Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  Jesse looked at Rory, and addressed him alone.

  ‘I came into the cage last week and Paula was dead,’ Jesse said.

  Rory shook his head. It wasn’t that he was sad. It just didn’t make any sense.

  ‘But these white-handed gibbons – they live until they’re thirty or forty,’ he said. ‘Paula was – what? Six? Seven?’

  ‘Paula died young, okay?’ Jesse said. He looked at Tess and me. ‘Hepatitis B,’ he said.

  ‘Hepatitis B?’ Rory said.

  ‘It’s a disease that humans get,’ I said.

  Keeva and Chatree wandered further down the trail to where there were more gibbons.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Rory said, looking up at Tess.

  ‘Do you want me to explain it to him?’ Jesse said.

  I shook my head, crouching down so that I was the same height as my son. He was soaking wet from the walk between the waterfalls and now he took off his glasses and polished them furiously.

  ‘They probably gave Paula things in the bar,’ I said. ‘Drugs. To keep her awake or to keep her quiet. And they must have used a bad needle. A dirty needle to give her the drugs.’

  My son nodded and put on his glasses. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

  He was beyond crying.

  Above us Travis crashed hard into the wire mesh and pressed his face against it, and for the first time he looked as though he was in a prison and he kept on singing his broken song, and now I saw that it was a song of loss and grief.

  He was singing to someone he would never see again, a young female gibbon who had the tips of her fingers chopped off for scratching the face of a drunk tourist.

  ‘I’m sorry, kid,’ Jesse said to Rory.

  ‘You should be fucking sorry,’ my son said.

  Tess grabbed his wrist and pulled it hard.

  ‘Hey!’ I told him. ‘Watch your mouth, young man!’

  Travis went to Jesse then.

  The gibbon dropped from the wire mesh and hopped up into Jesse’s arms, burying his face into a T-shirt that said, WE ARE WILD – DO NOT PET US. Travis drooped one of his long arms around Jesse’s neck. The sight seemed to sicken my son to his stomach.

  ‘How many gibbons do they have to kill before they can capture one?’ Rory said. ‘They shoot the mother in the tree and she falls holding her baby. Most of the babies die in the fall. But not all of them. And the rest of the family try to protect the baby that survives, and so the poachers have to kill them too.’ He swallowed hard, his eyes not leaving Travis resting his head against Jesse’s chest. ‘And the really sad thing is – the saddest thing of all – is that they think whatever human bastard takes them in is their family.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jesse said.

  ‘They love us and we kill them,’ my son said. ‘That’s the saddest thing of all.’

  Travis took to the trees.

  ‘I want to show you some new arrivals,’ Jesse said.

  ‘I’m not interested,’ Rory said. ‘I’m going to sit by the waterfall.’ He glanced at Tess through his steamed-up glasses. ‘Come and get me when you’re ready to go home,’ our son said.

  We let him go and walked down the trail with Jesse to where Keeva and Chatree were watching a mother suckling her baby. The mother was dark brown with a white, heart-shaped trim around her face, and the baby had hair so short that it looked as though it had been cropped, and a face that was hairless and bright pink.

  ‘If we walk a bit further down,’ Jesse said, ‘we’ve got some young ones who arrived this week.’

  I nodded at the dark-brown gibbon with her pink-faced baby.

  ‘What’s the story here?’ I asked.

  Jesse shook his head.

  ‘The father of the baby was another one who didn’t make it,’ he said. ‘He was kept in a bird cage as a baby. When he started growing, they still kept him in the birdcage. So his arms grew bent backwards. Even if he had lived, he would never have been released into the wild.’

  ‘So who does she sing to?’ Tess said.

  Jesse looked at the mother with her baby.

  ‘She doesn’t sing to anyone,’ he said.

  We walked down our road as the pale light of sunset became the cool shadows of twilight.

  There was a police car outside our front door and a middle-aged woman I did not recognize sitting on our veranda.

