I did the nails of every girl we sold to Myanmar.
Shadow wanted the nails red, because the men over the river paid more for it. I painted each set on the front step of Golden Hands Massage on Nanai Road in Patong, with the girl’s fingers spread on my knee, a Chang beer warming against my ankle. I finished with a top coat so the polish would last the drive.
I told every girl she had good hands. Then I described the job in Bangkok, a hotel spa with a uniform and a dormitory with a working air-con.
There was no spa.
There was a white van. It left Patong after the bars shut and drove north to Ranong, the last Thai town before Myanmar. At the fish pier, boatmen ran the girls across the river mouth in longtails, narrow wooden boats with a car engine on a pole at the back, and landed them on the Burmese side. Shadow said they went on to new buildings that looked like apartment blocks, full of men who worked phone scams all day and paid for women at night. Past Ranong, I asked no questions.
Shadow owned Golden Hands, the red tuk-tuks outside it, and a police captain at Patong station who drove a black Fortuner SUV on a policeman’s salary. The Thai girls called him Khun Ngao, Mister Shadow in Thai, and the farang, the foreigners, called him Shadow. None of us knew his real name. When I asked, he smiled at me with his mouth closed until I said sorry.
His hands were the softest on the island. He buffed his nails to a clear shine, wore a jade ring on his pinky finger, and smelled of Snake Brand, the cooling powder Thai people pat on their necks in the heat. His great-grandfather crossed from Fujian on a contract to dig tin at Kathu, the old mining town over the hill from Patong, and Shadow recited that story while he counted money.
Shadow had a rule about the van. It never left with an empty seat.
On the night everything came apart, the van left full. I am telling you now, so keep count of who gets in.
***
My name is Nene. My ID card says Nai, the Thai word for Mister, followed by a long boy’s name my father chose from a monk’s list. I will not write it here, and no Thai law will let me change it.
I grew up in Ranong. My father ferried Burmese workers over the border and back in his longtail. Every time I ended a sentence with ka, the polite word Thai girls finish a sentence on, instead of krap, which is what a son says, he hit me across the shoulders with the pole he used to push off from the pier. When I was small, he took me to the Muay Thai camp behind the temple to make a man of me, and I came home with other boys’ blood on my elbows. The night I broke the headman’s son’s nose, my father opened a bottle of Mekhong whisky and let me pour it.
In April, when every Thai man draws a card for the army draft, the officers looked at my lipstick and sent me home without one. That week I took my big sister’s purple sarong and the night bus to Phuket. I still carry the sarong rolled up at the bottom of my bag, for luck.
I get hormones from the pharmacy beside the 7-Eleven, the same contraceptive pills the bar girls take, and swallow them by the handful with Mekhong whisky. My hips came in the way the tide fills the mudflats at Ranong. Nothing moves for a long time, and then one morning the water is over your feet. A Swiss man bought my breasts and cried as I fucked him. Nobody paid for my vagina. A clinic in Bangkok charges more than my father’s longtail made in a year to build one, and every baht I saved ended up with Shadow.
My English is Bangla English. I learned it from men who wanted a discount, so most of it is prices.
Mon was from Roi Et, a rice province in Isan, the dry northeast that sends its daughters south to work. She had a son at home with her mother. Each morning she gave the spirit house in front of the shop, a little gold temple on a post for the guardians of the land, a bottle of red Fanta with a straw, because she said the Gods were too busy to open bottles. When we returned from Bangla at the hour the monks walk barefoot past the shop, Mon bought sticky rice from the auntie on the corner and knelt on the wet pavement in last night’s dress to fill their alms bowls.
Shadow filled the van on the closing night of the vegetarian festival. For nine days the Chinese families of Phuket wear white, eat no meat, drink no alcohol and sleep alone, and yellow flags with red letters hang over the food stalls to show that the cooking is jay, pure enough for the gods.
Each morning, the ma song march through Phuket Town in trance, with steel skewers through both cheeks, saw at their tongues with axe blades, and swing balls of nails into their backs until their white shirts turn red, while the crowd throws lit firecrackers at their bare feet.
Mon was not Chinese, but she fasted in a white T-shirt from the market, did only foot massages, and didn’t take any men upstairs. She said heaven could find her easier that way.
