Topping up with Mr Esso

‘I am not imprisoning him in his room. Do you have a problem with that?’

Well, that was rather abrupt…bloody rude, in fact.

I was talking to the girlfriend of an attractive young man I have met.

Esso (Sor) is the eldest child by a previous marriage of Mum, a woman who runs a massage shop down the road from me.

Mum, as everyone calls her, is having problems with her marriage. Her new husband, father to their second child, Oo-ee, an 8 year-old girl, is seldom home.

‘Home’ is the massage shop where I met Mum, her son Sor, and Oo-ee several weeks ago.

Oo-ee dotes on her dad, and makes her preference for her father’s affections plain in her unpleasant exchanges with Mum.

Mum in turn stresses about the hostile way her daughter treats her.

‘By contrast, I never worry about Sor…even though he has no work, he causes me no bother,’ she tells me.

Sor, 28, lives with Mum and his younger sister at the shop.

They share the space with a couple of mor nuat (massage therapists), and any number of strays and waifs who appear to bail up at all hours wanting company.

Sor, who has a lovely smooth shape, has no regular work. 

Mum sent him to work with relatives in farms in the provinces, to no avail. He left school early, and reckons he lacks the intellectual rigour to go back to school.

He is painfully shy, and spends much of his day with his head bent over his smartphone, playing computer games.

Pow! Bang! Slam!

Isn’t that what they do?

However, I like him, and understand that he’s not the simple, idle young man that he might appear on the surface.

Sor, who wears only black T-shirts, wears his hair down the sides of his face, Korean-style. So much of his pretty, angular face is obscured by his trendy hair, in fact, that the first time I saw him I mistook him for a teen.

He’s so shy, I had to tell his mother that I wanted to talk to him before I could get him to utter a word.

‘Sor…farang Mali is interested in you,’ she said plainly.

That was two weeks ago.

The first time I visited, I went for a massage, but was taken by the friendliness of its owner.

I decided I liked the feel of the place so much that I called the shop a few hours later and asked if I could pay social visits. Mum agreed.

I went back that night. About half a dozen guests had gathered, ostensibly to celebrate Sor’s birthday, though I saw precious little of him. 

They were friends of his mother. She and her pals gambled and drank the night away, as they do most nights...the fact it was her son's birthday, it seems, was just a coincidence.

Sor came down the stairs of their three-storey place occasionally to visit the toilet. 

However, he would disappear just as furtively up the stairs again, without saying a word to me or anybody else.

Occasionally a manly looking woman appeared on the stairs too. 

‘That’s his girlfriend, Muay,’ said Mum.

She came and went without a word.

'What a modern family,' I thought. 'Mum doesn't mind if her young son spends the night with his girlfriend, as long as they do it in the privacy of his bedroom.'

That was back when I thought he was a mere teen.

In fact, Sor’s mother told me later that night it was Sor’s 32rd birthday.

He's older than he looks, though it's hard to tell from under all that hair.

A few days later, I asked Sor himself how old he was, and he told me he was actually 28.

It’s nothing unusual for a Thai mother not to know the age of her own child; I come across it often. Perhaps both are mistaken.

I was to go back another three or four times in the next week. Boyfriend Maiyuu was away, so why not?

Sor, who helps his mother run the shop, arrived in Bangkok five months ago from his home in Esan. ‘I grew up with my grandmother,’ he said.

Sor is having trouble fitting into Bangkok. The two massage therapists who work at the shop tell me he is ‘mean’ with money. 

I suspect it’s simply a case of Sor not wanting to commit himself to Bangkok, which is too big and busy for his liking. He's a country boy, after all.

‘I go out occasionally, but mostly I like to stay with Mum,’ he told me. ‘I rise early to take Oo-ee to school. Then I clean the floor of the shop. 

'I might still be awake at 2am or 3am the next day, depending on whether I have to take the mor nuat to see customers outside the shop,’ he said.

Sor takes the mor nuat – who, like him and almost everyone else I have met there, comes from the poor Northeast – to local hotels on his motorbike. Their customers can call the mor nuat at all hours and expect service.

