Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach jj-2

by Colin Cotterill

  "It's really odd. She squeezed through on Cs and Ds. It was as if they were carrying her for four years. Every year the faculty had to get together to decide whether to kick her out. She was the class dunce. Some of her professors tried to convince her to save her money and go home. They were certain she'd bomb her finals."

  "And did she?"

  "Straight As. A-plus in four subjects. A-minus the lowest. Top scorer for the year for that program. It pumped her GPA up to somewhere approaching respectable."

  "How?"

  "That's what the faculty wanted to know. Clueless for four years, then a sudden spurt. The university didn't like it. They convened the Honor Council and interviewed our girl. They hired a private detective to investigate."

  "Wasn't that a bit excessive?"

  "They had a reputation to maintain. They take academic dishonesty very seriously. They were sure she'd cheated, but they needed to prove it. She was interrogated. There may have even been a lie-detector test at one stage. I accessed the personal files of the detective. In the end they decided to give her an oral test in the subjects she'd excelled in. A sort of resit of the examinations and thesis topic, but with a committee asking the questions. They checked for bugs and transmission devices and put her in a soundproof studio and bombarded her for three hours."

  "And?"

  "Got 'em all right. Nobody could understand it. Given her high school results, they had to assume she'd been suffering from some mental disorder for four years and then suddenly got over it. But whatever the reason, she's kept her mouth shut. At the end of it, they had no choice but to give her a degree."

  "Happy ending."

  "But. .."

  "What?"

  "She didn't turn up to receive her diploma. Vanished. No record of her leaving the country."

  "Obviously she did. She's here."

  "From Washington to Pak Nam Lang Suan. Every young girl's dream. But just to make sure it really is her I'll send you a photo to your phone. It was from her school yearbook."

  "I get a strong feeling we're missing some vital information."

  "And I'm afraid the Internet can't fill in that gap. The last I have for her is the university newsletter listing the students who didn't collect their diplomas, and a modest little hacking of the central airline registry that told me she wasn't on the passenger manifesto of any flights out of the country. Right now, she only exists in your resort. The trail has gone cold. But I can tell you that both her mother and father resigned unexpectedly from their jobs."

  "How do you know that?"

  "A cunning little invention called the telephone. I called their places of employment. Nobody has any idea where they are."

  "So Dad vanished too? Damn. I wonder where he went?"

  "Have you checked the boot of the car?"

  "Yes. Grandad went through it. It's empty. No bloodstains."

  "This is a darned fine mystery, Jimm. Too bad I won't be around to solve it for you. On Thursday the good ship Sissi will be setting sail for foreign shores."

  "Good. So I have two more days of free research assis-tant.

  I met Aung under a lamppost beside the District Electricity Authority building. He'd said he couldn't give me an address because his domicile didn't have one. He'd have to guide me there in person. He was standing back in the shadows when I drove up, and he stepped into the light like a dishy cabaret singer. Unfortunately, he was now dressed, but his hair was just as unruly as earlier. A feral beast. My insides felt like a newly opened soda bottle. I was wearing a dress with a pattern that trivialized my bottom but positively yelled out how nice my legs were. My shoes had half-heels, just enough to take me up to his height. My sensual lips were within smooching distance.

  He smiled and I wanted to throw him up against the

  Electrical Authority sign. But he was too fast for me. He headed off along the main street. Eight P.M. and not a car in sight. Pleasure city. After passing the council hall, he ducked down an alleyway, and I followed him into a labyrinth of little dwellings. The belly of Pak Nam. We passed poky concrete row houses with the doors open so anyone could look in to see families watching TV, small fat people sitting cross-legged on the floor drinking beer, teenagers patching motorcycle tires. Then down tighter and darker paths, where a girl could never feel safe. Where at any moment a rough man might turn around and throw his arms around her.

