Grandad, There's A Head on the Beach

4.

We were sitting at dinner that evening when the hand grenade went off. It was just after Mair had asked everyone if they fancied a bowl of mixed-friends ice cream. Hut three spent so much time eating with us it was almost inevitable they'd sprout names. We doubted the names were real. They certainly lacked imagination. They insisted we call them Noy, the mother, high-tone, and Noy, the daughter, low tone. Thai is a wonderful language that leaves many a foreigner ripping out chunks of hair. It has the ability to change a dog into a horse, a skein of silk into a bush fire, an entire town into an irrigation ditch. And all at the mere drop of a tone. For a Thai, when speaking, Noy and Noy were two completely different words. But as I had to write this down I anticipated problems. So I decided to call them Noy and Mamanoy to make everything easier. They had taken to spending every meal time with us in the cluttered kitchen. There were restaurants of a sort a mere ten-minute drive away in Pak Nam, our nearest town, but they never went anywhere. Their car was already caked in salt and had taken a coconut hit on the back bumper. Between meals they hardly left their room.

Our mealtime conversations were all of the tell-us-about-life-on-the-Gulf variety. They were so focused on asking questions and pretending to be fascinated by our answers that they left no gaps for us to talk about them. The few comments they made about themselves were so obviously untrue that only Arny believed them. Noy, having learned that Arny was attached to another woman, became at ease in his company. His fiancee, Gaew, was off in Hong Kong on the seniors bodybuilding tour. She was in good shape for a fifty-eight-year-old, but I wouldn't ever want to see her in a bikini. Muscles on old people started to look like oil-saturated barnacles. Noy's questions to Arny-training, competition, steroids, fan adoration-all seemed sincere. I wondered whether she might have been developing a crush on him. He was a sweet man. Couldn't blame her. And she was closer to my brother's age. A more natural match. I quite liked her, despite the fact that she was a lying little calf. I liked the cow too. The fact that they were on the run made them even more fascinating to me.

"You poor thing," said Mair to Mamanoy. "You must be missing sex terribly."

Mamanoy's spoon clunked onto her plate.

"What?" she said.

"Sex," Mair repeated loudly, as if it was the volume at fault rather than appropriateness.

I looked at Arny. His eyes were closed. We knew Mair was about to launch into one of her bawdy tales from the annals of her long, fascinating life. Sometimes we'd shut her up. Other times we'd ride it out. On this evening I decided a story from Mair would help convince our guests we were all mad and therefore posed no threat.

"I don't-" Mamanoy began.

"You don't have to tell me," said Mair. "When you're away from your man, that's all you think of. Sex, sex, sex."

Grandad Jah looked up and attempted a half-hearted chastisement.

"Girl," he said. "Don't."

But he didn't put a lot of menace into it because he knew our mother wouldn't take any notice of him. Unfettered, Mair burst into her story.

"My husband had been away on a business trip," she said. "At least that's what he called it."

OK. Good. A rare anecdote about our father. We knew so little about him she was guaranteed the undivided attention of her children. To us, our father was a fictional character we only got to meet in stories.

"I was desperate for him," she said. "Two weeks without his strong arms around me. Two weeks without the taste of his tongue. Two weeks without-"

"Mair!" Arny shouted and pointed his fork and his eyebrows toward Noy. I personally doubted the girl was a stranger to strong arms and tasty tongues and the rest. Mair forged ahead with barely a pause. She was there in the past, seeing it all.

"We'd been married for two years," she said. "But I'd never let him believe I was just there for the taking. The only way to fire a man's passion is to make him understand you aren't the house bicycle. He couldn't just climb on and go for a ride around the block whenever the mood took him. There had to be a flat tire now and then. Sometimes the saddle would come loose and you wouldn't have the right size spanner to straighten it. A twig might get stuck in the gears."

I forgot to mention our Mair had a habit of getting tangled up in her own metaphors.

