“Shortly after this he disappeared for a couple of months. I’d mentioned to a few people what he’d said. Most people felt this was just a drunk mouthing off. He probably had issues with his mother and so he had these little sick fantasies. You know the kind of things that people say when they don’t want to hear a real problem. But I felt that if someone like that got caught it wouldn’t just be bad in and of itself. This kind of thing has a knock on effect. If you’re a minority in a country you have to watch your step a little. A couple of arseholes can turn half a population into farang-haters.
“He came back just before Christmas and he didn’t talk to me again. I was relieved to be honest. Then, after he’d gone back to Singapore someone from the Embassy told me that Rog had cornered him and said all the same things about what he liked to do to women. The more this got around the more people wanted to blacklist him. Didn’t matter if he was one of us and it didn’t matter how good a player he was. And there were rumours around that some prostitute had filed a complaint with the police about a farang who had tortured her and cut her and left her with permanent scars. I think we were all set to confront him and make sure his employers in Singapore knew all about him. It turned out he was quite highly placed there. He’d been involved in gathering intelligence on a supposed uprising and he was regarded as indispensable. But he’d also disappeared.
“This is where the story all gets a bit John Le Carre I’m afraid. There were politics involved. There was always a fear of communists doing this or that in friendly countries and people who were useful; didn’t matter if they were secretly Jack the Ripper as long as it stayed a secret. In Thailand there was a lot of paranoia. They were hunting communists who’d supposedly disappeared into the jungle back in 76. The matter of Blake was to be left alone. Didn’t stop us talking amongst ourselves. Everyone had a theory about him. He was, for a short while, a Lord Lucan figure. People would talk about having seen him here or there. But, to all intents and purposes he was missing.
“1979 I met Betty. She was no spring chicken but she was a sexy girl and she had a certain pull over me. She had tricks, if you know what I mean, and she was a wonderful cook. She also had a house just a little way out of town due to having done fairly well due to careful management, family connections and a willingness to take care of the higher ranking American military chaps. I was doing fairly well… I won’t say exactly how but it wasn’t anything to do with Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Service. I was less and less involved with the other British expats and more and more likely to come to spots like this for my rest and recreation. But Betty, for a while, she had me and she slowed me down. I felt that she was a very sweet woman who had a good head on her shoulders. I thought she would be exactly the same kind of woman I might have ended up with if I’d gone back to blighty but just a little more interesting in the kitchen and bedroom departments.
“One night, and I remember there’d been a bit of a storm outside, we were in her home. It was a beautiful place. Hardwood furniture, Western style four poster. Not the kind of place you’d expect a Thai to have. Anyway… She started talking to me about death. I think we’d been drinking too much and had had a bit of a passionate evening due to the thundercracking down around us. Something about the smells and the sounds of the heavy rain and the intermittent flashes. One of the nights of my life in fact… It seemed odd that with her beside me she suddenly started talking about things in a way that you don’t normally hear a Thai talking about with a farang. She asked me if I’d ever killed anyone. I said that I didn’t really like thinking about it too much but there had been an occasion, when I was young, in Malaya. The thing had haunted me for a long time but it really had been me or him. She laughed a very strange kind of laugh and said ‘you should never regret killing a man as long as you look him in the eyes.” For some reason, despite having made love and eaten nice food and being pretty much gone on her, I suddenly got a little angry and told her that she didn’t know what she was talking about. She just looked at me and smiled. It was a nasty little smile. Not one I’d seen on her before and I’d been seeing her for a little bit by this point.
“’Yes… I do know.’ She said. You know I very much like you but my family and my country I love. I love my family especially. I have two sisters and two brothers. One of my sisters, Jaeb, you know. My other sister, Pornpan, you never see because she never goes anywhere and she will never marry and we will always have to support her. You know why? Because one time she met a farang. And this farang was like a devil to her. Pornpan, she never hurt any man in her life. She love animals. She wouldn’t even kill a mosquito. But she couldn’t tell a man who was a devil. And, when Jaeb and Tom were there, she disappeared with a farang, an Englishman, like you, who she thought might be a gentleman. The English are supposed to be gentlemen, na ka?’
