by Tony Parsons
‘The world is going to come to this place, Tom. I’m putting it on the map. This island is still the richest province in Thailand. The beaches up here are the most untouched on the island. There’s real money to be made. And we can sell it without spoiling it.’
I touched the exhaust with the tips of my fingers. It was still hot.
‘When we were in Phuket Provincial,’ I said, ‘someone told me that you would end up running a bar. I didn’t believe him.’
‘Who told you that?’ he said. ‘Miles? That burned-out old spook? That sad case – he lives with his boyfriend in Ko Surin – did you know that about him? He was in Bangkok and the Brits kicked him out because he couldn’t keep his hands off the boys and the Kathoeys. James Miles was an embarrassment in Bangkok. He can speak the lingo – I’ll give him that, the old fag. See, Tom, you don’t know everything. Just because you’ve got yourself some fisherman’s pants – it doesn’t make an old hand.’
‘But he was right,’ I said. ‘All the big talk and you wind up running a bar on a beach.’
The first flash of anger.
‘That’s just a start,’ he said. ‘A cash cow to get me on my feet. Don’t you want a future? For yourself? For your family?’
‘I want to stay out of jail,’ I said. ‘And I’m not looking for a job. I already have one.’
He nodded, his gaze drifting to the back wall where all of my tools were lined up. Bookended by two twenty-litre jerrycans – one for petrol, one for oil – there were tools for maintenance of the bike. Pressure gauge, feeler gauge, screwdrivers, spanners, ratchets, a socket set, an Allen wrench. Then there were my general tools for building that had been given to me by Mr Botan. A paint-stained old spirit level, second-hand saws dappled with rust, ancient hammers and chisels. And in pride of place, on the bench in front of the back wall, there was a glinting 127-piece toolkit in an aluminium case that Tess had bought me for Christmas. Slotted screwdriver, cross-point screwdriver, long-nose pliers, diagonal cutting pliers, combination pliers. I always left the lid of the aluminium case open and the tools displayed in their regimented lines because I thought it looked so beautiful.
Farren was grinning. He nodded at the case.
‘And what’s all this?’ he said.
‘My tools,’ I said.
He laughed and shot a quick look at me, as if we had some secret understanding.
‘Your tools,’ he smiled, and the way that he said it made it seem ridiculous.
Then Tess was in the doorway, holding one of the water pistols.
‘We don’t want you here,’ she told him.
‘Suk-san wan Songkran,’ he said. ‘Happy Songkran day.’
‘Just stay away from us,’ she said.
He went off, still smiling.
I reached for her but she stepped away, shaking her head, and I could not touch her. Outside I could hear the laughter of the children.
‘You bring so much trouble to this family,’ she said, and my face flushed with shame. ‘I know you don’t mean to, Tom. But you do.’
Mr Peter of Peter Suit International was standing in the doorway of his shop, surveying the strip. Behind him, the half-made, hand-stitched business suits on the mannequins seemed to be dreaming of some other life in some northern country.
I pulled up next to him and he stepped forward, grinning at me, his white teeth shining in his smooth young face. Like many of the businesses on the strip, Mr Peter’s shop was brightly lit but seemed to cast no light beyond its entrance. Take one step away from it and you were in the natural darkness of Hat Nai Yang, lit by nothing but the Milky Way and moonlight.
‘Many people come now,’ he said.
‘Yes, they do,’ I said, raising my voice above the throaty rumble of the traffic.
The traffic on the beach road was different now. Not just heavier, but different. In the days before the water came, when there was just a strip of seafood restaurants on the sand, there had always been a puttering procession of small bikes and scooters that went on past midnight. But now the bikes were bigger, and the faces of the riders were whiter, and when they got to one end of the Hat Nai Yang beach road, they turned around and came slowly back, as if they were looking for something.
‘Now there are many opportunities,’ Mr Peter said.
‘Let’s hope so.’ I smiled.
Mr Peter rubbed his hands with glee, but behind him his shop was empty, and his bespoke tailoring ignored.
