Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  ‘I saw you on TV,’ I said. ‘A few days ago. The day after it happened. I thought you’d be gone by now.’

  ‘Why would I leave?’ he said. ‘This is the biggest story in the world. My girlfriend went home, but my editor is all for me staying another week or so.’

  I nodded and began walking as he fell into step beside me.

  ‘Don’t you get tired of sticking your nose into other people’s misery?’ I said.

  ‘It’s sort of my job, Tom,’ he said. ‘Sorry. What you doing?’

  I stopped and stared at him.

  ‘I was looking for a little boy,’ I said, and when I said it out loud I saw that it was hopeless. ‘A Norwegian boy called Ole.’

  ‘A missing child?’ he said. ‘He might turn up. You never know. You hear all these stories. Incredible stories. Missing kids being found. Climbers who saw it coming in from miles away. Scuba divers that didn’t know that it had happened until they came back to shore and found everything gone. Unbelievable stories. Like the one about all the animals surviving.’

  ‘The animals surviving?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look at that,’ I said.

  There was a pick-up truck by the side of the road and when a man in a white breathing mask moved to one side you could see that the back of it was full of dead dogs.

  I heard Nick Kazan gasp as though he had been punched in the stomach and he saw that not all of the animals had survived, that it was just a story, a happy myth that had spread fast and was always believed. But it was not true. The dogs in the back of the pick-up proved that it was not true.

  They were beach dogs like Mister, the scavenger dogs, the ones that clung to the beaches and the tourists, looking for scraps, unloved and unwanted. But the man in the mask carefully placed the dog he was carrying into the back of the truck as if he were putting it down for its rest, and I saw that the beach dogs were not treated like rubbish in death.

  ‘That’s no good,’ Nick Kazan said.

  Some tourists were looking at the dead beach dogs as though they were one of the sights, peering into the back of the pick-up truck, grimacing and chuckling with theatrical disgust.

  A man with a sagging belly straining at the palm trees on his Hawaiian shirt was taking pictures and Nick Kazan stepped forward and took the camera from the fat man’s hand.

  ‘Hey,’ said the fat man. ‘Was machen sie denn da? Give me my camera!’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Nick said, and the fat man reared back, shouting something in German, and soon all the tourists were shouting at Nick about the police. Then he hurled the camera as hard as he could at the ground and their jaws dropped open as it exploded. The fat man retrieved his broken camera and they went off to fetch a policeman.

  ‘We should go,’ Nick said. ‘Your family must need you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, seeing he was right. ‘I have to go home now.’

  And that was the day Nick became my friend.

  There were no fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

  But we went to our beach where the sand met the sea and we lit a candle inside a balloon made of tissue paper and we set it adrift on the night sky.

  Many others did the same all along Hat Nai Yang, and on the beaches to the south and to the north, and on every other beach and hill in Phuket, and as the tissue-paper balloons became floating lanterns, soon the night sky was full of thousands of small, flickering flames, and we could not tell our one from the rest.

  The floating lanterns with their trembling flames were like all the lives that you would never know, and we craned our necks and watched them drifting from the shore to the heavens, high above the Andaman Sea, all these tiny stabs of fire in the black and starry night, always drifting away from us, always going higher, and my family stood on our beach, our beautiful Hat Nai Yang, Tess and Keeva and Rory and me, and we held hands as we felt the soft white sand beneath our bare feet and we watched the night sky until the last of the lights were gone.

  PART THREE

  The Young Man and the Sea Gypsy

  19

  On New Year’s Day Mr Botan’s new second-hand longtail spluttered out of the still, sun-polished bay and into the choppy, deeper blue of open sea.

  Mr Botan gave me some small foamy pink earplugs which I took but didn’t use. The throaty rumble of the longtail’s two-stroke diesel engine was loud, though not deafening, as we left the shore far behind. I loved that sound.

