Malee thought it was a familiar voice as she fell on the road. Luckily, the front wheel bicycle hit her leg as she was running and aside from the few scratches, she didn’t felt any other pain. She got up from the road and dusted her clothes to meet the face of someone who looked like George. She wiped her eyes to make sure her eyes were not tricking her.
“George, young master. What? Why?” Malee stuttered in shock as she finally confirmed herself it was her young master from the house.
“I am going to school early to hand in work because I would not be going there later. Why are you running?” asked George. Malee remembered he had mentioned his school before and it was a few roads from the night market, but within the more privileged cluster.
“I am, my father, you need to go.” said Malee. She would not in her mind wanted him to be involved in her own family issues. She had heard too many stories about her friends’s being beaten or even kidnapped over their parents’ debt. She could sense the potential trouble after seeing her father on the floor soaked with blood.
“Come on. Tell me. What happened?,” pressed George.
Malee foolishly gave a brief of what she had seen to George, only to find he wasn’t someone who could be persuaded otherwise. Ignoring her plea to go to school and return to the house, he insisted going to Malee’s house to see the issue for himself. Malee tried to drag him away by hand, but he did not relent to her pleas and asked her to lead the way back to her house, whatever that was. Malee had no choice but to walk back to the place, in fear of George’s safety and herself. Or, as she wondered to herself, what she afraid was George seeing her home.
“This is your home?” asked George. They were standing in front of a small hut by the roadside with a full view of the dump site behind it. He could only describe the smell only as indescribable, if not because George sprayed a few drops of perfumes his sister sent to him for his birthday before leaving the house. George wondered why there was no door and quickly answered himself. There was no door because there was nothing to steal from it. George had seen such places on the television but couldn’t imagine people living in such conditions only a few kilometers from his house, especially one of them was his servant.
He hesitated for a while before walking into the hut. There was no one there, or nothing that could be described as furniture. a table with three legs standing was the closest he could associate with. Malee followed him and was surprised as to what had happened to her father. There were drops of red marks on the ground where her father collapsed, but her father was no longer there. Then a loud sound followed by a limpid body thrown from the back of the hut and two men. It was her father with more blood on his shirt. Both the men were big and were carrying wooden sticks dripping with blood.
“Oh, you must be his children. Good. We can sell both of you.” said one of them calmly. Malee had seen him before as working for the boss of the gambling den her father frequented regularly. She had seen her father coming home with black rings around his eyes, but not such violence. It frightened her so much that she grabbed onto George’s arms and hid behind him.
“What do you want? Money? I will give.” said George calmly. The men laughed. They were there to collect half-a-million Bahts and a boy living in such a condition offered to pay them.
“Oh, you will pay back alright. Both of you should fetch half the amount on the black market.” said the other man with the wide grin. They stepped over the body on the floor towards the children. It was then that George felt afraid. The men were not from the class that he was accustomed to. A few millions meant nothing to him, but it would have meant nothing if they wouldn’t believe him. Then the men stopped and looked down at their legs. It was a pair of hands, colored bright red, holding their ankles so they couldn’t move forward. A voice howled from behind.
“Run!”