"Men need motivation to perform," she said. "And there's nothing like rejection to make a man try his best. If you beg, he hands out loving like alms to a tired old monk who needs a shave. But if you show no interest, ho ho, his pride pushes him onward and upward. So he was away for two weeks and I was desperate, so I hacked off my beautiful long hair with scissors and I dressed all in white, and when he walked in the door, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor reciting the Precepts. Actually I'd never memorized the Precepts. I was just making it up. But he wouldn't have known that. He wasn't that. .. you know, connected to the Lord. He asked me what had happened, and I told him I'd become a nun and I couldn't have contact with a man for three months. By dinnertime he was drooling like an octopus. And that night, once I'd rescinded my vows, I had the best hammering I'd ever experienced in my life."

"Mair," I said. "I really don't think this is relevant."

"Really?" She smiled as if remembering the intimacy of that night. "I think it's relevant. If it hadn't been for that homecoming present, you wouldn't be sitting here at this table."

"Why wouldn't…? Oh, my God. You aren't…?"

"Nine months later my little angel of heaven arrived in the world. The child conceived of passion. That's why you have so much fire in you, daughter."

"Fire? I was the result of you impersonating a nun. I'll go to hell."

"Don't be silly, child. We were husband and wife. Couples often resort to role-playing."

The revelation was too much. As if I wasn't already messed up, now I had to analyze how religio-erotic blackmail might have affected me. I looked across the table where Noy and Mamanoy were sitting open-mouthed like catfish on ice at Tesco. And that was when Mair dropped in her non-sequitur of "Would anybody like some mixed-friends ice cream?" Followed a few seconds later by the bang. At first I thought it was something exploding in my head, a brain overload perhaps, but everyone looked around, so I knew they'd heard it too. We all rushed outside. Always a good idea when someone's firing mortars at you. But I imagine, like me, they assumed it was the electricity distribution box, which blew up often. Instead, we saw gray smoke coming out of Mair's shop and being immediately dispatched on the wind.

Grandad Jah and Arny made the womenfolk stand back cause we were all so fragile and needed protection. They walked into the shop through the smoke, and Arny grabbed the nice red fire extinguisher that had stood beside the door unnoticed for a year. He was trying to figure out how to follow the Chinese instructions to make it foam.

"Arny, don't bother," I said, pushing past him. "There's no fire."

A blast of some type had sent cans and packages flying to the back wall and ripped apart two shelf units. Ground zero was our refrigerator, which now looked like a paper lantern after a wind-tunnel experiment. Something mighty powerful had torn that up. The shop was open-fronted with a pull-down metal shutter. We had moved to an area where people tended not to lock their doors, so we'd got into the habit of leaving the shutter open while we were eating. If some rare customer should happen by, he or she could alert us by beating a stick on the zinc watering can suspended from the rafter or just leave the money on the counter. It was that kind of place. All this by way of explaining that the shop was wide open and anyone could have tossed in an explosive without even slowing down their car…or their black SUV.

In a place like Maprao you didn't have to wait for the evening broadcast on public radio. News spread like urine in a public swimming pool. First on the scene, as ever, was Captain Kow. I swear he has some sort of radar antenna inside that dirty gray baseball cap he never takes off. Then there was Jiep, the rice porridge lady, and Chat from the used-bicycle dealership, and Loong, the coconut pulp grinder, and Ari, the monkey handler, without his monkey, and Auntie Sakorn and her fourteen-year-old pregnant niece. Very soon the entire village was standing around staring at our bombed-out shop. Someone with a sidecar on their motorcycle had kindly given Constable Tawee a lift. The volunteer village constables were semi-serious police whose main function was to fine locals for betting on card games. Hardly a day went by when some group of fishermen's wives wasn't betting away their husbands' income. As he rarely left the police box, I imagine Tawee had to rely on gamblers with guilty consciences turning themselves in. He wasn't qualified to do any investigating, but he did have a cell phone and I was sure he'd called the real police. "Real" being relative, in our case.

This presented two problems for us. I called Grandad Jah to one side.

"The gun?"

"What about it?"

"You have to get rid of it."

"I do not."

"You know who did this, don't you?"

"Yes."

"If we accuse them, the gun story comes out. It'll be our word against theirs. We all saw them pull their knives, but if they find the gun…"

"They won't."

I glared at him.

"They won't," he repeated.

