by Guy Lilburne
At last I was able to type freely and tell Jee all the things that Nut had said to me both about herself and about Jee. Jee could also tell me what she and her make believe husband had said about me. Jee told me that she understood, and that she didn’t believe her at all and this time I think she meant it. I hadn’t done anything wrong and I had no other lady either in England or Phuket and Jee knew it. I also didn’t believe that Jee had a boyfriend. Jee was the sweetest kindest heart that I’d ever met and I knew how lucky I was to have her.
The decisions had already been made. I loved her and I was going to sell my house and move to Thailand and marry this girl before she changed her mind. Jee changed her phone number and nothing else was ever heard from Nut. I had flown out of Phuket on 27th and already that was three days ago, and I had only flown home and had a sleep, today I wake up and it’s 29th already. Doesn’t time fly when you are drunk, jet lagged and asleep.
Now Thailand and Jee felt like along way away. I was counting the days until we would be back together. We chat everyday on the phone, on the internet and by text and email. I also seem to be spending a lot of time writing this book and looking on the internet about visa’s, getting married and living in Thailand and to my simple mind it all seems very difficult, but now it’s too late, nothing will be able to keep Jee and I apart.
Chapter 35. Missing Jee and her family, compare to Irish. Toilets, Eating, craic and sanuk
I find that I’m not just missing Jee, I’m missing her family and her friends. I’m missing Thailand and I’m missing Isaan. I miss the sense of family and community. The Thai remind me a lot of the Irish, from which I descend. In Thailand you have Sanuk, in Ireland you have the Craic. It’s the same thing an enjoyment of fun and an inbuilt ability to find it and exploit it at every opportunity.
Ten years ago I met an Irish girl on holiday in Gran Canaria who became my girlfriend and we ended up having a five month long holiday romance with me travelling over to stay with her and her family for four days at a time every three weeks. I met a lot of wonderful characters and witnessed and shared in the fun in the same way as I now have in Thailand. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s fun. The first time I stayed in Ireland we stayed in Dublin and one night we ended up in a night club called ‘Break for the Border’. I went to the toilet and was having a pee at the urinals along with a lot of other men when a mobile phone started ringing from one of the cubicles behind us. It was answered;
“Hello, no you’re grand, I’m just having a shit.”
Everyone started laughing it just sounded so funny, then the man in the cubicle shouted
“Oy ya feckers, do you fecking mind, this is a private call.”
Everyone fell about but maybe you just had to be there.
There was more toilet humour when the girl took me to stay at her village in County Meath. The local pub was called Paddy’s, and it was little more then a shack, in the beer garden there was just an old couch that had been put outside the front of the pub but it was a great place.
The first time I went there I used the toilet which was outside the back of the pub and was nothing more then four brick walls with a tin roof. You had to pee against the walls, it then ran down the painted wall into a trough which was inlaid with plastic guttering cut in two halves. The pee then travelled along it around the bottom of the walls before the trough took a sharp right turn into the centre of the room and disappeared into a hole in the middle of the floor. You had to step over this if you were peeing against the far side wall. If you wanted to do anything more then a pee, you had to get a toilet roll and a key off Paddy and cross over the road to use the one in his house. Paddy had taken great pleasure in telling me that his cousin was going to refurbish the toilets and they would be done by the time I next visited.
Three weeks later I was back, Paddy and a few of the regulars wanted to show off the new toilet block. We all walked round to the toilet and I saw the refurbishment. Four urinal bowls had been screwed onto the walls, not plumbed in, just screwed on the wall. Paddy insisted that I try one out and after a little effort I managed to pee and we all watched it trickle out the hole in the bottom of the urinal, down the wall into the plastic trough round the bottom of the walls and do a sharp right turn and into the hole in the middle of the floor and then everyone clapped. (I knew that they were taking the piss!)
The refurbishment wasn’t finished of course but everyone had had a good laugh, this was having the Craic. I could tell you many more stories about Ireland but seeing this is a book about Thailand I won’t bother.
Chapter 36. House for sale (12th May)
I hate being back in England and spend a lot of time dreaming of being back in Thailand with Jee. I have had three different estate agents come out to value the house and I have had to pay £350 to a solicitor for them to provide me with the Home Pack which sellers have to pay for these days. Anyway today it’s 12th May and my house has just been put up for sale for £180,000. I just hope it’s sold by the time you are reading this.
Chapter 37. Keeping in contact.22nd May. Jee loses job living back with sister, contact getting less by internet.
Jee has been telling me that her boss is causing her problems at work and today, 22nd May, she told me that she has left her job and has had to give up her apartment and move in with her sister Pon. It also means that we will no longer have daily internet contact because her sister hasn’t got any internet connection. This is a nightmare for me. I desperately don’t want to lose contact with Jee. I love the girl, I just need to sell my house and I’ll be with her, we can sort everything out when I am with her.
