Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  I laughed bitterly. ‘I’m not a fisherman,’ I said.

  ‘But you know many things,’ he said, and I followed his eyes to the red satellite dish.

  ‘Not fishing,’ I said, my voice was flat and hard. ‘I was a builder. I built things with my hands. All different sorts of things. And when that was taken away, I was a driver. Vans. Cars.’ I touched the Royal Enfield. ‘A motorbike. Now that’s gone too.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t need charity.’

  I watched the anger flare in his face.

  ‘It’s not charity,’ he said. ‘It’s a job.’ He shook his head, heading back round the side of his house. ‘Just like my son – the big shot! – too good for fishing!’

  I watched him storming off.

  ‘I’m not too good for anything,’ I said, but he had gone by then.

  I wheeled the bike to the end of the dirt road so as not to wake my family or Mrs Botan, and then I rode south to the Bangla Road in Patong, where every night the music plays and the beer flows and the money pours in.

  A river of money. I wasn’t looking for much of it. We didn’t need that much.

  The rain came and I bought an umbrella made of transparent plastic from a street vendor on Bangla Road. Then I was suddenly hungry and I bought a coconut from another street trader, and I cruised slowly through Patong, one hand on the umbrella and the other hand on the coconut, sipping milk through a plastic straw, no hands on the bike, the Royal Enfield steering itself between my thighs, and the rain coming down.

  I lowered my new umbrella and lifted my face to the heavens and the raindrops were so warm and fat that I had to smile. I felt the rain on my face and I tasted the thin sweet milk of a coconut and I realized that the island always made me feel this way. As if something would turn up.

  But a few hours later I sat on the bike outside the Hotel Sala, and I looked at the long line of idle taxi drivers standing by the open doors of their cars, smoking and talking and waiting – mostly just waiting.

  I looked at their blank, impatient faces and they looked back at me, staring straight through me, as if I was already gone.

  As I put the bike away Keeva appeared in the doorway of the shed, a look of rapture on her face. There was a small dog in her arms. A mangy little mutt, ratty and brown, hardly more than a pup, although it looked as though it had been living rough for years.

  I was immediately furious with her.

  ‘What’s the rule about dogs?’ I said, my voice trembling.

  It wasn’t just the dog. It was everything.

  Keeva’s smile faded. ‘We don’t touch them,’ she said, and she immediately put the mutt on the ground. ‘We never touch the dogs.’ The ratty little pup looked up at her and then shuffled over to me, sniffing at my boots, its grubby tail wagging away as though we were old friends.

  ‘It’s probably got rabies, Keeva,’ I said, my voice softer now, and I pointed at the shed door as I fixed the mutt with a look. It cocked its head to one side, as if it didn’t quite get my drift.

  ‘Beat it,’ I said, but the dog did not move.

  There were stray dogs everywhere in Thailand. Mrs Botan had told me that it was because Thais respected all living things. Mr Botan had suggested it was because His Majesty the King had once adopted a street dog called Thong Daeng, so all dogs were favoured. But it always seemed to me that the dogs were everywhere because Thais were totally unsentimental about animals, and yet they had no appetite for dog meat. In their attitude to wild dogs, you could see both that famous Thai tolerance, and that less famous Thai indifference. And sometimes you couldn’t tell them apart.

  Seeing the mutt refusing to move, Keeva looked all hopeful.

  ‘Can we keep him just for a little while?’ she said.

  I could see Rory lurking outside the shed, still furious at me with a rage that he could neither express nor explain, but drawn by the dog.

  ‘No,’ I told her, as the mutt followed me out of the shed. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Beat it, mister.’

  The pea-brained creature capered happily by my side and my daughter’s eyes were wide. Keeva looked at her brother and then back at me.

  ‘Is that her name?’ she said. ‘Mister? How do you know her name, Dad? Is she called Mister?’

  ‘Here, Mister,’ said Rory. ‘Mister, Mister, Mister.’ And the filthy little hound was cunning enough to respond: Yes, that’s my name – how did you guess? We were clearly born for each other.

