The Dying Beach

by Angela Savage

  He was trying not to think about how his mother would feel if he were to marry a non-Indian when he reached the Princess Cave, arriving at the same time as a tour group. The tourists filed inside and gathered around the spirit house, trying not to brush up against the large wood lingams that encircled it like a picket fence.

  ‘This is the Tham Phra Nang, the Princess Cave,’ their baby-faced Thai guide said in English. ‘Long time ago, a princess from India, Si Kunlathewi, died in a shipwreck near to this place. But her spirit did not die. The princess spirit we call Phra Nang. She come to live in this cave. The fishermen pray to Phra Nang for the good catch of fish. The ladies, they also come here to pray for the good catch of husband.’

  The guide laughed at his own joke. ‘The people leave the offerings you see here to make the princess spirit happy.’ He patted the glossy red-painted head of a lingam as high as his waist.

  ‘That princess must be one horny lady,’ an American voice piped up.

  There was more laughter, chatter, the click and flash of cameras before the group moved on and the cave was quiet.

  Rajiv eyed the princess statuette on the terrace of the spirit house and wondered who this Phra Nang was. The jilted bride at a supernatural wedding party turned violent? Or a shipwrecked Indian princess? Evidently local folklore allowed her to be both.

  He thought of Pla, and Jayne’s reluctance to believe the official verdict of accidental death by drowning. In this scenario, two contradictory explanations could not coexist. Pla’s death was either an accident or it wasn’t.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  He turned to find Jayne at the mouth of the cave.

  ‘The farang who found Pla’s body. She checked out later the same day. I should’ve guessed it. No one would want to hang around after something like that.’

  Rajiv couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses but he heard the disappointment in her voice. ‘Did you get a name? Contact details?’

  ‘Sigrid Homstadt from Norway. The concierge said she had more than a week left on her booking, but that’s all the information I could get. They take their guests’ privacy very seriously. That rude prick of a security guard wasn’t for show.’ She kicked at the sand.

  ‘You did your best,’ Rajiv said. ‘Do you want to head back now or shall we stay for a swim?’

  From the way Jayne stared out over the bay, Rajiv assumed she was contemplating the swim.

  ‘If she’s come all the way from Norway, she’s not going home with more than a week left of her holidays.’

  It took him a beat to catch up.

  ‘My guess is she’s relocated to the mainland,’ Jayne said. ‘We know she has expensive tastes in accommodation and, given there’s only a handful of five-star hotels in Ao Nang, she shouldn’t be too hard to find.’

  Rajiv gazed squarely at her. He recognised the stubborn tilt of her chin and knew that behind those sunglasses was a faraway look. Jayne’s tendency to fixate was part of what made her a good detective. But Rajiv was determined they remain off duty.

  ‘We have only today and tomorrow left in Krabi before we return to Bangkok,’ he said. ‘Are you really wanting to spend the last days of our holiday chasing a woman who, for all we know, may be leaving Krabi already?’

  ‘But I can’t just do nothing,’ Jayne protested.

  It was on the tip of Rajiv’s tongue to ask why not, when he had a better idea. ‘There’s still Miss Pla’s flatmate to visit. You are wanting to ask her about the funeral, yes?’

  ‘That’s right, the funeral.’

  ‘We could make a donation,’ Rajiv said. ‘That would be a good thing to do, yes?’

  Jayne seemed revived by the idea and set out at a brisk pace, heading back along the beach to where the water taxis pulled in. Rajiv hastened to keep up; he wouldn’t put it past her to start asking around the five-star hotels the moment he dropped his guard.

  5

  The address they’d been given for Pla’s roommate was in Ban Khlong Haeng, a brief detour inland from Ao Nang on the way back to their hotel in Nopparat Thara. After a couple of false starts—Thai people were inclined to give incorrect information rather than admit they couldn’t help—Jayne and Rajiv located the small compound where Pla had lived with Suthita. The main building was two storeys of narrow apartments in whitewashed concrete, windows shuttered against the heat, no sign of air-conditioning units. There was what looked like a communal shower and toilet block to the right, a muddy puddle around the entrance, and an open-sided sala on the left, where sticky rice simmered unattended in a bamboo steamer on a small brazier.

