He decided to wait until twelve-thirty to start his first tour. At midday, a fat, old man made a huge splash in the pool. It took Craig by surprise because he had been engrossed in his book, but he looked up to see if a greeting of some kind was in order. The man was not looking at him, but he caught sight of a small, young woman hiding from him behind a bush not five metres away.
She was looking at him, then at the man in the water and giggling. The old man shouted at her: “Spring ins Wasser” – German for ‘jump into the water’. The woman was obviously shy of Craig, so he looked down at his book, until she ran past him, dropped her towel at the last moment and slipped into the water.
Craig watched her for the last few seconds and she knew it and wasn’t too happy about it either. They were probably used to having the pool to themselves, he thought. Ten minutes later, an old couple came down, also German, as it turned out. They were both as brown and as wrinkled as walnuts. He was twenty kilos overweight and she was about twenty kilos underweight. They were lappers – swimming up and down the pool, obviously counting out a predetermined number of laps before they could go for lunch.
The first German was quite adept at keeping out of the way of these serious swimmers, but his girlfriend, just hung onto the side as if an undertow would suck her away if she let go. Each group, the man and his girlfriend, the couple, and Craig studiously ignored one another, although Craig had not started it.
‘Very friendly, he thought, ‘very friendly indeed’.
Meanwhile, Lek had got on a Baht Bus outside the compound, gone right to Pattaya Klang and then had to change bus to turn right again as the one she was on turned left towards the beach. She was in her cousin’s house fifteen minutes later. Beou’s daughters were in school, so they had the place to themselves.
“How did you get on in Craig’s town, Barry, isn’t it? Did you like his friends and family?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Lek, “I wasn’t joking yesterday when I said that I loved everything about it except being away from my daughter and a few others in the family. I want to go and live there, but that will take some work too, because Craig has his heart set on living here. With me, of course. Still, I can work on that one. There is time enough.”
They both laughed and hugged. It was great to be in cahoots with each other again. They really got on well, more like sisters than cousins. Lek had worked for Beou in the bar for ten years but even then Lek had had a special position that none of the other girls could ever have achieved.
“Well, look at it this way, telak, Soom is still only young and cannot speak English anyway – well, not fluently, eh? So, maybe it is better to get Craig to teach her before you all go over there anyway. That will take a couple of years and by then he may want to go home again. Don’t worry. As you say, you have plenty of time. Let’s see what fate has in store for you all.”
Lek had told a white lie to Craig, she hadn’t been invited to lunch, well, not a prepared lunch anyway. The two friends wanted to cook lunch together as they might have done if they were back in the village, where it is normal for visitors to help prepare the food. There, if you are not asked or allowed to help, you know that you are not being considered a close friend.
So, the first job was to call another old friend from the village, Noi, who also worked at Daddy’s Hobby but as night watch woman. She had arranged to get off early to be with her oldest friends. They met up in the market and when Noi and Lek saw each other they ran at each other and hugged.
“Oh, Noi, I have missed our chats together. I tried to wait for you to come on shift at the bar last night, but we were so tired and the taxi came early. Still, here we are together again, all three of us. Like ‘The Three Sisters’, three peas in a pod, eh?” and they walked off arm-in-arm to shop for their favourite foods.
They spent an hour shopping, an hour washing, chopping, preparing and cooking the food and an hour eating it, although, in proper Thai country style, they prepared three or four dishes and started eating them first, but cooked other courses at the same time, so that there were always half-eaten and totally fresh, different courses on the table at the same time
By the time they had finished they were truly stuffed and there were still kilos of food both cooked and unprepared. After an hour dozing, chatting and watching TV, Beou, put the left-overs into cartons and put the cartons into three carrier bags so that they were shared equally.
Noi would take hers home, because she had to meet her daughter after school, but Lek and Beou weren’t finished yet. They would take theirs to Daddy’s Hobby and start the party up again, but with a lot more people this time.