  As the sun grew stronger I sat in the middle of the longtail, huddled under a little green umbrella that Mr Botan had erected for me. He was the colour of old teak, and apparently unaffected by even the fiercest heat. But the sun was not the only reason he wanted me to stay in the centre of the boat.

  When I was on either side of the longtail, Mr Botan could not see where he was steering, for ahead of us the bow of the longtail curved dramatically upwards like the sharp end of a Viking ship. From his position at the stern, steering our course with a rudder attached to the longtail’s old diesel engine, Mr Botan never had a clear view of what was ahead of us. Under the national flag of the Kingdom of Thailand, there were bright silk scarves of blue, pink and yellow tied around the top of the bow, and they fluttered and whipped like the flags of some forgotten army in the wind of open water, not for decoration, as I had always thought, but for warning. Like so much of Thailand, behind the delicate, decorative beauty there was a hard-headed, practical purpose. The silk scarves were our headlamps.

  Mrs Botan had made us Haway thawt, an omelette stuffed with mussels, and when we stopped on open water, we ate it with our fingers for lunch.

  He showed me how to weight a trap for lobster. The fishing was poor, but just when it seemed that we would have a bad day because we had set out late and missed the best spots, the nets he threw into the water were suddenly full of white snapper, squid and crab, so much crab that he was able to teach me the difference between blue crab, red crab and soft-shell crab.

  He was in a hurry to get back, and I could not understand why, but when Hat Nai Yang was in sight I could see that some rough version of the fish market was operating, and the longtails were docking with their catch. There were even a few tables and chairs on the sand where the line of restaurants had once stood. The island was already rebuilding.

  Tess was sitting beneath the shelter that I had made on the sand, ready to give bottled water to anyone who asked. We had brought down all the water that we had left in the shed, and it took up so much space that Tess and Rory and Keeva and Chatree and Kai sat in a semi-circle before her using the stacked pallets as seating.

  When we were close to shore, Mr Botan killed the engine and we jumped from the longtail into the shallow water and began hauling the boat up the sand, our catch slapping in their baskets and flashing silver in the crystal sunshine.

  I recognized some of the faces buying and selling fish. But I was aware that other faces were missing, and it made me think that what had happened would never really be over.

  As Mr Botan displayed our catch I reached up to touch Jesse’s chain of amulets around my neck, saying a silent prayer of thanks for my family’s safety, and was stopped by the colour of my arm.

  I had not noticed before.

  My pale skin had turned brown.

  Mr Botan did not sell as much fish as he would have wanted. Business had begun but it was far from normal. He had so much left that it would take both of us to carry it home. Our families would have a lot of fish to eat tonight. We started down the beach road to home.

  ‘What did you build?’ he asked me. ‘In England?’

  ‘I built homes,’ I said. ‘I built houses and flats.’

  ‘You did this alone?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I had men working with me. But that is what we built. Places for people to live.’

  He nodded. ‘Can you build a restaurant?’ he said. ‘If you only have me to help?’

  I looked at him for a long moment.

  ‘Yes,’ I
said. ‘I can do that.’

  Mr Botan and I walked up the green hill to home and the sun set in a firework display of red and gold over the Andaman Sea, so blue and unmoving on the first day of the New Year that it could have been a painting of the sea.

  There was a big black BMW parked at the end of the yellow dirt road and from inside the Botans’ house I could hear a man shouting in Thai and the soft reasoned response of Mrs Botan.

  ‘My son,’ Mr Botan said, and I thought of the man in all of the photographs. ‘He wants us to go with him to Bangkok,’ Mr Botan said. ‘Too dangerous here, he thinks.’ He nodded, not moving, and I thought perhaps that he was reluctant to go inside and join the argument. He already knew the sound case that his son would make for quitting and he already knew that, no matter what his son said or how loud he said it, he and his wife would not leave their life in Hat Nai Yang for the city to the north.

  ‘I can understand why your son is worried about you,’ I said.

  Mr Botan shook his head.

  ‘This is our home and we are staying,’ he said. ‘Just like you.’

  20

  The next day we drove south towards the rain hanging over the distant hills.