The only competent officer at the local police station was Lieutenant Chompu, and he was warm and snug in my pouch. He'd be no problem. Whoever else they sent to investigate our explosion would merely ask the questions as they were laid out in the regulation manual. All I needed to do was get to the witnesses and make sure we all told the same lies. Arny was our weakest link. They wouldn't need interview room violence to break him down. If they raised their voices, he'd confess-even if he wasn't responsible. I found him squeezing pilchard cans back into shape and reminded him he was interfering with a crime scene. He pouted. I grabbed his thick arm and led him outside.

"Arny," I said. "Grandad Jah didn't shoot at the body snatchers."

"He didn't?"

"No."

"You know I'm not very good at this?" he said.

"I know. But this is family, and I need us all to stick together with this one. Do you really want to see Grandad locked up in chains in the Lang Suan prison, the handcuffs chafing his old flaky wrists? His body riddled with rat-and flea-bites from the communal bedding? Abused in the shower room by perverts with fetishes for…skinny and ignorant old men?"

He thought about it.

"No," he said at last.

"Then you didn't see him shoot at the body snatchers."

"OK."

And I knew I was pushing my luck, but I needed one more small lie from him. This one was for me.

"And Noy and Mamanoy? They don't exist."

"They don't?"

"Not at all. We weren't having lunch with them today. We still don't have any guests. In fact, if you moved our truck over, I bet we could squeeze their car under our carport too. Put one of those silver gray plastic covers on it and nobody would even notice it was there."

My little brother looked uncomfortable. He lowered his voice.

"There's something suspicious about them, isn't there?" he said.

"Yes. But if Pak Nam's finest come by in force, it might just frighten them away and we'll never find out what the Noys have been up to. It wouldn't surprise me if they were in their room packing as we speak. And whatever mess they've got themselves tied up in will only get worse if they flee past the entire population of Maprao in their unregistered car."

"I should tell them not to panic."

"Good boy. Tell them to go for a blustery stroll along the garbage-strewn beach, like good tourists, and not to come back till the excitement's died down. Tell them…I don't know. Tell them we don't want to lose our only paying guests of the month. Don't, and that means, do not tell them we think they're suspicious."

The last witness tampering I'd have time for was Mair. I knew everything would depend on who or where or when she was at that particular moment, but it turned out she was way ahead of me…or somebody.

"Sissi, darling," she said. "You know I've never condoned dishonesty in any of my five children."

"Yes, Mair."

"But this is a family matter. It's my father's life."

"I didn't see him fire a gun," I said.

"What? But you were standing right there."

"No, I mean, wink wink I didn't see him fire it."

"Oh. That's right. You didn't. It was a tern."

"What was?"

"A tern, disoriented by the northeasterly wind, was thrown into the side window of the big black car, which caused the glass to smash. It had been flying so fast it might have been mistaken for a bullet. A tern flying at high speed makes a similar sound to .41 caliber gunfire."

"Either that or we don't know anything about a broken car window."

She gave that a lot of thought.

"Yes," she said. "That might work too. If it happened, which I doubt it did, it didn't happen here. Good. Then there's the situation with the older and younger Noys."

"I've never heard of them."

"Is that a wink wink?"

There were eleven police officers permanently attached to the Pak Nam station. Nine of them came to investigate our explosion. Life could be dull for crime fighters down here. The charge was led by Major Mana, who had obviously been having a slack day in his Amway direct-sales dealership- which afforded him the time to investigate a crime at last. Alighting from the truck with him were constables Ma Yai and Ma Lek and a skinny officer with a Nikon, all of whom I was acquainted with. Then came the fat fellow with the cheap toupee, with whom I was not but felt I needed to be.

Right behind the truck were two motorcycles carrying two uniformed officers apiece. The only one I recognized was Lieutenant Chompu. He was riding pillion with his arms locked around the good-looking young driver.

"Little Jimm," said Major Mana for everyone to hear. He was middle-aged, shiny brown and short. Yes, I'd once rejected his clumsy attempts to seduce me, but I'd also made a name for him on a case a few months before. He owed me a favor. But he had a short memory and wandering hands. "You know? Ours was a very peaceful little district before you and your family turned up here."

His hand was already kneading the small of my back.

"Right," I said. "And look. Here we are blowing up our own shop just to mess with your statistics."

"I'll be the judge of that," he said, the sarcasm sliding past him like an oiled eel.

