My Thai Story

by Guy Lilburne

  A couple of days later contact by phone was resumed and finally we could speak and arrange times to chat on the internet and generally catch up.

  Jee explained that the reason that her text messages were all numbers was because she had no credit. I told Jee how worried I had been about her and I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to hear her voice again. I knew that I had missed her but I didn’t realise how much. Jee told me that she was okay now and she had started working in the HSBC Bank in Bangkok and was now living with a friend who would also allow Jee to use her lap top and so once again we had internet contact with each other.

  On 20th July I had some people come to view my house, could the two Buddhists monks who told me that I would sell it in July possibly be right? I really hope so. Having said that, the people haven’t put in any offer yet. I had also told Jee a few times that I was writing a book about our story and when I told her that there was some interest from Monsoon Books she suddenly wanted to read it.

  For the first time I was a bit worried that I might have written something that would offend her or her family but Jee wanted to read it so I sent her a copy by email. Every day for the next four days Jee sent me a text message saying ‘very good book darling. I still read’.

  Then four days later she sent me an email. ‘Darling I like everything your book. Your book very good. Before I not understand everything you speak and think now I understand everything good and I love you even more……..’

  There was some more but it’s personal. So anyway Jee likes my book and if nothing else comes from it, at least she has had an insight into things from my prospective. It must have been interesting for her to read it. I wonder what she would have written if she had written the same story?

  So it’s 27th July today. I still haven’t heard from Monsoon Books, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, maybe no news is good news, but whatever, my main focus is still to sell my house and get back to Jee as soon as I can. I love her.

  July has turned into August, in fact we are now half way through August and I still haven’t sold the house. As the weeks slip into months it is getting quite depressing and I have to make a lot of effort to keep my spirits up. I think about Jee all the time and I know that I have a life waiting for me over in Thailand, I just need to sell this house and I can go.

  I keep swapping text messages with Jee and we keep telling each other how much we miss each other. This credit crunch is doing a lot more damage to my personal life than anyone realises. I hope things pick up soon.

  I feel very sorry for Jee. She tells me that she hates Bangkok.

  “People not good darling,” She keeps telling me.

  She only earns 7,200 baht a month working at the bank and she has to pay 3,600 a month to share her friends apartment. That’s probably what it costs her friend to rent the apartment, so she isn’t really much of a friend. Even Jee realises this, last night she said to me;

  “I not like my friend, she no good person.”

  It’s a very Thai thing to still call someone a friend when quite clearly they are not.

  I can tell that Jee is getting depressed and I wish I could just sell this house and go to her. She told me that some days she has no money to eat, and that’s very serious in a country where everyone eats eight meals a day. Jee understands my financial position and knows that I have no money to be able to help her out, but I have decided to sell my car and maybe then I can help her until I finally manage to be with her again.

  I haven’t heard anything else from Monsoon Books so I have decided to try yet another Book publisher to see if I can get anyone interested in publishing this. Hopefully things will get better for Jee and myself. I hope that she doesn’t get tired of waiting for me.

  Chapter 46. What’s next?

  September 2008 will be long remembered as the time the banks crashed and airlines went bust, (I didn‘t want to say the airlines crashed) leaving thousands of passengers stranded worldwide. It seems that everyday only brings more bad news. I’m still desperately short of cash myself and to top it all the company that is supposed to be selling my house has just closed their shop in Stafford, somebody told me that they have gone bust, I guess I will have to try and find out tomorrow, because it hard enough trying to sell your house when nobody can get a mortgage and even more difficult trying to sell it with a company that doesn’t exists anymore. It also seems that my house has de-valued by about 20%, in my case that’s £36,000. What a nightmare!

  Contact with Jee has dwindled down to only one or two text messages a week. She is still in Bangkok and she is still not very happy with her life, she keeps asking me when will I come to Thailand but I have to say I don’t think it’s going to be any time soon and I have to be a realist. How long is she going to wait? No long distance relationship will last forever and my mind has sort of been distracted from my Thailand dream because of a change in my job.

  On 1st September I started working back in a general CID Office, after eight years of working as an ‘Undercover Detective’ in a Covert Department, doing all the top secret stuff that nobody is supposed to know what we do, but everyone does.

  I think back a lot to how I felt at the beginning of 2008; I had grown tired with my job, I had no money and I really mean no money, and my future looked very bleak. My ex girlfriend was making it very difficult, if not impossible, to see my baby girl, Sasha, who will be two years old next month. I was only four years away from my retirement in 2012 and that ‘big pension’ for life that keeps tired old Police Officers like me going until the bitter end and I was prepared to give it up and try and find a life in the country I love, Thailand.

  That really still is my dream and I have no doubt that I will end up living there, but now I just don’t know when. As 2009 is quickly approaching, I will be counting down the last three years of my Police service, maybe I might make it to the end after all, it will certainly make a big difference to my future standard of living.