  Pla’s apartment was on the ground floor. The door was ajar and they could hear someone moving around inside.

  ‘Khun Suthita?’

  Silence.

  ‘Khun Suthita, we’re friends of Khun Pla,’ Jayne said in Thai. ‘We just wanted to ask you—’

  The door swung open on a diminutive, wild-eyed girl brandishing a coathanger.

  ‘G-get away from me, p-phi tai hong,’ she stammered.

  Rajiv backed away but Jayne inched closer, hands pressed together in a wai, her voice gentle. Rajiv recognised the word phi, Thai for ‘ghost’, and guessed Jayne was trying to calm the girl down.

  Eventually Suthita lowered the coathanger. ‘You can come in,’ she said to Jayne but when Rajiv tried to follow, Suthita shook her head. ‘Men no allow,’ she said in English. She poked her head out and glanced from side to side before closing the door.

  Rajiv made his way to the open-air kitchen where the benefits of shading himself from the sun were soon cancelled out by the heat of the brazier. A sweaty V had formed at the neck of his T-shirt by the time Jayne reappeared. She carried a red, white and blue striped bag, the kind favoured by Asian tourists for the shopping that wouldn’t fit in their suitcases. Rajiv tilted his head in an unasked question.

  ‘Let’s get a coffee,’ she said.

  Rajiv nodded, the rumbling in his stomach telling him it was lunchtime even before he looked at his watch.

  They headed for the village market. Alongside a line of vendor carts was a makeshift cafeteria of child-sized plastic furniture clustered beneath a canvas tied to four dusty coconut palms. Rajiv found them a table in the shade, pulling up an extra chair for the striped bag, while Jayne ordered them bowls of khanom jin, the curried fish soup with thin rice noodles that was southern Thailand’s fast food. Rajiv wolfed down the meal, though Jayne’s bowl was still half full when she pushed it aside.

  She patted the striped plastic bag on the seat beside her. ‘Pla’s things,’ she said. ‘All she owned and the bag’s not even full.’

  ‘And how is it that you are now custodian of Pla’s worldly possessions?’ Rajiv asked.

  ‘I’ll explain in a minute. Iced coffee okay for you?’

  He nodded. Jayne placed the order with a woman in a headscarf, who unveiled a large slab of ice in a tub beneath a hessian sack, hacked off several large shards with a screwdriver and placed them in two tall glasses. She added slugs of condensed milk and doused the lot with viscous black coffee strained through a muslin sack.

  ‘Suthita says Pla has no family apart from an aunt in Nakhon Si Thammarat province. And the aunt is a humble nun in the village temple. Suthita’s trying to get word to her. But there’s no money to transport the body home, let alone to send on Pla’s things. The funeral will have to be held here in Krabi.’ She referred to a scrap of paper. ‘At Wat Sai Thai.’

  ‘What a sad state of affairs,’ Rajiv said.

  ‘I offered to take care of Pla’s things because frankly, Suthita didn’t seem up to the task.’

  ‘What will you be doing with them?’

  Jayne shrugged and sipped her coffee.

  ‘What happens to Pla’s remains?’ Rajiv asked.

  ‘I assume the monks will take care of all that. I don’t know.’

  ‘What about her employer? Her colleagues?’

  ‘Remember what Pla told us,’ Jayne said. ‘Guides work for t
heir bed and board plus tips. Can you imagine an employer that stingy forking out for a funeral in another province? As for her colleagues, if they’re like the two we met at the tour agency this morning, I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

  ‘But this is dreadful.’ To Rajiv’s mind, for someone to be abandoned in death was both shameful and tragic. ‘We must do something, Jayne.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘So it’s not just me?’

  ‘Yes…I mean, no.’

  She placed a hard on his arm. ‘We just have to figure out what Pla needs most from us.’

  ‘I agree,’ Rajiv said. Within reason, he added privately.