  Rory picked the dog up, his love of animals greater than his fear of me, and I shook my head and sighed as he aimed the dog’s tail at his sister.

  ‘And Mister’s a boy, see?’ he said.

  Mr Botan came out of his house and looked at the children with the dog.

  ‘What time do you go to work in the morning?’ I asked him.

  But he ignored me and went back into his house.

  Rory looked at me, and I felt that it was the first time he had looked me in the eye since everything had fallen apart.

  ‘Mister is hungry,’ he said. ‘Can we feed him before we let him go?’

  I nodded, and Rory and Keeva took the mutt into the house before I changed my mind. I could hear the voice of Tess, and their excited response. Mister began to yap as if this was its lucky day.

  Mr Botan came out of his house carrying some kind of clothing. Clean, green and carefully folded. He gave it to me and I saw it was a pair of the lightweight trousers that he always wore. He nodded at my jeans, and I suddenly saw how unsuited they were to the island, how they were from another life at the other end of the world.

  ‘I go when it is light,’ he said, and when I nodded he went back inside his house.

  I went inside my own house where Keeva and Rory were feeding the dog.

  ‘I want it out of the house when it’s been fed,’ I said, and neither of them gave any indication they had heard. ‘I mean it,’ I said.

  Then I touched my son’s shoulder and he looked up at me.

  ‘Are you still mad at me?’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t mad,’ he said, turning back to the ravenous dog. ‘Just worried.’

  That night on the Bangla Road I saw the young sergeant.

  He was on the other side of the street, standing by his car watching two Australians argue outside the No Name Bar, wearing his Top Gun shades even though night was falling fast. He had been waiting to see if the Australians were drunk enough to need attention, but when he saw me on my bike he strolled over to me.

  ‘We got your file,’ said Sergeant Somter. ‘After you left.’ He laughed and shook his head as if he could not quite believe my luck. ‘All the files came on all the men. But after you had gone.’

  The raindrops had started to fall, fat and soft and warm. I had my plastic umbrella with me but I did not raise it.

  ‘I know what you did,’ he continued. ‘In your own country. I know about the trouble you were in.’

  ‘I did nothing wrong,’ I said. ‘I protected my family. That’s all.’

  ‘We both know what you did,’ he said.

  The Australians had begun to swap wild, swinging punches. They grappled with each other for a bit and then tumbled into the gutter. A tiny woman in a tiny skirt began to scream, swaying precariously on her impossible heels. A few tourists stopped to watch the action, leering with delight.

  ‘I don’t want to see your face any more,’ Sergeant Somter said, and pulled back his shoulders, preparing to deal with the Australians. ‘So you go home now,’ he said. ‘Just go home.’

  He wasn’t talking about Hat Nai Yang.

  It was after midnight when I came bumping down the dirt-track road. The house next door was in darkness, but on our porch Tess had left a light on for me. In the faint yellow glow I could see the dog looking up at me, as if waiting to see if I had a heart. He was patiently waiting in the same place after I put the bike in the shed.

  ‘Come on, Mister,’ I said, and I picked him up and carried him into our home.

  PART TWO

  Beach Do
g

  11

  London.

  The night it finally all fell apart.

  I had been stuck out at the airport for hours, waiting for a delayed flight, and by the time I had dropped the client off at his hotel and got myself home it was the far end of the night, that brief moment when the entire city seemed to sleep.

  As soon as I came through the door my last breath caught in my throat as I sensed the cold air coming in from somewhere. I looked into the blackness of the living room, and knew with a sickening certainty that there was something wrong with my home.

  I was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform that always carried the traces of some unknown driver’s cigarettes, no matter how many times it was dry-cleaned, and a peaked cap that I usually tore off as soon as I was through my front door. But that night I did not take it off. I just stood there listening to the silence, the car keys still in my hand, the firm’s limo still clicking and cooling on the driveway, and feeling the cold air on my face.