I pushed off for home, and there was a lizard on the wall of a massage shop where the women kneeled in front of their clients, digging their thumbs into the feet of travellers, and something about the light made the shadow of the lizard massive. In the past the women in the massage shop would call out a greeting to me, and perhaps offer me a cup of the ginger drink that they supped constantly, but they were very busy now and they did not notice me.
The music was different too. The various songs no longer bled into each other, that strange night soundtrack of Thai pop and sentimental ballads and big hits from the West. All of that was shouted down by the music coming from the big bar that was not even built yet but already open for business.
There was a long straight shaded bar on the beach, serving on both sides, and on the beach road in front of it were a line of bikes outside a door with no walls. There was a sign above the door that they must have found on the beach. THE LONG BAR, it said, and the writing was mine, because it was from the shelter where Tess had given out the bottles of fresh water.
I could hear someone on a microphone, and the laughter of the crowd, and I caught a glimpse of some kind of coronation. It was a girl in a string bikini on a plastic chair flanked by two more girls, all of them grinning with bashful pride.
‘Miss Songkran,’ said the voice, and there were cheers and more laughter.
I rode on, away from the strip, and in this part of the beach road, between the strip at the far end and the line of restaurants at the other, there was only the stars and the moonlight, a beautiful silvery-white light that seemed to wash over everything, and to touch and bless it all. The tall casuarinas were bright with moonlight, and the same silvery-white light splashed across the rough road, and dappled the black surface of the Andaman Sea, and lit up the dead beach dog in the middle of the road ahead.
He had been hit by a large bike. Other bikes had gone over him, before or after he died, and I remembered the respect that the Thais had shown to the dead beach dogs after the water came, and how they had been handled with care and gentleness, and I knew that I could not just leave the dog there. I stopped the bike and until the moment I reached out to pick him up, I did not realize that the dog was Mister.
I stepped back, almost crying out, and I sat down beside the road and just looked at him, knowing it was our dog now, wondering how I could have thought that it was any other. Then I heard some bikes driving fast in the distance, and I walked into the beach road and picked him up. He was a broken bag of fur and bones and dirt. He weighed next to nothing.
‘Oh, Mister,’ I said out loud. ‘What kind of stupid name is that for a dog?’
I got back on the bike, cradling him in one arm, and I drove up the green hill to home very slowly, knowing that I had to deliver his body to the care and custody of my son and my daughter.
28
The longtail moved out of still water into the open sea and as the wind whipped our faces I wrapped my arms around Rory, still red-eyed and breathless from grief, while Tess sat behind us with Keeva and Chatree, the pair of them pale and silent, all five of us huddled in the centre of Mr Botan’s longtail, lessons cancelled for a day of mourning.
I turned to look back at Hat Nai Yang.
Towards the south, on the right-hand side of the beach, our side, there was the line of seafood restaurants with their jumble of tables and chairs, apparently identical to each other apart from the little wooden huts I had built on the sand in front of the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. Towards the north, to my left as I looked back at th
e beach, I could see the businesses of the strip, the dive shops and beachside bars and massage shops and motorbike rentals.
And separating the two ends of Hat Nai Yang, like the bridge between the past of the beach and its future, they were building The Long Bar.
It was a huge air hangar of a place, squatting across the beach road and Hat Nai Yang itself like some giant black toad. Even this early in the day I could see a few solitary foreigners nursing their Singha beers at a bar that ran around an empty stage. Young women who looked as though they had been wearing high heels for about a week tottered around them, stuffing fresh bar chits into the cup that sat before every man.
Then Keeva was on her feet.
‘Look!’ she cried.
There was a sea turtle by the side of the longtail, only a couple of feet below the surface.
It was huge, the shape of a giant teardrop, powered through the water by massive front flippers that looked more like wings than fins. Its mouth was a giant maw, set in a ferocious stern line, and the black eyes in its huge spotted head slanted down, making it look as if it was permanently squinting. I was so shocked by its sudden appearance that I did not notice it had no shell until Rory pointed it out.
