Catching the Sun

by Tony Parsons

  I watched the traffic and when a pick-up passed by and there was nothing but a flock of scooters ahead for a bit, I stepped into the road, my hands held high. An elderly Vespa slid to a halt so close to me the front twisted hard against my leg.

  ‘Please,’ I said, my hands still held high.

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ the driver screamed, one hand for the scooter and the other in a fist, waving it in my face. He was some kind of American. ‘You speak English, you dumb bastard?’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  He stared at me, and slowly unclenched his fist.

  ‘What happened?’ he repeated. ‘You’re asking me what happened?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ I said.

  And then he told me.

  ‘It was an earthquake,’ he said. ‘Below the Indian Ocean. CNN said it was the biggest earthquake in – I don’t know – the history of the world. You believe that? And the earthquake made the tsunami.’

  I shook my head. ‘Tsunami?’ I said.

  ‘The water, man! The fucking water! Jesus Christ! You see the water?’

  ‘I saw the water,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, calming down, his eyes moving from me to the traffic and back again. He was wondering how long this was going to take. ‘And the water hit all over,’ he said. ‘India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand …’

  I couldn’t understand. The terrible reality of it was too big to fit inside me.

  ‘So it’s not just the island?’ I said.

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘It’s not just the island, man,’ he said. ‘It’s not even just the country.’ He looked at the fast-flowing traffic, ready to go. The Vespa came to life. ‘It’s more like the whole world,’ he said.

  I walked quickly down the dirt-track road. Through the trees the sea was smooth and flat and still, more like a lake than an ocean, more like turquoise stone than water, but I thought of the strong currents that kept the swimmers from Hat Mai Khao, and of the surfers who came for the big waves further south, and above all I remembered the white line that had stretched across the horizon.

  How stupid I had been, how suicidally trusting that Nature would be kind. I stared at the sea for seconds and minutes, trembling with fear and anger, and then I began to run back to the house as fast as I could.

  I went into our bedroom, Tess and the children still sleeping, and pulled out a suitcase from the wardrobe and began to stuff it with clothes. Her clothes, my clothes. I just wanted to fill the suitcase. I didn’t care what we took and what we left behind. I just needed for us to be on our way.

  ‘We have to go,’ I said.

  Tess stirred, sat up and then settled back down under the sheets, Keeva moaning in her sleep beside her. Rory was out for the count.

  ‘I mean it, Tess,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  Now she was sitting up in bed.

  ‘I talked to someone on the road,’ I told her. ‘You can’t imagine. It’s not just the island. It’s everywhere.’

  She pulled back the sheet, eased herself over Rory and out of bed. She came to me and placed a hand on my arm.

  ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Stop.’

  I stopped for a moment and looked at her.

  ‘We have to stay,’ she said.

  I could hear the traffic on the road. The sky was getting light. I went back to my packing. It wasn’t really packing. I was blindly shoving whatever I could into the suitcase. Already it was nearly full.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We have to go, Tess.’

  She wiped her forehead with her hand. With the air con out, the heat of the night was still in here, and it was difficult to breathe.

  ‘We have to stay,’ she said. ‘These people have nothing now. Mr and Mrs Botan, they’ve lost everything. Those children sleeping in Rory and Keeva’s bedroom. So many people have nothing now.’

  ‘We have nothing!’ I said, too loud, and Keeva sat up, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘We have water,’ Tess said.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Keeva said.

  ‘That’s why we’re staying?’ I said to Tess. ‘Because we have a few bottles of water? Because the man got the delivery wrong and we ended up with twenty pallets instead of twenty bottles?’

  ‘If it’s as bad as you say, then there’s going to be disease,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not a reason to stay,’ I said. ‘That’s a reason to head for the airport.’

  ‘Cholera,’ she said. ‘Bottled water will prevent cholera. And dysentery. And – I don’t know what else.’

  ‘Just give it to them and go!’ I said. ‘They can have the water!’

  ‘Is it time to get up?’ Keeva said.

  ‘Go back to sleep, angel,’ Tess said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t go back to bed. Go to your room and get your backpack and start filling it with your stuff.’

  ‘Are Kai and Chatree already awake?’ she said.

  ‘Keeva,’ I said, ‘please, just do it.’

  Our daughter looked at her mother for a moment, then yawned widely, and got out of bed.

  ‘You’re telling me two different things,’ she muttered, and stumbled from the room.

  The air con suddenly came on. I heard the rattling hum, felt the blast of cold air and I saw Tess smiling at me.

  ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘It will be all right. Do you really think I would stay if I thought the children were in danger?’

  ‘Everybody is leaving,’ I said. ‘All the foreigners. They’re all getting out.’

  ‘Let them go,’ she said, her face darkening. ‘But we’re not leaving. We’re not running away again.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said.

  ‘In the end you have to decide if you’re going to have a real home somewhere,’ she said. ‘Or if you are just going to spend your life bouncing from one place to the next.’

