I never used to believe in ghosts, same as I don’t believe in Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, or UFOs. I’m a mechanic, I work with my hands, and I always figure that if I can’t hold it or hit it with a hammer then it isn’t real. That was before I met Nid. Don’t get me wrong, Nid isn’t a ghost, she’s as real as you can get, a tall lithe twenty-two year old from the north-east of Thailand and one of the fittest girls you’ve ever seen dancing around a chrome pole.
Nid was dancing in Tilac Bar in Soi Cowboy when I first saw her. She was wearing a tartan bikini top and a little white skirt and judging by the reflection on the shiny dance floor, no underwear. She had high cheekbones and a supermodel’s legs and more moves than a Russian chess grandmaster. I was with my mate Jules, he’s a London cabbie for nine months a year and a coked-up sex tourist for the rest of the time. I’d fallen in with him the previous year and this trip we’d flown over together. We had both been in Bangkok for two weeks and I had one more week to go. Jules was planning on staying for two more months and was going to head down to Pattaya. We were sitting by the toilets with Singha beers in our hands and love in our hearts. Nid knew that we were watching her and she played up to us, dipping and twisting and flashing her dark eyes. First at me, then Jules, then back to me. I figured she was covering all her bases as she wasn’t sure which of us would be paying her barfine. That’s how it works in the go-go bars, you buy the girls drinks and they get a commission and if you want them to leave with you there is a barfine to be paid, usually just over a tenner. You have to pay the girl on top of that, of course. Nothing comes free, right?
When her dancing shift was done we waved her over and she sat down between us. She looked just as hot close up, perfect skin, a taut body, and whiter than white teeth. She smelled good, too. Damned good. It still wasn’t obvious to her which of us was going to take her out, she gave us both the benefit of her sexy smile and we both had her fingers brushing our thighs.
I could see that Jules was up for it but I really wanted to be the one that left with her, so the next time she was up dancing I switched our rounds to tequila shots and got half a dozen down him before she came back. He’s not the world’s best drinker so he was hardly able to stand and I thrust a thousand baht note into her hand and told her that I wanted to pay her barfine. Jules was too drunk to argue and I left him barely conscious, head back against the wall, as I left the bar hand in hand with the lovely Nid.
She took me across to the Penny Black, a short-time hotel where you get an hour and a half and reasonably clean sheets for about a fiver, but they were full and there were two Japanese customers with girls queuing up. Nid squeezed my hand and flashed me a smile. ‘We go your hotel?’
I pulled a face because I was sharing a room with Jules to save money and we’d both agreed not to bring girls back.
‘You want to come to my loom?’ she said.
Okay, she said ‘loom’ but I knew what she meant and I was surprised. Most bargirls won’t take their customers back to their rooms because nine out of ten of them live with their Thai boyfriends or husbands.
‘Are you sure?’ I said, which was pretty much the most blatant act of looking a gift horse in the mouth that I’ve ever committed.
‘No problem,’ she said, and pulled me to a taxi. We climbed in the back and she spoke to the driver in Thai and off we went, with the lovely Nid spending most of the time rubbing my thigh to make sure that I didn’t lose interest.
I’m not sure where we went,. We headed down Sukhumvit and then made a right, that much I know, but as she kept sticking her lips onto mine and playing hockey with my tonsils, I didn’t spend too much time looking out of the window.
She lived in quite a modern building with a keycard entry system and potted plants either side of the door. The lift was clean and according to the notice in a frame on one wall, it had been serviced only three months ago. Nid lived on the ninth floor. There was no Thai boyfriend in residence, but half a dozen large cuddly toys lined up along a shelf over the bed, all staring at me accusingly as if I wasn’t wanted.
There was a wardrobe and a dressing table and a desk with a flatscreen television and a new MacBook computer on it. Around the mirror above the dressing table were photographs of Nid on various beaches and at Thai beauty spots, always alone, and always making a cute face with her finger and thumb under the chin. She was alone in the photographs but I was pretty sure that it had been a customer, or more likely a string of customers, who had taken the pictures. I got the feeling that Nid had a lot of admirers, and somebody must have paid for the television and computer.
‘You want shower?’ she asked and gave me a pink towel with Hello Kitty on it. The bathroom was tiny, just a toilet and a shower head and a washbasin. I gave myself a quick shower and when I came out of the bathroom she was wearing nothing but a skimpy towel. I made a grab for her but she slipped past me. ‘I shower first,’ she said.
