Tiger Lily Of Bangkok

2 SUNDAY

2 SUNDAYLily was quite the creature of habit. She found it better to get into routines as far as her college life, her boyfriends and her weekends were concerned. She got up on Saturdays and Sundays at about nine o’clock and then studied until three or four, before doing a bit of shopping and eating. This day was no different. Lily got up, took some rice out of the steamer and put that in water with a little curry kept for the purpose from the night before and set it on a low heat to reduce it to the consistency of porridge, while she got under the shower and then plastered herself in talcum powder again. The rice and Lily were both ready at the same time; then she took her school books to the dining table and started work.

Lily liked to study anatomy, which was a major part of her speciality. Others preferred medicine or specific sectors of medicine like palliative care, paediatrics, gynaecology or dentistry, but the internal organs and their functions particularly fascinated her and she was getting good grades in her class. Her teachers were predicting that she would do very well and that gave her a great deal of satisfaction. Lily had always liked to be good at things and please people in the process.

She often wondered whether that was why her ‘uncle’ had picked on her for the special treatment. Had he spotted a vulnerability in her and merely taken advantage of her personality? She would never know now since he had banished himself to one of the Thai islands, so rumour had it, but no-one knew which one and he had never been seen since.

When she could take no more in, she doodled as she frequently did. Not pictures, but names. She liked to make up names for herself. She liked to get a variation of her real name in the pretend name, but that was getting harder every day. ‘Tiger Lily’, ‘Thai Girl Lily’ and ‘Bangkok Lil’ were her favourites, but she had considered ‘Kid Gloves’, ‘Pattaya Princess’, ‘Teachers’ Pet’ and ‘Wet Behind The Ears’ too, she quite liked suggestive names that most people would not understand. They were like wearing personalised knickers, sexy, but most people would never get the joke, because it was private. Lily had quite a collection of personalised knickers that she had ordered online too. One had ‘Kiss Me Quick’, another ‘Daddy’s Hobby’ and another ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here!’ embroidered on the front.

They made her feel sexy, but she rarely wore them for her boyfriends. She never wore anything for a boyfriend that he had not bought for her. She got more clothes that way and never made the mistake of making someone wonder where she had got the money to buy something from. All of her clothes were labelled with the name of who had bought them, even though her memory was good enough never to forget.

No need to take chances with one’s livelihood, she reasoned practically, and Lily was always very practical.

Having given up on the nicknames, but still holding the pen poised over her notepad, she phoned the first of the other three boyfriends and then the second, promising each of them a meeting during the following week. The third, she wanted to phone from a bar to make him jealous, so he would just have to wait.

Lily stripped off, took another shower, covered herself in talc, put on a little make-up and dressed in a white medical coat. She took all the large notes out of her purse, put one in her bra and hid the others in the flat leaving just a few twenties in her purse. She wore skimpy black underwear beneath her thin white coat, put on a thin, full-length coat, but left it open and then descended into the street. The first man that passed her was better than any mirror, for his reaction assured her that she was very noticeable.

So, satisfied, she did her coat up and boarded a Tuk-Tuk taxi to ride a few kilometres down the road to one of her favourite clothes shops. It specialised in children’s clothing, but then that was Lily’s size. She loved shopping for clothes – it always made her feel so much better. She bought a couple of outfits, some underwear and a red beret, all of which she paid for by a credit card which was in her family’s original Chinese name and her own Chinese first name. Lily in Chinese was Baihe.

Then she took a Tuk-Tuk part of the way back home, put her coat in the bag with her purchases and walked into a bar frequented by visitors to Bangkok. Lily walked straight up to the bar, stood next to a group of men and ordered some food and a beer, which she took to a nearby table. She could see that those men had noticed her too and she smiled coyly and politely at them from time to time. When she had finished, Lily returned to the bar, took out her purse and asked for the bill.

She did not have enough to pay of course, but she was only twenty short and the nearest man offered to pay the hundred Baht and buy her another beer. As the men became drunker, they touched her arm more often and she touched them back in a similar fashion. It was no surprise to her, when she said that she had to go, that that man asked to see her again. Lily said she was working strange hours all week, but that she could possibly meet him the following Saturday, if he liked.

“Oh, what is your name? I am Ben and my friends are… oh who cares what their names are?” He was smiling from ear to ear.

“You can call me Lotus Blossom for now, Ben. Thank you for helping me out, I don’t know what I would have done without you. You are my knight in shining armour.” Lily squeezed him lightly on the forearm.

It was obvious that his friends were jealous, but that was how she wanted it to be. She wanted him to feel special.

It was like dangling a baited line in a barrel of starving fish, she thought and went back to the hotel with the man’s number.

She had not given him hers. That was how it was with her ‘real’ boyfriends too – none of them had her number. It had been difficult to persuade one or two of them, especially Aeng, that this had to be so, but it was not negotiable. She usually said that she disliked phone calls in the way that people used to dislike telegrammes or she would say that she had a phobia for telephones, but had to carry one in case her sick mother needed her in an emergency.