  But he rounded one final corner and stood bathed in a moody yellow light from another open doorway. He smiled and kicked off his shoes. I joined him on the front step, and a little girl of about two came at me from out of nowhere and lifted the hem of my dress above her head. I have to say it was fortunate I was wearing underwear because there were a dozen people in the room looking in my direction. They all seemed to think my indecent exposure was funny, or perhaps, like the Thais, Burmese used laughter to camouflage embarrassment. I wanted to punch the little girl in the nose but was aware that this would be an inopportune moment to do so. I'd get her later. I unfastened my shoes, and Aung introduced me to various members of the Burmese community who had turned up in honor of my visit. Then I met Aung's pretty wife, Oh, and their five children.

  "Have you eaten yet?" Oh asked me. Her Thai was just as Thai as that of her husband. I wasn't sure of the etiquette. Should I say yes or no? I tried no. It was a winner. The women retreated joyfully to the back area, which I assumed housed a kitchen. There were only two rooms, divided by a wall that didn't make it all the way up to the ceiling. It was a minimalist terraced garage of a place. The walls were painted with watered-down pink undercoat, and the electrical wiring was all visible. There was a large poster of Aung San Suu Kyi and a smaller one of our own royal family on a skiing holiday. The floor was tiled with non-matching squares, and there was a stack of bedding, presumably for seven, in one corner.

  I heard a gas range pop and the clatter of pots and dishes.

  "I invited some members of our community committee," said Aung. The men were all still with us, and they were folding themselves down into a circle on the floor. In jeans or shorts I'm fine with sitting on the ground. But I was wearing a dress. I felt stupid. But what the hell? They'd already seen my Macro Huggy Rabbit bikini briefs.

  "That's good," I said and negotiated a position that was demure but totally uncomfortable. Another half hour and I'd be paralyzed, and they'd have to carry me out to the truck.

  If you didn't count the disappointment, it was a splendid evening. I was pleased that I could still enjoy myself without alcohol. Aung and Oh seemed comfortable together. They somehow made you feel that living in a sub-divided brick dog kennel was the answer to a dream. After a while I'd learned to ignore the TV channel-hopping from the next room, the even louder Mo Lum country music tape from the place behind, the howling dogs, the screaming babies, the drunken arguments. I felt like an anthropologist doing research on twenty-first-century slum culture. But like I said, it was a good night. The committee members were all interesting and smart, and we talked and laughed a lot. All the while I took notes.

  There were some 5,400 Burmese in and around Pak Nam. Half of them were here officially. This meant they had sponsors and ID cards. The rest paid fines to the police whenever they were rounded up and gave their cell phones or any jewelry they were foolish enough to be wearing. As part of the conditions for their employment, the Burmese were not supposed to have cell phones. They couldn't own or drive motorized vehicles. The legal Burmese had access to the thirty-baht health care services, but the kids weren't accepted at local schools. Legally the schools were obliged to take them, but in reality they had nowhere to put them and no teachers to teach them. So they ignored the law.

  I had so much interesting data I even considered actually doing a story on it. But what Thai publication would give a monkey's about the harsh living conditions of the Burmese? Nobody would read it. And it wasn't even big enough for the world press. These people had told me about humiliation, degradation, corruption, and racial prejudice. But what the world wanted was
violence on a huge scale. To get into Newsweek these days, you needed celebrity break-ups or genocide. But now I had my chance. The younger kids were asleep on the tiles, and I decided to tell everyone about my head. I described the discovery, the collection, and the refrigeration of my uncle what's-his-name. During the telling, passed on through the buzz of translation from Aung and Oh, I noticed some disquiet in the ranks. There were glances. Looks of guilt. I'd obviously trespassed on some hallowed ground. But at the end of my story nobody had a comment to make. I didn't even get the obvious question, "Why did the police and collection crew automatically assume the head was from a Burmese?" The hair, the skin color, the earring-they all pointed to a Burmese fisherman but didn't eliminate a Thai. Or was I missing something?

  "Have you heard of other Burmese bodies or parts thereof being washed up on the beach?" I asked.