Mon also had a man from Dubai, Ahmad, who rented a pool villa in Kamala every rainy season, the quiet bay north of Patong, and paid her to sleep beside him. Each time he packed to leave, he proposed, and she always said Dubai was too hot even for an Isan girl.
Jessie grew up in Udon, further north in Isan, and she was the youngest of us. She had a certificate from the beauty college there and an ex-husband who drove a sugarcane truck. She called me Phi Nene, big sister Nene, the only girl at Golden Hands who did. Her family’s rice fields belonged to the bank. Jessie was going to buy them back and open a nail salon with a pink sign that she had already designed on her phone with a cartoon cat in the corner.
When the fields were hers again, she was going to set off firecrackers in the brick kiln at Wat Chalong, the big temple in the south of the island, where people go to thank the gods for making their wishes come true. Jessie did her own nails. She painted them pink with tiny white flowers, and she was better at it than me.
Lauren was a Doncaster girl, from northern England. She flew out with a boyfriend, Luke, and stayed when he left. His name was still on her hip, crossed out, with a gecko on top. Lauren was the most beautiful farang on Bangla Road, and she was a cunt, which is her word, and she’d want me to use it. She bit her nails to the pink and owed me for every set of gels I ever did for her.
Lauren hunted the farang girls. She sat in the hostels behind Jungceylon mall and on the sand at Kata with a paperback she never opened, and picked out the ones travelling alone. She was lovely to them until they cried on her shoulder about their boyfriends. The whole time she was pricing them. When she was drunk, she called me he.
Iman came from Killeen, Texas, an army town. Her father was a sergeant from Georgia, and her mother was from Udon, like Jessie. After her mother died, Iman flew out to find the Thai side of the family, and her grandmother licked a thumb and rubbed her wrist to see if the colour came off. In Isan, people call dark-skinned girls dam, the word for black.
When Iman was little, her mother called her suay. In Thai, suay with a rising voice means beautiful, and suay with a flat voice means bad luck. Iman never learned her tones well enough to tell which one her mother meant, and now she had no one left to ask.
Iman worked the men who paid to be hurt. She had the top room, with a steel hook Shadow had screwed into the ceiling for her, a rattan cane, and patent boots she rubbed down on Sundays with the coconut oil we used on the customers. On Bangla, a mistress is a woman with a whip or the woman a rich man keeps, and Iman was both.
She filed her nails into black almonds and never let me near them.
“Mistress or the door,” she told a German dentist, with her heel on his breastbone.
He chose Mistress, and while he hung from the hook thanking her, she emptied his banking app into a crypto wallet.
“I’m getting out,” she said to me on the roof one night, smoking a menthol.
***
The trouble started with a man from Perth on his bucks party.
He came in off Nanai Road when the rain stopped, a big pink man in a sleeveless shirt with BUCKS PARTY across the chest and MITCH between his shoulder blades. He had a gold chain, a Garmin watch, soft palms and bitten nails.
Mitch looked up at the price board instead of at me. “Do you have ladyboys?”
I stood up off my plastic chair and let him take me in from my heels up, because they always need a look first. “Massage, sir? Thai massage, oil massage. Very strong, very good,” I said. “I am ladyboy. You wan’ me?”
He blushed down into the shirt. “Yeah,” he said. “Righto.”
The back room upstairs had a mattress on the floor, a batik curtain for a door, and a fan that ticked on every turn; it smelled of Tiger Balm, and the bleach Mon used on the towels. Jessie crouched on the landing behind the curtain, doing her part, and Lauren sat on the top stair with her camera ready.
I started on his back, because the oil travels from the neck down.
“You wan’ special?” I asked when my hands reached the backs of his thighs.
“How much?”
“How much you have?”
He laughed into the pillow. “Fuck me. Whatever. Yeah.”
I turned him over. His cock was already hard, and he laid a forearm across his eyes. Australians always hide like that. They fly here sure that a ladyboy is a joke, and then my fingers tell them otherwise. I warmed coconut oil in my palm and gave him a hand job. I talked the whole time in my Bangla English, sexy man, strong man, you like, you like, because a man with busy ears forgets he has pockets.
Behind the curtain, Jessie’s hand slid in along the tiles and lifted his shorts off the hook.
