Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

One thin-necked unsmiling girl, with pale skin and a fragile body, narrow shoulders and no breasts, tried shyly, turning sideways, to catch my eye. She was attempting to smile, but her eyes gave her away, for as she posed as a coquette, she seemed afraid that I might choose her. She was a soft pale thing with muscles like custard. Was I imagining that she was twisting a little stuffed toy in her hands?

"Maybe later."

"I'll be here," King said.

I got one last glimpse of the girl before he switched the light off. Her child's face stayed with me the rest of the night and saddened me.

We met Gerrie Lim back at the noodle shop. We left Geylang and went by taxi to Katong and the Paramount Shopping Center, where energetic Filipinas howled when they saw us. This horde of clawing, screeching girls fell upon us and tried to drag us into one of the bars that lined the long hallway. We then went back to Orchard Road, where Gerrie brought me to an escort agency run by a lisping and unamiable Indian, who opened a fat album of photographs.

"Russian ... Ukraine ... Romania," he said. They were hard-faced women, alluringly posed in expensive dresses. It could have been a clothing catalogue. "This one works during day in estate agency ... This one teacher ... This one in shop. Booking fee three hundred. You work out the negotiation for whatever else."

He was one of many, Gerrie said after we left. Twenty-four pages of the Singapore telephone directory were filled with escort services. We took a short walk up Orchard Road to a busy intersection at the corner of Scotts Road. In an earlier time I used to go to the nearby movie house. I saw Midnight Cowboy here.

"What's this?" I asked, because we were right on Orchard Road, in the middle of one of the largest shopping districts. I had passed the building twenty times without knowing what was upstairs.

"Orchard Towers," Gerrie said. "Four floors of whores."

We went to the top floor and worked our way down, from bar to bar, seeing the same ethnic variety we'd seen in Geylang—Thai, Burmese, Mongolian, Lao, and all the others. The bars had themes. One was hard rock, another tropical décor. Gerrie's favorite was country and western; most of the girls were from Vietnam.

I bought some of the girls drinks. They smiled. "Please," they said. "Take me."

I said goodnight to Gerrie and Jason. Alone, I walked back to my hotel, which was surprisingly near. The face of the young girl who had been woken on her mattress by the overbright light at Ah King's stayed with me. Sad, fearful, frail, her small breakable body and bright eyes. What haunted me about her was that she was obviously a recent arrival, not yet debauched, with a luminous innocence, the glow you see on the face of a child.

The next day I was in a taxi, going to a book sale, hoping to stock up for the next leg of my trip. I saw the driver's name on the identity disk on the dashboard: Wally Thumboo.

"Wally, can I ask you a question?"

"Can," he said with Singaporean economy.

I mentioned where I had been prowling—Geylang, Katong, Orchard Towers, even Serangoon Road, where taxi drivers themselves paid for sex—Indian girls for a few dollars, the lowest of the Singapore stews.

"No Singapore girls!" he said to my reflection in his rear-view mirror. That was his boast, and it was perhaps the rationalization for all of it.

"Why not?" I asked.

"We no do, lah!"

And he began lecturing me on the vices of foreigners. It was his master's voice, like listening to Lee Kwan Yew denouncing the morals of Americans while at the same time justifying the red-light district. The place of piggy lorongs was regulated, it wasn't dangerous, and best of all it was sanctioned because it didn't corrupt Singapore women. These were all foreigners. Only foreign women did those things. Singaporeans were well educated and much too pure for that.

"It is shameful for our girls to do such things." And he became sententious and preachy, boasting of Singapore virtue.

THE SLOW TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

BACK IN BANGKOK, buying a train ticket to the border, I ran into a farang

who advised me to take the bus instead. I could even buy a bus ticket here at the main railway station. He smiled when I said that I had wanted to take the train to Cambodia long ago, but that it hadn't been possible.

"When was that?"

"Thirty-three years ago."

"Bus is quicker."

"I'm trying to be consistent."

The Cambodian border wasn't far, only half a day's journey. The beauty of it, and its singularity, was that the train tracks ran due east, an almost straight line to another twinkling point of the Eastern Star.

The train left at six in the morning and would be at the border town of Aranyaprathet in the early afternoon—plenty of time to struggle across the border and onward to Siem Reap. That was the other thing I'd wanted to do all those years ago, visit the Angkor ruins.