Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach jj-2

by Colin Cotterill

"Don't bother. They were at Egg's house. Just the three of them."

  Convenient. Egg and the rats alone.

  "He has a house?"

  "On the way to the hospital."

  "So he has other means. Like someone else I know."

  "Don't lump me together with his type. My means are from a family heirloom."

  "Accrued over hundreds of years of honest dealings with the common people, no doubt."

  "Don't mock the wealthy. The only difference between your family and mine is that we were successful at business. We were competent."

  "No argument there."

  We sipped our Nescafe, and I wondered why instant coffee was classified as a drink.

  "All right," I said at last. "Then we need a counter-witness who saw them in Maprao at the time of the explosion. You were interviewing the bystanders. Did anyone see the SUV?"

  "No."

  "Come on. We have twenty cars and trucks passing a day. Surely someone saw a big black wagon pass through."

  "Not one."

  "All right. Then they were driving one of their own cars. Did anyone see a strange slow-moving vehicle cruising the village?"

  "No."

  "A motorcycle with both riders in helmets?"

  "No."

  "Come on, Chom. You and the Keystone Kops were talking to the crowd for an hour. There were fifty-odd people there. Surely someone saw something? I watched Constable Mah Yai filling out a case form. Somebody was making a statement."

  "Not about the bombing."

  "Something else? What?"

  "You know Ari?"

  "The monkey handler? Who doesn't?"

  "He filed a complaint."

  "I bet it wasn't relevant."

  "Someone's kidnapped his monkey."

  If I was the UN, I'd pick up the phone and request a Thai/Burmese simultaneous interpreter. Twenty minutes later I'd have a girl in my office with a Ph.D. in both languages. I wasn't the UN, and I had no idea how to conduct a clandestine interview with Shwe the squid dryer. He supervised a team at Grajom Fy that laid out sandfish and baby squid on bamboo racks to dry under the hot sun. With the arrival of the monsoons, sunny periods were few, so the workers had to hurry out with their trays and be prepared to hurry them back under cover when the rains came. I know it sounds trivial, but some twenty thousand fish are sun-baked there every day. Someone was making a lot of money out of the operation, and it wasn't the Burmese.

  There was just the one NGO working out of Pak Nam, and that was Rescue the Orphans Thailand. It was a branch of an international organization called Rescue the Orphans World that reputedly did some good…somewhere. I had yet to find that place. In my cynical mind they were every bit as bad as the SRM and a dozen other acronyms and ini-tialisms that claimed to be doing more than they were. They misled and leeched off the backs of other projects and took a lot of photos of things they weren't responsible for to send back to the ignorant church folks in the West. ROT was brazenly Christian. With every pill, every textbook, they'd issue a reminder to the orphans that if it wasn't for the great white God, they'd be illiterate or starving or dead. So howsabout a hymn?

  But ROT was also one of the three places downtown with A/C (7-Eleven and the bank being the other two), so I strolled into their office. I'd heard they had a Burmese working there who spoke English. There were four desks, and they were all empty. A tall man in a yellow T-shirt, yellow trousers, and a yellow peaked cap was sitting on the floor cutting out yellow paper chains. Yellow seemed to be in this year. He looked fearfully in my direction.

  "Hello," I said in English.

  "Sawat dee," he said badly in Thai.

  He remained seated on the ground, perhaps believing I'd come to the wrong place.

  "Do you speak English?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "I need to speak to a Burmese worker. Can you translate for me?"

  "Yes."

  I wondered whether this was one of those gag scenes where the person you're speaking to only knows the word yes.

  "Where did you learn your English?" I asked.

  "I graduated from the University of Rangoon many moons ago. I was an English major. Not frightfully useful in my present circumstances, I might add."

