by Tony Parsons
Keeva was there, Mister in her arms, going wild.
‘Somebody wants the leftovers,’ my daughter laughed. Her brother stroked the dog and looked at it thoughtfully.
‘It might be something else,’ he said.
Tess came out of the kitchen and threw her arms around me. ‘Merry Christmas!’ she said, planting a kiss on my mouth.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I said, kissing her back. I hugged her and turned to our girl. ‘Keeva, that dog doesn’t want to be held,’ I said.
She put Mister down and with his paws skidding on the smooth wooden floorboards, he dashed straight out of the front door.
Rory and Keeva went after the runaway dog and thirty minutes later, after Tess had called them from the front door, they came back without the dog, both of them silent with worry. I had laid the table and as Tess was getting the turkey out of the oven she gave me a look. I went to the door and called the dog’s name.
But all I could see was our island.
Inland there was the thick forest with its fifty shades of green. Towards the shore there was the endless line of casuarina trees along Hat Nai Yang and Hat Mai Khao, and the still blue of the looking-glass sea beyond. The dog could have been anywhere. I went back inside.
‘He’ll be back,’ Tess said.
‘And if he’s not, I’ll look for him in the morning,’ I said.
The children had perked up.
‘It’s not even our bloody dog,’ I grumbled.
But my family just laughed at me.
15
It was just after breakfast on Boxing Day. A Saturday morning. The sea was flat as a mirror, and it shimmered with gold as the sunshine came through the casuarina trees.
‘Mister!’ I called. ‘Mister! You dumb dog …’
There was a gang of dogs on the beach. But as I came out of the trees and on to the sand, the small pack trotted off, one of them with a dead fish in his mouth, and none of them was our dog.
I walked down to the edge of the sea and turned north, towards where we had seen the turtle lay her eggs, my feet sinking in the wet sand. I felt good. I knew I would find him – he wasn’t so dumb that he would run away from home – and it seemed like magic that I was feeling the wet sand and the warm sun on Boxing Day.
I passed an old massage lady sitting under a tree. I had seen her before at this far end of the beach. She seemed to do more knitting than massaging. There was some formless pink thing she was making on a long piece of wood that bristled with nails. She had been working on it since the first time I saw her, and she didn’t seem to be in any hurry. The knitting seemed to be the thing. She waved and smiled, her sun-dark face splitting in a wide grin.
‘Sa-wat-de!’ I said, lifting my hand.
‘Sa-wat-dee,’ she called. ‘Ah-gaht dee na!’
I nodded, and stopped for a moment to look at Hat Nai Yang stretching out before me. The scattering of longtail boats on the glassy sea, the bow-shaped perfection of the bay, and beyond the treeline, the endless shades of green that grew inland. I felt the early morning warmth of the sun on my face.
She was so right.
It was a beautiful day.
A bit further on there were some local men playing the special kind of volleyball you saw on the island – dazzling displays of acrobatics as they kept the ball in the air with head and feet and heel. Nobody ever kept score. It was just sanuk. It was just for fun.
They called out to me to join them and I laughed and shook my head, miming a bad back, and that made them laugh as I kept going. The beach was empty here. I walked the length of Hat Nai Yang and saw no more people and no more dogs.
I paused at the sharp tip of the bay and wondered if I should turn back. There was only one more beach on the island, Hat Mai Khao, the longest, least-developed beach on Phuket. After that there was just the bridge across to Phang Nga on the mainland, and the end of our island. After a moment I kept going, but now I had to turn inland, the sea a still blue world on my left as I called Mister’s name and trudged through the thickening casuarina trees.
The tangled roots and the mud of a mangrove swamp rose ahead of me, barring my path, so I walked back to the sea and the great expanse of Hat Mai Khao lay before me.
It looked like the beach at the end of the world.
These were the widest, whitest sands on the island, banking steeply, because the developers had not been allowed to flatten the land the way they had on the tourist beaches further south. Hat Mai Khao was part of a national park and the nesting ground for sea turtles. Despite the crowds that flocked to this country, the Thais knew how to protect what they valued.
There was one hotel ahead of me. I could see a line of sunloungers, and the first sunbathers of the day, and further back, beyond a strip of grass, a small dining area where a couple of wild dogs moved panting and hungry among the breakfasters, trying to avoid the attention of the staff as they scavenged for scraps. None of them were Mister.
‘Oh, you silly thing, Mister,’ I said out loud. ‘Maybe you are gone for good.’
The lazy commerce of a Thai beach was just getting started for the day. A local was leading a small horse, offering rides. The old lady that I had seen knitting under the trees was walking between the white bodies on the sunloungers, shyly offering foot massage. She must have come by the road, I thought, and have a motorbike or scooter, and I made a note to ask her about getting decent spare parts for the Royal Enfield. Maybe I would get a foot massage too. She waved to me, and smiled, and knelt before a woman in a big floppy hat. Out on the sea a few fishermen moved silently on their longtail boats, ancient nets in their hands, the diesel engines puttering in the calm of the early morning, and I wondered if the fishing was good up here.