“I nodded with a nasty feeling in my gut and she continued, ‘This man, you might know him, he liked to hurt women. He took Pornpan to a room in a dirty little Chinese hotel. He tied her to the bed, he gagged her, he cut her with his pen knife and he watched her bleed, laughing at her. He kept on cutting her until she had written the word “ji nu” in Chinese characters over her breasts. You know what this means? It means prostitute. Whore. He took his time with her. Maybe two hours. He burned her skin on her neck, on her inner thigh and dug the point of his blade into her nipples. He watched her as she tried to struggle and told her that she was now broken by him. Then he raped her and washed the blood off himself but left her tied to the bed.’
“’Jaeb and Tom had seen the man and they looked for him but could not find him or find anything about him. Then one day almost a year later Jaeb saw him in the Thermae. So stupid. After he did that to someone he was looking for a woman in the Thermae. She called me and Tom and Gian, my older brother, and Gian brought his van, we waited for him in the car park, and grabbed him paying everyone off and telling them they saw nothing, tied him up in the van and went to get supplies before driving him about three miles out of town to a place Gian knew well. We gagged him and told him what we were going to do to him during the drive, which was a long drive, he pissed himself.
“’Once there Gian and Tom got out of the van and dug a hole in the ground. I looked into his eyes. His stupid eyes… He was trying to look like he was not afraid. He didn’t know who we were. He didn’t know why we had him. He probably thought we were after money. He struggled a bit while Gian and Tom put him in the ground. They buried him standing up and covered his body so that his head was sticking out the ground like a cabbage. Then Jaeb took the gag off. He promised us money. Then he said he would tell us everything. He would tell us everything he knew about the British in Asia. If we let him go he would do anything we told him to do. Gian took out his dick and pissed in his face. The man was spitting and spluttering. Then Tom showed him a picture of Pornpan. “You recognise her face? You know her face?” Then Tom took out his knife and cut the man across his cheek. And the man stopped screaming. I think he knew we were going to kill him so he just gave up. It was disappointing. I had been with Pornpan for her nightmares. I had held her hand while she screamed. I wanted him to scream like her. I asked Tom for his knife and I held it over his eye showing him the picture. I told him to beg for mercy. He said “What’s the point?” So I dug the knife into his eye and kept stabbing him there. It made him scream but not enough. Not enough for me. Then Gian got out the petrol can and said “Let’s get this over with.” Without asking he just poured the petrol over his head. He screamed some more but not enough. Not enough for me. I started hacking at his face with the knife. I wanted him to feel horror. I wanted him to feel pain. Gian said that we had to be finished before it got light but he let me light him up. The smell of his burning… Very bad… Jaeb didn’t do anything. She just took the pictures. You want to see?’
“I said I didn’t but I think she didn’t feel I’d quite believed the story. So she showed me the pictures. Washed out looking polaroids. They’d been taken with a flash. It was Rog Blake’s head sticking out of the ground. She showed me four. In one he was looking down. In another he was screaming with a gash across his face. The other two were of his head burning. I felt silently grateful not to see anything with an eye wound. It was bad enough as it was. I didn’t ask her any more. I didn’t want to know any more. She made love to me again… But it wasn’t making love. It was more a kind of angry passionate f**king… I stopped seeing her and she never asked me why. Sometimes I think she only started seeing me in the first place because she wanted to tell some farang that might have known him the story.”
One of the waiters appeared and Binky ordered a bottle of Sang Thip with coke and ice. “Not much of a fan of coke and ice with any kind of alcohol but when in Rome… Don’t tell anyone this story. Not until I’m dead anyway. Then you can tell everyone.”
