Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

She can't even smell the exhaust of Mr. Pattison's motorbike anymore. She's been sniffing for it, but it's gone.

The last she saw of them was the wide cone of light from the bike's headlamp, bumping away from her, leaving her by herself, dead center in the red dirt of the road, staring after them. Staring at the black and white stripes of Teacher Suttikul's terrible blouse as it recedes into the darkness and the fuzziness of the nearsighted. Gone now, leaving Kwan more alone than she's ever felt in her seventeen years.

They're far enough away now to take with them even the sound of the bike, and here she is, ducking into the undergrowth to the side of the road just beyond the village, out of sight of anyone who might come looking for her, anyone who might say any word at all to her, have any kind of plan for her. She's thinking about ghosts and wishing she could have gotten on the bike. Just climbed up, wrapped her arms around her teacher's thick, solid waist, and zoomed through the night. Away from the broad black door that's just swung open in front of her.

Sold. Ruined.

Her father's eyes when her teacher talked about prostitution, about families who-

She's the center of a vortex of mosquitoes. Something moves, back in the bush. Everyone knows there are ghosts outside the village.

A breeze rattles the dry leaves on the bushes near her. If whatever made that noise is still moving, she won't be able to hear it. She can smell herself, the salty smell of shock and fear.

She can't stay here all night.

She feels like she's turned to stone. Her feet are too heavy to lift. And even if she could lift them, where would she go? She can't force herself to go home. She can't be in the same room-she can't even share the same light-with her father.

What she wants to do is drop to her knees and cry as she cried when she was a child, her throat wide open, her eyes running, and her nose streaming, letting out some of the grief that's built up inside her, like smoke with no outlet. She wants to slice open the skin on her cheeks and forehead with her fingernails and then scrub dirt into the cuts, dirt that could never be washed out, that would scar her, and then nobody would ever want to… buy…

She realizes she has her palm pressed hard over her lips and that a moan is building behind them. She straightens. Pulls her hand away. She will not moan.

And as she feels her will strengthen, a new thought, even colder than the others, breaks over her. What had her mother known? How long had she known? Her mother.

An hour ago, Kwan thinks, I was worried about staying in school.

She's aware again of the door, broad and even blacker than the night that surrounds her. She imagines something on the other side, holding out a hand to her. Or maybe it's not a hand.

The image makes her back prickle, and she turns slowly, seeing the dark, foamy shapes of bushes and, behind them, something bent and spavined, and she inhales quickly, the hand that had been over her mouth now pressed to the center of her chest, fingers splayed.

From the direction of the village, off to her left, a motorbike coughs a couple of times and roars into life. Kwan looks again at the twisted shape, sees that it's not moving, and backs deeper into the brush, farther away from the road. She keeps her eyes on the road, trying not to imagine the twisted thing opening long-fingered hands behind her. As much as she needs to know what's coming down the road, she looks over her shoulder at the dark shape. At first she can't give a form to anything, but then the bike's headlamp is turned on and the darkness thins, and she can see the bushes behind her, with nothing behind them but a spindly, dejected tree, and the roar increases in volume and whips past, dwindling into the distance. Two boys from the village, a little older than she, boys who are always in trouble for drinking and fighting. Boys without money. No one knows where they got the bike.

There is something in her left hand, the clenched hand. She lifts it to see what it is but then remembers. It's Nana's earring. Brought all the way here from Bangkok.

She sees her village with sudden clarity: Two rows of slanting, leaking houses, stinking latrines, badly chewed dogs. Dust and heat. People who are sometimes kind and sometimes cruel. Old people, young people. Working and living and dying. At the mercy of the weather, at the mercy of the rich. At the mercy of alcohol. Trapped in circles of karma that none of them can perceive, sentenced to a life of numbed endurance, voluble about nothing they care about, but slinging words bright and sharp as razors when tempers flare or the whiskey speaks. Mute as fish about the things that matter, the things they think about all the time. Hunger, work, injustice, endurance, the empty bellies of those they love.

The problem of their daughters. The opportunity presented by their daughters.

She could, Kwan imagines, just turn and walk down the road with the village behind her and never look back. Walk through the night until she sees a lighted window with someone behind it who needs her, someone who will take her in and let her help, let her wash and scrub and lift and carry. And never speak to her, never ask her anything. A smile in the morning, work through the day, a clean floor to sleep on at night. No one coming to the door. No one knowing her name.

Right, she thinks. Life is a movie.

She takes three deep, silent breaths. She'll be able to go to school. Teacher Suttikul won. She's got what she wanted. School, learning, working to make herself better. The story she's been trying so hard to write, the story of a village girl who is led to a treasure by the ghost of her dead grandmother. How happy the treasure makes the girl's poor family. The story Teacher Suttikul likes. The word Teacher Suttikul said: "college."

Her father's eyes. The way he watched her when she crossed the room to get to Teacher Suttikul. Their cold weight on her back as she and her teacher paused in the doorway to talk to Mai.

And she knows, deep in the pit of her stomach, that the wide dark door is still open and that school is not on the other side of it.

The moon has begun to lift itself above the hills to the east, just a sliver of silver so far, a crack in the black sky, not much thicker than a pencil line. It brings a chill, chalky light with it, and Kwan uses that light to look down at the earring in her hand, sparkling cold blue. To her own surprise, she reaches up and, working by feel, removes the little steel stud in her left ear and puts the sapphire in its place.

It seems to throw off a sort of warmth. She imagines she can feel it, not only in her ear but down the side of her neck and across the top of her shoulder. Like a soft fall of light. She likes the feeling. Something about it loosens the tangled knot that's squeezing her heart-not much, but some.

Her father will not take the earring from her. She will wear it, even if people laugh at it. She's used to being laughed at. It hurts, but it doesn't scar.

She has fingernails. She has teeth. She has fists. The house is full of knives. Her father will find it hard to push her through the dark door. Pocketing the stud she removed from her ear, Kwan pushes her way through the brush and takes the road back to her village. SHE SEES the dark shape on the wooden platform by the side of the road, the platform on which her father and his friends drink and play cards. She stops, hoping she has not been seen or heard, hoping it is not her father who sits there, but then the figure speaks.

"Where have you been?" Nana's voice.

"Down the road," Kwan says. What she felt there, what she thought there, is her secret, not to be shared even with those she trusts. And she doesn't trust Moo. Now, with all that has happened, she remembers that she didn't much like Moo-Nana-when she lived in the village. Moo was five years older than Kwan, a hot-tempered girl who fought with other girls frequently, usually girls smaller than she. She was fat then, and she used her weight as a weapon, bulldozing her opponents to the ground and kneeling on them, digging her knees into the most sensitive spots and bearing down. She once put her hand in a plastic bag and used it to pick up some dog droppings, which she rubbed in a smaller girl's face. Kwan finds it difficult to see the angry fat girl in the self-possessed, attractive woman who has come back, at least temporarily, from her years in Bangkok.