Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach

by Colin Cotterill

  I said, “Ming ga la ba,” the only Burmese I knew. I hoped it meant good day. He probably didn’t even know I was speaking Burmese because he continued in Thai.

  “How can I help you?”

  “Your Thai is very good.”

  We said that to Westerners all the time, but we didn’t really mean it. We didn’t really expect that much from the wealthy whities. But we tended not to compliment menial day laborers from neighboring countries, even if they were fluent. But Aung was fluent and gorgeous.

  “I’ve been here twenty-four years,” he said, and smiled again. “I must have picked it up.”

  I’d obviously reached that hormonal juncture in my life when every second man I met was a sex object. Aung conjured up feelings in me I hadn’t felt since university. I wished he’d put on a shirt so I didn’t have to stare at his pectorals. But he continued to stand there, sweating wonderfully.

  “I … I…” I said.

  “Yes?” He smiled.

  “I’m a journalist. I was hoping I could interview you about the problems the Burmese community faces in Pak Nam.”

  “No problem,” he said, which surprised me for some reason.

  “Really? When would be a convenient time?”

  “I work till seven,” he said. “Any time after that is fine.”

  “Would tonight be too soon?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  “Sissi, he’s so…”

  “Yes?”

  “So natural.”

  “Jimm, we’re all buds of Mother Earth.”

  “No, we’re not. We start off natural, then we’re tutored in the arts of pretense and deception.”

  There was a pause, and I wondered whether we’d been cut off.

  “That comment wouldn’t be directed at me, by any chance?”

  Damn. Why was everything about her?

  “Shut up, Siss. No. It’s him. He’s raw. If he’d hit me over the head with his spanner and dragged me off to his cave, I wouldn’t have made a whimper.”

  “OK. So you’ve got the hots for a Burmese. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel. I’m happy for you.”

  I wondered when the Burmese stopped being equals. Everyone hated them. It was as if you got yourself a shitty junta government and it was a reflection on the whole population.

  “I’m going to marry him,” I said, just to be cantankerous.

  “Yeah, right. So do you want information about your Honda City, or do I have to listen to tales of migrant lust all night?”

  “You already found something?”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  “What do you know?”

  “The car was registered in the name of Anand Panyurachai. I looked him up. They’re not an online family at all. No Facebook, no Twitter, not even e-mail accounts, as far as I could ascertain. That’s really odd for a young girl in the dot com age. So I had to go down the slow track. The prehistoric route. National records. A program put together by orangutans. I started with the census and found where they live, and I worked outward from there. There’s a program that allows me to align and cross-reference the—”

  “Sissi, I’ve got to meet my Burmese in ten minutes. Can we just cut to the chase?” I’d always wanted to say that.

  “All right already. I just wanted you to appreciate how much love I put into this assignment.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Father, Anand. Owns a small engineering company. Some gambling problems. Rumors they were living beyond their means. He seems to have sorted that out. No outstanding debts. Mother, Punnika. Middle school principal.”

  “Any political connections?”

  “He’s a registered democrat. He’s helped with campaigning. Nothing fanatical. Couldn’t find anything for the wife.”

  “And the daughter?”

  “Right. Now here’s where cross-references went bananas. Once I put in her name, I was bombarded. Daughter, Thanawan. Twenty-four. Nickname, Bpook. Number two in the nation in 2003 in high school mathematics. Number fourteen nationally in chemistry. Top fifteen percent in English, History, Thai language, Physics and Geography. Girl’s a genius.”

  Who’d have thought it?

  “Didn’t you have to be overweight and dowdy to excel in high school?” I asked.

  “She won a scholarship in 2004 to study in the U.S. Georgetown. Washington, D.C. And in the sciences, no less: they have very high standards.”

  “And she got through the course?”

  “Barely.”

  “What?”

  “It’s really odd. She squeezed through on Cs and Ds. It was as if they were carrying her for four years. Every year the faculty had to get together to decide whether to kick her out. She was the class dunce. Some of her professors tried to convince her to save her money and go home. They were certain she’d bomb her finals.”

