Suk's Progress

Marlay Spencer George

Description

Our benign efforts all add up,they accumulate and have force,even failure has effect.Petite, almost aggressive in her vitality, Suk raises herself out of childhood poverty to become a trek guide in the forests of the Kingdom of Thailand. She lives with her friends at LekNaruk Inc, a tiny eating place in the country town of Klong Graitin, and struggles to establish and maintain her independence amidst a miscellany of acquaintances and visitors. Experiencing the full range of the human comedy, including hubris and violence, inevitably Suk has to compromise in life and love.Suk Quartet: Volume 1

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528993548
• Langue: English

Extrait

S uk’s P rogress
Goodness is useless without judgement
George Marlay Spencer
Austin Macauley Publishers
2022-11-30
Suk’s Progress About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Part 1 The First of Earthly Blessings Chapter 1: Friday Chapter 2: Gothic Peaches Chapter 3: Disaster Chapter 4: Freedom Chapter 5: Decisions Chapter 6: Klong Graitin Chapter 7: Human Nature Chapter 8: Art Chapter 9: A Reward Chapter 10: The Human Condition Chapter 11: The Falls Chapter 12: A Frying Pan, the Queen and a Platypus Part 2 The Glare of Contradiction Chapter 1: Goodness Without Judgement Chapter 2: The Glare of Contradiction Chapter 3: Mutability Chapter 4: God Does Not Give Presents Chapter 5: Vision Chapter 6: A Golden Cat Chapter 7: Incident Chapter 8: Doctor Chapter 9: Nobility Chapter 10: Light Chapter 11: Lost Chapter 12: Schadenfreude Part 3 Starry Heavens Chapter 1: Starry Heavens Chapter 2: Massage Chapter 3: Failure Chapter 4: Substitute Chapter 5: Serendipity Chapter 6: Ching’s Fling Chapter 7: Elderly Primary Gravider Chapter 8: Success Chapter 9: Tactical Concession Chapter 10: Woolliness Chapter 11: The Battle of the Lodge Chapter 12: A Most Triumphant Lady
About the Author
GM Spencer was born in the United Kingdom in 1946 and was educated in Liverpool and at Oxford University. He has taught in Kenya and Singapore where he lives. He is married to a radiographer and has two daughters.
Dedication
To my wife Vanessa
Copyright Information ©
George Marlay Spencer 2022
The right of George Marlay Spencer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528993531 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528993548 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published 2022
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Part 1 The First of Earthly Blessings
Chapter 1

