Later, back at my favourite haunt, the lobster pot, I mulled over what had happened. I'd never been with a prostitute before as such. I'd slept with bar girls for money before in Chaing Mai, but this was somehow different. The bar girl culture was so subtley and strangely different to what had just so brazenly happened. As different as Soi 6 was to the bargirls of Soi 7, 8 and 9. I didn't even know her name. There wasn't even a pretence of a relationship, just two hours of sordid, wonderful no-holds barred sex. In a strange way it seemed more honest somehow.

No matter how illusory and temporary, with a bargirl you developed a sort of relationship, no one kids anyone else that it's not based on money, but there is the capacity for freindships to develop, especially when the bed isn't involved, and I remembered with fondness and no small degree of guilt my friendships with Lek and Noi for example. With bargirls it seemed more like going down the pub back home and chatting up a girl. In my safe havens of Leks bar and the crossroads bar, the girls would always playfully try to get me to take them home, but it was more of a flirtation than a serious attempt, they knew me, knew that although I found them to be devastatingly sexy, that I would not take them home. And so we would relax, talk, sometimes I would buy them food for a couple of dollars from passing vendors, other times they would give me a free beer or a shot.

I tried to rationalisewhat had happened just a few hours earlier but couldn't come to any logical or rational explanation, other than I was so sexually tense, she was so sexually attractive - the money didn't seem to matter somehow. I needed her sex, she needed my money. On so many levels my Western Catholic upbringing was shrieking my guilt at what I had done, and yet, try as I might I could ultimately find nothing remotely wrong with what had occurred. I rejected my automatic catholic guilt syndrome, I just couldn't see how anyone had been exploited. My mind turned to Lek, remembering her answer when I asked her if she liked her job - no.

But then I remembered Noi, when I had asked her the same question, she'd shrugged and said it was better than working in a factory. She got to meet some nice men, who treated he well, she liked coming out to lunch with me, talking to me at the bar, and she could always turn down men she didn't particularly like. But Noi had a choice, she was spectacularly beautiful. Lek could not afford to be as choosy as Noi pehaps.

My thoughts swung back to the sex I had had with the girl earlier, as I cast my gaze out over the sea to the coral island a few miles off the coast, brilliantly clear today, normally it's shrouded in the mist.

The girl had been enthusiastic enough, inventive even. She'd stayed a couple of hours, we had some beers, watched MTV, teased one another - it hadn't been like I'd imagined it would be.

In Britain I'd always had a negative view of prostitutes. I used to live in Streatham, London, and there the prostitutes that pestered you on the way home seemed hard-bitten, drug addicts somehow unsavoury in their pursuit of the oldest profession. Stereotypes I know.

My mind flew back to a woman I'd met one night in a bar in Covent garden. I'd fallen in love with her on the spot,she was intelligent, well-educated, sexy and flirtatious. Unusually for me, I actually asked her out, in London you get just one chance, if you don't strike you'll never see her again. She turned me down flat.

We still proceeded to get drunk together, I'd reached the age where a rejection isn't the soul crushing agony that it used to be in my younger years. She's started telling me a little about herself. She had a doctorate in Geology from a Cambridge university, and she funded herself by being a hostess. She'd accompany lonely business men to functions and parties, and was paid a good price. Although I didn't ask the question, she saw what had crossed my mind and being perceptive, asked it for me. Yes, if she was attracted to the man, she would negotiate a price and sleep with him. She shrugged, these men were succesful, confident, often sexy, she liked what she did.

Another event connected, an office Christmas bash at an expensive restaurant in Pall-Mall. I'd noticed an unusually large number of very attractive young women hanging around the bar. They were all Americans, Canadians or Antipodeans. I found out later that they were there to pick up rich businessmen, for drinks, dinner or perhaps something more. It put them through college or helped eke out their earnings so that they could spend longer partying in Europe.

Back in Pattaya, my musings didn't seem to get me anywhere, I was moving in strange circles that I didn't yet understand and strangely enough, the only person I felt I had let down was Lek, lovely cheeky Lek. Perhaps I needed some time to go by, to digest my sudden and spectacular fall from a somewhat dubious grace.

Broooding, I ordered a second carafe of wine, and staring out into the sea, let my mind soar above the breezes and surf, up, up into the sky peppered with para-surf sails under which the jet-skiers and speedboats played, in this middle-aged male paradise.

yechydda,

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