Noi was gorgeous. She was small, slim, sexy and fun, she always wore figure hugging clothes but with a subtelty that many of the other girls lacked, a sort of sophistication and sassy class that surrounded her every move, word and smile. She oozed charm and poise and an open friendliness with every moment of her being. She had a cute snub nose, and she had an endearing habit of raising both her nose and her eyebrows and her head in a tiny simultaneous bob to indicate approval or disapproval in such same measure and yet you somehow knew exactly what she meant, what she was saying in her silent song.

Noi was very popular with the customers, sometimes I would go days without seeing her, and when that happened my heart would be heavy, she was a delight to be near and to talk to. Of course I desired her, but Noi was a friend, we would talk long and deep on the nights when she was there and the business was slow and quiet.

Noi, like soi many of the bargirls had children and was working to look after them. Like so many of young Thai girls, she too had been married and subsequently dumped by her husband as soon as he'd claimed her virginity and the babies had arrived. She had worked in a factory near Chiang Mai, but the work was hard and unrewarding. Unlike Lek, she seemed to actually not mind her work, sometimes she said she enjoyed it. It was certainly better than working in the factory. I sometimes took Noi to lunch, never dinner, from 6.00pm onwards she worked, trying to get customers, trying to get money to support her family and her parents, long abandoned by what few shiftless males there were in her brief and bleak history.

One night I arrived at the crossroads bar, and there was Noi, quiet, not herslef, visibly upset. When she bobbed her nose,eyebrows and ehad,it was half-hearted, a token gesture to my greeting, I instantly knew that something was wrong. It turned out that the pevious nightnoi had been on the way home, she hadn't managed to find a customer and it was late,she was alone on her motorbike. She was mugged. Two young Thai men dragged her to a cashpoint and forced her to withdraw some $200 dollars from her account.They took her motorbike, her cash - everything. Pattaya is notorious for its muggers, late at night drunk Farang raid a cashpoint and a few minutes later are relieved by the modern day highwaymen of their cash. But they also prey on the bar girls, knowing that most have some money stashed away to send to their families.

She was down, but still needed to work, if she didn't work she didn't get paid, the, usually Ferang, managers of the bars were unsympathetic to individual cases of plight. It was worse - she had started her period and wouldn't be able to take a customer home for a few days, in the short term she was ruined. Things are never as bad as they first seem, no matter how deep and dark they appear to the victim. There's tremendous resilience to most people and the generosity of others willing to help should never be readily discounted.The other bargirls had rallied around, Noi would not hungry, the bargirls looked after one another,sometimes with brutal and deadly consequences for the unwary that mistreat them.

I first realised this when I met the ghost. A thin, whisper of a girl, who would wander the Sois berating the invisible that were haranguing her, cursing the thin air and the living alike in her mad reverie known only unto her. She wore heavily applied white make up, and on coffee skin the effect was ghostly and unnerving, her desperate plight laid open for all to see. The ghost had been run over a few years earlier by a drunken Ferang on a huge motorbike he didn't really know how to control. He was jailed for six years, but paid to be released after just a few weeks. She was left brain-damaged for life. She got a few hundred dollars compensation but what could recompense your livelihood and your sanity? For the Ghost had been a bargirl, at the peak of her earning power before a drunk and arrogant idiot had effectively ended her life. But the bar girls remember her. They give whatever they can to her, she is always reasonably well dressed if badly assembled, they look after their own for nobody else will.

And so they took Noi under their wing until she won a new customer.

What delved into my soul however, was pure arithmatic and economics. Noi would have had to sleep with at least 16 men in order to earn the money that had been removed. 16 nights of sleeping with strangers, 16 nights of probably passionless sex, 16 nights of saving for her children and parents all taken in a whisper of violent robbery.

I was shocked, shocked to the quick. I was angry, angry at myself for being part of this game, confused because I was torn at the moral conundrum that the Western mind imposes on such a foreign attitude. But above all, I thought of the number, 16, engraved in my soul for all time, never before had I considered that any one of the bargirls could ahve slept with 16 different men in probably less than a month. There were different interpretations of course, it could have been two or three men 16 times, Noi was someone that you wanted to be with 'extra long time'. But it was still 16 fucks minimum with someone she would never truly know. And those hard earnings gone, blown away with the wind.

I didn't know what else to do. I invited her back to the hotel, 'No sex, no money' I warned, just clean sheets, a mini-bar, some TV and company. She agreed. She just needed to be with someone that would hold her that night. We got back to the hotel, raided the mini-bar for snacks, watched some Thai MTV and ended up talking for three hours about everything and nothing. We held one another, we both needed the warmth and comfort of another human being, her heart beating slowly as she slept, my mind turning like windmills,as her soft breath broke the silent night, and occasionally I would kiss her forehead in affection. Sometimes, I realised that she wasn't asleep as a gentle, simple smile stole across her closed face. For that night at least, she was safe and at peace with a friend.

The next day we rose late, and I insisted on buying her lunch. Back to the Lobster Pot it was and she tucked into her favourite steamed fish and rice. When she wasn't looking I slipped $10 dollars into her bag. I didn't see Noi again for a day or four, she'd got another long-time customer one of the girls told me.

Shortly before I left she spotted me at the crossroads bar. She ran up, she was with a customer, and hugging me pressed something into my hand. It was the $10 dollars.

'Thankyou, thankyou - I okay now, I have customer.'

I felt the briefest of hot tears melt on my cheek, she kissed it, and then she was gone, back to her customer who was shifting awkwardly in the sun. I left two days later. I never saw Noi again.

yechydda,