“I don’t see him,” I said.
“Did you look carefully? Sometimes the facial features can change after a terrible death.”
“I think I know what Uncle looks like.”
“Of course you do. Oh, well. Then, if it was the beach…”
“Yes?”
“Well, there might have been a mistake. He might have been put in with … them.”
“Them?”
I was put in mind of the Alien movies, tentacles and drool.
“It’s almost as comfortable for them,” she said and led me to a door at the end of the building. “And, of course, it’s refrigerated.”
“Oh, good.”
“But it’s a little … congested.”
It seemed unfair that all these bodies should be laid out with room to turn over, if they so desired, but that Uncle What’s-his-name had to share a room. She opened the door, and I stepped up to take a look inside. It was like a skinny third-class train compartment. Two by four meters. Bodies were crammed in there on bunk shelves like pigs on their way to market. They were dressed in their own clothes, some bloody, others with no telltale sign of how they died. My uncle’s head was looking down at me from an overhead luggage rack. He had a ticket attached to his left ear. I heard a voice from behind me.
“Do you…?”
I turned around. Felt quite drained of blood. The gatekeeper grabbed my arm to steady me.
“No, he’s not there,” I said.
“And you’re certain it was one of our trucks that collected the body?”
“Black SUV. Registration number Gorgai 2544.”
She looked at me as if I was the first woman to ever memorize a number plate.
“I wrote it down because the men you sent out were extremely rude,” I told her. “Men like that can only give an organization a bad name and make the general public think twice about donating money.”
I couldn’t mention the knives because then we’d have to involve the police. Apart from the fact that most officers here moonlighted as criminals and fell somewhere between jellyfish and tree stumps on an IQ chart, there was the matter of Grandad Jah’s gun and the shattered window.
“I’ll look into it,” she said without enthusiasm, hurrying me back along the aisle. “That is certainly one of our vehicles. Perhaps they took your uncle to the hospital. Are you sure he was dead?”
No heartbeat, respiration, nerve reaction or physiology beneath the neck.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“Then all I can think is that somebody else claimed the body. Another relative?”
“You know? I was just thinking the same thing. He did have a number of minor wives dotted around. It’s very likely one of them wanted his body all to themselves for the first time. Yes, that’s probably it.”
“Well, there you are.”
And with that her interest in me vanished completely. I held my ground.
“So, if there’s nothing else?” she said.
“I was just wondering…”
“Yes?”
“That little room at the end?”
“What about it?”
“I couldn’t help notice there’s a lot of empty space in the units. Why weren’t those bodies laid out here with the others?”
“The freezers are for viewing. Nobody’s going to claim the bodies from the end room.”
“How do you know?”
“We just know.”
She’d been hustling me out of the morgue and into the reception area. I stopped and turned around. I didn’t like being nudged.
“I’m asking you a polite question,” I said, and I did the glare thing. This time it worked.
“They won’t be claimed because they probably don’t have relatives here. And if they did, the relatives wouldn’t be brave enough to come to collect them. By law we have to hold the bodies for ten days. Then we cremate them. We have a monk at the center. They get a decent sending off. Better than they deserve, most of them.”
“But who are they?” I pushed.
“They’re Burmese.”
* * *
“‘They’re Burmese,’ she said. Like they were windscreen debris in fire-ant season. Then she kicked me out ’cause she knew she wouldn’t be getting any money out of me. Nasty little bitch.”
Lieutenant Chompu sat opposite me, smoking a joint. He was wearing a white silk ankle-length dressing gown and probably nothing else. I didn’t ask. He was elegant rather than handsome. There was something early Duke of Edinburgh about his looks. But he was unashamedly effeminate. Gay men seemed to flock to me. Chompu had his official police barrack room near the Pak Nam station and this, a single bedroom bungalow with a nice view of Pitak Island. Here he lived his other life. Family money had prodded him as far as lieutenant in the Royal Thai police force, but that was where his career had stalled. His refusal to act like a good, manly cop—just pretend a little—had seen him dumped here at the end of nowhere. We were both refugees from real life, and we were friends of a sort.