I lay back on bed and looked up at the ceiling. It was my fifth trip to the Land of Smiles and my first visit to a hooker’s bedroom, though I couldn’t help but wonder how many other customers had been invited across the threshold. There was a small wooden shrine to the right of the bathroom door, painted red and gold with a small brass jar containing incense sticks. There was a small pile of wrapped sweets next to the jar, and a couple of tangerines. A blue plastic dog and a small doll were standing either side of the shrine.
There was remote control on the bedside table so I grabbed it and flicked through the TV channels while I waited for Nid to finish showering. She actually had decent cable, all the Thai channels obviously but she also had HBO, Cinemax, Fox, BBC and CNN, more channels than I had back in the hotel.
The bathroom door opened and Nid reappeared, wrapped in a fluffy yellow towel. ‘You okay?’ she asked, slipping off the towel and tossing it on a chair.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Big okay.’
The next couple of hours passed in a blur, partly because the tequila shots and partly because it was like being in my own private porn movie. Nid was awesome, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do and she showed me a few tricks that were totally new to me. She moaned and she groaned like I was the best lay in the whole wide world, and while at the back of my mind I knew that she was a hooker and I was paying for it, it still felt as if she was genuinely enjoying herself. I don’t remember which of us passed out first but I’m pretty sure it was me.
I woke to find Nid already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching me. She smiled and brushed my hair away from my eyes. ‘You want McDonalds?’ she asked.
‘What?’ I asked sleepily. I squinted at my watch. It was just after nine.
‘Breakfast,’ she said. ‘I get McDonalds.’
Only in Thailand, right? You pick up a go-go dancer, she takes you home and gives you the best sex of your life, and then she goes and gets you breakfast. While Nid went of to get my McMuffin and coffee, I luxuriated in a warm half-sleep, cuddling her pillow. I was just drifting off when something pinched my leg. I flinched and sat up, wondering what the hell was going on. It hadn’t been an insect-bite, I was sure of that. I pulled up the sheet and looked around but there was nothing there. I figured I must have imagined it so I lay down again. I was just drifting off to sleep when it happened again, only this time it was my arm. I yelped and rolled out of the bed, gathering the sheet around me. I felt a bit of an idiot, I have to say. I mean, I was alone in the room, right? So nothing could have touched me. I looked under the bed and there as nothing there. Obviously. And I checked the bathroom, even though I knew I was alone in the room. I heard giggling but it was faint so I figured that maybe it was from another room. I pressed my ear to the walls either side but didn’t hear anything.
I got back into bed and snuggled under the sheet. I was drifting off again when something tickled my ear. I rolled over and after a few seconds there was a tickling sensation on the other ear, as if an insect was brushing against it. I sat up and looked around but there was nothing to swat. Just
then the door opened. It was Nid, with my breakfast.
She could see from the look of confusion on my face that something wasn’t right so she sat down on the side of the bed and asked me what was wrong.
‘Something pinched me,’ I said. ‘While you were gone. And it kept tickling my ear.’
She laughed. ‘Is that all? That’ll be Nok and Som. My children.’
I didn’t understand. There was no way that Nid could have had children. Her stomach was washboard flat and totally unlined and her breasts were damn-near perfect.
‘They’re just playing with you,’ she said. She handed me my coffee and McMuffin but I didn’t feel like eating.
‘What’s going on, Nid?’ I said. ‘You don’t have kids.’
She sat down on the edge of the bed and gave me the whole story. Apparently she was at a temple six months earlier and a monk had come up and spoken to her. The monk had told her that two ghost children had been living at the temple for the past year or so, but that they had chosen Nid as their new mother. The monk had said that the two children, a boy called Som and a girl called Nok, had been standing either side of Nid, but she couldn’t see them. The monk said that the two children had died in a car crash along with their mother and father. A drunken truck driver had piled into the side of their truck and it had burst into flames The parents had died immediately, the children had survived for another two days in intensive care before passing away. According to the monks, the spirits of the children had stayed behind. They had found their way to the monastery but now they wanted to live with Nid.
Nid asked the monk why and he said the children had said that she seemed like a good person so Nid agreed to allow them to live with her.
