The Dying Beach

by Angela Savage

  She eyed him impassively. ‘I try to be respectful, to get by. I’m not so naive as to imagine I can assimilate.’

  What was wrong with him? Why the hell was he dumping on her? She wasn’t to blame for the mess he was in. ‘Jayne, I’m sorry—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She dropped her cigarette into the Coke bottle and stood up. ‘For the record, I made that comment about the price you pay for intimacy out of empathy. It wasn’t meant as a criticism.’

  Paul grabbed her wrist as she walked past. ‘Please, don’t go. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. You just hit a raw nerve. The other Aussie volunteers gave me such a hard time about getting involved with a local that I freaked out. Behaved like a prick. Backed right off. Pla didn’t deserve it. And I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t abandoned her, she might still be alive today.’

  Jayne frowned at his hand on her wrist. He released his grip, expecting her to keep walking. But she stayed where she was, stared out to sea as she spoke. ‘About a year ago, I went to Chiang Mai to stay with a friend. I loved this man, but when things got hot between us, I couldn’t handle it. I left him at his place to cool off, said I’d stay at a hotel and we could talk in the morning. Later that night he was murdered on his front veranda by the Thai police.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘For a while I did what you’re doing, tortured myself with the thought that if only I’d stayed for the night, he might still be alive. But Paul, it’s bullshit. More likely scenario is we’d both be dead.’ She drained the contents of her glass and touched her hand to his arm. ‘I never bought the argument that Pla drowned. I think she was killed because she got in someone’s way. And you could’ve been killed, too, Paul, if you’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘But who’d want to kill Pla?’

  ‘I know I’m supposed to be off the case, but can I see Pla’s notebook?’

  He handed it to her. ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’

  ‘I didn’t think you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  She handed him the packet, took a seat and leafed through the notebook. ‘Light me one, too?’

  Paul put two cigarettes between his lips, lit both, handed one to her. A gesture he’d seen in an old black-and-white movie, the name of which escaped him.

  Jayne accepted the cigarette without looking up. Paul lay back in the hammock and smoked while she read. He felt lighter, no less regretful about the way he’d treated Pla, but somehow less guilty.

  ‘Your friend in Chiang Mai. Was he Thai?’

  ‘No, he was gay,’ she muttered through the cigarette between her teeth.

  Paul figured he must have misheard her.

  She removed the cigarette and stabbed at the book with her free hand. ‘It’s been playing on my mind all afternoon. I’m sure Pla mentions mangroves somewhere in these notes.’

  ‘Right at the end, I think. I noticed because it’s in English.’

  She leafed through the pages. ‘Shit, you’re right. Here it is…Need to ensure indirect impacts don’t damage environment in other areas, such as mangrove forest. And the context was…’ She backtracked over Pla’s notes. ‘Pakasai village consultation. The PR consultant was there, the engineer, the health official, the headman Amnat. They talked about explosives, dengue fever, business opportunities…’ She looked up. ‘Does the name Choom ring any bells?’

  ‘Should it?’

  ‘There’s something familiar about that name.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘God, it’s only nine o’clock. It feels so much later.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Paul stifled a yawn.

  Jayne rested her cigarette on the mosquito coil tray. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  He watched as she ducked into her room, re-emerging with her mobile phone to her ear. He thought he heard the word ‘sweetheart’ as she strode out of earshot towards the beach.

  The cigarette she left smouldering had turned to ash by time she came back. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed.

  ‘Choom is the name of a man Rajiv and I met at a village one night when we mistook a golf driving range for the project Pla was working on. He wasn’t from that village, though. He gave us a lift back to our guesthouse on his way home. He runs a company that sells diesel generators.’

  ‘Diesel generators?’

  ‘Yeah, as in a local business that can only lose customers when a power plant opens in the area.’

  ‘Could be coincidental.’

  ‘True. When we showed Pla’s photo around, he gave no sign he knew her.’

  Somewhere in the dark a gecko trilled.

  ‘My instincts tell me—’

  ‘What does your gut say?’