‘Leatherback!’ he said, jumping up, and I held his arm as he shouted above the noise of the longtail’s engine. ‘See? Look, look – no bony shell on its back! Just his skin!’
His skin looked like the thickest leather coat in the world.
Rory sat back down, settling into my arms, while Keeva and Chatree leaned over the edge of the boat, laughing wildly, reaching out to touch the sea turtle. The old leatherback shot them a warning glance.
‘Oh, no, no,’ Rory said, wringing his hands. ‘They have to come to the surface to breathe. If you frighten them then they will stay under water and might drown.’ Mr Botan made a slight adjustment to the longtail’s course and we edged away from the sea turtle. Rory smiled gratefully at Mr Botan and the old man nodded in acknowledgement. Then, as we watched, the leatherback dipped his head and, with what seemed like one smooth movement of flippers that were as big as a man, drove itself into the deep of the Andaman Sea, far away from Keeva and Chatree.
I looked at my son and, for the first time that day, Rory smiled.
The longtail passed the curve in the bay and Hat Mai Khao lay spread out before us, an endless expanse of undeveloped, untouched empty white sand, and the giant white beach at the end of our island looked like the beach at the end of the world.
The huts were set back from Hat Mai Khao, making the most of the shade and invisible from the sea, but the longtail knew where it was going, and Mr Botan glided to a halt towards the northern tip of the beach, where the casuarina trees gave way to thick mangroves. As we approached land there were fishing nets ahead of us, and Mr Botan lifted the engine from the water so that we could clear them. Suspended by the corroded metal pole, the blackened diesel engine was like an anti-aircraft gun from some rusting planet, and Mr Botan covered it with stripy tarpaulin and then heaved an anchor into the water that looked as though it had once been owned by Long John Silver.
Chatree slipped over the side, weighting the anchor further with stones that were stored on the deck. We splashed ashore and the sand was so hot that we ran for the trees, crying out with appalled laughter.
Chatree burst into his sister’s home and we followed him. The beach huts at Hat Mai Khao only had two rooms, a living room and a bedroom, and the sound of raised voices came from the other room. I had never heard Kai angry before.
‘Kliat maak!’ she screamed. ‘Moh hoh khun!’
Mr Botan grunted to himself, shaking his head as if this was just what he knew would happen, and headed back to his boat without a word. The door opened and Nick came out.
‘She hates it,’ he said. ‘I make her angry.’
Kai followed him into the room, fighting back the tears. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘Go and play outside,’ Tess said. ‘The three of you.’
‘But we came to see Nick and Kai,’ Keeva said.
I tried to silence her with a look, the way that her mother could, and it just about worked. The three children went outside and soon I could hear their subdued voices talking to each other under the trees. I looked at Tess, wondering if we should just leave too.
‘It’s amazing how poor you can be when you have a cheap life,’ Nick said, scratching his head. He looked awful. Pale, puffy, as though he had just got up. I could smell the wine on him. And then someone else came out of the other room, the cousin from Ko Siray, and he flopped into an old rattan chair, surveying the proceedings with his wary eyes. He looked at me and then away.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s a bad time.’
‘Him? He’s always hanging around,’ Nick said. ‘You marry a Thai girl and you marry her family. They are very fond of me, though. They say that I am the nicest cashpoint machine they have ever met.’
Kai laughed bitterly at that. ‘Tap, tap, tap,’ she said, gesturing at the laptop glowing on the coffee table. ‘Tap, tap, tap, all day long. And still no money in this machine.’
‘My angel, you do not understand the vagaries of the freelance existence, I’m afraid,’ Nick said. He looked at me. ‘I’m trying to sell a story about the Chinese quarter of Phuket City. Have you seen it? Fascinating place. The Chinese came over to mine tin and some of them stayed to build houses of incredible beauty.’