At that point I really had to stop her. I asked her why, why had she believed the monk and why had she agreed to take two ghosts into her life? She couldn’t really explain herself. I know that ghosts are important to Thais, they do tend to believe in them and there are always stories of dead family members coming back to give their relatives winning lottery numbers, and nonsense like that. Nonsense? Well, yes, that’s what I thought it was when she told me the story. Now I know different, of course.
Anyway, Nid explained that’s why she had toys in her shrine and bigger toys around the room. They were for the ghost children. And she always left sweets on the shrine for them to eat, but she balanced it with fresh fruit because she thought that would be better for them. She explained that there were ghost children everywhere. A lot of ghost children liked to be in cars so often they would stay with a taxi driver and that was why when you got into a taxi in Bangkok you would sometimes find children’s toys along the rear window.
I thought she was crazy, because she admitted that she’d never seen the children or heard them. But sometimes they would tickle her and often last thing at night she would feel them kiss her neck just before she fell asleep.
It all sounded bloody weird, truth be told, but then the Thais can be funny about the supernatural. All the bars have little shrines in them and the girls also do the wai thing where they put their hands together as if they’re praying whenever they pass it. They’re always telling stories about seeing ghosts in their dreams and the ghosts giving them lottery numbers and stuff. Anyway, I ate my McMuffin and then gave Nid another seeing to and then I went back to my hotel.
I couldn’t get Nid out of my head and so for the next three nights I went back to her bar and paid her barfine. Took her out to dinner, went to a movie once, took her to a Thai disco, and each time we ended up back at her place. She said she didn’t want me wasting my money on a short-time hotel. To be honest, the sex was never as good as it had been on the first night, but it was still pretty darn good.
I didn’t get pinched again, and I never heard the ghost kids laugh, but every now and then I’d get a tickling sensation on my ear or on the back of my neck. Sometimes, on the way to her room, Nid would get me to stop off at the 7-11 to buy some sweets to put on the shrine. She said that would keep the kids happy and make them like me. Bloody ridiculous, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The day before I was due to fly back to London with Jules, I barfined Nid and took her to see a movie at Terminal 21 and then for dinner at an Italian restaurant. We drank a bottle of red wine between us and then we went and hung out at her bar for a couple of hours and I was spending money like there was no tomorrow, knocking back shots with Nid and three of her mates. I must have blown the best part of two hundred quid but I had a ball. I was more than a bit drunk when we got back to Nid’s place. I don’t remember having sex but I guess we must have. I do remember our conversation, though, as we lay in her little bed with our arms around each other. ‘They want to go with you,’ she said.
‘Who do?’
‘Nok and Som. They want you to be their dad.’
I remember laughing. ‘You said they didn’t talk to you,’ I said.
‘I know what they want,’ she said. ‘They want to go to England with you. Can they?’
It was crazy, right? Two ghost kids wanted to come and live with me? I remember laughing and saying of course and she asked me if I was sure and I said yes. I think I passed out then.
I woke up to find Nid sitting on the bed with a warm McMuffin and a hot coffee. I asked her if she wanted to go to the airport with me but she said that she’d be too sad to say goodbye which I thought was sweet. Anyway, I had my breakfast, had another roll on the bed with Nid, then headed back to the hotel to pack. Fifteen hours later, I was getting my bags at Heathrow. Jules had said he was off to Pattaya but I made him promise not to barfine Nid.
That was a Sunday and on Monday I was working, my adventures in Thailand already feeling like a dream. I called Nid but her phone was off.
It was Monday night when things started to get a bit weird. I was watching TV when books started falling off my shelves. And the tap kept turning on and off in the kitchen. And I started to hear laughing. At first I thought the laughing was coming from next door but I pressed my ear against the party wall and couldn’t hear anything. I thought I was imagining things but when I went to bed something kept pulling the duvet off me. It was the kids, I realised. Som and Nok. I know it sounds crazy, but they were in the flat, I was sure. I got up, switched on the lights, and phoned Nid. Her phone was still off. I went back to bed but I didn’t get much sleep because the duvet was constantly pulled off me.
