Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach

by Colin Cotterill

  Our other guest that night was Captain Waew, retired from Surat Thani police force. He was as round as Grandad Jah was anorexic, as short as me, and worryingly twitchy. He had so many tics you’d doubt he could ever be truly still. He ate sparingly, spoke frugally, and smiled at everything. He was the reinforcements called in by my grandfather. I felt so much better to see he had back-up.

  The grenade attack on our freezer had destroyed our frozen fish and most of our beer supply. The bottles had shattered, but the cans had merely been blasted across the room. The beer that accompanied our supermarket seafood therefore was in Salvador Dali cans, which exploded foam at every opening. After an hour we all stank of Leo. By then we hardly noticed the arrival of the subtle black curtain of clouds being pulled across our sky. While everyone else was getting plastered, I called on my superhuman ability to be unaffected by alcohol when a good story was at stake.

  With bladders filling fast and their owners running off to rooms to empty them, I worked my way around the table like a clever Pac-Man, sliding into vacant slots until I found myself beside my prey—Noy.

  “Are you having a good time?” I asked.

  “They seem so happy,” she said, staring at Arny and Gaew, her words slurred. She was pickled.

  “Love. What can I say? Blind as a beefburger.”

  She didn’t laugh.

  “She’s…”

  “Older than your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Noy was swaying. I don’t know how many abstract beer cans she’d been through, but I was certain she was just about to say things she’d regret. I leaned into her ear.

  “Tell the truth, I’d like to see him with someone younger,” I said. “But she’s so worldly. She’s been everywhere. Can you believe she studied in America?”

  That was a lie. I was fond of lies.

  “Well, so did I,” slurred Noy.

  Bingo.

  “You don’t say? He loves women with overseas experience.”

  “I have it,” she said. “I have overthere experience. And what an experience. You know? You know what I was?”

  Drunk was what she was. About to pass out, I’d bet. I needed a few more clues before I lost her completely.

  “What were you?” I asked.

  “I was…” She looked around, not focusing on anything or anyone—perhaps only the memory.

  “I was a rental.”

  “Like Hertz?”

  “Excac … ex … actly like Hertz. Driven into the ground, dented and dumped. Used. That was me.”

  She put her arm around me and belched.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  “All used up,” she sang. She was fading now. I had twenty seconds left at the most before her lights went out. “And what … what would they have done to me after the gas tank was empty? Put me in the scrap metal, that’s what. So, Jimm, that’s why.”

  “Why what?”

  Mamanoy had seen her girl talking to me and was on her way over to us.

  “Why what what?” Noy asked.

  “No, you said, ‘That’s why.’”

  “Right. That’s why.” She got clumsily to her feet and raised a fist. “That’s why I stood up to them. Why I told them it wasn’t right. It shoul … should have been me.”

  Then in English she said, “The monitor lizard knew nothing.”

  Her mother caught her just before she collapsed.

  “She isn’t very good with alcohol,” said Mamanoy. “Talks absolute rubbish after the slightest amount of beer. I’d better get her back to the room.”

  Ex-Captain Waew saw an opportunity to manhandle a nubile twenty-four-year-old and propped up one side of Noy while her mother took the other. I watched them fade into the shadows.

  “Well, how confusing was that?” I asked myself. I couldn’t think. Beer made my brain stodgy. If I’d been drinking Chilean red, I would have had an insight by now. Casa de Easter might give me brimstone hangovers, but it did wonders for my imagination. Noy had told me something important, but I didn’t know what.

  When the captain returned from Noy’s cabin, he joined Grandad Jah at another table and I knew they were up to no good. I wasn’t having it. I went over to them and squeezed in between the old fellows.

  “Jimm,” said Grandad, “go and play somewhere else. This is grown-up talk.”

  He sometimes forgot I’d grown up too.

  “OK, old policemen,” I said. “Here’s the deal.”

  “Jimm!” snarled Grandad.

  I didn’t want to break Grandad’s face in front of his colleague, but I had a lot on my plate, not least of which was the feel of Captain Waew’s strong forearm against my side. Just how evil were those pills?

  “I know what you two are up to,” I said.

  “Jimm, do not interfere where you aren’t wanted,” said Grandad.

  “If you do anything to the rat brothers, I’m going straight to the real police. I’ll tell them everything, including the gun.”

  Grandad Jah looked at his friend apologetically.

  “She’s young,” he said.

  “I may be young,” I agreed, “but I’m not stupid. I know why your co-avenger is here. And I need your combined expertise on a much bigger case. I want to know whose head that was on our beach. It’s possible he was beheaded by slavers, and they got away with it. They’ve probably been getting away with it time and time again. I want you to focus your minds on something more important than revenge against a couple of lowlifes. I know you aren’t that fond of the Burmese, but they’re people. They have rights. And they believe nobody cares about them here in Thailand. That’s because nobody does care about them. I don’t think that’s fair. I want justice for our day laborers. But I tell you what. The rats are connected to all this somehow. And once we’ve uncovered the kingpins, you can do whatever you like with them. Or perhaps you aren’t up for a large-scale operation.”

