Maya - Illusion

And they didn’t have any money and they didn’t have any reserves or a pension pot. Soom would discover bitter disillusionment early in life, when she realised that university had ensured her an office job, but not a good one. There were several glass ceilings that only money could smash and they didn’t have any and never would have.

She was too old to go back to ‘work’ and earn good money now, but in five or ten years, she would have no chance at all of working in Pattaya. If she were going, she would have to go now or forever hold her peace. Could she rely on Craig to get her out of this awful situation? She would truly be happy to go to sleep now and not wake up again.

Craig woke Lek up at seven o’clock as it was getting dark outside.

“What’s the matter? Why are you waking me up? Oh! I forgot. We’re in Laos. What time is it?”

“Seven. There are a lot of people walking around outside. Shall we go out and have a look? Are you hungry?”

“Yes, OK. I’ll just brush my teeth. Five minutes.”

“OK, Lek. Say, don’t you think we should get some Lao money, some ‘Kip’? We paid in Baht this afternoon, but I think they just round everything up when you pay in Baht. Let’s get five thousand Baht’s worth and see how it goes. I can pay for the hotel by credit card. I don’t know about the visa. What do you think?”

He could hear her gargling in the toilet. When she came into the room, he asked what she thought of the plan.

“I couldn’t hear a word of what you were saying! I only heard ‘blub, blub, blub, blub, blub’. You knew I was brushing my teeth, why were you talking to me? What did you say?”

He told her again.

“Yes, OK. We can get some Kip. You have very many Kip for one Baht, I think. You want to get now, tonight?”

“Sure, as soon as possible, eh? Do you have my new Lloyds ATM card? The green one they sent me last month?”

“Yes.” She rummaged in her bag and handed it to him.

“And the PIN – you know the number – security.”

“I don’t have. You not give to me. You have.”

Craig wanted to blame Lek, but he couldn’t remember having given it to her. She might be right, but that made the card useless.

“Oh, shit. We cannot take money from the UK bank. Do you have your card?”

“No. I not take any gold or cards with me, I think it is not safe in Laos, because I do not know here.”

“Right... so we cannot get any money from the banks and we are on holiday in Laos. Great! I’m not blaming you... I am just saying. I am thinking aloud. How much money do you have?”

“Thai money?”

“What else? Do you have any Chinese?”

Lek was already counting out some notes. “A little more than seven thousand Baht.”

“OK, the visa costs nineteen hundred, I believe, so we have money to last for now, but we either have to go home early or.... This is bloody daft, eh? Who goes abroad with no money, eh? Only us! Come on, let’s go out. We can change a thousand Baht and enjoy ourselves. We can deal with it all tomorrow. Are you ready? Come on then, my dear.”

They turned left out of the hotel and walked the three hundred yards to the bureau de change that they had spotted earlier in the day. The exchange rate was two hundred and fifty-one Kip to the Baht and Lek was as delighted as a child at Christmas to be given a quarter of a million Kip for her one thousand Baht note.

She felt very rich and very superior, which were sensations that she was not accustomed to.

“Look at all this money, Craig! Look!”

“Yes, Lek, it’s a thousand Baht in Kip. The numbers don’t matter, it is the value that counts.”

But she wasn’t listening again, just counting the notes over and over.

“Where do you want to eat, dear?” asked Craig.

“Oh, we can eat anywhere with this sort of money,” she replied. “How about that open-air restaurant on the pavement near the hotel? The food looked very nice and they had the big prawns that you like.”

So, they walked back towards the hotel and sat at an empty table in the restaurant area. When the waiter came, Craig ordered two beer Lao’s, ice and a glass. When that had arrived, Lek went with the waiter to select the food that she wanted cooked for them.

Lek was in her element, but Craig was feeling rather stupid for not having checked his ATM cards.

The food that Lek picked was fit for a king. They had a dozen huge prawns, a large, steamed, pink river fish, spare ribs, salad and shellfish. Just as they were struggling to get to the end of it all, Craig ordered another round of beer. The waiter looked at his watch and said:

“It is nine o’ clock. We close now. Everything in Vientiane close now, but you can have one more, if you are quick. You must finish before I clean everything away... OK?”