The next day I phoned Nid but, you’ve guessed it, her phone was off. She hadn’t set up a voicemail, it just rang out. That lunchtime I went to a toy shop and bought a small teddy bear and a soldier, then I went to a newsagents and bought a couple of chocolate bars. Back at the flat, I put them on the bed in the spare bedroom. ‘They’re for you,’ I said, feeling like an idiot because I was talking to myself. Except it worked – that night I slept like a log. In fact everything was fine for the next three nights, but then the duvet-pulling started again. I bought some more toys and sweets and it stopped.
The following Saturday I picked up a girl in my local pub, a fit blonde hairdresser called Dawn. Cute as a button but not very bright, which is just how I like my English birds. She’d downed half a dozen Bacardi Breezers, most of which I’d paid for, and I’d to pretty much carry her the last few yards to my flat. Dawn was well up for it, and as soon as I’d shut the front door she had her top off and she left a trail of clothes down the hallway on the way to the bedroom. We kissed and cuddled for a few minutes then she stripped off my clothes and climbed on top of me. I was just reaching for the condoms when she screamed like a banshee and jumped off the bed. ‘Something pinched me!’ she shouted.
‘You’ve had a bit to drink,’ I said.
She twisted around and showed me red marks on her backside. ‘Something bloody well pinched me, I’m not making it up,’ she said.
I tried to hold her but she wouldn’t have it, she put her clothes back on and rushed out. I was fairly drunk so I just hit the sack and was asleep within minutes. It was only the next day that
I realised what had happened. It was the kids. They’d obviously taken a dislike to Dawn and made their feelings known. I went out and bought them some more toys and sweets and stood in the middle of the spare room and said that it was my flat and that if I wanted to bring a girl back they would have to bloody well behave themselves.
The following week I was out with some mates and after a few drinks we hit a curry place and there were four really fit girls at the next table. One of them was a student, Jemma her name was, and she was high on something, ecstasy probably. We paid our bills at the same time and somehow we ended up back in my flat. I’d had a fair bit to drink so I’m not sure what my chat-up line was, but to be honest she was so high I don’t think it mattered what I said. We had a few beers in the flat and then she starts snogging me on the couch. She was just about to take off my jeans when she screamed and leapt to her feet. ‘What the hell was that?’ she asked.
I asked her what had happened, but I already knew. Something had pinched her backside, she said. Pinched her hard. And as both my hands were on her breasts, she was sure it wasn’t me. She looked under the bed, and while she was bent over she screamed again. The second pinch had been harder, so hard that it left a red mark. She demanded to know what was going on and I lied and said I didn’t know, and with that she stormed out of the flat.
It was the ghost kids, I was sure of that. I gave them a piece of my mind, cursing them for messing with my life, but I didn’t get a reaction. But later that night, when I was asleep, the duvet kept slipping off me and falling onto the floor. Every time it happened I woke up and so the following morning I was dog-tired. I realised I had to do something because the ghost kids were making my life a misery. I needed to talk to Nid. I needed her to take the kids back.
I called up a guy I knew who lived in Thailand. Robin, his name was, he used to be manager in the NHS but he’d taken early retirement and now he runs a couple of ladyboy bars in Nana Plaza. Bit of a funny bugger, I have to say, but he spoke reasonable Thai and I couldn’t think of anyone else who could help. I gave him Nid’s address and he went around to talk to her. Except that she wasn’t there. Apparently she’d moved out the day after I’d flown back to London. Robin spoke to the neighbours but no one seemed to know for sure where she’d gone. One said Phuket, another said Singapore. It looked to me as if she’d done a runner. She’d dumped the ghost kids on me and gone somewhere where they couldn’t find her.
I needed advice on what to do. I Googled “How to deal with ghost kids” but didn’t find anything helpful, but I did turn up a Thai monastery in, off all places, Wimbledon. I got the Tube to Wimbledon station and a bus and then walked half a mile or so through suburban streets until I reached the wat. That’s what they call a temple, the Thais. A wat. I thought it was funny the first time I heard it. What’s a wat? What? Yeah, I guess it’s not really funny.
You walk down a narrow lane to get to the temple, and it’s a little piece of Thailand, a genuine Thai temple with lots of monks wearing saffron robes. It’s known as the Buddhapadipa Temple, pristine white walls with a red and gold arched roof, and set in four acres of gardens with ponds and trees.