As I passed the hotel I waded out to the sea. There was meant to be a strong current off of Hat Mai Khao, another reason why it was undeveloped, but the Andaman felt warm and still and calm, and under my feet there was nothing but the soft shift of perfect white sand.
There were a few people in the shallow water. Swimming and snorkelling and paddling. Or simply standing there, feeling the sun and the soft golden glory of the day.
Voices travelled across the water. German, Swedish, English. Then I stopped, feeling a wave. Nothing more than a gentle movement of the sea. But unmistakable, and insistent.
I looked at the hotel.
There were swirling pools of water on the grass between the beach and the dining area. That was strange. I stared at them, not knowing what I was seeing, and I felt the wave move back out to sea.
And then the water just kept going, as if God had decided to pull the plug.
With the sea sucked out towards the horizon, a fish flapped and gasped on the sudden sand. A small boy laughed, chasing after it as the dying fish beat against the sand with its final breaths.
There was laughter on the beach and I looked up to see that a tourist had climbed on to the horse and it was bolting inland. The tourist shouted out with a mixture of strained humour and pure terror, trying to be a good sport even as he fought to control the animal. The Thai ran after them, grinning with embarrassment.
‘But I know this,’ said a child by my side, and I looked down to see a girl of about Keeva’s age. The girl was the older sister of the boy who was chasing after the dying fish and she remained protectively close to him. She stared up at me as she went off to retrieve her brother.
‘We did this with Miss Davies,’ she said. ‘Last year. In school. We have ten minutes.’
‘What?’ I said, understanding nothing.
I watched her take her little brother by the hand and run back to the dining area, calling out to her mother. I heard a dog bark and I looked up. But it was not our dog. It was not Mister. Then I heard the birds screeching high in the casuarina trees. They took off in a black scattering mass and I could feel the magic draining out of the day. I began to feel frightened. The water was still going out.
One of the longtails that had been sitting in shallow water was now ag
round, and the young fisherman stared down at the wet sand beneath him.
‘Look at that,’ someone said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
They were looking out to sea.
And far out to sea, all the way to the end of what could be seen with the naked eye, as if it was the very edge of the world, the sea was a foaming white crescent of wave.
It looked very clean.
It looked as though it was not moving.
The water was blue-black beneath it.
And when I looked at the blue-black water beneath the foaming white crescent, I could see that it was moving after all.
Although still very far away, it was getting closer. The sea began to come back in, and it was not like that first wave. This time it was strong and I felt my fear grow. I steadied myself against the movement of the water, digging my toes into the sand, and an old fisherman in the water next to me was knocked off his feet.
He nodded as I helped him up.
‘Go now,’ he said in English. ‘Run now.’
I stared at him.
‘Run!’ he told me.
Under the trees I saw a group of old massage women, unmoving, ready for the working day. There were still people coming into the water, staring out to sea at that moving horizon, and so I just stood there.
‘My camera,’ a woman said sleepily. ‘Don’t let it get wet.’
Then I heard the dog barking. It sounded so much like Mister that I had to smile.
I walked off the beach, through the people all staring out to sea, and I crossed the deserted dining area and walked to the back of the kitchen, all the while calling his name. But it was some other dog. The dog was tied to a cold-water tap with a ragged piece of string. Its eyes bulged in its head as it fought to free itself. It was wild, maddened, and I was afraid that if it wasn’t untied, it would hurt itself, so I crouched down beside it, releasing the knot that held it, and all the while the dog was snapping at my hand, catching me just as I untied it, making me curse, and then it was gone.
I touched my hand, relieved that its teeth had not broken my skin, and that was when I heard the sound, a roaring white noise, like some kind of terrible engine. I felt the air shudder. Then somebody screamed and I turned to look at the sea.
The wave was rushing to the shore now, and it was as if the sea was trying to fill the sky. There was a man standing on the beach, staring up at the wave, as still as a statue. There was a beach towel wrapped around his shoulders to prevent sunburn. Then he was gone, lost in the rushing water, and the wave was even closer.
The wave will break, I thought, even now, it must break. But it did not break. It just kept coming, up the steep incline of the sand, and across the dining area, and into the hotel, and the sound of that wind filled my head and choked my throat.
The water lifted me off my feet as if I weighed nothing and it carried me backwards, half-turning me around, and it was not clean, or at least it was not clean now, it was filthy, like boiling mud, swirling and stinking and brown.
Then my head slammed hard against a wall, my forehead and the bridge of my nose taking the full force of the blow. The water pinned me there, the rough surface of the bricks rubbing against the skin on my face, the water just nailed me there and would not let me move for some unknown length of time, minutes or maybe seconds, and I was dizzy and sick and there was something in my eyes and when I saw that it was blood my heart tried to burst open with the flying panic.
I cursed and begged and prayed, and when I managed to turn my numb and battered head, I recognized nothing. I was all at once in some other place and my skin crawled with blind dread.
Tess, I thought. Keeva and Rory.
The beach that I had been walking on a few minutes ago was gone.
I did not know or understand what I was looking at. None of it was familiar, none of it made any kind of sense, all of it was new. The world was suddenly insane, ripped apart, drowned in the avalanche of water.
