Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  He looked at me in the harsh yellow light of the night market and for the first time since we met, he no longer looked a young man.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  We rode back to the street of the Chinese shop-houses. As we turned into it, I heard Nick curse behind me. At the end of the road there was a maroon-and-white from the Royal Thai Police with its lights off. Even in the dimly lit street, it was clear that there was only one man in the car. I stopped the bike across the road from the house with all the lights and turned to look at Nick.

  ‘It’s Somter,’ I said. ‘He’ll be waiting for us when we come out with Kai. Waiting for you.’

  At first he couldn’t speak. Then his face twisted with anger.

  ‘You called him?’ he said. ‘You called him?’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ I said. ‘You have to face it – what you did. You can’t run, Nick. If I thought you could run, I would let you run.’ We both stared at the maroon-and-white at the end of the street. Somter was unmoving at the wheel. ‘I trust him,’ I said. ‘He’s not a barbarian. He’s a good man. He is going to give us fifteen minutes.’

  Nick hung his head. And then he laughed. The bike was heavy with all the water and I suddenly wondered if there was some other way.

  ‘Maybe this is a stupid idea,’ I said, wanting him to tell me that he would walk down the street to Somter now.

  Nick shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not a stupid idea. It’s a good idea. Everybody needs water. Let’s get it over with.’

  We both took a six-pack of water in each hand and walked to the door of the Chinese shop-house. There was a metal buzzer and intercom to the left of the shuttered door. A Thai voice crackled through the speaker.

  ‘Nam plao,’ I said. ‘Delivery. Nam plao.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit late for a delivery?’ Nick murmured.

  I did not reply. I could hear Thai voices discussing the matter and just when I thought that my plan had not worked the door opened and a large Thai man in his thirties stood there, staring at us out of the darkness. Then he stood to one side and indicated the staircase.

  ‘Khawp kun karp,’ I said politely, dipping my head as I made for the stairs. Nick fell into step behind me.

  The man laughed.

  ‘Yindee tawn rap!’ he said.

  Welcome to Thailand.

  The old concrete stairs were in darkness but light poured from the first floor. The door was open and a mamma-san was saying goodbye to a couple of men in their thirties. This place was different but she looked like every mamma-san on the Bangla Road. The hair of a very young girl and the face of a very old woman. One thing about her was different from all the other mamma-sans. She did not smile at a pair of white boys. Her smile faded and died as she looked at us. She jerked her head and we went inside.

  I had never seen anywhere like it.

  Men were lined up against one wall, standing and drinking and smoking. Women – ten, fifteen, twenty years younger than the men – were on the other wall, sitting and not drinking.

  The girls were all in what looked like pretend evening dresses – silky, cut low at the front, slit at the sides, a mamma-san’s idea of sophistication and class. There was some kind of little karaoke system set up in the middle of the room, and one of the girls was singing a Thai love song.

  And that was Kai.

  ‘Hey!’ someone barked at us.

  It was the mamma-san. She was indicating the bar in the corner of the room where the young Thai barman frantically chopped at a champagne bucket full of ice with a long silver pick.

  I carried my dozen bottles of nam plao over to the bar. He didn’t look at me. And why should he? I was nothing. A nod of his head told me to stick it under the bar.

  Kai had finished singing. There was polite applause. One of the men left the wall and placed a garland of paper flowers around her neck. I noticed for the first time that the girls sitting against their wall all had garlands of paper flowers around their necks.

  So that’s how it works, I thought.

  The girls trade the garlands in with the management at the end of the night. And then, as I looked up from placing the nam plao under the bar, I saw that it wasn’t much about the paper flowers.

  I watched the man who had placed the garland around Kai’s neck take her hand and, blank-eyed and unsmiling, lead her towards the door on the far side of the room. And I knew that we had to get to her before she went upstairs.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Farren said behind me.

  Nick was standing in the middle of the room, in the no-man’s land between the women and the men, still holding his dozen bottles of water, paralysed at the sight of his wife. The English words seemed to wake him from a dream.