Craig thought that he had got away with a free pass as he nodded to the security guard on his way out of the hotel compound, but in fact he had been granted one, so that Lek could do what she wanted. He thought he would stroll quietly down Soi Buakhao, the same way Lek had gone, but turn off before the end and make his way down to one of his favourite places the ‘Pig and Whistle’ on Soi Seven, which was not far from Beou’s bar.
He intended to stop at quite a few of the intervening bars along the way though and get to Daddy’s Hobby between four-thirty and five – late, as is normal in Thailand. He knew that Lek wouldn’t consider an hour as being late.
As he had hoped, every bar along the way was devoid of customers, because it was still too early for most people, but they were full of bored bar girls and he got come-ons from every bar. They took a standard form, which was usually: ‘Hello, sexy man’ or /and ‘Come have drink with me’. He took more than a few up on their kind offer, but he had no intention of doing any more than drink a few beers.
Most of the girls were beautiful and scantily-clad. Not many of them could speak English well enough to hold a decent conversation, but if the truth be known, they weren’t really interested in talking either. If you didn’t want sex and you wouldn’t buy them a drink, you were soon left to your own devices. This was not a problem, because there were literally hundreds of bars on his chosen route and thousands of girls. He could not possibly have even one small beer in even five percent of them.
There were usually some nice surprises too though. You would meet a girl who was willing to just talk for a beer or even for nothing, because it kept you spending money in her empty bar and because she was bored out of her mind. If there were clients then it was only fair to move on. These were the sort of contacts that Craig was hoping for today. Just a few nice chats with young, beautiful, half-naked, female strangers.
He always made a point of telling the girls the truth, although he would never reveal were he was staying. After all, the last thing you need is some drunken, desperate woman knocking on your hotel room when you and your wife are asleep. And that had been known to have happened, or so he had been told. You never knew what to believe in Pattaya, but it sounded plausible enough to make him cautious.
Today he could tell the girls that this was the first day of his holiday. That always caught there attention, because it could mean that you will stay with them for a month (most people go for a month’s holiday), or at least take them out often or it could mean that you didn’t know your arse from your elbow with regard to Thai bar girls, so they would get more money out of you. The second question was usually: ‘How long you stay here’ and the third, though less important question for most girls was: ‘You have Thai girlfriend already?’
Most girls didn’t mind ousting another Thai if she didn’t know them and some didn’t care whether they did or not, but those were rarer – much rarer. It was usually the older, desperate pros who fell into that category – and the loners and the free-lancers.
As a bar girl had once told him: ‘We bar girls don’t cheat on wives, we are just the rope that cheating, husbands hang themselves with.’
In time, he got to the ‘Pig’ and went inside to see who was there. It was four o’clock, not the busiest of times, which revolved around meals: midday, five to six and seven to ten, but there were a few faces sitting at the bar that he recognized from his previous visits months before.
“Hello, Craig, how are you?, When did you get back?,” said a voice from down the bar. It was one of the people who either owned or managed the bar/restaurant-cum-hotel.
“I’m fine thanks, Rob. How are you? We got back yesterday evening.”
“How’s that little darling of yours, Lek, isn’t it? I thought I saw her walk past here a few minutes ago with another woman arm-in-arm, but I thought, no, that can’t be Lek, she’s in Wales with that Taff.”
“It probably was her – with her cousin, maybe. She went for lunch at her house and I’m supposed to be meeting her at about now. But she’s all right, can you ask one of the staff for a pint of Guinness, please? Do you want one?”
“Nah, not for me, thanks. I’ve got an hour off, then I’m on till closing. It’ll start getting busy soon. Can’t be pissed on parade, can I? Well, not every night anyway.”
The pint of Guinness duly arrived. The taste of burnt wood or charcoal that characterized Guinness for Craig was always a lot stronger in Asia than in Europe. Probably because of the water supply there he thought.
“What’s the news then, Rob? Anything monumental happen while I was away? A few more Scandinavians fell off their balconies pissed, I suppose?”
