Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  The village of the sea gypsies had not changed. The tin shacks on their stilts stared out at a rubbish-strewn beach where ancient longtails rocked in a choppy sea. Some men were on the beach, repairing the giant cages they used for fishing. People slept. And everywhere you saw that flash of gold in the hair that marked the chao ley out as people from another tribe, another place and perhaps another time.

  It still felt more like another planet than the other end of an island. We were the only visitors, and I wondered if there would ever be a time in our lives when we would come back. Or perhaps Keeva and Rory would come back here one day, together or alone, all grown up, teenagers travelling with a rucksack and a year to burn, or older, with their partner and perhaps even their children, just to show them, just to tell them, just to know.

  This was our island.

  Kai appeared in the open doorway of one of the tin shacks, wearing her expression of shy good humour, lifting one hand in salute while the other self-consciously rubbed the baby growing inside her. She came down the stilts slowly and heavily and when she reached the bottom we were waiting for her. Tess and Kai embraced, laughing, and it was a moment shared only by these two women, and the babies that grew inside them.

  I looked up at the shack and I saw the unreadable face of her cousin. Then he disappeared into the shadows.

  ‘Here,’ Tess said, and she held something out in her hand.

  The wedding ring glinted in Tess’ palm and Kai took it, holding it up to the light and smiling, as if it was a particularly beautiful shell. But she did not put it on, and we did not expect her to.

  Chatree slid down the shack’s wooden ladder like a fireman responding to a call. He was in a rush, and he wanted us to know it. My children demanded that he come to the beach, to play with them the way they had under the casuarinas of Hat Nai Yang. But he was done with playing.

  ‘Fisherman now,’ he said, banging his fist against his broad chest. ‘Now that my aunt has died, my uncle is fishing again.’

  ‘Cool,’ said my daughter.

  ‘Chatree,’ Tess said. ‘We are leaving soon. We are going back to London. We have come to say goodbye.’

  He nodded, a small gesture, almost nothing, as if she had made a remark about the weather.

  ‘Everyone goes home in the end,’ he told us.

  Tess stepped forward and hugged him. He fiercely returned her embrace and then broke away. He began to run to the beach. My children chased after him. I looked at Tess, holding Kai’s hand, as if reluctant to let her go, and then I went after them.

  There was an old man on one of the longtails, and I recognized him as the uncle who had silently watched his wife dying, and silently watched his niece getting married.

  Now, for the very first time, I heard him speak – shouting a brief command at Chatree as he splashed into the sea and waded to the old wooden boat. The boy hauled himself aboard as my children stopped on the shore, holding the coconut shells that held the wind chimes.

  ‘Chatree!’ Rory said. ‘Wait!’

  But Chatree could not wait for them. He was busy stashing the anchor and the weights that held the anchor. The old man yanked the diesel engine into life and the longtail began to move away from the stony beach of Ko Siray. The boy and the old man changed places, and we watched Chatree steering with one hand as his uncle prepared the lobster pots. And as they moved further out to sea, the old man and the boy were black shapes in the blinding sunshine. Keeva called the boy’s name once. With one hand still steering the longtail, he raised his free hand in farewell, and that was when I knew he was gone.

  The night before we left the moon rose full and white over the island and it was the time of Loy Krathong.

  Rory and Keeva had spent the entire afternoon making their baskets. Mrs Botan had given them each a lotus-shaped section of a banana tree. The wood was soft enough to press in their small candles, incense sticks, banana leaves, coins and flowers, but strong enough to keep them there.

  ‘Good,’ Mrs Botan smiled, and her husband nodded, the unlit cigarette in his hand moving like worry beads.

  When the full moon lit up the sky we walked down the green hill, Mr and Mrs Botan and Rory and Keeva and Tess and me, and we passed in single file through the fairy lights at the entrance of the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill and on to the beach. It was still very early, but already the glassy black surface of the sea was swarming with tiny lights.