  They spoke at the same time, stopped, smiled.

  ‘I want to go back to Krabi and interview him,’ Jayne said. ‘It is only a gut feeling, but if Choom told Pla he intended to start farming shrimp in the mangroves, you can see her trying to stop him, can’t you? I mean, growing up around here she’d know firsthand the damage commercial shrimp farming does to mangrove forests.’

  ‘Would he have her killed for it?’

  ‘That’s what we need to find out. I’ve managed to get another day’s grace out of Rajiv. If we leave early enough tomorrow morning, we should reach Krabi in time to track down Choom.’

  ‘You want us to go back to Krabi?’

  ‘I assume you want justice for Pla even more than I do.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I’m counting on Apex Enterprises being open for business on a Saturday. That’s the link to Choom…’

  Paul was too tired to concentrate on what she was saying. His vision of a relaxing night sipping whisky on the beach dissolved and, with it, his last reserves of energy.

  ‘…and if it’s okay with you, I’d like to hang onto Pla’s notebook for a while longer.’

  He nodded as she lit another cigarette and held out her glass for a refill.

  Paul left her with the bottle.

  51

  Jayne took the bottle and headed to the beach, too wired to even think about sleeping. An outcrop of smooth boulders offered the perfect vantage point for staring out over the moonlit sea. The rocks were still warm and as Jayne took in the view, she wished she could absorb the calm of her surroundings as the stones had absorbed the heat of the day.

  She glanced back at Paul’s bungalow and saw his light go out. The day’s events had clearly taken it out of him. Poor bastard. He appeared to know nothing of Pla’s marriage nor her prior history of activism, and, given his already fragile emotional state, Jayne decided not to enlighten him. To learn he was not the centre of Pla’s world after all would be a terrible blow to his self-esteem. So she’d taken the Thai way out, telling him only what he wanted to hear, withholding any information that might upset him.

  She was impatient to get back to Krabi and to the case. She didn’t have time to deal with the fallout of coming clean with Paul about Pla. At least that’s what she told herself as she sat on her rock and gazed over the Gulf of Thailand, trying not to think how she’d feel in Paul’s position.

  What if Rajiv had been married—or God forbid, still was? It wasn’t a question she’d thought to ask him. Her instincts told her he was too sexually inexperienced for a married man, not to mention too guileless to keep something as significant as a wife under wraps. But for all Jayne knew, there was an arranged marriage waiting for him back in Bangalore. She’d been fooled before.

  Why the fuck do you live in Thailand?

  Paul’s question played on her mind. Given it’d been more than five years, it was surprising how rarely she asked herself the same thing.

  Back in 1992, the decision to stay had been a no-brainer. A short-lived affair with a French teacher, while freeing her from a philandering fiancé, had also cost her her job at an elite girls’ secondary school in Melbourne. She could get as much work as she wanted teaching English in Bangkok, and at the same time put off returning h
ome to the censure of family and friends.

  Truth was, Jayne had long felt like an outsider among her peers. Since her final year of high school, in fact, when she spent six tantalising months on a student exchange in France. When she returned home, her passion for the outside world met with lack of interest, if not downright hostility—as though it was disloyal to find anywhere as attractive as Australia. Being of an age when what mattered most was fitting in, Jayne tried to tamp down her enthusiasm, aspire to the same things her peers wanted out of life. But she couldn’t unlearn what she knew to be true, neither about herself nor the world. For all that Australians liked to boast about the national larrikin spirit, in reality only irreverence was tolerated. Unconventionality was not.

  The Thais weren’t ones for rocking the boat either, but they were much more polite about it. Besides, as a farang, she wasn’t subject to the usual rules. So long as she was also polite, Jayne was more or less left to her own devices. Certainly there was no pressure to fit in. She was allowed to be an outsider in Thailand in a way she never was in Australia.

  She raised her bottle in the direction of Paul’s bungalow. ‘I live in Thailand because I fucking want to,’ she said aloud.