They set to work, although most of them seemed to have been assigned gawking duty. Chompu was chief interviewer. We sat together on my porch. He led with:

"Nice one, Jimm."

"I know who did it," I told him.

"Well, hooray. That makes our jobs just that much easier. Who?"

"A couple of goons from the SRM. They came to pick up the head nobody's investigating."

"And why would they want to damage your shop?"

"They were rude cretins with knives. They threatened us."

"And did you make a complaint to the police about that threat?"

I laughed, then he laughed. Reporting a threat to the Pak

Nam police would have been like reporting a mosquito bite to the provincial health authority.

"We chased them off, so I imagine their noses were put out of joint."

"How?"

"How what?"

"How did you chase them off?"

"Well, there was me, Arny, Grandad Jah, and Mair. We outnumbered them."

"A fearsome foursome indeed. I'm surprised they haven't already brought out a comic book about you all."

"Don't make fun. We can be pretty frightening. Look at Arny."

"Ooh, I have."

"Right. If you didn't know he was a hamster…"

And talking of animals, out of the corner of my eye I saw Sticky carrying something large and dirty in his mouth. He was heading toward the crime scene. I had a bad feeling about it. I called out to him, but he didn't exactly know his name yet.

"Give me a minute," I said to Chompu. "Go interview Mair."

I went after the dog, who looked back over his shoulder and started to run. Running for me was as alien as discipline was to him. But I felt there was a need. I swore I could make out the shape of a handgun wrapped in rag. Sticky was heading straight for the major. He stopped directly in front of him, dropped his booty, and barked proudly. The policeman turned around to find Sticky staring up at him and drooling. Like most southerners, the major was wary of strange dogs. He backed up. Sticky nudged the package closer.

"Will someone call this mutt off?" said the policeman.

"Looks like he brought you a present, Major," said Constable Ma Yai. "Hey, little fellow. What you got there?"

He bent down to pick up the package, and Sticky snapped at him. Ma Yai recoiled. I arrived at that moment. There's something slow-motion about me running. I threw myself to my knees and grabbed the gun and the dog. Over the sound of Sticky yapping, the major asked:

"What is that?"

"Hairdryer," I said. "It's a game we play."

I laughed. They laughed. Sticky barked. It was pretty clear the dog had been Eliot Ness in a previous life. It probably really pissed him off that he couldn't make words anymore.

"You buried it?"

"Yes."

"That was your grand idea for hiding the gun?"

The police had gone, and I had Grandad Jah cornered in the toilet block. He'd been unclogging a drain. It was a good feeling to be reprimanding him for screwing up. I didn't get the chance that often. He nodded. His overconfi-dence had given way to humility at last. All at once he was forty-five kilograms of decaying osteoclasts, and I felt like a bully.

"Well, consider yourself lucky our local police force can't tell a magnum from a hairdryer," I said. "I bet they raid a lot of beauty salons."

"Idiots."

I knew it was too much to expect an apology from the old man. I sat on the sink and heard a crack. Time to think seriously about that diet. With the monsoons, I'd stopped cycling, and every meal, every flagon of Chilean red, every mini-Mars Bar was setting up home in my hips.

"So where do you think it'll go from here?" I asked.

"The police will bring the two hoodlums in for questioning. They'll deny they threatened us. They might or might not mention the gun, but my guess is they won't."

"Why not?"

"Because we don't look like gunslingers, so the police would laugh at 'em. And they don't have any evidence."

"Thanks to me."

He ignored that.

"They'll probably come up with an alibi," he said, "and technically the police would check it out. But knowing our lot, they'll probably accept it and apologize to the hooligans for taking up their valuable time."

"Not Chompu."

"I admit the queer boy does have skills. But we don't know they'll assign him to the case."

"They don't have cases, Grandad. What else has happened down here for the past couple of months? They weed the station flowerbeds, use up their petrol allowance by driving round smiling at girls, and set up random barricades to extort money from truck drivers who think seat belts are for sitting on. Oh, and they practice marching.

They have to assign it to Chompu. He's the only one who can spell."

"These police don't know how to deal with hard nuts like those two thugs. There's only one recourse," Grandad snarled.

He cracked his knuckles. It sounded like tiles shuffling on a mah-jong board.

"Oh, Grandad. No."