“Nothing much has been going on. The season has been quiet and hot. Except for Songkhran, of course. That was busy, but then it always is. Even if there were no falangs the Thais would make up for it. It’s always good. A couple of jumpers, yes, if you believe that. I think most of them get pushed. Pissed, robbed and pushed. Not only Scandinavians either. Quite a few Germans too.”
Rob left and Craig had another Guinness. Nobody else seemed to recognize him and he couldn’t be bothered to start a conversation with any more strangers, so he just sat there and watched the girls walking to work and the falang coming back from the beach, wondering about where all this living in Thailand lark would eventually take him.
In truth, in private, in his head, he had no idea at all, although he was more confident when talking to others. He knew what he wanted to do: live in Thailand with Lek and support them by working on the Internet. And that seemed possible, but so much was beyond his control that anything could go wrong any day with just minute changes in the law or the exchange rate. It seemed unlikely that no law or no currency valuation would not go against him in the twenty-five years that he reckoned he had left to live there.
That was too much to hope for. What then? Would he have to go home broke with his tail between his legs? Would he be able to take Lek, even if she wanted to go with a pauper? The future was exciting, but it was also very uncertain and there was nothing he could do about that at all.
He and Lek were riding a canoe in white water on an unknown river.
So, on that sobering thought, he finished up and ambled down to see Lek, who he assumed would be waiting for him at Beou’s.
And there she was, looking as beautiful as ever, standing behind the bar chatting with Beou and a couple who were sitting in front of it.
She saw him coming and waved and whooped as if she been doing it for years. “Hello, sexy man. You want to have drink with me? Where you come from?,” she shouted. The three women laughed out loud and the man smiled broadly. When Craig got closer, he stood up and held out his hand.
“Hi, my name is Bob. I’ve heard a lot about you. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine thanks, Bob. How are you?”
Craig struggled with the man’s face as he shook the girl’s proffered hand. He knew her all right though – that was Mia, an old friend of Lek’s from up-country, but Bob with the Australian accent, Craig was sure he’d never met him before.
Craig had met Mia before though and in such a way that it would take senile dementia for him ever to forget her. She had behaved even more ‘friendly’ in the past than the new girls last night, although Mia had been shrewd enough to avoid being seen doing it. Mia was dangerous, but he liked her. However, they were all sitting right in the front of the bar with Mia’s fairly long-term boyfriend so that should be all right, Craig was reasoning.
He sat down next to Mia, Lek put a beer in front of him and Mia squeezed his knee.
“Oh, Bob! I love this man. He is very good friend for my good friend Lek and he help me too. You un’erstan’? You not jealous, neh? Craig only good frien’.”
Bob nodded and smiled at Craig. Craig smiled, but grimaced inside knowing the truth that was being shared between him and Mia, but which had not been told in its entirety to Lek and Bob. He felt as if he were being held to ransom.
“We good frien’s long time, neh, Craig? You, me and Lek?,” she said as her hand moved up from his knee to his thigh and squeezed it. “I know Lek very long time and I love her friend, same she love my friend, neh, Lek?”
Lek nodded enthusiastically, saying: “Mia and I know each other from baby school and we met Craig nearly one year ago.”
That elicited another squeeze on the thigh, but higher up and a kiss on the cheek. Lek was sitting behind the bar, so she couldn’t really see exactly what was going on, although she knew from the direction of Mia’s arm where it was roughly.
Bob knew exactly and he wasn’t too pleased about it.
He realized that there was more going on than he knew about, but didn’t know what. Lek, for her part, could see the growing consternation on Bob’s face, but she put it down to jealousy – an emotion that she detested and had given up when she had left her husband more than ten years before.
Craig had asked Lek before whether Mia was an exhibitionist, and Lek had reacted with surprise, but he knew from previous experience with Mia that she was ‘up for anything’ as long as there was a reasonable chance of not getting caught, although he suspected that she did want to be observed one day really.
Mia was like a ‘shy’ convent girl who drops her towel while changing and is so flustered that it takes her three minutes to cover up again.
The only one sitting there who knew that except Mia herself was Craig, because he had been on the receiving end. He would happily be there again, if the truth were known, but the stakes were higher now for him and he had had his fun.