  As we approached our home the woman came forward and began speaking angrily to Chatree in Thai. He froze on the spot, paralysed in the presence of authority.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Tess asked the woman, but there was no reason on earth why she should speak English. The door of the police car opened and Sergeant Somter got out. He leaned against the top of the passenger door and looked at me. The woman was still talking, still very angry, but Somter made it easy for us.

  ‘This chao ley child should be in school,’ he said, and he looked at Tess. ‘She says – a real school.’

  ‘We have schools,’ the woman said, breaking into sudden English.

  ‘I know,’ Tess said. ‘Of course you have schools.’ My wife looked down at our dirt-track road. ‘Sorry.’

  29

  Chatree stood awkwardly on next door’s veranda as Tess did up his top button. He was dressed in the uniform of the local school children – white polo shirt, dark shorts, white socks and black leather shoes. Neat, clean, old-fashioned. He looked at us and then looked away, grinning with embarrassment.

  We stood watching him, the children and Mrs Botan and me, as Tess tried to smooth down his shock of black hair with its golden streak. But it refused to be smoothed and so she pointed him in the direction of the outside world and gave him a gentle shove. Mr Botan appeared in the doorway and murmured something gruffly in Thai. The boy responded with a short affirmative and headed off down the lane. He did not look back.

  My family fell into step beside him.

  Chatree walked with the heavy steps of a prisoner making his way to the gallows. He was to get a ride to school at the end of our lane, where it met the road down to the village. We waited in silence until a Songthaew appeared, the two rows on the open-sided truck already full of school children. They stared at Chatree with open curiosity as he climbed on board. He did not look at us as the bus pulled away in a cloud of dust.

  ‘He looks a bit different,’ Keeva said.

  ‘He is a bit different,’ Tess said. ‘It’s his first day at school.’

  The children ran on ahead and it was only then that Tess let her eyes sting with tears.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ I laughed. ‘Look at the size of him.’

  ‘Not him,’ she said, nodding towards our son and daughter as they disappeared into our house. ‘Those two.’

  We stopped. ‘They’re fine,’ I said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re great kids. But Keeva’s half-wild and Rory has a head full of animals.’

  ‘They’re smart, kind, funny,’ I said. ‘And you do a great job with them.’

  ‘I’m at my limit,’ she said. ‘I’m at my limit with them, Tom. The island is the best place in the world for a nine-year-old. I believe that with all my heart. But they’re getting older. And so are we. So are we, Tom.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

  But I knew exactly what Tess was talking about. She was talking about home.

  I hung my head and I felt my throat close tight with misery. The sun was on my face as I thought of the life we had left behind and the life we would be losing.

  ‘It would be better this time,’ Tess said.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It would be the same. It would be the bloody same, Tess.’

  ‘It would be better,’ she insisted, and she took my hands and she ran her fingertips over the cracked wounds. ‘And we wouldn’t be going back for us,’ she said. ‘We would be doing it for the children.’

  Then she took my ugly hands and she placed them against the thin cotton of her T-shirt
, where it hung flat against her belly, and she guided my hands to make that gesture, that three-part gesture that she had made ten years ago, up and down and up again, a movement that covered a few inches, and a life.

  ‘Tess,’ I said, understanding at last.

  A child, I thought. Another child! Our child …

  Already I longed to hold that little bundle in my arms and to know again that feeling like no other, that feeling of limitless and unconditional love. Our baby. I had never dreamed that I could be so blessed.

  But even in that moment when I was almost drunk with happiness, I thought of going home, and England, and starting over, and it was a weight that I could hardly carry.

  I thought of the mountains that I would have to climb, the daily Everests that I would have to get up and over just to survive, just to put food on the table and a roof above our heads. For a moment – one shameful, terrifying moment – I did not know if I could do it.

  But then I looked into her face, the undeniable and beautiful reality of her, my wife, my Tess, and she filled me up, that is the only way I know how to describe it – she filled me up – and I knew that in the end I would always gladly go where she wanted to be, and then I would climb any mountains they put in front of me, because my home would always be wherever this woman called home.