A longtail torn from its moorings floated by. And then a car. And then a man. And then a beach house, intact and whole, but dipping forward at a rakish angle. People I could not see were screaming and calling for help and the people they loved in a babble of languages.
I thought perhaps the worst was over, but then I saw that the water was still rising and I whimpered like an animal as the water swiftly rose from my chest to my chin. The terror flew inside me as I took a mouthful of the filthy water and gagged and felt the blood pounding in my head, knowing that I was going to die today if I did not move right now. But I could not move. The water was the most powerful thing I had ever felt. I could not fight it.
Then from somewhere there were hands pulling at my T-shirt and I was dragged sideways and away from my wall and on to some concrete steps.
Then I was on my hands and knees for a bit, kneeling on stone steps as I brought up filthy water and shook with fear, and when I looked up I saw that I had been pulled on to some kind of staircase. Faces were peering down at me from a balcony. The man who had saved me helped me to my feet, and he spoke to me in a language I did not know.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
Tess, I thought. Keeva and Rory.
The man who had saved me helped me up the stairs. It was a restaurant. The tables were set and there was a large breakfast buffet. It was all untouched by the water.
A child looked up at me and I saw that it was the small girl from the beach, the one who knew about the water from school, the one who had understood what was coming, the little one who had said we had ten minutes. She was holding the hand of her brother. But I still didn’t understand any of it.
I went to the balcony with the others and it was as if we were on some strange ship in some murderous storm.
Below us the water was white now, and under the scum of debris and dirt on the surface, and beneath all of the beach loungers and smashed trees and splintered tables, and below all the chairs and sun umbrellas that it carried away, the water seemed to be full of small explosions. The water seemed to be alive, the water was this living thing that wanted to kill you, and it made me sick with helpless panic.
There were people in the water. The lights in the restaurant suddenly went out and I glanced up at them and when I looked back the people in the water were gone. Apart from one man, a local, probably one of the fishermen I had seen out on the longtails, dark skinned and lean limbed, and he had climbed halfway up a casuarina tree. Then the water tore the tree down and he was gone too.
The earth fell away.
We looked down from our balcony and we were above the uprooted trees. They floated by in a world that was water. Moving, filthy, murderous. There was a car, turning in circles like some fairground ride in hell, and I saw the pale, frightened faces at the window before it was taken away.
‘It’s not just our beach!’ cried someone, but it seemed impossible to me that this force could go beyond what I could see in front of me.
‘There’s another one coming in!’ someone else said, and I believed that, I believed it with all my heart, and we all looked out to the horizon, sick with fear, waiting for the water to come again and claim us.
The water was going out now, and people were staggering down the steps, and some of them were crying, and even more of them were calling out the names of the missing. The world had fallen apart and the same thoughts were everywhere.
Are you gone?
Have you been taken from me?
Shall we ever meet again?
I began to cry, these useless, ragged sobs that came from deep inside my chest and sounded like nothing human.
Tess, I thought. Keeva and Rory.
I saw my family lost in the water, I saw it clearer than anything I had ever seen in my life, and the sight was like a knife being shoved in my face, again and again and again.
16
I slowly crossed the shining field of mud that had replaced the landscaped gardens of the hotel.
My legs were gone, as if what had been
bone was now jelly, and my feet stuck in the mud. I looked down and saw that my feet were bare. I had lost my sandals and I swore because I knew it meant it would make it harder to get home, or to whatever stood in the place of home.
There was a sharp pain in my forehead, where bare skin had banged against brick, and when I touched it my fingertips came away slick with fresh blood. There was a man standing with me in the field of shining mud and it took me a while to realize that he was the man who had pulled me from the water.
‘But you must rest,’ he said. He had followed me down the stairs and into the mud and now he touched my arm.
‘No,’ I said, pushing him away, harder than I meant to. ‘I have to find them – my family.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Yes. Your family. Good luck.’
I staggered away, dizzy and sick, my bare feet sucked by the mud, and then I stopped and turned back, looking at him. ‘Thank you,’ I told him, as though he had opened a door for me rather than saved my life, and he nodded, just watching me. ‘And what about you?’ I said.
‘My family were at breakfast,’ he said, glancing back at the hotel. ‘My wife and our baby. They were upstairs at breakfast. They’re safe.’
I nodded, glad for him, of course, but also pushed down by the weight of what had happened, the weight of knowing that it took nothing at all to live or to die, how you carried on living if you went to breakfast instead of the beach, and how this was the day you died if you went to the beach instead of breakfast. Then a pretty woman with a new baby in her arms was calling to him and he turned away, and I walked towards the sea, and I wished that I had asked him his name.
The sand on the beach was unchanged, it was still that soft sand you find on the beaches in the north of Phuket, far closer in colour to snow than to gold. It looked untouched, apart from the dead fish that were now scattered across the sand. The dead fish were everywhere.
I looked at my bloody hand as I wobbled on, wiped it on the front of my T-shirt, and when I looked back one last time at the hotel I saw a nightmare in the sunshine. Everything that had been made by men had been smashed to pieces. The contents of the ground-floor hotel rooms had been sucked out and trashed by the water.