Читать книгу Catching the Sun - Tony Parsons - Страница 10

The pick-up truck woke me just after dawn.

I could hear the diesel engine rumbling right outside our bedroom window as it slowly backed up our narrow road.

‘Somebody must have the wrong place,’ I told Tess, pulling on my jeans.

I went out on the porch. The open back of the pick-up truck was piled impossibly high with pallets of plastic bottles of water. The pallets were stacked higher than the cabin. It was one of those sights you saw all the time in Phuket – loads that seemed to violate every law, especially the one about gravity. The driver’s face frowned with concentration as he carefully reversed past a banana tree.

Mr and Mrs Botan came out to watch. I looked at them and smiled, hoping they would take responsibility for the delivery. But Mrs Botan just shouted something at the driver. She seemed to be telling him to be more careful with our banana tree. Some of the thick leaves, still shiny with rain, had already been ripped off by the truck and littered the road.

Tess came out of the house, tucking a T-shirt into her shorts. The driver seemed to know her. He leaned out of his window, holding out an invoice, tapping it for a signature.

‘Not this much!’ she said, shaking her head at the mountain of mineral water, and I heard the sharp tone of the teacher she was back in England. ‘I didn’t order this much!’

The water came in cellophane-wrapped six-packs – big bottles, 1.5 litres, with a dozen of the big six-packs on every cardboard pallet, and another layer of cellophane over that, and too many of the pallets to count.

‘Reckon we’ve got enough water, Tess?’ I smiled, and she shot me a look before ripping the invoice from the driver’s hands. He was talking in Thai, very insistent now, and Tess was standing up to him, staring hard at the paperwork. ‘But I can’t read this,’ she said. ‘It’s all in Thai.’

Rory and Keeva came slowly out of the house, still in their pyjamas, still rumpled and sleepy from bed. We all stared at the pick-up truck.

‘I wanted a twenty of the six-packs,’ Tess was telling the driver. ‘Not all these – what do you call them?’

‘Pallets,’ I said.

It was getting heated. Mr and Mrs Botan came over to help, or perhaps just to get a better view. The old man looked at the invoice and nodded thoughtfully.

‘He is right,’ Mr Botan said. ‘You ordered a lot of water.’

Mrs Botan was more concerned about Tess.

‘Jai yen,’ she told Tess. ‘Jai yen. Keep a cool heart.’

Tess and I looked at each other. We had never heard of jai yen before. We had not heard the words or the concept. Where we came from, great importance was placed on being warm-hearted. But in Thailand they believed in the opposite. They believed in jai yen. Mrs Botan took Tess by the hand and gently stroked her arm, smiling as she taught her about the benefits of a cool heart.

‘All right,’ Tess said, and she nodded curtly at the driver. ‘My mistake. Sorry.’

‘Good,’ Mrs Botan said.

We kept the water. We kept a cool heart. The neighbours and the driver, all smiles now, helped us to unload it. I moved the motorbike out of the way and we stored it in the shed that passed for a garage.

‘Mai pen rai,’ the old lady told Tess. ‘Never mind. The water will keep. Never mind, never mind.’

When the water was unloaded, Tess and Mrs Botan and the children went inside our neighbours’ house for breakfast while I stood outside with Mr Botan as he smoked a cigarette. You could tell that he wasn’t allowed to do it in their house. The sky rumbled and cracked somewhere out to sea. You could see the storm clouds gather and the lightning flash.

‘Will it rain again soon?’ I asked him.

Mr Botan considered the sky. He took a long pull on his cigarette.

‘It hasn’t rained since yesterday,’ he said.

I digested this information, and wondered what it could possibly mean. We watched the sky in silence for a while.

‘How long do you stay?’ Mr Botan asked.

‘What?’ I said, shocked by the question. Wild Palm had a year’s lease on our little villa, and Farren had told me with a smile that Mr Botan had insisted on half of the money in advance. But I knew my neighbour was not asking me about leases or rent money.

‘I wonder how long you stay,’ Mr Botan said, and it didn’t sound so much like a question now, more of a reflection.