His stomach clenched. He gripped the edge of the mattress with both fists and finished on the towel.
Then the Garmin buzzed on his wrist, and the screen said NEW MESSAGE: KAYLA. He lifted his head and found Jessie in the gap of the curtain, holding his wallet and phone.
“Oi,” he said. “Oi. What the fuck.”
He came up off the mattress faster than a naked man should. He caught Jessie by the wrist and dragged her into the back room, and she said, “Sorry, sorry, sir, sorry,” in the same voice she used for the police and her father. He drew his free hand up to hit her.
I hit him before he could. I sank my elbow into his jaw, the strike the boys at the camp in Ranong taught me, and the joint popped. Mitch sat down on the bedding, then he lay down, and blood ran out of his mouth onto the towel with everything else.
Lauren pushed through the curtain with the camera up and took photo after photo of Mitch, naked, greasy and bleeding, with me standing over him in my work dress.
“Smile, Mitch,” she said. “Big day Saturday, is it? Shall I send these to Kayla or to your mam?”
I crouched by his ear. “You call police, this picture go to your wife,” I said. “Your mother, your boss, your Facebook. Everybody see ladyboy make you happy. Very nice picture.”
We took his cash and his gold chain. Lauren dropped the Garmin through the drain grate behind the shop, because a watch like that remembers every step he took. Mitch went down the stairs holding his jaw together with both hands.
Jessie cried in the toilet afterwards, the tap running, as she did after every job. Then she walked out and counted the money, twice.
My phone buzzed against the plastic chair. It was Shadow, on LINE, the chat app Thais use for everything from rent to funerals. He sent a sticker of a smiling bear, and then a line in Thai.
Tonight I want a farang.
Lauren read it over my shoulder. Lauren could not read Thai, but she was fluent in Shadow.
“I’ve got one,” she said. “Megan. She’s from Wakefield. She’s lovely.”
***
We got ready in the downstairs room at Golden Hands, with the door locked and the air-con on the lowest setting. Jessie put on her eyeliner under a ring light from Shopee, clipped to a massage bed. Iman zipped herself into black latex. Lauren tapped a line of coke onto her phone, right over the photo of Mitch, and snorted it through a cut-down McDonald’s straw. Mon sat in the corner in her festival T-shirt, sniffing her ya dom, the menthol inhaler every Thai auntie keeps in her handbag.
“Festival time, I no drink, no fuck man,” Mon said. “Only foot massage.”
Iman was lacing her boots. “You take a white girl, that’s the embassy on our back,” she said. “It’ll be on CNN, her mama on TV in a cardigan.”
“Shut it, Texas,” Lauren said. “Shadow’s paying farang prices.”
Iman pulled her laces tight. “Maybe,” she said. “He won’t be the one doing time.”
Bangla Road shuts to traffic after dark and becomes a walking street. And we walk it every night. Steam rose off the wet concrete with the smell of rubbish and frying garlic. A tout trotted beside every couple, saying “ping pong show, ping pong show,” and holding up a laminated menu with ping pong balls, darts and razor blades printed beside the prices.
A woman at a cart cooked loba, the pig ears and intestines Phuket people dip in sweet chilli sauce, in a wok of black oil. An Indian stag party pushed past in matching shirts with the groom’s face on the front. Many of the cannabis shops have gone dark since the government made weed a medicine again. Over the hill in Kathu, the shrines were sending their gods home, and the firecrackers reached Bangla as a crackle under the bass.
Megan waited for us outside the 7-Eleven at the top of Bangla. She had sunburn in the shape of a vest top, a bum bag, a swallow tattoo on her foot, and a nursing degree from Sheffield that she was celebrating with her student loan. She kept her nails short and square, because nurses have to, and hospital sanitiser had cracked the skin over her knuckles.
“Lauren!” Megan hugged Lauren so hard she lifted her off the pavement. “Oh my God, your hair. I’m buzzing. Are these them? Are you the massage ladies?”
“Massage ladies, yes,” I said. “Hello, beautiful lady. You very pretty.”
Lauren hooked an arm round Megan’s neck. “Yorkshire lasses stick together,” she said.
