The Dream

2 THE UNINVITED PARTY GUEST-1

2 THE UNINVITED PARTY GUESTAt three pm, Soom and Lek left Craig to his beer and his writing and took the food to Lek’s mother’s to start the serious work of preparing for the party, even if it was only a small one. They stored the meat, fish and fowl in the fridge and began cleaning; peeling and chopping herbs and vegetables to the sound of Thai popular music and occasional glasses of lao khao for Lek, as the other two never touched the hard liquor.

The sound of music, laughter and the pounding of pestles in mortars was coming from nearly every house in the village as sons and daughters who worked away arrived home to wish their mothers a happy day.

Mothers’ Day was one of the biggest non-religious Thai national celebrations.

However, preparing for a party was when women could let their hair down in almost exclusively female company. Most men would still be working, so the women who stayed at home could have their own pre-party hilarity, because they would be busy when their guests arrived.

This was why Lek was happy to leave Craig in the hotel, where he would not be in the way.

It suited Craig too. He still could not understand a group of Thais talking excitedly to one another unless they slowed down for him on purpose and Lek said that that put a damper on it for them. He could see women across the road calling in on friends to join in the merriment and get a glass of lao.

It was like going from house to house at New Year to have a drink with the neighbours.

He wasn’t expecting any visitors, because everyone would be too involved with their own families and those without children like Murray and Ross happened to be out of the country, but that was all right, he was used to being alone, and anyway, he got more work done like that.

He looked at the time on the k****e that he used for most of his out-of-office writing now; it was just past three, so he had three or four hours before he would be missed. He chuckled at how he had used to estimate his work in beers. In those days, not really so long ago, he would drink a beer an hour and write six hundred words. He could still write six hundred words in an hour, but it took him ninety minutes to drink the beer.

He was slowing down, or his body was and he could feel it. It was the real reason why he wanted to spend some time in Britain.

He was almost sixty-five and felt well, except for a little back trouble once or twice a year, but wanted a professional opinion. He trusted the Thai doctors in the big hospitals, but not so much the ones working in the provinces. Anyway, he had his pensions to sort out, although he knew that that could be done on line.

He did not have a real reason for having to go home, it was more of a feeling. He wanted a last MOT, a last full check-up, because he did not expect to live much past seventy, none of his male relatives had reached seventy-five. He had not told Lek that, he didn’t want to worry her, so he had used his old promise to her to take her to live in the UK after Soom had finished university instead. OK, he was five years late, but she had never complained about that.

In fact, she didn’t complain about much at all these days, she was happy with her jobs, her positions of authority and looking after Shell. She was also proud of Soom. He was the only one who hadn’t ‘made it’, he felt, and he thought that he would have more chance of doing that if he lived in a country where most people spoke English, so that he could participate in book signings and the like.

Where he lived, Murray was the only person he knew for six hundred kilometres that had read any of his books.

It was a way of killing three birds with one stone, but he worried that Lek might not go with him. It was far from a foregone conclusion, but it still had to be done and if he had to go alone, it would be the first time in fifteen years that they had been separated for more than a weekend.

It was a prospect that frightened him, but a little less each day that he had to face it.

Before he left the hotel, he invited Nong and Kurt to his mother-in-law’s house after they had locked up. They thanked him, but said that they had already told Lek and Ayr that this was one of the best days of the year for business and that by midnight they would be ready to fall into bed. He had expected them to say something like that and let it go without arguing. They were completely happy with their business and their own company and did not need anything or anyone else.

When he arrived at the party just after six, he was sat down, and plates of food and a beer were placed before him. His food was less hot than what the others were eating and they were drinking lao.

“We’ve had a rare visitor, you’ll love him if he’s still about, but Thai people are frightened of them, especially the old Thai people”, said Lek. “He’s gone under the house”.

“What is it”, asked Craig, “a snake?”

“No, not a snake”, she replied, “dua heer. I don’t know in English. Soom, what is dua heer in English?”

She looked at Craig and pulled a face expressing revulsion, “A lizard, a big lizard. Wait…”

Craig thought that this might be the highlight of his evening and waited with bated breath.

“A Clouded Monitor”, she said after a minute or so. He was unfamiliar with that particular species, so Soom had the page translated into English and passed him her phone.

“It’s bloody huge! Is ours that big?”

“No, maybe seventy-five percent”, replied Lek.

“If they can reach six foot, that’s four foot six! Wow! And he’s under there?”

“Yes, it is very bad luck. My Mum is not happy. Some people eat them”.

“It says here that they have been an endangered species for forty years and that means you can go to prison for killing one”.

“People here don’t know that… they don’t like them and can have free food, so they eat them”.

“Well, I hope you don’t eat our dua heer or I might report you and I hope you’ll spread the word that these animals are rare”.