  “And did she?”

  “Straight As. A-plus in four subjects. A-minus the lowest. Top scorer for the year for that program. It pumped her GPA up to somewhere approaching respectable.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what the faculty wanted to know. Clueless for four years, then a sudden spurt. The university didn’t like it. They convened the Honor Council and interviewed our girl. They hired a private detective to investigate.”

  “Wasn’t that a bit excessive?”

  “They had a reputation to maintain. They take academic dishonesty very seriously. They were sure she’d cheated, but they needed to prove it. She was interrogated. There may have even been a lie-detector test at one stage. I accessed the personal files of the detective. In the end they decided to give her an oral test in the subjects she’d excelled in. A sort of resit of the examinations and thesis topic, but with a committee asking the questions. They checked for bugs and transmission devices and put her in a soundproof studio and bombarded her for three hours.”

  “And?”

  “Got ’em all right. Nobody could understand it. Given her high school results, they had to assume she’d been suffering from some mental disorder for four years and then suddenly got over it. But whatever the reason, she’s kept her mouth shut. At the end of it, they had no choice but to give her a degree.”

  “Happy ending.”

  “But…”

  “What?”

  “She didn’t turn up to receive her diploma. Vanished. No record of her leaving the country.”

  “Obviously she did. She’s here.”

  “From Washington to Pak Nam Lang Suan. Every young girl’s dream. But just to make sure it really is her I’ll send you a photo to your phone. It was from her school yearbook.”

  “I get a strong feeling we’re missing some vital information.”

  “And I’m afraid the Internet can’t fill in that gap. The last I have for her is the university newsletter listing the students who didn’t collect their diplomas, and a modest little hacking of the central airline registry that told me she wasn’t on the passenger manifesto of any flights out of the country. Right now, she only exists in your resort. The trail has gone cold. But I can tell you that both her mother and father resigned unexpectedly from their jobs.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “A cunning little invention called the telephone. I called their places of employment. Nobody has any idea where they are.”

  “So Dad vanished too? Damn. I wonder where he went?”

  “Have you checked the boot of the car?”

  “Yes. Grandad went through it. It’s empty. No blood-stains.”

  “This is a darned fine mystery, Jimm. Too bad I won’t be around to solve it for you. On Thursday the good ship Sissi will be setting sail for foreign shores.”

  “Good. So I have two more days of free research assistant.”

  * * *

  I met Aung under a lamppost beside the District Electricity Authority building. He’d said he couldn’t give me an address because his domicile didn’t have one. He’d have to guide me there in person. He was s
tanding back in the shadows when I drove up, and he stepped into the light like a dishy cabaret singer. Unfortunately, he was now dressed, but his hair was just as unruly as earlier. A feral beast. My insides felt like a newly opened soda bottle. I was wearing a dress with a pattern that trivialized my bottom but positively yelled out how nice my legs were. My shoes had half-heels, just enough to take me up to his height. My sensual lips were within smooching distance.

  He smiled and I wanted to throw him up against the Electrical Authority sign. But he was too fast for me. He headed off along the main street. Eight P.M. and not a car in sight. Pleasure city. After passing the council hall, he ducked down an alleyway, and I followed him into a labyrinth of little dwellings. The belly of Pak Nam. We passed poky concrete row houses with the doors open so anyone could look in to see families watching TV, small fat people sitting cross-legged on the floor drinking beer, teenagers patching motorcycle tires. Then down tighter and darker paths, where a girl could never feel safe. Where at any moment a rough man might turn around and throw his arms around her.

  But he rounded one final corner and stood bathed in a moody yellow light from another open doorway. He smiled and kicked off his shoes. I joined him on the front step, and a little girl of about two came at me from out of nowhere and lifted the hem of my dress above her head. I have to say it was fortunate I was wearing underwear because there were a dozen people in the room looking in my direction. They all seemed to think my indecent exposure was funny, or perhaps, like the Thais, Burmese used laughter to camouflage embarrassment. I wanted to punch the little girl in the nose but was aware that this would be an inopportune moment to do so. I’d get her later. I unfastened my shoes, and Aung introduced me to various members of the Burmese community who had turned up in honor of my visit. Then I met Aung’s pretty wife, Oh, and their five children.