  All right, he could speak. He sounded like a leftover from the British Raj, but he could speak. My problem then for the next fifteen minutes, as we locked the office and drove my truck to Grajom Fy, was shutting him up. He was his own favorite subject. I could tell you all about his life, but it would really be a huge chunk of unnecessary narrative. So all you need to know is that his name was Clive. His portfolio in Pak Nam had nothing to do with orphans. He was here to initiate AIDS-awareness programs for the Burmese community. AIDS was still good charity, and even though there were far more pressing problems for the Burmese in Thailand, AIDS was what got Iowan and Indianan church folk dipping into their pockets. So, despite the fact he had no medical training and couldn't speak Thai, his command of the English language for some reason made him the ROT representative in Pak Nam. In his yellow ROT uniform the Burmese could see him coming half a kilometer away, but I wondered how they viewed him. With his education, I imagined he'd be something of an outsider. And would Shwe be comfortable with Clive as an interpreter?

  We found Shwe among the vast spread of sunning tables laying out sandfish on racks like neat torture victims. All began well. The two were acquainted. They exchanged smiles and greetings. Shwe nodded curiously at me and told Clive a quick story, which I'm certain involved my underwear. Clive's brown cheeks turned claret. We retired to the shade of a huge deer's ears tree and sat on large plastic buoys.

  "What would you care to know?" Clive asked, still too embarrassed to look me in the eye.

  "Last night I was asking a group what they knew about Burmese bodies being washed up on the beach. Shwe had something to say, but the others there wouldn't let him tell me. I want to know what he knows."

  Clive's translation and the subsequent discussion in Burmese took some time, and I thought I was about to be excluded until Clive sighed and looked at his knees.

  "Well, goodness," he said. "One is never too old for an education. I am flummoxed to learn of these things. It would appear that there have been numerous disappearances from amidst the Burmese. All unexplained. A husband would fail to return from his toil in the plantation. A workmate might stop by his associate's dormitory only to discover the door open and the bedding unperturbed. A fishing boat captain might be overwhelmed that a good and steadfast mate had failed to turn up for his shift. In the past year alone there have been thirty such incidences of whom he knows."

  "Were they reported to the police?" I asked.

  Clive passed on the question.

  "In the case of a Burmese being registered and having a Thai sponsor," Clive said, "the employer would go to the police station to report that one of his workers had vanished mysteriously. The response would invariably be that the Burmese are a notoriously unreliable race and the worker probably found some other place of employ that offered a more substantial stipend. There was, however, no explanation as to why he would be of a mind to leave behind his clothes, possessions, and, in some cases, his Burmese ID card and money."

  "Is there a theory as to where these missing workers may have gone?" I asked.

  Another dialogue.

  "There are tales," said Clive. "Seafarers" yarns about deep-sea slave ships. Vessels whose crews work under armed guard, never paid. Subsistence rations. Torture and cruelty. Out at sea for a month transferring their catch to smaller boats. No way to tell of their plight. And in case of a mutiny, a bullet to the head."

  "Or a machete to the neck," I added.

  "Quite so. Nobody has ever returned from such cruises."

  "So, if nobody returns…?"

  "Hmm. I shall inquire."

  The Burmese chatted. In the middle of their conversation Shwe's left leg started to play the Thai national anthem. He laughed and rolled up his trouser cuff. There, taped to his cal
f was a cell phone in a holster. He switched it off. He obviously wasn't about to calmly hand over his phone to the police. Necessity was the mother of invention.

  "There is no cement evidence," Clive said. "But the slices fit together to make the cake. The account from a drunken Thai crew member. The sight of a man being bundled into a truck. Missing Burmese. Body parts found on a beach…"

  "So there have been other parts?"

  "Again, rumors."

  It wasn't any type of tale a journalist would touch with a long bamboo pole. The Internet was full of this stuff. Not a shred of evidence.

  "Why wouldn't Aung want me to hear this?" I asked.

  "For the same reason you won't write about it," he said.

  Shwe smiled.

  He was right. I was a journalist in spirit. There might be facts I could follow up on, statistics, hospital records and the like, but I wouldn't get much from the Burmese. Why would they want to bring a rock face down on themselves? Who'd volunteer to have his precarious life crushed by getting involved in an investigation into a bunch of unsubstantiated claptrap? The missing were missing. The dead were dead. The police didn't care. Protect yourself and your kin, that's the way of it. I asked whether Shwe knew anything about the head on our beach. He said he didn't, but he'd ask around.

