Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

‘You feeling horny?’ Fred said.

‘No. I almost never feel horny. I’m just taking care of you. I’m at work, don’t forget.’

‘You’re going to kill me with being so honest.’

‘You want me to shut up?’

‘Oh, no,’ Fred said. ‘I want to die this way. Please, keep up the torture.’

She laughed that laugh. He’d noticed that whenever death was mentioned, it made her laugh. She’d told him it was from Buddhism: death was a kind of joke, once you got the message. Then she asked in a humble tone he’d not heard from her before if he minded if they stopped off for half an hour at her own village, which was on the way. Her grandmother was dying.

‘Sure,’ Fred said, ‘I have a thing about my own granny.’

‘You see her much?’

‘She’s dead.’

Lalita laughed.

He waited while she ran inside a small shack on stilts. Two kids played in a mud patch, an alcoholic grandfather sat and stared at him as if he wanted to kill him, an exhausted middle-aged woman in a worn grey sarong put her hands together to greet him. When Lalita ran out of the shack again, she introduced her mother. Then they were off.

‘Whose are the kids?’ Fred said.

‘My sister’s, but she did her head in with meths and they locked her away in the funny farm.’ She shrugged. ‘Someone has to give them a chance.’

She didn’t say it, she didn’t need to: that bunch of losers in the shack was the reason she sold her body. And they’re not even her kids, Fred thought, with an incredulity that was hard to live with. 4.

Fred said: ‘How come you speak such good English, Lalita?’

His memory of the night before had recovered somewhat. He recalled that apart from her good looks and great body, Lalita had stood out from all the other girls for her mastery of the language-and superior intelligence.

It was entirely possible that she had chosen him rather than the other way around. She could be playing him like a penny whistle-which didn’t bother him at all. He was enjoying the tune.

‘I had a sponsor,’ Lalita said, ‘A sugar daddy as you call it. He was an engineer. English, but spent all his working life in the United States. That’s why I speak the way I do. I lived with him. I mean, he had a big apartment in Bangkok and I lived there full-time. He travelled all over Southeast Asia on his engineering assignments. When he was home, we spoke English, when he was away I studied English-there was nothing else to do. It was part of my contract with him that I wouldn’t take on other customers. I was only nineteen and my brain worked good.’

‘What happened?’

Fred saw something strange in Lalita’s face. He was not used to Thai features. He couldn’t tell if a memory was causing her extreme pain-or something else.

She inhaled heavily. ‘You really want to know what happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, see, he would often be away for months at a time, sometimes six months, and he said his work didn’t allow him to fool around with other women, so when he returned he was pretty horny. I wasn’t enough for him on the first nights back, so I had to arrange a threesome. I was fine with that, because it was always fun and relieved the pressure on me. I would find a girl in one of the bars which had upstairs rooms and I would have to tell her in advance what he wanted, otherwise everyone could get all tangled up and lose the moment. He liked to fuck me doggy-style while she lay underneath pointing the other way so she could lick his balls and his ass.

‘Now, to understand you have to know that while she was licking him he couldn’t move without interrupting her work and bumping her on the nose, so he would stay still and I would move in and out.’ She gave Fred a glance.

‘Okay,’ Fred said.

‘So, one night it was all going perfectly. She kept on licking and I kept on thrusting with my butt, except that it went on for a long time and he wasn’t groaning the way he usually did. At first, I didn’t think anything usual was happening because he’d taken a whole Viagra and was going to be stiff for hours anyway.

‘I guess we went on like that for maybe twenty-five minutes or more, waiting for a tell-tale groan or two, and I was starting to get dry and her tongue was starting to ache before we realized he was having a seizure and couldn’t speak or move. So we both got out from under him, but by the time we laid him on his back he was dead. You could say we’d been having sex with a corpse.’

Startled, Fred stared at her. She was biting her tongue.

‘We ran to tell the mamasan, who came up and said we had to drag him downstairs because she wasn’t supposed to rent out rooms for sex and she wanted it to look straight before she called the cops. But before we dragged him downstairs, she had to close the bar. So we did and the cops came and called for an ambulance and we were left with just us girls in the bar.’

‘Okay.’

Lalita’s face was trembling uncontrollably. For a moment, Fred wondered if she, too, was not having a seizure. Tears started to stream down her face. Now she exploded.

‘It was just so fucking funny-all we girls and the mamasan had a party all night and drank the bar dry. I mean, out-of-control funny and shocking, too, which made it even more funny.’ She struggled to keep her hands on the wheel in the grip of a prolonged belly laugh that caused her breasts to bounce and her shoulders to shudder.

Fred gave her a few beats to recover. ‘You weren’t sad in any way?’

She caught her breath. ‘Why? He was a nice guy and had a great life, but how long was he going to live anyway? He was already fifty-six. Better to go that way than in a wheelchair sucking on an oxygen tube.’

‘Right,’ Fred said, scratching his jaw.

She flashed him a glance. ‘What’s the matter?’

Fred wasn’t entirely sure what the matter was. After a couple of minutes he said: ‘I think I’m the opposite to that bloke. I think I’ve been dead all my life and I’m only just coming alive.’

‘Maybe you’re not so different,’ Lalita said. ‘He told me he played it straight until he was thirty, followed all the rules and married a farang feminist who took everything including the kids. That’s when he saw the light.’

‘Of course, Khun James Conway got shot: he was an asshole,’ the village headman said; at least, that was how Lalita interpreted his words-freely, Fred suspected. ‘He treated his wife like some kind of slave and he was in a bad mood all the time, always complaining. He had a drink problem and spent all his time at the bar. In the end they didn’t bother with cans of beer, they served him with packs of twelve.

‘He was an arrogant shit, always yelling and criticizing Thailand. How that guy could bitch! It was amazing. He could moan for hours about a cockroach crawling across the floor, on and on and on like a buffalo chewing grass. We know we’re poor and low class, but he didn’t have to rub it in like that. And he was a know-all-told the villagers how to do everything, even told them how to live. And he was insulting about Buddhism.

‘His wife did her best for the first year. She was very patient and she’s young, only twenty-three now. Then she lost interest and went over to her uncle’s place to socialize with her cousins.’

‘She was unfaithful to him?’ Fred asked.

‘Of course not. She married him properly, village ceremony and the legal thing, both. Isaan women take that very seriously.’

‘Do you know who shot him?’

The headman shrugged. ‘Who would know such a thing? Anyone in that village would have shot him if they had the chance. They’re quite primitive over there. Maybe someone just happened to have a gun when they saw him walking down the street-a kind of accident, if you see what I mean. Or maybe they drew lots.’