Short Fuses (Four short stories) Read online

CAT’S EYES

  It was her eyes that I noticed first, even though I was sitting about thirty feet away from where she was dancing. They were cat-like and as black as coal and she’d emphasised them with mascara and eyeliner, but even without the make-up they would have stopped me in my tracks.

  I was in Rainbow Two, on the ground floor of Nana Plaza. There are four Rainbow bars and they’re geared up for Japanese customers rather than Westerners which means that most of the girls play on being cute and young with vacant stares and their hair in curls or pigtails.

  She was different, not Japanese-style at all. And she had her hair up, held in place with a clip, which is unusual for a go-go dancer. She wasn’t young either; I doubted that she would see thirty again. She had a real woman’s figure, nice full breasts and hips that curved. And those eyes. My God, those eyes.

  She was dancing around a chrome pole but when she locked eyes with me she stopped dancing and smiled. It was a full-on smile, loaded with self-confidence as if she knew exactly what effect her smile had on a man.

  When the dancing shift changed she came and sat down next to me. Her name was Cat and she was from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia. She asked me my name and I told her. Roger. From London. Actually I’m Simon from Maidstone, but I know enough about the Bangkok bar scene to know that it’s best not to reveal your real name up front. I bought her a drink and we chatted for a while, her fingernails gently scratching my thigh as if they had a mind of their own. Her English was good and she had a great sense of humour which usually means a succession of Western boyfriends. When it was time for her to dance again, she stood up to go.

  I asked her how much she charged for short-time. She flashed me her smile and her eyes locked on mine. “Everything you have in your wallet,” she said.

  I laughed and shook my head and paid her bar fine. Ten minutes later we were in the short-time hotel on the second floor of the plaza. Her lovemaking was intense and passionate and for most of the time she was looking deep into my eyes as if she could see into my soul. It’s not normally like that, usually the girls want the sex to be as impersonal as possible, something to be gotten out of the way so that they could collect their money and get back to the bar.

  Cat seemed in no rush to go and after the sex was over she lay down next to me and stared up at the ceiling. I asked her why she was working in the bar. With her eyes and her body and her personality, I doubted that she’d have any problem finding a boyfriend or a sponsor.

  “You want to know my story?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you,” she said. She sighed and carried on staring up at the ceiling. “The first time I met my husband, I was twelve and he was twenty-two.”

  “What? Twelve?”

  She continued to talk as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “He came to our village to stay with his aunt and when I looked at him I knew that he was the love of my life. But what could I do? I was twelve. Every night I prayed to Buddha and asked him why he had done this to me, why had he shown me the man I loved but made it impossible for me to be with him? Eventually the man moved away and I was heartbroken. It wasn’t fair. When I was a teenager lots of boys wanted to be with me, but I turned them all down. I knew what it meant to be in love and I didn’t want to settle for anything less. When I was twenty I fought with my mother because she said it was time for me to marry but I said I wouldn’t marry unless I loved the man, and I had already met the man I loved. She said I was crazy.”

  She sighed again. “When I was twenty-one I went on holiday with my friends to Cha-Am. We stayed in a hotel by the beach. On the day we were due to go back to the village I met him in the street. He was on holiday with his friends. We literally bumped into each other. He looked into my eyes and I knew at that moment that he felt the same. He hadn’t married, he hadn’t even had a regular girlfriend. He told me later that he felt as if he was waiting for somebody - he just hadn’t realised that it was me he was waiting for.”

  She turned to look at me and smiled. Her killer smile. And again I was lost in her eyes. “I never left his side from that day on and three months later we were married. He worked for Thai Airways at the airport and we had a really nice house that his parents bought for us. They were quite rich and he was their only son. They were so pleased when I got pregnant and we had a lovely baby boy. Our son was so handsome, just like his father. I was so, so happy. Every night I prayed to Buddha and thanked him for giving me my perfect family.”

  She stopped talking and rolled onto her back again. I watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed.

  “What happened?” I asked quietly.

  “They died,” she said. “Three years ago. It was a car accident. He was driving home with my son and a truck smashed into the car. Killed them just like that. The truck driver had been taking drugs, the police said. He ran away but they caught him. He’s still in prison. But I lost my husband and my son.”

  She sighed and turned to look at me. There were tears in her eyes. “That’s why I work in the bar. I cannot be alone at night. I cannot sleep. In the bar I can be busy and I don’t have time to think. And when I go with customers I can forget who I used to be. I don’t want to think about who I used to be. Because when I think, I feel sad and I want to die so that I can be with my husband and my son.” She smiled but the tears were still running down her cheeks. She shrugged. “And that’s my story.”

  She stayed on the bed as I got up and dressed. I took out my wallet and emptied it. I gave her everything I had. That night I walked home. And I never went back to Rainbow Two, because I knew that if I looked into her eyes again I’d be lost forever.

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  There are three stories available in the Asian Heat series – Banging Bill’s Wife, The Alphabet Game, and The Pregnant Wife. There are all much longer than Cat’s Eyes, though I do plan to write more short short stories !

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  My novel The Bombmaker was filmed for Sky One and starred Dervla Kirwan as the title character, whose daughter is kidnapped. The kidnappers don’t want money, they want her to return to her former life and build a massive fertiliser bomb in the centre of London. Here are the first few chapters -