Craig agreed. Lek and Craig stared at each other.

“Surely, the capital city of Laos doesn’t close at nine thirty, Lek?”

“That is what he said. Look around you. Lights are going out, people are going home.”

Lek spoke to the waiter when he returned with the beers and the bill. He confirmed that the city did indeed close at nine thirty by order of the government. Lek was not all that bothered, because she normally went to bed at nine thirty anyway, but she was shocked when she saw the bill of a hundred and eight-five thousand Kip.

∞

They rose at seven thirty, showered and went down for breakfast. There were both Thai and ‘European’ styles, so they were both happy with that. Then they went back to the room, picked up their paperwork for the visa and went back down. Another surprise awaited them- they needed sixty thousand Kip to get to the embassy and back in a broken-down, tuk-tuk motorbike taxi, so they had to change another thousand Baht. Lek was not so impressed with the two hundred and fifty thousand Kip she collected after seeing how fast it could run through her fingers.

At the Thai embassy, Craig collected his form, filled it in, stuck his two photos on it and waited for his number to be called. When it was, he went up to the counter. The immigration official looked over his document quickly and said:

“Marriage certificate.”

Craig called for Lek, who came running, as she hated to keep officials waiting. They talked. Lek looked in her bag. Then said something and the official said:

“Next!” A man tried to take Craig’s place at the counter.

“Hey! Stop pushing! Wait your bloody turn! Excuse me, what is the problem with my application?”

“Your wife no have marriage certificate and no have house book. I cannot gib you non-immigrant ‘O’ visa. Next!”

“No, wait! So what can I do about it?”

“You can go back and get all your papers I need. Next!”

“But that will take a day or more...”

“Not my problem. I must see papers. You not have papers. What can I do? Next!”

“Isn’t there anything I can do? How about if I change my application for a two-month tourist visa?”

“No can do, I know what you want now already. I cannot do that. Next!”

“This is crazy!”

“Send your wife home get. You can go too or wait here in Vientiane, now please go. Next!”

Craig turned to glare at the man who was hovering behind him. He backed off a little.

“OK, I can accept fax of papers this one time, because I see you have long visa before. Now go. Next!”

Craig bumped the next guy in the queue as he exited the line.

“Isn’t it bloody marvellous? Why do I need to prove I’m married to get that visa. Your ID has your name ‘Williams’ on it; your passport has bloody ‘Williams’ in it. It’s not a very common name in Thailand, is it? Do they think I searched Thailand for a Thai woman called Williams so I could get a ninety-day visa instead of a sixty-day one? Jesus! That makes me so angry. Well, now we are stuck here. Tomorrow is Friday, so if we hand the forms in then, we won’t get them back until Monday. OK, back to the hotel.

“And we don’t have any money! Shit, shit, shit, shit, sodding shit!”

Back in their room, Lek phoned her mother to go into their house to get the documents and fax them to their hotel. Her mother was pretty worried about taking on such a hi-tech venture, but she assured Lek that she would get it done with someone’s help. Meanwhile, Craig Skyped his friend in Barry, Blond Billy, and asked him to lend them £300 for a week or so. Billy agreed to wire the money care of the hotel.

The money actually arrived before the paperwork from Thailand, but they eventually had everything they needed and Lek went back to the bureau de change with $420 to exchange some of it for a million Kip. Holding a million Kip had as much effect on her as two hundred and fifty thousand had the day before.

In the afternoon, they went for a walk along the Mekong again and then back to the hotel. It was really too hot to do much and there didn’t seem much to do anyway.

In the evening, they ate at a different, but similar outdoor restaurant and the bill at nine thirty was about the same. Lek concluded that Vientiane was a lot more expensive than Bangkok and if she could have gone home the next day she would have, but there was still the visa to get.

The visa application went smoothly enough, although the transaction could not be completed in one day. It has to be applied for on one day and collected the following business day, which meant staying until Monday. They both reckoned that they would have had enough of Vientiane by then to make going back home no hardship.