Still, she tempted him more and more as the drinks flowed and Bob was becoming more are more cheesed off.
When Bob went to the toilet and everyone behind the bar was working because of the rush, Mia leaned over, put her hand on Craig’s bulge, slowly undid his zip and said in his ear:
“Your trousers are open, do you want anything while I’m here?” and she stroked him inside his trousers.
‘Where was Lek and her guardians when you needed them’, he thought, ‘when resistance was low?.’ Bob came back and Mia said:
“Craig you zip kaput Look!”
Three or four by-standers looked and laughed.
“The zip is broken, I’ll go fix it and go pee-pee,” he said in pigeon-English.
Craig slinked off to the toilet with his hand over his crutch, trying to keep up the illusion than the zip was broken. Lek blew him a kiss from behind the bar. Once in the toilet, Craig did his business, zipped up and walked outside, only to be grabbed by Mia.
She pulled him into a shadow, lifted up her skirt and put his willing hand into her knickers.
“I shave my pussy,” she said, “but you think I do good job? You shave for much longer than me; can you help me learn to shave pussy good same your face? Have little bit hair here, by pussy, what you think? Feel here. Oh, too wet, not have hair here. Sorry, what you think? Cannot grow hair in there, eh?”
After a fondle and with a great deal of will-power, Craig said: “Mia, you said that you had finished all this stuff because you had your own boyfriend. Bob, I suppose. If you are happy with him and I am happy with your friend Lek, what the hell are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she said, “Just having some fun” and she walked back to the bar.
Craig followed a few yards behind, but he was troubled.
This was beyond his ability of deception. Not that he wanted to deceive Lek anyway. The problem was that he couldn’t help feeling flattered and attracted to Mia. In fact, this was the first time anything like this had ever happened to him. Mia was unique amongst his friends or even casual acquaintances.
When he retook his seat, Lek smiled at him from where she was standing in font of the customer she was serving and Mia smile at him too.
Bob was looking the other way quite studiously.
Eventually, Lek tired of helping out and went to sit with Craig. Lek was on his left and Mia was on his right, so to talk over the din, they both had to lean across him and shout in one another’s ears. Lek put her hand on Craig’s thigh to steady herself and Mia put her hand about a foot higher on the other one.
Whenever Mia thought that no-one was paying attention, she stroked Craig’s crotch lightly by wiggling her little finger. She pretended to be really drunk too, but maybe that didn’t take much pretence. Eventually, the night finished and everybody went their own way.
On the way home, Lek said:
“Mia likes you, I can see. If I didn’t know any better, I think I might have reason for concern.”
“Ah, don’t worry.,” said Craig, knowing that he would never shag Mia or swap her for Lek in a month of Sundays.
As much fun as Mia was.
1 3 WHITHER NOW?
One afternoon, while they were drinking iced coffee on the balcony, the conversation turned to the future.
“So, Lek, we have had a bit of a holiday, so now it’s time to start making some plans. What do you think? What would you like to do?”
“Well, first of all, I want to go see Soom and my Mum.”
“Yes, OK, we’ll go in two days, if you like, but I mean longer term than that. Where do you want to live for a start?”
“That is up to you, darling. I give you two choices: here in Pattaya or in my village, Baan Suay.”
“OK, that’s a start. I must have the Internet, so if we can get the Internet in the village, we still have two choices, but if we cannot, then we live in Pattaya. We could buy or rent a condo or house here and have a small ‘hunting lodge’ affair in the village for holidays.”
“Hunting lodge? What is ‘lodge’? No hunting in the village. Only hunt frogs, not tigers. Cannot hunt tigers now. Police take you and not have tigers any more. I don’t understand.”
“Yes, all right, wait a minute, calm down. I don’t believe in hunting for fun anyway. I mean a small house. A hunting lodge is just a small house. Like a cabin. A small wooden house.”
“Ah, I see! We have many hunting lodges in the village. Not many for chow though – I mean for rent. Maybe buy land and make small house. Can do?”
“Do you have Internet in the village?”
