In the waterside café, a group of Scandinavian girls had gathered under the parasols, pink as crayfish in that dust- tinged light. They talked so loudly we could hear the gaps between their sentences. On the part of the property that faced the water, an Australian renter named Dennis was seated in front of an easel, picking at a watercolor. I had never seen him before so openly revealed in the sun, an elderly man with skin as white as fine library dust, with a fop of dyed blond hair falling between his eyes, as it must have all his life. I remember thinking, "Women must have loved that fop of hair," and wondering who he really was. A retiree, the others said, who liked the Thai girls. Wife dead, keeps to himself. When I went over to have a look at his watercolor, he didn't say "G'day, mate," but "Good afternoon," and I saw that his painting was an exact replica of the far side of the river. He put on a pair of incredibly frail spectacles and finally dipped his brush into a pot of water. I could hear him thinking in the gloom, "Another useful day completed in the great annals of aimlessness."
"Have you met that Spaniard?" he said as we sat on the pier, looking at the Nordics. "A terrible painter."
"I'm avoiding him for the moment."
"They say he did a mural in Bumrungrad Hospital. In the Italian restaurant there. I went in there one day when I was having a checkup and had a look."
"And?"
"It's called the Portofino. It's fine dining for the invalids. I went into the bar and got myself a martini just to look at his work. I'm curious, I'm a painter too, as you can see. Not a pro, but I like it all the same."
He was a bit like my grandfather, a man whom I had adored. An amateur scholar of sorts. He got up and said, "Come and have a beer with me on the terrace."
From there, we looked down at the Primrose.
"Cheap and comfy at least," he said sadly. "Cheap and comfy for the masses, dear."
He was reedy and awkward, tensile, with big popping hand veins, and he wore a woodcutter shirt day after day. Retired bank manager. He came here half the year. He spent the other half in Perth.
"Horrible place, Perth. Bangkok's where you find your youth again."
I said that I hadn't found mine.
"You're not sixty yet. Come back when you're sixty."
"I won't be coming here when I'm sixty."
"There are worse places in which to be sixty."
He added that what Bangkok offered to the aging human was a culture of complete physicality. It was tactile, humans pressing against each other in healing heat: the massage, the bath, the foot therapy, the handjob, you name it. The physical isolation and sterility of Western life, its physical boredom, was unimaginable.
"There's a reason we're so neurotic and violent and unhappy. Especially as we get on a bit, no one ever touches us."
I thought of him returning from work every evening to a neat suburban house in Perth, until the day his wife died and everything came unstuck. Twenty years of not being touched? That was the way it had been, but one couldn't say it. The forlorn rags of growing old, or a last beautiful disgrace in the Land of Smiles. He had taken the arduous leap into the latter. But I wanted to know about the mural in Bumrungrad Hospital.
"I got myself a martini at the bar. The mural is behind all the bottles. They have some damn good aged scotches there. It's a Thai hospital after all. Then there was this mad painting. I think it showed Christ turning up at a drinking party of Alexander the Great. I could see the Greeks in their tunics anyway, and there was the Savior, looking bloody liquored up. And there was Saint Peter, I think, swigging from a bottle of Gordon's. It was all very strange. But I knew it was good for that Spaniard to have painted. He did a frightful caca for the Shangri-La Hotel over there. I know that for a fact. What they call an absterraction."
And he pointed at the Shangri-La, far downriver.
"Did you ask the Spaniard himself?"
"One doesn't talk to Spaniards, mate. They're all crackers. I've been wondering, in fact, where all these Latins have come from. You seem like a nice young man. I wouldn't talk to the rest of them, if I were you. They seem like a bunch of skunks to me. I wouldn't touch them with a shitty stick. Especially that McGinnis. He's got the air of a right little schnauzer."
He used the word literally.
"Do you paint in Perth?" I asked.
"Crocs, the beach, sunsets. You name it, I paint it."
We admired the breadth and pugnacity of the river. Its waves crashed noisily against the pier. A river with waves. It was our kind of river, a real bitch of a river.
A water taxi drew up and a nubile girl in a black two-piece suit jumped off. Dennis got to his feet at once and began waving.
"Over'ere, Porntit!"
She looked up and I felt a stab of jealousy.
Dennis sat down again.
"Mate, you got to love a country where Porntit is a real name."
In fact, the name is Porntip.
•
Through my windows poured all the noise of Wang Lang. Blindfolded, you would think it was a waterfall, a cataract striking beds of smooth stones. At the corner, blind wikipo musicians played kuen pipes and an old woman cried out her guts into a microphone. A few luuk thung country songs, the bittersweet music of Thailand's rural misery.
