in parentheses

Jaime Gill is a British-born award-winning writer and creative whose journalism and fiction have been published by The Guardian, BBC, voidspace Wanderlust, Beyond Words, Bangkok Post, and others. He works for development organisations across Asia and lives in Cambodia while working on a novel, script, and far too many stories.

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A Trial

I’m a decent guy, so I paid her $6 an hour. That’s a dollar more than the going rate for a cleaner in the capital.

She was definitely worth it, the best cleaner I’d had in four years here. I hadn’t blamed the others, nobody taught them western standards. God knows where this one learned, probably the same place she picked up decent English. I hired her on a one-month trial.

The problem with her good English was her questions, though I didn’t mind, within reason. I work remotely here (tax purposes, among other things) so on the days she came she was sometimes the only human I spoke to in the flesh, unless I gave in to temptation and hit the girl bars later.

“Your boy?” she asked in her second week.

I looked up from my laptop. She held a framed photo of Luke, taken from my work-desk where I hold Zoom meetings. Right then I was sprawled on the bed where I did the real work, creating business plans for hapless entrepreneurs who could make bullshit walk but not money talk.

“Yep. He’s older now, though. Fourteen.”

“Handsome.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t look up, signalling that I was working and so was she.

“Good boy? No trouble?”

Overfamiliar, but I reminded myself it was her culture. They don’t have the same sense of privacy as us. Besides, she didn’t pry into really personal stuff. Never asked why my family didn’t live with me, unlike many locals. Disposed of forgotten used condoms without embarrassing either of us.

“Well, he’s a teenage boy, so I hope he gets into some trouble. Just not enough for me to find out about.”

I half-expected her to get lazy after the first week. Workers here start out trying to impress, then old instincts kick in and you either pull them up or let them go.

A fellow expat once asked how I squared donating to his education nonprofit with sacking staff so easily when I knew the poverty here. Flawed logic, I explained: indulge bad habits, and nobody’s incentivized to improve. These attitudes trapped the country in its permanent “developing” stage.

“Would you hesitate sacking someone incompetent back in Britain?”

“Actually, I would hesitate, but it’s not the same. We have unemployment benefits back home. Not here.”

Cue another argument about welfare and socialism. He’d grown up rich in London, while my Mom brought me up single-handedly in Boston’s second shittiest neighborhood. I actually knew poverty and worked myself out of it. Making excuses for your situation is easier than changing it. Safety nets are tangling traps.

The cleaner kept impressing me. She tidied my work-desk, which her predecessors seemed terrified of, as if my papers were sacred texts. She even arranged my invoices. This puzzled me, given she surely couldn’t read them, but then I remembered they do learn Latin numbers.

I tested her once, left money scattered around. She didn’t take one dollar.

When I told her she’d passed her trial she didn’t thank me. She pulled out a sealed envelope and a photograph.

The photograph showed a big-eyed teenager grinning goofily. He looked familiar, but in a country where everyone has brown hair, eyes, and skin you can get confused. That’s not racism, that’s practical reality.

“You never asked about my family.” Her English had an odd, stiff quality when she spoke, as if rehearsed. “That’s my boy.”

“Nice looking kid,” I said. “But I don’t…”

She interrupted. “He had learning difficulties. He got bullied at school and left. Got a carwash job, but only paid hundred dollars a month. He made bad friends.”

“Sounds tough,” I said, guessing where this was going. “Actually, I was already going to offer a raise.”

“No thank you. I’ve seen your home. I’ve seen how you live.” She thrust the envelope into my hands. “I passed your trial, but you didn’t pass mine.”

She walked away despite me calling after her.

I opened the envelope then ran after her, but the condo elevator doors had closed.

Inside the envelope were two printed screenshots from Facebook. I vaguely remembered the story from an English language news-site. “Motorbike bag-snatcher dies in traffic while fleeing crime.” The boy looked older and angrier in the online photo than hers.

The second printout was the comments, mine most popular. “Instant karma! Less trash on the streets tonight.”  Underneath were 30 likes/laughs, 4 crying-faces, 2 angry-emojis, 26 comments. One do-gooder said I didn’t care about human life. I replied that if someone decided to steal from people who worked rather than work himself, I wasn’t going to cry over the consequences.

Bundled under the printouts was every dollar I’d paid her.

It fucked up my whole weekend.

At first, I felt guilty, wanted to explain myself. How could I know he wasn’t one of those slum kids who learn to steal before they learn to write? I hadn’t read the whole article and didn’t know how young he was. That was on me, but it was an off-the-cuff comment, there are millions made online every day.

Then came anger. What was her weird stunt even about? I wasn’t the only one who commented, was she working her way round us all? She didn’t know how much I contributed to this country by bringing in business. More than most locals, probably. She had no right to judge me.

The photograph and money felt like a curse, but I left them bundled on my desk until I could give them back. Only, I didn’t know where she lived, or her surname, and I’d paid her cash so neither of us were taxed. I had no way of finding her.

Whenever I saw the kid’s photo I felt uncomfortable, but she never did return and I finally stopped noticing it.

Weeks later, the new cleaner held the photo up with a confused expression. “Your boy?” “No.” I hesitated, then realised I was done with the whole thing. “Throw it in the trash.”

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