‘I’ll start packing.’

‘Carry-on only, I don’t want to hang around waiting for check-in luggage. I’ll buy whatever when we arrive. Silk’s cheap over there. Might buy some for bondage.’ He rubbed his hands.

The Robot had been to Thailand before and knew where to go. He took her to Patpong where they watched young brown women remove ping-pong balls and razor blades from their private parts, but this was only the warm-up.

Later they went to a place called Nana where near-naked girls strutted their stuff on stage and a man could take his pick.

On the plane, he had told her what he meant by group sex. It would be her job to explain it to the girl once they got back to the hotel. To her surprise, he wanted to discuss with her which girl to choose. She found they had opposite tastes. He tended to go for the slightly taller, more assertive types while she liked the cute, petite ones.

At the end of the day though, for him it came down to tits. He hired one with large, firm mammaries and they took her back in the taxi like a pet.

It was strange the way they both went out of their way to be nice to her—kindness itself, actually. She spoke almost no English, though, so Penny had to use sign language to explain:

Phase I: blowjob for Boss by guest worker while staff member gets licked by Boss;

Phase II: guest worker licks staffer while staffer gives head; Phase III: Boss takes pix of guest worker lubricating staffer with her tongue;

Phase IV: guest worker gets under staffer to lick Boss while Boss rogers staffer.

When it was over, Mike slept between them and for the first time seemed to be at peace.

They repeated the exercise a couple of times with different girls, then Mike decided he wanted to spend a few days in the country. He’d done the beach thing too many times before; he wanted the mountains. Of course, if it was going to be for more than one night, it would have to be the right girl.

On instinct, they chose one who was slightly older, perhaps late twenties. Her name was Om and she was from the mountains herself, so she would be a good guide. The Robot bought first-class tickets for all of them and off they flew to Mai Hong Song.

He found a hotel with large rooms and immediately demanded an orgy.

Penny and Om already knew what to do from the night before, but this time everything had slowed down, perhaps because of the journey, the heat and the proximity of the jungle.

She didn’t know why she thought the jungle made a difference, it just came into her head. When the moment came for her to lay on her back with his hard-on in her mouth and Om gently, patiently working her vagina with her tongue, she too felt an extraordinary serenity, a sense of relief of flesh surrounded by friendly flesh. Afterwards, Om grinned at her for coming so quickly.

By the next night, Penny had realized there was something very special about Om. The young Thai woman remained friendly and unfazed by anything they did together. She treated Penny as a pal and would tug at her breasts in a chummy way, as if they were sisters. She liked it when Penny did the same back. Om even gave Mike’s cock friendly, non-erotic tugs from time to time, always with the same serenity, never losing her dignity.

This had a strange effect on Mike. He became even quieter than normal, watched Om with an increasingly gaping mouth, as if she were some kind of superior alien being.

It wasn’t supposed to last long. Mike had planned for a ten-day vacation and had booked the return trip, but just when they were due to leave Mae Hong Song, he contracted some kind of stomach infection that left him pretty much nailed to the bed. He postponed the flight home.

He was fine in a couple of days, but strangely reluctant to leave. He asked Om where her home village was. She told him it was on the border with Burma, just a few miles away. He asked if they could go there. She said they could, but she could not have sex with them there—it would be strictly a case of her acting as guide. Penny was surprised that Mike agreed to this.

Om’s village was really a collection of smallholdings where her kinsfolk grew rice and—secretly, up in the hills—opium. So there was no problem finding opium for Mike. Now he was really relaxed. The only problem: he wanted to sleep between Om and Penny. Om said that was okay, they would be like family—so long as there was no sex. How would anyone know if they were having sex or not, the three of them? Om seemed surprised at the question. She said it was obvious if three people were having sex together or not.

‘But you’ve both gotta be naked, right?’ Mike said.

Om said that would be okay; it was so damn hot, she only wore a sarong anyway.

So they ended up in a bamboo hut with a springy bamboo floor, on the edge of dense jungle, with Mike smoking his opium and gratefully—blissfully—lying between them like a baby, wallowing in the proximity of unlimited naked female flesh.

For the first time, he began to talk like a real human. How awful his home life was: an alcoholic father, hard bitch for a mother, brothers all in prison, mostly for burglary and armed robbery. A hell he’d only escaped thanks to his gift for computer science and Internet games. ‘You think I’m weird? That lot can hardly talk at all,’ he said.

When he was in an opium dream, Penny talked to Om. She told the guest worker about her contract with Mike.

‘He’s not so bad, really. Very screwed up, but actually honourable. I mean, he does everything he promised under the contract, he just can’t seem to relate to people, that’s all.’

Om said she didn’t see anything different about him from other farang.

Penny took this to include herself—did she strike Om as a female version of Mike?

‘Of course,’ Om said with a smile.

‘You mean a total mess, don’t you?’

‘I mean very sick,’ Om said.

She then explained that she had only gone on the game for a short while to pay off a debt her mother had incurred purchasing medicine for her father who had recently died. Thanks to Mike, she would be able to pay off the debt.

When Mike and Penny had gone, she would become a mai chee: a Buddhist nun. She wanted to spend the rest of her life in meditation.

Now Penny thought she understood Om’s dignity. As far as the Thai woman was concerned, she was not practicing a form of debauchery so much as administering therapy to two pink-faced psychotics.

When Penny thought about it, she tended to agree. She had looked down on Mike as being sub-human—but was she really so different herself? It was the leap of imagination that was hard to make at first, until you got used to it: the West as the source of a world psychosis that was destroying humanity.

When you put it like that in so many words, it seemed obviously true.

Look at how people were today: spoilt brats at best, enraged loonies in their hearts most of the time.

‘We all hate each other,’ she admitted to Om, with a gasp.

Om nodded and told Penny she should meditate. She explained that Mike had to have opium because he was too far gone to meditate, he would never break through the reinforced concrete of his ego, but for Penny, a woman with a good heart, there was a chance.

Now Penny found herself encouraging Mike with his opium habit, so she could stay on a few more days with Om and learn to meditate. Both women made sure Mike had plenty of fin to keep him quiet while they went to temple and sat in silence in a semi-lotus position. Penny knew she was slow in spiritual matters, but not entirely without talent. With Om’s help, she developed a vague understanding of the ancient teaching and an appreciation of the peace it could bring to the heart.

When Mike was able to walk, which happened for a couple of hours in the evening of each day, he would wander into the jungle and sit on a fallen tree trunk. That must have been where he caught cerebral malaria.