  Mr Botan was at the wheel of his pick-up truck. I was beside him and in the open back Tess sat between Keeva and Kai on one side, with Rory and Chatree on the other. Tess cradled the modest luggage of the chao ley – two overnight bags that reflected the passions of my children from a couple of years back.

  Hermione Granger was looking stern in front of Hogwarts on one bag, and there was a baby snow leopard with big eyes on the other. The bags were small but not full. Chatree and Kai only had what we had given them. It didn’t look like enough to start a new life and the sight of those small forgotten bags made my spirits dip.

  ‘My wife wanted to teach them English,’ I said, as much to myself as to Mr Botan. ‘So they could have a better life.’

  Mr Botan glanced in his rear-view mirror.

  ‘They will be better with their own people,’ he said, and nodded emphatically, as if there was no doubt.

  I was unconvinced. ‘But surely, if their English was fluent …’

  ‘Your wife is a kind woman,’ Mr Botan said, cutting across me. ‘But the girl is too old and the boy is too wild.’

  We were going south to find what was left of their family.

  The journey took us from one end of the island to the other and Phuket unravelled before us. Back roads winding through forest suddenly opened up on fields of pineapples and banana groves, there were large temples and small mosques everywhere, and the rubber plantations seemed to go on forever. Sometimes you saw the creamy sheets of rubber hung out to dry on bamboo, but it was easy to forget the real purpose of these plantations for it was as if the island was trying to hypnotize you with the tall, thin rubber trees in their neat regimented lines and lull you into some false, dangerous sleep. As I did on the bike, I sometimes jerked my head away from the neat rows of rubber trees, and did not look at them again for a while.

  We drove into the rain, the five of them in the back shrieking with laughter and huddling under one broken umbrella, and then we were out of the other side and driving down to the very end of our island, and the laughter stopped.

  Kai and Chatree had relatives living at the settlement of sea gypsies on Ko Siray, a tiny island just off the south-east coast of Phuket. When we finally arrived it hardly felt like an island at all. It felt like an afterthought. We rolled across a small bridge and we were there.

  I peered down and below the bridge there were ramshackle houses on stilts beside sick-looking water, tin shacks that seemed on the verge of collapse, but alongside there were stalls laden with fruit, overflowing with the endless bounty of Phuket, and the sight of these natural riches stirred the hope that Chatree and Kai would be all right here.

  ‘Ko Siray famous for two things,’ Mr Botan said. ‘Chao ley – and monkeys.’ He gave me a wry smile that said – Spot the difference, right? I didn’t smile back at him.

  Just beyond the bridge the monkeys appeared. Hundreds of them. So many that I thought my eyes were tricking me. They were scrawny, cunning-looking creatures that ambled from the woods at the first sign of humans. Two young female travellers with backpacks were feeding them old brown bananas. In the back of the truck Rory and Keeva were delirious at the sight of the monkeys. Kai and Chatree were less impressed.

  ‘Some monkey-seeing for your children?’ asked Mr Botan, always the perfect host.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Maybe on the way back,’ I said. ‘Let’s just get them to their family.’

  We drove to the far side of Ko Siray and suddenly the settlement was below us. There were more than twenty longtail boats bobbing in the choppy sea, moored close together. They were not like the proudly maintained longtails owned by the fishermen at Hat Nai Yang. These were old, abandoned, falling to bits. There was no sign of their owners. The pick-up truck rolled slowly down into the chao ley village and I had never been anywhere that felt so much like the end of the line.

  They had not been devastated by the water the way we had on the west side of the island. But something else had hit them here, and it was impossible to imagine that they would ever get up.

  A solitary unmade road ran through the village past shacks on wooden stilts. The shacks had buckling wooden floors, rusty tin roofs, slats hanging loose. Everything about them looked broken. The entire village looked broken. You could see the people inside the shacks. They were all sleeping. Children wandered around, but all the adults seemed to be out for the count.