“I don’t know, telak? I think nobody has a computer, but I don’t know. We can go look in two or three days.”
“Yes, good idea. I want Internet in our room too, so today I want to go buy a USB wireless modem. It’s a bit like a mobile phone, but only for the Internet. I saw one yesterday in Pattaya Klang for 3,500 Baht, so not too expensive. Then I don’t have to pay 20 Baht every hour in an Internet shop. Now I pay 100-160 Baht every day. Then I can work from the room or the beach or anywhere I like.”
So, they drank up, grabbed the laptop and set off. Once in the shop, Craig spoke to the assistant:
“I am interested in that wireless modem.”
“Eh?”
“That wireless modem there.”
“Eh?”
Then she said to Lek in Thai:
“What is the falang talking about? I cannot understand him. Does he speak English? I can speak a little bit of English.”
“He is speaking English, but I don’t know what he wants either. I don’t understand computers at all. Ask him again, but tell him to speak slowly.”
“What you say? Say again, but speak slowly, please, sir.”
“OK, I want that wireless modem there. That one, right there.”
“Ah! Wi-Fi? Internet Wi-Fi. OK. Here. Look.”
Craig inspected the device, took out his laptop and switched it on.
“I can try now?”
“No, cannot. Not have ca’s.”
“What? Not have ‘cars’. What are Internet ‘cars’? Lek what is she saying? Can I see the instruction book, please, Lek?”
There was a flurry of Thai and the manual was handed over.
“I don’ know how to tell you, but we don’t have ‘ca’s’ for modem. I don’t know what is ca’s.”
So he sat down to read the manual.
It was only in Thai. He couldn’t read it and Lek couldn’t understand it. Then the sales assistant took out her mobile phone, took the back off it and pointed to the SIMM card.
“Not have ca’s in modem. Must buy, then can use for Internet.”
“Ah, I see. Must have SIMM card.” The two women smiled and nodded. “OK, if I buy Wi-Fi and a SIMM card will it work everywhere?”
“No,” she said, “only in Thailand. If you go to Cambodia, stop working.”
“OK, does it work everywhere in Thailand? Everywhere? Even Sukhothai, Uttaradit, Phitsanulok, in a village up there? Or only in big city?”
“Everywhere, sir. It working everywhere in Thailand. Even in village.”
“OK, I want one Wi-Fi and one SIMM card, please.”
He was putting his laptop away, when she said:
“You can buy Wi-Fi, but cannot buy ca’s. Not have.”
“What?,” he was starting to become hot and bothered now. “Why not?”
More Thai, then Lek said:
“You must get SIMM card from a DTAC telephone shop.”
That meant nothing to Craig, but he bought the modem and they left. He wasn’t sure about the DTAC SIMM card, but Lek led him straight to a shop near the apartment. When he saw the shop, he realized that he’d seen hundreds of them before. There were several in every main street in Pattaya. DTAC is one of the biggest mobile phone providers in Thailand and with thousands of girls and several million tourists a year, Pattaya could support hundreds of phone shops selling DTAC SIMM cards.
Craig’s cost 750 Baht a month for unlimited usage, which worked out far cheaper than the roughly 4,000 a month he was spending then and it was much more convenient. It also still left them with two choices of where they could live.
Things were looking up.
They went down to Daddy’s Hobby, where Craig plugged in his new toy and was chuffed to find that it worked like a dream. They sat there until the battery on the laptop ran out and then Craig wanted to go home. Lek had a simpler solution and she had the laptop plugged into the mains. The adapter was always in the bag because the battery only lasted two hours and Craig regularly spent eight hours working in the cyber cafés in one session.
He was off again and, with a beer, was as happy as a sand boy.
Lek admired the way that Craig could sit self-contained, detached and completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. At times like this, she had noticed, he would be the only person in his world. Nothing would distract him, yet he would react to his name. It fascinated her. Lek found it hard to concentrate on anything for more than fifteen minutes at a time. For that reason, reading novels was not her favourite pastime.
