Chapter 15 Border run

Yaa leaving for Bangkok the previous evening I woke to the sound of my alarm clock, reaching out and fumbling to hit the button.  ‘What’s today’s plan?’ I questioned ‘Visa, I’ve got to meet Andrew at Flora House’.  I checked the time working out I had half an hour to shower and get myself out.  In Thailand nearly sixty days I had to make the run to Burma, trips from the camp arranged by writing your name on the board and finding others to share a car with.  Dressing in jeans and t-shirt I pulled my passport from beneath the bed and took $5 for my visa adding extra for snacks and drinks. 

Arriving at Flora House for seven thirty I knocked and waited.  It was a nice place, single storey chalets owned by an Indian with a hooked nose. Nothing doing, I knocked again. 

“Coming,” I heard in a plum English accent. 

A bleary eyed figure stepping from the bedroom, he crossed the living room and unhinged the patio doors. 

“Morning, ready for a trip to Burma?” I said brightly.

“Yes, Paul, isn’t it?”

I made my way inside, leaning against the breakfast counter and watching as a Thai girl took a seat at the table.

“Ah, Paul, this is Pom.”   

She was younger than him, the type of girl I saw everywhere, looking pretty, following her paymaster. She passed me a flirty grin.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Have you seen Gareth?” Andrew enquired.

“No, but I don’t think he’ll be long, nice place.”

“Come and see the bedroom.”

It was huge, king-size bed standing like an island at the centre, three piece suite facing a wide screen T.V..

“Apparently it used to be a brothel, that’s why we’ve got the giant mirror above the bed.”

‘I need a place like this’ I thought ‘I’ve had my fair share of fun with Thai girls but imagine the fun I could have in a place like this’.

Continuing to survey the room I took in the rugby on the screen and a pile of books on the arm of the sofa. 

“I’ve finished with those,” he said as he saw me looking. 

Picking them up I leafed through and stopped at Man and Boy. 

“If you like reading about Asia, you’ll like that one.  It’s set in Hong Kong, you can have it for three hundred baht.”

Replacing it with the others I considered what a tight arse he was for trying to make the sale.  He was older than me, possibly into the forties, and if he could afford to stay in Flora house he didn’t need the cash.

“How long you been here?” I asked.

“Thailand, what is it Pom, four months? I was in Bali before I came here and before that I’d spent six months in Chiang Mai.”

“Not been back to blighty for a while then?”

“No, no,” he said looking uncomfortable with the thought.

“Have you been to Bali?”

“No, I’d like to, I’d really like to have a go at some surfing.”

“Oh you must go, it’s very beautiful.  I’m having a house built.”

He walked to the table spreading a map and showing me the location as Gareth walked through the door.

“Morning fellas”

“Hiya buddy, just having a look at Bali.’

‘Bali are ya, nice little spot Bali”.

“I was just telling Paul I’ve bought some land in the north, I’m having a house built.”

“Bloody hell, doing a bit of investing are we, not sure I’d fancy that.”

Andrew looked ruffled again as he considered his response.

“Well, I left England with a hundred and forty thousand and I had a choice, go back and buy a small flat or spend the money here.”

He lifted a set of drawings to the table and showed us the property.

“This is what they’re building.  As you can see its right next to the beach, there’s a swimming pool overlooking the ocean, a main house and a second at the entrance.  I’m planning to keep that to live in and rent the larger out.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“So, what time are we off?” Gareth asked.

“I think we should leave now if we want to make it back in daylight,” Andrew replied.

Volunteering to drive first he took the car steadily from the city, crossing onto the expressway and winding slowly into the mountains, conversation drifted from I.Pods to the prospect of completing the journey by motorbike.

Four hours later we’d arrived at the border. It was like a scene from a Wild West movie, a shop lined strip leading to an arch adorned by a portrait of the King.  One queue for foreigners and another for Thai’s we passed onto a bridge and handed in our passports at the halfway point. It was different on the other side, no 7/11’s, a look of dull apathy on people’s faces.  Not interested in anything other than the price of D.V.D’s I browsed a few stores and continued into the town where an elderly man came to walk alongside us.

“Want girl,” he said, “have very sexy girl.”

I shook my head, looking forwards.

“Young girl, have very young girl,” he persisted dropping a palm to his waist.  

On the return leg we moved on to what we were doing in Thailand.  Gareth telling us for the past five years he’d been working six months a year in England and spending the other six travelling, crossing the States in a camper van, diving in Africa, surfing in Bali and this, his second spell of boxing. He had his own place back home, a female tenant paying bills while he was away. 

“So, what do you do for work?” Andrew asked.

“I’m a graphics artist, work in a modelling studio. You know, taking out the spots out, adding a bit of breast.  We’ve got a team doing the same job.  In the summer, when they want their holidays, I work. Winters somewhere warm, summers watching the cricket”

“And they have no problem with you going back?” Andrew asked.

“Just give them a call and the job's waiting.”

“Sounds like a good set,” I chipped in, and it did, what a set up.

Moving to Andrew he told us he’d been educated through boarding school, later working as a computer programmer he’d taken eight months out and returned to find work hard to come by.

“IT’s difficult,” he said. “You’ve got to be working and training all the time, if you don’t keep up your obsolete in six months.”