I got up at four, put on sandals, and wandered down to the ferry. The monks came off the boats in a swarm, reeking of God. Standing by this part of the river, you have the partial illusion of being in an old city; the embankments are filled with rotting warehouses in that economical Sino-Thai "row house" style known as hong taew. After a few days I noticed that Porntip arrived at the pier at the same time every day. She had a quick eye for farangs and she made it her business to catch mine as she came up the jetty, swinging a fake Fendi bag. This eye-play is at the core of the city's erotic juggling of East and West. She was not always with Dennis, and I sometimes caught her walking through the premises as if at a loose end, simply dressed in jeans and tank top, looking like one of the students from the universities, which is what she was. She would knock on doors, the rap echoing down the cement corridors, and there was something brittle and excessively polite about that knock. Presumably she didn't need to say anything. When it happened to me, she didn't bother opening a conversation, she stepped into the corridor of my unit smelling of pharmaceutically processed alpine flowers. She didn't mention money. She walked in, tossed off her shoes, and asked me if I had any orange juice. She was from the provincial town of Udon, and studied Chinese. Nothing about her revealed her methods of procuring supplemental income.
There are 200,000 girls working in Thailand at this twilight game, though nothing close to the two million that NGOs once claimed. The majority are freelancers, or part-timers, slippery single-woman entrepreneurs who wheel and deal by themselves, barely noticed by the society around them. Many are migrants from the north, from places like the rice-growing plains of Issan, though Porntip was not one of those. She seemed familiar with the layout of the Primrose Apartments, and with the mental states of the men she did business with. She seemed amused by them. Big, simple children with a twist of guilt inside them. She once told me she could not believe how polite and apologetic they were. Did they think they were doing something wrong? If they did, what was it?
She stayed all afternoon, and afterward we listened to CDs or played Scrabble. There seemed to be no schedule boxing her in, her time was malleable and extendable. When she left I had to pass the banknotes into her hand, a gesture which I had never made before—the damp notes sliding from palm to palm, suddenly weighty and acrimonious, and she caught my eye as if to say "See?" The internal barrier broken.
There is a word in Thai, sanuk, which embodies the idea of enjoying life to the full as a duty. It is usually translated as "fun" or "pleasure," but it is really untranslatable. Porntip was a bearer of sanuk. She came every fourth day for a month, with a curious punctuality, as if she was coming upriver between classes. Sometimes she said she was avoiding Dennis and made me promise not to tell him. We made love on the wood floor, burning knees and elbows, crushed flat against the white paint of the walls. Once she made me cut off her ponytail with a pair of scissors and laughed for ten minutes. Other times, she was silent, concentrated, determined on something undisclosed. We are told ceaselessly that sex and love are two different things that merge only within monogamy, a tirade straight out of the Dark Ages. It is categorically untrue. With a quick, mysterious tropism one loves every woman one fucks. I loved Porntip, but it didn't have to be elaborated. Even the most disgusting misogynist sex tourist is secretly in love with the thing he tries so hard to defile. That love gnaws at him and you can see it in his furious, ruddy face. And Porntip was only doing this for a year, she said, before she graduated and moved on. She said once:
"This part of the river is haunted. Have you ever heard of Si Ouey? He's buried right next door, in Thonburi. Rapist and murderer! He's in the hospital museum; you should go see him and say hello. Of course I'm not going with you! His ghost is still there. It's still walking about at night. You should be careful."
•
I go a single stop upriver to the Thonburi pier. It is so close to Wang Lang you can practically see it from the Primrose, but like Wang Lang very few foreigners stop there and there is a desultory, shabby quality to the place. Thonburi, on the left bank of the river, is where Bangkok began. This is where the early fort was built and where the court resided.
I get off at the pier. It is a scrum of dogs and young soldiers prone on the benches which line the passageway to the street, a smell of burned grass. There is a large Victorian-style railway station here, where train operations have been suspended. A street leads up to Wat Suwannaram, where Thai royalty used to be cremated. Then there's a sign for the Siriaj Hospital. The Forensics and Parasitology Museums can be found on the second floor of the Anatomy Building in this nondescript hospital founded by King Rama V and named after his dead baby son.
In the Forensics Museum there are countless photographs of crime and accident scenes with terse captions: "Multiple Cuts by Propeller," decapitations from train accidents, "Cut Throat by Beer Bottle," cases of crania punctured by gunshots, yellowed mandibles and bottles filled with damaged brains. On a lighter note, there are the medical gowns worn by the men who investigated the mysterious murder of the young King Rama VIII in 1946.
Then there are the preserved corpses of serial killers, which are placed in glass cases with metal basins to catch their cadaverine wax. In the middle of the room, there's the shrunken body of the child murderer Si Ouey, sometimes written in English as Zee-Oui: a Chinese immigrant called Li Hui who went on a spree of infanticide in the 1950s, eating the internal organs of the small children he abducted and killed. He is standing, gesticulating, his mouth wide open.
It is like Madame Tussaud's, except that the waxwork is real. And the Forensics Museum is popular with Chinese tourists. It's as if word of mouth has gotten back to China about this unsavory compatriot of theirs, this shameful splinter of the race. They are also curious about the method of his execution: in Thailand the condemned man is shot with a weapon fixed in place, the bullet directed through a square cut into a length of silk. A flower is placed between his tied hands. A single shot through the heart.