  ‘Kai!’ he said.

  She turned, and saw him, and pulled away from the man and I saw the faces of the other men twist with confusion and disbelief, and then anger, but before they could make a move Somter was standing there, small and neat in his brown uniform, although it was not yet fifteen minutes, listening with a stern, neutral expression as the mamma-san and the man who let us in spoke urgently to him.

  Then Nick and Kai were standing at the bar and Farren was moving towards it as if he was going to order a drink and I was still on the other side, the barman by my side, although he had stopped smashing the ice with the pick, and Nick was crying a bit as he looked at the neat white marks on the brown skin of Kai’s wrist where she had hurt herself.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as if every mark was cutting into his flesh too. ‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ he said. ‘What did you do to your beautiful arms, Kai?’

  Farren was laughing.

  ‘I really don’t fucking believe it,’ he said, but he placed the palm of his hands on the bar and he made no move. The sudden presence of the small sergeant from the Royal Thai Police had put fear into the room.

  ‘You are in big trouble, Nick,’ Kai said, and there was a dull light in her eyes, and I did not know if it was from lack of sleep or drugs or something else.

  Somter was listening to the pleas of the mamma-san and the large man. He looked up and caught my eye and nodded.

  ‘Get her out of here now,’ I told Nick. But he couldn’t move either.

  ‘I’ll face it,’ he said. ‘But come home. Chan rak khun ja dai.’

  ‘You will go to jail,’ she said.

  ‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ he smiled.

  I came out from behind the bar and gave him a shove. One of the Thai men had crossed the floor and was making his case to the policeman and a few more followed. I pushed Nick again, harder this time, and Kai began to move, leading him away. I followed them. The mamma-san grabbed Kai’s wrist as she passed.

  ‘Lindsay!’ the old woman said sharply.

  I placed my hand on the mamma-san’s arm and she whirled to look at me.

  ‘Her name is Kai,’ I said. ‘Not Lindsay.’

  I indicated Nick and I tried to remember the Thai word for wife. But it was just out of reach and they did not need to know much English in here. It was a private world. ‘She’s his wife, okay?’ I shouted, as the old woman refused to let go of Kai.

  The mamma-san shook her head.

  ‘Mia noi, mia noi, mia noi,’ she said, jabbing a furious finger in Kai’s face, and I saw that it had been heavily made up to make her dark skin look lighter. ‘Gik! Gik! Gik!’ the mamma-san said, and some of the men began to laugh at the observation – fuck buddy – and then the old woman’s open palm slapped hard against Kai’s face.

  Suddenly there were people shouting and hands pulling at me and I caught a blow on the back of my neck and a kick high on the thigh and the mamma-san’s fingernails clawed at my eyes. I lashed out wildly but Somter raised his voice and they all fell silent and still. Including me.

  Only Nick and Kai kept moving, heading towards the door and the dark staircase beyond. They had almost made it when Farren stepped in front of them and punched Nick once in the chest.

  And as Farren stepped
back, there was the clatter of metal falling on a hardwood floor as the ice pick hit the ground.

  Then Nick was on his back, the shock on his face and his wife trying to lift him up with one hand and stop the blood with the other. But the blood was already everywhere.

  ‘Chan rak khun ja dai,’ she told him, as he had told her so many times.

  I love you to death.

  The beach huts at Hat Mai Khao were all empty now. After Nick’s death Kai had never gone back. I knew that Nick’s parents were briefly at their son’s home with their respective partners when they came to take his body back to England, but Tess and I steered clear until Mr Botan told us that the national park were sending in a cleaning team.

  The world had been leaving us alone and that was how we liked it. But the season was changing. Now that the long rains had come to an end, it would soon be the best time to visit the island – a time of cool breezes, low humidity, when every day felt like the best day of summer. The national park was hopeful of renting out the beach huts under the casuarina trees, even though few travellers ever ventured this far north. A young Swedish couple who came to the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill every night for three weeks were briefly in one of them, but they had moved on to Ko Kood on the other side of the Gulf of Siam, seeking a triple-tier waterfall and an island that the world had not yet discovered. I never heard if they found it.