‘Well, we’re staying,’ I said. ‘We have no plans to go back to England. There’s nothing for us there.’

I said it with great conviction, but Mr Botan did not look persuaded. He smiled with a bashful courtesy, as if he had heard it all before, and examined his roll-up with great interest.

I live here, I thought. This is my home now.

But I remembered Baxter’s hands on Farren’s throat, and the lies that Jesse had told so easily on the phone, and the lie that I had been forced into myself the moment our plane touched down and they had asked me about the purpose of my visit, and so I did not dare to say it aloud.

‘Your boss,’ he said.

‘Farren,’ I said.

‘Many men like him in Thailand.’

‘Businessmen,’ I said. ‘Many foreign businessmen?’

‘England rich country,’ Mr Botan said. ‘Thailand poor country.’

I laughed and nodded.

‘But there are plenty of poor people in England,’ I said. ‘I was one of them.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Botan, smiling shyly at the sky, as if we had gone too far. ‘Ah.’

Mr and Mrs Botan. Our neighbours lived from the sea. He caught fish on his longtail and she cleaned it, cooked it and served it on the beach at the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. He wore the baggy trousers of the Thai fisherman and she was usually dressed in a white apron, as if she was coming straight from a kitchen or soon returning to one. Their lives centred on the few miles of sea and land around Hat Nai Yang, and right from the start they wanted us to see its secret beauty.

‘Many bad people come to our area at this time of the year,’ Mr Botan told Tess the day after the mountain of water had arrived. He rubbed his hard old hands with anxiety. ‘They take great advantage of poor stupid farang,’ he said. ‘Make easy money from the foreigners. Sell them shells. Leaky boat rides. Massage.’ He shot me a meaningful man-to-man look, and lowered his voice to an embarrassed whisper. ‘Love pills,’ he murmured.

Tess looked up from the rucksack she was packing.

‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll be fine,’ she said with a smile. ‘Everybody seems very kind.’

Mr Botan was unconvinced. He had taken it upon himself to protect us from the venal side of Phuket and insisted on accompanying us on our trip to see the turtles lay their eggs.

Rory looked up from his collapsing copy of Traveller’s Wildlife Guide.

‘This is so cool,’ he said excitedly. ‘During mating rituals, the male turtle swims backwards in front of the female while stroking her face with his clawed foot. When he is ready to mate, he climbs on to the female’s shell and grips the rim with all four feet.’

Tess smiled at him. ‘You’re so clever,’ she said.

Rory was too young to know anything about sex. But he knew everything there was to know about mating habits.

It seemed like a miracle that, of all the beaches on the island, the turtles came to lay their eggs on our beach. But Hat Nai Yang was one of the most secluded beaches on the island, visited mostly by locals and only at the weekend, when they spent the day in the shallow waters and the night eating in places like the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. Those turtles knew what they were doing.

When we got to the northern tip of Hat Nai Yang just as the sun was fading, the beach was deserted. It was Sunday, my day off, but it was that dead part of the day when the swimming was over and the eating had yet to begin. No people. No turtles. We sat on the sand staring out at the empty sea.

‘So basically turtles are like big tortoises, right?’ said Keeva.

Rory looked at his sister as if she was raving mad. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Basically not. They live in the open ocean and the female only comes to shore to lay her eggs. Tortoises are more like – I don’t know – hamsters. Tortoises live in your back garden. Turtles live in the sea.’

‘Well,’ Keeva said. ‘Looks like they’re staying in the sea.’

She picked up a red plastic frisbee and wandered down to the water. Rory pushed his glasses up his nose and anxiously watched the sea.

‘It’s November and they lay their eggs from now to May,’ he said. ‘But they’re dying out.’ He watched his sister throwing the frisbee in the air and catching it as she let the almost non-existent waves lap her toes. ‘No loggerhead turtles for fifteen years,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They’re all endangered, or already dead, maybe even extinct.’

Tess touched his back.

‘One day we’ll see the turtles,’ she promised. ‘One day soon. We’ll keep watching, okay?’

Rory nodded and went down to join his sister. Mr Botan checked his watch, as if he had specifically told the turtles to be at Hat Nai Yang at this time and place.