  The other thing that has taken over my life is writing, when I started to tout this book around in the hope of finding a publisher I got inspired and started writing again. I have always written stuff, usually Detective stories but in the old days it was written in long hand and then when finished it was packed away, unread except by a few close friends into a suitcase and stuffed in the attic.

  Anyway with my trusty Microsoft Word and PDF writer I spend hours typing away and I wrote my first novel ‘Made in Thailand’. It’s about a handsome young doctor who was struck off after a mother and baby died on his ward and he was found drunk. He escapes to Thailand and has an affair with an older and wealthy woman from Indonesia who is also in Thailand running away from her gangster husband, after years of sexual and mental abuse. The Doctor meets and falls in love with a bar girl who takes him away from Patong when the Police come looking for him after he seriously injures an Australian guy in a bar room brawl. The Indonesia woman’s husband finds out where his estranged wife is and heads off to Thailand to kill her. The woman leaves a desperate cry for help on the doctors mobile phone before her own is stolen and she finds herself alone and hunted in a foreign land.

  The Doctor has to leave the woman he loves to go back to Phuket and try to find his friend, now it’s a race against time. I won’t tell you how it ends, and anyway now I’m thinking of re writing it, because I know I can do it better but it was a good learning exercise for me and I loved writing it. I’m just over 11,000 words into my second novel ‘The Thai Dragon’ and I’m really excited about this one. It’s about an old drunken Irish Detective, who is packed off by Scotland Yard (arranged by his Commanding Officer and boyhood friend, to get him out the way for the last six months before retirement, to avoid any further discipline charges which would result in him losing his pension). The Detective has to go to Thailand when the niece of the British Ambassador is found brutally murdered and cut into pieces. I really can’t tell you anymore about this one because I just love all the twists and turns in this murder c
ase and I just know that it is going to be a great read. Writing Detective stories based in Thailand, I think this could be my future, a writer living in Thailand.

  Chapter 47. 2008 ends

  Well it’s December 2008 and I’m still here. I thought that I would be living in Thailand by now but I’m not. The company that was selling my house went bust and then I put it with another company, and guess what? They went bust too. I didn’t bother again after that.

  Contact with Jee dwindled down to a call or a text message once a week and then finally it stopped. There was no big goodbye and no promises of anything in the future, it just sort of stopped.

  So here I am, still in this big old house, still a Police Detective. I told you that I started back in the general CID office on 1st September, well I only stayed for a few weeks before I was seconded off onto various serious enquiries, so it’s sort of back to normal, now I’m investigating shootings, manslaughter, suicide and a serious fraud, funnily enough by a Thai lady living in England.

  I am due to retire in 2012 and I think I will probably stay until then, it is a big pension after all and anyway I feel a lot happier now. I’m enjoying Police work again and 2012 isn’t that far away. I’ve also been busy writing novels and trying to get an agent, who knows maybe one day I will get published after all.

  What I do know is this, in April I will be back in Thailand, maybe I’ll go and see a different part of the country, I know that when I retire I want to live there, but maybe in a plush luxury apartment in Phuket over looking the sea. There is a magic about Thailand and it has got under my skin, it’s a place where anything can happen, and usually does.

  Chapter 48. Thought you should know

  It’s now July 17th 2010 as I sit here writing this update. I’m still in England and now just two years before I can finish in the Police and live my dream in Thailand.

  I’m still a Detective, since last putting pen to paper, I have left the CID and I went on a squad set up to investigate a death at Stafford District General Hospital. Then I went back into the CID before leaving for good in January 2010 to set up a ‘Cold Case’ Detective Squad. It’s all about the detection figures really, but I’m solving a lot of closed cases so the squad has been made permanent. It evolved slightly and now we have a bigger remit.

  Anyway back to my story. At the end of 2008 contact with Jee was fading away and more or less came to nothing in the end. In 2009 I probably had a couple of messages on the internet from her. I still returned to Thailand twice in April/May and again in October for a month on each occasion. I didn’t go to see Jee, I just travelled around. At the end of 2009 I started to have contact again with Jee on the internet. We caught up with each other but it felt like we were more friends than lovers. Although I still loved Jee, the conversation was really little more than polite conversation but it was so nice to hear from her again. She was now working back at the hospital and living once again with her sister.

  We drifted into 2010 and I was planning to go back to Thailand in April, once again for Songkhran. I asked Jee if I could see her and asked her if she wanted to have a holiday with me in Phuket but she told me she was now working in a hospital in Laos, so I never got to see her again on that trip.

  I don’t know really how it changed but it sort of crept up on us. Suddenly I was back from Thailand and Jee and I started having a lot of contact on the internet, it was becoming a daily event again. We swapped phone numbers again and then just like before we were having a lot of contact both by text and on the internet. I found myself falling in love with her all over again. We started talking about everything again, the past and the future. We told each other that we had never stopped loving each other and I know it was true. I have never felt like this about anyone before. Jee makes me happy in my heart.