Friday
Suk was born on Friday so she was called Suk, which is Thai for Friday. Naturally, she had other more formal names but no one ever used them as was the way of things in her part of the world. She might have been Thursday the day before or Tuesday next week, but her heavily gravid mother, inspecting a goose’s nest at the rear of their house, almost stepped on a snake and went into labour on the spot. Suk, small and skinny, arrived into the world as rapidly as was possible and was soon labelled Friday after a brief period when it seemed she might be called Snake or Goose. The former was too sinister a name for a baby and the latter too comic, so Suk was the obvious compromise—pragmatic and precise.
Her mother had recently been deserted by her father who had left the blissful tedium and peaceful torpor of his rural village in Isan and disappeared off to the bright lights of Khon Kaen and was never heard of again. Suk, growing up with four siblings and an embittered mother on little or no income and only intermittent education, spared no sentiment on her father. He was useless because he had abandoned them amidst the corn of their little holding and uselessness deserved nothing in return. Nonetheless, if the situation were objectively assessed, her father had done the family a favour in taking himself off, as he had been chronically and comprehensively useless, his only activities being drinking and smoking. Thus, his voluntary absence was actually a mitigation of his uselessness but Suk, characteristically unforgiving, was not going to give him credit even for this.
Her first practical lesson in life was not to invest in uselessness in herself or other people.
At sixteen, Suk was still skinny. From a distance, her small size made her appear younger than her years but if casual observers were to look hard into her face, they would see her relative maturity. Her eyes were a little sunken and she had hollows in her cheeks. If they looked harder still, they would divine also her resolution to escape her poverty-stricken family and build a life for herself to achieve that first of earthly blessings—independence. However, few bothered to do this and those that did might have been repelled by some sardonic observation because Suk, even in her anserine mode, was surprisingly fierce. Although on rare occasions charming when so pleased or when she was warming to an acquaintance, her pugnacity could break out at any time if she felt she were being taken advantage of or being patronised. She passed rapidly from the sarcastic and abusive to furious attack straight into the face of whoever had provoked her so that the offender felt as if he had been assailed by a cute little honey bear, which had suddenly shown its teeth and claws.
Suk possessed a relatively dark skin that was not solely the result of working around the family holding. She shared this feature with her mother. It was surmised in the neighbourhood, quite plausibly, that her parent was the product of a liaison between a country girl and some Latino or Afro-American of the American army, stationed in Isan or on leave in Pattaya at the beginning of the second Indochina war. Some credence to this theory was created by the discovery in the family archives, a small pile of second- or third-hand magazines and cartoon books, of a picture of a girl who may have been Suk’s grandmother. She was standing on a beach with her hair permed and dressed as a South Seas island girl in a grass skirt and a flower garland, touting for some establishment of pleasure. This putative sprinkling of alien genes may also have accounted for Suk’s full wavy hair, which required no artificial body.
When she was fourteen or fifteen, Suk had realised that her mother and the family holding held no future for her whatsoever. Indeed, since she worked all day for virtually nothing except her keep, and not much of that either, it was a positive handicap for any future. The land produced maize and vegetables and some poultry and was situated close to a range of forested hills that at one time had been haunted by communists and eventually had become a series of national parks or reserves of one type or the other. Wild animals sometimes raided their crops and this became more frequent when protection of the designated areas improved and the numbers of wild game increased. If Suk had to listen to a woman grumbling about the expense of everything, the uselessness of men and the rooting of wild pigs in her maize field, she might as well do it in a city where some foreigner would pay her at least a pittance of hard cash and where she could pick up a new language and a few household skills. The wild pigs would not be referred to in such an environment but the other two components were universal.
Thus, Suk rapidly found herself working as a domestic slavey for a Thai-Australian family living in Chantaburi. The Australianised Thai father and Australian mother were kind to her in an unintentionally patronising way since Suk remained skinny and small and looked about twelve. They ended up treating her like the eldest sister of their own three children—Roberta, Esther and Isabel, aged one, four and seven. Suk was the youngest in her own family and had been bossed around by her two brothers and two sisters who delegated to her tasks given to them by their mother. They also sent her on errands of their own so Suk never had time for herself but was always doing something for someone else. In the Thai-Australian family, she was made responsible for the children and followed them about and restrained them from vandalising ornaments and committing unintended suicide in the kitchen and elsewhere. The two younger girls accompanied her wherever she went, the baby of the family riding piggy-back behind or slung in a cradle to her front. Since Suk was small and the child relatively large and happily waving her arms, the resulting combination suggested a multi-limbed Hindu deity.
The children responded well to Suk and she soon stamped her authority on her charges through a mixture of kindness, sternness and physical intimacy.
Suk habitually wore a long white tee-shirt and long shorts. The tee-shirt was too big and long for her and hung down over her long shorts to the bottom of her small but protuberant backside. It was decorated with large, somewhat mammary-like peaches both back and front and some writing in dense Gothic script, which naturally meant nothing to Suk. She had two or three of these tee-shirts purchased cheap at a night-market. Her shorts had many pockets handy for carrying around cleaning items and tools and useful things like a spoon and a penknife. Her full head of hair she screwed up or behind as befitted a slavey and she performed her household tasks seriously with unsmiling lips slightly parted.
Suk had hoped that her considerable and wayward burden would grant her some autonomy in the household. Unfortunately, the children’s tall New South Welshwoman mother interrupted her constant care of the children with an as constant stream of incidental tasks prefaced with long preambles in English.
“Sukee, I wonder whether you could find time—no, that’s unreasonable—still, if you have finished the clothes—perhaps you—would you be so good as to just peel and s