Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Your house is full,’ he said, addressing Tess. ‘But we have space.’

  Tess nodded, and smiled her thanks, and there was nothing left to discuss.

  A man strolled out of the casuarina trees wearing a straw hat and carrying a broken umbrella. He wore ragged khaki shorts, a stained polo shirt and the black leather shoes of some other life. He looked as though he had just got up. A butterfly the size of my hand flew past his face and he reared back in terror for a moment then carried on, grinning with embarrassment. It was Nick.

  ‘Hard at it?’ Tess said.

  ‘Trying,’ he said, giving us all the benefit of his sleepy grin. ‘Decided to stick around for a while. I’ve been trying to write something all morning.’ He took off his straw hat and scratched his bird’s-nest hair. ‘But it’s strange. When I had been here for a day, I felt I could write a book about the place. Then when I had been here for a week, I thought I could write a short story.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘And now I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Well, you missed a beautiful morning,’ Tess told him, and she introduced him to Kai and Chatree. They stared without expression at the strange sleepy Englishman with his straw hat and ragged shorts and broken umbrella.

  But Nick smiled at them, and stroked the dog in Chatree’s arm. He looked away, took off his hat and stared out at sea. Then he looked back at Kai with a goofy expression on his face.

  And I got it then.

  I had thought of Kai and Chatree as children, more grown-up and bruised by the world, but not so different from our own.

  But Kai was almost a woman now and when I saw the way that Nick was looking at her, and then looking quickly away, I knew that Mr Botan was right.

  She was too old for school.

  23

  I rode the bike north, taking it slow, watching for the last turning before reaching the bridge to Phang Nga, because the turn was easy to miss, and because I had Tess on the back.

  She had one arm wrapped around my waist and the other cradling the food that Mrs Botan had prepared. I could feel the cardboard containers in the plastic bag warm against the base of my spine and the thought of what was inside made my mouth flood with juices.

  After three weeks of work, the kitchen of what would one day be the new Almost World Famous Seafood Grill was still just a single gas ring in a room with no roof, but Mrs Botan had somehow prepared rice noodle soup with pork belly, a fish curry that would explode on the back of the tongue and her great staple, Pahd Thai in a blanket of wafer-thin omelette. She used the gas ring to feed Mr Botan and me while we worked. But this meal was for Nick.

  We had seen nothing of him since that day on the beach, but a fortnight ago he had left a message that he had moved from his hotel in Patong to a beach hut in the north. There was nothing up there on the very end of the island, and Tess worried that he wasn’t eating properly.

  The road to his beach hut was the toughest turn on Phuket because if you overshot then you had to go over the Sarasin Bridge to Phang Nga, leaving the island, then swing back and then go through the roadblock of Royal Thai Police who waited unsmiling in their shades at the start of Phuket. I always preferred giving the police a wide berth, so we looked sharp for the turning.

  ‘This is it!’ Tess shouted into the wind.

  The turning was a dirt-track road to the left that ran off into the casuarina trees, but if you followed it down far enough then you came to a barrier that was permanently raised. This had once been the headquarters of the Sirinath National Park – the beach on the far side of the trees was where we had seen the turtle lay her eggs – and the land was still protected, although it had long ago been abandoned by the authorities.

  The only sign that they had once been here was the raised barrier and a small settlement of beach huts under the trees by the beach. They were nothing fancy, just basic bamboo and thatched palm-leaf huts, but they were cheap and popular with travellers. This was where Nick was staying.

  ‘Which one is it?’ Tess said.

  I thought his message had said that it was the hut closest to the beach, but now I wasn’t so sure. There was a dinky moped parked outside and I could not imagine Nick renting something like that. But I thought that was his hut, and I nodded towards it.

  ‘Looks like he’s making friends,’ Tess smiled, and I felt my spirits dip.

  I parked the bike next to the scooter, Tess with the food in her hands, and already steeling myself for the worst.

  But it was worse than that.

  The door opened and a young woman came out. She was pale and skinny in a little leather skirt and spike heels. When she threw back her long black waterfall of hair, her eyes were raw and shining from where she had been crying.

  I risked a glance at Tess.

  She was not smiling now.

  The girl climbed on the passenger seat of the dinky moped and buried her face in her hands. Then the door to the beach hut opened again and another young woman came out.

  Her clothes were less obvious than the first. This one was in bar-girl mufti – T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops – but what made her career choice obvious was her complexion – she had the ghostly night pallor of the bar life, and the diamond-bright sunshine of midday made her vampiric. Even in her unassuming street clothes, she looked like a creature of the night.

  This one was dry-eyed but unsmiling and grim. She said something to the girl sitting on the back of the scooter, and her words crackled with a hurt and anger that threatened to explode. I couldn’t look at Tess now.

  One of these girls would have been bad enough.

  Two was too many.

  The girls exchanged a few words and arranged themselves on the scooter. Then the door opened again and I looked up expecting to see Nick, sheepishly grinning in khaki shorts and straw hat. But, amazingly, it was yet another girl, whose breast-enhancement surgery gave her the look of a pouter pigeon. I stared in wonder at the door. It began to seem like a debauched magic trick, an attempt at some sick world record.