For the third time that day he looked uncomfortable, furrowing his brow as if still trying to figure out where he was going.  He’d left early in a way, turning his back on England with another forty years of life ahead of him.

“Well, me and Pom will have the house to rent in a few months and we’ve been toying with the idea of a guesthouse in Chiang Mai, just something small, offering rooms in different themes.”

Coming to me I seemed like the odd one out, I’d run out of ideas.  ‘How should I live?’ ‘What should I do?’ ‘Is it worth living at all?’ Questions which constantly haunted me and sent my mind spinning. Neither Gareth’s nor Andrews’s lifestyles would work for me.   

“I worked as a business analyst for the first four years after college,” I began. “Drove me nuts doing the same thing every day, just thought there’s got to be more to life.  So I jacked the job, went travelling, went back for a bit and worked in a bar, did India, charity fundraised, went to teach in China, now I’m here. The only snag’s needing a house.”

“The house is a good idea,” Gareth confirmed. “Once you’ve got that little nugget you're set”  

Completing our biographies we listened to music for a while and I watched the jungle.  There was something about it, beautiful but impenetrable, just dense forest, living and breathing.

“The thing is,” Andrew resumed “The world’s not like it was twenty years ago, you don’t have to spend your whole life working. Look at us out here.”

I thought back to a book I’d read about the future of work, how most tasks would be performed by machines, the coming age of leisure.  And jobs were disappearing, people operating checkouts, cleaners, accountants, every task shifted to a low cost location and automated when the technology became available. It was the inhumanness of economics, it didn’t care about keeping jobs or maintaining stability.  It wanted growth and profit, driving ever faster towards the bottom.  It was one of the reasons I’d left my first job.  No one at work had been thinking about the future, all busily, busying themselves, but I’d looked ahead, read about back offices heading to India. ‘What’s the point talking about pensions and perks’ I’d thought, it was all going to go, and it had.  One of my last projects preparing the system to send our jobs to Delhi, each day a team of analysts disappearing to a room, hacking away to complete the task in the quickest possible time, those outside oblivious to their fates.   

“You know, in a way work’s a form of social control,” I restarted “Without work most people wouldn’t know what to do.  I mean, imagine you suddenly turned around and said, hey people, we only need you two days a week.  What would they do? I think things will change, but it’s going to be a gradual and we’re the pioneers.”

The others liked that idea; it was Pirsig’s static latching, the pioneers having the idea and waiting for everyone else to see its truth.  Get the machines doing the graft and everyone could spend their days in coffee shops or playing chess.  There was a problem however, a problem with meaning and self worth.  People had identified with their jobs for so long it was ingrained, the reason they got up in the morning, their purpose.  Did it take the value away from life? It would require a philosophical fix, people being able to value their lives in a different way.  We wouldn’t be completely obsolete, we’d still have to make decisions about how things would be organised, but we’d need to accept much of the physical, the mundane, would be accomplished by technology.  Perhaps it would be an age of contemplation, or would it be annihilation?

After Yaa had been away for nearly a week I took time to think about what I was going to do.  She’d been a fun distraction for a time but perhaps it was time to get serious again.  When the phone rang on her birthday I ignored it.  The following day returning to my bookstore where I picked out the sequel to the book I’d just finished, the author intending to clarify his ideas using a girl named Lila, a bad girl, a girl who took a free ride in other people’s lives but there was something about her, the narrator attracted to her, enjoying her company despite her failings because, because she had quality, a mix of characteristics which rendered her his perfect company.  He used the analogy to explain how all life was an evolution towards perfection and again it fitted with my own ideas.  Life a journey to be taken with as little of much consciousness as you could face. 

When the day came for Gunner to leave we went to the roof for a smoke.

“Well buddy, it’s been great,” I said looking up at the mountain and turning to a view of the city.

“Yeah, for me too.”

“You are coming back you know.”

“Maybe.”

He’d given me his itinerary for his next stop in New Zealand and my attention had been caught by references to the church.

“O.K., I’ve got to ask this, are you a Christian?  I mean a proper Christian?”

“Yes, at home, I’m not like out here.”

“You go to church?”

“Every Sunday.”

That said everything it needed to about religion.  A guy breaking half the laws in the bible and reconciling it didn’t count in Thailand.  When my mother had been dying my whole family, who never attended had church, had stood around taking communion, but I hadn’t.  It had smacked of insincerity, it was what I was trying to scream out to the world, look at your lives people, you have a duty to examine them.  It was the reason the world seemed so shallow to me, no one really looked at what was important anymore. 

We accepted religions and systems but we never questioned them. As long as we went to church or chanted our mantras we’d be saved, as long as we went to work we’d eat and sleep.  I envied those from the past, the originators, those who’d first asked life’s questions. They’d seen life for what it was, the inevitability of conflict, of pain, the joys of pleasure, the need for discipline.  When you understood them, balanced order with freedom, you had quality.  I was sure the founders of most religions would have been disgusted with the way their teachings had developed.  Shrines to the ascetic Buddha, T-total Christians Jesus would have viewed with suspicion but as with work for the masses it had to be mundane rules, the word.

“Well it’s been a pleasure buddy, and I hate long goodbyes, so, until we meet again, in Thailand, it’s been an honour.”