The children played with the frisbee on the edge of the sea until Keeva got bored and came back complaining of hunger. Her brother followed her and we ate our picnic – Pahd Thai from the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. The light had almost gone and we were packing up to go home when we saw the turtle.

It was already out of the water and hauling itself across the smooth white sand, looking like the most exhausted thing on the planet. Its head looked a thousand years old and there were tears streaming from its depthless black eyes.

‘Daddy,’ Keeva said, stricken. ‘She’s crying.’

‘No,’ Mr Botan said.

‘That’s the salt gland,’ Rory said, trembling with excitement. ‘It helps the turtle to maintain a healthy water balance when it’s on dry land. Don’t worry, Keeva.’

Mr Botan nodded. ‘Not sad. Not upset.’ His Chinese face grinned. ‘Very happy day,’ he said, genuinely delighted at the sight of the turtle, and not for our sake. ‘Very good luck,’ he said. ‘Very good luck for Thai people.’ He pointed an instructive finger. ‘They are the universe,’ he said. ‘The top of the shell is the sky. The bottom of the shell is the earth.’

We watched the turtle for a while and then we saw the boat. A rough canoe, no engine, containing three shadowy figures. It was difficult to see them in the dying light, but they were coming to land where the turtle must have crawled from the sea.

Mr Botan watched them suspiciously.

‘They are not Thai,’ he said. ‘They are chao ley. They stay close to the shore during the long rains.’

‘Fishermen?’ said Tess.

He laughed shortly.

‘They do a little fishing, but they are not fishermen,’ he said. ‘They look on the beach for anything they can eat or sell or use.’ He spat on the sand. ‘Look at their boat!’

As they landed on the beach we could see that it was a canoe that seemed to have been carved out of some ancient tree. ‘No engine!’ Mr Botan snorted. All the longtails had two-stroke diesel engines. He considered a dugout canoe to be a relic of the Stone Age.

‘They live on the island?’ Tess said.

‘A few,’ Mr Botan said. ‘Down south. All the way down south. On Hat Rawai. They approach tourists with their rubbish. There are others on Ko Surin and Ko Boht. They have Kabang. House boat. Or shacks. They move around the sea.’

‘Gypsies,’ I said. ‘Sea gypsies.’

‘Thieves,’ said Mr Botan. ‘Beggars. Tramps. Some chao ley are not so bad. Almost like Thai. Almost. They get registered. We call them Mai Thai – new Thai. But these are moken. Like oken – sea water. Same name, almost. They don’t even want to be Thai, these moken.’ He clearly took it personally. ‘Anyway,’ he said, looking back at the turtle. ‘They are more Burmese than Thai. Anyway. Mai pen rai. Never mind, never mind.’

The rough boat was being dragged out of the water. There was a man and two children. A girl in her mid-teens and a younger boy who, now I looked at him again, was more like a tiny man than a child. He was not tall but he was broad and the way he moved as he dragged the canoe further up the sand suggested the kind of workhorse strength that you only get from years of manual labour.

I looked at Rory and Keeva with the turtle. They were keeping a deferential distance as the turtle started to dig into the sand, moving its flipper-like feet to dig a hole.

As the feet fluttered in the sand, it didn’t look like very effective digging. But a hole somehow began to appear, and the head and shell of the turtle became covered in sand, giving it a carefree, oh-I-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside air.

The sea gypsies, the chao ley, were slowly coming up the beach towards the turtle. They were different from any Thais that I had ever seen – shorter, stockier and darker, and yet their hair was streaked with gold, as if they had just emerged from a fancy hairdressing salon rather than the Andaman Sea.

They stopped some distance from the turtle, kicking their bare feet in the sand, not looking at us, and now ignoring the turtle. At first I thought they were beachcombing. But they were waiting.

Mr Botan watched them with mounting anger. To us they were colourful travelling folk. To him they were a bunch of thieving, peg-selling pikeys.

‘Look!’ Rory cried.

The turtle had begun to lay its eggs. We edged closer and so did the chao ley.