  I could hear voices through the wall speaking softly in Thai. Kai and Chatree were awake. Keeva’s voice came through the wall.

  ‘Do you think their father is going to come walking up the hill any time soon?’ Tess said quietly.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And it’s a tragedy. But what’s it got to do with you?’

  Rory groaned in his sleep and we both looked at him.

  ‘I teach those children,’ Tess said. ‘That’s what it’s got to do with me, okay?’

  ‘A few free language lessons,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t make you their guardian.’

  ‘It’s more than that.’

  ‘We’re staying so you can play teacher with the locals?’

  The first flash of anger.

  ‘Teaching is not something I play at,’ she said. ‘It’s who I am.’

  ‘Tess,’ I said. I was begging her now. ‘Please. Let’s go.’

  But she held my arms, wanting me to understand. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You don’t go to another country to be someone else. You go to be yourself. You go to be the person you couldn’t be back home. The person you want to be.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she said. ‘And – more than anything – that’s why I want to stay,’ she said. ‘We can be ourselves here in a way they wouldn’t let us back home. You can be a good man, Tom. I know you can. The man you want to be.’

  Rory was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Am I meant to be getting my backpack?’ he said.

  Before either of us could answer, Keeva burst into the room.

  ‘Next door,’ she said. ‘Come and see. The TV’s working.’

  The Botans were watching a local station. They did not look up at us as we came into their home and stood behind them while on the screen a young Thai woman pinned a photo of a young Thai man to a board.

  When the camera pulled back you could see that the messageboard seemed to go on forever, and
there were already many photos pinned to it. The faces in the photos were from every nation on earth, but what you noticed about them was that they were all happy. They were faces captured on birthdays, weddings, holidays. Some of the foreign faces smiled with Christmas trees in the background, and you did not know if the picture had been taken in some other time on the other side of the world or here on the island, the day before yesterday. All ages, all races, all smiling.

  I could feel the choking sob of grief, that sob like filthy water, rising to my mouth and my nose and my eyes, sickening me, and I could not imagine a day in my life when it would not be there, waiting for the chance to come again.

  My daughter tugged my hand. Rory and Keeva both had empty rucksacks, as if trying to please both Tess and me at once by getting their bags but not packing. Then Chatree and Kai came shyly into the room, and sat on the polished wooden floor, eyes solemnly fixed on the TV screen, too. Mr Botan glanced up at the sea gypsies and then back at the television.

  ‘Tess,’ I said, indicating Rory and Keeva, but she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ Tess said. ‘Let them watch.’

  Mrs Botan said something to Mr Botan at the sound of our voices and he picked up the remote and began flicking through the channels until he found the news in English. There was a smashed beach and a British voice was reeling off statistics.

  ‘The death toll in Sri Lanka alone has been revised from three thousand to … twenty-six thousand,’ the voice said, and in his little pause I knew you could have all of the information in the world and still be unable to comprehend the scale of what had happened. ‘Worldwide, deaths stand at an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand,’ he said. ‘The homeless are expected to number more than one and a half million.’

  There was only one story, but it could be told in many ways, in many different places. A road washed away in Southern India. A train tossed across jungle in Sri Lanka. A village swatted flat in New Guinea. A hotel drowned in Thailand.

  In the areas where the tourists were, you watched jerky footage of what happened when the water came, but in the poor places where there were no foreigners, no phones and no cameras, you only saw the aftermath. I felt Tess take my hand and hold it and not let go.

  The scenes of devastation switched to the studio, where a man in a suit and tie was looking grave.

  ‘London journalist Nick Kazan was on holiday with his fiancée in Phuket, Thailand,’ he said, and there was Nick, standing by the side of the road somewhere to the south, one of the tourist resorts, although it had been battered out of all recognition.

  ‘I wasn’t really sure what was going on,’ Nick said, not addressing the camera but someone standing just to one side of it. ‘We were – we were driving back to our hotel,’ he said, and I saw there was a young woman with him, a pretty English girl with long blonde hair, and she had been crying, and Nick looked at her before carrying on, and I could see that he was trying very hard to do his job, to do what he was trained for, to be a hard-nosed reporter, telling it as it was, but it was tough for him. ‘And the people came running up from the beach,’ he said, and he looked out to sea.

  There was a palm tree behind him.

  Uprooted, smashed, flattened.

  He was somewhere around Patong, because I recognized the name of the hotel they cut to, but the landscape was mutilated, unrecognizable, like the end of all things. Crushed cars. Smashed wood that had once been buildings or trees. Mud everywhere. As though the coast had been pulped.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Nick said, and the urge to do a professional job fought with the urge to weep. ‘An unimaginable thing,’ he said, and he hung his head, shaking it, finally lost for words.

  A voice said, ‘On the beaches of Phuket, many people did not realize the power of the waves until it was too late,’ and there was more rough footage of people running from the beach, and the water swirling and claiming whatever it could, and then a steady shot from later, the emergency workers cutting their way through the fallen trees that were everywhere. A man still clung to one of the trees, his arms and legs wrapped tight around the trunk, and it took me a bewildered moment to understand that the man was dead.