The best part of my day is talking with Jee, so any loss of contact is a very bad thing for me. Later she sent me a text message which read ‘darling you please no look for new lady. I love only you, please you only have me’. It was so typical of Jee and it really cheered me up. These are long days without my Jee.
Chapter 38. My hopes and dreams
Well we have drifted into June already. Two different Buddhist monks had predicted that I would sell my house in July but I had been hoping to sell it already but the housing market has come to a shuddering stop because of the credit crunch that we have the Americans to thank for. Internet contact with Jee has all but stopped now, occasionally she will send me a text to say that she is going to an internet café and then we can chat for a while but most of the time our only contact is by text message. I never thought I could miss anyone this much. I think about her all the time.
They say ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, well it’s just breaking mine. Jee can’t find work and she told me that she is thinking about going to look for work in Bangkok. I don’t want her to but I’m in no position to stop her, and I’m in no position to help her out financially, not that she has ever asked me to.
Chapter 39. Contact Bangkok book 4th june reply next submit synopsis, takes all day, further reply on 6th now wait two weeks. Monday 9th June offered co publishing contract. Jee tells me no money going to work in bkk.
I sent an email off to Bangkok Books today. They are a book publishers. I sent them a synopsis of this book along with a sample chapter. When I started writing this I didn’t think much about actually getting it published but now I need to try and find a publisher. Now I will find out if anyone is really interested in reading all this stuff. Will it actually interest anyone other then me? Even if this never gets read by anyone, I’m still happy that I have written it and recorded my thoughts and feelings while they were fresh.
I hope I marry Jee and we have a great life and maybe even have the two kids that she wants. If we do then they can read this when they grow up and see how much their dad loves their mum, so I haven’t wasted my time at all.
Just to update you, on 9th June Bangkok Books offered me a contract to publish this. Well it was a contract to co publish actually, which means that I would contribute 65 Baht towards the cost of each copy printed but with a minimum print of two thousand books. That’s a v
ery expensive deal for me so I declined it. I’ll just have to keep trying to find a publisher.
Chapter 40. Jee job interview at bank fri 13th June
Jee sent me a text today. She has a job interview at a bank in Udon Thani. I’m delighted and I hope she gets it. I don’t want her to go and work in Bangkok. I know she is having a hard time at the moment. She hasn’t got her room anymore, she hasn’t got a job and she hasn’t even got internet connection now for her laptop. I don’t think she is happy living with her sister and not being able to pay her way. I know that she is missing me and everyday we are apart it feels like a week. There has been no interest in my house and I worry that Jee will get tired of waiting for me to return to her. Since she lost her job at the hospital there has been very little contact on the internet which makes me very sad because at least on the internet we could chat and even see each other on the web cam. We still have contact everyday but usually it’s just a text message.
I have asked Jee what she thinks about coming to England if I don’t manage to sell the house soon, and she loves the idea. I’m not so sure about it. I’ve looked on the internet and it looks very difficult to obtain the appropriate visa and it’s expensive too and even if we managed all that and she came to marry me in this country, how can I afford to keep her? The CSA are already taking more money off me than I can afford to pay, that’s one of the reasons that I have been forced to sell up and leave the country.
Even if Jee did come here and I could afford to keep her, I really worry that she would hate it here. There are very few Thai people in Stafford. The weather is not so good in England and there are no Buddhist temples around here. Jee would hate that. She says that she just wants to be with me and that money is not important, but we have to eat.
No, I just need to sell my house and go and start my new life with Jee in Thailand. I just hope that she will continue to wait for me and I hope the British housing market picks up.
Chapter 41. Is this the end?
It’s Friday 20th June today and I’m writing this with a very sad and heavy heart. I probably should have written it a few days ago but I have been putting it off. As I write, I have not got a clue what has happened to Jee. The last contact I had with her was on Monday 16th when she sent me a text message to say that the bank had offered her the job. Even after Jee lost her job in the hospital, which in turn meant she lost daily internet contact with me, we had always had daily contact by way of text message.
Once before Jee had just disappeared off the radar for three days but it was a time before I had actually travelled over to meet her and it was sometime in March. I did send a couple of ‘where are you?’ type text messages but to be honest I had not yet met the girl so I wasn’t really that bothered and just thought that she must have changed her mind or found somebody else.
Then three days later I got a flurry of text messages and phone calls and she told me that she had been ill in hospital. I was slightly suspicious at the time and Jee was very vague as to what was wrong with her. Maybe it was the old language problem, or maybe it was a cover story for something else, I just really didn’t know.