Lao people were friendly enough and Vientiane was easier for Westerners that most Thai cities including most areas of Bangkok, but there was so little to do and it was so expensive.

On Monday morning, they got up just in time not to miss breakfast, ate slowly and then checked out. They booked a taxi to the bridge but asked him to wait at the embassy first. The embassy opened for the collection of visas after lunch at one-thirty, so they had plenty of time to start their long-winded return trip home.

Sitting in the bus to Phitsanulok, both were analysing their ‘holiday’. Both thought that it had gone well considering and both felt better for having spent so much time alone away from Lek’s distractions in the village. As she felt the tablets kicking in again, Lek reached out under the blanket and took Craig’s hand and he squeezed it back.

3 The Death of a Neighbour

Lek and Craig both benefited from their trip to Laos in that their relationship grew closer and they started spending some time with each other again. Craig still had to work all day, but Lek made a point of meeting him at Nong’s for a couple of hours at five o’clock every day, whereas these meetings had dropped to once of twice a week over the previous year and even then Lek had spent most of the time on the phone talking to her daughter in Bangkok or her cousin in Pattaya.

Craig had actually wished she would stop coming, because he found it distracting and unsettling to have her talking loudly in a language he couldn’t understand to people he couldn’t see when he was out for a relaxing break between two long sessions of work. More than once he had reminded her that it was a mobile phone, so why didn’t she ‘walk over there’ and chat to her family.

It hadn’t helped their relationship any, but it had been at rock bottom anyway.

Now she was being ‘nice’ to him again, but he couldn’t help wondering how long it would last. Craig was sure that either she was menopausal or worried about something and the ‘something’ could only be her daughter or money or both.

“How are your web sites doing, my dear?”

“I have a hundred and fifty-two now, but the global recession is still hitting them badly,” he replied somewhat shocked at the sudden interest. This was probably the second time she had asked about his work in eight years.

“I’m thinking of scaling back to a hundred web sites or less, because I cannot write enough articles every month to keep them all looking fresh. At one five-hundred-word article a week for each site that would mean writing twenty-two articles a day or eleven thousand words a day. That is unsustainable...”

Craig looked up but he could see that he had lost her.

“If I am going to be writing... Lek, Lek! If I am going to be writing eleven thousand words a day for web sites, I might as well write a book, mightn’t I?” he joked.

“Yes, dear. You could write a book on Thailand. Write some stories. Maybe they sell better than web sites.”

“I was joking. I’ve never written a book in my life... I wouldn’t know where to start. Writing five-hundred-word articles on interesting topics is easy enough, when you get into the swing of it. I can do five a day for a few days, but I can write three a day for ever. However, three a day means twenty-one a week which will only support twenty-one web sites, but twenty-one average web sites won’t provide enough income to support us.”

Craig loved to talk about his work, but no-one else in the village shared his interest and he never met anyone else. Or rarely, so whenever anyone showed the slightest interest, he tended to go over the top, as he was now. Lek tried to maintain a level of interest, but she had no idea what he was talking about.

“Darling, you know me. I care about people: my family and my friends, I know nothing about machines and computers. It just goes in this ear and out that one, but nothing sticks. I am stupid, I have no education. I never go high school and never go to university. My mother not have money to send me. That is why I want Soom to go. I don’t want her stupid like me, I want her clever like you.”

It always broke his heart to hear her talking about herself like that.

“You went back to school a few years ago, didn’t you? I thought that was for high school.”

“Yes, now, at the age of forty, I can prove that I am as clever as a sixteen-year-year old. Great! I am still twenty-four years behind. Do you think anyone wants to give a job to a forty year old woman with the brain of a sixteen-year-old? No, I am on the scrap heap. I am even not fit enough to work in the rice fields like women half my age again. My Mum is sixty-er, er... something and she can still work in the fields all day if she has to, but I would not last one hour and you would not last ten minutes.”

