I was friendly to an entire town for a year and not one of them knew me.
I did everything the advice tells you. I said yes to things. I went to the quiz night at the bar with the broken sign. I learned the names at the coffee place and used them. I asked people about their day and I remembered what they said the next time.
By any measure I was doing it right. And at the end of that year there was nobody in that town who would have noticed if I got on a bus and never came back.
I was on friendly terms with the whole street and I did not have one person I could call at night. I was the friendly foreigner. Every town out here has one. Warm to everybody, known by no one, and slowly going quiet about it.
What changed it was not more friendliness. It was a broken scooter.
There was a family that ran a small food shop at the end of my lane. The daughter did the buying. Her name was Nok, or that is what everyone called her, and to this day I could not tell you her full name. Every morning before light she went across town to the wholesale market for the vegetables and the meat, and she went on a scooter that was more rust than scooter.
One morning it would not start. I was awake anyway. I never sleep well the first months in a new place, and I was standing outside with a coffee watching her kick the thing and swear at it in a way that needs no translation.
I had a bike that worked. I said I would take her.
That is the whole heroic story. I had a bike and I was awake.
The scooter stayed broken and I kept waking up early, so it turned into a routine.
Her on the back with the empty baskets. Me driving. Six in the morning, the city still cool, the roads still half asleep. She knew every seller in that market. I learned them too. Which auntie had the good morning glory. Which man would cheat you on the weight if you let your eyes drift to your phone.
I carried the heavy sacks because I was bigger and it cost me nothing. Rice. A whole stalk of bananas one time, up on my shoulder, and she laughed at me the entire way back to the bike and I never did work out what was so funny about it.
We did that for months.
Somewhere in those months I stopped being a customer.
I noticed it in small things.
They stopped letting me pay, and we had a short fight about it that I lost. A plate would land in front of me that I had not ordered, because the grandmother had decided I was too thin. When my own bike finally died the father took it into the back and worked on it for two days and looked genuinely insulted when I reached for my wallet.
And Nok started telling me the real things. Who in the family was sick. Which cousin was trouble. The kind of talk you only get when people have stopped thinking of you as a guest.
Nobody once used the word friend. Out here that word does not get said much. It gets shown. They showed it by needing me at 6 in the morning and feeding me at night, and after a while I understood this was the exact thing I had spent a year failing to buy with quiz nights and remembered names.
You do not get taken into a place for being liked. You get taken in for being useful.
I had that backwards for ten years. Being liked is pleasant and it goes nowhere. It gets you a warm nothing and a street full of people who would not notice the empty chair. The ones who actually get let in are the ones who turn out to be some use to somebody. Not the charming one. Not the interesting one. The one with the bike. The one who shows up at the ugly hour and does the boring thing without being asked twice.
There is a cost to this and I should be honest about it.
Once you are useful you are also on the hook. The one morning I woke up with a fever I still got on the bike, because Nok was already down at the road with the baskets and there was no version of me that could roll over and leave her standing there. Useful is not free. It ties you to a place by the ankle. For a man who moves on every year or so, that is a strange thing to have signed up for without noticing.
I did move on, in the end. I always do.
The last morning she would not let me drive her. Said she would sort the scooter herself, waved me off, did not look at me while she said it. I found out later she just hated goodbyes and that was the whole of it. I got a bus that afternoon.
Ten years out here and that was the first town I ever left that actually felt like leaving.
I still do not know most of their last names. I know the grandmother thought I needed feeding, and the father could fix anything with his hands, and the daughter laughed at a grown man carrying bananas. That is more than I can honestly say about people I called friends for years back home.
I got all of it for owning a bike and being awake at six. Nobody warns you the way in is that small.
Andrew - No Refunds •••