“It’s their fault,” he said in one of those high-pitched don’t-try-to-speak-while-you’re-inhaling-ganja voices.
“Whose?”
“The Burmese.”
“For what?”
“All those years when they were totally nasty to us. All those rude invasions and mass murders. It all comes back to haunt you in the end.”
“Oh, right. Like we didn’t rape and pillage the neighbors too. It was a primeval hobby. They didn’t have football in those days. And I think there’s a statute of limitations on exacting revenge. Chom, they’re just trying to make a living wage.”
“They can’t have everything, dear. If they want to be spared abuse, nobody’s forcing them to come here.”
He lay back on his cushion-strewn chaise longue, posing for some unseen photo shoot. The gusts whipped beetle-nut fronds against the glass of his picture window.
“Oh, good,” I said, and sipped my lemon juice. “That’s a relief. There I was thinking you had no faults.”
“And I do?”
“You’re a racist pig.”
“It has nothing to do with racism. Are they here to help develop our country? Noooo. Do they try to learn our language and assimilate? Noooo. They come solely because on this side of the border they can make three times what they could in Burma.”
“And three times what they could earn in Burma still doesn’t equal our minimum wage. They’re slave labor, and they’re doing all the jobs we refuse to take on. If it weren’t for the Burmese, there’d be no fishing industry in Thailand, no palm oil or rubber, a greatly reduced tourism…”
“Oh, Jimm. You know how my eyes puff up when I cry. It’s my day off. Can’t we talk about boy bands?… Making soufflé?… Anything but Burmese.”
“I’m angry.”
“I know you are, darling. But don’t forget, just four days ago you couldn’t give a titty about the state of our slave laborers, just like the rest of us.”
“I … I didn’t know four days ago.”
“Know what?”
“That we were exploiting them.”
“Of course you did.”
“Did not. I just looked it up at the Internet café yesterday. Exploitation—Burmese—Thailand. Forty-six thousand sites.”
He took a deep toke and blew a little cloud of heaven out of each nostril. I had no problem with ganja, but there were times when I needed to be mellow and times when I wanted to lead with my animosity.
“Jimm,” he said. “When you lived in Chiang Mai, how many of your neighbors had Burmese nannies or maids?”
“Well, a lot, but…”
“And didn’t you think it was interesting that they started making breakfast at six and were still there washing the dishes at midnight? What? Did you think they were just showing their love for the kind family that hired them for 120 baht a day? And I doubt they got a day off. They knew if they complained there were plenty more menials available in the refugee camps. Sadly lacking a tr
ade union, those people, don’t you think?”
“Well, I’m going to do something.”
“Fine. There were two million of them working in Thailand last count. I think you should call them in for a meeting.”
“No, we’ll do it one at a time—or fractions thereof. Let’s begin with the head.”
“Oh, my word. I’ve told you.”
“I want it investigated.”
“It’s been investigated.”
“Some fat cop with a lump of dead grass on his head walks down the beach, looks at the victim, and hands him over to the bodysnatching rat brothers. They shake hands and he drives off. Fifteen minutes all told. I’d hardly call that an investigation.”
“He filed a report.”
“Oh, good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Show it to me.”
“Hmm. All right.”
“Really?”
“No. Not really. Are you insane? I’m hardly going to risk what little I have left of a career by leaking confidential documents to the press.”
“You’ve done worse.”
“Not in public.”
I sighed and looked him over. And I have to confess that was a peculiar moment. I knew Chompu would sooner mount a faulty electric junction box during a rainstorm than have carnal knowledge of a woman, but there was something really … erotic about him lying there in his silk gown, his tanned muscular legs exposed to the mid-thigh. His hair wet from the shower. I was embarrassed by the emotions dribbling through me.
