John Burdett - Bangkok 8

"How so?"

"Because he really got into the praying, and bought a Bible and started preaching to me about salvation. He would go on for hours, usually after he'd had a bottle of Mekong, and I used to sit at his feet and murmur adoring approval. It was like those American preachers you see on the TV sometimes, all emotion and intensity and certainty about God's grace. We Karen are religious groupies, we love everyone's God, we've had more missionaries over the years than you can count: all kinds of Christians, Buddhists, Muslims. We take them all in, believe every word and never bother about the contradictions. So I was a perfect audience for him. We would reach this peak a few times a week, after ganja and whisky, when we were certain that the doors of heaven were about to open and we would walk right in. You have to bear in mind that he was under a lot of pressure. The loan sharks were closing in. They didn't want to kill him, of course, but they were charging twenty percent a month and at that rate things get on top of you very quickly. He would get these three-in-the-morning telephone calls and the guy's English would be so bad I'd have to take the phone and have him make his threats in Thai so I could translate. It was the usual stuff, you know, what they would do to his body, his face-especially his face. They're not stupid, those people, they know a person's weakness."

"And at this time, you were still…"

"Still a man? Oh yes. My change came later. I would say that we decided I would start to take the estrogen together, it was a family decision which popped up quite casually. We were in bed one night, drunk, and he was caressing me and I asked him if he would like me to have tits. I don't think it had occurred to him before. He sort of jumped a bit. Maybe he saw it as a solution to at least one of his problems. If he turned me into a woman he could claim not to be queer, couldn't he? But that wasn't what I'd had in mind. I was just suggesting the estrogen as a sort of-you know?"

"Sexual adjunct?"

"Exactly. So I got hold of some local stuff and, lo and behold, the tits start to grow. The effect on him was weird. I mean, he started obsessing about making changes to my body. I said, 'Sweetheart, I'm starting to feel like a lump of jade that's being worked on.' He laughed, but it was true. And the funny thing was that at that time, everything seemed to change for the better. He told me he'd been contacted by someone very very big in the gems trade in America and it looked like a little real business would be coming his way. Nothing big to start with, but at least there was light. And this jeweler-he never told me his name in the early days-was going to pay off Bill's debts. Boy, I mean, it was just like the clouds lifted all at once, all thanks to this big shot from America, this jeweler, who I never met until much later, but who would come to Krung Thep once a month on business and he and Bill would go somewhere-to this guy's hotel I guess-to talk business all night."

"All night?"

"That's right. I had my suspicions. I mean, it's pretty standard that someone comes from the West or Japan on a business trip and expects to be entertained in the Bangkok tradition when the talking's over. I didn't really mind. I even thought it might be healthy in a way. I mean, from what he said this jeweler seemed to like women and I thought if Bill is doing a little pussy-chasing just for form, it's probably what he needs. He was still pretty freaked out about having a serious affair with a man. Maybe he needed the balance. Anyway, the jeweler had become our number one man and anything he wanted he had to have. At the same time, all kinds of stuff started appearing in our house. Silverware, ceramics, local craft products, things which I thought were priceless in my ignorance of those days, but which turned out to be just leftover junk from the jeweler's warehouse."

"They went to the bars together?"

"I don't know about that. This guy was so big, so rich, I got the feeling they would party with some hired flesh, you know, the most expensive kind, right there in his hotel suite. Bill mentioned a Russian pimp and some Siberian women."

"How did Bill seem after those sessions?"

"At first he was kind of amused. He would say that this guy, who was so respectable, who met presidents, who knew senators and members of Parliament, was really quite a swinger. He didn't say more than that to save my feelings. Quite a swinger. Then one time he stayed away three days and when he came back he was a different man."

"Different?"

Silence.

"Totally different. He'd lost his soul. He even admitted it. He got drunk, smoked some ganja and started tearing up his Bible. He says: 'I prayed for grace and salvation, but they sent me the devil. So now we work for the devil. Maybe there's only the devil, maybe all the other nonsense is kid stuff. That's what the man told me. Kid stuff.' He looked at me when he said that. He looked at me and carried on tearing up the Bible."

"And that's when you started on the estradiol?"

"That's when my transformation went high tech. Estradiol. Computer programs, medical dictionaries, specialist news groups on the Web."

"And Dr. Surichai?"

"And after a few months, yes, Dr. Surichai. I'm watching Bill every day playing with this computer stuff with-you know-diagrams, color pictures of the anatomy of a man and a woman, and he can move the bits around, cut off this, add this, and I'm standing behind him adoring him with my arms around his neck saying: 'Yes, darling, let's give me tits like that, anything you like. You can have three tits and two pussies if you want, anything, anything.' "

"You were being designed?"

"That's right, I was being designed. What did I care? I was just so flattered, you know, that my man is obsessing about me. Who wouldn't be? I didn't care if he'd turned into the devil. What did God ever do for me?" A quick flash of those large black eyes. "What you have to appreciate, darling, is the change in me. It was as if I was born and brought up in hell, then suddenly transported to heaven. I found love, a home, a sense of belonging, for the first time ever. Somehow I think I see in your eyes you know what I'm talking about, no?"

"Yes."

"And when you experience that kind of transformation, you're walking on air. You really can't believe your luck."

"But you knew you didn't fit the usual profile of a transsexual? You didn't believe yourself to be a woman trapped in a man's body?"

"That crap? That's what farangs get all hung up on. Here in Krung Thep we already have designer bodies-the boys on the street will cut anything off, add anything on, take any kind of drugs. We are the future, darling. The farangs will catch up. You'll see, they'll soon drop all that psychological caring stuff once they see how much money is in it."

"But you must have thought about it, that at a crucial moment the man with the knife was going to cut everything off?"

A shrug. "Not really. I was doing it for love, darling. You're a child of the street, you must know what it means to have nothing to lose? And it wasn't really a loss. He turned me into a goddess."

I switch the recorder off. In my mind echoes Dr. Surichai's question: What is a transsexual? A medieval eunuch pumped full of estrogen? Did Fatima ask herself that very question now and then, in her down moments? I switch the recorder back on.

"But you didn't make any connection with the jeweler?"

"No, except that that was where the money was coming from at first. Then Bill used the jeweler's contacts to get into the yaa baa trade, and that was where the money was supposed to be coming from after that. But you know, there wasn't much time, suddenly, to worry about anything. I'm taking the drugs, going to see the doctor, Bill's obsessing about my throat, the Adam's apple thing and what my voice is going to be like-even the whole devil thing just faded into the background after a while. I think Bill just put it into the back of his mind what he'd agreed with the jeweler."