The Lady In The Tree

2 ENTRENCHMENT-2

They liked the system but couldn’t see much until someone activated it, usually by walking past Lek’s front gate.

“That’s boring, isn’t it?” said Lek one afternoon in Nong’s at lunchtime. “I thought we would be able to see everything like in a 7/11.”

“No, I did say that they were motion-activated, so they only switch on if something the size of a person or big passes in front of them. You watch the screen and I’ll go into the shop.” A minute later one of the eight dark grey boxes flashed on showing Craig entering the shop and taking a packet of crisps off the shelf.”

“Did you see me?”

“Yes, that’s twenty-five Baht you owe us,” said Lek, “but that’s brilliant, isn’t it. Ayr?”

“Yes, I am impressed. I see what Craig meant now.”

“The camera remains on for about three minutes after the object has left it’s field of view and you can enlarge the image to full screen by pressing an F key. F1 for camera number one, et cetera. So, F1 for this camera.” He demonstrated and the image of the shop filled the screen, but went grey again a few seconds later as the three minutes had elapsed. That’s like preview when you take a photo with you camera.

Ayr leaned over and flicked through the options, Somebody was walking past Lek’s front gate.”

“So, what do you think, ladies?”

“We told you once,” sad Lek.

“Well, I think it’s brilliant,” said Ayr.

Lek had gotten out of the habit of praising Craig, but she nodded, “Yes, it’s fine,” although she couldn’t bring herself to say thank you.

Lek’s problem was that she had worked in Pattaya hoping to find a wealthy falang to marry who would be able to keep her in the manner to which she had never been accustomed. It was true that she had first gone there to earn enough money to save the farm, but in those days she hadn’t known anything about foreigners. However, after talking to more knowledgeable co-workers, she had realised that marrying a foreigner would be a short ladder into the lap of luxury, which she had never thought possible for someone like her – a farm girl who had never been anywhere.

Almost as soon as the bank loan had been paid off, she had met Craig, the first man to have come back for her because he loved her and she had fallen in love with him too. Now she sometimes regretted having allowed her emotions to rule her actions, because she hadn’t checked how much money he had before settling down with him. She had only seen that he obviously had a lot more than all her family put together and more than anyone she had ever known well, but she realised now how little she had had to compare with his savings.

After nine years, the money had started to run out and he had had to sell his apartment in Barry. However, Lek had earmarked that as their holiday or retirement home or even their pension fund and so when that had had to go to keep her daughter in university, so had optimism for the future. That was sad enough, but the first real harbinger of what was to come, although she hadn’t fully realised it at the time, was when she had bought the suan from her mother.

She had effectively stopped being a farmer more than twenty years before and had never had any intention of becoming one again, but now she had a small plot of land and she was farming it. She had even been talking to Ayr about buying more rice fields together! These were retrograde steps in Lek’s plans for the future and she was not happy about it at all.

On marrying Craig, she had assumed that her working days were over for ever, and that her travelling and frolicking days had begun. They had too, but within ten years, here she was, a farmer again. She had escaped it for twenty years and had to do some horrible things in the process, but here she was, back on the land and getting brown skin and broken, dirty fingernails again.

The problem was really that she could not blame Craig, because he had never said that he was rich, she had convinced herself that he was and she got angry about that more and more often, especially when she saw other ex-bar girls with rich husbands.

Yet she didn’t even have a car!

She hated herself for the way she spoke to him sometimes, but she couldn’t stop herself, not all the time anyway, despite the fact that she knew that she had a lot to be grateful to him for. When she had squandered all the money that she had saved and Goong had left her showing off by playing cards every day, Craig had stepped in and sold his flat to pay for Soom to stay at university.

She was well aware of all that, but she couldn’t keep it at the forefront of her mind all the time and it was then that she lashed out at Craig, although he had done nothing except not be as well-off as she wanted him to be, but she hadn’t checked that in her rush to marry a falang and secure her future.