“I’d let you have sex with me,” I said.
He coughed and dropped his joint down among the cushions. He burrowed frantically after it before the entire scatter empire went up in flames. You got to see all his neat little teeth when he laughed, and he did laugh long and hard.
“What on earth for?” he asked at last with his rescued joint between his fingers.
“A reward?” I said.
“You’re hilarious, really you are. I’d sooner…”
“I know.”
Gay or not, that kind of reaction didn’t do a lot for a girl’s self-esteem. I don’t know what had come over me. I’d never found him even vaguely sexual before. I put it down to the trauma of discovering my mother in flagrante. But, well, if my body didn’t tempt him, I suppose all I was left with was blackmail.
“This is such a nice little house,” I said. “Hidden from the road by a long winding driveway through the trees.”
“I was waiting for this.”
“A stash of marijuana and a stack of special magazines. Unauthorized use of handcuffs. Quite a little love nest.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“An anonymous phone call to the major. A late-night raid.”
* * *
I sat on my balcony with Gogo and Sticky on either side of me, as full of vim and vigor as roadkill. I was attempting to read the photocopy of Lieutenant Egalat (Egg) Wirawot’s report on the discovery of a John Doe on Maprao beach. It wasn’t War and Peace. Two and a half sheets, all told. It was getting harder to read as the light drained away. If there had been a sun, it would have been setting behind me, but we were in what they call a lull, a word I’d become very familiar with of late. The wind had died completely and the dark clouds were all low and gathering to drench us for the standard twenty minutes. Mair and Arny were running around closing all the windows. You can’t say the monsoon season didn’t have a sense of humor. I should have been helping the family batten down the hatches, but I’d only just been sent the report and I wanted to know what it said. If fiction awards were presented in the category of police reports, I had the winner right there on my lap.
FOUND THE HEAD—NO DISTINGUISHING MARKS—LONG HAIR, EARRINGS, DARK SKIN—PROBABLY BURMESE—MARKED OFF A PERIMETER AND SCOURED THE BEACH FOR EVIDENCE—INTERVIEWED AND CONSOLED DISTRAUGHT VILLAGERS—BEGAN SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATION AT THE DOCKS—NO COOPERATION FROM THE BURMESE FISHERMEN—CONCLUDED THAT THIS WAS ONE MORE INTERNAL DISPUTE WITHIN THEIR COMMUNITY SETTLED THE WAY THEY DO.
It began.
There were vegetables, but that was the meat of it. The people behind our resort have three cows. Even on a good day when they get bamboo root treats, those cows couldn’t produce half the manure I read there in that report. And his nonexistent, in-depth systematic investigation hadn’t turned up so much as a name.
The sky all around me grumbled like a troubled stomach, and the cloud—and I swear I’m not making this up—squatted down on our resort like a huge Malay black bear’s bottom. Plonked itself right down on top of us. It was so dark I could no longer make out words on the paper. The dogs, a species renowned for its innate sense of predicting extreme weather conditions, snored through it. Only when the rain tossed itself down in zinc bathtubs and the wind rose to smash it sideways against our little huts did they wake up, stretch, and amble off in search of a drier spot. I was halfway inside my room when I noticed Grandad Jah jogging toward me through the deluge. I’d seen video footage of a horse being picked up by a tornado. A horse weighs a thousand times more than my grandad, and I swear his feet weren’t touching the ground.
“Grab something solid,” I shouted, but my words were whisked away on the wind. It could only be the weight of the rain soaking through his clothes that stopped him flying off like Mary Poppins. He clambered up the steps and pushed past me into the cabin. He had a smile on his face. It didn’t suit him. When the door was shut, he started to undress.
“Grandad, don’t.”
“Pneumonia,” he said. “That’s what gets us. Lungs full of rain. Sudden chill. Two days and you’re on the pyre. Can’t be too careful.”