"There's only one thing those types understand."

"Please."

"Street justice."

I'd been afraid that might happen. Our own geriatric Judge Dredd had recently formed an alliance with an equally honest and subsequently vilified ex-policeman from the south called Waew. Together, they had wreaked revenge on an evil-doer and got away with it. Vengeance was a drug that made Viagra look like aspirin. I suppose I should have reasoned with him, told him how dangerous it was to be messing with villains like the rat brothers, but Grandad's well past his use-by date. When you're beyond seventy, nobody's really surprised when they find you facedown in your fried rice. Probably better to arrive in nirvana with a slit throat and stories.

"Whatever," I said.

I was about to take the truck into Pak Nam in search of the elusive Burmese community that Lieutenant Egg had failed to engage. I'd reversed out of the carport and was crunching my way into first. It's an old truck. But in my side mirror I saw an excitedly pretty face. I squeaked down the window and said hello to Noy.

"The coast is clear," I said.

Mother and daughter had been hiding out in the woods at the far end of the bay for an hour for no particular reason. None of the police asked whether we had any guests.

"Jimm, I just wanted…to tell you…"

She was out of breath. The wind did that to you. Filled you up with so much air you couldn't get it all out. I'd been expecting a story. They'd had enough time to come up with a good one. I'd thought something like…I don't know…vengeful husband or boyfriend perhaps. That would have worked. Ours was a matriarchal family, so that would probably have twanged at our heartstrings. But what they conjured up was a disappointment. Noy ran round the front of the truck and put herself in the passenger seat. She was trapped now. There were no handles on the inside.

"I hope you don't mind," she said.

"Not at all."

I switched off the motor, and the truck shimmered to a standstill.

"I imagine that you and your family are wondering what people like us are doing here," she said.

"You're not on vacation?"

She giggled.

"I'm sure you didn't believe that," she said.

"If our prime minister can make spring rolls on national television, nothing would surprise me."

"The fact is…" she began.

I've noticed how often people say "the fact is" before launching into fiction.

"The fact is my father is one of the leading activists against the yellow shirts. You do know about the situation in Bangkok?"

I guessed nobody had informed her that I'd been an almost prize-winning journalist at a national publication. An army was rising up to oppose the yellow shirts, with the backing of the satellite-dish tsar and his billionaire family.

"I think I saw something about it on TV," I said.

"Well, he…Dad was very vocal against the yellows. We tried to convince him to keep a lid on it, but he's a very principled man. He spoke up in public accusing the yellow shirts of dragging our democracy into the dirt. He…"

"Yes?"

"He received threats. Not against him but against us. His family. They said they'd kill us."

"The yellow shirts said that?"

"Right. As he loves us, and I'm sure you understand why I can't divulge his name, he sent us away from Bangkok. That's why we're here. That's why we removed the number plates. That's why we're avoiding the police. I'm so sorry we couldn't tell you this. But we still have to be very careful. The yellow shirts can be evil."

"Right."

I could imagine the scene. Auntie Malee, the exporter of traditional coconut cakes, calls together Bert, the brake lining supplier, and Lulu, the barista, and orders a hit on Noy whose father had dared voice what half the country had been complaining about publicly ever since the yellows sauntered into Government House. So the Noys flee. And they head in exactly the wrong direction, south, yellow-shirt central. Come off it, girl.

"You must be terrified," I said and put my hand on hers.

"We are," she said, looking at a string of beach cabbage that had blown over from the sand and wrapped itself around our wipers. "But when you told us the police were coming, we sensed that you could feel our anguish. We decided we could trust you and wanted you to know the truth."

"Well, I appreciate honesty. We all do."

"We just wanted you to understand that we've done nothing wrong. Nothing illegal. We are victims."

"I feel for you, my sister."

She took back her hand and placed her palms together. She folded herself low to my left kidney like a scullery maid addressing a royal in a very confined space. She smiled and tried to leave the truck, only to realize there were no handles. I ran round to let her out and watched her walk off toward her cabin. It had been a performance worthy of a raspberry. But one thing was certain. These two were no grifters. They couldn't act their way out of a prawn cracker packet. It was time to see what dirt Sissi had come up with. The Noys had done something bad. Very, very bad. I wanted to know what it was.