I enjoy Sor’s company. He’s a so-called red shirt, who enjoys bantering about politics with his mother, a yellow shirt. 

The mor nuat, who fancied me as a potential catch until I told them I live with a man, now understand that I prefer Sor’s company, though they are not happy about it.

The shop attracts mainly Thai custom. Mum, who holds qualifications in massage therapy, has owned one or two other places in town.

When she moved to this one a few months ago she did it up at her own expense.

‘Sor was like you when he was young…he liked men,’ Mum confided in me one night.

That might explain why Sor likes white make-up, girly-style, and wears his hair in the style of effeminate Korean boyband singers.

It might also explain why his girlfriend looks like a ladyboy, though my mor nuat friends insist she’s real.

Anyway, Muay, as she is known, does not appreciate the competition for his affections which I represent.

Someone must have told her I was taking an interest in Sor.

Really, we are just friends. I enjoy teasing him about his quiet life. He appears to enjoy our exchanges, perhaps because he rarely meets anyone outside the shop.

Sor has big plans, despite his lack of experience in the workforce. ‘I would like to fix computers, though I would prefer to own my own shop than work for someone else,’ he said.

‘You will need capital for that,’ I reminded him.

When I was there most recently, about a week ago, I found Sor downstairs when I entered. He had dyed his hair red.

‘What do you think, Mali?’ he asked.

‘I am not sure what to say,’ I replied.

Sor laughed.

‘I obviously have too much time on my hands,’ he joked.

I had bought him and his mother a simple dish of oysters fried in egg batter.

‘I have never eaten fried oysters before,’ Sor said, declining to join us.

His mother and I decided to eat it instead.

Moments later, Sor slipped quietly upstairs.

I could hear noises coming from upstairs, but thought nothing of it. Apparently, his girlfriend was in residence, though no one told me. 

I asked the mor nuat, who like many Thais are expert liars, where he had gone.

‘You want to see him, don’t you,’ one asked.

Well, yes. You know how it is, dear.

‘Oh, he’s just up there with a friend,’ one said.

‘Oh, he told his mum to entertain you as he has a headache and wants to go to bed,’ said the other.

Bullshit.

I called Sor, and asked him what he was doing upstairs when he could be sitting at the table enjoying our adult conversation.

‘Why are you keeping yourself shut away up there?’ I asked him, jokingly.

The manly voice of girlfriend Muay came on the line. 

She must have wondered who had called, and snatched the phone from her hapless boyfriend’s grasp.

‘‘I am not imprisoning him in his room. Do you have a problem with that?’ she asked me.

I could barely believe what I heard. Muay must be half my age, and has never introduced herself to me, but spoke to me as if I was a mere dust mote. 

At the very least, she should be aware that I am a guest of Sor’s mother.

I ended the call without saying a word, so shocked was I at the abrupt way she spoke.

I asked the mor nuat for background on my new rival.

Manly Muay studies accountancy at a university in Kanchanaburi. She and Sor have been going out an impressive six years, though meet only once every fortnight or so.

I knew all that; Mum and Sor had told me as much themselves. Oh, well.

I complained to Mum about the harsh way she spoke to me. I am not sure she understood.

‘When he was 11 or 12, he used to wear makeup and do his hair like a girl,’ she added matter-of-factly, as if that was supposed to make him more appealing in my eyes.

Half an hour later, the happy couple appeared on the stairs, ready to go out for the night.

Both wore so much white makeup they looked like ghosts. Sor was carrying a handbag, which I assume belonged to his manly girlfriend, though who can be sure.

Several friends had turned up on motorbikes to meet them. 

Sor and Muay walked out the door without a word of goodbye to Mum, me or anyone else, which once again is nothing unusual for Thais.

I haven’t been back to the shop since, because I don’t appreciate Muay’s hostile manner – or the gutless way Sor let his girlfriend talk down to me.

‘She saw you as competition, so hit back at you,’ a farang friend told me, after I told him my frustrating massage shop story.

True. But will it keep me away from my new shy, red-haired, white-faced friend?

...What do you think?

Game on, dear!