  Again the stares. Again the feeling I'd overstepped the mark. The shaking of heads. One man, Shwe something, long-haired, mustachioed like a seventies folksinger, looked me straight in the eye and spoke…Burmese. His wife tried to interrupt, but he ignored her. The other men shouted. But he continued to speak to me and nobody translated. I watched it like a bemused viewer at her first Australian Rules football game. No idea what was going on. At last they all stopped, and all I could hear was a cacophony of slum life around us. Our room was quiet.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Nothing," said Aung.

  "That was a long noisy nothing, Aung."

  He gave me a smile, but there was nothing erotic about it this time.

  "Just a small domestic disagreement between husband and wife. She thought he was flirting with you. It happens."

  "Not to me," I thought. My research was finished for the night, but I was getting tired of being lied to. What I needed was to get Shwe alone. We'd see how his wife liked that basket of mackerel.

  6.

  It's Been a Hard Day's Night,

  I Should Be Sleeping on Kellogg's

  (from "A Hard Day's Night" (LENNON/MCCARTNEY)

  There's something you need to know about the monsoons. They come. And they blow. And they go. It's not like a Robert Louis Stevenson story, where the biting wind blows blood-numbing sleet off the ocean for three months at a time. The southern monsoon season is more like a security guard at a gold necklace shop. Day after day nothing happens. Then suddenly two masked robbers burst in, firing guns and banging the guard over the head. They scoop up the necklaces and they're gone. Then it all goes back to nothing again. I got that one from Mair, but it's one of my favorites.

  When I got to bed that night, there was no wind at all and the surf was soothingly soft. The first monsoon had passed and we were back to nothing. That was too bad because I needed a distraction. I needed crashing waves to drown out my thoughts. My brain was trying to convince the rest of me that I was over the hill. That I would never again feel the strong arms of a lover around me. Never again have a man snore in my ear. That, like the salt virgins of Xanadu, my vagina would seal itself up and I would become a fossil. The antidepressants weren't working. Or perhaps they weren't strong enough to counter my mega-midlife crisis. I took another two, washed down with Chilean red, and lay my head on the pillow. I couldn't be bothered to clean my teeth again, so I knew they'd be mauve in the morning. I needed a man, desperately. I needed to be admired, wanted, complimented, desired…loved. How difficult could that be? Village head Bigman Beung desired me, as did Major Mana. So there were precedents. I wasn't totally repulsive. All I needed to do was transfer that desire to a man with skin rather than scales.

  Since I am a Thai woman, my culture discourages me from making the first move. But my culture is eroding as fast as the Gulf coastline. And I am a Thai woman raised by a liberated, free-thinking hippy mother. Unlike most Thais, I never fit in with groups. Relationships with my friends, whom I always felt were wary of my un-Thainess, evaporated on the last day of high school and then again the day after my university graduation. I had been encouraged to embrace the modern world and follow my instincts. Mair wouldn't have thought twice about being the aggressor when she was my age. Enough of being the tick on a blade of grass, hoping some hairy creature might brush past me. No, sir. Tomorrow I would go after my prey. It was a good plan and I felt confident. I might have even found sleep about then if it hadn't been for the headboard of my mother's bed banging against the wooden wall of her cabin.

  I was in the new, barely used meeting room at the Pak Nam police station. They still hadn't removed the plastic wrapping from the chairs. It had taken me a while to get up to the second floor. I had been passed from man to man like a baton on my way up. Loitering was the activity of choice there. Officers old and new were leaning and sitting and standing at every corner, like statues in an ancient mansion. Nobody seemed to have a job. Those I knew, like Desk Sergeant Phoom, quickly introduced me to those I didn't, summarizing my entire life in twenty seconds and ending with the ubiquitous "She's single." But as they knew I was a reporter and therefore educated, "She's single" here was not intended as an invitation to date me, more a sorrowful postscript much in the vein of "She only has two months to live."