  Just how many bar girls can you get into a beach hut?

  The third girl squatted on the handlebars and the middle girl eased the moped into life.

  We watched them go, puttering off into the trees and the road south. Then I turned to Tess, awaiting her decision.

  ‘Shall we just …’

  My voice trailed off, and I gestured towards the open road, and home.

  But Tess nodded at the door.

  ‘Knock,’ she said, very quietly.

  ‘Tess,’ I said. ‘He’s a single guy. More or less.’

  ‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘You know it’s wrong. Knock,’ she said. ‘There’s something I need to tell your friend.’

  So I knocked. Nick came to the door. I quickly scanned the room over his shoulder, worried that there might be a few more stray bar girls lurking in there. But the room was now empty. Tess edged me to one side and shoved the plastic bag of food into his midriff. He caught it with a shock of breath.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Dinner is served.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, with his most winning smile, lifting the bag to look at it.

  Tess did not smile.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. ‘It’s from Mrs Botan.’ She turned to go, and then turned back. ‘Personally,’ she said. ‘I hope it chokes you. Men like you are what ruin this island. And this country. And this planet.’

  He looked sheepish.

  ‘I can explain,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Tess said. She had not erupted yet, she had not gone volcanic in the way that I knew she could, but she was getting there.

  ‘Bad timing,’ he said.

  ‘Bad something,’ she said.

  ‘May I just say something?’ he said.

  ‘You may go fuck yourself,’ said Tess, who never swore, unless you pushed her to breaking point. Then she looked him in the eye. Because this was what she wanted him to remember, this was what she wanted to say. ‘And stay away from that girl,’ she
said.

  ‘What girl?’ he said.

  ‘You know what girl,’ she said, her green eyes fierce, furious slits, and he stepped back. ‘Just keep right away from her. Okay?’

  ‘All right,’ he said, and I thought of the way he had looked at Kai on the beach, and the way that she had not even noticed.

  Then Tess was gone.

  She got on the Royal Enfield and took off, giving it far too much throttle, so that the front wheel rose dramatically and the bike kicked up a billowing cloud of yellow dust that quickly rose and slowly fell on the dirt road.

  I looked at Nick and shook my head.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Hello, my big, big honey. Hello, you sexy man. That looks like it was some party you had last night.’

  He shook his head, unnerved by Tess’ anger. ‘More like a wake,’ he said. ‘They only want me for my laptop.’

  I had to smile at that. ‘Your laptop?’ I said. ‘Is that what you call it?’

  He stood back and gestured for me to come in. I looked at the road, thinking of the long walk I had ahead of me back to Hat Nai Yang. I went inside and there was a small table with his computer on it, the Apple sign throbbing white in the half-light of the beach hut.

  And there were letters. Dozens of letters. Letters with par avion envelopes with stamps from Australia and the United States and Germany and Switzerland and India. Stamps from everywhere.

  And there were other letters that were waiting to be sent. These were letters on cheap writing paper that was often decorated with hearts or bears or some unspecified cute creature with giant Manga eyes in envelopes bearing the beautiful stamps of Thailand – His Majesty the King and bright tropical flowers and characters from that ancient Sanskrit epic, The Ramayana.

  ‘These girls get letters,’ Nick said, flopping down in a chair. ‘They get letters and they write letters.’

  ‘What’s wrong with email?’ I said.

  ‘You can’t put money in an email,’ he said. ‘Oh, they like email too – especially when funds are being sent to them and they need the MTCN – the Money Transfer Control Number – but they are the last of the great letter writers. Love letters, begging letters, all sorts of letters. Some of them just want money wired to them at Western Union. Some of them think they’re in love. And maybe they are in love – these girls, and the men they meet in the bars.’

  I nodded, picking up a letter to a man in Rotterdam. ‘But these girls,’ I said. ‘They all speak English.’

  And I thought how incredible it was that all these young women, many of them uneducated and from farms, were such brilliant linguists.

  ‘It only takes them so far,’ Nick said. ‘The English they have. It takes them up to – wham-bam-khawp-kun-karp-ma’am. Then it fails them. When they become lovers. When the man goes home but they stay in contact. When the guy is revealing that he is married, or he wants to bring her over to Melbourne or Manchester, or he is worried that she is not really in love with him.’ He laughed. ‘All the mysteries of the human heart. And that’s when their words run out and I come in. For a small fee, I translate for them. Put their feelings into words. Help them to express themselves. Read the letters they receive, explaining why the man is not coming back, or why he will always love her, or none of the above.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Those three girls are from the Bangla Road, right?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re all from the No Name Bar.’

  ‘It’s the sex industry, Nick,’ I said. ‘It’s a business that came into being to separate sailors on shore leave from their pay packet. That’s all. Love doesn’t come into it. Love doesn’t drink at the No Name Bar.’

  He sighed. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t always end with the money handed over, and it doesn’t always end with the sex. Most of the time, yes – but not all of the time. The Bangla Road is the romance industry as well as the sex industry.’

  ‘Boy meets girl,’ I said. ‘Boy pays girl. What’s romantic about that?’