  All along the bow-shaped sweep of Hat Nai Yang parents and their children stood and crouched at the edge of the water and, at the beachside tables of the restaurants, travellers who had never before seen the November festival of Loy Krathong paused with their forks halfway to their mouths, stunned at the sight of the night sea suddenly blazing with what looked like ten thousand fireflies.

  We knelt by the water and Tess lit the incense sticks and the candles of the children’s baskets – tiny candles in pink and blue such as you would put on a birthday cake.

  Keeva immediately launched her basket with a shove, spinning it across the surface of water with such enthusiasm that for a moment I thought it might capsize. But my daughter’s basket seemed to recover from the shock of the launch and steady itself, twirling very slowly as it made its way out to sea.

  Rory was different. He held the basket in both hands, staring at the beautiful jumble of banana leaves and candles and coins and all the rest, and I knew that he was reluctant to let it go. He wanted to keep it forever – as I wanted to keep our island, as I wanted to keep this time. But it was impossible, of course, so all at once he laughed and crouched down beside his sister, gently sending the basket on its way, shaking his head as if it had been silly to think there was anything else that could happen.

  We stood on the soft sand of Hat Nai Yang and we watched our baskets drift away until they were lost among all the others, all those flickering pinpoints of fire on the water, and in the end all you could see were the tiny flames beyond counting, dancing in the darkness as they were carried faraway to sea.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. But Hat Nai Yang – Nai Yang beach – is exactly where I have placed it, in the secluded northern tip of the island of Phuket on the Andaman coast of southern Thailand.

  This book could not have been written without the kindness and generosity of the inhabitants of Nai Yang, who by showing me their beach helped me to understand and love their island and their country far better than I did before. But the characters in this book are all products of the imagination. The story is invented.

  Only the beach is real.

  Read on for one of Tony’s short stories from Departures:

  No Tower for Old Men

  Through the smoked glass of the control tower, the Jumbo 747 first revealed itself to Spike as if it were a star above a distant manger, a glittering point of white light in the ink-blue sky.

  It was the hour before dawn on a midsummer’s day and Spike loved this moment.

  Because the star was always getting bigger, and getting closer, and the naked eye of the young man in the Air Traffic Control tower could make out other stars, other bright pinpoints of light stacked up behind it, and he knew that these lights were the first arrivals of the new day, the night flights from Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok.

  There was a bank of screens before Spike but his eyes were on the sky, and the pinpoints of light above the distant London skyline.

  There were three 200-ton planes up there – twenty-five miles away, twenty miles away and fifteen miles away respectively – their nine hundred passengers coming awake to see the sprawl of London beneath them. Three giant aircraft, heading this way at the end of their journey through the night.

  And young Spike was going to land them all safe and sound before he had his morning macchiato.

  Now he looked at the bank of screens. The Jumbo from Hong Kong appeared as a flight number – BA26 – an altitude – 9000 feet – and the ID of the airport where it was landing – LL for Heathrow. Just a bu
nch of letters and numbers on a screen, moving with the jerkiness of some video game from the last century. Spike looked at it, and he registered the information, but it was almost subconscious. The most important screen, Spike always said, was the window.

  And now a shadow passed across it.

  Spike ignored the shadow.

  But Earl, Spike’s lighting operator, stirred at the sight of the shadow falling across the window. Earl was sitting on the lower level of the tower, the perimeter, and from up on the podium Spike heard his lighting operator chuckle to himself.

  ‘Final approach,’ Spike said calmly to the pilot of the 747. It was no longer a shining light in a summer sky but a recognizable wide-body four-engine aircraft capable of flying 345 people across 8000 miles at over 600 miles an hour without once touching the ground. ‘Speedbird 26 established on Instrument Landing System,’ Spike said. ‘Continue approach, clear to land. Wind speed thirty knots at fourteen hundred feet. Stand eighteen. Follow the greens.’