There were a couple of young monks sitting on a bench talking and I went over and introduced myself. One of them spoke fairly good English and once I’d told him what my problem was. He had me take off my shoes and then he took me inside and down a corridor to a small windowless room where an old monk was sitting on the floor. I say old, he was ancient, more than eighty, probably more than ninety, totally bald and his skin so thin that you could practically see through it. The young monk knelt down on the floor and motioned for me to do the same. I’ve never been a fan of sitting on the floor, but the Thais seem to prefer it to chairs and sofas. The old monk’s arms and legs were stick thin and his fingernails and teeth had yellowed with age, but his eyes were bright and his thin bloodless lips curled into a smile as the young monk explained in Thai why I had come to the temple. When the young monk had finished, the old monk nodded and said something in Thai. I heard the phrase ‘Phi Dek’ several times.
‘They are ghost children,’ said the young monk eventually. ‘In Thai we say Phi Dek.’
‘They’re real?’
The young monk nodded. ‘Oh yes. Very real. And they like you. They like you a lot.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ I said.
‘No, you don’t understand,’ said the young monk. He nodded at the old monk. ‘Phra Sarawut has spoken to them.’
‘Spoken to them? What do you mean?’
The young monk smiled patiently. ‘Phra Sarawut says that the children are here with you and that they are very happy to come to the temple.’
My knees were burning but I was barely aware of the pain. ‘He can see them?’
The young monk nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Can you?’
The monk smiled and shook his head. ‘No. But I am sure they are with you. Phra Sarawut says the girl is called Nok. She is eight years old. Her brother is Som. He is two years younger.’
That knocked me for six. I hadn’t mentioned their names or their ages, but the old monk knew. ‘Ask Phra Sarawut what they want,’ I said.
The young monk spoke to the older monk and then listened intently as he replied.
‘They want to be with you,’ said the young monk. ‘You are their father now.’
‘I’m not their father. I just met their mum a few times in Thailand. Their parents are dead.’
The young monk smiled patiently. ‘Yes, but so long as they remain on this earth, they can choose who they live with. And they have chosen you.’
‘They’re making my life a misery,’ I said.
‘In what way?’
‘Every time I get close to a girl, they start throwing things around and pinching me.’
The young monk laughed. He translated for the benefit of the old monk and the old monk laughed too.
‘They are jealous,’ said the young monk. ‘You are their father, the lady in Thailand is their mother. They do not want you to be unfaithful to their mother.’
I shook my head in disbelief. This was crazy, absolutely crazy. ‘Look, can you get Phra Sarawut to explain to them that I’m not their father and that they need to leave me alone?’
The two monks spoke to each other in Thai for a couple of minutes, then the young monk looked at me and shrugged. ‘Phra Sarawut says that there is nothing you can do. You are their father and you are responsible for them. You need to take care of them until they are adults. They are your responsibility now.’
The old monk closed his eyes, which I took as a sign that he had nothing more to say. I got up, my knees making loud cracking noises, and I walked unsteadily out of the room. The young monk followed me and he took me back to the road. Just before he left, he put a hand on my arm and whispered that I should be careful. I asked him what he meant and he put his mouth close to my ear. ‘Phi dek can be dangerous if they are unhappy,’ he whispered. ‘When they are angry, then can hurt you. Best you don’t make them angry.’ Then he hurried away.
So that was that. I went back to my flat over the next few days I installed a small shrine in the hall, similar to the one that I’d seen in Nid’s room. I put a small teddy bear and a doll in the shrine, along with some sweets and miniature bars of chocolate. I left some bigger toys in the bedroom and in the living room. It seems to have done the trick. Sometimes I see that the toys have moved but nothing gets thrown about and I haven’t been pinched awake. So that’s it. No sex for me for another twelve years or so. Unless I can persuade the ghost kids to go and stay with their mum. But according to the old monk, they’re more than happy to live with me. They like me. I make them laugh.
I’m working lots of overtime and I’m saving every penny I can so that I can go back to Thailand. I’m going to look for Nid. That’s my plan, anyway. If I can find her then maybe I can persuade the kids to stay with her. I know it’s not much of a plan, but it’s all I’ve got.
If
you enjoy supernatural stories, why not try Stephen Leather’s Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. In order they are Nightfall, Midnight, Nightmare, Nightshade and Lastnight. There are also two Jack Nightingale short stories, Cursed and Still Bleeding, which are only available as eBooks. Jack Nightingale has his own website at www.jacknightingale.com
MASSAGE THERAPY