Craig spent a lot of time looking out for the big lizard, but gradually got into the party as he became caught up in the atmosphere, and, since the signal from his WiFi unit wouldn’t reach Mae’s house, he borrowed Soom’s Smartphone to read up on the reptile. Apparently, the monitor was active by day and ate beetles, although he told Lek that it ate snails, cockroaches and geckos to give it a more favourable press, since those are the three animals that most rural Thai housewives hate the most. He thought it was reasonable too, because it would take an awful lot of beetles to fill a four-foot lizard.

Lek told her mother and the others and that started a buzz which lasted a while and appeared to make Pang feel a lot better about having the ‘bad omen’ under her house, where it was probably curled up for the night.

They soon forgot about the monitor and brought out the karaoke machine to join in with the music being played in most of the other houses in the street and Shell danced with Soom and Lek in her playpen.

The following morning, after she had taken Shell to nursery on her small tricycle, which they did every now and then to strengthen her legs, Soom joined Craig in his office.

“Would you like me to help you look for that lizard, Craig? Mum’s gone into work, and I’d like to get a better look at him as well”.

“Yes, sure. You’re not afraid it will bring you bad luck then?”

“No, I love animals. Thailand has changed a lot since my grandmother’s day and is changing faster than ever now. I’m not even sure that gran went to school, but I don’t like to ask. My mother only went until she was twelve and her grandmother almost certainly never went. It’s amazing when you think about it. My great-grandmother spent no time in school, my grandmother maybe three or four years, my mother six years and I, sixteen years including university. That’s from zero to sixteen in four generations… in one century!”

“Yes, I hadn’t thought about it like that. In Britain that would be, at a guess: six; eight; ten and sixteen for me as well…”

“Yes, but your family is from a town, mine is from the countryside, and in Thailand rural people are much more superstitious that townspeople, so I have gone from a completely superstitious family to non-superstitious in one generation. That makes a very big gap between us… even between me and Mum and she has lived in a city and travelled abroad”.

“I think I’ve noticed that younger people are less religious and less… let’s say ‘traditionally polite’. You don’t see teenagers waaing, and a lot of them are pretty rude, especially the boys… being rude, I mean, not the girls”.

“Yes, I suppose so… they… we associate all the bunkum with old people and the old ways. It might not be fair, but that is how it is. Buddhism gets the blame rather than the bad monks who use Buddhism for their own ends, and bowing, curtseying, waaing and crawling on the floor is considered degrading to kids who have twice as much education as their parents. Perhaps, it makes them… us, arrogant”.

“All old people are superstitious and stupid, all young people are educated and smart, eh?”

“Yes, something like that. Am I like that, Craig?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve never seen you behave like that towards your family or me anyway”.

“Good, I’m glad about that. Are you ready to go and look for Lizzie the Lizard?”

“Sure, let’s go. Where do we start, your gran’s house?”

“Sure, but she could be anywhere. She probably got up at first light and they can roam hundreds of metres, so we haven’t got much chance of finding her. I don’t like to say this, but someone could even be preparing her for dinner right now”.

“But…”

“People don’t know it’s against the law… they don’t know she is an endangered species. They only see her as bad luck and free food. That’s what I mean about ignorance and superstition, but kids are learning about such things from the wildlife programmes on TV, especially satellite TV and the Internet, and at school, especially from the foreign teachers, so it is getting better, and pretty quickly too”.

“That’s something, I suppose, but all the rare animals will be eaten by then…”

“We still have wild tigers and elephants… OK, not many wild tigers and no wild crocodiles, but we’ve got huge snakes, they’re finding them every few months – monsters, eight to ten metres long… you see them on TV!”

“Yes, but what happens to them when the TV crew has left? Skinned for shoes and sold for barbecue?”

“I don’t know… I guess it’s hard to keep something like that in a zoo…”

“Yes, they can’t put them all in zoos, and they can’t put them back in the wild because they only found them when they were cutting the forest down for development. I bet they get tied up for a few days and if no-one wants to buy them, then it’s barbie time”.

“Yes, probably”, she agreed sadly as Craig pulled the lane gate shut behind them. “Don’t talk loudly now, or we’ll scare it. Be on the look out for a big brown lizard with yellow spots. It could be on the side of a tree or on the ground in among the fallen leaves, but it will be hard to see”.

They walked down the lane between Lek’s and her mother’s houses like a pair of Sherlock Holmeses, sometimes bent low to look under houses or sheds on short stilts, and sometimes upright to inspect trees. When they had checked the lane and then gran’s house, they went next door with the intention of spending a few hours combing the block and then going for lunch in the hotel.

“Can we look around your garden, please?” she asked her aunty who lived next door.

“What have you lost, maybe I can help?”

“We saw a dua heer last night and want to find her”.

“Filthy things, going to eat it are you?”

Craig heard the words ‘dua heer’ and ‘falang’ but did not understand much of the rest. When the aunty got up on her table and Soom started looking around, he asked her what had been said.