  The 747 came out of the sky. Earl had lit up a string of green lights that would guide the pilot safely to his aircraft’s designated stand. These were the greens – a unique lighting system that meant that nobody was going to hit the 747, and he was not going to hit anything.

  ‘Left on Bravo, hold on Link four-one-seven,’ Spike said. ‘Follow the greens.’

  ‘The shadow’s back,’ Earl said. ‘Check it out, Spike.’

  Finally Spike looked at the shadow on the glass.

  There was a window cleaner on the outside of the Air Traffic Control tower. Some skinny youth in his early twenties who had been there for most of the week, making their massive smoked-glass window spotless, clipped to a hydraulic lift with massive squeegees attached to his wrist. The cab at the top of the tower was angled out so he was always leaning backwards as he worked with his squeegees nearly ninety metres above the ground.

  ‘That’s got to be a stressful job,’ Spike said to himself.

  They decided to give the window cleaner a cup of tea before they got busy. Spike and Earl had tried waving to him a few times, but he had always looked away, hiding bashfully behind his squeegees. And this was a good time to bring him in.

  The first flight of the day, the 747 from Hong Kong, had arrived on time just before five in the morning. Traffic would be light for another hour, and then at six the heavens would open with forty-six planes arriving every hour and another fifty-four departing.

  Earl went to get the window cleaner while Spike watched the sky. He kept watching it when he heard the voice from the other side of the podium.

  ‘Make sure your guest keeps his bucket outside,’ the voice said drily.

  Spike smiled to himself. ‘Don’t worry about it, Ian,’ he said. ‘It’s cool.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said the dry voice.

  Ian was the oldest controller in the tower. Spike, who was twenty-three, and the youngest, although not by much, had no idea exactly how old Ian might be, but he knew it was like forty or fifty or something. That old. Dad old. Ian liked all the old bands like The Smiths.

  They would be sharing duties on the watch. Spike would take care of arrivals on the north runway, while Ian would be taking care of departures on the south runway. So they would be almost sharing duties, Spike thought. Nobody liked to admit it, but arrivals were a tougher gig than departures – getting them on the ground needed faster reflexes than getting them in the air. Ian was a good controller, Spike thought. Maybe even a great controller. But he was not twenty-three any more. And if you were an air traffic controller at Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport, then you were playing in the Premiership.

  Earl appeared with the young window cleaner. The kid had two security clearance cards around his neck – one for cleaning windows airside, and the other for having his cup of tea in the tower. He turned slowly around, taking in the panoramic, 360-degree view of the airfield. Then he looked at them. His mouth fell open.

  ‘I’m Spike. This is Earl.’

  The window cleaner stared at them, dumbfounded. Spike and Earl looked at each other and laughed. Because they knew exactly what he was thinking: Who are these kids? Spike in his frayed T-shirt and cargo shorts and scuffed Asics, a martial arts tattoo on one arm. And Earl with his shoulder-length hair, sawn-off jeans and bare feet. Oh, they knew what the window cleaner was thinking: But where are all the grown-ups?

  ‘Thanks for cleaning our window,’ Spike said. ‘You’re doing an awesome job out there.’

  From the outside Spike always thought the control tower looked like an Olympic torch – the long column and then the smoked glass cab on top, tapering out. But when you were going up and down inside, it was like a lighthouse. A long way up. Earl gave the kid a cup of tea. He had earned it.

  ‘I saw that movie,’ the window cleaner said. ‘That movie about … all of this.’

  Spike smiled. He knew what he was going to say.

  ‘Pushing Tin?’ the window cleaner said. ‘I saw that movie three times. Did you see it?’

  Spike and Earl both nodded, trying not to smirk. They didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings, or to make him think that they were laughing at him. All controllers had seen Pushing Tin. It was like people who worked in record shops going to see High Fidelity, or gangsters going to see The Godfather.

  ‘Welcome to my sky!’ Spike and Earl quoted in unison, and then they cracked up.