  ‘Chao ley sleep,’ chuckled Mr Botan mirthlessly.

  These were people with nothing. The sense of crushing poverty was everywhere. No escape, no respite. Poverty as a time-eating, terminal illness. Tess looked at me and shook her head.

  Through the shorn and scrappy trees I could see the beach. I had started to take for granted the white-gold sand of the beaches in our part of the island. But this was a different kind of beach, strewn with stones and rubbish and empty Coke bottles. There were giant cages, the size of Wendy Houses, for fishing that made Mr Botan snort with contempt. And everywhere, stirring in their sleep as the pick-up truck drove by, there were people with that flash of gold in their hair.

  Mr Botan parked the car.

  Kai and Chatree took their pitiful little bags and conferred. They were meant to find their uncle, the brother of their father, who was said to be expecting them. Keeva and Rory wanted to go with them. Tess said they would all go with them. I was reluctant to let my family wander off, but there was no menace in the air here. When the people rose from their sleep they stared at us with total blank-eyed indifference. Tess slipped her arms around the shoulders of Keeva and Rory. But no harm would ever come to us in this place.

  They all went off to look for the uncle, including Mr Botan, and I went for a walk. We had quickly got used to seeing things smashed to pieces on our island, but the chao ley village was something else. Everywhere on Phuket that was ravaged by the water had begun rebuilding within days. But it was as if the chao ley were living on another island, and the fighting spirit of Phuket had been knocked out of them.

  Mr Botan found me. He could tell I was shocked.

  ‘It is perhaps not what you expected,’ he said, producing a roll-up cigarette from his pocket.

  Until the moment we entered the chao ley village, I’d had a romantic view of the sea gypsies. Free spirits, romantic nomads, untied by civilization. All of that. Now I laughed at myself.

  ‘I thought they were hunting buffalo on the plains,’ I said. ‘Instead they’re sleeping it off on the reservation.’

  He nodded, sucking deeply on his cigarette, as though we had reached an agreement about something.

  ‘We have found their family,’ he said. ‘But there is a problem. Your wife says you must come.’

  The problem was that the uncle had problems of his own.

  We walked to a rickety shack at
the far end of the village where Tess and Rory and Keeva stood outside, pale and silent, as a chained-up bony dog barked at them. Tess held them more closely now. She looked at me, unsmiling, as I climbed the wooden ladder into the shack’s one room. It was dark in there, but when my eyes adjusted I could see the old uncle kneeling by a mattress on the floor. On the mattress there was an elderly woman who was clearly close to death.

  Kai and Chatree were pressed up against one wall, staring at the scene, clutching their overnight bags. The old man rocked back and forth on his knees, briefly looking up at me with eyes half-closed with exhaustion and grief, and then back at his wife. He had a wet piece of cloth in his hand and he soothed the old woman’s forehead. She did not move and for a moment I thought that she was already dead.

  There was also a young man in the corner of the room, chewing his thumbnail as he considered his parents. He was young, perhaps in his early twenties, but carrying the extra weight of a man in his middle years. The streak of gold in his hair gave him a rakish air.

  He cleared his throat, murmured a few words to Mr Botan, and then we were all leaving the shack. Outside he made a lengthy speech to his cousins Kai and Chatree. There was nothing but hardness in his voice. It was a grudging welcome, if it was any kind of welcome at all.

  Chatree stared at him, as if trying to understand, and Kai kept her eyes down, staring at the unmade road.

  ‘What does he say?’ I said.

  ‘He says it is not a good time,’ Mr Botan told me.

  I shook my head. ‘It sounds like he said more than that.’

  ‘They will have to work hard,’ Mr Botan said. He looked at me. ‘It is not a good time.’

  And that was where we left them.

  Our children muttered their awkward goodbyes and Tess fiercely hugged Kai and Chatree as they stood there, stiff and awkward. Chatree was a couple of years older than Rory and Keeva, and Kai somewhere in her middle teens, but the chao ley seemed to be grown up in a way that my children would never be.