  I was discreetly removing chair plastic with my nail scissors when Chompu threw open the door of the meeting room. He entered diva-like with the back of his hand on his forehead, slamming the door behind him. In order to get into the police force, Chompu had pretended to be straight at the interview, just as many other successful gay policemen had done before him. Some even married and produced children to compound the effect. But my Chompu had wanted to make a stand for camp. He believed that openly effeminate men had a role in the modern Thai police force and should not have to disguise what nature had given them. Consequently, he'd been transferred thirty-eight times in his career, and here he was at rock bottom. There was nowhere else to be transferred to. So Chompu could be himself and nobody really cared.

  "Bad day at the office?" I asked. It was only nine A.M.

  "They treat me like a dishrag," he said. "Honestly. I'm the only one actually working here, and nobody appreciates me. They've got their catfish ponds and their Five Star fried chicken concessions and their Amway-and who in their right mind would buy foundation cream from a man who plucks his nose hair in public, I ask you?-and actual policing is a troublesome diversion for most of them."

  He plonked down in a padded chair I'd already liberated from plastic.

  "Why didn't you want to meet in your office?" I asked.

  "I don't have an office anymore. Not to myself, anyway. They put him in there-Egg, the fat man with the cat carcass on his head."

  "What's he doing here?"

  "Requested a transfer, they say. But pray tell me why anyone would ask to move here. He was in Pattani before."

  "Well, excuse me, but that might just explain why he'd want to move here. Are you joking? Pattani? Muslims on motorcycles shooting harmless Buddhists. Buddhists on motorcycles shooting harmless Muslims. Pick off five of ours, and we'll pick off six of yours. Schools torched. Primary school teachers assassinated. It's the world center of cowards with weapons. Kill anyone as long as there's no danger of getting hurt yourself. It's the symbolism. They no longer value human life down there."

  "Have you entirely finished?"

  "Yes."

  I hadn't really. There was so much I had to say about the deep south.

  "Well, Senora Evita, if you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed I didn't question his reason for leaving Pattani. I asked why he'd want to come here to Thailand's own Pyong Yang when there are so many better moves he could have made. I sneaked a look at his transfer papers. He specifically requested Pak Nam, but he has no family connections here."

  "Has he got a girlfriend?"

  "Do you have no shame?"

  "I'm not applying. I was just…"

  "I know. I'm just being catty. Sorry."

  "You don't like him, do you?"

  "Well, apart from the fact that his short-wave radio is on ALL the
time, you know what he did? You remember those darling little button ferns I had on the desk? He emptied them out the second-floor window, dirt and all."

  "No!"

  "Can you believe it? He said if he wanted to be in the jungle, he'd take a job with the border patrol. I'd nurtured those ferns. They were like children to me. Of course, they died immediately. They weren't used to the harsh world outside."

  I took a tissue from my bag and handed it to him. I was just in time.

  "He's a bully," I said.

  Chompu nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes.

  "I'm afraid of him," he said. "He talks so rudely to me. I daren't go in the office now."

  "You've got a gun."

  "You think I should?"

  "Can't hurt. Most bullies are just friendless cowards. Nobody would miss him."

  "Oh, but he has friends."

  "How would you know?"

  "Because according to the statement, he was having lunch with his buddies at eleven thirty yesterday."

  "Were you doing surveillance on h- Wait! What statement?"

  "The statement that was included in the investigation of your bombing. It was a hand grenade, by the way."

  "Why would…? Don't tell me he provided an alibi for the rat brothers?"

  "They're off the hook."

  "I could see they were friendly when he came by our place the day they picked up the head. But why would he give them an-"

  The door swung open, and Constable Mah Lek sauntered in with a tray of coffee cups and iced water.

  "Sorry, folks," he said. "Had to wait for the water to boil. It's an old kettle. Sugar in the pot. Coconut cookies, but they're a bit old too."

  He set his wares down on the table between us.

  "Everything OK?" he asked.

  "I'll recommend the service here to every criminal I know," I said.

  He laughed and left us to it.

  "Where were they supposedly having lunch?" I asked. "There'd have to be witnesses to corroborate it."