  She laughed and smiled and gently removed my hands from her belly and the tiny life inside her, this little life we had made, shaking her head as she looked at the wounds, fresh and old, that scored my palms, my fingers, my cracked broken nails.

  ‘Your hands,’ she said.

  When the day’s heat was dying the four of us walked along the beach where the warm water touched the white-gold sand and we saw the green hill of Nai Yang start to grow a darker shade of green above the bay, and the shadows of the hundred-year-old trees reached out across the sand, as if stretching with weariness at the end of another long, hot day.

  In the hot season, nothing moved if it could help it. I had never seen the sea so totally clear and peaceful. It could have been a mirror made of gold-flecked glass, and the longtails that were moored along Hat Nai Yang were as still as statues.

  Far ahead of us, where the bay began to curve, a lone figure rose from a table at the front of The Long Bar and came towards us. It was still a shock to see how big and brash the strip had become, and Farren’s bar rose black and silent behind him, still waiting for the night. The man’s skin was pale, almost white, and even this late in the afternoon he wore a baseball cap pulled low over his face to shield him from the unforgiving sun. But when he got closer I recognized the T-shirt.

  WE ARE WILD, it said. DO NOT PET US.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ Jesse said to Rory. ‘Near the Ton Sai waterfall.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it,’ Rory said.

  Jesse looked at Tess. She smiled at our son.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, taking his hand.

  And so we went.

  The waterfall was a trickle now.

  We followed it uphill over slick wet stones at the start of the Khao Phra Thaew National Park, where the ground rose steeply until the real rainforest began. Then all at once we were in a green world where the trees were suddenly rising, and the light of the day was gone, hidden by the thick canopy above us. Jesse led the way, but he had to stop every few minutes to find the trail that weaved in and out of thick undergrowth.

  Then we were going downhill, an easier trek but more dangerous, with the ground falling away sharply to one side. The trail took us to a small wooden bridge and Jesse stopped to get his bearings. He seemed suddenly uncertain of himself, looking for something that there was no sign of, waiting for a sound that never came.

  We all heard it at once.

  The calling of a solitary gibbon. From somewhere high in the rainforest. I had heard their songs many times by now, but that strange hooting music had never sounded so haunting. This was the sound of a gibbon in the wild and it made me shiver.

  Then there was another, responding call, much further away, so that it sounded like a train whistle heard in the middle of the night, and there were more of them, up the hill ahead of us and to the right of the trail. Jesse was off and moving as fast as he could, and we hurried to keep up, climbing again, sometimes bending to avoid the branches that crept low across the trail, sometimes using them for support, sometimes climbing over the fallen trees that blocked our path. And the only sound was our voices – Careful here – Watch your face on that branch – It’s slippery here – and the ghostly symphony high in the trees.

  Jesse stopped. He looked back at us and smiled. He held out his hand to Rory. My son hesitated for a moment and then came forward, taking his hand. Jesse’s smile grew wider and he nodded to a clearing in the undergrowth.

  It was the dark brown gibbon with the trim of white fur around her face. She turned to monitor some noise high in the trees and we saw the baby in her arms. It was no longer the crop-haired little foetus that we had seen at Bang Pae. Already the fur was growing, to the same deep brown as its mother, and the pink old-man face that we had seen was much darker, though not yet the jet black of the mother. The short fur on the baby’s arms made its limbs seem impossibly long and bony.

  There was a trembling hoot close by, and suddenly Travis was with them, ambling across the clearing to mother and child and then stopping to have a relaxed look round.

  ‘They get up at first light,’ Jesse whispered. ‘The female leads the family to some fruit trees for feeding. Then they listen to some singing. Then they respond to the singing. After that, they groom and rest for a bit. They like the rain – they like playing in the rain. It really makes them happy. There are some other families nearby, and Travis stares at the other males on the edge of their boundary. The males chase each other while the females and the babies hang back. Then they feed again, go for a swing through the rainforest and turn in early. The baby sleeps with the mother, and Travis sleeps nearby but alone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said my son. ‘That’s what they do.’