  So when we knew that the national park would be throwing out anything that remained in the beach huts, Tess and I took Mr Botan’s pick-up truck and we went to take one last look. We did not think about taking the old Royal Enfield. Tess was too far along with the baby for that.

  There wasn’t much in their little home. A few light clothes for both a man and a woman. Some newspapers with his old stories, including the one about the day we rescued the dolphin. A cardboard box full of more stories, maybe the ones that had never been published, the sides of the box already rotting from the humidity. On the small dresser on one side of their bed was a carved wooden figurine of a monk, his palms pressed together in prayer.

  We packed it all up and loaded it on to the back of the pick-up truck, even though there was nothing to do with it and no one to give it to and in the end we would only throw it all away. But somehow leaving it there for a team of cleaners did not seem right.

  There was a hole in the wall in the shape of a heart. Someone had punched it, or thrown something heavy. The walls of the beach huts were thin and cheap and you would not have had to hit it very hard to make a hole. I watched Tess go over to it and reach inside. She showed me what she had found. A band of gold in the palm of her hand. A woman’s wedding ring.

  ‘We must give her this,’ Tess said, and her hand closed around it.

  The beach hut was empty now. There was no clue that they had ever lived here. I could hear the traffic on Highway 402 heading for Sarasin Bridge and the end of the island. It was time to go.

  Tess climbed into the driver’s seat of Mr Botan’s pick-up and I told her that I would follow on in a few minutes. I thought it unlikely that I would return to the beach huts any time soon and I wanted one last look at Hat Mai Khao. I watched her drive away and take the road south. Then I walked through the trees and on to the beach. The sight of it robbed me of my breath.

  No beach could ever match its lonely beauty. The wide, white, sloping expanse of sand stretched south for as far as the eye could see, before it came to a gentle bump in the coastline. Hat Mai Khao looked more like a desert than a beach, and more like a mirage than a desert. The sand was white and fine and endless, and your bare feet seemed to sink into it in a way that they did not on any other beach. The sea was wilder here than on the beaches further south, and crests of white formed and fell on the smooth blue muscles of the waves. I pulled off my T-shirt and waded in.

  It wasn’t like our beach. It wasn’t like Hat Nai Yang where you could wander into the sea and feel that you had stepped into some huge God-made swimming pool, warm and shallow and safe no matter how far behind you left the shore. On our beach you could swim far out and, if the mood took you, stand up, the water reaching your chest, smiling to yourself at how far away the shore looked. Hat Mai Khao was not like that – you went into the water by that long, empty beach and you knew immediately that you were in the sea. I began to swim parallel to that beautiful beach, looking at the trees beyond the beach, noticing how they became a darker green when the casuarinas gave way to the mangroves, and that was when I felt the current. It was like a change of mood in the sea, as undeniable as that, and it began pulling me backwards.

  I looked at the spot where I had thrown down my T-shirt, the faded blue vivid against the white dune of sand, and I swam hard for that. But the sea took me in exactly the opposite direction – away from the T-shirt, away from the shore, away from the soft white sands of Hat Mai Khao.

  I watched the beach grow more distant by the moment, and with each passing moment I felt my strength sap and my panic rise. I was very frightened now.

  There were good reasons why this beach looked the way that it did. There were good reasons why Hat Mai Khao made you feel like you were the last person left alive in the world. They could not build here because of the turtles that had chosen this one beach on the island to lay their eggs. They could not build here because it was part of a national park and the Thais, no matter what the world might think, were good at protecting the best of their country. They could not build here because it was so far north. And they could not build here because of the current.

  I fought against the current and it beat me without effort, and it beat me immediately. I fought it and then very quickly there was no fight left in me, it was too strong, and then I didn’t fight it at all. And it pulled me south along the great white stretch of Hat Mai Khao, too far from the shore to feel anything but raw terror. But after a lifetime it dragged me beyond the gentle bump in the coast that marks the end of Hat Mai Khao, and I felt the sea suddenly release me from its grip.