The club the girls nicknamed the Fridge stood at the end of the beach. It had the coldest air-con in Patong, and inside it was blue, dark and chilly, enough to make your nipples ache. Lauren bought a bottle of Black Label for the table. Iman stood behind Megan, out of the cameras’ view, and tipped the little brown bottle from her bag into Megan’s glass.
Jessie took a crumb of yaba from Lauren’s palm, the cheap red speed pill the trawler crews run on, and swayed on the spot with her eyes shut. I drank Mekong Whisky from a flask in my bra, because the Fridge watered its drinks with iced tea. Megan danced with Jessie. She held Jessie’s hands up into the blue light and turned them over.
“Did you do these yourself?” Megan said. “Shut up. You did not. You could do this for a living.”
“I want open shop,” Jessie shouted over the music. “In Udon with pink sign. I have picture.”
She showed Megan the cartoon cat on her screen, and Megan put a hand on her heart.
Then Megan’s knees went.
The brown bottle works all at once. A girl sings along to the DJ, then she is a sack of rice someone dressed up as. Iman took one arm, and Lauren took the other, and I went in front to clear a path. The bouncer, who collected an envelope from Shadow every month, studied his lock screen.
“She drunk,” I said to him anyway. “Too much drunk. We take her home.”
We carried Megan past the tourist police box, where an officer posed for a selfie with the Indian stag party, to the line of tuk-tuks on Beach Road. Shadow’s were red mini trucks with disco lights strung inside, speakers that made your fillings hum, and a jasmine garland on the mirror for the Buddha to smell. Bank drove ours and flashed a gold tooth Shadow had paid for.
At the tuk-tuk, Iman let go of Megan’s arm. “I got a client in Kamala,” she said. She held my eyes for a long time, and then she walked up Bangla in her boots.
Lauren, Jessie, and I climbed in with Megan between us, and Megan’s head dropped onto Jessie’s shoulder. Inside Megan’s bum bag, her mobile lit up through the nylon. Lauren unzipped the pouch and lifted the phone out.
The screen said MUM over a photo of a woman in a fleece in a garden, holding a brown dog up to the camera. Lauren switched the phone off and dropped it in her own bag.
“Eyes front, Jess,” she said. “It’s only her mam.”
Jessie turned her phone face down on her knee so the screen didn’t light up, and held it there all the way up Beach Road. I let her. I was tired, my feet hurt, the gods were going home, and I wanted my bed.
***
Beach Road runs north out of Patong until the hotels stop, and then it climbs over a rocky headland to Kalim, a small bay of boulders and dead coral. Kalim has a car park at its south end where a roti man and a noodle woman sell from carts in the evenings. The van waited there. It was a white Toyota Commuter, the minivan every Thai family hires to take the household to a funeral, with tinted glass and a yant sticker on the rear window, rows of old Khmer letters a monk blessed for safe travel.
Daeng drove it. He had engine grease in the cracks of his knuckles and a long nail he used to clean out his ear. Two Lao women slept on the middle seat, heads together, their belongings in a Big C supermarket bag at their feet. Their nails were Big Apple Red from my brush. I had painted them that afternoon on the step while they chattered about singing karaoke in Bangkok. A broker at the Mekong bridge had sold them on to Shadow.
We laid Megan along the back seat. Lauren sat in the tuk-tuk with Bank and tapped another line onto the dashboard. Jessie climbed down onto the rocks below the car park with her phone, and I didn’t ask who she was ringing.
I walked up the hill road to the 7-Eleven to buy Jessie a ham and cheese toastie, because she’d eaten nothing since lunch, and yaba on an empty stomach makes a girl emotional. The woman behind the counter said sawasdee ka, hello, without lifting her eyes, and pressed the sandwich in the toaster until the cheese ran out of the sides.
As I walked down the hill with the toastie in its paper sleeve, the van rocked on its springs.
The sliding door stood open. Daeng was kneeling on the back seat between Megan’s knees with his shorts around his thighs, and he was raping her. He had dragged her denim cut-offs down to one ankle. His left palm was over her mouth and nose, and his right hand gripped the headrest. Megan was not awake for any of it. Her eyes were open a slit, and nobody was behind them.
A policeman made that same grunt on top of me in the back of his pickup on the same hill the year I came to the island. Afterwards, he bought me moo ping, grilled pork on a stick, from a cart and dropped me at the bottom of Bangla like a gentleman.