  I know that back in 2008 it was too long to expect anyone to wait for four years, but here we are again, now with only two years until I finish in the Police. Maybe, just maybe we can hold on to each other this time. I know that I have thanked Buddha all over again for Jee. Suddenly I feel as if I have a future again.

  July turned into August and September is fast approaching now. It already has started to feel like Autumn and it’s dark in the morning now when I get up for work at 5:45 am. I just had my house valued again and it’s now only worth £160,000, in 2007 it was worth £210,000, but it’s only money I guess.

  Anyway I’m delighted to tell you that Jee and I have been in contact everyday now for months, we speak on the phone and on Skype and of course there are always countless text messages. A few weeks ago we were talking about getting married, nothing definite, but it’s an idea we have talked about.

  Next April when I next visit Thailand we are planning to have the whole month together on one of the many tropical beeches that I love so much, or at least we were planning all this but it’s slightly changed now. Jee has told me she has a bit of debt to pay off before she can have a whole month off work and she is insistent that she pays it all off herself.

  “Darling, I not want you have problem money family me. I do myself.”

  She explained that she has to pay off her own debt for her university education, she is also paying for her sisters car and her nieces (Fon) education. Jee has a great job now working in a hospital in Laos and she earns 30,000 baht a month (£600), well over the Thai average monthly wage. She currently pays out 20,000 baht a month on the debt and thinks she can pay it all off by 2012, which would tie in with my retirement. There is one more thing, after I visit her next April she is going to work at a hospital in Vietnam for twelve months for even more money working for the same company, then she will be debt free. I offered to help her with the debt and told her that I just want to marry her and have the life that we both dream of but Jee knows her own mind. So now we have a plan.

  We think we love each other and if we stay together we may marry in 2012 and live happily ever after. Oh I dearly hope so. It sounds like a great plan to me. I think I love her. The other news is that I have just received an offer from Bangkok Books to publish my latest book ‘The Thai Dragon’.

  You cannot imagine how excited I am. We signed contracts on 20th September 2010.

  Chapter 49. The Last Chapter

  Well here it is, the last chapter of my book. This book that I started two years ago back in 2008. I always thought the last chapter would end with me married and living in Thailand, or at the very least a final scene of me waiting at Manchester airport, maybe enjoying a last beer on English land before taking the flight to a new life in the ‘Land of Smiles’.

  It isn’t ending like that. In some ways it’s ending as it started; I’m still a Detective in the Police, in fact I’m the longest serving Detective in Staffordshire Police and I have been for a few years now. I’m still living in the same house. I’m still having a big problem with my ex who still won’t let me see my little girl and I’m still dreaming about starting a new life in Thailand. But some things have changed. Now I only have two years to do before I can retire in 2012 and now I have a plan.

  The other day I started reading this book again from the beginning. It made me smile. I said that I didn’t know how it was going to finish. In the introduction I said, “Maybe one day I’ll read back over these writings myself to see at what point it all went wrong or hopefully at what point I realised it was all going to turn out just fine. I’m hoping that this will be a story of leaving my job as a Police Detective and settling down in Thailand, a country that I have fallen in love with. Hopefully I will find the happiness and the peace of mind that has always eluded me. There are no shortages of beautiful women in Thailand and I’m hoping to find love as well. If I don’t then I will settle for spending my days living in a tropical climate, learning Thai, playing guitar and finding some kind of spiritual enlightenment and soul searching. So I guess here my journey starts.

  It’s January 2008.…………”

  I have thought about this a lot. I’m still in the same house and still in the same job
, so did I have a journey at all? The answer is a very big YES, of course I did.

  Today I am a very different person. I have not just visited and explored most provinces of Thailand, I have fallen in love with the place. I have discovered Buddhism and found that it works for me. I have discovered things about myself, some good and some bad. I have become a writer, well actually I always was, but now I’m published and people are reading the stuff I write. I don’t hate myself as much as I used to.

  Am I happy?

  The true answer is probably yes, well a lot happier than I have been in the past, and I honestly believe things are going to get even better. I have had an amazing journey and I have learnt two important things. First, that once I decided to change my life I had the capability to do that, I think we all that capability.

  Secondly, It is not life that lets you down, but your own expectations of it, that is if you are not prepared to reach out and grab your dreams.

  Don’t do what I was so guilty of for so many years and just let life wash over you like waves over a rock. If the waves are washing over you then swim and get to where you want to be. I’m still swimming but I will get there. Life is good, and I know that it‘s going to get better.

  I was sort of hoping that this last chapter would be about my wedding in Thailand. I thought that would be a great way to end ‘My Thai Story’.

  I have to say I am now thinking it might be a great first chapter in ‘My Thai Story 2’.