Catching the Sun. Tony Parsons
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