  The two old men were silent for a while. A squall had started to gust the rain off the Gulf. Large drops hit the straw roof over the table and the napkins blew away. Mair and Gaew hurried to clear up the dinner things. Captain Waew smiled at Grandad.

  “Mitt,” he said, “she’s a child of your loins right enough.”

  “I taught her everything she knows,” said Grandad.

  We had the beginnings of a task force and a downpour.

  * * *

  It was Thursday morning and I had to go to market to scrounge for food. The Pak Nam covered market, once the heart of this metropolis, where lovers met and movies were shown on the weekends, was now a huge dilapidated warehouse of a place with a few stallholders hanging on for dear life. There was no logic behind what fruit and vegetables would be available at any given time. Like the deep-sea catch from the night before, the abundant fresh produce was targeted by the gluttons of Bangkok, whisked away in huge refrigerated trucks before our sleepy heads left the pillow. Like temple dogs, we had our choice of what scraps were left. I often returned home with a sprig of what could conceivably have been weeds and a plastic bag full of something local and covered in dirt.

  I’d hardly slept the previous night as I wrestled with the ravages of withdrawal. The beer had sedated me till about two when I sat bolt upright in a cold sweat, like they only do in movies. I reached for my antidepressants, but I’d flushed them all down the toilet. I lay back and relied on the strength of my will to get me through the next four hours. I did a lot of thinking but no sleeping at all. I wondered what effect a rubber toilet plunger might have on submerged pills. I wondered whether Ed’s friends were drawing lots to see who’d get me first. I’d listened to the rain that clattered down on my concrete roof all the way till dawn.

  I drove home through the pouring rain with our humble food supplies and noticed how the little ditch at the back of our place had become a stream. It was quite picturesque. Now I understood why there was a bridge. Until now it had served no purpose. I could imagine a big-eye-contact-lens Japanese bik
ini girl standing there with an umbrella. We could make it a tourism feature. Tourists loved features. I parked in front of our burned-out shop and marveled at how the village women had rallied around Mair. The ladies of the co-op were mopping frantically and sorting out the salvageable from the hopeless. Despite the steady rain, Captain Kow was sitting on his motorcycle in a flowing purple plastic poncho. He looked like a morning glory. I needed a seafaring man to explain to me the politics of deep-sea fishing. Kow, the squid-boat captain, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in front of our shop selling fishballs from his motorcycle sidecar. I wondered whether “Captain” was just his first name. I think he was surprised when I walked up to him. If he’d had more teeth, he’d probably have a nice smile. His nose was a little broken, but his eyes were smoky gray, and time and weathering had shaped him a good face.

  “Captain Kow,” I said, and saluted as was my witty way.

  He saluted back, as was his.

  “Nice weather for dolphins,” he said.

  For some reason this made me think of all those creatures that have never experienced dryness. Fancy that, being permanently wet. That in turn made me think of whales washed up on beaches, creatures who obviously associated dryness with death. On our beach we had a lot of fish washed up. They all had that “who put that beach there?” expression. But nobody rushed out with damp blankets and iced water to rescue a mackerel. There were no SAVE THE MACKEREL bumper stickers. My philosophy was that if you were too stupid to realize you were swimming on dry land, it really didn’t matter how enormous or endangered you were. Mother Nature has a way of dealing with the dumb. Meanwhile, Captain Kow was yakking on about the weather conditions. Something about rain and two weeks and flash floods. I interrupted him.

  “Captain Kow? I was wondering whether I could sit you down sometime and ask you some fishing boat questions.”

  His gray eyes lit up.

  “It would be an honor,” he said.

  I booked him for ten o’clock in my room.

  * * *

  I was offloading my fruit and vegetables when I felt a presence behind me. I turned to see Noy under a green umbrella. She looked pummeled, all puffy and red-eyed. I loved to see beautiful women in those paparazzi photos taken at the supermarket when they looked just like you and me. Noy was the type who should really stay away from Leo beer.

  “Pee Jim,” she said.

  Pee. Older sister. Good. Respect. I liked it.

  “Yes?”

  “I…”

  There was probably more to that sentence, so I waited.

  “I wanted to ask you … about last night.”

  “Yes?”

  “I … my mother said I was talking to you … a lot.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I drank a lot of beer. I’m not used to it.”

  “I could tell.”

  “Did I … did I say anything?”

  Now perhaps you can see why I was one of the country’s top crime reporters. My chance had arrived.

  “You told me a lot,” I said.

  “About?”

  I was getting wet. I took her arm and led her to the plastic awning.

  “About everything,” I said.

  “No.” The muscles of her face tensed. “I … I wouldn’t have.”

  “Georgetown. Science. The exam.”

  She was a white girl. The type of girl sheltered from the harmful rays of the sun from birth. Coated in creams. Barred from garden games. But I swear that white girl dropped through three more shades of white right there in front of me.

  “It’s not possible,” she said.

  “Then I must be psychic. Listen, you told me. It doesn’t matter. You’ve landed in the safest place in the country. We all like you and your mother. We want to help. You can stay here as long as you like. What happened in America doesn’t bother us. Everything’s fixable.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  It was true. I didn’t. I knew the what but not the why. But I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “I think it’s quite evident,” I said.

