An Inopportune Love

Nee took in washing making their rooms smell of dirty clothes. That day she was crying over the ironing board. I didn’t speak Thai then but I knew her youngest sister. She did ‘ bitch on the edge of blousy’ and this was her place. Everything was hers: the fading pan-aristocratic husband nearly 30 years her senior, a pair of neglected vivacious daughters, the posse of buck male admirers.

She tried to explain. The demands for money had become intolerable. First it had just been the electric for the washing machine, then the water usage, now some kind of rent was being wrung from her. This insult after she had raised her younger sister and other siblings practically single handed since her teens and later given up a secure job to care for her nieces. She would leave for Ubon the next day.

I spoke urgently with Catherine. We had been looking for a maid since Min had found us this half-genteel apartment in Phra Kanong round the corner from her solitary digs. But the unknown we feared. How could we trust young Kit to a stranger? With Min, and Sumitra our middle class near-paranoidly anxious friend, never tiring of their horror Bangkok stories of kidnap and scam. You never knew who you could trust, they chorused until we had run out of not believing them. But this was different. Nee we knew. More than that; we knew her sisters, her nieces, even her broken down mother who ghosted among the offspring between whisky glasses. Moreover Kit liked her.

Catherine and I reckoned would have to bid high to cover the costs of her renting a room in our condo. We offered 7000 and Nee graced us as her saviours. Within a few hours she had found a room on the eleventh floor and had ezibought an industrial sized toploader to continue her business part-time as had been agreed.

She was 38 eight years old, the eldest of six. I knew two other sisters and her surviving brother who was quiet and docile. Gay lived in Phuket in the penumbra of prostitution and Goo did something in IT near Bang Na. The last sister was entirely absent and one brother had died eight tears before around Yaa Baa.

Their mother and father had separated in 1980 and Nee had elected to stay with him in Bangkok. The other children remained in Ubon with their alcoholic mother but upon adolescence had steadily filed to the household in the capital, straining resources. Worse, Nee was just 19 when her father died while driving his taxi. She already had 3 dependants.

Her then job in the factory paid OK but was too inflexible to let her be mother. She gave it up and her boyfriend and laid a bamboo pole across her shoulders loading the pans with wares. How far and with what kilograms did she tramp?  I have seen the indelible weals in her shoulders and the flexors of her back feeding into a Hottentot- like rump.

‘They wanted me to put on make-up but I wanted to work’ she said recalling that period, one rainy morning between swabbing our tinsel floors, reminding me of Min speaking nonchalantly about labouring on the building sites for about 100 baht a day, in a not so different context.

About five years later, her sisters and brothers already part grown, some even earning a wage, she changed job.

A Thai Chinese businessman wanted a Nanny cum Housekeeper and at 24 with her peculiar history she had the experience. This job might have gone on forever except that some years later the bitch sister had a litter and Nee was summoned to baby-sit. Only that when they grew up she had to start the laundry.

I cannot date when I realized she was in love though I recognized it well, being similarly afflicted, object elsewhere. Perhaps it was when we took Kit and the nieces to Koh Samui to spread out in Mercedes' apartments on Chaweng, or maybe later. Certainly before that night out on the Cowboy where she gawped in revulsion and awe. I saw clearly then how unkind I was being.

Now, in our rooms she intones "Falang chai dee.. take care lady good" while my frail attempts at disenchantment only fuel the infatuation. Catherine is not amused.

One day this Prince will surely collect the glass slipper and fly away somewhere.

Then, shall we smuggle her there in the diplomatic bag or foist her onto an ex-pat brat-pack in Thong Lor?

More likely I suppose.

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