  My family were sleeping. They were definitely sleeping. So I let out the trapped breath, thinking it was just me, my nerves all jangled from too much caffeine and a long day behind the wheel. I went to turn on the lights. Then my foot touched the photograph.

  I picked it up and saw there was a jagged crack of broken glass across the front, like a flash of lightning. It was a photo of the children, just two years ago but shockingly so much younger, feeding a banana to an elephant. Keeva laughing as she held out the fruit, and Rory standing behind his sister, looking at the elephant with dumbstruck love as it unfurled its trunk for the banana. Something stirred at my feet and I scooped up a twitching bag of fur and bones. The hamster’s beady eyes shone with guilt when I showed him the broken photograph.

  ‘Smashing the place up again, Hammy?’ I said.

  As I put him down the security light came on in the back garden. A fox stood perfectly still, staring through the glass doors that led to the little garden.

  I saw that they were open.

  The back doors were open.

  That was where the cold air was coming from, and I felt it chill the sudden sweat on my face.

  The fox was young, scrawny, but standing there like he owned the place. Eyes like yellow flares in the night, totally unafraid. The light went off and the shadow of the fox slid over the garden fence and into the night. For a moment I just stood there, not understanding what was happening, and not knowing what to do.

  Then I was running upstairs, calling her name.

  ‘Tess!’

  The door to the children’s bedroom was open and Tess was standing there in her dressing gown. She had a knife in her hand, a really elaborate knife that I recognized from our brief scuba-diving days, a couple of holidays before the children were born. Coral reefs and looking at the fishes and Tess in a wet suit. That’s what I remembered. I didn’t even know we still had that knife.

  We heard a distant siren. Then it faded away. Tess shook her head as I looked from the knife to her face.

  ‘It’s not for us,’ she said quietly. ‘I only just called them. The police.’

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  ‘Maybe it’s just the fox,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not the fox, Tom.’

  From beneath the folds of her dressing gown the twins appeared, as if by magic, their eyes sticky with sleep, one either side of her, clinging to their mother’s legs. Different in ways that went beyond the boy’s Harry Potter glasses and the girl’s long hair. Rory was trying not to cry.

  ‘Maybe they left,’ Tess said.

  ‘Who?’ Keeva said. ‘Who left? Mama?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, starting back downstairs, and stopped at the top of the stairs when I heard the gulping, snotty sound of someone trying not to cry. I knew it was Rory and I looked back at him, wanting to say something but not having the words.

  ‘I’m going with Daddy,’ said Keeva, and her mother silenced her with a yank on her arm.

  ‘Just stay here,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Is Hammy all right?’ said Rory, and he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his World Wildlife pyjamas.

  ‘Hammy’s fine,’ I said, and I went downstairs.

  This is what will happen, I told myself. You will check the back doors where they kicked them in and then you will check every room downstairs, but they will all be empty. Some stuff will be gone, but that will be okay. It’s just stuff. Let them have it.

  I did not want to fight.

  And then the security light came on again and I could see the glow of the hard white light through the window on the stairs, knowing it wasn’t our fox this time, and feeling the fear clogging my heart, my legs, my mouth.

  Just go, I thought. Take what you want and go.

  But when I got to the foot of the stairs and looked out at the back garden, all lit up in the dead of the night, I could see that he had not gone.

  The shed door was open and this young man, this overgrown boy, this giant kid was coming out backwards, carrying my daughter’s bike. The security light didn’t seem to bother him and now I saw there was a dark pile in the middle of the garden and it took me a second to realize that it was our TV set, our DVD player, all that stuff that should be sitting in the corner of our living room.

  Before the security light went off he looked at me with foggy eyes. Neither of us moved but he was still out there in the darkness, a black shape on more blackness, and he was not revealed by the moon or the light that never goes out in the city. Then somebody pulled the flush in the downstairs toilet.

  And I thought to myself – You’re kidding me.

