Craig swam for an hour and Lek watched and pretended to try to sleep. When he got out, Lek handed him a towel and began pulling on her jeans.
“I cannot sit here, darling, it is too hot and the sun move and give me black skin. I want to go to Beou’s house and eat lunch with her. You stay here, swim and read your book. It is boring for you to sit listen to me and my cousin speak in Thai, I think. No?
“I want to know everything what happen here when I stay in Wales. Too boring for you, eh? I want to speak Thai and eat real Thai food from north Thailand. Beou phone to me and ask me come for lunch. She ask you too, but I say I think you not want. You want to come, telak?”
Craig knew that he had been outmanoeuvred, but he didn’t really care. Lek was right, he would find it boring and this way, he could slip out to a bar and see who was about.
“No, that’s OK, don’t worry about me, Lek. I’ll see you later.”
“OK, thank you so much, telak. Don’t drink too much and I phone you later. Maybe see you in Daddy’s Hobby bar at four o’clock. Good idea, neh? OK, good idea. Bye-bye.”
She looked around furtively and then gave him a quick peck on the cheek. She was back in Thailand now and kissing in public was frowned upon even in Pattaya. He watched her walk away and could not help thinking how beautiful she was yet again. It was still too early to go out, so he took Lek’s advice, rummaged in the bag for his book and started to read.
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?”