The place emptied to the few stragglers, mostly farang having all night debates on matters of great importance; God and politics.
Binky became someone I got to know quite well over the years… As did Betty. They’re both dead now so I guess it’s okay.
TurkFist
(C) Copyright March 21013.
“He came back just before Christmas and he didn’t talk to me again. I was relieved to be honest. Then, after he’d gone back to Singapore someone from the Embassy told me that Rog had cornered him and said all the same things about what he liked to do to women. The more this got around the more people wanted to blacklist him. Didn’t matter if he was one of us and it didn’t matter how good a player he was. And there were rumours around that some prostitute had filed a complaint with the police about a farang who had tortured her and cut her and left her with permanent scars. I think we were all set to confront him and make sure his employers in Singapore knew all about him. It turned out he was quite highly placed there. He’d been involved in gathering intelligence on a supposed uprising and he was regarded as indispensable. But he’d also disappeared.
“This is where the story all gets a bit John Le Carre I’m afraid. There were politics involved. There was always a fear of communists doing this or that in friendly countries and people who were useful; didn’t matter if they were secretly Jack the Ripper as long as it stayed a secret. In Thailand there was a lot of paranoia. They were hunting communists who’d supposedly disappeared into the jungle back in 76. The matter of Blake was to be left alone. Didn’t stop us talking amongst ourselves. Everyone had a theory about him. He was, for a short while, a Lord Lucan figure. People would talk about having seen him here or there. But, to all intents and purposes he was missing.
“1979 I met Betty. She was no spring chicken but she was a sexy girl and she had a certain pull over me. She had tricks, if you know what I mean, and she was a wonderful cook. She also had a house just a little way out of town due to having done fairly well due to careful management, family connections and a willingness to take care of the higher ranking American military chaps. I was doing fairly well… I won’t say exactly how but it wasn’t anything to do with Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Service. I was less and less involved with the other British expats and more and more likely to come to spots like this for my rest and recreation. But Betty, for a while, she had me and she slowed me down. I felt that she was a very sweet woman who had a good head on her shoulders. I thought she would be exactly the same kind of woman I might have ended up with if I’d gone back to blighty but just a little more interesting in the kitchen and bedroom departments.
“One night, and I remember there’d been a bit of a storm outside, we were in her home. It was a beautiful place. Hardwood furniture, Western style four poster. Not the kind of place you’d expect a Thai to have. Anyway… She started talking to me about death. I think we’d been drinking too much and had had a bit of a passionate evening due to the thundercracking down around us. Something about the smells and the sounds of the heavy rain and the intermittent flashes. One of the nights of my life in fact… It seemed odd that with her beside me she suddenly started talking about things in a way that you don’t normally hear a Thai talking about with a farang. She asked me if I’d ever killed anyone. I said that I didn’t really like thinking about it too much but there had been an occasion, when I was young, in Malaya. The thing had haunted me for a long time but it really had been me or him. She laughed a very strange kind of laugh and said ‘you should never regret killing a man as long as you look him in the eyes.” For some reason, despite having made love and eaten nice food and being pretty much gone on her, I suddenly got a little angry and told her that she didn’t know what she was talking about. She just looked at me and smiled. It was a nasty little smile. Not one I’d seen on her before and I’d been seeing her for a little bit by this point.
“’Yes… I do know.’ She said. You know I very much like you but my family and my country I love. I love my family especially. I have two sisters and two brothers. One of my sisters, Jaeb, you know. My other sister, Pornpan, you never see because she never goes anywhere and she will never marry and we will always have to support her. You know why? Because one time she met a farang. And this farang was like a devil to her. Pornpan, she never hurt any man in her life. She love animals. She wouldn’t even kill a mosquito. But she couldn’t tell a man who was a devil. And, when Jaeb and Tom were there, she disappeared with a farang, an Englishman, like you, who she thought might be a gentleman. The English are supposed to be gentlemen, na ka?’