  I was looking at the horizon, the white clouds like a distant mountain range, and after I had brought up a gutful of salty bile, I trod water, steadying my breathing before I turned round.

  And when I turned around, there was Hat Nai Yang.

  I was still too far from the shore to feel no fear, but the sight of our beach was enough to convince me that I would not die today.

  There was the beach road. There were the longtails. There was the strip of restaurants that ended with the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. And above it all, there was the green hill that rises above Hat Nai Yang.

  I filled my lungs with air. The water was warm and still and so clear that I could see a school of bright yellow fish gliding across the sandy bottom.

  I began to swim towards the beach.

  Home, I thought, and now there was no room in my heart to think of anything else but that.

  Home.

  32

  We had a small house on the green hill that rises above Hat Nai Yang.

  Our home stood at the end of a yellow lane of hard-packed sand, and when the long rains came in September and October the road darkened to the colour of buried gold. It was almost empty now. Our belongings, such as they were, had already been shipped back to England. We would follow soon. The baby would be born in London, in winter.

  On the island the long rains turned the back roads to mud and made the main highways slick with danger. Down on the beach road that ran next to Hat Nai Yang the water was sometimes up to your shins, and yet I loved the long rains because of their savage beauty.

  Called by the rolling thunder, I would stand in the doorway of the shed where I worked on the Royal Enfield and watch the summer lightning split the sky in jagged flashes.

  Life went on as it always would. In the over-lit shops selling everything from foot massage to handmade suits to rides on the elephants, and in the strip of restaurants on the beach selling fish that had begun the day in the Andaman Sea, they never closed. Sometimes the long rains made the people of Hat N
ai Yang run for cover, and then we were caught and soaked to the soul. But Hat Nai Yang always went on. There was always a living to be made, and a meal to be eaten, and work to be done. There were always small children wandering about long past anything remotely resembling bedtime, their solemn brown eyes shining in the night. As always, the children seemed to belong to no one or to everyone. Safety was gently administered, and I never saw one of them allowed to come to any harm. Hat Nai Yang was a wonderful place to grow up or, for Rory and Keeva, to have spent a part of their childhood.

  As the long rains neared their end, I could not remember when I had last heard the thick green coastal forest of our island home dripping with water. I would come out of the shed to look at the last of the lightning flashing over the horizon.

  More often than not Mr Botan, my neighbour and my friend, would be out on his veranda watching the white light cut the inky, blue-black sky, and because I valued his opinion on these matters, and because weather forecasts on our island were always a strangely hit-and-miss affair, I would ask him if he thought that there might be a storm coming in later.

  He would think about it for a while as he contemplated the distant lightning and his features, which I had once thought were more Chinese than Thai, but now simply thought of as him, would frown with concentration. And then, before we both went back to our work or our rest or our meal, he would give me his verdict.

  ‘It hasn’t rained since yesterday,’ Mr Botan would say.

  There was a gift shop on Ko Siray now.

  Not really a gift shop – more of a stall with a tin shelter from the sun and the rain, and it sat in the middle of the unmade road that ran through the chao ley village. But Rory and Keeva treated it like a gift shop, chattering with excitement as they counted out the few baht they had stuffed in their jeans and examined the things for sale.

  They were beautiful things – giant wind chimes made from hundreds of sea shells, wind chimes such as I had never seen, intricate and elaborate and the result of endless hours of work, each shell chosen for its special shape or colour, all hanging down on thin pieces of string from a coconut shell, and softly jangling like the sigh of the sea. They were very cheap. Rory and Keeva bought one each, and the old woman on the stall began to carefully fold the shells into the coconut. Tess smiled at me and I thought I knew what she was thinking. The wind chimes of Ko Siray would live in their bedrooms in London and the wind outside would never disturb them.