  6

  People who rented out their beach houses in Australia seemed infatuated with nautical decor. Lifebuoys on balcony rails. Dolphins on the kitchen tiles. Abalone-shell ashtrays. But the hotel room Jayne and Rajiv shared in Nopparat Thara took marine kitsch to a whole new level. Shell mosaics decorated not only the mirror and picture frames, but every available surface, from the bedside tables to the shower recess, where the liquid soap and shampoo were dispensed from real conch shells. The bed was a four-poster, but in place of mosquito netting were strings of beaded periwinkles that swayed in the breeze generated by the ceiling fan.

  Through the curtain of shells, Jayne could see Pla’s striped bag sitting on a chair, as though the young woman herself was in the room, waiting to strike up a conversation. Rajiv had fallen asleep within minutes, but Jayne lay awake in the heat of the day, her mind going over the time they’d spent with Pla.

  Pla. How well she’d fitted her nickname. Few of Jayne’s Thai female friends could swim at all, let alone take a group of tourists snorkelling off the back of a boat in deep water. Pla had an open-water dive ticket, too. Someone in their tour group had asked to see it.

  ‘You must be called Pla because you swim so well,’ Jayne said as they climbed back on the boat after snorkelling off Chicken Island.

  ‘People think so,’ Pla said. ‘But I had my nickname long before I could swim. My mother gave it to me. She said when she was pregnant, it was like having a little fish swimming around inside her.’

  ‘Is your family from Krabi?’

  Pla smiled the way Thai people often did, to lessen the blow of bad news. ‘I come from Nakhon Si Thammarat. But my parents died already. My father was killed in a building-site accident. My mother got sick with fever, but we couldn’t afford to pay the doctor. By the time we took her to the hospital, it was too late.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Pla’s smile faltered but only for a moment.

  ‘So what brought you to Krabi?’ Jayne asked.

  ‘Work. I work the tourist season as a guide and I also—’

  ‘Can we please get some water over here?’

  The request, issued in a loud American accent, cut across their conversation. Jayne got out of the way while Pla distributed bottles of chilled water from a tub at the front of the boat. As well as Jayne and Rajiv, the tour group consisted of a stylish Thai couple from Bangkok with special waterproof bags for all their belongings, a Canadian couple with a well-behaved little girl, and two Americans, an older man who repeated everything Pla said to his female travelling companion, a taciturn brunette in designer sunglasses.

  Inevitably it was the American who asked Pla how she learned to speak English.

  ‘I taught myself by listening to Voice of America radio,’ she told him.

  ‘You hear that, honey?’ The man nudged his companion. ‘She taught herself English by listening to Voice of America. Well, you speak it real well, honey.’

  ‘Jing reu?’ Jayne asked Pla in Thai. ‘Did you really learn English by listening to Voice of America?’

  Pla grinned and for the first time Jayne noticed the coin-slot gap between her two front teeth.

  ‘If they’re from the UK, I tell them I learned English from BBC World Service.’

  ‘Pak wan,’ Jayne teased her. ‘Sweet mouth’, a flatterer.

  Pla’s smile changed but did not fade. ‘My father died working to pay for my education, to give me opportunities he never had. I studied hard to honour his memory.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be very proud of you.’

  Pla shook her head. ‘He’d think I was crazy working in this job, it is so badly paid. But money isn’t everything,’ she said with a shrug. ‘We cannot eat money.’

  The exchange stayed with Jayne because she’d never heard a Thai person so dismissive about money. Most Thais she knew obsessed about it. The poor worried about not having enough. The rich worried about protecting what they had. And everyone gambled in the hope of winning large sums of it.

  The expression Pla used—we cannot eat money—reminded Jayne of something, too. But she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  Jayne also remembered Pla alluding to a lover, or love interest. The boat was pulling up at the last stop on their itinerary, a cluster of islands touted in the brochure as ‘a site of Natural Wonder’.

  ‘The island on the left is called Koh Mor, and just beyond it is Koh Tup,’ Pla told the group as the driver cut the engine and dropped anchor. ‘Right now the islands are separated by the sea but as the tide goes out a sand bridge appears to join them together.’

  ‘You hear that, honey?’ the American man said. ‘She says a sand bridge is gonna appear.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pla said politely. ‘If you look this way you’ll see people wading between the islands in knee-deep water. In about twenty minutes more, you’ll be able to walk on dry land from one island to the other.’

