The Lady In The Tree

1 TROUBLE AT T’ MILL-2

Nong brought Craig’s beer.

“Lek auw eek kwat nung duay, kap – Lek wants another bottle too, please.” It was obvious that Lek was in a bad mood.

“Cheers, my dear!” They clinked bottles. “I rang Ross and ordered a few security systems. He’ll bring some back with him and post the others. The video cameras work on movement, so we will always be able to see anyone hurting your business. Ross says he’ll post them the day after tomorrow and they will bring the rest in ten days,

“So, what do you think? That should go a long way to solving your problem, shouldn’t it, telak?”

“Yes, Craig, very good. You do know that I was only joking about taking a lover, don’t you?”

“No, I didn’t really, but I bet it did cross your mind as an option, didn’t it?” He watched a dark cloud pass over her expression. “I don’t mean that you considered doing it… I just mean that the option probably crossed your mind and you said ‘no’ immediately, which I am sure you did, because you are a loyal and faithful wife, I know that.”

She smiled enigmatically, but did not give a reply, although he knew that he was right. After ten years of living with her, he knew that Lek thought of most things.

When Nong brought Lek’s beer, Craig tried another idea.

“Khun Nong, khun loo layoo wah Ayr mee penha tee baan? Phom yahk wah mah khun bai non tee baan khun Ayr wahn nee, OK, mai?.”

Nong looked at Craig quizzically, and then at Lek, who said it properly.

“He’s trying to say: ‘You know that Ayr had a problem in her house,’ – he means the break-in – ‘I want your dog to sleep in Ayr’s house tonight, OK?’.”

Craig knew what was going on and listened carefully, as he always did, but couldn’t notice the subtle changes Lek had had to make to render it intelligible to a Thai who didn’t know him as well as Lek.

“Is that what you want, Lek?” asked Nong.

“It is not my idea, but it might help.”

“Yes, all right, when do you want to put him in there?”

“Mmm, have you fed him yet, and what time are you going to close?”

“I fed him two hours ago, and I will probably close at nine, but if you buy a few beers, you can still sit here and drink them. That is not a problem. Things are pretty quiet tonight, eh?”

Nong called Milo over and picked him up. He was a fully-grown, chocolate-coloured poodle cross, which stood a foot tall, but he was brave and would bark at anything that moved within four yards of him at night.

Milo would be the ideal guard dog, not because he was much of a threat, but because he would make enough row to wake the neighbours up, should anyone try to enter the shop.”

“Will you be safe without Milo, Nong?” asked Lek.

“Yes, I’ve still got my 38 under my pillow and I can scream louder than Milo anyway.”

Nong and Lek walked over to the shop with Lek and dropped Milo inside the door as Lek opened it.

“I’ll just pop inside and put some water down for him. Thanks ever so much.” Nong started back to her shop, pleased that she could help out.

“No, problem, any time. I hate thieves.. the bane of my life, they are… kids nicking sweets, their parents taking petrol and forgetting to mention it… You’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head when you’ve got a shop like mine, you know…” She walked off still muttering.

“OK!” Lek regretted triggering one of Nong’s hobby horses, because she could go on about petty thieves for hours. However, it did give her an idea.

She locked up and rejoined Craig.

“You really should run these ideas past me first. You know that I don’t like people to think that we can’t cope on our own, I lose face again now a little bit. Thai people don’t tell people everything or ask for help – only from family. I don’t like Nong to know everything.”

“Jesus, Lek! She already knows you had a break in! She already knows that there is not much you can do until Ayr gets back, so what is the problem? She lent you her dog? Big problem, eh?

“I just solved a problem for you… OK? Now, tomorrow you can get two of the boys to sleep in there and give Milo back! In fact, you should have organised that today already! Capiche? Lighten up will you?

“Not everyone has got a scorecard at the ready to deduct points from your face-count whenever you do anything.”

“Are you finished ranting now? That is what I said, you do not understand Thai people, because that is exactly what they do, especially in a village. Oh, they don’t have score cards like in ice skating, but they have very good memories… believe me, and so do I.”

Craig knew that he shouldn’t have made that last remark, because he did believe her.

“Yes, all right, love, I’m sorry for saying that, I didn’t really mean it, but you can’t criticise me for not helping and then shout at me when I do. It’s not very fair, is it? I might just as well crawl behind my desk and stay there – and say nothing!”