‘I’ve seen it,’ I said, remembering when Mr Botan had taken me there. It was not even a Chinatown. It was too small for that. Just a few Chinese streets in Phuket City, a reminder of the thousands of Chinese who had come to the island to sweat in the tin mines. It was a beautiful old neighbourhood and Mr Botan and I had drunk coffee there once when we were buying equipment for the kitchen of the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. But even I could see that it would be hard to sell a story about it to the outside world.
Tess touched my arm, not even needing to look at me.
‘Nick,’ I said. ‘We’re going to go.’
Kai wiped her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said, too ashamed to look at us. ‘Oh, so sorry.’ There was a corner of the room with a sink and she began to fuss with a kettle and a couple of chipped cups.
‘It’s fine, Kai,’ Tess said, quickly embracing her, and placing a kiss on the gold streak in her hair. ‘But we’re just going to go.’
I gave her a squeeze and the cousin looked at me as if he wanted to cut my throat.
Nick and Kai looked at each other then, and it was as if there was nobody else in the room. I could hear the children outside, their voices louder now.
‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ Nick said quietly, and she came to his arms and he held her. ‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ he repeated.
The cousin got up and went into the bedroom. Tess was looking from the doorway.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You don’t stop caring about each other because of money. Tell your wife you love her.’
‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ Nick said. ‘It means more than that.’
And I thought to myself – But what could mean more than that?
I took a deep breath and left, only to find there was chaos on the beach. Keeva was screaming, Rory was crying and, standing up in the middle of his longtail, Mr Botan was shouting angrily in Thai.
Tess ran down to where the sand met the sea, and began to jog along the shore, trying to keep up with the two locked figures out in the shallow water, who plunged below the surface and then rose to gasp for air, and then plunged once more below the water, as Chatree clung to the blunt, splotchy head of the leatherback sea turtle that fought so hard to throw him off.
It had been a long day, and not the day that any of us had wanted, so when we walked between the two waterfalls we did so in silence, all alone with our own thoughts, not even really looking at each other until we paused, and heard the song of the gibbons.
In the high rainforest above the Bang Pae waterfall, you could hear the gibbons long before you ever saw them.
We stepped on to the trail that led down to the waterfall, listening to their songs, and Rory’s face lit up with happiness.
‘Listen,’ he smiled, as the strange music drifted through the canopy of trees. He lifted his head and his spectacles were covered in a thin film of mist.
Ahead of us, Keeva slashed impatiently at the undergrowth with a machete. ‘Let’s just get down there,’ she said, mopping her face with the back of her hand. The five of us were limp with the heat, our T-shirts clinging with sweat.
‘Just listen,’ Rory said. ‘That’s him. That’s Travis.’
I knew what he meant. In the strange symphony of the gibbons, that hooting music that sounds like owls pretending to be penny whistles, or penny whistles pretending to be owls, one call seemed to stand out. The song was high and sweet with an almost comical trembling note in it.
‘Maybe,’ said Chatree. ‘Maybe not.’
‘No, that’s him,’ said Rory, and we continued down the trail, past the Bang Pae waterfall, completely deserted in the middle of the hot season, and the first of the giant cages rose up before us. This was the halfway house, the cage between rehab and the rainforest.
Rory was right. The trembling warble belonged to Travis. He swung across between the trees with an effortless grace, his long arms seeming to have all the time in the world as they reached out for the next branch.
Below him, Jesse busied himself filling the water supply with a hose. But apart from Jesse, the big cage was empty. We stood with our faces pressed up against the wire mesh.
‘Where’s his friend?’ Rory called. ‘Where’s Paula?’
Jesse continued to fill the water container.
‘Paula didn’t make it,’ he said.
I watched the smile fade from Rory’s face.
‘She didn’t make it?’ Rory said.
Jesse turned off the hose and came across to us. Above us the gibbon continued to make his way through the trees at the top of the cage, and then, when he reached the limit of his freedom, he would turn round and come back, and all the while he sang in the high, wobbling vibrato that was his singing voice, and now I thought that it sounded as though there was something in it that I had not noticed before.