None of them liked it, but that was tough. It was either no phone or no Lily and she was too good to pass up for something silly like that. Others wanted her email address and to them she said that she did not have one, because she did not have a computer. Only one, Aeng, knew that she had a laptop and could use it, because he had bought it for her when she had said that she needed one for university. He sometimes picked her up from ‘school’ as he called it as well and he could see it in her bag.

She had forgotten to phone boyfriend number four, so she went into another bar about halfway back to the first one and tried the same trick, and while she was at her table, she phoned her last boyfriend.

“Hi, Deo, how are you? Everything all right with you?”

“Yes, I’m fine. How are you doing? Are you still in the village?”

“Yes, a few of us have gone out for a drink locally.” Lily ‘accidentally-on-purpose nudged her bag, knocking it to the floor. A man standing nearby rushed to pick it up.

“Oh, thank you, kind Sir,” she said.

“Who’s that you’re taking to now, Boo?”

“Oh, I don’t know him. He’s just trying to talk to me, nothing else. Don’t worry. Not jealous are you?”

“No, of course not, but I don’t like you letting strange men chat you up.”

“But it’s all right for you to chat up strange women, huh?”

“That was nothing and you were there to see what was going on, but I’m not there, am I? Anything could happen…”

Lily flapped the collars of her uniform as if she were warm and she saw the man craning his neck to look down her overalls.

“OK, Deo, I have to go now. I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye. I’ll go right home now, I promise. Bye.”

The man came over and said, “Hi, I couldn’t help overhearing, sorry, but you shouldn’t let jealous boyfriends upset a beautiful young girl like you. Let me get you a drink.”

“OK,” she whispered. “I didn’t do anything wrong and he takes all my wages every month. I don’t know what to do about him…” She dabbed at an imaginary tear welling up in her eye.

“May I sit with you, please?” he asked.

“If you like, I could do with the company. I’ve just finished my shift and I don’t want to go home just yet. He’ll want to know where I’ve been, who I’ve been talking to and I’ll have to get his dinner… I wouldn’t mind so much but the lazy so-and-so just lays on the couch watching TV all day and all night. He doesn’t work! Oh, no! He got ‘laid off’ as soon as I got this job. And he drinks too much Thai whisky, lao khao too, the worst kind… Sorry, I’m boring you with my problems. It’s just hard sometimes…” and another tear drop was dabbed at.

“Don’t worry, my dear, you tell me anything you like. Thanks for letting me join you. My name is Nat, what is yours, please?”

“Hello, Nat, nice to meet you. You may call me Lotus Leaf.”

“What a pretty name, Lotus Leaf, a very unusual and a very pretty name for a remarkably beautiful woman, if you will permit me to say so.”

“Thank you, Nat. It is nice of you to say so. My boyfriend never says anything like that to me anymore. I am not used to hearing compliments. It is so nice to be treated like a woman again.”

She smiled at him with real tears in her eyes this time, but a smile on her lips.

“Your boyfriend doesn’t know when he’s well off.”

When she said that she had to go, the man paid for her beers and asked for her phone number.

“If you get any trouble from your thieving boyfriend, you just ring me on this number. Can I have your number too, Lotus Leaf? Maybe we could have a chat again, the next time you are feeling down?”

She took his number, but gave him a false one, before going back to the flat.

Lily took all her clothes off again, showered, covered herself in talc and put on her towel. She had had a very enjoyable couple of hours with those men and she was sure that they felt the same, so she filed their names in her Rolodex, then took her diary out of the desk and went to sit in front of the TV to fill it in. She didn’t fill it in every day, but she liked to when the whim took her.

She wrote about the phone calls to her boyfriends and that two of them were jealous and she wrote about the two men that she had met and how they had bought her a few drinks in her time of need. She spent some considerable time describing Ben and Nat and what sort of people she thought they would turn out to be if she were ever to meet them again. She also wrote that she did not think she ever would meet them again though, because she had given them false phone numbers.

When Lily had finished writing her diary, she put it away neatly, and cleaned up the flat a little, although it was already immaculate by most people’s standards. She took the new clothes that she had bought that day out of their bags and hung them up so that the creases would fall out of them and went to bed, where she liked to read magazines on modern make-up techniques, until she fell asleep.

She read about how to make herself look younger and how to make herself look older. She circled the names of the products and wrote the page references of the most useful articles on the cover along with a brief description of the articles. Once a week, she would scan these articles to her hard disk and then throw out the original magazine lest it clutter her lovely apartment.

She already had quite a collection of beauty and make-up tips and she revisited them to reread their contents often. As soon as an article became obsolete, she would archive it, so that she always had the latest information to hand. Lily was very proud of her appearance, which was another reason why she liked to get to sleep early.

One of her articles on skin care had recommended that a woman should drink plenty of water – at least eight glasses a day and get eight hours of sleep a night and Lily would have to be up at seven to get to her university on the other side of town by nine o’clock and the fumes from rush-hour traffic in Bangkok played havoc with a woman’s skin.

When she felt the first signs of tiredness coming on, she put her magazine on the bedside table and switched out the light. Lily never had a problem getting to sleep. She could be asleep at the drop of a hat any time of the day or night she wanted. She slept stone-still, hardly moving a muscle all night and never dreamed, although that had not always been the case.

She was glad that she didn’t dream any more though.