  I drove Clive back to Pak Nam, and he was pleasantly quiet. I assumed this was his inauguration into the horror of life for the poor fisherfolk. This wasn't the yellow-paper-chain world, or the world of asexual hand-puppets telling each other to use a condom. This was the world where people got eliminated. There was no evidence, but I could tell that he believed what he'd heard. When he stepped out of the Mighty X, I asked him how he knew Shwe.

  "I consult with him from time to time," he said. "He used to be the head of urology at the East Yangon General Hospital."

  "So what's he doing here drying fish?" I asked, although I was sure I knew the answer already.

  "The poor blighter has a son back home with muscular dystrophy. In his old job he didn't make enough to medicate the boy. This pays twice as much."

  All this excitement and it wasn't even lunchtime. Just as well because I was supposed to be the one making it. I don't know how I ended up with kitchen duty, but it was by far the hardest job in the household. Mair looked after the shop, which was currently Kosovo. Arny minded the chalets, all but one of which were empty. Grandad Jah watched traffic. I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner and solved world problems. You can see where all the pressure fell in our family.

  I pulled into the car park and saw a crowd standing around the latrines. Nobody was doing anything. They just stood by the concrete block, staring like tourists at the pyramids. It didn't occur to me at first, but as I walked down to the beach, I noticed some geometric anomaly with regard to our public loos. The entire block was leaning at a thirty-degree angle. When I reached the scene, the problem was clear. The sea had claimed the entire beach right up to the crest. The water was scooping out the foundations of our toilet block wave by wave. We weren't talking tsunami here. This was a deceptively gentle rise of the tide. To my left, the polite surf was already lapping at the top step of the front cabin. The plants bobbed up and down in their plastic pots. The picnic table was sub-aqua. In the four hours since I'd left, our resort had become Venice. Captain Kow was right. Earth was in the process of wreaking revenge on its abusers.

  As King Canute discovered to his chagrin, there isn't a lot you can do to turn back the sea. We stood and watched. Our kitchen, farther inland, had a thirty-centimeter wash, and the carport was a quay. But this was a kindly reminder from Mother Nature that we lived beside several trillion liters of water. If it wanted us, it could have us any old time. I stood beside Mair as the toilets dipped another four degrees.

  "Should I get buckets?" she asked.

  I laughed and she smiled. It wasn't inconceivable that one day our entire resort would become Atlantis and they'd make TV documentaries about us. But today all I could think of was Grandad Jah unblocking the U bend on a toilet that was now deep beneath the surf. Like I said, the monsoons had a sense of humor.

  We had lunch that day crammed around the bamboo table on the veranda of my cabin. I hadn't had a chance to tell anyone my findings about the Noys. Noy genius had embedded herself beside Arny. I had no idea what chemistry would draw a future Nobel prize scientist to a man who shaved his buttocks. She was so in love with him I didn't have the heart to mention that my brother's fiancee would be back from Hong Kong the next day. I really didn't want to tell her that Kanchana Aromdee, three times national bodybuilding champion, could easily rip Noy's skinny arms out of their sockets. And I didn't want to point out that Arny was not flirting with Noy in the least. Didn' t even understand the concept. He was just being his sweet, honest self. But, in fact, I knew I'd have to point all this out because Noy, alias Thanawan, had enough problems already and the last thing she needed was a broken heart. I'd wait for an appropriate moment.

  "What do you intend to do about your toilet block?" Mamanoy asked.

  "I was thinking we might issue snorkels and goggles to customers asking to use the bathroom," I said.

  "I must say you're all taking this remarkably calmly," she said.

  "You know where your cheeks are, but that doesn't stop you biting the inside of your mouth from time to time," said Mair, looking out to sea.