  They loved that film in the tower. They thought it was a fantastic comedy. So wonderfully, gloriously, hilariously wrong. The controllers in that film – they have fights, they have mental breakdowns, they sweat, they drool and they sing. Spike had never seen any air traffic controller do any of those things.

  But the biggest travesty in Pushing Tin, Spike thought, was that all those controllers were just so old.

  All those geezers with their weekend barbecues and their marital problems and their bald patches and their meetings with teachers about problem children and their potbellies.

  Where did all that come from? Air Traffic Control was a young man’s game. But Spike couldn’t say any of that. Not with Ian on his watch.

  Ian was so old he remembered when the tower was actually landside, half the current size and built of red brick, back in ancient history when dinosaurs walked the earth. About, oh, three years ago.

  ‘That film is not completely accurate,’ Spike said diplomatically. ‘I think you’ll find that nobody ever raises their voice up here.’

  ‘But it must be so stressful,’ the window cleaner said, shaking his head. ‘All those lives in your hands …’

  Spike smiled.

  ‘If it was stressful,’ he said calmly, ‘you couldn’t do it. Excuse me.’

  He looked at the screen and at the sky, and he heard the rollers on Earl’s chair glide across the carpet and into position.

  ‘BA12, seven miles from marker, maintain three thousand till intercepting the localizer,’ said Spike, and his voice was soothing, hypnotic, designed to inspire trust. ‘Descend and maintain five thousand. Reduce speed to one hundred and sixty knots. Clear to land … and follow the greens.’

  He looked again at the young window cleaner.

  ‘There is no stress,’ Spike said. ‘But there is urgency. Time is everything. You can’t occupy the runway too long at Heathrow.’

  He looked over at Ian. He was sitting perfectly still in the twilight of the tower, watching the aircraft at their stands. Here was another reason why arrivals were tougher than departures. Noise restrictions meant planes were allowed to land a lot earlier than they were allowed to leave. Ian hadn’t even started work yet.

  ‘Follow the greens,’ Spike told the flight from Singapore when it was on the ground. ‘Turn left on Echo and park on three-two-two.’

  A voice crackled over the intercom.

  ‘But our gate’s over here,’ objected the pilot.

  Spike had been expecting a British or possibly an Australian accent, but the voice was American. Spike exchanged a look with Earl. The lightin
g operator knew how Spike felt about American pilots. They sometimes confused themselves with kings of the wild frontier. Follow the greens was such a simple order, and it ensured that everyone was cocooned from harm, with none of the drama and trauma that happened at lesser airports.

  ‘Follow the greens, turn left on Echo and park on three-two-two,’ Spike repeated, firmer this time.

  ‘Or you’re going to get lost,’ Earl muttered.

  The sun was up and dazzling now. The window cleaner shielded his eyes as he watched Spike up on the podium, and it was as if the kid was blinded, not by the rising sun, but by the presence of the young air traffic controller. Spike looked down from the podium and spoke in that voice as soft as a prayer.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  The window cleaner’s cup seemed to tremble. ‘Dan,’ he said.

  ‘Dan,’ Spike repeated. ‘And am I right in thinking that you do not want to clean windows for the rest of your life?’

  ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with cleaning windows,’ Earl said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Spike agreed. ‘But I don’t think you want to do it forever. Am I right, Dan?’

  The window cleaner’s voice was barely audible. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want to do with your life, Dan?’

  ‘I want – I want to keep working here at the airport,’ he said, and the words tumbled out as Spike smiled and nodded encouragement. ‘The airport makes me feel – I don’t know how to say it – like I’m connected to the rest of the world.’

  ‘We understand,’ Spike said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course,’ Spike said. ‘Look – our game is changing. Controllers used to work their way up from the regional airports. Not any more. Air traffic is increasing, the sky is more crowded. You can go from college door to landing seven hundred aircraft in a working day. Excuse me for a moment, Dan.’