Jee told me slowly and I felt quite reluctantly that she had been working too hard to make up time for my upcoming visit and as a result she had made herself ill and was taken to hospital. Did I believe it? No not really. I’m still a Police Detective and I have spent a lifetime of being suspicious of people, especially when the story they give isn’t free flowing. I did ask Jee at the time if she was telling me the truth and also told her that it was ok to tell me that she had been somewhere with somebody else. I told her that she owed me nothing because these things happen and we don’t even know each other. Jee got quite upset and insisted that she was speaking the truth. Maybe I was wrong. She did seem genuine enough. At the time I thought that this might well be a warning sign and I would have to be very careful.
All this was forgotten when I did meet Jee. I have to say that I have fallen in love with the girl. Forgotten until now that is. Once again this week she has just disappeared. Every morning I get a text message from Jee at 6:00 am British time and then there are a few more exchanged throughout the day. On Tuesday there were none. I did send one just asking are ‘you alright?’ but got no reply. I have to say that I knew then that something was wrong. I just knew in my heart and this time it bothers me. It bothers me a lot because this time emotions are involved and I don’t want to lose her. I was going to write something about the way I was feeling on Tuesday but the thoughts and feelings running through my head were too much in the way for me to write.
Again on Wednesday and Thursday I sent text messages and tried to ring her. Her phone was switched off and I got no reply to the text. I was determined not to let the texts get too pleading or sounding needy, so they were just texts telling her that I love her and miss her and that I am worried about her and I just want to know what has happened. I didn’t send any text messages telling her how I hadn’t slept for two days and hadn’t been able to eat. The expression ‘sick with worry’ comes to mind and that’s exactly how I am feeling.
Today is Friday and this morning I have written emails to the two email addresses I have for her and I have sent a text saying ‘goodbye’.
I don’t know what has happened to Jee or why she has changed her mind. I think that maybe she decided that she didn’t want to wait until my house gets sold, I know it could be months. I have thought about many things. I have thought that maybe she has been in a terrible accident but I know that can’t be true because I know her family would have been able to make contact with me and tell me. I like to think that she has just decided that she can’t wait because the other thing I think about is that she is already with another man and that makes me feel so hurt. The thought of it is breaking my heart.
The romantic in me is saying just go and book a flight and get over there but then my head tells me not to be so stupid.
What would I find? Either Jee would not be there, or if she is, she will just say she doesn’t want to see me, or even worse I will turn up at her sisters house and as I approach I will see another Farang sitting in my place on the concrete bench at the front of the house. What a nightmare this is. I don’t know if it’s the miles between us or all the stories you hear about Farangs being taken for a ride by Thai girls who already have Thai boyfriends but whatever it is there is something about it that can make you very paranoid. After I got back to England at the end of April, Jee phoned me one day, and as we were chatting I suddenly heard a mans voice in the background, it sounded Thai and as soon as I heard it Jee suddenly said
“Ok darling I have to go talk to you online later.”
And the phone went dead. I don’t think that it’s because I am a Police Officer that I was suspicious, I think any man would be.
Lets recap; we are having a phone conversation, a mans voice coming in the background, then sudden termination of phone call. Jee did speak to me online later that day and I asked her about it, I had to, it had been on my mind all day. Jee just said that she was ‘staying house sister. That sister husband’. I asked her why she so suddenly closed the phone but she didn’t understand what I was asking, or at least said that she didn’t. All these things that I had forgotten have come back to mind now. They were things that made me worry at the time but I just thought about Jee. She was so loving, kind and caring. She was a nun for Gods sake.
I have always been a good judge of character and once I had met Jee I could tell that she was a genuine girl. Have I really got it all so wrong? What am I going to do now? I still want to live in Thailand, my life is miserable and lonely here in England. I will still sell my house and I will still go. I know that some time I will find a girl to settle down with but I don’t want a bar girl for company, I want Jee. I want her to contact me, at least just to tell me why. I want to know what I did wrong. Maybe I haven’t done anything wrong. Maybe she has just changed her mind or simply can’t wait for me anymore.
I have to remind m
yself of the reasons that I want to live in Thailand. There I can be happy and live the simple life that I so want. Trying to find love on the internet was an after thought anyway, and now that I think about it, what a crazy, stupid idea. I think I have made a fool of myself, just another stupid old Farang chasing a dream that he probably doesn’t deserve in a place that he hasn’t even started to understand.
Life can be so shit and just as you realise it, it all gets worse.
Chapter 42. More questions then answers.
Jee made contact with me again on Sunday 22nd June. In fact there was a lot of contact. All day on Sunday I was receiving text messages and phone calls. They were all very nice and Jee was telling me how much that she loved me. She said that she had been in hospital, again! When I tried to question her about it she was very vague again, just like she had been before. Most of this contact went on by way of text message. When I tried to establish the detail, Jee was obviously uncomfortable giving me answers. She seemed very genuine, but something here feels very wrong. Jee says that because she is worrying and thinking so much about her life she had a accident, but then she can’t or won’t tell me what sort of accident or if there are any injuries.