  ‘But they make connections,’ he insisted. ‘Some of them. Human, emotional connections – whether it’s mad or not. Whether it’s moral or not. Whether you – or Tess, or me, or the world – approves or not. The girls. The men. Sometimes the bond – the love – is faked for the sake of business. Not always. Sometimes they spend weeks together – they think of the other one as their lover. You know it happens. You see it all the time. The guy pays her bar fine for a week or two, and suddenly they’re dating.’

  ‘I’ve seen those dates,’ I said. ‘They always run out of conversation.’

  He shook his head. ‘It starts off that she’s the one with youth and beauty and he is the one with cash and credit cards. And then – some of them – they end up needing each other. The women want to be saved and the men want to be loved. It’s sort of the opposite to the real world. Is that wrong?’

  ‘A rich foreigner with a poor Thai girl is never going to be one of my favourite sights on this island,’ I said.

  ‘What happens if they fall in love?’ he said.

  ‘That’s even worse,’ I said. ‘And these people – the men, the girls – can mess up their lives without you lending a hand.’

  I leafed through the letters while he got us a drink. Love letters, I suppose you would call them. But if they were love letters, then they were love letters full of doubt and fear, a hard-nosed reality, love letters with the shadow of the No Name Bar falling over them. I picked up one with a crying panda on the top right-hand corner.

  My darling,

  I will never forget the night you came to the No Name Bar or the two weeks we spent together. Thank you for asking – me and my baby are fine. The money arrived at Western Union – thank you. The Thai baht is very weak right now. When will you come back to me? Did you get the divorce from your wife? Do you love me still?

  He came back with two bottles of water from the small yellow cube that was the beach hut’s fridge.

  ‘It’s better than the stuff you wrote about me,’ I said. ‘You’re getting better.’

  ‘That’s how she feels,’ he said, a bit defensive. ‘I just help her to express it.’

  ‘I hope she’s not holding her breath for that divorce,’ I said.

  ‘It happens,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised. But of course, you’re right – sometimes it doesn’t happen. Maybe most of the time.’ He didn’t look me in the eye. ‘That’s what makes my job even more important.’

  Your job, I thought, and picked up a letter from the UK.

  My darling,

  I bet you are surprised to receive a letter from Portsmouth in England. Do you remember me? I never forget you. Darling, I do not like to think of you going to work in the No Name Bar every night. Please be careful in that world …

  Men who had met some girl in a bar. Men in every corner of the developed world with jobs, lives and money – at least, compared to our island. The letters from the men were full of practical details – about sending money to Western Union, about when they planned to come back, about why life was hard. And there was plenty of the other stuff – the fear of their beloved going to work in a string bikini and a pair of high heels in a place where everything was for sale, including her.

  ‘You sleeping with these girls?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I got sick of the Bangla Road after one night. That was enough to last me a lifetime.’

  I believed him.

  ‘Nick,’ I said. ‘You didn’t lose your job, did you?’

  He closed his eyes and sighed.

  ‘I stayed too long in the sun,’ he said. ‘Overdid it on the first day. Typical tourist, right? I should have gone back with Sarah,’ he said, and I guessed that Sarah was the pretty blonde English girl we had seen. ‘I should have been at my desk three weeks ago,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t leave. Can you understand that?’

  Through the insect net on his window I could see a patch of stainless sky and the polished blue sea and the empty beach, its co
lour somewhere between white and gold.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘I thought I could file more stories from here,’ he said. ‘I know I can file more stories from here. Great stories.’ He looked out the window and I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about the great stories or the perfect blue sea.

  ‘My editor thinks I should try going freelance for a while,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you it’s a dying industry?’

  ‘What about your fiancée?’ I said.

  ‘She’s not my fiancée,’ he said. ‘Not any more. She called me after she had been back for a couple of weeks. Thinks we should try it apart for a while. There’s been some guy sniffing around – some old boyfriend …’ He shook his head, having enough of it, not looking at me. ‘It’s really okay – all of it.’

  ‘What are you going to live on?’

  ‘I have some money put aside. Not much, but I don’t have many expenses here. And the girls pay me what they can.’

  ‘So this is your writing career? Being an Agony Uncle for bar girls?’

  ‘It’s not really how I imagined the future. Where do you see yourself in five years? Oh, ideally, I would like to be writing letters for prostitutes.’ His face clouded. ‘I shouldn’t call them that. You know, most of them are good girls. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. There’s goodness in them. This is not the life they want. They want work, marriage, children – same as everyone else. If those three girls had been born in England, they would be decent women.’

  His eyes got a faraway look as he thought of the Bangla Road.

  ‘It’s not for me,’ he said. ‘Not that side of it. I’ve seen it and it’s a dead end. For me, at least. In the bars – those kind of bars – you think you have found yourself. But really you have lost yourself.’ Then he smiled. ‘Besides, as a poor freelance, I can’t afford it, can I?’

  Suddenly he was aware of the bag of food sitting among the piles of letters.

  ‘Join me?’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  He looked for plates.

  ‘I’ll have to buy some chopsticks,’ he called from the tiny kitchen.