Welcome to the end of the world
by Tom Vater
[ places - october 04 ]
Tom's book is wryly affectionate about Thailand, where he is based, and the neighbouring countries in which he works, but this interview with a paedophile is uncharacteristically but appropriately bleak - Val
He's well-dressed, like a business man in civil fatigues.
White, British, straight-backed, stuck in pressed blue jeans and a chequered shirt. He's bald and wears glasses, not too thick. The hair inside his ears, thick, grey and bushy, is trimmed into a neat dark hedge.
I am standing in the mud of the main strip of Sway Pak, a village of whorehouses outside Phnom Penh. The Khmers call it just Km 11.
He looks up at me from his can of Coke that he's sipping in a small café opposite Number 21. All the places look the same but they have numbers. There's only one café. It's full of white men.
He stares up at me fixedly and grins, "You cannot photograph It, you know. Welcome to the end of the world."
Km 11 main-street is a muddy dirty trail of slime between two rows of shacks and concrete two-storey buildings. Those look quite new. Because the entire place burned down a few years ago.
Almost every house has an open front, partly protected by shutters with scores of young girls inside. At the turn-off from the main road a huge sign in eight languages proclaims, "We love safe sex so please wear condoms."
Behind both sides of the strip, dense clusters of trashed shacks lean into a stagnant expanse of tepid water. The buildings are home to hordes of children and mean-eyed men who breed fighting cocks. The animals sit everywhere where there's shade under great Rattan baskets, eyeing each other and all passers-by with distaste.
I am getting used to the Cambodian skies, always gun-metal grey and forever shifting. I just stand there and watch the girls ride by on a BMX bike in this weird doom-laden light.
"You could just pay for them $5, then you can photograph them in the rooms, you wouldn't even have to fuck them."
The Englishman watches me with clear eyes and continues, "It's really something this place. I feel that if you have made it here you know something about Asia"
I nod and look down the street again. I've had a look around. The village is piss-poor, like most villages in Cambodia. The girls look very young. One Mama-San, the ubiquitous fat lady that sings, offers me a 14-year-old, "or younger," and she points upstairs. The girls are dressed in cut-off jeans and skimpy tops, many have children's figures. There's a few hard-looking guys around but security is low-key. There are no police visible.
It's six pm. The sky is heavy with clouds.
Dieu cuts an elegant figure as she sweeps past the café and smiles. Dieu is from Vietnam and her dress is marine blue, tight-fitting and almost long enough to be soiled by the mud of Km 11. Moments later she is back and sits down. Dieu is 17 and speaks good English. Her mother lives in a near-by market.
"In the morning I go to school." In the afternoons and evenings, she tries to keep her long dress clean, stalking through the mud, looking for clients. She is scared to be photographed. I don't insist and after a moment she asks me if I want to fuck her.
The Englishman continues, "Of course this is not worst place, not the hardest one. That's up by the lake back in town. There it's $3 a fuck for a Vietnamese and across the railway lines it's $2 a fuck for a Khmer."
I ask him how young the youngest kids were that he's seen here.
"There used to be an interesting gentlemen here called Mr Drummond, a Vietnamese man I believe. He was quite well-known in Phnom Penh and he operated out of one of these places," he points across the road in a matter of fact way.
He reminds me of the Marathon Man. But the Marathon Man was in a cheesy movie with Dustin Hoffman, this guy is real.
A couple of girls come over to us and hustle hopefully with painted smiles. After a while they decide we are not worth it and slink off into one of the shuttered entrances of their homes, their prisons, the ditches that someone was kind enough to dig for them. Dieu remains composed and eyes the camera on the table in front of me with distrust.
"I went upstairs with Mr Drummond once and he had two girls there." He pauses and gives me that stare again, curious, as if he continuously measured the impact his words had, while not really caring at all. A complicated glance, free from guilt or remorse, liberated in a detached, inhuman way. What I'd call extreme.
"One was 10 he said, the other one 12, apparently." He pauses again. "I only fucked the older one though." He carries on, "But that Mr Drummond disappeared. Yes, he was an interesting character."