“Sometimes, it would be better, I think so too… I was just talking to Nong and she has a bee in her bonnet about theft from her shop, so why don’t you order one of those security set-ups like they use in the 7/11’s and sell it to her. You said you could order one from China through eBay, didn’t you?”

“OK, but she is a bit mean, what if she doesn’t take it?”

“If she doesn’t, one of the other shops will and there are at least ten well-off families that might as well. In, fact, order two or even three, with video cameras that can be linked to the Internet. Don’t worry, I’ll sell, you just install them. You can do that, can’t you? Good, no-one else around here is doing it yet.” Lek started to enumerate the likely local customers under her breath in the strange way she had of counting on her fingers starting with the thumb on her right hand. “I think we can sell at least ten, maybe fifteen, telak, what do you think? Good idea or no?”

“It sounds good to me, I’ll order them tonight. I know that many, many people in the village are on the Internet now, because I get so many f******k friend requests from people here. Last year there were only a few in total, but now there are a few every week. Yes, it sounds like a very good idea.”

“Internet is still new here, people don’t know about eBay and don’t have credit cards and don’t trust to send money to China to someone they don’t know for alarms. They don’t understand yet, but Thai people are not stupid, they will learn quickly, we must do it first.”

“Yes, OK, telak, I get the picture. I’ll get on to it as soon as Nong kicks us out of here.”

∞

The next morning, Lek got up at six fifteen, as usual, showered, made a bowl of rice soup for breakfast out of leftovers and took it in a flask to their shop, Northern Farming Supplies. She was normally there by seven anyway, but she wanted to let Milo out before he got desperate and had an accident. She opened up, set him free and sat at the small concrete table outside to have her meal.

They had two gangers running their workforce, Da and Bot, both of them from Mae Sot, as were most of the workers. Da was slightly senior, so she phoned him.

“Good morning, Da! Everything all right?”

“Yes, Khun Lek, we are already out. We’ve got the guys out in the fields as arranged yesterday… rebuilding the boundary paths between the plots and we’ve got two teams cutting rice.”

“Good, good. Look a few things have cropped up, so when you’ve got everyone settled could you come up here to the shop? Bring Bot with you too, will you? You’ll have to phone him and let him know, because I am a bit busy right now. What time? Oh, before lunch, say, tenish…. Yes, righty-o, you do that then, ring Bot and then call me back. See you, bye.”

She took her bowl into the shop, swilled it and the flask out under the tap, put the coffee machine on, and then had a quick look around for dog muck, but there was none, so she clicked the computer on and started her day’s correspondence.

Most of the emails were junk as usual, but there were a few offers from new suppliers that had to be looked into when she had more time. She quickly created a few rules that would direct them to the Suppliers’ Folder in her Inbox in the future and dragged and dropped those emails into the folder manually. Requests for work were dealt with in a similar fashion, and then she came across an email the like of which she had never seen before.

“Get out of the rice business! If you don’t get out, we’ll TAKE YOU OUT! You have been warned!”

She had to read it a few times before it sank in that it wasn’t a joke and that it really was addressed to Ayr and her. It crossed her mind that Nong had a g*n as well as a dog that she might need to borrow, but she put a brave face on, took up her ledger and started stocktaking.

Meanwhile, Craig was getting up too. He clicked on the coffee machine as he headed to the bathroom. The two mugs of water that he had put in there the night before had boiled by the time he came out, so he made his first mug of instant, took down the biscuit tin, and went into his office. He always left the laptop running, so he only had to move the mouse to bring it out of hibernation. He too ate his biscuits – three with each of the two mugs of coffee – drank his coffee and answered his emails, most of which were junk too, the same as for every other Internet user in the world.

He had nearly finished, when f******k beeped to say that he had a message. It was Lek.

“If you have time, please come to the shop. I want your advice. Love Lek x”

It was an unusual message for Lek, but it didn’t sound urgent so he drained his coffee, went for a shower and got dressed. Then he poured another coffee, left it there to cool, locked the house up and walked the several hundred yards to the shop.

“What’s the problem, Lek? Everything OK?”

“I not sure, take a look at this email, telak. It came this morning, or last night.”

He wanted to correct her English, but sensed that it would not be a good time.

“That’s not very nice, is it? Do you think it’s serious? The timestamp says it came at one eleven this morning.”

“I don’t know, but I think that I have to treat it as serious because of what has been happening, don’t you? I tried to ignore it when I first read it, but I can’t, it keeps coming back into my head. What do you think we ought to do about it?”