  That was when I gathered my children in my arms and turned their faces from the TV screen, and I realized that Tess was gone.

  ‘I think she’s on the beach,’ Keeva said.

  Tess was where the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill had been, just beyond the first of the casuarina trees, sitting on a footstool, an upturned wooden box in front of her. There were perhaps thirty small bottles of mineral water in front of her.

  That was all she could carry.

  Her head was covered with a large hat, and there was a light cotton scarf pulled over her face, and she looked like one of the gardeners who tended the grounds of the big hotels. As I came through the trees a woman and a small child approached her, and Tess gave them each a bottle of water, and they both received it with a deep wai.

  I looked up at the sky. With the sun as high as it was now, there was not enough shade for her on the beach. I walked back to the house and I borrowed a machete from Mr Botan’s shed. The four children were sitting on our porch, the dog capering between them, ecstatic at all the attention.

  When I returned to the beach with the machete there was a white man standing by Tess’ side. Crisp blue shirt, clean white trousers, and a tan the colour of money. A rich farang with his hands behind his back, like minor royalty at a garden party.

  Tess sat on her stool, wilting in the heat, ignoring him. As I walked up I saw it was Miles, the Englishman who had got me out of Phuket Provincial. He looked over at me as I went into the trees, and when he heard me chopping branches from the casuarinas, he came and stood by my side. He watched me for a while and then cleared his throat.

  ‘You’re aware that this part of Nai Yang is a national park?’ he said, and when I gave him a look he smiled at me, and then at Mr Botan’s machete, and after that he did not say anything else.

  I hefted the machete and brought it down hard on a low branch. It came away and I looked at it, thinking how I could use the casuarinas to make a wall, but that I would need to find something else – some of those big palm leaves would be good – for a roof. Then she would not get burned. Because I knew that if she still had water to give away, Tess would not leave the beach.

  Miles followed me to where Tess was sitting with the bottled water on Hat Nai Yang. He did not offer to help me carry the wood. Now more people were coming as the word spread. I began to work around her, jamming the casuarina branches into the sand, and covering them with the biggest palm leaves I could find. Two walls, a couple of metres high, covered with the thick leaves on top. It was enough for now.

  A cooling shadow fell over Tess, and she turned her head towards me. Above the cotton scarf that covered her nose and mouth and below the rim of her hat, I could see that her eyes were smiling. I loved her so much that she filled up my heart and she knew it and she did not need me to say it.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and when I came close to her, making adjustments, making the shelter more solid, squinting up at the sky to judge the angle of the sun, she lightly touched my back as I passed her, and something was decided.

  I stood back as an old man slowly came forward for water, and I looked at the shelter, thinking it would last a while. When I looked at Miles I saw that he was almost laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I said, and my voice sounded strange, croaky and harsh, in the silence of the beach in the blazing midday sun.

  ‘That’s very impressive,’ he said. ‘You’ve built her a real little beach house, haven’t you?’

  I knew what he was saying.

  Or I thought that I did.

  But I did not reply, and I continued to work, pushing the branches deeper into the sand, covering the gaps that let sunshine through in the roof, and letting the silence between us grow.

  I was angry with him. He thought he knew
me and he didn’t know me at all. I went into the trees one last time and I looked at him as I dragged more palm leaves back to the beach. He wasn’t smiling now.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ he said. ‘You’re very good with your hands. For someone … You know.’

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at him hard, forcing him to say it. But he would not say it. He was too much of the little white-trousered diplomat. So I said it for him.

  ‘For a driver?’ I said, mopping the sweat from my face. I looked at the shelter I had built for my wife and thought that I had done a good job. It would work. It would give Tess the shade that she would need if she was going to stay on the beach.

  ‘Yes,’ Miles said. ‘For a driver.’

  ‘I’m not a driver,’ I said. ‘I’m a builder.’

  At the hospital there were people shouting in English.

  They were angry that the Thai nurses could only speak Thai. They were angry that the lists of people who had been admitted to the hospital were only written in Thai, which they could not read. They were angry because they had lost things that could never be replaced.

  There was a Christmas tree in the entrance of the hospital, and under it there were neat stacks of designer clothes, with more arriving all the time. It could have looked absurd – responding to what had happened with clothes that had fancy labels. But people felt the need to do something.

  I walked out of the hospital and saw a face that I knew from somewhere, a man in police uniform, and it took me a while to recognize Sergeant Somter. He did not look like a young man any more.

  He was talking to a group of men in suits. They looked important, like men from Bangkok, some kind of government or health officials. But they listened silently to Sergeant Somter as he explained something to them. When the men got into their cars Somter put on his shades, flopped into the passenger seat of a patrol car and was driven away.

  ‘Tom?’

  I turned and looked at Nick Kazan. He was dressed in a polo shirt and chinos, a London journalist’s idea of summer clothes, but far too warm for Phuket in the final days of December.