Lek was telling everyone how excited she was to be going home for a few days to see her family. They all made the appropriate noises, wished they could be going too and those from Baan Suay asked if she would take small presents home for their families for them. It was a custom and Lek naturally agreed. Some girls even rushed off there and then to get something from a local store, while it was not busy in the bar.
Gifts would be things that were impossible to get in the village like chocolate for the kids and dried squid for the grown-ups. A pineapple from Chonburi, the Province that Pattaya is in, is also a luxury as they are famous for being the sweetest in Thailand. Children’s clothing was also often sent back by mothers missing their children.
Some of the girls who knew how to, wanted a go on the Internet. It would save them time and money not to have to go to an Internet café and Craig found himself reading, translating and writing some quite pornographic message to amorous falang lovers. Little did they know that a bloke was writing them, he thought. The image of their faces if they had known made Craig smile.
“Ha, ha! Man tell man he want to kiss him all over. Funny, neh, Craig? If my boyfriend John know you send message, he want box you and me. Tell him I wan’ to kiss him down there. Good joke, neh?”
Craig was not very impressed but wanted to help out and so did so.
It went a log way to getting him back in with the girls and he loved every minute of it. It would become a regular part of his frequent visits to Daddy’s Hobby.
They went to the apartment quite early at nine o’clock, but both were tired after a week of parties. They went to bed after a shower and Lek fell asleep almost immediately as she often did. It was a knack that Craig envied.
He had had problems getting to sleep all his life; for as long as he could remember. Even as a very young child, he could remember going downstairs to ask for a drink of water, just because he was bored that he couldn’t get to sleep. His parents’ advice had always been to just lies there with closed eyes as ‘a rest is as good as a sleep’. He didn’t believe it any longer, but he still couldn’t get to sleep.
Usually, he just got up and read, but this evening he had a new toy, so he switched the computer on and got ready to work. It would set the trend of the way things would be for the rest of his life, but he didn’t know that yet.
Craig had made a few web sites before, but he knew that they were amateurish, so he set about looking for instructions on how to do it properly. He didn’t want to have to learn HTML thoroughly, so preferred the route of using an editor.
After three hours of research he had selected a British HTML editor from a short list of six. It was not cheap, but by two a.m. it was on his desktop and he was preparing to launch it. This was typical of Craig, he always wanted to be ‘doing it’.
By six a.m. he had created a web site that was better than he had ever made before. At least it looked good in preview, so he looked around for a host for the web site. Within the hour, the web site was uploaded to the host and a decent-looking web site was live on the Internet. When he looked up, Lek was standing behind him.
“You get up early, telak? I think you not go to bed. Why you not sleep, my dear?”
“Don’t worry, Lek, it’s just that I’m excited with this new modem. It allows me to do what I want at any time of the day or night. I love it. Look, I made my first web site in Thailand. Not bad, eh?”
“Very nice. You can make money with that?”
“Well, no, not yet. As it stands it will not make money, but....”
“So, I don’t understand. Why you work all night for web site that not make money? Seem stupid to me. I don’t understand Internet and web sites. Tell me later, I go to sleep again for one hour.”
He didn’t feel too discouraged, but he knew that he could not ever be certain of being able to make enough money on line to keep them together either. It was another facet of their new life together that was not guaranteed. In fact, so far there was nothing guaranteed except that anything could happen.
When Lek woke up again at eight thirty, Craig had applied for a Google Adsense account, a PayPal account, an Amazon account and several others. These would allow him to monetize his web sites, if he were accepted and it would mark the first step to being able to live in Thailand without financial worries whether it be in Lek’s village, Baan Suay, or Pattaya.
There was little more he could do now except think of an idea for a good web site, so he undressed and crept into bed beside Lek with sunlight streaming in through the French windows leading to the balcony.
Moments later, he heard:
“Telak, I go get tickets for go to the village tonight. OK? I want to see my daughter and my family. See you later. We go tonight, if I can get tickets. Or tomorrow if I cannot.”
Lek was getting up, before he was completely asleep – this too would become a regular occurrence in their future.
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