  How long would she stay? What were her long-term prospects? Did she and Rajiv have a future together here, or anywhere else for that matter? Would she ever return to Melbourne?

  These were the kinds of questions that would keep her awake at night if she let them. But Jayne intended, on this occasion, to let sleeping dogs lie. She raised the bottle again to Paul, this time in a silent toast of thanks for having bestowed upon her the means to tranquillise those dogs.

  52

  On the road by sunrise, they reached Krabi at lunchtime. Paul had given himself a killer headache by squeezing his eyes shut for the duration of the journey, unlike Jayne, who appeared to have actually slept. While he swallowed painkillers in the tuktuk en route to the Apex Enterprises office, she briefed him on the controversial golf driving range and her interaction with the villagers opposed to the project.

  ‘I figure Samyan, the driver at Apex, will put us in touch with Choom’—she shouted to be heard over the tuktuk engine—‘particularly if you agree to look into the project on the villagers’ behalf. What do you say?’

  It sounded so convoluted, all Paul could do was nod and wait for the painkillers to kick in.

  Paul figured luck was on their side when the Apex office turned out not only to be open for business on a Saturday, but also closed for a two-hour lunch break when they arrived. They found the company Landcruiser parked in the shade nearby, Samyan asleep in the front with the windows down. He was surprised to see Jayne and a little wary when she invited him to have a cold drink with them out of sight of the office.

  Over iced coffee and Red Bull, Jayne introduced the two men, encouraging Samyan to tell Paul his story. Jayne translated and Paul took notes as Samyan described how communal land tended by villagers for generations was appropriated, sold and razed to make way for a project local people didn’t want.

  ‘And he’s sure no EIA took place?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I’m not sure he knows what an EIA is,’ Jayne said.

  ‘Was he or anyone else asked for their opinions about the project?’

  Samyan shook his head in response to Jayne’s translation.

  ‘Are you aware of any experts coming to visit the area, someone from Forestry and Wildlife, for example?’ Paul asked.

  Again Samyan shook his head. He said something to Jayne in Thai, got up from the table and flicked through the newspaper stand at the front of the coffee shop.

  ‘He says someone from Bangkok came for the ground-breaking ceremony,’ Jayne said. ‘He thinks there might a photo.’

  Samyan returned with a paper. The cheap newsprint smudged as he pointed to a photo of a Thai man and a foreign woman cutting a ribbon over what looked like a dirt track.

  ‘That’s Apex CEO Pamela Schwartz,’ Jayne said. ‘The man next to her is an official from the Ministry of Tourism.’ She transliterated the name for Paul’s notes.

  ‘Tell Samyan I’ll follow it up when I get back to Bangkok. I’m not sure if the project is on a large enough scale to require an EIA by law. But if nothing else I should be able to get the foreign media interested and put some heat on the Ministry of Tourism.’

  Jayne relayed this to Samyan, who shrugged as though sceptical about their chances.

  ‘I’ll do my best to raise awareness of your case,’ Paul found himself saying, surprising himself as much as Samyan with the conviction in his tone. He’d come to Thailand in search of a cause, and it seemed one had finally found him. He got up to pay for their drinks and give Jayne the opportunity to speak with Samyan about Choom. He returned to find them in an animated discussion.

  ‘Hua chohn,’ Samyan was saying. He balled both hands into fists and knocked the knuckles against each other.

  ‘Mai khao jai.’

  A phrase Paul understood all too well, though it was the first time he’d heard it from Jayne’s lips: ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Hua chohn,’ Samyan said again. He picked up the bottle of Red Bull and pointed to the label. Two red bulls, horns lowered, going head to head against a yellow sun.

  ‘Hua chonh means heads crashing together,’ Jayne said for Paul’s benefit. ‘At least I think so…’

  She conferred again with Samyan, both taking turns to use the Red Bull bottle as a prop. When she met Paul’s gaze, she looked as excited as she had at the temple fair. ‘How do you fancy going to a bullfight?’

  Paul’s horror at the prospect must have shown in his face.

