Free The Half-Child by Angela Savage

carry him in a sling on her back while she scrubbed other people’s houses. Sometimes she let him lie on a cool, tiled floor, where he swatted at dustmites caught in beams of sunlight. But as he became more mobile, squirming to be released from the sling, rolling from one side of the room to the other, grabbing at rags, brooms, floor cleaner and bleach, Mayuree was forced to reconsider the arrangement. By necessity, Kob ended up spending more time in the institution, less time with her.
    As she took pains to explain to Khun Frank, the counsellor at the centre, it didn’t mean she loved Kob less.
    It’s just that her options were limited.
    Khun Frank asked her about family support. She wanted to tell him they’d had the perfect arrangement: her brother looked after the baby while she worked to save enough money to get them home to Kanchanaburi. But Sumet had insisted that he could raise money, too—enough to take them further from Pattaya than back to the western province they came from. Poor, sweet, dumb Sumet.
    As for her parents, Mayuree pretended she had none, though in truth, she could no more endure long-distance separation from Kob than she could subject him to their disapproval.
    Mayuree’s native province of Kanchanaburi was known amongst Thais for its national parks and border skirmishes with Burma. Other tourists visited because Kanchanaburi was where the Japanese Imperial Army forced farang prisoners to build the train line to Burma. This ‘Death Railway’ passed over a bridge on the Kwae River not far from where Mayuree grew up. There was a film about the bridge, which Mayuree had never managed to sit through without falling asleep. That didn’t stop her selling the video alongside bottled water, soap and batteries to tourists who came into her parents’ store.
    Her mother later regretted encouraging her daughter to interact with farangs. She blamed herself for setting in train the events that led to her daughter’s disgrace and the birth of a black-skinned bastard grandson—a mother’s punishment for having put the family’s business interests ahead of Mayuree’s honour.
    In fact, the farangs in Kanchanaburi were mostly sad-looking old men and polite backpackers, who praised Mayuree’s schoolgirl English, never argued about prices and did nothing to prepare her for the sort of foreigners she encountered in Pattaya. But there was no point arguing with her mother. Mae saw Kob not as the beautiful baby he was, but as a penalty, a curse. Unlike Mae , Sumet was deeply fond of Kob and had tried to make a difference for his sister and his nephew; but he’d been too ambitious. Euam ded dok fah —reaching for flowers in the sky.
    Mayuree wanted peace and stability for her son. She also wanted to raise him to think highly of himself, to have pride. She wondered at times if it was too much to expect.
    Mayuree missed Kanchanaburi. She missed the Erawan Falls that looked like the sacred three-headed elephant.
    She missed communal bathing in the shallow pools, the old ladies scrubbing their grandchildren while the young girls took turns to shampoo each other’s hair. She missed swimming, fully-clothed, with her brother and cousins in the deeper pools where tiny fish nipped at their toes and water cascaded over their necks. She missed their picnics on the rocks, eating barbecued chicken on bamboo skewers, rolling sticky rice into bite-sized balls, shooing the monkeys that tried to steal their fried bananas.
    She wanted her son to know these pleasures and the quiet and gentle pace of life on a river. It was a far cry from their life in Pattaya. She wished she could transport him by water instead of by road, lull him to sleep in a rocking long-tail boat instead of a makeshift hammock in her cramped one-room apartment above a pharmacy. But she couldn’t take him home to Kanchanaburi until she could hold her head up high enough to protect him with her