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beautiful.
    Don’t get me wrong – I’d be the first one to put my hands up and say that I don’t think she loved me for my looks or in any genuine way.
    Thai women become involved with European men for various reasons. Some give themselves over for genuine love, but others do it for money.
    Nanglung was mostly interested in me because she believed I had money. I was attracted to her for all the obvious reasons, though I have to say it wasn’t the same as dating a girl back home. I knew the foundations that our relationship was built on. But you must remember that I was alone and far away from home.
    Eventually we got married. But when I say married, I don’t mean it in the conventional sense.
    After we lived together for some time, she brought me home to meet her parents. Nanglung grew up on a farm in the provinces outside the city.
    I remember arriving at her village which was rural and backward. Her parents lived in a small house and could not understand a word of English, but I could tell they were delighted she was marrying a foreigner. It was all very surreal.
    At the time, there were two separate types of marriage in Thailand. The first was a Buddhist ceremony of traditional Thai marriage, and the other was a legal process of marriage registration with the Thai authorities.
    Nanglung chose to marry me in a Buddhist ceremony which simply involved me visiting her village and asking her parents for her hand in marriage. I had no interest in entering into a legal marriage because I was still married.
    The traditional arrangement suited me fine. In Thailand, a couple gets engaged during a ceremony known as Thong Mun . This involved me giving gold to Nanglung.
    Whether traditional or official, Thai marriages involve a tradition called Sinsod . This is the custom of paying a dowry to compensate the bride’s family for the mother’s milk. Although I was told there was no set amount, the sum was determined by the suitor’s wealth. In my case, her family believed the Farang , or foreigner, marrying their daughter was wealthy. Little did they know. I gave them some money and they seemed genuinely delighted. The whole village shook my hand that day.
    I have to say that the whole experience didn’t mean that much to me. I couldn’t talk to her parents or hold a conversation with her family, but I was obviously being taken quite seriously by everyone concerned. Her parents certainly regarded our wedding as a lifelong commitment. In the eyes of the Buddhist religion, marriage is sacred and everlasting.
    I did love Nanglung. She was my only real friend at the time. At the time, I would have done anything for her. In fact, I did everything, and more and she reciprocated it. She fell pregnant soon after we moved in together. Almost a year later, she gave birth to a son. I called him Brendan.
    * * *
    Although I now lived in domestic harmony, I never stopped searching for O’Connor. He became my obsession. I checked his favourite bars and restaurants regularly and I continued to pay the motorcycle taxi boys to look out for him.
    I also kept in contact with the police, and telephoned them at least once a month to check on the progress of the investigation.
    The answer I received was always the same: they were still looking for O’Connor, but they said he hadn’t left or entered Thailand, or even returned to his apartment since the fraud.
    I didn’t trust them one bit and continued to offer a reward for any information on his whereabouts. This generated some leads from time to time. I’d rush off to a bar or a restaurant after getting a tip-off to say he was there, but it would never be him.
    One time, a friend of mine came back from a holiday in the Philippines and swore that he’d spotted O’Connor. I caught a flight the next day to Manila. I found the town, I found the bar, I even found a prostitute O’Connor had spent the previous night with. She showed me his hotel, but he had already checked out. He had vanished once