‘These sea beggars,’ Mr Botan said to me. ‘They follow the turtle. They know she will lay her eggs.’

Rory’s eyes were pleading. ‘They’re not going to hurt her, are they?’

I stared at the chao ley. They didn’t seem as though they were going to give her a saucer of milk. The three of them were watching the turtle now. The tough-looking little boy. The girl, who was perhaps sixteen. And the old man. Watching the eggs emerge. If their skin had been one shade darker then it would have been black.

The turtle laid five eggs and then seemed spent. Keeva was disappointed.

‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘Is that all the eggs? I thought there would be – I don’t know – millions.’

But Rory was in a fever. I really believe it was the best day of his life.

‘They don’t lay many eggs in Phuket,’ he said to his sister, patient but breathless, grateful for seeing this vision. ‘Because it’s warm all year round, see? So they don’t have to worry about the weather. But the eggs are left unprotected. They’re small and soft. The eggs are. Predators eat them up. Rats. Lizards.’ He looked at the chao ley. ‘People.’

The turtle was dragging itself back to the sea. The old chao ley passed it and walked swiftly to the eggs. He picked one up, examined it briefly, and started back to his boat.

‘I can’t believe that’s legal,’ Tess said.

Mr Botan spoke harshly to the chao ley and began following him.

Hefting the egg, the old man gave him a mouthful back.

Mr Botan stopped, shaking his head. ‘He says he only takes one, out of respect for the mother. But he says the rats will eat the rest anyway.’

Rory whimpered. Tess looked at me, as if I might somehow rescue our day out. But all I could do was shrug. I wasn’t going to get in a punch-up with some old sea gypsy over a turtle’s egg.

‘Sounds sort of reasonable,’ I said.

Rory walked warily to the sea turtle, his shoulders sunk with anguish. We all followed him. The tough-looking chao ley boy was squatting on his haunches watching the turtle as it crawled and clawed its way to the sea. He ran one curious hand across the turtle’s rock-like shell.

Rory began hyperventilating.

‘He shouldn’t touch it,’ Rory said. ‘Excuse me? Oh, excuse me? You shouldn’t touch it. I don’t think he speaks English. Tell him not to touch it.’

But the young sea gypsy was already up and off towards their boat, pausing only to scoop up the frisbee that our children had discarded in the sand. He looked at it as if it was a shell, and wandered down to the shore, idly tapping it against his thigh.

‘Hey,’ Keeva called, going after him. ‘That’s not your frisbee.’

The boy turned to face Keeva. She held out her hand and he took a step back, holding the frisbee above his head, although he was a couple of inches shorter than her.

Then Tess was there.

‘Do you speak English?’ she asked with a friendly smile, and in that simple question you could see that she had been a great teacher.

She had been sick of the school at the end – the lack of discipline, the lack of ambition, the parents who owned more tattoos than books. But the way she looked at that hard little child who was stealing our frisbee made me see that she had loved her job once, and maybe missed it more than she let on.

The boy looked at Tess with his fierce feral eyes.

‘I am an engineer,’ he announced, his voice thin and reedy. ‘I am from Germany. I am from Australia. What time is the train to Chiang Mai? Is there anything cheaper? I want something cheaper. I am a student. I am an engineer. I am Mr Smith. I am Mr Honda from Tokyo bank. Take me to a doctor. My stomach is bad.’

Tess clapped her hands and laughed.

‘That’s very, very good,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

But he stared at us silently, bitterly, and it was his big sister calling to him from the boat where she waited with the old man who revealed his name.

‘Chatree!’ she called. ‘Chatree!’

‘Look, you can play with us if you want,’ Keeva told him. ‘But taking something that doesn’t belong to you is basically not cool.’

But the boy had no time for play.

He ran off to join his family. They were getting back in the boat, the man wrapping the egg in some sort of filthy blanket.

I picked up the red plastic frisbee as they pushed off. The turtle swiftly disappeared below the waves, but we watched the canoe for a while longer, the three dark figures bobbing up and down on the empty sea until they were round the bay and out of sight.

‘They wander still,’ said Mr Botan, making it sound as if it had always been that way in the past, and it would be that way forever.