  Pla hooked a stepladder over the side of the boat for them to disembark. ‘Joined at low tide by a sandbar, separated at high tide by the sea.’

  ‘Sounds like a formula for the perfect relationship,’ Jayne said in Thai as she waited in line for the ladder.

  Pla’s face fell. ‘Oh no, Khun Jayne. Surely there is only sadness in being kept apart from the one you love.’

  Jayne muttered that she was only joking.

  Shortly after that, Pla had managed to get Rajiv into the water for the first time. Jayne would never forget the pure joy and wonder on his face when he emerged. She’d never seen a photo of Rajiv as a child, but in that moment she could imagine it—a flash of insight into his past that felt like a gift.

  She gazed now at Rajiv as he slept beside her. His ability to sleep regardless of circumstances was something he had in common with the Thais—a skill Jayne didn’t resent so much as envy. She would love to be one of those people for whom stress triggered sleepiness, instead of what a Chinese doctor once described as ‘monkey brain’.

  She gave up on the siesta. Gently parting the shell curtains, she eased herself out of bed, wrapped herself in a sarong and dragged a T-shirt over her head. The bag containing Pla’s things rustled when she moved it. Rajiv stirred but didn’t wake. With her cigarettes and lighter balanced on top, Jayne carried the bag outside to the veranda of their bungalow.

  An inventory of the contents revealed two pink Barracuda Tours polo shirts, two pairs of chinos, a pair of jeans, a white cotton blouse, two T-shirts, two sarongs and a pair of rubber flip-flops bearing the imprint of Pla’s feet. There was a toiletries purse containing a comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant and menthol inhaler, a plastic wallet and a mobile phone.

  While the Thais’ love affair with meu theu or ‘handheld’ technology appeared to know no bounds, it surprised Jayne that a poorly paid tour guide in a relatively remote part of the country would own a mobile phone. She made a mental note to look into it.

  The wallet contained Pla’s ID card showing her full name as Chanida Manakit, born 21 August 1975. Her place of birth was listed as Khanom in Nakhon Si Thammarat, the province east of Krabi on the Gulf of Thailand coast.

  At the very bottom of the bag was a spiral-bound notebook. On the cover, against a background of orange hearts, were the words ‘Note Book Love’ and in fine print, ‘Health is the thing that makes you feel that now is the best time of the year’.


  Jayne had a collection of such notebooks. They were made in China, but the stationery companies used English phrases to make their products look more sophisticated. The result—as in the case of Pla’s notebook—was usually nonsensical, if not downright baffling.

  Jayne scanned the contents. She read Thai less easily than she spoke it, but within a few pages, she’d figured out the handwritten notes were transcripts of conversations or minutes of meetings. Each entry was dated, the oldest going back six months, the most recent taking place only a couple of weeks earlier at the end of March. She gleaned a rough idea of the subject matter—something to do with an infrastructure project—but didn’t recognise the names of any people or places. The English acronym ‘EIA’ appeared periodically amid the Thai script.

  On the inside back cover she found a note, handwritten in English in the neat lettering learned by Thai schoolgirls:

  Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we cannot eat money.

  During Jayne’s university days, this quote, attributed to the Cree Indians of North America, had appeared on posters, postcards, brochures, in student newspapers and leftist magazines. It was ironic how many trees had to die in order for the quote to become so famous.

  No wonder the phrase ‘we cannot eat money’ was familiar. But what was the significance of this quote in Pla’s notebook? On the face of it, the notes seemed to have nothing to do with the work of a tour guide. What else was Pla involved in?

  Jayne took out her own notebook and wrote down the little she knew about Pla’s life. As she copied down Pla’s address in Khlong Haeng village, she had a flashback to Suthita standing in the doorway of their room, accusing her of being a phi tai hong. At the time, Jayne hadn’t dwelled on it. Thai people believed in all kinds of ghosts. But a phi tai hong, if she wasn’t mistaken, was a specific type of ghost that haunted the place where a person died an unnatural or violent death.