When she listened to young women talking about how great it would be to have a falang husband now, she wanted to laugh out loud, but she couldn’t, not without giving her reasons and that would mean losing more face than she could bear.

She could see no way out, she was stuck in a working environment with a husband who would never be wealthy and the only person she could complain about it to was him and she did. Too often and too spitefully and she always regretted it, but by then it was too late. Craig was the only one who wouldn’t laugh at her or fight back, so sometimes, and it was becoming more frequently, she made his life a misery.

She was amazed that he hadn’t left her already. She would not have taken so much injustice.

And now, on top of all that, she was getting death threats from the local mafia, who might shoot her or destroy her livelihood. She had never had problems like these before and she had never expected to have to face them, and if Craig had had the money she thought that he had, she wouldn’t be facing them now. However, she still could not hate him, because it wasn’t his fault, it was all hers. She had wanted to retire on his money at thirty-one years of age and that had been unreasonable, she could see that now.

Her mother had pointed out to her one day, that all of Craig’s falang friends that she had met were fifteen to twenty years older than he was, making them thirty to forty years older than Lek. Since Lek and most of her friends were about the same age, that meant that they were going out with men up to twice their age. She had congratulated Lek for not having done that, and, at the time, Lek had agreed, although now she was not so sure.

All those friends with older men were now well-off with secure futures because of their husbands’ pensions and savings after working for forty to fifty years, whereas Craig had stopped earning decent money when he had moved to Thailand to be with her at fifty. She dreaded to think what she would do in later life when he was dead – still farming her tiny suan at the age of seventy?

The future was vey bleak in Lek’s mind.

There was one more scenario that she feared, Craig becoming ill. She worried herself sick with the thought of him becoming senile, which would mean she would have to take care of him without even the meagre amount that he might make from his writing. That was why she had had to go back to work, she told herself, to build a nest egg for when Craig became a burden. She couldn’t just send him back to Wales, because he had no family there who could take care of him, since he had never had any children.

Sometimes she sat on the toilet and just cried over the probable future that her Karma had provided for her, despite having been a good person in her own eyes.

She knew that some of the wives of the old falang were working out ways of getting rid of their husbands, if they became very sick or insane, but she knew that she could never do that, and perhaps not even out of love, although she thought that she did still love him, but out of a sense of loyalty and duty. After all, he had done nothing wrong and had paid for Soom to go to university and now she had only one more year to go.. That would ease the drain on their resources, but it was still a year off and anything could happen in a year.

He had promised her an exciting future, well, this was not what she thought he had meant, so perhaps that was the one thing that he had done wrong.

He had held out the dream of an exciting future, and all he had done was dump her back on the land to get broken fingernails and dark skin. She had believed him when he had promised her that – she had needed to believe it after ten years in Pattaya’s s*x tourism industry.

What she didn’t often remember though was that she would not have been able to return to her village without a trophy husband, and then she would have missed seeing her daughter growing up completely and she would not have been there to help her mother in her old age either. At thirty-one years of age, Lek had also been worried about what her daughter would think of her if she were working in a s*x bar in Pattaya, even if it were as a cashier and not as an escort. She also ignored the fact that a cashier’s wages would not have been enough to fund a university education, even with the money she had put away for the purpose.

Craig was aware of what Lek thought, because she sometimes taunted him with it when she was angry or had drunk too much with her friends. They had used to have blazing rows, but now they had found ways to minimize the intensity of the outbursts. Lek tried to go straight to bed after her shower and Craig refused to talk to her if she started swearing which she only did when drunk and was a clear precursor to a row.

Craig had his own theory about what was happening, and they had discussed it several times when the opportunity had arisen.

He said he thought that she was going through the menopause early.

Since being menopausal was not a reason for losing face, Lek thought that it might be possible. It was certainly better to admit to that than ingratitude, which her mother had suggested once or twice and so had a few friends, although they had not remained friends for much longer after saying it. At one stage, Lek was going through old friends at an alarming rate for someone living in a village, which was another reason why she was now trying to curb her temper.

