“Tomorrow,” she said, as if we’d shared an illicit joke.
“You no go with ladee?” said the waiter, as the woman walked away.
“No go,” I said, and then wondered why exactly I was speaking like one of them.
I looked around me, then, and realized I’d never seen so many beautiful women in one place before; then I looked closer and realized why they were so beautiful. They weren’t real. They were real people, of course, just not real girls. And yet not not-real either. Some of them, I thought, just made themselves up as girls. But some were no doubt on the way to becoming real women, in every way. And some of them had completed the transformation and now, reborn, were more girlish than any girl could be. All the excitement of them came from this sense of ambiguity, of mystery, I suppose. I felt almost seasick watching them.
I went back to my hotel then—it was on one of those brightly lit lanes, which in the daytime turns out to be just a rather peeling, derelict back alleyway. But at night it is enchantment. They call this place the “City of Angels,” but I think that’s a kind of spell, a way of saying it’s not a place of djinns. Didn’t Nana tell us, one of those long winter afternoons—Scheherazade in Somerset—that the best devils in the world are the ones who look like angels?
I suppose you’ll say all this has something to do with Sarah, and finding myself alone again. A widower is a king exiled from his palace, I tell my friends, and they look at one another and tell themselves I’ve lost it. But it’s true. When you’re suddenly alone again, it’s as if you’ve lost not just your jewels, but yourself, your life. You’ve woken up in a strange place, and there’s no way to find the road back to the castle. Nothing makes sense, and you don’t have any money on you, and whatever past you thought you had is locked up in somebody else’s keeping. I suppose I realized that if everyone was going to misunderstand me in any case, I might as well go full hog and become someone entirely unexpected.
Which brings me to the part that’s going to shock you. I feel strange saying all this to you; I suppose if would be easier to call. But if I could hear your voice, I don’t think I’d be able to say anything at all. And anyway, with you off in Bangalore, I’d probably hear someone else’s voice, or someone pretending to be you. And you’re not who you usually are either, I imagine, in that tropical setting, with all those streets around.
Besides, there is something rather magical about coming into one of these little cafes at 1:00 a.m.—the young girl at the desk curtsies, the kids wait around in chairs, as if waiting to be claimed—and typing these words onto a screen, and then, that very minute, the same words appear on a screen in India, taken there by a genie with STD connections.
So, back to the part where you’ve got to block your eyes (or ears, or both). I asked myself, as I went out for breakfast that second night, what I really wanted here. The streets around me were thronged; they have this night market thing here which is a kind of Oriental bazaar in the dark, so mad with flickering neon and shouted prices that you can hardly walk. People are shooting numbers back and forth, or offering one another calculators on which their bids are typed. Girls are drifting out of the bars in underwear, or even less. People are selling blacklight posters, lanterns, false perfumes and little vials of something strange, bras, luminous green rings to wear around your neck and spices that are said to be love potions. All around, on every corner. And I, walking through the midst of it, thought, “What is it that I could do here that I could never do at home?”
What I’m going to tell you won’t make you very comfortable. But I suppose I was after something that’s the opposite of comfort; if it had been comfort I wanted, I’d have stayed in London. No, I thought; this is a chance—my best chance, maybe my last chance—to become someone different. To say abracadabra and whirl myself around so fast that the person who gets up again is someone other. You know how my reasoning works when there’s no real reason behind it.
People were pushing me, scraping past me as I walked, picking up panties and Rolex watches that cost less than a drink, fingering X-rated videos and bottles of Chanel that looked like colored water, and at last, having fortified myself with a beer, I went up to two girls I’d seen the night before. One of them had short, spiky hair—she was less tall than I was—and a soft, young face, virginal in a way. The other was much taller than both of us, with long hair and a tiger’s face, predatory and strong.
“What magic tricks do you offer?” I said, not meaning anything, I think.
They looked at one another—though I’m sure they’re used to worse—and then the small one, the shy one, said, “What country you come from?”
“England,” I said.
“Same-same, America.”
“Not really, no.”
“Where you stay Bangkok?”
“The Dream Palace. Over near the Golden Temple.”
They looked at one another appraisingly.
“You have ladee, Bangkok?”
“No,” I told the shorter one. “No lady at all.”
Here the taller one grabbed hold of my arm.
“You come with me,” she said.
“No,” said the other. “You come with me. Number one.”
“Same-same,” said the first. “You take us both.”
“I will,” I said, and the whole conversation stopped for a moment. Whatever they were expecting, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t what I was expecting, either. It was the moment speaking, taking me wherever it went.
They looked at me and the tall one said, “You want me and my friend?”
“Of course,” I said. I don’t know why, but I thought at that moment of what I’d read about the women in those poor African countries—Sao Tome, the Central African Republic—who support their families by pretending to be other women at phone-sex centers. Purring down the international phone lines, as if they were in Croydon or Atlanta or somewhere, sighing and giving back false names, so they can go home and give their mothers enough money for food.
It’s degrading, people will tell you. It’s just colonialism in another form. It’s a way of keeping the poor poor, and exploiting the fact they’re in need. Maybe it is, but that wasn’t how it seemed just then. The girls were eager; they didn’t want to spend any longer waiting for someone who might be even worse than me. And the next thing I knew, they were leading me, one by each arm, down the little lane, past the booths and the fortune tellers and the girls in briefs, who were running a finger down a man’s shirt or underneath it to his skin. It was like walking through a stranger’s imagination.
We arrived a few minutes later at an unlit staircase and walked up into the dark. At the top we came to this musty aquarium of a place, with a string of lights along the walls. A man—a boy, really—was sitting at a cash register, eating something from a bowl and watching a television set that sat on the floor in a corner. With rabbit- ear antennae and a scratchy old black-and-white film on the small screen.
I suppose the girls had been here before (I call them girls because I don’t know what else to call them). They collected a key from the boy, and then the three of us walked, or straggled, down the corridor. There were pink lights above every door, no windows at the end. One of them turned the old-fashioned key and we walked into this room of wonders, really; she turned on a light, and we saw a television set, a drinks cabinet, a video player, a karaoke mike. There was a deep bathtub in the middle of the room. The other girl, the smaller one, pushed another button and the room shone red, then blue.
The taller girl went into the bathroom, and the small one began to unbutton her shirt.
“No,” I said, putting a hand on her arm. “Not now.”
She sat on the bed—she looked puzzled, even rejected—and a few seconds later, the taller girl came out, freshly showered, with some exotic perfume newly applied. She’d changed into a bathrobe, but she hadn’t done it up, so she walked across the room like someone from a James Bond film, her robe waiting to fall open.
“A thousand and one nights,” I said, rather foolishly, again, and they looked at one another, a little alarmed. I suppose they were wondering—worried—what would come next.
“You crazy guy,” said the tall one, pushing me onto the bed.
The other one, always more obliging, said, “No, shy. Same-same Japanese.”
“No,” I said. “I know what I want.”
They both looked at me, expectant. All three of us were on the bed now and the red light made us feel like X-rays or something not quite real.
“We tell each other stories. The stories of our lives.”
