School portraits / One August, before the lease was signed
The Six-Forty Rehearsal
A Swedish mother who would not sign a Bangkok lease until she had done the Bang Na school run for real, child included.
Anna Lindqvist refused to sign a lease in Bangkok until she had done the school run. Not imagined it, done it: Thonglor to Bangkok Patana’s campus on Lasalle Road in Bang Na, at the exact hour a Year 4 child would have to make it, with the child in the car for authenticity. Erik said this was excessive. Anna said that in Stockholm they had once chosen a flat for its light and lived for three years beside a tram depot.
The taxi came at 6.40. Freja, eight, was wearing her Swedish school jumper to get into character. The driver, a cheerful man called Khun Somchai, asked which school. “Patana,” said Anna. He nodded in the way Bangkok drivers nod when they have already calculated the route, the traffic and the probability of rain, and he put on a Thai pop song about heartbreak that Freja later hummed for a month.
The expressway was moving. Anna wrote “expressway moving” in a notebook, with the time. Erik, who had come under protest, pointed out that the sky over Bang Na was the colour of a wet slate. “It won’t rain,” said Anna, which is a thing people say in Bangkok about once before they stop. It rained at 7.04. Khun Somchai turned the wipers to a setting Anna had not known existed and said, in English, “Every day, this time,” which she wrote down too, and underlined.
They pulled up on Lasalle Road at 7.22, which Anna announced as if she had landed a plane. The school buses, of which there were a great many, were arriving at the same time, and this was the moment Erik looked at the column of yellow and said the thing he had been saving. “They have buses, Anna. More than a hundred, the guide said. We could have stayed in bed.” Anna noted the buses. She also noted that a bus from Thonglor would have been on the same expressway, in the same rain, with Freja on it alone and no song about heartbreak.
The afternoon leg was the one nobody had planned. Anna insisted on doing the return at 3.30, after a notional football club, and the notional football club is where the marriage was tested. Forty minutes out, in dry weather. Then a second attempt at 4.15, “for after activities”, which took an hour and ten, during which Freja fell asleep on Erik and Erik fell asleep on the window and Anna sat upright with the notebook like a woman taking minutes at a meeting of two sleeping people.
They took a house in Bang Na, eleven minutes from the gate, chosen entirely for its distance from the gate. It has no particular light. Three weeks into term Freja came home and announced that all her friends took the bus and she wanted to take the bus too. “We live eleven minutes away,” said Anna. “The bus goes past our road,” said Freja, who had checked. So Anna, who had moved across the city to avoid a bus, now stands at the end of her road at 7.10 each morning, waving at one.