I set the toastie on the roof of the van.
Then I pulled Daeng out of the van by his hair.
He came out backwards, tangled in his shorts, with his cock still wet, and he fell on the gravel. He got up on one knee and swung at me. I hit him with my fist and then my knee and then my elbow, the combination my Muay Thai teachers drilled into me until I could throw it in my sleep. His nose flattened, and his front teeth skittered under the van.
I grabbed a lump of dead brain coral from the rocks and hit him with it until it broke, and then I used the jagged piece left in my fist. His face split open like a mango somebody dropped on the floor of Banzaan market. I spat into the mess. His blood streaked the white side of the van, and over the hill in Kathu the firecrackers kept on.
The Lao women woke and screamed in a language almost like Jessie’s. I dug my sister’s purple sarong out of my bag and covered Megan from her chest to her knees, then folded the edges under her, the way my mother tucked our mosquito net into the mattress. Down on the rocks, a light came on in a fisherman’s hut and went off again.
***
Lauren had already rung Shadow. Lauren always rang Shadow.
Shadow’s white Alphard crested the headland from Patong with a driver at the wheel and two of his men trailing it on motorbikes. A tuk-tuk carrying Mon and Iman rolled down the far side of the hill from Kamala because Shadow wanted all his girls present whenever he cleaned up a problem.
Shadow stepped down in white clothes with Snake Brand powder on his collar. He looked at Daeng on the gravel, and at the blood on his van, and at Megan under my sister’s sarong.
He did not come near me. Shadow was fasting for the gods, and I was wearing Daeng’s blood, and blood is meat.
“Farang girl, finish,” he said in English, for Lauren’s benefit. “Too much problem. Take to hospital Patong. Leave at door. Drunk tourist. Happen every night.”
Bank drove Megan away toward Patong Hospital in my sarong, with the disco lights and the speakers off. It was the most respect Bank had ever shown anyone.
Shadow looked at the Lao women in the van, then at the empty rear seat. He turned his jade ring.
“Van no go empty,” he said.
At the point where Patong beach ends, a red flag cracked on its pole, the signal lifeguards raise in the rainy season when the rip is running.
Lauren lit a cigarette, and her fingers held steady.
“Take Jessie,” Lauren said.
Jessie made a small sound in her throat.
“She’s a grass,” Lauren said. “I clocked her on them rocks with her phone just now, and she rang someone from the bogs in the Fridge an’ all. Check her phone if you don’t believe me. Go on, Jess. Show him.”
Grassing is English slang for talking to the police.
“No,” Jessie said. “No, Phi. Khun Ngao, no. I not call. I only save number. I only save!” She held the phone out to Shadow with both hands and her head bowed.
Shadow left the phone in her hands and nodded at his men.
They took Jessie by the arms. Her body went stiff and then soft between them, and her eyes stayed open. Mon screamed for her mother in Isan. Iman said Lauren’s name under her breath.
I went for the men.
I broke the taller one’s arm backwards over my knee at the elbow, and he sat down in the gravel and stared at it. The other carried a pistol in his waistband, but Shadow allowed no gunshots during the vegetarian festival, so he smashed the butt into my cheek, and my mouth filled with iron. I got up anyway. My nail file was in my dress pocket, the steel one I had used on every girl we ever sold, and I pushed it into his belly up to my knuckles, and his blood ran down to my wrist.
By then a police pickup was racing up from Patong, and Shadow had already got back into the Alphard. He made a phone call, and it cost me everything.
The sliding door slammed on Jessie and the Lao women. Shadow’s driver took the Commuter’s wheel with Daeng’s blood on his trainers, and Shadow had to drive himself. The van pulled onto the coast road toward Kamala, my toastie still on the roof. It slid off at the bend by the giant robot statues.
Policemen pinned me face down where the van was, and one of them knelt on the back of my neck. The captain from Patong station stood over me in good shoes and talked into his radio. Past his shoulder, Mon walked to the road in her white T-shirt, flagged a motorbike taxi, and rode away sideways on the back, knees together, already calling.
Lauren was laughing. I think it was the coke.
Iman hit her with the cane.