“It’s not appropriate to…”
But I was too late. His thick soggy shirt was already on the floor, and he was working on the tie string of his fisherman’s trousers. Grandad undressing was like a skeleton shedding its ectoplasm. I hurried to the cupboard for a spare blanket and wrapped it around him before I had to witness any more of him.
“What do you want, Grandad?”
“I’ve got it,” he said, his daringly small underpants falling to the floor beneath the blanket.
“I’m sure you have. What is it?”
“The number.”
“What num— The engine?”
He grinned.
“But how? It wasn’t there last night,” I reminded him.
Me and Grandad had crept out under the cover of the crashing surf the previous night and broken into the Honda. We’d left no traces. Grandad Jah was the Ali Baba of grand theft auto. But our clandestine operation beneath the bonnet had only succeeded in confirming that the couple had gone to great lengths not to be traced. The engine number had been filed away to nothing.
“There are ways,” he said.
“To read a number that’s not there?”
“To read the ghost of that number, young Jimm. When a number is punched onto metal, the metal below it is hardened. Even when the surface is filed level, that hard metal retains the number. By cleaning off the grease with petrol and applying heat from a blowtorch, then by grinding down the area with emery paper and working up a fine shine, with a strong side light you can pick out the relief of the original numbers.”
The rain was beating so hard on the concrete tile roof that Grandad had been forced to shout the end of his explanation. Then, within a minute, the storm was gone, and the rays of the setting sun found a loophole in the convoluted clouds and formed a halo around him. He looked like the starving Buddha. He was, without question, an arrogant, ignorant, genius.
* * *
“How are the preparations going?”
“I’m getting wigs made.”
“What for?”
“For my head.”
“I know where they go,” I said. “I’m asking you why you need them. Did you accidently exfoliate all your hair off?”
Sissi was trying to be cool, but I’d known her long enough to sense the girlish excitement in her voice. This gala would be the best thing to happen to post-depression Siss
i.
“There’ll be three days of mingling,” she said. “Participants set up stands with blown-up photos of themselves pre- and post-work. The judges—me being a distinguished foreign judge responsible for grooming and make-up—go around and talk with the contestants. They’re gorgeously challenged, and here they are naked without their Photoshop tools. There’s no time to rush out for plastic surgery, so all they have are grooming and makeovers to be the belles and beaux they aspire to be. And nobody’s allowed to be their finished Web Idol until the ball. That’s when everyone goes glam. Cinderellas and Charmings all. And I have to be especially gorgeous, as I’m such an icon.”
“Hence the wigs.”
“I’ll leave it till the last moment to decide which Sissi I shall be.”
It was perverted but so much better than self-imposed imprisonment in a luxury condominium.
“I want to see all the photos,” I said.
“There’s just the one problem,” she said.
“What’s that, Siss?”
“I have to pass through Bangkok.”
“Wear a mask.”
“No, I mean the demonstrations.”
A pause here to explain what was going down in our nation’s capital. For a month, an army of yuppies with undisguised connections to the aristocracy and the military had been occupying our government house. Had they been merely motorcycle taxi drivers and papaya salad vendors, they would, and some would argue, should, have been mowed down in a barrage of police gunfire. These quiche-eating misérables were making a mockery of our political system. A system, I may add, that had no problem making a mockery of itself. But what these yellow shirts represented made them bulletproof. A baton to the head of any one of them would have left a dent in the kingdom’s heritage. So those arrogant yuppies strolled through police lines and set up a holiday resort at that Italo-gothic mansion in Dusit.
Meanwhile, the rightful residents sneaked out the back gate. Led by the brother-in-law of the ex-PM-telecommunications tsar who’d threatened to make us Thailand Inc., the government jumped on the bus and skedaddled out to our old airport at Don Muang. There they were currently conducting the business of running the country in a room behind left luggage. It was all so humiliating I wanted to apply for Lao citizenship. At least the Lao had a nice oligarchy where everyone knew where the lines were drawn.
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach Page 5