  I stared at the door of the toilet and another one came out, frowning as he buttoned up his jeans. He was wearing my old leather jacket. It was a bit small for him.

  He stopped, looked up at me, and even then I hoped that it would all just go away. Even then I thought that they might make a run for it, carrying what they could, and I would give half-hearted chase until I heard the sound of the police siren.

  But none of that happened. This is what happened instead.

  The one in the garden carefully laid the bike on its side, as if he was afraid of damaging it, and he came into the house through the smashed back doors and the one who had just used our downstairs toilet waited for him before he started coming towards me and then somebody was howling with fear and rage and after a numb second, I realized that it was me.

  But it was all right.

  Because they were only fighting for all that stuff they had piled up in the back garden, while I was fighting for the woman and the two children upstairs.

  In one corner of the police station there was a tangled mess of brightly coloured metal, this sad jumble of flaking yellows and reds and blues and greens, some of it deliberately curly-whirly and some of it deliberately bent out of shape. There was a sign above it: Please be advised that this play area is unsupervised, it said. As I stood there, waiting for my turn, I kept reading the sign, trying to make sense of it. I rubbed my eyes. I was very tired now.

  Four in the morning, but the cop shop was still busy. All of us victims of the night. We queued with our complaints and our stories and an overweight policeman slowly wrote them down, speaking to everyone as though they had just had their brain removed or he was at the end of his tether or both. When my turn finally came, he really did not like it when I said that I needed him to come outside and take a look.

  ‘I need to show you,’ I said. ‘In the car.’

  ‘Sir,’ he said, making sir sound like another way of saying time-wasting moron. ‘I am not permitted to leave my station, sir.’ He peered at me. ‘What happened to your shirt?’

  I had not noticed my shirt. It had lost all the buttons at the front. I tugged at it self-consciously and told him that the car was parked right outside. He looked up at my chauffeur’s cap. Somehow I was still wearing my chauffeur’s cap. His eyes narrowed as they drifted down to my face.

  ‘Is that blood on y
our lips?’ he said.

  ‘Please,’ I said, my fingers flying to my mouth.

  In the end he came, lifting his massive bulk from his long-suffering chair, sighing with professional impatience, huffing and puffing as he waddled behind me out to the street.

  I shivered in the night air, pressing the car key. The orange lights on the big black 7-series BMW flashed twice. The fat policeman stood by my side as I opened the boot. And there they were, their hands and feet tied up with jump leads. It was a bit of a squeeze.

  One of them began to swear at me, telling me that his brother was going to kill me. The other one was sucking for air. I had seen that over the years with a few passengers. That desperation for some air. I knew it was an asthma attack.

  The cursing did not stop. If anything, it was getting worse.

  ‘You want me to shut this boot?’ I said, and that was when I felt the hand of the fat policeman on my arm.

  At work I sat on the fire escape overlooking the neat lines of cars, all black and shiny with money and love.

  Men in dark suits, white shirts and dark ties moved between the BMWs and Mercs like parents in a maternity ward, gently removing smears on the paintwork, frowning at the spotless windscreens.

  My body was stiff and aching from the hours in the police cell, the stink of the toilet in the corner making sleep impossible, and the sunshine on my face told my mind that it was a good thing to shut down for a while.

  I loosened my tie and closed my eyes. All I could hear were the jets of a power wash smothering the sound of the city. I slept right there, sitting on the fire escape, my head nodding forward, dreaming of water. A voice broke the dream.

  ‘Got a job for you, killer,’ he said, and I opened my eyes.

  Andrzej. A big, tough-looking Pole with a nose that had been broken so many times it looked like a ski jump. The only man at VIP Motors who was allowed to wear a T-shirt and jeans. He was holding out a piece of paper. I rubbed my eyes and yawned.

  ‘What are the charges?’ he said.

  I took the piece of paper and stared at the name and address, scratching my head. The sun slipped behind some clouds, and I shivered in the sudden chill. ‘Actual Bodily Harm,’ I said. ‘ABH and False Imprisonment.’