Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

He was sketching, smiling at this irrational thought, the night he noticed the beaky woman coming toward him. He’d seen her there before many times; her nose made her unmissable. She was, like him, another loiterer.

She was not tall but her features were so enlarged as to seem like distortions — menace in her nose, menace in her tangled hair, defiance in her chin. Among these tidy people she seemed like a freak for being so disheveled. But her shabby clothes seemed to inspire respect, even awe, in the passersby. She was someone from the lower world; she had nothing to lose. She had singled him out. Or was he imagining her menace? From a distance, shuffling, she had seemed so sad.

Ignoring half a dozen people near him, she scuffed toward him with a clapping of her plastic sandals. She didn’t look like any Thai he had seen. He hoped that she would walk past him. But she stood before him, near enough to assault his nostrils. Her body odor seemed another kind of aggression: a hum of hostility in her smell.

She began to squawk. The people around him, all Thais, giggled in embarrassment hearing her, yet they were fascinated, too, at the sight of the foreigner being challenged. For those waiting for trains, this was a diversion.

One man said to him, “She talking you.”

She was much too close: her dusty toes in the sandals touched his shoes. She wore a tattered wraparound, her lips smeared with lipstick. One cheek was cut cleanly, and though not a serious wound was crusted with dried blackish blood. She whined a little and nodded to get his attention, seeming to peck at him with her fleshy nose.

The bystander said, “She say, ‘I not myself what you see.’”

This obscure statement made him look away. Without meeting the woman’s gaze, but feeling disgusted as he brushed past her, Osier walked to a bench where a woman and a man were sitting with luggage.

Haunting him with her ripe-smelling shadow, the woman followed, legs wide apart, carrying a shoulder bag. Some of the Thai travelers also followed. Osier turned away and pretended to be busy with his notebook, but still he heard the aggrieved voice.

Someone touched him lightly with a finger. It was the Thai man who had said, “She talking you.”

The woman was gabbling in her sinuses. The foreign language had a twang of incomprehensible menace in it, too.

“She want money.”

At first he resisted, but he got another whiff of her and dug into his pocket. He found a ten-baht note and handed it over.

The woman handed it back, gabbling.

“She want three hundred fifty baht.”

Osier smiled at this precise amount, which wasn’t much, but stopped smiling when he looked up at the woman. She was still talking in her scratchy voice. Her reddened eyes scared him.

“What is that language?”

“It Thai, but she kaek, from India. She want talk you.”

“What about?”

His question was translated. Everything the woman said sounded like a threat or a protest.

“She say she special.”

Osier reacted sharply, as though remembering, and shook his head. He said, “What’s she doing here? I think we should get a policeman.”

“No, sir.” The man looked frightened. “That make her angry.”

“Why does she want to speak to me?”

“You farang. You listen.” The man laughed a little. “Thai people no listen.”

Osier looked at the woman and said, “Hello.”

But the woman’s gaze did not soften.

“She come from far away,” the man said.

The woman clutched her ragged wrap with heavy sunburned hands and turned her beaky face on Osier. She was chewing something, and then, as she began to shout, showing red teeth and dark gums, she grew devilish.

“You come from far away too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She wanting money. You have money.”

Osier put his hands in his pockets, to protect his wallet.

“She say, ‘I not normal.’ She say, ‘God make me different. People treating me in a bad way because I not normal.’”

The other panhandlers Osier had seen always repeated the same whiny phrases, pleading for food, saying, “No mother, no father.” They made themselves pitiable. But this rough-looking beggar woman was making a speech, becoming angrier, denouncing Thais, proclaiming her abnormality, and, her voice going harsher, all of it seemed threatening.

“I someone else,” the Thai man said, still translating, but slowly — he could hardly keep up with her. And because Osier did not understand anything she said, he looked closer, scrutinized her, and saw that she was not a woman.

She was a man in a woman’s clothes, middle-aged, lined, muscled and graceless, clownishly painted with sticky makeup, in a torn wraparound and a dirty blouse, with big filthy feet and swollen hands, a wooden comb jammed in his matted hair, and demanding money, beginning to shriek, showing her green gummy tongue.

“If you don’t give, sir, she will remove clothes. She will make nuisance and shame.” The Thai man in his panic was clawing in his own pocket for money. “She will show private parts.”

Seeing Osier counting twenty-baht notes onto his lap, the man (Osier no longer saw him as a woman) became calmer and licked the spittle from his lips. He reached out, his thick hand like a weapon, and snatched the pile of money.

“That’s more than you asked for.”

After the man in the wraparound whined his thanks and touched the notes to his forehead, after the Thai translator hurried away, after the crowd of onlookers dispersed, Osier got up and flapped his hand at the lingering cloud of stink and walked quickly out of the railway station, feeling banished.

He thought, Why did he choose me? But the sudden pantomime had been a shattering experience, much worse than being accosted by an aggressive beggar. He’d felt assaulted, and the smell, which was poisonous, wouldn’t easily wash off. Then the unwelcome memory of the man who had provoked thoughts of mutilation and danger gave way to sorrow. It was not the menace he remembered, but the sadness.

He called Joyce and talked inconsequentially to calm himself. She said, “That’s funny. You called me just a few hours ago and said the same thing.”

He wanted to go home. He would have gone home, except that his work was not done. The hours to fill, from five to eight or nine at night, hours that were made bearable by his sketching at the station waiting room, he could not endure at the hotel. His room was small and poorly lit by a dim stylish lamp; sitting in the lobby, he felt conspicuous. He couldn’t take the accounts back to his room, and he had to leave the office at five when all the others left. He’d been using a taxi, to avoid the questions in the company shuttle bus. But now he took the shuttle bus.

He’d turned Fred and Larry down so many times he didn’t think they’d ask him to go with them anymore. He hoped that one of them would say “Drink?” Not because he wanted to carouse but because he wished their protection. He needed to stay as far away as possible from the railway station and the sight of the man-woman who was probably waiting for him.

The Thai workers were competent and hardworking, the factory so well run by the local managers that he had time on his hands. So did Larry and Fred. Like Osier, they had wives back in the States, but it didn’t stop them going to strip shows and massage parlors.

“Soi Cowboy! Great bars! The girls are hot — they wear boots and Stetsons!”

“Great little place called Angels. They’re barely legal!”

They talked like excited boys. Maybe it was a feature of going overseas, a danger in outsourcing — you were infantilized by the efficiency of the locals. Larry and Fred were like teenagers. Had Bangkok done that to them? Even he felt it, the vitality of being among healthy hardworking people.