but he declined with a polite smile and she disappeared into the darkness of the No Name Bar.

‘But if your wife has doubts,’ Farren said to Baxter, ‘then let’s have some sanuk and you can go home with your money. You know sanuk? It is a very Thai concept. A lot of farang think it means fun but sanuk is far more than that. It means finding pleasure in everything you do. Finding pleasure in all things. It’s not hedonism. It’s a philosophy, a credo, a way of life.’

The two men clinked glasses. I went to the bar and watched Jesse playing Connect Four. He was playing with a different girl now. The prettiest girl in the place, who wore jeans and a T-shirt and served behind the bar. They had already gathered an audience. Every time it was her turn, the girl slammed small blue discs into the slots on the board. Jesse laughed, shook his head.

‘The reason they always win is because they are allowed to set the pace,’ he told me, dropping a red disc into a slot with slow deliberation. ‘And you have to play at your own pace, not theirs,’ Jesse said.

The gibbon hopped up on to the bar and straightened the rim of its Stetson. It seemed fascinated by Jesse’s ground-breaking Connect Four technique. Girls climbed on bar stools to get a better look at the action. It was like watching James Bond blowing them away at baccarat at a casino in Monte Carlo.

The wall behind them was covered in photographs and I wandered over to it. I didn’t see any of the faces in the bar in the photographs. These were all the girls who had worked here in the past, and the men who they had known. Everybody was gone now. Years of thin women with smiling faces and the men, older and whiter and drunker, all mugging for the cameras, all seeming to have the night of their lives. I wondered what had happened to them, all those girls and all those men, and if they missed the Bangla Road and the gibbon in the cowboy hat. Although I guessed it must have been a different gibbon back then.

A roar from the bar. Jesse had won again. Now a small stout woman in her forties was rolling up her sleeves and taking her seat opposite Jesse.

‘Oh no,’ Jesse laughed, his pale face shining like the moon in that unlit bar. ‘Secret weapon. They’re wheeling out the mamma-san.’

‘I beat you,’ the mamma-san said, with no trace of humour in it. ‘I beat you good, white boy. Oh – such a white boy, you are, I never saw such a white boy.’

The mamma-san reached for Jesse’s face and took a fistful of his ghostly flesh in one of her small brown hands. The No Name Bar girls laughed with appreciation.

‘Want a bet?’ Jesse said.

‘Yes, I want bet,’ the mamma-san said, and the girls all cheered.

Jesse rolled his eyes.

‘But what do you have that I could possibly want?’ he said, and the gibbon’s mouth stretched in a huge and mirthless smile.

When I went back to the table Baxter was entwined with girls. Their thin brown limbs snaked around his waist, his neck, his khaki shorts. The girls chatted among themselves, examined their nails, and stared into the glow of their phones while absent-mindedly rubbing his old didgeridoo. And now it was Baxter who had his cheque book at the ready. A girl approached Farren but he held up his hand. He had lovely manners. She shrugged, smiled and walked away.

‘Explain one more time,’ the Australian said. ‘About setting up a Thai company that I control.’

The thing I was realizing about that Phuket, the Phuket of bars and beer and girls – the hundreds of bars, the thousands of girls, the ocean of cold Thai beer – was that it offered more than anyone could ever possibly want or need. And although, as Jesse said, I was fresh off the banana boat, even I had already worked out that they were not really selling sex on the Bangla Road.

They were selling dreams.

‘Come on, mate,’ Jesse shouted. ‘We’re going home.’

I looked up but he wasn’t talking to me. Jesse slid from his stool and took the hand of the gibbon.

The creature adjusted its cowboy hat and fell into step beside him, its free arm trailing, and there was much wailing and moaning among the bar girls as the pair of them disappeared through the curtain that covered the door.

The mamma-san spoke sharply to the girls. You didn’t need any Thai to know she was telling them that Jesse had won the gibbon fair and square and they should get back to work. One of the girls wiped her eyes with her fingers and started packing away the Connect Four. I headed for the door.

Out on the street Jesse and the gibbon were already settled in the back of a tuk-tuk. The gibbon stared straight ahead with its depthless black eyes, unsentimental about leaving its place of work, although holding on to its hat as if fearing it might blow away on the ride home. I called Jesse’s name but he didn’t hear me, and the tuk-tuk puttered off down the Bangla Road, trailing smoke.

Back inside the bar Farren and Baxter were shaking hands.

‘We’re going to clean up!’ Baxter bawled over the song they were playing and when he stood up to embrace Farren his sturdy legs overturned a table of glass and beer and overpriced fruit juice.

It was ‘Highway To Hell’ by AC/DC.

I recognized it now.

It felt very early when I left them to it in the bar, but by the time I got back to Nai Yang it seemed very late, as though everyone around here had gone to sleep hours ago.

The lights were off in the Botans’ house. In our place there was a light left on for me. I wheeled the Royal Enfield into the shed as quietly as I could and stood there in the moonlight, smelling the clean air, just a hint of sulphur from the mangroves, and hearing the insect-drone of the traffic.

Our house was still unfamiliar to me and in the darkness I held out a hand to guide myself, the hard wood of the wall panels cool and smooth and somehow comforting against the palm of my hand. In the bedroom I undressed quickly in the darkness. When I curled up against Tess she murmured and pressed herself against me and I buried my face in her hair.

‘Good day?’ I said softly.

‘They’re all good days,’ said Tess. ‘How about you? Is everyone really friendly? Did you meet anyone you like?’

‘There’s an English kid called Jesse. He’s full of himself but I like him.’

I didn’t tell her about the gibbon and I didn’t tell her about the Australian who tried to strangle my boss and I didn’t tell her about the little Muslim girl on a motorbike. Because I wanted it to be true – for all of the days to be good days. But it felt like there was a lot I couldn’t tell Tess if I wanted her to keep her smile. And I wanted that more than anything.

‘You need to talk to Farren about our visas,’ she said, more asleep than awake now. ‘Your work permit. All of the paperwork. We need to get that sorted.’

‘Tess?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Close your eyes, angel.’

Soon I felt her slip into sleep but I stayed awake for a long time, curled up against her, my face in her hair, listening to the distant buzz of the motorbikes out there in the wide wild night.