She started laughing at the thought of him planting or cutting rice by hand. She found the mental image of Craig up to his ankles in mud hilarious. “I am sorry,” she said with a hand before her mouth, “but when I think of you..., you standing in sloppy mud planting rice, complaining about your bad back and wanting a cold beer because there is no shade... Oh, my Buddha. You are very funny. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

“You working with all the old ladies and they are working faster than you and you complaining and wanting a chair, a beer and an umbrella in the wet rice field... Oh, my Buddha.”

It was nice to see her laugh again. She touched his hand, clinked glasses and put hers to her lips. At the last moment she had to put the glass down again as another mental image caused a laughing fit.

“Oh, I must tell my Mum later! I will tell her that you want to help her in the field next time, but she must take a chair and some beer for you.” And she was laughing again. Craig didn’t mind in the slightest being the butt of her jokes – anything to see her laugh again, He wished she would do it every day.

“Oh, Lek, that money we borrowed from Billy in Barry. I had forgotten all about it. Had you? Anyway, I sent it back to him by PayPal today and thanked him very much. He pulled us out of the shit there big time, didn’t he?”

“Yes. How stupid we were. I liked Billy the first time we met him in O’Brien’s. And the other guys we used to sit with on market day when it was freezing cold outside... Look at the time, Soom will be thinking that I have forgotten her.”

At six o’clock Lek always phoned her daughter. It was their designated time; it was the time she should be arriving in her bedsit from university or ‘school’ as Craig called it. Lek would never demean such a respected establishment of higher education with the word ‘school’, although she had respect for schools in their place. She realised that Craig could be so flippant about university because he had attended one and familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, but she didn’t like him using that term when referring to Soom’s university.

Lek looked forward to phoning Soom every day, so took up her mobile and rang her.

“Hello, where are you now?” - the standard greeting - “Have you eaten yet? Good... Are you well? How did university go today? Good.... Good. Me? I’m fine. Yes, he’s all right too. He’s sitting here with me now, drinking beer. Soom says ‘Hello’. He says ‘Hello to you too’. What are you going to do tonight? Yes, that’s right... Do your homework, read a bit, watch TV for a while and then early to bed

“Tomorrow is another day. You want to be fit and bright for every day in university. You have worked hard to get there, now you have to work hard to stay there. You will do that, I know you will..

“OK, yes, OK. Phone me if you need anything at any time of the night or day. We are well, don’t worry about us. Gran is fine too. She sends her love. Yes, OK, thank you. We miss you too. Bye-bye for now. Bye...

“That was Soom. She says she misses us... and you. I mean including you. She is doing well though. I miss her too. I want to go down to see her. Maybe stay with her for a few days, what do you think?”

“If you stay with her in her bedsit, then I can’t go. That’s what I think, but I don’t mind, if you want to go on your own. I can survive here alone, on my own, with absolutely no-one to talk to for two days, if that is what you want.

“I know how much you miss her. I don’t mind, really! I’m only joking with you. Look, it’s, er, Tuesday today, so why don’t you go down on Friday morning, stay the weekend while she’s off school and comeback on Monday morning?”

“University, dear. Soom finished school last year – nearly eighteen months ago. She does go in on Saturday morning for private lessons, but that is a good suggestion of yours. OK, I’ll book a seat in the minibus and leave on Friday. Thank you for understanding, darling.” She cupped her mouth and whispered the words ‘I love you. Choop, choop.’ “You would only be bored in Bangkok anyway. It’s no good you coming, is it?”

It was true that Craig did not like big cities, but he said, “Yeah, right! I’d be bored rigid what with all those bars, girls, strip joints, A-Go-Go bars and everything. I mean... you get too much of that around here.... Enough to last a man a lifetime.”

Lek thought he was joking, but even after eight years, she was rarely completely sure. They both had such different senses of humour and Thai humour was different from the British variety anyway. Probably Asian was different to European in general. So she put on a weak smile and studied his face.

“Only joking. I’m happy for you to go and I’m happy to stay here. All alone, while you’re out going everywhere in Bangkok. Boring old Bangkok. While I live in up in Baan Suay, the only place I’ve ever lived without a pub.”

