The man regards her for a moment and then grunts. The hand goes back under the desk, and the lock clicks again. “Ahh, you’d probably be a dead fish anyway.” He takes a deep drag and scrubs the tip of the cigarette against the bottom of the ashtray, scribbles something on a pad, rips off the page, and holds it out. His eyes follow her as she gets up to take it. “It’s an address,” he says. “Go there tonight, you can sleep there. We’ll pick you up at six-thirty in the morning. You’ll work from seven to four, when the night girl takes over.” He glances at a gold watch, as thin as a dime, on his right wrist. In English he says, “How’s your English?”
“Can talk some.”
“Can you say ‘Please, sir’? ‘Please, ma’am’? ‘Hungry’?”
“Please, sir,” the girl says. “Please, ma’am.” A flush of color mounts her dark cheeks. “Hungry.”
“Good,” the man says. “Go away.”
She turns to go, and his phone buzzes. He picks up the receiver.
“What?” he says. Then he says to the girl, “Wait.” Into the receiver he says, “Good. Bring it in.” A moment later an immaculately groomed young woman in a silk business suit comes in, carrying a bundle of rags. She holds it away from her, her mouth pulled tight, as though there are insects crawling on it.
“Give it to her,” the man says. “And you,” he says, “don’t lose it and
The young woman glances without interest at the girl with the torn jeans and hands the bundle to her. The bundle is surprisingly heavy, and wet.
The girl opens one end, and a tiny face peers up at her.
“But…” she says. “Wait. This…this isn’t-”
“Just be careful with it,” the man says. “Anything happens to it, you’ll be working on your back for years.”
“But I can’t-”
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have brothers and sisters? Didn’t you spend half your life wiping noses? Just carry it around on your hip or something. Be a village girl again.” To the woman in the suit, he says, “Give her some money and put it on the books. What’s your name?” he asks the girl holding the baby.
“Da.”
“Buy some milk and some throwaway diapers. A towel. Wet wipes. Get a small bottle of whiskey and put a little in the milk at night to knock the baby out, or you won’t get any sleep. Dip the corner of the towel in the milk and let it suck. Get a blanket to sit on. Got it?”
“I can’t keep this.”
“Don’t be silly.” The man gets up, crosses the office, and opens the door, waving her out with his free hand. “No foreigner can walk past a girl with a baby,” the man says. “When there are foreign women around, pinch it behind the knee. The crying is good for an extra ten, twenty baht.”
Dazed, holding the wet bundle away from her T-shirt, Da goes to the door.
“We’ll be watching you,” the man says. “Sixty for you, forty for us. Try to pocket anything and we’ll know. And then you won’t be happy at all.”
“I don’t steal,” Da says.
“Of course not.” The man returns to his desk in the darkening office. “And remember,” he says. “Pinch it.”
FOUR MINUTES LATER Da is on the sidewalk, with 250 baht in her pocket and a wet baby in her arms. She walks through the lengthening shadows at the aimless pace of someone with nowhere to go, someone listening to private voices. Well-dressed men and women, just freed from the offices and cubicles of Sathorn Road, push impatiently past her.
Da has carried a baby as long as she can remember. The infant is a familiar weight in her arms. She protects it instinctively by crossing her wrists beneath it, bringing her elbows close to her sides, and keeping her eyes directly in front of her so she won’t bump into anything. In her village she would have been looking for a snake, a stone in the road, a hole opened up by the rain. Here she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
But she’s so occupied in looking for it that she doesn’t see the dirty, ragged, long-haired boy who pushes past her with the sweating
The boy sees her go, assessing her without even thinking about it: Just got here. Still got mud between her toes. Doesn’t know anything. Looks stunned, like someone hit her in the face with a pole.
The baby’s not hers. Too pale.
He thinks,
The nervous man behind him slows again. The boy hesitates grudgingly, feeling like he’s trying to lead a cat. For a moment weariness washes over him like warm water. He longs to disappear into the crowd and leave the foreigner to fend for himself, but the others are waiting, and they’re hungry.
“Come on,” he says in English. “Nothing to worry.”
“I don’t know,” the man says.
The boy stops. He draws a deep breath before he speaks; it will not do to show his frustration. “What problem now?”
“It’s not dark enough.”
“When it dark,” the boy says, “they all gone.”
