This story begins 12 months ago. I needed a new door for my bathroom, so I walked down to the end of my soi where there is a giant wood factory.
Yes, I know; I choose the most salubrious of neighbourhoods. Making my way through piles of woodchips and sleeping underpaid Cambodian labour, I met the owner, who showed me a catalogue. I picked one door at a price of 2,500 baht.
This is where the story should have ended, only to be filed away for eternity in that folder of life's forgotten chores, except for one thing.
I opened my big mouth.
When I returned home, waiting outside my house was my old friend Daeng and his sour-faced wife.
"How much are you paying for the door?" he asked when I told him where I'd just been.
"2,500 baht," I answered.
Daeng's eyes widened, then darkened. His face contorted.
"Paenggggggg!" he exclaimed.
"Kha," his wife reiterated. "Paenggggggg"
In Thailand food is cheap. Clothes are cheap. Cabs are cheap.
Dental work? Cosmetic surgery? We're a hub. On any given day the wards of Bumrungrad are cluttered with the world's foreign princes and princesses desperate to reverse the onslaught of inbreeding.
Despite all this, the locals remain convinced that every purchase they ever make is expensive.
Nothing gets a lower-middle-class Thai more excited than hearing that something is expensive, and Daeng is definitely lower-middle-class. I suspect that by marrying what's-her-name, he managed to drag her up to that social rung as well.
The word for "expensive" in Thai is paeng, which rhymes with gang (or bang, for that matter). Normally Thais are very polite when speaking. Put a price tag in front of them, however, and watch them gasp. Wide-eyed. Open mouthed.
"Paenggggg!"
Daeng doesn't get very excited over much, nor does his wife, whose mouth is a permanent upside-down U shape, except when hubby asks the price of something.
Daeng leant forward and tapped my knee. "My cousin has a wood factory," he said. "He can sell you a cheaper door. We can go visit him. Just have a look. You don't have to buy."
"No really, it's --"
"I'll be around at 10am tomorrow," he said.
The next day he was on time, arriving at 11am with his wife in sullen tow.
"We'll take your car," he announced, as if he had a say in it. Out on Srinakharin Road, Daeng said: "Take the expressway."
"To … where?"
"Nonthaburi."
"Nonthaburi!??!"
"It's Saturday. The traffic won't be that bad."
Daeng's life has been a series of serious miscalculations, starting with his betrothal, and passing through numerous odd jobs. He fixed air conditioners; then he had his own van-for-hire business. Each new enterprise lasted no more than a year -- was it because his wife kept answering the phones?
Another of his serious miscalculations was the traffic to Nonthaburi that Saturday morning.
With half my gas tank spent, we arrived at Bang Khu Rat, Nonthaburi, around 1pm. Lunchtime, as Daeng's wife kept reminding us from the back seat, repeating hew ("I'm hungry") throughout the journey.
I foolishly asked what she wanted to eat, and she replied duck, so another half-an-hour was spent circling Nonthaburi looking for a duck restaurant.
Amazingly we found one, where Daeng's wife ordered the most expensive duck on the menu while Daeng ordered a few bottles of Heineken. When the bill came, I paid for it, as a show of thanks for Daeng going out of his way to take me out of my way.
Then, in the restaurant car park, an unforeseen event.
Blame it on the idiot car park attendant with the whistle. Blame it on my short temper for being on the wrong side of Bangkok without dark glasses and a fake beard. As I reversed out of my space, I clipped the side of a pickup truck parked next door.
"Oo-ee!" cried Daeng's wife from the back seat, and the upended U morphed into an O.
The dent was tiny and almost unrecognisable, and would probably cost about 2,000 baht to fix, according to the vehicle's owner. I handed over 2,000 baht to end it right there.
What a mistake that was.
"Paeng," hissed Daeng as we got back in the car.
"Kha!" his wife added. "Paengggg!"
It was a small price to pay for the dent but I was howled down by Daeng while his wife gave me the evil eye. What hope did I have against a millennium-old culture that screeches paeng at the mere sight of a price tag?
Soon we arrived at Daeng's cousin's wood factory, way smaller than the one at the end of my soi.
Daeng's cousin, Ko, showed me his scant collection of wooden doors -- they were hideous, dear reader, all woodchip and plastic.
I stood there, flanked by eager Ko and Daeng, nodding and praising the beauty of a pink fake-wooden door resting in cobwebs against the back of his mini-factory, in some godforsaken soi in the backstreets of Nonthaburi.
"Special price for you," Ko announced. "2,300 baht!"
"How about a discount?" Daeng asked. "Andrew's my best friend!" It was neither the time nor place for me to bark back "Since when?", so I maintained a stony, futile silence.
Ko rubbed his chin. "OK! 2,000 baht!"
"Can you install it for me too?" I asked, and Ko said of course he could, for a small fee.
I said OK. There was no other way to answer without all of us losing face.
The next day some worker who spoke broken Thai turned up with a door, the type one would normally spot in brothels and gas station bathrooms. He managed to get the door on some hinges and, if you lifted it slightly as you slammed it shut, it stayed closed.
Ko added an extra 300 baht for the installation and travel costs. When I calculated everything, including my own gas and toll fees (400 baht), the duck lunch (1,800 baht) and the crash (2,000 baht), that door cost me 6,500 baht.
Paenggggggg.
That was a year ago.
Daeng disappeared after that, as lower-middle-class friends do, and turned up recently with a new business transporting Japanese tourists to golf courses.
He had ditched his wife, too. He had a new one now, a younger hairdresser who was much prettier than the first, though just as dour and perhaps more demanding. She, too, was "hew" all the time.
"I remember that door," said Daeng proudly as he settled into his second Heineken. He turned to his new wife. "I saved Andrew a lot of money on that door. At first he was going to buy one for way too much -- 3,000? 4,000?"
The new wife gasped.
"Paenggggg," she announced.
"But in the end I helped him out. Took him to my cousin who only charged him one or two thousand. Right, Andrew?"
"Right," I said.
Daeng peered at the door a little more closely. "It looks different. Did you paint it?"
"Paenggggg," repeated his new wife, in case I didn't hear her the first time.
I never told Daeng the truth; that the week after we visited Ko I walked down to the end of my soi and ordered a door from the local factory. It cost me 3,000 baht, including installation, which means in the space of a month I'd outlayed 9,500 for a door.
But that is the price I paid for opening my big mouth.
I did learn a valuable lesson about living in Thailand: when a Thai asks you how much you paid for something, just halve what you really paid and tell them that.
It doesn't have any effect. It's still paengggg.