  We all nodded. None of us had any idea what that meant, but our guests had obligingly learned to surf my mother's squalls. They were becoming family. I wanted them to stay. Having found out what had happened in the States, I knew I'd never sleep again if I couldn't make some sense of it. I didn't want to scare them off by asking directly. I needed a ploy to squeeze information out of young Noy drip by drip without her realizing what I was doing.

  In order to obtain their trust, I decided to share my Burmese findings with them. Severed head stories aren't always the best accompaniment to a meal, but the Noys appeared to take them all in bon gout. I went on to list the indignities our Burmese neighbors were experiencing day in day out in our land of smiles. Then I even added the myth of the slave ships and the alleged execution of mutineers. By the time my tale was told, all eyes were on me, and only I had a full plate.

  "Serves 'em right," said Grandad Jah.

  "For what?" I asked.

  "Turning against the British," he said.

  I was surprised the old man knew the first thing about regional history.

  "Stick with the Brits," he went on, "and you've got a royal family at your back. Can't beat royalty for political stability."

  I wondered whether to point out that Thailand had entertained no fewer than thirty-nine prime ministers since 1932, seventeen of whom were planted after military coups. But you never won an argument with Grandad, even when you were right.

  "The Malays stuck with the Brits," he said. "The Indians. The Australians. And look at all them. Democracy is government by the people. These countries aren't run by halfwits in tin hats bleeding their countries of all their natural resources and treating their citizens like unpaid coolies. If they'd just stuck with the Brits, we wouldn't have any Burmese on Thai soil. Not a one. We'd be sending our laborers over there to build high-rises and roads."

  Grandad was a man who generally dribbled words sparingly. On the few occasions he let the floodgates open, you appreciated those dribbly moments that much more.

  "That's really sad," said Mair.

  "Just pay attention to the lessons learned from history," said Grandad.

  "They can't even count," said Mair.

  We all paused.

  "Who can't count, Mair?" Arny asked.

  "The Burmese children," she replied. "And they're so adorable in their little clothes and powdery cheeks. It hadn't occurred to me that they weren't in school. I shall build one.

  "Mair, you aren't nearly connected enough for a Nobel prize, and will you stop spending all this money we don't have?" I pleaded. "We can't even afford to clean up the shop or salvage the la
trine from beneath the mighty ocean, let alone set up a school."

  "It shouldn't cost much," she said, her mind already seeing the smiling faces sitting in the front row, the hands raised, the queue for the pencil sharpener. "We could hire ourselves a little teacher. A Burmese teacher wouldn't cost very much. And we could drive over to Ranong and buy books, and I could teach Thai once a week, or sewing."

  And off she went, describing her Burmese school, the Noys smiling and offering suggestions, Grandad Jah grumbling that nobody ever listened to him and collecting the lunch plates, Arny smiling like the little boy whose mother told fantastic stories to three little children with no father. And me, unappreciated, carrying the worries of the world. I reached into my pocket, palmed two antidepressants and washed them down with the last of my Coca-Cola. And to my utter surprise, with my mother sitting to my left yakking on about blackboard paint, a familiar sound emerged from Mair's cabin next door. It was the sound of a headboard clattering against a wooden wall.

  7.

  They Say Love Is More or Less a Gibbon Thing

  (from "I'm a Believer" – NEIL DIAMOND)

  "Are you out of your mind?" I asked, and immediately knew it was a silly question. Of course she was.

  Grandad Jah and I sat opposite Mair, who was seated on her bed with the monkey sprawled across her lap.

  "What in the world possessed you to kidnap a monkey?" asked Grandad.

  "She needed me," said Mair.

  "She told you that?"

  "Not in words."

  "Well, that's a relief."

  "She told me with this," said Mair. She lifted the animal's left leg and rolled her over. The monkey's back was diced with welts, some quite fresh. Her hair was patchy, and there were sores everywhere. Ari, the monkey handler, used to bring her once a month to collect coconuts from our trees. The first time they'd arrived I'd been relatively amused by the animal's skill. But from then on, it was just a monkey on a rope and I can't say I paid much attention. I'd go to the truck when it was all over, count the nuts, and take our share of the profits. It looked like only Mair had taken any notice of the monkey.