“I nodded with a nasty feeling in my gut and she continued, ‘This man, you might know him, he liked to hurt women. He took Pornpan to a room in a dirty little Chinese hotel. He tied her to the bed, he gagged her, he cut her with his pen knife and he watched her bleed, laughing at her. He kept on cutting her until she had written the word “ji nu” in Chinese characters over her breasts. You know what this means? It means prostitute. Whore. He took his time with her. Maybe two hours. He burned her skin on her neck, on her inner thigh and dug the point of his blade into her nipples. He watched her as she tried to struggle and told her that she was now broken by him. Then he raped her and washed the blood off himself but left her tied to the bed.’
“’Jaeb and Tom had seen the man and they looked for him but could not find him or find anything about him. Then one day almost a year later Jaeb saw him in the Thermae. So stupid. After he did that to someone he was looking for a woman in the Thermae. She called me and Tom and Gian, my older brother, and Gian brought his van, we waited for him in the car park, and grabbed him paying everyone off and telling them they saw nothing, tied him up in the van and went to get supplies before driving him about three miles out of town to a place Gian knew well. We gagged him and told him what we were going to do to him during the drive, which was a long drive, he pissed himself.
“’Once there Gian and Tom got out of the van and dug a hole in the ground. I looked into his eyes. His stupid eyes… He was trying to look like he was not afraid. He didn’t know who we were. He didn’t know why we had him. He probably thought we were after money. He struggled a bit while Gian and Tom put him in the ground. They buried him standing up and covered his body so that his head was sticking out the ground like a cabbage. Then Jaeb took the gag off. He promised us money. Then he said he would tell us everything. He would tell us everything he knew about the British in Asia. If we let him go he would do anything we told him to do. Gian took out his dick and pissed in his face. The man was spitting and spluttering. Then Tom showed him a picture of Pornpan. “You recognise her face? You know her face?” Then Tom took out his knife and cut the man across his cheek. And the man stopped screaming. I think he knew we were going to kill him so he just gave up. It was disappointing. I had been with Pornpan for her nightmares. I had held her hand while she screamed. I wanted him to scream like her. I asked Tom for his knife and I held it over his eye showing him the picture. I told him to beg for mercy. He said “What’s the point?” So I dug the knife into his eye and kept stabbing him there. It made him scream but not enough. Not enough for me. Then Gian got out the petrol can and said “Let’s get this over with.” Without asking he just poured the petrol over his head. He screamed some more but not enough. Not enough for me. I started hacking at his face with the knife. I wanted him to feel horror. I wanted him to feel pain. Gian said that we had to be finished before it got light but he let me light him up. The smell of his burning… Very bad… Jaeb didn’t do anything. She just took the pictures. You want to see?’
“I said I didn’t but I think she didn’t feel I’d quite believed the story. So she showed me the pictures. Washed out looking polaroids. They’d been taken with a flash. It was Rog Blake’s head sticking out of the ground. She showed me four. In one he was looking down. In another he was screaming with a gash across his face. The other two were of his head burning. I felt silently grateful not to see anything with an eye wound. It was bad enough as it was. I didn’t ask her any more. I didn’t want to know any more. She made love to me again… But it wasn’t making love. It was more a kind of angry passionate f**king… I stopped seeing her and she never asked me why. Sometimes I think she only started seeing me in the first place because she wanted to tell some farang that might have known him the story.”
One of the waiters appeared and Binky ordered a bottle of Sang Thip with coke and ice. “Not much of a fan of coke and ice with any kind of alcohol but when in Rome… Don’t tell anyone this story. Not until I’m dead anyway. Then you can tell everyone.”
The place emptied to the few stragglers, mostly farang having all night debates on matters of great importance; God and politics.
Binky became someone I got to know quite well over the years… As did Betty. They’re both dead now so I guess it’s okay.
TurkFist
(C) Copyright March 21013.