  “Have you eaten yet?” Oh asked me. Her Thai was just as Thai as that of her husband. I wasn’t sure of the etiquette. Should I say yes or no? I tried no. It was a winner. The women retreated joyfully to the back area, which I assumed housed a kitchen. There were only two rooms, divided by a wall that didn’t make it all the way up to the ceiling. It was a minimalist terraced garage of a place. The walls were painted with watered-down pink undercoat, and the electrical wiring was all visible. There was a large poster of Aung San Suu Kyi and a smaller one of our own royal family on a skiing holiday. The floor was tiled with non-matching squares, and there was a stack of bedding, presumably for seven, in one corner.

  I heard a gas range pop and the clatter of pots and dishes.

  “I invited some members of our community committee,” said Aung. The men were all still with us, and they were folding themselves down into a circle on the floor. In jeans or shorts I’m fine with sitting on the ground. But I was wearing a dress. I felt stupid. But what the hell? They’d already seen my Macro Huggy Rabbit bikini briefs.

  “That’s good,” I said and negotiated a position that was demure but totally uncomfortable. Another half hour and I’d be paralyzed, and they’d have to carry me out to the truck.

  If you didn’t count the disappointment, it was a splendid evening. I was pleased that I could still enjoy myself without alcohol. Aung and Oh seemed comfortable together. They somehow made you feel that living in a sub-divided brick dog kennel was the answer to a dream. After a while I’d learned to ignore the TV channel-hopping from the next room, the even louder Mo Lum country music tape from the place behind, the howling dogs, the screaming babies, the drunken arguments. I felt like an anthropologist doing research on twenty-first-century slum culture. But like I said, it was a good night. The committee members were all interesting and smart, and we talked and laughed a lot. All the while I took notes.

  There were some 5,400 Burmese in and around Pak Nam. Half of them were here officially. This meant they had sponsors and ID cards. The rest paid fines to the police whenever they were rounded up and gave their cell phones or any jewelry they were foolish enough to be wearing. As part of the conditions for their employment, the Burmese were not supposed to have cell phones. They couldn’t own or drive motorized vehicles. The legal Burmese had access to the thirty-baht health care services, but the kids weren’t accepted at local schools. Legally the schools were obliged to take them, but in reality they had nowhere to put them and no teachers to teach them. So they ignored the law.

  I had so much interesting data I even considered actually doing a story on it. But what Thai publication would give a monkey’s about the harsh living conditions of the Burmese? Nobody would read it. And it wasn’t even big enough for the world press. These people had told me about humiliation, degradation, corruption, and racial prejudice. But what the world wanted was violence on a huge scale. To get into Newsweek these days, you needed celebrity break-ups or genocide. But now I had my chance. The younger kids were asleep on the tiles, and I decided to tell everyone about my head. I described the discovery, the collection, and the refrigeration of my uncle what’s-his-name. During the telling, passed on through the buzz of translation from Aung and Oh, I noticed some disquiet in the ranks. There were glances. Looks of guilt. I’d obviously trespassed on some hallowed ground. But at the end of my story nobody had a comment to make. I didn’t even get the obvious question, “Why did the police and collection crew automatically assume the head was from a Burmese?” The hair, the skin color, the earring—they all pointed to a Burmese fisherman but didn’t eliminate a Thai. Or was I missing something?

  “Have you heard of other Burmese bodies or parts thereof being washed up on the beach?” I asked.

  Again the stares. Again the feeling I’d overstepped the mark. The shaking of heads. One man, Shwe something, long-haired, mustachioed like a seventies folksinger, looked me straight in the eye and spoke … Burmese. His wife tried to interrupt, but he ignored her. The other men shouted. But he continued to speak to me and nobody translated. I watched it like a bemused viewer at her first Australian Rules football game. No idea what was going on. At last they all stopped, and all I could hear was a cacophony of slum life around us. Our room was quiet.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” said Aung.