Now she knew he was joking. Maybe speaking the truth in jest, but that was his way. He didn’t mind her going and didn’t mind staying at home.

“OK, thank you my dear. I’ll let Soom have a shower and then ring her with the good news. I am really looking forward to it. Isn’t it exciting? We haven’t been separated for more than a few hours for eight years.”

He had had his little joke, so he didn’t push his luck. He just smiled back at her. He was wondering if he could get his friend Murray to come around and take him out in the car. He had never explored the local village ‘bars’ – if there were any.

Just as Lek was about to phone her daughter, Nong came running out.

“Lek! Lek! There has been an accident. Mrs. Ng just told me that a petrol tanker has knocked two local ladies off their motorcycle in the lane. One is dead and the other has less than a ten percent chance of pulling through. Who is it?”

“Oh, how awful! But how would I know? I’ve been sitting here for the last hour.” She told Craig about the accident.”

“But no-one knows who they are?”

“I think some people know, but we don’t know,” she replied, wondering whom she could phone to find out who the victims were.

Nong spoke up after making a phone call. It never took her long to know the local gossip, it was why she was always busy, people called in for groceries and to find out what was going on. In the absence of a local paper or radio station, Nong was the repository of all local knowledge.

“One was that young Mrs. Ma who lives... lived just round the corner. The one with two young children and another on the way. She’s the one that died outright and the other one was your next-door neighbour, Joy. They’d been out shopping apparently and were coming back through the lane when BANG! Head on into a petrol tanker making deliveries around the villages.

“He was actually due here, but was redirected down the lane by road-workers. The driver is beside himself with grief. The doctor had to sedate him. Joy is in hospital, but she was dragged a little way by the truck so she’s in a very bad way. They think she’ll die. Just a ten percent chance of pulling through.”

Craig couldn’t follow much of the conversation, but he could see other women gathering at the shop to discuss it. When Lek started explaining to Craig, Nong darted off, anxious to tell the others what she knew and maybe learn a few more details.

When Lek got up to join the other women, Craig slipped into the shop and helped himself to another Chang. He knew that there would be no decent service for at least an hour and he didn’t mind helping out. Eagle-eyed Nong spotted him in her peripheral vision and nodded him her consent.

Craig was roused from his daydreams, by a collective sharp intake of breath, but he could guess what had happened.

When she had all the information there was to be had, Lek rejoined Craig. “Joy just died too. Isn’t that just awful? Ma had two young children and was just pregnant with a third and Joy, well, she is or was a grandmother, but only fifty years old and looking after her daughter’s baby... and her husband’s not well. I know you don’t like him much, but you used to get on well with Joy, didn’t you?”

“Yes..., we never actually spoke because we couldn’t, but when she saw me sitting here she always used to shout ‘go home’. I used to like to think that she meant ‘go home to your wife’ and not ‘go back to Britain’. She probably didn’t know any other words in English. Yes, I liked her... she used to ask me to dance at parties, remember?”

“Yes, I liked her too. You realise what this means, eh? I won’t be going to Bangkok this weekend. Not if they have the normal seven-day ceremony. Still, Bangkok will still be there next week, so no rush.

“Perhaps, Soom ought to come back to pay her respects. She has known Joy all her life. I must phone her now. Are you all right for ten minutes?” She inspected his bottle, “OK, I’ll get you a fresh one first. I think I’ll have one too. It’s no good waiting for Nong, I’ll get them myself.”

As soon as Lek had sat down, she was back on the phone to Soom.

“Soom can’t come back until Friday. She finishes early on Fridays and can cancel her..., what name did you say again? Her ‘tutorial’ on Saturday morning, then, if she goes back on Sunday afternoon, she won’t miss any classes, so that’s all right, isn’t it? Maybe I could go back with her. Couldn’t I?”

“Well, obviously you could, but you won’t see much of her during the week and if you only get to see her every few months, why use up your visit so soon after she has come home? Why not leave it a month and then go down? That way you see her twice in two months. Sounds better to me.”