I ask him how it feels to fuck these young girls.
"Oh well," he says. I think he doesn't understand the question, then he points at a child playing Badmington in front of us.
"I fucked her but she wasn't that good." He grins, sips his Coke and explains, "The good thing, the really great thing was that they had a shower in the room, because in the last place I went to it was down the corridor and you had to take all your belongings with you if you needed a piss."
He looks pleased. It's an answer, I guess.
I ask him how safe it is.
"I never come here in the evenings. Too much trouble. Khmers brawling. All the foreigners except for the Japanese come here in the afternoon."
He points at the 10 or so other twisted and bent white human shapes that sit in the café like vultures, smoking Marlboros, inhaling deeply and staring into hell. Everyone is cool. They are all in the club, amongst friends, people with shared interests. I'm cool, camera casually slung across the shoulder, taking pictures every now and then. The clouds keep rolling across Km 11. It's beginning to drizzle. Time is short but I don't want this conversation to end yet. I have tapped into something else here, the human dimension gone absent without leave. Terrible and yet familiar. The girls in the street continue to play badminton, a few fumble with mobile phones. Perhaps ringing to another place just like this one, perhaps calling their mums who have sold them here.
"I bring a bag of cheap plastic trash every time I come here. That's what you should do if you come here again. Lipstick, cheap perfume, that kind of thing." He laughs, "And look, I'm all out."
I ask the Englishman about STDs. I never ask him his name.
He throws me a look of little concern.
"I use my own condoms here you know, so I don't think it's too much of a risk. I have heard of only two men who got 'sick' in Cambodia and not many in Thailand either."
He shrugs and carries on, "I went to the other place by the lake. I tell you that's out of this world completely. Just wooden shacks built against a crumbling hillside. You have to go in and down some stairs in the back to get to the girls. Cheap, $3 a fuck and it was very strange. In the room where I found her, there was a man-sized hole in the floor with a 10-foot drop onto the hillside. God knows what was going on there."
He grins again, waves at a passing group of girls. No one waves back.
"One way to make sure it's safe is to check. I always take a torch with me. One of those little Mag-lites does the trick. The other day, up by the lake, I saw this young Vietnamese lady. I wanted her, so once we got in the room, I told her to lie down and open her legs. I had a good look and she was full of vaginal warts, so I didn't fuck her, just paid and left."
I don't know what to say to that but the Englishman carries on without prompting, "Most Vietnamese girls are clean, you know. The Khmers are dirty people, Phnom Penh is dirty, so the girls are dirty. But cheap."
The white men sit together in the small café, yet each of them sits alone, looking away. I have no lighter and have to ask several times. I get the light but no eye-contact. The men are like shadows and their eyes are bad.
"I got here just at the right time, 3pm, by motorbike. Look, my friend", he points at someone who's just getting into a white car, tinted windows, engine running, another shadow pushing out of Km 11.
"He has a car. I like the bike. But if you are really poor you can always take the bus."
He speaks to me like a teacher or tour guide, he doesn't patronise. He explains his world, he doesn't care.
Dieu gets up, smiles down at me briefly. Not a friendly smile I think, but not bad either, just empty. I watch her move along main-street, holding the hem of her beautiful dress just above the mud.
The Englishman points at her and says, "She's been here for quite some time. Her mother sold her to one of these places and lives round the corner. Once a month she turns up and collects money."
I say good-bye, the night is near, the gun-metal sky has faded to black and belongs to whisky-crazed Khmers that descend on Km11, drinking, fucking, shooting at each other and occasionally lobbing a hand-grenade or two down the street.
I jump on my motorbike. Yan, the driver, is surprised I don't want to stay and take one of the nice ladies. The Englishman looks briefly across at me, then I'm gone. I can't remember some of the best things he said but for me at least, he made Km 11. As we head back for the main road, I realise that I have not seen a single attractive girl at Km11. There are more beautiful women in any market in Phnom Penh. Km 11 is rough, as twisted, creepy and dysfunctional a place in the world as any. As we pass the sign at the entrance another white car with tinted windows slowly spins towards darkness. Welcome to the end of the world.