Iman carried that rattan cane in her bag for work, and she brought it across Lauren’s face so hard that Lauren’s cheek opened along the bone. Lauren snatched the neck of a broken whisky bottle out of the gravel and swung it. Iman caught the glass in her bare hand, and they tumbled over the curb together onto the sand.
Ranong raised me in a cage, but nobody in it fought like these two. They had never been taught, so nothing told them the fight was over. Lauren had no nails to fight with, so she bit into Iman’s ear. Iman raked her black almonds down Lauren’s neck and pushed her thumbs into Lauren’s eyes. They crashed into the noodle cart parked on the sand, and a pot of cold pork broth slopped over them both. They rolled through a stack of plastic chairs, down to the water, and Lauren drove her fist into Iman’s braids and hauled her into the surf. Iman kicked free, climbed onto Lauren, and held her under.
No one in uniform went down onto the beach. The captain had his ladyboy.
“Say her name,” Iman shouted over the waves. “Say Jessie’s name.”
Lauren came up out of the foam with blood and seawater pouring from her mouth, the bottle neck still in her fist. She rammed the glass into Iman’s side, and they went under together.
The police threw me into the back of the pickup on top of the man whose arm I had broken. As the truck swung round toward Patong, I pushed up. Out in the white water off the car park, there were two heads, then one, then a wave came in taller than the others, and a policeman put his boot between my shoulder blades and pressed my face into the ribbed steel floor.
I have not been near the sea since.
***
The Department of Corrections keeps me on the men’s side of the provincial prison, because my card says Nai.
On the day I arrived, the guards made me strip and bend over for the male officers and the other prisoners, and they shaved my head with clippers that pulled. At night they lock the ladyboys and the gay men into a room of our own at the end of the block, and we sleep in rows on the floor. We wear brown. The rules state I’m not allowed a bra, because I never had my vagina made, so the breasts the Swiss man bought hang loose under my shirt and my nails are short because the shop sells no polish. The classes are detergent making and welding. Nobody teaches manicures.
In the police report, Daeng was driving past Kalim when he found a ladyboy attacking a tourist, and he stopped to help, and the ladyboy took out his eye with a lump of coral. Daeng wears a patch now, and he has a lawyer.
An English newspaper printed my old ID card photo, the one with a boy’s haircut, beside the words LADYBOY GANG BOSS. The judge gave me a number of years I won’t say out loud.
Megan flew home to Wakefield without remembering my face. The brown bottle took the night from her. Nobody will ever tell her who covered her with the sarong.
Golden Hands has a new name and new girls. Shadow attends the vegetarian festival every year.
Mon married Khalid in Dubai. She sends me photos from a balcony so high that the sea underneath is a blue screensaver, and she puts money in my prison shop account for coffee and Mama noodles, the instant noodles every Thai student lives on.
Nobody found Lauren and Iman. Every rainy season the riptide at Patong drowns farang. Fishermen pull bodies off the rocks at Kalim and Kamala, and plenty never turn up. A woman who swims well could also crawl out onto a dark beach where no one is searching and keep walking.
Jessie’s mother rings the old Golden Hands number from Udon. The new girl on the phone tells her Jessie isn’t there. The police say they have no record of a van. In Thailand every van on the road is a white Commuter.
When the rains returned the next year, my eyes turned the same yellow as the vegetarian festival flags, and the guards trucked me to Vachira Hospital on Yaowarat Road with chains on my ankles.
A doctor who looked younger than Jessie showed me my liver on a screen. She said tap khaeng, which means it had turned hard, and then she said tap wai, which is liver failure. She counted the reasons on her fingers: the hormone pills and the Mekhong Whiskey and Bangla Road. Then she asked me if I had family who could come.
I told her my family was in Dubai, and maybe in the sea, and over the river.
I did the nails of every girl we sold to Myanmar, except the last one.
Jessie did her own.
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About
Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer who’s never met a rule of reality he didn’t want to bend, mostly because straight fiction never let him say what he actually meant. Nominated for Best Small Fictions 26/27, his work appears or is forthcoming in over fifty literary journals, including Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Cherry Tree, Thin Skin, The Fool’s World, HAWKEYE, Mobius, i70 Review, Palisades Review, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and many others. His debut short story collection, Unhappy Endings, will be available in 2027, and he’s currently finishing his novella series, Crescendo. Read more at ashleymangtani.com
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