Thais do not like shouting and will not be shouted at, but Lek seemed to have forgotten that during her time in Pattaya, where life looks more glamorous, but is really quite coarse.

However, that only made it worse for Craig, because it meant that she could not vent her anger on anyone that upset her, so she took it out on him. A Thai woman who did that to her Thai husband would soon be sporting a black eye, but she knew that she could get away with it with Craig.

∞

Ayr and Lek spent all morning cleaning up the flat, after the intruders had trashed it, and she had a specialist take the car away to have the paint and graffiti removed or the car resprayed, since it was covered by her insurance. In the afternoon, she left Lek in the shop while she led a detail of six men to do some work on Lek’s suan. She had had an idea during the night and wanted to try it out. Craig and his assistant were there as well installing three CCTV cameras in the trees one at either end of the garden and one in the middle, since it was long and narrow. There was a gate at each end and the four sides were protected by a barbed wire fence seven feet high. The problem had been that the chains that secured the gates could be cut and the gates could be scaled, rendering the fence pointless except for keeping out stray dogs.

“What are you up to, Ayr?”

“Oh, I have an idea I’d like to try out. Lek said that it would be all right.”

“I don’t doubt that for a moment, but I wasn’t asking why you were doing it, just what you are doing.”

“Yes, sorry… We are going to try to make this place less attractive to thieves and vandals. Our efforts and your cameras should ensure that Lek doesn’t get any more problems.”

“Great, well you carry on. I want to have these three cameras working before nightfall. It’ll put another three channels on our TV’s.”

Ayr and her crew worked among the mapang bushes and banana trees and along the perimeter fence. They seemed to be digging holes.

Craig adjusted the sweep of the motion sensors and their sensitivity. The signals would be picked up by a receiver in the shed, and then uploaded to the Internet.

He was all finished by six thirty and they left to see how Lek was getting on.

“See you in Nong’s when you’re done, Ayr. Don’t forget that it gets dark at seven at this time of the year.”

“I’m not likely to, but thanks anyway. We won’t finish tonight, so we’ll have to come back tomorrow anyway. I won’t be long. I can’t wait to see your cameras working again.”

Craig told Lek a white lie for no other reason than that he wanted a drink with his wife.

“Lek, telak, I’ve finished putting the cameras up in your garden, and Ayr is finishing up now too. She said to ask you to lock up and have a drink with her in Nong’s. It’s six forty-five anyway and it’ll be fun to check your cameras. Can you bring your laptop with you, I put mine back in the house on the way round.”

“Yes, sure, you get the laptop and I’ll start locking up.” Craig waited a few minutes by the front door for Lek to finish and then they walked next door.

Ayr was not far behind them. Craig opened the laptop and went on line. While Ayr and Lek caught up on the days events, Craig tried to remotely control the information that was available on screen from the three cameras in the shop, the three in the suan and the two in their own garden. He set them up as a grid of two rows of four grey rectangles, but none of them was showing anything.

“There you are, ladies, what do you think?” he said, spinning the laptop through ninety degrees so that Ayr could see it as well. They giggled to each other and then looked at him as one does when indulging a child.

“Er, there’s nothing there, Craig, just eight grey boxes.”

“Yes, that is true, but that is good news, as I said before. That means that no-one is trying to rob you blind or vandalise your property. That’s a good thing, or not?”

They went back to chatting and left him to it. Craig dank his beer and concentrated on the screen. It had worked earlier on, so it had to be working now. Fifteen minutes later, he became excited.

“Look, look, ladies! Camera eight, in Lek’s suan, has come on!”

They stopped talking and looked at the image of something whitish on or near the rear fence on the screen.

“Is that someone climbing over?” asked Craig, peering at it hard.

Ayr and Lek studied it too.

“It is! It’s an intruder,” shouted Lek, “our first intruder! It’s one of next door’s chickens sitting on the fence!”

Lek and Ayr laughed loudly, and so did Craig, although not right away.