  ‘It’s nothing like Spanish bullfighting,’ she added quickly. ‘No animals are killed. In the Thai version, two bulls fight each other, head to head, until one of them backs off. Like on the Red Bull label. Much fairer, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t like the idea of any animal being forced to fight for sport,’ he said.

  ‘Fair enough. Look, I can drop you at the guesthouse if you want and we can meet up later.’

  ‘I thought you needed a bodyguard.’

  ‘I said I needed you to watch my back. You make me sound like Whitney Houston.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The Bodyguard. The movie with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner? Screened in Bangkok for months? Soundtrack beloved by Thai drag queens?’

  Paul shook his head.

  She sang a few bars of ‘I Will Always Love You’.

  He made a face. ‘Think I’d rather watch a bullfight.’

  ‘As luck would have it, the fights are on today. The stadium’s in a village in Neua Khlong district. We can hire a motorbike from here and drop our bags off at the guesthouse on the way.’

  ‘Only one motorbike?’

  ‘It’s cheaper. We’re both working as volunteers, remember?’

  ‘So who’s driving?’

  Jayne gave him a withering look. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Worth a try.’ Paul shrugged.

  53

  Jayne found it so distracting to have Paul’s body pressed against hers, she wondered if they should have hired two motorbikes after all. She was also overdue for another dose of paracetamol and could feel a rice whisky headache coming on. Preoccupied, she almost missed the turn-off to Ban Nah Ok, where the fights were staged. But the unexpected sight of a pick-up truck with a bull standing upright in the tray brought Jayne’s mind sharply back into focus.

  As they got closer, Jayne saw the bull was tethered by the nose to the roof-rack. She tailed the pick-up to a dusty compound crowded with motorbikes and more pick-up trucks. Eight Brahmin bulls stood around a belt of grassy land that bordered the parking area. The bulls looked alert and expectant, heavyweights in the locker room waiting to be called into the ring. Several wore red collars with brass bells around their necks, another was draped in floral garlands like a temple effigy. One beast was being hosed down by three men in matching blue polo shirts. Another was having its face
smeared with banana.

  The tin sheds around the perimeter showed signs of human occupation—clothes hung out to dry, sarongs strung up as shadecloths—suggesting makeshift dormitories. The ticket booth was a smaller shed, like a herding pen. Two hundred baht bought a ticket to the entrance on the left, one hundred baht paid for entry on the right, though the ticket seller was so baffled by the appearance of two foreigners he simply waved them through.

  The stadium was a sandy ring with a muddy puddle at the centre. Of the three surrounding pavilions, two had rough wooden bench seats. The premium seats were in a concrete grandstand. Bulls waited under the watchful gaze of their owners on opposite sides of the ring. In one such group was the only woman in the place other than Jayne.

  She and Paul hovered on the spot as two bulls were led into the ring. The first—brown with the tips of its horns painted white—was guided by a man wearing long pants, long-sleeved shirt, rubber gumboots and a straw hat. The second bull was black, its handler in shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops and a green plastic sunhat.

  As the bulls circled the ring, Jayne scanned the crowd for Choom. They’d met at night and she wasn’t sure she’d recognise him. But a flash of recognition on his face gave him away. She made a beeline for the grandstand. Paul, wearing dark glasses and playing the part of her bodyguard, followed close behind.

  The crowd parted as she ascended the concrete steps to where Choom sat. In the full light of day, he looked like Charles Bronson with his wispy moustache, thick fringe and deep frown. He wore a gold Buddha on a chain around his neck. A box of 555 cigarettes protruded from his shirt pocket.

  ‘Sawadee ka, younger brother. Remember me?’

  He stared straight ahead.

  ‘It’s Jayne,’ she said. ‘May I join you?’

  Choom gave the barest of nods, his frown staying put. The men nearest him moved to make space for her. Jayne sat down on Choom’s right. The man on his left moved back in again. Paul stood to the side.

  ‘I’ve never been to the hua chohn before,’ Jayne said. ‘I hear you’re a regular.’