December was approaching and Nin wondered if Alfie was coming back. She was still being treated for her condition by the fake homeopath who had already extorted twenty thousand baht from her. The doctor insisted she had to stay there, two hundred and twenty kilometres from home, so he could treat her every day, when he was sober enough.
Nin was right to be scared. Alfie would not be happy when he found out.
It was dark inside the cupboard. The darkness you might associate with a corpse in a coffin. If there had been a chink, the light that got in would have been sharp as a laser. But there was no chink, only pitch black, and the boy didn’t stop screaming until she let him out an hour later. This was but one of the cruel punishments Mother inflicted on him when he was naughty. And because he was a spirited three-year-old boy, he often was.
Mother was known throughout the village as a viper, a malicious and treacherous person. She had infected three of her four daughters with her venom, and Nin, the eldest of the four, was the only one who felt any sense of responsibility towards her. Whether it was out of duty or love didn’t matter. She respected her culture more than any other member of the discordant family. Few people were close to Mother, and only one or two of them came to the house regularly. They conspired and helped her enact her vile and deceitful plans. Tonight, she sat alone on the stone floor outside the old house, immersed in thought. She was planning the sting, which would ruin her unsuspecting daughter, Nin. But first Mother had to trick Nin into relieving a farang of his money. She’d successfully masterminded several rip-offs within her immediate family of six sisters and three brothers, some of whom were illiterate, the rest below average intellect. This was Mother’s most ambitious swindle by far. Gaining the trust of an illiterate family was easy compared to taking on the naïve but savvy Nin, and the farang she had yet to find.
“I’m going to sell the house and land and move down South with Tuk,” Mother announced from her spot under the tamarind tree.
“But where will the family live?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Why is it up to me?”
“You’re my eldest daughter. It’s your responsibility.”
The seed was planted, and the first part of Mother’s plan was laid. Had she convinced Nin that she was selling the family home, which sat on two rai of land in the middle of the village? She was banking on it, and that her daughter would get the money, somehow. How, she didn’t care. The poorly constructed old house, built thirty years previously, was run down and worth nothing. It was no more than a cattle shed. The value lay in the land. Thai culture dictated that families pass land to the next generation, in their lifetime. It was not normal for parents to sell the family home over the heads of their daughters or sons.
The old house had been home to the family since the sisters were born. But it was now a relic of the past. The sun shone daily, reaching out to light the place that skulked in the shadows of neglect and bad memories. Shutters darkened the abandoned interior, and no-one cared that years of dirt could be removed with ease. With little effort and a few tins of paint the old house would be transformed. Even close to death, new life could be breathed into it. But frozen hearts had not thawed, and the house was a tombstone to another age. Even the ghosts stumbled around the rotting structure, in muted apathy, waiting to be kissed by a ray of sunshine to warm their sallow cheeks.
“Please don’t sell the land, Mother. I will get the money, and you can transfer it to me.”
Mother sunk into the only dilapidated armchair the house possessed. It groaned under her weight, praying for the day when it could retire gracefully to the scrap heap. She gave nothing away, just smiled inwardly. She had hooked Nin, who, within a week, scraped together five thousand baht plus a thousand for the fare. Nin packed a small bag with clothes and boarded the bus to Phuket at Lam Plai Mat railway station. Sleeping for most of the twelve hundred kilometre journey, she woke as the bus finally lumbered into Phuket Town eighteen hours after leaving Isaan.
It was something many girls, young and old, from the North-East did to make money from tourists. Money, they sent home to their struggling families and the children they hadn’t planned to bring into the world. For several days no-one in the village noticed she’d gone. There was nothing strange in that, as all her life she felt no-one noticed when she was there.