  “That was a long noisy nothing, Aung.”

  He gave me a smile, but there was nothing erotic about it this time.

  “Just a small domestic disagreement between husband and wife. She thought he was flirting with you. It happens.”

  “Not to me,” I thought. My research was finished for the night, but I was getting tired of being lied to. What I needed was to get Shwe alone. We’d see how his wife liked that basket of mackerel.

  6.

  It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night, I Should Be Sleeping on Kellogg’s

  (from “A Hard Day’s Night” (LENNON/MCCARTNEY)

  There’s something you need to know about the monsoons. They come. And they blow. And they go. It’s not like a Robert Louis Stevenson story, where the biting wind blows blood-numbing sleet off the ocean for three months at a time. The southern monsoon season is more like a security guard at a gold necklace shop. Day after day nothing happens. Then suddenly two masked robbers burst in, firing guns and banging the guard over the head. They scoop up the necklaces and they’re gone. Then it all goes back to nothing again. I got that one from Mair, but it’s one of my favorites.

  When I got to bed that night, there was no wind at all and the surf was soothingly soft. The first monsoon had passed and we were back to nothing. That was too bad because I needed a distraction. I needed crashing waves to drown out my thoughts. My brain was trying to convince the rest of me that I was over the hill. That I would never again feel the strong arms of a lover around me. Never again have a man snore in my ear. That, like the salt virgins of Xanadu, my vagina would seal itself up and I would become a fossil. The antidepressants weren’t working. Or perhaps they weren’t strong enough to counter my mega-midlife crisis. I took another two, washed down with Chilean red, and lay my head on the pillow. I couldn’t
be bothered to clean my teeth again, so I knew they’d be mauve in the morning. I needed a man, desperately. I needed to be admired, wanted, complimented, desired … loved. How difficult could that be? Village head Bigman Beung desired me, as did Major Mana. So there were precedents. I wasn’t totally repulsive. All I needed to do was transfer that desire to a man with skin rather than scales.

  Since I am a Thai woman, my culture discourages me from making the first move. But my culture is eroding as fast as the Gulf coastline. And I am a Thai woman raised by a liberated, free-thinking hippy mother. Unlike most Thais, I never fit in with groups. Relationships with my friends, whom I always felt were wary of my un-Thainess, evaporated on the last day of high school and then again the day after my university graduation. I had been encouraged to embrace the modern world and follow my instincts. Mair wouldn’t have thought twice about being the aggressor when she was my age. Enough of being the tick on a blade of grass, hoping some hairy creature might brush past me. No, sir. Tomorrow I would go after my prey. It was a good plan and I felt confident. I might have even found sleep about then if it hadn’t been for the headboard of my mother’s bed banging against the wooden wall of her cabin.

  * * *

  I was in the new, barely used meeting room at the Pak Nam police station. They still hadn’t removed the plastic wrapping from the chairs. It had taken me a while to get up to the second floor. I had been passed from man to man like a baton on my way up. Loitering was the activity of choice there. Officers old and new were leaning and sitting and standing at every corner, like statues in an ancient mansion. Nobody seemed to have a job. Those I knew, like Desk Sergeant Phoom, quickly introduced me to those I didn’t, summarizing my entire life in twenty seconds and ending with the ubiquitous “She’s single.” But as they knew I was a reporter and therefore educated, “She’s single” here was not intended as an invitation to date me, more a sorrowful postscript much in the vein of “She only has two months to live.”

  I was discreetly removing chair plastic with my nail scissors when Chompu threw open the door of the meeting room. He entered diva-like with the back of his hand on his forehead, slamming the door behind him. In order to get into the police force, Chompu had pretended to be straight at the interview, just as many other successful gay policemen had done before him. Some even married and produced children to compound the effect. But my Chompu had wanted to make a stand for camp. He believed that openly effeminate men had a role in the modern Thai police force and should not have to disguise what nature had given them. Consequently, he’d been transferred thirty-eight times in his career, and here he was at rock bottom. There was nowhere else to be transferred to. So Chompu could be himself and nobody really cared.