Facebook photos of my staff member Mek pop up regularly on my Timeline.
He is an amiable young man who lives with his girlfriend of two years. I have no idea of her name; it was not in my interests to know. For a while there I could not keep up with the carousel of Mek's girlfriends. No sooner had I managed to remember that Noon was his life partner that suddenly it was Cartoon, who morphed into Ann, and now this most recent one, whose name I deliberately refused to put to memory. Once bitten, twice shy is all I can say about that. And, of course, she ends up being the one who has outlasted them all.
Or so I thought.
I don't spend so much time on Facebook these days. After the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up, Facebook for me changed from pleasant updater of friends and family movements to creepy cyber-stalker selling my personal information off to shady multinationals. I am not against selling one's soul, but at least give me a cut of it.
What little time I have on Facebook is peppered with pics of Mek and his girlfriend.
There is an occasional shot of him sitting in a small circle with similar-looking young Thai men, downing beer cans while grilling prawns. They are sparse and intermittent. They don't hold a candle to shots of Mek and his girlfriend.
There they are, heads close together, staring up into the selfie pic. Here's another one with a love-heart frame. "Our love will last for eternity" is the caption. On another he writes: "My wife is everything to me." She looks up at him with doting eyes. The pics never look like him, either. He employs all sorts of apps to distort the colours and even contours of his face and, presumably, those of his girlfriend.
I know this because my staff insisted I download an app called "BeautyPlus". After taking a photo, you can instantly smooth out wrinkles, change your skin tone, increase the size of your eyes and the contours of your face. I can change my lips and nose so that my nice innocent mugshot transforms into a translucent monster with marshmallow skin. That, apparently, is beauty these days.
So it was a shock to me when I finally met Mek's girlfriend in the flesh. Mek had a minor ailment but had to be rushed to hospital. Upon my arrival, I was met by a mousy little thing in a Big C uniform with a bob haircut and teeth that would ensure she could eat nam prik pla tu through a picket fence. It wasn't until 20 minutes into the visit that I realised that this was the same white-faced, flawless-skinned Aphrodite whose arm was fused around Mek's shoulder in all those photographs. Clearly she had downloaded "BeautyPlus" as I had, along with the "BeautyTeeth" plug-in.
"I'm thinking of renting a room in another apartment block," Mek told me out of the blue a month ago.
"Good idea," I said.
"Alone," he said.
I wasn't expecting that.
I have a personal creed not to get involved in other people's private lives. In my earlier decades I lost too many friendships thanks to male friends who, having finally split from nightmare girlfriends, would receive a lecture from me on what a great thing it was to have split, since she was hideous and not worthy of my friend's love, to which my friend would nod his head and thank me for my sage advice, adding how much I was a good friend in being so honest with him, only to have him quietly return to aforesaid hideous nightmare girlfriend a few days later. I would be left having to see them both socially, with the knowledge that my male friend knew I couldn't stand her, and I daresay passed that knowledge on to the girlfriend as well. She would forever cast me that look of "I know".
Mek took a deep breath. "She just won't stop nagging me. We fight every day. I get home from work and drink one can of beer. She gets angry about that. She says I'm a drunk and spend more time with my friends downstairs than I do with her. That's because she's always shouting at me."
Don't ... get ... involved, says the little voice in my head.
"I spend 20 minutes downstairs with them, and she accuses me of having another girlfriend. When I'm asleep she steals my phone and goes through it. If one of the girls from work calls, she thinks I'm sleeping with her."
Just … keep ... quiet.
"I try to ignore her. But sometimes I want to hit her. I know that's wrong. So I just turn over and try to go to sleep. That's when she gets out the knives."
That's when she gets out the what??
"She attacks me with knives. She gets one of the big steak knives and tries to stab me with it. I don't know what to do."
"You pack your bags and get right out of that place," I blurt out. Heck. I just got involved! "Mek, I normally don't give you personal advice, but … well, nagging is one thing. Attempted murder is another. It may be dangerous for you to be staying with her. How long has this been going on?"
"One year."
How could this be? His Facebook page is festooned with glistening pics of them in a perpetual lover's embrace. Wasn't their love eternal? Didn't his wife mean everything to him?
"She wrote all that," he said glumly.
That mousy little thing had access to his Facebook page. All those posts in Mek's name were in fact hers, which explains the myriad airbrushed photos of them both. And that, of course, was the clue that Sherlock Holmes would have spotted immediately. Mek is a reliable menial worker, but will never be a member of his hometown Mensa club. Airbrushing a photo requires certain cognitive responses, the ability to download an app and make critical choices on how to beautify objects. Those talents do not appear anywhere in Mek's job description.
I felt betrayed. Her pulling the wool over my eyes seemed more heinous than her pulling knives on Mek.
"Why don't you find a nice quiet girl?" I suggested one morning, after he'd been living alone for three weeks. "Anybody is better than that knife-wielding monster."
Let's skip to Friday a week ago.
"I need to take Monday off," he said to me. "My ex-girlfriend's mother is coming to town. She wants us to get back together again."
That scheming little buck-toothed …
"My girlfriend wants us to get back together, too. She says she will stop her nagging."
"What about the knives?"
"What about them? Oh. That."
Which brings us to this week. As of last Monday Mek moved his things back in with his girlfriend. They are back together again. I'm not surprised. We humans like our routines, even if they do involve Wiltshire Staysharps. Better the devil you know and all that.
Apparently she swore to change and the three of them -- mother included -- went down to Wat Narm Daeng where the girlfriend drank holy water in front of the Buddha image, promising to mend her ways.
Last Tuesday she came to work to pick up Mek. As Mek hopped on the back of their motorbike, she waied me with a strange glint in her eye.
Dammit. She knows.
