The atmosphere is something between a festival and a hunting lodge. It’s that time in the evening when the girls make an extra effort, before the 2 a.m. curfew when the cops close the place down, and the men sense the increase in intensity, like wildebeests sniffing lion. Everyone is drinking Singha or Kloster beer ice cold straight from the bottle, and wherever you look there are television monitors. Larry King’s suspenders scream from a lot of them. Even the guy who sells fried grasshoppers from a stall near the Buddha shrine owns a TV monitor on which he plays old Muhammad Ali fights and scenes from the siege of Stalingrad. Mostly, though, the screens show Manchester United playing Leeds to the boom of every kind of music from a thousand speakers.
I squeeze past some excited Italian men to climb the stairs to the second tier, which is a U-shaped collection of go-go bars looking down on the courtyard. As I pass each bar a curtain is whipped aside to show naked or near-naked girls dancing on elevated platforms, usually to Thai pop. Girls in bikinis try to drag me in, but I’m focused now on the Carousel, which is one of the biggest.
There are two revolving platforms, and all the girls dancing on them are naked. At one of the stand-up bars a farang is arguing with a girl in traditional Thai costume.
“I tell you I tired, no have power mek boom-boom.”
The man cocks an eye at me, then back to the girl. “And may I ask why you are so tired tonight?” The accent is Swiss German. With a twist of his head the man adds: “Why do I torture myself with such questions?”
I order a beer and watch the girl pull a sulky face. Gaunt and petite, about twenty-four, although to a farang she might seem sixteen. She catches my gaze and shrugs: farangs never understand anything.
“She was probably looking after her baby all night,” I offer. Bar girls are rarely exhausted by twenty minutes of sex with a customer. The farang’s eyes brighten.
“You have a child?” To me: “She never told me this.”
Don’t ask me why, but almost all the girls have one child, usually at age eighteen.
“Of course I have baby.”
I watch the Swiss. Perhaps he took the girl out a couple of nights ago, made love to her casually-and finds himself haunted by her. His calculations so far have had to do with the practicalities of taking her back to Switzerland: the envy of his friends set against the disapproval of his mother; the pleasure of her body beside him every night against the social problem. And what about table manners? She probably sits cross-legged on most chairs and eats with a combination of fork, spoon and fingers.
As she turns the back of her head to me, I smile. Most of the girls are forever wrestling with their thick black hair. Often they tie it back in a ponytail, and a lot of them have taken to ripping the rings off condoms and using them as heavy-duty elastic bands, which is exactly what this girl has done; not a trick likely to win approval at the dinner tables of Zurich.
Now the Swiss has to factor in a child. But perhaps the child would not come with her?
“How old? Boy or girl?”
“Boy, him six.” She beams proudly.
The Swiss looks at me with suspicion. “You know this girl?”
“Never seen her before.” The Swiss is in his late thirties, balding and hurt. His face carries all the pain of a recent failure. Why has he come to Bangkok? To demonstrate continuing virility? For the simplicity of hired flesh? Now, within less than a week of landing, he is planning a relationship far more complicated than anything he’s tried before.
“At least let me pay your bar fine and take you out to dinner,” he tells the girl. “I want to talk to you. I want to know something.”
“What you want to know?”
He stares at her, blinking self-consciously behind his thick spectacles. “I want to know why I’ve been thinking about you for the past forty-eight hours.”
The girl brightens. “You think of me? Me too, I think of you.” Not a bad performance. Nong would have made more of the moment, though, I reflect loyally. My mother still possesses the trick of projecting instant warmth. She would never have allowed herself to get as skinny as this girl, who looks like a yaa baa fiend, nor would she have been so slow to see an opportunity for an overseas trip.
I give the man a congratulatory nod. You wanted her, now you’ve got her. What more could one possibly ask of life?
I take a photograph of Bradley out of my pocket and watch while the mamasan tells the Swiss how much he has to pay for the beer and the girl.
“It’s strange the way they call it a bar fine,” he shares with me, “as if one is doing something wrong.”
When the Swiss has paid up the mamasan takes his five-hundred-baht note and brushes all her girls with it, for luck. I nod to the mamasan to come over. She looks at the picture. Not a man one could easily forget: huge, black, shaved head, good bone structure, a pleasant mouth and a brilliant smile. American, not African. No, she’s never seen him before, she’s sure she would have remembered, but she’s not been here all that long.
Turnover of labor is going to be a problem. Bradley was in Bangkok five years and had probably made his own private arrangements with women a long time ago. Men grow tired of Nana surprisingly quickly. Girls come and go.
I doggedly try all the bars, showing Bradley’s picture to mostly older mamasans who look as if they’ve been around for a while. No one remembers Bradley and I’m tiring by the time I return to the Carousel. The huge bar is packed with the usual collection of Caucasian men and Asian women. On a TV monitor on a wall bracket two white women are serving a gigantic black phallus. On the big screen which covers one wall Manchester United are playing Real Madrid. Those girls who are not attending to a client are watching the football. There’s a yell of female approval as Beckham scores from an impossible angle for the second time in five minutes.
All the men are watching the show on the largest revolving stage, where a woman in her early forties, naked except for a pair of cowboy boots, lies on the floor shooting darts from an aluminum tube she has inserted in her vagina. Customers hold up balloons for her to hit, and she rarely misses. Her name is Kat, a friend of my mother who lived with us for a while when I was young. When her act is over she makes a tour of the bar, still naked but holding a cowboy hat upside down for tips. The hat is full with twenty-, fifty- and hundred-baht notes by the time she reaches me. I toss a fifty into the hat.
“Can I talk to you backstage?”
She smiles. “I have another show at the Hollywood in twenty minutes. Come round to the changing room as soon as I’ve finished here.”
I watch her finish her tour, which she completes with great dignity, as if she were doing a job of work as valid as brain surgery-or law enforcement. As soon as she has disappeared through the artistes’ door, I follow, pushing my way through a crowd of naked women who are waiting to go on. By the time I reach the changing room Kat is already dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a tiny pack on her back, that same professional expression on her face.
“How is your mother? I keep meaning to visit, but Phetchabun is so far away.”
“Five hot hours in the bus. I don’t go as often as I should myself.” I take the photograph of Bradley out of my pocket and hold it up. I’m sure I see a flash of recognition before the inscrutable professional mask returns. “You know him?”
She purses her lips, shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m sure I would have remembered a face like that.”
I put the photo back in my pocket. “That’s what everyone is saying, everywhere I go.”
“What happened, did he murder someone?”
“The other way around.”
A tensing of her facial muscles. “Ah! An American?”