  We watched them until the light was gone.

  Once, just before they left us, Travis – although of course that was not his name – stole a shy glance in our direction and then looked quickly away, as if he knew us but could not quite place us, like a good friend from some other lifetime.

  Mr Botan was coughing hard, despite the fact that the cigarette in his hand was unlit. His old Chinese face creased with discomfort.

  ‘I am old,’ he said, nodding at me, and then Tess. ‘I am old and I will be gone.’

  I laughed at him.

  ‘I reckon you’re good for a while yet,’ I said, and I looked around the restaurant. The Almost World Famous Seafood Grill was packed. The far end of the beach road, the new businesses thrown up on the strip, were all busy, but somehow that just seemed to increase our custom. For the first time ever, Hat Nai Yang was a place that foreigners came to.

  ‘But there’s no tables,’ Keeva said.

  ‘Come,’ Mrs Botan said, and Tess and the kids started following her towards the kitchen. But Mr Botan held my arm.

  ‘One day,’ he said, holding my gaze. ‘It’s true. One day I will be gone.’

  I wasn’t laughing now. ‘You’re fine,’ I said.

  It had been a long time since there had been anyone resembling a parent in my life. I did not want to be reminded that they always left you in the end.

  ‘Getting too much,’ he said. ‘All of it. The fishing. The business. You see how long it takes me to get my old body in the longtail. What kind of fisherman can’t get in his own boat?’

  ‘Mr Botan,’ I said. ‘We all get old.’

  He nodded. ‘Already – your children – so big,’ he smiled. ‘They were like little children when you came.’

  ‘It goes fast,’ I said. ‘Time passing. And nothing measures it like your children.’

  I thought of the third child, the unknown child, the baby growing inside my wife, and I thought of the years ahead, and how
it takes so long for them to grow up, although at the same time it all goes so fast, and the only thing that I could think of, the only thing that I wanted in the world at that moment, was to live long enough to see that unborn, unnamed child fully grown.

  ‘We want you to have it all,’ Mr Botan said. ‘My wife and I. There is not much – this restaurant, the boat. But when I can’t work any more, we want you to have it. The house – we keep the house, and when we are both gone that goes to my son in Bangkok. But not the business. That is for you.’

  ‘Mr Botan,’ I said, and in his gruff old face I saw such beauty and kindness that for a moment I could not speak. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘We will make it legal,’ he said. ‘All in writing. No problem. Never any problem.’

  ‘You honour me greatly,’ I said.

  ‘You know many things,’ he said, and his face lit up with humour. ‘Although not how to hit a nail without first hitting your hands.’

  ‘Nobody was ever so kind to my family,’ I said, choking on the truth of it. ‘Nobody was ever so generous to me. Thank you.’

  He smiled, and the sight of it pulled my heart, and I thought that I would wait a while before I told him. But there was no good in waiting.

  ‘We’re thinking about going back,’ I said in a rush. ‘Going back to England. There is another baby. The children need proper schools. There’s …’

  There were a million tiny reasons, I suppose, but none of them sounded like enough to refuse his offer. He frowned under the fairy lights, turning away.

  ‘Big shot,’ he said. ‘Just like my son. The big shot does not want to do simple work.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘You know it’s not that. Thank you—’

  ‘Big shot!’

  It ripped at my heart to refuse his great kind gift, which was everything in the world that he had to give, although I could do nothing else. The best part of me would always be with him, and out on the longtail, and in the small house on top of the green hill, and in the restaurant on the beach, and I would remember his face and his kindness on my dying day, but I did not have the words to explain any of this or to make him understand. All he knew was that we were leaving soon. I wished that I could tell him that he had been more of a father to me than any man I ever knew. I would somehow find the words.