  “No, Jimm. This is serious. This isn’t a sinking latrine. These are dangerous people. If they found out you were helping us, they could … delete all of you. There’d be no evidence that you ever existed.”

  I felt a tingle of excitement. I wasn’t sure that I had existed for the past year, but this was incredibly dramatic. I took her shaking hand in mine. She was truly terrified.

  “Pbook,” I said.

  “I told you my name?”

  “Just that. No surname. No connections to your real life. Your family’s identity is still protected. And only I know the truth. I haven’t told anybody else. It’s just me and you against … them. And I’m a great ally to have.”

  All she knew about me was that I was a cook in a beaten-up resort at Earth’s end. But she was desperate for a friend. She fell against me and took me in her arms and sobbed into my shoulder. In my current condition, even that was a little exciting. But the longer we stood there, the more her anguish seeped into me like a computer virus. It was overwhelming. What could possibly have happened to this poor little bird?

  “I like to see girls bonding” came a voice.

  I looked up and there was skinny Bigman Beung leaning against a coconut tree with his arms folded. His uniform was drenched. It was some type of archaic police suit. Noy stepped back and wiped her tears with her hands.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Reminds me of a video I once saw,” he said. “Except there was less clothes and more baby oil.”

  “I asked you what you’re doing here.”

  “You need to ask when I’m clearly dressed in my sanitation department uniform?” he said.

  I smiled at Noy.

  “We can talk later,” I told her. “Tell your mother you really have no reason to leave here.”

  She returned my smile, collected her umbrella, and headed off into the rain. Bigman Beung observed her bottom.

  “Leaving, is she? Such a waste. Still, I can probably return to the image of you two smooching at a later time. Perhaps when I’ve had a few drinks. Meanwhile, I have an ecological disaster to avert.”

  “Our latrine?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Ooh, I don’t know. Tons of human excrement escaping into the Gulf from our three-seater toilet block? Would that be it?”

  “I have a camera. There are grants available. Combination of natural disaster and hazardous waste. Worth a million baht if I take the snaps from just the right angle. You want to come down and pose in front of it?”

  “It’s underwater.”

  “You’re right. It would be a swimsuit photo shoot.”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. Please yourself.”

  He headed off down to the beach. I called after him.

  “Beung.”

  “Changed your mind?”

  “That day I reported the head, who did you phone?”

  “The M code?”

  “Yes.”

  “New fellow at the Pak Nam station. He’s responsible for all Burmese matters. Lieutenant Egg. He called us village heads to a meeting and told us about the hotline. Any body or body parts washed up on our beaches that we suspect might be Burmese we were to contact him directly.”

  “What does the M stand for?”

  “Maung.”

  8.

  Our Love Is Like a Chip on the Ocean

  (from “Rock the Boat” — WALDO HOLMES)

  Maung was the generic term the rude Thais used for Burmese. It was like calling all Australians Bruce. It was just another show of disrespect. I sat down with my task force, and the three of us went over everything we thought we knew about the Burmese fishermen. It didn’t take long. We needed professional input to understand exactly what was happening out there in the deep Gulf. Ten minutes later, that information arrived. There was a knock on the door. I opened it to the gappy grin of Captain Ko
w. I noticed Grandad’s haunches rise like a mad dog, so it would help to point out at this juncture that Grandad and the squid-boat captain weren’t on speaking terms. I have no idea why. Of course, Grandad Jah could count his close friends on one finger, whereas the number of people he irritated would fill the national football stadium. So, whatever had come between them was probably his fault. Captain Kow was a very laid-back type, and most other people seemed to like him. In fact, Grandad was the only one who didn’t. Having them together in a small room was going to be a challenge to my refereeing skills.

  Over the next half hour, the captain proved that he was every bit as knowledgeable about maritime matters as Grandad Jah was about road transport. That didn’t stop Grandad arguing and making nasty comments. But Captain Kow gave no indication of being rattled at all. He rode the interruptions like a man in a rubber dinghy and calmed us all with his soft sing-song voice. I noticed that he directed most of his attention to me, as if we were the only two in the room. He was given perhaps to unnecessary detail, but the gist of his talk was this.

  The Gulf of Thailand is 350,000 square kilometers and is 80 meters at its deepest. Until the sixties it was rich in all different types of fish. The local markets were full of cheap anchovies and mackerel. Thence developed the deep-sea trawler industry … instant huge profits leading to overfishing. An average catch of 300 kilograms an hour in 1961 dropped to 50 kilograms in the eighties, 20 today. All that was left was called “trashfish,” supplied to the anything-will-do factories. Most affected were crabs, sharks, rays, lobsters, and all the large fish. With the decline of these predators, the trashfish and squids and shrimps—the bottom plankton feeders—increased. Commercial squid-fishing vessels primarily used purse seines—which the captain told us were a type of fine net used to encircle the shoal—or scoop nets. Powerful lights were used to attract the squid to the surface, where they were more easily captured.