Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

‘What about the police investigation?’

The headman stared at Lalita and made a gesture toward Fred, then snapped out something in Thai: ‘What investigation? Why would the police be interested? He was going to get himself killed wherever he went, and if someone’s caught, they will bribe the police chief, so nobody will ever know who did it.’

Now both the headman and Lalita looked at Fred as if he were retarded.

Fred didn’t know why he was enjoying it. ‘So he just got wasted for being an asshole?’ Fred summed up.

‘Right,’ Lalita said, not bothering to refer to the headman.

Fred did his professional duty and checked out the village where James Conway was shot, even visited the Sino-Alicante monstrosity the Englishman had built with its garish green tiles, blinding white walls and stark blue swimming pool.

They went on to the bar where he drank, the spot where he died. Nobody in the village would talk, not even to the point of saying where Conway’s widow was now.

But Fred knew he was only going through the motions. When his mobile whooshed with a message from Penny (Where are you Sugarplum? Look, I know I’ve been a bit standoffish, but I’m coming round, give me time and I’m yours, okay? Just don’t go needy on me-you have that needy thing, frankly, and it scares me-I have to be all about me right now, that’s all, nothing else in the way), he muttered something obscene and deleted the message.

He’d already written the Conway story in his head. He was clever with words and would make the investigative reporting good and noir, but the message was plain for anyone with a brain: Jerk had it coming. He also knew how he would end the report: By the way, I resign. Then he walked with Lalita through the village to a meadow that sloped gently down to a bubbling brook.

‘Any land for sale here?’ Fred said.

‘Plenty. If you’re serious, we should go back to Bangkok, then I’ll return alone to negotiate-you will get a better price that way.’

‘All in your name, of course?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘I want the house in wood on stilts. What about the car?’

‘It will be mine too; you can’t register in your name with a tourist visa.

Don’t do it if you’re scared.’

‘I’m not,’ Fred said. ‘But if I turn into an asshole, don’t shoot me yourself. Let someone else do it. I wouldn’t want you to do jail time for a selfish slob like me.’ He thought he was making a joke, but his eyes teared.

Lalita was silent and frowning for a long moment. ‘You really can love me that quick?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Fred said, then bellowed at the sky, ‘HEAD OVER EFFIN HEELS, DARLING-as my granny used to say.’

* * *

He checked his mobile. Twenty three hours and forty-one minutes since he’d landed.

AQUA-SUBCULTURE Lee Ee Leen, Malaysia

I sold beautiful curiosities in my shop, so it was only fitting that one walked in.

However, it was not an antiques shop. My merchandise was a living example of years of human manipulation in enhancing specific genetic traits in fish.

I stocked common goldfish, black goldfish supposed to guard the family home from bad chi, calicos, neon tetras, comets and bubble-eyed imported specimens. I rented a corner lot squeezed next to a dim sum restaurant in a neighbourhood shopping mall; contrary to what you may have overheard in the management office, my fish did not end up as fillings in the wantons served up for the lunchtime crowd. A week after I had expanded the shop to include marine fish, Andie sauntered through the door.

I tried not to stare at her. Beautiful women are often defensive and accompanied by protective items such as boyfriends and husbands. But she was alone, a towering, slim beauty whose physique almost blended in with the narrow shelves that overlooked the reef tank. With a Harley-Davidson biker’s cap tilted over her face, she lured me out from behind the counter.

‘How much?’ She tapped the glass of the tank to indicate the black-and-white cleaner wrasse, darting around the bigger fish in the tank like harried waiters. For a natural tank janitor and a collector’s item, I recommended a cleaner shrimp, a miniature automaton coloured like a barbershop pole and equipped with six jointed legs.

‘I am not a beginner,’ she stated in a lilting accent that was definitely not local. Her green contact lenses flashed in the fluorescent light. I was naive to think she was referring to her fish-keeping experience.

‘Come back in three days. Those wrasse are reserved.’ I lied.

Three days later, when I arrived at my shop, she was standing outside the shutter at a quarter to eleven. With those narrow hips wrapped in tight snakeskin jeans, she looked like a boy when viewed from behind. When she turned at the sound of my jangling keys, I saw her breasts constricted under a Boy London T-shirt. ‘Please wait outside, miss.’

I learnt her name after I had bagged a cleaner wrasse. The fish flailed as I handed her the plastic bag ‘It only has one hour before it suffocates.’

‘Kinky,’ she muttered as she took the bag. She was not wearing the green contact lenses this morning. I preferred her eyes naturally tawny. She told me her name because she was fed up with my calling her ‘Miss’ as if I were giving inept instructions to an artillery unit.

‘Andie,’ she said. ‘Like the actress, Andie Macdowell.’ She paused and waited for my response, as if I had flubbed a line of dialogue.

‘I wasn’t named after someone famous.’ I told her after some hesitation. I wished I was called Jacques as an alternative to my pedestrian moniker, Jack.

When I was young, I saw a documentary on TV about Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer. But local mispronunciation would flub the Gallic inflection of Jacques, and make it sound more like Jock.

Andie laughed and removed her biker cap. Her black hair fell to the waistband of her jeans. She looked like a mermaid, the black tresses and their green iridescence shimmering above the scaly faux snakeskin.

We met under the fibreglass model of a whale shark in the aquaria in Kuala Lumpur City Centre. I suggested the trip as a natural progression of shared interests. The aquaria were divided into biotopes: coral reef, Amazon River, Malaysian rainforest and mangrove swamp. A tunnel lit by neon-blue track lights connected each biotope.

‘Arapaimas mate for life,’ I point out to Andie at the Amazon River tank.

Two behemoths drift past us in the green water, their bony heads etched with curlicues and ridged scars.

‘Fools.’ She set her lips together in a compressed line.

‘Sea slugs are hermaphrodites-but can’t self-fertilize. They still need a partner,’ Andie informed me as she pressed her palm on the reinforced glass of the cylinder tank for invertebrates. A specimen unfurled its fuchsia plumes as it clambered over a Venus’ Flower Basket, a glassy hollow sponge that imprisons a pair of male and female shrimp for life.

We followed yellow arrows plastered to the wall of the tunnel to the special aquaria exhibit of the month- Australian sea snakes. A large open tank was covered with mesh wire, flanked by signs that unnecessarily warned visitors not to put their hands inside the tank. I peered through the wire and saw two banded sea snakes entwined